Home life
Bottling it up
Alice Thomas Ellis
Ihave been compiling a little list of Things We Were Not Told. I'm not think- ing about the things our leaders do not see fit to inform us of. I don't care about that at the moment. I'm thinking of things like birth and death, and how, after all the years Homo sapiens has been around, these events still take us by surprise. I didn't know childbirth was going to be like that, and while I always knew with every thread of my being that the death of a child was the worst that could happen I had no idea of the extraordinary dimensions, the varieties of anguish, that it could induce.
Caroline was listening to a Leading Clergyman the other day. He was offering consolation to the relations of the victims of a disaster, and he assured them that some of them might mourn for even a year. He didn't tell them that they might well go on grieving for as long as life is long. Perhaps no one had told him, and he didn't know. I've heard people rabbiting on about the stages of grief and saying that in the end we get over it. They sort of chop it up into three sections and by the time you get to the last one you're supposed to be all right. I don't know how they figured that out, but it isn't true.
The anniversary of a death came round again the other week like a cyclical tiger back to claw a bit more off one. One of the things I should be told frequently is how stupid I am. With idiot craftiness I had decided to foil him by being away from home and refusing to acknowledge the date; with many a merry quip and a light-hearted laugh I tripped around, hither and yon, imagining I was hidden• in the undergrowth and he wouldn't be able to find me. Two days later I woke up saying to Someone, 'Oh my God, I'm a conduit.' He said drowsily, 'I thought you were going to say you were a condom,' and that cheered me up for a while. Nobody can say con . . . anything these days without people assuming they're going to say that word. It's tough on the Tories. The cheer- fulness wore off. I felt exactly like a very small drain trying to contain a furious storm. I could almost hear cracking.
Beryl came round and I explained to her that I now felt like a milk bottle, vastly over-full of some corrosive that was about to overflow and flood the kitchen. So she rang a doctor, and that was a waste of time. He wanted to know what was wrong — and you try telling a doctor you feel like a milk bottle. All professionals are the same lawyers, architects, medicos — you have to tell them what you want them to do. I suggested hopefully to this doctor that he might kill me, but he found that facetious and got ratty. He wanted to hear that I had a localised pain in the third metatarsal of the left foot or had been visited by a sudden spasm of endogenous depression (or reactive — you pays your money and you takes your choice) and if not prevented was going out to put myself under a passing truck. But one of the things I know without being told is that suicide is a great mistake and utterly forbidden, so I said merely that, if I could die of wanting to, I would now; and he said irritatedly that that was very poetic. Oh God. Anyway it wasn't depression. I know all about depression and this was different. This was like being a milk bottle used for a purpose for which it was neither designed nor sufficient. Then the quack said, very beautifully, that he had to go and care for a sick child, so I apologised profusely and got off the line. No wonder the poor sods so often take to drink.
I think I'll read some of the Prophets. They tended to a fairly glum view of matters, and one of them — probably Jeremiah — clearly suffered from some- thing much worse than endogenous de- pression. He was way off his head. I'm not going to take much heed of what they have to tell me — none of them ever said he felt like a milk bottle, so I can't relate to them — but when I'm really low I don't want to read P. G. Wodehouse. When I'm really, really low only Strindberg makes me laugh. The Father once had me rolling round in hysterics. Maybe I'm incorrigible and peo- ple have been trying to tell me things for ages. Perhaps it's just that I haven't been listening.
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