Untold Stories (6 page)

I suspect the motorbike was bought as another means of escape, something to ‘go off ' on at weekends perhaps or for little evening runs round the lanes of Adel, Eccup and Arthington. It's hard to imagine, looking back, that Mam could ever have been persuaded to ride pillion, but though she was never keen (‘too draughty for me') she was still game enough in those days to give it a try. Had crash helmets been obligatory then, that would have clinched it, as I cannot imagine either of them got up in the necessary gear. As it was, Mam would be in her usual clothes (‘my little swagger coat and that turban thing') and Dad in his raincoat and trilby, making any concessions to what this mode of transport required thought by them to be pretending to be something they weren't … and they certainly weren't bikers. Sometimes even all four of us would go out, with Gordon and me laid on a bit of old curtain inside the closed box.

Dad had never got as far as a test and still had L-plates, and though helmets might not be obligatory it was already an offence for a learner driver to carry passengers. Thus it was that on one of our few outings as a whole family the bike was flagged down by a particularly pompous local policeman, PC Brownlow, who proceeded to lecture Dad on this point of law;
Mam presumably still sitting on the pillion clutching her eternal handbag, mortified at this public humiliation, particularly in a part as better class as Adel.

His lecture on the Highway Code completed, PC Brownlow lengthily puts away his pencil and adjusts his cape so that my brother and I, thinking he's gone, choose this moment to open the lid of the box and reveal our presence, thus triggering a further lecture. Dad is ordered to drive home alone as Mam and my brother and I trail back to the tram terminus at Lawnswood, all of us knowing that the bike's days are now numbered.

Though it straight away took its place on the list of ‘your Dad's crazes' (fretwork, fishing, home-made beer) the idea of a motorbike wasn't instantly extinguished, dwindling away via another short-lived investment in a contraption called a Cyclemaster, whereby a motor was attached to the back wheel of a pedal cycle, and which came into play when climbing hills. Or didn't, as proved too often to be the case, so that it ended up like the fretsaw and the double bass advertised in the Miscellaneous Column of the
Yorkshire Evening Post
. After this they stuck to the bus.

It wasn't until twenty years later, when Dad was over sixty and they knew they were about to leave Leeds, that Dad had some driving lessons and took his test in Harrogate. Always a considerate man, he had got it into his head that courtesy towards other drivers was on a par with the more basic requirements of the Highway Code. The result was that coming up to one of the town's many elaborately planted roundabouts he was so concerned to raise his hand to another driver who had given way to him (out of prudence, I should think) that he drove the wrong way round the Floral Clock and was failed instantly.

Harrogate had always been a favourite place with my parents, but the recollection of this humiliation was so keen that they seldom went there again and when he did take some more driving lessons it was in Skipton and he kept it a secret. The night of his test he telephoned me in London, but boasting was so foreign to him it was some time before he mentioned it. ‘I took your Mam out in the car this afternoon.' ‘Oh, that's nice,' I said, not catching the reference. ‘I thought we'd have a run out. I passed my
test.' For him it was as if he had joined the human race. Nothing that he had ever accomplished gave him so much pleasure or, I think, made him feel so much a man.

His first and only car was a khaki-coloured Mini which transformed their lives, put paid to hanging about in bus stations and set them free to range the countryside and visit places they had only read about. It affected my life, too, though in ways which, for them, were less welcome. Previously I had gone north at regular intervals really to chauffeur them around and give them a change of scene. Now I stayed longer and longer in London and saw them much less.

It meant, too, that when Dad rang to say ‘I think your Mam's starting another depression do', there was not the same urgency to hurry home. He did not need me to ferry him the fifty miles round trip to the hospital. Now he could manage on his own, and manage he did, though Mam was often in hospital five or six weeks at a time. This was at Airedale, near Keighley, further than Lancaster it's true but modern and with better facilities. He drove there every day with no thought that he could do anything else, and in due course it was his conscientiousness and devotion to duty that killed him.

Love apart, what led my father to drive fifty miles a day to visit his wife in hospital was the conviction that no one knew her as he knew her, that if she were to regain the shore of sanity he must be there waiting for her; finding him she would find herself.

Years later I put this in my only play about madness, with Queen Charlotte as devoted to her husband, George III, as ever Dad was to Mam.

‘It is the same with all the doctors,' the Queen says. ‘None of them knows him. He is not himself. So how can they restore him to his proper self, not knowing what that self is.'

How could any doctor, seeing this wretched weeping woman, know that ordinarily she was loving and funny and full of life? Dad knew and felt that when she woke from this terrible dream he must be there to welcome her and assure her that she had found herself.

So together they trailed the long system-built corridors of the hospital,
empty on those August afternoons – summer always her worst time; they sat by the unweeded flower beds, watched the comings and goings in the car park, had a cup of tea from the flask he had brought and a piece of the cake he had made. ‘I think she's beginning to come round a bit,' he'd say on the phone. ‘They say next week I can take her for a little run.'

The hospital where she was most often a patient was one of those designed by John Poulson, the corrupt architect who made his fortune in the sixties by deals done with city bosses all over the north. Architecturally undistinguished and structurally unsound – it was said to be slowly sliding down the hill – the hospital was still streets ahead of the ex-workhouse at Lancaster or the old St James's in Leeds, where Dad himself had all but died. ‘Well, if Mr Poulson did one good thing in his life,' Dad would say when Mam was on the up and up, ‘it was this hospital. It's a grand place.' And featureless though it was, it was indeed light, airy, cheerful and split up into small manageable units. The snag was that these units, colour-coded though they were, were all more or less identical. Even for those in their right minds this could be confusing, but for the patients who were already confused, like those on the psychiatric ward, it was doubly disorienting. Psychiatric was not far from Maternity, with the result that the unbalanced would wander into what looked to be their ward only to find what they took to be their bed was now occupied by, as Mam said, ‘one of these gymslip mums. She didn't look more than fourteen,' her language and her humour discovered intact where she had abandoned them months before. ‘She cracked out laughing this afternoon,' Dad said. ‘They're going to let her come home for the weekend.'

Early on in her first bout of depression and not long after she had been transferred from Lancaster Moor to a smaller and less intimidating institution near Burley in Wharfedale, Mam was given electro-convulsive therapy. We had no thought then that ECT was particularly invasive, an interference with the mental make-up or a rearrangement of the personality, and I do not think this now more than thirty years later, when ECT is even more controversial and to some extent discredited. I do not, then or now, see it as torture or punishment and no more routinely decreed or
callously administered than any other treatment, though these were the objections to it at the time as they are the objections to it now. So far as my mother is concerned, she does not show any alarm at the prospect, and talks about the procedure with curiosity but without apprehension.

This was the period when the fashionable analyst was R. D. Laing and madness, while not quite the mode, was certainly seen as an alternative view of things, the mad the truly sane a crude view of it. In practical terms (though it was never practical) enlightenment consisted in encouraging the mentally ill to work through their depression, schizophrenia or whatever to achieve a new balance and an enhanced sense of self; the most extreme case and often-quoted exemplar being Mary Barnes, who came to a revised perception of herself via a period in which she smeared the walls in excrement. I thought at the time that this was not on the cards for the average patient or for the unfortunate nurse or relative who eventually had to clean up after them, though this didn't seem to enter into the equation.

I had a similar difference of sympathy about the same time when at the long-gone Academy Cinema in Oxford Street I saw Ken Loach's film
Family Life
. It's about mental illness and includes a scene in which a doctor prescribes ECT for a patient, at which point the audience in the cinema roundly hissed the supposed villain. Unable to join in or share the general indignation, I felt rather out of it. Faced with a loved one who is mute with misery and immobilised by depression and despair, what was to be done? Hissing the doctor didn't seem to be the answer and I left the cinema (which wasn't the answer either).

ECT apart, much of the literature to do with mental and neurological illness irritated on a different level and still does. There is a snobbery about mental affliction beginning, I suspect, with Freud; there was little twisting of the cloth cap went on in Freud's consulting room, I'm sure, but it wasn't simply due to social snobbery. Like most writers on the subject, the great man concerned himself with the intellectual and the exotic, so that there was something of the freak show about many of his well-known case histories, with alleviation of suffering nowhere.

Depression, which is much the most common mental illness, doesn't
even qualify as such and mustn't be so labelled, perhaps because it's routine and relatively unshowy; but maybe, too, because it's so widespread not calling depression mental illness helps to sidestep the stigma. A sufferer from it, though, might well regret that his or her condition is so common since a patient mindless with despair is such a regular occurrence as scarcely to be worthy of a proper physician's time.

Nothing excuses us from the obligation to divert our fellow creatures. We must not be boring. And since for the specialist most illnesses soon cease to intrigue, if you have to suffer choose a condition that is rare. Should you want to catch the doctor's eye, the trick is not to see no light at the end of the tunnel; anybody can do that. Rather mistake your wife for a hat and the doctor will never be away from your bedside.

To give them credit, Laing and his followers were not medically snobbish in this way, but what they seldom discussed was the effect an illness like depression had on the rest of the family, in this case my father. The reverse, the effect the family had on the patient, was much discussed and it was one of the central tenets of Laing's writing that mental illness was generally the work and the fault of the family. In the crowded family plot love, or at least relationships, cramped and warped the weak and ailing, with health only to be achieved by explaining how schizophrenia, say, had been a rational response to the constraints that other family members had imposed, this process of explanation invariably leaving the family, if not in the dock, at least a bit shamefaced.

But nothing that I read or saw at that time resembled the situation in our family, the sudden defection of a loved one, her normal personality wiped out with a total loss of nerve. In Laing and in Szasz the love that was on offer in the family was generally seen as rigid and repressive, with affection bartered for good behaviour. This didn't seem to me to have much to do with my father's affection for my mother, which, while not denying her faults, seemed as near selfless as one could get. There was no bargain here that I could see, just distress and loss on both sides. The books talked of the family working through its breakdown and coming to a new understanding, but when both parties were in their mid-sixties it
seemed a bit late in the day for that. What Mam and Dad both wanted was the same going-on as they had had before, and if ECT was a short cut to that then they would take it.

We were told that following a few sessions of ECT Mam would be more herself, and progressively so as the treatment went on. In the event improvement was more dramatic. Given her first bout of ECT in the morning, by the afternoon Mam was walking and talking with my father as she hadn't for months. He saw it as a miracle, as I did too, and to hear on the phone the dull resignation gone from his voice and the old habitual cheerfulness back was like a miracle too.

Successive treatments consolidated the improvement and soon she was her old self, confused a little as to how this terrible visitation had come about and over what period, but that and other short-term memory loss could be put down to the treatment. Now for the first time she went back to the cottage for a trial weekend and was straight away on the phone, bubbling over with its charms and the beauty of the village and particularly how clean everything was.

My mother had fought a war against dirt all her life, as any conscientious housewife had to who lived in one of the industrial towns of the West Riding. To visit Halifax, where she grew up, was, my father always said, like going down into the mouth of hell, the bottom of the valley invisible in a haze of soot and smoke. Leeds was scarcely better, Armley, where we first lived, covered in a fine drizzle of grit from Kirkstall Power Station.

The campaign against this dirt produced its own elaborate weaponry, an armoury of Ewbanks, Hoovers, wringers, possers and mops in daily and wearisome use, items still familiar nowadays because sold in the humbler antique shops, everything in good time collectable. Besides these implements my mother maintained an elaborate hierarchy of cloths, buckets and dusters, to the Byzantine differences of which she alone was privy. Some cloths were dishcloths but not sink cloths; some were for the sink but not for the floor. There were dirty buckets and clean buckets, buckets for indoors, buckets for the flags outside. One mop had universal application, another a unique and terrible purpose and so had to be kept
outside hung on the wall. And however rinsed and clean these utensils were they remained polluted by their awful function.