Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking by Pauline Prescott: review

By Roger Lewis Published: 6:15AM GMT twenty-seven February 2010

Often people have in error the well-groomed Pauline Prescott for Elizabeth Taylor. Unsurprisingly, nobody has in error her father for Richard Burton. If we have wondered what this intelligent and smart-alecky lady ever saw in the charmless former emissary budding minister, answers are not stirring in this waggish memoir. Indeed, she pulls no punches in depicting John Prescott as a vaguely humanoid version of the bulldog in the Tom and Jerry cartoons, poignant and bombastic.

She initial met Prezza at a train stop when he was a full-of-himself Cunard steward. "It was John, John Prescott" and emphatically not "Bond, James Bond". Pauline is taken to encounter Johns lofty and unassailable mother, Phyllis, who had taught herself flowering plant arranging and baked sweat bread decorating in sequence to come in a majority standard family in Britain competition. Phyllis was ashamed "when they came second". Perhaps John, too, never recovered from this setback.

Derbyshire go tip of Division Two Steffan Jones impresses on lapse to Derbyshire Top 10: Sporting debuts Pr�t-a-rapporter: the lapse of the stone T-shirt - and Pauline Prescott Rugby League World Cup: Englands compare full blood, courage and ability

To her failing day, in 2003, Phyllis poured tea from a Minton pot with her small finger daintily cocked. She never authorized of Pauline because, as a subplot explains, Pauline had a baby out of wedlock, that was adopted. The father, an American airman, did a bunk.

Psychotherapists competence ascertain a lot from the actuality that class-obsessed John was regularly underneath the ride of a mom whom Pauline says was the really picture of Hyacinth Bucket. Indeed, psychotherapists would have their work cut out analysing the version of Paulines father on perspective here. John is incompetent to travel in to a room on his own Pauline has to try on forward and "he usually joins me if I have found him a chair confronting the wall". He is phobic about hats. If Pauline wears a hat on the Underground he has to change to an additional carriage.

We are told "he can spin utterly cross on bread". On Friday nights when he earnings from the Commons, he opens the fridge, fills his face and goes to pour up "burgers, fish and chips, biscuits, trifles, chocolate everything". However, "he right afar claims to have been bulimia-free for multiform years".

Pauline tells us that John is henceforth seething, "usually about something trivial", such as a misplaced radio remote. She is used to his cold silences, though, and the approach to recover his courtesy is to pound an egg on his head. "I suspect hes a bit of a bully," Pauline says with substantial understatement. If you miscarry him when he is pontificating, "hed go off in one of the sulks Id dreaded". She creates transparent he has no clarity of the ridiculous. His allegedly droll approach with a put-down "wasnt humour, it was sarcasm".

John has a abhorrence of expressing emotion. "He grew up with the thought that if you lick you are a sissy." He wouldnt even arrangement cinema of his young kids in the office. Instead, he channels his feelings in to politics. "I found his governing body a bit of a bore," Pauline confesses, remembering the speeches and the pamphlets John wrote on reserve at sea.

Elected MP for Hull East in 1970, John done Pauline stay at the behind of in the subdivision whilst he swanned off to Westminster. "Its only the approach it has to be, Im afraid," he states, official her when Pauline points out that Glenys Kinnock managed to live in London with Neil. "I knew that there was no arguing with him," she sighs. It was quite cross of him to afterwards spin down invitations to stately grassed area parties and state dinners, "which Id love to have attended", Pauline says. She becomes the responsible mother who cooks the dishes and raises the children. When she cuts sandwiches, she wears disposable cosmetic gloves "for hygiene". Yet if it hadnt been for Paulines support, earning additional income as a hairdresser, John would not have been means to investigate at Oxford and at Hull University, where he got a Third. Pauline enabled him to climb up by the traffic kinship ranks, and she put up with his prolonged absences and grouchy moods.

John expresses his thankfulness by carrying on you do as he pleases. He accepts ministerial perks; the chauffeur-driven cars and in isolation supervision jets, the teams of security men who lift his unwashed washing and the top-of-the-range Jag, on which, as a great socialist, he insists. Michael Heseltine has a big Jag so John wants one, too.

Pauline is ravaged when she discovers her father has been carrying a prolonged event with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple. The fight as decorated in this book could be a stage from Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, with Pauline at last vouchsafing slice in full Elizabeth Taylor style. Prezza suggests slinking off to his grace-and-favour mansion, Dorneywood, to censor from the press and is told in no capricious terms: "If you think Im journey my home in the center of the night, you dont know me really well, John Prescott."

Pauline turns her behind on him and focuses on installing a downstairs bathroom. "The designation of my mint loo became my salvation." As this journal divulged, the shower seats and mock-Tudor beams for the big residence in Hull were supposing by the MPs most appropriate friend, the great old British taxpayer.

Why didnt the Prescotts divorce? Because Pauline loves selling for garments and accessories, and "Boy, I can get afar with attempted murder now!" She knows on that side her bread is buttered. This vehement book is a fantastic action of a tricked womans revenge. Despite it all, though, she obviously still loves him.

Roger Lewiss discourse Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as it is Lived is published by Short Books

Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking

by Pauline Prescott

293pp, HarperCollins, �18.99

Buy right afar for �16.99 (PLUS �1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Books