How I tamed the fear that might have split my mind
In this exclusive extract from his new memoir, Melvyn Bragg recalls the psychological ordeal he suffered as a teenager
I can’t remember when it began to happen. I was about 13. There was no severe illness to start it off, no injury to my head, no violence on any front. For some time I was able to keep it at bay. Then it became aggressive. In the early days it showed itself when I was alone, in bed. In the top right-hand corner of that narrow bedroom there would be a light. Distinctive. A reflection of nothing. The light was a thing in itself.
It was my mind. From whatever cause, the core that makes you know that you are you and what you are had slipped out of me. It had become the light in the corner of the room when I was in bed in the dark. My body felt without life. I felt that it would be dangerous to do anything because I had not the slightest idea of what might be happening, save that I had to concentrate everything I had on that small light and try to get it back in my head. All I can truthfully report is that there had to be a connection between the light and what had been me, otherwise… It was terrifying.
This was when the pub [below the family’s flat and run by Melvyn’s father] had closed. My parents had gone to bed. Or, much, much worse, had decided to go for a stroll if the evening was still warm. The front door banged shut, and until [the lodger] Andrew came in from a night shift – which sometimes would be just after six o’clock in the morning – I was pinioned to my bed and transfixed by that light in the corner.
I could not and never did cry out. There was the sense of a most powerful spell that must not be broken, least of all by my voice. And to whom could I explain it? My father and mother? Unthinkable. I could find no words. Friends? Teachers? The church, the AYPA [youth club], the Scouts? No, no, no. It would appear trivial and be made a joke of – and me made a fool of.
It got worse. On my way to school [in Wigton, Cumbria], when I passed the double-stretch of windows of Johnson’s, or Redmayne’s shop, and glanced in, my mind would eject itself from my head and I would see the reflection of me as the real me and have to wrench myself away. Worse if I caught my face in the mirror when I was cleaning my teeth or washing. Worst of all when, over many months, this disassociation from myself began to creep into the classroom. How could I hide what I was feeling? It sucked out my energy.
I began to behave badly at school. Swore. Said crap, bloody, even bugger. Was sent out several times and ended up in the headmaster’s study, where I was threatened with expulsion.
That summer I began to walk out of the town. I could walk for two or three miles, beyond Old Carlisle, into narrow roads that netted the lower fells, like the drystone walls higher up, and all would be well until I caught the sound of my breath.
I felt that I did not know how breathing worked or whether it would keep working; it was just a sound and yet I had to keep doing this breathing. It became too difficult – as if I had forgotten how to do it and had to learn again. To breathe. The panic was there and I was solitary in the country without a house in sight.
Sometimes I ran to shake off the fear. It pursued me, but eventually it would dissolve. And, I think, though this is where memories can be unreliable, I remember my father giving me more to do in the pub. In the mornings helping to set it up, in the early evenings to offer the minimal help needed in the bar, and sometimes taking me along to the hound trails. I suppose I am saying I sensed that he was keeping an eye on me.
I was changing – the on-creeping of hormones, shifting gear. There could have been some of that. I think there was some self-pressure to become different, to make something else of myself. And when I went back to school for the autumn term, in my first pair of long trousers, I knew I had to make a new life, wherever I could find it.
Over the next two years, two teachers – the head of history, Mr James, and the headmaster, Mr Stowe – gave me purpose. They sparked an interest and then a passion for learning, which began to block out fear.
Mr James had been brought up in Madagascar, one of the seven children of a Congregationalist missionary. Like his brothers, he was sent to an English Congregational boarding school when he was 12: he did not see his parents again until he was in his early twenties. He won a place at Wadham College, Oxford, volunteered for the RAF after his first year, became a Spitfire pilot specialising in reconnoitring behind enemy lines, returned to Oxford to continue his degree, and a few years later landed up in Wigton, married. He was dedicated to converting to high scholarship what he saw as largely working-class and under-privileged children. This became his mission.
Mr Stowe arrived as headmaster just before Mr James. He was a Methodist, son of a Methodist preacher, and marched – crunch, crunch on the gravel, left, right – from the schoolhouse to the main school building with an almost show-off briskness. He had a gift for organisation, a taste for urging on effort, and a determination to “get the
‘Even now, 67 years on, I can go into a blind panic before making a speech or doing a programme’
best” out of the pupils, some of whose fathers and mothers he had been at school with.
By the time I reached the sixth form, work became something between a drug and a pleasure. This was the way to a different self. Slowly it healed the fracture that had threatened to splinter my mind. It kept the fear at bay. And when, a few years later, I received my A-level results, they were good and Mr James urged me to try for Oxford.
As time has passed and life filled up, the light in the corner has dimmed but has not died. Even now, 67 years on from that adolescent experience, I can go into what can accurately be described as a spasm, a wipeout of memory, a “blind panic” before making a speech, before doing a programme, or just, worst of all, stall for no reason at all and have to find a solitary small physical space, stay there for five or 10 minutes until what is trying to resurface and wreck things somehow passes on, or is pushed away.
There can be no complaints. Many people have had so much worse and come through. On the graphs of pain and misery, it scarcely registers. But for me – you speak as you find.
Whatever happened, and I am still not quite sure, the consequences of the breakdown shifted me into a new world.