Faceblindness

Summer 2013

I’m not sure whether I have already shared with you my inherited disability. (One of many.)

Prosopagnosia.

My grandfather sometimes didn’t recognise his wife and children.

Alex doesn’t even bother to try. Just comes straight out with it. Do I know you? To someone he’s known all his life.

I could give you a week’s posts of amusing anecdotes on our inability to perform this most basic of social functions, but will content myself with my parents’ Ruby Wedding, when my aunt and uncle (yes, my father’s brother and sister; and yes, they’d grown up together, as siblings do) spent fifteen minutes trying to work out how they knew each other.

Park that thought, to come back to.

It was not yet midsummer. The year of Serena’s wedding.

We were in Serena’s college, having a pre-wedding canapé-tasting, when Ben called us out to come to the Senate House a minute away. So we all ran out into the drizzle and admired his name, framed on the building with all the others.

It was handy really, because when he invited us to lunch in Jesus College for the day of his graduation, I had a smart outfit and hat already.

Matching shoes and bag, you know.

Alex had quit Peterhouse in the fall-out from our homeless period, so we went to Bristol and watched him graduate, in a hilly rather than a flat city and with a different coloured hood.

I don’t do graduation photographs as a rule, but I took a picture of Alex shaving in the side mirror of the car as soon as he’d greeted us.

We had tea in some jolly university hall, and took home balloons and streamers.

Bink was allowed one guest the night before. We would all be having lunch with her the next day, in the Provost’s garden.

As you know already, she was at my father’s college. She hadn’t studied any Latin or Greek with him for a couple of years, but the well-Bink is the most gracious, grateful person you could hope to encounter.

Grandfather, please will you come with me to Evensong and my graduation dinner? (Hundreds of courses, you know.)

I have booked you a room, and arranged parking in college.

How jealous I was! And how thrilled.

The next day we were at the Senate House early. Our second time, presumably: Ben on Friday and Bink on Saturday. Something like that.

Hoards of bigwigs milling around King’s Parade. Rows and rows of them. Maces and gowns and hoods and whatnot.

Coffee upstairs.

Then front row seats. 

Graduate after graduate stepping forward, shaking hands with the Vice-Chancellor, accepting a rolled-up scroll with a scarlet ribbon.

It can be daunting, even when you’ve done it yourself. (Not that I ever bothered: the pomposity of Shaun’s graduation was enough for me. If I ever send you a CV claiming to have a degree, I’m lying. My mother didn’t collect hers till the Girton centenary, in her eighties. They weren’t members of the university when she went up.)

All these bright and beautiful young things, with their bright and beautiful futures.

One particularly drop-dead gorgeous stunner stepped forward. Slim as a willow, golden hair swimming down her back, face like an exquisite faerie.

Oh my word, how her parents must be brimming with pride! So beautiful, and clever, and set for what stellar brilliance!

Oh my WORD!!

What?!

I realised after she stepped back down again.

It was my daughter.

It was a long time ago. And that precious scroll has long since been torn up in tears.

But last night Bink posted this on her Facebook page:

Am coming out of a six-and-a-half-year... don't know what to call it. Period of extreme mental illness characterised by intense, near-constant terror and warped thinking (caused by very mild cannabis use over 9 months). Am EXTREMELY, EXTREMELY angry and also very confused.

It has filled me with hope.

1. She is angry: so she is feeling.

2. She is confused: so she is realising.

3. And she is coming out.

Miracle

Autumn 2012

So during that dreadful and life-changing year of 2012, Bink turned to cannabis to enable her to stay off prescribed medication.

I don’t know exactly when, and as (sadly) I haven’t spoken to her for over three weeks I can’t ask her. 

So I can only tell you what she has told me before.

That she very, very nearly managed without. Another few months and she would have been all right.

That she only used the tiniest trace: five grams in total. She was extremely susceptible: one or two puffs made her high. She didn’t need more.

That she got it from a friend who did our gardening. (Don’t blame him, she said: someone else would have given it to me. Why would I bother? Pot has wrecked our relationship with him anyway: we looked after him for seven years, from the age of sixteen. He was arrested for driving under the influence and fined several hundred pounds. Which we lent him to keep him out of the courts... and never saw him again.)

That a number of people knew. Including, as I’ve already said, her psychiatrist and her therapist. And Gatsby, who seemed to think it was cool.

And that she is now as consumed by guilt as Grenfell Tower by the flames: utterly convinced it has stolen her life, her mind, her years.

So there is an explanation to what was happening to her personality. Twisting, and turning the knife. Particularly in me. Flashes of cruelty completely unBink, never seen before except when incarcerated in the Unit at sixteen and made to take drugs.

That Michaelmas Term she was indeed in a bad way. Alex knew, when he thought to give up his degree to care for her. Ben had some idea, wanting to call the police when Gatsby wouldn’t tell where she was.

And indeed, who else should be waiting to gather the shards of her shattering sun-catching image... I could have warned him: those who watch glass houses splinter shouldn’t try to catch the glass.

But I haven’t leisure to care too much what happened to him in all this.

Bink has a very dear, very wonderful friend she met at the same time as Gatsby, too modest to appear in this blog. He saved her life that term, she believes. That he gave his health for her.

I was too depressed to reach out of bed for a glass of water, she told me long afterwards. Sometimes for days at a time.

She was kept alive, not just by love of a friend. But by a miracle.

As a child and teenager Bink espoused her Christianity with the energy and passion she did everything. That same fervour and commitment which has now been worn out of her by merciless mental neuralgia.

She has prayed so many fruitless prayers – I would say, let down by God so often but my reader Alison will (rightly!) correct my doctrine – that she has no heart for much of anything any more.

I know better than to ask her about her soul while her mind is still so sick, but a few years ago, she said, You don’t need to worry.

There is something, she said.

That term she had at last given in, did a pact with the devil and agreed to kill herself if he would only end the pain.

She put the pills in her mouth. She was about to swallow. When she heard a voice.

Follow me.

And spat them out.

Some time after she told me this story, I made a reference to the One who said it.

Unbelievably, although she must have recognised the voice, she had failed to recognise His words.

Springtime

Sunday

We went to see Bink on Thursday.

On our way back from Norfolk, we went via Cambridge to have lunch with the very kind people who have taken her in.

She didn’t make it. Downstairs from her room. Or even into the daylight of being awake. So we all sat downstairs having lunch without her.

Her hostess said Bink panicked during the ten days they were away, terrifying herself with thoughts that they might change their minds while they were away, ask her to leave on their return. It has happened so many times before: friends very kindly take Bink in... and then break, or realise they will. She really has not been easy to live with for the last few years.

It will not happen here, her hostess said. 

And I believe her. Not, actually, primarily because she is so obviously such an intelligent and reliable – and gentle and kind – person: Bink has had all this many times before.

But because of the change in Bink. Which is a much better reason, isn’t it?

The change that she is off Lorazepam.

What a momentous statement that is!

How can it be legal, that stuff? How can it be, when it wrecked her mind and her life so comprehensively, and took several years and four and a half months in The Priory to be free of it?

I think, Shaun said after we got home, Bink is going to be all right.

Of course, it all depends what “all right” means.

Incapacitated for life, but at least alive, and living on benefits?

Or dare we hope for more?

I think, her hostess said in that gentle way of hers, it’s not helpful to think in terms of well and ill.

Bink hates it when I do that, I admitted.

Well, she does it a lot herself.

Probably my fault then.

I have been hugely helped by reading this blog written by our friend Alison Whale, about living with ME. So much talent, so squandered by such a devastating illness.

So much worse an affliction than Bink’s, in so many ways. Why does God allow it?

So, yet again, I fall back on the exercise of measuring the drops that are in the glass:

She is so much better off than a year ago.

And that was very much better than a few years ago.

And it is springtime.

(Ten years ago, twenty, I raged and wept about Alex. So much of his life, his energy, his many talents squandered trying to explain himself to – and understand – a world with no time for Asperger’s syndrome.

Last week we went to enjoy him singing a solo in a concert with a choir from the firm he loves working for.

It can come good. It really can.)

Rose and Serena – and the big Viking, and the little – at home for the next week. Bink invited.

I am praying she comes home for Easter but not expecting it.

Give her a month, her hostess said, to recover from her panic. Then we might start doing a few things again.

Going to pot

2012 again.

It was a long time before I had any idea what Bink herself was going through, that dismal winter.

For which, we need to go back a bit.

In the summer of 2012 Bink had at last agreed to see the so-called “top” OCD psychiatrist I’d found for her.

Twice.

Would, oh would that she hadn’t!

It was obvious pretty soon afterwards how incompetent the woman was. You can almost tell by someone’s secretary’s spelling mistakes, can’t you? I am flamboyantly dyslexic myself, with a defiant joy in creative Shakespearean spelling, so I do try not to judge by a person’s i’s before e’s and so on. 

But you can surely tell by someone’s secretary’s wild and hair-raising inaccuracies...

We have a bit of a joke in our family, when it comes to names and initials. (Bear with me: this is relevant.)

There are seven of us, right?

We are all (as were my father’s and mother’s families, and Shaun’s) customarily known by our second Christian names. Which gives some scope for confusion. In one’s NHS notes, as well as the precise delivery of one’s post.

This potential is further enhanced by our weakness for inherited names: when faced with a crisis of indecision at the font, we tend to fall back on what we know.

Thus, two of us are Austen Atkins (Shaun and Ben, first name: Shaun’s grandfather’s).

Two are Adelaide Atkins (Bink and me, first name: has been the second daughter’s for about two centuries).

Two of us are Davidson Atkins (Alex and me, third name: my father’s, shortened to David.)

Two are S Atkins (Shaun and Serena: pure coincidence).

Two are B Atkins (Bink and Ben: ditto).

And a whopping five of us are A Atkins (Shaun, me, Bink, Alex and Ben: sheer mischief).

(Rose, alone, is unconfusable. Well, except that when she won her scholarships to senior school she appeared in The Times as Felicity Atkins. Her first name.)

So it goes like this.

Dring dring.

Hello?

Can I speak to Mr Atkins, please?

Which Mr Atkins?

Mr A Atkins.

Which Mr A Atkins?

Er... Mr Austen Atkins?

Which Mr Austen Atkins?

Oh! Sort of... um... youngish?

He’s at work, sorry.

(Actually, they’re all at work. But it’s more fun this way.)

(There’s also a very entertaining story about Ben missing half a May Ball around the time of his birthday, in order to receive a parcel addressed to B Atkins – possibly even, Mr B Atkins; which Bink says is entirely my fault for allowing her such a whacky nickname – which turned out to be a delivery of half-a-dozen identical mop-heads. But Ben finds the memory very distressing so I won’t relate it here.)

Still with me?

If so, you will have already spotted that Ms A Atkins could be me or Bink. Given that she doesn’t open her letters for several years, if one looks interesting I might as well.

And did.

And as it was a medical epistle talking about a consultation with Adelaide Atkins (which is what the NHS calls me) I was onto the second page before I realised it was nothing to do with me.

It was from said shrink. Or, presumably, her secretary.

And highly confidential.

And really quite worrying.

I mean, it was worrying that this top bod had spent two hours with Bink and not realised she never goes by the name of Adelaide. (Lara, Bink, Robin, lots of other loony things to choose from. Adelaide, never. So shrink barely knows who Bink is. Certainly not well enough to know what to call her.)

It was even more worrying that she referred to her quaffing, or puffing, or ingesting, or whatever your preference, sixty quids’ worth of weed a week.

I was appalled.

Over and over again, I had warned Bink. Never, ever, ever touch the stuff.

We’d seen what it could do. Shaun had a parishioner in Parson’s Green whose mind had turned to jelly with it. Schizophrenia, more accurately. And violence. Committed Christian... and last we know, he was banged up for smashing up a bus shelter... after writing Gospel graffiti on a bridge over the M4 which, yes, genuinely brought someone to Christ. Shaun met the convert. Years later. Pure chance.

I’d also read Patrick Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons and Julie Myerson’s The Lost Child, and you really don’t have to be a top shrink to realise that the effect of this muck on a minority of the population can be utterly devastating.

I realise a lot of politicians, even a lot of doctors, are too stupid to join the dots... but you barely need a a pinch of common sense.

(A member of Bink’s prayer group lost her son to it. Completely. Though this hadn’t happened by 2012 and I didn’t know her yet.)

So don’t touch it Bink. Because you, of all people, would go stark raving bonkers on it if anyone would.

(When I heard Gatsby had shared a spliff with her, I went apeshit... but I think that was later too.)

So reading this, right under my nose, was not a happy experience.

Fortunately, Bink must have been on speaking terms with me, occasionally, around then. Because when I shared my concerns a few weeks later, she reassured me. Not only had the women got her name wrong. And addressed the envelope so that nearly half a dozen people might have opened it.

But Bink had told her she’d consumed sixty quids’ worth of cannabis in her whole life. About five grams. Next to nothing. In junkie terms.

(As we were to discover much later, she only used it to enable her to stay off the legal meds: she was finding withdrawal so excruciating.)

Nevertheless, this top shrink knew she was smoking pot. 

Actually, thought she was using several hundred times more than she was. 

And didn’t stop her.

(In fact, so did her wonderful therapist and she didn’t stop her either. Nor a very kind, wonderful and supportive friend, whom we still adore. Let alone bloody Gatsby, who smoked it with her.)

It gets worse…

Obviously, I don’t know what this daft prof actually said because I wasn’t in the room. But Bink came away with the very definite impression that it wasn’t doing her much harm

Shrink told Bink, you should be more worried about your alcohol consumption.

I can’t go on...

Everyone denies sixty grams of dope can wreck your life.

Talk to Bink about it.

Just talk to Bink.

Let’s end on something more amusing.

So… I rang the secretary, explained the confusion, and said if she could kindly address Bink’s letters to Miss A Atkins in future, I wouldn’t open them by mistake.

Natty little convention. Goes back hundreds of years. Prevents confusion.

Can’t do that, she said. We don’t use Miss or Mrs.

Oh good grief… get a life! (Not even if a patient requests it? Nope.)

I took a deep breath and counted to something.

The difficulty, I explained to this retard, is that Bink and I share the same first name. Adelaide. Perhaps you could address it to Bink? Or Lara? Or ALM Atkins?

Guess what?

Next letter. Ms Adelaide Atkins.

So I opened it again.

Sonnet

New Year 2013.

Daughter

Dull misery. She is gone.

The smiling eyes,

The impish smirk, the child so full of wit.

That bairn, bereft of years but not unwise,

Nor short of poetry, or words to fit,

Brimming with music, overspilling laughs,

The one whose japes we many times rehearsed,

Who jumped in with both feet, never by halves,

Whose joy and energy like sunshine burst.

And she is fled. Instead, a stick-thin soul

Came home for Christmas. Never smiling now.

Withdrawn. A stranger. Always in control.

Goodbye my wild quicksilver lovely. Ciao.

Often I thought a changeling had been left,

But dreamt that we would find her.

Gone.

Bereft.

9th January 2013

Shoes and crackers

Christmas 2012

There was nothing to forgive, Bink. I have always been far more heart-broken than angry.

(Though admittedly, yes, sometimes anger is less painful.)

Nevertheless Bink apologised, just two or three weeks ago in fact. I was trying to explain, I can’t remember why, how her illness hurts the rest of us. I cited that example, at random.

She’d had no idea the Vice-Provost had rung, or that he’d asked me to pass on the message.

I’m so sorry, she said several times.

She had no idea of a very great deal that winter, I suspect.

Gatsby invited them both to our house for Christmas, that winter of 2012. Himself and Bink, together. Or neither, presumably.

As we no longer heard from Bink any more, that was the deal. He would bring her.

I wouldn’t have minded if he’d said, I’m going to be alone this Christmas because it’s the ex’s turn for the kids. We have often welcomed waifs and strays at our Christmas table.

But he invited himself as if he were doing us a favour... If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d have declined, as kindly as I could, and let her come alone or not at all.

They turned up half-way through Christmas Eve, while Ben was giving a music-accompanied reading of The Snowman to the children at a neighbours’ party.

Bink like a rake.

She has always been petite. 

That Christmas, she looked as if she could break.

The previous summer, Serena had (after some months’ deliberation) accepted Christian... to our unanimous delight. She asked Bink and Rose to be her bridesmaids. In the same breath almost, she asked Bink if she would please be kind to keep her hair long for her till the wedding. It was to be the following Midsummer: just after Bink, Alex and Ben all graduated.

There were, of course, fittings to be had.

Serena had designed the dresses most beautifully. All three to be in the same soft ivory silk. Serena’s an exquisite pure silk lace over satin. Rosie’s a dreamy silk chiffon. Bink’s the stunning same silk satin naked, falling like a waterfall over her lovely figure; classic as Grace Kelly; suitable for a simple wedding dress in itself.

But Bink couldn’t bear to go to the fitting. We had a hard job of it to calm her at all. Tell her we would find a way around. That yes, of course she could come another time and try again. And the dressmaker would minimise the visits.

It wasn’t this that I remember as being most pitiful that winter.

Bink has always adored Rose. She had asked her what she wanted for Christmas, and Rose had said, casually, as you do as a child, high-heeled shoes.

A pair of platforms, from a charity shop, for a couple of quid, might have been a laugh. If she had promised only to wear them but occasionally, and kick them off for dancing.

To wear once, and throw away perhaps...

I can barely relate this without weeping.

As we cleared away the plates, before bringing on the darkness and the flickering pudding, Bink produced Rosie’s presents. Three careful boxes. Three pairs, different colours, different styles, so she had a choice for different outfits. Beautiful, elegant, far-too-high stilettos, suitable for a grown woman. Each pair costing about seventy or eighty pounds.

We stared, aghast.

For a nine-year-old.

Poor Rose.

Poor, poor little Bink. What was she thinking?

It was Serena who broke the dreadful silence.

Bink, she said, as gently as only Serena can. Rosie’s feet haven’t finished growing.

Bink looked puzzled. Had she done something wrong?

We told her how kind and generous it was. We explained about children’s feet. We asked, very tentatively, if she had arranged to get her money back on the styles Rose didn’t choose...

I’ve no idea what happened to them.

Rose never wore them. (Her feet are now size seven.) I don’t suppose Bink ever had the wherewithal to do anything about it.

And it still makes me cry, even now.

And again...

Early December 2012

I had no idea what Bink was going through. Not for a long time afterwards. I can only assume it was even worse for her than it was for me.

By quite some.

It was Saturday 1st December, 2012. Afternoon.

Bink’s Vice-Provost on the telephone. Quite an important chap. Wouldn’t generally expect him to have time for this kind of chit-chat. Secretaries, PAs, all that.

He wanted to know how he could contact Bink. (Your guess as good as mine, matey.)

He’d happened to bump into her the other day, he explained, and there appeared to have been an oversight in her first year and she hadn’t been invited to the Founder’s Feast, which every member of college was entitled to attend, at least once.

I knew all about the Founder’s Feast. Bink is a member of my father’s college. It’s quite a posh bash, posh nosh, world-famous choir singing the entertainment. Bink loves all that stuff, or used to.

Anyway, he thought this will never do, so he made sure there was a place for Bink that year, as it was her last. But he couldn’t get hold of her, to get the invitation to her.

Because, as I’ve told you already, Bink doesn’t do telephone. Or email. Or indeed, being generally contactable in any way whatsoever for the convenience of others.

Given as I could hardly tell a busy dude like the Vice-Provost to wander over to Bink’s room and rap on the door, even though it was probably only five minutes from where he was making the call, I told him to leave it with me and I’d see what I could do.

Bink hates surprises. One year (I think I may have told you this, too) Serena very sweetly arranged a surprise birthday party for her as she was one of the few members of the family who’d never had one, and she spent the afternoon at the top of the house sobbing with the shock.

Which I can kind of understand, because if all your favourite people suddenly turn up and you haven’t washed your hair and you’re wearing your worst lime-green jumper and icky slouching-trousers, it would be a bit minging. (Which is why, when I arranged Serena’s surprise 18th, we all fibbed and told her she was invited to the opera and they were really pricey stall-seats so she had to be dolled up to the nines.)

So Bink wouldn’t enjoy discovering at ten to seven that she was invited to be in college at seven for seven thirty, black tie. Even more than your average gal wouldn’t. I mean, I would find that a tad stressful and I’m not nuts. Much.

So the sooner I could get the message to her, the kinder it would be.

Nothing if not resourceful, me. And I was brought up in Cambridge and frequently witnessed my mother’s resourcefulness in similar situations. She used to say you can get away with anything if you have grey hair… as she dialled Shaun’s college when I’d barely met him and asked for his home address.

(Now I stop to think about it, her hair must have gone grey a lot younger than mine...)

So I rang the Porters’ Lodge.

They couldn’t see the colour of my hair, as they obviously could my mother’s, so it didn’t matter that it wasn’t quite right for that sort of stunt. Besides, they knew me of old. And Bink. More than once I’d baked a large fruit cake and dropped it off at the P’lodge to thank the porters for looking after Bink or helping me do so.

So I asked the one who answered if he could nip over to Bink’s room and tell her, please? The magic word Vice-Provost (or is that two?) immediately did the trick though he sounded like he was happy to, anyway.

(And yes, of course I was thinking what you’re thinking. Why didn’t the VP think of this himself, given that he must have had the P’lodge number and the porters would have jumped to his bidding without a second thought. I imagine because by the time you’re VP, so much of your brain is taken up with so much more important things like nuclear physics or the authorship of Gawain and the Green Knight that it hasn’t got room for common-or-garden-things like where you left your socks or how to get a message to someone a few hundred paces away. That’s Alex’s excuse anyway. And he hasn’t even reached VP yet.)

I would have loved to have heard from her. A simple thanks. Account of her lovely evening; what she wore; what the food was, and the wines; whom she sat next, and spoke, to... all would all have doubled my pleasure.

I contented myself with imagining it anyway, as I often had before.

The next day I received the briefest of emails:

Please don't contact me. I don't care how important you think it is.

No signature. No reason. No more.

Some time later (or was it that same day, first in Advent? Would make sense…) we were in Cambridge for Ben’s carol service. A treat to be much looked-forward to.

I’d baked something and so had his godmother, for a chaotic student tea in the basement kitchen of his digs, friends running up and down the stairs, grabbing gowns, dashing off.

Beautifully woven singing. Hushed candlelight in the tenebrous chapel.

(Presumably Bink invited.)

Afterwards his godmother hugged me.

I’m so sorry, she said. So sorry.

I hadn’t said anything. Presumably I hadn’t needed to.

All that hurt still written in my face.

Spiralling down

Michaelmas 2012

We fast-forward a year again, to October 2012, and Bink returned to Cambridge.

I really hadn’t got it, not at all. Not why she had left home to live a mile or two away, over the summer holidays. Nor why we didn’t see her any more.

Nor where this strange... what? Antagonism, I suppose... had come from. Or why.

Curious, that I had been the first in the family, by some months, to feel the chill in my flesh over Gatsby.

And yet I was so blind, so deaf and ignorant, when it came to her welfare that autumn. Needing my other children to see what I couldn’t.

First Serena.

Bink had asked if Rosie could spend the weekend with her.

There was a harp workshop taking place that Saturday in Cambridge: enjoyable, educational, where she could perform with other harpists. I’d signed nine-year-old Rosie up already.

And a concert in the afternoon, learning orchestral sight-reading.

It would have been much easier for me to take her myself. But I like to please Bink, of course I do. So I made everything far more complicated for myself than it need have been, organised a lift for Rosie at 8am with another participant; then another lift to Bink’s after the workshop; then Bink was supposed to take her to the concert in the afternoon.

When I learnt she hadn’t and asked why, the answer was trivial: they wanted an ice-cream or something. She made me feel (as Bink often did) a pushy-control-freak parent, for trying to organise their afternoon.

This is wrong, Serena observed, afterwards.

What is?

A child doesn’t spend the weekend with someone who isn’t relating to that child’s parents.

I hadn’t joined the dots. Serena was right, of course. It was the first time Bink had spoken to me in ages. Because she wanted Rosie.

I don’t think you should send Rosie again, Serena said. It’s too confusing, for a child.

The realisation felt – horrible to admit – liberating. We no longer had to go along with Bink’s plans, where Rosie was concerned. Indeed, it wasn’t right to do so, if Bink was cutting me out of her life.

And a watershed. From now on, the child’s needs would be paramount, not the adult’s... however ill the adult was.

A decision which was to cause much anger and accusation…

Then it was Alex.

He, like Ben and Bink, was due to graduate the following summer. He contemplated, out loud, throwing in his degree, to go and look after her.

Chuck in your degree?! Why, Alex?

To save Bink’s life.

What had he noticed, that I had completely missed?

Then Ben.

He and Bink were part-way into the Michaelmas Term. He went to find her, to tell her the deadline for the Cambridge Bursary Fund (formerly the Isaac Newton Trust) was the next day. It gave generous financial support to students who qualified. If he did, Bink would.

She wasn’t in her room. He went to find her in college. She wasn’t in the hall or bar or café. He looked in the library.

He exhausted everywhere he could think of.

He rang me.

I rang Gatsby. He might know.

He was LA, on a work trip.

He did.

And he refused to tell.

Ben was incensed. She is vulnerable. Suicidal.

Ben, too, seemed to know what I didn’t.

Gatsby is thousands of miles away, not even in the same day-and-night zone!

We must tell the police.

No Ben, I overruled.

Cambridge has rules about residency. You have to keep term for a certain number of weeks in the year to qualify for your degree. Bink might be able to wing the language, the set texts, the lit crit. She’s pretty smart.

But even Bink couldn’t get a degree if she didn’t fulfil the university’s basic qualification.

I had no idea how the rule might be interpreted, or how strict they might be. Just as we had no idea where she was.

I didn’t dare blow her cover.

Ben was right, of course.

Rescuing her from Gatsby – had we succeeded – would have been worth a very great deal more to her life and health and welfare than a Cambridge degree. 

Had we but known.

And, as I say… had we succeeded.

Stealing the sunshine

As is the way of memories, one has been lurking, watching me, just out of sight, like a half-lost dream, a waft of mist around a corner.

Unlike a dream, which becomes more distant the more you relax your hold on it, a memory hovers, waiting for you. It is patient. It lets you get on with other things... knowing that sooner or later you will pick something up and go, Oh yes, and then it will jump out and say, here I am.

It was Christian helping Bink with Rosie’s birthday party which knocked it into position.

This was how I realised it must have been Rose’s ninth birthday... that terrible summer, even as Bink was already leaving us, it must have been. While Fleur and I sat in the glorious sunshine enjoying the happy cowboys and Indians running and screaming with delight, and I thought, I would have done something much simpler for Rose’s birthday... but Bink had put so much into it.

Yet again, so much love just before abandoning us. Exactly as when she was fifteen. As if her spirit, her heart, knew how brutally she was about to treat us. So she wanted to give Rose something utterly beautiful and memorable, before leaving her high and dry...

Please, allow me to take a brief respite from that awful year of 2012, for this fresh memory of a happier time.

The first time we met Christian.

It must have been late July, 2011, because we were on our way to Norfolk. We took an absurd detour via Central London, where Serena was helping with her new church’s summer fair.

She had set up the donkey rides and the Victorian photo booth.

Lovely day.

Serena and a new, quiet friend, tall, Norwegian, red-blonde like Good Queen Bess, helping her, both of the them dressed in severe black costumes, Serena in a savage bonnet, both posing as an example of a solemn couple in front of the lens. Stare at the vast and cumbersome black box, keeping still for a very serious time, until it bursts into flash.

Then outside again.

Busy, happy people, in the summer sun... just like when we used to run the church fair, on Parson’s Green.

Buying things you would never buy. Absurd body wash, I bought, for Bink... made of butter or something crazy. With a loofah, and some double-cream bodilicious to smother all over yourself afterwards.

I still have it. Still in its bag. Untouched. With the instructions. At the top of my wardrobe. Reminding me of a more together time.

Leaning on the rampart of some tiny bridge construction, wishing I were small enough to ride the tiny donkey of Serena’s, going back and forth a few steps at a time before turning in that tiny mead of grass in the middle of Victoria.

And then, in one scream, the curtain of that glorious afternoon was torn in two and let loose the darkness behind...

A howl from Bink.

A raw wail of pain, and loss, and panic, and horror.

What is it, Bink? What is it?

My bag! My bag. I hung my bag on that little bridge, while we watched the donkey and looked round the stalls.

It’s gone!

Well... of course it’s gone. This is Central London. A Saturday afternoon. A fair.

Me, I lose bags all the time. Purses. Whatever. Behind the sofa, half the time. Under a book or in the garden. Cancel my cards and start again. Never have any cash so I don’t particularly mind. I have enough in my life, not to fret about a lost bag.

We’ll cancel your cards, Bink. Immediately. Don’t panic so.

But it was full of cash!

How much cash? Why would you carry cash?

Because I have such problems with my bank, they never let me take out any money, so much hassle and paperwork, my card never works, so I took out the maximum allowed from the cash machine, for the seaside.

(Please don’t suppose, for a moment, that this was for Bink to enjoy herself at the seaside. Her dæmons would never let her do such a thing. This was to allay the fear that she might not be able to buy the toiletries she needs, and would be enveloped in terror.)

Three hundred pounds. Cash.

And she hung it on a fence on order to enjoy the fair.

Can you see, kind reader, the cruel innocence of it? The pity? How Bink is like a child, in her simplicity.

Alex has a similar trait, with his Asperger’s syndrome. But Alex... well, Alex has learnt to survive, and laugh, and speak neurotypical.

Though my heart sometimes wrenches for Alex too... When Serena goes skiing and leaves Alex to walk her dog and he locks both dog and self out of the house while he is still in his pyjamas and has left his telephone inside with all his keys and contact numbers and has to be at work in half an hour.

How can you possibly get cross with him, Serena? You can’t get cross with Alex.

So she employs a dog-sitter, nowadays.

Thus we spent that first afternoon of our summer holiday, that year of 2011, the last year we were all together, the day we first met Christian, cooped up indoors in a church vestry talking to the police on a hopeless quest to recover Bink’s bag.

The theft doesn’t matter. Of course.

Fortunately, it was insured. And it gave me an opportunity, over the following week, to talk to her bank about all the grief they’d been giving her, so she could go into Boots in future and simply buy what she needed with her card.

What matters is Bink’s visceral fear, which I can still feel under my own skin now, when I recall it all. That she had tried to bring some small semblance of control into her life, so she could go to the seaside... and yet again it was seized from her.

Her sobbing, sobbing, pitiless and comfortless fear and loss and desolation.

And, yes, this was a happier time for us.

We were all there to help her.

That was the summer, after our return, when she tackled her illness with such discipline. Out of bed every morning, early. Taking exercise. Eating sensibly.

Fresh air and routine and good, common sense.

Still studying with my father.

Bink, I assured her over and over. No depression can withstand such treatment. Keep going! Such sunshine will drive the clouds away, I’m sure of it...

Yet another lie.

Nothing will come of nothing

Sunday

No word from Bink since last Sunday: her brief text apologising for missing Mothering Sunday.

No response to my text on Monday saying we were nearby: would she like us to visit?

No response to my couple of missed calls. (I have to be careful: attempts to contact can “stress”.)

One response on Friday however.

I had sent a text to the person looking after her this week, inviting her to a concert. Alex has recently joined a City choir, and would be singing the Freddie Mercury solo.

I've passed along your message, but Bink doesn't want to go.

Along with a few other kind responses, throughout the week.

She knows you’re trying to contact her.

Hopefully she’ll ring you tonight.

I took her to the GP for a check up she seems alright.

All the old worries, round and round.

Bink’s life slipping away. 

Will she never have a job, a lover, a child?

Ben thinks – if I’ve understood correctly (which I might not have done) – that I should give up. It is destructive, this obsession with helping Bink.

A mother is only ever as happy as her least happy child.

I can quite see Ben might be right. It might be what Bink needs. For me to let go.

But… really?

How many more years does she need? Of experiments with helping her more? Or less?

How much more of her life to waste...

There are some helps she has definitely needed, aren’t there?

My aunt never had a job, a lover, a child. The youngest in a warm, clever, lovely family of wonderful people. She died in her forties, one entire room in the house floor-to-ceiling with magazines and newspapers which couldn’t be thrown away because she hadn’t yet read every word.

Was that OCD of a kind?

The couple who now care for Bink are on holiday.

Perhaps it will be better when they get back.

Perhaps not.

I take a deep breath and look on the bright side.

We are much better off than we were a two or three years ago:

1. We know where Bink is living.

2. We know she is living.

3. We know she is not being abused.

4. She is off Lorazepam.

5. And Alex’s concert was fab. Alex was too. Perhaps a mother should be as happy as her happiest child.

(I’m sure fathers are! Consider some prolific fathers of old. King David. Priam. Bach. They didn’t let it cramp their style much, did they. Shakespeare, too.)

Today’s picture is of the sky.

Sometimes there is simply nothing to say.

PS [A couple of hours later.]

I have decided, even when there is nothing to say, there is always something to celebrate. A new hen has just started laying: look what I found after breakfast…

And it will be Easter soon…

Cowboys, native Americans and an Indian.

Summer 2012

My memory from then on is of myriad harsh pinpricks – often brutal stabs – of pain.

Summer holidays. Bink living a mile or two away.

Now, I would consider this bliss: Bink independent enough to pay for her own room. Able to look after herself. A grown-up lodger. Why on earth did I complain?

Because something was out of joint.

I just couldn’t work out what it was.

Guests were coming for the evening.

I have no idea, now, who they were: the rest of the world recedes behind the thick, dark banks of Bink’s miasmic clouds. They were young people she would have enjoyed, or they her. Perhaps friends of Ben’s, at Cambridge with both of them; musicians?

Bink doesn’t answer her telephone. The times when she has done so, over fifteen or more years, wouldn’t keep the fingers of one hand very busy.

So I sent her a text a day or two before. Folk to meet you: please come for supper?

To be sure she knew I also told Shaun’s colleague, her landlady; who confirmed she had given Bink the message and Bink had said, Ok.

(A confusing response, I now know, which Bink uses to mean, Please leave me alone. Rather than what you might take it to mean. What I took it to mean, for many years.)

I hadn’t seen her for so long, she was become such a stranger to our house, I spent many hours cooking Bink’s favourite. Several different curries: mild, creamy korma, for Rose; searing jalfrezi, for Bink’s wilder taste; spicy okra and aubergine; homemade nan.

The guests arrived soon after seven.

I rang Bink soon after that.

Again, half an hour later.

Eight, eight thirty. No answer. Guests hungry.

What do you do? How long do you keep a kitchenful of people waiting for Bink’s favourite dinner and to meet her?

Shaun, Ben, would both say, You don’t wait at all. She knows. She’ll come if she wants to.

But Shaun and Ben will never know what it takes, what you have give, to bring someone into the world. How your body tears itself into two, every time, and what is left is never quite your own again.

I rang her hostess’s mobile. She was in a meeting, out of the house. All she could say was that Bink knew, and had the message.

We ate around ten. Or the others did.

When we eventually spoke, a long time later, she simply said, I never agreed to come.

Once that summer, I lost my cool.

And made her angry with me. With reason, this time.

Rosie was nine. Bink had always considered herself Rosie’s second mother. First carer, sometimes, when you listen to her. Credits herself with bringing Rose up.

It seemed innocent enough, benefitting both.

They slept in the same bed, since Rose stopped her night-feed at six weeks old. Bink took her to nursery school, the park, friends’ houses.

Organised her birthday parties... when, yes, I longed to do this myself...

But Bink went to so much trouble. For her eighth birthday (I think it was), Rose chose cowboys and indians. Bink ordered a real wigwam for the bottom of the garden, decorated the summerhouse as a Wild West station, ordered a vast cake with a chief’s face adorning the icing. (In truth, I believe Christian helped her with a lot of this. But she sparked it off, had the ideas, asked him to help.)

And then, wham!

Moved out. Not here in the summer holidays. Wanting Rosie to go to the house where she was living, and refusing to come to ours.

Is this what carers do? Leave home and expect children to follow?

Shaun said, No, Bink can come here if she wants to see her sister.

So one rare afternoon that summer, she did.

And I told her that the way she had behaved towards Rosie was unkind, unfair, abandoning her. How could a child understand such indifference?

Later, she told me why she was so angry.

Those weren’t Rosie’s feelings you were describing. They were yours.

How can you be so perceptive, Bink…

And so unkind?

A new cruelty

Early summer 2012.

The shrink with the big write-up had at last agreed to see Bink. She just needed the necessary documentation from our MP.

Bink, please can you give authorisation, as always, so I can arrange this for you?

I can’t do anything.

You’ve done it often before, Bink. You just tell the MP’s PA that I have permission, as usual.

I’m not up to it.

It’s easy, Bink!

You know you wanted to see a psychiatrist? I’ve got one lined up for you, supposed to be the best in the country for OCD. But she needs your authority to see the paperwork. It will take you less than five minutes.

(As against the dozens of hours I’ve spent on this so far...)

You just pick up the telephone, ring the parliamentary office, speak to Richard’s PA and give him permission to forward on the documentation.

So, eventually, she did.

After a fashion.

She picked up the telephone, spoke to Richard’s PA, said she didn’t want to see the psychiatrist and she didn’t give permission for me to do anything on her behalf.

If Shaun had slapped me in the face in front of the entire congregation of family and friends on the day we both said, I will, I couldn’t been been more scalded. Shocked. And hurt.

The MP had become a friend of ours. He and I had tried to do so much for her, together.

I don’t often feel humiliated.

I felt humiliated.

He must think… what? That Bink’s difficulty was nothing but an interfering, pushy mother, trying to run her life against her will.

Everything is always The Mother’s Fault.

I didn’t have space in my head to work out that he had met Bink. Frequently. Seen the state of her. And me comforting her, on the sofa in his surgery. (And was far too busy to care and his PA wouldn’t bother him with such trivia anyway.)

Nor could I have begun to imagine how much more damage a new psychiatrist could do to her. Certainly not realise how relieved I should have been that Bink didn’t want the consultation.

I’d forgotten all about the incident until the other day. I keep telling Serena, I can’t remember what it was like. You block pain out, afterwards.

I can, she says.

There was that time when she refused to see the psychiatrist you found for her.

She must have remembered my tears for some time, afterwards.

Bink is not an unkind person. She really, truly isn’t.

When she is well... one of the kindest you could ever meet. If you can ever meet her well enough to meet you.

Her dæmons are something else altogether.

When she went into the Unit, aged sixteen... Something took hold of her which had possession of our most vulnerable secrets. The surest ways to hurt us. Pitching Shaun and me against each other.

Not Bink. But something in her did.

We hadn’t seen that Bink for over a decade.

It was Rose who told me, shortly after this, that Bink wasn’t coming home for the summer holidays.

I was distraught.

Surely she was well at last, wasn’t she? I had so looked forward to having her home, well again. All the life and work we – I – had poured in, caring for her for the last ten years. Were we never to be rewarded by seeing the well-Bink?

For some time she had been awash with benefits: she preferred to pay rent to a colleague of Shaun’s, a mile away, rather than come home for the summer holidays.

She didn’t want any more Latin or Greek help from my father, either. From several hours a day, last summer, getting her within a whisker of a First… to nothing.

(She did eventually apologise for leaving her nine-year-old sister to break the news. You’re right, she said: I shouldn’t have done it like that.)

The penny dropped around midsummer.

Not entirely: I didn’t see the full picture for a long time. 

But I had a sudden and terrible glimpse of it.

As always – Bink often complains about my unscientific “instincts” – no facts to back it up. 

I just knew.

Bink had met Gatsby the first time she was at Cambridge. Five years earlier or so.

She twenty-one. He in or near his forties. He would come to visit, became a friend of the family. Cambridge-clever. Often in our house. Offering to help.

Shaun would sigh, Oh no, not Gatsby again. And I would say, Oh come on, Shaun. He does useful stuff around the place. He’s intelligent over breakfast. He brings decent whisky.

His company was always more enjoyable than one had remembered its being.

Shaun didn’t like the way he walked into our home as if he owned it. The very first time, he did.

It’s a lot worse when it’s your daughter he behaves to own.

That evening, high summer it was, we were expecting Bink home. Gatsby bringing her. He did that sort of thing a lot.

I hadn’t seen her all term. I was longing for her arrival.

I made supper for all of us. We waited. Some hours.

Eventually ate without them. 

By midnight I was alone in the house.

By the time Ben answered my call and said they were all in the pub with Bink and Gatsby – and I not invited – I became hysterical with grief.

Sobbing so much, Ben couldn’t work out what I was saying.

My distress was unmistakeable, though. He rounded everyone up and brought them home.

A long time later – years, it must have been – and Bink and I were looking back and I said that was when I knew, she said, That’s strange, because Gatsby told me I must go home and see you. He often said that sort of thing.

Oh Bink! How can you be so naïve? You studied Iago.

“But let her live...” He drops the thought in mind.

So Othello kills her.

That night was when I first knew.

I didn’t fully know that I knew. For months, I dismissed it as my paranoia: upset to be excluded from the party. It’s because you were in bed, Ben said.

Of course. Stupid of me.

No one else in the family seemed suspicious.

Yet.

It was Serena who was next uneasy and Ben himself who first became angry. Fool that I am, I stopped him informing the police.

I didn’t yet know how it was happening. I didn’t know where this new, cruel Bink had come from. I didn’t know how it was being done.

I just knew Gatsby was stealing her…

Continuing to help

Lent Term 2012

Meanwhile I was doing all I could to get Bink an appointment with a psychiatrist, as she had requested repeatedly throughout the Christmas holidays.

I looked up the name given me by the psychiatrist I had met in the Cambridge BBC studio; rang her office; mentioned my contact, as instructed. She too had written to her.

Though I was still fobbed off with all the usual objections to treatment. Wrong area. Wrong method of referral. Nothing on the NHS.

I contacted our MP’s office.

I’d lost count of the number of times I’d sat in his surgery, Bink in tears, trying to fathom how on earth we could get help for her. His PA had a file an inch or two thick, of all the ways in which mental health system had abused and abandoned her, mis-drugged and mistreated her.

Of course he would support the referral.

Back to the shrink’s office.

And so it goes.

Measuring out my life in telephone calls. In hassles and chasing up and campaigning. In trying to work the system. In a desperate bid for help...

I asked Helen, the superb psychologist, the question that was now tormenting Bink herself, as it had me for many a long year.

What had the drugs done to her?

She had been so sharp, so quick-thinking, before she was first medicated at the age of 16. It was only after she went into hospital and was forced onto drugs that she flipped into the world of the insane.

We have some idea of the effect of drugs on adults, Helen said. But that doesn’t tell us what they do to the still-developing brain of a sixteen year old...

Are there any worse words a mother can hear?

How could I pass this back to Bink? Yes, your brain was indeed wrecked when you went into the Florence Nightingale Unit.

As I’ve always thought.

In March I was the speaker at a Ladies’ Guild lunch. Knowing my concerns, the organiser had seated me next to the President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

I begged this eminent shrink the same question over the poached salmon. What had the drugs done to her? Could there be permanent damage? Both Bink and I have been seeking the answer for some time, I said, but no one will give us a straight answer.

And anyone who does, she said, is lying.

Nobody knows. The research is led by the States. It’s illegal in US to conduct medical research on anyone under eighteen. This sets the pattern for the rest of the world.

We simply don’t know what effect that kind of medication has on anyone under eighteen, because the research has never been done.

So we prescribe it instead.

What?

* * * * *

Bink was dreading coming home for Easter. Because of our au pair, she explained.

It made sense. They were not dissimilar in age, the au pair had had a troubled childhood, she looked to us as her new family... When Bink was at home she felt displaced: in both Rosie’s affections, and mine.

So she made Bink’s life difficult...

In that case, Bink, the au pair must go.

Not just for me?

Of course, just for you! I’m not having you unable to come home.

(Reason enough, had the au pair been the best in the world – unless Rose would have suffered by losing her. Weighing up one offspring’s needs against another is never easy, though we now know the child’s must always trumps the adult’s.)

It would be kind, though, Bink, if I could leave it till after Easter. To give her as much notice as possible. Can you cope with that?

Of course.

She’ll be gone before you come home for the summer.

I couldn’t have known, when I sacked that au pair, that Bink might not come home again.

Not for a very, very long time.

A reaction as unpredictable as her response to the smart new shrink.

It was quite a long time before I started to see what was happening to her.

Meds and madness

Lent Term 2012

Turning Point is a corny cliché. And like so many corny clichés, sometimes ticks the box.

I knew, from the moment Bink rang me that Saturday afternoon, that she would stay on at Cambridge to the end.

I also knew her health was improving. And would surely continue to do so…

She had a consultation with Helen once a week, alternating telephone sessions with coming home to Bedford. She credited Helen with enabling the breakthrough which enabled her to stay at Cambridge.

Helen had told her that her essay didn’t need to be good.

It didn’t need to be finished.

It didn’t need to be anything.

She could just write a little more. If she wanted.

As Serena said, taking the pressure off...

She did indeed seem dramatically better almost straight away, and making progress all the time.

The longer she was off the medication, the more clearly she perceived its dangers.

I understand the correlation now, she said. Those shocking stories of people being put on anti-depressants, and then committing suicide. She quoted someone who was put on meds to help his depression... and shortly afterwards killed his entire family.

It took away any sense of the consequences of my actions, she explained.

That’s why I did such crazy things.

She reminded me of the Girls’ Ski Clinic which Serena, she and I had been on, in March 2008. How we laughed at her recklessness. Skiing all day with her boots undone. Flying over moguls and landing inches from lethal rocks.

It’s not funny at all though, is it? I had no idea what I was doing. It didn’t feel dangerous at all.

I could have killed myself.

She reminded me, too, of her going with a friend to pick Rosie up from school, and allowing him to put her baby sister in his car. He was doped to the eyeballs, and yet she let him drive Rosie home.

I’m sure the her teachers knew there was something wrong. It’s awful, what we did.

Well, what I did, really.

I’ve always admired Bink’s honesty. 

You should be writing a blog about Bink coming off drugs, Serena said more than once that winter, though I still didn’t really know what a blog was. Going through all the awful withdrawal. People need to know.

The world really needs that book you were writing with Bink. It’s so critically important to know the effects of this stuff.

And that you can get through it.

So I spoke to the Health Ed of the Mail. 

He questioned me a lot, listened a bit, and then said, The internet is full of cranks. Basket cases refusing to take their meds. Conspiracy theories about doctors being in the pay of the big multi-national pharmaceuticals.

My readers need a clear message. Otherwise they’ll end up chucking their medication away and going off the deep end.

I think what you meant was, your readers need your message.

My message was very clear. That medication had wrecked my daughter’s life for over a decade and now she was breaking free of it. That she had been chemically coshed year after year instead of being treated. That coming off it had been hell. And could have proved fatal.

It’s not the end of the story yet though, is it? he objected.

Why don’t you ring me in six months’ time, when you can see where this is going?

Why don’t I not, I thought.

Sadly, by the end of six months I had no idea where it was going.

The truth was, I didn’t have all the truth.

No idea what was really going on. At all.

Turning

Saturday 28th January 2012.

It was almost exactly half way through her course – the January of her second year, during the fifth term of nine – that Bink had dropped out before, in January 2008.

We had said to each other repeatedly, Shaun and I, that if she could just get beyond that tipping point, just pass the half way mark through her degree course, just get beyond the moment at which she had crashed before... which she had lived to regret so much.

Surely, if she could only get over that glitch… well then, returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Shaun got back from work earlier on Saturdays.

School finished at lunchtime, and after clearing emails and cheering on a few Rugby matches he was usually home by teatime.

Most unusually we had a free evening that Saturday, two days after my breakfast with Bink.

Ben had invited us to a concert he was singing in, but seemed relaxed about whether we were there. And it was so rare that we could enjoy simply being together, no demands on our time, that I had lit a roaring ruddy fire in the drawing-room, and we were enjoying Shaun’s (and Gabriel Oak’s) idea of Paradise: either side of the crackling, clock ticking on the mantel, pot of tea between us, reading companionably.

Warm against the tea-time darkness. Hot drink, good book, unending evening before us.

Happens about once in several decades. If ever…

Dring dring.

Hello, Bink!

Can you come to Cambridge?

When?

This evening.

I closed my book, rather optimistically promised it another encounter soon, and hugged my mug of tea. 

Do you want to go to Ben’s concert?

No…

I just wondered if you’d like to come over and celebrate.

She had finished her essay.

If I can work under these conditions... with her DoS threatening to evict her, everyone seeming against her, the world wanting her out.

I can do anything.

I’m staying on.

There is, in Newnham, the other side of Coe Fen from Cambridge itself, a Mill Pond.

I went to school with Katie, whose family lived in the Mill House, facing the pond and including most of Mill Lane behind it. Her father was an eccentric Old Etonian musician, whose name most improbably was Ludwig. When we were thirteen they still owned the gratuitously large hall with its curtained stage at the back of the house, and I directed my friends in a production of Little Women there. It was our first encounter with boys: I’ve no idea where we recruited them from… but one of them contacted me again a few years ago, and sent me a song he’d written for me.

I still remember, and draw on, a lecture Ludwig gave, on my fifteenth birthday, about how to listen to several tunes of a symphony at once.

By the time we were eighteen Ludwig had, very sadly, had to sell, piecemeal, most of the house off, including their wild and rambling garden. Katie was often ill throughout our teens, and I marvelled at how much school she had to miss...

When we were not long married, living in Cambridge and visiting friends in London for the weekend, I jumped on a train on a spontaneous whim, without even telling Shaun, the weather was so brilliantly sparkling, just to be back in Cambridge to skate on the Mill Pond… All afternoon, no one knowing where I was. Figures of eights and whirling patterns and nothing but the wild white sky above me.

I also experienced my first and only sacking, there by the Mill Pond. I had completed my training as an actor, Shaun was training as a vicar, and I took a job as waitress in Sweeney Todd, part of a pizza chain. We received a new directive that clients had to be in and out of the building, fed and wined and having paid up, in under thirty-five minutes.

Spot checks were held to ensure we weren’t allowing them to linger and enjoy themselves...

Sweeney Todd is long gone with all of the snows of yesteryear, melted away with the ice of that glorious skating-winter.

That evening we took Bink to the Italian restaurant which had replaced many successors on Sweeney Todd’s site.

To toast her victory. Which she had, so preciously, included us in.

We never made it to Ben’s concert.

Clergy kindness

Thursday 26th January 2012

By the time I had soothed Bink’s fears enough for her to find the chaplain’s room, via a circuitous route along the river because that was the only way she knew, we had missed his visitor.

He gave us tea while we sat with Bink’s tears. He offered her cupcakes from a deep tin, left over from some student gathering the afternoon before.

If he had any opinion about the recent interview with the Director of Studies, or Bink’s version of it, he was far too professional to show it.

Bink, he asked her gently, if you don’t degrade, have you planned how you’re going to cope with the work? If you didn’t manage any last term? How will this one be any different?

With respect, I believe that’s the wrong question. I suddenly saw it clearly.

There are two issues here. Bink’s study. And Bink’s health. I can quite see that it might – possibly – be better for her academic work if she were to degrade now. If she hasn’t done any work at all, this academic year.

(And I could certainly see, though I didn’t say this, that it might be better for the college’s academic record.) 

She might indeed come back next year and start her second year again, with a better chance of completing assignments.

(Or she might never come back at all…)

But for her health, her well-being, her spirit… I believe she wants to stay, I said. For the moment anyway. And that is far more important than her degree.

The chaplain graciously inclined his head. How could he object, pastor that he was?

Do you, Bink? Do you want to stay? What do you want?

I want to finish the essay I’ve started.

Then that is what you will bloody well do!

But... she was terrified. What about being out by Sunday?

She could never be out by Sunday. Even if she had wanted to degrade. She couldn’t have done it by Sunday.

Suppose the Porters move my things?

Bink, the Porters will not touch your belongings. I sincerely hoped I was right. You will not think about moving or packing until you have finished your essay.

But what about...?

Forget your DoS.

Really?

Really!

Ignore him.

I had never been more sure of anything in my life.

The chaplain discreetly inclined his ears the other way.

He cannot evict you by Sunday. He can’t make you degrade if you don’t want to. He can’t expect you to leave before you’re ready. You have a disability.

And if you want to write an essay, then don’t give any thought to packing up your room or leaving or what you will do after your essay.

Just do that one thing.

I think now, years later, how very nearly I didn’t stay for that half hour, while Bink was seeing her DoS. How I might not have been there for her, when she came out in tears.

How different the outcome might have been.

How different so many things might have been in Bink’s life.

If I’d taken the beach path, not the clifftop one, she said to me years later.

If I hadn’t let her go into hospital at the age of sixteen.

So many. So much...

Bink soon forgot that breakfast and the hour or two after it. She didn’t remember my intervention.

Only Helen’s, her psychologist’s.

It doesn’t matter, does it? Who scores the goal… Or indeed lets it through. What matters is the team. Whose side you’re on, when the score is announced.

Besides, I won’t forget that morning.

Ever..

Thank you, Bink, for involving me in your life.

(I was woken by a text at one o’clock this morning.

Sorry I didnt wish you a happy mothering sunday or come to the lunch. Everything's really difficult at the moment. I hope you had a lovely Mothering Sunday. Sorry I didnt get you anything.

When you are a mother the simplest things can make you cry…

Or laugh, actually. A few minutes later I received a rather different one from Rose:

yes sorry I didn’t have time [to buy chocolates for her hostess] it's ok ill send a peng thank you card to make up for it yes the party was really fun thank you)

Mothering Sunday

Mothering Sunday

Christian invited us a good couple of months ago.

With Serena’s authority, I passed the invitation on to Bink soon afterwards. I’m pretty sure she said she’d like to join us. What’s not to like? Christian’s cooking, Serena’s welcome, Alex’s jokes, the little Viking’s antics.

I shouldn’t have tried. I really, really shouldn’t. Hours on train time-tables and trying to coordinate with Shaun’s preaching and Ben’s car and trying to work out paid lifts... and never, never, almost never being able to talk to her.

Do you want to come, Bink? What happens when you do something regardless of your feelings? Well, to be kind to someone, say? Of course it would. Well, it would be kind to me, for one thing; and polite to Serena. I’m not wanting to put pressure on: I agree, that doesn’t help. Just asking questions and interested in your answers because you just said you are ill and that makes me so sad, so very sad, so very, very, very sad... and I’m not even talking to Bink any more but I want to tell her, it’s not nearly as sad as when you were living with Gatsby and thought you were well. And you really, really weren’t.

But it’s sad, nonetheless. If she wants to do something, and can’t.

Though... yes indeed... not nearly as sad as not wanting anything.

The first time Serena took me to her church was on a Mothering Sunday. I wasn’t expecting it – I had offered to take the dog for a walk (no mean task, believe me: Serena has a very beautiful and utterly psychopathic dog; Serena’s dog is more nuts than Bink) until I realised quite how much it would mean to her. Well, until she asked me to come, to be precise.

And I then punished her by spending the rest of the day in tears. In the middle of Mothering Sunday lunch, I kept saying, How could they do that to us?

(The church in Oxford.)

I can do it now. If I prepare very well. I’ve been to the church a number of times now. And it’s fine. Enjoyable even.

It’s called Exposure. In OCD shrink-speak.

I got here yesterday, in Ben’s car, and took a picnic and the little Viking to the allotment where Serena and Alex were digging in the sun. Well, Serena was digging. And Alex was...  pottering about. In that Alex way.

Ben came by bike. All eighty or ninety miles of it.

Shaun is coming by train after preaching this morning.

And Rose? Rose is fifteen.

Is Sunday really Mothering Sunday oh no really I was going to do you the best Mothering Sunday in the country really I was honestly breakfast in bed and everything I know you don’t like breakfast in bed but at least it would have been a surprise well not a surprise now obviously but a surprise when you came down and found the kitchen burnt down because you know how useless I am do you think Dad would drive me to this party?

It’s my friend’s brother’s eighteenth and really quite posh...

So Rose isn’t with us, obviously.

Nor is my father. He simply isn’t mobile enough any more. But even my father… well, a hundred and one is quite impressive really and every year he is nearer heaven and my mother.

Here are the flowers I left with Shaun, to put on my mother’s grave. He had to do it for me because the Garden of Rest is locked all the time, now...

Whereas the flowers at the top are the ones I picked for Serena, when Ben’s car broke down so I had a two-hour wait and had to do my Sky interview from home instead of Serena’s house.

The clematis filled the car with the smell of almond blossom, all the way here...

And Bink?

Bink won’t be with us. I pray she will but know she won’t.

Perhaps next year.

Perhaps one year, a little person will take Bink daffodils in the pew.

You have to pray, even when you can’t believe.

Toppling…

26th January 2012

What do you mean, Bink?

“Got to be out”?

The College isn’t making you leave, surely? Slinging you out?

If I’m going, if I’m degrading, it’s best that I go straight away. Apparently. Otherwise I’ll end up paying another term’s rent. And it will get complicated. So my DoS wants me out immediately. And if I’m not gone by Sunday, he’ll...

Tears of distress and panic overwhelmed again.

What? Evict you? I was angry now.

I don’t think so, Bink!

We had been here before, don’t forget. Twice, as it happened. 

The church can be a wonderful... what? Institution to work for? Let’s say, family to give your life to. You make friends for ever. Your contribution can have eternal significance. The rewards, as they say, are out of this world…

However, as a member of the clergy of the CofE your boss, strictly speaking, is not the Diocese; not the Bishop; not even – as I understand is the case in some non-denominational churches – the congregation which pays you.

But God Himself. Legally. I believe. And great though God though obviously is to work for, His channels of delegation can sometimes be a little messy...

His choice of representatives, as ambassadors for His perfect Justice and Righteousness – and, one assumes, divine efficiency – occasionally seems to us mere mortals a tad… eccentric, shall we say?

Thus it has come to pass that twice, during the course of what we laughably refer to as Shaun’s clerical career, an attempt has been made to evict us.

The first time I absolutely believed the vicar, Shaun’s line-manager under God, verbatim. And would honestly have moved out, as he asked us to, on the button, without demur.

Except that:

1. The first intimation I had of this entertaining little whim was on a Monday. That he wanted us out by Thursday.

2. While Shaun was away on a reading week. Before the days of mobile telephones and instant contact.

3. When we had three children under four. Who were not, as it happens, on Shaun’s reading week with him. But at home with me. Meaning I had one or two things to do in my spare moments.

4. With a houseful of furniture.

5. And nowhere to move any of it to, except possibly the garage of my parents’ seaside cottage some hundred miles away or more. And no car: I used to transport the children by tricycle.

6. And just by chance I was not particularly well that week and had my first ever deadline on a paid piece of writing, an article for a magazine.

I did my best. Truly I did.

I rang the new vicar who had just interviewed Shaun for his second curacy, and talked him into giving it to him. In Shaun’s absence. On the grounds that otherwise we’d be homeless by Thursday. So the fact that said kind vicar had thought his curate-accommodation too small for three children, a large dog, an au pair, a wife and the curate himself, really didn’t seem quite such an obstacle as it had a moment ago.

That done, doing anything more to get us all of out the house by Thursday (for no apparent reason whatsoever, since a replacement curate hadn’t yet been appointed) was so patently absurd... well, I’m not usually given to giving up... but I did.

Give up.

When Shaun got home at the end of the week, he told me that evicting your curate before he has a new post (and house) to go to was so completely and utterly illegal that I needn’t have worried at all.

So by the time of the second attempt – which you will have read about, here, some months ago if you’ve been with us that long – I’d got wise to being evicted by law-flouting vicars, and all Hannibal’s elephants wouldn’t have evicted me out of our home until we had somewhere to be evicted into next.

Apart from anything else, not only is it quite difficult to evict someone anyway; not only had I learnt to become a lot more stroppy when being pushed around or seeing my children pushed around; but I’d also done a spot of journalism myself by then, and become a lot more savvy not to say cynical about what you could do to an institution like the CofE, through the pages of (say) the Daily Mail, if you camp all your children out on the pavement, sit them on bin-bags and tell them to look forlorn..

(And then ring the Picture Desk.)

So these two experiences were behind us now…

Bink, it wouldn’t be legal for the college to kick you out by Sunday. Not even remotely. You’re not well!

But suppose he sends the porters round to move all my stuff?

She was terrified.

You don’t need to have the law on your side or send legitimate bailiffs to Bink’s room, in order to scare the wits out of her. You just have to threaten to touch her possessions the wrong way... and you can catapult her into orbit for years.

Gatsby did it, some years later.

She still hasn’t landed.

Her DoS had struck me as such an intelligent man.

Could he not imagine? Did he not see what the threat of this alone would do to her? The very thought of her belongings all being muddled up and dirtied and moved without her being in control. Dumped outside on the street. The screaming anxiety she must be going through, just at the idea of it.

She burst into tears again.

He wouldn’t have dared treat me like that if you’d been there... And the reason I didn’t ask you to come with me... it’s so silly... I didn’t want to raise your hopes.

My hearing quickened.

I’ve started an essay. I just wanted to finish it before I leave. But I didn’t want you thinking and hoping I might be able to finish it, and stay.

Bless you, Bink!

I rang the college chaplain.

I remembered his telling me, with exquisite poetry, of the day he decided to live again, in the devastating wasteland after death took his partner. There simply came a day, he said, when I woke up and a blade of grass was green again...

He struck me as someone who understood pain.

He had a visitor with him but would be free in fifteen minutes. Or indeed, he kindly invited, if we arrived before that, we could meet his visitor too. 

College breakfast

January 2012

The following Thursday morning, 26th January, I was broadcasting Thought for the Day from the BBC studio in Cambridge.

I offered to call on Bink (now back in college) for breakfast afterwards. The previous week I’d breakfasted with Ben, so it was Bink’s turn. We arranged to meet as soon after 8 o’clock as I could get there.

Throughout the Christmas holidays Bink had kept saying she needed a psychiatrist. She had even rang someone in America, whom she’d met once on college High Table, because she was married to some top shrink.

I thought she needed one like a hole in the head, myself. Psychologist Professor Paul Salkovskis’s approach sounded much safer, healthier and more likely of effecting healing than any psychiatry I’d ever come across. But, unless she is clearly having an off-her-head episode, I prefer to believe Bink knows what is best for her, and try to help in whatever way she believes in.

If I had stopped to think for five minutes – instead of rushing around finding solutions – I might have asked myself why she wanted someone whose speciality is chemicals, brains, and the effect of the one on the other…

But then we all might ask ourselves all sorts of things. Had we but world enough and time.

And hindsight.

Instead of having the tiny studio to myself as usual that morning, I found myself sharing it with an academic psychiatrist doing the item after mine.

I stayed to listen.

And then stayed to talk.

Yes, she happened to know the best psychiatrist in the country (in her view) for OCD. Yes, of course she would put me in touch.

So I was a few minutes later for Bink than usual. It didn’t matter. We were still in plenty of time for college breakfast.

Smoked salmon. Buttery scrambled egg. Luke warm tea. Thank you, Bink.

At nine o’clock she had a meeting with her Director of Studies.

I rose to go.

Don’t, she said. I’ll only be half an hour. Wait for me.

I am not a patient person. Doing nothing for half an hour, used to be (before I learnt to waste my life, with Bink’s illness and other aggravations) unbearable agony for me. It still doesn’t sit easily...

Unless I have a book.

I had.

Suppose I’d left my book in my overnight bag? Suppose the car had been too far away to fetch it?

Suppose I’d decided it was silly to stay? That I needed to get back home, to my desk, to my poor abandoned writing, stranded with the driftwood of Bink’s madness so many years ago...

I sat reading in the college bar till half past, then went to meet her out of her DoS’s room.

Coffee? I said, as we walked round Henry VI’s gracious courtyard, his fountain sprinkling the winter sunlight.

She nodded and burst into tears.

Oh, if only I had asked you to come with me! She cried and cried. Surely he wouldn’t have treated me like that, if you’d been there?

Tell me, I said when we had our coffees and were sitting by the window, overlooking the lawn and Chapel.

I have to be out by Sunday...

Teetering

New Year 2012

Throughout those Christmas holidays, Bink’s return to Cambridge hung in the balance.

I didn’t have the emotional energy to contemplate her not going back. To imagine, properly and in detail, what it would mean to have Bink drop out again. Living at home again. Being ill, full-time.

Again.

It had been such an achievement to get her back to Cambridge: so what she wanted.

At the time I didn’t know she hadn’t done any work throughout the Michaelmas Term. Not attended a single lecture, produced work for one lone supervision, opened a book. That she’d hardly been in her room and often barely eaten or slept.

In the New Year she went to see Tim Alberry, a hypnotherapist we both like hugely and had found helpful.

I didn’t dare ask what she hoped for...

When she came home she was wearing that ironic, mock-annoyed, so-typical, self-deprecating Bink smile.

Apparently I want to stay at Cambridge…

Excellent!

On Wednesday 11th January, Bink returned to her college.

A few days later she rang.

I’m leaving.

Fine. I breathed deeply.

Whatever you think…

I prayed. Every day. Many times a day.

I didn’t even want to imagine her future, if she gave up again.

How many more years of her life, trying to get showering right? Trying to clean her teeth in the correct way? Not washing her laundry?

A day or two later:

I can’t stay here. I’ve got to come home.

What do you want me to do, Bink? What help do you need?

She needed help packing. But she didn’t want me to come and do it. I would make her stressed.

A few days later, a Monday night, we hosted Shaun’s school prayer meeting. As we always did, at the beginning of each term.

I put my head round the drawing-room door, half way through getting dinner ready for them all. Sometimes it’s easier to cook, than pray. To be Martha, not Mary.

Please pray for Bink. She’s ill; may have to leave university.

(Again.)

I’d met Rachael when we first moved to Bedford. Her family attended the church where Ben played in the band. She and my father read the Bible together every other Wednesday morning.

Endlessly kind: supremely calm.

She came into the kitchen.

Please tell me if there’s anything I can do.

Help Bink pack?

Bink liked Rachael. And she had a large car.

Of course, Rachael said.

She would go over to Cambridge the very next day.

Too soon... Bink panicked. I can’t get ready that quickly!

After tomorrow, Rachael wasn’t free for another ten days... to my immense relief.

I had done all I could. It wouldn’t happen yet.

Thank goodness.

Friday afternoon. Bink on the telephone again. Distressed again.

Come home, I said. Now. Just for the weekend.

She had to be here on Monday anyway, to see Helen, her wonderful psychologist.

That night we were going out for dinner with neighbours. Join us, Bink!

I hoped they wouldn’t mind.

Or rather, to be more honest, I couldn’t afford to care whether they minded or not.

That’s what it does to you. Extreme illness. Extreme anything. You become a person, a guest, a friend with no manners.

(The same when we were homeless. Relations invited us to live with them. Without our dogs.

Serena’s dog, and Ben’s dog, to be precise.

I would never normally query, try to renegotiate, a gift; a favour. The offer was what it was.

That’s very kind, I said… but please can we bring the dogs? I couldn’t do that to my children, too.

No, they said.

Similarly, you put your head round the door of a prayer meeting which is supposed to be for a school, and ask them to pray for your daughter.)

I can’t get ready in time, Bink wailed, over and over. To come home.

You don’t need anything. It’s home. You’ve got it all here.

She missed one bus, and then another. The next was in five minutes.

I can’t do it!

All right, Bink, I said: out of ideas. Don’t come. It doesn’t matter.

Really??

Of course not. I just thought you’d enjoy a weekend at home. Stay where you are.

Minutes later she rang.

I’m on the bus.

Of course, Serena said later. You took the pressure off.

Ah yes. I had forgotten that.

She turned up at our small dinner party, just in time for pudding.