Dating : A Crack In The Facade — Understanding My Own Mental Health

Part 1: Childhood

Nobody on our street had a mental health problem when I was young — back in the 1950s and 60s.

Sure, there were people who were … different. Like Edie, the girl who never came out of the house on the corner, but sat at the window and waved and grinned at people all day.

Old Mrs Lacey, three doors down, I never saw her out either, but she was always watching behind her net curtains. I was scared of her and never dared meet her eye, but I knew she was there.

Then there was Bravo, the friendly watch repairer who lived across the road. After my dad died, he was always helping out doing odd jobs around our house. In return, my mother used to cook for him, and you’d see my brother or me scurrying across the road with his plate. There were always people with him — they came from miles around to fix their watches. And yet Bravo hadn’t ventured past the corner of our street since the War, mum said. Sleeping sickness, she confided — whatever that was.

Trevor, in the house directly opposite, was a couple of years younger than me. When he was about 10, he got into trouble for stealing underwear off people’s clothes-lines. I caught the grown-ups tutting about it, but they quickly changed the subject when I came in.

The big scandal was at the Robertson’s house. He’d done away with his wife. Nobody ever spoke his first name or told me what had happened, but I knew my mum thought it was all down to his long hair. For years, as I slowly matured into hippiehood, she worried about my hair tendencies. ‘You’ll be just like him over there was’, she would warn, skewing her eyes to the cursed, now-empty house.

It wasn’t the only death. Soon after I left home for university, my mum told me that Auntie Glad had died. She wasn’t really related, just the woman who ran the corner shop where I went as a kid to buy my penny chews or sherbert fountains or sometimes, for a treat, Lucozade in its crinkly yellow cellophane packaging. I was grown up now, so mum could tell me Auntie Glad put her head in the gas oven. They’d demolished the houses at the far end of our road, near the town. Now they were going to knock her house down too, with its shop in the front parlour. We agreed it seemed a shame.

Mrs Bridger, the woman who used to have us in to see her collection of exotic fish and birds, she killed herself later too. I didn’t hear why or how, but she must have been getting old. Or maybe taking care of all the animals got a bit too much for her. Her husband was still alive, but never spoke to anyone now. It’s only natural to grieve, we said.