16 JILL MOLYNEUX

 
JILL MOLYNEUX
 
C905/16/01-05/VHS 01-02
Original on DVCPro
Copy on VHS

Interviewed by Judy Mead
Camera by Faye

Transcribed by Julie Sharman
December 1999/January 2000

`So Jill, can you tell me a bit about your earliest memories… where you were born?’

`My earliest memory is… very early because I’ve always… I have at different times, made efforts to… to trace back memories but… [pause] I think… it’s… umm… was at sixteen months… [pause] or maybe one even earlier. I thought… I was… I know I was born in Devon, in Torbay Hospital… [pause]… I… I don’t know if it was a difficult birth but according to my mother it was a very painful one. [Pause] And from what she said, it’s… it would be… more time [???], I think it was quite a long labour… but she was thirty two, and had been married for ten years and… as my father put it, as he kept a copy of all the many letters… typewritten letters he wrote, they’d had a couple of scares but nothing like this. Umm… she… ahh… she breast fed me for a couple of months until she had breast abscesses, but she didn’t enjoy breastfeeding, she said it made her feel like a cow. Umm… and also, I think she felt her breasts were purely for sexual purposes, you know, from choice, and… her life was saved by the forerunner of antibiotics M and D [???].’

`[Inaudible]?’

`Antibiotics M and D, and…’

`[Inaudible]’

`M and D it was called. It was the forerunner of antibiotics and it was new at the time, and… I was subsequently bottle fed and thrived. I have a very early memory, and I… whether this was prompted at some time in the intervening period, I don’t know… of my… of a little girl who was… come in with her father, were in the garden and they gave me a panda to play with, a black and white panda, and… I think I would be about nine or ten months… umm… when they go, naturally enough, umm… they take it back again, and I’m very bereft, ‘cause having taken it as a gift, I think, or as one could possibly put it in that… I mean it’s… and the… we have… someone then who’s called the maid, and she’s really… [inaudible] she’s feeling incensed about this [laughs], and making the baby cry sort of thing, and I don’t remember her at all otherwise. I’ve tried to remember… and sometimes think, who’s this person with the red hair? There’s no photograph… umm… and anyway, she would have left shortly afterwards because we was declared the day off tomorrow… the day of my first birthday, and… people stopped having… people working for them thank goodness and… the most memory I have is of my father coming on leave when I was… he saw me for the first time when I was sixteen months old and he told… he taught me a dirty nursery rhyme which I was not to tell my grandmother and mother until after he’d gone, which I did tell them… fortunately they found it… a bit shocking but funny I think. It was…

`Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John
Went to bed with his dirty nick nicks on,
One shoe off and one shoe on,
Diddle diddle dumpling my son John.’

…and I was meant to say this when I was on the pot, and… this is a… kind of harbinger of things to come. [Pause] They said… that’s when… and I have memories of… of the case, and of course I have the… I have… there are photographs and I even went back for it all though… the present owners very reluctantly showed me part of the garden, but I remember the garden… the grass and flowers and whatever, and my grandmother on… and my grandfather and my dog. I had little dog… tiny little dog, which I threw in the [inaudible] [laughs] and a… and a… and a bigger Airedale, and… I remember my grandfather’s death. I was two then. I remember… I don’t know if I remember… ‘cause I thought… he had one of those… heart attacks where people die very quickly, and apparently he couldn’t get hold of the doctor, and he died, and the heart… he… he was on the bed and, it was a bungalow, the whole thing, and… I sort of remember this… his pallor and I remember being kind of shooed out of the room by… and that was, obviously the last time I saw him.’

`Did he live with you?’

`We lived in their house… in their home. My grand… my grandparents’ home… my mother’s parents’ home. ‘Cause my father was in the Navy and his… and then he was… you know, frequently used to go on very long things, even before the war, and this was, what do they call it? Umm… the early part of war where actually nothing happened, but they were sort of at war. He was in the Persian Gulf I think. Anyway, umm… after that, they found… I now know the full story, but the… I didn’t know until relatively recently, when my cousin told me… oh, when he died, it turned out he’d been gambling… he’d been gambling all his money on bucket shops or whatever you call them, and there wasn’t any, and… but the house wasn’t… he hadn’t sort of mortgaged the house or whatever you did, but they didn’t have enough money to keep it up and… I remember he told me all kinds of stories about how the German paras were dropping bombs on the [inaudible] and the windows being blown out, the dog going mad and had to be put down and anyway, we went to stay with my… aunt in Yorkshire, and… umm… that became a permanent… thing, but…’

`Was that just you and your mother?’

`Just me and my mother and grandmother, who was still alive, and she became seriously ill while we were there and… in so far as I’ve ever had any explanation about why we left, it was later. I’m sure I didn’t have to know at the time, it wasn’t a kind of family where everybody gave any… well, certainly not my mother gave any explanation to children, or indeed took them much into account at all. [Pause] What happened then? Well, I saw this nursing my grandma because she was more and more ill, and my mother… of presumably… packing up the house and so on and then she was off to see my father and… and we lived in my aunt’s house, well it was her partner’s house. They weren’t… he was… he was a very nice man. Very nice man, but he died and he was very nice to me, even though my mum had done her best to sort of terrify me of him, and… he… but… he became ill and we had to move out in the same village, so it was my mother and grandmother, very ill, and me, in a very small place in this village… and, there again he died, but I was never… told he’d died. I just didn’t see him ever again after that… and then… my grandmother died, and the same thing happened… and I found it, it was my cousin was with her when she died, who’s only eighteen, and… she was in the WAAF, and although she had seen planes crashing on the runways and so on, she’d never sort of sat by somebody dying, and while my mother was off somewhere meeting my father, and I was dumped at somewhere else… and the child there told me, that my grandmother had died, but… you know, I knew this child you know, with several other things and I just hoped that she was lying, ‘cause she often did at… well, you know, not lying exactly, you know children… and when my mother did come back, there again she never said anything, and she… it wasn’t until I sort of tentatively said… I wouldn’t dare say anything ‘cause I thought she’d upset her, and tentatively I said, “I miss my grandmother” and then she thought that I… she’d… been thinking that I’d been very hard because I hadn’t been showing any distress about my grandmother’s death, but in fact… [pause] to spare her feelings really, and I was kind of just exploring by… by saying that there’s… telling everyone that she was dead and… anyway… [pause]. On the whole, the time in Yorkshire wasn’t too bad. I had lots of friends, we all went to the same village school. My Uncle Joe, when he… was… and his… sort of… were very, very nice to me… umm. But, obviously again it’s like a [inaudible] it… you play out… sort of be put out to the play most of the day really.’

`Were you the only child then?’

`I was the only child. I was the only child from my family, but if there… people who lived in the road I lived, you know, I was probably the youngest at… well, apart from one, he didn’t sort of… was too young to play with then… a [inaudible]… and so… [pause]…’

`You were saying you went to the…?’ [both talking together]

`And besides it was war time, I mean… much worse happened to much… many more kids they were… sort of shunted off as evacuees or whatever, and their parents would persuade them they’d be better off like that and so on and so on, and some of them were lucky. I never met one that was lucky yet. I just didn’t… always met the ones that said “I was evacuated”, you know… and… it was the sort of experience at the times that you didn’t pay much regard to children anyway, and… but I had a very… I had a very nice experience having my tonsils out… umm… when I was about five.. and I was very ill afterwards… for ages… but I… got better and… and I got older and I knew my way round the village.’

`What was the name of the village?’

`Eldon (??) … Eldon…’

`And where’s that near…?’

`Near Shipley in Yorkshire. [Both talking together] It’s sort of on the edge of the Moors...’

`Would you say that your family… were they sort of working class or middle class or how would you describe them?’

`They certainly thought they were middle class [laughs]… and… they were middle class I guess. You know… ok… my father was… he… he went into the Navy as a mid-shipman when he was fifteen, and that’s another long story, but he was a Naval Officer after… just a bit, and they were… although they were… weren’t paid very much at that level… well I think he… you had to work your way through but you were sort of classed differently, you know, if you weren’t that brilliant… and it was all, you know, you did so many years, then you became this, and you did so many and all of that, and he ended up as a… a Lieutenant… which is… a… like… I suppose… I read that it was the equivalent of a Lieutenant Commander nowadays, but… and it’s also… you’re responsible for like the ship working so it’s a heavy sort of thing, and in the Navy, you know, it’s… fair… and I think he was very good at it actually… all that engineering business, ‘cause I read… he kept records of everything, and I’ve only just recently sort of finished reading them all ‘cause I just couldn’t face most of them, but I have read engineering reports of his, which sounded really quite accomplished and… and professional, and then sort of the tone was sort of human as well [???]… Anyway…’

`The tone was human did you say?’

`Yes, yeah. So there was that side… and… [pause]. My mother, she was very snobbish indeed but that doesn’t make you middle class. Of course, but… it is… like the house my grandparents had is really, it’s a beautiful house, with grounds and gardens, what have you, and before that he was a… he was a… a jeweller at some stage and then he was a farmer, because they told him the stuff you… in other jewellers for some reason something was affecting his lungs, but in so far as he could do that, you know, go from one to the other, and… and I knew he was also a landlord ‘cause I found out previously he sent my aunt rent collecting. He was a slum landlord in Leeds, and… so yes, yes…’

`That was his grandfather was it?’

`No, no it’s my grandfather that I was very fond of, and…’

`Did your mother work, or…?’

`No, she never worked… though… [pause]. One period when she was really off my father and was moaning about him constantly when I was about eight or nine I suppose, she would sort of go into “Oh, I found out I’ve been trained for something and so so…” but my aunt, who was widowed after three years… she went and had a child, she went and… and you know she… she became a manageress. It was possible… of hotels and stuff like that, rather than going back to being, as she said, a skivvy for like her father and collecting the rents and stuff like that. [Pause] Economically… it didn’t… economically they were middle class, but lower middle class I would say really though they fancied themselves as middle or upper middle class, and…’

`And is that how the area was in general or…?’

`Where…? Oh no, no, in Yorkshire my… my aunt’s partner was a self made millionaire. He did come from really… he was reputedly… reputedly was very good to his workers though how would I know? In a… but where he came from was back to back in… Bradford, that sort of… the house… not exactly back to back but like one step up… but of course he had plenty of money, but he and… I… I don’t know. My mother always… you know… looked down her nose at him… and suggested that he was never accepted you know, among his… he can, you know, among the sort of… err… he… he had… I mean it’s really… he spent his money and he was sort of flash. He had three cars and you know, fancy cars, and he… he sort of rented this more stately home place in Cumberland and… and well… he spent his money. He was Freemason and he’d give the donations to the charitable… but I just think he was a… as for what kind of employer he was, I did go to the mill sometimes but it’s hard to remember. [Pause] I sensed something, you know, I sensed like people working… the women working there were not particularly pre-disposed toward me, but why should they be? You know, they… also I was only like three or something, or four. They wouldn’t… you know people mouthed over their looms. They used to use silent speech to one another, when they were working the looms. The looms made such a noise, such a racket, that the women working them, they used to speak silently to one another, they lip-read like… I forget, yeah, more or less. I remember that and I remember going down this shoot… umm… onto an enormous wool sack, which is quite a shock… kind of a jarring, ‘cause you… it’s very fast, and… [pause] there is a contradiction here because in later life I would not hobnob you know, with mill owners [laughs] but never the less I was three and four, he was a really, big, jolly, expansive, generous man, as far as I’m… was concerned, and I guess as far as my aunt was concerned… umm… and my cousin says no she didn’t. My mother was always like, “Oh my cousin’s always looked down on us ‘cause like after all, you know, and how her parents weren’t married and she went to boarding school and this and that…”, and my cousin says no, she did join like the WAAF to get away from home… we all got away from home. She didn’t… doesn’t seem to feel at all sort of bitter towards him and she’s told me a lot about the family that I never knew, and would never have known, certainly from my mother. Some of the rest of… [pause]… a couple of her brothers did well as they say, but I hardly saw them, and… and I didn’t even know she had a third brother until I was an adult, because he left his wife who… and children, and… for some other woman, and… and like he was non-existent within the fam… but there again his wife, she worked as a shop assistant, and eventually she was a buyer and, you know, she did very well, independently speaking, so… it’s a really weird family and it was really weird and difficult to try and get any… any information about it, and I think I once heard Anthony Clare say that his mother kept her name… she was a very… by kind of looking down on the minute… minute gradations between her and knowing that it was a question of those perhaps she considered her inferiors and looking up to the married…sort of perhaps… superior there where she should really be, and I thought that is my mother exactly, and… it was really sad, what a life!… but they… but she and my father were obsessed with each other and… I think they certainly shouldn’t have had a child, ‘cause there wasn’t room for one really, and… and he… there’s a letter written before I was born where he says very, very plainly that he definitely doesn’t want a child, he wants his wife all to himself and… and it’s really bad news [laughs], and I guess that’s how it always was for him.’

`Was he younger or older than your mother?’

`Four years older than my mother.’

`So do you think they chose to?’

`No, I think she chose to, but he probably knew that war was coming, so she’d… or… or, she felt it was an acquisition that which was time she had. She did say, when he had… he was a little bitter straighter than her about giving answers and… one time he said to me, “Well, nothing was the same after you were born”, and I said, well that’s… I think I was seven, but he said… and she said, “Did he tell you that?” and… and… [pause] umm… that sort of confirmed the matter pretty well, but… [pause]… I don’t know why she decided to have a child after… ten years, I mean, of course they’d have these long separations and when they did meet they’d become totally sort of you know, taking up with my mother. [Pause]… That’s what he wanted, but I don’t suppose I was responsible for all the changes in their life, because the war came along and that in itself, you know, brought a lot of changes…’

`But you were made to believe that you… were in the way almost it sounds?’

`Yes, yes. Definitely so… not so much before… [pause] well I think we must have moved to Portsmouth in about 1947, something like that, and they bought a house here… [pause], and… and really up to that point, in a way, in Yorkshire, life had just been life. It was two people kept dying off, and there were… there were bad events like the [inaudible], you know, getting it all or what have you… at the same time you know, it was quite… bearable, but it got to be… once he came home, it was on the very difficult and unbearable side… but he had to be born (?), so there we go…’

`Do you remember him leaving to go to war, your father?’

`Umm… well… not only in the war… I remember him… coming on leave and going, coming on leave and going, maybe three times, that was all in Devon, and then once in Yorkshire, and it was about a very short time, and [inaudible] the transport broke down and he had to take him back to his ship or whatever, and… he was kind of panicking, “Oh my God, I’ll be shot” and all this… and my mother was so contemptuous of him. I was sorry for him. I really felt sorry for him, and he’d spent the day making… playing in the sand pit, well they were sand bags actually, which I wasn’t allowed to play in [laughs], well he’d made this sort of elaborate thing with this like [inaudible] paths and the train going round and… it was all coming through it, and I still wasn’t meant to play with it but it was very nice and then there was all this panic, and my mother organised some sort of transport for him to get back when he was meant to get back, and she was so kind of scathing that I felt quite sorry for him.’

`What was she scathing about?’

`Oh that he panicked, was panicking, but he was frightened, I suppose… if he was frightened. I dare say… oh… or he… or just that he was showing emotion perhaps. I don’t know what it was, I mean I didn’t witness it all. And another time he came back in Yorkshire, I know I didn’t want him to go to the loo with me, but otherwise he… I… well he took me to Leeds and I quite liked… you know, it was quite all right. And then we were in Scotland after VEJ, was it? Yes, the first one, you know, ended the war in Europe and they still had to go out to the Pacific, so I remember standing on the balcony waving blankets from Glenoch [ph] or somewhere, the… the sort of little convoy was on the horizon. But everybody knew it was really… or everybody felt… or behaving as if they felt, it was all over, and… [pause], the previous day in the dockyard and… and there was a captain had me up on the bridge giving orders on the voice pipe to take them from Newcastle to South Shields and he was always very nice to me. He was extremely nice, and my… my parents would explain this by saying “Oh, he always wanted a daughter, it’s embarrassing isn’t it really?” and all this, but…’

`Who was he again?’

`The Captain of the Destroyer, my father…’

`But he wasn’t a relative?’

`No, no. [Pause] And the dockyard workers were kind of cheering everything and we had a… there was a signal out to the ships saying please would the people stop [inaudible] themselves, because it was two days before the official announcement and… because it was stopping people working in the dockyard and… and they just ignored it and…’

`Two days before the official announcement of…?’

`VE Day… and they went off and they got drunk, which was quite unusual for… very unusual for my parents, and… [pause] and then, you know, the… ok, and they still had to go the next day and I asked like “Why do you have to go if the war’s over?”, and “Ah well, you know…”, but still didn’t really understand it all… the… it was the War in Europe and not the war in the Far East, but in fact I don’t think they ever got to [sneeze in background] sorry… they didn’t have to… they never actually got to the conflict in the Far East. So after that we were in Portsmouth, and…’

`What age were you when you went there?’

`Umm… oh [sighs] about eight I think. By the time we got into the house and so on…’

`Do you remember that quite clearly, moving and…?’

`Oh yeah, one thing I remember very clearly is… and there was… my mother wasn’t terribly close to the house, and… subsequently she’d always say that when father had said they only had to be there for three years and then they’d leave and what have you, but this old Victoria wallpaper, it had to come off according to her but I quite liked it… birds and leaves and what have you, and… and she was papering it all. It was hard to get things at that time, anything, wallpaper, what have you, furnishings, and I came through the house with a fountain pen, and I didn’t know, but I must have… it had gone all over this wallpaper she’d done, and she went… really went bananas, which I can understand that, and… but… but anyway, she said that you know, that she was a witch. She said my father would go bananas. Anyway, she managed to restore that wall up with a razor blade and this and that and my… my water colour paint. So there we were, we were there… they were there until he died.’

`In the house at Portsmouth?’

`Yeah, in Southsea. [Pause]…’

`Can I take you back to...’

`Mmm…’

`…the school in Yorkshire and what you remember of that? [Both talking together] [Inaudible].’

`Oh yes, it was nice really… umm… [pause]. Well I often say that I… that all… the only thing I ever learnt was worth knowing, you know [laughs] were useful in later life, I learnt there, you know, all the rest of… endless education was neither here nor there. I think I went a bit early because I was four and a half, and I think that’s too young, so my mum told me I could just go in the mornings and… I came out and she said how had it been, and I said, “It was… oh it was lovely, it was terrific”, I was so relieved to be… that it hadn’t been terrible, you know. It’d been fine, and… she said, “Oh well, if you feel like that about it you can go back this afternoon”, which I thought was really cheating, but there you go, and… it was all ages, both sexes… that, it’d be like primary now but in one room, and one teacher, Mrs Nicholson [ph]… and… you started off with slates with sand, I was really… umm… and… [pause] well I think I liked it.’

`And was that a state school or was it a private school or…?’

`I don’t know. No, it was private. Well, I think it must have been. I think they must have paid. [Pause].’

`Was it where most of the other children went to school in that area or did they go to different school where the children…?’

`As I said, it seemed like they all went there, at… there may have been a state school somewhere, up on… towards this kind of cliff behind Bel… Beldon [ph]… there’s like more housing but… umm… no, there were two who went to some primary school somewhere, but almost everybody… almost all the other children went to this one school.’

`You have mostly good memories of it?’

`Yeah, mostly good memories, yeah.’

`Do you ever remember any of the playground chat about… was there… do you ever remember any terms being used, say, about people from psychiatric hospitals?’

`At that age?’

`Mmm…’

`[Pause] Absolutely none. [Pause].’

`So from… again, it wasn’t something that you had ever heard about, or not acquainted with at a very young age?’

`No, I don’t think so. Umm… [pause]. No, I don’t ever remember.’

`Would you have been aware that… that there were such places as a… as psychiatric hospital when you were…?’

`No, I wouldn’t. ‘Cause I’m not… I don’t think there was one in the village, you know… or even sort of round it. I mean we went to Bradford sometimes, but I don’t remember, which I presume there probably was in Bradford, but I don’t ever remember any mention of psychiatric hospitals, or… people being mad or… or even a kind of village idiot. I mean it was a… it wasn’t a very rural village, it was too near centres of populations to be very rural. [Pause]. No, I don’t.’

`Ok… shall we take a short break there?’

`Just before we broke we were… you were telling me that you’d moved to Portsmouth and… [both talking together].’

`I was, yes… mmm…’

`…about your school in Yorkshire. Perhaps if we go on from when you came to Portsmouth?’

`Ok.’

`Presumably you went to… a different school in the…[both talking together]?’

`Yes, yes, they sent me to a local school which is in fact… I don’t know if it still is, but really it was a crammers and I didn’t need a crammer you know, but…’

`A what, sorry?’

`A crammer, a crammer [ph]…’

`What’s a crammer?’

`It’s a kind of… place… where they… well I think they started off when public school people failed exams, they’d send them to these places to sort of cram until the exams, to get through the exams they might need… and… I mean it was similar to that, it wasn’t one or… other places wasn’t, ‘cause I think they normally have tutors or something. I’m not sure what they have, but… it was kind of forcing it in a… it was like… it was rather like the modern idea… or Blunkett’s idea. You had marks, percentages, for every subject every week, all the day, blah, blah, blah… making it really competitive and… it wasn’t so bad the first class I was in… but when they sort of moved me into the more sort of older bit, it was just hectic. And the trouble was… my parents would question me, and like… what happened today? And I was still quite… innocent at that time in these respects and… and I told them the truth and… the trouble was with him in particular you know, if you said you got ninety nine per cent, he’d say why didn’t you get a hundred? Or if you got a hundred, a lot of the time I don’t remember getting a hundred but you know… if you got a hundred, well, you should have done twice as well, whatever. That was how he was. At the same time, “if you don’t understand anything, you should ask your father, you… he’s very good at maths” and all this… palaver… and… I couldn’t stand him telling me anything. I found it so unpleasant, and he was… he was very bad at… absolutely hopeless at explaining anything actually. I did try once, on… my mother was urging, I couldn’t get the difference… I couldn’t really understand what… an… an… an acute angle and an obtuse angle was, and I think by this time I was so miserable anyway, it was a wonder I ever understood anything whatsoever, and… so I did ask it to him, but he couldn’t… he didn’t explain it to me, but he wasn’t a teacher but so… you know, at the same time I was constantly being urged to ask him to help me…’

`What was so unpleasant about him? What were you finding so unpleasant?’

`[Pause] He was no nasty, so… [pause]… Well, when he said, for example… “Oh, why didn’t you get a hundred per cent?”, he meant it, and it wasn’t… if somebody had challenged him he might have tried to pass it off as a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. He meant to be nasty, he meant to say “Well that’s nothing” you know. [Pause] And he… he was like that about… well my mother, even my mother… apparently, I used to listen to children’s hour with her everyday, if.. before he sort of came home, and then he’d just come in and say, “We don’t want this” and switch it over. Well actually I didn’t mind all that ‘cause I wanted to get out of the room.. but my mother, even my mother thought this was a big strong, but she… not that she’d ever say anything, but… [pause] it’s… it’s really difficult to pin down, but… but now I know it wasn’t in my imagination, ‘cause I have all these… this documentation you know, where he’d document doing extremely mean and petty things, just to kind of try and put me down for example, and… I mean this is an adult with a child and… and my mother used to say “Oh, he’s so jealous”, you know, as if that… but…’

`Jealous of what?’

`Me. Or her. Her, I suppose. I… but… I… I guess in a sense, she may even have liked that, because a lot of people take jealousy to mean a different… there’s a… jealousy’s proof of love, I mean that’s really quite common. So… do you know, like to some extent… what… umm… [pause] and although I… I’d got to work hard and all this and so on… umm… [pause]. But my mother too acutally… I mean it was earlier… she would often mock if she could. I had a friend, a little boy called David when… who was not particularly flash or… or… he was quite quiet, and he was one of this group who… but he was my particular friend and she never like, let an opportunity go by without some sort of contemptuous comment at it… on this child, or laughing at something, although the mother was a friend of hers, but she said the mother had three children. [Pause] If I ever showed attachment to anybody, or indeed sort of… feeling for anybody… she would tend to divide it but… I think that’s ‘cause she felt jealous, that she felt I belonged to her, and although she wasn’t… I remember when I was really, really young and we’d just moved, I used to really wish that she’d show some physical sign of affection, and only the closest she came to it was like to brush my hair. I used to long for her to do that, but she never did… and she was under a lot of pressure, what with my father away, my grandmother ill and so and so… war time… having to manage on the money she had… and she used to do… occasionally she used to… she used to threaten me with terrible things sometimes…’

`What sort of things?’

`Well… I don’t know, she threatened that she’d thrash me, and I don’t know if she’d know what was thrashing, and I can’t say she ever… I mean she would occasionally, very, quite occasionally slap me on the legs and nothing more than that, and not very often at that. But… but I know I’d… I’d done this… I’d developed a psychological trick when I was quite young, to prevent pain. If… especially if I hurt my head… umm… because she’d get upset about it, and to sort of stop her getting upset, I… I got… sort of developed this… I don’t know, mental… trick or something, of cutting out of the pain, and… not that she hit me round the head, she didn’t, but I had accidents, and one time she hit me accidentally, completely accidentally, and, you know, you have falls and stuff like that, and… I don’t know how I got onto that… umm… oh, she whizzed, she came rushing out the house one time and told this whole group of children, and most of them were… boys were a bit older than me, I didn’t normally play with… kind of ranted at them, for picking on me, and they hadn’t picked on me, and I think it was completely out of the blue, you know, and then disappeared again, ‘cause… like with a lot of children in those days, you were out to play for ages, and actually they were playing at the end of the road, in sort of a wood, they were playing hanging games, and I don’t think that ever got through to her, and that really was dangerous, but somebody did put a stop to it, because, I don’t know whether there was an accident or what. There was also rumours there was a man with a gun in that place, whether… I doubt it, a gamekeeper, but… umm… so… there you go, and… I remember I had a fight with some child… a boy, and it… his mother had asked him where he’d got his red nose or whatever it was and she… he said “Jill did it” and my mother was endlessly telling this tale, and the… and the… and that would be… her mode you know, anything she could, but… but… in a way, life… the early life in [inaudible] was like heaven compared with… and with my mother if you like, was like heaven compared with what it was later, after he came back, and… of course I’m not the only person that found this, ‘cause I’ve read things, later… relatively recently I suppose, you know, how… how other… you know, families felt when people came back from the war and… sometimes it was the man who was unlucky at some time… and sometimes it was the family and… and I’ve tried to put down my father’s behaviour at different times, to like what we call post-traumatic stress, or war experiences, right… but when I’ve read the letters, there are all the signs, so it was all there before, and… it was his character, right, and… and I can’t remember when he started it, but I think it was then. He started… this business of endless dirty jokes, the kind that boys tell behind the bike sheds you know, or girls for that matter, and it was always meal times, so on one hand he’s criticising the food or refusing to say he likes the food, and my mother was a really good cook, and… that was one source of conflict, so at one time he was more bickering on at her, but there was also this business, it’s like being drowned in shit really, and I wasn’t allowed to answer back, so it was real shock horror if I sort of tried to say anything myself, although it was very infantile, and years later, my mother told me that my… my aunt had said, you know, had remonstrated with her about this, ‘cause it was continual, I mean it was… it wasn’t just the odd occasion, it was every day…’

`Like his joke telling and stuff…?’

`Yeah, yeah… umm… and… she said if I grew up to be socially maladjusted you know, she wouldn’t be surprised [laughs] and… but he said to my mother, that he had to do it because I didn’t have any brothers. Now… [pause] at first I think I did begin to gravitate towards boys who did it, also, you know, ‘cause it was familiar I suppose, but… and also… I’m sort of going on, you know, also he did expose himself to me, deliberately, probably I would say, and that… and once at puberty he sort of touched my breast, but I think I may… I think I did immediately go to my mother and sort of say “Look… he… you know…”, and say he had and said that I didn’t like it, or… ‘cause I think she said something like “Well, what do you expect me to do? I don’t… you know, I don’t want to help…”, I think I actually did say it directly. It didn’t happen again, so it was all kind of covert, he never actually hit me… he never actually had intercourse with me, you know, or sexually abused me physically, but… mentally and emotionally, covert, always covertly… this went on and on and on… well except that he got ill and they got in… he got an ulcer he was in hospital and then… I don’t know what he had… he had a heart attack… he fell off the shed, he was concussed, he had some err… When I was at college he had… [pause] well, one thing when I was at college and one when… he had two paranoid breakdowns. My mother had taken to having separate rooms because she thought he was having… by this time he was out of the Navy and in the Civil Service. She thought he was having an affair with this woman at the office, and he had sort of execrable taste, maybe he was but… I don’t know if he was or not, but she wouldn’t sleep with him anyway, and they’d had separate rooms for about three years, and the psychiatrist told her it was her fault that he had a breakdown and she must resume marital relations, which she did… so that was… and then, and I think he had ECT at that… then, though she did ask me, and I could only say to her that, you know, we were not… we didn’t think it was very effective treatment and so on… and then… he had another one… when I was first at the Tavi’ and… she asked me again, and… umm… as if I was an expert, you know, what… I’d just done a degree in psychology. It doesn’t really fit you for much advice on psychosis, right… and… the second time I was in analysis and my analyst gave me the address of an analyst in Portsmouth… I went to see him, he was very nice. He came round with a list of people who would treat psychosis… actually there wasn’t and I don’t think there was anyone on there that was sort of… well they didn’t say anything about paranoia on there anyway, and… and then again when my daughter was… a baby… I sort of called and he was in intensive care and… my mother seemed very distressed and he looked like he was pegging out, and I thought she wanted him to live and I went and talked to him and he said, “Oh…”, you know, “What I’ve done to your mother…” and all this, and… and that he tried to get… kill himself and he’d thrown down the bottle with… in the garden, and… and the Senior Consultant had said “Oh you’ve had a… you’ve had a heart attack”, which he had had a heart attack, but a small one really, and… I went and I told my mother that he was going to live and she seemed really annoyed. What I’d taken for distress at him, looking like he was going to peg out, was… I don’t know what it… and the… for once we did actually talk, and she told me she’d been living in the fear of her life for a year and… that she was afraid like that he was going to spread… the paranoia was going to spread to her, or the doctor, which it normally didn’t do apparently, and anyway we’d talked for a long time, and I said, “Well at least… you know… at least, you know, we’ve talked about it…” and she said, “Well, what good does that do? What good does talking do?”, you know, “… it doesn’t help, it doesn’t do any good…”, and I was a bit shocked at this, and… [pause].’

`What hospital was he in?’

`St James’s. Mmm…’

`[Both talking together] [Inaudible].’

`Well what I thought, he was… by that time he was in the Civil Service, there was a big security thing after… Burgess and Maclean and it… the amalgance [???] insisted on everybody you know, everything… the security checks and everything, even down to his level, which I think… was eventually he had done [???] or possibly, although I doubted they’d done very… or maybe they had, and maybe he’d picked up on that, you know, and it had all… got out of hand you know, and that was…’

`What, do you think it may have made him paranoid?’

`…the origins of the paranoia, yeah. ‘Cause he was the last person to pass secrets… through anybody for God’s sake, he was like the ultimate opposite you know… he’d never breathed out of turn sort of thing, you know. It was all order, obedience and rules and… I don’t know how that came about. I’ve tried to think of a better side to him. Well one thing was he insisted on my getting a good education. That was the idea, but unfortunately when I went to high school here, because I’d had such a good education in Yorkshire at this village school, you know, I was ahead of the… other kids and… so we… stupid… they decided to accelerate me by… which was in fact by about two years…’
`We may have to take a break in a moment…’
`Uh huh… ok…’
`We’re at the end of the tape.’
`…and… and he was meant to do something about it, i.e. prevent it, stop it, ‘cause when the Head had asked me I was so over-awed I said yes, and then I was totally upset, and everybody he knew of had advised him against all, you know, I mean teachers and what have you, and he did nothing on purpose, and then wrote to his friend saying that I seemed happy at school. It was very far from the truth, and… [pause] sort of blamed it on the Head, for being not… you know, terribly available. Umm…’
`We’re going to have to take a break…’
`Ok… [laughs]…’
[End of DVC Pro tape 1 – VHS tape 1 continues]

[Start of DVC Pro tape 2 – VHS tape 1 continues]

[Camera: `Interview with Jill Molyneux C905/16 tape number two’].

`You were telling me that you were searching in a way for something good to find about your father and…’

`Oh…’

`…you were beginning to tell us about your… the fact that he was keen on education, if I’ve understood you right?’

`Ah, yes but, unfortunately he didn’t… well… if… it all depends of how you think of education I suppose, but… ok… he hadn’t had the opportunity to go to university. During the first world war his father, who’d been a courier on the continent, couldn’t get work and then… according to my mother was pretty feckless anyway and… you know, in those days there was no social… no welfare state and… at all… and he had two sisters, a mother and two sisters and… so he had to leave school where apparent… which apparently he… he loved, you know, he had got a… said something about him loving… loved every minute of it. He was a Queen’s Scout, he was really keen on… with all the badges and… he had to leave school and go into the Navy to help support the family… at fifteen… so, right, and they wear it… in fact lot… in his family there were lots of doctors by marriage and Scottish doctors in particular. There was one of those who was the father of the guy who painted the pictures… and… and others, and actually there were also quite a lot of independent women, you know that generation when so many men were killed and everything… Scottish as well, and… and I think he felt very much the poor relation, he felt very flawed by these doctors and… he would have liked to have been a doctor, that was what he said… [pause] and he… he wanted me to be a doctor he said. Or certainly he wanted me to go the High School which was… [inaudible], and…’

`Is that a private school too?’

`Well, it was half and half by that time. If you’d been to a state school you could go, you could go on the Eleven Plus, and if you hadn’t you couldn’t, so he had to… but I hadn’t been to a state school so they had to pay… umm… and… they were already using sort of intelligence tests, well they would have called them that for the Eleven Plus, and… I’m very… I’m very opposed to intelligence tests. The father of intelligence tests, Cyril Budd [???] has now been proved to have faked all his… his figures, and I sensed that anyway, you know… years before that, it was clear, why should intelligence be distributed in a normal curve anyway? Who ever said so, and… and in… and who can really define what the wretched things are meant to be measuring, and as for determining children’s lives of the basis of them, that was really, you know, one of the main reasons I gave up… education psychology, in a sense of working in the clinic and… [inaudible] and… I also think there’s meant to be a five… only a five per cent practice effect, but… as luck would have it, I ended up doing many, and I could… go right off the scales eventually, and I think it’s a much bigger practice effect and even recently I looked at what they used to use… been done for many years, and if that’s not cult.… they used to say it’s not culturally contaminated. It is so culturally contaminated it’s unbelievable you know, it’s just so obvious. Anyway… and… and anyway, I think in… what they think they may be measuring, which may give some vague guidance in some incidences… in… you know, in some instances… it’s not such an important quality anyway, it’s not… you… why should it be, you know. Well, the best therapist I ever knew, said he thought it was pathological, you know, developed at a time of need, you know, if you’re lucky. So where were we? Oh yes, my father, yeah… he wanted… so didn’t want me… he wanted me to be a doctor. He never asked me! I wouldn’t have made a good doctor at all, especially when I was young… or nurse for that matter, and… you know, I would have been very bad at handling all the physical… the blood and all that, and… and I’d only been at this school about two… two years, when I dropped all the subjects which I would have definitely needed to have, [inaudible]… and he never did the least thing about that, or barely showed an interest you know. So it was all very contradictory, but what I did love was dancing, and… I did do dancing, but… the… and the school done… put on like a show every year, as most dancing schools do, and it’s the first time I’d been like, in a tutu, points, all that… and as luck would have it, I won the lottery to present the bouquet, you know, ‘cause it was something, and… I didn’t… I don’t think it… I did… very well but it was all very nice, and… we all had a nice time, and… my parents gave me this book for the ballet (?)… but it’s like the… this tome, it was kind of a… meant to be a children’s encyclopaedia, but believe me, I used to be a voracious reader, but nobody, but nobody was going to open this thing.. it was the most kind of… off-putting kind of volume. I haven’t got it here, I was going to show you… you could imagine, but anyway, they’d given it, and it was like enough to kill you is what… if you’d hit anybody with it, but… lo and behold, two months later, the news was given to me but my father had said, I could go on with my classes, but I couldn’t do the show because it interfered with my homework, so… [pause] I said right, I won’t… I won’t do it at all, because somehow, you know, it meant more to me to say no, you know, keep it, if… or I don’t know, if that’s what… oh, and I think oh I said, I want to do ballroom and… you know… for six weeks, something like that…’

`Ballroom, did you say?’

`Yeah, I wanted… umm… I… I know it sounds like cutting off my nose to spite my face, but I think that’s when I learnt to say no. I found ways of saying no, you know. It’s better to do without, than to sort of… to be sort of tantalised with… the way… he wanted, it to be, and…’

`What were your real ambitions? You said that he wanted you to be a doctor, but what were your own ambitions?’

`Well I did want to dance.’

`To dance?’

`Uh huh huh… and… I had for a time… thought I might like to be a vet, because… I’d become so lonely and distressed, you know that animals were my big comfort, and he also had a law that I couldn’t have any animals, because there was a flat underneath the house we lived in, and in a tenancy agreement they couldn’t have animals so I couldn’t have any animals, and a fellow officer of his gave me a tortoise, brought a tortoise back for me, from Ceylon (??) so, he couldn’t stop me having the poor tortoise. But he was very well aware of my attachment to animals, and… and that’s… it was just… I mean though it was ridiculous. In the end they had a cat, because he travelled on the train with somebody who bred Siamese. I mean I was seventeen by this time and I wasn’t going to… you know, die for a cat, and it was meant to be mine, and so much so that they didn’t tell me that it had been killed until after my… session exams or something, and I thought… they just… totally barmy, and… there were lots of sort of embarrassing things, and the one, or… I do remember once I was allowed to take out, some… alsation, of a friend of theirs, and I… and one… on one occasion, it was all fine, and then I wasn’t allowed to any more, but they didn’t tell me why. You know, they just didn’t say the dog isn’t reliable or it’s too big, or what, you just can’t, and… [pause] I learnt never to ask for anything I wanted, ‘cause that was a sure way not to get it. The trouble is, these things become habits, you know, you… you may learn to do this in your own family ‘cause it’s… the best… it’s not the best way to be with people in general, but it kind of persists, or has persisted… umm… [pause]. Oh, I was meant… oh, once I got the better of him. At that time, I got the better of him more than once, I find from the letters, because… I wanted a… a racing bike, you know, partly because I… I didn’t want to be… I was getting enough stick at school for having a sitting up bike, right… at the time, everybody had… it was like, what, now you have trainers now don’t you? Well, I had to have a racing bike. “Oh well, you’ll have to save up for that.” Well the only money I got was at birthday and Christmas, so… and usually from other people anyway, but… as luck would have it, I did have a tenner on my birthday, and this bike hadn’t been sold. It belonged to someone I knew, and her father was kind of doing it up to sell, he’d… and I just went and I bought it, with the… ‘cause I had the ten pounds, and… there I was… and I found him complaining in my letters, much to my delight, however, that I looked like a monkey on a stick on this bike and I was… ‘cause I think that was the first time I really sort of… cut the ground from under him. And I used to plan to kill him but then… children do sometimes plan to kill their parents, and my grandmother had a… had a phrase about greasing the step…’

`About what sorry?’

`Greasing the step… and we’ll have to grease the step. It’s hard to get rid of somebody you don’t like. I… she had… I don’t… it’s a kind of a joke, bit of a black joke I suppose, but I used to think about greasing the step, but didn’t… how could I be sure… and… I didn’t get as close as doing it.’

`Were you scared of him?’

`[Pause] Well, only so far as he had power of me I think… which he did. I got very religious early on, as a kind of alternative you know. Well I was about nine at the time. Then I cheated in an exam. I looked in my desk at a book and… and people saw me and they all knew, so it was a… and it was the same time as being accelerated, I thought I’d have to go to the Head and admit I’d cheated and… ‘cause I wasn’t… I somehow wasn’t really aware that just looking at your notebook for an answer was such a big crime, but clearly it was a major crime. So then I had to go and… I… I’ve never resolved this really, it was like a big scandal among the children, and… but to me, I had to be best, you know, I had to get a hundred per cent, I had to do it, and all I got was getting bloody accelerated… and… and… and of course that was a misery ‘cause like, it wasn’t… the work was bad enough, but it was like everybody… it was emotionally and socially two years older you know…’

`So you got put in the class that was two years older than…?’

`Mmm… mmm…’

`…what you should have been, at your age?’

`Mmm… mmm…’

`And you were saying, that… did that please your father? [Inaudible]…’

`Well he was meant to… he was meant… on all the advice, and I was very distressed about it, all the people who the family knew, who knew about teaching whatever, said it wasn’t a good idea, and he was sort of meant to go and… put it right, to stop it, and he just twiddled his thumbs about it really, and then made out that I was sort of ok in that situation.’

`And how did you feel about it?’

`Proud. Proud… no, I don’t ever remember him being proud of me, in any respect at all. [Pause]. No, I don’t think proud had ever come into it. [Pause]. Apparently my mother told him if he was going to criticise, he must also pay to do that, but I don’t think he could really get the hang of that.’

`There wasn’t any point where they thought they’d have more children or there’s no mention of…?’

`Oh, at the end of the war… there was some talk of him bringing back a… a… orphan child, a Dutch child from the East Indies, but in fact he wasn’t the first in line and her mother was found. And then, again, my first year in college I was rushing round quite a lot, it’s an ongoing revolution you know, and I’d been… had gone out with this Polish boy, Polish exile, for about three years here, and I wasn’t in love with him or anything, but he… I think he was a kind of necessary buffer in my life, you know, and… he was planning to go to Budapest and all this, romantic… this was to fight and what have you… and… then we got involved with this organisation, which I thought… it was very small, called The Common Cause. Turned out actually to be… mostly fascists, and… and… so I do know there were counter revolutionary elements, you know, trying to involve themselves as the Stalinists would have said, but they weren’t… they weren’t the people, you know, trying to overthrow things on the streets of Budapest, they were in Britain, and elsewhere no doubt. And anyway there weren’t very many of them, and the whole thing split into kind of little fractured groups of people meeting in the loo and stuff like that. I wasn’t very politically sophisticated at the time so I had… I just… just didn’t realise what was going on, and…’

`This was happening when you were at college?’

`Mmm..’

`Which… what age were you then?’

`I was just eighteen, and…’

`And you went off to study Psychology?’

`Yeah… I chose Psychology, because I’d wanted to be different I suppose, and also… where he’d insisted you must go to university, you must go to university sort of business, I thought blow me, you know, if I’m going to university, at least I’ll do something that interests me, and I didn’t really know what it was, but I wished I could sort of… act as an… agony aunt, you know, have the answers really, to problems found. Umm… funnily enough, when I was working in television, there was somebody there who wanted to make me into like a big TV personality, and he… he did sort of thing I might be an agony aunt, a… among other things at one time, but when I wrote a couple of practice letters he wasn’t convinced, ‘cause he wanted something like `Dear Abbey’, you know, have you ever seen her?’

`Like a magazine sort of agony aunt?’

`Yeah, and he was quite impressed by it… for the fact that I was a Pyschologist, ‘cause in those days you know… umm… a lot of the people in commercial television, I don’t know what… in particular, you know, they’d started off at the bottom in Fleet Street and they had this sort of respect for it, for Dons or whatever, thought they were quite something and, you know, and if they hadn’t been to university, that it wasn’t quite the same thing and… so, there are… there I was, with everybody and I know… I had a sort of friend, well I knew her at one time, who… who did do a… a problem page for one of the teen magazines, and I when I… really I thought it was really good. I… I thought what she wrote was good. Anyway, what I wrote wasn’t very good [laughs], not at the time, but… that was the kind of thing I had in mind, you know… knowing the answers, knowing what you ought to do. They were terribly… kind of… conservative at the time. Incredibly. If you should ever look back to Evelyn Home and Marjorie Proops and… well Marjorie Proops slightly less so… she was a real radical at the time, you know, but… the other two [inaudible]… oh dear. Anyway, umm… they were better than nothing, for me, you know, they were better… magazines and my friends and… my boyfriend. He was a really nice… he was a really nice person, but… [pause] but you had to have a boyfriend. You know, it was like… I don’t know really what it was like. It was like having to have… at my school you know. Well… did you… I sort of felt that anyway… and… I knew I’d never marry him though ‘cause one time they tried to stop my mother’s… I used to go round his place and we did used to do a lot of necking, but no more than that, and cuddling really I suppose. Once I’d sort of… I’d sort of cleared the decks with him that I wasn’t going to… you know, when I was really young, that I wasn’t… going to sleep with him, and… they wanted to stop us… me going round there, and there was a kind of interview afterwards and… and my father… it was for my father, he would say, “Well, when you’re older, if you want to get married?” and that was [inaudible]… “there’s no way I’ll ever marry, dad, and that was always the case. That’s… or if anybody… if they approved of anybody, there was no chance, and… though for years and years I always took a bloke down there with me. It was as if I didn’t dare go there without a bloke for protection, you know.’

`So where did you go to university?’

`University College, London.’

`Oh, but your parents were in Portsmouth at the time?’

`They were, yeah. It was marvellous. In those days at least they… they did think you should go away to college, and I was like a terrible liberty (??)… I had… I loved being at college. I was very happy and I was… you know, I was very gregarious and I was very well-known in the university… and you… I was very popular I suppose, well with the alternative element, I suppose. Everything…’

`What sort of things did you get up to?’

`Well… what does… well I was in some like student council and… and I was… I was the secretary for them… they wanted a Chairman for U.C… for which U.C. was mostly like… we had like a thousand of us, these students, but it was mostly overseas students and that, so I knew all the overseas students and I’d arrange [???]… what else did I do? I… wanted to be a debater and… debate [inaudible]…’

`You wanted to be what, sorry?’

`I was a member of the debating team at one time, and… I was always really terrified of that… but… I just spent so much time socialising, you know, really… [pause].’

`That would have been in the… in the sort of swinging sixties?’

`Yeah, well I did go on demos, um… the first demo I ever went on was the Hungarian revolution, and… I went on one… I hate to say… I mean it’s too bad now, how Hastings Standard turned out, but it was the quick thing at the time, we’d… we’d demonstrate. What other demos did I go on when I was at college? I think I went to some CND… committee for a hundred things… umm… [pause]. Quite honestly, I don’t… I just you know, had a massive amount of friends really [laughs]. It was like the Slade-ish part of U.C. and apparently art school was part of U.C., so it was like both schools you see…’

`Slade School, did you say?’

`Mmm… so there was people… not the… there was people that… the people at The Slade, they didn’t mix all that much with the… and there was University College Hospital so like up until… second year, they sort of did mix quite a lot, and… I just had a brilliant time.’

`You were saying that you always made sure you had a… if you had a boyfriend, you’d always take him home?’

`Oh, I always had a boyfriend. I seem to have come to believe it was like a necessary sort of evil [laughs]. I wouldn’t say evil exactly. At school I was very, you know, I was… I would fall in love with girls, older girls… who I was particularly fond of… but that was kind of like at a stage I guess. I don’t know. But the girls I wanted to belong to, had all reached the… the boyfriend stage. The trouble was I was two years younger than they were, and they persecuted and bullied me no end, and ostracized… kind of ostracized. Well I caught up with them in the end. Umm… [pause]…’

`So did you… you found college far more preferable to home life, is that right?’

`God, yes, it was paradise. I’d really escaped, and they seemed to have… it was like eighteen… “she’s come of age”, you know. They seemed to think they… they shouldn’t be interfering all the time, any more… though he was still weird. I remember one time… I did… it’s a long story, but I… I… I guess… I did try to sleep with my Polish boyfriend before he was going to Hungary to fight, ‘cause I thought it was the least I could do, but I had vaginismus, and all in all it was bad news, but I didn’t sleep with anybody again until I… I was nearly twenty one, and… I decided that I was going to marry this guy, this was… and that was it, and…’

`The Polish guy?’

`No, no, no, he was long gone. I had lots of… boyfriends, but there always was somebody around, or several somebodys. Well when I was at college, there was a lot of candidates let’s say, because in my college like there was… there was… it was two thirds men, one thirds women, so women were at a premium anyway, and… women who were around were a premium and… and… I wasn’t Miss Fresher but I had a lot of people shouting for me, on… up there, and… and I was on the newsreel, and that gave me a sort of… very sort of… boost really I think, and I just had plenty of confidence when I was at… I guess maybe people were always… I used to get… kind of… and say if I went into the canteen and one person didn’t smile at me, I’d think what… what’s wrong, you know, why aren’t they smiling at me today? You know, I just expected everybody to, and I did the same, and apparently I gave the impression of being very happy, ‘cause people said to me later, you always seemed to be so happy, and… well I was because by comparison with what I’d been living up… you know, it was sort of most fantastic, and… you know, in those days as well I guess university was for the very privileged, because there was so few of them, and… once I… when I got… got a place it was kind of… and they’d given me all this stuff, we’re going to accelerate you, because then you have three years in the sixth form. Well when I… after two years there was nothing to do in the sixth form you know, so I left and I went to the local Child Guidance Clinic to observe, ‘cause I was already sort of quite interested in educational psychology, and they were extremely nice people and they took me all round the social services and stuff like that, and… I used to sit in on the remedial teaching and… and do a bit myself. So… I had already begun to live a life [inaudible]. My parents were so strange though because, they decided to give me a dress allowance, and that had never crossed my mind, they’d give me a dress allowance for example, because it had always been really difficult to get… they never said to me, “We can’t afford it…” or fee… “We can’t afford that, because… you know, if we do we can’t afford this…” sort of business. So it all seemed like it was as if they were intend… they were being mean, and… it was incredibly difficult to get my mother into sort of agreeing to let me dress like other people did, more or less, you know.’

`Like being fashionable and so on do you mean?’

`Yeah, in the sense of wearing jeans or… trousers or… or… kind of teen dresses, which were… there were teen dresses by that time. ‘Cause actually, when I was at school come to think of it, it was this… this petticoat era, it wasn’t… it was, you know… it was very difficult to get that…’

`That would have been in the fifties would it?’

`Yeah, this was in the fifties. ‘Cause I went to college in ’56, right, and this is sort of leading up to it, but bit by bit I’d managed to sort of get a few things I could wear without feeling really… umm… well at first it was to get in with this gang of girls. You know, it was to be one of them. ‘Cause in my mind, they were the ones that mattered, in the class… be it the least academic, and… but… kind of to me, the most, well now I’d say hip, you know, be… but anyway, as far as… I was going blind to anybody else, you had to be in this group, and… and I did… by sheer perseverance, really, it did work out in the end, and…’

`So you did get into it?’

`Yeah, but part of it meant that if you went to some church hall to a hop or something, you know, I… I had something more or less similar to, well a bit similar at least, to what other people were wearing. But it was a hard struggle, and I don’t hold it against my mother because it was like the first time there were teenagers wasn’t it? And… and the fact that they couldn’t sort of pick up on that, or… or… accept it… well I could sort of understand, ‘cause up till then, you know, teen girls wore the same as their mothers or more or less, or… well, thirty year old women anyway… and I remember my… when I was about twelve or something, she gave… my mother gave me two suits she was fed up with. You know, she thought that was quite ok, because I wanted clothes, there weren’t school clothes anyway, you know, so… they’d go… just one of those things. Well it was just like… eighteen you come of age or something, and you suddenly transformed over night, and you were allowed to stay out late and… without saying… exactly when you were going to be home or… and all this, and you were [inaudible] and I sort of felt, I’ve done it, I’ve got the place, you know, this is what all these years he’s been banging on about, and all these… I really worked hard for mock GCSE or O Levels it would be now, really hard… and it was a shock to the school as well as… as… to my parents I guess, ‘cause I think they’d given up on me entirely, ‘cause I was kind of a rebel [inaudible]. You know, I was a rebel because I thought it would get me in good with these girls [laughs] which was true in a way, but I had to get the hang of it really.’

`What sort of rebellious things did you do?’

`Well, turn up really late for classes and… and… kind of… there was this singing teacher who used to get a flagging, poor woman, and… playing sort of tricks on… the teachers as it were, and… nothing very amazing. And for a long time I wasn’t there in the lunch hour, so things they got up to in the lunch hour… ‘cause I couldn’t face school meals… I was out of anyway, you know. They went climbing in the roof over the gym and stuff like… I did go there but you know, it was kind of like… been better to be there at the original time… anyway… [takes a drink]. Umm…’

`Did you get into the… pop music side of things as well in the fifties and early sixties?’

`Yes, mmm… definite… we did, because, thanks to my friend, who came to school late… she didn’t come at the beginning of the seniors weekend… like three years later, she’s still a friend of mine. She was… there were two who came late and they were both absolute blessings to me, ‘cause… I suppose the worst of my dislocation and sort of being this young kid with plaits, ‘cause… he wouldn’t allow me to have my hair cut for years, and my mother did collude in that, but it ended up worse than… almost worse ‘cause it was like permed then… but thanks to them that somehow my parents accepted there were other girls at school… I got to go to dances, and we all used to go to dances in the town. Sorry, what was the question you…?’

`Oh, pop, how you got into the pop culture.’

`Oh, pop music… so at first there were big bands, you know, [inaudible] and Ted Heath and all that, at the Savoy, down there… and what did they play? I think they played Victor Sylvester at Kimbles [ph] probably, and the sort of… I can’t remember what kind of… the music was like, so I guess we didn’t… we… oh, yeah, and I used to manage to listen to Radio Luxembourg. This was meant to be a secret… ‘cause I’d go off to do my homework, and there was a radio in the room you see, and my housework wasn’t to be disturbed so they didn’t come in, and I could get it on Luxembourg sufficiently loud to hear it without them… ‘cause they disappeared, Radio Luxembourg of course… oh, it’s so stupid all this… and I had some… I think had a few EPs but they was all stuff like… was jazz more, you know, and… [takes a drink]… and the dances they had, which was like mostly students and us and what have you, I can’t remember what the music was, though obviously not very… important you know. Umm… [pause] that’s brilliant, and I used to go and say I was staying with her, which I was, but before, you know we’d go to the dance, like before hand, or with… oh, they were brilliant. She…’

`And you got into all that…?’

`She would lend me clothes to wear there, you know… [takes a drink].’

`So you’d already got into all the youth culture and things and then you carried that on at university…?’

`Yes, well… I can’t remember when I first heard Elvis you know. I definitely went to a kind of club, I probably went… it was probably at the pictures. [Pause] ‘Cause I was definitely into rock and… every… well… it’s difficult to kind of remember, but Elvis was so brilliant at the beginning, you know, before he got castrated… [pause].’

`Do you remember television sort of coming in and becoming more popular?’

`Well my parents wouldn’t have television while I was… before I… finished school because they thought I might get distracted, so they wouldn’t be there until I… until I’d finished, then they got a television. Serves them right [laughs]. Umm… I remember we used to watch a bit… I used to play tennis a bit, I used to like tennis actually, but there again, they decided I should practise at the United Services. I was… every time I was kind of doing well or doing anything like that, something came down. You know, “she’s got to learn to swim”… the minute she’s enjoying it, “no more”, sort of… she can do it, she’s doing quite well in tennis, and other people are noticing… “Oh well, she’d better stop practising there and go and practise there… it’s posher and there won’t be anybody there.” They couldn’t bear the idea of my… shining if you like, of my standing out above a crowd. I think that… on the one hand they seemed to be trying to produce a high achiever, you know, and I remember they couldn’t stand it, they couldn’t stand that, you know that I would outstrip them, so oh. And funnily enough in his letters, my period when I was in television which I think they least understood, which probably most people would be… mostly think “Oh she must have had a really good time”, and want to… you know, people are like that, aren’t they? That’s kind of… doesn’t exist… in the letters or reference or whatever… except I had a series of publicity photos taken like before that…’

`So they weren’t impressed by that, or were they…?’

`I don’t know’

`…just didn’t acknowledge that that’s what you were doing or…?’

`I just don’t know. I heard what…’

‘How did you get into that?’

‘I offered them one of the publicity photos and… and they wanted that and they had it in the room, but that was neither here nor there… umm…How did I get into that? Well, the stepmother of this guy decided I was going to marry, was a big friend of mine. She was only like nine years older than me and… when we… she split up with like… with his father and she went to live somewhere else, and I split up with Gav [ph] I guess… and… she asked me if I wanted to live with her, and I did… seeing I’d split up, and… oh, and there was like the au pair and her little boy and other people and so on… she was an actress, but… [pause]. His father was… well his father was… oh God… mmm… his father was a film director… umm… and… umm… anyway, I went to live with Dorothy, this… who’d been a really good friend to me… always was a really good friend to me, and… [pause] one of the things they used to do… there was a kind of upper class commune in Kent. I think it was near Tunbridge Wells somewhere, called… is it called Stepping Stones? Anyway, [inaudible…] and her husband established it… and it’s… well it was a very nice place, and… and… you could sit around or… it was like communal eating and… everybody had like their own little flat and… there were communal decisions and so on, so… I don’t want to be too… derogatory about it being a commune, but… you know, it was also… most people had a lot of money, or plenty of money and therefore it made it much easier… everything a lot… great deal easier, ‘cause I’ve… I’ve been… I’ve been… stayed in lots of communes in that period, most of which I quite liked… but all very different I guess, you know, and this was this kind, and… and we used to go sometimes… and one of the people who lived there… well it… like they had… then they… I’m not sure, I think they divorced, but in fact they both… the wife lived there and the children and the husband sort of came and went, and I think this was true for several or… you know, of more than… and… of course, when I went down with… Dorothy and the family, I met the people there and talked to them and so on, and one of them, it’s always… there was like somebody you know… he was head of… he was at that time, Head of Light Entertainment at Rediffusion and they’d moved him over from Head of Current Affairs, ‘cause I think… they considered it a bit of a pinko… extremely pale pink to my way of thinking, but it’s… never the less, that was the way it was. But anyway… I noticed that… I did notice that he was sort of interested in me, and… I was… to be fair to me, I was extremely unhappy, I was really numb. There’d been the abortion, my boyfriend had had a long illness, it was… a parasitic illness and everybody thought he was going to die, except he and I, and he was moved to the Tropical Diseases Hospital and he got better and… but he didn’t want to continue the relationship, and… I felt… and I was coming to my end of the time at The Tavistock, and I’d been very much on my own in my last year, and I felt really smashed up, and of course the analysis had gone very badly, and then they found me somebody else ‘cause she’d moved away which wasn’t all together a bad thing, but it’s unusual, and… the other person was quite nice, but… [pause] I just had no sort of rapport, do you know… I always thought that I wondered… for a friend would have been fine but you know, not this… and… I didn’t… I’d come to the conclusion that I definitely didn’t want to work in a normal Child Guidance setting or… take a chance that maybe I could do some educational therapy if the psychiatrist was you know sympathetic and… it just didn’t… having worked at the Tavistock, which is a much freer situation and you had masses of expertise everywhere, and you could always go to somebody and… and…’

`Were you on a placement at the Tavistock, when you were a student?’

`Ah, well sort of. In the… in the first year I had to get a teaching qualification and I spent one day at the Tavistock.. and then in the second I did the same course as all the other EP’s who’d also had teaching experience and everything, and it was the same… the Clinical Psychologists did the same, and then they went to the adult department, and in my last year I was sort of… more or less, working there in educational therapy and groups and what have you, and going to case conferences and… and things like that, more or less choosing what I did from that point of view, so it was going to be really difficult… a different situation in a normal Child and Guidance Clinic unless I was really lucky and… and… I don’t know, well as I say, I was feeling really smashed up because of all this, and… [pause] and… oh, I don’t know… he asked me out and I… you know, and I… I said, and I think I must have just in… said that I was looking for a job, or that… but it wasn’t quite as crude as that [laughs] and I initially went there for fourteen days, and he wasn’t even… he wasn’t there at the time, to do… to finding some music… to go… with a little four minute film and music, you know, find the film… to be matched with the music… there’s a fill in before the news or something. I can’t even remember what it was called, so I spent most of the time you know, at an editing machine with a… [pause] a technician… looking at old film that was in the… in the library, and… I’ve always been quite surprised that I’ve actually been working away [laughs], so they gave me a… a three month contract, and… it just sort of went on from that, and I switched from Light Entertainment, to Current Affairs, and… which I really was more… I didn’t… was I more interested in that? I was interested in it anyway. I think I felt a bit overwhelmed by Light Entertainment you know, [inaudible] programmes and so on, it was like they were very silly.’

`Was this the BBC or…?’

`No, Rediffusion… Ready, Steady, Go was their [both talking together] big… thing at the time, but they were doing other quite big programmes, and… [pause] and I first went to a magazine programme, as a researcher, and I was… didn’t get on at all well with the producer, but he was away quite a lot, but I got on very well the person who replaced him, but I don’t think they’d have renewed my contract on that one. Because mostly I felt as if I didn’t know what I was doing, and… so it was lucky that… they came up… for political programmes, so… that’s… so in free… I was a freelance, you know, all the way through… and I’m just glad my contracts were… renewed until… [pause]…’

`[Inaudible]’

`… I was on loan to [???]… you know, it’s thanks [inaudible]. But actually I… I’d had a break in my contracts but then I had another… [drinks] and… for children’s and then… then I was on loan to Southern for the first three programmes, and… I had really done the work, and Brian Redford was presenting it, and he… he was extremely… very nice man… and… he said to me “If you ever need a job, come to me.” But in fact I never did do that, but… I thought well maybe I will one day, but… what happened was, I cracked up. I freaked out, before the transmission, so I had done it all really and got the stuff there, ‘cause it was… it was… [laughs] “how to… spend a million in three”… you know, “in a day” or something like that… silly thing… silly programme, it… which I think he thought it was a silly programme too, but Jack Hargreaves [ph] was the producer, and I think he didn't know what to make of me really, and… [pause] umm… before the programme… you know, before it was transmitted, when I would have been there, I’d cracked up, so… they sent me most of the money, but… or at least a reasonable amount of money.’

`When you say cracked up, what…?’

`Well, I’d taken… umm… [pause] I had sort of started seeing this rather druggy group of people and I tried dope a few times, ages… but it never seemed to do a great deal for me. I didn’t know what it was meant to do for you at the time really. I think I thought it was meant to do more for you than, you know… and… so I had tried it a few times…’

`You thought it would be a stronger drug than it actually is?’

`Yeah…’

`…actually is…?’

`Yeah… more… transforming, you know, and… [pause] and… I just happened to meet one of the group and sort of met them all and… they were nice people but they were… they were very into drugs… [pause] and to cut a long story short, the guy who used to do most of the supplying, had tried acid, and sort of came round to her and said how marvellous it was, and I was pretty miserable at this time… it sounds like I’m always miserable, but no I wasn’t… again… umm… and how wonderful it was, what have you, and so… umm… four of us… [pause] tried it… took it together, right. The guy who supplied it on sugar… someone else, and like they should have warned me, who’d taken some a week… a month earlier, or so, and his father put him in hospital, and his father was a big socialist doctor. I always remember, they had… they had Queen Elizabeth’s saddle [ph]… I think going into Bristol…’

`What’s that?’

`It’s a beautiful green velvet saddle, with gold… embroidery and… in the house, they had it on the wall, I was really impressed with it. I never met his father actually, but I knew that he was… president of the socialist doctors association or something, and… [drinks] I think we thought, oh well… he just put him into hospital because he’s a doctor, you know, and he would…’

`He put him into a psychiatric hospital?’

`Yeah. So there was him, and there was… [pause] Spire [???]… he’s dead now actually so I can say… his name was Paul. Apparently he committed suicide when he was forty I… I heard. There was… me… [pause] and there was someone else and I… I’m not sure who the someone else was. And… unfortunately, Paul used to come down very quickly I think because he was kind of all… and when he had music on it was really beautiful, really… wonderful experience, but I think he must have come down most quickly, and he was kind of oh… you know, what shall we do, shall we go out? And all this… and… I think that was the real… wrong… mom,… you know, the wrong thing, ‘cause… now for example, Laing says you must always have a guide, you know, it’s trying to land… it was like trying to land a plane in a storm without a guide... you know... there always must be somebody, and of course, when we did there wasn’t, ‘cause he’d had it as well right, and… and he had a different sort of reaction. Anyway, we did all go out, and I remember having this like… that we completely united, that we want to be able to pee for one another for example, you know… and all… and that… but I also remember crossing Holland Park Avenue, and thinking that the toys were just Dinky cars, so… I could easily have… I suppose, if I hadn’t been…’

`Thinking that the…? Say it again…’

`That the cars weren’t really real, they were just like Dinky cars, you know, and they were no… they weren’t… wouldn’t run you over sort of thing, you know, you could just kind of… dispose of them and… so it’s lucky that I was kind of… with them, but then if I hadn’t been with them I wouldn’t have gone into Holland Park in the first place, and we went into Holland Park and… we came back and… this was all very well, but I wouldn’t feel… all the next week I never really came down, and I didn’t really want to, and… Paul, this same guy was… he had a studio where… and he was trying sculpture at the time, and I went round there and sort of laid round watching him chipping away at things, and… I remember during the… that week, I can’t remember what else I did, and… [pause] then we all went away, all… a lot of this group [pause]… to Michael’s parents’ place in the country, and everybody else… I didn’t have acid again, I’m sure I didn’t… but I was quite… high and… and… Michael’s brother arrived, followed by the Police, and I… sort of talked the Police off you know… whilst everybody was out of their heads, and I was kind of… “Well, you know how it is officer, when you’re late for a party, ‘course I shouldn’t have done that…”, and all this, and also on the way, we travelled in the van… I’d taken all the acid in my bag ‘cause I didn’t have any kind of criminal record or… what have you, so I said, “Give it to me”, and funnily enough the van was stopped, but they didn’t… you know, they were just quite insultory (??) about… them… they certainly didn’t search anybody or… but one of the group had been on television, sort of defending the right to take heroin and what have you and then he… and then naturally enough he got quite paranoid, another thing was that,… I think his father was the editor of the Jewish Chronicle or the other Jewish paper. Anyway, he… subsequently he… he thought “My God, they’ll all be after me, you know, ‘cause I’ve been”… which… [laughs] was a fair assumption, I dare say, as this sort of self appointed spokesman for heroin users, you know, and… [pause]… what else happened? I’ve got the vague feeling that while I was there I may have taken a pill, and I don’t know what it was. I’ve got this feeling that my… I’d sort of said to Mike… I don’t know what I’m… wondering about, ‘cause it was really in the country and near a beach. It was a very nice, sort of location, and… I’ve got this feeling I might have taken a pill, and then we all came back to London… and I’d been with Evan [ph] most of the time there… but… I liked him a lot, and we came back… to London and I think… by train. Anyway, when I got to the tube station, a big one somewhere, almost… it seemed like there was too much stimulus, you know, too many lights, too many this… and… went home. I was living just off Portobello Road then, and Evan [ph] went back with me, and… then he was going, and I wanted him to stay but… [inaudible] he went… and… we had a television in the kitchen there, it was a sunny basement, and I shared a flat with… well it was her flat and her children and… and another… the… both of us, both of us… were both at The Royal College, but by this time they were independent, and… I’m not sure Ann was there… perhaps not. Anyway, people were watching television in the kitchen, and apparently… not her youngest child but her next child… I threw a cloth book at him. Well obviously it wouldn’t hurt, a cloth book, but it was just like I never do that, you know… I wouldn’t do that… and… so Wendy was really worried, and I thought… umm… umm… I thought that the television was communicating to me, right… kind of culture… spiritual revolution or something like… or [inaudible]… and… she tried to get hold of somebody at the Tavi’ and I think she tried to get hold of Dan [ph] ‘cause I’d spoken of him occasionally, and… but she couldn’t, so she got… you have to remember she had three little children apart from anything else… umm… she got… social services or something, and I don’t know whether it was a social worker or what it was in those days… he was Asian as it happened… although at the time, he arrived I was do… doing what I was… considered to be yoga, on the bed, recreating the sort of continents and what have you… not that I… I’d never done yoga so I don’t really know how to do yoga… and [pause]… he asked me how I was, and I said I’d got a pain in my back. Well I always used to have a pain in my back, when I was tired, and eventually I… years later, went to a physiotherapist and they fixed it in about one minute, but… umm… umm… and I’ve a feeling Michael came round. That was one of the four [inaudible]… and…’

`I’m sorry to interrupt you but… [both talking together].’

`That’s all right…’

`…finished, I think…’
[End of DVC Pro tape 2 - VHS tape 1 continues]

[Start of DVC Pro tape 3 – VHS tape 1 continues]
[Interview with Jill Molyneux, C905/16, tape number three].

`Yes… umm… where was I… on my way to the hospital…’

`You were…’

`On my way to Springfield… well that… the Social Worker or whatever he was… said, “I think you should go to Springfield.”’

`This was after you’d taken the LSD is it?’

`Yes, and I was back at my flat and my flat mate, who owned the flat had… but then she got hold of some kind of Health Authority, ‘cause… and he’d arrived and I’d been… in my own mind I’d been doing yoga and my sort of… I had a large bed and… sort of recreating the continents and so on. Anyway, and he asked me how I felt and I said I had a pain in my back. He said he thought I should go to Springfield, and that… I thought that’s a nice name, and then… I think I had a faint sort of feeling and I also had a fairly strong feeling I didn’t have much choice about the matter, and… we went off in this little red car, and he was sitting next to me and I remember I’d sort of got hold of him at one point, his arm or something like that, and I mean… said, “don’t touch me”, you know like people do… and… [pause] my idea of hell was mental hospitals actually, and I had been to some, as a student… for demonstrations and so on, with other… members of staff in training… psychiatric registrars and so on, we all used to go kind of in groups, to Napsbury and… and well, I don’t know… various… various places…’

`That was in your professional career?’

`Yeah, yeah… so I had some idea what they were like and also I’d been to one in Holland, in a much more intimate way, when I was… an undergraduate, and we were visiting Amsterdam at the university, and they have very long and… degrees and they… they are more or less working part of the time and… they were very advanced by comparison with our, us and I suspect they still are, but they… I had been to a mental hospital in Holland, and… [pause] so… I felt very apprehensive… eventually… eventually got there…’

`But you did realise that you were being taken to Springfield’s? Did you realise it was a psychiatric hospital?’

`More or less… you know when you’ve got kind of a… yes… you know… it must be, that’s what it must be, sort of business… and… so when I got there… Springfield has big grounds, or did have, I’m… I can only describe it as I knew it then, quite extensive grounds anyway, and the main hospital is one sort of old, very big block, but there was a separate block on one side and a small building on the… at least there was then… when I went there, and it… I was taken to this, like smaller block, much smaller block, and… and I think you know, they came to give me an injection, and I was like fighting them off… and… I lost… at least a day and a night. I don’t know how long it was, maybe slightly longer, and I was also… from having been in the ward downstairs I was in the ward upstairs, and I think it was about… I think there was about seven people kind of trying to hold me… down, so probably I was quite fierce… or they tend to do that don’t they? You know… not always, but… and it turned out later that I’d had a shot that was too great for my body weight…’

`Do you know what it was that they gave you?’

`Oh, I imagine it was Largactil but I don’t know what it was, and I didn’t actually ask. But I… I was quite… I don’t know how much I… I suppose I weighed less than eight stone at the time, and… [pause] when I came round it was really weird, ‘cause like I didn’t know where I was. In a sense, I didn’t know which planet it was, you know… which country, which anything, and the noticeboards revealed nothing, you know, you couldn’t glean anything from the noticeboards, so it was just a matter of probability… and people were going off to have ECT, not me fortunately, but… and coming back very zombified, and I… I remember sort of, often talking people round and down and sort of… you know when people aren’t eating ‘cause they’re not sure it’s really food or whatever they’re thinking or… that they are alive or what have you, and you can… just sort of tell them they can eat, that they can… you know, whatever… and… that they are alive. I don’t think I was all together sure about that myself at… in the beginning.’

`How was ECT given, do you know much about how it was given in those days?’

`In Springfield? I… I don’t know, because they went off the ward… but… but they… and they came back fairly quickly. But they certainly came back… and… they didn’t all come back at once as far as I remember, but… you know, within a given time and… and very kind of affect… well… very out of things, you know, and… it wasn’t the whole ward by… you know, it was just some… some people there. And I saw… [pause] I wasn’t really aware of it, but apparently… at that stage, but apparently I was trailing my left hand side as if I’d had a stroke, the whole of my left hand side, when I went walking and everything, and the Psychiatrist asked my mother if I was always like that… and she said, no of course… and I think he assumed that I was… hadn’t been like that previously, it was probably just checking but… the Pyschiatrist, I didn’t… I still had… three… no four… sugar cubes with acid, right… on me, and I gave them to an… I gave them to the… to analyse, I told them why I’d taken one, like when and all this, but this is very early days, and I don’t think they had any experience of it, whatsoever, and… I didn’t have much either, and… so if it ever was analysed I’m not sure what… you know, I didn’t certainly didn’t hear about it… so I never knew how much I’d taken or if it was adulterated or anything like that, and… I had a lot of visitors… I really had a lot… and fortunately, somebody up in the living room… well you know, relatively… not long before, sort of came and confirmed all my story about like what I’d been doing, where I’d been working, what I was qualified in, this, that and the other… and I… ‘cause it must have been very strange for them because I didn’t… I mean… at the time I was really… highly qualified and I was probably the youngest EP in the country, and…’

`Youngest what in the country?’

`Educational Psychologist, qualified… and, you know, I’d spent three years at the Tavi’ which they probably had just about managed to hear of the Tavistock, and… then I’d been working in TV you know. I mean it must have all sounded really… hallucinatory… but they didn’t show that. I mean they were quite nice. They kind of talked to me like a person, but just didn’t know what to make of me I think. But once my visitors had come, particularly this one and some others, and I was really lucky ‘cause people were trekking out to Tooting Bec. [Pause] You know, they knew I was more or less sane about what my past history as it were, and… the one I saw most often, asked me what I’d like to do while I was there, and I said, “You mean for my therapy?” sort of thing, and I said, “Well I’d like to do it in the garden.” And in fact, that’s what happened… and… it’s just a really strange association perhaps but… there was a… there was a place called Finchton Manor [ph] which was for maladjusted adolescents and it was run by a really marvellous man, who was the nearest thing to a father, or a living grandfather I ever had, and I could and should have spent a lot more time there, but I’d been there as a student, in Kent, and… it was… in the past there’d been a member of staff who was… I think he was a classic scholar or something like that, and he used to spend a lot of time gardening, and people were always mistaking him from the… for the gardener and… and he was like this… really sort of famous scholar, and… and he used to sort of… apparently he used to swear a good deal, and… and somebody mistook him for the gardener, and he said, “Madam I’m not the… you know, I… I’m… I’m…” and then apologised, and… “Madam, you know… I can’t sort of take it amiss… to be mistaken… for the gardener, and nor am I the first…” you know, ‘cause like the Magdalene thing… and I’d never met him… I’d just heard about this guy, so… and I suppose I saw myself in Magdalene vein…’

`What’s the connection with Magdalene? I don’t understand.’

`Mary Magdalene… she mistook the resurrected Christ in the garden… for the gardener, do you remember?… ‘cause she was weeping… you know, when He left the tomb and started living again, whatever. In the Bible, you know, in the Bible story, and… and she was in the garden and… weeping, and she mistook him for the gardener, and He asked her doesn’t she recognise Him? And then she recognised Him. And ‘cause I think she was the first to see Him wandering about after He was crucified, or whatever… I’m not very strong on the Bible, but… you know, I was… I was at a school where you couldn’t avoid it [laughs]… assemblies every day and church was on Sunday and so forth. So… for some reason, I wanted to go outside… and I thought… I’ll be all right if I… if I can find a gardener, and… they kept me locked up. What I hate above all in any mental hospital… it could be like the Hilton or… or Claridges even… I… if… if I was confined, it… I will still loathe it, you know… so… I’m not very concerned about like the furniture or anything but… but they kept me in that locked ward, for… for… three… about three weeks, and I don’t know if it was on… on my account that it was locked, ‘cause it was sometimes locked on account of one or more patients, but in that ward there was… a really, really young girl, about fifteen, blond… she… and she was very… fierce, and not surprisingly ‘cause she shouldn’t have been there. It was absolutely dreadful, and… [pause] I sort of learnt to fight through Pam, because I had to you know, ‘cause otherwise she’d have sort of… she’d just grab me by the hair and keep hanging on, and… I don’t mean I never fought in the past but not much, and certainly not so… too, in a situation which you couldn’t get away from, and it ended up so other patients were saying… “Oh…”, or she was saying to other patients, “Oh, it’s no good your hiding behind Jill, you know…”, sort of thing. I… I eventually became kind of… I don’t know, what exactly, but certainly… I was in… I suppose I was a bit afraid of her, and she nicked my radio which I had under my pillow, and I just thought there’s no… hope of getting this back [laughs]… and… I would see her dancing a lot, like ballet, you know, ‘cause I was still high, and… that sort of mixture… and the first outside person to do with the hospital who was really nice to me, was the Catholic Priest, and I’m not a Catholic. I think he may have been a monk of some kind. Anyway, he gave me his hand because I was crying so much… [drinks] and the Rabbi kind of… let me hang about but he clearly… [inaudible] [laughs]… but just anybody, anybody was… you know, when you’re locked in, anybody from the outside world…’

`What… what other patients were there? You mentioned the one… young one that was fifteen…?’

`Pam, yeah…’

`How many others would have been on that locked ward then?’

`Oh… it wasn’t really, you know, it was sort of so, so locked, do you know what I mean? Partially, sometimes… and it was called Narcissus ward… which my second analy… the Psychologist found extremely kind of ironic when she came to see me. How many, how many, how many? Well, at least thirty I should say.’

`And how was it sort of laid out with… the beds and things?’

`Well, there was a big… a big kind of day room, and it had big windows, which were onto the grounds, and there was music on all the time, which is a bit of a drag, and I got somebody to bring me some ear plugs but I never… I don’t think I ever actually used them, but it was sort of irritating sometimes. It didn’t get me down too much.’

`What kind of music did they play?’

`Mmm… just pop music really… and… then… the… dormitories were at an angle. It was kind of L shaped then. There was a kind of corridor and a dormitory sort of there and… and there as far as I remember… and… [sighs] I was really hoping I was pregnant, but I turned out not to be quite soon. I thought I might be for some reason. Well, I mean you know… no more reason than… and… [pause] and, oh… I can’t remember too much of… oh, the kitchen, yeah. I met one of the nurses at a party later, and she said, “Oh yes, you were always making tea for the nurses”, and I suppose I was, ‘cause it gave me something to do… you know, and you could make tea endlessly in the kitchen, and… but at one point I sort of had the… the feel that it was like… like the… that part of Auschwitz that they used to take the visitors round within, the kitchen… and I was convinced that Dietrich [ph] had made a kind of… covert underground visit to Auschwitz and…’

`Who’s that?’

`Marlene Dietrich… was always a very big figure for… me and… was very, very important in the later breakdown, which is like… umm… like… a good architype, sort of thing, but at the worst times. Also… I found there… I accidentally smashed an ash tray, a glass ash tray in the kitchen, and… I thought probably everybody would come down on me, but they didn’t, you know, and I just… cleared it up and what have you, but I realised what a tremendous release it was, and I don’t know if I’ve always felt this, but to break glass is so… it’s such a relief, it’s… it’s so… umm… be… if the atmosphere’s heavy, you know… I always understood why people wanted to break windows after that, or did break windows, and I once pushed a window out myself in the next hospital. [Pause] But I did it so sort of subtly I didn’t get put on the back ward…’

`What…?’

`Which is what usually happens to people who put the windows out.’

`Were the staff sort of in uniform or on… were they not in uniform?’

`The nurses were in uniform I think… and mostly they were really nice. One of the sisters was a bit of a bitch. But… not too bad. But… I had… she was the one who said she’d never seen anybody have so many visitors as me, so maybe she… but she wasn’t very nice, and… [pause] I was like friendly with the cleaner who was Afro-Caribbean, and I could see how wary she was and what have you, and what… and I also… there was another woman, Susan, a Jamaican, who somehow… and I… I’m not sure this was why the ward was still locked, it may have been when it was open, it must have been, but she used to somehow manage to turn up on the ward when… when like whenever I was particularly distressed and she would kind of wipe my tears and she would make up my face and… she was just a wonderful person, and… anyway, this Sister asked me why I talked to them you see… why I talked to the cleaner, and… “You seem to like black people…”, and I said, “Well I guess I did.” “Well why? Why do you?” and I said, it wasn’t a terribly good… I said, “I think they’ve suffered more than the others”, something like that… and she said, “Oh yes, but they ask for it…” [laughs]. But anyway, she didn’t actually prevent, you know, it was just a kind of interchange…’

`So were most of her staff white then?’

`Yes, uh huh…’

`They didn’t have any black nursing staff, but the cleaners… some of the cleaners were black?’

`I don’t remember any black nurse there. I remember… who… there was a… a… what was she? Later when I started telling fortunes and everybody came to me, patients, nurses, whatever… I didn’t charge, just kind of… you know, sixpence if they had it, and this Lithuanian nurse came, and I’d had her down as being particular kind of… [pause] well, possibly racist, but I wasn’t sure really, but it was more her manner, so in some cases it was… you know… I thought she was all right really, and I got on well with her after that… once we’d had… ‘cause when you talk… when you’re telling fortunes you always know there’ll be interchange and… and I think you know, in fact it’s like… I think fortune tellers were the Psychologists of the poor if you like, and I think that it’s very, very… I just deal with ordinary cards, so I think it’s incredibly similar…’

`Ordinary cards, did you say?’

`Cards, not Tarot cards. I think it’s… it’s… it’s so similar to projective tests, which… well Psychologists are using all the time. It’s just a medium by which you can allow your own level of awareness to sort of open up a bit and I don’t… and it sort of… somehow releases the barriers or puts them lower. So once she’d asked me to [laughs] tell her fortune… I thought she was rather nice actually, this Lithuanian… or descent, you know, and… and… who else was there? Well on the whole the nurses were nice, it was just this one sister I didn’t like very much, and she was a bit kind of bossy and she was a bit authoritarian, and…’

`Sorry to interrupt you, was there any black patients, or were most of the patients white as well? [Both talking together]’

`Well this Susan… this Susan, who’d… just a minute… who was Jamaican, wasn’t on that ward, she was on… in this little building near it. It was used… just seemed telepathic in the way she’d turn up on the ward. There was… there was somebody else who struck me very forcibly, was a blind, older man, with a white stick… that I used to see round and about. One of the nurses, my nurse… the… that… who was kind of delegated to me at one stage when I went on the hunger strike, or I think just be… because… was from Indian descent, from Malaysia, and… in those days they had Oxfam had advertisements on post… on postage stamps books, all right, on stamp books, you know, some chart… extremely emaciated child usually then… and for some reason I… I just kind of saw this and… and I kind of stopped eating, in protest, you know.’

`Is this why you were in the hospital?’

`No… no [laughs] this was while I was in the hospital.’

`It was while you were in hospital?’

`Uh huh. How I came to have a stamp book I don’t remember. I expect one of my visitors brought it or… my parents were also visiting me, not at my request. [Pause] But she kind of convinced me that she knew more about hunger than I did and had seen a lot more… much more of it, and… persuaded me to eat after two or three days… not much of a protest, and… so, who else was there? [Pause] It’s funny, she gave me a pink elephant which I kept. I mean I lose things everywhere, and I’d just thrown them about but my… children both had this pink elephant that she gave me years… years later, that I took a fancy to in…the sale… there was a little sale or something, and… [pause] over the… there was some Psychiatrists I never saw before [inaudible] came on the ward, and somebody gave me a jar of honey. It’s amazing how jars of honey figure in my… and I was carrying it, and… I was asking why it was locked, and I sort of got hold of his arm, but not… strongly, you know, and the guy went “Don’t… and it must have been another of these ‘don’t touch mes’ and I dropped the honey and I was… I said, “Now look what you’ve made [laughs] me do…” and I… I never saw him before nor since and there was one who came to… so in effect, after two or three weeks, I… oh, they wanted me to have… an EEG and… the one I saw most frequently, because of this trailing business they felt I might be brain damaged…’

`Because of the what business?’

`Trailing this left side of my body… thought I might be brain damaged and he… I… I was saying “No, no I don’t… I definitely don’t want it… you know, it could be ECT and who knows, ‘cause I had to go to the Maudsley to have that, and… he kind of took an oath that it wasn’t ECT for me, which I think was really nice of him, and one of the other patients gave me this artificial rose to take with me, ‘cause they all knew I was really scared. It was the black nurse who went with me… and she was a bit fed up with me ‘cause I was in the right… I was still right messy… you know, I was far too messy, sloppy, you know, generally, to go anywhere really. Anyway, I went there, I had this, and there wasn’t any… it was normal, and… it was an EEG and it wasn’t ECT, and I’d had one before when I was still a student from… one of my tutors who was doing research on perception, so it wasn’t a mystery to actually what happened, you know, the gel and everything, and… the paralysis or whatever it was, wore off after about six weeks fortunately, and…’

`Did you have that before you… went into the hospital or…?’

`No…’

`…after they’d given you///?’

`It was after that shock.’

`The injection?’

`Mmm…’

`Do you think there was a connection?’

`Yes, certainly. Umm… but I don’t know exactly what the injection was, I just knew it was too… much, and I also knew that… they were worried, I could tell… that… and he also apparently asked my mother… you know, he asked my mother had I always had it sort of thing, and she wasn’t saying I had, and… and she said like also, saying can’t they do something. ‘Cause like, she came to visit me and I really didn’t want to know very much and she… and she was making something or other and I said to her, “You… you’ve never made any… I’ve never had anything that… you’ve never made anything that fitted me”, and I guess I was speaking metaphorically or over stating the case anyway, [takes a drink] so she was saying “Can’t you do something?” and… he said they couldn’t give me any more Largactil, you know, they were giving me the maximum for my body weight, and for about eight weeks I was just throwing it off, completely. I don’t think I had anything in fact. Anyway, they let me off the ward. Great, and I spent my time… oh the first… the first thing that happened, there was a trip, and I used to go and talk to the people in the men’s ward, through the glass and… ‘cause I have a horror of… and I had an even worse one then of all female gatherings. I suppose it reminded me of school or something. [Pause] You know, so there was… it was all female ward, that was on top of it, and now I think people are mad to want single sex wards personally, but there you are, that’s what’s happening.’

`So how were they separated off at Springfield? [Both talking together] [Inaudible].’

`Oh they were miles apart [laughs]. They were… there was this block and then the… well I had to go… you went down some stairs and round… I’m not sure if it was the same block. I think it was the same block, it was very small. It was on the ground floor, and… somebody I talked to there, umm… there was a trip, a coach trip, going, and he kind of sneaked me on it.’

`Who… who sneaked you on there?’

`This bloke… ‘cause he was more kind of together than I was.’

`Was he another patient?’

`Yeah, a patient. It was for patients, but… the following time was one that the sister told me I couldn’t go ‘cause I hadn’t been in… in the hospital long enough. But anyway I went, and it was to some gardens, and they must have been fairly close and… there was a sundial, and it was a beautiful day, there was the gardens, and I thought… and it… I just managed to get off this locked ward and I thought… and this had actually… and I’d checked the perimeter of the hospital. I’d gone right round it. I’d checked where the gates were, you know… I knew I couldn’t get out of them, very easily and I’d gone right round, and sort of checked the… the area, and the bus went through the gate… out, out. So then I felt… free… then I thought I knew what freedom was, that was the most intense experience of freedom that I’ve ever had, in these gardens… and then of course I had to go back, and… [pause]. Of course I didn’t have any property you know, at first, no goods, no money and… what happened then? Oh well, I [inaudible]… I went and looked for the gardeners as planned, and he turned out to be Polish, and because I’d had this Polish boyfriend I knew a bit about this, so we sort of… that’s a… you know, kind of… puts you in well with him [laughs], so we sort of exchanged a few words, but I told him I was… didn’t mind helping in the garden and that was that really. But he didn’t turn out to be any better help than that, and… I met some… a man who was a long stay patient in the main block, called Bill Sylvester, and… who was lovely, and I never found out how he’d come to be a patient or indeed exactly when, but we used to… and there were people digging… ditches and stuff like this, and for some reason I got into a first world war thing, and it was all to do with the first world war and we were singing the songs from the first world war and ‘Long Way to Tipperary’ and with these people and… well I suppose it was trenching, you know, initially… trench… and so and so on, and that happened… he sort of… remained a sort of friend for the time I was there, and…’

`What were they really being dug… what were they really being dug for? Just part of gardening, or…?’

`Well I imagine… no, they were probably for drains or something like that, ‘cause they were… grassy area, you know, by paths and so on, and… [pause]. I didn’t know the first world war had such a sort of… significance for me that would come up you know, during the breakdown until it did… but then that was true of all kinds of things… and one of them was if I tried to think of like an archetypal figure, I’d probably have come up with Carmen, but in fact that didn’t figure either. Except once a bit and I… but… only because… oh well. My Psychologist came to visit me. She was a bit put out ‘cause I was… I wasn’t on the ward when she arrived, it was a long journey from the [inaudible] and I asked her, “How long do you think I have to stay here?” and she said, “Oh, for a very long time”, you know… hmm… it’s really not good.’

`What did you take that to mean when she said a long time?’

`Years, I suppose or… a year or something, and… but at the same time she arranged with the hospital I should go to her… like in future.’

`Where would that have been then?’

`Hampstead. You know, it’s quite a way from Tooting Bec but, and so I did, and one time… I remember on the tube [laughs] I was sort of vaguely acting out a bit of Carmen Jones, but it wasn’t sort of a deep thing that came up, it was more super… more conscious, and… so… so then there was Susan who was like a mother to me… this… Afro Caribbean… Jamaican, and she’d been working in a laundry, I think. I’m not surprised she cracked up, but… and… she really wanted to go to a garden party at Buckingham Palace and I felt really annoyed she couldn’t… or couldn’t be arranged… and we used to squat around, pretending to smoke dope, and dreaming of Jamaica, and there… there was one Pyschiatrist there, Steiner [ph] who was… I never actually… I was never his patient… but I could see he got it. He came by one time and he... he said... he kind of like did a... a howl, a sort of eureka, that you could see he… he really got it, what we were doing… and…’

`[Inaudible]… he thought…?’

`Mmm?’

`He didn’t object though? It was OK?’

`Oh no, not at all, not at all. He was… he was… unfortunately he was leaving the hospital. He was really nice. He was probably the best one, or at least he was the one… who was able… was sufficiently… you know, were to be able to do that, as it were, and… what else happened? Umm…’

`Can I ask you a bit about the daily sort of regime in…?’

`Daily regime, right… right… right…’

`What would have happened?’

`Mmm Hmm… uh huh…’

`Sort of from when you get up to say going to bed? Would the routine [both talking together] have been generally…?’

`Ok… get up, dress, wash, what have you. Have breakfast, and in my case, just go off the ward, and… I think I was meant to come back for the lunch… but once it started, you know, in there… I had the feeling that nobody was going to jump on me very much if I had… well I didn’t… I’d go back for lunch and then I’d go off again… and then I’d come back… for… the evening meal, which I think was quite early, and then… I couldn’t go out again after that. We’d just be on the ward until the following morning.’

`And when you… in the washing facilities, what were they like? Can you remember?’

`[Pause]. I remember the loos, which were sort of all… you know…’

`What were they like?’

`Normal loos, really. Adequateless… umm… [pause].’

`Did you have any privacy, you know to wash or… were you sort of… were there rows of basins or did you have a… did you have a basin each or how did that work?’

`I’m sure we didn’t have a basin each, but you know, I’d lost any sort of modesty of that kind years before, so it wouldn’t have bothered me. But…’

`You didn’t expect any privacy?’

`Well, they were all women weren’t they? No… I wouldn’t have exp… either expected it or it wouldn’t have bothered me. Well it would and it wouldn’t. If I’d been forced to take a bath, I can’t remember being forced to take a bath there, and the nurses kind of sit there. No, I don’t like that. If we were forced to take a bath, I would take a bath on my own. I can’t remember ever being anywhere where there were showers, which are much preferable after all. But if it was just other patients… umm… [pause]. Perhaps I was… you know… [pause]… I just can’t remember, but I certainly can’t remember being bothered about it, at all. I remember thinking… well I came on… I was really disappointed. That was really shortly after I was there, but apart from that… [pause]. Perhaps I was just extremely lax about washing or something, or bathing.’

`It just wasn’t a particular issue anyway…?’

`No, but I’d lived in that multi-occupied house where it was kind of pointed on to always leave the bathroom door… mixed [???]… you know, you’re meant to leave the bathroom door open, whatever, so…’

`Was that at school?’

`No… no, in one… I lived in the… [inaudible] with my boyfriend in… in Paddington. [Pause] [drinks]…’

`So meal times and things like that, were they… how was… how were dinners…[inaudible] [both talking together]…?’

`Oh, I’d lived in communes and… and I’d trekked, you know, 3,500 miles, as far as Europe, I mean… I’d… I… somehow also if you… if you saw them with… with nothing on, people were always… and if you think there’s only a couple… you know, you’re the only people there, you can be sure that people turn up before you’ve sort of finished [inaudible] and… [pause] and also, actually, having a very messy abortion, you know… it just wipes out sort of considerations of that kind, or it did with me anyway. It’s like getting fond of snakes. When I was a girl, I had an exchange to France and the guy had… lots of snakes, grass snakes they were, and I just thought, well I have to get to like these else, you know, my life’s going to be a misery, so I did.’

`So those things weren’t… didn’t really bother you that much…?’

`No… [laughs] no. But non stop, you know, being locked in with a lot of women, yes.’

`Were you under a section? [Pause] or were you there voluntary?’

`…or indeed with anybody. Umm… I presume so, I don’t know…’

`So if you’d…’

`I didn’t get out for four months in the end.’

`But you were under the impression that you weren’t allowed to leave, or…?’

`I didn’t have the means to leave really. I didn’t have any money. And one time, Paul, the supplier, who came to see… he came twice to apologise, you know, he wasn’t just your average pusher… and he really did apologise, and he left me all this tobacco, you know, quite a load of pot (??) but that sister, promptly impounded it on the grounds that it could be Cannabis, but it’s just ludicrous, you know, ‘cause there’s no way it’s Cannabis. She was just being… I shouldn’t have let her see it… and that was like the first smoke I would have had for ages. Umm… so if I… I… well I knew the perimeter of the place, but I still didn’t know… [pause] I don’t… even if I had known it was Tooting Bec, I wouldn’t have known where Tooting Bec was… in London, you know. Gradually I got to learn these things, ‘cause I went home with… with Brian, the one that got me on the bus, to his place one day, and back again, and then… he got in a really bad way, and I was talking to him through the glass, and it was cracked, and it was a very small… opening, and I… I had my finger on the opening like this, kind of thing, but kind of… he was really far gone in a very bad place, and… afterwards, I had this… like a crack in my stomach. ‘Cause like, I thought that I actually sort of had to enter there… and… I don’t know, I’ve had it again. But it’s the first time I’d ever had it, and…’

`What do you mean by that? I’m not… I’m not with you.’

`Well… he was in some kind of terrible mental… state, or emotional state, some hell of… of his, that I didn’t know… understand, but I had to sort of try to go in, in order to communicate with him. I mean it was only… there was only this little pane of glass anyway. He was locked in the ward at the time… and… it was such a mental effort, or such a… a dangerous place or something, that when I came out of it, it felt like something had broken in my stomach, across here. It hadn’t, I mean it just… it was just a reaction, and it frightened me, and I went rushing off and found Steiner [ph] and I didn’t… can’t remember what I said to him. “Brian wants to kill me”. That’s what I said, and that was very, very bad, ‘cause I didn’t know at the time, but he was there because… it was something to do with… him throwing darts at his wife… a dart… which was sort of… borderline homicidal attempt, right, or something. You’re not meant to throw darts at your wife are you? Not a good idea, so… Steiner [ph] took this really seriously. Well I think he did at that point, but I shouldn’t have gone rushing… it was ‘cause I was frightened ‘cause of this physical reaction I’d had, and… he said, “Will you stay away from that ward for… twenty four hours?” or something like that, and I’ll see to it. [Pause] So I said I would and I did. [Lights a cigarette] And Brian was transferred to the main block, which I… and I saw him with the people from the main block, so obviously I felt very bad about that. I still feel very bad about that to this day, and… also, in Springfield, I found out that… there were two of the group, and they visited me and they… and they were talking about Edina, who I was still in touch with and… I’m still in touch with both of them, but they were like brother and sister really, although they married, but that’s a long story. Umm… they were talking and they were both on heroin right? And I was… so horrified by this… ‘cause I knew that one of the group was on heroin, but they’re… or he was… but I thought he was the only one. And I knew that Dina had dabbled in all kinds of things, and probably Michael too, but… not heroin. In those days if you were in… using heroin, you were injecting as well, so… umm… I thought `something’s got to be done’, ‘cause I loved them both dearly, and… I… told a Psychiatrist, which is the only time I’ve ever grassed anybody up in my… life. And fortunately… nothing happened.’

`They were just visiting you at the time?’

`Mmm… they were just… [both talking together] visiting me.’

`…they were your old, sort of original friends that you’d taken the LSD with?’

`Well he was… no, Dina hadn’t been there. Not… not that day… [pause]. But in fact they were both heavily into drugs and… and years later, if not now, you know I… doubt if they’re completely off… everything, and I doubt, that… oh, I don’t mean dope, because I don’t count that [laughs], you know. I knew… I know Dina did a lot of coke and… she’s very beautiful… very beautiful, and… with blue eyes and black hair, and… you know, she lost her looks more or less, in about… three years… three, four years, and… anyway, I told the Psychiatrist in the hope that… like they’d stop them really, ‘cause Irvine… the other one who was the heroin spokesman on the telly, so to speak, reckoned he’d got off heroin with acid, which I think now, means that he never was really hooked, you know. Like, some people aren’t… Mike and Dina were different, they were… more likely to beholden (??) everything in a… in a way. Anyway, they’re both still alive. [Pause] And actually, it’s not… the whole group isn’t sort of sad stories, you know, some of the group have been and gone… one of them was… she was editor for Rolling Stone magazine for quite a while, and her partner, had a…’

`Editor of what magazine sorry?’

`Rolling Stone… and… and others are fine, you know. I… it’s just that you tend to talk about the casualties really, and… I’m not sure that Dina is a cup… is a cup… casualty. Umm… but she had one of those awful childhoods and… her mother used to take her out into the sea, by her… you know, take her hand and walk out into the sea, “…then we’re going to drown ourselves now…” and all… and that kind of thing and… and…’

`Do you mind if we take a short break?’

`No, not at all.’

`I think they treated me very nicely really and I think that’s because I was kind of… you know, as far as they were concerned I was kind of unusual [inaudible]. They just called it a breakdown, and… they used to let me go out at weekends and… my friends were brilliant, ‘cause two of my friends, Colin and Francesca… they came and sort of took me home for a weekend and then some other… Jo, she said I could go and then she didn’t turn up and another friend turned up, so I asked him to kind of stand in and… and take me, and he was really… really, really good all round because he’d been extremely unlucky, but he and his brother had been in mental hospital in Transvaal and they’d had… a huge number of insulin shocks and God knows what…’

`In Transvaal, did you say?’

`Yeah, in South Africa, and… well they said like, you know, bad as they were treated of course the black sort of people in it were treated a lot worse, and… they survived because the insulin shock is really dangerous you know, and they were… his elder brother was there. It was something to do with he tried to kill their mother, and all I heard about their mother, it sounded an extremely rational thing to do, and… [pause] especially in view of the way she treated the… Africans, who had more or less brought them up and everything, and… it was really hideous stuff, it was like… all this sort of pornographic story, that part of it. So ok, his brother was in this hospital when he was fourteen. He then went to visit him and they got him too, but somehow or other, they did let them out, and they did eventually get to England, so he was partic… he was a…. very, very talented painter at the time, he was at The Royal College, but he kind of talent kind of died, I think, but he became a… became a Psychologist. I lost touch with him, but… anyway, he was really helpful [laughs] and he took me to this other friend and I was there for… the weekend, and I had lived in that flat, but during the night… I got… I got that feeling where you kind of want to arrange everything and… you know, exact form and everything, and then it became like the Valley of the Dead or something, but… shrouded, sort of underworld, and then I went back to the hospital, or after the weekend was over, and… I was wandering about one day, and there was a place, sort of quite like a ploughed field, and I had what I considered to be a vision, which was… something like the friar (??) angelica annunciation [???] but it was all shimmery, you know, and I… and to me, it took… I took it to mean that I would conceive again, and… and then I went down to the pigsty, and I’d brought a sort of wrap and… I screamed, and I think it’s the only time that I’ve ever really screamed, completely full out, you know… and… as I was saying, I thrown off this Largactil all the time, and there was a place where we used to dance… patients used to dance, and I was going along there one evening, about eight weeks after I’d been in there. Oh they did let me out sort of in the early evening… you were allowed to go there and… and I really liked to go there, ‘cause… you know, I was in that kind of gregarious and… dancing… and sort of, I danced about elsewhere… and it… and suddenly, you know, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t… I was kind of… [makes noise like “chukung”], and I think the… the… the Largactil must have sort of clocked in but it… it might have been something else as well, and they sort of carried me back to the ward, and I was sort of laid on the bed, and one of the nurses was being… you know, she was being nice and… and I said to her, “I had an abortion”, which was sort of partly by way of expression, but I think partly sort of, “You wouldn’t be nice to me if you knew I’d had an abortion”, you know, and… and she just said, “Oh, lots of people have”… which was the case, ‘cause lots of people did indeed have…’

`But it was illegal still at that time was it?’

`Yeah. I think the act was… the act was thirty… came in thirty years ago… let’s see, 1999, ’69… towards the end of the sixties I think. ’69 or something like that, ‘cause that’s what all the recent… Maurice (??) and The Guardian and everything else, that was all the anniversary and… they expected a big… push by LIFE and [inaudible] and so on, and… was in order to counteract it really, and… so… obviously, I mean I didn’t plan to say that you know, it just came out, so… obviously it was all tied in to me, somehow… and… actually their vision, what have you, you… and it was really external… was after that… late after that, and… eventually… I’m probably missing out lots of things. Oh, for two nights he was screaming from the small block, and I was really worried in case it was Susan, you know, I didn’t think it was her, you know, it kind of didn’t sound like her, if you know what I mean, but all the same, you know, if people… someone screamed for a long period, you really wonder what’s going on, and I never did find out what was going on… and…’

`Was it a patient, or staff or…?’

`A patient, yeah. It must have been one of the patients in there. It was a really small building really, there were a few patients in there. And… eventually there was a… [inaudible] umm… Irvine, who I liked very much, another from the group, had come and he’d sort of tried to bring me down, he said “You must come down, you must come down”, well, I said, “Well, can… do you understand what I’m talking about?”, and he said he did, which was fatal really ‘cause to me it was, well, why should I worry? But he had said… I think he said something about “Well what do you want when you come out?”, and I said, “I want a party” and so on, and he said, “You must come to the…”, I think it was him… there was this International Poetry Congress at The Albert Hall, so… I went out that weekend and I don’t remember anybody coming to fetch me… and I went, and… I ended up dancing… solo, almost all night… and… somebody was making a film and lots of people were taking pictures and… so on and so forth, and… umm… but I just started dancing because, when Allen Ginsberg started reading, I thought there was some tension between him, the chanting as it were. He was sort of chanting…’

`Who Ginsberg?’

`Allen Ginsberg… he’s… the… probably the most well known of the Beat Poets… and… there was like some tension between him and the… and I felt it needed another interpreter, so… I felt sort of inspired by the lights or what have you, it’s a brilliant place for a spectacle, and… I… I sort of became this sort of dance interpreter for the poets, and… umm…’

`So you would dance while you read the poems, or…?’

`Mmm… Yeah… and… [pause]. Irvine was a bit pissed off with me, I think, ‘cause like he was back with his girlfriend of quite long standing… well longstanding, seven years or so, and… so I didn’t go and sit with them… and the others, I went downstairs, and I saw somebody that I knew in the central part, it was like a rampart [???], this writer, who’d won a prize not long before, and I met him at a party, and he’d sort of said various things like… “Do you know where you’re going?” and stuff like this. So I… I said, “Yeah…”, I sort of took him on about this and… I don’t know, I just started… I really looked… quite a few people a bit slightly, and… I just started dancing, and that’s what… and there was a film, and it was… it was shown in Oxford Street and… about six years ago there was an anniversary thing and they had the… big screen behind the poets, and lo and behold they’d chosen a clip that… of when I was dancing, you know, I was some… one clip was, and… and… and the… there was a photograph, which I hadn’t even seen, of me, and two of the poets, earlier, for a photographic… exhibition at the National Gallery… Portrait Gallery, and I got in touch with the photographer ‘cause I wanted a copy of the photo, and… I don’t know, one thing led to another, and eventually last year, Blast [ph] Films were doing three programmes for BBC. They were doing one of… one on that event, so they interviewed me for that, which is how I came to… but this is all from nowhere going in 1965, the original thing, and at the… Ronnie Laing was at the thing, then, and he came up to me in the interval, and he said, "You’re higher than anybody I’ve ever seen…”, and there’s all these people taking acid you know, trying to get high and like this, sort of sat around, and I was going off with this… him, and the others afterwards, but… to Chalk Farm. I can’t remember what was happening there, but Irvine came off and carried me away and said, “Oh well you’re going home”, sort of business, so I went home.’

`Can I stop you there ‘cause I think we’ve got to the end of the tape?’

`Mmm… yeah, yeah…’

`We can just carry straight on in a moment…’

`Uh huh…’

[End of DVC Pro tape 3 - VHS tape 1 continues]

[Start of DVC Pro tape 4 – VHS tape 1 continues]
[Camera: `Interview with Jill Molyneux, C905/16 tape number four’].

`…when to start…’

[Camera: `Ok’].

`Oh… how can I describe… who R.D. Laing was?… He was… an alternative psychiatrist. He… he didn’t… believe in… the… the sort of disease entity due of mental illness, and he’d done a lot of work on the… genesis of… of mental illness and distress, and he rejected most of the physical treatments. He thought… patients were treated in a very cruel way, for the most part, and he… he was very thoroughly qualified, both as a Psychiatrist and a Psychoanalyst, but subsequently you know, he… he in fact was rejecting that whole model and… and putting everything in the social setting, and… he was also very well… he became very well known in the sixties, he was very famous, mostly through his books…’

`And you knew him?’

`And I knew him because we… but… had both been… associated with the Tavistock Clinic at the same time. Me as a… as a postgraduate trainee Educational Psychologist and he was in the middle of research at the Laing… which… at sort of… Laing Clinic was there. It’s all associated and we’d see each other in the Tavistock, so I decided after that, that I’d better ‘phone him, because I was trying to get out by this time, and my Psychiatrist said, “Oh I want to be really sure you’re well”, and I’d sort of developed this relationship with this woman, Amelia, and I wanted to live with Amelia, and Amelia seemed to be going along with this, but then she decided that I wasn’t really… you know, a lesbian and… so… wasn’t such a good idea and… and… so I thought I’d got to get out somehow and… I… a friend, err, of Laing and he said “Oh well, you know, come and see me…”, like… it was like the day after, or a couple of days and I… I said… when he eventually said, “Well, if you want, you can… you can come to Kingsley Hall if you want to…”, but it was really in the very beginning and… at that point, I don’t think anybody had lived in. Oh yes, I think… may have once perhaps have lived in and Joan, who was looking after her and… but very few people were living there and there was sort of just the… very [inaudible] the way, you know, but I didn’t… I had wanted to be involved in that project, and I’d been very miffed that Ronnie had actually invited an ex-partner of mine to sort of be in the project, and he hadn’t asked me, previously you know, when I was sane as it were. So I thought I would want to go there and… that’s what I told the Psychiatrist and everything, and I knew that the longer he kept me there, the more depressed I was getting, you know… I was getting more and more depressed…’

`The longer you stayed at the…Springfield?’

`Yes. Yes, it was just very hard to get out… little did I know that it was quite quick really, and… ok, I went to Kingsley Hall but not for long. I won’t go into that now, unless you want me to. The other thing that happened at Springfield… I met Bill Hill who was a gypsy, who was sort of lying low in the hospital. There wasn’t really much the matter with [laughs] him except like some marital difficulties… they were very strong, and… I don’t know, it… he… he became very dear to me and very important in my life, and… and although… we have now lost touch, and I don’t know where he is, or if he’s still alive. Never the less, he was a very, very important person in my life, who brought me a great deal of happiness and…’

`Was he a fellow patient, as well?’

`Yeah, he was a… officially he was a fellow patient, but… he seemed to, you know, have great faith in the movement and… and… the truth of the matter was, there were two warrants out for him, not very serious ones… one of which, he reckoned was fair enough, and I don’t know what it was, something to do with betting and Goodwood or something, and one which was a case of mistaken identity, so I think he just thought it was wise to sort of lie low for a while, and… he and his wife had separated, and… I think he wanted… he really wanted to repair it, the marriage, you know. They had quite a… they had… they had a big family. [Pause] But he was a great sort of protector somehow. I had lots of protection in Springfield, but I had two punchy boxers, you know, boxers who… with brain damage, who… in… in the early days, [inaudible] side and I… I gave them “The Family of Man” (??)… and… and… and that… they liked it ‘cause I gave them, you know, the exhibition, the photographic exhibition book?, no… no… well I’ve often wondered if they really liked it. I never… I never knew really. But later on… he was a… a much better friend, guide, guard, protector and general fun person really.’

`So did… how… you went… you left… Springfield’s by going to Kingsley Hall, is that right?’

`Mmmm.’

`It’d be interesting to hear a bit about Kingsley Hall.’

`Ok. Kingsley Hall. Well, as I say, unfortunately it was just… it was in its extremely early days…’

`That was in London was it?’

`It was in Bow.’

`In Bow?’

`Yes… and… I… I wish I’d either gone later or been a bit more… persevering but… when I… I was there, there were… there was Mary, who became quite famous really, and I… and when I first went… we got on really easily, really well, and although she… in her book she did say she hit me when she came out of hospital, she did hit me, but it was nothing much, and it certainly didn’t bother me, you know. But everybody else was kind of, “Oh, it must have hurt…”, [inaudible] but it was nothing to do with Mary that I didn’t stay, and… Ronnie didn’t… wasn’t living there by then, he was still… had lots of commitments and… he did come quite a lot, as much as he could I think, and… that was nice, when he was around and he used to bring people there as well.’

`So who was around?’

`There was… Joan and Mary… Mary had… been a Social Therapist for… what’s his name, David Cooper at… at Shenley, when he’d sort of had an experiment with his ward of… very laissez-faire I think, I don’t really know the details, but Mary had worked there, and she seemed nice. [Pause] There was a couple who were sort of ostensibly caretakers, who I think were busy stirring most things most of the time… young couple, and… there was… Joan, who had been Sergeant, the kind of High Priest of ECT and brainwashing, she’d been his like head nurse or whatever you call it, you know, main… and she thought he was mad, which she was probably right in that…’

`But she was there as a patient?’

`No, no, she was there to look after Mary Barnes really, ‘cause Mary was set on a kind of total regression, and… going down as she did and she… she’d been hanging on for quite a… a year… at least a year, you know, Ronnie would say “Oh you… there will be a place if you… but you’ve… you’ll just have to sort of hang on…” and she’d been a… I think she’d been a Sister Tutor as a nurse and what have you, but… also her brother had had a kind of major breakdown and she was very concerned about him, and…’

`And how was it different say to an ordinary hospital?’

`Well, you know, there was…’

`To a… to another psychiatric hospital, say?’

`Oh well… in every way really. There weren’t… there wasn’t meant to be a distinction, and Esterton [ph], a doctor… there was a Psychiatrist called Esterton [ph] who was there, who’d moved in, who used to work at Napsbury, and I’d seen him present a patient who’d been in a concentration camp, and I thought it… he did it so dreadfully, that I completely didn’t… had gone off him at that point, you know, unfortunately, so I was kind of predisposed against the man, and… so that wasn’t a very good… thing, and I also… Ron… Ronnie did give him in the credits sort of co-authorship of one of his books… but in that book there, he makes it plain that he never… he never read any of it, actually, but he did some of the research or whatever.’

`So you weren’t in wards and… it…[both talking together]…?’

`No, no. We were… there were rooms. On the roof there were three cells, one of which Gandhi had once stayed in when he was in London, ‘cause the building belonged to the Quakers, so there was this flat roof with three little cells, but below that there were rooms and I… I had a room. [Pause] My mother went off and took the… for reasons she best knows, and took my clothes, except for one rather awful sort of knitted suit that she’d… that had been hers and… and… that was like, it as far as I could… street clothes, you know, and… by this time I… [pause] I’d… hadn’t had the energy that I had at first. I was sort of feeling a bit in limbo all together [pause]. I knew there was sort of things going on that I couldn’t put my finger on. But Ronnie did tell me what was happening, sort of with the personnel, or not happening or what have you, that they were… you know, what the tensions were… and in fact, none of them stayed very long…’

`They left the…[inaudible]?’

`I think they were… neither… Esterton [ph] or Joan or Mary stayed. They only stayed five or six months, and I think they were all asked to leave, so it was…’

`Was there drug treatment there at all… on the…?’

`Oh…’

`…[inaudible]?’

`I was still taking whatever it was the hospital had prescribed, so… if I said I didn’t want it, I guess I… but I was… I was so… you know, like not taking acid again, I was like, oh I’d better stick to it in case sort of thing, but it was sort of zombifying me. But I didn’t really stay there long enough to… to get round to coming off and there weren’t enough… I just didn’t have… it had just kind of been too long. If I’d gone there sooner, before I’d sort of gone into a down, or it had been later when like people had moved in and everything was functioning and… and…’

`So did you have the sort of therapy sessions there or…?’

`No, no…’

`You just sort of… were there, and you lived there and that…?’

`Just lived there really.’

`Just [inaudible]…?’

`Uh huh. At that point. Well I didn’t… Ronnie used to come and try and cheer things up and take people… people would go to the pub and so on, but I’d got in a state by then. I didn’t want to go out ‘cause I didn’t have anything to put on and… and anyway, I felt depressed and… or something. I felt sort of totally in limbo.’

`Were you hoping to get back into work and so on?’

`Well eventually, yeah, but I was on social security there at… first off, and they organised all that, and they… I didn’t feel up to… to helping anybody, or… well Mary I helped, but I didn’t feel up to like cooking or cleaning or what have you, and… [pause]. What was… and so many things were all right, you know, when there was a few people around and things like that, people did come a bit. It was just getting underway, and I just didn’t have… oh well, Esterton used to come and stand in my room in the mornings and kind of stand there, and… I really didn’t like that, ‘cause I didn’t like him, and… I knew that… oh and Joan on one hand was his mistress of… fourteen years or something, and at the same time… Mary was you know… I don’t know if I should do… Mary was in analysis with him and he hadn’t bothered to tell her whe… whether… the… the fact that he was sleeping with her was part of the treatment or not. This was the situation as I understood it, and then there was these two caretaker types, [lights a cigarette] who I think were just making trouble, and it was about the food. I couldn’t have cared less, as long as I had something to eat, but they were both vegetarians, and I did… I… I really didn’t care what I ate, but… for… I think this girl went and said “Oh, she doesn’t like not having meat”, or something, ‘cause then the people get… meat and… I… I couldn’t handle it you know. It was all stupid little things, but it was just… [sighs]. If I had a bit more hope, that sort of… things would work out more…’

`Was it very hard to adjust to that after the sort of regime of hospital life?’

`Yes it was [both talking together] really hard… and… two people… well, one… guy I’d worked with in television, and who in fact had been kind of hanging around for… years, kind of finally decided he could drop me now he’d sort of transferred me to Laing and somehow my having a breakdown set him free from his obsession I think, you know, so… ok, he didn’t turn up but that was kind of… and it was about… it was the worst possible time he chose but I suppose that was fair enough considering. I hadn’t behaved very nicely to him anyway, and… another great friend of mine, who was originally from Nigeria, finally had to go back home, and… ‘cause he’d been putting it off and putting it off and putting it off, and doing another… you know, qualification and all this and that, and I didn’t see him before he left, ‘cause I didn’t feel up to going anywhere, and getting… I think he found… thought getting to Bow was you know, a bit difficult, so all in all everything seemed to be going downhill. I had a lot of confidence in Ronnie, and… and I… I didn’t want to tread on anybody’s toes you know. I knew he was trying to get this off the ground, it was bad enough as it was, you know, trying to… to manage everything, and I just… and there was a whole crowd of people came from The States, black and white, and I said to them… to the black people really [laughs]… “Are you…”’

`Do you mean patients or workers or…?’

`Interested parties, you know, not patients.’

`People had just come to look at Kingsley Hall?’

`Yeah, yeah… and some to stay…’

`…[inaudible] right…’

`And… [pause] well, he was quite nice really, and they took on Mary afterwards and he was very good at feeding people and stuff like that. He was nice, but he talked to me like I was a Psychologist, but I was completely kind of freaked out by… it that sort of way by then, and… felt I couldn’t do it you know, and… these… about… I don’t know if they were a couple or not, but they were really nice… lively, and I said, “Are you going to stay?”, and they said, “Oh, no we’re not staying…”, you know. I thought oh well, they’re going to go, and there’s just going to be these kind of skeleton people, and I… and it… I’d better go home, so I did. But unfortunately, I don’t think they were that keen to have me, so I had to sort of… when my mother came to visit me, I had to sort of give a reason, that would kind of… move her, so I said, “Oh, I can’t stay here, you know… everybody’s sleeping with everybody else..”, that was good enough, umm… [laughs], so I went home. And that… [both talking together]’.

`So that she would agree with you leaving?’

`And that wasn’t the case, I didn’t tell her exactly what was going on…’

`[Inaudible]’

`And yeah, so she would cooperate with my leaving, so I left, and went back to… here to Portsmouth… which is… was the worst thing I could do. I tended to do it after I had breakdowns… was to go back to the family home, which was really the worst thing I could do, to convalesce, but it’s really hard when you’re wiped out, to sort of have the energy and the initiative to sort of organise a life, isn’t it… I found that.’

`And… and presumably, you weren’t… were you helped at all to do that? Presumably not? I mean was there anything to help you try and adjust back into the every day world as it were or prepare you for work? Anything like that?’

`Well, I mean… at Kingsley Hall the idea was that I’d stay for a while, and it was all like organised for money, and food, and shelter… and it just hadn’t got everything else under way, because like later on there was masses going on and all concerts and… and there was plenty of people and, you know, and there was… sort of routine and… you know, I just caught the very early period unfortunately and… and even Mary, I’m amazed… on the point of really sort of regressing, so she was no longer a kind of company as it were. I could get on really well with her when… when she was just really freaked out and that, we’d get on really fine, but if somebody sort of really sort of… became on your nerves, you know, it’s not… you can’t do anything, I mean there’s not much sort of… socialising can be done, and… so… I think I should have hung on longer, just for a few more months and I think it would have all worked out well, from what I later saw and heard and everything, yeah. And it was much… it was much better than being in some locked ward or something, you know. But it was very kind of empty then, to the whole… the whole… it was quite a big building, and there was like very few people in it [laughs], so…’

`Did you have a feel for what you needed? Did you know what you wanted or needed in order to sort of get your life back on track again?’

`Umm… I think I felt I just had to wait until I had some energy, you know, sort of thing ‘cause I really hadn’t. Well also the pills you know, this… this… totally knocking me out, I guess, by that time you know.’

`What sort of pills would they have been?’

`I expect it was still Largactil. It’s really a heavy drug. I mean if I have it now, I can’t even speak. I mean if I had it sort of in recent years.’

`What other side effects did it give you? Say…[inaudible]?’

`Ah well in the hospital… when I was in the hospital when it… when it did eventually start… having an effect on my mood, or whatever, or my body I suppose… I felt I didn’t walk properly and… and if I was trying to drink a cup of tea, the tea would you know, it was kind of… I couldn’t keep it in the right plane, it would be totally over sort of like drenching someone that’s really unstable [???] and… Bill used to help me, the gypsy, he used to help me, or… or anything… a knife and fork or… or… [pause] I could still whirl about… I mean it… it happened gradually, but it’s… no, it was really unpleasant and gradually sort of heavier and heavier really.’

`And did you ever question it? Did you ever say that you didn’t want to take it? Were you offered any alternative to taking Chlorpromazine?’

`Umm…’

`Or Largactil?’

`Umm… [pause]. I can’t remember doing so. I was so… worried about making sure I didn’t have ECT or Psychosurgery or… you know, it seemed like a very small evil by comparison, and when Bill was trying to help (??) me, he really kind of looked after me and we used to go into the town a bit and… and round and about and… [pause]. No, I just… focusing on getting out.’

`So, for what sort of things did you think you might get ECT for, it sounds as if you were very scared of getting it?’

`So, for what sort of things did you think you might get ECT for, it sounds as if you were very scared of getting it?’

`Yeah, I was. Well I… I thought it was fairly random. I thought it was a totally negative treatment… it was a punitive treatment, you know, the way it was developed. If you read the sort of original, experiments of that Italian fascist, they’re just unbelievable stuff. How he tried something on a pig, and he tried something on a down and out, that nobody’s going to miss and… and… and so on. It… it’s obviously an anti-human treatment, that you don’t necessarily… recover from, and I knew that… there were departments. I think Sergeant [ph] was at St Thomas’ but I’m not quite sure which one. It might have been Guys, and… I used to be going round on buses thinking, I hope I don’t get… totally freak out and get dumped in Guys, you know, or wherever it was.’

`For fear of that treatment?’

`Yeah, yeah, ‘cause I knew they just like… it went on and on you know.’

`Was it ever used as a threat, directly to you?’

`Certainly not in Springfield.’

`At any other times?’

`Well, Dr Denholm who was Head of the Hospital in St Clements where I next was, he did say that he thought maybe I had a deep underlying depression, and I should have ECT, and I said… “If I’m depressed, it’s because I’ve got good reason to be depressed. I’m engaged to one man, I’m in love with another, he’s…”, I didn’t say he’s not free, but he wasn’t really free. And that’s why, you know… and he said, “Oh I didn’t understand all this”, and I said to Rosemary, who was his Registrar, ‘cause it was all very intimate there, I said “Well do you understand?” [laughs] and she said, “Yes.” So it was just… the idea was dropped, but there were lots of working class people in… in St Clements, who’d… who didn’t want… ECT just as much as me. I mean they didn’t… they… was as much against it as I was, but you know, they didn’t have a chance really, they just got it. [Pause].’

`That’s interesting…so you feel you had a better chance [both talking together] of… avoiding it?’

`Well, manic… yeah, manic people… I don’t know if all manic people, but me, I’m very, very verbal when I’m high, more so than normally, so I can even sort of argue out… he was quite… Denholm wasn’t really an authoritarian, and he would really take a chance on a patient, and as for… my having underlying depression he was probably right, but, you know, I didn’t want the ECT and… he was clever though because… like this Sister, she thought she’d be funny, and I had… my… some of my most exotic clothes that… I had this… Afghan waistcoat which was embroidered in lime green, one of the… I was one of the first people in… in London to be wearing, the… before it became a kind of stereotype, and I couldn’t find the coat. Well I knew where the coat… I couldn’t afford a coat actually, ‘cause there was a club that… where they… the Australian trav [ph]… backpackers of their day, used to bring them in, but… and I had sunglasses or something, and she said, “Oh, put this on, put this on…”, so I said… and, when I was going in for this interview… and he said, even he said, “Why are you dressed like that?”, and I said, “Well…”, I said, “…’cause you told me to…” [laughs], so… he wasn’t… and I knew… I know he took kind of chances with other patients. There was someone there who was… well he was qualified as a doctor, but… he was kind of schizoid, I guess, but Denholm really helped him a lot, I think, and then eventually he ended up in the papers, you know… `Psychiatrist lets dangerous maniac loose`, or something, but… not long before he died, but I guess he could take it you know. He was good… he was a good bloke, and… but as far as the… but he obviously must have been into ECT… and when I first went in there, I said, to… I was put in a… well sort of…’

`In Bow is this?’

`Yes, St Clements, yeah…’

`Right…’

`They put…’

`That was your second...?’

`Yeah…’

`…state hospital admission?’

`I’d been trying to get to Kingsley Hall, but… this is really weird. I… I was working at Which, and I got engaged to this guy, who was sort of small film directing, so he said, and an English Buddhist Alan… and… I don’t… it was a mad business anyway, and I had this engagement party, and invited all my friends and then they all turned out to be men, didn’t they? [Laughs]. You know, a room full of blokes, you know, and Bill, who was really the person I was in love with, they gypsy, he actually turned up, and then… but he had to leave sort of fairly early… and… but I was ringing up Kingsley Hall and… I think I got Ronnie the first time, but I got a guy called Noel, the second, and I got really annoyed with him because he pretended to be… Laing right, but he… anyway, they said come over and I went over… somebody took me over, [inaudible]… took me over…’

`Who took you over?’

`I was with my Polish boyfriend of long years before, who was by that time… was… married for the second time I think, and his wife was having a baby, and he went off to see her. ‘Cause when I got there, I wouldn’t go in… ‘cause Noel… well, in the morning answered the door. I was too far gone. Ronnie… Ronnie and… who had to go to work, did come out and was talking to me, and… and he even warned me that I’d get in a bin if I didn’t sort of cool it, and then he… [inaudible] tried really hard, but I was… I was… I couldn’t do… I was there outside, you know, I could have gone in, and… Alex was there by that time, and I sort of went off… and I was meant to meet Bill at Charing Cross tube at ten o’clock, so I just had to hang out ‘till then and get to Charing Cross.’

`Who was Bill?’

`Bill was the gypsy… that I’d seen the night before… at Charing Cross… ho hum… and… Ronnie was always very quick and he sort of picked up on… he’d picked up on this before… ages before, and… I wouldn’t really talk about it, and… but anyway, he… he was… he was saying that, oh… well he did warn me and… and then he had to go, but nobody was going to force me to do anything you know, ‘cause they didn’t believe in… Uta [ph] had tried really hard, to get me to go in, and… but I sort of wandered off down the road and managed to get… and I was dressed in a sequin jacket and… and [inaudible] trous… well, flares you know, yellow silk… gold silk flares, on this building site in Bow, in the East End, and picking about like I was… was… it wasn’t surprising the cops came along I guess… and Alex had gone off to have a cup of tea or something, and then… they took me to the station and they… they weren’t too bad at all… in Bow… umm… and I was really upset and… and they were planning… Alex came… the men on the… who were doing the like building on the side, gave them a really hard time because they obviously thought he shouldn’t have left me… there on my own, which I guess was right really, but, it… they didn’t know what all had gone before really. They were all planning to… that I should go Kingsley Hall, but they go in touch with my mother who said, “Oh no, you can’t possibly take her to that place…”, so that was when I say I should never have told her what I did… dreadful place, sort of thing, so… I got to St Clements, which wasn’t a bad place at all. It… and… I got to know… so many of the patients, and… and I saw ECT being given on the ward, you know, in quite a crude way.’

`How was it given?’

`Well just on the bed, you know, with the electrodes.’

`Without any anaesthetic?’

`[Pause] I don’t think there was anaesthetic…’

`So they just had ECT straight?’

`Uh huh…’

`How did that make you feel?’

`[Pause] Well… [long pause]… I only remember watching it with the one person… an Irish guy called Shaune. It’s in a women’s ward it was done. It’s like the end of the hospital was two wards, a male ward and a female ward, and there was three side rooms, and when I first got there I said to the… I… the registrar said, “No injections”, you know, and she went off. But I must have been very agitated ‘cause I felt I was cooking in this thing. I felt it was like a little Mosque and I was just cooking, and it had one of those small windows and it was old, you know… thick walls and everything, and they put me in the… in the padded cell. I hadn’t been in one before, and… and I didn’t know what they were like, and… I found… this writing in Hungarian on one of the cushions, you know… and… not that I could read it, but… I found it quite encouraging, and… whatever injection it was, it must have took effect I think because I wasn’t… agitated really. And I had a kind of vision, or what I call visions, of Ganesha in… you know, in a red light… the Indian elephant God you know on the door and… and they let me out in the morning, and one time later when things were really crowded, I offered to sleep in there with the door open, so I overcame my fear of… of… and… there was one nurse that was a real bitch. Only one, and we had a… a young, woman from Glasgow, and I have never met anybody so enraged. She was really… she was just like rage. So you had to be really careful with her anyway, ‘cause whatever you did she might kind of turn it, you know… however you’re trying to be nice, whatever, and… I think, I don’t know she… I think she may have broken this woman’s arm, ‘cause she was off for three weeks and everyone was so pleased… umm…’

`She was offered what, sorry?’

`For three weeks, and everyone was really delighted. Umm…’

`Oh, she went off for three weeks?’

`Well… like somebody… managed to do something to her that removed her for three weeks, ‘cause we all hated her, and… so we all felt… we knew this… girl would suffer for it, ‘cause I’ve only known one person break a nurse’s arm and get away with it… and lots of people get transferred to special hospitals for a great deal less, so we knew she’d suffer for it, so we wanted to be nice to her, ‘cause we were all so grateful to her, and… she did get transferred, back to Glasgow I think… which also was a bit of sigh of relief, because she was like… so volatile, you know, but when you felt sort of for you’d… got to be really careful and…’

`Was violence a sort of thing you saw very often or was it quite a rare event?’

`[Pause] Well, it depends what you mean by violence really. Umm… I had these fights with Pam in Springfield and then she had sort of fights, but they were… they were mostly sort of like strong hair pulling and… and shoving around and… verbal… sort of… I used to work in the refuge and… here, for a couple of years and… and sometimes, people would want me to kind of like be chaperone at… the local dance hall, you know, and one or two people, you’d… one always knew… there would be… there would be fights, but… not much you know. The trouble with fights is sometimes you get heavier injuries than are intend… you know, than you imagine, you know, or that anybody imagines, isn’t it? But in Springfield, like she was a strong young girl, of fifteen, but she’d… she was… there was never anything… she wasn’t going to break any bones or anything, or at least she said it didn’t. Not while I was there, and did I… I can’t remember seeing any other violence in Springfield, but I bet there was violence towards patients in Springfield. And another thing was, there were relationships… Pam was having a… a relationship with a very handsome young male nurse, and who could blame her? You know, she’s… there was nothing going for her there, and… but the time I had a visit in the main block and we went back… Bill and I went… the gypsy and I went back to visit Bill Sylvester once. I was so scared of going into the main block, my legs were like stone, I mean I… I was really pushing them to walk, [both talking together]… I was so… frightening…’

`Why were you so scared?’

`The main block at Springfield. I wouldn’t like…’

`Why were you so scared of it?’

`Well, I wouldn’t even like to think about when… what went on there, and I… I saw so many odd people. I saw people really physically, kind of corkscrew, and I didn’t know what that was then, but I’ve heard you can get that effect from polio, and sort of struggling to get around, and nobody ever helped them. They’d break their glasses and never get any more and… just the whole bareness of the… it’s… I… nobody said to me, none of those patients from main block ever said to me, “People are mistreating us or they’re mistreating somebody or other…”, I just… I just felt that it… that was going on. But it didn’t go on, in the smaller block I was in, just these fights between patients that didn’t matter. These argy bargy… more or less, the kind of thing you get in a dance hall really or something, but… I have known patients… now which hospital was it? It’s really hard to remember which is the hospital. There was some hospital I… where some… people had… err… have you seen how aggressive people get if they… on pills? You know there was a period of people… some people took pills, and that was about all they took, and they’d just get kind of so… geared up somehow, and then… and there was… this… guy, who had these bongos here, Michael. I can remember his name, I can’t remember which hospital that it was, but he broke some… a nurse tried to take the bongos off him or something, and he broke the nurse’s arm and nothing happened to him.’

`You mentioned that you thought that there was probably violence from the staff towards the patients. What… what gave you that idea, or what did you witness that made you think that?’

`[Pause]. Well… I don’t know. It was just a… a feeling. I didn’t… I don’t think I witnessed it at all. It was just a… the attitude and demeanour of… the male nurses in… or some of them all. One or two of them or something.’

`And what was their general demeanour?’

`[Pause].’

`Can you describe it?’

`[Pause]. Well I don’t know. Once when I was in St James’s, there was a nurse… my nurse, who’d been in Broadmoor, and she told me that… me and somebody else, that the whole regime was in a… was designed to break down the personality, so as it could be built up again, and… I wondered what he was doing in an ordinary hospital, but he didn’t do anything to me. But… umm… it’s that kind of… [pause] well, of them not treating the patients as individuals, perhaps.’

`So was there a strong divide… between the patients and the staff? Was there a strong feeling of us and them?’

`Well not… not in the… certainly not in the block I was in, there… I don’t think there was.’

`But in this main block? That’s what you felt?’

`I think there may have been, in the long stay wards and things like that.’

`And did you get a sense of how long some of those patients had been in the long stay wards? Or…?’

`Oh, a long, long time.’

`What sort of ages they might have been?’

`They’d be like middle aged, the ones that I talked to mostly, but there were older ones.’

`And how long might they have been in there? At a guess, how many years or…?’

`Twenty years, or… I don’t know, maybe more. I don’t know, you know, I was young so… that sort of space of time seemed very long to me probably. I… I… I don’t know, I don’t even know how long my particular friend, Bill Sylvester had been in, but a long time.’

`Did it worry you that… that might happen to you? That you might be there for twenty years or… or did you know that that wouldn’t be the case?’

`When I was in Springfield… it worried me when I was in St James’s, but not really when I was in Springfield. I thought I might have to be be… after what my analyst said, I thought I might have to be there for a year or years, but I didn’t think I’d have to be there for like a decade or something, but when I was in St James’s, for the first time…’

`And that’s in Plymouth?’

`Sorry?’

`That’s here in Plymouth…’

`Yeah, in Portsmouth.’

`Porstmouth sorry…’

`Umm… and I was… on a back ward and I was… you know, incommunicado. I was forbidden visitors, or… letters or… telephone calls or anything, and… for a while, because I’d said to the Psychiatrist, it’s really… you know, in the beginning it was a drug problem, and I really got across him because I said… one time I said, “Ask… Ronnie Laing about it, you know, he knows all about me, you know… if you want information…”. I’m sure he didn’t like that. Well he didn’t like anything, and… some years later, some friend of… the… said, that… he was going through a messy divorce and I was very much like his wife and all this. So what, you know? I wasn’t his wife was I? And… and he… did something worse actually. There was another woman who had been a nurse, and her mother had died, in the upper ward. She’d choked to death, in the toilets I think it was, and he… and he put her on this ward, where her mother had died, deliberately, and…’

`What year were you at St… how old were you when you were in St James’s?’

`Oh… [pause]. I think I was thirty. Something like that. [Pause] I didn’t think… I was in St… I was only in St Clements for three weeks and then they said I could go.’

`You also went to Friern Barnet, is that right?’

`Yes, that was not a lot of fun, but… that was less… it wasn’t anything malignant really. Except in the buildings themselves, which are so old, and they were so… it was a very big hospital, and… with big grounds. Lovely grounds actually, and… a lot of patients. I… I’m not quite sure… oh, it must have been… I must have been in the catchment area. I was living with an Indian classical dancer at the time, and she hadn’t been in Britain very long, and I probably frightened her, and… I was taken there by an ambulance. But that was from Kensington, and like it’s a long way from Kensington anyway, but… [pause].’

`Did they give you a diagnosis or… why were you… taken there?’

`Well, I suppose I was obviously psychotic… high or whatever.’

`Did they ever give you a name for that or… a label?’

`Well I think I had… I think I got… the diagnosis of manic depressive at St Clements, which is like the second… thing, admission, which is fair enough. Because, also ‘cause… St Clements… the sister kept saying they were… they were worried that I was going to burn out, and I think she was… but it was before I left… and I think she said that to kind of… neutralise any criticisms I might have, you know… that everything had been done in case I burned out. I didn’t know a lot about burning out, but… I’m told that some manic’s have burnt out, and I was very high, it’s true. [Pause]. Denholm did agree that both my parents were toxic to me, ‘cause they came to visit me and I told them, “Look, I’m not going to marry Alex, I’m going to marry Bill” and it was all, “We don’t believe in the marriage breakers and this, that and the other”, but actually they were terrified of Bill because… my father was a coward anyway, and he… I… I don’t know. Bill wasn’t in the least kind of… my mother wasn’t terrified of him. She used to say things like, “If he’d been an educated man, you know… it would have been nice…” and all that kind of thing. But later on, my father said to John, “Do you know who… that terrible man…”, and John said, “Oh yes, he’s a friend of mine.” So I think it was clear enough he was fine by then. And that was probably why he meant such a lot to me because… [pause] he wasn’t intimidated by… well I… I don’t know how to put it really. [Pause]…’

`Had you had your children by then?’

`No, no. I didn’t have… I was pregnant when I went to Friern Barnet, but I didn’t know at the time, I just hoped, and the father of that baby wasn’t… did in fact ‘phone up my flat, spoke to my mother who was staying there, and she… apparently, said… he asked if he… you know, she told him I was in hospital. He asked to visit me and she said she’d refer it to the Psychiatrist. Well all this is… is recorded in letters but I… never knew anything about it. So I didn’t know he was looking for me.’

`You didn’t know who was looking for you?’

`The father of the baby…’

`Right…’

`Leo… [inaudible], so I never… I thought he’d… forgot about me really. But… and once or twice one of the staff would say he’d ‘phoned or something, but I thought, you know, later, that he’d made it up to comfort me. Anyway, I landed in Friern Barnet, and there’s a kind of a modern ward. There’s this old Victorian building, where this terrible fire took place. Lots of people burned to death. When it was a mental hospital it was called Colney Hatch so they changed the name, but actually the road going down beside it is called Colney Hatch Lane, so it doesn’t need much working out, and… everybody knew, and then… I don’t know how, you know, but everybody knew this really, and…’

`Everybody knew there’d been a fire?’

`Yeah, this famous fire, you know, and… anyway, I was in like the pre-fab area, you know, it was a modern ward of a… but… the rooms were little cells and they locked you in at night just the same, you know… and I used to bang on the… with my forearm, and it’s amazing how long you can bang like that, without it hurting you, you know. I suppose it toughens it up really. Well I just used to bang, bang, bang and bang, and usually before that I’d sort of tipped up the bed, ‘cause that was all there was in the room, and all I wanted was the door open. I didn’t mind it was closed, but I didn’t want it locked, and I guess they didn’t have the… there was a Finnish girl, and I guess she didn’t have the authority to leave them open anyway, but eventually she brought like… some Psychiatrist stood there, who took a look. I said, “I just want the door opened”, and he’d go… often it would be locked and… I think she must have been quite afraid herself. I hope, not of me, ‘cause she used to bring in her big kind of husky type Alsation with her sometimes, for night duty. So I guess she wasn’t so happy, and she was quite nice actually. And some of the nurses were really lovely there. There was Chinese nurses, so delicately built, and yet she was really strong, it was amazing, and there was a music student, and… she liked Beethoven best, and… and I got to doing really sort of, regressive things… I wet the bed one time, and I felt… and I used to sleep under the bed sometimes, and she… she was really… cross… well she wasn’t really cross, but she said, “I don’t think people really need to do this” and then we had to change the bed then. I thought, no I didn’t really need to have… she needn’t have really changed the bed and everything, and she was a really nice girl, and… while I was there they decided I should have a lumbar puncture, and I’d never had it and you know they’re supposed to be extremely painful., I didn’t feel anything. Strange thing, except I had sort of visions… a perception of… of a little sort of delicate network of lights, coloured lights, and…’

`Why did they think you needed… why did you need to have a lumbar puncture?’

`God knows, I’ve… I’ve no idea. And… but when they used to let me out, I used to take off, and… because… I don’t think I did so much, maybe not at the beginning when I… well I didn’t really like it there very much, but… yeah, I did take off and… and… one time, I usually got into central London, and… when I wasn’t taking off I was talking to the gardeners, who were all different nationalities. They’re… like the head gardener was Ukrainian, kind of middle aged man. One of the younger ones was Italian, and they used to make me cups of tea and I would… whenever I got out, I’d go and ask them for cups of tea, and… one time I tried fire walking there, because like they’d dug this ash pit, not very long, and it was made… it was really easy. Perhaps it wasn’t hot enough really, but it was all glowing, and I couldn’t resist it, and… they had this little hut, and… I know that the Italian got a Vespa, and he took me for a ride on the Vespa, but… I… I tried to get him to just take me into London though, you know. He didn’t… and I’m not quite sure how I did manage to get into London, but I was looking on the one hand for Leo, who’s… I was pregnant by him really. I’d met him after the Dialectics of Liberation Congress. I’d met somebody else, and I’d seen Ron… both Ronnie and Uta [ph] looking at me like why are you with that person? And… then… I… I realised that that was a mistake, and somehow I’d picked Leo, and I think I was full… I must have been really high. But anyway, he did sort of stick around and… I was sort of looking for him and I was also looking for Bill. Now Bill did come to see me in Friern Barnet, and he came in and he was… as usual he managed to meet… in the café opposite, and he gave me some money, and then he came with one of his children, and then he turned up with his wife, ‘cause no doubt she found out he’d been to see me, and they went… she went to see the Social Worker [inaudible], but he came to see me another time when I was really in a locked ward, and that was so terrific, only unfortunately, my parents arrived at the same time, so they were sort of down there, and he was there, and he said, “Oh, you must go and speak to your parents and…”, ‘cause he always used to say, “You’ve only got one mother…”. He was full of these proverbs, but… and he was right about that.’

`So were you sectioned then or… did you not know…?’

`I don’t know.’

`You just didn’t… you weren’t aware of what the right… the laws were, or the rights of… [both talking together]?’

`Well… I think I must have been, otherwise they couldn’t have kept bringing me back could they?’

`But you weren’t sure? Nobody told you whether you were or…or weren’t sectioned?’

`Not to my knowledge, no. They just took me off in an ambulance, went for miles and then I ended up there, and… [pause]. Well I had all kinds of adventures, on my escape-its, somewhere, some others. Umm…’

`Did you…?’

`Anyway, after… sorry…?’

`Did you ever argue with any of the authorities about the fact that you were…you know, you felt as if you had to be there, or if you did escape you felt as if you had to come back? Did you ever argue with authority against that fact that your liberty was being restricted?’

`[Pause] Well… in so far as making a big fuss about being locked in, as I say, you know, at night, in these little cells… I made a big fuss about that. I don’t ever… maybe I saw a doctor, but I just don’t remember seeing one. Like when… for interview. Surely I must have done. Umm… and I suppose they would have just told me I had to stay there. Well, my friend… [inaudible] you know, she must have got in touch with them in the first place, and when I went back there one night, when I was… she did the same… well actually she wouldn’t let me in ‘cause I turned up with sort of a very well known musician, who I met in the… at the back of Buckingham Palace, and he’s such a nice person. He must have realised that I… I was freaked out, but he assumed it was drugs I think, because he rang the following day, and… and left his home telephone number, everything, and Sirias [ph] my friend, she said, [pause] “Oh I explained to him and he thought it might be drugs, you know. He just rang to see if you were all right and what have you.” And generally speaking, people did… [pause] well… I think I will put this on record. That was Freddie Mercury, and it was really nice of him. I think he really behaved so nicely, ‘cause I mean most people, you come up to them… out of the blue, they are… might think you’re on the game or they might think whatever, but they’re not going to take the trouble to take you home in a taxi and blah, blah… and then have the door shut in their face [laughs], didn’t help… and then ring and everything. [Pause] He was really great, and I’ve never forgotten it. And he wasn’t sort of very… you know, he wasn’t a very well known name then, but why I remembered was, Siria [ph], being Indian, she said, “I think he’s Indian” and I said, “Well it’s not a very Indian name Siria…”, and she said, “Well I think he’s from Bombay”, and she’d had the conversation and that’s why I remembered. Even though I was out of my head, you know. I don’t know if she remembers, it’s so long ago. Anyway…’

`I think we’ve come to the end of a tape, there Jill…’

`Yeah…’

[End of DVC Pro tape 4 – End of VHS tape 1]

[Start of DVC Pro tape 5 – Start of VHS tape 2]

[Camera: `Interview with Jill Molyneux, C905/16, tape number five’].

`Ok… we’ve come to… we haven’t got that much longer…’

`No…’

`As we’ve been just chatting in the break there…’

`Right, well…’

`So do you want to just say…briefly…?’

`Yeah, I was just talking about one of the occasions I escaped, from Friern Barnet, and I wanted to say, having you mention this, but when I stuck in this hall way, with the person who rescued me, I… I had no idea who he was, but I saw him, as an archangel sort of in the columns of the Blue Beard pas de deux [ph], which I think is very strange. I haven’t the faintest idea who he was… even the next day when he left his name, if you see what I mean. Anyway, I escaped lots of times, some bad and extremely bad adventures, and mostly not too bad. They put me in a sort of semi-subterranean ward where most patients were. There was shit, there was blood, there was stuff like that, but none of the… none of the staff, I don’t feel I was treated badly, by the staff. The buildings were very unsuitable and the regime, probably was felt to be necessary for such large numbers. Anyway, I eventually escaped far enough to get into another catchment area, and ended up in Bexley Heath and I was profoundly grateful ‘cause I had been sort of wandering for some long time, and there was a cop who picked me… I was sitting in tatters really, outside a cinema, and they were all ok, and when I said I wanted a door left open, they left the door open, and… so I was pleased to get to Bexley Heath. I even managed to buy my cigarettes. I thought everybody was terrific, but… unfortunately, the consultant was yet another, both quite frequently he thought he was God, and… he… I was pregnant, he thought I should have an abortion. I found out that he knew very well that if I continued on Largactil I would abort, and sure enough I did, although I tried you know, to tell everybody I was a Catholic and this, that and the other.’

`So the Largactil caused the abortion?’

`Yeah, you’re likely to abort… and I did, and I had to be transferred for D and C, and back and… as usual, home to my parents. I think the next admission I had… again I was picked up in London, but I was transferred to Portsmouth, probably at my parents’ request, ‘cause after all they could visit they couldn’t they? And I found, to my astonishment, the consultant who’d been insisting I should have an abortion in Bexley Heath… I wouldn’t tell him who the father of the child was, and that was annoying him you know, and he thought I didn’t know and so on. Anyway, there he was in Portsmouth, and I asked him. He said, “Oh you look terrible, what’s happened to you?” and I said, “Well losing a child doesn’t really do much good for you…”, and… I said “Did you know that on… I would lose the baby on the medication?” and he said he did know, and so I transferred myself to the other consultant’s list… there were two, only I should have stayed with that one, ‘cause the other one was even worse, and his name was Christie, he was… trying to make a name for himself as the drugs person of the south coast, but he knew precious all about it, and he really… I think he was really vindictive, not only to me, to a lot of… patients, and… he’d treated one highly institutionalised patient… he gave her the most awful life, in a really dreadful way eventually. Another guy was in there with bad ulceration from heroin use and… died through neglect really, and… eventually he put me… he especially didn’t like me ‘cause I… I’d kind of… I suppose I talked to him on… in an egalitarian way, and I managed… and he knew I had been a Psychologist and so on, and… [pause] and he put me on this… first with no medication… I really was getting really high, on a back, locked ward, incommunicado. No visitors, no nothing. As it happened, I had a really nice kind of vision when I was first locked in there of… of my Uncle Joe, and Mao Tse-tung and Khrushchev in a kind of… having tea in a… [laughs] I don’t know why I had that, at first. Then I had one sort of, like there were crossbars on the windows, it was like the back of the cross and a kind of a ruby… ruby living water sort of business, and so I was really getting high, and… lucky for me, two friends of mine… one… they didn’t let her in, but she left some talc or something, Jenny, and… the other, a friend from Sierra Leone, he brought some drugs, and I saw him walk… walking away from the window, so I knew they’d both been, and… [pause] and eventually, to cut a very long story short, I mean apart from anything else, the man didn’t turn up for… more than once in three weeks, and, nothing was meant to be done in the meantime. There was a German night nurse who was really brilliant, [inaudible] and her husband was a tutor, and she used to sit and talk to me, and she thought I was this… I’d got really, really high and I was having sort of [telephone rings in background] hallucinations, sort of things…’

`We’ll have to stop there for a sec…’

`…quite a lot. Sorry…’

[Pause]

`So she was a very insightful woman and… and she was a great sort of saving grace in this… awful situation. And, by some miracle, an old friend of mine… he’s an actor and film director, Peter Baldwin… he sort of spent time between Italy and Hollywood, and London, and he’d… ages before made a film about Cinanon [ph], which is a drug rehabilitation place in the States, which was all right at… it’s very inception but deteriorated very rapidly. He’d made his film and it was shown at the Venice Film Festival, so… he rang up and wanted to take me out for the day, and he’s not at all a person who’s used to being said no to, so I don’t know how he did it… ‘cause I told this man about this film… and, sort of “You’d be interested as a drug…” that sort of thing. Anyway, it happened… he came, he took me out for the day, and… he was sort of vaguely looking for locations on Hailing Island, but not really, and then after that you know, things were easier. I think everything was better… changed really, so eventually… but I still couldn’t get the… out, and… they sort of let me out for a day occasionally. This is ages afterwards, it was going on and on and on.’

`You were there for a few months were you?’

`Yeah, months and months and months, and then… there was a male staff nurse, and he said to me one day, “This isn’t doing you any good is it?” and I was getting out for the weekend and bit by bit I was getting out, but it all took a long time. Five days a week and… eventually, eventually I managed to get out. But I really thought for a long time I never would… ‘cause I knew… I knew he was vindictive, and I knew…’

`This Psychiatrist?’

`That’s how he behaved with people. [Pause] So, he set up the most awful drug unit, which is still running, but friends of mine who… a friend of mine who was in a concentration camp in Chile… he said the place reminded him of the concentration camp.’

`In Chile did you say?’

`Yeah. It was so bad. And they used to go up there and sort of play football with them and stuff, you know…’

`And out of all the different hospitals that you experienced, which was the worst?’

`Oh, St James’s by far, because of this consultant. Oh, well both… both of them actually, you know. What a duo.’

`Mmm… and which was the best?’

`The best was Horton, in Epsom… and for the same reason, there was a consultant who was really lovely and… who protected me from my parents, who… you know, managed to… I was pregnant again, but this… to protect the baby, me, from them. Stopped them transferring me to Portsmouth… umm… oh… My father was… was… was absolutely obsessed with the… that I shouldn’t have my cheque book, so he even managed to make, you know, to make it… to have my cheque book, and he was a great help to me, and… and… when I was… I was ill there, I had trachitis, early on in the pregnancy, and… they sort of treated me very well, and… it wasn’t all perfect by a long chalk, the… I mean one of the ward sisters was a bit of a pig. Or I couldn’t get on with her anyway, but friends of mine got on well enough, and… he… I didn’t dare to tell him the full story, even then, ‘cause after all he was a Pyschiatrist, but I went off and… and had this… illegal marriage, you know, marriage in name, whatever, with somebody… for the reasons I’ve explained, and he even sort of took that very well. I didn’t tell him I was going to, and… all in all I’m very grateful to him, and he’s the only one, the only Psychiatrist, you know, that I came across as a patient that I kept in touch with a little, at least at Christmas or… sometimes more than that, and… Horton is closed now. He’s retired for a long time ago.’

`And so, did he… he enabled you to have your first child, is that right?’

`Yeah.’

`And when was he or she born?’

`She was born on… 1971… 18th of May. [Voice in background] You’re a bit early love [laughs]. Sorry, that’s recorded…’

[Voice in background] `What do you want me to do, sorry?’

`Go upstairs…’

`[Inaudible].’

`It’s all right…’

[Camera: `Ok…’]

`I was just asking about… so… I was asking you when your first child was born?’

`May 18th 1971.

`Uh huh…’

`Uh huh.’

`And you’ve… and you’ve got a son as well?’

`Yeah, and he was born four years later...’75, July, and… My daughter has two daughters, Lauren who’s ten and Bardie [ph] who’s eight. So… I… I was very happy as a mother. I… I… I feel in a way, that all the sort of… work I did and training, what have you, sort of enabled me to be a different kind of parent than parents I had, if nothing else, and I really loved being a mother. I’d like to have had more children… though I did have some breakdowns, you know, during this later period, but after I… I was working before I had Sara, and… then I was a single parent for… two or three years, and… I didn’t imagine I would either have more children or… get together with somebody or anything, but I was really pleased… I was absolutely thrilled to have it, ‘cause I had… [pause]. She was very much wanted, and… [pause] this parent, and… I always liked being a mother.’

`And you still have a good relationship with her? [both talking together].’

`I felt totally justified as, you know, as having children sort of thing, I didn’t… after all, I’d had all my opportunities, most of which I’d messed up, and I’d probably do the same again if I had them again, and… I was really not… you know, some of my younger friends were really pressing to get on with their masterpiece or their career, whatever it was when they had kids, but I… I wasn’t at all like that you know. I had absolutely no desire to be a wage slave, and… if I hadn’t got to go for a job, I dare say I would have lived on benefit until… it was no longer available. So..’

`And do you… you have a good relationship still with your children?’

`Oh yeah. Brilliant, considering how it… you know, so… in ’95 my… both my parents died, and whatever else, it had a profound effect on me, especially my mother’s death, and I think I was sort of really wobbly and… semi-freaked out for ages, but up to that point I’d… I’d been a very solid sort of mother… and they think they… forgive me for… those times. And fortunately, you know, John was always there to… sort of… take my place when I wasn’t, sort of thing. I see…we see their… the grandchildren of my daughter about once a week at least, usually. And my son, well, you know, he went to university and then to London and we see him… sometimes more often, sometimes less, but… he’s only, what… he’s twenty three now… but he hasn’t found himself yet, I don’t know if he will. But he’s… he had one of those sort of city jobs that he’s just given up, which we’re quite pleased about because he… he didn’t like it and… we… we were afraid it might become a habit, ‘cause it’s quite difficult to reduce your standard of living, isn’t it?’

`Mmm… certainly is…’

`You have no problem increasing it [laughs]… and… he’s really nice on the whole, and Sara’s brilliant, she’s… she’s… well she had one when she was just eighteen, so... I think she really wanted to... that’s what she wanted at the time, she wanted children, family, what have you, that’s what she wanted then, and now she’s doing a degree. She’s half way through a degree.’

`And what’s she studying?’

`Business Studies, so… [laughs] marketing, and…’

`Taking a different path to…you…’

`Oh yeah… but… she’s… but at least she’s doing it, which isn’t that easy when you’ve got two children and… she has a partner and everything, but… they’ve… got to struggle a bit financially so… But this year she’s getting sort of paid, they don’t give you the full rate, but they give you… and she’s very good apparently, ‘cause they keep… they suggest that she apply for a… for a full time job at… you know, almost immediately after she got there, so… and she’s… she’s very well organised. I don’t know how she does it really. I just wanted to concentrate on the… one thing, once I had the children, really.’

`So you put everything into them really then?’

`Yeah.’

`So… it sounds as if you’re very proud of them?’

`Yeah, I am, I think they’re brilliant, ‘cause what with this freaky mother and everything, but… I guess… the times I wasn’t… I wasn’t freaky all the time by a long chalk, but you know, I’d rather I hadn’t been at all, ‘cause it’s not very good for the kids anyway, but it… I wasn’t for three years… for Sara’s first three years, and then I can’t remember, you know, just when and how, but at least it was never very long. Oh maybe one time it was a bit long. Although that’s one time, John tried Laing’s thing of if you just sit it out for ten days it stops. Well in my case it didn’t, you know, perhaps the pattern had got too set. It just went… tended to go on and on and worse and worse really, but even so it wasn’t terribly long. But… [pause] I think I was so much into sort of, my children and… and children generally, ‘cause what… I did… you know, when there were playgroups, I didn’t want to leave them, I wanted to be there. Except, they went to the first group… Jack went to a very progressive play group with some great friends of mine, and I would have left them but it was too much fun, but otherwise, you know, I didn’t really trust anybody sufficiently to leave them, not the ones round here, and… and then when they went to school I was involved with the schools, and when they were a bit [inaudible] I was involved with the other, and so… umm… I suppose the first thing I did separately really was the refuge, by which time… you know, they were a bit older and that.’

`Ok… well, we’ve… that’s about… we’ve come to the end of the day, I think. Is there anything that you want to add before we finish?’

`No, not really.’

`Ok.’

`It’s funny how there’s always less to say about the good things. I mean I could go on at length about Horton, but I don’t really need to, from my point of view. [Pause] One of the best… well one of my… the most… I’m quite interested in survivors and exiles of all kinds and it was really at Horton that I realised there were concentration camps’ survivors in most mental hospitals in… in [inaudible], but I didn’t mean… manage to do anything about it. At least I could to talk to this consultant and he would answer, you know, he’d tell me things like that. Or he would discuss Laing or what have you, and… that’s the only one I can think of, would… would do that, and… [pause]. I don’t know what I was going to say about that. Well it sort of led to other things I think. You know, later in life, you know.’

`I know when we were having a break and one of the things you said to me was that you’ve had a very interesting life but you wouldn’t necessarily want to have to go through it all again?’

`Yes [laughs].’

`Shall we end on that point now?’

`Yes, sure.’

`Thank you very much.’

`Thank you.’

[End of DVC Pro tape 5 of 5 – End of VHS tape 2 of 2]