THREE years ago, Shirley Lancaster married her long-term partner Simon, after 17 years of living together.

Two aspects of this wedding set it apart from normal marriages. The first was that a union such as this had been illegal in the UK only weeks before.

Then Shirley received a letter from the Home Office.

“It said that, thanks to a European Court ruling (overturning the 1949 Marriage Act), that me and Simon were free to marry,” says Shirley, from her home in Whitmore Way, Basildon, where she lives with Simon.

The second fact was Shirley’s family – children, in-laws, grandchildren – all attended the wedding and gave it their blessing.

So did most of Simon’s relations, for the simple fact is the two families are, to a large extent, one and the same – Simon was Shirley’s son-in-law.

Unsurprisingly, when they first came together, the relationship convulsed the family.

She says: “My then husband, my children, my workmates, everyone was horrified. They thought I had gone mad.

“My daughter and Simon were having problems, and I went to speak to him about it. This continued over time and eventually we fell in love.“ The process by which, the couple became reconciled with the rest of the family, is just part of Shirley’s remarkable story.

Their relationship is simply the latest affair in a life packed with the sort of incidents that make the most torrid episode of EastEnders look anaemic.

Now 70, settled and serene, Shirley readily admits her past life has been “pretty wild”.

Just how wild can be seen from the first volume of her autobiography, Against the Odds, which takes her up to the age of 16.

It ends on a cliffhanger as the young Shirley is packed off by magistrates to an approved school. By that stage in her life she had already found time for prostitution, violent assault, expulsion or removal from 12 different schools, and running away from home.

“Everything about me was trouble,” she writes. I was undoubtedly spawned for trouble.”

It all started as it tended to go on – at a New Year’s Eve party in wartime Dagenham. Shirley was conceived behind the blacked-out windows of a terraced council house.

“Definitely not a joyous moment for my 17-year-old mother, who after too many gins, succumbed to a cocky and persistent 18-year-old merchant seaman,” as Shirley puts it.

It was a rough, tough existence. Shirley, a naturally gifted writer, recalls it all graphically, but without self-pity. She simply believes she was a child of the times.

“Constant poverty and the bloody war, together they tore families apart and they never recovered,” she writes.

Shirley’s mother became locked in a loveless, brawling marriage. Her father became a war hero, but her mother refused to acknowledge his courage or attend the award ceremonies or his meetings with Winston Churchill.

After the war he declined into a violent, mostly unemployed, drunkard. He was jailed for beating up her uncle Len.

“Family life was like a war zone at times,” says Shirley.

The only well-adjusted member from that generation seems to have been aunt Betty, who was too busy on the game in London to involve herself in family brawls.

Shirley was just 14 when, returning home one evening and saw the first two Teddy Boys she had ever set eyes on.

“They looked awesome,” she says. “I thought, ‘My God! I want one of those’.

She rapidly found one, and took up with him. “I did not care he was a layabout, a thief, a wrong ’un,” she says.

Nor did she care she was underage and he was 20. The police intervened, on the grounds of underage sex and Shirley was remanded for medical and social reports.

It was during this period the most harrowing part of the story begins as Shirley was duped into prostitution.

While her boyfriend was in jail, she was romanced by a handsome Maltese waiter, Freddy. Flattered, she went out clubbing with him. But Freddy was a pimp, and he took her back to his brothel.

It was run by Jack, the seedy tenant, who spent his life in a decaying armchair, drinking a bottle of whisky a day.

Shirley was soon out on the streets, coached and supported by two experienced prostitutes. Eventually she was picked up by the police as a missing person.

The first stage of the autobiography ends with Shirley’s committal to an approved home. It seemed to be just the next step in a life destined for ruinous self-destruction.

Yet the extraordinary fact is Shirley’s tale is a positive one. Behind the wild child lay a rebel who wouldn’t accept life had to be defined by aggression, poverty and despair, and behind the brawling lay a contempt for bullies.

After her time on the streets and in an approved home, she turned to nursing and emergency care work, careers she loved.

In the end, Shirley pulled out from the tailspin and made a life for herself. Now she has turned a life-long love of writing to good account, and decided to tell her own story.

“I wrote it for my children,” she says. I also wrote it for me, to identify who I am, and why I am.”

Beyond that, she also consciously set out to write a social and historic document.

“I want the young people today in colleges and universities to know what life was all about in those days,” she says.

l Against the Odds by Shirley Lancaster is published by Arena Books on December 6, price £12.99 ISBN 978 1 906791 69 8 Available from from arenabooks@tiscali.

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