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.