Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

church, but it translates as ‘I need a safety pin for my hamster’.
    It was mad – I said it was mad – but I was determined to go on with it. What made it possible was the sanity of the book in the mornings and the steadiness of gardening in the spring and summer evenings. Planting cabbages and beans is good for you. Creative work is good for you.
    The afternoon madness session contained the oozing lunacy that had been everywhere. I noticed that I was no longer side-swiped and haunted. I was no longer being attacked by sweating terrors and unnamed fears.
    Why didn’t I take myself and the creature to therapy? I did, but it didn’t work. The sessions felt false. I couldn’t tell the truth, and anyway, she wouldn’t come with me.
    ‘Get in the car . . .’ NO. ‘Get in the car . . .’ NO.
    It was worse than having a toddler. She was a toddler, except that she was other ages too, because time doesn’t operate on the inside as it does on the outside. She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen.

    Whatever she was, she wasn’t going to therapy. ‘It’s a wank, it’s a wank, it’s a wank!’
    I slammed the door. ‘Do you want to learn to eat with a knife and fork?’
    I don’t know why I said that. She was feral.
    So I went to therapy and she didn’t. Pointless.
    It wasn’t all pointless though, because after therapy, in Oxford, I was always so fed up that I went to Blackwell’s bookshop, and down to the Norrington Room, looking at the psychoanalysis shelves. The Norrington Room is a serious place – designed for the university, and stocking every text on brain/mind/psyche/self.
    I had been reading Jung since 1995 – I bought the whole hardback set. I already had the whole hardback set of Freud, and I had always read Mind Body Spirit stuff, because if you are raised on the Bible, you don’t just walk away, whatever anybody says.
    Now, I was looking for something, and I found Neville Symington, a priest turned shrink, who had a simple direct style and was not afraid of talking about the spirit and the soul – not as religious experiences but as human experiences – that we are more than body and mind – and I think we are.
    Symington helped, because I was getting well enough to want a framework in which to think about what was happening to me. Previously I had been holding on to the side of the open boat that was my life, and hoping not to drown under the next wave.
    Occasionally the creature appeared when I was reading, to mock me, to hurt me, but now I could ask her to leave until our meeting the following day and, miraculously, she did.
    It was summer. The Battle of the Sun was nearly finished. I was lonely and alone, but I was calm, and I was saner than I have ever been, insomuch as I knew there was a part of me that was in madness.
    Symington talks about how the mad part will try to wreck the mind. That had been my experience. Now I could contain it.
    A few months later we were having our afternoon walk when I said something about how nobody had cuddled us when we were little. I said ‘us’, not ‘you’. She held my hand. She had never done that before; mainly she walked behind shooting her sentences.
    We both sat down and cried.
    I said, ‘We will learn how to love.’

13
    This Appointment Takes Place In The Past

Dear Madam
    With reference to your request regarding the above numbered file.
    The District Judge has considered your application and made the following directions:
    1. The copy birth certificate is not a copy of the entry in the Adopted Children Register.
    2. Part 8B of the Practice Direction Section 1.3 requires the Application and Evidence of Identity ‘must be taken to the Court’, the Court makes a note on the application form. The original evidence of identity must be produced (not a copy).
    3. After that a redacted copy of the relevant documents, specified in the practice direction, can be forwarded. The file is not open to inspection as a whole and cannot be sent to the Home Office.
    Unfortunately it will therefore be necessary for you to attend personally at the Court and produce original evidence of identity together with a certified copy of the entry in the Register of Adopted Children which relates to you.

    It was one of many exchanges with the court holding my adoption file.
    I am an intelligent woman with plenty of resources but the adoption process skittled me. I did not know what was meant by ‘the entry in the