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      THE FRAGMENTS OF MY FATHER

      A memoir of madness, love and being a carer

      Sam Mills

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       Copyright

      4th Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      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

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