The biggest taboo is the estrangement between a mother and her daughter. I didn't see my mother for more than 20 years. She was beautiful and intelligent but hated all women. She saw them as a threat. This included her mother, her sisters, her son's girlfriends and wife. And of course, her own daughter.

Isabel Jacobs was born in 1918. Her parents were Romanian Jews fleeing anti-Semitism. They came to Manchester around 1911. Isabel was their first daughter. Eighteen months later a second girl, Edith, arrived, then came Pearl. The struggle to retain maximum attention and put down her sisters dominated her childhood.

On paper, her childhood looked brilliant. She shone at Manchester High School for Girls. But, in prewar provincial England, poor Jewish girls rarely went to university. Her sole ambition was to be a doctor's wife. Cecil Fridjohn, my father, came from an impecunious Irish Jewish family. My parents married in 1942. After the war, they moved to Blackpool, where my father, a strong socialist, benefited from the new NHS.

I hardly knew my mother. She sent me as a baby and toddler to her parents in Manchester. Growing up, I believed I'd done something wrong and was separated from her as punishment. I knew my mother didn't love me. Why else would she send me away? I was told she was ill. Most of her life was spent in bed. And her behaviour to all of us alternated between seductive charm and sudden hostility. She believed that she was a victim and wanted us all to be her servants.

I was a “good daughter” if I set her hair, and massaged her back every morning. She would keep me off primary school “to help in the house”. It was only when an inspector appeared, asking why I was absent, that I realised something was wrong.

We never ate as a family. Everyone commented on how thin my mother was and her semi-anorexia continued into old age. Despite her tiny body, she had a certain sexua- lity, flirting outrageously with my brother, David. At 18 he was tickling his 45-year-old mother while she, semi-naked, could roll on the floor squealing in delight. When she was 86, she inexplicably sent me a photograph in which she was semi-naked posing for David in stockings and suspender belt.

I had to leave her to discover that there were women out there who could show me alternatives.

My grandmother told me that “education is never too heavy to carry around” and my mother's hated younger sister, Edith Newman, who had distinguished herself in the Second World War as the country's first woman munitions officer, encouraged me to go to university. The women my mother denigrated were the ones urging me towards independence. Now I see that, unlike her, they were my positive models.

Defying my parents, who opposed me going to university, I read English at London University in my mid-twenties. Study offered me entry to new worlds far from the stifling atmosphere of my mother's emotional blackmail. This led to my becoming an actor, a theatre director and, eventually, a playwright.

Because of her, the idea of becoming a mother horrified me. Fear of repeating her patterns and of being the miserable woman imprisoned in the house was paramount. Being child-free is a decision I have never regretted. I married my French husband Alain in my early forties. Older than me, he had grown-up children who welcomed me as a friend.

Of course I doubted my own decision and missed having a strong bond with my mother all my life, but when I last saw her at my father's funeral in 2001, I realised that my decision to move away had been a life-saver.

She arrived 45 minutes late. We delayed the service for as long as the rabbi allowed and then, just as I was giving the funeral address to honour my father, an 83-year-old woman appeared. Her face was powdered white. She was stick-thin, in tight, black leggings, a short black leather jacket and a beret over her long black hair. The few mourners looked at her teenage street clothes with amazement. It had always been difficult explaining my relationship with my mother to my husband. When he saw her then for the first time he understood everything.

Isabel Fridjohn died at 86. My brother did not tell me of her death until he spontaneously invited himself to dinner and announced that he had had our mother cremated that morning. I felt a tornado of fury that he had denied me the right to see her at the end and realised that he wanted to be the solitary mourner at his mother's passing.

She had succeeded in dividing her children, even after her death. Now, as I think of such a beautiful woman, I still wonder why she allowed jealousy and destruction to shatter what could have been a wonderful life.

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