The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  She was in a park with Sam when the hospital called. ‘I got to the ward,’ she said, ‘and they always close the ward when babies die and the woman at the door said, “Sorry, the ward’s closed,” and I was trying to say, “I know. That’s me. It’s my baby.” They let me in, put me in a room on my own and the head consultant and the nurse came in, and said, “I’m sorry, Flora’s dead.”’

  By now, we were both crying. But one of the many reasons I love Louise is that she’s so honest. ‘For all the shock of grief,’ she said, ‘all kinds of things went through my head, like the doctor put his arm around me and I thought: he’s going to know how fat and heavy I am. And another thing I felt was extensive vindication, actually. Here we all are trying to pretend life is rosy and actually it isn’t. And also relief. I’ve only got one left to worry about. I was thinking all these things.’

  They had a small funeral for Flora a few days later, just Louise, Stephen, her sisters and her parents. Louise read two of the poems from the anthology I had sent her. One of the poems I had marked out for her was Raymond Carver’s ‘Late Fragment’. A very short poem for a very short life. The title of the book was Staying Alive. In the circumstances, it wasn’t ideal. But the thing is, one of her twins did stay alive. Beatrice was in hospital for five months. She was on a monitor to make sure she didn’t stop breathing. Louise was trained to resuscitate her if her breathing stopped. She rented the cheapest house she could find and had Beatrice sleeping, with oxygen tanks, in her room. By the time she bought a house, within relatively easy travelling distance of the hospital, she could breathe well enough without the tanks.

  ‘There was a possibility,’ said Louise, ‘that she’d be absolutely fine. Some kids are.’ But it soon became clear that Beatrice was not. I have met Beatrice many times, but I have never been entirely clear what she can and can’t do. ‘She can’t do anything,’ said Louise. ‘She’s thirteen now, but she’s like a two-month-old baby. She’s profoundly brain damaged. She has six per cent of the vision you or I have and she’s completely deaf. She can’t stand up, she can’t sit up, she can’t really hold her head up. She is,’ she said, so matter-of-factly that I had to fight the tears again, ‘about as disabled as you get.’

  Louise went from being a happy and successful publisher in London, on an exciting sabbatical in Japan, to being the full-time carer, in a tiny village in Scotland, for a child who can’t even lift her head. Stephen is still in Japan during term-time, so Louise spends most of her life as a single mum. When she was in London, she had the busiest social life of anyone I knew. Now her life is one of nappies and oxygen tanks and emergency trips to the hospital. Does she, I asked, feel like a prisoner? There was a very long pause. ‘I did,’ she said. ‘But for the first few years of Beatrice’s life, it was very, very hard work looking after her and I didn’t really have time to think.’

  For most of my adult life, I haven’t been to school reunions. I didn’t want to be the one who didn’t have a partner, didn’t have children, the one, in fact, who didn’t seem to have grown up. For years, I watched the lives of my school friends from afar. I didn’t know how they had managed to get the husband, the house, the family and the career when I couldn’t even seem to find a nice bloke for a weekend in Brighton. I thought they had perfect lives, or as perfect as lives ever get.

  When I finally went to a school reunion a few years ago, I found out that one has a daughter with anorexia. One has a daughter with severe anxiety. One has a child who left school with almost no qualifications and seems to be stuck in low-wage dead-end work.

  Another friend called about a column I had written about gangs. His son had got caught up in one, he said, and ended up in jail. When people first hold a baby in their arms, they don’t have dreams of visiting them in jail.

  I don’t know how my friends have coped with these situations. I have never really understood how Mimi and Louise have coped with theirs, or how they have done it with such grace. But now I have sat down with them and listened to their stories and later I will tell you some of the things I have learnt.

  When I talk to them, I can see the love. I can certainly see the love. But love, as my mother will tell you, can come at quite a price.

  Depression with a smile

  I have the genes to crack up. An awful lot of us do. About 10 per cent of us, according to mental health charity Mind, will have some form of mental illness in our lives, but in my family the odds seem to be higher. My father’s side of the family has more than its fair share of brilliant minds that can flip into depression. At a dinner party, my father could transfix the table with his dry wit. But just one weather forecast could set the tone for the weekend. ‘Well, that’s it, then,’ he would mutter, if the weather man said rain. And then there would certainly be clouds.

  I’m a mix of my mother’s vivaciousness and my father’s tendency to gloom. When I was a small child, they called me ‘the sunshine girl’. I was plump and smiley and laughed all the time. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, that sunny smile had been swapped for something more like a scowl. It was partly adolescence. Of course it was partly adolescence. But that adolescence seemed to go on for a very long time.

  When I discovered Thomas Hardy, I thought I had found my soulmate. It wasn’t Tess of the D’Urbervilles who hooked me in, poor Tess who dug turnips, was tricked by a libertine and was marched off to be hanged before she could be reunited with her Angel Clare. No, it was Jude the Obscure. Here was someone who understood me! Someone who wanted to study among dreaming spires, someone who believed in the life of the mind. Someone, in fact, who tried hard to fulfil his dreams, but felt that his lonely struggle was doomed. ‘Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble,’ says Hardy at a moment of particularly intense misery for Jude. ‘But nobody did come, because nobody does.’ Like I say, not the sunshine girl any more.

  When my sister was fourteen, she went to stay with a Norwegian family. She and the younger daughter stayed with the girls’ grandmother in a tiny island off the western coast. My sister wrote a letter to my parents saying that she was ‘terribly homesick’. When she got back, she hardly spoke. At night, we heard heavy steps up and down the landing and the sound of doors being slammed. Three weeks after she got back, she disappeared. She was, my mother said, in a ‘unit’. It took a while for my brother Tom and me to understand that it was the adolescent unit of a mental hospital.

  When Caroline came out, I hardly recognized her. She still had matchstick arms and legs, but now she had a swollen tummy as if she was just a couple of months away from giving birth. Her face was covered in spots, her hands shook and she was hunched over like an old woman. When she went out in the sun, her skin turned red. She walked as if she was on the edge of a cliff she might fall off. It was, my mother said, the pills that made her skin go red, the pills that made her hands shake, the pills that made her fat. The pills, my mother said, were making her better, but she didn’t seem better to me.

  For my sister, everything was a struggle. While my brother and I got straight As in almost everything, she battled to scrape a pass. Tom and I went to the local grammar schools. She went to the local secondary modern and was put in the bottom stream. When she was seventeen, she was given a special prize by her school for ‘outstanding effort’ in German. I was twelve and thought it wasn’t effort that mattered. I thought what mattered was what you achieved.

  I was seventeen when Caroline’s illness finally had a name. Schizophrenia seemed like a long word for the shadow that hung over us all. Schizophrenia, with a dash of depression. I have had times in my life when I have felt so desperate that I have wanted, as Keats did, to ‘Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget’ the ‘weariness, the fever, and the fret’, but I don’t think despair is the same as depression. When I lost my job, I was full of grief and rage, but I’m not sure I would say I was depressed.

  My cousin Robin knows all about depression. He’s the only one of my cousins who lives in London and he
’s not just my cousin, but my friend. He sings in the BBC Symphony Chorus and has taught me most of what I know about classical music. I still don’t know all that much, but I do know what I like and I honestly couldn’t imagine life without Handel and Bach. If you have heard Joyce DiDonato singing the libretto from Handel’s Rinaldo, you’ll know what I mean. When she sang ‘Lascia ch’io pianga’, in her pure, electric voice, at a recent concert at the Barbican, it was like a thunderbolt from heaven, or hell. Allow me to weep, sings Almirena in the opera. Yes, allow me to weep. Sometimes we have reasons to weep.

  Robin had his first breakdown when he was seventeen. ‘It was the pressure of approaching A level exams,’ he told me, when I invited him over for a Sunday roast in exchange for a grilling. I am, by the way, quite good at Sunday roast. You just unwrap the polythene from a chicken or a piece of lamb and stick it in the oven. It’s quite hard to burn. Even for me, whose cooking attempts often set off the smoke alarm, it’s really quite hard to get wrong.

  ‘I’d been very successful at secondary school,’ Robin told me, ‘but I was asked to write an essay on something I hadn’t been doing essays on and I suddenly found I couldn’t do it. I found I could not express myself. My essays had been getting longer and longer and less and less productive. In the end, I walked out of a couple of A level exams.’ Not long after, he was diagnosed with depression. ‘The GP told me I was a smiling depressive,’ he said, with a smile. ‘I was still smiling although depressed and very anxious.’

  When Robin said this, I remembered the time I had burst into tears in a kind of group therapy session on a ‘holistic holiday’, because I had been ill and could not get well. ‘Did you know that when you cry,’ someone told me, ‘you smile?’ I was so shocked that I looked in the mirror the next time I cried. He was right that the corners of my mouth turned up, but it looked, I thought, more like the painted-on smile of a clown.

  Robin was put on antidepressants, which eventually made things even worse. ‘It was one particular drug,’ he said, ‘which is now not used, that pushed me over the edge several times, into mania. I lost track of time. I did strange things. I had all sorts of ideas and connections about how things would work. I became very animated. I filled out my UCCA form in a weird way, with lots of strange writing. One day I cut down a lot of plants in the garden, thinking that extreme pruning would make them grow better.’

  This, he explained, is why he has never wanted to get drunk. I had wondered, over the years, why he would often stick to one glass of wine, while I would be knocking back my third. ‘Once,’ he said, ‘I was watching a programme about Rosicrucians. It was all very mystical and it pushed me into a second bout of mania.’ A couple of years later, when he had, in spite of his struggles, made it to Oxford, he was put back on a much smaller dose of the same drug. ‘I remember someone came to visit me in my room,’ he said, ‘and I organized my books into a kind of skewed pile, a sort of spiral. I’d do some very strange things and get all sorts of strange ideas about what things meant.’

  In the end, Robin had to leave Oxford. They kept his place open for him, but he decided he wouldn’t be able to cope if he went back. And then he told me something I never knew. ‘I took a lot of paracetamol that night. I think my parents had visitors. I had my stomach pumped. I was in for a couple of nights, on a drip. In a strange way,’ he said, and this time the smile was wry, ‘it seemed to take the pressure off.’

  I thought of Uncle Maurice and of Auntie Bell, who is probably the person in our extended family who looks most like me. We are made, in so many ways, of the same stuff. Her hands, like mine, go blue even when it isn’t all that cold. Our tiny hands are frozen. Well, perhaps they’re not tiny, but they are certainly frozen. And now I thought her heart must have been nearly frozen, too.

  ‘When I phoned my mother from my fortieth birthday party,’ said Robin, ‘she told me that the worst time in their lives was when I was at home and ill. Weeping for months, with no sense of direction, unable to commit to any plans. I think they fought very hard so I wouldn’t be admitted to hospital. I think it was partly because they were aware how difficult it had been for Caroline and your parents.’

  My mother does not like to talk about that time, but I know, because she has shown me her diaries, that the second time my sister was put in a mental hospital, my mother watched her change before her eyes. In the end, Caroline refused to believe that my mother was her mother. My mother, her mother, fought like a tigress to get her out.

  It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for Maxine’s mother when she found her eleven-year-old daughter trying to drown herself in a stream. ‘It was,’ said Maxine, ‘the first time I tried to kill myself. I kept trying to lie in this stream and keep my head under water and of course I couldn’t, and then I remembered Virginia Woolf and tried to use stones.’ She was eleven and she ‘remembered Virginia Woolf’? ‘I read everything,’ said Maxine, ‘it was one of the ways I survived.’

  I met Maxine through a friend. She was happy to talk to me about her depression, but she didn’t want to use her real name. There is still a stigma. There’s no use pretending that there isn’t still a stigma, and what she told me made me feel sick.

  ‘When I was three and a half,’ she said, ‘my mother took me to play school for the first time. I walked in and they all ran away from me. None of them would speak to me, and they were all pointing and laughing. And there was a black-haired girl who suddenly said, “You’re a nigger and niggers have to go to custody.”’ Even now, in this café in Soho, the word is like a grenade. ‘Weirdly, the word I latched on to,’ said Maxine, ‘was custody because I liked custard, so I asked her what it meant. And she said, “Custody is prison and there are witches in prison.” I suddenly had a very strong vision of a witch stirring a cauldron of custard in a cell and that I would have to be in there. I don’t think I ever asked her what nigger meant.’

  Maxine is the daughter of a light-skinned Jamaican mother and a white English father. She grew up in a small village in the New Forest. That first conversation at nursery school set the tone for the rest of her childhood. At lunchtime, the children all sat on a carpet to eat their packed lunches. ‘I was very anxious that I had the same food as the other children,’ she said, ‘because that was the only time in the day they would touch me, because there wasn’t quite enough space. I realized that the only way I would be tolerated, literally allowed to sit on the same carpet where occasionally our knees would touch, was if I was perfect.’

  It wasn’t, it turned out, just the children who were racist. ‘The teachers that weren’t racist,’ she explained, ‘would comfort me by saying “you aren’t a nigger, because you’re not one of those women in Africa with a pot on their head”. But some teachers would call me a nigger and other stuff as well. It was so much to do with cleanliness and dirt and that being brown meant you were dirty. They would make me sit at a desk on my own. I would go home and wonder what a wog was.’

  This was not in the 1950s. It was in the 1970s and 1980s. No wonder Maxine was depressed and anxious throughout her teens. When she finally escaped to university, and then heard that the person who had encouraged her to apply had committed suicide, she had a breakdown. ‘I felt quite outside my body,’ she said, ‘but mainly I just couldn’t function and this was always a sign for me. I couldn’t really read. It’s like being used to having a car with a big engine and one time you go to overtake somebody on the motorway and you put your foot down and there’s nothing there and the car’s just freewheeling.’

  Depression slows you down. Everyone I know who has suffered from depression has said that their depression has slowed them down. There are times when it’s hard enough to function in the world even when your brain is in full gear. When it isn’t, it’s like being sent to climb a mountain without climbing shoes, a pickaxe or even a proper coat. It’s a cold, dark, terrifying place.

  Robin has had just one bout of serious depression since that overdose at the age of twenty-one. Maxin
e has had a few more. But they have both continued to hold down good jobs. Maxine works at a senior level for a charity. Robin works in IT for a bank. Most of the time, they are fine. They have both been in such screaming mental pain that they have wanted to die, but most of the time they are fine. They have both learnt that when you feel you’re in a cold, dark place, that isn’t usually where you stay.

  I first met Frieda Hughes at the Ledbury poetry festival. I was meant to be introducing her reading, but nearly missed it because I had got stuck in traffic after picking up a new car. I had recently taken over as director of the Poetry Society, and decided that perhaps now I could afford to swap my father’s old Nissan Micra for something that didn’t look as if it had been caught in a hail of bullets. I took out a loan, bought a What Car? magazine and tracked down a second-hand silver Mazda MX-5. My father drove me to the garage to pick it up. It was only when I was sweating in a ten-mile traffic jam that I realized I couldn’t work out how to open the windows. By the time I got to Ledbury five hours later, I felt like a boiled ham.

  Frieda, who is tall and stately and beautiful, was reading from her second collection of poems, Stonepicker. Her first, Wooroloo, had been published two years before. She’s a painter as well as a poet and her poems, like her paintings, are full of bleak landscapes, animals and rocks. She writes about love and greed and pain and sorrow. Her voice is strong and clear. And she writes about death. In the last poem in Stonepicker, she has a conversation with Death. ‘You took him too soon,’ she says to Death, as she sits by her father’s coffin. ‘You could have left him longer.’ In answer, Death gloats. ‘I let him ripen on his tree / Like a heavy fruit,’ he boasts. He could, he says, have waited ‘until his stalk broke’, but his victory was ‘To take him at the peak of his / Perfection.’