by Jean Davison
‘I think perhaps I am,’ I said slowly, tracing the design on a beer mat with my finger. I wondered if this was how members of Alcoholics Anonymous felt when they first publicly admitted to being an alcoholic.
Mandy looked at me long and hard. ‘I’ll never believe that about you,’ she said with feeling. ‘Never.’
I don’t know if Mandy’s faith in my mental health would have wavered if she’d seen me in the café or at the church youth meeting, around this time.
I was eating with my family in a fish and chip café when Brian tried to rope me into a nonsensical argument. I must be crazy, he said, because I’d been in a ‘loony bin’ so that proved it and everyone he’d told thought so too. When he got tired of the hospital ‘digs’, he went on to say that I didn’t belong in our family and it was time I learnt I wasn’t wanted. Throughout the meal he carried on like this while I just continued to eat, quietly listening in my drugged and ECT-induced state of apathy.
Recently Brian had heard me mention to Dad I’d seen Eileen Barrett, a pastor’s daughter, in a pub – very unusual for someone from that Pentecostal church. Brian didn’t even know Eileen, but after berating me at length for going to dance halls and pubs, he added: ‘Eileen Barrett doesn’t go in pubs.’ I don’t know why after not reacting so far to Brian’s silly talk, this finally ignited my flattened emotions. I flung the spoonful of sugar I’d been about to put into my coffee across the table into his face, along with the spoon, and shouted: ‘YOU’RE FUCKING STUPID!’
The sound of knives and forks scraping plates and the chatter in the café ceased abruptly while people turned and stared.
‘Jean, cut that language out!’ my mother hissed, her face turning to the colour of the tomato sauce.
‘I’ll kill you!’ Brian said as he tried to get the sugar out of his hair where it had settled like dandruff.
Some elderly ladies a few tables away stared at me in disgust before resuming eating with much tutting, head-shaking and grumbling about not knowing what the world was coming to these days with foul-mouthed young people like me around.
‘I’m going now. I’ve never been so shown up in my life,’ Mum said, standing up. ‘I’m disgusted with you, Jean.’
‘It was Brian’s fault,’ Dad said. ‘I don’t know how Jean managed to ignore him for so long.’
But Brian wasn’t to blame for the incident at church. This took place one Wednesday evening when nostalgic longing for my old beliefs drew me to the youth meeting. Maybe I was hoping for a miracle to dispel my doubts and make me as happy, innocent and uncomplicated as the teenagers there seemed to be. But when Mr Roberts began talking about God’s love, I felt so isolated and pained. No matter how much I wanted to believe, I couldn’t help but see countless flaws in Christian beliefs. Unable to contain myself, I interrupted the meeting cutting off Mr Roberts mid-sentence by blurting out: ‘IT’S A LOAD OF RUBBISH!’
Heads turned and a moment of uneasy silence followed as in the café. Mr Roberts gave me a quick but searching look. He proceeded to carry on with the meeting but was flustered. I’d once heard him give his testimony saying he used to stammer but God had helped him overcome it. He hadn’t stammered for the past thirty years, Praise the Lord, he had said. As he stammered his way through the next few sentences of his talk about God’s love I was too embarrassed and ashamed to look at him. Nobody could have been more thankful than me when he managed to regain his composure and normal speech. I had no difficulty in not speaking for the rest of the meeting: I was trying not to cry.
As soon as I could do so without attracting further attention to myself, I left the church and hurried away into the darkness. I roamed the streets aimlessly, thinking about how things at church hadn’t changed since I used to enjoy going with Jackie. The church, the preaching and the people were the same. It hadn’t made any difference how much I’d wept and struggled and tasted something of a world of despair I barely knew existed before. How could everything else be the same when the sun and moon had fallen out of the sky, plunging my world into darkness? How could everything else be the same when I had changed so much?
Sometimes I wondered if Dad thought about the faith we’d once shared. He’d always said he was leaning on me, but now I didn’t feel strong enough to keep myself out of the gutter, never mind lift anyone else out of it. Dad was spending a lot of time with his mate Joe, driving around the red-light areas. He showed me a photo of a teenage prostitute called Nicola lying naked on a bed in a provocative position.
‘She tells me she only does it ’cos she needs the money,’ he said.
I stared at this photo and wondered if Nicola was happy with her way of life, if she ever had thoughts and feelings and conflicts like mine. Well, why not? We were both products – or victims? – of the same society.
‘Dad, do you remember …’ I said, as I handed back the photo. A tear rolled silently down my face. ‘Do you remember when we used to pray together?’ I caught the tear on my tongue and tasted salt.
‘Yes, I remember,’ he said, slipping his warm hand into mine and squeezing it tightly. He sighed. ‘Something’s gone awfully wrong, hasn’t it? But yes, Jean, I do still remember.’ And there were tears in his eyes, too.
One afternoon when my parents and brother were out on their bus-conducting shifts, Pastor West turned up unexpectedly. I was lying on my bed, zonked out on Melleril. Recognising his car through my bedroom window, I sleepily made my way downstairs to unlock the door. I was wearing grubby pyjamas and my old blue dressing-gown. My hair, in need of washing and combing, hung down in greasy bacon strings. Aware I looked a mess, I could hardly meet his gaze and I was further embarrassed and ashamed by the state of the house, which I had made no effort to clean or tidy.
‘Would you like some coffee? I was just going to make some.’
I seemed to be moving, talking and thinking all in slow motion, so I made my coffee extra strong in the hope that it would quickly revive me.
‘I’m glad you’re out of hospital. How are you feeling?’ Pastor West asked as he sat opposite me on a chair from which I’d just hastily removed a pile of old News of the World papers.
‘Oh, I’m OK. Fine,’ I said, not very convincingly. ‘Just a bit tired, that’s all.’
There was an awkward silence during which I felt he kept staring at me. For the sake of something to say I went across to the mantelpiece and fetched the ceramic tiled ashtray I’d made at OT.
‘Look, I made this at the hospital,’ I said childishly, pushing it into his hand, like a little girl showing Mummy what she’d made at school.
A mixture of sadness and anger clouded his face as he held the ashtray. ‘But this is the kind of thing children make in kindergarten,’ he said.
Brian arrived home. He burst into the house, slamming the door shut behind him. When Pastor West had called before, Brian had been either out or upstairs. Today, Pastor West tried to converse with him, just sociable chit chat. When Brian left the room, Pastor West remarked in surprise that he couldn’t manage to get anything resembling sensible conversation out of him.
‘I know. He’s always like that,’ I said, fiddling with my hair.
When Pastor West was leaving he stopped at the door. ‘I don’t know how you can stand it here,’ he said. ‘You’re far more intelligent than your family.’
But not intelligent enough to keep myself away from a mental hospital, I reflected cynically as I watched him drive away. Not intelligent enough to stop myself getting screwed up in the first place. And not intelligent enough to sort myself out now.
Now that I was unemployed, I had each day free to spend as I chose. Ah, strange freedom … When the drugs wore off a bit, as they inevitably did now that I was taking them less often than prescribed, I sometimes got up before midday and wandered around town. I usually ended up in a dimly lit coffee bar, one of my old haunts, where I would sit for hours thinking. But my thoughts kept bursting like bubbles, then, try as I might, I couldn’t remember what I’d just been t
hinking about.
I did remember, though, that I’d been banned from this place along with Jackie, and two other old school friends, Helen and Kay, because we’d smuggled in a bottle of sherry and were caught drinking it in the Coke glasses. When did that happen? Was it recently or a long time ago? But, anyway, it didn’t matter. I had obviously not been recognised now.
At lunchtime, teenagers came and went, put their money into the jukebox, sat in intimate little groups, smoked and chatted. Nobody bothered the girl sitting alone at a table in the corner who was hiding her face behind long, dark hair, slowly sipping her Coke, while Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees kept singing something about being saved by a bell and walking down Heartbreak Lane.
Feeling a need to resort to my old method of catharsis by getting it all down on paper, I bought a thick, ruled exercise book. At night while my family slept, I crept downstairs (my dad would have been angry at me for ‘wasting electric’) to write at the kitchen table. But how to begin? How many memories had ECT wiped out?
Last week a lad in a pub had said: ‘It’s me, James! Why are you acting like you don’t know me? We said we’d still be friends when we split up.’
‘Split up? Did we go out together?’
‘Is this some kind of joke, Jean? I don’t get it.’
And earlier in the evening Jackie, after recalling times we’d shared, had kept saying in dismay: ‘But, Jean, don’t you remember when we did this?’ I’d thought and thought with increasing distress as I poked inside the cavities in my memory. ‘It hurts and scares me when you don’t remember these things because they’re part of my life too,’ Jackie had said.
I rested my head on the kitchen table, burying my face in my hands. ‘Oh, Jackie, I know what you mean. It hurts and scares me too.’
I searched through last year’s diary in which I’d written an entry each day right up to going into hospital on 4 December. I found James in there and, yes, we had dated several times but the memory of him was gone. Robbed from my brain! Horrified, I turned back the pages to January and read on. How strange and frightening it was to read the parts expressing my views on various topics because it now seemed that the author of this diary was someone more intelligent than me. Sometimes I needed to read long sentences several times because I couldn’t grasp the meaning or I’d forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time I got to the end. And all that warmth, passion, youthful idealism; precious parts of myself … diminished? Gone? Devastated, I mourned the loss of the old me of pre-hospital days. I missed me terribly: it was like a bereavement. Why did they heap stones on my head and bury me alive?
I read on and on until dawn. God, it was painful. Many times I was almost tempted to give up, take my pills and retreat between the bedcovers. But I fought against self-pity and tried hard to force my brain back into functioning properly. I imagined that this was how someone who had sustained head injuries might feel when trying to ascertain how much brain capacity they could hope to regain. But why had they given me ECT? Why had Dr Prior told me there was ‘no risk’? Why had no one told me the truth? And, my God, why hadn’t I realised myself the inevitable dangers there must be in violently assaulting the brain with electricity? Why the hell had I let them do it?
Morning came and I went back to bed: I hadn’t written a thing. I lay in bed watching the shifting shadows of early morning on my bedroom walls. Words kept forming from fragments of thoughts, then teasingly floating away before I could fit them together and hold on to the meaning. My head throbbed with pain as, sick at heart, I grappled with the most distressing question of all. Had ECT permanently damaged my brain?
The following night I sneaked downstairs again to sit at the kitchen table with my diaries, pen and notebook. For hours I sat ‘looking back’ and peering through the fog in my mind at the blank page, until at last it happened: I began writing. Once started, with the aid of my diaries, more memories returned. Throughout the next few nights, I wrote about my childhood and those confusing adolescent years preceding my stay in hospital.
Then I was ready to write about the hospital. Or so I thought. I searched my mind, trying to grasp hold of and fit together my memories of those four hospital months, but I could only achieve something like the fragmented picture of a jigsaw with pieces missing. I was back to staring at a blank page, my stomach knotted with the anxiety of a thwarted need to express my experiences, though the emotional pain was still raw. I had to tell the truth and get it down on paper because what had happened was important and I mustn’t ever forget the way that it was.
My head was aching by the time I resumed writing. I pressed on regardless, but the end result was a version of what life in hospital had been like which, although painstakingly accurate, lacked something. I’d always been in touch with my thoughts and feelings (or so I had believed), always been able, at least in retrospect, to lay them on the table in front of me like a pack of cards, to examine, turn over, laugh about, cry about and write about if I chose. But it seemed that the painfully recent memories of those four months in hospital were resisting being pulled out and written about. I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet. Not for a long, long time.
LOOKING BACK 1
HOME FOR MY FIRST seven years was 24 Madras Street in a dingy row of back-to-back houses in Bradford, Yorkshire. An initiation into our rough neighbourhood came when I was only a few weeks old. I was left outside in my pram and a boy thumped me, giving me black eyes.
My first ‘cradle’ was a drawer from our sideboard. My second bed was a pink cot in which I slept long after I’d outgrown it; I remember having to sleep with knees bent. Brian, my brother, four years older than me, slept in a bed next to the cot. At night Mum would stretch a dark heavy blanket across the window so that the light from the street lamp wouldn’t keep us awake (at least I think this was the reason). It made the room pitch dark – perfect for making scary shadows on the walls and ceiling when we became the proud owners of torches. Best of all were the times when Dad came in to kiss us goodnight and he entertained us by making twirly patterns in the dark with two lighted tapers. I would watch, delighted, in childish fascination, as the flames leapt, twirled, joined, separated, like two magical dancers from Fairy Land.
Thick black smoke from the tall mill chimney permeated the air, mingling with the smoke curling upwards from chimneys of houses, and dirtying the washing which hung across the street and in shabby little back yards. We had an outside lavatory inhabited by bluebottles and spiders. Torn pieces of the Daily Mirror hung on a nail inside the rickety door. Rats roamed around the dustbins and Dad said, ‘Be careful, Jean, they attack you and go for your throat.’
The area we lived in was known as Little India. Madras Street led into Calcutta Street and then, a bit further on, Bombay Street was followed by Bengal Street. The air in these streets often seemed to be filled with a strong smell of fried onions that seeped from behind stringy net curtains. Noise never stopped: children yelling, dogs barking, mothers standing on their doorsteps booming out names that often ended on a longer and louder note than the beginning. ‘An…DRE E EW!’ ‘Sus…A A AN!’
Old Mr Benson lived a few streets away and I loved sitting with him on his doorstep. I didn’t like the smell of his pipe or his breath but he told me stories and gave me chocolate-covered toffees. He lived near the pub where my granddad used to drink himself into a stupor every weekend. Mum used to say that when she was a girl, if her dad didn’t end up lying in a gutter somewhere, she’d hear his foul language as he made his way down Bombay Street, and this was her cue to pull the blankets over her head.
‘I knew yer mother when she was nobbut a lass,’ Mr Benson told me. ‘I remember her coming in The George every Saturday night wearing her Sally Army uniform, a bundle of War Crys under her arm. Such a shy young lass she was. We rough, noisy drunks teased her summat cruel but she kept coming. We asked her to sing. She wouldn’t at first. Then one night she stood on a buffet and sang “The Old Rugged Cross”. When she’d done you could’ve heard
a pin drop, and then we all started clapping.’
I skipped off home eager to find out more about this.
‘Yes, it’s true,’ Mum said, ‘But I daren’t go to pubs if yer granddad was there. He’d no time for the Army and he kept threatening to burn me Army bonnet. One day when he was drunk he staggered into a meeting with a cig dangling from his mouth. I was in the songsters at the front. He pointed me out to the whole congregation and announced in a loud slurred voice: “That’s my lass there and she’s a bloody sight better than all the rest of you lot.” I felt awful being shown up like that.’
Dad’s parents lived a long walk away from Madras Street, or so it seemed for a child. I didn’t see them much. I wasn’t close to any of my grandparents. No hugs, no kisses, no sitting on their knees. Years later Dad told me how both sets of grandparents were opposed to my parents marrying ‘until I got yer mum pregnant and that changed her parents’ tune’.
I was sitting on the kerbside prodding some dirt in a crack in the pavement with a lollipop stick. Not far away lay a dead sparrow. Suddenly I was struck by the force of knowledge that one day my parents would die, I would die, everyone would die. I looked around, half expecting the world to look different in the light of this startling revelation, but, on the line stretched from lamppost to lamppost right across the street, sheets, pillow cases and towels flapped gently in the breeze as on an ordinary day. Did those big girls who were trying to walk with tin cans tied to their feet realise that we’d all be dead one day? Did the boy over there climbing a lamppost know it? Did the two girls who were busily chalking numbers on the pavement for a game of hopscotch? Or that snotty-nosed lad from a few doors on who was throwing stones at a row of milk bottles lined up across our passage? I returned to my dirt-prodding, nursing my grim secret, wondering what death would be like and trying to remember where I’d been before I was born.
But there were plenty of other things to think about in the early morning of my life – such as Santa Claus and bus outings to Blackpool and Easter eggs filled with chocolates.
