Then one morning everything changed. Until that day, my first seven years had been notched up without the merest hint of a cloud. I was Daddy’s girl, the girl waylaid on the stairs and squinted at like a stranger. ‘Oh my goodness, who is this angel? Could it be my daughter? Could I be that lucky?’ Or, ‘What perfect timing, sweetie. I was feeling a bit lonely, come and sit on my lap, tell me what you think of this drawing, this painting, this poem.’ By lunchtime, life had altered and repetition was a thing of the past. It took less than twenty-four hours for my father to forget who I was, or so it felt.
Mervyn had written a play called The Wit to Woo. It had taken years to be staged, the script having done the rounds of the British theatre establishment. The Oliviers, Peter Hall and Michael Codron were all interested, and enthusiastic letters had travelled back and forth for a year or so. At last, in 1957, it was to be produced at the Arts Theatre, but Maeve was apprehensive. The theatre was such a different world, far removed from the solitary world of writing and painting, and perhaps a cold place for the inexperienced. The play, Maeve said, was ‘like a boulder rushing downhill. Nothing could stop it. It seemed to carry a sense of doom in it. There were too many people involved in it – whereas in a book, a painting, a poem, you are only answerable to yourself.’
For some reason, Mervyn had pinned his hopes for a better future on the play’s success, and had an idea that if in the areas he was most confident he found it impossible to make any kind of living, maybe writing a play would be the answer. He was optimistic by nature, but not unnaturally so, yet his hopes for a successful outcome were uncharacteristically high. I was sitting at the kitchen table on the evening the play was finished. He suddenly emerged from beneath it, straightened himself up and declared the play ‘done’ as the pages fell from his hands and landed on the floor like an open fan.
‘Come on, let’s all go out, let’s celebrate,’ he said. Arms linked, the five of us made our way down the suburban high street and into the local fish and chip shop. Instead of the usual newspaper wrapping and staining our food with the print, we sat at a Formica table, ate off lightweight white china plates using lightweight knives and forks, and it was one of the happiest hours of my life.
The first night arrived and you could have cut the tension with a knife. I sat on the bottom step of the staircase with my brothers and watched as our parents left the house. The colourful shirts Dad usually wore were often a tad on the scrunched side, absent-mindedly buttoned through the wrong buttonhole, his baggy corduroys held up by a redundant and lonely tie, pleased at last to be of service; and to save precious time in the morning, his striped pyjamas could be found trailing at the bottom of his trousers. But that night was different. That night he could have given any matinee idol a run for his money. Unrecognisably scrubbed, he wore a dinner jacket that Maeve had had made for him especially for the occasion. She was wearing a new dress and looked as well turned out and glamorous as ever.
I had already seen the play at one of the previews, but hadn’t really understood it, although the words sounded familiar, and reminded me of him. We had gone together, Dad and I, and as clichéd as it now sounds, someone stood on the stage before the play began and called out, ‘The author is in the audience. Let’s ask him to say a few words.’ Dad walked up the centre aisle and on to the stage, as I smiled at the elderly couple sitting beside me. ‘My daughter is with me tonight,’ is all I remember.
As Mervyn and Maeve walked to the station to catch the train ‘up to town’ our whistles and catcalls followed them into the distance. The night was heavy with significance and we all felt it. Everyone was longing for a success. The first night went well, the audience responded enthusiastically, and the cast, including Colin Gordon, Zena Walker and Kenneth Williams, were sure they had a hit on their hands.
After Maeve’s relatives treated them to a celebratory dinner at Prunier’s, they arrived home, exhausted by the euphoria of the evening. Early the next morning Maeve went out to buy the papers. Every paper gave an extensive review. This was the man who had written Titus Groan and Gormenghast, the illustrator described by many as the greatest living. Sadly, they ranged from lukewarm to sneeringly unimpressed. The dismissal was final and, as my mother read out the words of the judicious, something snapped.
My father crumbled, metaphorically and physically. In spite of his astonishingly modest view of himself, and the fact that he had taken previous criticisms with a healthy dose of salt and good humour (although my mother didn’t, and found it impossible to be objective, sanguine or less than murderous when it came to any criticism of her husband or children), those opinions mattered. When I woke, a doctor had been called, and this time I watched with horror from the top of the stairs. My mother, her face ashen with fear, was holding my father, attempting to pacify him, as he sat in his leather armchair outside his study and shook uncontrollably. My leaden feet became rooted to the spot as I stared at this terrifyingly naked tableau being played out twenty steps below, and an awful wave of panic washed over me. My brothers and some friends of theirs took me out for the day and we walked in silence. We crossed a bridge that I always visualise as a pretty, arched and slatted Japanese walkway over to safety, but in reality was a nondescript, flat bridge, carrying my silent brothers, their friends and me over to nothing. I looked down at the curling waves that a group of ducklings, hurrying to keep pace with their mother, had made in the water, and envied the simplicity of their journey.
When we got home, Mervyn had been sedated and taken to hospital (a recurring leitmotif throughout my later childhood) and diagnosed with a complete breakdown. For the next twelve years, with intermittent visits home, he languished in dozens of hospitals, the husband and father we knew gone like a puff of smoke, to be replaced by someone who had partly retreated into another world, somewhere we couldn’t join him.
It is hard, and I am trying, not to romanticise a father who was larger than life, a buccaneer with a heart and soul bursting through his chest like a tornado – not the perfect father for a girl who liked life to be comfortable, but the perfect father for a girl who lived and breathed for love and laughter. He had managed effortlessly to make sure his daughter felt adored and appreciated, pretty and funny. By seven I felt all these things, even if they were all to be lost one morning in the blink of an eye. These feelings had maturated and he had done his job.
A different life began, and so we adjusted. I carried on with my childhood, my brothers with their teenage life, and our mother with the nightmare she was enduring. She was thirty-nine years old and, with hindsight, I wonder how she managed to make it all seem so easy. But her magnanimous approach to life made it impossible for her to view herself as a hard-done-by woman. Her sense of humour was too finely tuned, her temperament too philosophical. Her sadnesses were not indulged or interpreted; there was no time for that. She just faced things full on and got on with it. But she missed my father desperately. Her days were fitted around hospital visits. ‘Do I look all right?’ she’d ask me, taking as much care with her appearance as if this were a first date. She took a wicker basket filled with chocolates and fruit, and a book of his poetry, so she could read to him and attempt to jog a memory confused by drugs and illness.
Arriving home, her swollen eyes hidden by sexy dark glasses, her body exhausted from worry and lack of sleep, she’d kick off her shoes and lie down next to me. With our arms wrapped around each other, hot tears smudging my face, she’d tell me how each visit had gone. Her style and elegance never deserted her and as I lay coiled in her arms, I could smell the Arpège, Miss Dior and Chanel No. 5 that she mixed with alacrity, hating rules of any kind, especially rules that said she shouldn’t mix scents or look like a woman enjoying life. Her respect for herself and others remained intact; to let herself go would have spelt defeat, would have marked the beginning of the end.
The diagnosis for Mervyn ranged from senile dementia (he was forty-five) to encephalitis lethargica – sleeping sickness (thought to be contracted during an epidemic sweeping China at the time of Mervyn’s childhood, laying dormant for thirty years and precipitated by a shock) – and back to breakdown. Through all of this, she made my life happy, more than happy, wonderful, a life jam-packed with fun and gentle anarchy, in a house where the ambiance she created was warm and exciting, where our friends could come and go, feeling free and important, where the conversations carried on as before, and where her intense love for my father was unwavering. The loneliness, the frustration, the despair, the exhaustion and the longing to be free of the constant supervision and care for her husband must have been present at times, but it appeared to me that however much he fell, dribbled, shook, wept, she never faltered for a single moment in her wholehearted respect and pride for the man she was married to. I couldn’t have put it into words or thoughts then; all I knew was that she was the best company on earth, that there was nothing small about her. There was a generosity of spirit, a feeling of naughtiness and a passionate quality that was both romantic and baldly realistic. We began to talk endlessly, and it was the beginning of the conversations that would last our whole lifetime together.
I had my friends, my brothers theirs. Life went on. Dad came home for a while then went to a new hospital – Friern Barnet, Banstead, Virginia Water, the Maudsley – endless awful places, where corridors went on for miles, where walls were painted a mossy green, a touching attempt at some sort of calm and serenity in the madhouses. I was taken to visit him in these places, where anguished men and women roamed the corridors screaming and laughing, or sat in chairs, sometimes silently, sometimes violently, rocking rhythmically to the beat of some inner torment. One man ran from one end of the corridor to the other in a ceaseless bid for freedom. The smell of desertion and loneliness was awful. Mervyn was permanently terrified and often sedated. He hated and feared the electric shock treatment Maeve had been advised was the right thing for him, and he longed for our visits.
I was confident and optimistic, certain this was all just temporary. All it needed was prayer and patience, and he would be well again. The thought that he might never recover too horrible to contemplate.
Dear darling,
I have been ½ drugged since I last wrote to you so I haven’t much to report. I have had 9 injections and feel like a pin-cushion. Today is lovely outside. Wish I were out in it. Had to see the ‘Dr’ today and had a lot of Tests. ‘Say 7345-2176 backwards’, ‘Put in your own words’, ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’ etc., all of which I passed.
I miss you all very much.
The ward nurses (all men) have pet phrases which they keep on repeating ‘I’m out for blood’ (injections etc).
It looks as though I’ve got to the end of stage 1 – the rest period and treatment. The Dr is OK but not very sympathique. But all will be well.
Letters are allowed here – in fact it’s very lax. I love your notes and the love you envelop me in. My thoughts are all for you, I adore and love you.
Please give my love to the boys (and the girl) I love them all. A Chinese man has just come on to our ward, maybe he speaks Mandarin. God bless you. All will come right and we will storm the citadels together.
This is going to be a great spring in our lives.
Mervyn
More letters came, almost daily.
Maeve, more than ever before I want you now. It is beyond all falling in love. It is a yearning such as I have never known before. I have almost lost my identity. I long for your white arms around my neck. The male nurses are pleasant but I am afraid of something subtler – it is the smell of the place – its miles and miles of corridors – the expression on the faces some of whom have been here for years.
I will never write about mad people again. I am in a kind of dream or nightmare and I yearn for your touch.
Maeve, never! Never again! It has done something to me, or rather it has frightened me a bit to be under the same roof with those in other wards – perhaps it’s because I have played too much round the edge of madness. O I could cry to be free. I have had 4 electric treatments. I don’t like them much – but I believe they do good. O days! DAYS! Roll along.
Tell the children I loved their letters. I long for my family again.
God bless you
God bless all of you
From your own husband
Mervyn.