Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  In the morning, by contrast, I had breakfast in the little parlour, in the oldest part of the college. This is an enchanting room, half-panelled and looking out over the lawns and trees, and with a small combination room next door where senior members of the college can relax and read. It was one of those rooms which promote an atmosphere of tranquil meditative happiness and I wished I could spend the day there and write.

  Afterwards two other guests, a speaker at the conference and her husband, and I were shown the Perne Library and able to examine some of the college treasures. These include a very early printed book which was obviously designed to deceive the buyer since the printer’s name had been carefully erased. It was beautifully decorated and the print remarkably clear, a fake but still a work of art. The young College Chaplain, Graham Ward, then took me to see the Chapel. The east window, designed by Rubens, is remarkable. Beneath a turbulent sky, a boiling of vivid blue, the figures round the three crosses are crowded together, yet each individual, the two robbers distorted in agony, the figure of Christ, passive and luminous, in the centre of the picture. The window is violent and restless, forcing the viewer to face the reality of what is happening.

  SUNDAY, 29TH MARCH

  I am writing this just before 11 o’clock at night after what has been an enjoyably fulfilling weekend. It began on Friday with a pub lunch with Bud McLintock. Bud’s firm is responsible for the publicity in connection with the Whitbread Awards, one of the most interesting and successful of the literary prizes. She has hopes that the BBC might do a programme about it and we discussed the possibilities. I don’t think television has ever managed to cope successfully with literary prizes. Viewers on the whole probably aren’t interested in shots of dinner-jacketed guests eating and drinking en masse, or in the speeches. But it should be possible to discuss the shortlist in a way that is both interesting and informative. I think viewers and listeners particularly like to hear from the authors themselves—how they get their ideas, how the book began, what are their methods of writing. It will be good if the Whitbread can be given more publicity on the screen.

  Jane arrived in the early evening to spend the weekend. She needed to order some blinds for her Oxford house, so we went first to John Lewis and then walked to the Wallace Collection. I hadn’t been to the Wallace for over a year, but entered it as I always do with a sense of being received into a private house as a welcome visitor. It is interesting how one’s response to some paintings changes while the initial reaction to others is only deepened with every viewing. Titian’s air-sea rescue of Andromeda, which once I thought rather fine, now seems to me half-finished and almost slovenly, while I can never view the Guardis without pleasure, and I particularly love the Bonington oils and watercolours. I received more pleasure—and Jane more amusement—from the armour than I expected, particularly the jousting armour. I tried to imagine the sensation of being screwed into this ornate and cunningly hinged accoutrement designed, judging by the bizarre pointed helmets, to terrify as much as to protect. I can see that, once dislodged from the saddle, the jouster would lie helpless, a gigantic upended beetle.

  We read the notice describing the additions planned as a result of the successful application to the Lottery. There is to be a learning centre and also a coffee house for visitors under a glass canopy in the courtyard. Jane and I disagreed about this. Perhaps because of my age, I am always thankful for a place where I can sit and drink coffee after visiting a museum. Jane dislikes the idea of museums—and in particular galleries—becoming places where people will congregate to meet friends, eat, drink and chat. A purist, she prefers to think that visitors are drawn by one need only: to look at the pictures in comfort and relative solitude. I don’t see why they shouldn’t, afterwards, be refreshed with a good cup of coffee.

  This morning we went to 11 o’clock Mass at All Saints—or it would be more apt to say that that was our intention. Because we hadn’t listened to the radio or read the papers in detail, I had completely overlooked putting forward the clock by one hour. We got to the church, as we thought, early and wandered around to kill time, then presented ourselves at the firmly closed door at quarter to twelve, thinking it was quarter to eleven. Opening the door, I saw that the church was very full. My instinct was to leave, but Jane, more robust, was determined that, having decided to go to church, to church she would go, and we were shown to a seat in a side aisle. Afterwards I was very glad that we did go in. I was in time to take Communion, and Jane, who is not a believer, greatly enjoyed, as did I, the singing of Byrd’s four-part setting of the Mass.

  Afterwards we walked to Regent’s Park and made our way eventually to the restaurant, where we had a light lunch sitting outside. Although the sun was fitful, the air was warm and moist. Just to breathe, particularly in this green and flower-scented place, was a sensual pleasure.

  Each of London’s three main public parks has its distinctive ambience. St. James’s Park is the one I know best, perhaps because I so often walked across it during the years when I worked at the Home Office. Stretching in green and watery beauty between the Palace and Whitehall, St. James’s has always held for me an air of regal propriety and of high policy tinged with mystery. There have been so many espionage TV series in which bowler-hatted men of power pace magisterially together beside the lake exchanging their dangerous confidences. The very birds seem to know themselves privileged.

  Regent’s Park is more formally splendid with wide paths leading to Queen Mary’s Rose Garden or the zoo; a less intimate park and one for people intent on going somewhere, pausing less often than in other parks to sniff, touch and wonder.

  Hyde Park is redolent of high Victoriana (perhaps because of Kensington Palace), peopled with the small ghosts of supervised children sailing their boats on the round pond while beribboned nurses wheel deep-bottomed bassinets between the flowerbeds of Kensington Gardens. The particular pleasure of Hyde Park lies in the vast acres of grass. Here I can walk for miles in untrammelled solitude, the perfect place to be when I am plotting a new novel.

  After we reached home, Jane went out again into Holland Park, reluctant to miss the rest of the daylight, while I sat with the Sunday papers. Jane left to catch the bus to Oxford shortly before ten, so now I am sitting alone in that state of indolent tiredness in which the contemplation of sleep becomes more agreeable than making the effort actually to go to bed.

  Tomorrow I leave London by the 10 a.m. train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, where I am to give a lecture to the Scottish Medico-Legal Society.

  April

  WEDNESDAY, 1ST APRIL 1998

  Today is the anniversary of my husband’s birthday and inevitably it is a day for memory to take hold. It was an unpropitious day to be born, provoking in childhood the inevitable jokes and teasing. Connor would have been seventy-eight today and I am trying to picture him, like me stiffer in his walk, his strong fair hair now a thatch of grey. I know that he was glad to die and I never mourned him in the sense of wishing that it had not happened. I still miss him daily, which means that no day goes by in which he doesn’t enter into my mind: a sight which he would have relished, a joke which he would have enjoyed, something seen or read which could be shared with him, the reiteration of familiar gossip, opinions, prejudices, which are part of a marriage. And then there is the success and prosperity in which he never shared and which could have made such a difference to his comfort, and the grandchildren he longed to see but never did.

  For much of his last years he was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, chiefly Goodmayes in Essex. It was, indeed still is, one of those impressive and forbidding Victorian edifices which, during my childhood, were called asylums. The word is beautiful, as is its meaning, but it was spoken then always with that mixture of fear and shame associated with the word “workhouse.” These large communities for the care of the mentally ill have, of course, been largely superseded by community care, which could be described more accurately as the absence of care in a community still largely resentful o
r frightened of mental illness. Connor was never unhappy in Goodmayes but then, as he said, education at a minor public school and subsequent army service prepared one for anything. For him and for very many, particularly those who could not possibly have survived outside, it was indeed an asylum.

  I was living at the time with his parents in Ilford, where my father-in-law was still working as a general practitioner. Every Sunday I would take the bus to the end of Goodmayes Lane and join the straggling stream of dispirited-looking men, women and children trudging up the driveway to the hospital. It was too reminiscent of similar journeys to a similar hospital taken in childhood with my father. All the visitors would be carrying baskets or bags containing the weekly offering of food. I usually carried fruit and a cake baked by my mother-in-law, in addition to cigarettes, any book I thought Connor might enjoy and pocket money to see him through the week. We would meet in one of the large day-rooms smelling as always of inadequately washed bodies and furniture polish. If the weather was fine we would walk in the grounds. The wards were large and barrack-like with small padded side-wards in which patients had occasionally to be incarcerated. Many of the modern drugs had not been developed and patients saw psychiatrists only infrequently. For many of them, the burnt-out schizophrenics, there was in fact little that could be done medically, but here at least they did find an asylum. Sometimes the care might have been a little rough and ready, but on my frequent visits I saw no unkindness—and much compassionate and sensitive caring.

  I got to recognize the other visitors, since we went week after week. One, a very large woman, with a son built like a rugby player and ferocious in mien, took him a cooked meal for each day of the week in a series of heaped metal containers. She confided to me when we walked together up the drive: “George has been reclassified. He’s a voluntary patient now. Mind you, we’re not telling him!”

  The hospital was a place where eccentricities and bizarre behaviour were tolerated as they rarely are with community care. I went once with Connor to a church service where the chaplain was in no way put out by the fact that a third of the congregation took the high kneeling hassocks and placed them on the pews so that the congregation looked as if it contained a proportion of formidable giants.

  Connor, on admission, had decided to call himself Ted, and I got used to hearing him addressed by nurses and patients by that name. For some time he worked in the library but also captained the soccer team. I don’t know whether any games were played away, but those on the home ground had their moments of eccentricity. Connor was not pleased when, during one game, the goalkeeper began hearing his voices and stood immobile, eyes raised to heaven, while the ball whizzed past him into goal.

  Only those who have lived with the mental illness of someone they love can understand what this entails. One suffers with the patient and for oneself. Another human being who was once a beloved companion can become not only a stranger, but occasionally a malevolent stranger. It is easy sometimes to understand why mental illness was once seen as possession by an evil spirit. But at least I was spared the theory which some psychiatrists subsequently developed: that it was the family members who were ill, the patient who was sane, and that the family, particularly the parents, were responsible for the sickness. This theory is so cruel and wicked—I use the words with care—that it should surely never be put forward unless there is proof of its truth and something can be done about it. The additional burden this placed on parents, already trying to cope with little support with an intolerable burden, was frankly appalling. I suppose it principally arose from the psychiatrists’ need to relate emotionally to the patient. But too often it seemed a collusion; parents, in addition to being regarded as the cause of the illness, were denied information about its progress. I know of one case where a schizophrenic son subsequently drowned himself but the hospital at which he was a patient didn’t know that he was no longer in his room, since to enter it would have been a violation of his privacy.

  The policy of treatment in the community, which began when I was working at the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board and was enthusiastically implemented, has immeasurably increased the burden on families, many of whom live under a pressing cloud of daily anxiety which must at times seem insupportable. When will we learn not to legislate for, or introduce, so-called reforms unless and until we have the will and the means to finance them? Depressing as the old psychiatric hospitals were, at least they provided respite for the family, and control, care and support for the patient. If there is to be community care, there should also be small local in-patient and out-patient facilities to which patients can return in moments of crisis or when they have neglected to take their medication, and to which carers in the community can look for support and help. It might be necessary to have short-term compulsory orders to ensure that patients who won’t return to in-patient care voluntarily can be admitted until they are stabilized. But one would hope that these small units—I hate the word, but “hospital” hardly seems appropriate—can be attractive and welcoming and seen by the patients as true asylums. I suspect that there are many thousands of parents, wives, husbands, children coping with the mentally ill, in circumstances which no one should be asked to endure. It is surprising they are not more vocal, but it is difficult to criticize the system when the system is all you have, and to antagonize it might take away even the inadequate support which you at present receive.

  I remember watching with my younger daughter a programme on the television in which a team of psychiatrists and social workers were in session with the family of a schizophrenic boy, indulging in some kind of family therapy. I felt outraged at the intrusion. What exactly, anyway, is a normal family? There can be few in which the relationships are without tension or even occasional acrimony, or in which some unhappiness is not endured. By what right have these outsiders, these experts, come in to meddle in other people’s lives when, in reality, they have so little to offer? At least I never had to endure that kind of intrusion. It is an injustice about which, perhaps not surprisingly, I can become vehement.

  THURSDAY, 2ND APRIL

  I am writing this on the train from Edinburgh to King’s Cross, following my address to the Scottish Medico-Legal Society. The carriage is almost empty and I’m enjoying what I like best, a quiet uninterrupted journey. At York a man got in and immediately began using his mobile telephone. I had a horrible fear that this was the end of peace, but he made only the single call. One would like to see carriages set aside for people who want to conduct their business in loud voices throughout a journey, but I am always reluctant to add to prohibitions. Perhaps it’s better to have notices asking people to use mobile phones only when standing in the corridor or between compartments. That might get the message over that this is not an acceptable practice.

  The first part of this journey is the most exciting; rugged coastline before and after Berwick, the wild sea rolling in over jagged rocks, and the first gorse, bright yellow on the headlands. Then the Tweed, flowing under the last bridge to merge with the sea at Berwick. We are now in calmer country and the weather has changed from dull to rainy; raindrops, like silver tadpoles, weaving and spurting down the panes. The north seems to be painted boldly in dark oils, the south in watercolours. But now the blurred countryside is seen as a pointilliste painting, the fields as yet only smudged with the acid yellow of the rape.

  It has been an enjoyable visit. Edinburgh is a splendid city, but one in which a southerner will always feel a stranger, even if—as on this occasion—a welcome stranger. It offers that greatest of city delights, the unexpected glimpse down narrow roadways or cobbled passages of glittering water and far hills.

  Grandson James met me off the train yesterday and drove me south to walk on a wide, firm and deserted beach before dropping me at my hotel. This was The Witchery, snuggling down under the castle. It is primarily a restaurant with only two rooms for visitors, one a suite called the Inner Sanctum. This was furnished almost exactly as it would have been for
a Victorian visitor and his wife. It looked like a theatre set that was in danger of overpowering the action. Here, artfully arranged, was high Victorian clutter, a large bronze head of the Queen presiding over more artefacts than one would find in a row of antique shops. The nineteenth-century travelling couple would be ushered into a room in which they would feel immediately at home, indeed their luggage is already here: leather suitcases, tartan rugs, an officer’s red jacket arranged on a stand. The large sitting-room has tartan rugs as well as a tartan carpet. Both rooms are crowded with family pictures in silver frames, sentimental coloured prints, an open photograph album on a stand, large floral arrangements, innumerable knick-knacks crowding every surface. The bedroom is dominated by a high, wide four-poster bed with a scarlet canopy and eight huge tapestry or embroidered cushions. All this brilliantly arranged reconstruction of another age was combined with cleverly concealed modern conveniences: television, fax, telephones, although the eight different taps in the bathroom could be more properly described as a challenge rather than a convenience. I suspect that I shall one day use this room, or one very like it, in a novel. The description of a room can be as revealing of character as dialogue or action.