The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

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СКАЧАТЬ to illness being tested, clarified, boxes ticked and clear prognoses made. Dad had had an operation for bowel cancer the previous year and the accompanying leaflet gave a window for recovery of five to seven days and then a prognosis for his health in three months’ and six months’ time. Now he was an enigma, someone suffering from something which might or might not be cured at any time in the future.

      Last September, when my dad had been brought in with the same ailment – a mysterious catatonia – they had also been a little suspicious and bewildered at first. I think it was the result of government cuts. With so few beds, perhaps there were fears that we were just dumping him on the system, creating a bed-blocker.

      ‘You can’t discharge him, we’d have no idea how to look after him,’ I said. ‘And I’m worried about him eating and drinking.’

      The nurse softened. She said he’d be assessed by a psychiatrist. She added that she’d try to feed him.

      I sat down beside my dad. Unscrewing a bottle of orange juice, I pushed a straw into it and held it to his lips. They looked parched, chapped. He drank in gasping, slurpy bursts. Relief came over his face. But it didn’t cease the relentless Bang! Bang! Bang!s. I unfolded a copy of The Daily Telegraph, his paper of choice, and attempted to read an article to him, lifting the paper high to hide my face as irritated patients and visitors glared over at us.

      The hospital cafe was a Costa; I ordered a hot chocolate and sat down by the window. I was taking a break, for I hadn’t been able to soothe my dad’s relentless banging. From my bag, I pulled a copy of Mrs Dalloway.

      Virginia Woolf’s novel is set on a single day in June 1923 and captures the psyche of a nation in the aftermath of the First World War; it dives and swoops into the consciousness of various characters, shifting from one to another within a single paragraph. I suppose I was drawn to a reread because of its theme of madness. In the novel’s early conception, the book’s two main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, were one; then Woolf split this imaginative egg into two. Clarissa is a high-society woman planning a dinner party; Septimus is a soldier who fought on the Western front and lost a friend there just before the Armistice. Woolf notes in her diary that she wanted to sketch the ‘world seen by the sane and the insane’, showing how thin the membrane is between the two. Clarissa suffers from neurosis, Septimus from psychosis. She is more manic; he is more depressed. Clarissa represents the governing classes – ‘civilised life’ – who were left largely untouched by the war, whilst soldiers such as Septimus were left in a state of trauma and despair.

      I found myself moved by the relationship between Septimus and his wife, Rezia, seeing echoes of my parents’ marriage. They sit in Regent’s Park together, gazing at the trees and sky. Rezia tries to cheer herself by recalling the reassurances of her husband’s doctors, that he has ‘nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts’. The narrative jumps to Septimus’s viewpoint and we see just how disturbed he is, for he hears the birds singing in Greek, and imagines he sees his dead friend, Evans, behind the park railings. It is an evocation of the lonely ache of mental illness – lonely for both of them. Septimus’s wife cannot fathom the depths of his despair, musing: ‘To love makes one solitary’; he cannot share the state of his mind with her; they sit as man and wife, but they are strangers. Septimus ends up committing suicide, jumping from a window. His psychiatrist attends Clarissa’s dinner party and there she learns of his patient’s death.

      The book pinpoints a time in history when attitudes towards mental health and gender were changing. In the Victorian era, women with mental health issues were often diagnosed with hysteria. Shellshock baffled a society in love with the romantic idea that men returning from the front were war heroes. When soldiers first began to exhibit symptoms of what would now be called PTSD – dizziness, depression, sexual impotence, nightmares, fits of shaking, paralysis – doctors initially reacted with denial. The military saw it as cowardice and veterans were threatened with court martial if they did not ‘drop’ or suppress their symptoms. By 1922, however, over a hundred special treatment centres had been established for veterans seeking help. The illness was first termed ‘male hysteria’, then ‘neurasthenia’ and, eventually, ‘shellshock’. Doctors had to acknowledge that it might be a malady of the mind rather than the body. As a result, psychiatry gained in power and prominence.

      A friend of mine once said that she would have loved to have had a husband like Leonard Woolf. He supported Virginia in her writing, rooted her during the wild winds of her illness. Leonard, I supposed, had effectively been her carer.

      Carer: that word again. More and more, people were pinning the label on me, and it still felt odd. I associated the word with someone in a blue coat, stripping beds, wearing rubber gloves; a Florence Nightingale figure with endless reserves of patience, energy and love. When I’d googled the verb to care, I’d found it was of Germanic origin, relating to the High German chara, meaning grief, sorrow. To care involved suffering. Over time, its meaning softened as it also came to signify to make provision or look out for someone.

      My mum had looked after my dad for years, but I don’t remember her ever being called a carer. Clearly it was a term of the present day, one that was gaining currency. Recently I’d picked up on the white noise of a social care crisis in the press, though I knew little of the details. If I thought about it, however, I did know of friends who were going through something similar. One had a parent who was ill with Alzheimer’s. At midnight she would suddenly be woken by a call from her mother’s neighbour telling her that her mother was wandering about the road without a coat, and she’d have to jump into a car and drive across the night to rescue the situation. Another had a brother with Down’s syndrome: his parents had given him a loving, stable environment, but as they’d grown old they’d become wrung out with tiredness and, after a lifetime of sacrifice, had been forced to give up and put their adult son in a home.

      Carer: the term seemed an anomaly in our modern society – one that, since Thatcherism, has become so individualistic, amplified by Twitter and reality TV; one which prizes aspiration, self-reliance, getting ahead. Not one in which wages are down and inflation is high and life is moving so fast, for I was beginning to associate being a carer with losing chunks of time, getting behind, to-do lists forever unticked and multiplying. Perhaps that was why the label has evolved: as a way of defining duty, enclosing it, protecting it from life’s pressures.

      I told myself to get up and return to my dad’s bedside, or head home. Reading Woolf felt like such an indulgence. When I wasn’t with my father I fretted that I was neglecting him; when I was with him, I fretted that I was neglecting my other responsibilities. I was a conscientious type. Missing deadlines made me anxious; I hated to feel I was letting people down. I had so many things to do: emails, freelance editing, chapters to write, chapters to edit, research, washing, housework. I imagined my Florence Nightingale alter ego, who would be back at my dad’s bedside by now, saying soothing words, knowing how to calm his banging. I sat and read and felt guilty.

       4

      I remember the moment I discovered what was wrong with my dad – or, at least, found out what label his illness had.

      I was fourteen years old. Now that my dad was working as a clerk – his first job in a long time – and my mum had part-time work as a medical secretary, our house was less of a dump and even had wallpaper in some places. My bedroom was the corner box room upstairs. In the evenings, I could hear the wind battering the side of the house and the thrum of a wasps’ nest in the air vent. But I loved it in there; it was my hiding place, my cave. It felt more like a study than a bedroom. I had so many piles of books and lever arch files filled with my writing that I couldn’t move more than three paces without bashing into them. I was already keen to be a published author, СКАЧАТЬ