Human Traces
Page 75
For the theoretical backbone of Thomas’s lecture in chapter 20, I also drew to some extent on The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (London: Bantam, 2001) by David Horrobin; and on Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought by Anne Harrington (New York: Princeton University Press, 1987). The latter was recommended to me by T. J. Crow, Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford University and Director of the SANE Prince of Wales Centre for Research into Schizophrenia and Depression. Professor Crow considers that the concept of the genetic predisposition to schizophrenia as a component of the variation generated in the speciation event was first introduced in his papers, ‘Constraints on concepts of pathogenesis; language and the speciation process as the key to the etiology of schizophrenia’ (Archives of General Psychiatry 1995, 52: 1011–1014) and ‘A continuum of psychosis, one human gene, and not much else – the case for homogeneity’ (Schizophrenia Research 1995, 17:135–145). He kindly invited me to one of his graduate seminars in Oxford and drew my attention to the quotations that I have used from the work of J. Crichton-Browne and E. E. Southard. Professor Crow’s work in this field is extensive; I am indebted to it, as was David Horrobin.
Oscar Baumann led expeditions to German East Africa at the times stated for the German Anti-Slavery Committee. He left a diary of his travels and an elegant, though sketchy, map. Hannes Regensburger is a fictional character, so Baumann’s mention to him of a specific site is invented, though the existence of a rift valley had excited the interest of palaeontologists by this time. The actual footprints described in the novel are based on those discovered by Mary Leakey at Laetoli in 1978. Although they differ in some respects and are not in exactly the same place, I was so taken by Mary Leakey’s book, written with J. M. Harris, Laetoli: A Pliocene Site in Northern Tanzania (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), that I wished to include some of her detail, and I acknowledge this debt with admiration and gratitude. The site itself is hard to find and has been covered to protect it from the elements and the Masai cattle, but there is an accessible replica, cast in plaster, in the nearby Oldupai Gorge museum. (This name is more usually written ‘Olduvai’, though local scholars assured me this was a faulty transliteration by early German visitors.) I would like also to thank Professor Michael Benton of the Department of Earth Sciences at Bristol University, Professor Jeffrey Schwartz at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History.
The operation described in chapter 23 was made famous by Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute in the mid 1930s. A detailed description was given in Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain by Wilder Penfield and Herbert Jasper (Boston: Little Brown, 1954). However, Sir Victor Horsley had undertaken similar procedures in London before the First World War, and the operation was carried out in Vienna and Zürich in the 1920s. I would like to thank Michael Powell of the National Neurological Hospital in Queen Square, London, who talked me through some aspects of brain surgery.
My thanks are due to a number of other doctors and medical practitioners, notably: Lawrence Youlten, Martin Scurr, David Sturgeon, James Anderson, the late David Horrobin, Trevor Turner, Gwen Adshead, Professor Vichy Mahadevan, Professor Uta Frith and Professor Christopher Frith.
The Imperial War Museum, not for the first time, was exceptionally helpful, and I must thank Dr Roderick Suddaby, Dr Simon Robbins, Dr Christopher Dowling and the staff of the documents department. I am grateful to Alice Ford-Smith and other staff of the peerless Wellcome Trust Library in London, and to the National Maritime Museum, whose beautiful photograph of the City of New York took six weeks to reach me by post from Greenwich – exactly the time, oddly enough, as the vessel herself took to cross the Atlantic in 1896.
Other institutions which helped me were the Library of the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill, London; Bethlem Royal Hospital in Kent and its archivists Patricia Allderidge and Colin Gale; Springfield Hospital in London, particularly Hazel McElligot and John Cheetham; and the public relations office of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
Books I would further like to acknowledge are: the works of Andrew Scull, particularly Masters of Bedlam (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), written with Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey; Psychiatry for the Poor by Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (London: Psychiatric Monograph Series, reprinted by Wm Dawson and Sons, 1974); A History of Psychiatry by Edward Shorter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997); Presumed Curable by Colin Gale and Robert Howard (London: Wrightson Biomedical Publishing, 2003); and Hearing Voices: A Common Human Experience by John Watkins (Melbourne: Hill of Content Press, 1998). Mapping the Mind and Consciousness by Rita Carter (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998 and 2002) are sometimes called ‘laymen’s’ guides, but perhaps only because they are so clearly written.
My thanks for help in locating source material to Kate Roach, David Loveday, Liz Sturgeon and Charlie Miller; also to Rethink, a national charity that helps those with severe mental illness, including schizophrenia, and can be found at www.rethink.org or on 0845 456 0455.
For assistance in other areas, I am grateful to Andrew Ferguson and Electra May; William Sieghart; Gillon Aitken, Sue Freestone and Rachel Cugnoni. Claire Tomalin and Margot Norman made many helpful comments on an early draft of this novel.
In Carinthia I was helped by Julian Turton, Olivia Seligman and Linda Hardy; in California, by Jane and Stephen Moore and by Diana Faust; in Tanzania, by Anael and Olle Moita; in Brittany, by Caroline d’Achon. I would like to thank my wife Veronica for many things, but particularly for accompanying me 3, 207 feet up Echo Mountain in a rainstorm and going with me one afternoon into the remotest, trackless parts of Masai country, where the Land Rover broke down in the dark.
My mother, Pamela Faulks, did not live to read this book, but convinced me many years ago that it was legitimate to have an interest in the way the mind works.
The individual to whom this novel owes most is Janey Antoniou, for whose assistance this acknowledgment can be only a token of what I owe her.
The Mount Lowe railway existed as described in chapter 15, and the remains of Echo Mountain House and the machinery at the top of the Incline can still be seen today if you walk up from Pasadena. The railway carried millions of visitors into the hills, but after a succession of characteristically Californian disasters, including fire, flood and bankruptcy, the entire system closed for good in 1937.
They never did reach the top of Mount Lowe.
S. F. London, April 20, 2005
It must have been forty-eight hours after I’d written my letter of polite refusal to Pereira that I saw the corner of the envelope, still unposted, beneath some junk mail on the hall table. I pulled it out, dropped it in the wastepaper basket, sat down at my desk and began again. ‘Dear Dr Pereira, Thank you for your letter. I should be delighted . . .’
A week later, I heard back from him; and ten days after that I was on the plane.
Flights to Toulon were rare and expensive; I dog-legged via Marseille and a boxy hire car to the tip of the peninsula – what Pereira called the presqu’île, or ‘almost-island’ – to a small area where pleasure boats and water taxis berthed. Here I stood outside a scruffy place with a red awning, the Café des Pins, waiting to be collected.
What reckoning with my past had made me change my mind? I conceded now that looking back over my youth in such detail was probably a way of preparing my defences. Recent research showed that your brain came to a decision more quickly than your mind could do so and fired the relevant systems before your plodding ‘judgement’ took the credit. Overlooking the implications for free will, or the illusion of it, I was happy to accept that that had been the case with me.
I was going to meet a man who could open a door on to my past: it made me vulnerable to think a stranger might know more about myself than I did; I needed to make sure my own version of my life was in good order. At the same time, the w
retched Annalisa business (such a mess of lust and fear and blocked feeling) had made me admit there were aspects of my character – or behaviour, at least – that not only were self-defeating but also inflicted pain on others. Even in my early sixties, I felt young and vigorous enough to change – to confront whatever I had yet to face; and perhaps a medical man of my father’s generation whose special interest was in memory could be the very one to help.
I was into my second cigarette when an old woman in black stopped and looked me up and down.
‘Vous êtes Dr Hendricks?’ Her accent was strongly of the Midi.
‘Oui.’
‘Venez.’ She gestured me to follow. Despite her bowed legs she moved at speed. We went down a stone jetty, past the public ferry that had tied up for the night, over a gangway and on to a boat with a white canopy. It was big enough for a dozen people, though there were only three of us on it. The third was a man in the wheelhouse, who opened the throttle and began to edge the boat out into the waters of the bay.
My French was good enough to ask how far we were going and how long it would take, but I couldn’t make out the old woman’s answers over the noise of the engine, and it seemed to me she preferred it that way. Eventually, I gave up trying to talk and instead looked back over the churning white wake to the port. Twenty minutes later, the mainland was no longer visible; we had left behind the croissant shape of Porquerolles island as we headed away from the setting sun.
At some point, despite the heave of the sea, I must have nodded off. I was woken by the thump of the side of the boat against a rock. It was dark.
There was an urgent exchange between the pilot and the old woman. We had arrived at a rocky inlet, or calanque as the man called it. He shone a torch on an iron hoop hammered into the reef; through this he secured the painter. The sea was calm enough to allow him to jump out and extend his hand, first to the woman, then to me.
It was an awkward scramble by torchlight before we reached a path. Here the man left us and returned to his boat; I followed the old woman in the dark on an uphill wooded path. I caught the smell of pines and could feel their needles under my feet. Eventually we came to some steps, which after a considerable time – there were perhaps a hundred of them – led to a flat area on what must have been the cliff top. A large rectangular house was now visible, lit only by the moon; I could make out numerous tropical shrubs and trees along its shuttered verandah.
We went in through a side door, into a dark passageway. The old woman told me to wait, while she vanished into the gloom, returning shortly afterwards with a gas lamp. With this, she led the way up a bare staircase and into a long corridor. At the end, we turned at right angles, towards the back of the house, and went up a half-flight of stairs to a door.
‘Isn’t Dr Pereira here?’ I asked in my rough but serviceable French.
‘No. He was called away to the mainland. He’ll be back tomorrow. There’s a bathroom down there. Breakfast will be at eight o’clock.’
I lit a candle and said goodnight as I looked round my room. The bedstead was iron; the mattress was thin, but yielded when I sat down on it. There were clean sheets and a single blanket; the night was warm. Above the bed was a crucifix, a carved figure in soft wood with convincing thorns and drops of gore; on the opposite wall was a painting of a pious-looking man in a robe with a faraway look.
The shutters gave way to a hefty push and opened on to the chatter of cicadas. The moon was obscured by loose clouds, but I could make out the shapes of umbrella pines; I thought that over the din of the insects I could hear the distant gasp and slap of sea in the calanque. The shouting of the women in my London flat seemed remote.
Pereira’s island appeared on none of the maps I had flicked through at the airport – being too small, probably, for their tourist scale; yet the size of this house alone argued the presence of running water, labour, human habitation. As if to confirm my guess, a distant church bell struck the hour.
I tried to read by candlelight, but even with two flames the print was hard to make out. I was lucky to suffer few of the indignities of middle age – beer belly, stiff knee or hair loss – but a bright light had become indispensable for reading.
It didn’t matter. When you’ve slept in as many spare rooms and lodgings as I have, there is a comfort in strangeness; the new is always familiar.
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Copyright © Sebastian Faulks 2005
Extract from Where My Heart Used to Beat © Sebastian Faulks 2015
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First published by Hutchinson in 2005
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