My Animal Life(38)

A week or so after we got back home, my A- and S-level exams began. My mind responded; I sat down and did what I had always done, and did very well. Not long afterwards, the school term ended, and we all stood and cried as we sang the school song for the very last time, ‘To serve is to reign’, that hymn of the female downtrodden.

And then there was a blank. I did have a plan, to do my very first job, for the civil service, as a filing clerk in an office in Horsham. The job was very boring, and very easy, sorting grey-green cardboard files alphabetically. The pay, I think, was £1 or £2 a week (but then my rent, three years later, was only £3). Only two things were wrong: first, my fellow-workers. One was a stout, glossy-haired girl who had been at my father’s school, and seemed friendly, and offered to take me under her wing. Her name was Thelma; she had a soft voice and a strong Sussex accent. She talked incessantly. Soon she was pouring pure vitriol, softly, constantly, into my ear. Whenever she could get me out of other people’s hearing, she told me bad things about my father. ‘It’s going downhill, the school. He’s losing his grip, everyone says so. Shall I tell you what we used to say about your father?’ I was powerless, fascinated, by Thelma. I did not know how to deal with her, how to stop her talking, or stop myself hearing. I felt I saw evil, once again. And so the second thing went wrong: my mind. The world started to slide under a veil of terror.

Every lunchtime I escaped from the office, and Thelma, and bought myself chips from the fish-and-chip shop. They were huge and greasy and I could not eat them. There was a phone-box in the street outside. One day I rang up my mother in a panic. ‘I hate this job. I can’t go back.’ She was puzzled, and consoling. I returned to Thelma.

Poor Mum. I phoned her, crying, every day that week. I did not know what was the matter. My father agreed I should give up the job. I think they told themselves it meant I was special; Margaret wasn’t meant for filing. But giving up beached me in structureless summer, in the empty days before we went away on a camping trip, the last family holiday, tenting with my parents and my cousin Susan. Something definite: the holiday. But before that, a featureless glaze of time, and beyond, a cliff of anxiety, the beginning of Oxford, at the start of October. The security of school and the prefects’ room, of lying on the sunny garden bank with the girls, my friends, my dear friends who had grown up with me, Jill and Gillian, Jacky and Hilary, Patty and Lizzie and all the rest, that big gang of girls who looked out for each other, sprawled on the short yellow grass we loved under the monkey-puzzle tree outside the library window, giggling and teasing and dreaming of the future, was shrinking inexorably into the past. No more navy jumpers with gold at the neck, no more uniform days promising safety. I sat at home, in the new vacant summer, watching things float away from me. And everything turned blank and grey, a thick goo of slime that choked reality.

Worse, it became reality. Like other people suffering from depression (I had no idea I was depressed) I felt I at last saw what life was: an alternation of emptiness and terror. When I lay down to sleep, my heart beat madly, and I woke terrified, night after night. Then that fear invaded my days, as well. I tried to tell my mother, but I only cried, because I did not know what to tell her, I did not know what was happening, and couldn’t make the connection that now seems obvious, between this terror and my untold story, the thing that had happened in St Aigulin and at once been suppressed when I reported to my parents: ‘I had a lovely time. All my friends were there …’ Yes, watching me, afterwards, pale and worried, wondering if the conscript had raped me.

I don’t believe in therapies that mean endlessly reliving traumatic events, but I know that I needed to talk to someone. If I had done, perhaps there would have been no breakdown. But physically, the scene had been left far behind, on the other side of a channel ferry, and nothing could be told without appalling my parents and causing — what? Anger, disapproval. So I kept it inside, and slid into paralysis.

It’s forty years ago, more or less exactly, but I do not enjoy recovering this period, still feel it’s somehow perilous. It has never happened to me again, but sometimes the terror has brushed against my cheek, often at night, like a bat’s wing, passing, a leathery thing whispering of claws in the darkness, hissing that if you fall through the surface, there is nothing underneath, just falling for ever. I won’t invite it to come near again.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, 1966 was an eventful year. The good thing I learned, slowly, piecemeal, gathering it as inefficiently as fragments of gold from a dirty river, was that life will save you, if you let it. I saw no doctors, took no pills, talked to no one until years later. But grain by grain, second by second, I began to forget, to be distracted. One night the terror did not come, and I slept till morning with a steady heart beat, even though that was followed by twenty more nights of torment. There were mornings when I managed a couple of hours before the grey veil closed over the day. Then we went camping: there were lots of things to do. I had to be normal for my cousin, loving, cheerful, athletic Susan. We sang on walks and in the tent at night, and even though for me the song had lost its joy, performing it, filling my lungs and sounding the notes of ‘My Favourite Things’ in the clear blue air, made my body remember the feel of being happy, and my body started to save my mind. My animal body. My animal life.