ALL THE TIME WE THOUGHT WE HAD
Gordon Darroch was born in Norwich in 1974. After studying English Literature and German at the University of Edinburgh, where he also edited the student newspaper, he went into journalism as a reporter on the Peterborough Evening Telegraph. In 2000 he moved to Glasgow, where he worked for the Press Association, the Herald and stv News. In 2014 he emigrated to The Hague with his wife Magteld Darroch-Jansen, who died seven weeks later from breast cancer. The couple met in Italy in 1992, married in 2001 and had two children.
All the Time
We Thought We Had
A Memoir
Gordon Darroch
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.polygonbooks.co.uk
1
Copyright © Gordon Darroch, 2018
The moral right of Gordon Darroch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved.
ISBN 978 1 83697 447 2
eBook ISBN 978 0 85790 022 3
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
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For Luc, Diny, Sanneke and Marlies
‘Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.’
BARUCH SPINOZA, Ethics
‘So what if I die. Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love.’
GILLIAN ROSE, Love’s Work
Part One
Glasgow
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When the world collapses it is not with a great blast of energy, like a tsunami or a fireworks display; it simply crumbles into dust. I discovered this brutal truth on my thirty-eighth birthday, when I sat with my wife in a small whitewashed room and heard a sentence that dispatched us to the worst place in the universe.
It was a bright late August day in Glasgow in 2012. I was working in the afternoon, so Magteld and I planned to go out for lunch. We would go to a café and have something with chips, in the good auld Scottish tradition. We would celebrate life and good health and contemplate the future, which glowed enticingly just beyond the horizon. Like good middle-class couples we were engrossed in our personal goals, the most immediate of which was to move to her native Netherlands. We lacked nothing materially, but in that way peculiar to people in the Western world approaching middle age we had a nagging sense that we were lagging behind ourselves. We needed to get on. Life was neither dazzling nor disastrous, and in any case there was still plenty of time for a fresh start.
And we were in unblemished health. Ordinarily that would have been an unqualified statement. But three months earlier a lump had appeared in Magteld’s right breast. It appeared quite suddenly, hard and round like a golf ball, and firmly lodged. Her breasts were small, and there was no way, surely, that an incongruent mass could have squatted there unnoticed for long.
It was probably a cyst, the GP reassured her, but just to be sure he arranged for her to have an X-ray at the oncology department at the Victoria Infirmary. The words ‘oncology’ and ‘radiographer’ were jarring notes from a sinister realm that would resonate for months. We went on holiday to France and did our best to shut out the loitering sense of dread.
Thick clouds hung low during our two weeks in France. In the first week, on a campsite outside Gérardmer, we were ambushed by a mountain storm that smacked against the walls of our chalet and turned the stream flowing past the door into a fizzing torrent. When the clouds parted we went out and behaved as tourists do, walking along forest trails, eating in cafes, visiting museums where we knew nothing of the history, or paddling in the nearby lake. Holiday time constantly needs to be pushed forwards, in contrast to regular time which drags you along so fast you can feel your heels burning on the ground. One morning I rose early, inspired by Hemingway’s dictum about mountain-tarn swimming, and traversed a smaller lake further up the hill. When I got out I noticed two things: a sign saying ‘natation interdite’ and the sharp gravel lining the path that led back along the lakeside to the spot where I’d left my shoes. Every jabbing step felt like a pinch of retribution for my illicit swim.
Euan and Adam, our two sons, spent much of the week paddling in the rushing stream, the icy water pouring over their bare feet as they scoured the water with their fishing nets for imaginary creatures. On the brightest day, we ventured out onto the lake in a pedalo while the locals sat huddled in the beach café looking as if the sky was about to fall on their heads. And all the while we tried to banish the thoughts of what was looming when we returned and time resumed its normal cycle.
Magteld could turn minor worries – a lost bank statement, a missed appointment or an unpaid bill – into full-scale crises. In Scotland she was called up several times for jury service. Each time, she phoned the court, obtained a doctor’s note and sent it off with a cover letter explaining, regretfully, that her civic duty was incompatible with the demands of being a mother of two young boys with autism. For weeks afterwards she drove herself frantic with the conviction that some oversight or official intransigence would trigger a tyrannical sanction. Only once we moved to the Netherlands and I encountered the armoured fist of Dutch bureaucracy did I appreciate that this anxiety was not altogether rootless. Yet when a genuinely appalling situation arose she handled it with remarkable calm. Worrying wouldn’t hasten the news or soothe the pain of waiting, and, anyway, it was probably just a cyst.
We spent the second week of our holiday in a large house in the Vosges, where her parents had invited the family to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary: three daughters, their husbands and the four grandchildren. Magteld’s youngest sister, Marlies, had to call off when it turned out her first baby was due around the same time. The family gathering was upstaged by the fringe drama that the two daughters carried within them. The haze of uncontrolled events hovered on the horizon.
Magteld felt the distance from her family most keenly at birthdays. As children began to appear, these occasions became more frequent and livelier, and her sense of separation weighed heavier. I would watch her head dip, even as she made the effort to smile, as her mother reconstructed the scene over the phone. Visits to her homeland sometimes generated fanciful images in our minds of the brighter, happier family life we might enjoy there one day. We had consoled ourselves with the idyll of emigration for years, and made concessions such as giving the children Dutch middle names – Euan Hartger and Adam Floris. But it never went further than wishful talk.
It took the dull threat of cancer, that hard little lump, to turn our aspirations into something firmer. In France we discussed and developed our plans to move to The Hague, the city where Magteld’s other sister, Sanneke, lived. We set ourselves a target of three years, before Euan started secondary school. It was daunting enough to raise two autistic children when we were in the prime of health, but how would we cope if one of us had an accident, or worse? I thought of the colleague’s nephew who was killed one Monday night by a speeding driver as he left the gym, perhaps pausing to fumble for his keys in his pocket and wondering what to have for dinner in the seconds before the wayward car swatted him out of existence. Life was so fragile, so prone to random cruelties. The worst things we had imagined so far tended to be external: falling into a ravine, dying in a plane crash or walking round a corner and blundering into a knife fight. Cancer was a more intimate horror. It confronted us with the
potential nightmares that lurk in our own bodies.
On another family holiday, six years earlier, in Normandy, we had seen some of the first clear signs of Euan’s autism. Magteld’s mother, Diny, took her grandson, then three years old, in his dungarees up to a field where he had seen some cows. He took her hand without a murmur and when he got to the edge of the field gazed at them blankly.
‘Why don’t you say anything?’ Diny asked, in gentle exasperation.
Euan remained unmoved. She turned around, he took her hand again and they walked back down the hill.
Euan acquiesced in everything: if an adult held out their hand he took it with not a flicker of inquisitiveness. People reassured us he was a contented, placid child with an infectious, cackling laugh. ‘I never hear him crying,’ our next-door neighbour said approvingly. But at birthday parties we saw how other children ran around and chatted away, tasting language for the first time, while Euan stood and watched, seemingly disengaged, as if in a dream. His most familiar pose was standing in front of the radiator and singing songs memorised from his favourite CDs, running the words and instrumental sections into each other in a miasma of sound.
At nursery he played alone in the book corner. ‘He’s never any trouble,’ the staff said to reassure us. One day a senior nurse was waiting for me when I went to fetch him. ‘Let me show you something.’ She laid out a row of numbered cards, in sequence, except for two of the cards. Euan immediately spotted the inconsistency and switched the misplaced cards. ‘I’ve never seen a three-year-old do that,’ she said, astonishment etched on her face.
‘He’ll be a maths genius,’ friends said. But Euan was more of a puzzle than a prodigy: a quiet, almost eerily self-sufficient boy whose favourite pastime was watching the dial on the CD player. Friends and relatives told us he was too clever to be autistic. I know now that intelligence doesn’t preclude autism. And ‘contented’ didn’t explain the depth of his silence. Even when another child attacked Euan in nursery he didn’t yelp or cry, and it was only much later in the day that one of the nurses noticed a large bruise on his face. Euan, however, had no words to explain what had happened.
We decided we must be doing something wrong. Magteld blamed me; I blamed her; we both blamed ourselves. We spoke for him too much, people said, unaware of the hours we’d spent waiting for him to reply. Magteld would shake and clench her teeth as she tried to compel him to listen. I bowed my head in passive rage. Once Euan was fixed on an objective he developed such pronounced tunnel vision that it became an agony to deviate from it. We made the mistake one Sunday of going for a walk in Queen’s Park, where he liked to visit the snakes in the glasshouses. They were closed on Sunday, but Euan dragged me for a quarter of a mile by the hand, screaming his determination to see the snakes and only giving up, reluctantly, in front of the locked iron gates.
But autism? That was unthinkable. At the time the former doctor Andrew Wakefield was bent on convincing the world that the MMR triple vaccine was responsible for autism, and media coverage tended to focus on its most grotesque, distressing aspects. A typical news report would show a harrowed mother describing her withdrawn, emotionally frozen child, who could be seen in the background, sitting in a corner, rocking and flapping and emitting alien grunts, locked in their silent world. It was unthinkable that our bright, giggling, music-loving toddler could be one of these children.
We were frightened because we barely knew our son. We had a world to learn about him, and about ourselves.
Two weeks after our return Magteld went back to the hospital for the mammogram. ‘It’s probably a cyst,’ the radiographer said as she fumbled the stubborn mass inside Magteld’s chest. But just to be sure, she took a biopsy, a cutting from the lump, to examine under a microscope. The results would be revealed to us a week later. The appointment coincided with my birthday. So the lunch would be a double celebration, marking both my smoothly advancing years and our release from the fear of cancer that had blighted our summer.
We arrived at the clinic slightly before the prescribed time. It was the end of the morning session; only a few patients still needed to be seen, and Magteld was called almost immediately. We waited in the consulting room, all wipe-down furniture and shadowless light, for five merciless minutes. We joked about rummaging through the cabinets to see what we could steal. It was a way of not thinking about where we were, or why.
The door swung open and two women we had never seen before strode in. They were smiling cautiously. The room seemed to darken. I wondered why there were two of them, like detectives in a Sunday-night drama.
One woman sat down opposite Magteld, the other beside her, so that the four of us formed a diamond shape. The first introduced herself and her colleague. They gave only their names, not their job titles, I noticed.
In my memory this next scene plays out in slow motion, because I can scarcely bear to watch it through to the end. It was a moment when life spun on its axis, when the past and the future flipped polarities, like Alice stepping through the looking-glass: on the one side fear and missed opportunities, on the other hope and redemption. The conceit of youth is that the future is redemptive: there is always enough time to atone for past mistakes.
The surgeon, Miss Winter, is leaning slightly forward, ready to deliver her terrible payload. Her eyes are shaded, anticipating Magteld’s response. The breast nurse, Jennifer, has her legs crossed and is tweaking her long dark hair. Magteld sits with her hands in her lap, her face cramped with fear. I am suspended in time, like an actor with stage fright, swamped with the desire to flee through a locked exit.
‘I’m afraid this is a cancer that you have, Magteld,’ said Miss Winter.
Magteld burst into tears. Horror flooded her eyes. She choked out a reply. ‘I’ve got two kids. They’re autistic. I need to be there for them.’
‘We’re going to treat it,’ Miss Winter said immediately. She sketched out a plan in a language full of dissonant words: chemotherapy, mastectomy, radiotherapy, lymph nodes. The medical terms seeped out like toxic waste.
The treatment would take a year out of our lives. Instead of an alluring, hope-laden journey across the North Sea to the Netherlands we faced a year in hell, shuttling back and forth along a two-mile corridor across the south side of Glasgow between our house and the New Victoria Infirmary.
Jennifer brought out a book with a title like ‘Explaining Cancer in Simple Terms to People Still Recoiling from the Abysmal Terror’. She went through it, crossing out passages with her pen: ‘It’s not that type,’ she said as she marked a big X over one page. She flicked through again. ‘It’s not that type either, that’s worse.’ Vast sums of money had been spent on research to improve the prospects of cancer sufferers, she told us, in the manner of a car salesman describing the enhanced safety features of a family saloon. Then came the fine print. The chances of surviving had improved, but the outcome was far from certain. Tumours were inherently unpredictable. Cancer treatment was still, essentially, a crap shoot.
Later, as we sat in the garden in the glaring sunlight, eyes raw from crying, Magteld said, ‘The stupid thing is, I don’t feel ill. And yet I’ve got a life-threatening disease.’ This is the awful cowardliness of cancer: it consumes you by stealth. It is a dumb, unfeeling thing, a bug in the DNA code. It is a silent mutiny within the body, terrorism by cell division, a populist uprising that destroys the system it depends on. Within a few hours of her diagnosis I hated it viscerally.
The phone calls began as soon as we got back from the hospital.
In Dutch, kanker is one of the ugliest words in the lexicon, the common root of its most venomous swearwords. It sounds harsher than its English equivalent: a pair of velar plosives to be spat out like rotten teeth. I had called off work so I could sit in the kitchen and hear my wife speak it, again and again, in between shrieks of despair, as she relayed the news to her family.
Nobody knew what to say. The callers expected inconvenient news at worst. Miss Winter had told us that even th
e consultants were surprised by the results. In the consultation room Magteld had turned to me, her eyes filled with tears, and tried a light remark: ‘This isn’t quite what we’d planned for your birthday.’
Jennifer, said, ‘Oh, is it your birthday?’ Until then I’d sat quietly, numb with shock, but now the tears streamed from my eyes. This was when I understood that this diagnosis wasn’t just for Magteld; it would disrupt my own life, our children’s and those of her family across the sea, in ways that we had barely begun to understand.
The treatment would take a year, and give us back the shattered pieces of our lives, if we were lucky. A year in hell, as if the plague sign had been painted on our door.
In this swamp of uncertainty and medical terminology, the question that consumed us most fervently was: why? Magteld was thirty-six and a half years old. She had had two children and breastfed them both. She had only smoked for a few months, when she was seventeen. The previous autumn she had taken up running. The only history of cancer in her family was her father’s sister, who had been treated in her mid-forties and was still thriving a decade later. The biggest statistical risk was the fact we lived in Glasgow, but even that had only applied since her mid-twenties. Why had cancer sought her out?
We went to bed that night, exhausted and bewildered. As we drifted off to sleep another question took shape in the darkness: what on earth were we going to tell the children?
Maurice Sendak, a writer with a rare gift for understanding children, contended that they know everything. Hiding the truth from them, or trying to sweeten it, was not only dishonest: it was futile. Or as he put it more pithily: ‘I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.’ Adults claim they lie to children to protect them, when their real motivation is to shield themselves from the searing curiosity children display when they uncover an unpleasant truth.
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