Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley

by Dame Stephanie Shirley

  Eventually, after a morning at Amersham social services when I simply couldn’t stop weeping, I was allocated a social worker, which probably didn’t make that much practical difference but did at least give me someone else with whom to share the mental burden. I also managed to get an hour or so of daily help from some teenage sisters who lived nearby. They were called Eke, and used to take it in turns. They had no special expertise, but simply having an extra pair of eyes and an extra pair of hands - and an extra heart - can, in such circumstances, make the difference between survival and despair.

  But the involvement of the social services brought with it a fresh problem. The approved policy in state agencies for dealing with adolescents as violent as Giles was to sedate them. This was understandable: the only alternatives were physical restraint - itself fraught with problems - or letting him run amok. But there is something distasteful, to the parent, about letting your child be drugged into submission, and Derek, in particular, was horrified by the whole idea.

  We never did resolve the issue. Sometimes Giles would be sedated; often he wasn’t. Sometimes, when he was, life became briefly more tolerable, although it always left me with a slightly sick feeling to see him drugged. But the subject provoked some terrible rows between Derek and me, in which he would argue that Giles’s needs had to come before ours, and imply (very hurtfully) that I was putting my business before my son, while I would argue that it simply wasn’t possible for me to manage Giles without some kind of medical intervention. I would have given up work altogether, for ever, on the spot, if it would have done Giles any good; but it wouldn’t. The sedation issue and the working mother issue were unconnected.

  There was no middle ground: Derek’s aversion to “drugs” was more instinctive than theoretical. So we argued until we could argue no more, or until some crisis involving Giles distracted us, and then we fell into miserable exhaustion. This went on for months. I don’t think our marriage ever fully recovered.

  Once, we watched a snatch of a nature documentary together on television. (We never watched an entire programme together: there would always be some kind of interruption.) The programme showed a cuckoo laying an egg in the nest of, I think, a sparrow, and the resulting fledgling gradually taking over the nest. The mother and father sparrows were working themselves to exhaustion trying to feed the young cuckoo, which simply grew bigger and bigger and more and more demanding, dominant and aggressive. In a rare moment of marital harmony, Derek and I looked at each other and shared the unspoken thought: this is what our lives have become.

  The depressing thing was that, no matter how hard we worked, things never got better. We never had proper meals - just grabbed mouthfuls of food as the opportunity arose. Every waking moment when we weren’t at work was devoted to clearing up after Giles or trying to forestall the disasters he seemed intent on causing. We had bolts on all the windows and locks on all the cupboards (although most things we possessed were broken anyway). We lived in a perpetual state of high alert. And Giles just grew bigger, his rages stronger, his seizures more alarming.

  I simply cannot understand, now, how we got through this period, which coincided with some of the most stressful business episodes of my career. When I try to describe what it was like, I inevitably focus on particular examples and incidents; but my overwhelming memory is of a misery far more pervasive than that. It was like living half my life in a different world, permanently soured with pain; or perhaps like living in a horror film. Sometimes I thought I was going mad. In retrospect, I probably was. There was certainly a phase when we talked again, but seriously this time, about the possibility of calling in an exorcist. And there were many black months when I contemplated a more extreme solution.

  One image still makes my body tense up with remembered horror. In the Old Schoolhouse there was a big, double-height room, with high windows, which had once been the school room itself. The ceiling sloped steeply upwards from two sides, parallel to the roof, and a huge oak beam crossed the room at the base of these slopes. There was also a kind of gallery at one end of the room, with steps leading up to it, where pupils’ younger siblings had once been left to amuse themselves during lessons.

  One day, at the end of some long, exhausting tantrum, we found ourselves up in the gallery, all in a heap on the floor. I looked through the railings at the beam, and the thought came into my head that it was at an ideal height for all three of us to hang ourselves from it. We could put the nooses round our necks while in the gallery and then simply jump over the railings. Perhaps that was the only answer, so that all three of us could finally be at peace.

  I said as much to Derek. Did I mean it? Yes. At least, it was, unquestionably, a serious thought. It had been a long time since I had had any long-term thoughts about our futures beyond “When will this all be over?”, and I had been sufficiently tempted by such ideas already to have bought a guide to voluntary euthanasia a few months earlier. (The book in question was banned in the UK, but I had picked it up on a business trip to the US.) Perhaps I was exploring such issues with the unconscious intention of using them as a way of crying for help from Derek. But now, as we lay in our unhappy heap on the gallery floor, I simply proposed to Derek, quite calmly, that we should make a family suicide pact and bring this miserable parody of a life to an end.

  It was typical of Derek, with his visceral traditional values, that he refused; but indicative of our misery that he did not dismiss the proposal out of hand. He could follow my reasoning but couldn’t overcome the objection that, ultimately, it felt wrong. He also pointed out that, for Giles, it wouldn’t be suicide - which I think was the point at which I more or less dropped the idea.

  But the trouble with intractable situations like ours is that the alternative to despair is not acceptance or hope. It is simply a different form of despair. We struggled on, at home and at work. But we remained at breaking-point.

  In November 1975, the Post Office moved its Research Station from Dollis Hill to Martlesham in Suffolk. Rather than move with it, Derek opted to switch to a fairly lowly administrative job, for the same employer, based in Old Street, in central London. This was a considerable sacrifice for a man of his intellect and creativity, but relocating to Suffolk would have meant leaving me to manage Giles - and the company - single-handed all week. For all the strains that our marriage was now under, he would never have contemplated doing a thing like that.

  So he knuckled down to his unstimulating new role (never once complaining), while I got used to the fact that - even with this compromise on his part - he would now be leaving home earlier each morning and getting back later each night. I could hardly complain: it was Derek, not I, who was making the sacrifice, and part of his thinking was that he could put his under-utilised brain-power and energy towards finding ways of bettering the family’s lot. In the short-term, however, it felt - as most things did by then - like one more burden to be endured; one more thing to add to the great mass of things that threatened to break me.

  Finally, towards the end of the long, hot summer of 1976, I broke.

  The strain had been showing for a while, even outside the home, in undramatic ways. I was tense, irritable, joyless; I doubt if I had laughed all year. Work had begun to seem like a series of burdens rather than a series of challenges to be relished. I was smoking 60 cigarettes a day, which can’t have helped, and I had forgotten what it was like to have a proper night’s sleep - which can’t have helped either. I don’t think my decision-making had become erratic, but it was certainly becoming uninspired. I was tired all the time, prone to headaches and inclined to snap at people for no good reason.

  Then something more frightening happened. I was driving along a dual carriageway one afternoon and, going over a fly-over, felt suddenly agitated. The road seemed terribly frail and narrow; the drop below a huge, gaping abyss. I clung tightly to the steering-wheel, heart pounding, as the car seemed to teeter on the edges above the windy
void. By the time I had reached ground level again, I was shaking with terror.

  A week or so later, it happened again - and then again and again, on bridges, fly-overs, anywhere where it was possible to imagine a car slipping off the edge of a road and plunging downwards. I had never suffered from vertigo before, but now it began to loom in the background of every working day.

  By the autumn, it was in the foreground. I had stopped driving by then, but I would suffer vertigo if I saw a bridge on television. Big staircases made me giddy. Sometimes, too, the walls of rooms would seem to be closing in on me, angrily, threatening to crush me.

  I gritted my teeth and carried on, treating these occasional panic attacks as just one more trouble that had to be endured. But I did recognise that the pressure must have been getting to me, and, as a result, I looked into the possibility of giving myself a break from work, now that the company’s fortunes had stabilised. Derek and I got as far as agreeing that I should try to take a trip to Australia to see Renate. But it was too late. I was growing more hysterical by the day, and, as the year’s end approached, my panic attacks became more frequent and more intense.

  I was on my way to Manchester for a business meeting when I realised, abruptly, that I could not continue. The train I was travelling in seemed to be lurching forward at a suicidal speed; the walls of the carriage were alternately closing in on me and threatening to fall apart; the blur of ground outside the windows seemed miles below; my heart was racing and everything was spinning around me. Nauseous and terrified, I scrambled off the train when it paused at Altrincham. For a while, I just stood on the platform, sobbing, as the train pulled away, seeming to take with it all my hopes and ambitions; all my inner belief that, somehow, I would always stay on top of things.

  Then I found a pay-phone and called for help.

  We had been making corporate use of a medical service provided by the Institute of Directors (because with a company as large as F International now was there were always health issues of one kind or another to be dealt with). I spoke to the doctor who handled our corporate check-ups - Dr Harvey-Smith - and was summoned to see him immediately. I am not sure how I got to London. I suppose I must eventually have got on a train, but I have no recollection of doing so. None the less, by the end of that afternoon I was in Dr Harvey-Smith’s surgery, weeping and trembling on his couch.

  By the end of the evening, I was in hospital. Dr Harvey-Smith wouldn’t even let me go home. That is more or less all I remember. I was, it seemed, having a full-scale nervous breakdown.

  All those years of fighting, all those years of accumulated emotional scar tissue, seemed to fragment and fall away from me, leaving me as vulnerable and helpless as the five-year-old child I had been the last time my life had changed irrevocably at a railway station, 37 years earlier.

  12: Time Out

  PEOPLE WITH no experience of such traumas sometimes imagine that a nervous breakdown must be rather pleasant. If your life is normally an unrelenting ordeal of stress and exhaustion, what could be sweeter than an interval of complete peace, in which all responsibility is taken from your hands and all the worries that you have been grappling with are simply released, like captive birds?

  I had probably indulged in such speculation myself. I will never do so again.

  The reality of losing control of your mind is so awful, so destructive of your sense of self, that the trauma overshadows all other considerations. Thirty-five years later, I can still hardly bear to contemplate this episode - perhaps for fear that, if I try to re-live those experiences, I may actually bring them back to life.

  All I can say with confidence is that I was in St Anthony’s Hospital - in North Cheam, Surrey - for a month or so. I slept a lot; I wept a lot. I felt overwhelmingly weak. The image that always comes into my mind when I think of that time is of trying to get out of a bath one morning and being unable to complete even that simple task without crying for help.

  I suppose that there must have been a momentary relief in this unconditional surrender, after all those years of believing that no challenge in the world was too great for me to overcome. But behind the relief was a raging frustration. I had vowed never to give up, and here I was, unable even to get out of the bath. I had vowed never to abandon Giles and was now doing nothing for him at all. I had vowed to conquer the world with my company and instead couldn’t even make the simplest telephone call. I had let down my colleagues, let down my son, let down my husband, let down my elderly dependants. Lots of women drop the occasional ball when trying to juggle competing responsibilities. I had dropped the lot.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind was the additional tormenting thought that all those doubters in the past - all those people who had said “She’ll never cope” - would now be saying “I told you so.” Each time this thought came into my head, I would be filled with a furious urge to pull myself together. Each time I tried to do so, I found myself falling apart again.

  Derek visited as often as he could, and tried to reassure me, but he was in a scarcely better state himself. Giles had been temporarily hospitalised, as a necessary response to the emergency, in Borocourt subnormality hospital (formerly Borocourt Certified Institution for Mental Defectives), in Rotherfield Peppard, near Henley-on-Thames. I think this may have been part of Dr Harvey-Smith’s intention in sending me to hospital. He had realised that, whatever else happened, Derek, Giles and I could not carry on as we had been. Neither Derek nor I would voluntarily accept that necessary conclusion, so he had to make us do so.

  Derek now had to divide his time between visiting Giles (on the Oxfordshire-Buckinghamshire-Berkshire border), visiting me (in Surrey) and going to work (in London), while continuing to live in Amersham. He had no one to confide in or to turn to for advice, no one with whom to share the burden. Like me, he had been sustaining himself with the simple mantra: “I will not give in.” Yet now circumstances were forcing him to do so. For 13 years, he had spared himself nothing, making every possible sacrifice rather than take the “easy” option - which we had been advised to take when Giles was first diagnosed - of putting him in an institution. And now he was being given no choice. Dr Harvey-Smith had repeated conversations with him, as he did with me at St Anthony’s, and each time the gist was the same: I would not be allowed to leave hospital until Giles was receiving proper medical care in a proper medical institution.

  What he hadn’t said (but could have done) was that I would never become well enough to leave hospital until I gave up my cherished sense of indestructability. The belief that I could control my destiny by will-power alone had been central to my world-view - and had been exposed as an illusion. And the idea that “recovery” meant picking up my life at the point where I had lost my grip of it was equally fallacious. “Business as usual” would have meant going back to living on the edge of a breakdown, pretending that nothing could damage me. But none of us is truly invulnerable, and those of us who deny our vulnerability are merely storing up trouble. For real recovery, I needed a new world-view.

  Slowly, we accepted the inevitable. Our lives needed to change, radically. The only question was how.

  Giles remained in Borocourt while options were explored for a more long-term solution. I was allowed to leave St Anthony’s and went to convalesce in a hostel attached to the old Quaker meeting-house at Jordans, near Beaconsfield. Here I began to feel that I was healing. It was hard not to. The accommodation was plain, with a communal dining-room and a simple garden, but the atmosphere was extraordinary: there was no hint of the noise and haste of the wider world, and the air seemed to glow with stillness and peace. Nobody asked questions; nobody sought anything from me; nobody expected me to be anything more than a simple human being, with basic needs for food, sleep and spiritual contemplation. When, years later, I came across Max Ehrmann’s poem, “Desiderata”, its opening lines immediately put me in mind of Jordans: “Go placidly amid the noise a
nd haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence...” The poem and the place have been associated in my mind ever since.

  Derek visited regularly, crisscrossing England in the stifling heat in an old car with no air-conditioning. My mother was in Australia, visiting Renate, so through no fault of hers this episode in my life largely passed her by. But I did receive one rather moving visit from Uncle. I don’t think he really understood what had happened to me: people of his generation didn’t have nervous breakdowns. He certainly didn’t know what to say to me. Yet he somehow managed to convey (though he would never have used the phrase) the fact that he was “there for me”, and it was reassuring to reflect that, in that case, perhaps my world hadn’t entirely collapsed.

  Within a couple of weeks, I was well enough to go home. It would be another six months before I felt well enough to go back to work, but at least I had begun to pick up the pieces.

  It felt strange being with Derek again. After all the traumas of the past 18 months - including the great battles about sedation - it was hard to recover a sense of intimacy or trust. We wished one another well, but I think we had got into the habit of each thinking of the other as part of the troublesome world that needed to be dealt with - part of the problem rather than the solution. There was still love between us, but I no longer thought of him as the other half of my soul. He was a separate human being, with many virtues and some faults. Any closeness with him would need to be worked at.

  Derek, for his part, felt betrayed. His battle to protect Giles from (as he saw them) the twin evils of institutionalisation and sedation had ended in defeat, and I must have seemed less like an ally than one of the enemy who had defeated him. He still did his best to care for me. But there wasn’t, at that point, much trust.