A few years ago, at Christmas, I rang an old friend who I'd known for more than 50 years. We had been best friends and neighbours in Ruislip, Middlesex when we were eight. She wasn't feeling well, and suddenly started telling me the most shocking things about her mother that she'd never mentioned before. I remember that my mother had never approved of Pamela's mother, and I had thought her rather odd. She would often get up and come downstairs wearing a pale silky green dressing gown and bright red lipstick in the late morning. Why? Where was she going? Where had she been? Lipstick was for going out dancing, I thought, which is when my mother wore it. No wonder my mother disapproved. And then one night, coming home late in the car, my mother spotted a couple very close together, clutching each other, visible for only a few seconds as the car headlights swept round the curve of a roundabout and lit them up, but in those seconds, my mother knew.

"That's Cleonie Saunders," she said to my father, with great contempt, "the kurve [prostitute]. And I'll bet you that was Mr Thompson from the carpet shop. I'll bet you anything."

My mother knew a lot. She knew that Pamela's mother was sleeping with half the high street, but she didn't know that Cleonie was worse than a kurve. She was a child beater, who often locked Pamela in the cellar or upstairs with the blackout blinds down. We never guessed. Now, half a century later, I had found out. Looking back, I also realised that all our parents were going through various shades of hell: dreary, struggling or collapsing marriages.

More or less, whatever my mother knew, I knew, because she would tell me, or she'd tell everyone else loudly, so that I'd hear, because she wasn't very good at containing herself, which is why my father called her Blabbermouth. As a child I was hardly bothered by these grown-up goings on. I had better things to think about – my friends, my dog, my pet mice and riding. My parents bothered me more as a teenager, when I grew rather snooty and thought them a horribly vulgar pair. I didn't want to hear them laughing loudly and crudely at things to do with sex and bottoms, or using Yiddish words beginning with "schm …", which to me sounded distasteful and squelchy.

And they were not serious enough about being Jewish. They ate bacon and eggs, and shellfish. They did not pray properly. My mother prayed in occasional snatches and my father never prayed at all. They told vulgar jokes. They often farted loudly and then laughed, and they shouted.

It was a dreadful embarrassment going out with them in public. No one else's parents, as far as I could see, behaved like that. I wanted to feel clean, polite and superior, so I turned to God for a while, then I went to art school and thought my parents even more crude and hopelessly unsophisticated.

I only began to understand them once I had my own daughter, and now I am even more of a grownup, I can see more clearly why my mother was such a screamer and my father a sulker. Because even when nothing much dramatic was happening in Ruislip, suburban life was a struggle for both of them, particularly my mother.

My father would be thinking of nothing but "the business", which made him anxious, which made him sulky. He would return from work, demand silence and speak only in grunts to my mother, who, probably like many other housewives in the 50s, had been left at home with no outlet for her considerable talents and energy, other than flower-arranging classes, art classes and bridge. And gardening and cooking and looking after the dog, and me, and him, and mainly stuck in the bloody kitchen for the whole of her life.

So she screamed rather a lot and worried even more, mainly about me. Did the neighbours feed me properly on the rare times that she wasn't home? No. Were they feeding me drek (rubbish)? Yes. Was I eating enough? She was concerned about the whole eating process. I must stuff my food in and be sure it came out properly. Was everything in working order? Had I had been to the lavatory that morning? Had I washed my hands? Had I washed my bum? I thought nothing of these questions at the time. I knew nothing different. I just answered: yes, yes, yes.

My mother asked me the same questions almost every day, until I was 27. Then I read Portnoy's Complaint, and told a friend that my mother, like Portnoy's, hung about outside the bathroom asking questions. He fell on the ground laughing. Luckily it was soft grass at an Oxfordshire wedding. The next morning my mother rang with her usual questions, but I refused to answer. "Don't ask me that again," I said. "I'm 27 and I'm not answering it any more." So she didn't.

I rather admired her for that, considering the great difficulty she always had repressing herself. Repression came naturally to my father, but for a loud, excitable woman, life in Ruislip was pretty stifling and there was no way out. It was heavenly for children. We had the fields, woods, the lido and the river Pinn for our huge play area, and despite my mother's anxiety and a mad Tarzan rumoured to be roaming the woods, we were allowed out aged eight or nine by ourselves. We had freedom, but the grownups didn't.

My mother had little education, and in those days wives didn't often have careers. You couldn't just swan off, leave your husband, take the children, get a job or live in sin. If you did that you'd have to leave your children behind. Husbands went to work, came home and expected their dinners to be ready. I don't think my father was particularly odd for his time. He was uncommunicative and critical, hadn't a clue about positive reinforcement, and neither were he or my mother much cop at expressing affection and declaring love for their child, as today's parents are meant to do. You just had to assume that they felt it.

My father's mother taught him little about expressing affection. She spent a lot of time in bed, and rarely lifted a finger to look after her seven children, so my mother told me. She didn't even give them any breakfast, but sent them off with a penny to buy a bun on the way to school, and then they were bullied all the way up the road until they got there, on a more or less empty stomach. Luckily my father had a big brother, Phil, to look after him, but still his childhood was not easy. Here is an example of his mother's poor parenting. He had a pet toad living in the coal hole. He had asked his mother repeatedly to warn him when the coal men were coming, so that he could save his toad, if it was still down there hibernating. She did not warn him.

As if that wasn't bad enough, there were the hardships of everyday life: the lack of breakfasts, the bullies and once, when my father was little, he asked for pears. Just that particular day he felt desperate and probably nagged. "Pears he wants, pears he'll get," said his mother, and gave him a frusk (smack). And no pears.

My mother often reported this event, because what really shocked her about Grandma Nathanson was her lack of food provision. Such behaviour in Christians she was used to. It was almost the norm. But for a Jewish mother to fail in this area was unspeakable. Her own mother, my maternal grandma, was good at food, but fairly poor at social integration. She wasn't at all keen on Christians, and was inconsolable when her son, my Uncle Cyril, married one. This was a tragedy of enormous proportions to her, and it made their daughter, my cousin, a bastard in her eyes, for ever. And all the time, my Auntie Celia, Queen of Fibbers, who my parents couldn't stand, was doing her very best to steal my inheritance from Grandma.

But despite these family miseries, we still managed to have a jolly time, and my father turned into a man who told fabulous jokes with perfect timing, and could afford holidays in the south of France. Every year we drove down to Cannes, where my parents came into their own.

There was something about the French people and language that made my mother feel more at home than in England. Among the pale, thin-lipped Ruislip women, my mother would be seen as a vulgar loudmouth. In Cannes she was an attractive, voluptuous woman appreciating things and enjoying herself rather noisily, which, to the French, was normal. Here she could shout, talk more or less non-stop in very loud French, crack jokes, repeat herself and eat the lovely food.

My father also loved the French. He turned French upon arrival in Cannes. Being dark-skinned, he already looked rather foreign, and once he had changed into his sandals, khaki shorts, string vest and navy beret, you would have thought he was a real Frenchman, sitting in the local betting shop, drinking pastis and reading the runners in the Nice Matin. Not that Cannes was perfect. Out one day on a pedalo with my parents, I sat on one of the front bits with my legs dangling in the clear, blue water, looking down at the sandy parts of the bottom of the sea, jumping off now and again for a swim while they pedalled, when suddenly, something brown came bobbing past my dangling legs. What was it? A sea cucumber come loose? No. It was a floating poo from the American naval ship anchored off shore. I lifted my legs out of the water. Together we counted 35 more floating by, flushed straight out of their ship's lavatories into the azure water.

Here was an advantage to having a mother and father like mine. It only made them laugh. And the laugh would go on, because this was a fabulous story to tell one's friends. It had four top-notch ingredients: danger, horror, thrills and bowels. Perfect.

At that time I was too young to be embarrassed and now I'm too old. I look in the mirror and I see my parents. There are the faces my mother used to pull, the little expressions of distaste, the blabbing, shouting, butting in, vulgar laughs and flatulence. Perhaps not so publicly, but still there. And the Yiddish, which I thought so distasteful, I now love. But I have learned all about positive reinforcement and clear expressions of affection, and I never ask my daughter bowel questions. Never.

• What the Grown-ups Were Doing by Michele Hanson is published by Simon and Schuster, £14.99. To order a copy for £11.99, with free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846.