From a Safe Distance (8 page)

By the time I reached the Sixth Form though, most of the colourful characters and the quiet drips had left. Those who remained from these groups seemed to have realised something serious: they had grown up. And now, of course, my glasses were a kind of badge. Aunt Mary was still there, but I had pushed some big boxes full of books against the white door. It was a very ordinary adolescence, but the black drops were still dripping, out of sight.

I had all the usual childhood ailments, and Mum looked after me, but Ron always seemed to think I was doing it for attention, so that over time, being ill and feeling guilty became inseparable in my mind. It had to be my fault; I was letting everyone down. And I didn't see any need to discuss this mindset because I thought everybody's household worked the same way. Likewise, I had accepted the presence of Aunt Mary as part of ordinary life. Not something you talked about every day, but there all the same.

But I was not just a swot in the Sixth Form: I had to get everything right. Because to get things wrong was to invite the black wave. While I might have believed I was in a position of strength, in fact it was simple arrogance, which is the armour of the insecure. My disdain spread to people who had anything wrong with them, like my grandparents who had let themselves get old and deaf. I found it hard to conceal my impatience. But the worst offenders were those who showed any sign of being “mental”. Nothing was going to go wrong for me: I was in control. I knew exactly how the black wave could come, where Aunt Mary and the door
were, and how to limit their influence. I had absolute faith in a state of eternal health, along with what I considered intellectual superiority – and oh yes, I sealed my contemptuous perfectionism with a determination never to get old. I wasn't weak!

I tried to read one of the course books on the train south to uni, but it was difficult. Fields passed and trees rushed by and I thought about Aunt Mary. I had really wanted to ask Granny about her, but I never seemed to find the right time.

Why had she been “taken away”? Did it happen more than once? I recalled the old dream of her as a dog on a lead. Secretly I knew the answer, but it was hard to admit to having a relative who must have been mentally ill. I checked the white door: it was still closed, the boxes of books were still there and it was partially obscured by ivy.

My routine was totally different now and I had very little money, but much more freedom than at school; it was up to each of us to structure our day. This took some getting used to, as did sharing a kitchen and bathroom with complete strangers.

After graduating and getting a PGCE, I soon discovered that to teach was not simply to convey knowledge to a rapt audience. It was hard work. I could see so many different personalities and needs in each class. But I was still naïve enough to believe that my love of French would enable me to impart my knowledge without any trouble, a belief that was soon to be utterly destroyed.

My first full-time job was in a comprehensive in the Midlands. The buildings were of the plain 1960s variety. In some places the roof leaked, and the paint was peeling, but the staff worked on regardless. Most were disillusioned, punch-drunk and demoralised, inured to the dismal round of coping with adolescent minutiae, doing their best in spite of everything, day in, day out. Cynicism, it seemed, was all that kept them going. They seemed to have forgotten how to live in any other way.

I walked into a classroom one day to find two boys fighting. The rest of the class, a bunch of streetwise fourteen-year-olds, were cheering and egging them on. I went to the front and shouted.

‘Kevin and Sean, break it up! Now! Everybody sit down. Come on! Quiet! Sit down, Tracy.

‘Miss, Miss!' Tracy shouted from the back. ‘He's doin' sumfink disgustin'!'

I didn't know what to do. I still did not understand why discipline was not automatic.

‘Eeurrh! Two or three boys stood up. ‘I'm not sittin' next to him, Miss!' said Jason. ‘He's filfy!'

‘Miss! Sean's bleedin.' Can I go to Mrs Jones wiv ‘im?'

‘Oh, alright.'

‘Pwaar! Who's farted?' came another voice, followed by a peal of laughter. ‘Can I open the window, Miss?'

Meanwhile I was trying to write something on the board, which was being pelted with bits of chewed-up paper meant for the back of my head. I turned round quickly and saw two boys hide something.

‘Miss?'

‘Yes, Sharon?'

‘Why do we ‘ave to learn French. It's borin.' We'll never go to France, anyway. Who wants to? Bloody frogs!'

This comment set off more laughter as well as croaking noises. I couldn't give Sharon an honest answer, because in the end, Set 3 were never going to be able to get anywhere with their French. The idealism of teaching theorists would soon evaporate in this room. The truth was, I could see the children's point of view, a fact which naturally undermined me. They weren't there from choice, and they might have had problems at home, something which never crossed my mind at the time. Only dimly aware of it, I was digging a hole for myself with the class looking on. I wanted to keep up the appearance of being strong in adversity, so I ignored what my instincts told me. Uncle Ron had taught me to be tough, not to give in, not to complain. But my attempts to get past the issue of discipline and into the safer territory of actual
teaching only served to make me more and more weary. The problem would not go away. Things rapidly reached the stage where I could not climb out of the hole. The black wave was up, ready to carry me to hell.

My private insecurity was now on public display. Only in teaching do you stand exposed in this way, and only children are capable of rubbing away at your very soul until it dawns on you that all is lost. Then there is the heart-stopping, instant silence which tells you that another teacher has entered the room, an especially vivid reminder of your shortcomings if the teacher is there because your class was disturbing the one next door. The children searched in vain for someone in me who would stand up to them. I could feel the black wave twisting, threatening to burst through. I stayed at home for a couple of days, feeling empty and not knowing what I should do.

‘You're depressed,' said Wendy, a fellow teacher who found me in bed. ‘Go and see the doctor.'

One of my flatmates had let her in; the school was concerned at my absence. But the doctor was no help at all, telling me to go away and sort out my problems. She must have thought I was weak. I was. I was useless. Aunt Mary … The padlock was broken, the boxes had been moved.

When I failed my probationary year it should have come as no great surprise. But it was the first time I had ever tasted failure. I had always taken it for granted that I would succeed in whatever I did, if not from ability then out of determination, toughness. Something died in me that day. I discovered that getting things right all the time was impossible. I was, after all, a weak person. To my shame I packed up and travelled back to Howcester to stay with Mum. At least she and Ron were there for me.

‘So what are you going to do next?' Mum asked one morning. ‘Do you want to retrain?'

‘No. I want to teach.'

‘But how d'you plan on doing that?' She began the washing-up.

‘I can apply to independent schools. They might give me
another chance to prove I can do it.' I picked up the tea towel.

‘Oh, Vee! I forgot to tell you! You know your old grammar school?'

‘Yes?'

‘Well, they've moved everyone out to another site. They've had to knock the old place down. Something to do with concrete fatigue … '

I had spent seven years at that school, but I didn't get attached to places, did I? So what was this uncomfortable feeling?

It was getting late, so Max closed the folder. With Simon and Jackson living in their house though, it was difficult to relax. Max did feel sorry for them, but he hoped they would soon find somewhere else. Helen was fed up. After reading these first pages, Max wrote:-

“It is clear that Vee's childhood was unremarkable, apart from the death of her father. She had been loved, but the spectre of Aunt Mary haunts her.” Then he realised that this Uncle Ron must have been the tall gentleman with Mrs Gates he'd seen at the funeral.

He went on: “Despite the difficulties she experiences in her early career, Vee evinces the determination she will need as her life moves on through light and shade.
I
haven't appeared in the story yet, and my anxiety is edging up a bit. But I know from the way things are going that Vee is about to move to Lexby, so no doubt I will be in it soon. I can't recall what it was like not to know Helen, though. She now has Vee's first pages. Incidentally, Helen has read nothing of what
I've
written; she wanted to, but I said I would only let her after we've read Vee's book.

“The big question of action remains. I might be committing myself to much more in the way of personal involvement, in ways I have not yet considered. Meanwhile I will read on, to escape domestic chaos as much as anything else – Simon knows what I'm doing and has left me to it. Vee's story is made of the kinds of things you get to know
about someone when you are close to them for long enough. While she did not have that opportunity with me, I can still feel her watching, somewhere near”.

It was hard to get to sleep that night because Simon's son Jackson had some friends round who didn't leave until midnight and played loud music. Helen and Max had forgotten just how noisy teenagers could be. They asked the boys to turn it down when they went to bed at eleven, but after a hollow apology Max heard sniggering from the boys and it wasn't long before the music was as loud as before. Simon was nowhere to be found. Max would not have been surprised if Jackson's behaviour had contributed significantly to their eviction by Simon's brother.

Helen and Max were forced to lie awake until the boys decided to pack up. Max heard Simon come back at around 2 a.m. Then there was the bathroom. Not only a queue in the mornings but scum round the bath. And then Helen found a half bottle of vodka in the cupboard under the washbasin.

As he sat wearily in his attic office, about to read Vee's next chapter, the light changed and Max was back in the pitch black lecture theatre. Darkness, apart from the spotlight on him and the irregular lace effect of the light at the top of their heads. When a student speaks, his or her face is illuminated as if by a torch. Eerie though the setting may be, Max proceeds as if nothing unusual were happening.

“Can anybody give me a definition of good mental health?” There is silence. Then Mr Phillips's face appears as he says:

“It means having your life in balance, keeping interested in things, not doing anything to excess – and getting enough rest.” The torch clicks off.

“Fine, those are certainly aspects of it, but to my knowledge, nobody has ever summed it up succinctly. We have precise tools for diagnosing illness, and we can usually tell when somebody is unwell, but more often than not, we have to fall back on ‘the absence of illness' as our unspoken definition, despite what this could mean. The WHO's definition of health in general includes the words: ‘a state of complete well-being', but that doesn't help really, does it? And how would you define that other old chestnut, ‘normal'?”

“That's a bit easier, sir,” says Mr Jones, his features animated in the light, “because it has a social context.” Click.

“Explain.”

“Well, every society has rules and behaviour which are considered ‘normal', even though one society's normal might be another's weird.”

There is a short burst of laughter in the dark from the four tiers of young men and women, all in darkness.

“That's good enough for now, but it's important to bear in mind that, whatever the social context, the differences between well/unwell, normal/abnormal, are not necessarily clear-cut – or even constant. So. Our next topic: severe depression. Symptoms can be quite unmistakeable. What does psychomotor retardation mean, Mr Phillips?”

“It means, sir, that the patient is slow physically, so they have difficulty walking, eating, etc.” His torch goes out.

“Right. Their thought processes are slow, too. In fact if the depression is extreme, they can go into stupor – I'm not going to talk about that right now – but in that state, they must be kept under observation.”

The face of a young woman appears in the dark: “Would ECT be the treatment of choice for someone as depressed as this?”

“It depends on the individual circumstances, but I have seen patients who have undergone a remarkable recovery with ECT. The argument against it relies mainly on the fact that we don't know how it works. But the same could be said of many of the medications we prescribe.”

The students murmur. Then Mr Flint speaks, his round face like a moon: “What do you think about the stigma attached to mental illness?” Click.