* * *
THE BISCUIT FACTORY, as the project became known, was in Bedminster, an area south of the river that had been bombed by the Luftwaffe. Many of the residents had moved to new estates while rebuilding took place, and this meant the area was a jumble of demolished brick and cheap new projects. The atmosphere was one of deep shock and fragile hope—just right, said Judith, for a psychiatric venture.
Boy, was it different from the old mental hospitals. On the upper floor, we put dormitories of three or four beds, with an open door between men’s and women’s areas and shower blocks at either end. Downstairs was a kitchen with long pine tables. Although there was always a cook on hand, the patients were encouraged to prepare the food themselves; a cooking rotation included the doctors, which was a challenge for me, coming as I did from a generation of men fed by their mothers, the army, or their landladies.
There was still plenty of space for common rooms and recreation, with a pair of table-tennis tables and a huge supply of balls donated by a local pharmacist keen to get in with us. We hoped that most of the therapy would be communal, and I was interested to see if I could resurrect any of the group success of Silverglades. With two reel-to-reel tape recorders on which we listened and re-listened to the patients talking about their lives, we became convinced that the clues were not in the “symptoms” but in the stories.
As ever in our branch of medicine, there was no shortage of patients. We wanted to take in those whom the system had failed, while not becoming a refuge for violent or antisocial people. After six months I managed to persuade Simon Nash that a year spent with us would do his career nothing but good. It was a time, I pointed out to him, of intellectual excitement in our discipline, and he needed to be at the heart of it. He joined as deputy director, and his humor made him popular with the patients: while few of them understood the purpose behind his role plays and psychodramas, hope and laughter seemed to follow him.
Judith Wills took some convincing of Nash’s value but was eventually won over by the papers of his that I showed her. Judith herself was a woman of flexible intellect but rigid determination: she could still the mania of large men by the power of her presence. She was driven by an apparently bottomless compassion for those whom inheritance, society, or ill fortune had broken, but if they became too familiar with her, she could rebuff them with a word. Discipline, even in the freewheeling atmosphere of the Biscuit Factory, was the means of her kindness.
She arrived at seven thirty every morning, neatly dressed in tweed skirt and casual sweater, a slight figure, about my age, with cropped brown hair and thick glasses. She was the product of a fearsome women-only educational escalator and in another life could easily have run some such bluestocking college herself. But she had humor too and a sense of wanting things to change. She was infused, as we all were, by the intoxicating belief that we might really do better than our parents, that many of the things they had accepted as immutable could in fact be altered.
This excitement was widespread then, and everywhere you turned you seemed to see an echo of it, not just in medicine or in academic study, but in what was written—in poetry, drama, and music. The uprising was doubtless caused in part by the war, for which—although we’d been its soldiers—we blamed our parents. We, in our generation, would not be making that mistake. There would be no more people born in mental hospitals and abandoned there. There would be no more padded cells and no more straitjackets, whether made of sailcloth or barbiturate; there would be no more lobotomies. Each patient was an individual whose story would be honored. There would be no blanket diagnoses involving long and badly formed Greek words. We outlawed the term schizophrenia, which gave a false idea of the condition, suggesting a “split mind,” taken by the ignorant as “having two personalities.” (I was glad to read somewhere that Eugen Bleuler, the man who had invented the name, was better at doctoring than he was at word-making.) Nash told us he knew someone who, as well as a house in Bristol, owned a weekend flat in Weston-super-Mare and described himself as living a “schizophrenic” existence; Simon offered to take him to a back ward in Glenside to see what such a life was really like.
Now in my late forties, I was rather old to be a part of the new idealism. There was a childish element in it all; I was aware of that at the time. I also knew my actual childhood years had not exhausted my desire to play: there hadn’t been much tree climbing or camping out with other children. The never-again years of my twenties had been spent in uniform, in foreign countries, killing men I didn’t know.
As if that were not enough, the fifteen or so years after the war seemed, in England at least, a joyless time with a background of menace. I felt uneasy that a nuclear bomb had brought the war to an end in Japan, though relieved that it had; I tried not to think of the burning paper houses. It was hard to work out exactly what was going on in the new cold war, but there was a pessimistic tone to public discussion, especially on television, where professors sucked on their pipes with long faces. I knew people who belonged to the Communist Party, not because—knowing what was known by then—anyone could seriously believe in it but because they felt that resigning from the party would be to say goodbye to their hopes for a better world. It says plenty for the era that some people thought the best thing on offer was Stalin.
It was not surprising that in a new decade I was ready to give everything I had to our big venture in its comically named place (Simon said he always felt there was a cheap joke to be had about nuts and biscuits but to his irritation could never pin it down). The Biscuit Factory was going to change the world and the way we looked at it. If we could find out exactly what had gone wrong inside the heads of the 1 percent of humans who were broken, then we could not only mend them but, by extension, discover a great deal about the other 99 percent. When testing a new substance, Judith pointed out, physicists don’t sit back, take photographs, and admire it; they push it to extremes by mixing it and melting it and determining the temperature at which it freezes. In the Biscuit Factory we thought of ourselves as more than doctors; we believed that we were establishing the boiling point of this still-new creature, Homo sapiens. Of course, even in such elated moments we didn’t imagine we were alone. We knew of similar ventures in the United States and of at least two experimental “communities” in England; we read about them, wished them well, but didn’t study their findings too closely for fear of being influenced or discouraged. We pictured ourselves as a forward platoon in a trying area (the Anzio salient came to mind), but we felt there was a division fighting alongside us.
This work freed in me at last the sense of possibility that had previously been dammed. I was not cast down by the setbacks we encountered. I nerved myself to deal with people who soiled themselves, to hold my nose. I talked deep into the night with a shock-haired woman who was as repellently insane as any I had met—permanently exhausted by the care of four nonexistent children. I managed it because I knew my colleagues would have done the same, because in Wills and Nash I had found people whose energy and talent were commensurate with my own ambitions.
* * *
I WAS LUCKY enough to be living in my old room in Redland. Mrs. Devaney had had several other “gentlemen” in my absence, but the last had just moved out. Simon suggested we should all live in the Biscuit Factory together, but I knew I needed time to myself.
Occasionally I went to parties or gatherings. When I told people what I did for a living they usually looked alarmed. There were obvious reasons for this, I think. First, they found mad people repulsive and upsetting. Second, they worried that the illnesses might be in some way catching, that if they spent any time with mad people they might be “infected” with psychosis. And I think they were suspicious about whether these were “real” illnesses or whether they were “all in the mind.”
Gently, I explained that the opposite of real was “unreal” and the obverse of “all in the mind” would surely be “all in the body.” Then I tried to explain that this second polarity was also fal
se, since “mind” was only a function of a bodily organ, the brain. At this point, most of them spotted someone they knew on the other side of the room or shuffled off to “find an ashtray.” If someone lingered, I would put it differently. So far as we knew, one in a hundred people in all populations across the world was mad (it was easier to stick with this word). No other animal had this problem. If you mistreated a dog it would turn nasty, but that was a different matter; that was also the case with humans, as the Borstal population of young men who’d almost all been knocked about as children went to show. But one in a hundred cows that had lived a normal life did not, at the moment she reached adulthood, start to hear the voices of nonexistent cows when she was alone in a field. First-year biology told you that for such an oddity to persist in the genes meant it had once conferred an advantage in the struggle for survival. Since humans were the only species to have it, perhaps that genetic blip—when we identified it—might also help us understand what made humans different, unique. Wasn’t that a reasonably exciting project to be working on: the secret of what we are?
I never could convince other people that it was. Quite often, rather than go through the rigmarole, I’d pretend I was a GP. People seemed to find that less off-putting, and I’d find myself included in some harmless drinking and flirting. Simon Nash told me that if he was feeling tired, he’d say he worked in a supermarket in the city center.
After a year the three of us published a paper that was in its way a manifesto for what we were doing. It was called “Who Is the ‘Mad’ One Here?” The focus was a patient called Elsie A, who had been in Glenside for twenty years, much of it spent sitting under a table, before coming to the Biscuit Factory for help. Simon Nash had treated her and gave an account of how he had engaged with her story and learned how to “read” her bodily signals.
“You make her sound like a chimpanzee,” I told him.
“She’s very like a chimpanzee,” Simon replied. “Words have failed her. She’s not happy in her species so she’s gone back to the family.”
He often said things like this. I could never decide if they were clever or absurd, but the rejoinders came back quickly, and he couldn’t have been expecting such a crude remark from me.
Simon’s serious point was the evolutionary one, and this became the focus of his work. It was pretty speculative stuff, because the study of genetics at this point lacked basic information. I, meanwhile, wrote a description of traditional treatments and why they had failed; Judith wrote an introduction to the paper, setting out our clinical practices and safeguards. We each suggested improvements to the work of the others, and finally we had something we all liked. The local television network sent a reporter, and our paper achieved some small notoriety. Wills, Hendricks, and Nash, people started to say, sounded like a firm of solicitors—though a reviewer in one of the educational supplements said, “not a partnership to which I shall be entrusting my affairs in the foreseeable future.”
And so the work of the Biscuit Factory carried on in the lingering air of shortbread and digestive, with many late-night “happenings,” arguments, complaints from neighbors, disappearances, parties, smuggled alcohol, visits from the police but no serious injury or disaster. All the patients seemed happier. None, as far as I knew, was cured. Some seemed “better.” And this last was the small group that drove us on through those great days of hope.
* * *
PARTLY BECAUSE OF the resistance I met socially when talking about our work, I came to think the best way I could engage other people might not be in talking but in writing. Following my article about Reggie and Diego, I had been asked to review a couple of books and invited to write a piece about the legacy of Freud for another general-interest magazine. The editor had been kind enough to say my style was “readable” and “not too academic.”
In the evenings, if I were not on duty, I’d make notes and plans for a book of my own. I didn’t want the deadening effect of words like the health service to limit its readership; I wanted it to be, in the swinging idiom of the time, “cross-cultural”; I wanted it to sell. It was agreed among the three of us that I should take a sabbatical to write it; the honor it would reflect on the Biscuit Factory—as Judith rather kindly put it—would be payment enough to cover my absence.
TEN
While I was in Northumberland visiting Richard Varian, I had left Max with Mrs. Gomez. As usual, he seemed stunned by tapas and television, so on my return I took him to Wormwood Scrubs to run it off. I tried to interest him in games with other dogs; there was a blue whippet spinning round in circles on the spot, trying without success to entice Max to chase him. I threw a stick, and Max politely watched it arc and fall, as though content that gravity still applied. Eventually we went past the men with their remote-control model aircraft and turned for home.
It had disturbed me a little to meet Richard Varian again after such an interval. Of course I had thought about him off and on over the years; I’d even seen his name once in the paper when he had become colonel of the regiment. In other ways he was like the small boys and girls I’d been with at the village school: I presumed they were alive somehow, somewhere, but they seemed separated from me by a chasm of more than simple time. They might as well have been dead.
I had often wondered why I seemed so disconnected from the early parts of my existence. It seemed there had been some watershed, though I had no idea what or when it was. Through my thirties and forties, newsletters from my old college recorded a world unchanging: they invited me to join in Christmas carols, go to “informal drinks” in London or to the Wallace Memorial Lecture in Old Hall, but all such events seemed empty to me, as though the people who took part in them were insincere. I felt there had once been a world in which things had authenticity, in which you could go to church, apply to work for Shell, marry, or have children, but that all this could only now be done self-consciously, as though quoting or referring.
This sense of being separated from the authentic world was not the result of wartime trauma; it had begun when I was a student. I already felt as an undergraduate that my childhood had belonged to someone else. And because there was such a clear sense of before and after, I had always presumed that there must have been a crisis, the nature of which, perhaps for good reason, had escaped me. In the days after my return to London from Northumberland, however, it occurred to me that the alteration might not have been caused by a single event. A change can also be the result of invisible forces combining over a period to reach critical mass: think of an apple falling from a tree. It was possible that the feeling of disconnection and of being unable to do things sincerely was no more than a symptom of reaching adulthood. But I felt I ought to know whether this feeling was universal, widespread, or rare; and if rare, whether it was morbid. It was part of my job to know that sort of thing.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING WEEK I had a letter from Pereira, asking me if I had been to see Richard Varian and, if so, how it had gone. “My health is holding up quite well, the Reaper is waiting but getting no closer,” he wrote, “and I would be delighted to see you again if you felt it worth your while to come and stay for a few days. We have had a fine spell of autumn weather, and it is forecast to continue. I have turned up a couple more minor references to your father in my diaries—nothing very sensational, but they might interest you. I know that Céline would be pleased to see you again, as would Paulette, who has been in a rich vein of form in the kitchen.”
I laughed as I put the letter down. “I can arrange a beautiful naked girl, meals from the great era of French cuisine, and as much wine as you can drink…” Whether his concern for my welfare was philanthropic or whether it was devious and self-interested, I still didn’t know.
The next day, after I had advised a distraught man about his marriage (dear God, if he had seen the mess behind my eyes), I took Max for a walk on the Little Scrubs, an area of common ground slightly less dispiriting than Wormwood Scrubs itself, and conveniently close to my consultin
g room.
It was not surprising, I thought, as we began the loop, that Pereira felt I was holding something back about Luisa. Denial had long been my favored way of dealing with her, having locked away the dormant file in my mind. The first time I remember thinking about her was one day while I was working as a houseman in London, probably in 1948, four years after she had left me to go home to Genoa. At this stage, our superiors wanted us to cover every aspect of general medicine and spared us nothing of death, birth, and reproduction. I had little interest in these areas, but at one point it seemed I spent most of my time with a rubber glove on. The venereal disease clinic, tactfully known as Outpatients Five, was the subject of jokes among the students, but no one enjoyed working there.
The months I spent dealing with these parts of the anatomy compelled me to think about the oddness of sexual passion. Many of the women who undressed in the clinic were old and overweight and less clean than the nurses and I would have liked. Other female patients, expectant mothers for instance, were young, and there were a few who would have been judged by the world to be “good-looking.” Occasionally I might appreciate that their figures were well made, but in a way no more erotic than that in which you admire a statue.
This was all quite “professional,” I suppose, but it did eventually resurrect the question of desire. And that brought to mind the body of Luisa. What had been happening to me in the hotel at Pozzuoli or in Luisa’s lodging or in my little upstairs room near the port? In many of the books I’d read, “love” was presented as a state of enlightenment. People who attained it were able to live on a higher plane where they could overlook the ugly facts of sex; they could subsume the grossness in a holy fire. Nothing could have been further from my experience. Luisa was to me like a lost Vermeer to a Dutch art historian: if there had been a magnifying glass at hand I would have been tempted to use it, if only to marvel at the varied colors of her skin.
Where My Heart Used to Beat Page 20
