by Pip Granger
‘May I ask what “Special Trial Number 13” means?’ I asked, keeping my teeth gritted against the seething fury that was just aching to be unleashed. I was at my three-month review with the great man himself. ‘Does it mean that you have been dosing me with drugs that are, in fact, still at an experimental stage?’
He was guarded. ‘You could say that, but none of the compounds in question is experimental in itself. Number 13 is a cocktail of Librium and Valium. The experimental part comes in the dosages of each drug.’
‘But the fact remains, there is an experimental element. It is a kind of trial?’
‘Well, I suppose you could put it like that.’
‘So, I’m right in thinking that you experimented on me, like some kind of two-legged lab rat, without either my knowledge or my permission. Is that the size of it, Dr Kingdom?’ My teeth were virtually rattling in their sockets, I had such a head of steam up. I could tell by his eyes that he didn’t like where my questions were leading.
‘Well I suppose you could view it that way …’
‘What other way is there to view it?’ I knew my voice was trembling, so I forged on before I could let myself down with hysterical yelling. I was literally shaking with pent-up fury. My sense of self, my basic humanity had been denied, insulted and abused, and I wanted to choke the bugger.
‘Why didn’t you consult me? Why didn’t you ask my permission?’
He actually snorted, let out almost an incredulous chortle. ‘Because you were in no condition to ask, that’s why,’ he said, as if any moron could work that one out.
I shot out of my chair. ‘Then you should have waited until I was,’ I spat. ‘You take your pills, mister, because I won’t. I’m a person, not some lab animal for you to play about with and I won’t have it, do you hear me, I will not have it!’
I shook the lid off the vat of Doctor Kingdom’s Special Trial Number 13 and hurled the tub at him. For some seconds, the world slowed, pills hung in the air then scattered and landed everywhere – in his hair, over his jacket, in his lap, all over his desk and the nice bit of carpet that showed his exalted rank; the lesser shrinks got little bitty rugs to brighten their lino if they were lucky.
Dr Kingdom and I surveyed the scene with wildly differing feelings. Judging by his bewildered eyes and slack jaw, Dr Kingdom was somewhat taken aback, shocked even. He was used to servile deference at work, not flying pharmaceuticals. I surveyed the wreckage with a deep satisfaction. My self-esteem had always been rocky at best, and being carted off to the bin and used as a laboratory animal had done nothing to improve it. But making a stand and telling Authority, in the shape of the good doctor, where it could shove its casual indifference to my humanity did wonders for it. Triumphantly, I smiled down at the shaken man, picked up my handbag and stalked to the door, head held high.
‘Goodbye doctor,’ I said, and walked out to face my future.
Epilogue
After my grandfather died, Grandma moved to the Outer Hebrides to be near Mother, who, after years of restlessly moving, finally settled on Scotland’s remote Western Isles. As I was teaching, I was able to visit regularly in the school holidays.
I loved the Hebrides and the Hebrideans. I loved the seabirds, otters and seals that were a part of daily life. I marvelled at the lazy flight of a golden eagle riding the thermals over the hills and ignoring the darting attacks of the ‘hoodies’, or hooded crows, that objected so noisily and aggressively to an eagle in ‘their’ airspace.
The contrast between those wild, rocky islands in the Atlantic and the crowded streets of Soho in England’s capital could not have been greater, but both took up significant parts of my heart and have stayed there. The inhabitants of both places are tough in their different ways. The Hebrideans quietly go about their business of eking a living out of thin, rocky soil and unpredictable seas, while coping with everything that the Atlantic can throw at them – storms, howling gales, towering seas and crashing waves. The Soho-ites, with their live and let live attitude to all comers, bustle about selling cakes, running up suits and theatrical costumes and knocking up plaster saints or mouth-watering pasta, while side-stepping gambling joints, porn shops, gangsters and booze hounds with a cheery smile of acceptance. In the Hebrides, the harsh, croaky cry of the corncrake, invisible in the hummocky grass of the machair, sometimes fills the twilight air: in Windmill Street, the croaking comes from the fag-laden throats of clip-joint hustlers, inviting the unwary in ‘to see the show’.
In stark contrast with the quiet peace of Mother’s Hebridean home, life in Father’s Surrey house went further downhill, as did my relations with Father. His behaviour became more and more bizarre as his brain injury progressed. On one occasion I made the mistake of intervening in yet another monumental domestic, when it looked as if Father would strangle Gaby. Enraged, Father chased me out of the house and pursued me round and round the car in the driveway. Luckily, I was nippier on my feet than he was and came away very shaken but unscathed. The Rover, however, was a mess when he finally ran out of breath and steam and gave it up.
‘You should have let him kill her. It would have saved you a lot of bother in the long run,’ Mother observed drily some time later.
The phone rang one evening in December 1980. ‘What the fuck do you mean by giving my wife a few lousy chocolate biscuits for her Christmas present, you c*** ?’ Father screamed in my ear. ‘We’ve got you a Fortnum and Mason’s hamper.’ They hadn’t, of course, but to prove that they had, Nicci was dispatched a few days later to deliver their own Christmas hamper in the boot of her car. Pauper that I was, even I realized that Fortnum and Mason delivered in a smart liveried van.
Father hadn’t allowed me to explain that I had walked all the way from my flat in Kilburn to Finchley Road just to buy him his favourite, handmade marzipan fruits and Gaby her favourite Bendicks handmade chocolate mints. It was snowing, I remember, and the pavements were slick with ice. I’d walked because I couldn’t afford to buy their gifts and pay the tube fares. It is difficult to buy presents for very wealthy people when it’s coming to the end of the month and one’s salary hasn’t yet found its way into the bank.
I sent their hamper back to Father with a quote from Oscar Wilde about Father and Gaby knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’. I’d also added that the next time I heard from him, I wanted to hear that he was dead. I was desperately hurt that he’d failed to appreciate the effort I had made to please him and I lashed out blindly in retaliation.
On a wet, cold day the following month, I woke up so depressed that I simply could not get to work. This was unusual for me, as I had found ways to combat my depressions and anyway, I loved my work – by this time I was a peripatetic teacher working with children with learning difficulties in London’s East End. But that day was different, and I could not, for the life of me, work out why I felt so dreadful.
All day I was obsessed with fire. I kept moving restlessly from room to room, lighting gas fires and then turning them off again, irrationally convinced that the minute I left a room, the damned things would explode. It made no sense at all, but that was how it was.
Finally, for no reason that I could figure out, I decided that I really had to have a bonfire in the garden, despite having nothing to burn. In the end, I nipped down to the off-licence to pick up some empty cardboard boxes to fuel my fire, and a can of lighter petrol to get it going in the incessant, sleety drizzle. At the moment I lit my fire, my father suffered a massive heart attack in his office, keeled over and landed on a three-bar electric fire. When he was found, he was ablaze, and the heat was so intense, his face had begun to melt.
As Father and I had not been on speaking terms when he died, I wondered if I should attend his funeral. ‘Oh I should, dear,’ Mother advised, ‘if only to make sure the old bastard’s dead.’
I did as Mother suggested, and went to the ceremony at the same crematorium where Valerie’s funeral had been held. So many people attended, it was hard to g
et them into the room. One after another, men and women stood up to give their eulogies. These friends and strangers (at least to me) had loved the man: it was obvious. I wondered, at one point, if I had strayed into the wrong funeral. It dawned on me, as I listened, that the way to get the very best out of my father was not to be related to him in any way. It made me so very sad and angry that it took me a long, long time to get over it.
Don also died of a heart attack, not all that long after. His death could not have been more different from Father’s, and it illustrated the stark contrast in their natures. Don died quietly in his favourite armchair. As Mother said, ‘He couldn’t have been more considerate. If he’d died in bed, we’d have had the hell’s own job getting him past the bend in the stairs – I would have had to get the darling man lowered out of the window, like a giant sack of spuds.’ His funeral was very small, and no one stood up to tell us how wonderful he was. But those few of us who were there knew it anyway.
Mother died in 1987, of lung cancer. I travelled up to Scotland to nurse her after the operation to remove her lung and again, almost a year later, for the final month of her life. Just before she died, I was finally able to persuade my brother to come to Scotland, and he was with her for her last moments.
Peter and his wife didn’t stay for Mother’s funeral, or indeed, send any flowers. I was desperately hurt, partly by Pots’s apparent lack of respect for our mother, but also by his lack of compassion for me. If Ray, my future husband, and Nicci hadn’t come for the funeral, I would have been alone among strangers, yet again.
Peter died of brain cancer a little under a month after his fiftieth birthday in 1993. I travelled to northern Ontario to see him as he began his gruelling radiotherapy. Ironically, I arrived on Mother’s birthday. I hadn’t realized, until he told me during that visit, just how hurt and bitter he was about our mother’s drinking, promiscuity and lack of motherly instincts. It explained why he hadn’t felt the need to attend her funeral. Before I left to return to England, Pots thanked me for making the effort to see him before he died, and added, ‘I didn’t think I was worth it.’ That last sentence haunts me to this day. Of course he was worth it, he was my brother and I loved him.
Shortly before he fell ill, Pots had been made redundant from his job as chief laboratory technician at his local hospital. He was looking forward to being able to concentrate at last on photography, something he had always wanted to do. Tragically, he died before he was able to realize his dream.
It was after coming home from that visit that I finally plucked up the nerve to begin my first novel, Not All Tarts Are Apple. I was terrified that, like my brother, I’d never live to fulfil my dream, and I was also desperate to memorialize the time and the place that we shared the most, before he was sent away to boarding-school.
I am often asked if the narrator of the book, Rosie, is me, and whether the book was based on my life. All I can answer is ‘Yes’, but then again, ‘No’. Yes, I remember Soho, and some of the people who lived there in the 1950s, in my work, but no, Rosie’s family life bears little resemblance to mine. Maggie and Bert, Rosie’s adoptive parents, are the Mum and Dad that I wish Peter and I had had. On mature reflection, I realize that another character, Luigi, is a heavily disguised Pots, that Sharky Finn, the bent solicitor, bears an uncanny resemblance to Father in some ways, and that the Perfumed Lady is our mother, except Mother was nowhere near as posh.
One of the most flattering things a fan ever said to me about my novels was that ‘when I get inside that café, I feel like one of the gang, and I love that’.
And I have to say that, when I am writing one of my novels, I feel pretty much the same way. I feel happy in the company of the motley crew who make up my cast of characters: from Rosie, Maggie and Bert, T.C., Madame Zelda and the Campanini clan, to the waspish Bandy and her sweet-natured sidekick, Sugar Plum, I love them all. But revisiting my own past life was nowhere near as cosy for me.
Writing this memoir has been a really painful and difficult process. Sometimes it was so hard, I would have to walk away from it for a few days. On other occasions, I’d find such a flood of tears dripping on to my keyboard that Noah would be letting down his gangplank. I would hastily mop them up, for fear of imminent electrocution or, worse, losing the work and having to start again – a truly dreadful prospect.
Over the years, it has been suggested to me several times that writing about my childhood would help me to come to terms with it, but every time I tried, I fizzled out after just a few paragraphs. When this project was first mooted, I was against it, but, to my astonishment, my husband and many friends thought that writing a memoir might, in fact, be a cathartic experience for me. I was doubtful myself but, in the end, despite my better judgement, I decided to give it a go.
‘You’re a writer, why aren’t you fucking writing?’ Father once asked me. Anglo-Saxon curses always featured large in Father’s speech, even simple, everyday utterances, and although it may not appear so, I’ve toned it down for this book.
It was difficult to reply to Father’s question, because it was many years before I knew the answer, and it was my dear husband, Ray, who finally supplied it. I had just seen my first article in print – a non-fiction piece about preschool education – and was reading the editor’s very flattering letter when I remarked that I wished my mother had lived to see it, because ‘She would have been absolutely thrilled for me.’
There was a long, pregnant silence from my old geezer until finally he shook his head. ‘No she wouldn’t. She would have been jealous of you.’ And, with a painful lurch of the heart, I realized that what he said was true.
Every time I sat down to write in the past, I had heard this sneering voice in my head, saying, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Whatever made you think you could be a writer?’ And that voice was my mother’s.
Sadly, my mother was always envious of me, and I’ve spent quite some time trying to fathom why. All I can come up with is that, after a brilliant success in her school years, she set out on her road to womanhood with high hopes and high expectations, but wound up being bitterly disappointed. She never did become the great writer that she had hoped to be, largely because she frittered away her best years on my father and booze. She had to work full time in order to pay for both of her obsessions, and when she’d done her day’s work, she came home to a demanding husband and ‘whining brats’ and was simply too exhausted to think, let alone write.
Besides, pounding a typewriter would have got in the way of the boozing, the brawling and the making-up that so characterized the early years of her marriage to Father. They were both highly competitive when it came to writing, as well, and Father was merciless in his criticism. Thus, it was no accident that I didn’t start writing until both of my parents were dead.
Although it’s been a very painful and often wretched business, in a strange way writing this memoir has provided some catharsis. It has given me an overview that I didn’t have before. With the benefit of adult eyes, I have come to see that my poor father bore all the hallmarks of an undiagnosed, untreated manic depressive, and I can, at last, feel compassion for him, now that he’s not frightening me any more. I can also understand my mother better, and I feel sad for her blighted ambition and expectations. It was sad for both of us that she allowed envy to colour her relationship with me to such an extent that she was often unkind, competitive and apparently uncaring.
I have discovered, by writing about my parents, that the poor old darlings loved me in their fashion: they just weren’t cut out to be parents, because they never really grew up themselves. Best of all, I have at last come to understand that everything we all went through – the terrifying rows, the tears, the bitter partings and all the heartbreaks that followed – wasn’t all my fault.
THE END
OUT OF THE DARK
One Woman’s Harrowing Journey to Discover her Past
By Linda Caine & Dr Robin Royston
Life for Linda Caine should hold
no fears. As a contented wife and mother, she should have everything to live for. Yet a blackness has started to leak into her thoughts. Images flash through her head leaving her stunned and breathless. On the face of it, there is no rational explanation for the way she feels.
But Linda believes there is something bad inside her. At the back of her mind a voice tells her over and over again that everything will be OK. When it finally gets too much, she can always simply die. ‘How shall I die if that time comes? I need to know these things. They have to be planned.’ It must look like an accident. She will drive off a cliff on her way home from her weekly shopping trip. After all, who commits suicide with a load of groceries in their car?
The raw and powerful journey that Linda takes with her psychiatrist Robin Royston to discover what lies at the heart of her depression will leave you breathless. The secrets in her African childhood and adolescence are buried so deep that to reveal them may destroy her completely. Nothing is what it seems, no-one is above suspicion. Together Linda and Robin race to unravel the clues, before it is too late …
‘Reads like a psychological detective story … Linda’s passage
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A PIECE OF CAKE
A Memoir
by Cupcake Brown
The number one bestseller
From beloved daughter to abused foster child to crack addict, this is the heart-wrenching true story of a girl named Cupcake Brown.
Following her mother’s death, Cupcake was just eleven years old when she entered the child welfare system. Moved from one disastrous placement to the next, like so many, she was neglected and sexually abused. She developed a massive appetite for drugs and alcohol – an appetite fed by hustling and turning tricks – and before long, stumbled headlong into the wild, notoriously dangerous world of the gangsta.