My solo holiday must have made Franc think because while I was away he wrote to me. The letter was waiting when I got back:
Dear Helen
A lot of things to say and not knowing where to start. Perhaps there is no start.
I had told him that I was looking very fit and well but he said he would reserve judgement until he could see for himself, ‘with particular attention to the fat issue’.
He wanted to know if I was still planning to leave the flat. He had enjoyed working in England. He thought he would be back one day and ‘looking at the way things are at the moment . . .’ but in the next sentence he speculated that he might be wrong about that because, as he said, he hadn’t got ‘a clear picture’ of his future. Perhaps, he went on, he could open a small shop in the Midlands, a delicatessen with ‘good French wines’, or perhaps he could go and work in America.
He said that he didn’t mention me on purpose, not because he wasn’t thinking about me but just not to ‘create more confusion in you’. And this, he said,
. . . explains why I keep telling you to be sensible about your job: I am selfish in this case because I want you to stay put until I decide something.
Au revoir
Franc
He called me a couple of days later and said he was planning to come back for a week or so in August. It was his flat so I couldn’t really refuse. Actually, that’s not strictly true. It was an excuse. I wanted . . . I needed him back. Still. Despite my taste of freedom and my diary filling up again with friends and family, despite everything he had done, I wanted him back. Nuts, isn’t it?
On Monday, I signed myself ‘IN’ on Doreen’s whiteboard. I looked rested and tanned. On my computer keyboard I found a news cutting, photocopied from the Times Mirror, Los Angeles, with the headline, Dog’s name becomes fodder for joke essay and a rambling story about a dog called Sex. A couple of sentences were underlined: But this is a dog. He said he didn’t care what she looked like. My case comes up Friday.
I asked Jeannie if she knew where it had come from. ‘Doreen,’ she said, without looking up, confirming what I already knew.
I think, in her own unique way, she was telling me that I was a ‘dog’ (unattractive) and Franc’s only interest in me was for sex. I read the part about the ‘case’ as a warning that her disciplinary pursuit of me was approaching its conclusion.
Inspired by my holiday and thrilled (if a little nervous) at the prospect of spending time with Franc I thought I’d try to outflank Doreen by going to Dr Bray first with my next holiday request (he’d been much nicer to me lately). With his approval in the bag I went to Doreen’s office and closed the door behind me.
‘Would it be all right if I took a week off in August, from the seventh? It’s a month’s notice. I’ve asked Dr Bray and he said it wouldn’t be a problem.’
‘No.’
‘But . . .’
‘No. Sarah’s off the following week – you won’t have any handover.’
‘I said I’d call in to check if there was anything urgent and Dr Bray thought that would be fine.’
‘It’s not up to him, is it?’
‘I’m asking because Franc’s coming to the UK – I haven’t seen him since Easter.’
‘You’d better hope you’re not “on” then.’
With that she got up and shoved past me into the main office. I had to go through it to reach my own desk and that’s when she started:
‘Who do you think you are? You think you’re so fucking special. It’s always special circumstances with you . . . always bloody Franc. You’re not having time off.’ And she stormed out.
‘What was all that about?’ asked one of the typists.
I’d had enough. I went back to Dr Bray and asked him to pull rank.
‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘that’s way over the top. I’ll have a word with her.’
A form with two days’ approved leave duly arrived on my desk the following day – not the week I’d asked for but still better than nothing. When I thanked Dr Bray he laughed and said, ‘It’s probably her hormones, she’ll be back to normal tomorrow.’ And he winked.
Normal? While I’d been away she’d ransacked my office and left me a smutty newspaper cutting. She seemed to be obsessed with persecuting me. It was weird and I wanted to leave. I would have if Franc hadn’t told me not to because he might come back.
‘Because he might come back.’ If I could slip through time I would gently remind myself how unreliable he was. I could not and would not let Doreen treat me badly too. Funny, how I could fight her unreasonable behaviour but not his.
I suppose I could have predicted it after the row about annual leave but without warning on the last day of my first week back, I was summoned to Doreen’s office to go through the daily logs I’d been meticulously completing. I had not, it seemed, followed procedure. And, staggeringly, she’d also compared all my listed telephone calls with the thousands itemized in hospital records.
I carefully replied to the inevitable summary letter, explaining why an urgent addition to a procedures list had necessitated a departure from normal practice and justifying my telephone calls. I copied it to HR to be sure that everything was on record.
*
Doreen retaliated – I want to say ‘punished me’ – by giving me an extra job organizing a series of departmental lunches. Not even Dr Bray’s intervention helped. I was completely up to my oxters and – perhaps inevitably – I scored an own goal, totally forgetting about a sickness review meeting that Doreen had scheduled. Neither she nor the HR officer who was waiting with her phoned when I was late to see if I was on my way. Instead, the next day I got yet another official letter. Fuck.
In the middle of all this Franc arrived for a ten-day visit. I didn’t ask him why he’d come back (I didn’t want to rock the boat) – but just accepted that he was there. He seemed different, on his best behaviour, caring and kind. He told me I looked amazing. For once I didn’t say, ‘Really?’ because I knew I did. He even agreed to us both attending a staff barbecue at Dr Bray’s house the next day. Going on holiday on my own had been unpredictable. I think Franc found that independence of spirit attractive whilst also being unable to tolerate it – he wanted to reassert his control over me.
The day of the barbecue was warm and bright but I sensed an uncomfortable undercurrent.
We all sat around in the garden, drinking wine and making jokes about the potential irony of our boss giving us food poisoning. I smoked and drank, but not as much as usual – mainly because Franc was there, but so was Doreen and I wanted to keep a clear head. I wasn’t keen to introduce Franc but she saved me the bother and introduced herself. Franc was unimpressed. ‘She is round,’ he said, ‘a ball,’ giving a characteristic curl of the lip. He grinned and I giggled – I loved him for that. It felt so good not to be dealing with this alone. The only cross words to come out of his mouth were when I went to get a fresh bottle of wine. He thought I’d had enough.
He wrote me a letter during those ten days that was the closest thing I’d ever had to a genuine love letter (like the ones found in attics, tied in bundles with ribbon). I carried it around with me, folded in my purse, for years afterwards, telling myself it was a reminder that once I had been loved.
The letter starts:
It was not love at first sight. Before you had finished to say ‘Hello!’ your hand in mine, I was already in love with you.
He went on:
You are right to say that the fact you needed someone to help you in some way attracted me even more.
All that he had done for me he had done ‘just and only for love’. He had never before felt what he felt for me and he couldn’t stay away from me.
I had hurt him too, ‘don’t worry’. I had made him feel ‘the most unbearable pains’ in his heart. But I was everything he wanted.
He had loved the house where we first lived together best. He described how happy he had been when he would come home from work to find me cooking in the kitchen, then running to kiss him ‘hello’. He said he waited all day for that moment.
I have spent 5 months of my life away from you. If you can call that away. Every moment of my day I was thinking of you. Every place I was thinking I wished you were here. Still thinking to give you the moon if you wish. My all world if you want.
He said he was prepared to give up everything in France and come back to live in England with me, although he wondered if he would have ‘the guts to do it’ for the Helen he held in his heart, ‘the gentle, loving, caring’ me. He was ‘prepared to make sacrifices’ even if he wasn’t sure I would want him back after what had happened; it was for me, not him, to say ‘past is past’.
Then he spoiled it:
It is not your fault, even if at the back of my mind, I want to make you feel guilty for something it is currently killing me.
He believed my new-found strength and renewed social life were all his doing: ‘I thought I put you in the right way and said, “Go now.” Just that.’
It had hurt him to see me with a ‘stupid bottle’ because it made him think of me, as he put it, ‘some time ago’. He had called me at work that morning because he was crying over everything that had happened, because he could not keep his feelings inside.
He said he was sorry to bother me with his feelings. He hoped I understood what I meant to him. He said it was up to me to decide whether or not our relationship was worth discussing. That day he had wanted to leave.
The problem is I care so much about you and at the same time I feel betrayed. Hope you understand it. Hope the real Helen takes control.
Whatever Helen, and like you write: all my love always and forever.
I do. (You cannot even imagine how much.)
Franc
PS I forgot to tell you how beautiful you are.
And he still hated me wearing eyeliner.
Several years later I took that letter out of my purse and read it again, without the love goggles. I photocopied it and put the original, tattered and dog-eared, into one of those plastic wallets – this time to remind myself that something that looks like love sometimes isn’t. But for years I had only remembered the first sentence, that he had never stopped thinking of me. I blanked the rest.
The letter he sent immediately after his return to Paris seems to suggest that we were back as we had been:
Dear Helen
Once you used to start with ‘Love letter for you’. I miss those days.
Back to work and already fed up.
Thinking of you.
He was also thinking about holidays. He said he wanted to go to the Red Sea for the sunshine, beaches, clear seas and ‘a lot of sex as well’ but if we couldn’t go there then perhaps France or London or Dublin. He talked about the Christmas holidays, too, and whether we should stay at home or go away.
I think I will be able to manage the money but still worried about your financial situation (you have not mentioned anything about it and that really hurts me).54
Anyway, he said, ‘I wish you were here’, and then he talked about all the places in Paris we could go to because he knew I would like them.
He told me to think about the flat. If I didn’t want to stay there I should find somewhere cheaper to save money and if he decided to come back then we could find another, ‘a better one’.
Had he finished with Sophie? I didn’t ask. I just assumed he would tell me if he had.
He wrote again a couple of days later with more holiday suggestions, but ending with a brief reference to the horrors I was going through at work:
For that time you will have hopefully cleared your situation at the hospital, and won, so we can have some lovely time together.
Love
Franc
On Friday 1 September those horrors became much, much worse when Doreen walked into my office with a big, beaming smile and asked me to confirm my availability a week later. She told me I should check with my union rep to make sure she was also available. What was happening on the 7th? Had I missed something again? It turned out that it was the date set for my disciplinary hearing.
I suppose that having put in so much work on it she wanted the pleasure of seeing my face when she told me. Naturally I also had the pleasure of seeing hers. ‘Jubilant’ would be the word, I think.
I didn’t start to cry until after she’d left the office. The ward manager had a cigarette with me out by the ambulance bay. I was shaking. ‘Go home,’ he said, ‘and rest. You can’t work in this state. I’ll let Bray know.’ And he gave me a hug. A letter formally setting out Doreen’s allegations had arrived in the morning post, after I’d left for work.
— That Helen Walmsley-Johnson failed to improve sufficiently under a performance management framework and may thereby be failing to meet the standards of performance required of her in her contract of employment as a PA to the Consultant, described in her job description.
— That Helen Walmsley-Johnson fails to follow reasonable instruction from her Manager, Doreen Milson, with regard to punctuality, lunch breaks and information about her workload, which occur with such frequency that they could be considered insubordinate.
Insubordinate? Small comfort that I had predicted this would be her weapon of choice.
I couldn’t rest. I spent the whole weekend going through everything. Then I typed up my version of how we got to this point – eighteen pages of it. I needed to have it all written down so I wouldn’t forget any of it.
Pride got me back to work on Monday, although I would have loved to hide at home. The first thing I did was go and see Dr Bray. I had to clear the air or it would be impossible to work together. He was very nice about it and told me to try not to worry. ‘It’s not my intention to get you out of the door.’
*
On the morning of the hearing I dressed in my favourite navy suit and, for luck, a white blouse Franc had bought me. I felt as though I was dressing for my execution.
The meeting began at 9 a.m. and it was quite a revelation.
Doreen arrived, looking important, pushing a wheelchair loaded with paperwork and files. If she wanted to intimidate me with the amount of ‘evidence’ she’d accumulated then she succeeded. My heart fell into my tan leather, block-heeled Parisian ankle boots.
We were there all day and because I fought hard, with my union rep beside me, we didn’t get through all the evidence. We were to reconvene ten days later.
Part Two of the Trial of Helen Walmsley-Johnson saw me dressed in exactly the same clothes. Not that I’m superstitious or anything. We started at 10 a.m. and this time we did get to the end. I went home feeling that I had fought a good fight but without much hope.
I can’t remember what prompted it but in a coffee break during the hearing Lisa, my union rep, and I began talking about domestic violence. She told me about the time she’d been knocked unconscious and come round with her hands nailed to the sitting-room floor and her husband on top of her. She showed me the scars – I can’t think why I hadn’t noticed them before. I didn’t identify with it though. What happened with Franc wasn’t like that.
I probably threw out a few hints to Lisa – a coded message or two. I found myself doing that sometimes, especially now he was back in my life. I couldn’t say the actual words though and when Lisa told me about what had happened to her I parked the thought that he was abusive. A bit of shouting, hair pulling and a loss of freedom seemed trivial by comparison, not worthy of the term ‘domestic abuse’. I mean, what did I have to complain about, really? Nothing.
By this stage my doctor had signed me off sick, but now that the process had begun I felt too fragile to show my face in the office anyway. I’d been thoroughly – and for all that the hearing was supposed to be private – publicly shamed. I read something somewhere that says the amount of shame you feel is proportionate to the number of people who know what you’ve done. I don’t think that’s quite right. The amount of shame is proportionate to the number of people you think know what you’ve done. And I thought everybody knew about this – right down to the snack-trolley man. I felt that very acutely.
My diary shows that Number 3 Daughter came over and stayed with me for a couple of days. I had lunch with Lizzie and Nina. I had my hair done. It also shows that Franc came back on the 21st and again on 29 September. And during one of these trips he told me that he and Sophie were over. There are clues in an undated letter of mine proving I wrote it in this couple of weeks. It shows how much I had changed over the summer but also how much I still needed him, still stubbornly holding out for a hero:
Dearest Franc
I am so, so sorry to have said the things I said to you last night. Please try to understand just exactly what you did to me in March. I know you say that for you it’s finished but I still have the fall-out to deal with and you (we both) have the damage to deal with. Until that day I trusted you completely and I felt utterly, totally, entirely betrayed. That 5 months felt like 5 or 500 years. It took me months of struggling to get over it and I thought I had . . . until you came back in August. I had placed myself entirely in your hands – and until that day I felt safe. If it had been anyone but her I think I could have handled it better. She will always represent a threat to me and that’s something I’ll have to get over myself. But you, you can help heal my wounded heart and help rebuild the trust that was destroyed . . . that you destroyed (sorry, but you did).
What’s happening now [the disciplinary hearing] just feels like the end of the world to me, and I’m looking to you for help. I thought I was coping with that and then my body lets me down. I’m not as strong as you or anyone else thinks I am but when I fall apart I try to do it in private. I’ve spent today falling apart and thinking, allowing myself to grieve for everything that’s happened and for the people I’ve lost and not allowed myself the time to grieve for. I’ve been spring-cleaning my soul. Probably it was a bad time to speak to you on the phone. Can you understand that every time I have to say goodbye to you at an airport, in the flat or on a station platform a part of me dies? I put on such a brave act when you were here at the weekend and I could actually sleep when you were here in bed with me. The reason it feels so bad now is because I feel so insecure because of what’s happened and the lifeline I need is something that demonstrates real, strong commitment on your part. My commitment to you is there but I dare not give it and risk that pain again. It’s partly pride with me as well I suppose because I felt totally humiliated after what happened. I couldn’t go through that again – it would kill me. You say you could have a job that would involve you travelling a lot, that’s fine if there are two things back in our relationship – trust and commitment.
I think, after what you said last of all on the phone tonight that you’re going to give me an indication of your commitment and that’s all I need. It’s not so difficult. If what I hope for is coming from you then I thank you with all my heart. It means everything to me and is something I can cling to and cherish.
The letter doesn’t end with my customary H xxx. Maybe there was another page and it has been lost.
On 10 October a letter arrived informing me that a decision had been reached and I should attend a meeting the next day at the hospital to learn what that was. They really liked to drag things out. The panel concluded that I was not stupid (thank you) and I was therefore insubordinate.
So they sacked me. It was the first – and the last – time I have ever been sacked.
*
In January 2016, the Guardian published a feature on ‘pernicious’ workplace bullying in the health service, which included the results of an online survey carried out by the paper’s Healthcare Professionals Network. More than 1,500 doctors, nurses and other health workers in hospital, primary care and community settings took part. The results showed that:
— 81 per cent of those completing the survey had experienced bullying
— Of those, 44 per cent continued to experience bullying
— A third of victims said they had been pushed out of their jobs
— 41 per cent of victims said they needed counselling or treatment after being bullied
— 87 per cent of respondents think bullying is a big problem within the NHS
— Of those, three-quarters said they did not feel the health service took bullying seriously
— 55 per cent of victims said raising a concern prompted the abuse
— Just over a third of victims said they were persecuted through fear or threats, saying their career was deliberately sabotaged
— One in ten bullying victims was subjected to violent behaviour and aggression
— Fear of reprisals was the reason given by 54 per cent of those who had experienced bullying and did not report it
— Of those who did report bullying 44 per cent said it persisted afterwards
— Only 17 per cent of those who reported bullying said they received pastoral support from their organization55
Fifteen hundred is perhaps quite a small sampling. However, the Guardian survey confirms the findings of the 2015 annual NHS staff survey of 300,000 healthcare professionals across England, which found that a quarter of staff in NHS trusts had experienced bullying, harassment or abuse in the previous twelve months.
Some of the personal statements from the Guardian survey resonate painfully with my own workplace experiences.
‘The culture is driven by exerting undue pressure on others to get things done. If you don’t, you are targeted and eventually you end up with stress and depression.’
‘You are [then] managed out of your job through contrived actions designed to make you leave. All this leaves you broken and with no strength to fight.’
‘Following a reshuffle, our ward manager was replaced by someone who was known for being a bully. She frequently made comments and used language inappropriate for the role.’
‘I was constantly ridiculed and told that medical staff had criticized me even though, when questioned, they quite clearly had not.’
‘I was having panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.’
‘I believed that I had been targeted as I had previously raised concerns about patient care.’
‘The bullying was incessant – my line manager would call me in the evening at home telling me to take time off work and encouraging me to see my GP as, in her opinion, I was unwell – I wasn’t. She insisted that I had to contact her every morning to tell her where I was, even at work.’
Now that both Doreen and Franc are well behind me and I can look at what happened more objectively, what strikes me most is how similar their methods were. The winning me over, the slow escalation, the isolation, the sheer craziness of what was going on. In addition, the two separate lines of abuse converged and crossed over. As Franc stepped down, Doreen stepped up and when Doreen stepped down, Franc stepped up again. They only met once, yet you’d swear they were working together.
This convergence compounded the low opinion I had of myself, increased the stress and fed the crushing depression. The strain was immense. God knows how I survived.
But as significant as the ‘Doreen period’ was in my life it was also relatively brief and mostly, I now believe, a consequence of my relationship with Franc. Without his interference I might not have been such an easy target.
One thing in particular stands out in all the morass of accusations Doreen threw at me.
By the time her campaign reached its logical conclusion, she claimed I had been late on no fewer than sixty-six occasions. I have no idea whether that’s true or not (I have my doubts) but I was certainly late more often than I should have been. One of the reasons, as I’ve said before, was Franc. I wouldn’t have made the connection at the time. And to be fair to Doreen, I don’t expect she would have done either.
It is estimated that domestic violence costs UK businesses in excess of – drum roll – £2.7 billion each year due to decreased productivity, poor performance, absenteeism and employee turnover.
There are other costs, too:
— £1.6 billion for physical and mental health costs
— £1.2 billion in criminal justice costs
— £268 million in social services costs
— £185.7 million in housing and refuge costs
— £366.7 million in civil legal costs
— £1.8 billion in lost economic output
— The human and emotional costs are estimated at £26 million per day56
Violent men don’t come cheap.
When you consider that when they are not at home most women are at work, it doesn’t require a great mental leap to think that employers and colleagues might pick up signs of abuse in their team members. Yet it’s only fairly recently that employers have been urged to be aware of this aspect of their duty of care.
The Trades Union Congress’s 2014 survey on domestic violence and the workplace reported that ‘one of the striking findings from the survey was how rarely those experiencing domestic violence disclosed it to anyone at work.’57
There are the inevitable statistics to back that up: ‘fewer than one in three (29 per cent) of those experiencing domestic violence discussed the violence with anyone at work . . . The main reason for not disclosing were “shame” and “privacy”.’ The survey adds, ‘The same proportion (29 per cent) of those who did not discuss the violence they were experiencing believed that people were aware of the violence anyway even though they hadn’t been told and they never mentioned it.’ The report further adds, ‘it is surprising and worrying how few people felt that disclosing had led to anything positive happening.’
Had anyone taken the trouble to look closely at what Doreen was accusing me of, perhaps they would have wondered why a woman who had worked for them for eight years with great efficiency, punctuality and motivation seemed to have changed out of all recognition.
The opening statement of that TUC report makes it abundantly clear how domestic violence affects women in employment:
A Home Office report in 2009 found that 20 per cent of victims of domestic abuse had to take a month or more off work in the previous year due to the abuse. Other research found that 56 per cent of abused women arrive late for work at least five times a month and 53 per cent miss at least three days’ work a month. Nearly all respondents (99.4 per cent) said they thought that domestic violence can have an impact on the work lives of employees.
When I read that I thought, that was me.
The survey also tells us that ‘domestic violence may prevent employees from getting to work’. The reasons for that are terrifying:
— Nearly three-quarters of respondents who had experienced difficulty in getting to work reported that this was due to physical injury or restraint.
— For over two-thirds of respondents threats caused difficulty in getting to work.
— Over a quarter of those who experienced difficulty in getting to work said this was due to car keys or money for public transport being hidden or stolen by their abuser.
— Refusal or failure to look after children created problems getting to work for over a quarter of those who reported that abuse had prevented them from getting to work.
Another red flag is that ‘over one in ten (12.6 per cent) of those who experienced domestic violence reported that the violence continued in the workplace. In 81 per cent of instances this was through harassing and abusive emails or phone calls.’
Remember all Franc’s faxes and phone calls?
And, even worse: ‘For nearly half . . . the abuse took the form of their partner turning up at their workplace or stalking them outside their workplace.’
And if the way you’re treated at home is mirrored in the way you’re treated at work, there’s no respite.
As part of the preparation for defending myself at the hearing, I had been asked to write down my feelings. This is what I wrote:
ISOLATED. UNDERMINED. DEMORALIZED. LOSING CONFIDENCE AND FAITH IN MY OWN JUDGEMENT. CONFUSED. VERY, VERY UNHAPPY. INSECURE. MISTRUSTFUL. DEPRESSED. TOTAL DISBELIEF.
The irony is, of course, that all those words could equally apply to my relationship with Franc. The difference being that Franc wasn’t difficult all the time. Or, rather, Franc wasn’t very difficult all the time. He fed me just enough affection to keep me hoping. Now, after I’d been sacked, he was back to spend a couple of days with me every fortnight. He even took me to Italy for a few days of sunshine to help me recover. It was lovely.