I like sharing a good secret at Christmas... this year it’s about an affair...

Author Juliet Nicolson discovered her own family’s hidden history while researching a new book about secrets and unearthed some shocking revelations...

’My family story was suffused with secrecy. Unknown to us children, each of my grandparents conducted multiple same-sex relationships throughout their otherwise happy marriage’ (Universal)

We all love a secret: at least the good kind – the sort intended for eventual revelation. Psychologists estimate that most of us keep an average of 13 secrets at any one time, choosing whether to hold onto our own, while being trusted to keep those of others.

Christmas is peak opportunity for good secret-keeping, with all the planning, whispering, wrapping, and hiding that the celebration involves. The daybreak awakening, as small toes wiggle beneath a mysteriously bumpy, rustly weight at the foot of their bed embodies joyous childhood innocence.

And if a gradual inkling of doubt prompts questions about why Father Christmas has not only used the same wrapping paper as the family did last Christmas and also leaves the same scent trail as the child’s mother, the truth is batted away for as long as possible by child and parent alike.

In his classic graphic novels, Raymond Briggs challenged the cynics and supported the magicmakers by prolonging the secret – our sleigh-travelling benefactor all the more credible as “bloomin” Father Christmas was seen sitting on the loo or caring for his cat and dog.

In some ways, the child in us never grows up, as we yearn for a pantomime outing when the flight-enabling strings attached to Peter Pan’s wings remained invisible, and when Tinkerbell’s recovery from imminent demise depended on the audience’s chorused affirmation that we do believe in fairies. We miss that willing suspension of disbelief, that investment in lovely secrets. Adulthood brings a knowingness that we are not always happy to accept.

Unlike those tinselly, beribboned parcels temporarily hidden at the back of the wardrobe, the flipside of good secrets are the bad, corrosive kind that come wrapped in guilt, papered over in shame, tied up in the fear of breaking either the law or the boundaries of society’s tolerance.

My family story was suffused with secrecy. Unknown to us children, each of my grandparents conducted multiple same-sex relationships throughout their otherwise happy marriage. My grandmother even had a long, but never-spoken-about romance with her sister-in-law.

The following generation was not exempt from secret-keeping either. As a child, I would listen through a crack in the wall to my mother’s murmurings of romantic love on the telephone to an unidentified caller, appalled, fascinated and baffled by an unfamiliar syrupy-girlish giggle.

And on reaching adulthood, I too kept to myself the truth of a progressive substance addiction, consumed for years by the dread of my shame-packed behaviour being discovered. Only when I eventually shared about alcoholism’s corrosive power with someone I trusted did I experience the transformative effect of the well-placed confession and begin to get well.

In the course of researching a book about the evolving culture of secret-keeping, looking at how secrets can be forever concealed, handed down through the generations, I began my inquiries with my mother, hoping to uncover the source of her unhappiness many decades after her early death. What was her life of secrecy based on? Ignorance? Society’s judgment? Patriarchal control?

I hoped to find some answers by immersing myself in the post-war years when she was a young woman having no one with whom to share her worries and ignorance as a terrified new bride. I had read about a gynaecologist, Joan Malleson, in practice in London in the 1950s, who provided counselling for the young women who came to see her initially about their medical conditions but, on finding a sympathetic ear, to whom they also confided their emotional problems.

Some of these sessions were recorded. Listening to the tapes containing the voices of women then the same age as my mother, gradually gaining in confidence as they spoke, confirmed to me how secrets once released can bring healing and happiness. The experience of the confessional had dispelled their fear.

During further research, I was honoured to be trusted with women’s tales of infidelity, incest, prejudice, illness, secret love affairs, physical and mental abuse, and the identity of parents only revealed through a DNA test. Of all the dozens of people I spoke to across a huge range of age and backgrounds, not a single one expressed regret at sharing what were sometimes decade-long, even century-held secrets, declaring themselves afterwards to feel relieved, lighter, happier.

If you are still puzzling over your present list during the next few days, perhaps you could find someone you both trust and are trusted by and the mutual courage to exchange a secret.

The experience might be the best present you have ever given or received. But not a word to anyone about Father Christmas. He must remain the best-kept secret of all.

Juliet Nicolson’s most recent title is ‘The Book of Revelations, Woman and Their Secrets from the 1950s to the Present Day’. Published by Chatto & Windus, £22