This is where the picture starts to get very murky. So far I have given a relatively clear chronology of what I know happened and when it happened, according to the perspective I was allowed, whilst I was on my way to a major nervous breakdown. If I missed out events, for having forgotten them, then what I remember of those times was enough to make a workable narrative. At the time, because of the fear of mental health problems, the breakdown was written up and spoken about as something, anything else. Always it was labelled as something other than what it actually was.
At the time there was not even an understanding of the possible addictive effects that strong anti-depressant medications could have, when taken for too long. Many people, particularly men, feared doctors and disliked being thought of as ill. Men often saw alcohol as the best medicine, my father was one of those people. As far as he knew it was a medicine that created no side effects for any of the patients that took it, in whatever quantity. If there was reason for a person feeling ill it could not have been from alcohol. If anyone thought they knew better, then they were better keeping their thoughts and the proofs of their belief to themselves.
That was the understanding of mental health circa 1970, and if from the perspective of the 21st century that looks like a primitive and unreliable narrative in itself, then to that unreliability can be added how unreliable my observations of what I went through became the deeper I went into the breakdown and the more it seemed to swallow my personality, troubled as it was already, whole and then break down any strength of will, memory, and decision making capacity that I previously had.
I was a normal boy when, aged 10, I walked out of the Primary School classroom during morning break, in November 1971. I wrote with my right hand as most boys did. In the half day that followed when I lost myself in more deeply than anyone knew how to account for there was one minor but immediate symptom that should have been a sign to somebody. Other people might have thought me deeply hurt, or a howling lunatic, at the time but the thing that registered with most me at the time was the changing of the hand that I wrote with.
My new choice of a very cramped way of writing where I covered what I wrote as I wrote, and I had an awkward way of holding a pen was perhaps a very small part of the chaos that ensued when I became unstable company, but for all that it was telling metaphor for how I had changed. But I remained left handed even when I was 'settled' by being put on anti-depressants and it did not do me no favours in lessons, but no teacher suggested that I change back to writing with my right hand. The teachers seemed to not care about the standard of my school work, even though there was my 11+ exam coming up in a few months time in which, by how I performed, I would 'choose my future school'.
Many of the pupils attitudes towards me improved over my past experiences of me being either ignored or being horribly taunted. Once the medication stabilised me the new responses from other boys varied from them being wary around me, to them being sorry if they had said anything that had left me upset. I gained a higher status for having been temporarily unstable and now permanently 'dibby' than when previously I appeared to be normal. Some of the boys surely feared or hoped that I would be provoked into another crisis. They hoped that I would seriously hit someone because they liked the drama of the teachers to have to handle a crisis, it gave them cover for disobedience. There was no chance of that after the medications had settled me into being somebody permanently in shock.
The more regular my attendance at school , for me being watched to make sure I was there, the more of an oddity I became. One of the boys who had so frightened me out of my wits when there was no supervision spoke to me in class much later, when it was well supervised. He offered me a piece of string with some sort of widget on it that was assembled to form a necklace, and he told me that there was gold inside the string. I accepted it from him and said nothing. I stared at him as if we were on different planets, knowing that it was not gold and that he knew he was lying. I was polite, but I felt so distant from everything around me when anything that was nice was made from also made from so many lies.
At the time there was not even an understanding of the possible addictive effects that strong anti-depressant medications could have, when taken for too long. Many people, particularly men, feared doctors and disliked being thought of as ill. Men often saw alcohol as the best medicine, my father was one of those people. As far as he knew it was a medicine that created no side effects for any of the patients that took it, in whatever quantity. If there was reason for a person feeling ill it could not have been from alcohol. If anyone thought they knew better, then they were better keeping their thoughts and the proofs of their belief to themselves.
That was the understanding of mental health circa 1970, and if from the perspective of the 21st century that looks like a primitive and unreliable narrative in itself, then to that unreliability can be added how unreliable my observations of what I went through became the deeper I went into the breakdown and the more it seemed to swallow my personality, troubled as it was already, whole and then break down any strength of will, memory, and decision making capacity that I previously had.
I was a normal boy when, aged 10, I walked out of the Primary School classroom during morning break, in November 1971. I wrote with my right hand as most boys did. In the half day that followed when I lost myself in more deeply than anyone knew how to account for there was one minor but immediate symptom that should have been a sign to somebody. Other people might have thought me deeply hurt, or a howling lunatic, at the time but the thing that registered with most me at the time was the changing of the hand that I wrote with.
My new choice of a very cramped way of writing where I covered what I wrote as I wrote, and I had an awkward way of holding a pen was perhaps a very small part of the chaos that ensued when I became unstable company, but for all that it was telling metaphor for how I had changed. But I remained left handed even when I was 'settled' by being put on anti-depressants and it did not do me no favours in lessons, but no teacher suggested that I change back to writing with my right hand. The teachers seemed to not care about the standard of my school work, even though there was my 11+ exam coming up in a few months time in which, by how I performed, I would 'choose my future school'.
Many of the pupils attitudes towards me improved over my past experiences of me being either ignored or being horribly taunted. Once the medication stabilised me the new responses from other boys varied from them being wary around me, to them being sorry if they had said anything that had left me upset. I gained a higher status for having been temporarily unstable and now permanently 'dibby' than when previously I appeared to be normal. Some of the boys surely feared or hoped that I would be provoked into another crisis. They hoped that I would seriously hit someone because they liked the drama of the teachers to have to handle a crisis, it gave them cover for disobedience. There was no chance of that after the medications had settled me into being somebody permanently in shock.
The more regular my attendance at school , for me being watched to make sure I was there, the more of an oddity I became. One of the boys who had so frightened me out of my wits when there was no supervision spoke to me in class much later, when it was well supervised. He offered me a piece of string with some sort of widget on it that was assembled to form a necklace, and he told me that there was gold inside the string. I accepted it from him and said nothing. I stared at him as if we were on different planets, knowing that it was not gold and that he knew he was lying. I was polite, but I felt so distant from everything around me when anything that was nice was made from also made from so many lies.
The sense being physically present/emotionally vacant was also a strong part of life in the parental house. The more mentally absent I was, the more effectively the house returned to having three people in it, and the more smoothly it ran. My need to be alone was more accepted than before. Dad sent me more often than previous to the sweet shop at the top of the street to buy him his Old Holborn tobacco and roll up papers, even though tobacco was not meant to be sold to minors. In my sense of being vacant I didn't recognise how the more he sent me on errands, the less he saw of me, and happier he might well have been for not seeing me, but knowing where I should be.
It was into this rather detached atmosphere that a psychologist made his first intervention into my life. Mother and I were both gently instructed to visit our local Social Services. It was just around the corner from where we lived, but because of our level of avoidance until the appointment was made it could have been several worlds away. I was sent there for observation Mother went for a formal interview and some instruction regarding me and social activities. He was a stout man who was formally dressed with a full salt and pepper beard. I would like to have been dandled on his knee, and been talked to kindly by him. Instead I was sent to play with the large Lego set that social services kept, no doubt for people like me. The psychologist smiled when he commended me for the large Lego house that I'd made. Mother and the psychologist must have talking for a long time for me to have built so much. Also we were both assigned a social worker to help us through some of the decisions that Social Services knew had to be made in the near future. The moment dad heard the news of the appointment he disowned the idea of me having a social worker. But his attitude of disownership did not stop the social worker calling round, if he was in when she called she made her visits brief the better to minimise the lack of welcome and make a hasty exit.
One direct effect of Mother being pep talked by the psychologist was that she was instructed to apply for me to join the Cub Scouts, aged ten when the normal time to join was aged seven. They met locally, a ten minute walk from the parental house and Mother had to help me with the uniforms, the getting of badges for my bronze arrow, the sowing on the uniform of those badges, the whole thing. For the first time in life she had to openly support me, in a venture where, directly, I got more out of it than she did. I was only in Cub Scouts for nine months and I regretted joining so late and achieving so little, but I enjoyed it.
It was into this rather detached atmosphere that a psychologist made his first intervention into my life. Mother and I were both gently instructed to visit our local Social Services. It was just around the corner from where we lived, but because of our level of avoidance until the appointment was made it could have been several worlds away. I was sent there for observation Mother went for a formal interview and some instruction regarding me and social activities. He was a stout man who was formally dressed with a full salt and pepper beard. I would like to have been dandled on his knee, and been talked to kindly by him. Instead I was sent to play with the large Lego set that social services kept, no doubt for people like me. The psychologist smiled when he commended me for the large Lego house that I'd made. Mother and the psychologist must have talking for a long time for me to have built so much. Also we were both assigned a social worker to help us through some of the decisions that Social Services knew had to be made in the near future. The moment dad heard the news of the appointment he disowned the idea of me having a social worker. But his attitude of disownership did not stop the social worker calling round, if he was in when she called she made her visits brief the better to minimise the lack of welcome and make a hasty exit.
One direct effect of Mother being pep talked by the psychologist was that she was instructed to apply for me to join the Cub Scouts, aged ten when the normal time to join was aged seven. They met locally, a ten minute walk from the parental house and Mother had to help me with the uniforms, the getting of badges for my bronze arrow, the sowing on the uniform of those badges, the whole thing. For the first time in life she had to openly support me, in a venture where, directly, I got more out of it than she did. I was only in Cub Scouts for nine months and I regretted joining so late and achieving so little, but I enjoyed it.
But Mother would still wreak dire revenge on me through her delusions. Come the spring I'd been on the medication for four months. Mother thought of me as having a new hobby, electronics. It was true back then that electronics was a new, previously unknown, hobby for working class boys which suited the nerd, the introverted child. I was clearly highly introverted, but it was a lie on Mother's part when she claimed that electronics was my new hobby. What happened was that dad wanted to throw out his old radiogram, one of the few items of furniture still in the house that he had brought with him from his previous dwelling when he had married in 196o. It no longer worked, television was better and he wanted something more modern that played LPs. But Mother being the hoarder decided to recycle it as my new hobby. Dad surely tried and failed to stop her over this, but in the end fought and won for just his own corner of the house. The weirdest part of this story was that when the radiogram was eventually disposed of Mother insisted that she should save the glass that showed where the different radio stations were on the dial. It was something she taught me to hold on to and value as if it were part of my interest in electronics until I was nearer 30 than 25.
For many hours that Spring and early Summer I sat in the back yard and no longer played games like hopscotch on my own because there was not the room, but instead I sat quietly looking at the radiogram which was newly put in the yard which had taken up more space, both in the yard and in my head.
Radiograms were the 1940's precursors to the music centres that were sold in the 1960's and beyond. This one was veneered, the veneer was peeling with it now being left out all weathers. It was thrown out because the radio on it had stopped working. It stood four foot high and had a valve radio/amplifier at the top, a pull-out 78 rpm record deck with a green baize turntable in the middle, and speaker below that. At the base of the radiogram was a storage space for all the 78 rpm records it had once played which extended the volume of the speaker cabinet to make it louder. The valve tuner/amp looked intact and, for it being unfit to be plugged in, it seemed mysterious, interesting.
For many hours that Spring and early Summer I sat in the back yard and no longer played games like hopscotch on my own because there was not the room, but instead I sat quietly looking at the radiogram which was newly put in the yard which had taken up more space, both in the yard and in my head.
Radiograms were the 1940's precursors to the music centres that were sold in the 1960's and beyond. This one was veneered, the veneer was peeling with it now being left out all weathers. It was thrown out because the radio on it had stopped working. It stood four foot high and had a valve radio/amplifier at the top, a pull-out 78 rpm record deck with a green baize turntable in the middle, and speaker below that. At the base of the radiogram was a storage space for all the 78 rpm records it had once played which extended the volume of the speaker cabinet to make it louder. The valve tuner/amp looked intact and, for it being unfit to be plugged in, it seemed mysterious, interesting.
Mother thought of me as playing with it and my play as 'an interest'. 'Distraction' was nearer the what I found with the radiogram. Both I and it were both detached from the world we were supposedly part of. It distracted me from the hollowness that I felt was part of me, from the hollowness I saw in other human beings as they seemingly comfortably related to each other which I could not comprehend. Ever since the attic room became a working store room/my bedroom, several years previously, I was considered 'too old to need the comfort of a teddy bear'. The radiogram might as well have been an electronic teddy bear, or an imaginary friend, for the difference it would have made. My sitting out in the yard had one positive effect; it meant I could resist being cajoled into watching television programmes I no longer liked, even though everybody else in the family thought them good family viewing.
Before the breakdown I had awkwardly played with one boy in the back yard, Dale from next door who was friendly, though neither of us knew which of us was the more slightly aloof. He was older of the two of us when even the slightest age difference mattered. Now I had to be actively supervised by an adult if spent any significant time with other boys, to keep me in my bearings. I was at my safest by myself, supervised from the distance of inside the house. Had I gone out through the back gate then one of my family would have come looking for me, fearing that I would get lost.
In this atmosphere of mental absence and hidden hostility the power of cheap old jokes came into it's own. The older and cheaper the joke the better, it seemed to chime in well with the numbness and pointlessness I felt. One of my favourite jokes came, like many did, from the back of a packet of matches. Here it is;
Father and son at home, nobody else about. The son is doing his homework for school, the dad is distracted by his television.
Son to father; 'Dad where are the Himalayas'
Father to Son; 'I don't know ask your mother, she puts everything away'.
The joke was all the more delicious for me, for the novelty of a child having a space at home to do homework for school. With the television being so dominant in the parental house, mentally there was never room for study or a school project to be completed arounf my parents and their interests. Television put a stop to all that. The inattentiveness in the father's response was a given which needed no explanation to me. I'd found that made my father seem relatively human and approachable.
Beyond all the old jokes the future was looming. It was a matter of aspiration, if not showboating, that every parent who accepted state education wanted their child to go the local grammar school. The parents might begrudge the price of the uniforms but they knew that where the most money is spent per pupil, then the pupil will have the most confidence. If they wanted the best for their children then they had to back it up. Parents who openly wanted less than the best for their children seemed absurd. But equally everybody knew that if they have the best, then some other family will have to have worse, if not the worst. And those families who have to accept worse will also vainly try to make their choice appear better than they seem. A lot of the arguments around the worst and best choices in education were presented via the the red top newspapers. They would argue about resources vs results and the artificialities of 'failed' vs 'passed' until there were no more trees to print them with. However much children and parents reheated old arguments around schooling, money, and status, the main choice that mattered is how parents prepare their children for the 11+ exam, the result of which will decide their next school for them.
My parents preparation for me taking my 11+ was to keep me on the adult strength anti-depressants not just through the March that I took the exam but until late May, two months later. I did not so much fail to get the result my parents would have coveted most, as crash my way through the exam and through life for all that whole period in a blind haze of not wanting to be there. I can remember staring with incomprehension at the maths questions as I sat the exam and mentally leaving the building whilst still sat there. I was practically 'tripping' on reading the questions whilst failing to answer them. I got a very low score. This should been predicted. But back then the dishonesty of false hope was apparently an improvement on than the honesty of true despair. And many of the arguments about mental health were even more false and hopeless.
My result won me the choice of going to a school that was a thirty minute bus ride away. The bus fares alone would have cost dad too much as far as he was concerned, and the price of the compulsory school uniforms was way over what my Mother could budget for, even without me growing bigger and going through too many different sizes of uniforms to count and not getting the wear out of them. It was a school where the class sizes were going to be large where even as it was less Academic than a grammar school I would still have openly struggled.
Well before my 11 + results came through, Mother and I had been assigned a social worker by the local Social Services Department. Mrs Hunt was very good at providing basic support and excusing why those well above her status seemed to be so bad at making children and parents feel genuinely better about their shared, and rather shaky, futures.
Mrs Hunt was about to do more than the basics when in the May of 1972 the doctor took me off the strong medication that I had been prescribed to keep me calm, but it had actually sent me into outer space and destroyed the development of certain parts of my brain-not that anyone knew that at the time. My family and the authorities thought I was happier without drive or purpose. Mrs Hunt was deputised to show Mother and me the school that social services thought it best that I attend.
At this point Mother could have asserted herself and argued openly and pointedly with Mrs Hunt about how she as the social worker was sent to clients of social services to put into effect decisions that she had not really been part of which were made by a very male and very distant hierarchy. Mother could have accused Mrs Hunt of being the window dressing and messenger for a system that was actually highly opaque and quite brutal. But Mother did not do that, she chose to be well behaved and acquiescent, much like my being allowed off the medication had taught me to be.
Well before my 11 + results came through, Mother and I had been assigned a social worker by the local Social Services Department. Mrs Hunt was very good at providing basic support and excusing why those well above her status seemed to be so bad at making children and parents feel genuinely better about their shared, and rather shaky, futures.
Mrs Hunt was about to do more than the basics when in the May of 1972 the doctor took me off the strong medication that I had been prescribed to keep me calm, but it had actually sent me into outer space and destroyed the development of certain parts of my brain-not that anyone knew that at the time. My family and the authorities thought I was happier without drive or purpose. Mrs Hunt was deputised to show Mother and me the school that social services thought it best that I attend.
At this point Mother could have asserted herself and argued openly and pointedly with Mrs Hunt about how she as the social worker was sent to clients of social services to put into effect decisions that she had not really been part of which were made by a very male and very distant hierarchy. Mother could have accused Mrs Hunt of being the window dressing and messenger for a system that was actually highly opaque and quite brutal. But Mother did not do that, she chose to be well behaved and acquiescent, much like my being allowed off the medication had taught me to be.
Find Chapter 11 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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