1. Siren

My earliest memory is the scratching and clattering of plastic wheels as I try to escape the pursuit of a cantankerous Jack Russell terrier behind me. I am sat astride a rickety red plastic bus, my toddling legs a blur, and all the while an air raid siren wails and whines not so far away. It was 1969 and I was four years old. Thirty three years later I was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. Today I know the two events were connected.

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Why can’t I do just what I want to do? From child to man, that simple question kept troubling me like no other. Such a simple question — how did it come to bug me so much; what was the emotion around this question?

I said “bug”. Maybe because of the sporadic, tickly, subcutaneous nature of my emotion or maybe its alien touch. As a child I knew that something “other” was trying to get at me and my thoughts. As a man, I can see the bug’s strategies have been stealthy, all pervasive and devastatingly effective in commandeering my body, my brain and my destiny over many years.

But could it hop on to my unsuspecting children and commandeer them as well? I have to stop it don’t I ? But how?

I can’t remember when the bug was first felt. Maybe as early as those dreaded visits of a shy five year old to his only remaining grandmother in Liverpool, with her thick red hearth rug and that heavy, deathly tock of the mantelpiece clock. Was the bug roving around inside me even then? Or was it scuttling around during those dim, drizzly Sundays when my parents took me for walks seemingly always through graveyards and dreary seaside towns, long since robbed of their energy and vitality?

Melancholia. I don’t know when I first learnt and understood its meaning, but as I reflect today I know that this was the name of my invader and its mysterious touch. As a child, I was an innocent with no understanding of why things drew me or repelled me as they did. As I grew, melancholy would gently lower a gauzy veil over my eyes and re-tune my ears. It would change my sensitivities and move me along the spectra of sensation so that all things would have an underlying blueness of tone or hue. Slowly, so slowly, I would become tone deaf to happy ditties and blind to rainbow yellows, ignorant as to my invader’s true identity and power.

As time went by the authority exerted by my unwelcome companion would increase to overwhelm the key territories of heart, head and stomach. With these functions under its control my every action and emotion in the world would be ruthlessly and painfully twisted. Unfortunately, the world out there would know nothing beyond what it could see, nothing of the internal coup de grace that had been delivered by my assailant. Just the sight of a struggling, shy little boy.

I learnt later in studied detail, that heads and hearts and stomachs are complicated organs, interconnected through a fluid labyrinth of emotions, hormones and primal instincts and although my melancholy ruler was cunning it did not have the answer to everything. There was a glitch in the master plan.

Somewhere deep, hidden behind a bloated lump of intestine, was an undiagnosable tumour. It was there, but the doctors wouldn’t be able to see it, they wouldn’t know what it was or how to treat it. It was half physical and half mental, composed of matter that changed hourly with the mind’s moods, sometimes benign, sometimes malignant. Starting with a few tiny cells, this tumour would grow and become a formidable opponent for the melancholic commander.

A titanic struggle would develop which would frequently overpower the unwitting host. It was a war of sneaky tactics and propaganda, with insurgency and counter-insurgency of the mind. Periods of calm would come, only to be broken by fresh outbreaks of turmoil as each side in the struggle tried to deliver the decisive blow. All the while, I would simply feel the twisting and wrenching inside me, things being squeezed and strangled in the back and forth battle for control.

As time went by, the battle would start to spill out onto the streets, outside my body, into the world populated by others, the stakes were being raised, escalation was unavoidable. The pressure inside me was at times unbearable and drastic measures were required. I knew that that I would burst but it was impossible to predict how or when. The transformed and mutated tissue inside me after years of struggle was going to force its way out, some horrible unsightly growth would appear and I wouldn’t be able to conceal it. ‘It’, whatever ‘it’ was would finally be out in the world but the struggle would be over for me, the pressure released and I would be able for the first time in years to be comfortable again in my own skin, not sharing it with a stranger.

What burst out of me was a wailing, whining siren. The cells and sinew which mutated and now released this longing cry were programmed and shaped by an ancient genetic code, a code which had been dormant for generations, waiting for the right host, the right environmental conditions and the right time to struggle into the world and do just one thing before death, be heard.

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