abuse
The story behind the crime
Published author, Wally Lamb, has always loved teaching. So when the York Correctional Institution in Connecticut in the USA appealed for volunteers to help combat the despair and defeat that had overtaken the female prison population in the wake of a series of successful and attempted suicides at the turn of the century, he responded with an offer of writing workshops.
But teaching writing in such a setting proved to be a considerable challenge; it took time and patience to penetrate the barriers the inmates raised. However, once the women let down their guard and found their voices, he was amazed at the courage and insights they exhibited. It became very evident that they had been imprisoned by abuse, rejection and their own self-destructive impulses long before they had entered the criminal justice system. They carried scars spanning their whole lives. The process he started not only unlocked their creativity but began a transformative journey of healing, and a pathway from despair to hope and triumph.
In Couldn’t Keep it to Myself, their stories have been collected together, and present a moving and powerful testament to the potential for writing – regardless of its literary merit – to enable vulnerable people to gain self-awareness and the motivation to change their lives for the better. As their mentor and facilitator Lamb kept his own editing of their work to a minimum in order to allow these authentic voices to tell it as it was for them, tweaking just enough to ensure clarity and pace and drama.
The end result makes shocking reading. These are experiences most of us only read of in fiction. Childhood rape. Poverty and abuse. Dysfunction on a grand scale. Rejection and discrimination. Cruelty and thuggery. Depression and full blown psychotic illness and addiction. Degradation and dehumanisation. Suicidal ideation and PTSD. Without exception, all the authors describe histories fraught with such horrors.
But, by encouragement and sensitive guidance, by publishing their collective stories, Lamb has unearthed the humanity in the lost and the lonely, the victims of drink and drugs and self-destructive habits and mental illness and society’s prejudices … and given them a voice.
… little by little, I came to understand who I was beneath all those bad habits and bad decisions.
… no one deserves to be talked down to and assumed valueless – no matter what their poisons.
I began writing about my life because it was the only way I knew how to keep my sanity in this place of confusion. My writing is a sanctuary in the middle of each day.
Writing gives me a sense of peace.
Writing’s helped me figure out who I am and who I want to be. My body’s still in prison but my spirit’s finally free.
Terrifying history as fiction
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate is a bestselling 2017 novel, at once sobering and compelling, based on a notorious true-life scandal. A tale of children – real live babies and young girls and boys – being traded for money.
From 1920s to 1950 a social worker called Georgia Tann facilitated the adoption of thousands of children. But this was no regular professional procedure in the course of her work; she orchestrated the abduction of these infants and youngsters from poor families, kidnapping often in broad daylight, gave them new names (to help prevent birth families tracing them), and sold them to celebrities and people with political influence. And she charged exorbitant fees for doing so, adding extra for deliveries out of state.
Whilst in the so-called ‘care’ of orphanages belonging to the Tennessee Children’s Home Society those little people were kept in terrible conditions, abused, terrified, half-starved. They were tied to beds and chairs, beaten, locked in cold dark cupboards, molested. But on special days they were bathed, dressed in proper clothes, fed good food, and paraded before potential parents. Entirely fictitious background stories were spun about them, stories of their exceptional pedigrees and privileged background. And all the while they were on display, they were under dire threats as to what would happen if they dared misbehave or tell tales about their real identities or conditions in the home. That fear remained with them and kept them silent even after their adoptions.
Miss Tann also duped women in maternity wards into signing surrender papers while they were still under sedation. She told parents their babies had died when they hadn’t. And in addition, she headed up a network that under her watch allowed or intentionally caused the deaths of as many as 500 children and infants.
How did she get away with it, and for so long? Well, it has transpired that she had law enforcement agencies and family court judges in her pocket. She seemed untouchable. And in the end, she died of cancer before she could be brought to answer the charges against her.
This much is true.
But Lisa Wingate has used fictional characters to bring the horror of this scandal to life.
The Foss children and the Arcadia were formed from the dust of imagination and the muddy waters of the Mississippi river. Though Rill and her sisters exist only in these pages, their experiences mirror those reported by children who were taken from their families from the 1920s through 1950.
The year is 1939. The poor but close-knit Floss family live a magical life on the Mississippi on a shantyboat built by her father Briny. Queenie is her mother. When Queenie is taken to hospital during an extremely difficult birth of twins, the children are left unattended on the boat, and it’s then they are all abducted by the river police and taken to Memphis to a children’s home. 
Rill Foss is 12, and feels ultimately responsible for her three younger sisters and a brother, but she is powerless to prevent them being split up and either given to different families or disposed of. All except one of them have their mother’s blonde curly hair and blue eyes putting them much in demand. Their story (told by Rill) fills alternate chapters and is told with immediacy and the brutal clarity and honesty of a child wise beyond her years.
Woven alongside her account, is the present day story of Avery Stafford, a federal prosecutor in Maryland, and her growing awareness of the attrocities perpetrated decades before and the lifelong legacy borne by its victims. Her father is a well known senator and all her privileged life has been spent surrounded by wealth and fame. She has recently come home to support her father while he receives treatment for cancer. His mother, Grandma Judy, to whom Avery feels very close, is losing her grip on reality and now lives in a very upmarket care home. But there are ugly protests swirling about inequality, threatening the standing of the Stafford family, so they redouble their efforts to stay in touch with the less-advantaged. In the course of visiting a more mediocre care home, Avery is accosted by a woman, May Crandall, who appears to think Avery is someone she knows. And on her bedside table is a photograph of four laughing women, one of whom looks remarkably like Grandma Judy.
For my part I should have preferred the links to become apparent much later; it’s obvious from very early on who these old ladies are. However, hats off to the award-winning author, herself a former journalist, for giving us a harrowing glimpse inside this scandalous period of American history. But it leaves one wondering, scared even, about what other terrible crimes have been, or indeed are, being perpetrated in plain sight. And what if anything we are doing about them. What, for example, about the ongoing reports of the Ukranian children – many blonde, blue-eyed – who have been forcibly abducted by Russian troops, standing at over 20,000 according to one source? 20,000 innocent children!
What are we doing about it? What should we do?
Talking with Serial Killers
During my decades as a researcher I spent some years carrying out profoundly draining interviews with respondents who were grappling with deeply emotional issues relating to loss and grief, so 
I know a little of the personal cost to the listener of engaging with great damage and disturbance. Even so, I can only imagine the trauma of sitting opposite serial murderers who have repeatedly carried out the most sadistic and barbaric crimes against innocent victims. Christopher Berry-Dee, a world-renowned investigative journalist, has interviewed at length over 30 of the world’s most notorious killers, and recorded some of their stories in Talking with Serial Killers.
His modus operandi involves building up a relationship with a killer over many years of correspondence until they begin to trust him, researching their history, and meeting with as many people as he can who know/knew the offender. With dangerous individuals such as these, this inevitably means negotiating a path through a lot of red tape.
For each case, I take an in-depth approach, spending an enormous amount of time getting to know the unique qualities of each individual, rather than depersonalising them with generalities based on their crimes. While I develop an empathy for my subject, I always take care not actually to sympathise to the extent that their dramas start playing in the theatre of my own mind. It is a constant balancing act between identification and analysis.
His analysis evokes strong responses. It’s deeply disturbing to read of police inability to track these criminals despite a trail of numerous assaults and murders, or their failure to follow up on inconsistencies and blatant lies. The unscrupulous standards and incompetence of some officers or lawyers took my breath away. It was equally chilling to hear about young women and girls hitch-hiking and accepting lifts from strangers, of naive and vulnerable learning-disabled young people being caught in the nets of these murderers, and perhaps worst of all, to read of serial murderers being released to kill again … and again … and again.
The detail is sickening and certainly not for the faint-hearted.
One rather feels that even Stephen King could not better that scene in one of his horror novels.
Each killer has a chapter devoted to them, relating the background and relationships which were instrumental in forming their characters. Their crimes are recorded from multiple sources including their own descriptions and admissions, but particularly fascinating for me were the sections giving psychiatric, medical and forensic explanations for why these murderers performed in certain ways.
So, who were these villians, and what singles them out as exceptional amongst killers – the world’s most evil murderers as the strapline has it? A few basic details must suffice for this post.
Arthur John Shawcross took the lives of 53 human beings; Henry Lee Lucas confessed to at least 190, although it’s commonly agreed that he exaggerated the number.
John Martin Scripps travelled internationally, and with cold-blooded efficiency, killed innocent strangers using butchering techniques learned in prison to dispose of their bodies, and then went on shopping sprees using their credit cards. He was only 36 when he was executed in Singapore.
When Michael Bruce Ross was convicted after 11 brutal sexual assualts and 6 murders, all carried out before his 28th birthday, the state had to debate the relative merits of consecutive life sentences versus execution by electric chair, because the latter would involve costly repair work on the long disused chair itself, and redecoration of the witness viewing area and death house suite!
The multiplicity of errors and lies and unethical/illegal behaviours amongst the police, lawyers and legal fraternity in the case of Ronald Joseph DeFeo Jr, accused of killing 6 members of his family, makes for such confusing reading that, despite the author’s analytical reporting, I was unclear in the end just who had done what. And yet a man’s life is at stake here.
Similarly there seem to be serious flaws in the case against Daniel Clark, accused of killing a number of prostitutes more correctly attributable to his co-accused Carol Bundy. Witnesses and attorneys were bribed or coerced; statements and evidence tampered with or withheld or ‘lost’; alibis ignored. Bundy, herself totally untruthful and most certainly guilty, was given a deal to testify against Clark in return for her own life.
It was somehow particularly difficult to read the story of a woman, Aileen Carol Wuornos. Only about 2% of the USA’s felons who have been condemned to death are females. Abandoned as a baby, abused as a child, regularly beaten with a studded belt, a mother at 14, married to a man 49 years her senior, Wuornos was given to fits of uncontrollable rage. In just over a year she scattered a trail of middle-aged male corpses (at least six) across the main highways of central Florida, shooting each of them several times, leaving their naked bodies many miles away from their abandoned cars, robbing them of all their possessions. It was loyalty to her lesbian lover that made her finally confess.
Kenneth Allen McDuff didn’t just kill over 15 victims; he savaged them in unspeakable ways – savagery that turned the stomachs of even veteran police officers.
And so it goes on. Tales beyond imagining, minds depraved way beyond our comprehension. Collosal sums of money are needed to ensure these ultra-dangerous individuals are securely detained and safe from harm by themselves or other inmates. The average stay on Death Row is 11.3 years. In California alone there are up to 500 inmates awaiting execution at any one time; in Texas that figure is over 450.
A disturbing and challenging book by any standard.
Christmas greetings
Christmas blessings to you all whatever your circumstances.
If you are currently facing devastating loss or grief,
may you be given the strength and courage to go on.
If your life is a spiral of stress and anxiety,
may you find a way through to a calmer, more peaceful place.
If you are subject to oppression or rejection or abuse,
may you be helped to a place of safety and security.
If life is currently treating you kindly and you have all you need,
may these blessings continue, valued and appreciated.
If you are fortunate enough to enjoy a super-abundance of health and resources,
may you have the generosity to share wisely.
If you are in a position of power,
may you use it for the greater good and towards a fairer world.
‘Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me.’
The Girl Behind the Gates
A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine handed me a book, The Girl Behind the Gates, (2020) with a trademark smile but no explanation; just ‘I’d love to know what you think.’
I’m instantly intrigued. First, by the author, Dr Brenda Davies, who’s a consultant psychiatrist, author, broadcaster, spiritual teacher and Principal of the Brenda Davies International School of Healing and Spiritual Development. Impressive, huh?
Second, by the blurb which tells me this is Davies’ first novel, and it’s based on the true story of a young woman cut down in her prime who’s eventually found in a psychiatric institution and slowly helped to overcome her past.
The fictionalised account takes us back to 1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has led a charmed life, secure and happy, musically gifted, with bright prospects. Then one night of passion with her beloved cousin leads to catastrophic consequences. When her parents learn of her pregnancy, her father beats her savagely with a leather belt, before summoning their family doctor, priest and the senior doctor who directs the dreaded Hillinghurst Hospital, the very name of which is garlanded with shame and fear and inherent malevolence.
When it’s discovered that not only is Nora pregnant, but that she tried to abort the child using quinine and to cut her own wrists, the situation develops layer upon layer of criminality and moral unacceptability. All three acts are ‘mortal sins’. This is the era of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 after all. Nora, deemed a ‘moral imbecile’, or under the 1927 definitions a ‘moral defective’, poses a threat to others (terms only abolished in 1959!). She must be strictly controlled and segregated along with criminals, alcoholics, prostitutes and unmarried mothers who carry the same label. Sympathising with this disgraced family though he may, their family doctor can do nothing to protect her or he too will be imprisoned for ‘aiding and abetting’ criminal offences.
Under cover of darkness Nora is taken from her home and family and sectioned, locked away in the feared Hillinghurst Hospital. A young innocent with no diagnosis beyond a pregnancy out of wedlock.
‘We’re all here to help you get well’, the young doctor in charge of her care promises.
‘It would be best for everyone if you consider your family dead’, the second more senior doctor advises. ‘You’ve been a wicked cunning girl, and here you’ll learn to live a better life ..’
It’s horrifying to read of the barbaric treatments that were used in those days. Bad enough that they were applied in cases of real mental illness in a well-intentioned effort to cure; absolutely scandalous applied to this young sensitive girl who is simply trying to survive. Even the archaic un-pc-by-our-standards language sends shudders down the spine.
What’s more, those paid to care for the inmates inflict malicious cruel acts against her; and anyone showing compassion or kindness is punished or even dismissed. Nora endures both physical and sexual abuse, isolation, visitors are deterred, letters are withheld, humiliation is piled on top of scorn. When she gives birth to the baby, she’s denied even sight of her, and the child is left on a cold slab to die. Utterly bereft, Nora suffers a majorly powerful grief reaction but still clings to the hope that her baby has been adopted and one day she will seek and find her. She only learns of her death when she stumbles upon a patch of baby graves in the grounds and finds Angela’s marker.
Fast forward forty-two years to 1981, and Nora is discovered by psychiatrist Dr Janet Humphreys totally institutionalised and withdrawn in a back ward. Patiently and with great sensitivity, Janet starts to work with her to overcome her isolation and help her rediscover what it is to live freely. The account gives insights into the delicacy of such a task and the peaks and troughs that Janet much negotiate. And all the while the doctor is herself dealing with her own troubled past and broken relationships.
It’s a magnificent and heart-rending book, and despite the shocking revelations of life in a mental facility in the past, it’s ultimately a tale of triumph of good over evil, of hope over despair, and love over punishment.
‘Honour killing’
The title alone, No Safe Place : Murdered by our father, instantly captures something of the terror of being born into a family where violence is the norm. But this is no work of fiction; it’s a true story – a story so horrific that the identities of the two girls at its centre have had to be concealed. It is told by Bekhal Mahmod assisted by a legal reformer, Dr Hannanah Siddiqui.
Bekhal Mahmod was one of six siblings born into a Sunni Muslim family in Iraqi Kurdistan. Though living conditions were primitive, her early years were happy in the bosom of her extended family. But suddenly, when she was just six years old, the father she had adored and respected began to subject her to beatings and abuse as he enforced his strict misogynistic rules. Six years old.
At the age of about eight, she was genitally mutilated by her elderly, half-blind grandmother, pinned down by her own mother and aunt, with no explanation, no compassion. The shaking hand managed to sever a nerve with the open razor and cause serious haemorrhaging, but the women promptly threw scalding vegetable oil over the area to cauterize it, using nothing more than beetroot to treat the child’s raging fever. She waited a further six years for an explanation as to why this had been done to her.
Some girls die from blood loss or severe infections …
But hey, never mind – because it’s all about ‘honour’, right? Such is the mentality of some of the men in our family.
From that time on Bekhal knew she wanted to flee from this culture, this religion, the oppression, violence and control.
As she grew, and as she challenged the status quo, so the violence escalated. The soles of her feet were burned with a red hot metal scraper. Her bottom was thrashed with a hosepipe whip. Extreme verbal abuse left her feeling worthless and unloved. She was partially suffocated by her father sitting on her face. She witnessed a teenage neighbour being killed in a vat full of steaming tar. Another girl who lived nearby was killed by her father scalding her from head to toe in boiling water.
‘That’s what happens when they don’t listen to their fathers,’ her mother warned her.
Yet another father locked his daughter alone in the house and bombed it with hand grenades.
Still there was no mention of the term ‘honour killing‘ in Bekhal’s hearing. But the fathers were known as heroes in their community.
The perpetrators are proud. In their warped minds they’ve ended the shame and reinstated their family’s honour. It gives them power.
It was not until she was ten that Bekhal was able to go to school … a strict religious all-girls school, and this became a blessed form of escapism, and a place where she experienced approval and affection.
Then, suddenly and secretly, the family all moved to London.The culture shock was massive. But the tragedies of life in Iran reached across the miles when they learned that Bekhal’s beloved and beautiful cousin, Avin, was so desperately unhappy that she had committed suicide. And though the abuse, sadness and inhumane violence continued, Bekhal’s rebellion also escalated as she experimented with clothes, make-up, tobacco, weed, alcohol … if she was going to be abused anyway she might as well earn the beatings! But not even her miscellaneous efforts to numb the pain could prevent depression and self-harm claiming this teenage girl, drawing her inexorably towards a suicide attempt.
I can’t even try to kill myself without getting a beating.
Her father and uncle stepped up the vigilance and she was overtly threatened with death if she persisted in flouting the strict rules of their culture.
If I had my way, you’d be turning into ashes by now.
Their solution? To force her into an arranged marriage with a much older cousin in Iraq – at just fifteen years of age. Terrified, she ran away, making herself a target for ‘honour killing’. She was trapped.
If I run away, I’m dead; if I go home, I’m dead.
To Bakhal’s horror, in an effort to restore his family’s collective reputation, her father swiftly married off his two younger daughters, Banaz and Payzee, by force, to much older men. But two years later, aged only nineteen, Banaz walked out on her husband saying he had beaten and raped her; and she wanted to marry someone else, a young man from a different tribe who was not a strict Muslim, and therefore deemed ‘unsuitable’. More ‘shame’ on the family. She too must now die.
In 2006 when Banaz was twenty, she vanished. Though she had reported the violence and the threats to the police on five occasions, the system failed her, and she was brutally raped, tortured and murdered in a so-called ‘honour killing’, her body stuffed in a suitcase and buried in the garden of a disused house far from the scene of the crime. Bekhal was devastated.
Seven male relatives were convicted, her father and uncle among them, though the police stated that there were up to fifty men from their community involved in the murder or the cover-up. Bekhal’s own evidence was crucial in securing the convictions and for her own safety she was put into witness protection with a new identity. Even so she has spent, and will spend, the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, conscious that the unrepentant men who killed her sister and continued to boast of their ‘honourable’ actions in prison, have her high on their hit list still.
This landmark case in the Old Bailey shone a spotlight on the horrors being perpetrated in the name of honour, generating a powerful movement to end such brutality in this country. It also exposed multiple failings on the part of the police to protect Banaz from repeated attempts on her life and a catalogue of abuse, with both these authors working tirelessly to introduce new legislation to protect vulnerable women and girls: to be known as ‘Banaz’s Law‘. Films have been made, interviews recorded, courses run, based on this remarkable and tragic story. This book is but one cog in the wheels of change. A sobering and harrowing read.
Standing on the shoulders of giants
Who hasn’t heard of Romeo and Juliet?
But did you know that Shakespeare took his inspiration from a 1562 poem The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke? Or that Brooke borrowed the idea from a 1554 novella by Matteo Bondello? And, of course, writers and film makers and musical directors et al have been refashioning the tale ever since. Because at heart the story has universal and timeless appeal – young love fighting against the odds.
Director and choreographer Sir Matthew Bourne has given this timeless tale yet another twist by setting it in an institution – ?borstal ?prison ?psychiatric hospital ?scene of some brutal social experimentation – aptly named the Verona Institute, paying homage to the setting for Shakespeare’s play. This new production uses a simple but fabulous setting throughout, at once both the famous balcony and evoking the stark metal scaffolding and locked gates so reminiscent of prison. I was privileged to watch it in the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh on Saturday. Photography is not allowed but here’s the official trailer to give you a glimpse (click on).
Many of the classic characters are represented in some way – brilliantly stiff, ambitious pushy Montague parents; a delightfully open-minded slightly scatty minister of religion; an unscrupulous cruel bully – but the focus is on the young people rigidly separated by gender and only allowed to meet under very controlled conditions. 
The choreography is stunningly beautiful and athletic, yet manages to convey very dark issues such as mental disturbance, physical and sexual abuse, bullying, knife crime. And of course the ending is tragic and bloody. As Bourne himself puts it: There’s nothing balletically twee about it!’ Indeed there isn’t. Some people actually walked out, but I was lost in admiration for the clever and haunting refashioning of this classic tale. Impeccable performances, full of grace and emotion. Deeply thought-provoking issues. Raw passion – that between Romeo and Juliet is a far cry from the usual chaste kiss of classic ballet, and apparently this cast have created the longest ever continuous kiss in dance history!
Highly recommended.
Behind bars
There is something unutterably sad about people for whom prison is a refuge.
‘Being inside is my happy place.’
Life outside is so chaotic and traumatic that the safety and discipline inside gives them a sense of security. If you’ve never been exposed to such situations it can be difficult to empathise, which is where The Prison Doctor: Women Inside, by Dr Amanda Brown, comes in. It takes us inside, not just a large women’s prison, but the lives of some of society’s most damaged citizens.
The statistics are sobering indeed.
Female offenders are some of the most vulnerable people within our society. Women make up just five per cent of the prison population in England and Wales, and the vast majority are imprisoned for non-violent offences, and are often sentenced for a matter of just weeks at a time. Many of them are caught in a vicious cycle of domestic violence, drug abuse and homelessness. Written off by society, they disappear into a world that most of us are oblivious to, of lost invisible souls who have no voice.
… the more previous custodial sentences a woman has had, the higher her reoffending rate; the reoffending rate for women with eleven of more previous convictions is eighty-three per cent.
… a prison for women means it is full of mothers and the female chains that form our society. Around two-thirds of women in prison have dependent children under the age of 18 at home.There are mothers whose kids have been taken away from them; mothers whose kids are temporarily being looked after by others; new mothers looking after their babies on the MBU; and, sometimes, mothers who have harmed their children.
… the average age of death for a woman who is homeless is 43.
Dr Brown works in Bronzefield, the largest female prison in Europe, one of only two in the UK to house Category A prisoners, the most dangerous women who pose a serious threat to public or national security. She has a wealth of experience behind her: as a community GP; in a young offenders institution; and seven years in Wormwood Scrubs; but she still finds the encounters she has in this setting challenging. And she’s wise and humble enough to realise there is still much to be learned from conversations with the inmates who come into her orbit.
In the words of one prisoner: ‘I used to judge people. Now I don’t. You never know what someone else is living through.’ Probably the most powerful lesson this compassionate medic has learned from her own experience.
The stories she recounts so often show that the ‘criminals’ are in fact the victims – victims of cruelty and abuse and neglect and oppression. Victims whose self-loathing has taken them through self-harming to the brink of suicide. Victims who have resorted to drink or drugs or prostitution or crime merely to survive in their own private hells. It’s both sobering and traumatic to read again and again of how these girls are failed time after time, and are failed again when they are released into homelessness. Dr Brown herself uses words like tragic, heartbreaking, shocking. Her insights and empathy can help to enlighten us all. And how we need that enlightenment! Because these failures are a challenge to our whole society.
Life after Life
A bonus of lockdown was acquiring ‘new’ books from those donated to our outdoor bookshelf. 
One such was Life after Life by Kate Atkinson, about which I’d seen and read excellent reports. (I’m horrified to discover it’s eight years since it came out, and I’m only now getting round to reading it! Too many books, not enough hours in the day.) But somehow, living in this parallel universe of pandemic for the last eighteen months has made Atkinson’s premise – What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? – even more pertinent; so perhaps after all it’s a good time to read it.
The hook on the back cover is tantalising:
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath.
During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale.
What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life?
An ingenious premise upon which to build a novel, huh? And it challenges us to think, What would I do differently, given the opportunity? Would I even want to change things?
Add to that the time period of the story – 1910-1967 – including two great wars, and the implications of a second chance assume even more momentous proportions.
What if a pretty English girl had shot Adolf Hitler in November 1930?
What if a pretty British girl was actually living in Germany when war was declared?
The historic detail relating to big events gives a solid skeleton to this story, but inevitably some factual accuracy is forfeited in the name of literature, as the author herself acknowledges: To find the truth as the heart of a book, a certain amount of reality falls by the way.
Ursula Todd, born in 1910, is a strange child with odd ‘powers’. Was it reincarnation, or clairvoyance, or deja vu, or living in a parallel universe, sixth sense, or what? Certainly her mother thinks she needs ‘fixing’. A Harley Street psychiatrist does his best when she’s 10, but as she grows up, and bad things happen to her, Ursula persists in wondering if death is the answer; she can then have another stab at life and hopefully a happier ending.
We follow her different lives through her rural upbringing with an indulgent father and a superior mother, adult life in London, during the Blitz, and in post-war Berlin. She goes from knowing child, to rape victim, abused wife, assassin, mistress, rescue warden. Back and forth. At times she doesn’t even recognise herself.
It was, I must admit somewhat discombobulating to live through a traumatic experience of the death of a child or young person, only to have them return later in the book very much alive because an alternative version of their lives is being narrated. Short of cataloguing each iteration, I couldn’t hold them all in my head, so went for simply enjoying the moment.
Something of the challenge underpinning this story is captured in these few lines of dialogue about half way through the book:
‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said. ‘If one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.’
‘Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?’ Ralph asked mildly.
‘Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.’
‘But nobody knows what’s going to happen. And anyway he might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers. You might have to kill him instead of kidnapping him. Could you do that? Could you kill a baby? With a gun? Or what if you had no gun, how about with your bare hands? In cold blood?’
For me this book came into its own in the section A Long Hard War, where Ursula is a warden dealing with the aftermath of the bombings in London. It poignantly captures the fragility of life, the human tragedy on both sides, the courage and stamina people can find within them, and the importance of small things.
When asked what the book is about, Atkinson says, It’s about being English. That’s not what I took from it. For me it’s about something much more complex; an unravelling of our multi-layered selves, who we are in our imaginations as well as in different circumstances. And how our destiny can be determined by an accident of birth, or a chance conversation, or a seemingly casual encounter or decision. I’m still mulling over all that … and isn’t that one measure of a successful story?
What’s in a name?
You know that point when you think … life can’t get any weirder ….? And it does. Well, I had such a moment this week.
You might have noticed that my beautiful homeland, Cornwall, has been high profile for months – TV programmes, news items, holiday recommendations … now it’s in the spotlight again, this time for re-naming its fish to make them sound more appealing on restaurant menus. Spider crabs become king crab; megrim become Cornish sole. Pilchards have already become Cornish sardine. Made me think about names and what they conjure up. And about competing rights and interests.
But that’s when the ultimate craziness hit me. And it relates to another of my old stamping turfs: the maternity hospital. Midwives in one University Hospitals NHS Trust (Brighton and Sussex) are now being told to stop using terms like ‘breastfeeding’ and ‘breast milk’, and even ‘mothers’ without a qualifying add-on …! Like I say … Hello? OK, I accept that there’s an above average percentage of LGBTQ folk in that area of England, with sensitivities, but still … Has the world gone mad? In a hospital where women are naturally and normally having babies and feeding them from their breasts?
Why, you might well ask. Well, apparently such gender-exclusive terms might cause offence and upset non-binary people.
So, out goes ‘mothers’; in comes ‘mothers or birthing parents’
Out goes ‘breastfeeding’; in comes ‘chestfeeding’
Out goes ‘maternity services department’; in comes ‘perinatal services’
Out goes ‘breastmilk’; in comes ‘human milk’ or ‘chestmilk’ or ‘milk from the feeding mother or parent’
Out goes ‘woman’; in comes ‘woman or person’
Out goes ‘father’; in comes ‘co-parent’ or ‘second biological parent’
Out goes ‘maternal’; in comes ‘maternal and parental’
To begin with, are the folk behind this drive unaware of the facts?
– that men have breastbones
– that men can get breast cancer
– that it’s a biological fact that only women can give birth to babies
– that, in the excitement and responsibility of assisting the delivery of a baby, it’s hard enough to always use acceptable words, without this additional layer of prohibition and verbal diligence
– that in seeking not to offend an Infinitesimally small percentage of the population who object to exclusively female words, they are probably losing the goodwill of the vast majority
– that this attempt to be politically correct and woke, is most likely to put hackles up against the very people it purports to speak for.
I have no wish to attract the venom JK Rowling endured when she challenged a decision to use the expression ‘people who menstruate’ instead of ‘women’, so I will merely leave the matter in your capable hands. As for me, I’m still in recovery stage, and in danger of being left behind with the old dogs beyond learning new tricks.