The Fragments of my Father - Sam Mills

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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

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