Spike: An Intimate Memoir. Norma Farnes

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СКАЧАТЬ have some. It’s Lindt and very nice.’

      When I shook my head she burst into tears. ‘I can’t help myself when he gets a depression.’

      The stress of being married to Spike must have been horrendous. The longer I worked with him the more fascinated I became by this complex character. One day he was totally incapacitated, the next a man brimming with ideas and energy enough to charge round a squash court. Why was he so driven, so talented, often impossible but so vulnerable? In a way his outrageousness was compelling; you never knew what he would do next, and so often he seemed to get away with it. For example, he suddenly announced, ‘I have had this bloody black and white television on rental from Granada for nine years. Write to Sydney Bernstein [Granada’s top man] and tell him I have paid for it twenty times over and he should give it to me.’ I did and Sydney obliged. And when once I explained I would have to leave the office for an hour to do the household shopping, he told me not to be so ridiculous. He picked up the phone, dialled and handed it to me. ‘Harrods. Give your order and they’ll deliver it.’

      ‘Don’t be silly. I don’t have that sort of money.’

      ‘But I do and I need you here.’

      So Harrods delivered our groceries.

      There was also the challenge of such remarks as ‘I’m always being overwhelmed by time wasting and you’re the biggest waster of my time.’

      ‘Get on with it’ became my response.

      It was probably a combination of all these factors that made me stay with him. At times he made me furious, but my heart ached for him at the first signs of depression. I learnt to recognize them. Sometimes it would be caused by something in particular, like the Elfin Oak episode, at others it just came upon him. The first indication I would get was a slowing down of his normally lightning mental responses and bouts of exercise. Then the lethargy became total. The normally open office windows were closed, his blinds drawn, the electric fires put on, food ignored. I would sit with him when I sensed he needed the presence of another human being. Neither of us would speak. On other occasions he preferred to be alone. I once asked him to explain how he felt at such times and he gave me this poem, ‘Manic Depression’, published years later in Small Dreams of a Scorpion.

      The pain is too much

      A thousand grim winters

      grow in my head

      In my ears

      the sound of the

      coming dead

      All seasons

      All sane

      All living

      All pain

      No opiate to lock still

      my senses

      Only left

      the body locked tenses.

      He told me he had written it in the psychiatric wing of St. Luke’s Hospital from 1953–4, and I realized that the poor devil had suffered like this for decades with little hope of a cure. At such times he could not bear any form of noise. His definition of noise was different from other people’s: the ring of a door bell, the shutting of a door seemed to him as bad as the sound of a pneumatic drill. Unless one had experienced it, he said, it was impossible to imagine the feeling of utter desolation that followed.

      It was devastating to see him in this state, huddled in a chair, his shoulders rounded, his legs up against his chest. No matter how desperate he felt I never feared he would commit suicide because he loved his four children too much to put them through such an ordeal. But his habit of self-medicating worried me. He could so easily forget how many he had taken. Even worse than Tryptozole was a dreadful drug, Tuinol, which had the advantage of bringing him out of the trough more quickly than other medication, but after recovery would plunge him into even deeper misery than he was suffering before. I was told that eight Tuinol was a lethal dose so I started to sneak into his office when he was in the bathroom to see how many he had used. But he had his secret supplier so I could never be sure how many he had taken. Those were nightmare days.

      As soon as Spike sensed that the black dog was about to take over he moved into his office, which must have seemed like a womb to him. There he was self-sufficient and I made sure the outside world could not intrude. He felt he was better alone, and above all was determined that the children should not see him. His system closed down to such an extent that he neither ate, drank nor went to the loo.

      When I came to know him better I used to push notes under the door so he was aware that I was still in the office. I felt it was a comfort for him to know there was somebody else in the building. Often I stayed until nine-thirty or ten and would then write another note to let him know I would be home in twenty minutes if he wanted someone to talk to. On reflection I wonder whether this was more for my peace of mind than his.

      Sometimes the phone would ring at two or three in the morning.

      ‘Are you awake?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Well, you are now.’

      On those occasions he never discussed himself or his depression. He just wanted to talk to somebody.

      ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he would say. ‘Are you all right, Norm?’ And then we would chat inconsequentially, sometimes for an hour or two.

      I knew he was emerging from a depression as soon as a note appeared on his door. It meant he was preparing to come back into the world. It would say, ‘Leave me alone,’ or something else, less polite.

      Then he would come out of his office, his whole appearance changed, with large purple bags hanging over his cheek bones, his body hunched and his gait unsure. The next stage would be a curt, nasty, ‘Why do you keep me unemployed?’ But I always shrugged it off.

       Chapter Seven

      On 7 November 1968 Spike wrote in his diary, ‘I should shoot her.’ I got married the following day. To me he said, ‘Keep your own flat and let him keep his. You’ve been very happy for nearly a year together. Don’t cock it up.’

      John Hyman was everything I considered I was not: educated, professional, liberal and only too ready to agree that there were grey areas which needed to be discussed on most topics. He was quite different from Spike, who shared a number of liberal ideas with him, but did so vehemently leaving little room for argument. John seemed well-balanced and reliable. He was an extremely successful solicitor, with offices in Harrow and Regent Street, and did not expect me to give up the job I enjoyed.

      I was so busy that sometimes I wonder how I fitted a private life around it. We met on New Year’s Eve. I was dating a BBC director but he was in Scotland and snowed in. A friend dragged me out to a party in Pinner and I was immediately charmed by him.

      We did not follow Spike’s advice and moved in together. Spike’s version of married life was not an example I wanted to follow. There was no doubting Spike and Paddy’s tremendous mutual attraction. Within minutes of meeting he told her, ‘I’m going to marry you.’ But their relationship СКАЧАТЬ