You just don’t know what lies around the corner, do you?”While her string of husbands were none the wiser, she first came to the attention of the police when she was charged for petty fraud By this stage she was on to husband number four. Each time I left my previous husband, I simply walked out, taking nothing. I just tore up my wedding photos from the previous marriages andforgot about them. He started drinking, so I left him and married Tom, a Fusilier. Then he went off to Northern Ireland and came back all jumpy and childish, so I left him and married Ronald, a Royal Engineer I was married to those three all at once.

I never forgot what I was called, and I never forgot my new husband’s name, or called them the wrong name in bed; I think I just had a good memory.”She needed one. After Melbourne there were the four soldiers, all of whom she met in the Brewers Arms pub near her former home in Colchester “Mike was in the Light Infantry in Darlington I wore a white dress. She puts Ben down on the floor where he plays with some toy bricks.”Each time I married a new man, I changed my name, and everything. “I just went around marrying people,” says Pat, as if she was talking about trips to the supermarket. I wasn’t really sad; it just wasn’t right.”Just like any other teenage liaison, you might say. But two years later her grandmother died, leaving Pat, as she saw it, totally alone, friendless and unloved, with a small baby; and thus began a manic search throughout England for secur-ity and companionship with any available bachelor who might want a wife. But he wouldn’t get up for work and support us; and he started drinking all the time So I went back home to my grandmother.

I never had the opportunity to say I was sorry.”A year later she married a tyre-fitter, with whom she had her only child, Philip. “I wore a black and white dress and we got married at Tenby registry office I thought it was going to be for life. “I was 16 when I found out my older sister Sylvia was actually my mum – I couldn’t believe it at first. We had this huge row and I shouted at her, `I hope you drop dead’ A week later, she was killed in a hit-and-run accident.

Men seem to have been unable to keep away from her.For her part, Pat maintains that her grandparents’ steady, loving partnership perpetuated her heavily rose-tinted ideal of matrimony, one sustained through 10 marriages. However, it was the extraordinary confusion over the identity of her true mother that she believes is the cause of all her woes. She grew up at her grandparents’ house in Tenby, South Wales, with her two sisters, and had always believed her grandmother to be her mother. “The judge said I was a menace to the male popularity!” she continues, shoving a bottle into Ben’s mouth Perhaps popularity is the word for it. “I was told by the judge on my last court appearance that if I appeared again he would lock me up and throw away the key,” she says, giggling up at Malcolm.

She bounces Ben, the one-year-old child of her foster daughter Joanne, on her knee. Dubbed the “Bigamy Queen” by the Sun, Pat hasserved three prison sentences, totalling five and a half years, for a seemingly unstoppable habit of wanting to wear a long white dress and a veil, but not quite remembering to tell the current husband about it.The tabloid sobriquet fits her well: large, with a loud laugh and gaudily peroxided hair, Pat Hinton holds court in her home with a decidedly monarchial manner. But I got married in a different office each time.”The reason for this geographical promiscuity? Pat always managed to get to the church on time, she just wasn’t so assiduous with her divorce papers At one point she was simultaneously betrothed to three men. I know he’s Mr Right.” She smiles up at husband number 10, a 39-year-old rather dour-looking telecommunications engineer from Birmingham He looks down at her fondly. “She was just addicted to wedding cake,” he says, shrugging his shoulders and wandering out of the living room.
A more likely diagnosis is that Pat Hinton is addicted to marriage. Having tripped down the registry office aisle on average once every two years in the last 20, she now knows the lines so well that she can correct the registrar should a textual slip-up occur.”Yeah, I’m pretty familiar with the ceremony I notice when they make mistakes, or say it differently. But he went straight off to the Falklands and had an affair, so that ended after about two weeks Finally I married Malcolm.