Living conditions

I wrote a piece on The Outpost yesterday about flourishing, and how this had started ten years ago as an idea about the necessary conditions in Argentine tango social dances for good dancing, but took on a wider scope over the years as the theme persisted. After the trauma of the last few years I seemed to be seeing the question from the other end: not what conditions allow flourishing, but also what removes those conditions. One can survive grief, difficulty, effort, disappointment, fear, even trauma, but living things need some basic conditions in order to keep turning towards life.

To survive is to flourish if you are a plant: If you think of a flowering rose, you could not call it such if it hadn’t bloomed. It would be a rose bush or it would be qualified in some way.  If we point to a rose plant and say "this is a rose" what we mean is "this will become a rose".  I have changed from thinking what the pre-conditions are that allow a great dance to Argentine tango music, to wondering what the preconditions are for a life of flourishing.

For a person, those conditions are not especially glamorous. If there is safety the body need not be constantly braced and safety is one of the first pre-requisites for human life. The amount of bracing in modern life indicated by sore shoulders, necks, jaws, pelvises and other common holding points suggests many people don’t feel safe, irrespective of whether they admit or even know it.

People need agency enough to act, refuse, choose or leave. We need privacy and boundaries, truthful recognition enough to be heard - and believed; moral coherence enough to live in a world where care, fairness, loyalty and non-cruelty have genuine meaning and relational belonging enough to know that one has a place, a role, a voice, a meaning in the lives of others. All these things allow the maintenance of a sense of self and of agency over that self.  While philosophically controversial, those ideas of a self and of agency tend to be accepted as a pre-requisite for living in the Western world.

The conditions also include a kind of sensory and practical coherence. The world has to be readable enough. People, objects, routines, rules, promises, rooms, messages and meanings have to hold still enough for the nervous system to orient itself. A person needs food, sleep, movement, nature, light, rhythm, quiet, beauty, play, interest, and contact with people who are not predatory. These things can sound ordinary, even trivial, until they are removed.

Domination, coercion and control attack exactly these ordinary conditions. They do not only hurt by acting abruptly, dramatically, unilaterally and self-interestedly. They hurt by making the world less livable. Life is made unpredictable, rushed, surveilled, disbelieved, invaded, disordered and unsafe. A disruptor plans ahead, creates double or triple binds, ensuring there is no safety, less and less agency, forcing you into a smaller and smaller space. They create a maze with cul-de-sacs at every turn. Your world is not yours to manage. Your world is controlled by their will and devious strategy. Truth is replaced with narrative control, relationship is replaced with domination.  Exile takes over from belonging.

One of the most damaging forms of coercive control is epistemic control: the seizure of the power to define reality. It is not only that someone lies. It is that they position themselves so that others hear them first, believe them first, defer to them first. They become the interpreter of events, the gatekeeper of information, the respectable voice in the room. The harmed person is then not merely hurt, they are removed as a credible witness to their own life and to their legitimate roles. This is known as epistemic injustice and is a flourishing area of modern philosophical enquiry.

This matters because being believed, having standing in shared reality, is one of the conditions of human flourishing. A person cannot flourish if they are constantly forced to prove the obvious, defend against falsehood, correct distortions, or fight to be recognised as a knower of their own experience.

Moral injury is related but not identical. Moral coherence is the assumption of shared moral values or norms: it’s the way we live together in society. Deliberate rupturing of that moral fabric by morally transgressive behaviour, where ordinary values are treated as if they were naïve or irrelevant can cause moral injury. When family does not behave as family and protective or investigative agencies do not act as such there are two types of moral injury present - the primary betrayal is by family and the secondary betrayal by agencies that should have protected or investigated. The injury is not only “I was harmed, my loved ones were harmed.” It is “the world in which this was possible is not the world I thought I lived in.”

What does it look like if you don’t have those fundamental pre-conditions for a safe life that will allow flourishing? I have written elsewhere about the specific harms, in posts such as "Narrative containers", "Miasma", "Triggers", "My relationship with mum now", "Abusive control mechanisms", and "Living in fear". Those were containers, really: places to put things so I did not have to keep circling them. They are not really “for” the public but they seemed to need to be public, to help with closure. Perhaps it was a way of restoring voice and perhaps that was necessary.

But the effect is still here. I jump at everything. Someone closed a bin in a shop this week and I jumped out of my skin, gasped, a year after the active trauma was supposed to have ceased. This is commonplace. Almost every day I still “see” the abuser in the news, in cars in my town, in the heavy build of some men, in a half-seen profile. I routinely find myself scanning for “female social service types”: female, Scottish, working age. Even now, my shoulders are often hunched or half-hunched, which is an unconscious response to fear. At the GP, I still cannot speak because for me, my GP practice recreates the trauma environment of being disempowered, disbelieved and framed a certain way. Under the trauma I was and felt watched, accused, diminished, marginalised, manipulated, and regularly shocked by the abusive behaviour that caused that moral injury. I was too afraid to respond, most of all afraid of provoking worse attacks. My legal and family roles were taken from me or redefined around me. My relationships were altered by removal, accusation, narrative control and power. I was exhausted. Movement reduces. Speech reduces or stops in those conditions. My brain stopped processing properly. My system shut down under specific attacks. Finally, I forgot who I was, or the core of my being and my preferences seemed very far away, as though they belonged to someone else. At the end, my body was caught in spasms, I had no language left, just guttural, terrifying sounds and a paralysing sense of terror and helplessness - exactly as designed by the perpetrator’s strategy and actions.

This is why coercive control is so hostile to flourishing. It does not merely remove happiness. It removes orientation. It removes the conditions in which the body can stop scanning and move, the mind can think freely, the voice can speak, the self can act, and the person can belong.

If flourishing is the flower opening, then the pre-conditions for it are the roots, soil, light, water and weather. They are easy to overlook because they are ordinary, but the ordinary conditions are the essential ones. A person, a community, a dance does not come alive through force or domination. Life is not produced by command. It emerges under the right conditions.

The state of being responsive to propitious conditions is precisely what a tyrant wants to change because they want a different order: one they control. One is no longer a free entity, but a controlled entity. It's the difference between a person and someone subject to the will of another, between a wildflower and a food crop. If the tyrant attacks, undermines, dismantles, poisons the propitious conditions for flourishing, the response of the person, or the community if it's a larger tyrant, will be forced to change to their will.

Recovery then, in someone who has experienced relational trauma is not only about symptom reduction. It is also about the restoration of the conditions propitious to them: truth, safety, rhythm, agency, privacy, beauty, movement, trustworthy people, meaningful roles, shared meaning and values, and the right to be alive and to not be afraid to be alive and to be oneself.

"Safe place"

My third therapist is pleasant and more focused than the last who had to leave for personal reasons. She asked: Is there a place where you feel safe?  This is a standard thing, apparently, in EMDR work (a type of therapy often used in longer-term or complex trauma) because there is a preparation/stabilisation phase before activating traumatic material. The therapist wants to know whether your nervous system can access even a small calm/safe state or resource to help you return to the present, regulate distress, and close sessions safely.

When the second therapist had asked me this question, I thought about of my tent. There, I don't expect to be attacked although I did once camp with someone whose locked car  was broken into by breaking a window right next to him as he slept. In my tent, there are no demands, no pressure, no jobs besides those tasks I bring with me.

I am immersed in nature: the hoot of owls at night, crickets chirruping in the day, the calls of birds at dawn, the scurrying of small creatures in the undergrowth. That is when I'm in my ideal place. But recently, I went to an event there where the grass was long and I knew ticks were present, I wasn't in my regular spot, and felt exposed. The thermometer hit 40 degrees and the tent, in full sun, was uninhabitable all day.

In the another place I camped recently I wasn't given a choice of pitch and felt exposed to the gaze of strangers in campervans, rather than being tucked away in a corner by a hedge.

The next place I stayed, I was attacked all night by seagulls, which at first felt like someone was banging on my tent. So, no, my tent doesn't really feel that safe anymore.

So when the third therapist asked this question about a safe location, I considered the tent but this time, rejected it.

The very next thing that came to my mind was a memory of a certain, phenomenal dance. Actually, it wasn't even the dance I remembered, it was the embrace as a place of safety and place is important considering the next question she asked. It was a sense of safety in the embrace at a moment of stillness and connection. The safety came I think from this sense of being held, not just literally, and so, in some sense, relationally, but outside time.  I don't know the person to whom the embrace belonged to particularly well. I was surprised this came to mind at all. I didn't mention it to the therapist because how can you describe a dance embrace with someone you don't really know and that you experienced once as a place of safety? That dancer didn't invite me again for a year which caused all kinds of other issues so actually, if you asked me to think consciously and rationally, rather than intuitively, which is where a lot of therapy work seems to happen, for that reason it was about the very last place I would have suggested. Since then, we had danced again, but I'm not sure that was relevant or affected that felt sense of safety that came to mind so spontaneously.

I realised later perhaps it is precisely that kind of embodied safety, especially a kind of relational safety that could be so key to this work. On calm, rational reflection, would I choose that embrace, that moment held outside of time as my safe place now? No, because I still distrust a sense of safety that that stands in relation to a person, even in a memory, even when the sense of safety was more to do with the embrace, the moment, the embodied sense, than the character and traits of the person it belonged to. Is that a mistake, that rational choice over the intuitive one, a mistake? I'm not sure.

After I said no, there was no place of safety, the theraplist asked if, instead, I had a person.  Considering the nature of my traumatic experiences, this was never likely.   But I considered two friends who had come to my aid last month when they didn't need to, who had never harmed me, or caused me to shrink back, but people are fickle and people change, especially beyond the context of one particular moment. I didn't want to hang my hat there. So I said, no, I couldn't think of anyone either.

What about in fiction or films? she said, but I thought: No, maybe because they just aren't real enough.

I had done some work with Internal Family Systems just on my own. In this, you identify "parts" of yourself that are really behaviour, thought or I supposed even physical patterns that evolved to serve particular situations. These patterns can get stuck and loop or trigger when they don't need to, stopping your healthy evolution. To try and clarify in more concrete terms, I have, for example, a very strong watcher or vigilant part for instance, as I expect most people with traumatic experiences do.

I hadn't read too much about IFS because I hadn't wanted to influence myself from experiencing it. A lot of my "parts"stand in relation to something like an outdoor fire circle. Right by this fire was a very centred, grounded, wise part who I was surprised to eventually understand was also a part of me. I wasn't sure if this was what the therapist wanted or rather something outside of me. She asked about the colour of this part, the relevance of which I haven't gone yet explored.

At this point, I realised I had no safe place, nor person and also that not even my own body felt safe anymore.  There have been so many unpleasant experiences with my body since the autumn, since returning to the place, my home, this town, this region, where i was when so much of these traumatising experiences happened.  I get through one issue and think we're done, we're through, when another starts up.  Just now, simply moving is often exhausting and painful.

In the next session she realised that nature for me is a great solace and counselled not to underestimate that power. My backyard is a small, north facing area of small stones on concrete but over the last few years about a hundred species have decided, upon my scattering wild seed I find in late summer, to make this place their home. It might sound sentimental to say I greet my plants, each time I come home or leave home but I do have some sort of communing with them, much like anyone who walks around a garden. Dad used to take a daily walk around his garden and was always enthusiastic to show me. 

So I acknowledge the plants, which I do not consider "mine". I see them. I stop and pause and engage with them. I deliberately notice and respond to them.  And as I see their changes and what they are doing and drink in their beauty, really, and the miracle of their existence and what they've come from and where they are growing, for that matter, I will also hear the buzz of an insect or the soft brush of a bird's wing in the undergrowth. These things give me a profound sense of peace and pleasure and presence, which I suppose is a kind of safety.

Yankari

Yankari, Wikimedia

 The only place I remember baboons stealing things was at Yankari. We went there once on a special holiday. Yankari was special because of the swimming. Yankari wasn't a zoo, the animals were wild but in some kind or protected area. I see now it is called the country's "premier game reserve" and was established in 1956. I have a slight memory of some kind of tour to see wild animals but this memory pales in comparison to the swimming.

We were not allowed to swim anywhere in Nigeria apart from the Durbar pool and Yankari. That was because of bilharzia, a waterborne disease. Nigerians did swim in rivers, one would see the boys jumping and playing insouciantly into filthy rivers, but there was a lot of disease in Nigeria. We also weren't allowed to go barefoot anywhere, ever, boundaries we stuck to rigidly, through fear. The reason for this was hookworm, which would get in through your feet and do horrible things to you. Again, Nigerians went barefoot all the time, although most people had flip-flops. So Yankari was a liberation, at least in terms of the swimming.

The site was a huge vertical wall of rock which was heated by the sun. A warm spring emerged from under this rock. It was only like this for, I think, a hundred yards or so,because I have a vague memory that people washed clothes further down. But in that first stretch, we bathed as if we were in heaven, because Yankari seemed as like heaven as could be. We couldn't believe our good fortune, that there was such a place and that we were there. The feeling was a mixture of awe, delight and excitement: the eternal sunshine and the warm, safe, crystal clear water with a sandy bottom. It wasn't deep or or murky like the lakes we sometimes went to. There was no bilharzia, nor crocodiles nor dangerous fish. Everything was perfect. The picture above is recognisable, but not how I remember Yankari. It seems to have been much spoiled. I don't remember this concrete, though it might have been there. I remember a more sandy surface, which may be false, though again I don't have our photos to refer to. In some pictures I have seen online there is even an ugly low wall beside the water which definitely wasn't there. I don't recall grafitti on the rock at all. There were smallish trees lining the side of the spring where you see this barren concrete, because the baboons looked down at us from these. The water had a dappled effect, especially just below this pool, which was from the shade of the trees. I don't remember the water being bright blue like this. It was just clear.

The baboons, which we didn't see in Kaduna, added a microdose of reality and humour to this heaven. Once we got over the shock of their scandalous behinds we noticed they were very clever. They would sit in the trees above and wait for any opportunity to steal anything, especially food. I saw a baboon steal swimming trunks while another stole a Nigerian boy's long piece of sugarcane. People sometimes kept these to chew. They taunted him with it, holding it just out of his reach as he jumped up and down, squawking indignantly.

Each family stayed in a round, traditional round hut, except they were not made of mud, as in the villages, but some harder material. They had thatched roofs. The door had to be kept closed otherwise, the baboons or warthogs would enter and cause chaos, looking for food. Warthogs roamed freely but we gave them a wide berth. They were scary - like boar with huge, curly tusks. It's a wonder no-one was attacked - or maybe they were. But things were very different then.

Other people's memories

Baboon, Wikimedia

The person whose parents were in Kaduna, Nigeria at the same time as us, around 1979 - 81 was about 13 years old to my 7. As I said earlier, I didn't know her there as she was at boarding school in England while I went to a local international primary school, the Sacred Heart. At first she said about all she could remember was staring at the stars singing David Bowie.  The stars were exceptionally bright there.  I can remember standing with dad in the garden outside the patio next to the banana trees one night while he showed me the stars. 

I asked if she could remember the wife (of an officer) who got shot.  But in her version the wife was carjacked, dumped out of the car, shot in the leg so she couldn't get help while the thieves made off with the car.  In my version, a wife was shot during a burglary of the duplex (two level) houses and shot several times at that. I think both might be true. That's why we had m'guardis

She had a story about her brother accidentally hitting a local boy with a golf ball.  I don't even remember a golf course.  The brother apparently said: it's OK, you can have my sister.  And sure enough, the boy's father came around to request the white girl of the family. Barter was common there and disputes presumably were solved this way.

She said she remembered going to Jos and Kano a lot on trips with friends and the baboons would steal the mothers' handbags.  I don't remember Jos at all, though I know the name.  They were far away: four hours I see now, to Jos while Kano is three and a half.  Travel wasn't that safe.  Pretty much anything could happen despite the official presence of people British military people called "yellow peril men". The men directed traffic by standing on wide, raised circular wooden structures, like the kind of thing huge cables might be wound around. Their uniform was trousers, I think a hat, in the British military formal style, and a distinctive orange shirt. This is a shockingly racist term, a metaphor for the imagined threat of "Oriental hordes" from the East overtaking the "civilized" West. I didn't know what it meant at the time, but it was always used "humorously" by the adults.  I don't know how many adults understood the reference: I hope few but suspect more.  

During car travel, which was the only kind for us, apart from the school bus, I know my parents saw dead bodies left beside roads. The police stopped people and bribed them, though not the military because who were there teaching the Nigerian army and therefore, as far as I heard, were immune.  They perhaps did too good a job because there were three military coups in the 1980s and 90s starting a few years after we left.

Servants

There are practically no free photos I can find of Kaduna or the things I describe there from the late 1970s or early 1980s and as I said previously the family photos of that time have been appropriated but I did manage to find this Wikipedia photo of the Kano fruit market, which is not disimilar in terms of the goats and the fruit I mention. 

Kaduna outside the military "patch" and school, as I remember it was a place of much dirt, confusion, ramshackle huts, rubbish, goats, poverty, disease, disability, storm ditches, potentially snakes and sugar cane fields. It sounds awful and the people living affected by those things must have found life difficult but there was a lot more to life there than this.

In Nigeria, from about 1979 to 1981, dad employed, or the army employed, local people to help manage the house.  We didn't call them "local people".  Like the two ladies who came with the Berkshire farmhouse, as far as I know, the servants - because that's how they were referred to - may well have come with the house too. 

I asked the lady I met at the concert (see previous post ) who I didn't know at the time as she was away at school, but whose parents knew mine there, whether they had servants living at the bottom of their garden too. No, she said, archly, our servants lived out, as if this was sign of social betterment - though for whom I'm not sure. She was sitting next to an English friend at the time, with a pubescent daughter. This woman was obviously somewhat taken aback at the sudden mention African servants in a Perthshire village hall.  No one I know talks about servants nowadays, so it required some explanation on the part of my friend.

 I am not sure if the servants did come with the house though because apparently this bungalow was in such a state when we took it over that we couldn't live there and had to stay in the Durbar, a well known hotel in town for what felt like ages - a month or two maybe, while it was sorted out. This was fine because the hotel had a large pool, with a snack bar in the corner that sold spring rolls, even if I disliked the restaurant proper's food. The Durbar, according to a newspaper article I read of 16 years ago, was extremely swish.  It was only about two years old when we lived there and had been built in 1977 for the durbar a two day horse racing event.  A local man interviewed for the article said he met there chiefs, lawyers, the national chairman whoever that was, generals, ministers.  He deplored that it had fallen into a ruin and an eyesore from the 1990s.

A delay in moving in was unusual because military quarters (the name for a house) were required to be handed back in tip top condition so perhaps it had been derelict for a while, or maybe civilians, an easy scapegoat for the military, had had it previously.  

On "marching out" as I think it was called, there was an inspection and it was apparently always quite a stressful process for my parents.  My mother was a past master at getting houses sparkling clean for handover. Come to think of it, the bungalow probably had been inhabited because it also came with a tubby, orangey, mild-tempered, coarse-haired mongrel that looked  something like a cross between a Corgi and a sausage dog.  It wasn't young and God knows who looked after it before we moved in. It didn't seem to have a name either, so we called it Topsy after Bimbo and Topsy who were cat and dog friends in an Enid Blyton book I'd just read.

Like the servants and cleaners the dog was also passed on to the next people.  These properties were always furnished so while families acquired furniture over the years, there was no requirement to do so.  You would become familiar with a particular ugly print of army curtains.  Army furniture, and study chairs in particular had a look to them. It was also solid and good quality though.  Army bedsheets were second to none.  They were cotton and never wore through.  I have never found such good sheets again.

Somehow we also acquired a savage black kitten who was only ever half tame.  Obviously, my plan was to call it Bimbo, to match the dog, although it looked nothing like the Siamese, on the cover of the book.  My four year old sibling however insisted on "Timothy" for the cat, it being his favourite name at the time.  I stood up to this defiantly: it would unbalance the meant-to-be partnership of Topsy and Bimbo.  I don't know my parents didn't let him choose the second animal's name, but the kitten ended up as Timbo, which sounds like a diplomatic intervention by my mother. 

I remember seeing a picture of it before or shortly after we moved in - the whole veranda draped in some kind of vine that had taken over. I vaguely, and possibly falsely remember saying to dad that we should keep it. I suppose I thought it looked romantic or adventurous in some seven-year-old way - I was reading the Enid Blyton Faraway Tree series at the time. Anyway, the straggly vine was chopped back and, to my adult eyes remembering that bungalow before and after, was much improved by that action.

The servants, or some of them, lived in a sort of communal hovel of one level breeze block buildings at the end of garden, which I think was shared with at least one other military bungalow, if not three or four.  Everyone had servants and there were houses on either side of us and on a row behind us.  So there was a constant stream of unknown people walking through the garden. The house behind hours had a gap in the fence too so there was an unofficial path through the military gardens for the servants from the various houses to and from get to their accommodation - or for anyone else for that matter who fancied a shortcut. We never went to their accommodation. It was out of bounds, what it was like, what went on there remained a mystery but it was extremely basic. I seem to remember a constant smoke from fires there which I surmise is where they cooked.

I just accepted this gross social inequality as the order of things. We played with children of all nationalities and colours at the school.

What makes somebody a servant rather than a cleaner? Is it the designation? Is it designation and acceptance? Is it exploitation? Are they servants only when collectively? How did our servants describe their role to others in their language? What did they think of us? Did they resent us? Were they glad of the job? Were they paid comparatively well or not? I don't know the answer to any of these questions. 

There was a maid, Asaveto - I am spelling phonetically - who I recall as a solidly built. She worked with her baby on her back, as all the women did - it was a proper baby not a toddler. I don't know when she fed it because I don't remember seeing that baby being fed. I don't even know how long the servants worked. It was only a bungalow, and we didn't have many possessions, that is to say, we didn't until we had bought from all the visiting traders.

Asaveto came to the house in the night desperate about this terribly sick baby with a raging fever which they had rubbed with oil. Mum took it to the hospital. Dad said this probably saved its life.

Dauda, her husband, was a man with a dark look who seemed to simmer with silent resentment, probably because he did the family washing and ironing, a job he nevertheless he seemed to do well. I don't really remember the food we ate but Ezekiel was apparently a very poor cook, so he was regularly fired. But he would turn up soon after asking if my parents had found anyone else yet. As they never did, he was always rehired. I find this story difficult to integrate with my memories of my parents as both organised and tolerant. I took an instant and persistent dislike to Ezekiel. I would hang on to the standing fan and glare at him while he would jut his chin at me in distaste and to my parents refer to me insouciantly as “dat girl”.

Dam Dam Sambo (yes, really) was the gardener. A tall, lanky, man of nineteen or twenty with a huge, open smile, he in contrast was beloved by all. Mum still remembers Dam Dam with affection.  He was a kindred spirit to mum.  The trouble is she keeps adding "Sambo" to his name in a not particularly "indoor voice" when we are out in a cafes and has to be shushed, something she either doesn't completely understand, or does, and thinks our embarrassment, quite funny, the inhibitory part of her brain having been possibly more impaired by Alzheimers.

One night, my brother despite, his mosquito net and paladrin tablets was sick apparently with malaria. I thought malaria returned again and again but this didn't. Anyway, he had a fever and he was about four. Dam Dam was babysitting while my parents were at an inevitable party somewhere on the military “patch”. I don’t remember if he woke me to tell me he was going to get my parents or whether he just left but the upshot was he took my bike, which, luckily, was adult size, having belonged to a friend of my mum’s. I’m not sure if he’d ridden a bike before because he came back slightly injured after some kind of crash, but had found my parents.

I remember being surprised at how pink black people's skin was when it was broken, that the insides of their hands and the underneath of their feet were a different colour to the outsides and that the white of their eyes could be yellow. No one ever explained this but it can be natural or it can be a sign of malaria or other illness. I didn't think anything about any of the things I saw: I  noticed and accepted the difference.  With people who had lost limbs and were begging it was different. I felt very badly for them. 

There was a lot of untreated disease.  Many children had pot bellies, which I didn't know then was a sign of malnutrition.  I seem to remember most black children I saw wore rags or very poor quality, dirty clothing, whether in the bush or in the town but I don't have the photos to verify.  It was only really around the Durbar hotel that I saw people in smart Nigerian traditional dress.  

Tor the men these were matching trousers and tunic, often in a two tone print that you don't find in Europe, often white and blue or white and lilac, but it could be any colours and it almost always embroidered.  There was a matching hat, in what, in the UK would be unfortunately described as a pork pie style, also featuring embroidery. The men wore these with great regal elegance. The women wore shoulder to ankle wraparound material to make a dress and head-dress for a special occasion.  Most country or village women I think wore some kind of handkerchief or scarf on the head, but girls and young women might have their hair not in the very fancy styles you see today but often into geometrical segments like a map, each one with a twist of hair in the centre.  There were other styles but I can't remember them all.  

Another local with an evocative name used to cycle round the houses with an enormous, heavy black bike piled high with fruit and vegetables. He was a great character who wore a perennial purple all-in-one flared purple cotton jumpsuit and introduced himself as Rock 'n Roll. Mum said to him one day, “Rock n Roll, why do you cycle your bike round the houses in the hot sun? Why don't you set up a shop like everybody else?” Shop was a bit of a misnomer. These were corrugated iron shacks setup by roadsides. So Rock n Roll surveyed the 50 metres or so of ground between our row of houses with well paid officers and did just that. He set up a shack under a mango tree and was a useful asset to the row not to mention that we, pocketmoneyless, would regularly wander of there to rudely beg him for dash (free sweets) while he was performing his prayers to Mecca, not understanding this to be the case nor why he paid us not the blindest bit of attention at such times.

It was true, dad said he was extremely well paid on that posting.  The was generally an overseas allowance but this was handsomely bumped up, because it was Africa,  It was for that reason that we were able to buy a very small and very basic two bedroom flat in Spain in 1982 a year or two after they returned.  

There was also a m’gaurdi who turned up in the evening to stay on the veranda at night to guard the house. I never knew their names and there seemed to be more of a turnover of them than the house servants. 

 We accepted there were “other” Nigerians, with better jobs, who occasionally came to my parents' dinner parties in traditional dress. At least one of them only ate with one hand, I was told for religious reasons.

There was never pork on the menu at these times. Only once, mum offered someone, I think a cattle herder who passed by when we were out in the bush on a “breakfast picnic” a bacon sandwich. The look on his face signified a heavenly experience. I think dad had realised that mum had accidentally given pork to a Muslim but at that late stage, no-one felt they could snatch it away from him with an explanation.

We had a few photos of people in the bush, but not many because they feared cameras. The word was they thought it would steal their soul, though how true that was I’m not sure. We encountered these people, usually young, and ragged, herding the ubiquitous great horned white cattle around the bush. Sometimes there were girls with beautiful posture balancing trays of things to sell on their heads like green skinned guavas with pink flesh or ground nuts which were measured out in small tin cans. Oranges in Nigeria were always picked, sold and eaten green. It was a long time before I could accept, back in Germany or the UK, that orange oranges were what passed for normal and I never thought they tasted as good. I was used to the sharper, fresher taste of the green ones, which I never saw again.

Dauda once upped and disappeared for ages. Apparently he’d gone back to his village. He came back eventually and resumed his position. I suppose Asaveto must have filled in. Dam Dam once memorably returned from a trip with a gift for mum - a live cockerel intended for the pot. This off-white lord of the enclosed patio, strutted around the above ground, framed circular swimming pool in which we charged around in one direction to make an exciting whirlpool which, if we lifted up our feet would hurl us around the pool. But a visiting child nearly drowned and we weren't supposed to do it any more.

The cockerel was eventually removed to a country farm by my mother after the neighbours complained about it’s dawn crowing. It was annoying.  I can hear it now nearly fifty years on. I didn't much like the cockerel.  It just made noise, not eggs and it wasn't particularly friendly, but I did guard its life.  Mum promised he would be well looked after, but I didn't completely believe her.  The slaughter of animals, especially goats and chickens was no secret in Nigeria, the way it's all hushed up here.  I remember the feeling of dread as we drove it to its new home.

I remember, too, even at seven, being shocked at the poverty in Nigeria: the piles of rubbish, topped with goats which had a particular acrid smell that I can’t remember now but would recognise. I do remember, suddenly, the smell of burning that rubbish that caught in the back of your throat.

There were many beggars in Kaduna where we went for a supermarket to get things like powdered milk. There were people without legs or wheelchairs who shuffled around on the floor in rags or on wooden props. There were many deformities, no aid, no crutches, much begging. Dentistry seemed almost unknown, eyes could be discoloured. I never thought of it then but in comparison, our servants seemed to be in a better situation. I found these trips to the town distressing and stressful. The inequality, the wrongness of it struck me forcefully but such sights were everywhere and I was powerless.

Memory, family, responsibility, truth

A perfect afternoon out (2016) on the island of Inchmahome burial place of "Don Roberto"

After drafting this rest of this story I went out to hear a folk singer in Madderty village hall, in the Perthshire countryside.  I met a couple of people I knew, not unusual in a region of over 2000 square miles and only 155,000 people, and recognised several others. More unusual is that the woman has lived for twenty or thirty years on land bought by her parents, in fact below their original home and that these parents were in Nigeria at the same time as me and my parents in the late 1970s.  The lady herself did not live there most of the time, being several years older than me and already at boarding school.

There is an curious footnote to this tale which will be the subject of this post.  Perhaps 25 or more years ago, before my children were born, we went for drinks at her house I suppose not long after she and her husband had completed renovations of their steading, I heard, partly beforehand and was filled in by my parents later, that they had not been able to move into the large main house above because her parents had been forced to sell to to the tenants they had rented it to, presumably while this lady's father had been abroad with the military.  The tenants had refused to move out. I don't know why they weren't evicted.  Maybe they didn't want the unpleasantness, maybe the tenants had some hold over then and a sale was easier.  Maybe the truth is something else altogether.  It sounded an unpleasant, if not especially rare situation.  

The interest is only elevated in that a one time high flyer and 2019 prime ministerial candidate, about the same age as me, apparently made a public claim that this was his ancestral home, which I suppose depends very much on the definition of ancestral. I used to remember where this claim was made and now no longer do. It seemed to me then and to to the person who told me, like an invented fiction.  The high flyer had written books of his adventures before entering politics - in fact when I met him at this party he was in the process of writing or had just finished writing this first book, which I later read. It won many prizes.  More or less on the strength of that encounter dad predicted, about fifteen years before that the chap threw his hat in the ring, that he could end up running the country. 

The man, highly intelligent, motivated, with eyebrow-raising self-belief and voraciously ambitious, has been compared to Lawrence of Arabia.  Despite his conservatism he has also been compared to the far more radical Scottish aristocrat, and adventurer, Robert Cunninghame Graham, who founded the Scottish Labour Party and was first president of the Scottish National Party.  “Don Roberto” as he was affectionately known in Argentina is buried in wondrous tranquility on the island in the centre of the Lake (not "loch") of Mentieth. But, given the apparently embellished tale of the contested ancestral seat one has to wonder what else in the man of our times’ stories is fabrication.

To me, the oddest thing was that we were all having drinks together - the ousted family and the interlopers.  There was certainly understandably hushed bad feeling and resentment, but it was all papered over - for neighbourliness I suppose. The patriarch of the interloping renters, now long deceased had been a diplomat as I recall, the son became a politician, the mother of my friend, or acquaintance really, had worked in the High Commission in Nigeria, our families were military so it's fair to say that everyone present excelled in facades. I've always admired the social feat on my friend's part of hosting the people who apparently forced her family out of their home. I doubt I could have got over the inevitable rancour and resentment to that extent.

I never asked but I expect my acquaintance would have said What else could we do?  We'd been forced to sell, we had better just accept the new circumstances.  Perhaps these aren't the facts at all.  Perhaps her father would have explained it differently.  Perhaps the so-called sitting tenants would have too. But all of the parents are dead now and so is my father and it is just me left with these memories and these questions.

I had realised that afternoon, writing one of these African stories, in this case about servants that, with dad dead, and mum ravaged by Alzheimer's I was the only person who carried the memories of my family in that place at that time and it was a very special time.  It struck me as a responsibility.  I exclude my parents' monstrous son who was only four at the time, though, according to old claims,  blessed with a memory far exceeding that infants that age.  We had photographs, whole albums of them, but he had appropriated I suppose is the most generous term them, so all I have are my memories, which may well go the same way as mum's. 

I wondered what this woman who was, when on school holidays, in the same place at roughly the same time as me, could remember and so,in the few minutes before the concert began, across the row of chairs that divided us, I seized the opportunity and asked her. (to be continued).

Fraud and integrity

During the Pandemic, Major General Nick Welch was found guilty of fraud by mis-using the army education allowance. This is intended to be used to provide continuity of education in boarding school to the children or military personnel when they have to move regularly for work. He was sentenced to prison and court-martialled. Such failures of behaviour befitting an officer were exceptionally rare. There was to much to lose. You colleagues are also your friends in the army. It is a way of life and it was just not the way things were done. To me, the idea of an officer being imprisoned is almost unthinkable. I can only think they would become an outcast. Perhaps the general genuinely made a mistake about the rules, or perhaps he thought they could be bent at his level, but ignorance in the army, as elsewhere is no excuse, particularly at a high level and whatever the case there is no question he was made an example of.

My father claimed this educational subsidy. I boarded at Royal Russel school in Croydon, near London from the age of 10 when my parents lived in Germany.  I moved schools due to bullying and had to board at a school when my parents were living walking distance away, in Andover.  I saw them at the weekends. I didn't mind the school.  I liked the day girls. The mistresses were strict and although I had a lot of catching up to do, and thus had to drop German, the work was fine.  I practiced piano.  To help me catch up, the RE teacher, who was also the headmistress took me on a private trip to a mosque I think somewhere in London.  She was nice to me, said red was my colour.  She also taught English and would crane her rather scrawny neck forward over the pulpit-like desk the teachers used and dictate adverbial clauses of manner and other mysteries to us, which I never understood.  We even had a real Mam'selle, like in books, from France. She was very French with a mysterious scar that ran down one cheek and mostly hidden by Mam'selle's dark bob.    

Although as fifteen years olds we still had to go down on our knees in the gym every day to pray in assembly, while the adults stood, on summer days serving tables were brought out on to the lawn and we had our lunch sitting on the grass.  It was a lovely tradition.  But I was bullied again at this school, ironically by the children of soldiers who had got in to board through the same allowance. I became a day pupil for the last term or two until I finished, but my father then had to pay the full fees.

Batmen, a bomb and a ghost town

Continuing on the theme of things anachronistic, at the time I last mentioned dad was commanding a garrison where two cleaning ladies "came with" the house.  It sounds odd to say it now, because most people just don't live like that, but some houses have staff  and so it was with this one.  

It was a beautiful, rambling farmhouse with roses around the walls. It had a pond, a lawns for which mum, in aspirational fashion, bought a croquet set, a lavender path, a south facing sunny terrace, an orchard, a hedged vegetable garden, an empty paddock and a field. 

Just two or three years before we'd been living in a small, ugly grey brick house with a garden the size of a handkerchief on an army patch in Middle Wallop, which was an army air base in Hampshire.  There was no shop but the NAAFI half a mile or so away and we were regularly chucked out the house to walk the dog around the windy sports field.  At that time on Sundays, shops weren't open.  Sunday was what it still was for probably millions of families: church, roast lunch, a family walk and a period drama on the telly at night.

We did go for fairly uninteresting walks on the lanes around the base. I decided cycling them was better and cycled the pretty Hampshire villages for miles around with their thatched roofs, admiring cottages now worth millions. The base had some World War 2 bunkers and really that was it.  I was thirteen and read a lot at that time.  I tore through Judy Blume, the morose, horrifying Flowers in the Attic series, the terrifying Amityville Horror, god knows where I found this rubbish.  I moved on to my dad's James Herriots.  I read all the Gerald Durrel next, the Roald Dahl short stories, Jeffery Archer, anything that was around really.  There was no logic to it.  There was no local library.  I just read what I found. Mum threw a fit when she discovered 'Fear of Flying'.  I felt wronged because someone at school must have given it to me and I'd never got around to reading it.   
  

After that, we had our own house for the first time for a year or two, a modest Georgian affair  with a pretty cherry tree, opposite a garage on London Road in Andover.  I was regularly sent over the road for chocolate in the evening.

It was after that that we moved to the farmhouse in Berkshire. It also had several barns and an old stables where we kept tools and a table tennis table. At that time I use to cycle about twelve miles to Farnborough Sixth Form college or get the train from Crowthorne. Mum used to drive me and we were always but always late. We would end up in a long queue of cars on what is still called Wellingtonia Avenue after the eponymous trees that grew there.  The road led up to a roundabout which caused the tailback.  This avenue contained houses so large, prestigious and set back they could barely be seen and they were all gated anyway. It was a stones throw from Wellington College, the prestigious private school. I would tumble, inelegantly out of the ancient Peugeot 504 estate, in which I later learned to drive barefoot until an off duty policeman crashed into me on the A30 dual carriageway outside Stockbridge.  I was attempting, a week after my test, to negotiate a U-turn in order to chase after mum who I had been trying to follow but had just seen going up the opposite carriageway in my 6'4 father's mini Mayfair.  It was scrapped soon after.  

Anyway, before all that, I routinely fell out of that car onto Wellingtonia Avenue and harum-scarum, scattered down the road puffing and panting the half mile to the station, bag banging and bumping, to catch my train while all the drivers stuck in traffic enjoyed this frequent, chaotic early morning spectacle from the tranquility of their very smart cars. 

The land around the farmhouse has been sold off. Some of the land nearby has also been used to build very smart modern houses. This house had I think two double guest rooms facing that sunny, terrace with the roses rambling up the red brick walls.  My room on the same side. The master bedroom was across the corridor.  One summer night when my parents were away, mystifyingly, a colony bats flew in from an open window in my room and swarmed, around the upstairs corridors.  Alone, I barricaded myself in my parents bedroom to find the house tranquil and empty of the creatures the following morning. It felt like a nightmare I had imagined.  

There was a little servants room at the far end of the hosue  which my brother used as a bedroom.  It was above the kitchen and had its own loo nearby. There was even a separate poky staircase down to the kitchen. There was only one bathroom for all of us.  One day I walked in on an ancient naked general in the bath while he was staying with us.  The ground floor comprised a large drawing room facing the terrace, a dining room next door, the kichen with flagstones and at the other end of the house, near the entrance with its solid old wooden door, my father's open plan study and a sort of family room or snug with a fireplace. 

One night dad was sitting at this desk which looked onto the circular drive between the house and the barns.  It was nearing midnight.  The phone rang and a voice told my father to leave the house within I think, a minute.  Threats from the IRA were in full swing at this time.  Military in uniform were being killed all the time by bombs under their cars or on trains or they were shot. We had to check our car every time we got in.  Dad used to wear a civilian sweater over his uniform if he left the base in a car.  We never had the curtains open at night in case we were shot.  The Brighton bombing of the Conservative Party Conference had killed five people only a few years before.  

The first I knew of it I was woken up and was made to hide under a table.  The military police were called.  Everything swung into action and it all felt far too grown up and serious. They swept the grounds.  It seemed to take forever. I asked dad why we hadn't left the house when told to.  It's a measure of how I had been brought up with unthinking obedience.  Because they could have been waiting outside to gun us down, he said. I was suddenly glad he was my dad, that he thought things through.  I spent a good part of the rest of the night being taught to play pool by dashing young officers when we were temporarily moved to their accommodation while, I suppose the house was checked. I was sixteen and once we were safe it all became rather exciting and delightful.  

Somehow I knew who had done it.  Some detectives visited us.  We had all been badly shaken.  I saw it as no joke at all and had no hesitation in naming the boy I suspected with whom I had been having a bit of a thing.  Although I think he got a criminal record for the attention seeking, he claimed the detectives had sided with him and spoken badly of me, presumably for giving him up.  I didn't know whether to believe him or not, but I spotted the attempt to rattle me and didn't care.  Had he been "one of us" he would have "done the right thing" and apologised. I may misremember when I think he said he wanted to but perhaps hadn't been allowed.

That's how I thought in those days. I didn't realise until later the effort that went into my parents', and mostly my father's, iron fast rules that children, dogs, and wives too, for that matter, obeyed. He trained us very much the way he ensured our dog didn't beg - rules with no exceptions.  We were not to have a say, and most of all never to answer back.  We didn't have our own ideas, because we had his.  We were brainwashed into believing dad was right, always right.  He was confident, intelligent, powerful, respected, charming and often fun.  He was a 6'4 adult with decades of life experience.  Why on earth would we do other than what he said or believed? That training was immensely powerful and that early indoctrination continued for decades.   

Still, our house was a stormy one.  There were a lot of arguments around that time between me and my parents.  I had a friend nearby who I saw nearly every day.  I ate regularly with her family.  The dad watched nature documents and was gently ribbed by his wife and daughters.  The mum went off to bed routinely at 9.30.  It was an oasis of calm, stability and routine in comparison to our tempestuous, highly social home. In contrast, she always came to our house with a demeanour of slightly nervous yet relaxed good humour: a sort of what drama was going to happen next? 

Nevertheless, it was an idyllic place to live. There was a heron that used to flap onto the little  island on the pond that is still there and steal all the fish. The farmhouse itself, per June 2025 photos on Google maps, sadly seems abandoned or perhaps under renovation, the entrances to the garden boarded up with plywood. I hope the heron stayed.

The cleaning ladies who lived locally would also help with the regular dinner parties in the evening. There was the more senior lady with a gentle, refined way and the junior, who was probably older, smaller, stocky, and straw haired, who assisted. I don't know if dad paid them or the army paid them, but they were part of the fixtures. They were there when we arrived and they stayed for dad's successor when we left. 

There often seemed to be cleaners.  In Germany around 1980 we had had a batwoman, Frau somebody or other, a quiet, efficient, slightly intimidating woman who came to help with cleaning, but I didn’t have much to do with her as she only spoke German. They managed because Dad spoke fluent German and mum could get by. I think we had one later to, in another house on the Rheindahlen base around 1990.  This was a huge NATO base with  a pool, pub, bars, shops, a travel agent, churches, a cinema and hundreds of homes.  It is now completely abandoned and can be seen as a ghost town, on Youtube.

Dad also had a batman, in at least one of his postings. These were effectively a sort of part time personal servant.  I can’t really say I’m sure what he did. Polished shoes perhaps? But I remember dad doing that himself and teaching us. Dad’s driver at the farmhouse became a sort of driver come batman, largely on his own initiative. He was a likeable, easygoing corporal of limited ambition who probably found jobs around the rambling old place for himself. He and dad got on extremely well. Certainly he preferred hanging round the house doing odd jobs, working in the vegetable garden with dad or having tea with mum and the cleaning ladies than doing whatever they made him do back at the barracks where he lived as a single man. Occasionally dad and Cpl T (would pick me up from sixth form but the corporal rarely or never came alone because that would not have been an appropriate use of resources. Dad was careful about that, though how it was OK for Corporal T to work in the garden I don't know. Maybe it was only once or maybe I misremember. Officer behaviour was extremely strict when it came to integrity.

Anachronism, inheritance, tradition?

In the military you could see social differences as against, for example, civilian life or between officers and other ranks (soldiers) in dress, in food, in the types of social events they chose, sometimes in first names, in modes of address and most of all in accent. 

Many would call this snobbery, but there was a reason to keeping things distinct. Soldiers and officers did not socialise in the same places or in the same ways. They had separate bars and messes for meals. They never socialised in each others houses. The reason I heard for this was - and perhaps still is - because if an officer had to give a order in time of war, it could not be questioned. Maintaining social distance was one way to increase the respect of men towards officers and therefore the likelihood of that order not being questioned under the impossible condition of war.  

Many officers joined the army with a regional accent and it became replaced, in their twenties I should think, with an "officer accent" which was RP English, often with a "posh" twang. Their children, like me, grew up with and inherited this. Soldiers kept their accent. Soldiers who became officers also tended to lose their accent, sometimes to a lesser extent, unless they were Scottish (or perhaps Welsh, but I never met these).

There were things that seemed anachronistic from outside military society but that of course is just another word for "tradition" if it is deliberately maintained by a specific group. It depends on perspective.  The power of perspective was belatedly brought home to me in my late twenties or early thirties by an Irishman in a story recounted here.

On instance of a tradition within the army was RSVP cards.  These were invitations to all kinds of parties and they were commonplace. You have probably received an RSVP card to a wedding. It's an elegantly printed little card that says who is getting married, to whom, where, when , the dress code and you are invited to reply or "RSVP", from the French "répondez s'il vous plaît" saying whether you plan to attend. They weren't hand-written.  You ordered them from the printer and sent them out to your friends as required.  I feel I am labouring the obvious, only I know that to my children all of this would probably be impenetrable. My parents' mantelpiece from the the 1970s through the 1990s were packed with these cards, inviting them not just to weddings but primarily just to drinks and dinner parties. They had them even into the 2000s and 2010s, though in diminishing numbers as they left army life and their local civilian friends who may also have used the RSVP card convention, pre-deceased them. The advent of email also probably contributed to the cards’ decline.

Traditions like these belonged, as far as I could tell, to the upper classes and the military but then we didn't know many middle class civilian people. My uncle I suppose, ten years younger than dad, was that. He had a successful career in  sales in the chocolate and drinks industry  and ended up with a very nice large house in a Derbyshire village and a second holiday home somewhere on the North Yorkshire coast. But they weren't the same as us and he ribbed dad about it constantly.  Dad bore it with an endless tolerant good humour.  I never once heard him gripe about his brother.  Dad was posh, apparently and he was, comparatively.  There was something about him.  It wasn't that he had airs and graces.  He liked opera so that counted against him. But he'd got that from his own family and developed it himself.  My uncle was a folk singer.  Dad had gone to grammar school whereas my uncle hadn't, so that made dad posh too. He was posh just by virtue of Sandhurst, the officer training school.  All officers were posh, eventually.  It was just the way of things.

There were many things from the real upper social echelons  that remained in the army but which were not part of the lives of most of the families from which those officers came. Officers then either were or became, middle class. Dad was a typical example. He came from a working class family. He was the son of a policeman and a shopkeeper who sent their first-born at sixteen, to Welbeck, the now defunct military feeding school for Sandhurst which is where British army officers were and still are trained.

Officers were not, on the whole, members of the aristocracy.  There were infantry regiments that had more of them: the "Blues and Royals"  were one made up of the Royal Horse Guards (Blues) and 1st Dragoons (Royals).  They are one of the two regiments that make up the Household Cavalry of the British Army, along with the Lifeguards. "Household" here refers to the royal household.

So there were army officers, whose equivalent in civilian life would be middle class, probably on a rough social par with doctors and lawyers. Teachers were no longer really in the same sphere although they had been. But it was a special kind of middle class, because unlike ordinary middle class which might mean restaurants, foreign holidays, maybe a cleaner, maybe private school, this was a middle class that borrowed or inherited, in a social sense, customs from the upper class because that is where, of course, officers had traditionally come. 

That’s why I think RSVP cards for instance remained longer in the military for ordinary social events when the rest of society now only used them for weddings. An effervescent social life was also a hallmark of the officer culture not only because it was borrowed from an upper class but because it was a necessity to quickly integrate into a ready-made society when everyone was being moved around the world every few years. 

Nobody in ordinary society went to black tie dinners any more, even in the 1970s and 80s, unless perhaps you were aristocracy and who knew what they did. Dressing for dinner, never mind black tie belonged to a time pre-war, pre First World War perhaps, when society was clearly split into working, middle and upper class. Only the upper class then dressed for dinner - and maybe still do. But in the army, at the mess, black tie or “mess” dinners for officers still existed and also probably still do.

The mess, in our case, was the regimental headquarters, a lovely historical hall in the country just outside the garrison.  It had a terrace and gardens where we had pre-dinner drinks.  Dependents didn't go to these things very often but I did go once or twice and remember, as a sixteen or seventeen year old teenager, meeting King Constantine of Greece. There was much protocol around these dinners, which were held in a enormous dining room.  No one could leave for the lavatory for instance I think was one and there were funny stories around breaking or getting round protocol.  Women wore long dresses, men wore the very equivalent of civilian black tie, called mess kit, a tight fitting scarlet and black affair with a waistcoat. 

The place was sold off and is now a luxury hotel and spa. 

Dependents

 The pieces I plan to post next (and so many of these never make it), which are seen through the lens of life as a military "dependent" came out of a draft about how parties used to be in the military, which in turn came out of a piece about the importance of welcome. I realised how much life has changed and how things that from some viewpoints were anachronistic then, would not even be recognised by or would horrify my children today and so I thought they might be worth recording.

Dependents
"Dependent" in this context is interesting.  It referred to wives and children.  There were very few female officers at the time I am writing of.  I never met one and certainly not a senior one.  The first woman I heard of that was an officer was a girl I did the very first military Potential Officer Course with when they, which is to say the Royal Corp of Transport, first accepted women.  She went on to become a captain some years later and probably had a successful military career.  "Dependent" smacks, today of uselesness, a woman who trailed round after her far more important husband being his support.  

In many ways that was exactly what happened although from inside, it was known that the men couldn't do it without them.  Almost literally.  I don't think I knew any single senior officers.  There were a couple of divorced ones but it was very unusual.  The one I knew was a quiet type. It was at house, socialising with his son, where I first heard Bach, which dad,  Mozart and Beethoven man, never got used to.  It was a distinctly more intellectual household than ours.  I mentioned Bach to dad who looked as though I'd said something slightly suspect and distasteful.  Had I understood dad's views on Communism at the time I might have thought the guy was a hop and skip away from Communist sympathies.

Absent wives tended to be painted as faintly scurrilous.  There was one chap who ran off with a younger model and we were all very sympathetic towards the original wife.  It wasn't done you see, to chuck over your wife. There was one woman, I think her husband left her too, I think, rather than the other way round.  She stayed it was us for a night after this.  The atmosphere in the house was sad and tense.  In the morning, her room reeked of cigarette smoke.  It also wasn't done to smoke in other people's guest rooms. Soon after she committed suicide. Men weren't supposed to harm women. It went with the culture.  That's probably why divorcing them when they traipsed round the world after you, as dependents, entertaining, having children, packing and moving and leaving their families and friends, wasn't done.

If a wife ran off and the man married again, it wasn't held against him.  He had done the right thing.  No one said so, but it was obvious:  being a military officer was awkward without a wife.  It was awkward at dinner parties, awkward at bridge, he couldn't entertain but had to be entertained.  It just didn't balance. 

Cautionary tales

I heard two stories recently that brought me up short.

I was talking to someone who runs an art and craft class, very easygoing, light-hearted, joking, banter up and down the class constantly, mostly between him and a long term attendee, I think mostly for the entertainment of themselves and the rest of us.

In class there was discussion about a stabbing that had happened a few streets from my house, where I walk every day. Just a few months before my husband had berated me for saying his name near an odd character who was hanging about oddly on that same street. I thought he was over-reacting.  

Can't you see that guy's involved in drugs? he said.

No, I replied.

Apparently the stabbing was drug related.  The teacher was sure the long term attendee would know more about it and, being a small town, he had narrowed it down and claimed to know, by some opaque process of elimination, whodunnit.

The conversation moved on to drugs. The teacher had a surprisingly wide knowledge of the different drugs in the city and how they affected the way people walked.

 - How do you know? 

- Because they've staggered past my door all day for years.

I paid differently to most of the others and we sometimes had an opportunity to chat.  

He said that the class had helped many people with mental health issues over the years.

- How do you know about them?

- Some of them talk about it, some of them don't. 

He was observant, seemed to have learned to pick up on cues over many years.

Why do they come?

- As it's an afternoon class people often come with chronic health conditions, and maybe can't hold down a job.

I supposed the art and craft is a kind of therapy for them.

- How does it help?

- The class is small, friendly.

 He didn't mention the art material or process at all. 

I soon realised the teacher had an astonishing amount of insight and experience around people with mental health conditions. I began to see the level of perception in the guy, who was, after all an artist. Several times he'd commented on my fear in class of the artistic process. You look traumatised! he had said, lightly, one day, referring to my fear of making, or so I imagined.

I wasn't surprised when he said the class had helped many people.  It's what you would expect from a business owner, especially someone in the art business running classes with an undercurrent of informal art therapy.  But I was surprised when he said a number of people who had come to class had taken their own life. 

- Isn't that contradictory, if you say class also helps?

 He said sometimes they've been coming, they're stable, then they miss a class and they go back down some rabbit hole of mental health problems and then he gets the news that they've taken their life.

Apparently the evening class had no or fewer suicides. The people who come to that one tend to hold down jobs.  

He said one of the worst things that happens is when people come off their meds voluntarily or because their body has learned to tolerate it and they need new medication. When they're off their meds they go haywire and then they go on to new meds or back and then there are all the side effects to work through. He said for a year their lives can be a train crash because of this and that it was an awful thing to witness.

 He had done a suicide prevention course to see if there were things he was already doing that were helping and if there was more he could do to help the people who came through his doors.

He talked about somebody who came to class with a great sense of humour, a  joker, a big character but who came when he was in a dark place. 

- He was a larger than life, jokey character but in a dark place?

- Oh yes, those characters can often be the most troubled he said with experience.

The joker would ask if there was a space and the teacher always made space for him.

Or somebody would just die, suddenly. He mentioned a parent who choked and died one Christmas. 

He said how difficult it was to then tell the class, do his normal work, go to the funeral and then people from maybe a year past who don't come to class anymore had seen something about the death, would contact him to ask about it, and so on.

How do you do all this, run classes, your other work?  Do colleagues in your business have the same stories?

He thought it depended on the level of empathy.   

Some days, when he had three classes, he said he would go home and barely be able to hold a conversation.  I imagined he was probably carrying a fair amount of secondary trauma from all he had experienced.

But just then, it was he who talked and talked. I had barely said a word bar ask a few questions. I wondered vaguely who was helping who.  The question didn't seem relevant.  I appreciated the lack of presumption.

He had done the classes for years, and was taking advantage of a change in circumstance to stop them and run weekend workshops instead.  I wasn't surprised. 

How do you know if people had got these problems?

He said often, they hang around after class. I shifted uncomfortably, but he was still doing the talking.  

- And then what?

- Well, it's clear they want to talk, he said, so I offer to make them a coffee while I tidy up, prepare for the next class.

I should say at this point, with some relief, I had never been offered a coffee.

I was struck that you would never think, to see him in his professional life, that this fun, sensitive man, carried the weight of this experience and sense of responsibility towards the steady stream of broken people who walked through his doors.  That he didn't judge, moralise, analyze, theorise.  He just did what he could to help.

Then he mentioned, let's call her Marie, who had come to class and who would apparently swear a lot.  She had some kind of mental health issue and was possibly delusional. The class would be talking about, I don't know, surgery and she'd say one week that she'd, you know, she'd been a surgeon and they'd say, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, Marie, that, is that right? And then she talked about land the family had, but how she, the brother had got everything and she'd been left without. She'd be effing and blinding about that. And then another week they'd be talking about, say, teaching and she'd say, Oh yeah, I was a primary teacher once and they'd say, Yeah, yeah, okay, Marie. Then another week they'd be talking about the news, and she'd say, Yeah, I was a journalist once. And they said, Yep, sure, of course you were, thinking there was no way you taught children cursing the way you do.

One day mid-August she turned up and gave the teacher a Christmas present and a card. Then she turned up to a colleague's class soaking wet and half an hour late and with a belief that her house was being sunk in the river by the council. She lived alone. The teacher was worried about her, so he phoned a mate who was a paramedic.  The mate said, contact NHS 24.  Give them the contact details you've got, they'll look her up and someone will do a wellness check but you won't hear what happens.  After that she disappeared. It turned out she had been sectioned. She turned up three months later to class. About eight months after that, they found out that she had taken her own life.

So they went to the funeral, the teacher and the long-term class attendee. It turned out she was from a famous family. Someone who knew her spoke about her life, how she'd grown up in Africa and trained to be a surgeon. She did that for a while and then she got fed up with the misogyny of the industry and retrained to become a journalist at one of the national papers. After some time there, she decided her true calling was to become a primary school teacher. So she did that. And then eventually the weight of her condition overcame her.

 He made no other comment beyond that.

A few days later, I suddenly heard from someone I hadn't heard from in nearly a year. I had met her by chance a couple of years before. She was almost overpoweringly religious and had increasingly been encouraging me to go to Christian concerts in Glasgow, which I wasn't interested in. Then I received an intense rant against a local pub and all the things she was going to say about them in a review. I was beginning to think it might be wise to step back a bit.

Then in early April last year, she said she had been accepted at a local university to study in the autumn. I sent her another message at the end of April to, because we had a long-standing dinner reservation. I hadn't heard from her, so I thought she'd just decided to cool off the relationship. And I didn't hear back about the dinner. I assumed the brief friendship was over or other things had taken over in her life.

The rest of the year passed. It was perhaps towards the end of last year that I bumped into her in the street with her husband, holding on to him. I barely recognised her. I thought she had had a stroke or some similarly grave medical problem. She couldn't speak properly and was obviously very fragile. We said hello, exchanged some pleasantries, said it was nice to see them. They didn't say what had happened and I didn't want to pry.

The other day, out of the blue she invited me to have coffee with another friend I didn't know. She said she had discovered in 2021 that she had bipolar disorder but that had been living fine, without medication as far as I could gather. When I knew her, she seemed entirely normal. She painted my mum's nails. She was kind. She was smiley. She was enthusiastic. It had not for a minute occurred to me that she was bipolar.  Around the time of the pub review I did see clear streaks of aggression, a desire to punish, even what I thought was a kind of superiority complex. Certainly, I decided to be more careful in the relationship. 

Apparently she had been out visiting somewhere with her husband. Something had happened. She had to go to at least two maybe three hospitals and she was admitted at one of these for three months. She was now able to walk in the street on her own.  She still had some trouble with her speech due to the side effects of the medication. We were speaking in neither of our own native languages and I noticed that she mixed up this language with her own, which were admittedly similar, but in a way that she had not done before. She wanted to restart work, but just one day a week.  She was worried that the course she wanted to do might not accept her this year. I could see that she was becoming slightly stressed, and also tired after about 40 minutes of conversation. The other friend and I both suggested to her, one step at a time. Then I had to go to another appointment

I thought about Marie, and I wondered when she became the way that she did. Was it  harm from brother that tipped her over the edge? Was it the misogyny at work? Was it in the family? Did people have a role in what happened to her? Could she have been saved? What might have saved her? Or was it an inevitable path of neurobiology, genetic vulnerability, sleep disruption, medication effects and psychosocial stress?  Or was it these plus life events and the relationships she had with people in her life?  Or something else altogether.  I wondered if the teacher dwelt on those questions.

When I was about thirteen, someone my parents knew came to stay with us briefly for a night or two.  Her husband, an army officer, had left her and she was in a bad way. I remember a general vibe of unsettledness and unhappiness and angst.  The next day her room stank of cigarettes.  This was the most disturbing thing maybe because although everyone smoked then, people like my parents didn't stink out the guest room with smoke, when we stayed with friends. And manners were everything in those circles.  The cigarette smoke was somehow symbolic that she had already, in a some way, gone beyond the pale.  Not long after we heard she had taken her own life. I was shocked but part of me was not surprised.

I thought about my friend, who had been struck by bipolar disorder apparently in her early 40s. What was it that tipped her over the edge in 2021 then and what was it that did it again in 2025? Was it the stress of visiting the university? Did something in particular happen? Was she becoming more stressed generally or did it just come out of nowhere?

Certainly I felt a strong push from the stories: look after yourself. Stay on an even keel. Don't get upset or angry, don't let things get to you. Take care of yourself. Beware what you become attached to.