My mother and her mental illness.
When I was nineteen I was hospitalised in the
Blue Mountains Hospital with rheumatic fever. Really!! Fortunately, unlike
Robbie Burns, I survived. While I was hospitalised my aunty Mary visited me.
She put a parcel on my bed. It was the first instalment of her collection of
Georgette Heyer novels. I have been hooked ever since.
How did I contract rheumatic fever, I don’t hear you asking?
Let me tell you anyway. A few months before I was in hospital, my father was
contacted by his mother. My grandmother told him that she had been contacted by
Social Services to say that my mother was trying to get in touch with her three
daughters. At that stage we were, I think, 18, 16 and 12. She hadn’t seen us for ten
years!! All those promises my father made to his young daughters to see their
mother regularly after he had left her in a mental institution in Brisbane were
not fulfilled.
Now she was in Austinmer in the New South Wales South Coast.
My sisters and I caught the train from Katoomba to Central Station and then
from there to Austinmer. I wore a thick woollen suit, I already had a sore
throat and we arrived in Austinmer in the pouring rain.
We walked through the rain to her boarding house. It was a
very emotional occasion but I don’t remember much about the first time we saw
her a few months earlier for what seemed like the first time. I remember that
she really didn’t know who we were even when we were standing right in front of
her. On that first occasion my aunty Mary was with us and she assured our
mother that we were her daughters. We
were nervous and anxious but not nearly as much as she was. My mother doesn’t
cry often but she cried that day.
When the three of us arrived on this particular occasion in
May she was at the front door where she had obviously being watching
vigilantly, very much hoping that the weather had not prevented us from
coming. Having only a room in a boarding
house didn’t give her much scope to cook for us as she would have liked, to
welcome us into a home, but I remember that she did have a home-made cake so
she must have been allowed to use the kitchen. I remember that her landlady was very kind to
her.
My mother awakens a degree of kindness towards her in nearly
everyone who meets her. I don’t think I’ve met a person who doesn’t like her. Lord knows, as any of you who live with a
mentally ill person knows, she wasn’t, isn’t, always easy to cope with.
My mother’s story, briefly, is that she and her two younger
brothers were removed from their parent’s care in Broken Hill. They were taken
to a foster home in Guildford, Sydney. My mother was twelve and was considered
too old to be fostered while both of her brothers were taken by good families.
She told me something of her anguish at losing them because she was their older
sister and she felt responsible for them. It was a real wrench and , of course,
she was to be left all alone.
Mum’s schizophrenia
was well and truly apparent by the time she married my father when she was 23.
One of her brothers, Billy, was mentally challenged. That’s all I know. The
other one, Ken, became an accountant and
lived in Melbourne. Unfortunately, he appears to have completely wiped his
older sister from his life. He knows she
married my father, and our family name is rather uncommon, but he has never
made the slightest attempt to find her. Perhaps there is a good reason. She has asked me to trace him and I
have tried a couple of times but her family name is not all that unusual. I
didn’t like to disappoint her but I
haven’t met with any success.
Back to the rheumatic fever. Because I was in that thick woollen
suit all day, and believe me it was soaking wet , and I had a sore throat, when
I returned home from Austinmer to Woodford I was already sick. The trip took place on a Saturday. By
Monday morning I felt as if I had being run over by a steam roller. I had a
raging temperature and every bone in my body just ached. If it wasn’t for the
pain I would have thought I was paralysed because I couldn’t move. Nor could I
imagine what could possibly have happened to me overnight to occasion such
pain. A trip to the doctor, a throat swap (of a throat so sore I could barely
open my mouth) and a blood test and I was in hospital for the next five weeks,
not allowed out of my bed, and visited by interns from Sydney to pock and prod
at this patient with rheumatic fever at the ripe old age of 19 – which is
apparently quite old to be contracting this illness so there is no sarcasm
here.
The Elizabeth of my novel is modelled on my mother, who is at
heart kind and generous and accepting
and patient. She is intelligent, well-read and she recites whole passages that interest her by heart. She is fanatical about good health, exercise, good food. I have
not lived with her since I was seven years of age and anything I know of these
things I learned before then.
All of this is wonderfully described
but it is the love story between Dortchen and Wilhelm which has been so
beautifully told and imagined in ‘The Wild Girl’. This is truly gorgeous, turn
the page stuff with lovely little snippets of the tales Dortchen told Wilhelm
and which went to make up some of the Grimms Brothers Fairy Tales we grew up with. Like Wilhelm,
Forsyth believes that the truth has to be exposed and it is her portrayal of
some ugly experiences as the cause of the barriers between Dortchen and Wilhelm
that kept me reading well into the night and picking it up again a mere few
hours later. 
