The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

authors the art of spinning a tale, of how to build anticipation and end with a cliffhanger. As Dickens advised, ‘Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait’. The story of my father was a serialisation that I embellished day by day. It was Worzel Gummidge with a macabre slant; he had been unexpectedly kidnapped by a band of savage tramps who had invaded the bottom of our garden. This had evolved into a hostage crisis. My father was trapped in a garden shed: would he ever return? At one point, I became so engrossed in my story that I forgot it wasn’t real. I was taken to the sick room because I was crying. When I told the nurse my tale, I could see that she was trying not to laugh; she gave me a biscuit, patted me on the head and sent me on my way.

      Even if I had known the term for my father’s illness, it would have meant nothing to me. Children survive without science the way ancient societies did – making up stories which explained why sometimes the rain fell and sometimes there was a drought, where the stars came from and why humans were put on earth. When we are children we view our parents as our gods, and so they need grand narratives. To say that my dad was ‘mad’ felt simplistic and would have rendered him too fragile, too human. He needed to be a hero in a tragedy – and importantly, at the mercy of external forces rather than internal ones.

      In the playground, I became an observer. The difference in class between me and my classmates had cleaved me from them. The turning-inwards of my energies was becoming habitual; I read books in break-times, or watched the others playing. Most of the games were about love and war – Kiss Chase or some variant on Cowboys and Indians. Or children played at professions, at Doctors and Nurses, or being a spy. Children do not play at being children, they play at being grown-ups; the playground is a dress rehearsal for the future. I watched them with envy. I read James and the Giant Peach, Five Children and It, The Secret Seven and wished the characters might be coaxed from the page into real life friends.

      And then, suddenly, my dad was back home again.

      It was a plot hole I could not fill. Every time he returned, I was simply glad that he was home, without worrying too much about the whys: why he had gone, why he took pills at night, or why his work suits hung in his wardrobe and gathered dust. I remember going on a family outing by car one day when I was about eight years old. I was sitting in the back with my brothers and I was reading Roald Dahl’s Danny The Champion of the World. My father was driving. I could see his face in the rear-view mirror and he was muttering to himself as though in conversation with a voice; I smiled, recognising that I mirrored his reflection, for I had the voice of Dahl running through my mind, and it was witty, rude, wry, and compassionate. Fiction can sometimes enrich us, leave us feeling full, but just as often a good book can leave us wistful, with a sense of absence. In Danny, the hero does not have a mother but he has an amazing father. His father teaches him how to fish and takes him on secret poaching trips in the middle of the night. At the end of the book, there is a concluding message: ‘A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants – and DESERVES – is a parent who is SPARKY.’ It was hard not to stare at the picture of Dahl on the back cover, sitting in his Buckinghamshire garden, a tall man with a twinkle in his eye, and imagine that he was the perfect incarnation of paternity.

      Back home, I flipped through a tattered dictionary, wishing I could discover a word for my dad’s idiosyncrasies. If I could only find it, I thought, it would be like turning a key in a lock. Despite discovering new words I liked the sound of (peevish, aberration, crasis), nothing enlightened me. The key would not turn.

       3

       B ang! Bang! Bang!

      When I arrived at St Helier hospital, I made my way through the criss-cross of white corridors to the fifth floor. My dad had been brought here in the ambulance yesterday. As I approached the ward, I heard a noise that filled me with dread.

       Bang! Bang! Bang!

      There were eight beds. The other patients were all elderly men and, though sick, they appeared to be ‘normal’. They were reading the paper, watching TV, or chatting with relatives, who sat in plastic chairs around their beds. My dad looked simultaneously elderly and infantile. He was drumming violently, fists flying up and crashing down on the bed, like an enormous white-haired baby in a cot. When I said hello, a faint smile quivered on his lips – his fists pausing for a few seconds – before he went back to his routine.

      A nurse approached me and said that my dad would probably be discharged later that day.

      ‘But look at him,’ I said, my heart thumping with shock.

      ‘Isn’t he always like this?’

      I tried to explain the man my father normally was: a man who rose every morning and made his own breakfast, did his own daily shop, and cooked himself a poached egg for lunch, one of those simple recipes that involves a certain delicate skill, lest the egg collapse into a wobbly morass. The nurse looked sympathetic but wary, as though she couldn’t quite equate these two versions of my father. If he’d been in with a broken limb, she might have been able to synthesise them. But madness tears a person’s character into two, their sane self and their insane one, and it can be hard to make the join, perceive them as a whole. Here, in hospital, the staff were used to illness being tested, clarified, boxes ticked and clear prognoses made. Dad had had an operation for bowel cancer the previous year and the accompanying leaflet gave a window for recovery of five to seven days and then a prognosis for his health in three months’ and six months’ time. Now he was an enigma, someone suffering from something which might or might not be cured at any time in the future.

      Last September, when my dad had been brought in with the same ailment – a mysterious catatonia – they had also been a little suspicious and bewildered at first. I think it was the result of government cuts. With so few beds, perhaps there were fears that we were just dumping him on the system, creating a bed-blocker.

      ‘You can’t discharge him, we’d have no idea how to look after him,’ I said. ‘And I’m worried about him eating and drinking.’

      The nurse softened. She said he’d be assessed by a psychiatrist. She added that she’d try to feed him.

      I sat down beside my dad. Unscrewing a bottle of orange juice, I pushed a straw into it and held it to his lips. They looked parched, chapped. He drank in gasping, slurpy bursts. Relief came over his face. But it didn’t cease the relentless Bang! Bang! Bang!s. I unfolded a copy of The Daily Telegraph, his paper of choice, and attempted to read an article to him, lifting the paper high to hide my face as irritated patients and visitors glared over at us.

      The hospital cafe was a Costa; I ordered a hot chocolate and sat down by the window. I was taking a break, for I hadn’t been able to soothe my dad’s relentless banging. From my bag, I pulled a copy of Mrs Dalloway.

      Virginia Woolf’s novel is set on a single day in June 1923 and captures the psyche of a nation in the aftermath of the First World War; it dives and swoops into the consciousness of various characters, shifting from one to another within a single paragraph. I suppose I was drawn to a reread because of its theme of madness. In the novel’s early conception, the book’s two main characters, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith, were one; then Woolf split this imaginative egg into two. Clarissa is a high-society woman planning a dinner party; Septimus is a soldier who fought on the Western front and lost a friend there just before the Armistice. Woolf notes in her diary that she wanted to sketch the ‘world seen by the sane and the insane’, showing how thin the membrane is between the two. Clarissa suffers from neurosis, Septimus from psychosis. She is more manic; he is more depressed. Clarissa represents the governing classes – ‘civilised life’ – who were left largely untouched by the war, whilst soldiers such as Septimus were left in a state of trauma and despair.

      I found myself moved by the relationship between Septimus and his wife, Rezia, seeing echoes of my parents’ marriage. They sit in Regent’s Park together, gazing at the trees and sky. Rezia tries to cheer herself by recalling the reassurances of her husband’s doctors, that he has ‘nothing whatever