Finding Sanity

by Greg de Moore

  Mania, at its purest, can seem to be a liberating force. It offers a release to pursue what we all spontaneously desire, but curb. When manic, Bill was a froth of rascally notions, and when his mind unzipped, words streamed through the breach as compressed high-energy packages that whizzed about and took aim at everything in his sights. When manic on full throttle, Bill was ablaze. Even in rare moments of apparent solace, beneath the surface bubbled oddity: ladies’ silk stockings continued to be his preferred leg attire.

  The following years offered no prolonged periods of what anyone would regard as normalcy. Exiled from the normal run of life, he scrapped about for jobs. His relationship with the army was one stumbling inconvenience after another: ‘I seem to have misplaced my papers while out fishing’; ‘Can you please replace my lost file?’; ‘Would you kindly forward a copy of my discharge papers?’ In peace, as in war, Bill was a pestering distraction for the army.

  Bill’s marriage did not last; not a surprising outcome. Indeed it is extraordinary to think it persisted seven years, testimony to the values of the time to marry for life regardless of the suffering incurred. For some time Pearl held tight and maintained a dignified silence. But like so many other spouses married to men returned from the war and with mental illness, Pearl was unable to absorb the extremities of Bill’s mood and his threats of violence. Family history has it that on one occasion, she awoke in fright to find the dark silhouette of her husband standing over her, looking at her with a fixed stare. Pearl, bewildered, went to Bill’s doctors for help; they offered little. Whatever tender pull of affection she had once felt had long vanished. According to family lore, Bill’s father, concerned for the safety of his daughter-in-law, urged Pearl to flee. And so Pearl, taking this advice, bundled together her belongings and self-respect and fled, finding refuge elsewhere. It is hazy as to when she left Bill, but it was probably around 1930; when she did she took their young adopted daughter.

  By October 1931 Bill was receiving a pension of 2/2/-, Pearl 13/11 and their adopted daughter 6/-. Bill reported to the Repatriation Board, dutifully, that he did not reside with Pearl or his daughter, but had financially supported both since ‘wife deserted him about 12 months ago. Address of wife unknown.’

  In 1932, Bill sat down and tried to write a summary of the previous fifteen years of his life. For us, it fills in lost years, much of it grubbing about seeking employment: of his time as a handyman at a hotel in New South Wales after discharge from the army; working at Appelton’s Tannery in Richmond for eight months where the fumes—rising from an acid cauldron in which animal hides were pickled—scraped his lungs raw; at Johnson’s and Morrison’s of Burnley, where his two fingertips were sliced clean off; labouring at Larkin Aircraft Co. for two years until 1927 and of his inevitable sacking when staff were cut; and the many odd jobs he sought and sometimes did, and of countless disagreements with bosses. Bill had neither style nor connections to help leaven the blows.

  In the March of 1933 he was boarding in an outer Melbourne suburb, and, unsurprisingly, created trouble. Neighbours, fearful, reported to the police a man doing ‘peculiar things’. This time, Bill had set about trying to purchase a car but, of course, he had no money. Bill had left the care of his parents, stating he, ‘does not get on with his father who wants to treat him “like a small boy”’. Despite this, the police called for his father—the one constant support in Bill’s life. His careworn father attended but Bill had ‘a wild look in his eyes’ and stalked about, raving and howling, swinging his arms extravagantly. To the police he seemed shrunken in physical stature, thinned out, and his spindly legs and wild features gave him the appearance of a starved bird of prey. His neighbours, frightened, drew back.

  The following year Bill sank from his manic elevation and, ground down, became profoundly depressed. He remained in this depressive torpor for months; his talk slowed, each viscous syllable prised, hard-won, from his mouth.

  In 1934 there were no specific treatments for melancholic illness. It was a matter of nursing care, physical exercise, water baths, nourishment, and gently tending to the torments of men and women who saw no hope of resurrection of their spirits. Those severely affected by melancholia sometimes fantasised that their brains were rotting, their bowels unmoveable and that life was a farce in need of obliteration.

  When Bill was assessed, a shellshock specialist, Dr Clarence Godfrey, pronounced him as ‘very mental’, a seemingly more vigorous denunciation than Bill’s previous label of just ‘mental’. It was noted also that Bill had a peculiarly shaped head and that in his malnourished head only two teeth remained.

  When his depression broke, Bill returned to his parents. Unexpectedly, his wife, Pearl, briefly reappeared in early 1934 and wrote to the authorities:

  I desire to appeal on behalf of my husband. He is suffering from Neurasthenia and mental trouble. I had to leave him owing to his violence some time ago. I returned to him a few months ago, but owing to his mental condition I have had to leave him again.

  She wrote again, asking that a full pension be granted and mentioning that she had been forced to leave and travel to a small town and find work to support her child and herself: ‘I have commenced a home on two occasions and have found it impossible to continue owing to my husband’s mental state. I am really afraid that something may happen.’

  Her pleas were met with indifference; Bill’s pension went unchanged. Pearl cut herself adrift, and seems to have made no further contact with her husband.

  And then, an unusual letter landed on the desk at the Repatriation Department towards the end of 1934. It was a query from a woman in country Victoria, ‘whether there was any truth in a rumour that . . . [Bill Brand] . . . was dead’. The correspondent stated ‘that her son went to the War with Mr Brand, and he had heard that Brand was deceased’. The enquirer further noted that Mrs Brand ‘had given it out that her husband had died some months ago, and had remarried’. So a rumour was about that Bill was dead. When you tidy away the mentally ill, the tidiest of all methods is to kill them off. That’s what happened to Bill. Although Bill didn’t have the wherewithal to counter the claim, the army did. The enquirer was politely told that Bill Brand was alive.

  Bill was still capable of the odd gardening job but for the most part his catalogue of illnesses festered. At the end of 1935, Bill’s already mutilated left hand was ‘bitten by another man’ although how and where this occurred remains a mystery; no happy circumstance could have led to this. Bill’s afflicted hand was bandaged and he requested admission to hospital; it was denied. When he requested more money, it was denied.

  Hospitals might be for the sick but they are also shelters for the lost and lonely and are places of social refuge. Often Bill wanted nothing more than safety, and just a little company.

  A depressed mood bit Bill hard again in late 1938. This time Bill became agitated about his mother, a revolving theme whenever he was low, and was convinced that some lurking evil force was about to steal ‘her house from her’. The attending doctor struggled to extract answers from Bill’s sluggish brain as Bill’s thoughts trickled into speech; patient and doctor waited for the melancholia to thaw. Bill sat and stared and every so often mouthed the following sentence: ‘One has to be always in the warning for other people.’ The doctors had no idea what he was on about; depressed and beset by guilt—so characteristic of such black moods—a delusional Bill uttered that he ate only small portions of food ‘so that the poor people may have enough’.

  Five months later, in May, Bill’s sister Mary was found dead in an outside toilet in a suburban backyard in Fitzroy, a gunshot wound to her head. Mary was often unwell and suicidal. Her employer remembered her as:

  hysterical and she had to be held down . . . She had been in Royal Park under observation for mental trouble . . . depressed and unable to concentrate . . . Once she put a sheet around her neck and pulled it with her hands . . . the other [time] she was about to open an upstairs window and she said she was going to throw herse
lf out; [she] told [a doctor] that she often felt like throwing herself under a tram.

  In the early days of the Second World War Bill was back as a munitions worker, constructing weapons of war in Footscray. Even disturbed, his abilities as a machinist were in demand. His weary mother dragged her son to the Army Outpatients for review. She complained that Bill had been ‘calling that someone is calling for help. He wanders at night.’ Throughout the assessment Bill sat still and said little. Unable to care for himself, he heard the voices of his brothers and other people while with the doctor.

  Just after Christmas he collapsed into despair again and confessed that ‘he generally breaks down at Christmas on account of memory of previous unfortunate Christmas happenings’. His nutrition was poor, but his early life of horse-breaking and carpentry left him with a stringy muscularity. He was briefly admitted to a medical ward in the Repatriation Hospital, but straight away absconded—absent without leave (AWOL)—a repetition of his first escapade in England in 1917. When he returned, the bone-headed military response was to discharge him.

  One of his doctors wrote, in an echo of a previous diagnosis:

  I do not think that this ex-soldier is certifiable. He is a constitutional psychopath . . . cunning and not truthful . . . [his] statements cannot be accepted as reliable. Should not be admitted to Hospital: treatment useless.

  It seems another wrong diagnosis and contemptuous conclusion; the army’s blind and cruel manner of dealing with Bill had not altered one jot over 25 years.

  Given that his doctors had not twigged to his state of mental illness, Bill offered them a clue, articulating that his head seemed tight, and indeed that he had no head at all. Amazingly, against the grain of common—but not apparently military—sense, his army doctor concluded: ‘He is undoubtedly “strange” but . . . not certifiable.’

  And so it remained that Bill, who had never been quite right since he landed in England in 1916, was now, 25 years later, an object of medical curiosity: not quite mad enough to be incarcerated yet not sane enough to live with others.

  Bill rummaged about the streets of Melbourne, impecunious and vulnerable, a combination of attributes that made him prey to the unscrupulous. Trouble soon came. In 1941 Bill was arrested in St Kilda and committed to Pentridge Gaol on criminal charges: forging Savings Bank passbooks. His brother pleaded for Bill’s release, arguing that his misfit brother was not responsible for his actions. Bill remained in gaol awaiting medical review.

  The case was given some prominence and reported in the Melbourne newspaper The Age:

  Suffered from Shell Shock

  Whether his age was 50 or 61 was a matter of doubt to William Henry Brand, Acland Street, St Kilda, machinist, who came up for sentence before Judge Clyne . . . yesterday. Brand pleaded guilty last week to having forged and uttered a State Savings Bank passbook, and a jury found him guilty on two counts of perjury . . . He gave his age yesterday as 50, but Judge Clyne pointed out that his counsel said his age was 61 . . .

  The presiding judge, taking into account Bill’s parlous psychiatric state, released him on a three-year good behaviour bond of twenty pounds and ordered that Bill report to a Major Inglis of the Salvation Army. In handing down his finding, the judge noted the vile actions of Bill’s neighbours, who, it seems, sensing Bill’s vulnerable mental state, exploited him for monetary gain.

  Among the pages of Bill’s medical and army dossiers are the twigs of this carpenter’s life: the smallest splinters of information that remind us that he was a man who, illness aside, simply had to get through each day. On one page is a list of numbers, so unprepossessing and apparently anonymous that one is tempted to flick over them to get to something juicier. But the list on this page makes Bill all the more human. It is a list of all of his unpaid tram fares, carefully documented by the Repatriation Department, and awaiting payment: a sad vestige of a hard life.

  September 1943 found Bill ranting and threatening his parents. The police, yet again, were called to apprehend him. Dropped off at the Army General Hospital, Bill, who hadn’t slept for 24 hours, was promptly given a sedating elixir of bromides and phenobarbitone (a powerful anti-epileptic drug). By 4 am he was still awake. During the night he did all manner of strange things: slipping his coat on and off and on again as if in a private game with himself, and prancing about the ward, swiping at imaginary flies; when placed in his bath, he swished the water about and played ‘trains’ in a world of his own making like a small child.

  The following day, uncooperative, Bill flipped through ridiculous ideas so rapidly no one could follow him. At night he shot out of bed and danced in the rain. When he was grabbed and manhandled back into the dry, he spat irrational volleys of words at his attendants; among them he stated, rationally, that he was still married, though his wife had long since gone, her loss a scar he never erased.

  Bill’s doctors certified him as a lunatic, and police dragged him to Bundoora Mental Hospital, where his life was about to undergo a change.

  On admission to Bundoora, Bill was a muttering mess, uttering a lingo only comprehensible to him. At times, when questioned, his rank of private and his regimental number were all he could summon from his army life, snatches of memory from a perforated past. He drew his psychiatrist’s attention to the twittering birds that perched on the eucalypts outside. Bill, confidentially, revealed that the birds and beasts of the bush conveyed cryptic messages to him. These he understood. And sometimes he confessed, as if he had committed a crime, that among the squawking and growling he could hear the whispers of his dead father calling him.

  The haunting image of the asylum lunatic hung heavily in post-war Australia. The most famous of all the Victorian-era psychiatrists—the Englishman Dr Henry Maudsley—famously pronounced: ‘When a person is a lunatic, he is a lunatic to his finger nails.’ Bill—chattering, filthy, unstoppable—was a lunatic to his eight remaining fingernails. Bill’s life was all cut up. At every turn, his life had been buggered by genetics, by love, by medicine, by war. He was (to perfection) what the outside person deeply and secretly feared about becoming insane.

  18

  Bill Brand was a scoundrel in the asylum. He was notorious among the nurses and attendants, and regarded as the most grubby and pesky of patients. As a result, they gave him his own special name.

  Asylum patients were commonly stripped of their Christian names and, instead, staff bellowed out their surnames. Bill Brand was shorn of both Christian name and surname: when summoned for breakfast or lunch or dinner, the attendants called out for ‘Monkey’, rendering Bill more simian than human.

  When he felt the call of mischief, Bill aka ‘Monkey’, might grab a passing taxi and take off to Melbourne, and swan about racking up fares until he was ‘recaptured’ by some sweating attendant or tumbled out at the asylum gates by the taxi driver. Or he might divert his rowdy spirits into the manic mowing of a patch of the asylum lawn, striding back and forth over the same strip of dirt, hollering for the world to hear until his hazy outline was lost in a locust swarm of grass clippings.

  Everyone knew Bill in the asylum, but whether John Cade knew of Bill’s trials with the Department of Repatriation, of his feeble begging for money, of the wife who’d left him, or of his adopted child, we don’t know. In 1946, the medical and nursing notes often remained mute on patients’ lives beyond the asylum walls. So when Bill came under John’s care, it was to Bill’s mental state that John cast his mind.

  Of Bill, John wrote:

  His mental state has remained unchanged over the last two years. He is chronically euphoric: excitable, restless and has no power of concentration whatever; so lacking even momentary attention that questions usually fail to interrupt his flight of ideas. He is dirty and destructive; noisy both day and night. A rubbish gatherer and petty pilferer.

  Soon after he wrote this, John decided to treat Bill with electroconvulsive therapy—a brutal treatment in 1946.

  At the time, this kind of therapy was given raw, without
the present-day modifications that smooth out its violent and gruesome aspects. But at the time, electroconvulsive therapy was the high-watermark of effective treatments in psychiatry and used for just about anything on offer.

  The essence of the treatment was to bring about an epileptic fit in the man or woman suffering from psychiatric illness. John knew about convulsive therapy from his days at Beechworth. There, such fits were brought about by injecting a chemical into the patient’s bloodstream and waiting until the brain, irritated and prodded by such a foreign intrusion, launched into a full-blown epileptic convulsion. By 1946, the chemical injection had been replaced by an electrical current to do the same job. How these blasts of electricity helped someone was unclear. But there was no doubt that some patients underwent spectacular improvement.

  Preparing a patient for electroconvulsive therapy ran to a strict protocol; indeed, everything about asylum care in the post-war period was rigidly run. And with ‘Major’ Cade at the helm, the Bundoora asylum ran to the click of a metronome. It takes little imagination to picture what took place, as Bill was prepared for this treatment.

  On the morning of the first treatment, Bill would not receive breakfast and, if he was in an agreeable frame of mind, bowels and bladder were emptied; if not, the procedure would still push on. The thinning scalp hair over his left and right temple would then be shaved and cleansed with a swab. That’s where the electrodes would sit. The electrodes—two flat metal discs, two inches in diameter—were then strapped to the head, one electrode over the left temple, the other over the right.