Frank, who at this time was a manager with the Associated Octel Company in Northwich, was bringing a French colleague home to dinner, and fitting in the 6.30 visit to the hospital was a bit difficult. I had a mad scurry round before leaving, and at six o’clock put some sort of casserole into the oven. When I came back I should have to serve the meal immediately, and I wasn’t taking any chances. No instinct told me, as I closed the front door and stepped out into the chill February night, that the door was closing on everything I had been: that this night would mark a new and fearful beginning. It seemed a night like any other, except that I was worrying about the dinner-guest.
When I got to the hospital, I didn’t go to the ward, but asked the girl at the reception-desk to tell the house-doctor that I had arrived. I was directed into a small waiting-room on the ground-floor. Within a few minutes a white-coated doctor walked in, a sheaf of papers in his hand. He was a man of about thirty or so, recently arrived from some Middle Eastern country, with no more than a sketchy idea of the English language, and none at all of the language of diplomacy.
‘You are the mother of . . . -er, -er . . .’ He riffled idly through the papers in his hand. ‘Ah, yes, Paul Craig?’ I nodded.
‘Of course, you know he is not normal,’ he continued, in the same tone as before. His voice didn’t ask a question, it made a statement.
NOT NORMAL. I stared at him blankly, my world slowly dissolving, all reality crystallising into that one murderous phrase which a stranger had just uttered with such casual ease. Not normal, not normal. My mind struggled with this alien concept, but could not grasp it. I felt buffeted by meaningless words which were heavy with menace. The voice went on, as though the world was still the same; it was a voice that struggled with a language that wasn’t its own; a voice that lacked warmth and understanding. ‘He has Höhler’s Syndrome, a rare disease. In English you call it . . . er, gargoylism.’
Through the thickening fog in my head I heard him, and into my punch-drunk consciousness swam hideous figures, straight off the pages of Notre Dame de Paris – gargoyles. Monstrous creatures carved in stone, water gushing out of their leering mouths. Oh God, not that; anything but that. Not my son.
Like a drunk crazily determined to walk a straight line if it kills him, I managed to dredge up some words. Very slowly, and as though from an immense distance, I heard my own voice ask the question which was already tormenting me. ‘Will he be all right? I mean . . . his mind. Mentally?’ I can still see that doctor shrug away the question. It was more than his scanty English could cope with – and in any case, there was no answer. ‘I do not know. You must wait and see,’ he said impatiently. And walked out.
It seemed like hours that I sat there after he had gone, not even trying to collect my scattering wits. Then in a drug-like stupor I dragged myself to the telephone and rang Frank. I don’t think I did more than ask him to come for me. I wouldn’t have found words to tell him what had happened.
In a trance I walked up the stairs to the children’s ward, where I sat looking at Paul, with a heavy boulder where my heart had been. The scales fell from my eyes then with brutal suddenness. Self-deception was no longer possible; and I could see beyond doubting that Paul would never be as other children were. The stubby fingers, the too-thick lips, the flattened, bridge-less nose, the empty eyes, all pointed to this hateful but inescapable truth which we had gone on hiding from ourselves.
Frank came and took me home. It must have been terrible for him, but I was overwhelmed by my own misery and had no room for his. We had to go through the farce of a dinner-party, since our guest was a Frenchman who had nowhere else to go while waiting for his return flight from Ringway Airport, which was about five miles from where we lived. He knew something awful had happened, but we couldn’t trust ourselves to talk about it. There was a spectre at that feast, and both the food and the effort at conversation nearly choked us.
When he had gone, we packed a suitcase apiece, and drove silently to my mother’s . She had alerted her own doctor, an old family friend, and he had left a sedative for me. I took it with relief. It was a new product, which was just finding its way on to the market, and, because it was effective that first night and was easily available over the counter in chemists’ shops, Frank went and bought a new supply of tablets for me next day. I went on taking them for several weeks. It was not until nearly two years later that the name of this product, Distaval, came into a shocking prominence, as one of the names for thalidomide. I was two months’ pregnant and I took the tablets for at least a month. My blood runs cold at the thought of our narrow escape on this occasion: Mark, the child born in the December of that year, was a perfect baby.
There is a mental blank where the next few weeks must have been. All I remember is that after the first night I could shed no tears; a great freeze had descended on my emotional system. I was not, as some people believed, ‘being wonderfully brave’; I was merely in an extended state of shock, with all my capacity for feeling paralysed. Perhaps it was nature’s own kind of anaesthetic.
What triggered the change I don’t remember, but I can never forget the night when the anaesthesia wore off, and I was left to wrestle with my blinding, asphyxiating terrors in a foretaste of hell. Despair rolled through me in waves as I looked into the future I did not want to face, and found it full of grotesque images: of enlarged heads, swollen abdomens and drooling mouths. The dreadful word ‘gargoyle’ was working its evil in me, filling me with self-pity and panic. From now on, I felt sure, I would see myself and be seen as some kind of pariah, the mother of a monstrous child. Friends would avoid me, and Paul would be taken away. Oddly enough, in view of all this self-pity, the fear of Paul’s being dragged off to an institution was the blackest one of all. However agonising it might be to look after him, I could not face the prospect of letting him go.
It was the mother of an old school-friend who brought some sanity into my exhausted brain. ‘Look,’ she said briskly, ‘if you ever do come to send him away, you and Frank will have arrived at the decision yourselves. No one is going to drag Paul away screaming. For Heaven’s sake, stop worrying about something that may never happen!’ I knew she was right, and tried to cheer up. As I got up to leave, she came out with one of those pious clichés which at certain moments have tremendous force. ‘God makes the back for the burden,’ she offered, by way of consolation. The phrase impressed me, simply because it seemed so unlikely. God had picked a loser this time, one whose back was near to breaking under the strain.
Frank and I were both Catholics, conventional enough without being particularly enthusiastic. It didn’t bother us much one way or the other, and at this stage it would not have occurred to us to look for any comfort in God or our Catholic faith. But to the Lancashire Catholics among whom I grew up (especially those of my mother’s generation) life was nothing if not religion, and there were conventional pieties to cover almost any contingency. When things went wrong, God would put them right, though it must be admitted that, in their experience, he had rarely done so. Nothing troubled their faith that God was a kind and loving Father; and doubt was alien to them, a shameful thing. My mother, I am quite sure, had never allowed even a momentary doubt to cloud her faith. Her own life had contained almost an unfair share of tragedy – she too had had a handicapped son, her husband had died of killer pneumonia at the age of thirty-two, and as his body was brought from their home in Scotland by train to Leeds for burial in the family vault, her young son had fallen from the train and been killed. Father and son were buried on the same day, while she was six months’ pregnant with her second child, myself. When the time came for me to be born, she had quite plainly decided that she would die, because she left instructions that I was to be called Dolorosa, ‘child of grief’. (I had another narrow escape there.) But that was her only concession to despair, and she never doubted that God was a loving God. Still less did she doubt His existence. My mother went every morning to Mass, and was never happier than when she was in church. Religion was not only a consolation, it was her talisman against life. Say the right prayers, make the right Novena, speak to the right saint, and all would be well. It was a childlike, untroubled faith, shared by many of her friends; and though on many occasions it reduced me to fury, I think now that such calm certainty is to be envied.
When an uncle in Dublin offered