by Jean Davison
‘Dad, did I do all right?’ I asked him afterwards.
‘You were wonderful,’ he said, hugging me. He was in a good mood that day.
Sometimes Dad’s moods were something to do with Mum and Norman Cockroft, a bread-delivery man, who was supposedly a friend of Dad’s. Mr Cockroft started coming to our house a lot when Dad was doing the late bus-conducting shift.
I ran from school to arrive home early one day, eager to tell Mum I’d got a gold star for coming top of the ten-year-olds in an English test. On hearing her in the bedroom I slung my gabardine over a chair-back and rushed upstairs. Mr Cockroft’s head was peeping round the bedroom door, and he wouldn’t let me in. I pushed at the door and caught a glimpse of Mum. She was half-undressed!
Mum giggled in a strange, silly sort of way, while he shouted at me to go away.
‘I’ll see to her,’ Mum said. She appeared in her dressing-gown, led me downstairs and locked me outside after pushing my tortoise into my hand, telling me to feed him on the grass. Sitting among the weeds in our back garden, I tickled Timmy’s chin with a clover leaf while gazing at the bedroom window and puzzling over the funny ways of grown-ups.
‘You’ll catch your death of cold sitting there with no coat on,’ Mrs Jessop called over the fence.
‘I’m not cold,’ I said, wondering why I was lying.
I waited for Mrs Jessop to go, then picked up an apple core and threw it at the bedroom window several times. Mr Cockroft opened the window and the rotten apple core smacked him in the face. I hadn’t meant that to happen, but couldn’t help giggling.
‘Bugger off, yer cheeky kid!’
‘Norman! Don’t swear at her,’ I heard Mum say.
Mum’s pale, thin face appeared at the window in place of Mr Cockroft’s red, fat face. ‘Jean, love, will you fetch me some nylon stockings from Turner’s in Bass Street?’
‘Can’t I have me tea first? I’m hungry.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you what. Go fetch some ginger biscuits so you can have some with your tea.’
‘I don’t want any biscuits. How much longer will you be?’
She sighed, shut the window and drew the curtains. I looked down enviously at Timmy’s safe, warm shell as I pinched my cold arms and legs, wiped my nose on my sleeve and resigned myself to waiting.
I never mentioned this to Dad because, although I didn’t really understand what was going on, I knew it was one of the things that would put him in a bad mood.
‘Has he been round again?’ Dad said crossly to Mum, eyeing the packets of freshly baked bread rolls on the kitchen table. ‘I’ve told him to only come when I’m in. The neighbours’ll be talking.’
‘He only came to bring us some bread,’ Mum said.
That night, with the covers of the ‘big bed’ pulled up over my head, I gazed on the luminous angel in my hand until I fell asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
A NEW DECADE, THE seventies, had begun, and soon the long teen years would be over. But here was I, nearing my twentieth birthday, loaded with drugs, robotised, and still seeing Dr Prior.
‘I saw you in Smith’s on Saturday by the magazine racks,’ Dr Prior said, beaming pleasantly, ‘and you seemed all right.’
He sounded surprised that I ‘seemed all right’. I wondered how else he thought I might behave when out with a friend.
‘Are you shy with me when you come here?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, staring at the desk. Perhaps he’d noticed my body language was ‘normal’ with Mandy and at last realised my signs of ‘nerves’ with him were largely due to shyness. That’s what I’d tried to tell him several times before.
‘Who were you with?’
‘Oh, that was Mandy, a friend I’ve known since school.’
‘Do you ever go out with friends in the evenings?’ he asked.
‘Yes, often,’ I replied. ‘We go to pubs, dances, places like that.’
‘You do? That’s wonderful.’
I couldn’t see what was wonderful about it, or why he was suddenly interested in something I’d always been doing.
‘I can’t enjoy myself when I’m tired all the time and, anyway, it all seems wrong somehow.’
‘But why is it wrong? Do you think God will punish you for enjoying yourself?’
‘No, it’s not that,’ I said. ‘And, anyway, I didn’t mean “wrong” in a moral sense.’ I stopped, feeling confused. ‘At least I don’t think I did,’ I added, wondering if I did feel guilty about the kind of life I was living.
‘Well, what did you mean?’
‘I meant it all seems so empty and futile and meaningless.’
‘I see,’ he said, writing something on the papers he always kept in front of him on his desk. It seemed they’d got quite a file on me now. ‘So you’re still very depressed, Jean, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I am,’ I agreed.
‘I want you to have some more ECT.’
‘No!’
‘You don’t need to go back into hospital for it. You can have it as an outpatient,’ he pointed out.
‘I don’t want any more ECT,’ I said firmly. This was one of the few things in life about which I was certain.
‘At least consider it,’ he said, sounding exasperated. ‘I’ve taken a special interest in your case and discussed it with colleagues. They all think we should try more ECT.’
‘Do they really?’ I said, feeling uneasy that doctors who didn’t know me, had never even seen me, should form opinions like that based on no real knowledge of me or my circumstances.
‘Yes, they do,’ he said. ‘So let’s try it, shall we?’
I shook my head vigorously. ‘I don’t want any more ECT.’
Dr Prior looked tired. He lit a cigarette and began doodling a circular design on his notepad, while I shuffled my feet in the awkward silence.
‘I think I’ll try adding a new drug.’ He wrote something down, then gave me the prescription. ‘Who gives you your pills?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Well, does your mother keep them and allocate each dose to you when it’s due?’
‘Oh no, I just take them myself.’
‘You have access to the whole lot?’
I nodded. It would never have occurred to my parents to limit my access to the drugs or supervise my dosage. Dr Prior obviously hadn’t a clue about my home life despite his ‘special interest’ in my ‘case’.
My brother became the proud owner of a second-hand Mini. He surprised us by showing an aptitude for driving, passing his test the first time. Despite his continuing frequent antagonism towards me, he did sometimes help me out by giving me lifts. One day we were driving down a busy main road when a cat dashed out and was hit by a passing car. I watched, horrified, as other cars missed by fractions the tortoiseshell form in the middle of the road.
Brian jerked to a stop by the kerb. The poor animal tried to stand, wobbled, and slumped back down again. Traffic was notoriously heavy and fast on this stretch of road. It wasn’t a place where pedestrians would be likely to risk trying to cross.
‘We’ll have to find a phone box,’ I said.
Brian got out of the car, his eyes on the cat. He stepped into the road.
‘Don’t! It’s too dangerous!’ I yelled from the window.
He ignored my cries of alarm. To him there was no choice. ‘We can’t leave it there,’ he said.
Brian dodged the traffic and gently picked up the cat. Horns blasted, cars missed them by inches. I held my breath as he made his way back to the car. Very gently he put the wounded cat on the back seat, covering it with his jacket. I’d never seen such caring concern on his face, such gentle compassion in his eyes.
Back at the wheel, he kept looking over his shoulder at the distressed animal. ‘Oh, God, I hope the vet’s still open,’ he said.
About fifteen minutes later we were pulling up outside the PDSA. Brian lifted the cat carefully, speaking to it in gentle soothing tones each time it whimper
ed.
‘Leave it with me,’ the vet said, placing a hand on Brian’s shoulder. ‘You’ve done all you can.’
Back in the car, Brian turned on the ignition with a shaky hand.
‘Wait a few minutes. Don’t start driving just yet,’ I urged him.
‘Why not? I’m all right,’ he said. But tears had filled his eyes.
‘It’ll be OK with the vet. It won’t be suffering now,’ I said.
We resumed our journey, for the most part in silence. I was intrigued by this other Brian, this person with a kind, gentle side to his nature.
‘The poor thing,’ he said. ‘The poor thing.’
One afternoon the world blurred and the room started spinning. I lay on my bed feeling sick, my heart thumping wildly. Pink and yellow lights flashed before my eyes. I rolled on to my stomach and pressed my face, with eyes shut tight, into my pillow. And then came a screeching siren, a shrill whistling sound piercing my brain. I clamped my hands over my ears. It wouldn’t stop. My body was shaking. Surging fears of death or madness overwhelmed me. And then all went black.
When I opened my eyes the noise and feelings had subsided, leaving me soaking in perspiration and hardly daring to move. A fit? Gingerly, I crawled off my bed and was relieved to find that, apart from feeling weak, I seemed OK now, but I decided to visit my GP, Dr Russo, that evening.
‘It was probably a physical reaction against drugs which are too strong for you,’ Dr Russo explained. ‘Hardly surprising really. You’re on a mixture of potent drugs.’
‘Dr Prior added a new one recently. Do you think it’s that?’
‘Probably. You’d better discontinue it at once.’ He leant back in his chair and looked at me. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m still depressed and Dr Prior wants me to have more ECT,’ I said flatly. ‘But I don’t want it.’
‘Well, why not, if that’s what the psychiatrist advises?’
‘How would you like your brain to be wired up to electricity?’ I asked.
Dr Russo smiled. ‘Oh, it’s not done so primitively,’ he said. ‘You don’t feel anything under the anaesthetic, do you?’
‘No, but it’s unpleasant when the anaesthetic starts taking effect and then later you wake up feeling terrible. I’m scared it’s damaged my brain. I met this lad, James, who apparently I dated a few times a bit back, and he looked at me as if I was some kind of nut because I couldn’t even remember going out with him.’
Dr Russo threw back his head and laughed. ‘Well, you should go out with him again and enjoy it this time round,’ he said.
‘It’s frightening not to be able to remember things.’
‘Are you still seeing that pastor?’ Dr Russo asked, changing the subject.
‘He visits me occasionally.’
‘He can’t give you his faith.’
‘I know.’
‘All you need is a nice boyfriend. Once you get married and have children, you’ll be all right.’
‘I don’t want a boyfriend, I don’t want to get married and I don’t want babies,’ I said, feeling irritated at his implication that marriage and babies were all a female could ever want or need.
Dr Russo stroked his chin. ‘You know what your parents’ marriage has been like and it’s put you off. But you shouldn’t judge all marriages by theirs.’
‘Of course I shouldn’t, and I don’t,’ I said. ‘But I want something more in life than marriage and babies.’
‘And what is it that you want?’
‘I don’t know.’
Mike Conway was a mate of one of Jackie’s old boyfriends. Tall, dark-haired, not bad-looking, talkative, too self-confident (I was wrong about the latter) were my first impressions of him. I was a jeans-and-casual-tops type, whereas he wore smart suits (and even waistcoats), but I warmed to his friendliness and we started dating regularly.
I was a blank girl, my ‘self’ eroded by daily cocktails of drugs more deadly than I realised. But my explanation to Mike that I was ‘on Valium’ seemed to satisfy him, perhaps because repeat prescriptions for tranquillisers weren’t unusual at that time. Valium was in fashion. I didn’t tell Mike I was a psychiatric patient. No, of course not. Best to keep that hidden away like a guilty secret. Neither did I speak of my soul-sick despair, which I tried to conceal behind jokes and laughter during our long, boozy nights at pubs and nightclubs.
I admitted to Mike that I was unemployed ‘at present’ but didn’t say how long the ‘at present’ had gone on for. Every Thursday morning I dragged myself out of bed to go to the Employment Exchange to ‘sign on’, and occasionally they’d send me upstairs to see the Disablement Resettlement Officer, a sweet, grey-haired lady who specialised in finding jobs for the disabled. The conversation with her usually went along the same lines. ‘Ah, yes, we do have a vacancy for a clerical post. Oh, but wait a minute. It says the work is high pressure. I think perhaps it would be too stressful for you, wouldn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want a boring job.’
‘No, of course you don’t, but let’s be realistic, shall we? You’ve been ill for a long time and you’re on medication. We want a nice little job you can manage, don’t we?’
It had been Dr Prior’s idea that I registered as a disabled person. It would, he said, help me get a job because the law required employers to take on a certain percentage of disabled people. So now I was the owner of a green card to show to prospective employers as proof of a registered disability. I still couldn’t take it all in. Was that really my name on this card? Who am I now? A disabled person? And mentally disabled too; a highly stigmatised form of disability. Would I always be separate, different from the world of ‘normal’ people who didn’t think or feel like me and didn’t carry a green card?
In April 1970, a year after my discharge from Thornville Ward, I got a job as a stock records clerk at Dobson’s, a local engineering firm. I worked alone in a small basement office with damp, peeling walls. There was a constant draught from under the door and the one-bar electric fire at my feet did little more than help warm my toes. My job consisted of simple arithmetic to keep stock-record cards up to date, invoice typing and filing. It was dreadfully boring, but I was determined to prove that, mentally disabled or not, I could hold down a job.
The two warehouse lads, Jeff and Jim, who were also the tea boys, told me tales of the rats and mice they’d seen around the place. Jeff took me to see the tea room one day. It was disgustingly dirty.
‘Jim and me have great fun making the drinks,’ he said. ‘If you knew half the things we get up to. One day we found a dead mouse, still warm, on the floor there and you’ll never guess what we did with it.’ He was doubled up laughing. ‘We dipped it into the gaffer’s coffee. Isn’t that funny?’
My stomach turned cartwheels at the thought of a mouse that was probably disease-ridden and crawling with lice being dipped into someone’s coffee.
‘It’s horrible!’ I said, aghast.
Trying to work, even doing this simple job, while so drowsy with drugs was a big problem. I tried taking my lunchtime dose at teatime and my teatime dose at supper-time, but still often felt too tired to work. Sometimes I would lock myself in the large toilet-cum-washroom, give part of the lino a quick dust with a paper towel, then allow myself the luxury of lying down on the floor and dozing off for ten to fifteen minutes. This must seem ludicrous to most people, but anyone who has experienced the utter fatigue which drugs can induce will understand how tempting it was to lie down on the cold, hard floor and allow heavy, drooping eyelids to close, if only for a short while.
Sometimes I couldn’t – simply couldn’t – force myself to get back to my desk until I’d splashed my face in icy-cold water and swallowed several caffeine pills, which I found I could obtain from any chemist without a prescription. Caffeine pills were surely no more harmful than drinking plenty of strong coffee, which I’d long been having to do to keep awake.
When I next saw Dr Prior he asked me what my parent
s thought about my problems. I shrugged my shoulders and fiddled with my hair. ‘Dunno. They’ve enough problems of their own.’
‘What kind of problems?’
‘Well, marital for instance. Mum’s having an affair. They’ve both had affairs in the past.’
‘Really? What makes you think that?’
‘Dad told me himself about his. Mum isn’t trying to hide this affair she’s having now.’
‘And she’s had others in the past?’
‘Maybe only one other. I remember when I was about ten, I found Mum in the bedroom with Dad’s friend. She locked me out until … until they’d finished.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ he asked, stubbing his cigarette out with more force than necessary.
‘I didn’t think it was relevant.’
‘But this could have a traumatic effect on a child’s mind!’ he said, waving his hand dramatically. ‘A most traumatic effect! Oh, you should have told me before, you silly girl.’
Without even writing down what he thought was so important, Dr Prior swiftly packed the papers on his desk into his briefcase, sighed, stood up abruptly and left the room. I sat there alone for a while before going to the reception desk, wondering if the interview was actually over.
The thin-faced receptionist with plum-coloured fingernails flicked through the pages of the appointments diary. ‘You’ll be seeing a new female doctor, Dr Armstrong, next time,’ she informed me. ‘That will be in three months. Dr Prior will have moved on to another hospital by then.’
A strange farewell ...
On the way home I kept thinking of Dr Prior’s words. ‘A most traumatic effect!’ It seemed there were many things in my past he might have said the same about. So many traumatic effects. So much damage done to an innocent child. What hope was there for me? Who knew what dangerous demons of the past were lurking deep inside me ready to break out one day? Hurt and anger surged through me. Yes, of course it must have had a traumatic effect on poor little ten-year-old me.
