EXCERPT FROM THE HARROWED PATH
“The psychiatric Day centre seemed to me to be a meaningless place – little more than a holding area for the administration of various drugs.
From time to time, I would leave the building and sit behind it against the brick wall near the large metal rubbish bins. The sun shone down vacantly on the neatly cut grass. This exposed emptiness was more akin to the state of my spirit than inside the centre where people sat and did things. The things which they were asked to do had nothing in common with me. Nor did anything which was happening present the possibility of improving the state of my mind.
…
Part Three – Depths
…
Occasionally, I would see Dr Cross. I thought of him as a man with some special holiness. This belief derived from his name – and also his sensitivity. I felt intense respect for the light in his being which showed itself in his eyes. And I felt a calmness emanating from him. However, my positive attitude towards this psychiatrist did nothing to convince me that my presence within that place, or the drugs I was being prescribed, would make the slightest difference to my destiny. I still remained condemned to eternal damnation.
What has been done? What?
Life spilt from the cup –
What is left as the sun sighs?
Why work left, given up?
And songs of search, a jeopardy
Of silence strained by birth of fear
That cries in moving morning,
Torments the brain.
Pain is the pastime of knowing,
But what, when you start to forget?
Are footsteps timed now or ever
On their way into dread?
Deep stretching twists of root,
Eaten while being sung to
By the darkness of the wood.
Why are we here at all then?
Why are words given out?
Sleep may curl around a mind
As silent wisps breathe.
Slip into the next-time on;
Only be grey when the sun goes.
Slow the pace and know silent light.
It was now becoming obvious to me also that I was mad. That meant I would be put into a mental hospital. In my mind I could see a red door at the end of a long corridor. I believed this red door would close forever on me.
Most of all, I feared electro-convulsive therapy. For I believed that if they were to administer it to me, it would totally ruin my already-shattered mind, making me even more at the mercy of evil forces, and increase the crushing terror of my existence….
Stone faces him –
A tablet of recorded wrongs.
These etchings
Suggest midnight paths
Away into pasts,
All along the songless ways.
Startled by unfamiliar walls,
Smaller and smaller the etchings
As a heaving heart must survive.
Tide washes the entrance of the cave.
The point is reached where feet are deep
In a dark moving pool.
Water speaks
In deep, untroubled certainty.
Burdened are his feet;
A wave jokes its rhyme of knowing
He grows along that midnight waterside;
Time is the slightest shimmer.
But there is a dark world
Under the cave-time stories.
Love is a known stretch;
Sleep is the black depth.
The walls are falling.
Isolation slugs the rich dawn
Nothing gazes.
Despair breathes sleep in.
Friends Return
Soon after, Clare rang. Caroline and she had come back from holiday. Clare seemed very concerned when I told her that everything was as terrible as it had been previously, despite the medical treatment. It had been well over two months now since they had brought me back home to my parents. Clare asked me if I would like her to get in touch with the Beshara Centre again. I agreed to this, although I did not believe the people there could possibly make any difference – owing to the fact as to who I had become.
That weekend Mick came down from London to visit me. We ate the lunch which my mother had prepared and I made some inadequate attempt at conversation, more from decency than any interest on my part. I was aware that I had maintained the polite exterior but wished to get away from this uncomfortable and artificial situation. So I suggested to Mick that we go for a walk.
It was a fresh and cool sunny afternoon when we walked past the thick hedges of Harrow Lane and on past the Harrow Inn. I thought about the many boisterous hours I had spent with my friends in long-gone days. We walked down the steep road and stood together on the white wooden bridge where the road ends and becomes a path over the Kettle Brook.
Image: The Kettle Brook at the bottom of Harrow Lane
I gazed down at the green water weeds moving above the amber stones as the water passed through underneath the bridge. Suddenly, I became aware of Mick’s gentle presence beside me. So big, I thought, and yet so gentle.
All of a sudden I found myself saying, “Companionship is an amazing thing … isn’t it?” For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of friendship. At that moment there were no barriers between Mick and myself. We walked along the path above the leaf-filled muddy gorge and I began to tell him what was happening within me.