So that was God, but what about heaven? Heaven was keeping me awake at night; I was desperate to figure out exactly where it was. Usually I would start with the assumption that it was at the top of the sky, maybe on the other side of the sky’s ceiling. The ceiling would then also be heaven’s floor, with God and his staff and all the good dead people walking about on it. But surely heaven had a sky, a ceiling? What was on the other side of that? How could something – the sky, for example – both come to an end and not come to an end? The more I thought about it, the more it made me feel horrible inside, as if somebody were driving me over the same hump-backed bridge again and again and again.
Back at school, I had more immediate concerns. My mother went to speak to Mrs Chandler about my bad dreams. Every night I was doing wrong things by accident and getting myself told off. Here’s one typical example: we were all standing in a line outside the Portakabin classroom. I realized that I was facing the wrong way, but before I could set myself right, Mrs Chandler shouted ‘Turn round!’ and everybody did including me, so I was still facing the wrong way. I would wake up with the hump-backed bridge feeling, but this time the sharp tug in my stomach meant I was going to be punished. It was the robot-judge machine all over again, but in its human, teacherly form. I told my mother all about the dreams. I was worried that I wasn’t doing very well at school, I described how Mrs Chandler was always telling this other girl that her work was very good; then there was another girl who had been given two gold stars just that week, when I’d only got one silver one for a whole story I wrote that was longer than hers. Obviously I was doing everything the wrong way.
My mother told me years later that she and Mrs Chandler had had quite a debate about the best use of stars as rewards. Mrs Chandler explained that gold stars were given out when a child had made an effort and done her best, not because her work was good in itself. My mother argued that a six-year-old could hardly be expected to understand this and that all I saw were other children getting stars. I think they agreed to disagree on the general issue, but Mrs Chandler did speak to me afterwards and reassure me about my performance in the classroom. ‘You’re one of the top girls,’ she said.
I wasn’t a popular one. On more than one occasion I overheard one of my classmates telling another that they didn’t like/hated/couldn’t stand Joanne Limburg. Often they would go on to talk about some annoying habit of mine. For a little while I had a compulsion to take my right hand and drag it slowly down my face. Then my hair grew long-ish for the first time, and I discovered that chewing it helped me think. ‘Don’t chew your hair, Joanne,’ said Mrs Chandler. ‘It’ll go all rats’ tails.’ But I kept on, and chewed the cuffs of my school jumper for good measure. Sometimes I wiped my nose on the same cuffs. There was an absent-minded quality to all these activities that’s never entirely left me: if I’m deep enough in thought I’ll just do what I feel like doing and only become aware of it, and any attendant shame, when I become aware of laughter – or disgust. One day I was sent to the welfare officer with a bleeding scab on my face. ‘You were picking, weren’t you?’ she said, looking at me as if she could see just what kind of revolting child I was. Maybe I had been picking, but I couldn’t remember a thing about it.
When I was quite sure that I was going to write this book, I went to my GP and asked to see my medical notes. I knew that they would come in useful for checking certain details like dates and diagnoses, but I wasn’t looking forward to reading what I had always imagined to be page after page of clinically accurate character assassination. In the event, however, they were nothing of the kind. ‘You see?’ my doctor said. ‘You’re NOT – THAT – BAD.’
One of the older items in the file is a letter from a speech therapist, addressed to a consultant paediatrician; copies had been sent to my GP and my junior school headmaster. It proved me wrong on one count right away, when I looked at the first paragraph and saw that that I’d first been referred to her in early 1978, when I was still only seven and in my last year of infant school. All this time I’d been assuming that I didn’t develop the stammer until junior school, a place I’ve always found easy to demonize. The letter was written a year after that first referral, part way through what seems to have been a rather spasmodic course of treatment, and describes me on presentation as ‘an extremely bright particularly verbally, insightful and shy girl’ who ‘severely lacked eye contact, and on a number of occasions turned her head to one side’. None of that surprised me, but I was rather taken aback to read that at my initial assessment, I was ‘completely fluent’, only demonstrating ‘hesitancy, initial sound and syllable repetitions, and very occasionally mild initial sound blocks’ halfway through the second session.
What emerges most clearly from the letter is that, in the therapist’s opinion, it was not my speech as such that was the problem, but rather my anxiety about my speech.
For a girl of Joanne’s age she is extremely aware in a precise way of which people and situations cause her stammer to develop from a very mild dysfluency to what she considers [my italics] as a moderately severe dysfluency . . .
The dysfluency is very fluctuating. Neither her class teacher, nor her headmaster, with whom I have spoken at some length have ever detected even the mildest stammer.
Joanne’s feelings towards her stammer include embarrassment and anger. Joanne is over-conscious of her speech, in general, and very aware when she makes a ‘slip of the tongue’. She responds by stumbling and the form the stammer takes will then depend on the person(s) or situation.
Mrs Limburg is concerned about Joanne’s great anxiety about her speech, and is very wary that too much self-pressure regarding academic success (Joanne is a tremendously high achiever) . . . may exacerbate her daughter’s stammer.
She discharged me six months later, writing to the consultant of my increased ‘confidence’ in dealing with my stammer. When I checked the date of this second letter, I saw that it was written during the long summer holiday. That makes sense.
When we moved up from the infants’ to the junior school, the classes were shuffled. I found myself with a new group: there was Donna, my bully-to-be. Our teacher, Mrs Bowson, claimed a special interest in those of us she considered particularly bright. ‘I’m interested in the professors and prime ministers,’ she declared, ‘not the road-sweepers and the shop girls.’ I was one of the only two girls destined, in her opinion, to avoid the checkout at Tesco’s, and we were moved, with a slightly larger handful of boys, to a separate, special table in the middle of the classroom. We were the ‘Alpha Group’, so named because, while the others did their maths out of the green Beta textbook, we had privileged access to the more difficult problems in the red Alpha Maths book. It was streaming by another name, and the headmaster didn’t approve. Towards the end of the year some of the children in the class claimed that they’d heard shouting in his office, and then seen Mrs Bowson come out crying. They might well have been telling the truth.
They may remember it differently, but I think the Alpha males had an easier time with their peers than we did. They could still help to make up the numbers in football and cricket teams, and one or two of them were even very good at games, which helped a lot. To be accepted by other boys, a boy has to do as the others do; to be accepted by other girls, a girl had better be as the others are, and my all-too-obvious cleverness was something that set me apart. I felt disfigured by it.
The other Alpha girl was Deborah. She had an autumn birthday, so her cleverness had got her put up a year. Being cleverer and younger would have been enough to have marked her, but these were her least obvious differences. Deborah had spina bifida and hydrocephalus. This was a time when children with far less to contend with were still being shunted off wholesale into ‘special’ schools, and her mother had fought a hard battle to keep her in mainstream education. At that point in her life she was in the middle of a long series of operations, and her scalp was shaved. She had to stay out of the sun, so at lunch she would go straight into t
he hall with one of the dinner ladies and then spend the rest of the break in the corridor outside the headmaster’s office, playing chess with whichever nice charitable girl had agreed to accompany her. I joined her, but not out of charity: we had interests in common, we were fellow outcasts, and it was the only legitimate way of avoiding my lunch queue problem. When she was in Toronto, having more operations, I was eating behind the prefabs.
Deborah’s friendship made school a little more bearable, but whether she was there or not, I would begin most of my weekday mornings by announcing to my mother that I had a headache or a tummy ache or a sore throat and couldn’t possibly go. Then one day I sat down on the edge of my parents’ bed and sobbed that I didn’t want to go ever again. She told me that she was going to take me to see a nice man who could talk to me about it.
The nice, talking man was an educational psychologist recommended by Deborah’s mother. I remember being taken to a set of rooms in a town house in some expensive, more central part of London, where I did puzzles and played games. It was fun. The first puzzles came in a booklet and featured things called ‘matrices’ which each had a piece missing. I had to choose the missing pieces. The puzzles got harder as I turned the pages but I worked quickly, and had managed to finish the last one before the man came back and took the booklet away again. When he had marked it he brought it back to me and pointed out my mistakes. ‘You could have got those right,’ he said. ‘Try not to go through things so quickly – it makes you careless.’ I nodded; it wasn’t the first time a teacher had said that to me.
After I’d finished the tests I sat by myself outside the man’s office while he talked to my parents. The diagnosis was giftedness and the best cure was removal from the state system to some more ‘academic’ establishment. My mother started phoning around. There were no places available anywhere for my school year, and I wouldn’t be able to sit the exams for secondary school for another two. In the meantime, the best she could do was to take the report to the headmaster, Mr Vickery, and see if he could find some extra support for me from somewhere.
Mr Vickery was not sympathetic, either to my mother or to me. He waved the report away and told her that as far as he was concerned, I was ‘an average intelligence child with a personality problem’. He complained to Mrs Bowson, who called me up to her desk and berated me about my mother’s coming up ‘moaning to Mr Vickery’. Then I was called into his office to account for myself. I stood in front of his desk trying not to meet his eye while he spoke to me sternly: I should not pretend to have headaches and stomach aches to try to get out of school; I went through my work ‘like a robot’ and didn’t pay enough attention to it; I was to go and write an extra essay to prove to him and to Mrs Bowson that I was so special and clever. Most of all I was to stop making a fuss about things, put a smile on my face, and join in.
Some ten years or so later Mum told me that Mr Vickery had died. He had suffered a heart attack and fallen down the stairs at his house, where he lived alone. I started to say something conventional like ‘oh, how terrible’, but found I couldn’t stop the huge grin that was spreading itself across my face. It was quite a shock: I don’t allow myself to hate people, as a rule.
My father joked that I was ‘an intellectual’; he found my vagueness endearing. ‘Joanne’ll be late for the end of the world,’ he’d say, and I would imagine an apocalyptic scene, all red skies and toppling columns. A huge gate stood at the edge of this picture. It was wide open and everybody in the world except me was escaping through it. I was sitting on a broken pedestal with my nose in a book. The gate was about to close and I would be left alone in the burning, toppling, broken world, all alone.
I loved books, and by the time I left primary school I knew that I wanted to write them myself. In my second year I wrote a poem which impressed my teacher. ‘You’re lucky,’ she told me. ‘You’re talented.’ Talented. I breathed the word in; it filled me up like helium in a balloon and lifted me clear off the floor. I was talented, and maybe one day I was going to write something as good as The Once and Future King. In the meantime, I could live in it. I was Sir Gareth: they thought I was only a smelly kitchen boy but really I could beat them all.
Imagination can comfort, or it can terrorize. My husband recently told me that between the ages of nine and ten he slept with a Lego crucifix under his pillow to protect himself from vampires. He has since grown up into an utterly and infuriatingly rational adult. I sometimes wish I could say the same for myself, but I can’t. I was and remain suggestible in the extreme: if I picture someone vomiting I feel sick; if I think about multiple sclerosis the little and ring fingers of my left hand begin to go numb. If I’d been born a hundred years earlier I could have had a promising career as a hysteric.
Over the years, all manner of unpleasant suggestions have wormed their way into my mind and fed there. Some of the most greedy wriggled in during junior school. Many of these involved the soul, that thing which at the time I pictured as a greyish vapour, a twist of smoke behind the breastbone. It’s still the image I see when I hear the word ‘soul’. I wouldn’t claim to believe in it any more, but I’ve never lost that sense of how precious it is, how easily it can be soiled, lost or destroyed. In my third year at junior school, I sat behind a girl whose big brother had an interest in the paranormal. She told me that he’d told her that if you looked into the mirror, you could see your soul. It was the sort of idea which is perfectly nonsensical during daylight hours, and becomes absolutely true at nightfall. Mirrors at night became dangerous. It would have been frightening enough to have looked in the mirror and seen nothing but the grey smoke, but the image I feared was far worse: a grotesque figure, skeletally thin, with greyish or brownish lizard’s skin. It would have hands like talons, horrible teeth and a hunched back, and there would be a dreadful, knowing, ingratiating smile on its face. This was the worst of all possible true Joannes: a creeping thing, of the devil’s party, incapable of any good by virtue of being herself. Another girl told me – maybe it was even in the same conversation – that sometimes when girls looked in mirrors, they could see the devil standing behind them. That sounded so horrible that it had to be true. One night I was going to see myself, a crinkly-skinned vessel of evil, standing with my creditor behind me, ready to foreclose on a deal I never realized I’d made. I still can’t look in a mirror after dark.
Another threat to my soul came from sleep: where was I when I was asleep, and how could I be sure that I’d always make it back? The girl with the occult brother told me that when you fell asleep your astral body left your physical body and went wandering on the astral plane. At that time, my father was collecting a series of part-works called The Unexplained. It was subtitled ‘Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time’, and it contained a heady mix of physics, psychology and poppycock. I can remember being absolutely gripped by stories about black holes, ESP, spontaneous combustion, lucid dreaming, and that man who walked round a herd of horses and was never seen again, but it was the article about out-of-body experiences that had the most powerful effect on me. One of its illustrations showed a prone, translucent body floating above another body, identical to the first except that it was opaque, and linked to its twin by a greyish-blue cord. The text hurtled breathlessly through history, in and out of different cultural traditions, to show just how widespread and consistent accounts of these experiences were. It quoted Ernest Hemingway describing a moment on the battlefield when he had felt ‘my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner’. Hosts of other less illustrious subjects had reported such experiences, many in situations of obvious trauma such as the scene of a car accident or during major surgery. On the other hand, there were ‘numerous cases of people who were asleep or going about everyday tasks, such as shopping or gardening, when the experience occurred’. Clearly it was something that could happen all too easily if you weren’t careful.
I relayed this back to my paranormal source at school. N
one of it was news to her. In fact, she had another detail to add: if the cord snapped, she said, then that was it; your physical self and your soul – for that’s what I understood the astral body to be – would be severed from each other for ever, the soul set adrift. This was a terrible risk, and I knew that I could not possibly allow myself to take it. It was far too dangerous to go to sleep, so I did my best to prevent it: as soon I began to feel the familiar falling-away sensation, I would wake myself up again, just in case what I was feeling was my astral body peeling away from my physical body, never to return.
It’s just occurred to me how ironic it is that I should once have been so horrified by the idea of my consciousness divorcing itself from my physical self and striking out on its own. Since that time – since the onset of puberty, really – I’ve become more accustomed to thinking of my body as something that lets me down. Its needs and its pains, its cravings, its illnesses, its blemishes, the bits that are just too obviously female, the bits that don’t look female enough, the bits that are starting to age . . . Sometimes I wish I could apply for a better one, and move on. Maybe sit an exam. I’m good at exams: when I was ten they got me my pick of the local girls’ schools. That was the first of my getaways.
4. Ian M. Goodyer (ed.), The Depressed Child and Adolescent (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, 2001)
Body
21. I return home to check doors, windows, drawers, etc., to make sure they are properly shut.
The Padua Inventory
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‘O wombe! O bely! O stinking cod,
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 3