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HOME ABOUT BRENDA KEATS HOUSE THE OVERDOSE LIFE AND DEATH IN CAMDEN DEATH AND THE MAIDEN THE ENFIELD SONNETS THE PAIN CLINIC THE FORDWYCH HOUSE EXTRACT NEW POEMS PROTESTS ART GALLERY REVIEWS LINKS |
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BARRY TEBB LIFE AND DEATH IN CAMDEN
SIXTIES PRESS
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For the staff of Leeds Mental Health NHS Trust, where care is the best there is
Liars begin by imposing on others, but end by deceiving themselves Jowett of Balliol
What is said remains forgotten behind what is said in what is heard Jacques Lacan
Cover photograph of Brenda Williams outside the Royal Free Hospital, London sat in silent protest at the loss of her care © Eamer O’Keefe 2005
PROPOSED CLOSURE OF DAY CENTRES
I forwarded this letter as a question to be circulated at the meeting on the 21st of July of the Camden Mental Health Liaison Group. Councillor John Rolfe refused the question, stating that my criticisms of Tulloch Kemp and other unnamed people constituted possible libel. This is outrageous and untrue – it is no more than fair comment and I have had assurances to this effect from a reputable journalist. I hope that you will find things of interest and concern in my question.
Sir
I was aghast to hear that the vital Jamestown, Crossfields and Camden Mind’s day centres, which care for around 500 of the borough’s most severely mentally ill, are to close if plans revealed by the Social Services’ Press Office go ahead.
The rationale used as an excuse is a report of the Social Exclusion Unit but this simply says that the mentally ill should not be excluded from the mainstream of society, e.g. they should not suffer stigma. The Council carelessly conflates this with the DWP’s intention to move 1 million of the less ill on incapacity benefit into work over the next decade.
The 500 users of the centres are almost entirely on disability living allowance, i.e. the much more serious end of the spectrum.
Tulloch Kemp, Chief Executive of New Directions Camden, which runs all but the Mind Centre, defends the policy and says these patients are becoming ‘institutionalised’ when in fact the centres support them to live in their own homes and the network of friends established over years helps them to live and to stay alive.
The suicide level in Camden (already the highest in the UK – 1 suicide every ten days) is shameful and reflects badly but accurately on the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust – a ‘fused’ board made up of Camden Social Services and the Mental Health Trust. The proposed closures are barbaric and stem from a clinical ineptitude that leaves me breathless. A GP friend of mine in Camden asked pointedly: ‘And just what work are these patients supposed to do and who will look after them if the centres close?’ Who indeed?
Tulloch Kemp is content to co-operate with this policy rather than fight it. In other words he will stand by as patients die by their own hand. He should resign, as should all those in power who support this truly off-the-wall onslaught on the most vulnerable.
The ‘four working groups’ set up ‘to look at how to change services to encourage recovery and social inclusion’ do not include a GP or a psychiatrist.
What about risk assessment?
Recovery cannot be ‘encouraged’ – its not a foot ball team to be cheered onto victory. The whole ‘best value for money review of day services’ is GARBAGE. I have been a carer at the ‘hard end’ of mental health since the eighties. The level of illness among patients at the day centres is only slightly above that of those on acute wards. The so called ‘STAR WORKERS’ have been described to me by one patient as ‘ Like the Gestapo.’ My message to Camden Council is STOP IT AND STOP IT NOW.
Barry Tebb Trustee – Survivors’ Poetry, London Publisher – Sixties Press 89 Connaught Road Sutton, Surrey SM1 3PJ Web: www.barrytebb.co.uk www.criticalobs.co.uk From Councillor Heather M. Thompson, Lib Dem Shadow Chair of Social Services, Camden Council
Mental Health Day Centres – Jamestown, Crossfield & Mind in Camden
Yesterday I spoke on the telephone to Kevin Jerman of Social Services, who assured me that all the day centres are currently open. He told me that the purpose of the current review is to establish whether clients would be better served by mainstream services within which they could be enabled to become less institutionalised and to better fulfil their interests and aspirations. Self-evidently there are some clients for whom this could be beneficial.
I nevertheless believe that there are many clients for whom this strategy is quite simply not viable.
Almost all people need a secure social environment where their needs are understood. Having suffered from depression and anxiety neurosis, I am profoundly aware that there are times when the resulting problems and distress can be shared only with people who have suffered from the same conditions.
For many of our mental health clients, the day centres are the necessary secure social environment. Were they to be closed, I am entirely sure that there would be an increase in suicides and hospital admissions.
The availability of mainstream services for those ready to benefit from them should never be allowed to preclude the continuation of day centre provision throughout the borough for those for whom they are a prerequisite for life in the community, or indeed for living at all.
THE FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO CARE THE CASE OF BRENDA WILLIAMS
15 January 2005
The Right Honourable Chris Smith Chair, The Committee for Standards in Public Life
Dear Chris Smith
I need your help. You are not my constituency MP but you are MP for part of the area covered by the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust.
My ex-wife (the poet Brenda Williams, who suffers from recurrent severe depression) lost her care because we campaigned vigorously against the policies of the Chief Executive Erville Millar and the Chair, Professor David Taylor (cutting beds, trying to close a vital day hospital) Our campaign worked, the day hospital remains but we will never be forgiven. We found Millar and Taylor were breaking planning law, whistle blew to Camden Council and the building was delayed for eighteen months.
Even more seriously it is my belief that Millar intervened in the expedited discharge of Anthony Hardy and used his power to remove him from the care of one consultant (who insisted on Hardy remaining) to another, who agreed his discharge.
Debbie Abrahams OBE of CHAI and Sir Ian were sufficiently convinced of my argument that they considered mounting a formal investigation in the part management played in Hardy’s discharge but they were stopped, allegedly to prevent ‘duplication of an ongoing investigation.’
An agreement was reached in October 2004 for Brenda’s care to be restored. It took two months for us to see Dr. R. (our choice backed by Camden PCT, which brokered the agreement) but the promise for Brenda to return to Fordwych Road Day Hospital was reneged on and as a direct result Brenda seriously overdosed. I believe Taylor and Millar, since they took power, have acted with no concern except to increase their power base, consultants are ‘leaned on’ to make decisions in the clinical field at Millar and Taylor’s behest. Their ‘enforcer’ is George Platts, an aggressive, insensitive bully whose email to the PCT banning Brenda from Fordwych Road Day Hospital for the rest of her life for making a complaint when she was a patient there directly triggered her overdose.
The Ombudsman have begun the formal investigation of two complaints. They are excellent and thorough but to be so they cannot act as a rapid-reaction force. It may take eighteen months to begin a formal investigation.
Rosie Winterton, Minister for Adult Mental Health, tried to intervene but was stopped by John Hutton, not something I guessed but which I was informed by letter. At 63 I am primary carer to Brenda and to our son who, after a brilliant beginning as a King’s Scholar at Eton and a 2:1 at Balliol developed the most difficult-to-treat type of paranoid schizophrenia and is a detained patient in Leeds. His care is excellent. If you read my article One Carer’s Story in Kith and Kin the case is outlined.
I am formally asking you as Chair of the Committee for Standards in Public Life to investigate Erville Millar and Professor David Taylor. Their ‘record’ speaks for itself and so, in another way does mine.
Yours sincerely Barry Tebb
14 January 2005
Dear Mr Tebb
You reported to me on 10th January 2005 that it was agreed at a recent meeting with Camden PCT Commissioning staff that Brenda Williams would be admitted to Felix Brown Day Hospital for two weeks and then to Fordwych House. You were concerned that the Care Trust was now turning back on what had initially been agreed. I can confirm that I have now contacted the relevant senior managers in both the Care Trust and in the Camden PCT Commissioning Department and can report the following.
Both George Platts and Colin Plant have reported to me that the Care Trust had not agreed a place at Fordwych House for Brenda. I was informed that Brenda’s attendance at Felix Brown Day Hospital would enable continued treatment by Dr. R., and that Dr. R. does not have places at Fordwych House. Furthermore, Felix Brown offers art therapy, which is the service that Brenda and her GP requested and which was supported by the assessment undertaken by Dr. R.
I have also contacted Caroline Blair and she too has confirmed that the Commissioning Department did not agree that a place would be offered at Fordwych House. Caroline explained that the Commissioning Department would not be in a position to know what places are available there, and that the Care Trust as providers are responsible for Brenda’s care plan and placements.
Should you remain concerned about the reason provided above as to why a place is not offered, at this time, at Fordwych House then you can write to the Chief Executive, Erville Millar, who will ensure that your concerns are formally investigated and responded to. I enclose a leaflet on the service provided by the Independent Complaints Advocacy Service (ICAS), should you wish to avail of this service.
Yours sincerely Mary O'Leary
Patient Advice and Liaison Service Manager Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust and Camden Primary Care Trust
19 January 2005
Dear Mr Tebb
Contact with the PCT Commissioners regarding Brenda Williams
I am writing to you with respect to your calls to the PCT offices regarding Ms Brenda Williams and her access to treatment provided by the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust (MHSCT). The PCT has been involved in this case for some time now, and I believe that the commissioning managers have worked hard to provide you with information about access to services. However, the PCT role in this case is very limited and I make this clear below. I am also aware that you have been speaking to a number of people in the PCT about this case. This is unhelpful and can create confusion; and, I make clear below the arrangement for you to contact commissioners.
Role of the PCT The PCT was first contacted about this case at the end of September 2004 through David Hobbs at the Strategic Health Authority (SHA), with a very specific query owing to the fact that Brenda lives in Westminster. The view of the Care Trust was that her services should be provided by local services. While, this is generally the preferred model, owing to close links with the local Social Services Department, the PCT agreed that, as Brenda is registered with a Camden GP, we would be prepared to commission Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust to provide NHS services.
Role of the MHSCT The MHSCT then had the responsibility of accept the GP referral and make a clinical assessment of Brenda’s health needs. Following this, she has been offered services.
The PCT has quite a specific role in relation to this case, which we have discharged, and I believe from previous communication with the PCT you are content with the PCT decision. The PCT does not have a role in either assessing individual health need, nor with the day-to-day management of the MHSCT. If you are unhappy with the clinical assessment or the services, then you need to speak to the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) and/or the service manager (George Platts) and follow the complaints process. Similarly, if you are unhappy with the PCT, you may talk to PALS or follow the complaints process.
Future Communication with PCT Commissioners
Given the PCT role, I cannot see that you have further reason to contact PCT staff about this case. However, should you need to do so, then you should contact the mental health commissioning team: Caroline Stanford and Charles Oseghare or via the switchboard If they are not available, their voicemail will provide you with alternative contact numbers. If there are any problems, the accountable senior manager is Lorraine College. In particular, you should have no need to contact Caroline Blair, whose job changed last October and she no longer has a role with regard to mental health commissioning. I have instructed Caroline Blair to have no further involvement in this case and that all calls to her and this office will be referred to Caroline Stanford or Charles Oseghare. Accordingly, you should make any further queries as indicated.
I trust this clarifies any future communication regarding this case.
Yours sincerely Stephen Conroy
Director of Commissioning & Modernisation Camden Primary Care Trust
20 January 2005
Dear Barry Tebb
Thank you for your letter of 15 January which I read carefully - and for the various Sixties Press books - but I fear Parliamentary rules do not allow me to intervene on your behalf because you don’t live in my constituency of Islington South and Finsbury. You have clearly struggled to achieve a satisfactory outcome to your complaints, and I’m sure the Ombudsman will diligently investigate all your concerns. Although you have sent a copy of your letter to your own MP, Tom Brake, I am forwarding everything to him with a note offering to ‘back up’ any representations he may make on your behalf if he feels it would be helpful. I’m sorry that I cannot personally do more. With best wishes
Yours sincerely Rt Hon Chris Smith MP
21 January 2005
To Dr. John Carrier, Chair and Mr. Rob Larkman, Chief Executive, Camden Primary Care Trust
Dear John Carrier and Rob Larkman
I received two letters on two consecutive days from two of your employees. I doubt if either should have been sent at all and at 63 I cannot recall any two letters – sent almost simultaneously – which so angered me and I wonder how if either if you were as I am, sole carer for both my ex-wife Brenda Williams and our son Isaiah, how you yourselves would have reacted to such correspondence.
Letter from Stephen Conroy, Director of Commissioning Counsellor
While I have been fighting single-handedly over the last 19 months I have had little support and that I did receive I valued highly. First on that list must come Dr. Doris Lister and her in-house Henrietta. Their help has been consistent and unhesitating over many months.
I think Mr. Conroy has far exceeded his brief. In paragraph 1 I take particular exception to his statement of my having spoken ‘to a number of people in the PCT about this case which is unhelpful and creates confusion.’
I found my so speaking extremely helpful and I had long guessed that Mr. Conroy’s keeping his distance from this very serious and high profile case suggests - as it turned out – that he was deeply hostile to our cause. Perhaps his close working alliance with Erville Millar of CMHSCT has made him forget that you and not Mr. Millar employ him.
I welcome help and advice but I will not tolerate being lectured to and hectored by Mr. Conroy in the bullying blistering tones I associate with Mr. Millar and his managers. Paragraph 2 is mere padding. Paragraph 3: relations between PCT’s and acute trusts are nationally undergoing a sea change, as you are aware. Because of their funding role PCT’s can very much input into how acute trusts provide the care PCT’s pay for and this is as it should be.
The clinical assessment of Brenda has been done at great length and in great depth by her consultant, Dr. R. Charles Oseghare, your senior Mental Health Commissioner, in a call to me said that the PCT’s agenda was to ensure Brenda’s care was properly provided as it was properly commissioned. Is the phrase ‘patient choice’ foreign to Mr. Conroy’s vocabulary?
Referring me back to Messrs Platts and Millar or to PALS is totally inappropriate. I have recently asked Chris Smith MP, in his role as Chair of the Committee for Standards in Public Life, to consider whether there is a case to be answered by Mr. Millar and his Chair, Professor Taylor. Mr Platts, as I said in my letter to Chris Smith, is their enforcer.
Mr. Conroy assumes he can ban me from speaking to Caroline Blair, and thus take away one of our few supports – and this at an especially difficult time, only two weeks after Brenda overdosed.
This ban is illegal. I ran it informally before a member of the staff of the Health Ombudsman who said, as myself believed, that it was clearly ultra vires. Mr. Conroy does not seem to have cleared it with either of you before sending it and I sense Erville Millar’s deadly touch throughout.
For Mr. Conroy to ‘insist’ that Caroline Blair should have nothing further to do with me I find outrageous. I lost faith in Caroline Stanford when she failed to get a time scale for Brenda’s restoration of care in the October agreement. I spoke to Anita Wadhawen, the Minister’s Mental Health Policy Lead, who said that Miss Stanford was clearly out of her depth. Further months of waiting and a serious overdose could have been avoided if Caroline Blair had been in charge. Charles Oseghare has needed constant pressure from various people, including myself, to be as involved as he promised to be. He seems very unwilling to confront CMHSCT with their shortcomings, continual bad faith and outright lying. He should never have suggested I contact Mary O’Leary of PALS. I know her well of old to be a close ally of Mr. Millar and if you, as it would seem, pay half of her wages then this is certainly neglected in her letter which, with Mr. Conroy’s, appears to be totally on Erville Millar’s side. She is supposed to head PALS which is supposed to help patients – I’d be glad to know if she has ever taken the side of any patient against decision of Mr. Millar and her staff. I doubt very much if such a thing has ever happened.
I have had dealing with Mary O’Leary over a couple of years. When Charles Oseghare insisted I contact her I feared the worst and was proved right. Her letter is breathtakingly inept. Paragraph 3 totally refutes what Charles Oseghare said to me. The course of the call was that a referral to Fordwych Road Day Hospital would be the most likely outcome of the preliminary assessment process already ongoing (12 hrs. with Dr. R.) and a final assessment on January 10th at Felix Brown Day Hospital. Two weeks there would in all probability lead to a period at Fordwych Road where Brenda has received care for 7˝ years. Is continuity of care not relevant as well as patient choice and carer input? Caroline was not present during the call.
To publicly discipline Caroline, as Mr. Conroy is appearing to do, is outrageous and presumably because I have praised her to you and to others. I think Dr. Lister’s original referral to Fordwych House Day Hospital should be agreed immediately and the matter enforced by the PCT. I think Mr. Conroy should be better informed and not so ready to do Mr. Millar’s bidding and that he should know about and respect The European Convention on Human Rights and Standard Six of the National Health Mental Health Care Service Frame. He is hardly acting ‘in the spirit of the NHS’ but more as Mr. Millar’s mouthpiece.
This is a formal complaint against both Mr. Conroy and Ms. O’Leary. I have kept it ‘in house’ out of respect for both of you and the Trust’s reputation.
Yours sincerely Barry Tebb
7 February 2005
David Behan, Chief Executive Commission for Social Care Inspection
Dear David Behan
I sent you my book Kith and Kin today about the failure of Camden and Islington MHSCT to provide care for Brenda Williams. My book does not mention the absolute dereliction by Heather Schroeder of her duty of care in the matter. A letter of mine sent many weeks ago has been ignored and dozens of calls to the executive office over more than a year received the same treatment. Both CHAI and the Ombudsman are conducting formal investigations into the mental health aspects of the case but I think you might look at Ms. Schroeder’s abysmal record of cowardice, inhumanity and lack of basic compassion in a such serous matter where the GP, Doris Lister and myself as primary carer have been effectively abandoned to care for such a vulnerable patient apart from the magnificent work of CHAI and the Health Ombudsman.
I neither know nor care what investigative process, formal or informal, you choose to employ but the matter cannot be left until April 1st when you begin to work in tandem with CHAI. I hope you will see this as a desperate plea for help which is what it is.
Heather Schroeder’s predecessor, Jane Held, left her post abruptly in December 2003 after publicly rebuking Erville Millar for interfering in a Social Services matter e.g. issues around ‘care banding’ raised by Brenda at a meeting of Camden Council. Jane Held’s departure was a ‘sealed lips’ agreement which I think needs unsealing possibly via the new freedom of information act.
Yours sincerely Barry Tebb
17 February 2005
Dear Mr Tebb
Further to my letter of 21st January 2005 your complaint has been investigated and I can now let you have a response.
Your complaint has been investigated by Keith Marshall, Director of Human Resources, Camden Primary Care Trust. I can appreciate your concern for Ms Williams and the treatment she receives. I hope that you do understand the differences between the PCT which “commissions” healthcare in a given area, and the Acute Trust or the Mental Health and Social Care Trust, who provide clinical services within this allocation, as this is the context within which we operate, and in which your complaint must be viewed.
I will try to address each issue detailed in your letter. It appears that the first issue concerns Stephen Conroy's letter of 19th January 2005. 1) Objection to Stephen Conroy telling you that writing to several different staff can create confusion
I understand that there was no intention to ban you from writing to other people in the PCT. The remark was made to suggest that forwarding your complaint through one accountable person would ensure better co-ordination and a swifter response.
2) Being bullied and hectored by Mr. Conroy
His letter has been looked into and we find no evidence in it to suggest he is bullying or hectoring you.
3) “Paragraph 2 of the letter is mere padding”
Paragraph 2 attempts to put the actions of the PCT into a context of our duties and responsibilities towards our residents, but more specifically towards a patient who lives in another PCTs area.
4) PCTs can input into how the Acute Trusts provide the care
The PCT has responsibility for commissioning services and monitoring whether the Acute Trust meets qualitative and quantitative standards. It does not have responsibility for decisions made about individual patients and of individual care plans. 5) Mr. Conroy assumes he can stop me from speaking to Caroline Blair. The bar is illegal. Stephen Conroy “instructs Caroline Blair to have nothing more to do with me.”
The PCT is free to determine which of its staff will talk to the public and whether a member of the public will be able to talk to its staff. In this case, as Caroline Blair is not working in the area of the Mental Health Commissioning anymore, any contact with her would be a waste of time for both of you.
The other complaints in your letter seem to be referring to Mary O’Leary, and our response to these is as follows:
1. Para 3 of Mary O’Leary’s letter conflicts with what Charles Oseghare told me on December 23rd.
Mary O’Leary liaised with Charles Oseghare, Caroline Blair, George Platts and Colin Plant with regards to your concerns that a place at Fordwych House had been agreed at a meeting in October 2004. They all informed Mary that they had no knowledge of any such agreement. Charles Oseghare is sorry if, during his telephone conversation with you on 23rd December, you believed that the Commissioning Department could arrange for a place to be available at Fordwych House, as this is not the case. The Care Trust, as provider, is solely responsible for Ms Williams care plan.
2. She is supposed to head PALS, which is supposed to help patients. I’d be glad to know if she has ever taken the side of any patient against a decision of Mr Millar and his staff.
Ms O’Leary could find no evidence that a place at Fordwych House had been agreed and was unable to assist you in pursuing your concern that the Care Trust had gone back on what was agreed. Mary is very sorry that you concluded that this meant she is uncaring, as this is certainly not true. If she had found evidence that an agreement had been reneged upon she would have been more than happy to take your side in ensuring that the agreement was honoured.
I sincerely hope that this response adequately addresses the concerns that you have raised. I do apologise for any misunderstanding or distress caused to you. If you would like to discuss this matter further or need clarification on the outcome of this investigation then please do not hesitate to contact Keith Marshall or you may write to me within the next two months. In the meantime I enclose a leaflet on how to pursue your complaint if you wish to.
Yours sincerely Rob Larkman
Chief Executive Camden Primary Care Trust
28 February 2005
Mr. Dave Lee Strategy Director Camden & Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust
Dear Mr. Lee I gather you told CHAI that Brenda had not been offered a place at Felix Brown. The offer was made to me by Charles Oseghare, Senior Mental Health Commissioner at Camden PCT, and it was part of a ‘package’ – two weeks at Felix Brown to be followed by a transfer to Fordwych Road. Charles now denies he ever made such a call but if he didn’t why did Brenda give up her protest on the very same day? Nothing except an agreement including a place at Fordwych Road would ever make her give up, as you well know.
Charles also said that the two week Felix Brown placement would follow immediately after the assessment interview, which I attended with Brenda. Katie Clayton (acting Felix Brown manager) said she knew nothing of this and there would be a further week’s delay. The same day George Platts sent Charles an email (read to me by Caroline Blair) saying Brenda would never be given a place at Fordwych Road, because she made a high level complaint while she was there. This email (as I warned everyone at the time) is part of the chain of evidence and needs to be forwarded to CHAI along with the case file.
Brenda’s overdose followed immediately, this was no way Caroline’s fault but entirely George Platts’. His ‘decision’ to impose a life ban was illegal and such bans do not operate anywhere else in the NHS.
I shall continue with my vigilance, as will Brenda with her protest, until that place at Fordwych Road – three times referred to for by Dr. Lister, is forthcoming.
Yours sincerely Barry Tebb
16 March 2005
Healthcare Commission
Dear Mr Tebb
Re: Decision from the initial review of your complaint: Ms Brenda Williams
Following my letter of February 22nd 2005.1 am writing to inform you of my decision in respect of your case. In coming to this decision I have reviewed the documents received and sought clarification where necessary. In accordance with our decision making process a manager has approved my decision.
Your case has raised three issues, which I will deal with in turn:
You were unhappy that because Brenda was a resident of Westminster she could not access the services provided by Camden & Islington Mental Health & Social Care Trust
In your original complaint;you stated that you were dissatisfied because Ms Williams was unable to access the services of Fordwych Road Day Hospital. Ms Williams was being classed as a resident of Westminster and therefore if she wished to be re assessed to access this facility then this had to be completed by Westminster Primary Care Trust (PCT). You were angered by this boundary issue, as Westminster PCT would not be able to offer places at Fordwych Road, a facility that you feel is imperative to sustaining Ms Williams’s health.
On August 20th 2004 North Central London Strategic Health Authority wrote to you to clarify the position with regard to patients who wish to cross boundaries. David Hobbs stated that so long as Ms Williams was registered with a GP who was part of Camden PCT then Camden PCT would be responsible for commissioning care for Ms Williams.
Brenda had recently registered with a GP who was part of Camden PCT it was therefore established that Camden PCT would commission care for Brenda.
I have decided to take no further action on this issue because this matter has been resolved locally and Brenda has since had care commissioned from Camden & Islington Mental Health & Social Care Trust as requested.
You felt that the “art therapy” was needed by Ms Williams though she had not previously been assessed as needing this type of care
Within the letter dated August 20th 2005 from David Hobbs of North Central London Strategic Health Authority he refers to recent discussions about Ms Williams where there was a difference of view about the level of clinical support Ms Williams needs, he went on to state this was a matter for the clinicians involved.
This issue has now been resolved as an appointment was organised with Dr. Lister who subsequently made a referral to Camden PCT, Head of Mental Health Commissioning for Brenda to be permitted to have art therapy.
Art Therapy was considered by Ms Williams General Practitioner (GP) to be the only benefit Ms Williams had from any psychiatric service.
I have decided to take no further action on this issue because this matter has been resolved locally and it has been agreed that art therapy services would be beneficial to Brenda.
You feel that an “art therapy” place for Brenda at Fordwych Road is being withheld/obstructed because of previous complaints/protests which have been made
Following a referral from Dr Raven an appointment was made for you to attend an assessment with Katie Clayton, Acting Day Hospital Manager/lead art therapist at Felix Brown Day Hospital. Following the assessment a place was offered at the Day Hospital. It was explained in a letter dated January 10th 2005 written by George Platts that the first two weeks at the day hospital would be treated as an assessment period. At the end of that time a care plan would be offered to Brenda, which would include art therapy among other activities.
You state that you had received a phone call to the contrary stating that after the initial 2 week period at Felix Brown, Ms Williams would be able to attend Fordwych Road. Mr Platts confirms that this is not the case and that he is confident that attendance at Felix Brown Day Hospital combined with outpatient appointments with Dr Raven are a good alternative to Fordwych Road, offering a similar range of services. It was hoped by Mr Platts that by Ms Williams attending a different hospital, would have an advantage as she had experienced previous difficulty with Fordwych Road.
The offer of the place at Felix Brown has been turned down and Ms Williams wishes to continue to campaign for a place at Fordwych House. I have reviewed the detailed letters from yourself to various members of Camden & Islington Mental Health & Social Care Trust expressing your dissatisfaction with the decision. I have also read through the details of the offer made for a place at Felix Brown. I feel that the offer that was made was fair and reasonable. I understand that Ms Williams only wishes to attend “art therapy” at the Fordwych Road Day Hospital, though it is my understanding that the services offered by the Felix Brown Day Hospital are similar to that offered at Fordwych Road. I feel that it is reasonable to offer you a place at different hospital given that Ms Williams has been unhappy with some aspects of the service provided in the past. I have therefore decided to take no further action with regard to this part of your complaint.
I can appreciate that this may be disappointing news for you and Brenda, however I can assure you that I have given careful consideration to all the available evidence before reaching this decision. If you are dissatisfied with this decision you can appeal to the Health Service Ombudsman. For further details about how you can contact the Ombudsman, please find enclosed an information sheet called ‘Useful Contacts’. You may want to contact your local Independent Complaints Advisor Service (ICAS) to assist you. Their details can also be found on the information sheet.
If you are dissatisfied with the way I intend to deal with your complaint, please contact me to discuss this by March 23 2005. If you have any questions about any aspect of this letter, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Yours sincerely Lyndsey Dodd Case Manager
20 March 2005
Dear Ms. Dodd
No letter I have received (and I am 63) so upset me as did yours. I spent Friday afternoon (as you were unavailable) in a state of unbelievable stress and concern at the possible consequences I foresaw. I spoke to and was listened to with great kindness by a number of your colleagues and I was told that your decision is not necessarily final, a sentence at the end of the letter my wife had skipped while reading it to me on the phone. This is my sole crumb of comfort.
Issue 1 I personally over many months fought to have this decision re the Westminster and Camden border reversed via hundreds of hours spent writing hundreds of pages of letters and making innumerable phone calls and sending numberless faxes. It was illegal to impose such a ‘boundary’ due to: 1) Continuity of care issues (7˝ years) 2) Brenda’s previous GP was a Camden GP 3) The Nov. 03 PCT Directive effectively ended the power of trusts to refuse cross-border patients provided they met the criteria, which Brenda’s case did.
David Hobbs did not ‘clarify the position’ to me. I insisted that the case was as I stated and he most reluctantly agreed. Without the help of the wonderful C.E of S.W. London SHA, Julie Dent, my task would have been far harder.
Issue 2 Effectively Dr. Lister and I were proved right.
Issue 3 You have absolutely failed to represent the facts, instead you have presented the views of George Platts and Erville Millar. Your narrative is a travesty of what took place. You omit Brenda’s taking 84 Declefenac when she realized (as I did) that Charles Oseghare’s promise was being reneged on. What has happened to the email dated 7th Jan. banning Brenda for life from Fordwych Road read to me by Caroline Blair, Deputy Director of Commissioning for Camden PCT? Have you not bothered to get a copy as I asked you to?
There is no more objectivity in your letter than in those I have received from CIMHSCT and Camden PCT. The cabal of male managers (Millar, Platts, Lee, Hobbs and Conroy at the highest level) has persuaded you or you have allowed yourself to be manipulated by them or you were impressed by their ‘power.’
This entire problem is about ‘power’ not about the desperate need of one 56 year old sufferer from severe depression to access the care she so desperately needs. Brenda is back on the bench in protest, the only alternative to being her flat and possible suicide. As far as I am aware you neither know nor care as to the possible effects of your listening to only one side of an argument. This is not why the CHAI complaints service was created.
Myself as primary carer, Dr. Lister as GP and Dr. R. as consultant are deeply worried at Brenda’s deteriorating state, trying to do a protest when she is so ill. Are our views irrelevant? Recently the Ombudsman (prior to taking on a complaint of mine as a Formal Investigation) met with us at their London office. Brenda and I feel we should meet with you personally at CHAI’s London office and that a senior CHAI manager (not the one who approved your letter) attends the meeting. I suggest the Deputy Director of Complaints.
Whether you have been misled, misinformed or simply have not dug deep enough only such a meeting can set the record straight. We believe it should be set up a.s.a.p. Once you have met us and heard how we see the case I am confident of a different outcome. Yours sincerely Barry Tebb
18 April 2005
Dear Sir Ian
I am increasingly concerned that Brenda’s case remains unresolved and that she cannot access the desperately needed place at Fordwych Road Day Hospital. Her GP, Dr. Lister, sees her for an hour fortnightly and her consultant, Dr. R. for 1˝ hours fortnightly also.
Doing an outside vigil at the level of depression she suffers is an enormous strain on her. I think it is barbaric that in the 21st century so ill a patient should have been denied the care she needs for such blatantly political reasons.
When Mr. Chacal phoned me this morning to say that his decision was final I asked him if you yourself had agreed it but he declined to answer. I asked Mr Chacal to contact Mark Easter, the recently appointed new CE of London North Central SHA. While his predecessor, Christine Outram, was in that position the SHA was implacably hostile but that may no longer be the case.
Last year I was instructed by the Ministerial Briefing Unit (South) to write to the SHA on various issues, including the arbitrary change of CE’s at Enfield Chase. The then response was that I had no locus standi to ask them questions – in spite of who had briefed me to ask them! It may be that Mr Easter has a different view on Brenda’s case to that if his predecessor and as Mr. Chacal absolutely refused to approach him I am writing to Mr. Easter myself.
With considerable regret I have referred Brenda’s case to the Ombudsman. I feel that if Mr. Chacal’s processing of this case is typical, then the new ‘independent complaints system’ is not one whit better than the appallingly unjust system it was intended to replace. Yours sincerely Barry Tebb
1 MAY 2005
THE CASE HAS BEEN REFERRED TO THE OMBUDSMAN
6 June 2005
Dear Mr Tebb
Thank you for your letter of 31 May 2005 which you faxed to me on that date with a number of different questions.
The review into the care and treatment of Anthony Hardy is being undertaken by an independent panel. The latest estimate which we have is that the panel’s report will be available to the Strategic Health Authority and the London Borough of Camden, who jointly commissioned the report, in late summer/early autumn. As you know from the terms of reference, we are committed to publishing the main findings of the report, so as minimum significantly more than a press handout will be published. A final decision will be taken once the report has been received but the practice in the past has been to publish the full report. The original time set for the report was acknowledged to be a challenging one, but it is more important for the independent panel to satisfy itself that it has carried out a robust review than to keep to an indicative timescale.
In respect of your other queries, I cannot confirm that the man accused of murdering the pensioner in Swiss Cottage recently was a patient of Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust. I am unable to tell you the number of suicides and homicides recorded by the Trust in the last year, as that would require the conclusion of an examination by either the coroner or the police. I enclose a copy of the serious untoward incidents notified to the SHA over the period January 2003 until early February 2005 by the Care Trust. Yours sincerely David Hobbs Director of Corporate Development North Central London Strategic Health Authority
POEMS BY BRENDA WILLIAMS
Dismantling Fordwych House
I am forced to begin a long goodbye, There is nowhere to go with my sorrow, The days are just another reason why Everything that is nurturing must go. It has sustained me and been a bulwark Against the world more so a place to be, Somewhere somehow I was able to work Drawing pathways into my poetry, All this will be lost but the fire I drew Never burnt out, a closed unfolded fan, Yet high enough to reach into the blue Sky still whispering of how it began. There is nowhere else to go to from here, There is nothing I can do with my fear.
I shall be abandoned by everyone, And no one will know what is happening, Left to manage reality alone Without anything to keep me going, Most of the time I exist in complete Despair and hardly able to leave my Home, the world lies before me at my feet, The past is an echo answering why. Trapped between these extremes always, I need To draw, the finished picture is no more Than a poultice to draw out pain, to bleed Into colour again from a far core In the monochrome region of the mind, This will cease, it will all be left behind.
And the end is already as a blue Print now unfolding in its paradigm, There is nothing that anyone can do, The dismantling is a matter of time, And everything I have known will be swept Away like a carbon copy of my Life, fugitive in the garden I kept To, it will not remain however I Try to keep it from fading forever In my mind, from the world that was the Art Room, filtering colours tears and laughter And lost as an echo left in my heart, With new lamps for old, I cannot confine Whatever it was I claimed once as mine
A resurfacing of a yob culture I thought to have left forever behind, An assembly line is the new structure Based on a working model of a kind, Allowing respite from extremity For a single hour only, everything Else must wait on hold and preferably With no exception outside the building, Casual barbarity that never Should have been allowed through, yet existing Unopposed without regard for danger, A regime permitting no resisting, Either to obey or to go away, Art therapy will not work in this way.
What is on offer as a replacement Is but a smoking room in a drop-in With a pool table, it was never meant To be anything more than a passing Remedy for people to sit around Somehow trying to console each other, Even they will be sold on and the ground Reaped for profit, and accepted after Without a sound for nothing can be done, We are ill and therefore disenfranchised And with nothing to lose or to be won. Is there anyone to have recognised That this is a proposal that will kill The most meek and the most vulnerable?
More than fifty places will be reduced To only fifteen, a day hospital Razed to the ground, uncertainty unloosed Where once there was hope and a new level Of care yet wholly unacceptable Where the most desperately ill may not Be allowed to get through, suicidal Despair may well be turned away with what Could be termed after as not enough proof. For some of us the refuge of a ward Is not possible, for traumatic truth Experienced there, remains as a sword In the heart, while the mind left to cower Each time, is too afraid to remember.
I came to Fordwych House when my own life Had collapsed, left in utmost jeopardy In the past, I lived each day on the knife- Edge of existence with my family Still around me and gone from me, yet always In disarray. I knew panic and fear Again as I had done in the deep maze Of time and I came when no one was near Me, left to a fate of insanity, For me this place was the end of the line. My first day was the anniversary Of a poet’s death, as though it was mine, The place then stood between me and my own Suicide, I felt no longer alone.
The kindness of strangers this was something I was experiencing for the first Time but I could only see the ending Of things, even my shadow was accursed And I was a fugitive from my own History, still unable to fit in Anywhere, yet I belonged there alone As I was and unable to begin. And for weeks paralysed before empty Paper I suddenly began to draw From a dream under fathoms of the sea Great stones were grounded on an ocean floor, Gradually releasing moving free In rhythms surging continuously.
Five years ago, by then discharged as an Outpatient, I was allowed to return For one day a week and slowly began To draw scenes from my childhood and to learn From a different angle what the pain Was like then, the drawings became windows Each with its own view and I saw again As though for the first time. An echo throws A sound that from its first source ricochets Outward from every surface and forces Even the silence to listen, the days After are left without answer, night sees Another way to apprehend a far Sound as it draws around a single star.
Sometimes only art therapy got me Through and for two years after I hardly Left my flat, nothing worked, I was to be Marooned and holed up for nine weeks every Time, leaving mainly out of an utmost Fear that the day could be taken away If I left it any longer, yet lost And bewildered I would go on Thursday For three or more weeks until the same thing Started all over again. I got through In this way and then everything crashed in, Vestiges of the family I knew Were gone for ever and I was alone And left unable to be on my own.
For six months I attended every day A growing and unmanageable fear Encompassed me and nothing could allay Or halt the course of mental nuclear Meltdown, I was unable to live or To die, there was nowhere to go, even Silence such as I had not heard before Had pushed me over right to the end. When I was admitted to a ward I felt That the future was over, time after Had come to a standstill and days were dealt Out to me that hardly seemed to matter Any more, yet at Fordwych House for five More months I fought each day to stay alive.
I tried for twenty months to keep going, An infrequent outpatient once again, I was left outside within a ruin Inexplicable trying to explain Without words but the meaning would not come. I existed in an isolated World yet unable to trust anyone, The life I had known was devastated And not a stone was left to stand or rest Upon another and there was nothing Left within, an empty space that oppressed Me in the dark, a place no scaffolding Could lean on to, a hollow vacuum Empty as the days I was lost among.
There is nothing to salvage from those days, I was on autopilot pretending, Even reality was a black haze A smoke engulfing buildings, covering The sky’s rim with an infinite burnt pall. Each night was a shadow of the unlit Day in dreams full of clamouring people Yet indistinct at the furthest limit Of time, where past and future seem to merge And the mind is trapped in the interval Between, forced to the precipitous verge Of silence and echoes inaudible Reverberating round an arena, Locked in an unreachable amnesia.
Poetry had lost its meaning for me, It had become a weight and a pressure That I could not bear or carry any- More, for my mind was ill and beyond cure. What remained from the years was left behind As something unknown I turned away from Suddenly, without looking back, my mind Was magnified by its own vacuum And drawn towards the fixed point of the end, I was alone and out on a far reach Of time, a one way journey that happened Almost without my knowing, without search Or rescue I was beyond horizon, Turning back was not within my reason.
I could not go back the way I had come And I could not comprehend the reason For the journey into the future, some Remaining knowledge that I was alone With night coming on and the end before Me, inexorably there beckoning, Luring me away from the extinct core Of the day into the light darkening. How I wanted to be done with it all, Just to escape from time coiled around me After like a tightened spring, to free-fall Into the timelessness of memory, An unknown, an inextricable black Shadow from which there was no turning back.
Nothing else mattered and I sat for days At a time yet unable to amend An automatic reflex in the haze Of green and drifting leaf of an early Spring, the words had failed and I could not go On, for my mind was burnt out entirely, A rudimentary black smoke, hollow With the sense of something distant and near With the impact of intangible fear. The unending planning of how to die Kept me alive for a little longer, This was the only certainty and I Could not allow for anything other Than a last endless countdown to the end.
June 2001
In Memoriam Christine Blake (June 1945 – April 2002)
Christine Blake died in her home in Fordwych Road a few doors away from the West Hampstead Day Hospital. Christine had been denied this refuge.
When I summon together all the chance Encounters that have existed between Us, trying to weigh them with the distance Of things unsaid, the unlit future seen By you alone, there was so little to Go on. You seemed to be living only In the interval of time left to you, Slowly foundering, clinging to any- One who would listen, but we could not hear Or see as you were swept by a current Too far out to reach. Something beyond fear Failed to prevent what you finally meant, Left to mutely disappear without trace, Suspended from a life you could not face.
7th-11th April 2002
Alone on Tuesday morning just thirteen Weeks into the year, the first day after Easter, you put an end to what had been An unmanageable existence, where Another afternoon another night Was not within your reason or the span Of things, whatever intercession might Have happened, it was too late. As a fan Too widely opened you could not get back, The separate panels of your life were Locked into place, a surface on the rack Of being that yet could go no further, While the arc that held it all suddenly Gave way to the last trace of its story.
11th-12th April 2002 Even your death was as though for a crime You did not commit, then left to hang there Already too late, without enough time Leftover between before and after, Just to turn about and run the distance Of your own road to the day hospital Only yards from your own door, beyond chance And equilibrium left unequal To the task. It would remain a journey You would never make, even the words failed Leaving you unable to ask or see The day outside where darkness within trailed, Something beyond fear was all you could hear And the silence of it hurrying near.
11th April 2002
Our Lady’s Candles were still emerging, Chestnut leaves unspread, recently broken Under hazed green smoke, were slowly drifting Upward through the grey pall of winter when You suddenly turned away from it all. A single candle in the space behind You at the last lap of your funeral Burned through the terminal silence, your mind A plan, a last mechanical journey Into an inferno that would enfold You with intangible reality As you passed before us into the hold Of time, where sunlight and material Darkness broke from the cordon of April.
14th April 2002
Even meaning somehow seems to fall short, Words that refuse to adhere to a page Fear to bear the weight of the way you fought To live or the uncomprehending rage For the way you would die. All the panic That happened which the years could not amend And night and morning broken by the tick And sound of a countdown right to the end, When you could then reckon on your fingers On one hand all the people still installed In your day. A collective guilt lingers And it will not go away, your life stalled, Reduced to fashioning an open noose, Oblivion from which you were cut loose.
25th-26th April 2002
It was all over by the time they broke Through the door and final as a cry for Help that came too late, helpless in the spoke Of light mutely entering the heart’s core As someone began to knock on your door. The only barricade against a world You simply could not cope with anymore Left to its silence with the end untold And left for others to find or fathom, To sound the days you could barely get through As one by one all the things you had come To depend on were kicked away from you, Too weak to fight you tried to surrender, To ransom what you could not remember.
27th-28th April 2002
Only thirty days ago was the last Day of Easter and the long awaited Opening impact of April, a mask Beneath which you struggled unabated As you went for a walk for the final Time in Regent’s Park, and where even while Accompanied as on a casual Outing your mind was trapped in a trial For your life on your last full afternoon. Who judged you that you should die by your own Hand or ordered that your death come so soon, Was there no defence as you stood alone No one to witness your execution, With no last reprieve after hope had gone.
1st-2nd May 2002
Who will pay Charon now for your spirit Taken before its time without tender Or absolution from a place unlit, A closed unvisited ruin, a world Where hidden beneath unshifting bending Girders exists a brief reality, There the bewildered heart can find no rest Or refuge, a surface without any Vestigial foothold or anything To cling to, yet an interval after With no origin, recurring untold Without end as the spirit unrehearsed Is left to its first silence, left to the Shadows that lodge on the banks of Lethe.
1st-8th May 2002
No Last Reprieve
You became just another unmentioned Casualty of the drawn-out chaos Resounding around you, pursuing you Even to the mouth of the far harbour Where you sought for refuge from a breaking Storm gathering endlessly before you. Found to be wanting, you were judged to be Guilty, accused of ‘using too many Resources’, the therapeutic structure That had been keeping you afloat, keeping You from slowly drifting too far out, was Suddenly taken away from you, shunned And left to an inexorable fate, Left there to wait until it was too late.
21st June 2002
Instinctively we kept to the distance Left between us, too afraid of being A burden to each other but you were Force which seemed to ebb and flow around you Whenever you were there. I remember An ordinary afternoon and you Were talking about Art and Augie March And seemed almost beside yourself with an Overflowing feeling for everything That day, you were so relieved to be there It was as though you had been rescued from Something left unmanageable, I see You still in a crowd ineffaceable.
11th February 2003
Nameless in Camden
They come to me like wraiths out of the mist, Lost, insignificant, the dispossessed Searching for their shadow mislaid or missed, Effaced from the day. They linger oppressed Without end with the knowledge of someone Since forgotten that will not go away, They pass with only their own reflection For consolation outstaring the day, The outlandish night left there, endlessly Merging as an early oblivion And into everything they cannot see. And sometimes in dreams, in low light unshone, From echoes remembered something is heard Yet recurring mnemonic and conferred. 31st October-6th November 2003
They trace the heel of the day forever In front, with something of a life straight from The heart as they react between after And before, held in its arc as they come And go with a truth that has come apart And a name’s echo they cannot go back To, a future that refuses to start, That stalling lies abandoned in its track. The last light of a day is all there is Left, the sudden footsteps falling away, Throbbing endlessly through the arteries Of a life on hold with nowhere to lay Its head, hollowing out a centrifuge, An open dark without any refuge. 7th-12th November 2003
Killingbeck Drive for Colm Golden
The poems had been laid aside and I Chose to leave them behind, walking away My mind breaking under the strain, the cry From within, there I stood in the midday Glare, turning each way and back, the traffic Roar magnifying, pounding in my ear, My senses recoiling in the panic Silent in my throat, the end drawn and near. I had pushed something from me yet without Knowing why, a last instinct to be free Forever of it all, while slowly out Of the hollow depths of futility, Of abandoned mute imagination, My reason for being alive had gone. 13th-14th June 2004
There is no way I can ease the pressure Trapped in the depths and confines of my mind, There where I exist beyond reach or cure Searching for something lost I cannot find. Nothing in experience can console, My son is missing and cannot be found, The night collides and veers out of control, The day runs as mercury on the ground. I am there with you in the high-walled yard Where the tin-blue sky is a low ceiling, Your face rests on the brick surface, your guard Shields you from yourself, from the voice seething, Urging you through the fire door that begins The big bang for the residue of sins. 27th June 2003
My mother once worked in this hospital Now rearing as a low-levelled echo, A torched ruin hidden and still formal Beneath the listless mounting June shadow Of half a century of forgotten Leaf, rising green as once and verged between The nearby cemetery wall, and even As I try to retrace your steps, a dream Stalls subliminal in the shuttered drive Where I am endlessly calling your name Trying to find out if you are alive In a race against time on hold again, The circling horizon is closing in, I am unable to end or begin. 27th – 28th June 2003
Cyril lies now in his own cemetery Buried forever next to my mother In mockery of how it used to be. Helpless before them, left to remember And stunned by the sudden recollection Of it all, I turn and turn about, mute And without anything to fall back on, Experience that I cannot refute Seeps imperceptibly through the wasted Years paralysing everything I try To do. Round me from a far time gathered I thread a circle from which to defy, An unbroken line on which to rely, Pushing horizon through a needle’s eye. 28th June 2003
And legend has it that the beck ran red With blood during the Wars of the Roses, The king’s armies faced each other, gathered On Killingbeck Field, wild wheat opposes Now the chain installations of Walmart And Comet and the drive-thru Burger King, The fields of home effaced and torn apart, Their familiarity a ruin. The granite wall we balanced on has gone, Once I inched my way along its surface, Edging towards the utmost reach of stone, Unable to turn around or retrace My journey, yet paralysed at the rim Of something levelling pulling me in. 28th June-5th July 2003
How often I am reminded to pull Myself together or casually Told the relapse will improve, yet full Of foreboding I know nothing can be Salvaged but a new unalterable Reality, a far-flung ensuing Derailment of time, ineffaceable In a mirror’s endless self-reflecting. Nothing works and the past is left to stall, To peter out in the end as I hold The impossibility of it all, While memory collapses, fold on fold, Set on autopilot right to the end, A flight path nothing can apprehend. 5th-9th July 2003
Most of the time you hardly know I’m there, Laughing quietly to yourself you do Not need to communicate from somewhere So out of bounds to the rest of us, you Talk to God in an imponderable Language of your own making where long Lost echoes are incommunicable Even while you listen, words that belong To you alone, threading their threnody By night and day for the slow redemption Of the damned and the altered history Of a world heading towards collision. I hover at your narrative’s margin, Everything I have known is wearing thin. 9th July 2003
I stand in the supermarket trying To weigh your needs in the time left before Returning to the ward routine, crying From the depths of an unconscious world for Your mind’s ruin. The bedraggled language Hardly anyone now can understand, A monologue nothing can yet assuage, The tardy eschatology just fanned Out like a mushroom from the livid day, The manifest apparitions of night, The voice of God that will not go away, The past tense that can never be put right. The co-ordinates of my life meet in The Sanatorium’s summer ruin. 9th July 2003
And today is an anniversary, It is the day of your grandfather’s death, There in the traffic flow on the Selby Road he struggled in vain for his last breath. Back then I cared whether he lived or died, Not knowing who my father was at all And twenty years passed me by while I tried To unravel the unanswerable, As I tried to pull myself together And to give a voice to an unasked why, My father’s illness before and after My mother’s death, was left there to deny. Half your life so far and slowly each year For fifteen years I watched you disappear. 9th July 2003
You cannot see beyond here and now, lost In a world from which there is no exit, Locked without end in a cat’s cradle crossed Far beyond thought where words don’t seem to fit Into their experience any more. They appear at random a makeshift crew Left without any echo from before, In motley adorned outlandish and new, A syntax left to reap with the hallmark Of unreality stamped through and through, A passport to a country where the arc Of horizon is always out of view, Where language exists in combat without Leave trapped in the stronghold of fear’s redoubt. 14th July 2003
Now we encounter the different hell Of remission for a while, you wander At your will for an interval, a shell Empty of who you were, with no after Echo to remind us of the time still Left behind, left in its own vacuum To resonate without meaning until Some answer can be found. The afternoon Presses down and there is nowhere to go With the weight, the endless precipitate Days stalling, veering with their domino Effect on a future that will not wait, Its void seers nearing in the July sun, My mind has nothing left to lean upon. 16th July 2003
How shall I gather these unquiet days In order to thread them on their own string, Words I never thought to hear, in a maze Amassing and beyond imagining. I tremble at the breakdown of language When association has gone too far, The false turning that nothing can assuage, The total loss of the familiar, The siren wail in the labyrinthine Passage just drawing you towards your fate, The random erosion of what was mine And the intervention that comes too late, The closed chambers of schizophrenia Locked internecine within amnesia. 16th July 2003
Even the address of the Asda chain Store still has the name of Killingbeck Drive And the day is dislocated again, Reaching back to the time you were alive. Now it is the semblance of a terrain Of wheat and poppy, still deliberate, Rearing suddenly in between in vain, And verged among buildings as though innate, An inerradicable memory Precipitate as an endless summer And as it used to be. Infinity Left to stand, to reap forever after And abandoned under tarmac, ruin Blurring on an oscillating drive-in. 17th-21st July 2003
What would you have made of this world if you Had lived, these fields once so familiar, The long shadows of the drive you walked through In the sixties are now beyond repair, Only the blond abandon of the last Field left to stand reminds me you were there. As though to resurrect you I hold fast To the corn’s far ebb tide as I compare This high summer’s day to everything known, And with nothing to salvage but a dream Where you just went on living on your own, Your death a reality that had been Superimposed on a world turned upside Down, a world that you simply laid aside. 30th July 2003
A poem cannot be made to happen, Language comes always of its own accord At its own cost, the spirit is often At a premium I can ill-afford As I wait and then languish with the line Going nowhere and ground to a standstill, With nothing to fall back on to define Mute early echoes left unreachable And inaudible. Imagination Is an island that existed before Its toll, its route is via depression Leaving me behind with nothing to draw From the lasting untold pressure of time, Now hurrying away with what was mine. 5th-6th August 2003
There exists no word in the language for Parents who have lost their children, childless Is not a fit description any more Than children there yet not there, the endless, The relentless presence of their absence, Whether it be death or mental illness Or days and nights just left as they were once, Its aftermath is left to coalesce. An emptiness that will not go away, A shadow that falls forever alone Without direction or even the day To cling to, petrifying as the stone It leans upon, without any way out Of existence fragmenting round about. 19th August 2003
There are no words for the leftover state, The lock out when children have grown and gone, There is only the time in which to wait For those known once who can still abandon Each other without even a look back, Without any knowledge of the impact They will leave behind, the colossal lack Of the familiar lodged as a fact Of existence, shifting rearranging Its ground, with nothing new to hold on to, An echo always coming to nothing, Lingering in vain trying to get through And awake in dreams I am left to search, The end and the origin out of reach. 20th August 2003
Without anything left to live for I Rose up calmly and suddenly and closed The door behind me, free at last from my Own past, now wide open and unenclosed And converging exposed on the future. I had lived my life as though inside out Aware only of incongruity, While endlessly encompassed all about By inexorable disparity. Unnumbered years had become a pressure, An involuntary surrendering, A building slowly crumbling from within Long since abandoned under scaffolding, With the memory of its origin. 10th-12th September 2003
Suddenly from somewhere in the nowhere Of my mind the lost irretrievable Years erupt, short-lived unloosened from their Holding as shadows unredeemable Effaced now from the light of their own day, Remembered in passing in falling rain The light as darkness on the surface lay, Night echoes refusing to go away. They linger for a moment once again, A fading watermark, their disarray A reality left residual Layering softly through and through after And before, avowing their survival, A mendicant language that will not scare. 24th-26th September 2003
I heave a burden that is too heavy For my soul yet compelled endlessly here And there with the impossibility Of it all, alone and with the end near Enough to lend a hand I cannot be Any different, accustomed I breathe An airless sheer atmosphere where only The day on hold can say what I can leave Behind. All around me night’s disarray Gathers head, I am lost in a landscape Of my own making and the time that lay Before me has gone, there is no escape From dreams as a miasma closes in Encircling me with silence fast within. 26th-27th September 2003
I stand before the distance the outside Of a fairground as a child looking in, The world unfolds before me, open wide And beckoning and I cannot go in, My destiny was close to the white wall And I never moved out of its shadow Flickering with inextinguishable Colours projected on the far echo Of sprawling factory neon switching Off and on, fifties letters in high night Rain etching their aftermath, igniting The low industrial glow from the light Of a bus terminus on the far side, Shadows on a wall with nowhere to hide. 27th September 2003
Nothing remains now of the person I Was, standing at the margin always, whirled To the edge of things, just a sudden cry Breaking across the span of a lost world Is all I can hear as I try to sound A stranger nearby, taking up abode Without consent within me and new-found As ‘the man of the sea’. Under his load I stumble no longer aware of who Or what I am, while a tardy future Abandons whatever it was I knew, Leaving me to fend as though beyond cure, Imagination has taken its toll, The years a tangled weft beyond control. 16th January 2004
My spirit breaks under the coming year, It vacillates before each unknown hour, Endlessly they reach encompassed and sheer, Terminal to the edge where I cower. A single moment is sometimes more than I can bear and I am paralysed by The weight of the light, its lowering span The empty rust-coloured air as I try To make a meaning from everything known, The up-ended leftover disarray Where night is no more than the shadow thrown From a mute illusory unlit day, The stifled landscape of an early cry, The co-ordinates of a life awry. 20th January 2004
The Drive was the only way out each night And yet journeying home the next morning You must have sometimes wondered, catching sight Of your children there, about everything That might have been, how the closer you came To Nature and your country left behind, The village you would never see again In scaffolding at the core of your mind. The granite wall still enclosing after And before, stands now indestructible, You would have passed my father working there Where it verged almost on the hospital, Its inexorable reality Was the corner-stone of the cemetery. 16th June 2004
The ruins of Killingbeck have been sold Off, No Entry hoardings are fixed in place, In dreams the entrance to another world Is sealed up now, yet horizon’s first trace Will survive intact in my memory. The cure for TB was discovered here, So the hospital’s open balcony Is safe from the bulldozer drawing near, Destined to stand there in the urban sprawl A random reminder, its history Left to span real estate and shopping mall But nothing will remain of these early Thirties buildings, the sanatorium The refuge for your youth and its ruin. 19th-20th June 2004
Only here is it possible to stand Still with space enough just to turn around, To follow again the lay of the land, An echo ebbing on the reach of sound. Rising from it all The Melbourne Clock seen Now as in the sixties as you would see It then, the hours overdrawn that had been Entailed and left outstanding, already Long overdue, within the fourfold face, Curtailed and left before you, were your own Last days, a countdown nothing could erase While you pawned the time that was left on loan. Its edifice sustains a single tree Struggling upward beneath surface ivy. 20th -21st June 2004
I know of no validity outside Poetry and yet the frontiers keep on Changing, ever shifting, an exposed wide Distance never reaching its horizon. Seacroft that endlessly encircled me Enclosed forever within those narrow Confines, ebbing now like a slate grey sea Where the whitened shadows of history Are blown across its surface like a low Summer wind, evaporating slowly Over window glass into the empty Air, from a forgotten ordinary Day folded in the hold of memory, In the hollow depths of vacuity. 3rd-4th July 2004
How is it possible, how shall I be Able to say what the hidden words meant Then, resonating in extremity Always, unlike time that was only lent For a little longer, it was too late, It was always too late, the stifled years Were somehow put on hold and left to wait And innate with the sum of all my fears. How much I have missed you never having Known you through every unfolding season Since then when you suddenly went leaving Me with only anger as my reason, The pain since then, the years do not abate Your quiet fate, it was always too late. 22nd June-5th July 2004
Silently I wait in the triangle That still spans the outward rim of York Road, The fields of the adjacent hospital Once a sanatorium, form the mode Of an open ruin. Random echoes And their stories lay now in the fallen Corridors as they ricochet through those First days like down-turned abandoned leaves when They close or hold the seared summer shadows Of the light. Yet Killingbeck Cemetery Folds its layered history as it throws Its mantle on my son left behind me, Each time I leave him lost in his knowledge And waving now as once from his college. 6th July 2004
Through sixteen months as ‘one of the damned’ you Are back in Intensive Care, ‘The Middle Man of Christianity’ as you knew You were all along, but the hospital Is the disguise for a torture chamber, Somewhere you can be poisoned on a whim. There is nowhere to go beyond after And before, you reside now at the rim Of impermanent unreality In a region still unknown to us all, I have missed your familiarity In silence since your life began to stall Beyond understanding, I search among The hours for a peace that will never come. 6th July 2004
And for forty years I have been in thrall, Subjugated to memory without Knowing anything of myself at all, Left to nurse a colossal absence out Of the depths of which there was no escape, While I walked through the shallows of my own Life, a momentum halted by its gape, Sometimes stalling refusing to give way As though my shadow was only on loan, A passing moment of the utmost day. Darker than darkness in a mirror seen, The cursive script of what the words would mean, This world was the preliminary scene For its final rehearsal in a dream. 5th-6th July 2004
It curves silently backwards, endlessly Replicated, a mirror turned upon Itself, reflecting an entrance only Time can understand in its summation In a dream, wheat clings to the beginning Of Killingbeck Drive, high and white and out Of control, melting into rain falling Suddenly through July, while all about Me an airless encompassing future Presses into being, rearranging its load, Horizon darkens under the pressure Of a near sky, here there is no abode, No refuge to rest in, my life stalling At the entrance unable to go in. 28th July 2003
We are Stardust for Drs Doris Lister and Peter Raven
They say that poetry does not matter Anymore, that the sound of the spirit And its reality can no longer Be heard, even to the utmost limit Of its jeopardy and joy, lost among Contingency and circumstance, a lay Leftover from another time, a song Echoing yet mutely falling away. I shall be left to the silence after, The end unknown and with nowhere to go, Measuring the metre from a whisper To an audience of my own shadow, And from somewhere deep inside the heart’s core, Nothing seems to matter anymore.
22nd March 2005
All day I have struggled with the lost years, Random residual hours, a lament In makeshift time, my mind a storm that veers Over the void, mute moments that were meant As smoke to flare for a while or to pall Suddenly in sunlight to a pale sky. The emptiness is interminable As darkness that on the surface lay, I Don’t know who I am and the rehearsal Is almost over, the lines have been laid Aside and they cannot help me now, all I am is but a shadow left to fade. We are stardust charred with the sound of us, Echoes levelling and incongruous.
12th – 13th April 2005
I want to tell you about the morning When my mother left her home behind her For the last time, she just sat there crying Transfixed in silence before my father Who refused to give her the money for Her fare for the bus to the hospital. She had heard these words many times before And yet this was something different, all She remembered had converged on the end Where I stood paralysed trying to face Her, everything I had come to depend On was as darkness left on the surface Of the livid day, now there was no time Left and my mother was no longer mine.
13th April 2005
And I sensed she was quietly screaming As she stared straight ahead at my father The late September morning was streaming With fast held shadows abandoned after. None of us guessed the truth that only she Knew but my father had already been Told, we moved in slow motion and hurry While measuring the distance in between One life and another. She did not move Yet the door was open to the outside, Its narrow span was all she knew of love, Just left ajar or standing opened wide, When a taxi was summoned by someone She had passed at last through its horizon.
13th April 2005
The help that had been so long in coming Had come too late to save her, there was no Time left now just a few days outstanding, The jettisoned echo of tomorrow. When I try to remember the language Used for the mockery of her spirit, The incoherent inordinate rage That he used to summon to its limit, I cannot breathe, caught in the cat’s cradle Of it all, there where I turn about this Way and that with only a syllable Count to sound each silence left in stasis, Her mute reply was the secret refrain Found etched below the surface of night rain.
13th – 16th April 2005
How I long to be able to pull free And to lay aside her daily sorrow, The nights without end when she had to flee In fear of her own pursuing shadow, In flight from the footfall hurrying near, Random his clamouring far-flung echo Veering between us and before and sheer As the neon darkness of tomorrow. The streets would encircle us one by one In a secret maze of their own making Where the sodium glare of lamplight shone On an orange concrete morning breaking, Things unsaid and left too far off to say, Fugitive as grey stars along the way.
16th – 17th April 2005
How easily I lose the tightened thread Lost in a broken weft unravelling, Strands trailing out of time and ungathered And imperceptibly diminishing. April rain seeps among the listless drained Levels layering the fallen poplar Leaf dark in its own light and scrolling waned, Its burnt umber rusting into paper. And I have become unfamiliar Even to myself, the words are not mine Anymore, just purloined by amnesia Lodging now between memory and time, Only through language can I be near you, Always in silence in the streets you knew.
17th– 18th April 2005
Only through language can I be near you, Abandoned days that break from the cordon Of loss, inexorable nights that drew To the end beyond imagination. Even as a mirror self-reflecting, There fifties neon signalled your despair, An echo darkened and emblazoning Flickered intermittent across the air. No one knows how you hid your pain never Letting any of it out, a secret You kept to yourself, a way out after With a single ticket one way and yet You took your leave of us in the same way, Too afraid to say where the country lay.
18th – 19th April 2005
Only three days before, we had both gone
To see about
a room, to see about Unmanageable, she would leave without Saying where she was going but he knew. From nothing would ensue the usual Unforgettable trouble for the few Days left remaining, not a syllable Had she been heard to utter, not even When he tried to besiege her before she Made it to the door, nothing could soften His last intended impact, the many Times casually waylaid on her own, Left to walk the nights she had always known.
26th April 2005
How much did she know that Tuesday night one Month before her death, silent beside me After Mary had let her down, no one Knew what you were about to do as we Slowly returned the way we had just come, Until we reached the cross road, the very Route we had chosen before had now gone, It was as though we were permanently Lost, only a torn note left on her door Had any meaning, for you there was none, Will be wait for want to written before And then left for us to find. We had gone For nothing but the key was left behind For the journey to the unconscious mind.
15th May 2005
Always the silence, the mounting pressure Of silence which you kept so tightly wrapped Within and now beyond the reach of cure Or anything for you to cling to, trapped Within your last moments before my eyes, Left to watch you drown, mute and paralysed, To stand stranded on the banks of Lethe And without anyone there to go with You, quietly crying for your children For the last time, beside yourself with them, Still trying even then to hide the pain Knowing your silence had been held in vain, From the cemetery flowers that he gave, You would know too soon he would dig your grave.
15th May 2005
Whatever murderous thoughts were in his Mind that last morning, he had already Killed you many times before, the crisis Was that you could not know until then and Now it was too late and there was no time Left just to say goodbye to your children For whom you had gone without for so long. The endless silence for us to belong A little longer and for you to be Our mother for another day even One more morning, the silence that was mine, The exit I would never understand, There was nothing left with which to defy, We were too afraid to speak or to cry.
14th – 15th May 2005
You were as one overwhelmed by this world, Nothing that was done was meant to hurt us, You just kept your agony in and told No one, yet gentle and incongruous Right to the end, with nothing to explain Anymore even to yourself, taken Over suddenly by the intense pain Of carcinomatosis which by then Was inoperable as you well knew. We had seen this so many times before But you never let us in, only through Silence could you get to the other shore Of the place you were in without letting Us know, or that this was your last morning.
14th May 2005
God’s Little Nothing or so you became And by the time you got to your last year You already belonged to another World, you struggled with your usual day Hand-in-hand with death and yet as though they Were still ordinary, the growing pain Was something suffered and softly offered Up to God but the end was drawing near. The future or what would happen after Was not in your thinking, you would not be There then, on the matter of time you said Nothing and the past was once your country, Home where you could be as a girl again, Not this place where your life had been in vain.
14th May 2005
The end was something I could not amend And for the rest of my life I would be Told to pull myself together, the end Was simply put on hold, reality Would become what was left, you had become In your own effacement by your own hand As an undisclosed suicide by stealth, Yet unriveting your soul from yourself You worked while the secret cancer grew and You went leaving us completely without, An accident of circumstance among So many that left you with no way out, And in disarray we were your children And we loved you more than your own God then.
13th May 2005
The end is bound up with what I have known, It threads itself around me endlessly As a cocoon out of which I have yet To break, as though from my own shadow thrown, It pulls me in and will not let me go. That morning is conjured out of nothing Before my eyes, before it has even Begun, its volume fills the void, welling Wide open with curtailed infinity While the end assails me, sure as a debt Outstanding, her life was a wager thrown, Her soul was subjugated long ago. Trapped and wrapped inside my own chrysalis Language bound about beats in its stasis.
12th – 13th May 2005
What my father said is now too painful To remember, I only dare to go There in dreams, generated words that will Not settle and that possess no echo Of their own, my mother took them with her Knowing they would last for the rest of her Life, as she quietly found the exit, And without alert the way out of it, Something about a slow and painful death, A bull’s-eye, the target he could not miss Uttered every time until her last breath. They circulate now in their own stasis, I would become their leftover echo Left in the panic to rock to and fro.
11th – 12th May 2005
But there was no answer to my echo Mute in the emptiness of a darkened Room, in the fierce sun where could I go Without you, with only the verb to be For the span of a bridge across the end, Left to exist forever in her place, To turn about without identity, Your memory etched below the surface Of its effacement, inexorable As your silence, its resounding volume Now an open fan unalterable In the rain of an April afternoon. I became a poet to hear your name Answering once in the distance again.
11th May 2005
But what was she like, my mother I mean, And there was nobody there to answer, It was as though you had never been seen Before and your death just forgotten after, Your name once was Kathleen and that was all You amounted to and failed to explain. Sometimes in the empty rooms I would call Out your name as though as a child again, Waiting to hear my own name given back To me in vain, left waiting to belong As your daughter once more and with the lack Of the familiar in all that’s known, Merged shadows with nothing to lean upon, Left immaterial in dreams unshone.
10th – 11th May 2005
I exist at the mercy of my mind, Now unable to foresee even a Moment of the time that is left behind, Known and yet foundering in amnesia, Left to struggle with a life of its own, Eroding within its appetency, Memory lost and found as once, then torn From the shadow of anonymity. In a race against time how shall I come To the end again and for the last time Write it down, the years I am lost among, Salvaging something once from what was mine, Always the pressure, the unwritten page, The unlit ruin I cannot assuage.
9th – 10th May 2005
Then death became a familiar guest, As a salesman at the door, urgent yet Softly spoken, and leaving you no rest From his entreaty you quietly let Him in, the ventriloquist for your voice Miming then the final dress-rehearsal. And after, was there ever any choice, Held within his fast inextricable Grasp, surrendering to the random chance Of time and the end for your mute way out In a last accident of circumstance. I failed to find out what you were about, For I knew only what I did not know Faltering beside you in your shadow.
7th – 8th May 2005
For a few minutes before my visit To your grandson, I stare from a window At the entrance to Killingbeck Drive, it Now lies in ruins and the double row Of close spreading horse chestnut trees has gone. Did you stay because once you were a wife, Something to do with duty, the question Has the sudden capacity to stun Me while I search in silence through your life, Left looking for something I cannot find And there in your own imagination Preventing you from leaving him behind, Was your heart put on hold from the time where Once falling snow was curling in his hair.
7th May 2005
Nothing can encompass what you endured As my father’s delusions tore you from Yourself, even from your shadow, immured As you were with your four children among The days and nights of your leftover youth Brought to an end too soon, with no warning Of a time to come, when dismantled truth Left as the only thing continuing, Would be the only refuge I would know. Back then how did I manage to forget You, a slow imperceptible shadow Effaced and just felled from the day, and yet There was no chance, it was always too late, The world around you left you to your fate.
5th – 7th May 2005
It comes to me suddenly and in dreams, In hidden flashback what was happening, Day by day where nothing is what it seems, It is the only thing continuing. I never heard him call you by your name Except when the police were there the night Before, then over the hours you became Nameless and helpless and left in his sight, We grew accustomed to him calling you Woman, the times you would be told to pull Yourself together there in the onslaught, The nights of your life, inexplicable Now his own throwaway line for your death, Uttered every time until your last breath.
5th May 2005
Always the silence, the endless silence And such as I hardly know where to go With it all, left in another time once, With my own silence now as an echo Of your own. Such a space was left behind That it is still impossible to fill With words and how it was, how shall I find Myself when I amount to no more than The end, something left interminable And written down as though from memory, From a template going back further than Choice or chance, before their contingency, The pressure is unbearable and I Cannot contain the silence of your cry.
9th May 2005
Your last morning was put on hold while you Said goodbye to your children for a few Moments, at the furthest reach of your mind, There you shook the hand of your youngest son, Too afraid to love or leave him behind, ‘Michael take care of yourself’, your reason Was your paradigm and a short life spent Trying to keep us with you a little Longer while hiding the truth, the silent And inexorable fact of it all. I used to dream that you were still alive, Choosing to live by leaving us in time, Your secret let you feed us and survive, Living as a mother no longer mine.
30th April 2005
There are no records left they have all been Destroyed and it is as though you never Existed, nothing has changed, you are seen Every day, momentary as you were, In the closed kaleidoscope of my mind, Aligned within a mirror’s corridor Out of the scattered fragments left behind Washed up from the sepia at the core Of time, I calibrate your spirit in My mind’s eye. Across the neon terrain, Off and on and through the unceasing din, Mayday your warning was signalled in vain, Clutched in the hand of the only witness, The unacknowledged Morse of your distress.
29th April 2005
Known yet unknown and still I turn about Torn apart between these polarities, Where can I go, left to follow without Even looking back, the interstices In time through which she moved just amounted To a single day, the span of the pain To come, so casually encountered At the door of the night before. In vain, Your whole life was lived dying with the pain, Your last years spent in silent surrender To cancer the secret you kept in vain, Pain with a life of its own long after, The surface darkness on the livid day, And all your children left in disarray.
28th April 2005
So much about you must remain unknown Forgotten long since somewhere in Ireland Just a few momentary years no one Wanted to remember, abandoned and Thrown away in another century, My heart is still bewildered by it all. Your legacy was your own mystery And to this day it holds me in its thrall And there is no answer to the echo Of your spirit, it will not go away. I falter with the nights you were to know, Knowing you would not live to see the day Or watch your children grow, caught in a trial Of words, trying to raise us for a while.
28th April 2005
As a poet I have to get it right And as her daughter once I have no choice, The unwritten lines are beyond my sight, Yet as the ventriloquist and his voice So I have to wait for the words to come. My life seems to have been about the end These were key words just scribbled at random, The end was something I could not amend, Known for four hours only before she died. I was running across the Melbourne field From rhythm hidden with nowhere to hide, Giving voice to knowledge so long concealed, Running with my own primordial cry ‘She’s going to die, she’s going to die.’
26th – 27th April 2005
And that was the end of everything known, There in a field without any warning, Breathless in the October wind, alone With the evening and another morning. There was not enough time to say goodbye, That night it was not my turn to visit, Pounding in my ear was the final cry Of a lost deracinated spirit. There was no one to go with her and how Would she go alone without anything In the dark, left there and penniless, how Would she pay the boatman, what could she bring Instead as the barter for her journey, Where could she go left standing on the quay.
27th April 2005
All there was left to do was to follow You however many years it would take And of so little use to anyone, That only the stars below their surface And unseen waning had any meaning For me then, when morning would break its banks Precipitate among their scattered ranks Flickering deliberate and in vain Or in darkness scuttled in shallow rain, So many so few the resonating Stars left to efface your earliest trace, Echoes now unshone I am lost among In dreams, in front in flight and for your sake Quietly beckoning me to follow.
25th April 2005
Margaret – Part 1
‘I am tired of fighting… I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.... From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ – Chief Joseph, Leader of the Nez Percé
The end remains and who knows what to do With it, leftover as though by chance from Another century, where do I go From here, watching rain slowly falling through May’s marble darkness, when I hardly know Where to belong anymore. A poem Has to find its own way out of the years It is lost among, while the evening seers Into a last light, aluminium Among leaves and the wind’s rhythm, what am I, bound about in a closed vacuum My life thrown to one side, an open fan, I too am nothing, in the strands of time, From slanting depths the surface stars were mine.
16th – 19th May 2005 Yet I have never felt before such an Intense hesitancy, afraid even To put one word in front of another, For fear of it all collapsing into Itself, and I stifle under the end As it rears up suddenly from nowhere, Mute with my silence in a cavalcade, A mimicry with a garish motley Worn, assailing me with my destiny And my ruin, echoes in between, made Out of nothing in the unending span Of a dream, and all I amounted to, My mother’s spirit unable to fend Torn from her shadow in the darkness then.
18th – 25th May 2005 The world is being swept away around Me and death is standing on the corner Casually loitering with intent, Waiting for me to try to calmly pass By, how can I turn about without him Noticing, when the future is not an Option and when I have not reached the end, There is something that I have to attend To and I cannot put it right, its span Is but a spent candle I cannot trim Anymore, a silent spirit that has No refuge, a fugitive never meant To be heard, in its own meltdown after, A low flame eternal in which I drown.
21st May 2005
The tree before me has broken under The strain of its own weight and now it trails A fallen canopy along the ground, Outlandish in its young ignominy And sheered white into the bark exposed where The branches fell. The throwaway day fails And May light flares its last over London, I turn away from the Thames which holds no Interest for me now, without even Looking back, as though another country In which I am homesick and no longer know Myself, nothing lasts long enough around Me, only memory and now and then Something left infinitely lost and won.
22nd May 2005
It hurts as though I’m reliving her loss All over again, and I shall never Get used to people who were once just there And now are not, as if they had to cross Into another world and as they passed Too soon, they suddenly forgot to wave. It is we who are left behind to crave For the little that was left or the last Remembered stumbling in the dark without Anything to light the way, with nothing But random misalliance remaining, The casual certainty and the doubt That will not go away, the life we lend And borrow from diminishing the end.
25th May 2005
I dreamed that life was an elevator Halting in an infinitesimal Space to let someone get out, I felt it Come to a standstill momentarily, A sudden momentum in makeshift time, Through a world of make-believe, descending In its own oblivion, pretending. Yet nothing really mattered anymore, Each of us stood alone carrying all That we were, with no room for the spirit To inhabit, trapped between memory And the moment that nothing can confine, Among so many, clutching what was mine, In suspension in the lift-shaft of time.
25th May 2005
Why does the spirit try to surrender When prisoners are not being taken, When there is nothing left to remember The world by in a last look backward then. Is it the spirit’s own longing to be Free, encompassed round about, the tenant With a lease for life in the memory, Something unchanging and yet attendant Even to the end when the mind is no Longer recognisable in the form It once was, what is it that we don’t know When the body from its shadow is torn, Precipitate the isolate desire Thrown on the chance of circumstance for hire.
25th – 26th May 2005
It is the emptiness nothing can fill That will propagate with infinity In time, and that meanwhile begins to spill Full to the brim with the end already Installed awaiting a cataclysm That will turn language into the silence Of itself, there in a locked room, rhythm Into the hull washed up on a shore once. And we are left with the silence after, The echo through time, a forgotten tongue In a Babel of its own making, where Speech was the wreckage it was lost among, What happened in the interval between The end and its enactment in a dream.
26th May 2005
What happened in the light of a shuttered Room filtering the breaking May morning, The heavily laden storm that augured No good and that would end without warning. The utterances, at once disparate Yet fast locked, held in their own momentum, There for the world to realise too late. The carousel would become an omen For fixed horses soundlessly galloping Before the silence of eternity, The semblance of an enmeshed sky arching On birds in flight in an aviary, The audience at the last scene, left there Only to wonder endlessly after.
31st May – 2nd June 2005
No one can imagine in the present Tense the last moment of someone driven To the edge, the life that was only lent For a little while, failed to break even. Silence that was to descend just before The end, was already apocryphal, While the day converging on a locked door Would be seen forever through sepulchral Smoke, yet etched indelibly in the mind. The frozen panic of cataclysm, The past left with nothing to leave behind, The future, the vacillating rhythm Of the heart’s last countdown right to the end, The unending sleep nothing would amend.
2nd – 3rd June 2005
The hours beforehand were now converging On themselves, and whether time was counted Or forgotten, the date was emerging That would be all a person amounted To, when about to die by their own hand. When anger and love are in tandem With each other, they cannot countermand Or just pull back from choice or the random Chance of circumstance, sudden and awry, Then is the spirit silent and averred Left at the mercy of time and the cry For help always unheeded and unheard, The last unwitnessed ceremony for A world on the other side of the door.
3rd June 2005
How many times would the final moment Be re-enacted in the mind, only To fall back again to a time not meant For the end and then its reality After. What failed to make the difference Before the shortfall remaining, between The day’s deliberate effacement once And the familiar that might have been, Was it something to do with the spirit Quietly falling silent in the din, A leave taking calm and precipitate Unfaltering in its timelessness, in The fast locked last roulette of hit and miss And memory suddenly come to this.
4th June 2005
That it should come to this, in the chaos Behind your door that stood against the world, Forced and fallen and open on the loss Of a life unattended and untold And left in the guise of Ophelia Before us, drowned and entering the flame, A cocoon, a blossom-strewn nirvana And with only a familiar name, Without even an echo to adhere To, or a tardy note to leave behind, Locked as a shell rocked to and fro the sheer Flow and ebb of a tide trapped in your mind, The more you struggled the more you were caught, While flights of angels occupied your thought.
5th June 2005
Is it love or anger after that drives The self towards the end or the simple Act of just letting go, so many lives Lost and yet each irreconcilable, With a past beyond repair, a future, Fast-forward, or on rewind to the end. What is it that is beyond reach or cure Or anything that this world could contend, Could it be the vacancy after joy Has gone, with a To Let sign for ever There, or memory left as an alloy Of something known and now beyond compare, Yet its loss the colossal loss that knows The emptiness a mirror’s image shows.
6th June 2005
It is the emptiness inside that kills By degrees, before the unfaceable, Staring out at something unseen that wills The spirit to a last immutable Flight path and now locked on autopilot As it jettisons and sheers away from Its own habitation, precipitate Yet spiralling then into the unknown. The spectacular cartwheel from the sky That fell unnoticed on a busy day, Without warning or any exit cry, With night coming on in the disarray, The frantic search through the locked isolate Hours where fate had knocked already too late.
6th June 2005
It is the world that has come to an end, Its equilibrium and its orbit Awry with a malaise nothing will mend, The desperate and fallen, the spirit Left to contend with a future that is Not negotiable. Margaret forlorn Succumbing alone to her last crisis And left in her home with nowhere to turn, Pleading for the time she could ill afford, Forced into the only resolution, Left to cry at the door of a closed ward Too afraid to ask for an admission, While booked one way for an unknown country Without any luggage for the journey.
7th June 2005
Margaret – Part 2
Life and Death in Camden
If the right words exist I cannot find Them, within I am as a volcano Erupting, she was one of my own kind, Someone of like mind and she had to go Down as a casualty of her own Folly, and yet she amounted to so Much more, an unexpected death alone, Its consummate reality like no Other, she was known to us as Margaret. Silence seemed to become her only friend At the end, with an urgency she let Takeover that she might herself transcend, Collaborating with a new found mute Anonymity she could not refute.
8th June 2005
Margaret, like Christine before her, became A brief episode in the theatre Of sudden death in Camden with the same Pass through internal review thereafter. Nothing was done, nothing would ever be Done yet the patients kept on dying by Their own hand, pushed towards extremity With nothing more to be done but to die Waiting there for help that would never come, Left to beseech for a hospital bed Which for some would be permanently full, They lay abandoned in their homes instead, At the mercy of crisis teams, a cull Subliminal and as such it was done.
9th – 10th June 2005 Words break under the weight of their burden, She was left there completely overwhelmed, Her last scene with Christine before her then, On rewind in her mind as it was filmed. That they might never be effaced again And in the cold light of day as the world Hurried past unstartled and unheeding On its way, abandoned they stood alone With nothing left that they could call their own Except for the manner of their dying, As the slow cold intangible scarves curled Around them, their shadows left with their name, Unlit without echo in the mind’s eye, The future to measure and judge it by.
13th June 2005
There was no help forthcoming, not even Hope for one more day or another hour, Everything had ground down to the time then And silent shadows in which to cower. Mortal smoke would engulf every crevice Of the slow turning locked room, with a pall Impossible to see through, its soft vice The hold of low flame, as the natural Day was obscured and left beyond reach or Cure, with time enough then for you to fold Back as a girl again down to the core, Without any meaning any more, curled Up with the end unwritten, passing through, Silently leaving the world behind you.
13th June 2005
You would have read To be, or not to be, Preparatory in a time before, Pondering inevitability Or accidental death behind your door. Who can say if you followed Sylvia The first day of a week you could not face, You could quote by heart from Ophelia And like her would vanish without a trace. And always the hours, yet you knew full well When Virginia entered the water, Literary to the last, you would tell Her that your death would mirror her’s after, Was it a cry for help we shall never Know, a life too soon you were to sever.
14th June 2005
In your own way you were a campaigner For justice and equality for all People, and I never heard you utter As a Pharisee, you were a loyal Friend wondering at us all to the end. You would read aloud with rapt attention, No one intruded on your narrative, Once when you read about the Indian Chief who had resigned himself to fight no More and to look for his children among The dead, someone entered to then offend, A lapse in manners you could not forgive. Blaming the staff for Christine’s death, and none Other, you would follow in her shadow.
14th June 2005
In the countdown to the end there was no Time to draw from or to turn about in, Suddenly overtaken and as though Mutely diminished in the clamouring, As you just gave in to necessity For nothing while trying to imagine What it was you knew, the transparency Of smoke welled within slowly dissolving The real thing trapped there before time after, Parrying as Hamlet with your own name While you invoked angels for an answer And left To be, or not to be, in vain, Lured unsuspecting to the terminal Silence of the end beyond your last call.
14th June 2005
The stories abound but the crisis team Came to your door first thing in the morning And they found it closed, this could only mean That you were out or heavily sleeping, It took the rest of the day for something To happen and by that time you had passed Away, the rest of the day unfolding In the nightmare narrative of your last Stand. The police were to break down your door At four on a storm-laden afternoon, Just a month into sixty-three and your Voice as a poet just beginning, soon To be heard, not as a muted echo, But as Margaret, someone we used to know.
14th June 2005
What was it about the door, you could so Easily have left it open, was it Closed in order that you could not follow Your heart’s instinct to survive, the spirit Would be trapped there after, locked in with you, Left alone with its own mortality To face the crew as they rudely burst through, The door would have saved you from your folly. It was your one last stand to make the world Finally understand, you had to try To end your life to get your story told, The isolated dark of the day, by The light of your life you wanted to cry, To draw or yet to write and not to die.
15th June 2005
And yet you would have known from Sylvia That Monday morning about the margin Of error that comes in to play with a Vengeance customary and still within The timescale converging on a crisis. Was it a last pitched gamble that went wrong Or were you left there on your own, it is Too late, Margaret was made to wait too long And abandoned in the heart of Camden To die and by her own hand just to get Things done, to persuade someone to listen, That no one be refused, their needs unmet, With nothing but the spirit and its fee, Left to loiter on the banks of Lethe.
15th June 2005
When I try to think about the seven Hours it would eventually take to Rescue you, I feel the panic even More, the endless hours it would take for you To be allowed to die and with no one To stay your hand, the locked door your bitter Response to the hospital doors closed on You, as the tablets took effect after. While you waited for them to suddenly Come, to break their way in before the end Could begin but you would not live to see It happen, abandoned and left to fend, They were to say you died around midday, They knocked first thing then simply went away.
16th June 2005
You should have been in the day hospital Or on a ward which is where you wanted To be, not this sudden political Destiny, the ward off limits instead. You were never forgiven for Christine Blake, you gave it to the managers straight, A death by hanging when she should have been Observed, discharging herself to her fate, You let them have it, holding a mirror To Medusa and turning them to stone. You fought for art therapy from the core Of your being, not for yourself alone, Yet you were blind to discrimination, They let you die believing they would come.
16th June 2005
Margaret had been told she was ‘becoming Too dependent on the day hospital,’ Yet an assessment date was pencilled in After her death, this setback was crucial, The statement would lead directly to an Overdose and her subsequent death by Default, the unmentionable life ban On any acute admission, awry And still in place after. The crisis team Killed her by knowingly dragging their feet, By withholding a bed, and like Christine Before her, left to accomplish her feat, Her recent warning attempt had been scored As nothing and the last one was ignored.
16th June 2005
You were suffering from anxiety, You knew the end was near, three years ago Everything went wrong and it was simply A matter of time from then, the shadow Of Christine Blake was now the nemesis And template for future care in Camden, Subsumed under the aegis of crisis Team remedies, with only the garden And art therapy a fleeting refuge For us all. Back then, against all reason, You were discharged home to face a deluge, You would overdose there in the flood on Amytriptaline, your spirit broken, And found by random chance and awoken.
17th June 2005
You began to cry when you were reading Dismantling Fordwych House, you knew by then It would all be swept away and nothing Would remain after but a barred Eden, What was coming in its place would not touch The surface, yet the new reality Was final, its weight was certain death, such Was the shortfall after the remedy Of care on the cheap, the crisis teams all We were worth, with a fast track to the grave If they got in. The pity of it all, The hunger strikes, the protests, what you gave Just to keep a day hospital going, With nothing but your death for the showing.
17th June 2005
She was to be left alone to manage A life full of perpetual sorrows And nothing after can ever assuage This, but your dreams will sound through the hollows Of their minds in the certainty of things To come. You gave your life for the future, For art therapy and for what it brings, You were given the crisis team to cure Your imaginings for a little while, Like the Chief you gave up, resolved to fight No more, unable to go the last mile. Out of hearing and always beyond sight, That willing compromise of mental health By arbitrary proscription and stealth.
16th June 2005
Note: The author met Margaret Walsh (3rd April 1942 – 9th May 2005) at Fordwych House in the late 1990’s.
My Soul’s Garden
Welcome to the silver gates Made from a thousand spirals, Welcome to the stream, the toad on the rock; The stepping-stones to comfort, Tenderness and a loving angel presence.
Why do I let other people Distract, disturb me, turn me From my passionate purpose? Why do they laugh When they should weep With the grief of it? The pain of not loving Or, of only finding love At the bottom of a well With a bucket that is broken.
Thirsty for love and water I search my soul’s garden: Where all but a few things Have been destroyed. Who has done this? Who? The Beloved? Why would She demolish everything Except this shining stream?
Here on the bank Is the cup of connectedness; I shall take a sip And taste our loneliness.
Margaret C. Walsh February 2005
POEMS BY BARRY TEBB
Our Son
Quarter to three: I wake again at the hour of his birth Thirty years ago and now he paces corridors of dark In nightmares of self-condemnation where random thoughts Besiege his fevered imagination – England’s Imminent destruction, his own, the world’s…
Sixty to eighty cigarettes a day, unavailing depot injections, Failed abscondings, failed everything: Eton and Balliol Hold no sway on ward one, nor even being ‘A six language master,’ on PICU madness is the only qualification. There was the ‘shaving incident’ at school, which Made him ready to walk out at fifteen, the alcohol Defences at Oxford which shut us out then petered out During the six years in India, studying Bengali at Shantiniketan.
He tottered from the plane, penniless and unshaven, To hide away in the seediest bedsit Beeston could boast Where night turned to day and vaguely he applied For jobs as clerk and court usher and drank in pubs with yobs.
When the crisis came – “I feel my head coming off my body’ – I was ready and unready, making the necessary calls To get a bed, to keep him on the ward, to visit and reassure Us both that some way out could be found.
The ‘Care Home’ was the next disaster, trying to cure Schizophrenia with sticking plaster: “We don’t want Carers’ input, we call patients ‘residents’ and insist on chores Not medication”, then the letters of terrible abuse, the finding of a flat, ‘The discharge into the community.’ His ‘keyworker’ was the keyworker from hell: the more Isaiah’s care fell apart the more she encouraged Him to blame us and ‘Make his life his own’, vital signs Of decline ignored or consigned to files, ‘confidentiality’ reigned supreme. &nb | ||||
