Indomitable Bink

Sunday

We were in Professor Veale’s study a couple of evenings ago, Bink having invited me to attend her appointment.

“How much Lorazepam are you on now?”

“It’s supposed to be two and a half,” Bink told him. “It’s still hurrumhurrumhurrum...”

“Please can you speak up a little?”

“Hurrumhurrum...”

“Three milligrams a day?”

“Er… hurrum,” she conceded.

“Why is that then?”

“I was going to cut it down,” she assured him earnestly. “But I was too busy,” she gave me a sideways, Lady Diana look, “deciding whether or not to kill myself.”

Well, it’s a lot better than the dog ate my homework, isn’t it?

Professor Veale must think we’re all bonkers: I burst out laughing. Bink with me.

Quite rightly, he asked whether she is safe. (I don’t know whether he’d spotted the savage fresh cuts all over her right arm. The bandage was mostly hidden by her hoodie.)

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m safe.”

“So, why didn’t you kill yourself?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t get it organised.”

As we walked to the car, she said, “It’s a bit pathetic, isn’t it? Being too incompetent to kill yourself.”

“On balance, Bink, I think it’s quite a good failure.”

Over supper I was laughing almost too much to convey the conversation to Shaun.

“But killing yourself is difficult,” Bink protested. “You do have to be organised.”

Ben came up into the kitchen from his den, one of his snakes wound round his neck. “I totally agree,” he said. “You’re right, Bink. It is difficult to kill yourself.”

He was on his way outside, no doubt to get a rat for his cuddly little pet’s supper. He puts these at the back of the range to thaw, particularly if I’m about to cook supper or we have paying guests. Occasionally he adds to the fun by forgetting them. Or blowing them up in the microwave.

“But the good news, Bink,” he didn’t halt his step as he comforted her in that patronising but soothing voice he has acquired since becoming a teacher to young girls, “is that I am here to help you...”

A reader has just kindly commented on an article in today’s telegraph:

I admire Bink hugely.

When she was, almost miraculously, offered private treatment earlier this year after so devastating and destructive half-a-lifetime’s wait for the NHS, I asked if I could blog about it in gratitude to the person who has made it possible. She said I can write anything I like as long as she doesn’t have to do anything. But then became drawn into reading it without really meaning to. It was clear that the history of her illness was distressing her, but she was adamant I should continue.

It was the same with the Telegraph article. There was no problem… until she had to give her permission.

“But I said I don’t want to be involved.”

Bink is very precise in everything she does.

“You don’t, Bink. You just have to say you’re happy for the article to go ahead.”

“I’m not happy.”

“Then I must cancel it!”

“Absolutely not. I don’t want to stop you writing.”

She and I eventually came up with wording acceptable to her: that she had given me permission. No more, no less.

My daughter, you will know by now, has an illness which has ruined her life.

And yet she retains her coruscating, self-deprecating humour. And the sharpest sense of other peoples’ autonomy. Not only do I admire that more than I can say.

Far more important, it gives me hope for her healing.

What's it like?

Autumn 2002

Yesterday I was interviewed on our local radio station (www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/p06kjsbj about ten minutes in) and the first thing the presenter asked me was, “What’s it like, living with OCD?”

I’ve been doing radio for quite a while now, and it’s not often I’m stumped. But it felt like being asked, “What’s it like, living in England?”

Where on earth do you start?

I said something rather unremarkable about the early days, when the rest of the family couldn’t use the bathroom for months on end when Bink was in “clean mode,” so around 10 o’clock every night I would walk to our neighbour’s in my dressing gown for the hot bath I relied on to get to sleep in our unheated Vicarage; though that was far better than “dirty mode,” when Bink herself couldn’t wash at all for months on end.

A bit like saying, Living in England means we’re on Greenwich Mean Time in the winter. 

When Bink had been out of the Florence Nightingale Unit for some months, without friends, without schooling, painfully slowly beginning to recover from what they had done to her in there but still incapable of doing virtually anything, I enrolled her at the tutorial college Mander, Portman & Woodward. (The High Mistress wouldn’t have her back at St Paul’s Girls’ School: not after being in a loony bin.)

She tells me now – I had forgotten this – that she applied for a scholarship at MPW and long before she’d completed all the papers, on the strength of just her first essay, the Principle offered her a free place. 

My heart was in my mouth, that first day of the autumn term. I had bought her a brand new black Pashley bicycle with the insurance money from all the bikes we’d had stolen in London over the years, and with her cropped hair and new books and file in her basket, she set off that first morning, sun glinting on her bike wheels as I watched her set off along Parson’s Green, disappear at the traffic lights and the reappear again in the New King’s Road before finally disappearing behind the row of shops heading East for Kensington.

Phew.

First day down. If we could only keep this going, we might get her back on track for her A levels. She had switched from the double maths and physics she’d been studying, with English, before, and had now taken up Latin again with single maths and English.

She enjoyed the first day. Soon she might start to make new friends.

The next day she set off again. The longer we could keep this going the more likely she would stay the course. 

One of the things you learn, if you live with OCD, is how to lie. We all did. All of us except Alexander.

The psychologist Prof Paul Salkovskis told me OCD is perhaps the most contagious of mental illnesses. Anyone in contact with it is likely to become obsessive, because of the fall-out if you don’t. You become extremely sensitised to the slightest contamination: it can ruin your own life if you miss it.

We had all learnt what could happen if we admitted to having touched such-and-such, or letting so-and-so brush against something else, particularly if it was to do with washing. It could incapacitate Bink for months. She had a thing about anything touching the rim of the washing machine, for instance. If she had a wash on, even if it was long-finished, we weren’t allowed to touch it. Ditto, anything of hers in the tumble dryer.

Serena had just finished A levels and while she prepared for her Cambridge vet exams, was doing her first paid job, in a lab, starting at 8 am and with a long journey first. She had to get up at 6 because she wasn’t allowed to use the shower, so she had to have a bath which took her much longer. Bink must have been in “clean mode” that term, so the rest of us couldn’t shower.

One morning Serena needed to put an item of clothing in the dryer for a few minutes to wear it for work. But Bink’s clothes were in there. We all knew by now that we could occasionally do relatively normal things as long as Bink didn’t know and therefore couldn’t get upset about it, so Serena carefully took Bink’s wash out, put her item in, dried it, and then put Bink’s wash back in again. All looking the same as before, long before Bink was up.

Only it didn’t. Because she had dropped one of Bink’s bras on the floor and in her hurry to get to work on time, didn’t notice.

By then Bink had been going to MPW for a week. It really looked as if she might attend every day, last the term, last the year, and only have missed a year of her schooling on account of the Florence Nightingale Unit. She wasn’t receiving any treatment for her OCD and was far more ill than before she went in, but if we could get her back into some kind of worthwhile routine at least she would be beginning to mend her life.

It was inevitable that she would look in the laundry eventually, and it just so happened she did so before she set off that day.

And saw her bra on the floor.

Complete and utter meltdown. Far worse than the contamination – presumably the bra could be washed again – was the realisation that we must all have been lying to her. If that was so, how could she ever know whether anything was “clean” or “contaminated”? 

Which, of course, was why Alex never did. All very well, but if we had pursued Alex’s policy she would never have enrolled at MPW in the first place. Our lying had kept her relatively calm. While it worked.

I knew I had to get her to college that that day or we could lose everything we’d gained. I calmed her as best I could, reassured her every way I could think of, and eventually, only two or three hours late, managed to persuade her to set off after all.

Thank goodness! I knew how absolutely vital it was to ensure her attendance every day.

Fifteen minutes later she was back. She was in too much panic to continue.

She didn’t return that day. Nor the next. Nor the one after that. 

That was it, then. She wouldn’t return that term. Possibly not the next. She had lost another academic year.

Over one bra.

We had not been obsessive enough. I should have noticed. I should have checked the laundry, seen the bra, put it back in the dryer. I would live with the guilt all year; perhaps longer.

Far worse, perhaps Serena would. Working so hard at her new job, her application to Cambridge, all the demands of her own eighteen-year-old life. Whilst having to keep her sister sane too.

Which is a tiny little bit of what it’s like to live with OCD.

Bink has a date! (II)

2002

So, we had invited Bink’s “date” for the weekend. 

That done, I rang our policeman friend. The one who had been our liaison officer when Bink disappeared, aged twelve. Who had then got involved the previous Christmas (2001) when, he told us, the Florence Nightingale Unit had reported Shaun for the mysterious mark on Bink’s right cheek. Or rather, wrong cheek.

I did it in that order so he couldn’t veto our invitation. (Look, Bink was just seventeen by now, right? Tell a seventeen-year-old she can’t meet up with her “boyfriend” and what is she likely to do? And wouldn’t that be a lot worse?)

Nevertheless I couldn’t help asking. “It’s not insanely dangerous, is it? I mean, he’s hardly likely to murder us all in our beds, is he?”

He deftly dodged this question, and asked about the arrangements. Boyfriend was arriving by car. After this – which we found hilarious – taking Bink to a museum for a cultural day out. Then back to our house where he would cook supper for us all.

“Good,” said my friend. “He’s not going to abandon his car, so they won’t disappear.” And a museum is a very public space, obviously. “As soon as he arrives, ring me with the number plate and I’ll run a check on it.”

Saturday dawned. Boyfriend due at ten o’clock.

Twenty past nine, Frankenstein’s monster rang. Somebody had taken a man’s voice box, put it through a mangler then a shredder then stamped on it a few times, then shoved it back in a throat.

“Ah,” Bink explained a lot later. “I didn’t think to tell you. He got in a fight and someone nearly strangled him and he can’t talk normally again yet.” Could have warned me I was going to be rung by the top-billing voiceover artist for the Hammer House of Horrors.

I directed him to our house and went to tell her.

I haven’t yet properly explained what a challenge it had become – and still is, all these years later – for Bink to wash. She often couldn’t do it at all for months on end; and when she did, it could take a long time. (I once knew her take a three-day bath. She hotly disputes this but we only had one bathroom in the Vicarage and I ruddy well remember.)

She was obviously making a monumental effort and having a shower.

“He’ll be here in about ten minutes,” I shouted through the door.

“Please can you look after him?”

“How long for?”

“Um... about half past ten?”

Great. Would that be am or pm?

Dr Frankenstein’s friend arrived, I showed him in, asked Shaun to make him a mug of tea or similar, and nipped upstairs to try and read his number plate from the window so I didn’t have to go outside with a clipboard and pen and suck the latter thoughtfully while circling his vehicle.

Now, Shaun has many fine and excellent qualities. Loads and loads. Give me a mo and I’ll be able to tell you one.

Glistening on his palate of colourful talents, however, is a very noticeable lack of the essential Flake White of innocent chit-chat and small talk which can make so many socially challenging situations go with a jolly swing. Curious omission for a vicar, but there we are. When he’s in the mood, he can be as full of bonhomie and yo-ho-ho as the next chap, popping champagne corks faster than you can dodge them. Even singing the revolting Irish songs of his childhood if you oil him well into the night. (Revolting in the political sense, as per the Revolting Pheasants of 1066 And All That, you understand.)

The rest of the time, he buries his head in a book. If you bore him for a nano-second, without even a by-your-leave or heads-up he will reach for the nearest print... even if all to hand is the copyright information at the front of a hymnbook or the translated-from-the-Lithuanian instructions for the new fire extinguisher in the vestry, and it’s in the middle of a church PCC meeting he himself is chairing.

Making tea for, putting at ease, asking about the journey of, wishing a pleasant weekend to, Central Casting’s latest offering for the part of Bogeyman to frighten the children, obviously didn’t feature that day as high on his list of things that would be more amusing than preparing the morrow’s sermon.

It was a lovely way to spend a relaxing Saturday morning.

Dashing between slightly crazed cheerful-chatting with a gravel-voiced deterrent for warning young people against getting all their surfaces tattooed, whilst surreptitiously checking he’s not nicking the spoons; hanging out of an upper storey window smilingly persuading passing parishioners that I hadn’t finally decided to give up and jump, while trying to read a number plate parked at an awkward angle for the purpose on the Vicarage drive; bashing on the bathroom door asking Bink how long she expected me to hold the fort, and did she realise quite what a complete freak her date had turned out to be; and ringing our policeman friend, who only now told me he had opted for spending the first half of his weekend teaching a bunch of thugs on exeat from Borstal how to kick a pig’s bladder around a footie pitch as a cheery brief break from stabbing each other.

What felt like about a week later, Bink emerged; the result came back from the touchline that the car was registered to approximately the right name, from approximately the right part of the country, with no murders recorded against the owner; and the two love-birds set off for a romantic day looking at nineteenth century piston engines in the Victoria & Albert Museum…

Bink has a date! (I)

2002

Bink was almost a prisoner in her own room.

(Respect for her dignity constrains me from spelling out exactly what that means. Use your imagination. Peek, for instance, into your daughter’s bedroom for the first time in some weeks, and realise with sickening and horrified pity that she hasn’t been able to use the amenities. She often couldn’t wash or clean her teeth for months, either. Our brilliant Bink was almost a caged animal.)

There were long periods – months on end; perhaps years – when she had to wear rubber gloves, even to eat. She couldn’t touch books, musical instruments, a radio; certainly not food or glasses to drink out of. I bought her audio books, but she couldn’t touch a CD player. And couldn’t concentrate anyway.

We had a lumbering computer at the very top of the house, on a little landing lined with bookshelves which we called the Reading Corner. One afternoon when the children were small I had painted the walls (those not covered with books) with rainbows and birds and happy, smiling clouds. It was a comfortable place to be.

(After we left the Vicarage and before Shaun’s post was even advertised, the Diocese slapped magnolia over every surface – C of E clergy aren’t paid enough to justify colours on the walls – and chopped down the Cedar of Lebanon I’d put in the front garden and the luscious vine I’d tended in the conservatory we built. I learnt all this at a sad time, when I was desperately missing our dear home, and mourned the new Vicarage children not being allowed to choose whether to keep our hopping library birds and dripping indoor grapes. The Diocese also pulled down and skipped the large above-ground pool we had spent our first summer building and all subsequent summers swimming in and sharing, which we had specially left spotlessly clean – with a new motor and filter – for the new Vicarage family. Having no house of our own and never having been able to buy a car, it was the most expensive item we’d ever owned.)

Bink spent a lot of time at the top of the house that year, on that family computer. Presumably wearing her marigolds. I had no idea what she was doing, but at least she was out of bed.

Because her school High Mistress had ruled against telling any of her classmates where she was when she went into the Florence Nightingale Unit, she had lost them all. She was now too ill to leave the house, and had no way of meeting new people. She had no occupation, not even reading. A computer was it, really. And although I didn’t realise this then, the only way she could talk to anyone outside her family.

One day she came and found me, smiled sheepishly, and told me she had a boyfriend. 

“Wow, Bink.” I said. “That’s great news! Tell me all about him.”

He was around twice her age, and had recently been discharged from the army. He also had several children. From different women. He wasn’t allowed contact with any of them, though. Probably because he’d put a bloke in hospital with GBH. Presumably the boyfriend of one of his exes.

And he had invited Bink to his place (several hours away) for the weekend.

And. Yes. She had accepted.

Her eyes shone with excitement and pleasure. Poor Bink! She had little enough of either left in her sad life.

Multiple choice good-parent-questionnaire. At this point, do you:

1. Scream, “You must be out of your tiny little mind! What are you thinking of? Have you never heard about meeting serial rapists / killers / psychopaths via the internet? Don’t you realise you are about to be serially raped / killed / psychopathed!”

2. Lock her up.

3. Ring the police. Then lock her up.

4. Breathe slowly, think fast, and say very carefully and kindly and as enthusiastically as you possibly can, “Bink, that’s really kind of him. How lovely. Shall we have a think about the best way to do this?”

All my girlfriends gave variants on the first three, at various levels of decibel above 100.

Did none of them have any heart? My daughter’s prospects, health, happiness, education, everything, lay in ruins at her feet. She had no friends. She had nothing. She had managed, in this terrible and lonely solitary confinement which is the worst punishment custody inflicts, to make contact with a fellow human being, and he had issued her with the first invitation she had received since the Florence Nightingale Unit ruined her life.

My friends were not going to be any help whatsoever. So I rang my kind, imaginative, compassionate and utterly brilliant mother.

And she said exactly what I’d thought.

“Invite him for the weekend.”

“Thank you. That’s exactly what I thought.”

“Obviously. What else can you do?”

“That’s what I thought too.”

So we did.

(And I rang the police. Just... you know... in case.)

Dear Diary

Spring 2002

It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I have not done any work yet today. I haven’t done any work for days, months… years if you count books, my only real work, the only work I value; what with Alex’s unhappinesses, and now this. Others find their work disrupted when babies first come along. But that was easy. Easy to find the discipline, even with three in terry nappies, one at nursery school, no car, no help, no money.

I remember when Shaun was on a conference and I wasn’t well, and I had to pile all three of them onto a tricycle to get Serena to nursery school, and then dash back to get them occupied long enough to meet a deadline: one of my first writing commissions, for a magazine. The day before I’d been issued with notice to quit the house by the end of the week. With Shaun away. His first post, as Assistant Curate in North London, was due to end and he was looking for another, and his boss, our vicar, thought it was “businesslike” to evict us.

It was possible to cope with all, then. It didn’t sap the spirit in the way that this does.

Upstairs there is a terrible, dark and brooding presence. It is like a thunderstorm waking to break.

I have been out to Starbucks to buy hot chocolate and an almond croissant. There was a time when I would have thought, I can’t afford Starbucks; but I have run out of other ideas. Besides, so much money has been poured down the drain, it now transpires, over the last year and more, that it seems futile to baulk over a few more pounds. All the savings Granny gave her in her post office account, hundreds of pounds being preserved for some special treat or project, all bled away. All Serena’s too, lent secretly to her sick sister, our Iphigenia, to appease this awful god that is poisoning all our lives.

I understand now, about the changelings left by the hidden people. She is gone. The ray of laughter and music we once knew is long gone. It went into hospital and what came back eventually, when they were done, the husk that was spat out, was this, this other, this possessed thing, this thing bewitched by the powerful doctors with their hidden arts and powers. We thought she was escaping from hospital, I thought I had outwitted the doctor by stealing her back again. What I now realise is that it was already too late.

They took her by various strategies. A friend, a close and dear friend, saying we must let her go, because she will do it again and one day she will do it for real. She wouldn’t, I knew that. But they frighten me and bully me, and I don’t stand up to them. Why, when my own child was at stake, why didn’t I? Because they came in the guise of friends. And because they threatened suicide. I know how suicide is, how much worse than accident or murder, because it nearly happened to Alex. But do you really think, I say angrily now, do you really think suicide would have been worse than this? Death would be sweet, compared with this. Death would be easy: no more awful hoping that she might come back.

A few days after she came home, after what I thought was she had come home, I went into the room, the guest room, not her room, where she was not exactly sleeping but brooding, and found a snow storm. Every page, every Indian-paper-thin page, individually torn out of her bible, the bible she was given as a baby at her baptism, and the room was white. The bible that had tormented and taunted her with her illness and God’s deafness and his unheeded promises.

She must get up, the doctor had said, the witch doctor who had to let her go. She must get up, and out, and do something, do a job or something. I was outraged, that she could contemplate labour for this child, such a bright child, who had been snatched out of her education so prematurely by these wicked doctors. I would not have it. I will not send her to work. She will finish her studies, she will. Make sure she gets up every day, the doctor said, to work or attend school or anything. I smiled, happy to agree to anything, so that she should be free.

But how? How do you get something, so solid and heavy, up and out of bed? How do you insist? Do you scream, do you steal the bedclothes, do you drive her to tear every page out of her bible?

You go to Starbucks and buy her favourite treat and pray, or leave your friends to pray for you because you have no emotional or spiritual resources any more, because all you have left is the tiniest trickle in the bottom of the vast wide empty riverbed, so dry it doesn’t even catch the sunlight any more. You hope that hot chocolate will do it, because you simply can’t think of anything any more. You plead. You go up every few minutes and plead. Your favourite treat, downstairs in the kitchen.

Two hours later, I wrap the almond croissant, her favourite, their most expensive, in a paper napkin for some use, sometime… something. I don’t know what, but something. It cost too much to waste. I pour the now cold chocolate down the sink.

I still have not done any work. Not for a long, long time, nor a long long time to come.

Snowstorm

February 2002

Our children were brought up as Christians.

Before someone asks, “Isn’t it better to let them decide for themselves?” let’s knock that naïve two-dimensional pseudo-liberal notion on the head once and for all.

1. Of course our children must decide for themselves. We all have to take responsibility for our choices eventually, whatever beliefs we were brought up with.

2. There is no such thing as a philosophically “neutral” upbringing any more than there is English spoken with “no accent”. If you bring your children up to “decide for themselves,” you are teaching them the overriding supremacy of Western relativism as surely as the Amish are teaching their children... whatever it is the Amish pass on to their children.

3. If we ourselves have concluded that Christianity is – probably, on balance – the most credible interpretation of the facts available, we have a duty to pass this conclusion on to our children; just as we have a duty to teach them that the earth is round, or climate-warming is – probably, on balance – really happening, or any other article of faith which (after doing our research as thoroughly and honestly as we can) we believe holds the balance of probability. That’s what parents are for.

So that’s how we brought them up. (Got an issue with that? Get over it.)

Bink loved our Parson’s Green church. All our children did. She played her fiddle every week in the chamber orchestra, which eventually she ran. She lent a hand with the children in Sunday School, or handed round refreshments, or helped host the Harvest Lunch, or welcomed people into the Vicarage garden for coffee after the service. She took as full a part in the church as the rest of us did.

She also loved coming on the teenagers’ Christian holidays which we led every summer, eventually going on such holidays herself.

After one such, she came home bubbling over with a deep and thrilling personal experience of God. She was all for being re-baptised, and celebrating with the church and all her friends. To my shame and lasting regret, I told her that you can’t really be “re-baptised” any more than you can be “re-married” to the same person… though we would certainly celebrate with her.

In the years to come I wondered how I could have put such doctrinal exactitude above exuberant enthusiasm. Well, there we are. (Now I think about it, I wonder why I didn’t suggest confirmation, as she was the only one of our offspring not yet – and still not now – confirmed. Perhaps I did.)

And as I explained in an earlier post, Bink packed two books to take into the Florence Nightingale Unit. One, naturally and wittily (Bink being Bink), was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. 

The other was her Bible.

Bink had been home for a few weeks. For some reason she had moved into our guest room. Presumably because her own room had become “contaminated.” She has frequently, since, needed to discard clothes or a room or even a house for this same reason.

Dr Ratched had insisted we must get her up in the mornings. This was a bit like saying, learn to fly. Two-year-olds, easy. Sixteen-year-olds? Just try it some time. Not with a normal teenager, who simply needs the stick of being sacked from school or work, or carrot of not having the bedclothes yanked off and a bucket of water thrown over whatever remains, in order to jump joyously from bed.

But a sixteen-year-old who is absolutely, adamantly, completely, hell-bent-determined on not getting up. Or is simply too depressed and defeated to be capable. It may not be completely impossible but believe me, you can spend several hours of every day, for over a year, on the attempt. You can see my t-shirt if you like.

Still fairly early on in this dismal experience I went upstairs to embark on the daily, fatuous, enervating and prolonged exercise of trying to extract Bink from Bink’s bed so Bink could have a life.

I walked into a cloud. The room was white. I found myself in one of those children’s executive toys you turn upside-down to make Big Ben swirl with the kind of Victorian Christmas the Victorians probably never experienced.

Every single India-paper page of Bink’s Bible had been torn out. Every page ripped up into tiny little pieces. Every piece hurled into the room. Every scrap had snowed down and whitened her room with tears of scripture verses.

Year after year after year she had begged God to take away her pain. Year after year after year her prayers had fallen on what certainly seems to us mere mortals to be very deaf divine ears indeed.

I know how she feels.

And she was sweet sixteen.

Wouldn’t you weep the pages of your Bible, which had drifted down such lofty and pretty snowflake promises throughout your childhood merely for them to fall into the fire of your adolescence and melt into a wet and dripping howl of nothing?

Picking up the pieces

February 2002

It’s impressive how much damage you can do to a sixteen year old in a bare three months. Enough to sabotage the next sixteen years, at least. The Florence Nightingale Unit had torpedoed Bink’s schooling, her relationships and worst of all by a very long way, her precious and so unusually sparkling mind.

We faced a daunting battle to get back to where she had been, without even considering treatment for the OCD which had landed her there in the first place. (And she would never be able to resume the same A-level course: some things were lost for ever.)

If I’d had any idea how many long and painful years it would take... well, thank the kind Lord He doesn’t show us the future.

The obvious place to start was with the beastly little pills. The sudden withdrawal of which had made her so distressingly and disastrously demented on Boxing Night.

She was taking one a day. I’ve no idea what that is in shrink-speak: Bink would probably remember the dosage. A pill was about half the size of your average-sized squashed pea or Ecstasy tablet. No, of courses I don’t! Excuse me: I’m a vicar’s wife. (Actually, I’m not a vicar’s wife any more, strictly speaking. Perhaps I should start to live a little... Afternoon tea dances and membership of nudist colony, maybe?)

Bink’s trust in me must have been sufficiently restored, now she was home again, to have given me charge of her medication. It was in one of those blister pack do-dahs. So I took this into the scullery (we lived in a Victorian Vicarage, with all the proper rooms a proper house should have) and climbed up a step ladder brandishing a nail file.

Curious; but I distinctly remember balancing precariously up there. I deduce it was so that if anyone came in unexpectedly, I could hide what I was doing without looking the slightest suspicious...

I then took pill Number One out of the blister thingy and filed the edges carefully, so it was very slightly smaller but still much the same shape. Then I returned it to the blister pack and smoothed the foil meticulously over it. Number Two pill I filed a bit more, and returned in the same way.

By the time I got to pill Number Ten, it was so tiny it was barely visible. She was bound to notice, but so what? By the time she asked how her pills had shrunk so mysteriously in the wash I’d be able to point out that she was nearly off them anyway.

Then I hid the pack on top of a very high cupboard, so no one could come across these Russian dolls of Sertraline lined up in their little blister beds, each one a bit more roomy than the one before, and wonder whether I should be committed to the nuthouse instead of Bink.

Extraordinarily, this Cunning Plan worked. In ten days she was off the stuff, and said yes of course she’d noticed but hadn’t wanted to be on them in the first place.

Except that, sadly, it didn’t really. It only achieved the immediate goal.

Before she was on medication, Bink’s mind had been sharp, witty, extremely incisive and with an absolutely infallible memory; capable of recalling conversations verbatim, even years later. After she’d been on Sertraline for a month or two she’d become irrational, confused and apparently capable of unrecognisable fantasies and imaginings. Her mind seemed to have deteriorated from the clearest focus to an incomprehensible fog. (We went to see A Beautiful Mind around this time, and all my fears were vindicated by the numbing and stupefying effect of medication on the brilliant John Nash.)

Though the real damage was far deeper even than this.

Sometime after I weaned her off Sertraline so her battered mind could recover, she went to see our GP about something else altogether.

I liked him very much, that GP. He was a proper, old-fashioned family doctor who used to come to barbecues in our garden with his glamorous French wife, and had a very un-NICE-recommended tummy, presumably due to her lovely French food and wine. I once happened to mention, in his surgery, that any booze – other than champagne, obviously – seemed to have a detrimental effect on my sleep. Could he advise?

“Stick to champagne,” he said.

But alas, despite this jolly attitude to the good things of life, he was pill-happy. A great many doctors are. He gave Shaun Prozac for his ME, and permanently undid all the good a whacky alternative diet had done him six months earlier. (And didn’t think to tell him, far less me – what does the wife matter? This is the data-protection-obsessed NHS – that Prozac can affect your libido. We’re back to common sense again: how can less sex possibly make you more happy? Given that he thought Shaun was depressed – he wasn’t: he had post viral fatigue, commonly known as ME – wouldn’t it make more sense to prescribe Viagra??)

And he handed Bink, when she visited him, a prescription for more SSRIs.

Before she went into the Unit she would have given him a firm, “No thanks.” But she had lost her drug-virginity... and her power to resist. Sixteen and a half years later, prescription medication is still her most obvious presenting problem.

And the first thing the Priory will tackle with her... at last.

Anger

Late January 2002

Bink was home again.

Except she wasn’t.

This wasn’t the Bink we knew. She went into the Florence Nightingale Unit with OCD. She came out unrecognisable. Feral. Insane.

For one thing, she was now on highly addictive medication. That this was doing her no good was evidenced by the fact that she was so very, very much more ill than she’d gone in. I’ve always estimated, by a factor of about ten.

For another, she was now understandably terrified of treatment. Even if we could find something appropriate for her condition, she didn’t want to have anything to do with hospitals or doctors ever again.

Thirdly she had now dropped – or rather been forceably yanked – out of school. She had no structure, nothing to do, and no reason to get out of bed any more.

“She must have an activity,” Dr Ratched had said. “A job in a shop, or something.” Three months earlier Bink had been half a term into A-level maths, further maths, physics and English at one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country. Was her education now over? Could she have no higher ambition than this?

It soon transpired that getting out of bed before noon was an ambition considerably higher than she could now achieve.

And her school didn’t want her back, after what the Unit had done to her.

More pressing than any of this, she was angry. Very angry indeed. Young as she was, she knew Robin had treated her appallingly. She wanted an explanation.

Robin operated from (and perhaps owned) a smart clinic in Sloane Square. 

Shaun had given Bink a hat of his, presumably for the winter. Bink has always been petite: five foot three, seven stone. Since the Unit, she wore large clothes. I see her still, diminutive figure, large man’s coat, jogging trousers, all topped with the black beanie she now wore all the time, setting off with Binkish determination from our Vicarage in Parson’s Green, headed for Sloane Square. We tried to stop her a number of times. But, unlike the Florence Nightingale, we didn’t lock her in.

The crunch came during a working breakfast for a preaching group of fellow clergy. Earnest muscular Christians, good friends, getting to grips with the Book of Romans or whatever, over bacon and eggs at our large Vicarage kitchen table.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever attended, or indeed run, a smart counselling-cum-therapy surgery in Sloane Square. Even if you haven’t, you can probably imagine that one of the items you might not put at the top of your wish-list-business-plan, as a ploy for enhancing custom, would be an obsessive fruitcake, dressed like a tramp, camping out on your smart Sloane Square steps, day in day out and all day long, frightening the horses. And all the other patients going in and out.

Whether or not it was topped by a black beanie hat. It probably wasn’t the deciding factor, to be honest, but I don’t think the beanie helped.

Now it was Robin on the line, interrupting the working breakfast. I usually answer the telephone in our house, but for some reason Shaun had taken the call.

After ten minutes, he gave me a summary.

Robin was advising sectioning.

Every so often, in telling this tale, I have to break off to deal with my own anger. I had thought it all long gone, swallowed up in sorrow. 

Sectioning is, obviously, an extremely grave infringement of anyone’s freedom: essentially, putting an innocent person behind bars, without trial, to prevent loss of life or serious harm. The one and only criterion, as I understand it, being threat to one’s own or someone else’s safety.

Never have I heard, read or seen anywhere discussed in the press the following additional criteria: that someone is threatening the reputation of your smart counselling business in Sloane Square; that you feel a bit freaked out; that you don’t like her sitting on your doorstep.

It also stands to reason sectioning is likely to have far-reaching implications: not just the immediate loss of freedom, but loss of possible future freedoms such as callings to the Church or the Armed Forces... not to mention working with children, the one consistent ambition Bink has had.

“Over. My. Dead. Body.”

I may have thought, but didn’t say, go to the frigging cops and get a harassment order, like a grown up.

“I’ll take that as a no, then, shall I?” Shaun asked tentatively.

The really frightening thing is how easy it could have been. If I hadn’t resisted, Robin could have picked up the telephone to Dr Ratched and Bink could have been banged up before anyone had even had time to think, “Human Rights.” Given the damage done to her by three months’ supposedly voluntary incarceration, I don’t even want to imagine what that might have done to the rest of her life.

Bink wasn’t then and never has been sectioned. Presumably eventually Robin had to man up.

Though Bink still believes, all these years later, that he should be prosecuted, sued or at the very least reported to the apppropriate regulatory body for what he did to her.

Perhaps now is the time to do it.

Battling for Bink's soul

Late January 2002, Thursday morning.

Everything we had been praying for, for three months, lost in one idiotic slip-up: letting Bink see Dr Ratched without us. We had no idea how she had persuaded her to go back into the Florence Nightingale Unit (then: we discovered later) but whatever it was, it was damned effective.

Bink looked utterly crushed.

“Your mother will go home and get your things,” Dr Ratched said sweetly, “while you go back to the ward. Now,” she added with an undertone of firmness.

“No,” I smiled helpfully. (But, I like to think, with just a soupçon of slightly impressive steel.) “I won’t know what she’ll need. You come back with us Bink, and we’ll pack together.”

I didn’t for a moment believe this oh-so-obvious tug-o’-war could work.

“Ok,” Bink said, and got up to leave with us.

Phew. Fifteen all.

A long match still ahead of us.

As soon as we got home Bink asked if she should pack.

“No hurry,” I said brightly. “Let’s have lunch first.”

I nipped upstairs to ring a few friends and ask them to pray.

And then a Neuro-Developmental Consultant, David Mulhall, who had treated Alexander. Alex‘s schooling was blighted by repeated and relentless requirements to perform tasks which, with his Asperger’s syndrome, he was completely incapable of. Particularly if they involved time, which Alex doesn’t really relate to. I’m still not sure what effect David’s numerous and tedious exercises had, morning and evening every day for three and a half years. Time seems to have remained a bit of a stranger, to be honest. But Alex credited David with enabling him to relate to neurotypicals, at least. (Being Alex, the exciting breakthrough came when he realised, face shining, that he could communicate with the horse he’d just been allocated for a week’s family trekking in Donegal. Perhaps it was an Aspergic horse and they were on the same wavelength. Which is kind of cool as well as significant, given that he now works in the Equities department of his firm.)

David’s treatment was costly (for a clergy family) and time-consuming. It might not help. But it was harmless. If he treated Bink, the worst he would do would be nothing.

Very much unlike the Florence Nightingale Unit, then.

He offered to see her that afternoon.

“Come on!” I said, with irritating cheeriness. “Let’s see if David can help.”

The thing about OCD is that if I’d asked Bink to go to an appointment tomorrow or next week, it could have taken her three months to get ready. If something is immediate, there’s no time for any of the rituals so you just shrug and do it. Sometimes.

He assessed her and said he might be able to help. In a flowering of kindest generosity, he offered to treat her for nothing. (And did, for the next two years.)

“Do I have to tell you how I feel?” she asked, obviously frightened.

“Absolutely not. You don’t need to tell me anything. I’ll just give you some exercises.”

“You don’t need to know stuff about my childhood? Or my emotions?”

“Not in the slightest. I wouldn’t want to.”

She could scarcely credit this. “Do I have to believe in the treatment?”

“Not at all. My exercises work whether you believe in them or not.”

Her relief was heartbreaking. What had they done to her in there? 

As soon as we got home, I suggested tea.

“Don’t I have to pack and go?”

By supreme good fortune, a friend – of whom Bink was extremely fond and with whom she had played chess every week after church, in happier times – had just rung to say he was nearby. I seized my chance.

“Nick’s coming for supper,” I said. “Roast chicken, your favourite. Why not leave it till tomorrow?”

Fifteen thirty.

I hardly dared breathe.

The next day the spell has loosened sufficiently for Bink to tell me how Dr Ratched had persuaded her.

“She’s promised I’ll see Robin.” My heart sank. We couldn’t compete with this.

In case you missed this, Robin was the therapist who had bombarded Bink with inappropriate verbal and physical affection until, understandably, he became the most important influence in her life. Both he and the Unit had promised he would continue to see her in there, but after the first visit the Unit told him it would be professionally unethical for him to continue treating her while she was their patient. Probably the only sensible thing they ever did.

How the sands of morality had shifted so it could now be either professional or ethical to promise he would see her, as bait to lure her back in, will forever remain more inscrutable than the Bermuda Triangle.

And what if Robin himself hadn’t wanted to play ball? Daft question. For one thing, he was too wet (and presumably too terrified of his previous misconduct) to object. For another, they would simply do what they did first time around. You don’t need to keep promises to loony people, silly. Any more than promises to... I don’t know... spiders or children. And, you know, staff.

Perhaps Bink bore this in mind when she made a decision I never would have thought possible.

“I’ve realised,” she said later that day. “I don’t really want to see Robin that much.”

Shaun has a superb tactic – perhaps many men have – of simply ignoring someone or something unworthy of his attention. I answer my telephone to every cold caller. I explain in meticulously courteous detail why I believe they might be mistaken in thinking I’ve had an accident which wasn’t my fault, or am owed a life-changing fortune in mis-sold PPI. At some stage during the conversation, usually when I’m mid-sentence, my cold caller hangs up without so much as a goodbye or thank you. I’ve decided to stop feeling personally hurt by this.

The trouble is, such appalling behaviour isn’t the fault of the next cold caller, is it?

For once in my life, just once, I managed to employ Shaun’s approach. (Unlike each new cold caller who is an individual in his or her own right, Dr Ratched had form.)

She had been expecting Bink back on the ward since Thursday lunchtime. Heroically, I resisted the impulse to pick up the telephone any number of times all Thursday afternoon, to give her an über-polite update. I even managed not to ring her the next day too.

Last thing on Friday, she rang us. When would Bink would be arriving? Best before the weekend; the nurses would have her room ready by now.

“She won’t,” I said. No explanation. No excuses. No chit-chat. Then I hung up.

(After saying goodbye, of course. And hope you have a nice weekend. And… um… life.)

Shaun should have been proud of me.

I’d like to say, game, set and match. We had won that tournament, at least. Bink never went back into the Florence Nightingale Unit, or saw Dr Ratched again.

But alas: seventeen and a half years on and we are still whacking vicious balls over the net from the effects of those dreadful three months.

Which is why it is now down to the Priory to help Bink win the Grand Slam.

Gone again.

End of 2001

We never discovered how Bink got the injury to her face. The charge against Shaun was quietly dropped.

I didn’t care. 

All I cared about was Bink’s state of mind, or lack of. What we had witnessed was terrifying, far beyond anything we could deal with. This was why we had taken her back to the Florence Nightingale, despite all the damage I knew they’d been doing to her. She had been nothing like that when we’d first taken her in, two months earlier. Yes, she’d had OCD: a very significant difficulty, making her desperately unhappy. But she hadn’t been, like, mad.

If she was that demented... I don’t think we could imagine a future at all.

The word Shaun and I asked of each other, not even knowing what it meant, was, “Schizophrenia?”

My brother is professor of nano-materials. He knew how to use the internet long before we did. A day or two after he and his family returned home to Oxford after Christmas, we received some pages of print-out.

Sertraline.

The drug Dr Ratched had put Bink on, very much against our wishes and hers. Which had “no negative side-effects” and which you could stop “at a moment’s notice, without any issues of withdrawal at all.”

And here were all the horrendous symptoms of coming off it suddenly, described on the internet, for anyone (who know how to use the internet) to read. And Dr Ratched had said there were none.

Was she ignorant or mendacious? Which would be worse?

Bink must have stopped taking her unwanted medication as soon as she got home, acting (sensibly) on the information she’d been given: that she mustn’t combine it with alcohol; and that she could stop it whenever she wanted.

She wasn‘t mad at all. She was simply exhibiting the known symptoms of sudden withdrawal. Palpitations, extreme terror, hallucinations. It was exactly as I had feared: the pills had made her very much worse.

Did no one in the Unit have any compassion at all? Could they not have thought to allay our wretchedness, as my brother so kindly had? We had been worried out of our own minds.

And of course, now we knew this, we realised with sinking dismay that we needn’t have taken her back into the Unit at all. Just stayed with her, and calmed her, and held her while the effects of the drug wore off, however many days or ghastly weeks that might have taken.

2002 began dull and leaden. Bink back in. Back on medication. Back incarcerated and beyond our reach.

We could do nothing. Except pray. Which we must have been doing almost incessantly, even though my confidence in prayer had been pretty effectively demolished when all our church prayed for Alexander a few years earlier. So it wasn’t because I had any faith in prayer left that I’d gone on praying.

Just, there was nothing else we could do.

Day after day, week after week, no change, no hope, no access. No communication at all.

Unless Bink herself specifically requested it. And she wasn’t talking to me.

It was a Monday morning in late January when I got the call.

I was writing a script for Thought for the Day, for Radio 4 the next morning. Racking my brains, as I always do, for something interesting, about an item in that day’s news, with a faith perspective, which hasn’t been said many times before. Bit of a bum brief, really.

Staring out of my attic study window at our neighbour’s roof in Parson’s Green. No inspiration there either.

When the telephone rings it breaks my attention, but it’s welcome because I’m stuck anyway.

“Hello,” said a familiar voice.

Wow. “Hello, Bink!”

Togetherness

Sunday

I decided, when I started this blog, that out of courtesy to your being willing to walk with me, I would post every day so you’d know where we are.

And on Sundays we would have a break from the painful past, and dwell on some positive aspect of the present.

For today’s post, I was slightly stumped. 

Not because life isn’t good. It is. Thank you. Particularly this weekend because Alex is home, which always makes for a lot of laughs. Almost as many laughs as when Ben is home. Which is always. On account of, he lives at home. Which means we need all the laughs we can get.

Anyways.

Something I’ve learnt (pretty painfully) through the last twenty years and my mother seems to have known all her life, is that God can indeed bring good out of apparent (and indeed very real) bad. You just have to learn to recognise, and usually wait, for it.

Over the last couple of days, two of our three daughters have reacted, arguably negatively, to this blog. (Actually, three. Rose said, “I could walk to the station alone long before I was ten!” “I’ll change it then,” I promised immediately: that’s the thing about online publishing. “Naa,” Rose said. “Don’t bother.” As if my writing were the most unimportant thing in the world. Which, to my family, it is...)

I should perhaps explain a principle we drew up very early in this parenting business. I was brought up in a head master’s house, and once (and once only: most of the time I loved it) felt so resentful of our home’s being used for school business that I hid, under the sofa cushions, the coat of the piano teacher who had been giving a lesson in our drawing room. (And never confessed... until now. And overheard my parents saying the cleaner must have done it in a moment of incomprehensible absent-mindedness.) I determined that my children would never experience the same, so we established when we moved into a Vicarage that a veto of one, no matter how young that one was, would always be enough.

So if anyone in my family, at any time in the now or future, expresses this wish, my blog will cease immediately and disappear from view.

On Friday afternoon, I tried to show Bink a kind and very interesting comment from a reader... and it quickly transpired she was in a vile mood. (Bink. Not the reader. As far as I know.)

The reason followed soon after. My blog. All the things I’ve remembered differently.

“Bink, tell me!” I pleaded. “The last thing I want is inaccuracy. The truth is always more interesting.”

“How can you say that Daniel,” (in the Florence Nightingale Unit) “wasn’t abused? Her father made her watch porn when she was little.” (As a little boy, that is.) “And she was a girl long before she came in, too.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Please tell me and I’ll change anything you say.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said, after establishing this would take too long. “I said you could write it. But I also said I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, and this is why.” Maybe one day, she’s promised, she’ll read and correct everything.

Yesterday I spoke to Serena. “You sound low.”

“Perhaps I should stop reading your blog,” she admitted.

“Perhaps I should stop writing it?”

“No!” Serena was emphatic. “People need to know. There are far too many others suffering...”

“They don’t need to know at our expense,” I countered. “Our first duty – in this instance – is to ourselves.”

She was adamant, like Bink, that I shouldn’t stop the story on her account.

I have known others, as ill as Bink, who don’t acknowledge they are ill at all. How they will ever get well is a mystery... perhaps even to God Himself. Whereas Bink is extremely open. She has no truck with the taboo around being mental. None of us has.

This is a huge blessing, to her and all of us. As well as a great weapon in the armoury of health.

So yes, life – as Alex, Ben, Bink and I sat round the fire-pit till midnight last night, welcoming in the autumn – is very good indeed. Thank you.

Bat shit crazy

27th December 2001

It was the darkest hour of the not-morning when the telephone rang.

It would have been a pretty confusing call even if we hadn’t been groggy with sleep. Someone at the Florence Nightingale Unit, half an hour away in North London, was ringing us in Parson’s Green, garbling something about Bink who was supposed to be with Serena in the flat next door. 

We lurched into some clothes.

If that flat had been the city of Jericho it would have been rubble by the time we arrived. Bink was screaming the walls down. Bansheeing off them. If you’ve ever trapped a terrified wild animal in your bare hands you’ll know: I picked up a young field mouse as a small child and it bit me to the bone.

What assaulted us at the front door was a vortex of screeching fireworks. We went up the stairs into a caterwauling Charybdis. Trying to catch and calm whatever had taken hold of Bink was to embrace a water-jet.

And Serena had been coping with this alone.

It is years ago now and she has neutralised what memories she can, but still retains a few vivid details: her own terror; her realisation that this is what demon possession is; and the “men with knives coming through the window to get me.” Bink has always claimed she made them up, but I could see them in her eyes when we arrived. Serena too.

It transpired that, after we’d gone to bed around midnight, Bink had gone outside and started yelling her pain into the Parson’s Green night. Serena managed to get her into the flat but containment merely concentrated her incoherence.

The only thing which she communicated clearly was that Serena was not, under any circumstances, to call us. Serena must not ring home. She mustn’t tell Shaun or me anything. She was not to fetch us. She mustn’t she mustn’t she mustn’t.

Under no circumstances whatsoever at all at all did Bink want to see me.

So after two hours of this frenzied nightmare Serena rang the hospital.

This may sound strange to anyone under thirty, but when when we were children there was an idea – long left over from Victorians and smelling salts, for all I know – that the appropriate thing to administer when someone is suffering from hysteria is a slap. Like you say boo! to cure hiccoughs. No, that’s never worked for me, either. Perhaps sudden shock can tranquillise, or at least stop one in one’s tracks: I don’t know. Now that I’ve heard Professor Veale’s explanation about the calming effect of sudden cold (and read more about it myself) I presume a bowl of iced water thrown over the head could do the trick. Be that as it may, a slap in response to hysterics was a deeply ingrained idea, heard at our mothers’ knees.

What could we do with this shrieking maelstrom whirling round the plughole of Maggie’s flat? Nothing could contain her. In his panic and fear, Shaun slapped her.

No change. Even that couldn’t check the raging tumult that Bink had become.

We had no idea what to do. The hospital had rung us. They seemed to know what was going on. Goodness only knows why given the history, but all we could think of in that confused frightening whirlwind of howling in the most hidden part of the night was to take her back there.

We managed to steer her outside but my brother’s car was blocking ours in our Vicarage drive. He came downstairs, in his thin cotton summer pyjamas, and offered to drive us there.

The Vicarage in Parson’s Green is fairly public, even in the small hours in the deserted Christmas hols. Imagine you witnessed a slim, five foot three girl screaming in wild distress while two men bundled her into a car...

You might, sensibly, be too frightened to ask what was going on. So you might go home and do it from there.

I said that Shaun’s slap “did nothing.”

That wasn’t entirely true.

Nicotine and narcotics

Present Day.

When I went upstairs to wake Bink, as arranged, at one o’clock for lunch on Sunday, she peered out from under the pillowcase still tied around her head, and grumbled that she was much too tired. Trying to get Bink out of bed is a deeply dispiriting process, seldom – though occasionally – profitable; which seldom – even more occasionally – rewards the intrepid bed-dragger-from.

Always and invariably me.

I reminded her that we’d arranged the date around her: in a few weeks’ time she’ll be in the Priory. She grumbled some more.

Since Shaun resigned his job I’ve become creative about sources of income. On Sunday I’d let out our garden for a corporate event for 60 – and promised them lunch – as we were going to be out ourselves. (This does sort of make sense. We got the lunch ready, more or less; handed over to our amazing cleaner Gerda; and scarpered.)

Before we left, the organiser came and found me.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s someone in your garden.” She was clearly alarmed.

“Probably our son Ben. Six foot, blond...”

“Noo... I think he might have wondered in off the street.”

Sure enough, on a bench at the bottom of the garden was a diminutive tramp-like figure, rolling a fag, in turned-up men’s pyjamas and a hoodie, with a pillowcase round its head.

We teased her all the way to lunch.

“But Shaun says aristocrats dress really scruffily, because they have nothing to prove.”

I thought of Kate and Meghan, archetypal aristocrats of Bink’s generation.

“Surely I look like an aristocrat?”

Late Summer 2001

Since 1996 I’d had a column in the Daily Telegraph, and an income to speak of for the first time since my gap year. I now had a weekly telly slot. For a few brief years – till Bink shuntered out of hospital and I lost it all – I was earning more than Shaun. (Which, ok, given that he is a CofE clergyman, is not setting the bar very high...)

With such resounding zilch and nada forthcoming from the NHS, I decided we could pay for therapy.

Robin was dapper, in his thirties with a smart clinic in Sloane Square. £40 an hour.

After Bink’s second session, she started blaming me. I’d done such-and-such when she was six: the root of her problems. I didn’t believe this for a moment but it was a small price, if it helped.

Serena, aged 18, went to collect her after about her fourth session. She was taken aback. Not just by the protestations of affection from therapist to client, but by the hug Robin gave Bink when she left.

Bink had never really told anyone about her unhappinesses. Now she was opening her soul for the first time, to a good-looking bloke who told her he was extremely fond of her, and gave her cuddles.

No surprise that she was getting worse.

After ten sessions – I know, because for years afterwards she begged me not just to report Robin, but to sue him for the £400 (as if I had world enough and time!) – she was desperate. For proper treatment.

In our medicine cabinet were the pills our family doctor had given me when I was doing A-levels, suggesting one a night for a week to break my insomnia. Serena is extremely sensible: I had told her they were there if she needed them, for hers.

Bink rang Robin to tell him she’d taken them all.

As if a bomb had gone off in Pall Mall. Suddenly, everyone cared. Clearly, Bink’s strategy worked.

Serena and I sat with her in the ambulance, screaming and swerving its way round traffic on the way to the Chelsea & Westminster, and I thought, This is bonkers: we’d be quicker on our bicycles.

That was when I made my worst ever mistake in bringing up our five children. One with dreadful, dire ramifications still haunting and dogging us today. One which prompted the subtitle to my subsequent book, Childrearing for Fun: trust your instincts and enjoy your children.

Instead of listening to my own common sense, I obeyed the professionals.

Sunday 19th August 2018

As we walked back from our long, lazy, leisurely lunch with our kind neighbours in the slanting late 6 o’clock sun on Sunday, Bink said, “I enjoyed that so much. I’m really glad I came.”

(Anything about thanking me for dragging her out of bed? What was I saying just now about nada and zilch...)

Referral... rejected

Autumn 2000 and Spring 2001.

That same evening I put Bink in touch with a friend: an erstwhile child psychiatrist who had switched career. I didn’t realise he had a specialist interest in, and knowledge of, her condition: no one could have been better qualified to diagnose.

They talked over the telephone for two hours.

The next day he rang me. “Bink has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I’ll refer her.”

“Oh. Ok: thank you.”

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? I’d barely heard of it. He might as well have told me she had a slight cold.

Christmas came and went. Life continued.

Three months later I happened to be talking to him about something else. Before I hung up he asked, “What happened about Bink?”

“What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you heard anything?”

“I didn’t know we should have done.”

He was audibly shocked. “I referred her.”

To this day, eighteen years on, I struggle to process this. It transpired – after we discovered how very serious her condition was, and took the trouble to find out why nothing had happened – that our friend, a qualified psychiatrist, was the ‘wrong’ person to have made the referral. It should have been a GP.

Eat red tape for breakfast if that’s what excites you. Paper your house with it, if bureaucracy is the reason you work in hospital administration. Tick all the boxes, if that’s the most important thing about your job... more important than, say, saving lives.

But not even to pick up the telephone? Not bother to reply to the letter of referral, or say anything at all? Not inform the person who took the trouble to write it, or send it to the correct person instead, or advise the parents – or indeed anyone at all – that procedure hadn’t been followed correctly?

If Bink’s illness had been leukaemia or anything else life-threatening – as mental illness so very critically is – would her letter of referral have been folded into a dart and aimed so playfully at the wastepaper basket (if indeed anyone did anything so creative with it) with quite such gay abandon? Can you imagine the ramifications, the outcry in the press, if the consequences had been fatal... and it had been any other disease?

Three months when her condition was still manageable. Three months when she was still young enough to change habits. Three months when she could have learnt what was wrong with her, and how to challenge it, and what she could do to get better.

Three months, for pity’s sake, when she needn’t have continued in her terrible and confusing suffering, still so alone – given that her hapless parents still had no idea anything serious was amiss: since she could still hide almost all the symptoms; since a friend who knew better had done something about it; and since the family had three other children, one of whom very possibly had Asperger syndrome (also barely understood) and had nearly killed himself, so bullied had he been by his teachers.

Three months before her sixteenth birthday.

And why regret those three months, given all that happened – or didn’t – afterwards?

Our friend told me to ring our GP immediately. In those days you could talk to your GP. The same day.

“Bring her in,” Mike said. “Today.”

I can still visualise him, on the telephone in his surgery that afternoon, ringing the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, insisting on an urgent appointment with the person he had just looked up as the most appropriate for her to see: a consultant psychiatrist with a name for working with children and young people. Mike had run the name past me first for approval. I had nodded dumbly. I’d never heard of him.

The consultant curiously also a Michael: his name and surname soon branded and scarred onto my brain.

“It's very serious indeed,” Mike explained as he put the telephone down. “Just this morning,” he continued gravely, “I referred for hospitalisation a 21-year-old with OCD.”

(Did he even say, ‘sectioned’? It was a long time ago...)

Gosh, I thought. Thank goodness Bink will never be that ill. When she is twenty-one.