Heroine of a bygone age
Unspeakable tragedy in childbirth. A shell-shocked husband locked in his own torment. Yet despite it all, the mother of Call The Midwife star Stephen McGann showed a courage so rare today
ON SATURDAY, Stephen McGann — one of the McGann acting dynasty — told how being gently nursed back to health after nearly dying inspired his beloved wife Heidi Thomas to create Call The Midwife, the TV series in which he plays Dr Patrick Turner. In this, our second extract from his moving autobiography, Stephen reveals how his father’s World War II trauma scarred his family for ever... O ne day, while visiting the family doctor, my mother opened up about the difficulties of life with her depressive husband, Joe. The doctor listened. Then he rooted out my father’s medical file and showed it to her.
So it was there, in the surgery, that Mum saw the term ‘anxiety neurosis’ for the first time.
‘This behaviour is due to his past experiences,’ the doctor told her. ‘He’s putting you down because it makes him feel better — more in control. In reality, your husband feels the pressure and responsibility of married life very heavily.’
This was a revelation to her. An answer at last. Her husband was suffering, damaged, kicking out like a wounded animal against trauma and pain. Yet he’d kept everything hidden from her.
Mum was overwhelmed with compassion. She raced home and told Joe what the GP had said, and offered to help lift some of the stresses of life from his shoulders.
Today, my mother shakes her head at her naivety. ‘Of course, he hit the roof. He was absolutely furious that the doctor had dared to reveal what was on his record.
‘We never talked about it after that. not ever.’
Mum wasn’t the only one who had to live with Dad’s moods. His neurosis and melancholy was a miasma that his five children inhaled from their earliest perception. Sometimes you could taste it in the air like acrid smoke.
We’d tip-toe around the chair where he dozed, following a long shift at a Liverpool copper factory, hoping he wouldn’t wake. When he was awake, we’d confine our exchanges to careful pleasantries.
He wasn’t violent. He didn’t get drunk or fly into rages. He was more of a brooding cloud.
Meals without him were full of raucous laughter, inane argument, unfinished sentences, clannish conversation. But when he was there, it was all tight- chested bonhomie and watchful glances.
Saddest of all were the times when he tried to break through the fog and join in the family laughter. The effort was heartbreaking. DAD
had been just a boy, barely 20, when he went to war. What he went through in June 1944 would go on to affect him — and all his relationships — for the rest of his life. It would suffocate his marriage and bleach the colour from our childhood.
As a member of a specialised amphibious assault unit, his mission on the D-Day invasion of normandy was to land near the village of Arromanches-les-Bains and set up a radio-signal station to coordinate the naval shelling of enemy positions before the main Army arrived.
The Germans had placed formidable obstructions on the sand and were dug in to repel any assault. As Dad’s commanding officer told his men bluntly, it was a suicide mission. Their lives were dispensable.
Finally the ramp went down and Joe McGann was thrust into hell. The landing craft had beached too far out, so the commandos were jumping off the ramp into ten feet of bullet-pierced water.
Dad watched his friends drown. Then he scrambled to the shore and crouched for dear life behind a German beach obstacle, before getting to his feet and zigzagging his way up that beach.
By the time he reached the safety of the sea wall, his radio had been shot to pieces, so he joined some other men who were clearing a German defensive position of enemy troops.
everything was going to plan until a German soldier threw a stick grenade over the wall. My father saw it too late and the grenade exploded, piercing his flesh with shrapnel in 50 places.
He fell to the sand, critically wounded, and shivered for hours on the blood- soaked sand. The next thing he remembered was waking up in Leicester Infirmary.
It was after he recovered that he learned the military doctors had written a two-word diagnosis on his medical record: anxiety neurosis. Today, it would be known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
My father regarded his diagnosis as a badge of shame. In his mind, it tarnished the brave service he’d given and the medals he received.
The trauma ate away at his peace. He’d survived but remained wounded. He moved back to his parents’ tenement in Liverpool and began working in a factory.
By his late 20s, Dad was still a bachelor. Then one day he struck up a friendship in a pub with a docker from the adjoining tenement estate. Soon, he was engaged to the docker’s pretty, extrovert daughter, Rose Green. But she moved away to join the Army and eventually married someone else.
Years went by before Joe decided to ask out her younger sister, Clare. He was much older than she was, but she liked him: he seemed fatherly and respectable, and he shared her love of learning.
At 20, Clare felt she was too young to get married, but Joe, then 31, was in a hurry. So on September 29, 1956, they were wed at St Anne’s Church in Overbury Street, a short walk from the tenements where they lived. MY MOTHeR is now 81 years old, and as fit and sharp as I’d ever wish to be at her age.
For the first time, I ask her about her wedding night. She takes a breath, searching for the right word. ‘It was … fraught,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know anything. I was expecting him to show me the ropes. He was an older man. A man of the world.
‘ But he didn’t have any technique: any way of being tender, or of making you feel loved. It wasn’t enjoyable. He put his arm around me but there were no words of reassurance.
‘He probably felt pretty terrible himself. It was hard for us both.’
Yet what my father lacked in tenderness and technique, he made up for in fertility. My mum became pregnant almost immediately.
‘When I missed my period, I went to the doctor,’ she tells me. ‘ He confirmed it, and then told me to come back at six months. no scans, no checks, nothing.
‘Looking back, I should have been seen properly before then, but I didn’t know any better. It might have changed things.’ As her pregnancy progressed through its early months, her bump grew unusually large.
By the end of the fifth month she could no longer sleep, so to avoid disturbing her husband she started spending the night in an armchair. AFTeR
six nights in the chair, she was suffering badly from sleep deprivation, slurring her words and barely conscious.
The doctor was called. He sent her to the local maternity hospital, where an X-ray confirmed she was having twins. Soon afterwards, Mum went into labour. She was only 26 weeks’ pregnant.
When the babies came, they were just 3lb each. She waited for their cries, but the cries didn’t come.
The pain on Mum’s face is fresh
and raw. ‘I saw one of them. I saw his little leg moving in the incubator. It must have been John.’
The baby’s movement soon stopped. Finally, a nurse turned to her and said: ‘ I’m sorry. Your babies died. They were too small.’
Two boys. One stillborn, the other hanging on for a few brief minutes. The little corpses were quickly whisked away. My mum never saw them again.
‘That was it. I didn’t touch them. I never got to hold them. I never even got to see their faces.’
It had been just eight months since their wedding day. In that short time, all Mum’s hopes for joy had arrived stillborn.
In those days, there were no special places in the graveyard for infants, no specific services in church, and no counselling — even if Dad had been the type of man to request it.
he had to ask for permission to place his dead babies in the coffin of someone recently deceased. So the twins were sent to a public grave in Anfield Cemetery, and Dad cleared the flat of baby clothes. After that, he never spoke of them. Ever.
he was doing what he’d always done: burying pain and love and sensitivity beneath a straightbacked, stiff-lipped carapace.
By the time Mum got home, the expectation was that she should put her tragic loss behind her. But she was numb.
‘I wasn’t in floods of tears,’ she said. ‘I was broken. So much had happened. I was trapped. I felt that nobody understood or cared.
‘I was trapped in this flat with a man who shut his mind down; retreated into doing his job, doing his duty, while I was supposed to get on with doing mine. I didn’t know what to do.’
Sex remained ‘fraught’. And Joe insisted that she should stay home and look after him, rather than return to the job she’d been happily doing for eight years at Littlewoods Football Pools.
By that September, my mother could take no more. She went to see her doctor for a routine visit and burst into tears. Once started, the tears wouldn’t stop. Referred to a psychiatrist, Mum was told that she was severely depressed and would need to have electric shock therapy if she didn’t improve within three months.
Yet she never did have it — because a month later she was pregnant with my brother Joe.
And when Joe was born, something wonderful happened. My mum finally got to hold her own child in her arms — and the effect on her was utterly life-changing.
Even now, she still can’t speak of it without the joy transforming her face: ‘I became a mother. It was amazing!’
As she stared into the clear blue of my big brother’s eyes, the clouds in her life were suddenly obliterated by sunlight: a love that burned like fire in her veins. Everything became possible. ThE
months following Joe’s birth were probably the happiest in their marriage. The conformity that my father required in order to ease his anxieties seemed to be in place.
he was the Victorian patriarch with his own son and a wife who was a stay-at-home mother. he was finally in control. The terrible sounds of that French beach were temporarily quelled.
Meanwhile, my mum burned with a new purpose. her children. She would go on to pour all of her love and fire into her four sons and one daughter. They would be McGanns — but moulded in the image of Clare Green.
With her encouragement, all five of us ended up passing our 11-plus and being educated in faith-based state grammar schools. And it’s no exaggeration to say that our education was the single decisive factor that transformed our family’s fortunes. Without it, we’d never have been able to become actors who could dissect a script or build a character. Back at home, however, the happy days didn’t last. My father’s brooding depression and restless anxiety returned. he started endlessly criticising Mum, finding fault with the smallest things.
She learned to negotiate his black moods for our benefit. But after she’d seen his medical file and he’d refused to discuss his problems, her relationship with him deteriorated further.
My mother learned to grow from the pains she endured. My father never could. Eventually, Mum asked for a separation, but Dad refused to leave. It was therefore with the utmost pain that she saw a solicitor and filed for divorce.
Still my dad refused to go, and so she was forced to take out an injunction. Only then did Dad, shattered by the results of his own inflexibility, move back in with his brother and sister. DAD’S years of melancholy and inflexible duty delivered an unexpected consolation prize. he found himself the father of a family of ‘celebrity’ acting brothers.
Proudly, he took torn-out press clippings about us to his local church club to show his fellow snooker players. We were ‘Joe McGann’s lads’. Local boys made good. his surname was now pasted across headlines and glowed in theatrical neon.
Back home, he and Mum had re- established polite relations after we’d all moved away. he never swallowed quite enough pride to concede he’d been wrong, but the regret he experienced during the years of separation had softened his stubbornness.
Eventually, my mum invited him to move back in with her. The war was over.
She simply declared the divorce void. No legal papers necessary. She invited my father back home one day, and he came. When we arrived from London one day on a visit, Dad was sitting in his old chair, as if nothing had happened.
Asked how she explained her unorthodox marital status to the world, Mum just shrugged. ‘The Catholic Church doesn’t recognise divorce,’ she said, ‘so we’re still married in the eyes of God.’
ADAPTED from Flesh And Blood: A History Of My Family In Seven Maladies, by Stephen McGann, published by Simon & Schuster on July 27 at £20. ©Stephen McGann, 2017. To buy a copy for £14 (valid to July 22, 2017) call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk. P&P is free on orders over £15