There, that’s done. Lived through, yet once again. Are we what our childhoods make us? I was thirty before I could even think about my past. Yes, I would say, to all enquiries, I had a happy childhood, and if pressed would give an account of pre-war Brighton, with its clean pebbly beach, and long summer days in the sun, complete with candy-floss. A photographic account. Or pressed still further, forced to remember the photograph torn and on the floor, turn the whole thing into a bad joke.
Yes, I am a bastard, and a Jewess at that. My father abandoned me and my mother went mad and I was a lesbian for a time. Ha-ha.
Laugh gaily. Gayly, even.
All enquiries, I say. There were few of them. I must have carried the past with me, as an almost visible load. Why would anyone want to help me with it? They wanted me to help with theirs.
In the middle portion of my life, when I gave dinner parties by night and wrote advertisements by day, I was prepared to believe, how I wanted to believe, that I had to cure myself to cure the world. Now I believe I have to cure the world to cure myself. It is an impossible task. I am bowed down by it.
The world is ungrateful. See how I am left alone, unable to hobble to the stove? Or perhaps I just abuse the world, as my mother abused me. Call it the names I should call myself. Indifferent, ungrateful, callous.
Bastard, Jewess, slut.
I did better than my mother, or my sister. I can put such memories of joy together! Don’t think I can’t. Patch them together into a protective quilt of happiness, to keep the cold winds of reality out. I learned how to do it. Even here, in this horrible room, hungry and in pain, helpless, abandoned by the world in general and the social worker in particular, I can feel joy, excitation and exhilaration. I changed the world a little: yes, I did. Tilted it, minutely, on its axis. I, Praxis Duveen.
The funny farm, the loony bin, the mental home. The shelter for the mentally disabled. I have visited them all, over the years. Times have got better, I will say that. The staff, medical and paramedical, the social workers, the dieticians and the researchers these days all but outnumber the patients. Each mad act now supports upon itself a whole wonderful structure of bureaucrats, commentators, observers, and philosophers.
In the beginning mother was in a strait-jacket, guarded by those too low, stupid and depraved to work elsewhere; her face the only part of her allowed movement, was alive with hatred for the world in general and me in particular. She wore no quilts of exultation. No.
I did not hate her: I never did. I wanted only to be allowed to love her and help her: look after her: remove her from the distress of her life. I felt more for her pain than I ever did for my own. There could be no happiness for me, knowing that my mother was so incarcerated.
After the strait-jacket days, mother was locked in. Bolts clanged before and behind. I would visit her. She seems to walk towards me for ever, down long, clattery, tiled corridors, smelling of disinfectant and boiled cabbage.
Sometimes she would deign to recognise me: sometimes not. I replay the scene in my mind over and over: sending her back to the end of the corridor: walking her towards me: sometimes she deigns to recognise me, sometimes not.
Mother!
Later, when drugs took the place of locks and bars, and the patient could be imprisoned in his or her own mind (mostly her) and the outer body could be set free, and the buildings got better and day-rooms arrived, and private sleeping cubicles, and frozen peas instead of cabbage, and well-kept gardens, and segregation of the sexes ended and there was occupational and group therapy, and Patient Rights, and even the occasional, though brief, visit to the psychiatrist, mother’s lot was considerably better. She seemed happier. She was allowed out, for a time, on home visits.
Was she always mad, or did the world send her mad with its prudery, hypocrisy and unkindness? Or was it the likes of her that made society what it was, prudish, hypocritical and unkind? Did my father leaving make her mad, or did he leave because she was mad? And what is madness anyway? Throwing red-hot coals about a room, hating one of your children, worrying more about a lesbian kiss than a clerical rape? Preferring to lie in bed than to get up? I suppose, had she done all these things and more, and done them cheerfully, or even drunkenly, no one would have felt obliged to lock her up.
As it was, she was miserable, anxious, and showed it in her actions, and was put away.
Where did the misery come from? Women have given birth to bastards, been left by lovers, and merely laughed and carried on. Mother did not. Why not? She should have, for my sake.