Untold Stories

  It meant, too, that when Dad rang to say ‘I think your Mam’s starting another depression do’, there was not the same urgency to hurry home. He did not need me to ferry him the fifty miles round trip to the hospital. Now he could manage on his own, and manage he did, though Mam was often in hospital five or six weeks at a time. This was at Airedale, near Keighley, further than Lancaster it’s true but modern and with better facilities. He drove there every day with no thought that he could do anything else, and in due course it was his conscientiousness and devotion to duty that killed him.

  Love apart, what led my father to drive fifty miles a day to visit his wife in hospital was the conviction that no one knew her as he knew her, that if she were to regain the shore of sanity he must be there waiting for her; finding him she would find herself.

  Years later I put this in my only play about madness, with Queen Charlotte as devoted to her husband, George III, as ever Dad was to Mam.

  ‘It is the same with all the doctors,’ the Queen says. ‘None of them knows him. He is not himself. So how can they restore him to his proper self, not knowing what that self is.’

  How could any doctor, seeing this wretched weeping woman, know that ordinarily she was loving and funny and full of life? Dad knew and felt that when she woke from this terrible dream he must be there to welcome her and assure her that she had found herself.

  So together they trailed the long system-built corridors of the hospital, empty on those August afternoons – summer always her worst time; they sat by the unweeded flower beds, watched the comings and goings in the car park, had a cup of tea from the flask he had brought and a piece of the cake he had made. ‘I think she’s beginning to come round a bit,’ he’d say on the phone. ‘They say next week I can take her for a little run.’

  The hospital where she was most often a patient was one of those designed by John Poulson, the corrupt architect who made his fortune in the sixties by deals done with city bosses all over the north. Architecturally undistinguished and structurally unsound – it was said to be slowly sliding down the hill – the hospital was still streets ahead of the ex-workhouse at Lancaster or the old St James’s in Leeds, where Dad himself had all but died. ‘Well, if Mr Poulson did one good thing in his life,’ Dad would say when Mam was on the up and up, ‘it was this hospital. It’s a grand place.’ And featureless though it was, it was indeed light, airy, cheerful and split up into small manageable units. The snag was that these units, colour-coded though they were, were all more or less identical. Even for those in their right minds this could be confusing, but for the patients who were already confused, like those on the psychiatric ward, it was doubly disorienting. Psychiatric was not far from Maternity, with the result that the unbalanced would wander into what looked to be their ward only to find what they took to be their bed was now occupied by, as Mam said, ‘one of these gymslip mums. She didn’t look more than fourteen,’ her language and her humour discovered intact where she had abandoned them months before. ‘She cracked out laughing this afternoon,’ Dad said. ‘They’re going to let her come home for the weekend.’

  Early on in her first bout of depression and not long after she had been transferred from Lancaster Moor to a smaller and less intimidating institution near Burley in Wharfedale, Mam was given electro-convulsive therapy. We had no thought then that ECT was particularly invasive, an interference with the mental make-up or a rearrangement of the personality, and I do not think this now more than thirty years later, when ECT is even more controversial and to some extent discredited. I do not, then or now, see it as torture or punishment and no more routinely decreed or callously administered than any other treatment, though these were the objections to it at the time as they are the objections to it now. So far as my mother is concerned, she does not show any alarm at the prospect, and talks about the procedure with curiosity but without apprehension.

  This was the period when the fashionable analyst was R. D. Laing and madness, while not quite the mode, was certainly seen as an alternative view of things, the mad the truly sane a crude view of it. In practical terms (though it was never practical) enlightenment consisted in encouraging the mentally ill to work through their depression, schizophrenia or whatever to achieve a new balance and an enhanced sense of self; the most extreme case and often-quoted exemplar being Mary Barnes, who came to a revised perception of herself via a period in which she smeared the walls in excrement. I thought at the time that this was not on the cards for the average patient or for the unfortunate nurse or relative who eventually had to clean up after them, though this didn’t seem to enter into the equation.

  I had a similar difference of sympathy about the same time when at the long-gone Academy Cinema in Oxford Street I saw Ken Loach’s film Family Life. It’s about mental illness and includes a scene in which a doctor prescribes ECT for a patient, at which point the audience in the cinema roundly hissed the supposed villain. Unable to join in or share the general indignation, I felt rather out of it. Faced with a loved one who is mute with misery and immobilised by depression and despair, what was to be done? Hissing the doctor didn’t seem to be the answer and I left the cinema (which wasn’t the answer either).

  ECT apart, much of the literature to do with mental and neurological illness irritated on a different level and still does. There is a snobbery about mental affliction beginning, I suspect, with Freud; there was little twisting of the cloth cap went on in Freud’s consulting room, I’m sure, but it wasn’t simply due to social snobbery. Like most writers on the subject, the great man concerned himself with the intellectual and the exotic, so that there was something of the freak show about many of his well-known case histories, with alleviation of suffering nowhere.

  Depression, which is much the most common mental illness, doesn’t even qualify as such and mustn’t be so labelled, perhaps because it’s routine and relatively unshowy; but maybe, too, because it’s so widespread not calling depression mental illness helps to sidestep the stigma. A sufferer from it, though, might well regret that his or her condition is so common since a patient mindless with despair is such a regular occurrence as scarcely to be worthy of a proper physician’s time.

  Nothing excuses us from the obligation to divert our fellow creatures. We must not be boring. And since for the specialist most illnesses soon cease to intrigue, if you have to suffer choose a condition that is rare. Should you want to catch the doctor’s eye, the trick is not to see no light at the end of the tunnel; anybody can do that. Rather mistake your wife for a hat and the doctor will never be away from your bedside.

  To give them credit, Laing and his followers were not medically snobbish in this way, but what they seldom discussed was the effect an illness like depression had on the rest of the family, in this case my father. The reverse, the effect the family had on the patient, was much discussed and it was one of the central tenets of Laing’s writing that mental illness was generally the work and the fault of the family. In the crowded family plot love, or at least relationships, cramped and warped the weak and ailing, with health only to be achieved by explaining how schizophrenia, say, had been a rational response to the constraints that other family members had imposed, this process of explanation invariably leaving the family, if not in the dock, at least a bit shamefaced.

  But nothing that I read or saw at that time resembled the situation in our family, the sudden defection of a loved one, her normal personality wiped out with a total loss of nerve. In Laing and in Szasz the love that was on offer in the family was generally seen as rigid and repressive, with affection bartered for good behaviour. This didn’t seem to me to have much to do with my father’s affection for my mother, which, while not denying her faults, seemed as near selfless as one could get. There was no bargain here that I could see, just distress and loss on both sides. The books talked of the family working through its breakdown and coming to a new understanding, but when both parties were in their mid-sixties it seemed a bit late in the day for that. What Mam and Dad
both wanted was the same going-on as they had had before, and if ECT was a short cut to that then they would take it.

  We were told that following a few sessions of ECT Mam would be more herself, and progressively so as the treatment went on. In the event improvement was more dramatic. Given her first bout of ECT in the morning, by the afternoon Mam was walking and talking with my father as she hadn’t for months. He saw it as a miracle, as I did too, and to hear on the phone the dull resignation gone from his voice and the old habitual cheerfulness back was like a miracle too.

  Successive treatments consolidated the improvement and soon she was her old self, confused a little as to how this terrible visitation had come about and over what period, but that and other short-term memory loss could be put down to the treatment. Now for the first time she went back to the cottage for a trial weekend and was straight away on the phone, bubbling over with its charms and the beauty of the village and particularly how clean everything was.

  My mother had fought a war against dirt all her life, as any conscientious housewife had to who lived in one of the industrial towns of the West Riding. To visit Halifax, where she grew up, was, my father always said, like going down into the mouth of hell, the bottom of the valley invisible in a haze of soot and smoke. Leeds was scarcely better, Armley, where we first lived, covered in a fine drizzle of grit from Kirkstall Power Station.

  The campaign against this dirt produced its own elaborate weaponry, an armoury of Ewbanks, Hoovers, wringers, possers and mops in daily and wearisome use, items still familiar nowadays because sold in the humbler antique shops, everything in good time collectable. Besides these implements my mother maintained an elaborate hierarchy of cloths, buckets and dusters, to the Byzantine differences of which she alone was privy. Some cloths were dishcloths but not sink cloths; some were for the sink but not for the floor. There were dirty buckets and clean buckets, buckets for indoors, buckets for the flags outside. One mop had universal application, another a unique and terrible purpose and so had to be kept outside hung on the wall. And however rinsed and clean these utensils were they remained polluted by their awful function.

  In my television play Afternoon Off a husband is visiting his wife in hospital.

  MRS BEEVERS: I bet the house is upside down.

  MR BEEVERS: Nay, it never is. I did the kitchen floor this morning.

  MRS BEEVERS: Which bucket did you use?

  MR BEEVERS: The red one.

  MRS BEEVERS: That’s the outside bucket! I shall have it all to do again.

  Men, they make work.

  Left to himself Dad, like the hapless Mr Beevers, would violate these taboos and use the first thing that came to hand to clean the hearth or wash the floor.

  ‘It’s all nowt,’ he’d mutter, but when Mam was around he knew it saved time and temper to observe her order of things.

  Latterly disposable cloths and kitchen rolls had tended to blur these ancient distinctions but the basic structure remained, perhaps the firmest part of the framework of her world.

  When she became depressed the breakdown of this order was one of its first symptoms. She became incapable of cleaning the house herself, and stood by while Dad took over her duties. But however much he washed and tidied, the place was still ‘upside down’, dust and dirt an unstemmable tide, the house besieged by filth and chaos, its (imagined) squalor a talking point among the neighbours. So now when she came home from the hospital bright and better her first comment was how spotless the place looked. And not merely the house. She was taken up by the freshness of everything. It was as if the whole world and her existence in it had been rinsed clean.

  But it did not last.

  ‘I don’t know what I’ve done wrong.’

  ‘You’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘Then why are you shouting at me?’

  ‘I’m shouting at you to try and get it into your head.’

  ‘They’ll hear.’

  ‘Who? There’s nobody here.’

  ‘Then what’s that little car doing?’

  ‘Having a nice time. Leading a normal life. Doing what we used to do.’

  In the eight years between the onset of my mother’s first depression and my father’s death in 1974 there were half a dozen episodes, all of which ended up being what Dad called ‘hospital dos’ and in half of which she had ECT, other times just antidepressant drugs.

  In no case was her recovery quite as dramatic as that first time. Perhaps it was that we were getting used to the sequence, but certainly with each successive visitation it became clear that in her case this wasn’t an illness that was ever altogether going to go away, the likelihood of another attack there even in her most cheerful moments.

  Still, there were long periods of remission, months, years even, when she was her old cheerful self, though Dad was now always on the lookout for any tell-tale signs and ready to head her off from any experience that might upset her. One night we were watching Jeremy Sandford’s TV play Edna, the Inebriate Woman. Its elaborate depiction of irrational behaviour had nothing to do with Mam’s depressive condition, and the connection never occurred to me, but while she was out of the room Dad quietly switched the television off.

  ‘Oh, are we not watching that?’ Mam said, coming back.

  ‘Well,’ said Dad, ‘it was too far-fetched. You can’t believe half the stuff that’s on.’

  Always there was the shame at the nature of the illness, something Mam was able to overcome or at least ignore when she was well but which became a burden whenever her spirits began to fall, the guilt attendant upon the depression one of the signals that it was returning. Self-consciousness, if not shame, was in such a small community understandable, but the longer my parents lived in the village the more I became aware that my mother was not alone in her condition. Several middle-aged women were similarly afflicted in different degrees, one stumping silently round the village every afternoon, another flitting anxiously into a friendly neighbour’s, sometimes in tears, and both suffering from what was still called ‘nerves’ – a condition that goes largely unnoticed in cities as it cannot do in smaller communities.

  ‘I haven’t seen Mrs Bennett about? Is she alright?’

  Except that after a while people learned not to ask. And while there were support groups for some identifiable disabilities like MS or muscular dystrophy, there were none for depression. As how could there be? Anyone suffering from it would be incapable of attending.

  Insofar as I too kept it quiet when she was poorly, I shared in the shame, though it would have been callous to behave otherwise, as even when she was well Mam was always concerned with ‘what folks would say’ about every department of our lives. But once she was in hospital there could be no deception as Dad would be seen driving off on the dot of one and arriving back at six, day after day after day.

  When Mam was ill the first time I used to wish that they both had had the education they always longed for, feeling, snobbishly perhaps, that mental affliction was more appropriate to, sat more suitably on, someone educated or higher up the social scale. It’s a foolish assumption besides being statistically unfounded, which I’m sure I knew at the time though I felt it nevertheless. Education might at least have given them more insight into their predicament and diminished some of the self-consciousness they felt and which I felt too, though only in the village; among my own friends I made no secret of it. Still, if nothing else my mother’s depression and the omissions and evasions that attended it made me appreciate more the shame that must have attached to my grandfather’s drowning and how it was the episode had gone unspoken of for so long.

  My father wore a suit every day of his life. He had two, ‘my suit’ and ‘my other suit’, ‘my suit’ being the one he wore every day, ‘my other suit’ his best. On the rare occasions when he invested in a new suit the suits moved up a place, ‘my other suit’ becoming ‘my suit’, the new suit becoming ‘my other suit’, with the old one just used for painting in or working in the shop. They we
re three-piece suits, generally navy, and he always wore black shoes and a collar and tie. This makes him seem formal or dressed like an accountant but he didn’t give that impression because he never managed to be smart, his waistcoat (‘weskit’ as he pronounced it) generally unbuttoned and showing his braces, his sleeves rolled up, and when he was still butchering the suit would smell of meat, with the trousers and particularly the turn-ups greasy from the floor. He never had an overcoat, just a series of fawn or dark green gabardine raincoats, and he always wore a dark green trilby hat.

  About clothes Dad must always have been conservative. There are photographs of him as a young man, sitting on the sands in a deck-chair in the 1920s, and he is in his three-piece suit, with dicky-bow and fly-collar and even a bowler hat, his only concession to the holiday spirit bare feet. Retirement, which often sanctions some sartorial indulgence, didn’t alter this state of affairs, the regime of suit and other suit maintained as before. Or almost.

  After he had learned to drive my parents would sometimes collect me off the train at Lancaster. Meeting them there one day in 1970, I came across the bridge to see my mother waiting at the barrier with a stranger, someone got up in a grey check sports coat, two-tone cardigan, brown trousers and what I suppose would be called loafers. I was deeply shocked. It was Dad in leisurewear, the only relic of the man he had always been his green trilby hat.

  ‘What do you think of your Dad’s new get-up?’ Mam enquired as we were driving home. Not much was the truth of it but I didn’t let on, and as Dad didn’t say much either I took it to have been Mam’s idea, confirmed when the experiment turned out to be short-lived; the sports coat and brown trousers soon demoted to the status of gardening clothes, and we were back on the regime of ‘my suit’ and ‘my other suit’.