I thought when I arrived back in our room everything would be all right, but it was merely the beginning of the end. I couldn’t get over the fact that I had nerves, that people thought that I was a bit funny. I, who was so sensible, and level-headed, with such a sense of humour – people with a sense of humour didn’t have nerves.
When it was suggested that perhaps I should see a psychiatrist, the boil burst.
When, during my visit to him, this man further suggested that I should go for voluntary treatment, fear ran riot. Seeing this, he said it was up to me. I could either handle the situation myself, or have help. He was a very wise man in putting the onus on me for I knew I was no longer capable of handling this situation. It had now grown to such a gigantic form that even when in the state of deep depression, when nothing mattered, fear still held domination.
I went as a voluntary patient for treatment.
I cannot speak too highly of the kindness shown me by the Matron, nurses and staff of this particular place.
There were about twenty beds in our dormitory, classed as light cases. One of the light cases was a big Catholic woman. She slept next to me and cried and screamed out her agony of mind most of the time. Another was a young girl, a pretty girl who had been there for years and was always walking out – they didn’t call it running away – and always being brought back again. There was the vivacious good-looking girl who thought her husband had been going to poison her. And many others. The only one who seemed comparable with my own case was the woman who, when she lost her husband, couldn’t face up to life.
In this place I could see myself becoming any one of these patients, for I was open to negative suggestion like a sieve to water. At times I felt I was a bit of every one of them. Yet the Matron and nurses took my case very lightly. It was just a passing thing they said; as I knew all my symptoms and the reason why I was in this state, half the battle was already won. Of course, I felt aggressive. Of course, I wanted to hit back at people and life. That was natural after what I had been through; it would all pass.
Once again I made myself useful to a Matron, by assisting her in the storeroom, and under occupational therapy I made gloves, and wove cloth, and suffered the torments of Hell, and not a little because all feeling of affection had left me. I had to confess to my beloved Tom that I no longer had any feeling for him whatever. It could have been that he was an inanimate object.
Tom, at this time, proved just how right I had been in my first judgment of him. No man could have been kinder, more loving, more patient than he was. Every night he rode fourteen miles on an old bike to see me for a few minutes. This after finishing a day’s work in camp, the double journey to and from which entailed another fifteen miles.
It is hard for me to believe now that my main recollection of that place is the smell of urine. The house itself was magnificent. There was a large hall in which we ate very well; there were wide corridors, and a simply magnificent staircase. At an appointed time, we light cases went for electric-shock treatment. I have an impression of going down stone stairs and sitting on wooden forms around a room which was adjacent to lavatories. The smell of urine that pervaded this place was worse than that in the infirm ward at Harton. And there we would sit, waiting our turn to go in and be shocked into unconsciousness. I remember, as I sat in this room, thinking of the lavatory in William Black Street that had been my haven, but that lavatory had never smelt like this. And then there came to my mind a forgotten memory from the past, and with it the intense feeling of disgust, and shame, that I experienced one day as I was crossing the road from the last arch, near the dock gates, and in my line of vision was the men’s urinal, and out of it came two women accompanied by two men, and they were hanging on each other and laughing. The depravity of that moment was in the smell that was around me.
Under one electric treatment the machinery must have gone slightly wrong for I bounced up on the couch under the force of a terrific shock, but I was still conscious. This frightened me still further. The weird thing about the electric treatment was that you walked back to the ward. You were conscious of walking as if in a dream. Your feet lifted heavily over small objects that had turned into huge obstacles.
When I had been in the place five weeks I went into Hereford on my own for the day. It was a test. The test proved to myself that I was still mentally ill. On the following Sunday I decided to go to Mass. The priest was coming out from Hereford, the nice priest. I was clutching once more at the God I was denying, anything to use as a lifebelt. I’ll never forget the look on the priest’s face when he saw me coming into that room. He came towards me, saying slowly, ‘What-on-earth-are-you-doing here?’
A condition such as mine is difficult to explain at this distance. I can only say that I wouldn’t wish the devil in Hell to have a breakdown. And if I had the choice of having a crippling, agonising physical disease, or that of a breakdown, I know, without hesitation, which I would choose.
Fear had been my companion since a tiny child. Hardly ever a day went past but I feared something, and the accumulation of all those fears was with me now.
Fear of drink . . . of Kate in drink.
Fear of God.
Fear of not living a good life.
Fear of dying an unhappy death.
Fear of the priest and of his admonition from behind the grid in the confessional.
Fear of loving and of slipping the way of Kate.
Fear of people . . . even behind my gay laughter fear of people and what they might say about me having no Da.
Fear of losing Tom in the war – a great, consuming, agonising fear.
Fear of doctors.
Fear of operations, of blood-spattered floors and blinding arc lights.
Fear of swear words; this was with me always.
Fear of going mad.
fear . . . fear . . . fear . . . On with the years, mounting, swelling, until my laughter and small talk could not stretch to cover it, until I laughed too much. Then for a long period I laughed not at all.
I turned into a solid block of fear.
It would, at times, paralyse me, and I would lose the entire use of my legs; at others, it would make me retch for hours on end.
For twenty hours of each day I was in a wide-awake state of trembling terror, and the worst part of the state was the fear of what I might do in retaliation. The aggressiveness of my childhood period had returned. Indiscriminately it was turned against all mankind, but in particular, and powerfully, it settled on Kate.
One thing I knew for a certainty. I must face this thing and fight it. But how? The answer was that I must get back to The Hurst. In that house I would know a resurrection; at least so I thought. And in a way this proved true.
I had been in hospital just over six weeks when I discharged myself. They thought it was foolish of me, but I knew that I would only become worse surrounded by those poor people, who were, in a way, in a much worse state than I, for they were beyond being able to recognise, or analyse, their own symptoms.
The Hurst was in a dreadful state. For five years – except for a few months when it had a tenant who left it much dirtier than a herd of pigs would have done – it had been empty. It had received the slanting blows of two time bombs, and the roof, never good, was now in very bad shape. It had taken a great shuddering, yet all we could claim for war damage was the removal of the tower.
But it didn’t matter, nothing mattered. I was home once more. I almost knelt down and kissed the floor. Tom had a fortnight’s leave, and with the help of his mother, who was most kind to me, we tackled the cleaning of the house.
An odd thing happened when I entered The Hurst that bright July day in 1945, for I was assailed by a strong filthy smell of urine, and I thought, My God! I am always going to smell urine. But when we went upstairs and into the bedrooms we found overflowing chambers under all the beds. We found full receptacles even in the long linen cupboards on the landing. On top of this the tenant had flitted, owing us the rent.
> But what did it really matter, I was back home. I would get better; the war was over, and Tom would soon be home for good.
Not more than two or three people knew I had been ill, and even these saw that I was quite well now. I reinforced the façade with an armour plate, and this, too, was held together with fear; no-one must know that I was still ill. If you set a pattern for yourself you become like that pattern, act well and you became well; so I read in the books on psychology and auto-suggestion. I worked on myself all my waking hours; I very rarely got more than four hours’ sleep and those only with the help of drugs. So realistic did my façade become that it deceived almost everyone. I met a person down the town who knew I had been ill. We had coffee together, and after chatting and talking for some time, apropos of nothing that had gone before, she suddenly said, ‘You know, Kitty, some people are wicked. You know so-and-so? Well, she said you had been in an asylum. I wouldn’t believe this, and now . . . why, I’ve never known anybody in my life so down to earth and less like going into an asylum than you are. People are wicked, aren’t they?’
I reached home with another fear added to the rest; people knew about me being ill. Yet at the same time I was indignant that they should have thought I had been in an asylum – I hadn’t been in an asylum, I had been a voluntary patient and had private treatment in a home for nerve cases.
My illness entered another phase. I rejected completely all idea of a God, even while part of my mind was still begging the Blessed Virgin for help, still appealing to the Holy Family. When I look back now I think that the terror that filled me when I dared deny the existence of my Catholic God was the nearest to madness I reached. Never once did this thought attack me but I vomited with it. I haven’t the power to translate this feeling into words; only those Catholics like me who have lost God, consciously lost God through thinking him out of their lives, know what I’m talking about. There is a great difference between this way of losing God, and that of the lapsed Catholic; it is usually laziness that creates the lapsed Catholic, and nearly always they recant on their deathbed, but to people such as myself, the thought of recanting is only another means of giving in to fear again.
Up till recently, when I have been asked the reason why I left the Catholic Church, I have had difficulty in explaining. The only definite statements I could make were that I didn’t believe in the transubstantiation, or that I would go to Hell if I purposely missed Mass, and died without confessing my sin.
Then one morning I received an envelope in which was a small book entitled ‘A letter to a lapsed Catholic’. And I had not read two pages of it before I had the answer to why I was no longer a Catholic. Here was the narrowness, here the bigotry, here the fear that had been engendered in me in my early years.
I pick out a few quotations:
Shall we put it down to ignorance? Are you really convinced that the Catholic Church is different from all other Churches? That the Catholic Church was founded by Jesus Christ, who was God Himself, whereas all the others were set up by men? That the Catholic Church teaches you, pardons you, guides you, makes you holy and leads you to heaven by the authority of Christ Himself, who is God?
God does not want to have to damn you. He died to save you from damnation. If you do go to Hell – which God forbid – it will be through your own deliberate fault, through rejecting the graces He offers you, possibly through refusing the appeal of this letter.
I say God does not want you to go to Hell. He died to save you from that. He gave Himself to the very last drop of His precious Blood. How are you repaying that infinite generosity?
You will go to hell possibly through refusing the appeal of this letter.
To a trained, logical and educated mind it’s ridiculous, but only a small percentage of Catholics have trained, logical and educated minds. Only ten years ago that sentence would have filled me with fear.
God does not make laws without helping us to keep them. He is not a slave-driver, threatening us all the time with punishment. He is a Father, infinitely wise, kind, good and loving. He wants us to save our souls infinitely more than we do ourselves. He wants you to resolve now to come back to your Church.
Think of what He says to us through His Prophet in the Bible: ‘You shall be carried at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall caress you. As one whom the mother cares – so will I comfort you.’ Have you ever thought of it that way before – of yourself as a little child being carried through life like a tiny baby being loved in its mother’s lap or upon her knee?
What level of mentality is this supposed to appeal to?
‘Crucifying Him?’ Yes, indeed. Mortal sin, like missing Mass or your Easter duties, is just that – crucifying Christ. The Holy Spirit tells us so through St Paul, writing to the Hebrews: Grave sinners, those who ‘are fallen away’ are ‘crucifying again to themselves the Son of God, and making him a mockery’. That means, in everyday language, that when you deliberately and without an adequate excuse miss Mass on Sunday, instead of watching at the foot of the Cross with Our Lady and St John, you join the Roman soldiers or the Jewish priests, help to drive the nails into Christ’s flesh and add to their mockery of Him.
I have never yet met any person whom I could believe would consciously wish to crucify Christ again. I cannot believe that a person of that sort would read this letter of mine. I do honestly believe that most lapsed Catholics are being unworthy to themselves for just as long as they refuse to come back home. The consequences to themselves of every week’s delay are so incalculable that, did they but realise it, they would never afflict themselves so.
Perhaps you were married out of the Church. I have met many people who have done what you have done. Very, very few of them were not, deep down in their hearts, worried and anxious to come back home. PROBABLY YOUR MARRIAGE CAN BE PUT RIGHT; (my italics) do please see a priest about it as soon as you can. You will be the first to agree with me that it is foolish to go on living in sin. Sin never pays. Why delay? Why deny yourself all the graces you might so easily be receiving through Confession and Holy Communion?
There is more and more.
Time and again I have asked myself, would I not like to return to the church? And the answer from the bottom of my heart has been, yes, for I want God. I want something to hold fast to. But, when I read things like this, I say, never, for here is the core of my problem, this archaic threat of everlasting Hell.
When I discussed the above with a Catholic he said, ‘Good gracious! You don’t take any heed to that, that’s written especially for the’ – he paused – ‘well, you know, the rabble; it’s the only way to get through to them.’
I was once of the rabble.
Thirteen
I look back now and cannot understand how I came through that time. Perhaps Kate’s innate stamina was fighting for me. I was alone in that big house for seven months during which time I had another miscarriage.
I wrote out a schedule of work that took up every hour of the day, and on the wall of the kitchen I pinned a graph, like a hospital chart, and on it I marked my mental progress each night. I have the charts before me as I write, and I see in three places where the dots touched the bottom line. One of the dots represented a time when I decided to take all my pills at once. I could not go on living with this torment any longer. It was around two o’clock in the morning and I was alone. I went into the bathroom and collected the contents of three boxes, but instead of going into the bedroom again I went into the lavatory and put them all down the pan. After I had pulled the chain I thought, there, now you’re on your own, and miraculously for a matter of about three or four minutes I came up out of the depth, and I took it as a sign.
According to my chart it was a whole year before I knew one complete day without being overcome by the sickness of fear. And in my godless world I was attributing my then state to my denial of Him. The effect of this was renewed terror. How dare I question God, I would be punished still further for the sacrilege.
One person I dared
not think about was Kate. She wrote twice a week but I did not answer. I was finished with Kate. For the last time she had brought me near to madness.
While waiting for Tom to be demobbed, I started to write again. All my other little accomplishments were dead. I knew I would never draw again. The thought of those intricate, finicky designs that had kept my nose to the paper for days on end now filled me with resentment, and the sound of a piano being practised brought my hands up to my ears and my nerves jangling – but I could still write. This seemed odd to me at the time. It was like being washed up after a shipwreck and finding that you had brought ashore with you a locked shelter, in which, once you got the door open, you could live. So I transferred my tortured mind into a make-believe world, and began to write plays in which my cardboard characters worked out a nice ordered existence.
Then Tom came home.
For a week before his arrival I counted the hours, and in the last hour I counted the minutes, and when at last he held me in his arms I thought, if I don’t come alive now I’m in for a long waking death.
Tom encouraged me to write. He was wholeheartedly for anything that would help me.
After writing three plays I knew I wasn’t on the right track, so I started on short stories. I intended to do a number to form a book. The first was about a little north-country girl; she hadn’t a father and her playmates revealed this to her and she wanted to die. She went to confession and told the priest that she wanted to die.
Our Kate Page 24
