Extracts

Simon was twenty three years old when he went off the rails and hastened my father's death. I am absolutely certain that his strange mental state  was exacerbated by habitual cannabis use. Amongst the thing he left behind, I discovered six pages of writing he had drafted about that painful time in the summer of 1979. Those words have helped me to better understand both what happened and indeed Simon's mental health at that time.  Here are four  extracts...

⦿

Simon writing about his arrest in the Bridlington pub:-

"I may have been out of my mind. I still believe I was closer to myself than for a long time.I was happy but nervous which prevented me from sleeping..."

"My parents came in the evening and took me home. They were beside themselves. So many mixed up feelings. There was grave sadness, incomprehension, fear of me, disgust? And I was seemingly unconcerned about the whole business at all. I wanted my belongings to be left in that pub but my mother just wanted to get away from that town. The journey home brimmed with feeling. I insisted on being dropped off at the local for a drink. My father did this. They must have told Brian what had happened for he came and sat by me, drinking lager."

A few days later in Scarborough:-

"I wandered around the castle walls, a Bible under my coat and a black-tipped feather in my hair. The ancient temple. I was barefoot in that early morning. I smeared my face with the sandstone mud. My guts ached for I had yet another hangover. I came down the hill and had tea and a scone by the shore."

Before being sectioned under The Mental Health Act:-

"My brother said I should see the psychiatrist. He was wrong. They all were. I stormed off on a long hike to the river and back again. A social worker called Cherry came and she was very fair. I saw the psychiatrist. She had a young protege with her I became nervous when they came. The asked me: What do we mean when we say you shouldn't throw stones at a glass house? Like a fool I tried to answer and got muddled and anxious and that was that. They said - You've now got to go into hospital under a section. You are dangerous but I never really thought so. It was their thinking that I was crazy that really narked me."

In the mental hospital:-

"One day Nurse B called me in the foyer and said something like - "Your father has had to be taken into hospital - it isn't serious". I could have cried for I knew that my father's weak old heart would be under strain in those days. They let him out after two weeks and I was let out a week after that for the weekend."

⦿

There were more painful extracts I might have lifted from those pages but I decided to suppress them. Simon did  not choose to become the man he was. It just happened -  with the assistance of cannabis of course. Twenty eight years after my father's premature death, my mother died too and once again Simon had played a big part in her demise. She had become afraid of him and yet supported him to the end of her life. I don't think he ever really knew what hurt he had caused. He was a hard brother to love.