My father used to stay in bed a lot.
My mother said she sensed something was wrong when he got food poisoning and then refused to get up during their entire honeymoon in Greece.
She had to go down to eat alone.
He stayed in bed during his university finals.
He stayed in bed during their honeymoon.
He stayed in bed when he was supposed to be at work.
He'd lie in bed and smoke and play his trumpet and he wouldn't answer the phone.
My father would only bath on Christmas Day.
He would never do the washing up, he would say ‘Simon says hands on heads’ at the beginning of mealtimes and leave us trapped.
He would let us climb on things that were too high and take us outside during thunderstorms in just our knickers and vests.
One time, he encouraged us to paint the kitchen black whilst my mother was at work.
It was the windows that upset her the most.
After lying in bed for the two weeks leading up to my ninth birthday, my father decided to get up and go to a book launch just as my party guests are arriving in their party best.
I was speechless.
My mother was hurt inside, she says she ‘sensed something was wrong’, but he told her ‘Woolfendens don’t do divorce’ and anyways by then she was getting too depressed to do anything.
He would argue with my sister:
‘I'm not going to hit you’, he would say
‘Yes, you are’, she would reply.
It really infuriated him that she flinched.
‘You're turning them against me’, He'd say to my mother.
‘She doesn't love me’ He’d tell us
In his mid fifties, he took early retirement and started to have strokes.
He chose a chair in the sitting room and more or less stayed there until my mum had gone to bed, then he'd slip in beside her while she was snoring returning to his chair at around lunchtime.
And there he sat year after year with the curtains drawn, smoking, watching telly, listening to jazz, reading Byron or Pushkin and creating bloody scabs and bald patches in his beard.
He became an obedient child to my mother. ‘Move Peter, I want to Hoover’
He’d leave his flies undone and sometimes wouldn't make it to the toilet in time.
One day when he was shuffling back from the tobacconist, he was run over.
‘I live alone’ he told the driver
My father would cry spontaneously and frequently.
After dinner once. I asked him why.
He clumsily put his cigarette out in his plate and shot a sly look at my mother, because he knew how much she hated it when he did that.
Then he looked up at me with snot dangling in strings from his beard
‘I'm crying because I am alive’, he said.
I put my hand on his balding head and for a moment the kitchen disappeared and the profound sadness of his six words shot up my arm like a legacy.
When you needed dinner money
You asked your mum in between hasty bites of marmite toast.
Sometimes she would say ‘go and ask your dad’ And then you would take the three flights.
Two steps at a time to their bedroom.
As you entered their bedroom, you entered another world far removed from the busy breakfast scene downstairs,
Golden dust twirled gracefully in the morning sunshine through gaps in the curtains.
Your father snored.
Your father stayed in bed, a lot, so much so, a dip had formed on his side of the bed.
You had the sense that this dip was grey, smelly and slightly greasy.
Sometimes you would not even say a word to the hump in the bed.
You didn't find it pleasant to handle his brown corduroy trousers shiny with wear, tangled with his underpants.
One pocket was heavy with change, and the other pocket contained his leather wallet.
Your father's leather wallet was always half falling apart and half mended just the way he liked it.
The question was, how many of those one pound notes so green and so worn that they felt like shammy leather, how many could you slip from it without it being missed.
It was a delicious feeling
Then it was back downstairs sliding down the banisters with your left foot hooked just right for the turns.
And you set off to school, slightly late as always with a strange sad joy in your stomach as you anticipated a cream cheese and tomato roll with added niknaks for lunch and a pretty red soft pack of Marlboro.
3am on the 13th of July 1995
3am on the 13th of July 1995 found me out on the fire escape of the Whittington Hospital, London, dancing to samba on my walkman.
My father had been dead 1 hour. The moon was full and the nurses were preparing tea.
There was no happy ending. He never did get better, just worse and worse.
That brilliant, generous and selfish, fucked up man who confused us all was dead earlier than predicted.
The two fingers on his right hand permanently stained yellowy brown from his 40 a day. His skin remarkably smooth. He was 60 I was 23. What a relief. What a shame. What a waste. I danced.
At 7am driving out of the hospital car park the skies opened. It was impossible to drive. We sat in the car. My mother, elder sister, younger brother and I and let the sky cry for us.
Red Seed Diaries #4
Imbolc, Feb 1, Full Moon
I go to the healer again.
He has the same message for me every time:
I have a plate full of food. chicken and potatoes.
I must keep at least half of it for myself.
I need to put myself first, second, and third.
It’s taken me a lifetime to understand this.
To stop numbing, helping, chatting
to put down my phone and finally examine the lead in the marrow of my bones that weighs me down.
To understand why I’m so compelled to listen, even when I am exhausted.
To offer help, even as I try to step away.
I grew up in North London in the 70s and 80s, in a world of middle‑class privilege, held together by the structure of school, work, television, and Sunday lunch.
A family where dark humour and creativity were highly prized.
A family where both my parents were mentally ill.
My mother kept it all together. Growing up, I didn’t see what she was doing.
We were three blue‑eyed frogs in her saucepan.
My dad was checked out, suspended inside his bitter hell.
My little brother was wild.
My older sister was not OK.
And I was a secretive, promiscuous mess.
But we were well fed. We functioned. We joked about it in clever ways.
The deadly domestic despair that perfumed our house was obvious to anyone sensitive enough to smell it.
Mental illness has a distinctive odour.
I recognise it instantly.
It fills me with fear and fascination. I want to run — yet it summons me.
An instruction to my blood: to discard my needs, to accompany, to give, to shine, to dim, to keep something alive by my proximity alone.
When I was a young teen, after my first bleed but before my first kiss, my mother dropped the façade and came to one of her periodic standstills.
She had a stint in Friern Barnet Mental Hospital.
I remember standing by her bed and her saying ‘I can’t go on’
I remember trying to cook for the family and taking my brother to school.
I remember her friends coming to help us out.
I remember my father rallying and flipping pancakes that stuck to the ceiling.
When she was discharged, like a three year old after her first day at nursery, she brought back a painting of a dark cloud, which she said was meant to be a rabbit. It was pinned to the kitchen corkboard and ridiculed. For years it hung over us as we ate.
My mother was truth‑bending, vulnerable, stubborn, hilarious, generous, manipulative, irreverent, and sometimes (often) downright cruel. Her twisted behaviour quite literally floored me.
She merrily gaslit long before gaslighting was a thing.
On my nineteenth birthday she gave me my present: a card with a poem and a £50 cheque inside.
The poem was This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin.
She’d got my catatonic father to write the cheque with his shaky hand.
This Be the Verse - Philip Larkin
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old‑style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy‑stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself’
****
As I read it, I heard a door slam shut.
Not me, I thought. I refuse this curse.
Our neighbour popped round to wish me a happy birthday. I heard her mounting the stairs, a sound that broke the laws of the house; my parents never made it past the second floor. I desperately wanted to hide.
She found me in bed, snotty, stoned, and weeping amongst the wreckage of my room. She didn’t say a word. She got straight into bed with me and held me like a baby. I have never forgotten that moment.
My father was a brilliant, complex man who spent a lot of time in bed. I used to pilfer books from his groaning shelves (poetry, shamanism, Buddhism, psychology, quantum physics)
It was easy to swipe stubby and strong Embassy cigarettes from the kitchen drawer, and money from his wallet.
He became utterly immobilised by depression in his mid fifties and died when he was sixty.
After his death, going through his papers, I found a poem he had written. It is frighteningly lucid. A devastating read.
***
My room is on its nightly journey to the stars
No one left alive on the aberration of earth
The bleak city.
Sounds of homecomers must be in my head
The curtained room hangs in the void
The endless chronicle
- I am so tired I can hear my own blood
Tonight my room voyages far.
I hang in the void listening to the sound of my blood
Two cars have passed in the night world
How could he of all people fall into such despair?
He could take it by the throat and choke the life out if it came up for air
But no one is there. No cure.
I can starve it out
The cure is the disease. It is my enemy
(In the brain, my own fleshed fantasy)
The fantasy of cure
That I will remain
When it is no more.
***
As a teen, I would often come stumbling home in the early hours.
My heart would sink as I saw our house, the only one in the row with its lights still blazing.
Mostly I crept straight past the living room and up to bed.
But sometimes, even though it scared me, ‘the smell’ compelled me to open the door and wish my father goodnight.
My father would be mid‑voyage, deep in his void.
He would look up. Mute. Imploring.
His direct gaze always felt slightly incestuous. Indecent.
Whatever it made me feel was too enormous for me to comprehend.
I told nobody at school what was going on.
Aged twenty‑two, a year or so before my father died, I travelled to Spain and ended up staying in Barcelona.
One night, in a reggae club in Plaça Reial, I met an Iraqi man ten years older than me. We became lovers instantly. The connection lasted nine years. It was transformative.
I wrote this poem shortly after we met (I say I wrote it; actually, it wrote me)
***
I know a man, he gave me his eyes
He sits all alone and watches me rise
Tired of tomorrow, he sits and he smokes
Occasionally cries or makes sarcastic jokes
I know a place, it’s inside my mind
A place of all reason, that pain cannot find
This place is still small, a baby in thorns
I watch it quite closely, it stretches and yawns
I met a man, he has animal eyes
He’s feeding my baby and soothing its cries
Like an orange once peeled, skin that’s been burnt,
Paper that’s torn or a language once learnt
I feel a change, I sit terribly still
Holding this feeling, feeling the thrill
I go to the beach to watch the sun rise
All shadows behind me as part of me dies
Then I walk back quite slowly down your narrow street
Just smiling and humming and moving my feet
***
What strikes me now, reading this poem thirty‑two years later, is that I already instinctively knew about mental refuge, initiation, death, and rebirth.
At twenty‑seven I sat my first ten‑day Vipassana meditation course. I took to it like a duck to water. On that first course I reached states I have never found again.
One day, towards the end of the retreat, I heard a sound. I knew it was the sound that had killed my father. The sound of the Void. I could hear how utterly lonely it had been for him. In a hall full of people sitting, I wept and rocked silently for hours.
At the end of the course, I was full of joy. I learnt that even though my father’s mind had killed him, my mind could be different. I thought I was safe.
James Hollis writes:
“What the parents have not faced in their life remains a glass ceiling - a constriction that either the child serves or has to spend a lot of effort breaking through.”
For such a long time, I didn’t see the ceiling.
I thought I was already free.
Indeed, these past thirty‑two years have been rich.
A first‑class degree in music and visual art.
Two years training in voice and breath.
Teaching music in a Buddhist primary school.
Working as a clown in hospitals.
A diploma in midwifery.
Working as an independent home‑birth midwife.
Jet‑set nannying for billionaires.
Photography.
Gardening
Leading courses in singing, sexuality, creative writing, peri‑menopause.
Two teenaged children.
Homeschooling.
France.
Spain.
Off‑grid.
On‑grid.
And still
I chose relationship after relationship that left me drained.
Partners.
Bosses.
Neighbours.
Friends.
Different faces.
The same pattern.
I was compulsively generous.
Always available.
Impressively skilled at absorbing the weight of their lives when things inevitably got heavy.
It was the old instruction:
stay close, keep it alive, disappear last.
I wore myself out trying to shine into spaces that weren’t mine to illuminate and then had the audacity to blame them for my compulsive co‑dependency
And along the way, I’d become hopelessly addicted to my phone.
I was scrolling on the toilet and in my dreams. I was losing my eyesight. My attention span was decimated.
I repeatedly found myself watching blackhead‑squeezing reels at 2 a.m.
I was living a stupefied, vicarious life that made me feel ashamed.
Somehow last year I heard something faint, frantic, screaming.
The cry of a panicking baby through a thick wall.
The second I heard it, I rushed to its rescue.
It was my own dear soul.
***
“The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes.
The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation.
We must turn away from the cacophony of the outer world to hear the inner voice.
When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood.
We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us,
but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.”
— James Hollis, The Middle Passage
***
I started changing fast.
I realised nothing would actually crumble if I began to look after myself.
So I stepped back behind the line.
I put myself first.
And I stopped apologising.
I knew I needed to reclaim my mind from my phone.
I removed Facebook and Instagram.
I began switching my phone off for longer stretches.
Over New Year, I had a week alone.
I switched my phone off completely.
I meditated.
I learned how to enter the Void deliberately.
The vast nothingness.
And to my surprise, something appeared.
A cracked, glowing pomegranate,
turning slowly in the centre of my chest.
Then I became aware of others,
many hundreds of glowing pomegranates
That I couldn’t see yet,
They were celebrating.
Persephone is on her way up.
And so am I.
“We are in an extremely dangerous time.The one thing it absolutely demands is people following their own initiative wisdom about what they need to do, what they’re called to do. Sooner or later, sanity will return in some form, and it will depend on those kinds of people.” Stephen Buhner
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