by Roger Cohen
Willie tried to rein her in, but he was the weaker character. He volunteered at the Jewish orphanage and old age home. Increasingly he retreated into his silences, his depression. Sue and Peta grew up with one thing clear in their minds: this was not a normal country. Both would emigrate, Sue to Israel, Peta to the United States.
Tens of thousands of Jews, about a third of the South African community, have upped and left since my childhood, because they could not see a future. They could not see Mandela walking out of jail with a message of reconciliation.
My parents made their decision to go in early 1957, as the Treason Trial got under way and the poison of apartheid infiltrated deeper. It was a hard choice. They had gone back to South Africa with me in 1955 because that was where they felt they belonged. My father later said of this return, in a newspaper interview, that he went “as a son and not as a scientist, I love Africa, it is in my bone and marrow and it is there for good.” This love was a victim to hatred. It could not withstand the ambient racist venom of the Group Areas Act. My parents departed a couple of months after Rabbi Ungar. They never again lived in South Africa.
Asphyxiated by a country where now only white brains counted, my father felt he had no choice, despite what he felt in his bone and his marrow. My mother was pregnant with my sister, Jenny. Over the previous two years, she had given birth to me in England, returned to South Africa, and now, at the age of twenty-seven, headed for London again. So it is that political gusts buffet personal lives, leading in my mother’s case to the shock of displacement and breakdown.
We were in South Africa, and we seemed happy there, with all the family around us, yet back we went to England, where life was lonelier. And even in South Africa there was something not quite right: that fear and disorientation I had first felt in the arms of the black nanny who placed me on the parapet in Cape Town and intimated I could fall. When the disorientation faded and I discovered words, I understood the uneasy state in which South Africa lived, its double character, with the underclass always out there at the horizon on the brink of eruption. For a while I refused to go. When I went, I strayed across the lines, I touched the troubling flesh of the stranger. I wanted to know the other side.
It would all end badly because it had to, with the hot embers from the braais rammed down white throats, the country clubs on fire, the gold-birthed European annex on the Witwatersrand reef upended, and blood spilling red across the swimming pools of Houghton. The barefoot black mob would trudge out of the dust to take back what was theirs. This was what we believed. Calamity was inevitable.
So return was out of the question. My mother lived in her own painful state of suspension in Britain. Keeping the surface intact after her breakdown demanded a lot of energy. Below her was a maelstrom, as terrifying as any black storm gathering at the horizon. She dreamed of going back to South Africa, ever more so as she grew older. But we had decided to become English. Sometimes in life it is just too late. To forge new British identities, it seemed better, or at least easier, to forget. In the family we were not good at talking about the toll of “the situation” in South Africa and the consequent flinging of Isaac Michel’s grandchildren and Polly Cohen’s children back across various oceans. We were not good at tracing matters back to their roots.
The apartheid South African state was watching even its exiles. Sue and Peta Michel traveled to Europe in the mid-1960s. They saw my parents and the Bakers, now in London. In Paris, Sue fell in love with a Frenchman and decided to stay on for a while. She called at the South African Embassy and asked if they knew of any jobs. Yes, as it happened, the embassy needed a receptionist. Every day Sue would answer the phone: “Ambassade d’Afrique du Sud.”
Ruth Michel (Googoo’s wife), June, me, Joyce Michel (Willie’s wife), and Flossie in London
She made a few calls of her own. The embassy listened in. She had contacted the Bakers, who were like surrogate parents. “We note, Miss Michel, that you have been in touch with people who are enemies of the South African government, and we must ask you to leave at once.” Fortunately, her love affair was ending anyway.
The situation at home in South Africa had become very difficult. When Sue and Peta were in their late teens, Joyce called them into her bedroom to tell them something important.
“Your father is going to have electroshock treatment tomorrow to treat his depression.”
“Electroshock treatment! Why? What’s wrong?”
“The psychiatrist, Dr. Perk, says it’s the only way to get him out of depression. Shame, he’s been very bad.”
Willie had seemed low and forlorn to Sue, but she had not guessed the extent of his anguish. Depression was a nonsubject. Joyce took Willie to the hospital. When he came back, he looked dazed. His personality had changed. He seemed jolted, far away. After a few days he rallied, but the depression returned in its cyclical way, and back he went for more electroshock treatment. When their father came home, the girls always pretended that the ECT had not taken place. For the rest of his life, they never talked about it. Sue knew Willie to be a warm and loving person, so his withdrawal was particularly painful. Silence became a family reflex, a survival mechanism, whatever its cost.
Shame, depression brought trouble for us all. Willie’s ECT in Johannesburg in 1959 followed that of his niece, my mother, the previous year in London.
CHAPTER 7
Patient Number 9413
June Cohen was a woman hollowed out like a tree struck by lightning. She had been blighted. I wanted to know why.
On a blustery February morning I boarded the 8:50 from Waterloo to Woking in Surrey. The train was empty, commuters headed in the opposite direction. Ever since my mother’s first suicide attempt in 1978, I had been trying to fill in gaps. She was gone in my infancy, and when she returned, nobody spoke about the absence. She had suffered an acute depression after my sister’s birth in 1957. I learned much later that she was in hospitals and sanatoriums and asylums being shot full of insulin and electricity. The resulting spasms, seizures, convulsions, and comas were supposed to jar her from her “puerperal psychosis.”
In 1957 my mother was treated at a psychiatric hospital in Wimbledon. For several weeks during the early summer of 1958, she was injected with insulin at London’s St. Mary’s Hospital. After each session she would be revived with a nasal feed of liquid glucose. When she failed to respond, she was discharged on July 8. Soon afterward she was admitted to the Holloway Sanatorium, the sprawling Victorian Gothic fantasy of a nineteenth-century tycoon, Thomas Holloway, who amassed a fortune through the sale of dubious medicinal concoctions.
None of Holloway’s remedies was any more than a placebo. Joy Whitfield, a nurse at the sanatorium during the time my mother was confined there, told me his ointments were composed of olive oil (44 percent), lanolin (30 percent), resin (15 percent), and a mixture of white and yellow beeswax. The pills consisted of aloes (37 percent), rhubarb root (18.75 percent), ginger (18.75 percent), potassium sulfate (9.5 percent), and small amounts of cardamom, cinnamon, salt, and saffron. But Holloway understood marketing. London trams were covered with his ads. They promised miracle cures. Sales of his bogus stuff soared. Holloway went global. He had an office in Manhattan. Only in France was he not represented, because the French insisted the composition of medicines be disclosed.
Childless, Holloway and his wife, Jane, pursued grandiose philanthropy with their fortune. They built a ladies’ college inspired by French châteaux and a sanatorium in the likeness of the Cloth Hall at Ypres in Belgium. The Prince of Wales, in the company of a few friends who had been attending the nearby Ascot Races, opened the sanatorium at Virginia Water, west of London, in a ceremony on June 15, 1885. The great heap of gabled redbrick buildings were filled with paintings, a nod to a nineteenth-century French theory that the mad respond to visual stimulation. In some rooms small devils lurked in the exuberant design, as if to remind patients of what they were there to excise.
A square redbrick tower rose 145 feet into
the damp air of Surrey. The lugubrious dining hall boasted stained-glass windows and a magnificent cantilevered timber ceiling. Hand-painted medieval bestiaries adorned the overblown Gothic entrance hall, with its oak wainscot and blue and red medallions in the ceiling inscribed with “TH” and “JH,” the initials of the founders. In the Great Hall, where tea dances were held once a week, a picture of Holloway was flanked by portraits of Queen Victoria, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Nelson, William Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth, Francis Bacon, Benjamin Disraeli, and other English notables—the company the founder felt he should keep. Every inch of space was decorated. Images of philosophers weighing the world’s cares on their scales abutted elaborate floral patterns. On the recommendation of the Commissioners in Lunacy [sic], a chapel was added in French Gothic style. Matins and the Eucharist were celebrated every Sunday. The sanatorium had its own chaplain. A rabbi would come only if specifically requested or in case of a Jewish death.
It was into this establishment that my mother was admitted seventy-three years after its opening. Run initially as a private institution, the Holloway Sanatorium became a mental hospital within Britain’s National Health Service after World War II. It was not closed until 1981, after lightning struck a gable and caused a fire. Many of its records and casebooks were burned by Spanish orderlies. The chapel organ pipes were broken up and used as javelins. The gutted sanatorium became the setting for horror movies. Directors could not believe their luck. Holloway’s Gothic caprice found its natural calling a century on.
The premises adjacent to Virginia Water railway station were, however, too valuable to be passed over by Cool Britannia’s real estate moguls of the 1990s. The property was acquired, renamed Virginia Park, and transformed into a gated community of high-security luxury homes, complete with underground garage and a state-of-the-art health complex. A swimming pool was built where the mentally ill once thronged the dining hall. The vestry was turned into a shower room. The chapel became a sports hall. Lines of a basketball court were painted on its wooden floor. Behind a Ping-Pong table and a basketball hoop, a reredos survives, like a guest who has outstayed his welcome. It recalls another time, as do the wooden plaques with gilt lettering commemorating the Holloway Sanatorium’s dead in World Wars I and II.
So ends nineteenth-century philanthropy—in a twenty-first-century suburban fortress for the rich. It is situated opposite the Sunrise Senior Living Center (known locally as the Sunrise Home for the Bewildered). Children in bright bicycle helmets and pregnant American moms unwind in Virginia Park where lunatics once performed the gardening detail. The statue of Thomas and Jane Holloway has been removed.
Joy Whitfield notes that the two cast-iron weather vanes on the former chapel point in different directions. In the more than half century she has known them, they have never pointed the same way. In the Great Hall, she remarks that some of the lights are turned on by flicking switches up, others by pressing switches down: “We are in a mental hospital, after all.”
Not all the Holloway records disappeared. Some were preserved at the Surrey History Center. In the faint hope that a trace remained of my mother, I wrote to inquire. A letter came back a few weeks later. References to June Bernice Cohen had been located in the admission register and in ward reports from July 1958. These showed that “she was patient number 9413, was admitted on 25th July 1958 and was discharged on 12th September 1958.” The ward reports for August and September had vanished. I applied under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act to see the records.
It is a fifteen-minute walk from Woking Station to the history center. The streets follow like Eliot’s “tedious argument.” England in February weaves its misery into a gray curtain. Cafés in the Home Counties now do toasted panini and espressos. The mimicked “continent” is no longer the faraway place of my youth, where various forms of unpleasantness (rabies, garlic, and intellectuals prominent among them) lurked ready to invade England.
My reencounter with my mother was the object of a painstaking negotiation with an archivist. It left me struggling to maintain an appropriate library whisper. At last I was presented with the weighty admission register for female patients. Entries are written with fountain pen in cursive script. In columns across the page my mother is identified. Name: June Bernice COHEN. Ref Number: 9413. Age: 29. Marital Status: Married. Religion: JEW.
The admissions register for female patients at the Holloway mental hospital recorded details of my mother when she entered it on July 25, 1958.
I stared at her age—so young—and at the capitalized entry under religion: “JEW.” The noun form has a weight the adjective, Jewish, lacks. It seems loaded with a monosyllabic distaste redoubled by the strange use of the uppercase. June was not religious. She is the youngest on the page. She is also the only non-Christian.
The first ward notes on my mother read: “History of depression in varying degrees since birth of second child, now fourteen months old. Husband is engaged in medical research. Patient has some private psychotherapy and also modified insulin treatment at St. Mary’s last month, being discharged July 8th. On admission she was depressed, tearful and withdrawn.” The doctor examining June was struck by how “her tension increased remarkably on mention of latest child.”
Guilt, especially over my sister, Jenny, would pursue my mother, a shadow that could not speak its name. I ran my fingers over the page and paused at “JEW.” I wanted to take a soothing poultice to her face.
On July 28, 1958, June was visited by a Dr. Storey. He “confirms diagnosis of post-puerperal depression and advises Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT), which patient and husband are now willing to accept.”
What painful reflection and discussion must have preceded the electricity that left June in a permanent state of brittleness. She first underwent ECT on July 30, 1958. The treatment was repeated a second time on August 1, 1958, one day before my third birthday. At least now I know where she was.
At the time of the disaster, my parents had been in England for a couple of years, but my father had known the country longer. They had unequal experience of their adoptive land. Perhaps this discrepancy goes a little way to explain why he shed South Africa and embraced Britain, its climate and habits, in a way that proved difficult for my mother.
Fun-loving and bubbly, June struggled with the British understatement she had first known for a year as an eight-year-old boarder at Frensham Heights. She belonged in South Africa, the privileged child of a close-knit Jewish community in Houghton, where the trees in the yard dropped their fruit, apricots blushing into ripeness. She would gaze at the muddy winter fields of England with gulls hovering over them, the color of goalposts, and wonder.
There was no equivalent community for her to join in London. For Sydney, the obscurantism of the Jewish religious instruction he had received in Johannesburg was part of what he wanted to leave behind. He was uninterested in, if not hostile to, Jewish identity. As in many things, June followed him. She quelled whatever doubts she nursed. Sometimes she talked with pride to her friends about her distinguished great-uncle, Rabbi Michael Adler, but that was in private and sotto voce.
Sydney had arrived in England on May 18, 1945, ten days after the end of the war in Europe. Like many others in the West, he knew less of the Holocaust than seems imaginable today. The Nazi death factories—Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibór, Bełżec, Chełmno—were all liberated by the Red Army, not by the Allies, who saw the horror of Bergen-Belsen much not the much ampler horror farther east. A month-long sea voyage brought my father from South Africa to Britain. A circuitous route, charted to avoid lingering German U-boats, took him in a great westward loop almost to the coast of Brazil. Sydney, recently qualified as a doctor, with some experience in remote stretches of Zululand, spent much of the journey aboard the SS Nestor—“a huge funnel surrounded by a little boat,” as he described it—gazing at the Atlantic. It was a journey from balmy breezes to biting winds. When a depth charge went off during a meal and caused a panicked rush for the exi
ts, he opted to go on eating. Merchant sailors slept on deck as a precaution. They had already been torpedoed. They called Sydney crazy for preferring the comfort of his bed down in the ship’s bowels.
Early experience as a doctor had made him fatalistic. Working in the Transkei before he sailed for England, my father had been called into the bush to help an African girl who had been in labor for two days. He drove as far as he could and was met by men with horses. They rode for about an hour. When he entered the hut, he found the girl, encircled by elderly women of the tribe, with a baby’s arm dangling from her vagina. The baby was crossways. He reached in, managed to turn the baby around, and it was born, dead. He examined the mother and found her uterus hemorrhaged. The elders put him back on a horse and made a litter to carry the girl, taking turns to run with her. The journey lasted for more than two hours. Every ten minutes the team carrying the litter changed.
The little hospital, when they reached it, was run by nuns. They laid the mother out and did what they could, but she died soon after. With the baby and her mother dead, Sydney felt he had achieved nothing. He was astonished when the men of the tribe insisted on giving him a small, beautifully engraved wooden box.
“But the baby’s dead and the girl is dead and I wasn’t able to help you,” he said.
No, they explained, he had helped them achieve the essential, which was that the girl should not die with the baby inside her. If she had, an evil omen would have hung over them for many years.
Britain, its treasury mortgaged to the hilt by Churchill in the fight to defeat Hitler, was overrun with war injured. Doctors from the Dominions came to mitigate its burden. The backwash of empire bore talent as well as travails to British shores. Sydney was accompanied by three young South African doctors who would be lifelong friends: Allan Kark, Paul Marchand, and Pat Denehy. They had written to Jan Smuts, the South African prime minister, to appeal to be allowed to work for the Emergency Medical Service in England.