Finding Sanity

by Greg de Moore

  Mum and dad loved the nuns. The nuns offered them a Saint’s relic, a little container with, I think, the bones of St Gemma; they hung them on the end of Jack’s bed. I remember mum and dad coming home after visits to the hospital and both crying because Jack was almost dead. They were sure he was going to die.

  St Gemma Galgani was not an idle choice. The Italian saint, blessed with mystical powers, was said to have recovered, miraculously (there is no other way for a saint) from a serious illness as a young woman. An outcast, Gemma Galgani was said to exhibit the religious stigmata of a dying Jesus, the sine qua non of transcendental experience. Observers swore that every Thursday seeping spots of blood appeared on Gemma’s palms, and just as suddenly vanished.

  Now, from what we know of John Cade, he kept very private many of his religious beliefs. He was certainly no evangelist, and he bashed no bibles. It is unclear whether he believed in a literal version of the Bible, but, whatever form his belief took, no one disputes that John was a deeply devout and disciplined Catholic. David recalled his father on one particular occasion returning home from the hospital, heavy-hearted—matters were precarious with Jack—and quoting the attending hospital priest. The priest had asked John to summon all his energies into one furious ball and to ‘storm the gates of heaven’ with prayer to save his oldest son.

  And perhaps, in this case, prayer was all his son needed; not long afterwards, Jack, against all expectations, recovered.

  Whether John really believed in the priest’s exhortations, and that those heavenly gates truly buckled in response to tumultuous prayer, or whether he believed Jack responded to the medical marvel of a newly identified drug, cortisone—identified only two years earlier—John never revealed; nothing remains of his thoughts on this matter. But regardless of whether molecule or faith cured his son, John offered copious thanks to his Saviour each Sunday at church, attending with his customary regularity. And when all was done, John may not have cared whether it was faith or science that had triumphed. He would take his good fortune as he found it.

  26

  When the newly appointed head of the Mental Hygiene Authority—the debonair Dr Dax—cast an eye over the poor state of mental hospitals in Victoria, his first task had been to scrub them clean, literally. The hospitals were a sink-hole of filth. But an overhaul of mental health meant not only the scrubbing of floors, or the painting of wards, or the burning of urine-sodden bed linen—it also meant an infusion of crisp, modern ideas. To help this along, in 1954 Dax organised for John Cade to undertake a fully paid six-month study tour of the United Kingdom.

  Jean recalled their astonishment:

  Dr Dax sent John, which astounded him. [Dax said] ‘I’ve got permission for you to go to some of the places I was in, to find out what they do.’ Dax had arranged all the hospitals. His ship was booked. And John said: ‘I can’t go without my wife’ and Dax responded, ‘you’ll have to pay for her yourself.’

  There was never a suggestion that John would voyage to England without Jean, so without seeking further financial support, he paid for Jean without protest. And the four children bunkered down in the psychiatrist superintendent’s house, along with a live-in housekeeper.

  This was no trivial jaunt to England; John had a first-class ticket and a fully paid extended period of study, enough in those more frugal times to attract some media notice. As reported in The Argus, under the headline ‘Mental Expert for U.K.’, ‘Dr John Cade, medical superintendent of Royal Park Mental Hospital, will leave Melbourne in the Stratheden on January 19 on a six months’ tour of British mental hospitals.’ John was to report back, like a soldier on reconnaissance, and offer suggestions on how best to spend the ‘half a million pound building project now underway at Royal Park’. Dr Dax would be waiting for him on his return.

  John and Jean boarded the Stratheden on 19 January 1954, in Port Melbourne. The following morning John wrote his first lines to his four boys:

  This house ain’t safe—it rocks, like riding on an elephant. It shudders and squeaks too and makes at odd times during the night a sinister snickering—I think there are wallabies in the walls of our room.

  The last lines of this first letter—‘John, David, Peter and Ricky—Jesus, Mary and Joseph watch over you, dear boys’—were to be repeated often on this voyage, indeed they were almost engraved on the pages he sent home. Then, not to let the ecclesiastical moment overrun the practical, he prods their memories with filial expectation: ‘Hope you remembered dentist.’

  John and Jean proved the most assiduous of letter writers, a craft so seemingly ancient in the 21st century that one can almost picture the Cades—quills in hand, blotting paper on standby—beside candle-light illumination in their cabin at night. They wrote two, sometimes three times a week; the letters reveal their deep affection for all four sons.

  John wrote to his sons tenderly, yet with firmness. He chose his words precisely to achieve this effect. So, laced in among words of warmth are directions of duty and the importance of self-reliance.

  John was careful to write his letters in sections for his boys according to their age—from sixteen-year-old Jack down to four-year-old Richard. To his older boys he would reserve the right for the odd blue joke, something John saw as a kind of ritual of upbringing for boys entering manhood. It is true that John was a devout Catholic but he was no puritan and he loved to stir the pot and indulge in a private risqué joke or two with the boys. Before he left for England, John’s sometime saucy lines flowed freely when he spent time with his older boys, sprinkling his conversation with suggestive limericks. John had an encyclopedia’s worth of suggestive rhymes, no doubt honed during his time in Changi, which he poured out at will.

  There once was a man from Leeds,

  Who swallowed a packet of seeds,

  And blades of grass

  Grew out of his arse,

  And on his balls grew weeds.

  There once was a woman called Rhoda,

  Who kept an immoral pagoda,

  And the walls of the halls

  Were lined with the balls

  Of the immoral young men who bestrode her.

  Whenever one of the boys wrote to John with the merest suggestion of a sore throat, they received the full force of their father’s considerable medical evaluation and strict recommendations of whom to consult. John was no hypochondriac but he still had his own worrying fevers from time to time, courtesy, most likely, of the endemic malaria from Changi, and his near-death from pneumonia while a young doctor. The sight of Jack lying at death’s door was also fresh in John’s mind. Penicillin had only been around for a handful of years, so a cough in any of his sons was met with concern.

  Some fathers are cut off from their sons because of absence (long hours at work usually the culprit), some because of drink, some because they never connected. Whatever the cause, many fathers remain inaccessible to their sons, while sons, on the other hand, desperately want their fathers to listen. By dint of personality and time of birth and, perhaps, the dehumanising effect of war, John Cade’s own father was difficult to approach. One can’t help but think that John’s stiff relationship with his own father, in which affectionate words were rarely uttered, shaped how he wrote to his four sons during this voyage. John made sure that lack of expressed love would never be the cause of disaffection within his own family.

  The Stratheden’s first stop—Adelaide, in South Australia—allowed John to roam the Botanical Gardens, taking time to observe and attune himself to this green delight. He bent and studied lotuses with ‘circular leaves about 2 feet diameter’, measuring their delicate but expansive pink flowers as ‘two hands breadths’ across. And then as a small bird flashed past he turned and smiled, stopped and tried to make ‘friends with a willy wagtail’. Wherever John roved he found a place for the patterns of nature in his roomy intellect. And while the Botanical Gardens was a favoured haunt in the natural world, the deck of the Stratheden was a habitat of sorts as well, with different species of pas
sengers for John to categorise and make notes on.

  Among the ships passengers, there were various notables and non-notables: both at different times intrigued John, who studied them in the same detached analytical way he might study an egret bathing in a shallow pool of water. One of the passengers John instantly recognised—Douglas Jardine, former English Test cricket captain, a supercilious man and superior in his bearing. John ran his eyes over the aquiline-nosed Jardine like a blind man reading Braille, to take his measure. All Australians knew Jardine from the infamous bodyline Test series of 1932–33—and they didn’t like him. Jardine played the game of cricket with a ruthless lining that broke no rule but broke the spirit of the game; he was just the sort of Englishman to make John’s skin crawl.

  During the long days on board, John recorded that he observed an albatross ‘skimming the waves’, and how, on crossing the Tropic of Capricorn and entering iridescent warmer waters, schools of flying fish burst from the ocean in an orchestra of glittering saltwater spray. John carefully detailed how each individual fish gave ‘a mighty wriggle with their tail fins’ until it broke free of the ocean, using its pectoral fins to glide for a further 30 to 40 metres. ‘Every so often one will let his tail fin hit the water and give an extra wriggle to gain a few more yards.’ It was often the smallest of details that John troubled to record, as much for himself as for anyone else. Jean, in her later years, simply summed up her husband’s life as ‘one of observation’. Whether it was a pectoral fin, the flight of an albatross or the minds of men, all underwent the discipline of sustained studied observation by John Cade.

  As evening fell, John brought his observational acumen into the Stratheden’s first-class dining room and studied his fellow passengers. And as he did so we get a bit more of a glimpse of the man—of what he liked and disliked. And what he most certainly loathed—show and pomposity: ‘From the passenger list I see too we have a tame Marquis & Marchioness on board—I haven’t patted them yet.’ And in the British he found a number of ‘snob-voices’, also among some Australians, no doubt keen to be seen as more than colonial. He described them all—in his delicious vernacular Aussie style—as members of a self-styled elite, ‘the snobocracy’.

  Mummy and I are collecting voices. Our favourite is ‘snobjam’, spread thick, either English or Australian.

  Bread and water for a week would do everybody good. Sleek, fat, lazy and smug—that’s all of us—waited on hand and foot. I’m sure some of the snobocracy summon a steward to wipe their bottoms. At times I feel like slapping some haughty dame on her well rounded rump and yelling ‘Hi ya, Mum—have yer done the old man’s washing this morning?’ Still, you meet interesting people and nice people—hard working ones who are having a well-deserved holiday . . .

  And in case anyone wanted to know the kind of man that John admired, it was the captain of the vessel, with a steady-as-she-goes hand on the tiller: ‘He is a quiet firm man who keeps good discipline and knows everything that goes on.’ This was the type of man John respected: undemonstrative and clear-sighted, uncomplicated and honest. John, in his admiring portrait of the captain, might well have been drawing a template of his own ideal of a medical superintendent.

  The voyage to England put John in unfamiliar territory. Without the structure of work, he seems almost like a vessel adrift, becalmed; hemmed in by an orgy of first-class excess and sloth, it was not long before the constant consumption of food rendered him guilty of such gluttony. He looked down and observed, to his dismay, an abdominal girth expanding in a manner that he could only have fantasised about in his Changi days. Caged by the gratuitous opulence of ship life, he hankered to do something real, with solid earthy objects: a hammer with a few tacks and a shoe in need of repair would do; maybe even his Winchester single shot to blast at something across the bow.

  Within the first few weeks of travel, John started to prowl the decks, tracing and retracing his steps like a bored beast behind bars.

  On arrival in England, John and Jean headed to the Ashdown Park Hotel, Coulsdon, Surrey, their base for the next two months. Appointments had been made in advance, so John’s time was clogged with hospital visits. For the most part Jean was his secretary, wife and travel organiser, a triad of roles that weighed her down at times; a mild resentment gnawed at her as the months mounted.

  Not long after he stepped on to English soil, John received a noteworthy letter from his father, writing from Melbourne: ‘I am sending portion of this week’s A.M.J. [The Medical Journal of Australia] in which there is an interesting article entitled—“Evaluation of lithium in treatment of psychotic excitement”. The opening sentence began with a reference to the “work of Cade” in connection with this method of therapy.’ If nothing else it, in passing, reveals his fatherly pride in his son’s experimental lithium work. And it also tells us something about John; that it’s likely he had kept up a keen interest in lithium. It is unlikely that his father would have taken the time to pass on this information if he thought his son had lost interest in this marvellous metal.

  In Surrey, John headed to Netherne psychiatric hospital for a prolonged visit. This was Dr Dax’s former hospital, the place where he helped pioneer psychosurgery in England. At the time, Netherne was a prestigious institution with nearly 2000 patients wandering its grounds. John was impressed by the hospital, particularly its printing press and, of all things, its sock-making machine, glowingly putting pen to paper: ‘Netherne is a wonderful hospital. It has the reputation of being one of the best in the country and Dr Dax was largely responsible.’ There was none of the hostility in John’s tone that came to mark his relationship with Dax in later years. John was taken aback by the novelty of televisions, found even in the hospital: ‘one . . . five feet by four feet in the main hall . . . many of the wards have smaller ones of their own’. Television would not arrive in Melbourne until the end of 1956. And with an exclamation of surprise, he wrote: ‘They even breed their own rabbits.’ Which, while presumably efficient and reliable in supplying a food source, strikes one as infinitely less interesting than John’s own method of achieving the same end—wandering about the Bundoora paddocks with rifle cocked to knock off a bunny or two.

  As the tour wore on, homesickness and cold bit John’s antipodean sensibilities hard. At the start of March, snow fell in London, and for all its northern hemisphere beauty, John was aware of walking in an alien landscape. In this chilled climate, racing from hospital to hospital, John donned the same much-loved overcoat he had worn for eighteen years, with its ‘frayed cuffs, button holes and pockets’. When Jean held it up before his eyes and demanded that he buy a new one, he retorted ‘It shouldn’t fall to pieces for another two years’, believing that nothing should ever be tossed out. To keep domestic peace, he yielded to Jean, and graciously lost the argument. Within the family John would often proclaim that he only ever needed just one chair, indeed only one of just about anything. More than this was profligacy. He even took this to his love of golf; when playing the Royal Park golf course back in Melbourne, he’d happily chop around the course with just a 5-iron and putter, beating all comers.

  From Netherne, John headed to the Maudsley Hospital in South London. The Maudsley, led by the Australian Aubrey Julian Lewis (later Sir), was England’s premier academic psychiatric institution. John trekked in each day, catching a bus from Surrey into London. In between hospital visits he took the time to write to his third son, Peter, aged six, exhorting his young boy to stop writing with his left hand. Enticingly, he promised juicy presents on his return from England if Peter complied.

  John and Jean crisscrossed England like any pair of travelling Australians taking in the sights. Dotted throughout the letters home are the picture postcard images we might expect—the House of Commons, the Royal Mews, Windsor Castle and The Strand. Jean blushed, excited and self-conscious, when she reported seeing the smiling bluff figure of Winston Churchill exiting 10 Downing Street, with a half-chewed cigar and giving his signature wave to a cheering throng
of which she was one.

  After months of travel and a crushing work schedule, Jean could see John was slowing down. Jean wrote that his body was wracked by high fever; John suspected malaria, his old nemesis from his Changi days. He diagnosed himself and quaffed quinine. Struggling on without improvement, the fevers came and went. His weight dwindled until, gaunt and lined, he was admitted to Redhill County Hospital, Surrey, in early May. The diagnosis, it turned out, was not malaria but viral pneumonia. After two weeks, still coughing but improving slowly, he was discharged from hospital, a weakened but recuperating patient.

  For a spot of rejuvenation, at the end of May, John and Jean took the waters at Bath. The thermal springs, used by the Romans, had been rediscovered in the previous century delivering, John wrote, ‘half a million gallons of mineral water each day . . . People have “taken the waters”, internally and externally for years for a variety of complaints of which in the old days gluttony and gout were probably the commonest.’ John was fully aware that some of the curative properties in mineral springs around the globe were attributed to dissolved lithium salts. If he did speculate on whether Bath’s elixir contained lithium, he kept it to himself.

  In his last days in London, John passed by the ‘magnificent St Paul’s’ and travelled into ‘the crowded and mutilated East End of London and into the drab countryside of the north bank of the Thames’. His words suggest travel weariness; sagging a little, he was more than ready to come home.

  Jean was the ringmaster of this British tour—sorting out the quotidian tasks of where and when they should go, and what to see and whom to contact. As the tour drew on, her irritation with her workaholic husband wore her tolerance thin; though there is nothing to suggest that, apart from the odd exasperated remark, she was anything but a loving partner. She remained a compassionate and caring companion. The same could equally be said for John. Even during their moments of aggravation they were remarkably gentle with one another. One suspects most married couples would be happy to trade their own degree of aggravation for the Cades’.