Silence. And birdsong.

Summer 2006

The theft of her case notwithstanding, that summer – when she received appropriate medical treatment for the first time in ten years of illness; six years diagnosed – saw Bink completely transformed.

And with Bink, of course, the rest of us.

She could eat without marigold gloves on. Help clear away a meal. Answer the telephone.

Accept hugs from members of her family.

And the day, home from the Royal Bethlem Hospital for the weekend, when she sat down and played the piano, I felt I had been reborn…

She found it very touching, and sad, to see how isolated others with OCD can become. All her fellow patients on the treatment programme with her – yes, I believe she said all – had lost any friends they ever had. Most of them, family members too.

Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

We couldn’t let go of our daughter, because your daughter is always your daughter. A sister, always a sister.

But a partner? Why would you stay with that? So mad. So unreasonable. So impossible to live with.

Was this the first time I heard Bink express her appreciation of how fortunate she was? That she had us there for her, always.

If you had no one waiting for you... willing you to get well... caring whether or not you did... In Bink’s case, emailing numerous friends to update them to pray for you... “What reason,” she asked poignantly, “would you ever have to get well?”

Whereas when Bink had been in for three days, her not-quite-three-yet sister Rosie rang full of indestructible childish hope, and asked, “Are you better now, Bink?”

Indeed, Rosie may have been more responsible than anyone else in the family for Bink’s improvement.

She told us how her therapist had persuaded her to touch the loo. He asked her to list her most longed-for ambitions, currently unattainable.

Number One on the list? “Taking Rosie swimming.”

So that was what he said, as he urged her to touch a loo seat.

“Think of swimming with your baby sister.”

Her desire was so strong that she did.

Bink also told us how dispiriting it was that you couldn’t be admitted until you were so ill it was almost impossible to get well again. And then not kept in for long enough to be well enough to leave.

How the patients she met now were often back in for the second, or third, or fourth time... Because they hadn’t been fully cured before, and had to deteriorate before they qualified to be referred to come back.

By the time Bink herself finished the 12-week programme I estimated she was a good half way better. Half her symptoms gone. Or all her symptoms reduced by half. (Or a combination of the two, to make up a mathematical half, just in case anyone as precise as Alex – or indeed my late mother – is reading this.)

And yes, of course she begged to be kept on for another 12 weeks, to get fully better. She had been told this could occasionally be made possible, if there was proven clinical need.

As so often in the course of Bink’s illness, I’m left wondering what clinical need could possibly have been more proven than Bink’s own.

She had obviously been very ill before admission. She had obviously improved enormously. And she obviously had a lot more improvement still to go.

I still now sometimes wonder how different our, and her (and the taxpayer’s wallet’s) life could have been, if her request hadn’t been rejected.

And the rest of us? When she came home for that first Easter, it was like the very beginning of the earth’s feeling the warmth of the sun after the darkest nights.

Remember when your children suddenly reached an age when you didn’t have to put poisons out of reach, or move valuable ornaments any more? Or your daughter’s Great Dane goes on holiday and you realise you can leave a cooked chicken out on the kitchen table while you turn your back for a few seconds, without a fortified safe around it which has been secured with multiple padlocks? Or your medical treatment starts to take effect, and you notice you've just spent half an hour without pain?

Or the rain stops, or the spring flowers start to sprout, or the guns go quiet on the Western Front... The damage they did will never be eradicated, but you can envisage the day when they won’t do any more.

You suddenly hear silence.

Silence, and birdsong.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord

First Sunday in Advent.

I realise, of course I do, that Advent is about something far bigger than my little concerns. 

None the less one of the things I love about the God I do love – as I understand it, anyway: given His attitude to little children, for instance – is that He cares about little things, just a bit, too.

(True, He often doesn’t seem to answer my little prayers. Correction: He almost never seems to. In any meaningful timeframe. To me. I expect I’ll understand this one day. When The Days are finally Come.)

Anyway, Advent is about waiting. And hoping. And being without Someone for a while.

A few Sundays back, I mentioned how good it can be not to hear news of a loved one.

Today I am reminded how good it is to be without someone, too.

(Here’s a guilty secret. We’re supposed to pray for the Lord to return quickly, right? I’m afraid I don’t. I hope He’ll take a really, really long time about it. For all that it’s a Vale of Tears down here, I’m very fond of this old world, and I’ll be extremely sad to see it go. 

When I was little, my mother tidied up my toy-cupboard, and threw away my awful bashed up dog-eared old Wobbly Man that had seen so many better days. I’m guessing it must been made of seriously heavy-duty papier-mâché, because it had that frayed, exhausted look only bio-degradable substances can do.

When I turned my cupboard inside-out looking for it and asked her where it had gone, she realised her mistake, apologised and bought me a brand new one. In shiny bright plastic.

I appreciated her love and kindness a lot more than that horrid new Wobbly Man.

I do know the New Heaven and New Earth isn’t going to be made of shiny new plastic. And I do know it will be better than this earth, really. Theoretically. I’m just not good at adjustment and moving on when I love something already... Apart from anything else, there’s going to be no marriage in the New Creation. How can that be any fun, eh?

I can’t help wondering whether He’s really thought this through...)

Anyway, Bink’s therapist rang a few days ago. I hadn’t spoken to Bink in ten days, the longest since she’d gone into the Priory.

Today, we are giving my father a small lunch party to celebrate his 101st birthday. Bink is invited, of course, and has now finished the bootcamp programme so technically could come home. But had already told me she didn’t think it would be wise.

Her therapist said, moreover, that it might be better if Bink didn’t come home for Christmas, either. That Bink herself had said so. And how impressed she was – they all are – that Bink is so committed to the programme, and how she has thrown herself into it with such complete dedication.

Which they have told us a number of times already.

(And which I could have told them she would, if anyone had offered her any treatment any time this last twenty years.)

“A lot of our patients,” the therapist continued, “know they’ve put their families through so much already, they decide they owe it to them to go home for Christmas. And it’s too soon and they fall off the wagon and lose it all...”

“Listen,” I said. “We’ve been without Bink for nearly two decades. Don’t you think we’d rather have another Christmas without her, to see the real Bink back?”

Last week, if you remember, I was looking forward to raising a glass of champagne with our wonderful, generous, exuberant friend Joanna who insisted on throwing a party to celebrate my new novel.

Now here’s a funny thing. Joanna gave the most wonderful party for me. She invited her friends and ours. She filled her fabulous Manor House with lovely people, just to raise a toast to my finally putting pen to paper again.

I went into the kitchen at the start of the evening, was offered a drink, and realised I was very slightly disappointed. There were no bubbles in the glass. I shrugged it off, deliriously happy as I was to be there anyway.

At the end of the evening when all the guests had gone and we sat relaxing in our pyjamas, I felt the same tiny little pang. I couldn’t suggest we open the bottle we’d brought Joanna as a present: that would be really rude. Then her husband came in with the whisky and we enjoyed that instead.

The next morning we drank gallons of tea, and every time I opened any of Joanna’s three fridges, row upon row upon row of foil-wrapped corks winked at me, and I sort of vaguely clocked that Joanna is still Joanna, and all her fridges are full of champagne so the sun has his hat on and all’s right with the world.

The really funny thing is that Serena went through all these thought processes, exactly the same as I did: very slight disappointment at no bubbles; deep shame at being so spoilt that she even had the thought; reassurance at noticing that Joanna’s fridge has all the right bottles in it anyway.

That evening, after we’d all got home, Joanna rang, hooting with self-deprecating laughter, having forgotten all the bottles of bubbly which she’d specially emptied all her fridges for three days earlier and lugged up from the cellar so they were lovely and properly chilled.

“Ah. We assumed that was your normal stock,” I explained.

“What?!” she said. “Don’t you think we eat anything?”

“Not really, no.” On her own frequent admission, Joanna is a lousy cook. “Why would you need food, if your fridge is full of champagne?”

There is a theological point to all this...

Advent is all about looking forward. See?

Not only have we now had five days’ laughter instead of champagne.

We also have a perfect excuse to go back and see Joanna again (perhaps even with Bink, one day soon?) and put all her stock to rights.

Spring shoots

Easter 2006

For the first weekend of their twelve-week period of treatment in the Royal Bethlem Hospital Severe Anxieties Unit, patients were not allowed out.

Which meant that Bink’s first home leave, twelve and a half years ago, was on Maundy Thursday, for four days.

I can still feel my utter astonishment at the Bink who walked back into our little cottage, for that long Easter weekend, after just ten days of treatment.

She sat in chairs she had never been able to sit in. Drank out of glasses instead of mugs. Used the telephone.

It was like beginning to wake up after a long, tortured nightmare and daring to believe that this, after all, might be reality...

We didn’t all have to play musical chairs at the beginning of every meal, to work out where Bink could sit. Or dance a quadrille every time she wanted to get up.

I noticed with wide-eyed astonishment that she herself no longer had to dodge out of the way whenever I drew near; or make a firewall of several feet between us so I didn’t contaminate the air around my own daughter.

I hadn’t fully realised, until it stopped, how endemic this behaviour had become.

How demoralising had this been for me, month after month, year after year? That my own flesh and bone, whom I had given birth to in such a wash of pain and tears and blood twenty-one years earlier, was so revolted at the thought of merely brushing against her mother by mistake that she flinched away in terror.

I hadn’t been able to bear how hurtful it had been, until she didn’t any more.

She told us she had been tasked, in hospital, with washing up. Was this the first time in her life? I can’t remember her ever doing it before.

First she had simply had to do this for herself. Four plates, four mugs, a little cutlery.

One and a half hours.

Without gloves.

(Pretty extreme, I’d say. I won’t do this: washing-up without gloves. Your hands would end up like withered prunes for the rest of the day. Almost at the rubbing-faeces-on-your-face end of the spectrum, to my mind...)

Then she was put on the rota for the house, and washed up for five others. Two hours, with gloves.

She said this was pretty good going: some of them are up all night.

It was quietly noticeable that she could do a little to help. Not much, it was true. But at the end of a meal, instead of sitting incapable, she was able to carry a used plate into the little kitchen. Tidy away the salt. Remove some other item.

It was almost like starting to have four grown up children, rather than three and an invalid.

I could begin to imagine what life could be like...

Just think.

Bink had been asking for treatment for six agonisingly terrifying and lonely years. Since she had been fifteen. Begging, and longing, and so desperate for medical help that she took a token overdose aged sixteen, to get attention for her condition. And then attracted the wrong kind of attention altogether, which catapulted her into an extremely abusive hospital which brutally ended her schooling prematurely and made her addicted to destructive medication.

And yet the right kind of treatment had existed all along…

Which could have saved her over a quarter of her life. The rest of her family all that pain.

And – not that this compares in significance, though it does show the utter futility of the policy – saved the tax-payer, on Bink’s estimation, well over a million quid in subsequent piecemeal benefits and other stop-gap-aids to staying ill.

Endurance

Further prayer-email during Bethlem treatment.

‘Summer 2006.

‘You know what it's like if you have OCD. Or if you're lucky you don't.

‘One simple wash, which the rest of us probably execute at least twice a day without even thinking about it, becomes the most momentous event of your life. 

‘It is your first night performing solo in the West End... when you forget your lines. It is jumping out of a ’plane at thirty thousand feet, when you are terrified of heights. It is the day your fingernails are slowly pulled out by the Gestapo. It is also your visit to Buckingham Palace to collect your OBE.

‘It is all these, rolled into one.

‘And you are expected to perform this utterly exhausting and adrenaline-flooded ritual, not just once in your life like any of the rest of us with something so momentous, but on a regular basis.

If you can find the courage and energy and can face it in the few short hours of day which God gives for washing in.

‘Your laundry, even more apocalyptic.

‘So there they are, all in the same house, all with the same lunacy, all wanting to use the same one and only washing machine.

‘And Bink needed to wash her clothes.

‘But another inmate, Sue, had her clothes in the machine. So Bink had to wait, for the best part of the day, while Sue's wash went on and on and round and round and inside out and upside down – if she's anything like Bink, through the most aggressive, un-ecological, maximum boil programme available – before Bink could put her wash in in.

‘Who, naturally, would not dream of touching Sue’s laundry. Because if Sue is anything like Bink, touching her laundry could blow her out of orbit onto Mars.

‘Eventually and at last, Sue’s extremely over-washed laundry comes out of the washing machine and goes into the dryer.

‘Which means Bink can now put her clothes into the washing machine. Though she will of course have to wait for Sue herself to be present to take her clothes out of the dryer before she can dry hers.

‘Now… Jane was in the queue after Bink.

‘It's not difficult to follow! Concentrate:

‘Three women. All with washing obsessions. All living together. (If Sue is saner than Bink but madder than Jane, what is the name of the bus driver?)’

‘By the time Bink has also sent her long-suffering clothes through a zillion hour wash and is ready for Jane to use the washing machine, Sue has gone out.

‘Leaving her laundry in the dryer.

‘Bink can’t take her own wash out unless she puts it straight in the dryer. Without letting it touch the rubber sealant around the door, obviously. Because if it does, she would have to start all over again. 

‘But Sue’s clothes are in the dryer. And Jane and Bink don’t know what it will do to Sue if they move her wash. She could be all right... or it could just drive her over the cliff and away with the goblins. Even more away with the goblins than she is already.

‘So Jane and Bink stand looking at the machine, debating and deliberating for most of the evening, wondering what to do so they can move Bink’s wash and get on with Jane’s.

‘I picture them, hour after hour, like two cats transfixed by a goldfish in a bowl though with rather less to look at, staring at the tumble dryer and conferring and wondering whether they can take the huge risk of opening the door.’

[Bear in mind I wrote this is 2006. Now in 2018, science is beginning to realise there may be whole new undreamt of levels of terrifying tedium the human race can be forced to endure as punishment for a referendum.]

‘In the end they decide to go for it.

‘They don’t need to touch her wash. They will just inch open the door a crack and take a look inside. Not sure what it will achieve, but hey.

‘And if it freaks Sue out... well, at least she’s in a loony bin already so there won’t be far to go

‘Guess what they find?

‘One pair of knickers. One solitary pair.

‘Goodness only knows how many gallons of water and lashings of electricity and tubs of Persil and hour after hour of the planet’s resources have gone into exhausting that one little tiny pair of lady’s knickers.

‘Which presumably needs this treatment every time it’s worn.’

Hygiene hazards and handsets

Further prayer-email during Bink’s treatment in the Bethlem:

‘Summer 2006.

‘And what of Bink herself?

‘I knew something was up when I got a text message from her asking me to ring a landline. She was very precise. Not that day. Not the next.

‘The one after that.

‘She hasn't been able to use a normal telephone for as long as I can remember. Has she ever, in fact?’ [I’ve mentioned the time when she had to speak to a Cambridge Admissions Tutor from our borrowed house in Scotland, involving me in half a day’s cleaning of the handset and several days avoidance of the telephone myself.]

‘Not for years, as far as I recall.

‘In the early days of her illness, I could never understand why it was so impossible to rouse Bink by ringing home, if she was the only one in.

‘Serena gave her a mobile for Christmas two years ago, and it was five months before she was clean enough to take it out of the box...

‘Presumably it was going to take her two days to be ready for this momentous step.

‘Sure enough, when I rang at the appointed time, she came to the telephone. Actually picked up it up, and answered it. And used it, spoke down it, you know...

‘Imagine for a moment that your five year old picks up the car keys one day and successfully drives the car down the road to the garage. Or more to the point – because it is something you have dreamt of so long, though not consciously because you never believed could happen – your grown up paraplegic son gets out of his wheelchair and folds it up.

‘She told me her therapist had also made her touch a loo seat, and she was still around to tell the tale. This was one thing – having seen it done on The House of Obsessive Compulsives, the telly programme which told us of the treatment at the Bethlem – that she vowed she would never do, and still can’t quite believe she has.

‘She was allowed to wash her hands afterwards, though.

‘It’s good timing that she can use the payphone, because alas she has washed her mobile again.. This time possibly fatally.

‘I was surprised that they don't seem to watch more telly.

‘When Bink was in hospital last time, in the Florence Nightingale Unit, the tv was on all evening, every evening. All afternoon too. If they weren't in therapy, they were watching the box. It’s a shame they didn't watch more, really: it was a lot less damaging than the therapy. The only way to avoid being mesmerised by it was to take up smoking, which meant you were allowed outside. One of the many results of that particular stay – none of which was positive – was that Bink came out with an incurable addiction to The Simpsons. (You could hardly complain about the ciggies: smoking was almost the only sane thing you could do in there.)

‘But in the Acute Anxieties Unit of the Royal Bethlem, they don’t seem to watch telly at all.

‘The reason turns out to be beautifully simple.

‘“Someone washed the remote...”

‘On hearing this, Alex was very taken with the idea of a household full of people all with the same syndrome.

‘“How cool would that be,” he said, “to be in a house that is normal, but a different kind of normal.”

‘“Alex, it’s not normal,” I said. “The D in OCD stands for Disorder. They're ill. Asperger syndrome is different: thank goodness, they don’t yet shove Aspergic people in a nuthouse to ‘get better’...”

‘“Just think,” he continued, with a faraway light in his eyes.” (Warning: some readers may find this next sentence frightening or distressing.) “A whole house full of people thinking like me.”

‘(Actually, on unnecessarily honest reflection, he said, “A whole house full of spazzas thinking like me” – but I wanted to spare you Alex’s and Bink’s rather alarming levels of political incorrectness.)

‘“Like the Cambridge University Mathematics Department, you mean?”’

Terror

Further prayer-email during that long-ago, so-rare treatment Bink was at last given in the Bethlem Hospital Anxieties Disorders Unity. After five years (and an entire agonising adolescence) of waiting:

‘Summer 2006.

‘It's been quite an eye-opener for Bink, meeting people even worse off than she is.

‘Bob first got ill in 1980 (he’s 52 now) and was given treatment in the late ’80s. In those days the approach was harsher. He was made to smear his own faeces over himself.

‘And not allowed to wash it off.

‘Also, because he was frightened of broken glass, he was made to sleep with his bed full of it.

‘Surprise, surprise: he woke, badly cut.

‘Hard to imagine how this would make you less frightened of it, somehow. Or indeed more “normal”, if that’s something we’re aiming for: adjusted to every day life and able to function, anyway.

‘“Did it help?” I asked Bink, incredulous.

History didn’t relate.

‘Discouraging that Bob is back in for treatment. But Bink says he's leaving in a few days, a little better. For two years he couldn't leave his mother's house, at all.

‘Henry is also leaving. Unlike Bob, Henry has hardly improved at all.

‘When he came in his face was a terrible mess: probably rather like the whole of Bob’s body, after he’d been to bed with glass.

‘Henry can’t buy shaving cream.

‘Or indeed, toothpaste, soap, loo rolls, washing up liquid or any other basics you can think of.

‘Henry is frightened of shopping.

‘Sometimes, occasionally – I imagine like Bink with her washing – after many months of screwing himself up to it and going without, Henry can push himself to a point when he can face his fear. He will brave going into a shop. He will brace himself to fill his basket with all those essentials he has been without for many painful months. He controls his panic long enough to get to the check-out. He even succeeds in paying for it all.

Some people, I now know, have obsessions and compulsions around the dirt on money and can’t ever touch it. But Bink hasn’t reported this particular anxiety of Henry.

‘Something for Henry to be grateful for, at any rate.

‘Have succeeded at the monumental and life-changing task, Henry will then get out into the wide freedom of the open air, with all this hard won treasure which he needs in order to care for himself and not slice half his face off shaving.

‘Does he celebrate? Does he open the bubbly?

‘Does he even go home and enjoy the first safe shave in such a long time?

‘He does not.

‘He feels such overwhelming terror that he dumps it all in the nearest bin.

Still in all its new shopping bags.

‘Look on the bright side of Henry’s predicament.

‘Bink actually buys all her requirements. Which works out a lot more expensive even than Henry’s wasted shopping...’

Journey

May 2006

From another prayer-email-round-robin, that early summer of healing:

‘Bink has just been to a concert. Initially, she opted out because she couldn’t afford it. This was not because we hadn’t given her money. We had. Plenty. In truth, it is impossible to give Bink enough though, for luxuries like concerts, or pretty clothes, or simply enjoying herself with friends, because she never knows how much she might need for necessities. She lives in too much fear.

‘Suppose she spent money going out for the evening, and then tomorrow needed more wet wipes, loo paper, mouth wash... it would be like spending on lipstick and then watching your children starve. This is why she has never had a bank account or even an allowance. She always said it would be meaningless, because if she ran out she would have to ask us for more anyway.

‘So Bink said she wouldn’t be able to go. But her therapist said the outing would be of therapeutic value and ensured she had a ticket. Kindnesses like this mean a great deal to her.’

[It was much later that we discovered such expenses were part of her treatment, would have been funded as such, and she need never have worried about it.]

‘There they were then, three inmates – patients, freaks, what you will – trying to cross London together to reach the concert. Andrew and John (real names disguised, obviously)... and Bink.

‘“You know what it's like,” Bink said, “going out anywhere with me. I have to avoid litter bins. And dogs. And bits of the pavement. And I'm dodging all over the place trying not to let people get near me.

‘“Imagine three of us doing that, but all with different phobias...”

‘John is scared of buildings. Including the hospital they are staying in. So he has an issue with going into them.

‘But of course three loonies going out together were bound to forget all sorts of things they absolutely couldn’t leave without, so they had to keep going back... And every time they came out of the building again, John had to enact all his rituals all over again, to get over having gone into the building again. (We never discovered why he didn’t stay outside while the other two fetched things for him...)

‘Andrew, however, has performances that involve going round lampposts.

‘So every lamppost they passed was a major operation. Round and round and round, while the other two waited patiently, knowing there but for the grace of God...

‘Bink, meanwhile, is carrying her rucksack full of loo rolls.

‘(On her actual 21st birthday some previous, Serena and Alex took her out partying all night in Cambridge. At three a.m. she forgot her bag in a bar when they went on to a club, so some opportunistic thief, having noticed how carefully she nursed her treasure full of valuables, thought he’d hit the jackpot... until he got home, emptied it greedily and found it contained nothing but 24 rolls of Andrex-with-Aloe-Vera. He must be puzzling over it even now. Who knows, perhaps still there, in his thieves’ den, tearing open every square of loo roll looking for the crack cocaine which he’s convinced must be hidden in there for Bink to have stuck to it so carefully all evening... Gradually going mad himself.)

‘Naturally, they also had to find a route that avoided King’s Cross, because John (or Andrew) has a thing about King’s Cross, allegedly because of the bomb.

‘So their progress – avoiding buildings, alternately giving a wide berth to lampposts or circling endlessly around them, carrying industrial quantities of loo rolls and having to take an eccentric route three-quarters of the way around the wrong bits of London so they wouldn’t have to transverse King’s Cross – was not only circuitous but pretty tortured.

‘“Weren’t you terribly late?” Serena asked, somewhat naïvely.

‘“That didn’t matter. The person we were meeting also has OCD, so he was even later.”

‘(And of course, once they got there, because Bink can't use loos, every time she needed the loo Andrew, or possibly John, had to accompany her outside to help find a patch of grass’ while John, or possibly, kept guard so she wasn’t overlooked...)

‘Bunch of nutters.

‘Well, yes.’ 

Please pray for me

I have just found this email, the first of many I sent from that tiny little study in that sweet little cottage, twelve years ago:

‘April 2006

‘Dear Friends

‘Shaun and I have just dropped Bink off at the Bethlem Hospital, where she is due to stay for twelve weeks. The last thing she said as we said goodbye (having somehow managed to give me a hug for the first time since the last – disastrous – stay in hospital five years ago) was “please ask everyone to pray for me”, so this is what I am doing. Please forgive the round robin: I never send these things because they're so impersonal, but I hope you’ll allow it on this occasion.

‘This is what she has asked us to pray for: 

1. That she gets better! It is possible to get 100% better from OCD. Rare, yes; unlikely, for someone who suffers from such a severe form of the disorder, perhaps... but still possible. A week ago (the weekend we moved into this cottage) Serena organised a 21st birthday dinner for Bink and a small handful of her few best friends (all men, naturally...); I had spent the day getting new clothes and a makeup lesson for her, and she looked absolutely stunning... just, I thought, as she would have looked if she had grown up never having got ill ten years ago. She was sparkling and funny and exuberant and joyful, and we laughed till our sides ached until the clocks sprang forward and way beyond, and perhaps for the first time since her childhood I could imagine what her life would be like if she really could get better. We will never redeem her childhood or recover anything from her wretched adolescence, but it is possible that she could enjoy her twenties and more. Please pray for this.

2. That she doesn't “freak out”. I think what she means by this is that the treatment is terrifying: a question of setting the most ghastly challenges possible (the equivalent, for the rest of us, of daily bungee jumps, eating live maggots and cockroaches, leaping into scalding water or frozen seas, being shouted at by Alan Sugar in front of a million viewers... imagine whatever you're most frightened of and would cause you most pain, and having to do it every day for 12 weeks) and she wants us to pray that she doesn't suffer awful panic attacks, or fail to cope without us there to catch the pieces.

‘I would like to add three prayers of my own, though they are much more trivial.

1. She has been offered a job to start in two and a half weeks, working in her old prep school. After the first two weeks, you are allowed to combine the hospital treatment with outside activities if you can. Obviously it's much more important to get better, but it is a super job: giving her responsibility, self-esteem and experience in the only career she's ever expressed an interest in, and a nest egg for university.

2. There is as yet no way forward for her to be able to take up her place at Cambridge next October (her college hasn't got appropriate accommodation for her). She had her disability assessment last week, and the Admissions Tutor, Disability Resource Centre and I are trying every avenue we can think of... but we've been doing this since January and we haven't yet found an answer. Please pray for a solution so she can take up the place.

3. Very distressingly (and inexplicably) the vendor of the church-owned cottage we are now in ignored all Bink's instructions and all the details they'd spent hours agreeing together, and her bathroom has been fitted up completely wrong and may be no use to her at all. At its worst, what this means is that if she doesn't get better she won't be able to live with us; at best (again assuming less than total recovery) she will find it very stressful and miserable. (If she does get better we won’t care what the bathroom is like! – though it will be useless because it’s only a shower and there’s a shower elsewhere in the house.) Having discovered recently that we’ve missed five years’ entitlement to Disability Living Allowance for Bink (and probably Alex too) and Carer’s Allowance for me, I’m going to see whether the council has any disability grants available to redo the bathroom.

’Thank you for caring enough to read this. Her address until the beginning of July will be: c/o The Inpatient Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Unit, Alexandra House, Bethlem Royal Hospital, Monks Orchard Road, Beckenham, Kent, BR3 3BX. [Here followed her telephone number and email address of the time.]

‘Thank you all,

’Anne’

I have felt so much, over the years, that it takes me a while to work out what I feel now.

It is a salutary lesson, reading one’s prayers from over a decade earlier. Perhaps it’s as well that we don’t often write them down.

She got to Cambridge, yes. And managed to use her shower.

I had forgotten how much worry there was about these two issues at the time. It’s true (I remember now) that I spent many months looking for suitable accommodation for her, so she could take up her university place. In the end her college gave her two rooms instead of one, so she didn’t have to share a bathroom.

And she told me the other day that the benefits from her treatment in the Bethlem are still with her today. She no longer eats all her meals wearing Marigolds, for instance.

But as for her twenties being less painful than her childhood and adolescence… oh! why did I have to read such a prayer, written at such a hopeful time?

Still, we can pray for her thirties, can’t we?

It’s not that old, for your life to start…