The Dark Threads

by Jean Davison

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘When you’re at school, you’re in our care. You can’t just take off when you please. Can you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  I thought I’d got off lightly but a few days later a letter arrived for my parents asking them to visit the headmaster.

  ‘Do you know what this is about?’ Dad asked.

  ‘I think so. You know that dream feeling I told you about? I got it at school and I left early without permission.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have,’ my mother said, ‘but I don’t know why he wants us to see him. What can we tell him?’

  ‘Tell him I want to go down into the A2 class,’ I said.

  Mum was sympathetic to this. She’d seen my diary. I was annoyed that she’d read it without asking, but pleased that she’d shown some interest in what was going on in my life.

  A few days later I was sitting opposite the headmaster in his office staring at the carpet.

  ‘I won’t bite if you look at me,’ he said. I raised my eyes high enough to notice some copies of my reports on his desk. ‘I’ve just had your parents here. They tell me you’re unhappy in your class. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘I … I don’t know, sir.’ Ironically I was too shy to tell him about my shyness, but I thought he must know about that anyway.

  ‘Would you like to go back down into the A2 form?’

  ‘Oh yes please,’ I said, hope rising in me. My friend, Mandy, was in that class.

  ‘I’ve been looking through your reports,’ he said, rustling the papers on his desk, ‘and your school work is good. We put you in the highest form because we felt you could cope with the work and we were right. You’ve no need to worry. You’re doing fine.’

  I shuffled uncomfortably in my seat.

  ‘Look at it this way. Suppose you were running in a race competing with the best ten runners and you came fifth. You’d have reason to feel more pleased with yourself than if you came first in a race without a good runner. In fact, there’d be no point running in a race without a good runner, would there?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, my eyes on the carpet.

  ‘Well then, that’s why you are in the highest form competing with the brightest children in the school. Do you understand?’

  I did not understand. What was the use of being capable of getting good marks in English and History if I wasn’t capable of talking to my fellow human beings?

  ‘I … I don’t know, sir,’ I said, as the blue circles on the carpet danced and spun dizzily before my eyes.

  ‘Listen, I’ll explain it again,’ he said, and he launched into an explanation of the runner metaphor, linking it only with academic capabilities and competition.

  ‘Do you understand now?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘So don’t worry. There’s no problem. I’m pleased with your work. Just keep doing your best, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ‘HAVE YOU DECIDED ABOUT us getting married?’ Mike whispered as he leant over and kissed me tenderly. ‘I love you.’

  A drunken man in a cowboy hat bumped into our table, spilling some of my lager. ‘Mike, I’ve told you I don’t want to think about marriage,’ I said, mopping the spillage with a beer mat. ‘Anyway, how can you say you love me when you don’t even know me?’

  ‘Don’t know you? I’ve been going out with you for a year.’

  ‘There’s lots of things about me you don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, I’ll guess. You’re married with ten kids and you’re a nymphomaniac.’

  ‘Oh, shucks! My secret is out,’ I said, covering my face in mock shame and horror. We grinned.

  ‘Do you love me?’ Mike asked, becoming serious again.

  ‘I like you a lot as a friend, but …’

  ‘I’m going to start a new life in New Zealand,’ he announced.

  ‘New Zealand?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been making enquiries. I did hope we’d get married but if that’s not to be, there’s nothing to keep me in England.’

  ‘I suppose it’s best to stop seeing each other now,’ I said, my voice probably conveying less emotion than I was feeling. It’s hard to say goodbye to a friend.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ he said. ‘We can go out together till I leave, can’t we? As just good friends, I mean. No strings attached.’

  ‘Yes, I … I suppose so,’ I said.

  Mike proved firm in his intention to emigrate. Despite the ‘no strings attached’ he kept trying to persuade me to go too, even right up to the time we kissed goodbye, promising to write. I was leading a double life with Mike in that he thought I was still working at Dobson’s. He knew nothing about my hospital life. Now he need never know.

  Meanwhile, life at the day hospital settled into a routine. After my first week Mr Jordan cancelled my ambulance. He said there seemed no reason why I shouldn’t travel on the bus, and I readily agreed. My new doctor was Dr Copeland, though I gathered Dr Shaw was in overall charge of the treatment of day patients.

  Mr Jordan showed me into the little office on the first floor and introduced me to Dr Copeland, a stocky dark-haired man sitting at a desk by the window.

  ‘Sit down,’ Dr Copeland said to me. ‘I’m just reading your case notes.’

  I sat opposite the doctor at his desk, while Mr Jordan sat by the door.

  Dr Copeland looked up from reading and asked with a grin, ‘Am I going to hell because I’m an atheist?’

  I took it that he hadn’t meant this as a serious question so I didn’t bother to answer. He began doodling on a notepad which had some red lettering printed across the top and, in idle curiosity, I strained my eyes to make out what it said. I managed to read: ‘Mogadon – The Mark Of Good Sleep’.

  ‘Well? Am I going to hell?’

  ‘How do I know where you’re going?’ I said, feeling irritable.

  He glanced across at Mr Jordan, and they laughed.

  I wondered if they thought I was a religious fanatic, though I couldn’t see how questioning and losing my beliefs could fit me for that category – quite the opposite I would have thought. It didn’t take me long to decide that nothing was being meant unkindly and, as I tried to describe my sadness and confusion to them, I discovered that I hadn’t lost the ability to laugh at myself.

  Therapy at the day hospital was usually led by two student nurses and took the form of group games like the one organised by Sue on my first day, and activities such as handicrafts, dominoes and draughts. Some of the day patients, myself included, were sent to join the in-patients at the OT block in the main hospital for a few hours a day.

  In summer I was taken out occasionally with some in-patients from the OT block to the nearby town of Otley. I became immune to the stares of passers-by as we ambled along in twos, a nurse in front of the crocodile and two more keeping watch from behind. As we passed a fruit stall in the market, one of the long-stay patients, Amy, casually picked up a shiny red apple and began eating it. The nurses didn’t notice but an irate assistant did.

  ‘Hey! You! What d’yer think yer doin’?’

  Amy wandered on, obliviously, munching her apple.

  ‘She’s a thief!’ the fat woman in a white apron screeched.

  If the passers-by hadn’t been staring at us before, they were now.

  The nurse from the back of the line rushed up to Amy. ‘What are you playing at? Give it back and apologise.’

  She frogmarched Amy to the assistant on the stall. Amy took another bite of the apple before placing it among the others on display.

  ‘Do yer think I can sell that now? Do yer?’ This was addressed to the nurse, since Amy didn’t seem to know or care what the fuss was about.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ the nurse said, unzipping her purse.

  After that, we shuffled along a bit further, while the nurse gave Amy a long-winded sermon about not taking
things that didn’t belong to her.

  ‘Buy your Beatles pictures here,’ a man with a Beatles haircut who looked at least in his forties announced. ‘Get your big colour photos of the Fab Four.’

  ‘The Beatles split up last year,’ a young man in a ‘The Who’ T-shirt informed him as he sauntered past.

  ‘So what?’ the man on the stall called after him.

  ‘Let go. Move on.’

  I stopped to watch a group of mini-skirted teenage girls who were dancing by the side of this stall and singing ‘All You Need Is Love’. I guessed some of us who grew up in the Beatles era would never be able to let go and move on. A part of me longed to join in the fun and be just another ordinary teenager again.

  ‘C’mon, you. Stop dawdling,’ the nurse admonished me.

  No going back.

  On another trip to Otley, a nurse praised me profusely, in earshot of a shop assistant and people in the queue, for counting out the correct amount of money to pay for a bar of chocolate. I wanted to protest that I wasn’t mentally retarded, but perhaps this would have been a tactless remark to make in front of the group of patients I was with that day. This random mixing of two sets of patients with quite different needs, the ‘mentally ill’ and the ‘mentally handicapped’ (as they were then called) for want of better terminology, seemed to me to be not good for either set of patients, or the staff.

  I remembered from my stay as an in-patient the many instances I’d seen or experienced where staff talked down to patients. I wondered if, in my case, my shy, passive behaviour contributed to this. On the other hand, it did seem a no-win situation because our reactions to humiliating circumstances, whether of anger, rebellion or withdrawal, could be interpreted by staff as evidence of ‘mental illness’ no matter how justifiable our responses might be. Rebellious patients could be broken into submission through stronger drugs, more ECT and psychological cruelty, but there was an equally high price to be paid by those of us who accepted the psychiatric view of ourselves as ‘sick’ and co-operated with treatment. Brainwashing techniques, aided by both physical and psychological means, at a time when a person is already weak, unhappy and vulnerable, can be extremely effective. Although a part of my drugged, assaulted mind was sometimes critical about what was going on, I still, for the most part, quietly complied.

  I often passed a door at OT that bore the label ‘Group Therapy’. What went on in this room? Were interesting discussions organised? Were patients encouraged to form a kind of self-help group, perhaps? I felt curiously optimistic when told to join the group of patients in that room one afternoon.

  The patients inside, however, seemed severely disturbed or drugged out of their senses. The woman sitting next to me kept tugging at her hair while moaning softly to herself. There were about seven of us, including the therapist, a slim, blonde girl of about nineteen who wore beetle-shaped earrings. I wondered what we were going to do. The man sitting opposite me didn’t seem interested in doing anything except masturbating.

  ‘Let’s first get to know each other’s names,’ said the therapist, who was sitting on a chair in the middle of the group with a pile of newspapers in her lap. ‘I’m Christine.’ She went round the group getting our names and wrote them down on a notepad. Then she gave each of us a newspaper. And not just the tabloids; mine was a ‘quality’ newspaper. The mystery deepened. Whatever were we going to do? I would have liked to join a group where we could discuss issues arising from newspaper articles; something to help my bruised mind to think again. Being encouraged to participate in group discussion might also have helped me overcome shyness. But, no, this group had definitely not been put together for a discussion of current affairs.

  ‘Jack! Stop eating your paper!’ Christine said to an elderly, dazed-looking man who was busily engaged in chewing the corner of a page.

  Christine glanced round at us and clapped her hands for attention. ‘Can you see where the pages are numbered?’ she asked. ‘Everyone have a look at the numbers at the bottom of the pages. Can you all see them? Right, now listen carefully. These pages have been mixed up, so what does that mean? It means that the numbers don’t follow on in the correct order. Let’s see who will be the quickest at putting their newspaper into the correct order. Find page number one first, and then page numbers two, three, four, five and so on. Put the pages so that the numbers run on. Spread them out on the floor if you like. Do you all understand what you’ve to do? OK? Ready. Steady. GO!’

  Everyone began sorting out their papers except the masturbator, the paper-eater and myself. I didn’t move because I was preoccupied with something else, something more important.

  Ignoring the other two dissenters, Christine addressed me: ‘Come on, Jean. You understand, don’t you?’

  Caught off guard, I almost blurted out, ‘No. I don’t understand.’

  What I didn’t understand was how, merely by confiding in a psychiatrist in my teens that I was confused about religion and disillusioned with life, I had got myself into all this.

  My therapy routine included three mornings a week at the Office Skills class but, as when I was an in-patient, I was too drugged and unmotivated to benefit. I plodded through shorthand exercises taking in more of my depressing surroundings than of the symbols I was supposed to be learning. As far as learning shorthand goes, I was wasting my time. But about human misery, for what good it would do me, I was learning a lot.

  There was Nina, a shy-looking teenager with long black hair and large brown eyes, who sought the help of Mrs Taylor, the typing teacher, to explain what her Ward Sister meant by describing her as ‘inadequate’. Nina was wanting to leave home and get a flat after her discharge from hospital.

  ‘Sister says I’ll never be able to cope in a flat because I’m inadequate. What does “inadequate” mean?’ Nina asked the kindly Mrs Taylor, who floundered while trying to answer her.

  Earlier that morning a nurse had told a group of us at the day hospital that the reason we were patients and ‘different’ from people like herself was because we had a ‘weaker personality’, which made us unable to cope with the everyday anxieties of life.

  The worst thing about being constantly taught that you’re ‘sick’, ‘inadequate’ or have a ‘weaker personality’ is that you might eventually come to believe it. And the worst thing about coming to believe it is that this will help it become true.

  I made friends with Wendy at OT, a pretty sixteen-year-old, who was having problems coming to terms with her abortion. She was a patient in Thornville Ward. One day we were talking at tea break in the cloakroom, where it was a little more private than the corridors and hall.

  ‘My psychiatrist says I’ve to forget about the abortion,’ she told me. ‘My baby was taken from my womb and murdered but I’m supposed to forget that happened. How can I?’ She finished her cigarette and lit another. ‘God, I’m chain-smoking again but that’s the least of my problems.’

  A man wandered up to us trying to cadge a cigarette. We recoiled as we smelt his breath. He was puffing nervously at an over-smoked tab end.

  ‘Go away! We’re having a private conversation,’ Wendy told him.

  Head down, looking as if he’d no pride left, he turned and moved dejectedly away.

  ‘Oh what the hell, take it, have them all,’ Wendy said, running after him with the packet.

  He pushed the cigarette she lit for him into his mouth and we watched him shuffling away, his shirt hanging out of his trousers.

  ‘Silly old bugger,’ Wendy said, ‘but oh, Jean, isn’t life sad for people like him?’

  I nodded in agreement.

  ‘Now what was I saying? Oh yes,’ she said, ‘my psychiatrist says I’ve to forget I was pregnant and he says I’m the same girl as I was before … before it happened. But I’m not the same, am I, Jean? How can I ever be the same? I’m not innocent any more.’

  Tears sprang to her big blue eyes, smudging her mascara and running down her pink, dimpled cheeks, as she wept for lost innocence.

>   And there was Cathy, a pale, thin young woman who had been a teacher. She stood at the front of the typing class holding a cactus plant from the windowsill and proceeded to give us a lecture on it. Our botany lesson ended abruptly when Mrs Taylor came in and asked her what on earth she was doing.

  Cathy stopped lecturing mid-sentence, cactus plant still in hand, and looked thoughtful. ‘What am I doing? Well, I’m obviously mad as a hatter, aren’t I? I suppose I’m pretending I’m still a teacher because that time of my life was better than now.’ She broke down and sobbed. Mrs Taylor put a comforting arm around her shoulder and gently led her to a seat at a typewriter. ‘I’d do Miss Compton proud now,’ Cathy said, half laughing, half crying.

  ‘Miss Compton?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m talking about Lena Compton’s drama group. That’s the drama group I used to be in and the drama group I’d still be in if I wasn’t round the twist here in High Royds instead.’

  ‘But you’re getting better, Catherine dear. You’ll be able to go back to the drama group, and perhaps even back to teaching, when you’re well again, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, that’s not possible. It’s all over now. Can’t you see? Everything is finished, spoilt, changed, broken …’

  The cactus plant had been left balancing precariously on the edge of Mrs Taylor’s desk at the front of the class. I watched, half expecting it to emphasise Cathy’s words by toppling over and crashing to the floor.

  LOOKING BACK 7

  THE BEATLES WERE COMING to Bradford. On Friday 9th October 1964 the Fab Four would be starting their UK tour right on our doorstep, appearing at the Gaumont Theatre. Of course we had to go. I hadn’t been out with Sylvia, Carrie and Julia for a while, but we’d managed to save up for tickets costing 10s.6d, expensive in those days.