THE FRAGMENTS OF MY FATHER
A memoir of madness, love and being a carer
Sam Mills

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Sam Mills 2020

Image © Heritage Image Partnership/Alamy

Cover photograph courtesy of the author

Sam Mills asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Information on previously published material appears here.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008300623

Ebook Edition © June 2020 ISBN: 9780008300609

Version: 2021-02-24

Author’s Note

This is a true story, but I have altered some names and other details to protect the privacy, and conceal the identities, of certain individuals.

Dedication

For L.K.

And in loving memory of my mother.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Author’s Note

Dedication

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Part II

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part III

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Permissions

Select Bibliography

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART I

This world of human beings grows too complicated, my only wonder is that we don’t fill more madhouses: the insane view of life has much to be said for it – perhaps its the sane one after all: and we, the sad sober respectable citizens really rave every moment of our lives and deserve to be shut up perpetually.

Virginia Woolf to Emma Vaughan, 23 April 1901

1

It’s a Friday night in early 2016 and I am staring at the streaky paintwork of a toilet door. It is locked. It has been locked for the past two hours. The skin on my knuckles is pink from repeated banging.

I call out, ‘Dad, are you okay?’

There is a long silence.

Then, eventually, comes a reply:

‘I’m … okay … I’ll come out … in … a …’

I go downstairs, but the moment I reach the hallway, I feel I should venture back up, though it will only lead to a dead-end: the blank face of the toilet door again. By now, I have become familiar with its streaky whiteness, the thick and fine delineations of brushwork preserved in the white gloss, my brother’s DIY job. Through the hall window the sky is filled with the blue smoke of twilight. There is that sparkle in the air as people leave work and head for the pub or home. If they saw our house, what assumptions would they make? It’s a semi-detached in a little cul-de-sac, with a neat garden: I would have assumed it was a house where conventional people lived out happy, boring lives.

I suffer the vertigo of uncertainty. Over the past six months, I’ve spoken to several people on the phone for advice about my father. They’ve all asked the same question: ‘Are you his carer?’ And I’ve always replied: ‘No, I’m his daughter.’ The term ‘carer’ feels too clinical. I help my dad because he is my dad. But I’m also nervous of the term because it implies I am in possession of wisdom and medical knowledge and that I know what I am doing.

On the table in the living room is a card with ‘Emergency Mental Health Support Line’ printed on it in red letters. I dial the number. The man at the end of the line introduces himself as Joe. It isn’t until I tell him that my dad has been locked in a toilet for two hours that I realise how panicked I am; I hear it lacerate my voice. Often, in the present tense of a shocking situation, we can only feel numbness; it is in the aftermath that emotions take shape.

Joe is clearly a little confused by what I am telling him. In his line of work, the story of a man who is ill and locked in a toilet nearly always follows the same plot arc: he is making a threat; he intends to take his life. But my father’s condition is so odd and rare and complex – one that doctors have not come across in decades – that I’m not able to explain it on the phone. I just want someone to tell me what to do, even if they are ignorant of the context. I want instruction; I want a friend.

Joe tells me: stay on the phone, go back upstairs and speak to him. ‘Tell your dad he has to come out.’

Even though I’ve already tried this, I obey.

‘Dad, you have to come out,’ I recite.

Silence.

‘You have to put some force into the words,’ Joe tells me, and I suppress an urge to laugh hysterically; I feel as though I am auditioning for a part. ‘You need to say it with authority.’

I bellow the words. No reply. My dad has stopped speaking altogether: this is a bad sign. The echo of my voice makes it seem as though the tiny room has expanded into a vast space. I picture my dad sitting on the toilet in a state of zombie suspension. Or, perhaps he is standing on the seat, wobbling precariously – a rotund seventy-two-year-old, trying to escape through the toilet window.

‘I don’t think he can help it,’ I say. ‘I think it’s probably got out of control now.’

‘You’re doing very well,’ says Joe.

Joe tells me to ring for an ambulance. And then he tells me he is sitting in his office and he’ll be there all night. I can phone him any time. I can update him and let him know my dad is safe. And, if I feel afraid, I can just call and talk to him. In that instant, I fall in love with Joe. It is something that has happened a few times over the past six months. Someone shines a light into the dark storm of crisis and we bond in the intimacy of that moment; it feels as though we have known each other all our lives, even though we are strangers.

Why did Edward choose the toilet? Does he have a weapon? Do you think he is suicidal? These were the questions the woman fired at me when I called 999.

I answered: don’t know, no, and no.

They wanted his rejection of life to be defined as an absolute; but it was far more shadowy and ambiguous. The woman told me that the ambulance would take an hour to come. They were having a busy evening. I sensed a subtext in her tone: austerity and cuts were the cause.

I switched off the phone. The streaky white door stared back at me.

I called out to my dad once more. Once more, there was no reply.

For the third time that day I telephoned my younger brother Stefan. He worked long hours in the City, but I figured he’d be home by now; his flat was just a few streets away from Dad’s. When he appeared on the doorstep ten minutes later, he was carrying a half-drunk bottle of beer. Stefan was in his mid-thirties. Our interactions usually followed the same pattern: we took the piss out of each other as though we were kids again. But this time we were both panicked.

The hour stretched out before us. We argued about solutions. In the end, we surfed the net and picked out a locksmith. Not available, we kept being told. It’s a Friday night, we don’t have anyone …

While I kept calling out to Dad, Stefan found a screwdriver in a toolbox under the stairs and slotted it between door and lock, trying to force it open. A presence by my legs made me jump: my cat Leo was purring and gazing up at me quizzically. Most of the time, she possessed the haughty, wilful air of a cat who regarded her owners as her butlers. In a crisis, however, she seemed to soften and do her best to offer purry support, to play her role as part of the family. I knelt down and stroked her, watching anxiously as my brother jiggled, flecks of white paint flying to the floor. The lock, which my father had screwed on himself, began to rattle as it bent away from the door. And then – snap! – the door swung open and I saw a look of shock on my brother’s face.

Dad was wearing his pyjamas. He was standing upright, facing us, but he couldn’t see us. His body was locked into a strange repetitive loop, like a machine programmed to do an assembly-line task: his left arm would raise, jerk above his head, and then his right foot would lift. His scarlet face was screwed into a fist of agony.

I flew to him. Negotiating past the jerks, I gave him a hug. I whispered in his ear that he would be alright. He was unable to reply. It was as though his mind and body had said goodbye to each other. His body was doing its own strange thing and he was trapped in it, helpless. I tried to take his arm and smooth out the spasms, but it ignored me and carried on. Stepping back, I thought I should let him be: to interfere any more might hurt him.

The doorbell shrilled. The ambulance – early? But when I hurtled down to open the door, I found a locksmith waiting, ready to assist. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, giving him the bundle of notes my brother had passed me.

When the ambulance did arrive, the crew were wonderful. Like Joe, they exuded warmth; they genuinely cared. My father’s state baffled them. They fired questions at us, and we did our best to explain his tendency to slip into catatonia. In the end they moved Dad into a wheelchair and wrapped him in a blanket. Then they eyed the stairs nervously. My father is five feet-five and weighs sixteen stone. One of my friends once remarked to me that he looked like Father Christmas, with white hair and a benign, round face that people found instantly endearing. How to carry him? They hummed and hawed. They brought up a transfer chair, a bit like a sack barrow, and strapped him in. The final turn of the stairs was tricky. Eventually, they got him to the bottom. They looked as though they wanted to cheer.

The house felt lonely and empty after they had gone; night rain was freckling the windows. I pictured my dad and Stefan at the hospital, stuck in some side room in A&E. My brother would be there until at least two or three in the morning, whilst nurses spirited in and out doing tests, asking questions.

In the living room, I gazed over at Dad’s armchair, tucked away in the corner. The seat was hollowed from use and the arm on which he rested his head to nap, curled up like a big cat, was frayed to strings of cloth. Next to the chair was a wooden cabinet on which he’d placed a pair of chunky black reading glasses, his newspaper tokens, his Bible, a list of things to do and to remember, and his pocket diary. I picked it up and opened the front page. It contained that line that all diaries have and few people ever bother to fill out: who to contact in the event of an emergency. Perhaps those who do are the ones who are vulnerable, aware of the hairline cracks in their lives, the threat of fracture. I was touched to see my name and number written on this line, and then felt shadowed by fear: I thought of my father in the toilet and imagined what might have been if I hadn’t been there.

I wandered into the spare bedroom. Once this room had belonged to my mother. Her presence was there still, in the pleats and shadows. A basket of make-up at the back of the desk gathering a thick layer of dust. Her dressing gown, a long leopard-print affair, hung on the back of the door. On her bookshelf sat a row of spine-cracked favourites: the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a textbook about Freud, Herman Hesse’s Siddartha. Today, 19 February – the day Dad had spent locked in the toilet – was her birthday. She would have been seventy.

I grew up in this house, the neat semi in a cul-de-sac in a quiet town in Surrey, and stayed here until my university years. Mum was well then, and Dad – Dad was still stable. After graduating I headed north to a little place between Manchester and Liverpool called Appley Bridge, where I rented a room and wrote.

I had expected to reach my late thirties and suddenly metamorphose into Someone Sensible who wanted to put down roots and buy a property. It hadn’t quite happened. I was still self-employed, a writer with a bank balance that hovered perilously close to the line; I had no family of my own; I was uncertain whether I wanted to be a mother. I was, however, in a long-term relationship. My boyfriend, Thom, was eight years younger than me, a book reviewer and a fellow book-lover. Our favourite thing was to wander around second-hand bookshops, rummaging the shelves for gems and stealing kisses in dusty corners. He lived in the north too, anchored there by a young daughter from a previous relationship.

At New Year, Thom had come down to stay with me. We’d had a party in the dining room, pushing the table to one side, taking it in turns to pick tracks on YouTube. His dancing style involved swaying on the spot, whereas I resembled a manic hare. He’d stayed in the spare room, and we’d made love quietly, self-conscious as teenagers, giggling and stopping halfway through if we heard my dad’s heavy footfall on the stairs as he got up for a midnight snack. Thom had infused the house with energy, and when he’d left it had slumped back to flatness.

Since September 2015 I’d been living out of a suitcase, zigzagging between north and south, boyfriend and father, happiness and duty, pleasure and sacrifice. I’d grown out of the habit of hanging my clothes up. I washed them, folded them, put them back in the suitcase, which served as an improvised chest of drawers. For Valentine’s Day, Thom and I had celebrated with a meal out in Manchester. I’d been looking forward to another trip to his place in Buxton, a town of grand green hills, ancient buildings, icy winds and clear spring water. Now it would have to be cancelled.

Thom would be sympathetic, I assured myself. But I felt the itch of worry: I was seeing less and less of him. I recalled how hard it had been last September, when Dad had fallen sick, and those strange catatonic symptoms had first made themselves known. He’d been taken to A&E at St Helier hospital, then transferred to a geriatric wing in Tolworth Hospital. During those autumn months when he’d been hospitalised, life had been suspended, as though I had inhaled and I was still waiting to let out that gasp of breath. I’d found that nearly every email I sent began with the words I’m sorry for the slow reply, that I’d begged for work deadlines to be pushed into the week after next, and set aside my dreams for a future time when life might be normal again. That night, on my mother’s birthday, as I sat and watched the sky turn from blue to black, I wondered for the first time if it ever would.

2

My first memory: I am four years old and sitting in our cosy living room with my parents and older brother, John. Our faces are reflected and superimposed onto the TV set as we watch The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. One family sitting in suburbia looking at another version of suburbia. Suburbs were once a place for the poor, for those who overflowed from the cities. Then, as the rural poor migrated to industrial cities, the wealthy middle classes moved out to the fringes. Gradually, suburbia came to be associated with neat gardens, neighbours twitching at curtains, 2.4 children and nine-to-five jobs. In the late seventies, Reginald Perrin satirised the sheer boredom of it all; Reggie seeks to escape it by faking his suicide, leaving his clothes and belongings on a beach to be erased by the waves.

Suburbia was a place my parents had escaped to. My mother, Glesney, had grown up on a council estate in south London, at the Elephant and Castle; my father, Edward, came from a large working-class family in New Malden. My mum had been denied a good education by a chauvinistic father who said that university was a waste of time for a woman; my dad’s education had been meagre, but he managed to get a good job at the local factory. When they’d bought our semi-detached house, the estate agent had looked bewildered and asked: ‘Are you sure you want to buy this place?’ It was a house on a fine street, but inside it was a mess of loose wires, crumbling brickwork and walls painted in those lurid colours that were inexplicably fashionable in the sixties, avocado green and bright orange. The last owner had been an old man whose eccentricity had intensified into madness. His fingerprints were still on the walls, black smudges of wrinkled digits that looked eerie in their muddling of the elderly and the juvenile. There seems something prophetic about them now. My parents were thrilled, however. They had nearly achieved social mobility. The scene we watched together on TV was aspirational, for Perrin’s house showed how our place might look, his middle-class boredom the luxury my parents longed for.

Another memory: I am gazing out of the window and see a man walking up and down naked. His clothes have been discarded, like Perrin’s on the beach, trailing down the hallway. (Or have the two merged together in my mind?) My mother takes me, my older brother and my new baby brother to visit Dad. The place he is staying in is a large, white building, with cranky radiators that gurgle. People are wandering about as though they are in the middle of some imaginary maze, seeking the centre. One woman has the cackling laugh of a fairy-tale witch. My dad has always been a playful parent, indulging me in my favourite game whereby he would grab me by the ankles, swing me like a pendulum and cry, ‘Tick, tock, tick, tock!’ as my long hair brushed his shoes. This new version of my father is sitting in a chair in his green dressing gown. When he finally raises his eyes to look at us, I see sadness fossilised in his pupils.

With my dad missing, the planned transformation of our home failed. The house sighed and slumped its shoulders, the paint peeled, and the fingerprints remained on the walls.

I never asked my mum what had happened to my father. I felt too afraid, and perhaps she felt afraid of how she might frame that story. She looked tired and had a habit of biting her nails to the pink. She had started to take on various cleaning jobs. On one occasion a letter landed on the mat that brought her to tears. The local tax inspector had demanded a meeting, unable to believe that we lived off so little. My brother and I were taken along with her to see him. The man was kind, but he looked shocked when he asked, ‘Don’t you ever go out to dinner?’ and she replied in the negative.

Dad returned home some months later. But he did not go back to work and, a year on, he disappeared again. Once more, he became a mysterious figure in a dressing gown in that strange white institution that seemed to me a place somewhere between a hospital and a school for the anguished.

By now, I had started primary school, which made me conscious that I was different from the other kids. They were dropped off at school by parents who had swish cars; they lived in comfortable houses; their clothes were crisp and their shoes shiny. My shoes had holes in and when I changed out of uniform into my day clothes, they had a whiff of oddity about them. Someone once asked me why I wore clothes from jumble sales. Dressed in a ragged ra-ra skirt of mauve and lemon layers, which clashed with an off-white Mickey Mouse T-shirt, I wasn’t entirely sure how to reply.

The solution arrived with books. My mother had learnt the art of living off very little. She returned from jumble sales with bags bursting with tatty, dog-eared novels which cost a penny each. I read at night in bed and in the garden in the summer days, lying on the overgrown daisy-studded lawn and under the shade of a lilac bush, before breakfast and during breaks at primary school. Everything was wrong in theory. But in practice I was happy. I had Enid Blyton, Anne Digby, E. S. Nesbitt and Roald Dahl. In Matilda, Dahl describes how his heroine escapes from the unhappiness of her childhood through a visit to the local library:

‘The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.’

I couldn’t necessarily look to my parents for wisdom anymore. My father was hidden and my mother, though loving, was preoccupied with trying to keep us fed and not lose the house. My brothers were no help, either. My older brother was distant; my younger brother was still a toddler, though fun to tease.

Books became my glorious escape. Their invented narratives were coherent, where every detail of the plot contributed to a whole and all made sense in the inevitable happy ending. By contrast, the real world was puzzling in its chaos. I was acquiring a sense of how stories were shaped but my own family’s narrative remained a confusion, a tale seemingly without logic.

‘What happened to your dad?’ was a question I was asked in the playground. Not knowing what to say, I made up a story. I was learning from my favourite authors the art of spinning a tale, of how to build anticipation and end with a cliffhanger. As Dickens advised, ‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’. The story of my father was a serialisation that I embellished day by day. It was Worzel Gummidge with a macabre slant; he had been unexpectedly kidnapped by a band of savage tramps who had invaded the bottom of our garden. This had evolved into a hostage crisis. My father was trapped in a garden shed: would he ever return? At one point, I became so engrossed in my story that I forgot it wasn’t real. I was taken to the sick room because I was crying. When I told the nurse my tale, I could see that she was trying not to laugh; she gave me a biscuit, patted me on the head and sent me on my way.

Even if I had known the term for my father’s illness, it would have meant nothing to me. Children survive without science the way ancient societies did – making up stories which explained why sometimes the rain fell and sometimes there was a drought, where the stars came from and why humans were put on earth. When we are children we view our parents as our gods, and so they need grand narratives. To say that my dad was ‘mad’ felt simplistic and would have rendered him too fragile, too human. He needed to be a hero in a tragedy – and importantly, at the mercy of external forces rather than internal ones.

In the playground, I became an observer. The difference in class between me and my classmates had cleaved me from them. The turning-inwards of my energies was becoming habitual; I read books in break-times, or watched the others playing. Most of the games were about love and war – Kiss Chase or some variant on Cowboys and Indians. Or children played at professions, at Doctors and Nurses, or being a spy. Children do not play at being children, they play at being grown-ups; the playground is a dress rehearsal for the future. I watched them with envy. I read James and the Giant Peach, Five Children and It, The Secret Seven and wished the characters might be coaxed from the page into real life friends.

And then, suddenly, my dad was back home again.

It was a plot hole I could not fill. Every time he returned, I was simply glad that he was home, without worrying too much about the whys: why he had gone, why he took pills at night, or why his work suits hung in his wardrobe and gathered dust. I remember going on a family outing by car one day when I was about eight years old. I was sitting in the back with my brothers and I was reading Roald Dahl’s Danny The Champion of the World. My father was driving. I could see his face in the rear-view mirror and he was muttering to himself as though in conversation with a voice; I smiled, recognising that I mirrored his reflection, for I had the voice of Dahl running through my mind, and it was witty, rude, wry, and compassionate. Fiction can sometimes enrich us, leave us feeling full, but just as often a good book can leave us wistful, with a sense of absence. In Danny, the hero does not have a mother but he has an amazing father. His father teaches him how to fish and takes him on secret poaching trips in the middle of the night. At the end of the book, there is a concluding message: ‘A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants – and DESERVES – is a parent who is SPARKY.’ It was hard not to stare at the picture of Dahl on the back cover, sitting in his Buckinghamshire garden, a tall man with a twinkle in his eye, and imagine that he was the perfect incarnation of paternity.

Back home, I flipped through a tattered dictionary, wishing I could discover a word for my dad’s idiosyncrasies. If I could only find it, I thought, it would be like turning a key in a lock. Despite discovering new words I liked the sound of (peevish, aberration, crasis), nothing enlightened me. The key would not turn.

3

B ang! Bang! Bang!

When I arrived at St Helier hospital, I made my way through the criss-cross of white corridors to the fifth floor. My dad had been brought here in the ambulance yesterday. As I approached the ward, I heard a noise that filled me with dread.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

There were eight beds. The other patients were all elderly men and, though sick, they appeared to be ‘normal’. They were reading the paper, watching TV, or chatting with relatives, who sat in plastic chairs around their beds. My dad looked simultaneously elderly and infantile. He was drumming violently, fists flying up and crashing down on the bed, like an enormous white-haired baby in a cot. When I said hello, a faint smile quivered on his lips – his fists pausing for a few seconds – before he went back to his routine.

A nurse approached me and said that my dad would probably be discharged later that day.

‘But look at him,’ I said, my heart thumping with shock.

‘Isn’t he always like this?’

I tried to explain the man my father normally was: a man who rose every morning and made his own breakfast, did his own daily shop, and cooked himself a poached egg for lunch, one of those simple recipes that involves a certain delicate skill, lest the egg collapse into a wobbly morass. The nurse looked sympathetic but wary, as though she couldn’t quite equate these two versions of my father. If he’d been in with a broken limb, she might have been able to synthesise them. But madness tears a person’s character into two, their sane self and their insane one, and it can be hard to make the join, perceive them as a whole. Here, in hospital, the staff were used 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, though most of the books I wrote were derivative, borrowing from the romances I read, with little idea of how fantastical they were. I hadn’t the life experience to discern that men did not always bring happy endings.

Homework always came first, however. Mum had repeatedly impressed upon me that life had no future without a good education. Though I’d passed my eleven-plus I’d been destined for the local comprehensive school, until my mum intervened – fighting ferociously with the council to get me into the local girls’ grammar school. I had been sulky about the idea at the time: Mum had explained that girls did not perform as well when they studied in classes with boys, for both sexes just ended up showing off to each other. I’d thought: boys are just the thing I want in my class.

As always, Mum was right. On my first day, I’d fallen in love with the school. It was set in the sprawling grounds of a park; in the playground you could hear the yowls of peacocks from a nearby mansion. Local geography highlighted the class divides. Those who came from wealthy families lived in the big, white birthday-cake houses near to the school; those of us who were in the poorer division headed for the bus to take us on the long journey home. But class did not seem to matter so much, not the way it had in primary school. On my first day, I sat between a shy girl called Lucy, and Henrietta, the daughter of a Surrey vicar; and I got the bus back home with a new Sri Lankan friend called Eshani. For the first time in a long while, I was lucky enough to have good friends, and I treasured them dearly.

It was almost 7 o’clock by the time I finished my homework that evening – an essay about Lady Macbeth. Hungry, I went downstairs for dinner. Just four plates had been set at the table, as my older brother had recently left home; the shouts and babble of dialogue from the TV next door suggested my younger brother was watching Grange Hill.

In the kitchen, I found my dad pulling a tray of chips from the oven. He set them down on the surface and stared at them gravely.

‘You’ve burnt the chips, Dad,’ I pointed out casually. I didn’t really mind. I liked them that way, crispy and crunchy between my teeth.

My dad pulled off his oven gloves; I heard the pounding of his footsteps on the stairs. I watched the chips cool into a row of blackened fingers. As I ventured upstairs, I could hear weeping. I felt my heart thump, conscious that ignorance might be better than knowledge, that it might be safer to go back down.

The bedroom door was ajar. I crept closer. Dad was sitting on the bed, saying: ‘I burnt the chips, I burnt the chips’ over and over and Mum was there with him. Dad’s face was red, as if the tears he was shedding had been wrenched from his gut, and Mum was making shushing noises as though he was her child.

I crept down the stairs. In the kitchen, I walked in circles and chewed nervously on an apple. When my mother eventually came down, she explained that my dad had ‘schizophrenia’ and that sometimes it was hard to get his medication right. The amazement on my face startled her. ‘Didn’t you notice all the pills he takes?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you remember when he took off all his clothes and walked down the street and then none of the other children’s parents let them come to play for a while …?’ There was something oddly casual about her tone, as though we were exchanging gossip about someone else’s family. Our discussion was brief; I was too shocked to summon any questions about my father’s illness.

Later, after my parents had gone to bed, I sat in the bath and wept at this strange and sudden rewriting of our lives. Through the warped window glass, I could see the yellow lights of the house next door. I imagined the faint sounds of laughter as they sat and enjoyed dinner together: a conventional family, the one I’d fooled myself into thinking we were. At school I had been reading my nonsense poetry to my friends and they’d teased me for being ‘mad’; did that mean his illness was weaving its way into my words?

That night I was finally able to find the correct word in the dictionary. It informed me that schizophrenia came from Greek roots, skhizein meaning split/tear and phren, the mind. The key had turned.

The next evening my dad made tea again. A trio of us at the table: Dad, me, my younger brother. We ate in silence. It was a Tuesday, which meant Mum had her evening class for A-level psychology. Without her, the house felt empty and eerie; she always created a sparkle, a warm energy, a love that gave our home an ambient glow.

After dinner, I stood in the hallway and watched my father from the slit between door and frame. The beard he was growing highlighted his gaunt cheekbones. He was sitting in his armchair reading the Bible; this was his new obsession, something he clung to as though it was keeping him afloat in the world. Looking back, I wonder if he combated his voices by reading about men who had heard the voice of God giving them divine instruction; while he was labelled mad, they had been celebrated as prophets.

Upstairs in my room I got to work: I took an envelope from my rucksack containing a passport photo of my friend Anil. Using a Pritt Stick, I carefully glued the photo to a square of card with a college logo watermarked on its background. The next bit was trickier; I carved lettering into a rubber and used ink from my fountain pen to paint over the letters, before stamping it over the photo. The final touch was a dash of Blue Peter: a wrapping of sticky back plastic. And there it was – another fake ID. Anil had already paid me 50p for this. It was a way of earning extra money, since my weekly allowance was considerably smaller than most of my friends. It meant we could get into nightclubs with ‘proof’ that we were over eighteen. Nightclubs meant alcohol, boys, smoking: all the things that we missed out on at a girls’ grammar school where everyone was well behaved, wore coats that were the correct shade of navy, and where hems above the knee were forbidden.

I found myself thinking of Laura Palmer as I slotted the ID card back into the envelope. Twin Peaks was an obsession at our school. Laura lived a double life: her good girl, blonde, high-school sweetheart one, and her darker two-boyfriends-on-the-go promiscuous druggie one. (This splitting of people into two, normal self and doppelgänger, seemed to be a feature in the series as it went on.) That division was something I identified with. One half of me did my homework, achieved grade As, looked meek and innocent, was made form rep and obediently picked up the register each morning for my teacher; and the other smoked illicit cigarettes in the park on the way home, made fake IDs, lured boys on dancefloors, and shared fumbling trysts with them in dark corners in clubs. It seemed hard to allow the two to blur together and perhaps, I wondered, it was something the male sex found easier to do, to be whole, unified.

The ID card finished, I got stuck into my writing. It was becoming my addiction. When there was a knock at the door, I jumped. A stern silhouette appeared.

‘You’re not to have sex before marriage – it says so in the Bible,’ my dad intoned in a robotic tone.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. Dad looked upset, then he was gone.

The next day I recalled the incident and felt lost, as though the dislocated exchange with Dad had had nothing to do with me. When I told my mum about it, she just laughed and told me not to take any notice of him, which made me feel better. And this was how I survived growing up with my father. I saw the same process occur in my younger brother – a distancing, as though my father was an unfortunate and obscure relative staying in the house, someone we all had to tolerate.

Much of the time Dad was so quiet he was like a ghost – though sometimes, when he was doing the washing up, I’d hear him shout: ‘Shut up! Shut up!’, trying to bat away the voices that swirled around him like a malignant wind. Once, on the bookcase by his chair, I found a list he’d made of rebukes to its torments –

I am not under house arrest

I am not a Muslim

I am a Christian

– all written in small, jagged capital letters with his favourite Parker biro. After this, I would check the bookcase every so often, seeking more eerie rebukes, but there were only shopping lists and details of Bible services.

As an adult, whenever I came home to visit my parents, Dad would hover in the background in silence. A friend of mine who stayed with us later recalled: ‘I remember your dad not saying a single word to me. It’s as though he wasn’t there.’ I know now that this is a symptom of schizophrenia: an indifference, an ephemeral, unengaged absence. But at that time all I knew was that my mum was like a best friend to me, while my relationship with my father was virtually non-existent.

One year, we all went to the cinema on Boxing Day. We saw the film Australia, and as the credits rolled and we emerged from the dark, I was surprised by the animation on my dad’s face. When I asked him if he’d enjoyed it, he said it was one of the best films he’d ever seen. Later, my mum explained: ‘His voice suddenly stopped speaking to him – he had two hours of freedom.’ Freedom: the word jolted me. Because he had stopped vocalising his battle, I often forgot that he was imprisoned in that cell, where a hostile figure talked at him all day. Whatever conversational tug of war was going on inside him had become a private anguish.

On the mantlepiece in our living room sits a photographic triptych of my mother, looking shy, smiling and pensive. After I’d returned from visiting my father at St Helier hospital, I found myself looking at her frozen expressions, wishing I could ask her for advice. Had she ever seen my father descend into catatonia? How would she have handled it?

We had lost my mother just over four years ago. Since she’d gone, I had not seen my father cry once.

My brothers and I had waited and watched him, always vigilant for signs of a breakdown. But he just carried on in his set routine. Over the years, the bandwidth of his attention and interests had narrowed down. He had no friends, only his family. He had no ambitions. Taking a trip to somewhere he didn’t know would cause his hands to tremble with anxiety. Routine held him together. He slept the same sort of hours as a cat. At night, he would spend twelve hours in bed and often napped in the daytime. His day was bookended by the taking of medicines – Lansoprazole and Lactulose first thing in the morning, Amisulpride and Clozapine last thing at night. His physique was also shaped by them: he put on a huge amount of weight, a side effect of his pills. He went to the local supermarket several times a day, but rarely ventured beyond the town, except for hospital appointments; the parameters of his existence were more akin to those of someone who lived centuries ago. The only dramatic change after Mum died was that he stopped watching EastEnders, (he and Mum had always watched it together). My brothers and I were divided as to whether this was a sign of an improvement in his mental health.

When I was away in Appley Bridge I would call him every night. Our talks would last ten minutes or so. We always had the same conversation, cheerful and superficial: I would ask him how the weather was; he’d reply that it was sunny/rainy/grey. I’d ask him if he’d eaten/fed the cat/gone out. He’d reply yes/yes/yes. Then I’d say goodnight. He always seemed pleased that I had rung. When I was back living with him, I would cook him the occasional meal. There was a companionable warmth between us, in that we shared the house but didn’t speak much. This continued for three and a half years, before suddenly, dramatically, things deteriorated.

September 2015 brought the first signs of trouble. My dad was taking weekly trips to the GP for remedies for corns, a tickle in his throat, a fit of dizziness, a small rash on his hand. Initially I felt anxious, because I knew from loved ones I’d lost that a tiny symptom can belie an illness that slashes and burns; and then I became immune to worry, because it seemed that minor illnesses were becoming my dad’s hobby, something to collect, to fuss and turn over and label. Then his tendency to hypochondria became manic. Stefan took him to the GP over an indefinable illness; on their way out, Dad began to weep. He was taken to hospital, discharged a few days later. He seemed strange, blurry, slowed-down, tasks taking twice as long as usual. I thought if I cooked for him it might help. I thought that rest was the answer.

That day in September, when it first happened, I remember setting down plates on the dining-room table for lunch. My eyes skimmed a stain on the carpet. My mother had lived her last days in this room, and the stain had been created by – a spilt drink? – a splash of urine? – now faded to a watermark.

I went into the hallway and called upstairs: ‘Dad, it’s ready!’

Two plates on the table. The empty place where she once sat, at the head. My appetite was always sharp. Still standing, getting impatient, I speared a potato and chewed it quickly. I called to Dad again. When there was no reply, I hurried up the stairs. ‘Come in,’ his quavery voice replied to my knock. He was sitting on the bed, looking at the clothes neatly laid out next to him – trousers, braces, shirt – as though he had been given a set of bad letters at a turn in Scrabble and couldn’t make a word out of them.

Kneeling down, I busied myself with peeling off his socks, pulling on taut crisp ones. But when I reached for his pyjama shirt, my hand paused. I hadn’t seen my dad naked since I was a child.

‘Why don’t you have lunch in your pyjamas?’ I suggested.

As he lumbered down the stairs, I thought: hang on, has he even taken his morning medicines? One of our kitchen cupboards now functioned as a medicine cabinet: I found a jumble of white boxes with scientific names and labels giving instructions for doses. In the dining room, Dad sat down before his plate of cooling chicken and vegetables. I passed him his pills. Silence; stasis. I poured him a glass of water and put the pills on a spoon. I raised them to his mouth. He opened it. I slipped them in and passed him the water.

I started to cut up his food. A piece of chicken on the end of my fork came up against his closed lips. He looked at me as though he couldn’t hear the words I was saying: Dad, it’s good to eat, you need to keep your strength up. For one surreal moment, I felt as though I was an apparition he did not believe in. When I called 999 they asked if he was breathing, if he was in pain, and I had trouble explaining his state: he seemed as though he was in a coma, yet he was awake. After I hung up, I took solace in the sound of him breathing in and out, but I could not make his eyes connect with mine. The fading light in them chilled me with a grief-flash: my mother lying in this room, on a makeshift hospital bed, the life seeping out of her. It was as though he was in a liminal state, body half-dead, mind in purgatory.

It took eight weeks for him to heal. Due to a lack of beds at the local psychiatric hospital in Tooting, he was transferred from St Helier to Tolworth hospital, where he shared a ward with elderly patients suffering from dementia. There he was medicated and nourished back to walking, talking, speaking health and discharged for Christmas. I had assumed then that the catatonia was a blip, a one-off. Perhaps he’d just got tired, run down, needed rest. Now that it was happening all over again, I could no longer dismiss it as an anomaly. This was the start of something new, a pattern I could neither name nor explain. I thought of all the years that my mother had looked after him. Why, after decades of stability, had he collapsed again – and why into such a strange state?

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