7th April
Dear Evelyn
It’s a year since I left Wellbridge and it’s spring again. I’m writing to you because I wanted to let you know what I’ve been doing and what’s been happening. I hope that’s OK with you. I just felt that I wanted to tell you, perhaps talk to you again by way of a letter. I do sometimes still talk to you as if you’re still with me, which you are, of course.
Since I left Wellbridge House I’ve had time to think about the things that happened that took me to the unit and to begin my work with you. I had no idea before I went there that I’d end up talking to you about so many things in my life, the things that directly and indirectly led me to exhume Rachel and take her to that police station. Because that was the beginning. That was the first thing in my life that I freely chose to do that I knew would be momentous and would take me to places that I’d never been to before. Then, I thought it would be actual places, like a police station and a court of law and a prison. What I realise now is that the really important places I went to were inside myself. I could never have imagined what it would be like to explore the world inside me, the places that I’d avoided going to because they were too frightening, too dark, too painful. I didn’t really know, either, that there were such places and that those feelings were keeping me away from them. What I began to realise was that it was those places where I actually lived, not just in the house I lived in, the village, the county, the part of the world, but inside me, in my own house of terrors that I kept tightly shut.
With that wonderful thing, hindsight, I realise now that I was deeply depressed from when I was very young. I feel tentative saying this, but I think I was depressed since I was a small child. I can’t put an age on it but I was very young when that shadow started to fall over me. It wasn’t until the later days at Wellbridge House that I began to feel different. When you’re immersed in something all your life you have little idea that it can be different and that was me, very depressed with no idea that I was, only a vague insight that something was wrong. Of course, I understand now why I was so depressed. There was no love in my family, not even from my father. I made the best of him but it was as if I had to exaggerate in my own mind that he was good to me and kind to me, that he loved me, to make life bearable, I suppose. I don’t now think it was true. I think I probably had to make that up and believe it. I don’t think my father was capable of love either.
One thing leads to another, Evelyn, and I think writing about my father has led me to the news I received about five weeks ago, that my mother has died. I couldn’t go to the funeral for obvious reasons. It was difficult for me because part of me wanted to, the dutiful daughter part, who did as she was told. I could hear my mother telling me off the moment I heard the news and knew I couldn’t go. She’s so firmly entrenched in my poor head. I had to struggle with her tirade for days after the news came, from Ann McKenzie, as it happens. She’s been my liaison with the police and the CPS since my release (I expect you know that) and all through the court case and she’s been great. I’m so glad it’s over. I expect you know that both the men I identified were convicted. They didn’t have to rely solely on my evidence. There was some forensic evidence to convict them but I was called anyway as a witness. I suppose I clinched it for the jury. They were unanimous. The two of them were sent to prison for a long time and apparently there are other charges that may be brought against them. I think Stephen got his justice. But they never found the third man.
I seem to have wandered off the death of my mother. I wonder why? She died suddenly from a heart attack. She was only fifty-nine. It seems right that her heart killed her. It had been so firmly shut in all the time I’d known her. Even her doting on Stephen was sentimental and selfish, not love at all, just a horrible attachment to someone she could make up a deluded story about that wasn’t true. I feel I know nothing about her, where she came from, what had happened to her. When I’m feeling charitable I think that she must have had a terrible time when she was a child to turn into such a person, to do the things she did to her own children. But I’m not really convinced by my own reasonableness. I think I’ll die myself still hating her at worst, feeling contempt, and sometimes sadness at best. My own heart feels hard towards her and I don’t criticise myself for that. For it to be different from that would be expecting too much of myself just yet. Anyway, my mother is gone and I feel an enormous relief that she’s not still sitting in her dreary house in Kent hating my father, dreaming silly adolescent dreams about Stephen and not thinking of me at all unless she wants something. I suppose I should be grateful that there was little she did want from me and that she rarely did get in touch. That sounds bitter, and I think I am bitter that she never cared for me. Perhaps I’ll get over it in time. I hope so.
Looking back, I think I had a breakdown after Rachel died. Things were very bad for me for those years. Funny how they began to get better when I went against my better judgement to see Stephen for my mother. It’s bizarre how healing can come from the worst things that happen in life. I know now that it’s what we make of them and whether we want to heal that matters. There is an expression ‘mad with grief’. I was mad with grief about Rachel. It was because something precious, in fact the only precious thing I’d ever known, was lost forever. That awful space left inside me was unbearably painful. I fell apart slowly, painfully, and when I was in pieces I knew I had to rebuild myself and I didn’t know how. But actually I did know. I can remember one day, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve fallen apart, how do I remake myself?’ You see, there was no core, no starting point, nothing solid inside me to make a start with. I can remember thinking that, I felt so empty, so hollowed out.
I came to Wellbridge House not knowing anything about what you did there. I thought it was some kind of psychiatric hospital and that I’d be sedated all day and all night. Then I met you. I had some self-awareness before I met you. I knew something about myself but I had no language to describe it. You helped me find a language. You sort of trained that awareness, quietly and slowly. And you gave me a way of seeing myself and my life without judging me. Perhaps that was the most important thing of all: to not be criticised or judged, just nudged in the right direction. And I began to develop a liking for words, Evelyn. They are like precision instruments; they can describe the world inside me as well as outside me. I learnt how to talk to myself about me and the mystery that had been inside me for all the years when I didn’t know how to do that. That was the wonder, the revelation. I’ve taken to reading a lot since I came here because I like words and what they can do. I enjoy feeding that need in me. I’ve picked up a thread that began when I was young and at school and then on into university.
I read a lot when I’m not at work because that’s how I spend my time. And as I sit and read and go through my daily routine I’m gradually getting used to being someone with a new name and a new home and a new past. I feel curiously at home with being someone different, not Tess Dawson. This new identity is closer to who I am now. Tess is in the past, she suffered, she lost someone she loved and then she left that old identity behind her on the front step of Wellbridge House when she left that day a year ago. So it seems to suit me no longer being Tess and I find I’m growing into being this new person. I can make myself from scratch because I feel I have a core now, that I built with you, something of substance at the centre of me where there was once that painful void. I don’t know how it happened but I know it did. I spend some time with other people and I’m beginning to enjoy that. I’m beginning to know myself through other people, which is very unexpected. I always kept people away and lived a secret, private life. I always tried to live in the countryside but now I live in a small town and I enjoy getting to know people. These relationships are only superficial at the moment but it’s a beginning and I know that it’s good for me.
The one thing I have thought a lot about since I left is Stephen. It’s as if I’m working something out in myself which is to do with him and me and also about me. I keep thinking about him being my shadow. You remember, in one of our last sessions. I think now that Stephen died inside, when he was a child. He died and I didn’t and that meant that he lost touch with anything good in him. It’s as if the good part died and all that was left was his hatred and rage and underneath it the terror of knowing that he was dead. Can a soul die? I can’t bear to think that it might be true. I want to hold on to the belief that somewhere there was still a light, fading and dying but not dead and that somewhere he lost touch with that and never wanted to find it again. Perhaps he lost all hope that he could retrieve it from the horrors inside him. But I struggle with this, Evelyn, and I’ve never found that tranquil place with it. I’ll keep on struggling, I think, because perhaps I feel I’m keeping hope alive for Stephen. I know it’s hopeless, that he’s dead and gone but there’s something in me that won’t let go. Maybe one day…
This letter is getting rather long but I think I’ve nearly said what I wanted to say. It’s good to talk to you and to myself like this. What else do I want to say? Oh yes…. One of the biggest changes in the way I live now is to do with the fact that now I feel in charge of my life. Until Wellbridge House I always felt as if I was someone who things happened to and I had no idea that that was so. To live in any other way was completely outside my experience and it never occurred to me that I could experience life in any other way. When I dug Rachel out of the old chimney it was the first really consciously decisive act of my life. I know I’ve said that before, but it is so true. I really did learn the difference between being conscious and being unconscious about things when we worked together. That distinction has opened up my life for me in so many ways. In doing that, I took responsibility for myself instead of keeping everything buried. It is all so graphic and obvious now. The extraordinary thing is that I had no idea what I was really doing, I just did it. (I know too that sometimes it’s important to do things on impulse, because you feel compelled. At times like that you’re cooperating with something much bigger than your small self. That could sound a bit spooky but it’s true.)
I have experiences these days, really in the last three or four months when, unexpectedly, I feel something like a soft whisper in my ear and I feel what I can only describe as joy fill me up. It happened when I was still at Wellbridge House, after or during one of our sessions. I can’t remember exactly. But it’s like an intimation of life, pure life, full and rich and deeply satisfying. I can feel euphoric and serene at the same time. It’s a warm place and I feel bathed in that warmth. I think now, perhaps it’s a bit whimsical, but I think that this feeling I have sometimes, this joy, is perhaps how I could have felt or should have felt when I was very small and that the feeling would have been at the very core of me rather than the terror and the pain. And that if I’d grown up with that feeling inside me my life would have been very different. Who knows? But I like to think that, even if it’s true and I’ve missed the ease of living from that place of comfort and security.
I can’t let you have my address, Evelyn, because you can’t know where I am. I’d love to hear from you but it’s not possible and I know you wouldn’t do it anyway. Thank you for everything and I may write again if that’s OK with you. I hope it is.
Love