Whirlwind of the Lost.... (back to Disjecta Membra)
She had been referred to our psychotherapy service when the year was turning and the locals responded to the warmer weather by strolling in the neglected asylum grounds outside my office. I accepted the case at our allocations meetings only because of pressure from my supervisor who felt that I had not been pulling my weight. Brenda had been referred by adult mental health services, a middle-aged woman with recurrent hospital admissions due to depression. She had been in and out of hospital with no real clue to the sources of her distress, although childhood trauma could be guessed at. She had been patched up and sent along to the day hospital but had not really engaged with therapy there. The large district hospital housed its psychiatric outpatients in a warren of little rooms reached by a dizzying abyss of corridors. In the waiting area the patients milled like pigeons. Brenda used to sit alone and unnoticed on a side bench, apart from the throng, where anaemic pot plants strained for light against dusty, sealed windows. She was eventually sent home with the latest antidepressants, back to the bungalow in Clifton which she shared with her well-meaning husband who worked at the Raleigh factory making the chopper bikes that all the estate children rode.
He left her alone each day when he went out to work with his snap bag after bidding her a cheery farewell. One day she took thirty Coproxamol tablets with her morning coffee after straightening the beds. She also took a handful of the antidepressants that had failed to change her hormone levels enough for her to feel better. She walked to the field at back of her garden, thrust her way through the sharp stalks of the meagre haw hedge, then walked zigzag to a dip in the wide field then sat down, suddenly woozy from the tablets. She took out a Sabatier kitchen knife with a serrated edge and rolling up her sleeve, cut deeply at the dorsal aspect of her left arm down to the bone, severing the muscles then she cut round the other side to the inner arm, severing the ligaments but just stopping at the radial artery before she fainted at the pain. She was found by two frightened dog walkers. They called an ambulance which came bumping over the stubble with its blue light flashing. She had lost a lot of blood but survived. More treatment and more hospital admissions followed. It became obvious that conventional answers to Brenda's problems were not adequate. Something different should be tried other than the blunt instruments of acute psychiatry and thus I found her one February morning, reluctantly waiting for me in the psychotherapy waiting room.
She was a stout, homely-looking woman with indistinct squashy features and strangely long, silky hair. Her jaw always looked set as if locked in pain. On her left arm there was still a livid, purple weal and she kept it supported by a brace. She sat in my consulting room, head slightly bowed, holding her handbag on her knees. It took months before she would lower that bag to rest it beside her. She rarely looked at me and kept her head down and murmured in a low, barely distinguishable voice. I was surprised that she kept coming to those early sessions. She was angry that I did not lead her to any topic or guide her. I simply opened the sessions and waited for her to tell me why she was here and I sensed her fury in her tense, bowed posture clutching her bag on her knee and rushing past me to the door at the close of the session. I also sat there nursing my own wounds yet very aware of her smouldering, agonised, presence. The outside world would signal to us, the calls of children playing, the sound of a distant siren, and once, a spring-aroused bee which wavered at the window, tapping gently at its reflection. Silence between us would bloom; we would sit parallel to each other facing the clock. Sometimes she would tell me of her day, hum-drum tasks she had performed, what her husband required for his tea, how she kept her home, bought presents for her nieces. At other times she wondered aloud what to say to me and would speculate on what I wanted from her. She rarely asked anything directly from me but when she did, her eyes would glare at me out of dark, ringed pits while her face moved with suppressed anger and pain. I endured her hostility and some days we said nothing at all the whole session as she sat bowed and rage- filled beside me. Little by little, however, over the weeks, she gradually began to tell me her story, slipping in strands of it between the painful silences and flat descriptions of her monotonous days.
Once upon a time she had lived as a plump and relatively happy schoolgirl with her parents where the suburbs eroded the remaining wooded uplands to the south where the river joins the city. Her father was a sad, defeated man. He was from a Midlands yeomanry regiment captured at Singapore during the last war. He was one of only a third of his comrades to return home, beaten, starved and brutalised. He had caught beriberi caused by Vitamin B deficiency from the prisoner's diet of mouldy, milled rice. He had developed peripheral neuropathy which attacked his nervous system and his eyesight as well as weakening his legs. He had recovered some of his mobility after treatment on release and came home with a wide-legged gait and completely blind. He spent his days ruminating about the past, occasionally having a drink at the British Legion with the other ex-servicemen and spending other days at a day centre for the blind. He was a bitter man who continually honed his hatred for the Japs. Brenda's mother was a loving, simple soul who became stricken with breast cancer when she was still quite young. The cancer metastasised swiftly, bloating and distorting her body and killing her painfully. Brenda was taken to see her mother in the old General Hospital as she lay dying, a bandeau around her head to hide the hair loss from early attempts at chemo, the sclera of her eyes blood red as her kidneys failed. She took Brenda's hand in hers at the end and whispered.
'You will be a good girl and look after daddy won't you dear?'
'Yes Mam,' promised ten year old Brenda frightened by her mother's alien, urgent eyes.
Brenda tried her best after the funeral, helping her father in the house, an aunt coming in to do meals. It had been decided that they should stay together; there was nowhere else for her to go. She used to check Daddy's appearance before he went out, combing his hair and adjusting his tie, brushing scurf from his blazer with its regimental badge on the front pocket. In the evenings she would watch him feeling for his food, his fingers rustling over the table and sometimes she would hear him at night, calling out from savage dreams of the past. She went to school and neighbours helped a little and her maternal uncle arrived to lend a hand. At first there was a semblance of a normal life. All Brenda would say about this uncle was that he was dark, short and bearded. She was never able to utter his name and I never found out who he was and thus he remained nameless, just called 'Uncle' in our sessions, elemental, evil 'Uncle'.
He had started to call in that first year, helping by driving Brenda and her father to the shops in his Talbot car, or to the Legion, where he had a pint with her father. Cheerful, helpful 'Uncle', a shift worker at a sheet metal factory with his smart dove- grey car. Then one day Brenda saw him as she came out of school sitting in his car beyond the school entrance. He called to her, said he was passing and would lift her home. She was happy to go though she had never really known him before her mother died. There something unsettling in the way he stared when no one else was about, and yet she went with him. And he dropped her home, talking to her, promising her rides and little treats and again on the following days that week he was waiting for her. Most days he would be there outside her school and when he was driving and changing gear he would let fall his hand on her knee, or her thigh. At first it seemed like an accident; then he left his hand there for longer periods. At first she felt uncomfortable, thinking of the weight of that hand, but was too timid to say anything. Then swiftly, inexorably, his handling of her became more blatant and he began to pin her against the car or a wall with one hand while the other hand would rummage under her dress. This happened when her father was away at the day centre and 'Uncle' would threaten that she would be blamed and put in a home if she told anyone and her father would have no one to care for him. Then he began to make her handle him while he briskly instructed passive, tearful, hapless Brenda in what gave him pleasure. A routine began to develop every school day in the half hour before Auntie arrived to cook tea then Brenda was pressed on her back onto the warm bonnet of the Talbot as he would lift her dress and pump his semen onto her belly. Sometimes even there in the house while her father fumbled about their living room or listened to the radio complaining about Japanese products being advertised, 'Uncle' would silently thrust his work roughened hands up her dress while also making cut throat gestures in case she dared make a sound of protest.
The worst was when he used to force her to go to the upstairs bathroom of her house and run a bath then he would bathe her, washing his semen off her; his dark, hairy hands passing over her as she lay in inches of tepid water. She felt paralysed with fear at the sight of him and prayed for the delivery of the school holidays when she could escape his presence to a degree. She feared that her father would be left alone if she said anything and kept remembering her promise to her mother to look after him and so she endured it all without a word.
Brenda wrung out her story to me bit by bit in our weekly sessions and often I felt a sense of dread as I waited for her to arrive, standing near the office car park smoking, watching the feral cats moving in the brambles and along the parapet of the old asylum wall. Sometimes I even resented the feeling that I was allowing her to rest the heavy stone of her pain on me. We never met outside my office except in the waiting rooms with her heavy, stumbly feet sounding after me in the corridor as I summoned her for each session. She always smelt slightly of soap and at night after our sessions I would play the therapy tapes over and later at home, I too would float in my own bath, thinking of Brenda, stoking up a rage against the uncle, thinking how I would punish him, there was comfort in that. Thinking violent thoughts, fantasising absurdly, of travelling back in time to the 1960s Clifton estate to rescue her and hurt him. I also began to plan how to find him now and confront and punish him, now tremulous and old but still evil in a rest home somewhere in the city.
I had guilty, rage filled thoughts about those others in my life whom I had not protected from danger. Sometimes child Brenda and thoughts of all the women that I had hurt would become blurred and intermingled and I saw them all as forsaken children lost in a dark wood or tumbling in a whirlwind of lost people as in a William Blake painting I had once seen. I felt such rage at those who would hurt any child, perhaps also feeling a nameless grief for that forgotten hurt child within me.
It took four months for Brenda to tell me what happened in the end. How 'Uncle' continued to prey upon her until at the age of fifteen she had met the man whom she was later to marry. It was a timid, conventional, teenage romance yet it gave her resolve and she found the courage to fight him off after five years, refusing him when he tried to corral her and touch her although he blustered and threatened, yet somehow he recognised that his day was done. He left her alone after that and she saw him just once more a year later on a family occasion which she could not avoid. They had stared at each other silently across the crowded room. Shortly after this she told me that she had heard he had been killed in a traffic accident, he just went off the road one night and he was buried on the hilltop cemetery at Wilford within sight of the Clifton estate where she continued to live. She went on caring for her father and she managed somehow to forget those experiences, entombed in a safe, monotonous marriage until, after he died, she found the memories leaching back to torment her.
How disappointed I was! To think that this hateful man had escaped vengeance, and was now lying in the city of the dead, under the rook-infested beeches at Wilford Hill. How I wanted to dig him up, kick his wizened head, drag him and expose him that homunculus. I hid my disappointment from Brenda, realising that she had somehow transferred her anger onto me. I had been willing to incorporate 'Uncle' into my list of those who should be punished, but she had not been annihilated by her past, nor yet had she been cured by telling her story. She would always be damaged but somehow still burning a light in the darkness. She had survived 'Uncle' and she had survived me as her therapist. She gravely expressed her thanks to me. I, who had ministered conscientiously to her like a priest without a faith and who had played out the therapy to the end thanked her in return. I fancied that there was a twinkle of humour for the first time in her blurry face when we said goodbye and I noticed with surprise what a pretty, green colour her eyes were as we came near to each other for the only time and touched our hands together very lightly. She thanking me for listening and I wished her well but I also silently thanked her for releasing me so easily.
She had been referred to our psychotherapy service when the year was turning and the locals responded to the warmer weather by strolling in the neglected asylum grounds outside my office. I accepted the case at our allocations meetings only because of pressure from my supervisor who felt that I had not been pulling my weight. Brenda had been referred by adult mental health services, a middle-aged woman with recurrent hospital admissions due to depression. She had been in and out of hospital with no real clue to the sources of her distress, although childhood trauma could be guessed at. She had been patched up and sent along to the day hospital but had not really engaged with therapy there. The large district hospital housed its psychiatric outpatients in a warren of little rooms reached by a dizzying abyss of corridors. In the waiting area the patients milled like pigeons. Brenda used to sit alone and unnoticed on a side bench, apart from the throng, where anaemic pot plants strained for light against dusty, sealed windows. She was eventually sent home with the latest antidepressants, back to the bungalow in Clifton which she shared with her well-meaning husband who worked at the Raleigh factory making the chopper bikes that all the estate children rode.He left her alone each day when he went out to work with his snap bag after bidding her a cheery farewell. One day she took thirty Coproxamol tablets with her morning coffee after straightening the beds. She also took a handful of the antidepressants that had failed to change her hormone levels enough for her to feel better. She walked to the field at back of her garden, thrust her way through the sharp stalks of the meagre haw hedge, then walked zigzag to a dip in the wide field then sat down, suddenly woozy from the tablets. She took out a Sabatier kitchen knife with a serrated edge and rolling up her sleeve, cut deeply at the dorsal aspect of her left arm down to the bone, severing the muscles then she cut round the other side to the inner arm, severing the ligaments but just stopping at the radial artery before she fainted at the pain. She was found by two frightened dog walkers. They called an ambulance which came bumping over the stubble with its blue light flashing. She had lost a lot of blood but survived. More treatment and more hospital admissions followed. It became obvious that conventional answers to Brenda's problems were not adequate. Something different should be tried other than the blunt instruments of acute psychiatry and thus I found her one February morning, reluctantly waiting for me in the psychotherapy waiting room.
She was a stout, homely-looking woman with indistinct squashy features and strangely long, silky hair. Her jaw always looked set as if locked in pain. On her left arm there was still a livid, purple weal and she kept it supported by a brace. She sat in my consulting room, head slightly bowed, holding her handbag on her knees. It took months before she would lower that bag to rest it beside her. She rarely looked at me and kept her head down and murmured in a low, barely distinguishable voice. I was surprised that she kept coming to those early sessions. She was angry that I did not lead her to any topic or guide her. I simply opened the sessions and waited for her to tell me why she was here and I sensed her fury in her tense, bowed posture clutching her bag on her knee and rushing past me to the door at the close of the session. I also sat there nursing my own wounds yet very aware of her smouldering, agonised, presence. The outside world would signal to us, the calls of children playing, the sound of a distant siren, and once, a spring-aroused bee which wavered at the window, tapping gently at its reflection. Silence between us would bloom; we would sit parallel to each other facing the clock. Sometimes she would tell me of her day, hum-drum tasks she had performed, what her husband required for his tea, how she kept her home, bought presents for her nieces. At other times she wondered aloud what to say to me and would speculate on what I wanted from her. She rarely asked anything directly from me but when she did, her eyes would glare at me out of dark, ringed pits while her face moved with suppressed anger and pain. I endured her hostility and some days we said nothing at all the whole session as she sat bowed and rage- filled beside me. Little by little, however, over the weeks, she gradually began to tell me her story, slipping in strands of it between the painful silences and flat descriptions of her monotonous days.
Once upon a time she had lived as a plump and relatively happy schoolgirl with her parents where the suburbs eroded the remaining wooded uplands to the south where the river joins the city. Her father was a sad, defeated man. He was from a Midlands yeomanry regiment captured at Singapore during the last war. He was one of only a third of his comrades to return home, beaten, starved and brutalised. He had caught beriberi caused by Vitamin B deficiency from the prisoner's diet of mouldy, milled rice. He had developed peripheral neuropathy which attacked his nervous system and his eyesight as well as weakening his legs. He had recovered some of his mobility after treatment on release and came home with a wide-legged gait and completely blind. He spent his days ruminating about the past, occasionally having a drink at the British Legion with the other ex-servicemen and spending other days at a day centre for the blind. He was a bitter man who continually honed his hatred for the Japs. Brenda's mother was a loving, simple soul who became stricken with breast cancer when she was still quite young. The cancer metastasised swiftly, bloating and distorting her body and killing her painfully. Brenda was taken to see her mother in the old General Hospital as she lay dying, a bandeau around her head to hide the hair loss from early attempts at chemo, the sclera of her eyes blood red as her kidneys failed. She took Brenda's hand in hers at the end and whispered.
'You will be a good girl and look after daddy won't you dear?'
'Yes Mam,' promised ten year old Brenda frightened by her mother's alien, urgent eyes.
Brenda tried her best after the funeral, helping her father in the house, an aunt coming in to do meals. It had been decided that they should stay together; there was nowhere else for her to go. She used to check Daddy's appearance before he went out, combing his hair and adjusting his tie, brushing scurf from his blazer with its regimental badge on the front pocket. In the evenings she would watch him feeling for his food, his fingers rustling over the table and sometimes she would hear him at night, calling out from savage dreams of the past. She went to school and neighbours helped a little and her maternal uncle arrived to lend a hand. At first there was a semblance of a normal life. All Brenda would say about this uncle was that he was dark, short and bearded. She was never able to utter his name and I never found out who he was and thus he remained nameless, just called 'Uncle' in our sessions, elemental, evil 'Uncle'.
He had started to call in that first year, helping by driving Brenda and her father to the shops in his Talbot car, or to the Legion, where he had a pint with her father. Cheerful, helpful 'Uncle', a shift worker at a sheet metal factory with his smart dove- grey car. Then one day Brenda saw him as she came out of school sitting in his car beyond the school entrance. He called to her, said he was passing and would lift her home. She was happy to go though she had never really known him before her mother died. There something unsettling in the way he stared when no one else was about, and yet she went with him. And he dropped her home, talking to her, promising her rides and little treats and again on the following days that week he was waiting for her. Most days he would be there outside her school and when he was driving and changing gear he would let fall his hand on her knee, or her thigh. At first it seemed like an accident; then he left his hand there for longer periods. At first she felt uncomfortable, thinking of the weight of that hand, but was too timid to say anything. Then swiftly, inexorably, his handling of her became more blatant and he began to pin her against the car or a wall with one hand while the other hand would rummage under her dress. This happened when her father was away at the day centre and 'Uncle' would threaten that she would be blamed and put in a home if she told anyone and her father would have no one to care for him. Then he began to make her handle him while he briskly instructed passive, tearful, hapless Brenda in what gave him pleasure. A routine began to develop every school day in the half hour before Auntie arrived to cook tea then Brenda was pressed on her back onto the warm bonnet of the Talbot as he would lift her dress and pump his semen onto her belly. Sometimes even there in the house while her father fumbled about their living room or listened to the radio complaining about Japanese products being advertised, 'Uncle' would silently thrust his work roughened hands up her dress while also making cut throat gestures in case she dared make a sound of protest.
The worst was when he used to force her to go to the upstairs bathroom of her house and run a bath then he would bathe her, washing his semen off her; his dark, hairy hands passing over her as she lay in inches of tepid water. She felt paralysed with fear at the sight of him and prayed for the delivery of the school holidays when she could escape his presence to a degree. She feared that her father would be left alone if she said anything and kept remembering her promise to her mother to look after him and so she endured it all without a word.
Brenda wrung out her story to me bit by bit in our weekly sessions and often I felt a sense of dread as I waited for her to arrive, standing near the office car park smoking, watching the feral cats moving in the brambles and along the parapet of the old asylum wall. Sometimes I even resented the feeling that I was allowing her to rest the heavy stone of her pain on me. We never met outside my office except in the waiting rooms with her heavy, stumbly feet sounding after me in the corridor as I summoned her for each session. She always smelt slightly of soap and at night after our sessions I would play the therapy tapes over and later at home, I too would float in my own bath, thinking of Brenda, stoking up a rage against the uncle, thinking how I would punish him, there was comfort in that. Thinking violent thoughts, fantasising absurdly, of travelling back in time to the 1960s Clifton estate to rescue her and hurt him. I also began to plan how to find him now and confront and punish him, now tremulous and old but still evil in a rest home somewhere in the city.
I had guilty, rage filled thoughts about those others in my life whom I had not protected from danger. Sometimes child Brenda and thoughts of all the women that I had hurt would become blurred and intermingled and I saw them all as forsaken children lost in a dark wood or tumbling in a whirlwind of lost people as in a William Blake painting I had once seen. I felt such rage at those who would hurt any child, perhaps also feeling a nameless grief for that forgotten hurt child within me.
It took four months for Brenda to tell me what happened in the end. How 'Uncle' continued to prey upon her until at the age of fifteen she had met the man whom she was later to marry. It was a timid, conventional, teenage romance yet it gave her resolve and she found the courage to fight him off after five years, refusing him when he tried to corral her and touch her although he blustered and threatened, yet somehow he recognised that his day was done. He left her alone after that and she saw him just once more a year later on a family occasion which she could not avoid. They had stared at each other silently across the crowded room. Shortly after this she told me that she had heard he had been killed in a traffic accident, he just went off the road one night and he was buried on the hilltop cemetery at Wilford within sight of the Clifton estate where she continued to live. She went on caring for her father and she managed somehow to forget those experiences, entombed in a safe, monotonous marriage until, after he died, she found the memories leaching back to torment her. How disappointed I was! To think that this hateful man had escaped vengeance, and was now lying in the city of the dead, under the rook-infested beeches at Wilford Hill. How I wanted to dig him up, kick his wizened head, drag him and expose him that homunculus. I hid my disappointment from Brenda, realising that she had somehow transferred her anger onto me. I had been willing to incorporate 'Uncle' into my list of those who should be punished, but she had not been annihilated by her past, nor yet had she been cured by telling her story. She would always be damaged but somehow still burning a light in the darkness. She had survived 'Uncle' and she had survived me as her therapist. She gravely expressed her thanks to me. I, who had ministered conscientiously to her like a priest without a faith and who had played out the therapy to the end thanked her in return. I fancied that there was a twinkle of humour for the first time in her blurry face when we said goodbye and I noticed with surprise what a pretty, green colour her eyes were as we came near to each other for the only time and touched our hands together very lightly. She thanking me for listening and I wished her well but I also silently thanked her for releasing me so easily.
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