The Scent of Dried Roses

by Tim Lott

  In such cases, drug treatments, surgery, electric shock, would all be quite useless, argued Freud. The only way for a neurotic or hysteric to ‘recover’ – or at least cope with their anxiety and pain – was to confront buried memories of the trauma and somehow work them through, re-experience them, make fresh sense. Hypnosis, dream analysis and free association would give the psychoanalyst the clues to probe the unconscious. The catharsis of simply talking about these memories – under the guidance of the principles of psychoanalysis – would release trapped energies and help to integrate the personality once more.

  Disturbingly from my point of view, in Mourning and Melancholia (1915) Freud also pointed out that the bottomless rage and self-hatred of the melancholic is really a kind of displacement activity. The real subject of loathing, the real – in the case of suicide – murderee, is not the depressive at all but the ‘lost object’, the person or thing towards whom feelings of love can no longer be maintained. The sadism and hate which must be present in a suicide are directed against the depressive’s own ego, because they do not find it acceptable to direct it against the real culprit.

  As one of Freud’s followers, Wilhelm Stekel, put it, ‘No one kills themself who has never wanted to kill another, or at any rate, wish the death of another.’ In other words, when Jean murdered herself, she was symbolically, as well as literally, punishing someone else, was giving vent to a bottomless rage towards someone else, which she could not bring herself to express properly. And since she could not kill that other person, or even express rage towards them, she raged at, and finally killed, herself.

  From Art’s perspective in 1939, all this theory would have sounded about as convincing as allowing temple snakes to lick his eyelids, but psychoanalysis, in the inter-war period, was enjoying increasing popularity. Taken up by the Bloomsbury Group, feeding the art of surrealist painters and appearing regularly by now in popular films and newspapers, Freud was as fashionable as Marx, at least among intellectuals. My grandfather would have viewed the ideas of both as middle-class tosh, a ‘con’ not worthy of his attention, and the prejudice would have been obliquely returned, for most psychoanalytic patients were from the middle classes. The working classes were not really considered sophisticated enough to suffer neuroses, rather in the way that in the 1950s black Africans were not thought sophisticated enough to suffer depression.

  Psychoanalysis made its first big breakthrough after the First World War. In Britain there were 30,000 psychiatric casualties from the trenches, most of them suffering ‘shell shock’ or ‘soldier’s heart’. Psychotherapists were brought in, along with neurologists, to effect treatment. This was not a universally popular move, particularly among psychiatrists, who, priding themselves on being true doctors, viewed it as little more than foreign, pseudo-intellectual mumbo-jumbo. The view of one, that it was an ‘insidious poison’, was far from rare. The war between mind doctors and brain doctors reached a new pitch.

  Victims of shell shock were told to ‘look cheerful’ (the behaviourist school of psychology, ‘you are what you do’, was the dominant psychiatric doctrine at this time), to take warm baths and to divert their minds as best they could. Some were hypnotized, and some fledgeling electrical treatments were offered. Drug treatments were also provided, with the terrifying shock of cardiazol or the numbing effects of paraldehyde, the sour smell of which dominated mental hospitals throughout the country. After the end of the war, sleep narcosis was developed as a treatment using Somnifane, which would put the patient to sleep for up to ten days. Permanent coma would sometimes result.

  In 1923 it was noted that some depressed diabetics treated with insulin showed a marked improvement in mood. This was the beginning of a fifty-year reign for insulin shock treatment. By inducing hypoglycaemia – a condition of catastrophically low blood sugar levels – faintness, sweating and tremors would occur, frequently leading to mental confusion and coma. Drug treatments were gathering force now, with Benzedrine and purple hearts being prescribed, the first feel-good pills. They, like many others, made a swift appearance on the black market. Both cocaine and cannabis were used as treatments for depression, perhaps more informally than not – folk cures, you might call them.

  It was in the 1920s and 1930s that ideas of depression began to divide sharply into the rival camps where they still remain. On the one hand, there was the psychodynamic explanation, which saw depression as a form of neurosis based on conflicts, and on the other, the psychiatric model, which saw depression as psychosis – that is, a mental illness, an integral part of the mental make-up located in the structure and mechanisms of the brain. Where these explanations didn’t cancel each other out – for there were many in each camp who entirely denied the usefulness of those in the other camp – they suggested two quite distinct types of depression.

  The first, and most severe variety, was so-called ‘endogenous’ depression. Endogenous means ‘growing from within’ and – for those who believe the theory – such depressions are set in train by biological changes in brain chemistry. There was not – at least in the mind of whoever was doing the diagnosis – sufficient reason to be found in external circumstance for the apparent level of distress. Such serious, organic depressions were characterized by lack of pleasure, or any kind of sensation whatsoever. Thinking and activity would become retarded and often cease altogether, producing symptoms akin to, say, senility. There would be massive apathy and sometimes loss of ability to speak at all. Sleep patterns would be disturbed, memory would fade. Work, personal appearance and the needs of others would be entirely neglected. There would be loss of sexual drive, a sense of low self-esteem and guilt, and sometimes religious or other kinds of delusion. The endogenous depressive would feel abandoned by friends and family, and feel themselves to be a contemptible wretch, deserving no better than to die, justly punished for some real or imagined misdeed. The sufferer would pretty much go crazy.

  In this description, this outline of the purest hell, I recognized clearly the condition I was to find myself in shortly before my mother’s death. But there was – again, according to the mainstream definitions – another, frequently less serious form of depression, one that my grandfather probably suffered from.

  Reactive depression, the second variety, as the name suggests, occurs as a response to some external event. In Art’s case, this was clearly the death of Cissy. There is some kind of real rationality in this mind state, and it is far closer on the spectrum to genuine grief or unhappiness than organic depression.

  In this state there is some variation in the level of depression – it will abate from time to time. The depressive will most likely still be able to think and talk perfectly adequately. The emotional pain is liable to be expressed physically – headaches, backaches and so on. Art, according to some family members, suffered acute shingles after Cissy’s death.

  As in organic depression, there is a loss of self-esteem, but it is nowhere near as bad, and the characteristic self-accusation and self-hatred of the physically depressed are less crippling. There are anxiety and fear, rather than numbness and apathy. There is likely to be a sense of inferiority, a lack of confidence, an inability to express aggression. This type of depressive will find it hard to cope with criticism or to feel wanted, or to feel of any significance at all. These symptoms, lodged as they are in the essential personality, will not abate after the depression has passed. Such so-called mood disorders might be responsive to psychotherapy in the way that the first kind of depression would not.

  These two models of depression are crude, to put it mildly. Symptoms more often than not overlap and in assessment are highly subjective. What a doctor thinks is disastrous – say, a poor home, a badly paid job, low status – may not be seen as such by the patient. But it was as far as doctors in the 1930s had got, and it is along this spectrum that types of depression are still measured – or, more correctly, guessed at.

  Art, so far as anyone knows, was a victim of the second kind of depression. Despite not
seeking any kind of treatment, the inertia he suffered as a result of Cissy’s death did eventually lift and did not seem to recur. Given the treatments on offer, it was perhaps just as well that he showed no interest in consulting a doctor. Anyway, if there is a spectrum between mourning and melancholia, the place Art occupied in 1939 was very much away from the pole of pure illness. And yet he was sufficiently disabled to lie in bed while the business he had spent his life building up collapsed around him; to face the indignity of being looked after by his children rather than the other way around. Wells and Lott was going out of business and there was nothing, apparently, that Art could do to help it. Depression had struck for the first time at the open, unknowing face of my family.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘They have a horror of abstract thought, they feel no need for any philosophy or systematic world view… they have a certain power of acting without taking thought… the phrase “a sleepwalking people” that Hitler coined for the Germans would have been better applied to the English’

  – George Orwell, England Your England

  My grandfather’s breakdown did not endure. After a hiatus of several months, he had collected himself enough to rise from his bed and attempt to reconstruct his life, so suddenly imploded. His dignity, conducted through the sheets, earthed into the bedspring blocks, sought regeneration. The first step at least was clear enough, the almost-instinct of the English when faced with disaster: bury it. So it was that the breakdown was never spoken of again.

  The house in Essex Grove, with its cigarette machine and snooker table, its squat radiogram and Citroën Tourer, was a lost option: the business had gone West and there was no way any more of paying the rent. Art’s eldest son, Ken, had moved out already to live with his wife, Rene. A dapper man, so meticulous that he insisted on having his underpants and pyjamas ironed before he would wear them, he considered that his responsibilities were now for his wife. Anyway, the job at Hey Presto! was coming to an end, as war coalesced at the edges of vision. It was a simple war, light facing down darkness.

  Ken volunteered for the army, eventually to fight in the Burma campaign. Jack was thirteen years old. Arthur, fifteen, prematurely tense, less handsome, was already working at Cox and Co., a manufacturer of car spare parts in Croydon. The immediate family might be in extremis, but it was protected by the larger family, which felt the ripples that the disaster transmitted from its epicentre, as if all were held in a tensile web. For the time being Rose, one-toothed and wild, had moved in to look after Jack. It was plain, though, that the sweet, accustomed life that had floated them miraculously through the economic depression of the 1930s was at an end.

  Sanctuary came a few months into the war. Ken was now posted abroad, while his wife, Rene, slutted enthusiastically, rumpling and desecrating the geometrically folded sheets. Once she even tried it on with Arthur, climbing into bed with him, pretending it was all a game. She was a no-good, decided Jack, slightly jealous nevertheless, since he himself was too fat, and too shy, for girls. Also he was fond of Rene. He liked them all, his family, his friends, even his neighbours, and now he would have to leave them.

  Hetty, my grandmother’s well-to-do sister, lived in a large Victorian house in St James’s Avenue in West Ealing, bought by Emil de Villemieur. Emil had died from a surfeit of German hock, and her son Arthur was also gone, agitated into extinction by epileptic fits. Her second son, George, was at university, something unique in the family, and was shortly to train as a pilot in the RAF, while Ladybird, her only daughter, was a Land Girl, an agricultural labourer in uniform. The posters showed them laughing, throwing corn sheaves under the fat sun. Women, wanting of rationality, were not fit to slaughter. So now Hetty was by herself in the big, gloomy house in the self-styled Queen of the Suburbs. Three rooms were empty and she offered them to Art.

  He accepted, almost immediately finding a job as a delivery man at Chibnall’s, the local bakery. Jack found the old house gloomy and strange. It was inhabited by the scraps and traces of Emil de Villemieur, who stared down from a large oil painting in the darkened front room, down at heavy, age-soiled furniture and a variety of small, filigree hanging cages.

  There was a craze for exotic birds in the 1940s – they had, along with miniature poodles, become immensely and inexplicably popular, easily outnumbering all other varieties of pet. The budgies were, by mass habit, named Jimmy or Joey, and inhabited nickel-plated palaces with mirrors, bells and tilting ladders, while they attemped to frame epithets and curses through prissy horned beaks that they sharpened on cuttlefish.

  Hetty, perhaps in some kind of exercise in emotional displacement, had taken to these small, cacophonous birds. She had constructed an aviary at the rear of the house, where Jimmy would copulate with Joey, producing multiples of both. Their squawks and trills penetrated the gloom whenever Jack made his way to his new room upstairs, which he shared with Arthur, while his father lived at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. Sometimes the birds would be set free from the cages and flap around the darkened rooms like fat, highly strung moths. Downstairs, away from the front room with its birdseed and pelmeted and curtained fireplace and down a long dark corridor was an equally odd room, covered from ceiling to floor with dark, lugubrious oil paintings featuring Stags in the Glen, Misty Mountains and brooding, overcast landscapes. They looked down on an upright piano that was never played.

  The house had a smell, of loss and birdshit and Hetty’s fancy Du Maurier cigarettes, and a kind of Victorian dolour. Jack escaped as often as he could, heading at weekends by bus and train back to his friends in Crystal Palace, but the trips were arduous. Gradually, they became rarer and he tried to fit himself into this new life, riding out with his father on the bread van to Notting Hill Gate and the Portobello Road, which was, as chance would have it, Art’s designated territory. The schools had closed down when the bombs came, but Jack was more or less at the end of his school life anyway, having now achieved fourteen years of age. His education was absolutely rudimentary, but then what was the point of accumulating facts about alluvial deposits and logarithms and forgotten battles, when there was money to be earned, a life to be survived?

  He applied for a job on the assembly line at the Strand Electrics factory at the end of St James’s Avenue, and was accepted, wage 12/6 per week. There was to be no teenage interregnum, for teenagers did not exist, even as a word. Jack simply passed from childhood into manhood. Now he would be offered cigarettes and beer, sworn in the presence of, if there were no women around. You could cuss, but never, ever with a girl in earshot. This was a part of the vast patchwork of rules, particular to men, that Jack understood without being told.

  Entertainment had been circumscribed by the war to a certain extent, although some cinemas were still open and at home they could gamble – rummy, pontoon, Newmarket – in secret, as Hetty, a puritan by nature, disapproved. But then the war itself was entertainment and a kind of fulfilment. As in every other participating country, the suicide rate dropped sharply. Even in the worst imaginable of environments, the Nazi concentration camps, it was bewilderingly low.

  Since, as Jack knew, there was no chance that they would lose, or that he would die – he was English, he was young – the blackouts and bomb flashes became a lark. Walking home from the Northfields Odeon, you would thrill as the sirens sounded, duck and run as the big ack-ack guns sent a spray of razored shrapnel raining into the street. The barrage balloons and searchlights decorated the night sky, better even than the Crystal Palace firework tableaux.

  There was an Anderson shelter in the garden, but after a while Jack didn’t bother to get out of bed when the siren sounded; he just put his head under the covers, reducing the dangerous world by the trick of invisibility. If it’s got your number on it… You always half-hoped a big one would drop near you, just for the drama of it. And, in fact, early one morning there was a rolling whooom that had Jack sitting bolt upright. Shifting red and orange light made the wallpaper unfamiliar.

 
It was five-thirty and almost time for the factory anyway. Jack peeled back the counterpane, put on his work overalls and made his way downstairs. Emil de Villemieur looked particularly sanguine this morning, reddened by the reflected blaze. Where was it? Who’d bought it? Out in the street, cathedrals of smoke were rising from the end of the road, at the junction with the Uxbridge Road. Jack strained to see something. There were shapes, pressed by gravity and the force of the blast horizontal on to the pavement. He moved closer, a slight nervousness now intruding on his excitement, an apprehension that slowed his walk. There was glass and brick and tile, rubble all over, but other shapes, more disturbing, spread across the street, piled against kerbstones, for ten, twenty yards from where the explosion had taken place.

  A sickness hawked in his throat, as a cumulus of fog moved upwards and away. Now Jack could see clearly, his eyelids stretching to take in the enormity. There were the shapes of arms and legs, torsos, heads separate from the body, some black, some apparently melting, some on fire. Could a body burn? He wanted to turn and run, but an ancient fascination pushed him closer, his stomach acidic and in contraction.

  Amazingly, there were people standing by the scene laughing. Jack rubbed his eyes as if to erase what was impressed on his retina. Was war just fun, scaled-up fireworks after all? The bodies were so blackened, yet where intact, strangely perfect. He moved closer, the laughter still sounding. Were there madmen here? A bystander kicked one of the bodies and it moved with an impossible lightness across the street. Another lifted a head and threw it lightly to his girlfriend, who caught it with a giggle. Other bodies on the ground were becoming liquid.