My mother had a breakdown some time at the start of the 1970s. There was an ambulance parked at the end of the drive and men in white tunics crunched up the gravel to the front door of the hotel she kept with my father and led her out to it. I can remember the scene - though not the precise date - as if it was yesterday. What I didn't appreciate was that I would involuntarily file it for more than 30 years and then be overwhelmed by the need for continual auto-debriefing. It plays constantly somewhere behind the eyes, in the head space where the past is reviewed, the present documented and the future imagined.
He illness continued for most of the decade and required frequent hospitalisation. The thing followed a wave form, the troughs marked by her absences, the downs and ups a sliding scale between illness and wellness and the peaks characterised by her saying how marvellous she felt. The joker in the pack was the hotel. It seems to me now that she would manage to get through the season, Easter to September, and that her decline would then be such that my father and our family doctor would feel there was nothing to do but put her away. I wonder now whether she was suffering from that variation of bi-polar illness made worse by lower light levels.
Certainly, anything but the most run of the mill days in the autumn would lead to a collapse and she spent many Christmases in St Lawrence's, the Victorian asylum at Bodmin that served all of Cornwall. I've just this minute looked it up on Google and learnt that it closed in the 1990s and that someone has thought to create a website of photographs because - amazingly - some people (which people?) have fond memories of it. Such was its reputation that just the mention of the word "Bodmin" would cause casual conversation to falter. Anyone at school unfortunate enough to have a relative confined there would be teased without mercy and even referred to as "Bodmin (Surname)" if the news got out. Looking through the pictures I realise that my mother was often in a building called the Radial and can feel again the stifling heat of the corridors, smell the disinfectant on the washed down floors and hear the slam of distant doors, big, heavy, thudding.
My father had a Ford Cortina estate and chain lit cigarettes at the wheel during the 100-mile trips to Bodmin and back. There wasn't much talking on these journeys, he saving it up for the visitors' room and entreaties to my mother to pull herself together. That was the onset of our disfunction.
Towards the end of the decade she was well enough to stay at home and eventually the illness passed. However there remained one behavioural tic of hers which I now associate with her being ill (for it was surely madness) and am still incredulous about. Each year from, say, 1980, she would in the early part of December express the wish that we offer open house over Christmas to a derelict from a Sally Army hostel or to an orphan from the local children's home. Mother, what were you thinking? I'm sure any child or tramp sent to stay with us would have bolted after two minutes in our glum company, and even if we could have offered something other than the drabness she imagined was the lot of her longed-for guests, wouldn't it be absurd and cruel to kick them out the day after Boxing Day? Even now the whole thing is almost too ridiculous for words.
