The Siege
Page 18
She was growing all the time. We led a quiet life in England; inside the walls and fences of our neat suburb children played, but there was no way I knew to get Elly near them. Even at home, on the open lawns full of children, she had done no more than run beside them. Here, except for her own siblings, there were no children to run with. Yet I sensed a frail new readiness. I often took her to the village green, where she would swing unseeingly among strong wiry boys and girls who paid her no more attention than she paid them. But one day, as a squad of children marched out of the adjoining school yard, she did an unexpected thing — she suddenly shifted direction and ran directly among them. I reported this to the analyst, and other incidents that tended in the same direction. It was then that she made the move that has benefited Elly more than any other single thing that has been done for her. It was she who made the contacts that made it possible for Elly to go to nursery school with normal children. That Elly, from that time to this,has been able to go to school is largely due to the intelligence and devotion of the teachers at the extraordinary school the analyst found for her.
They too were professionals. The school was no plushy private foundation, but run with tight public funds as a demonstration school for the local teacher’s college. The analyst did not think a place would be found there for Elly — our best hope was that the principal would see her and recommend some tiny, mother-run class where Elly could at least see other children. We were foreigners. We did not even live within this school district. There was every administrative reason to send us on our way and none to welcome us. Yet the principal took us in — both of us, for the way she found to reconcile regulations with need was to invite me to come in with Elly, so that her status could be that of a guest, not a pupil. And as a further dividend, I could watch the work of teachers who were such subtle masters of their calling that no one could say, in this school, where teaching ended and therapy began.
For we were not the only waifs welcomed here. Elly was not even the most severely handicapped child in the school; she functioned far more ably than the overgrown, affectionate Mongoloid who moved clumsily about among the toys. I learned later that parents who wanted a place for their normal children in this fine school enrolled them at birth. Not that it was a school for misfits; normal children formed the great majority. But for children whose need was severe enough this principal would somehow find room. Whether their trouble was physical or emotional in origin, caused by deprivation or by family upheaval, they became contributing members of the school, even if like the little Mongoloid all they could contribute was their helplessness. More fortunate children, imaginatively treated, could learn much from that. Here imagination and competence bound waifs and healthy children into one thriving community, where by a miracle daily renewed fifty small people ranging in age from near babyhood (the youngest two and a half) to almost five were not only taught and fostered, but given their main meal of the day. The staff consisted of the principal and two teachers, helped by a student trainee and a pleasant woman who ran the kitchen. The school kept a seven-hour day, although Elly, as a guest, came only for an hour and a quarter twice weekly. American administrators, I suspect, would think this impossible. I wish they could, as I did, see it done.
My hours there were lessons in resourcefulness. Nothing seemed to escape these people. They observed Elly as closely as if they had nothing else to do. The analyst and I had been occupied for some time with Elly’s tub and basin obsession, which had lasted now for some months. The principal had needed no more than the bare mention that Elly liked to play with water; the first time Elly came to play, tub, cups, kettles, and waterproof apron were set out for her. No better introduction could have been chosen. Elly was delighted; she made loud, cheerful birdlike noises, she sang. Soon, however, a little boy came up. He wanted to play too. Elly, of course, had never in her life played except by terms she herself had set, and never with a child her own age. Rarely, indeed, had she appeared even to see another small child, although she now often focused on her siblings and on adults. She saw this child well enough, however. She warned him off with edged, anxious noises. Other children gathered. She did not mind them; they were not using the water. The little boy took the kettle and poured. Elly squealed, shrieked, jumped up and down, made the rhythmic intonation that I knew mimicked our ‘that’s enough!’ Calmly the principal kept on with the game. While another teacher suggested new activities for the watching children, Miss J. found a new washing activity that Elly and the little boy could share. Elly calmed down a bit and the little boy drifted away. Everything was fine then, naturally, but when another child came and she began to shriek, Miss J. gently explained that Elly had not learned to share yet, and let her have the tub alone. The rest of the session was dominated by water. Elly tired of the tub and, leaving the playroom, found a faucet she remembered from her first interview at the school, with a large bucket beneath it. It was no toy — children did not ordinarily play in this room, which combined the functions of clean-up room and toilet,equipped with large washtubs, four tiny toilets separated from the room by half-open curtains, and four tiny basins. Here Elly was allowed to play apart from the other children, who came and went on their own errands. Elly filled the bucket and emptied the heavy, awkward burden (weak Elly!) into one of the little toilets. She filled it too full and spilled some on the floor and on her tights. She wept furiously — a sound quite different from her former anxious shrieks — but when the water was mopped up she returned to the bucket. The next time, and all subsequent ones, the water level was exquisitely adjusted to avoid further spills. Except for an excursion into the playroom to get a doll to perch on the bucket and another to watch the assistant run water into the washtub she played in hermetic isolation until her time was up. She left with reluctance; her last act was to return to the bucket and empty it in the toilet. Miss J. said, ‘Bye-bye, Elly.’ No response. She leans down, puts her face close in front of Elly’s. Elly doesn’t see her. She kisses her. Elly’s face is expressionless. We go.
An unpromising beginning, but two days later we are back. Elly is reluctant to enter the school gate. I carry her to it, set her down, and wait. She goes in under her own power. This time the watchful overseers have provided two basins, and dolls to go with them; Elly is able to play uneventfully with her basin beside another child. But difficulties arise that Miss J. could not have anticipated; she does not know that Elly’s doll must sit in its bath and must have jointed legs in consequence. By chance, the other child’s doll is jointed, but Elly of course cannot be allowed to grab it. I look for another but can’t find one. Elly shrieks. Calmly, the tubs and water are taken away, while Elly is introduced to less sensitive playthings.
Next time Elly was able to transfer her water fixation to the small hand-basins. This was a less isolated activity; she watched the children wash their hands in fascination, especially since the pipes led into an open drain into which water whished visibly every time a child removed a plug. As one child finished washing, Elly, who had been watching from a distance, went up to her and touched her arm. I interpreted: Elly was asking her togo through the process again. The little girl was reluctant, but did so when I explained that Elly might feel braver if she could see her do it. The second child that Elly asked refused. I offered to fill the basin myself, but Elly did not want that. She returned to touch the child, at which point a third little girl, who had been watching, did it unasked. And then Elly did in fact feel brave enough to put in the plug and turn on the water herself, retreating eight feet away to watch the water gush into the drain when the plug was removed.
The staff did not take part in this compulsive activity, but they were aware of it. Elly began each session at the basins. At first they let her play there go on as long as she liked, but after a few sessions they decided that she was ready to have it curtailed in favour of freer activity. The school was simply but well equipped with toys — books, puzzles, play-dough (made by the busy staff), wagons, slides, paints. Half-heartedly,
Elly began to explore these, encouraged by the teachers. There was a high rocking-horse, splendidly painted and accoutred by a grateful father; there Elly, and other children in need of a temporary retreat, could retire and in rhythmic motion survey the life of the school without taking part in it. After a time a teacher would come over, to reinvolve the child who had been alone too long, to facilitate taking turns, to sing the pretty rocking-horse song that became Elly’s leitmotif for school. When her turn was over, Elly would come down and be led into play. She was no longer interested in puzzles, though she did them without difficulty. She gravitated straight to the doll-house bathtub, but with skill it was possible to divert her to a toy telephone or even a wagon. She tried out the paints, filling a sheet of paper with neat parallels. We had paints at home, but for months, whatever my strategies, she had only mixed and poured colours from vessel to vessel. Here, seeing other children use the easels, she made a picture almost daily — abstract figures in pure colours, never puddled or mixed. Once she made a little girl; Miss J. gave it to her to take home, a departure from the rule, since to save paper all sheets were normally used on both sides.
She began to respond to the teachers as people; after two weeks had passed, in her fourth session, with a brilliant smile she showed one of them a toy horse. Although she paid less attention to the children, by the sixth session she was actually sharing water in the tub. By the eighth she no longer required the full attention of a teacher. After four weeks Miss J. asked me to retire into the office; I could watch through the window, but Elly was able to function on her own.
Elly liked school. She might not herself be able to vary the monotony of her activities, but she welcomed variation when it came from outside. The analyst had told me to watch for signs of tension at home and to be ready with extra indulgence. None however, appeared. Yet I could see the ambivalence in Elly’s attitude towards this demanding new experience. At first she had tensed with pleased excitement as we approached the building, but on the sixth day — the third week — as we passed in the car a turnoff which though ten minutes away she recognized as leading to the school, she sang a bar of the rocking-horse song and began to cry bitterly. She kept on crying until we arrived. I parked the car across the street as usual and wondered what to do. She had seemed to like school — and besides, tolerant as the teachers were, I hesitated to introduce a crying child into the peaceful building. It would be better if she could go of her own free will. So we sat still in the car. I made no move to open the door, but waited. Crying, she put her own hand on the door handle. I opened it. Crying, she moved forward to be lifted down from the high Microbus. I put her on the pavement. Crying, she made the move to cross the street, to open the gate, to run up the path, to enter the school. She stopped crying as soon as she was inside and she did not cry again. The next time she merely whimpered. Then the approaches to school were no longer marked by tension. She was learning to take it for granted.
Elly was able to go to that school for five months. Then we had to leave. We would have had to leave anyway, for in a month she would have been five and too old for the school. It’s idle to speculate about what progress she could have made there. Miss J. had shown me a boy Elly’s age, playing, talking,kissing the teacher, apparently normal except for an odd mincing walk. Two years before, she told me, he had been admitted, silent, withdrawn, diagnosed as deaf-mute. The staff noticed first that he winced when objects were dropped; gradually — I had seen a little of how — they had drawn him into activity and speech. Miss J. said that Elly was very like what James had been then, and James was going to an ordinary school in the autumn. But Elly was five and James had been two and a half. And none of us were diagnosticians — James’s problem may have been quite different. In any case we could not remain here. Yet our experience was ours to take away — invaluable training for me and for Elly, who on her return home was able to enter a small local private school in the nursery class. She has been in school ever since. That this has been possible we owe to the kindness, flexibility, and intelligence of the professionals of England.
We found these qualities in every professional contact we made there. I had noticed it in the busy school administrators who solved the transfer problems of my normal children; I noticed it again in the university official who found me a graduate to take home to replace Jill, who would be leaving us for college. We experienced in our scheduled appointments in the offices of English professionals all the openness and warmth-I might almost say affection — that Americans expend so lavishly in their private relations. Private relations in England are neither warm nor open — at least until the participants have known each other many more months than were at our disposal. An American can only wonder at the reversal of what he is used to. It is as if all the Englishman’s dammed-up potentiality for warmth overflowed into the practice of his profession. Perhaps one cannot have it both ways, though I cannot see why not. At any rate, nowhere in England did we come across that chill routinization of human contact which too often passes in this country for professionalism.
Too often, but not always. On our return, on the analyst’s suggestion, we sought out an extremely well-qualified psychiatrist who had newly moved into a near-by town. We went to him with our usual shyness, but he received us with the flexibility and welcome we knew from England. We thought that now Elly was settled in one place he would begin direct work with her. We were not entirely easy about it, from the point of view either of utility or of expense. But he did not. After three or four sessions, all dealing with Elly, he put me on my own once more. He even suggested — I lived on it for months — that I work with children professionally. He even said that Elly could have done no better in the best residential school for disturbed children than she had done at home with us.
I return with Elly once or twice a year, and he tells me how much Elly has improved since he last saw her. We could not do without him. He acts as a buffer between us and the world. He provides documents, classifications, terminology, and these reassure the bewildered administrators and teachers who have to work with Elly. What school would accept her if she had only her parents to speak for her? But she has her credentials; she has a psychiatrist. We luxuriate in his encouragement and support. It is he who suggested that I write this book.
One day he may feel that Elly can benefit from analytic therapy, but four years have passed and he has not suggested it yet. In the meantime, he is willing to accept that parents can be partners, even senior partners, in the treatment of their child. He does not consider that he presides over a privileged arcanum into which we are not qualified to set foot. What he knows that can help us, he imparts. What he can do, he does. It is both little and much.
When, smarting from our first encounter with professionalism, we took our disappointment to Dr Blank, he told us we had expected too much. Psychiatry, he said, was a gift, not a science. We agreed with him; it was not scientific knowledge we had been looking for. We had indeed expected too much, but it was something else that we had expected. What we had asked, and with incredible naivete thought to get, was nothing less than the counsel of someone loving, wise, and good. We had been hurt and disappointed when we had not received it. Yet we had no right to surprise. Few people are wise and good.
It is remarkable evidence of the American faith in the power of cash that a profession should arise that puts wisdom, goodness, and love on sale. Socrates did not. We had no right to be shocked that at our first attempt our money failed to buy us these commodities. Should we not rather be astonished and grateful that it is ever possible for money down to provide access to the rarest human virtues, that some psychiatrists are wise and good, true counsellors, whose love and wisdom, if not their science, can help heal?
12. The Amateurs
It is obvious enough why psychiatrists seldom welcome parents as co-workers. Even if they do not try to convert them into patients on the hypothesis that it is their pathology that has caused their child’s, professionals can find other reasons,
some of them very good ones, for doubting the capacity of parents to work with their own offspring. Not only professionals, but any outsider may well wonder how father and mother can function as therapists under the handicaps inherent in their position.
Although detachment is necessary for wise action, parents are inextricably involved with their child, their natural emotional commitment intensified by constant physical proximity. Though they must be content to work from day to day, they cannot avoid the long perspective; they must think as heads of households, and the fruitless question ‘What is going to happen to him and to us?’ is one they learn with difficulty to suppress. Because much is at stake, they may be drawn to exert pressure on the child, and if they are, the opportunities afforded by family life are endless. If their involvement and concern does not produce a nervous and harmful overactivity, an opposite possibility presents more subtle dangers: loving their child, they may not be sufficiently armed against the slights and rebuffs that those who deal with troubled children must expect — against the rejection that seems deliberate even after one knows it is not. So many overtures repulsed, so many words unheard, smiles unseen, touches unresponded to — the danger is that they will be too bruised to mount another assault, for rejection does not cease to hurt when one has grown accustomed to it.
Even if they escape these inward pitfalls, a more straightforward one remains: how can untrained people know anything like enough to do what is there to be done?