AFTER MADNESS - CH 1 : 4 - I Don't Like Crowds.

My next memory is of being in a large room with a stage at one end and high windows and ceiling. On the stage was the woman. She was dressed in a sort of white, greek-style dress which was popular at the time. She had her arms tied behind her against a short pole which came to her shoulder blades. She was swaying dizzily. I looked at the room and it was filled with people with distorted faces. They were shouting and throwing glasses and ashtrays at the woman on the stage. She was pregnant. Someone had hacked off her hair so it hung raggedly. A man was on stage with the woman. He was ranting and whipping up the crowd. He had something long and shiny in his hand.

Suddenly something round with bits flapping at the side came flying through the air towards me. It was the woman's head. (My brain changed it in my memory into a cabbage with flapping leaves - of all things - trauma does that. The day I realised the truth in 2004 I was sick as a dog! Dean and I were out for a walk and were talking about my memories trying to analyse them with an adult mind. I suddenly SAW what it was and vomited for over an hour. It was foul.)

Margaret had several stories which her mind had turned the experience into. She claimed to have seen a little girl, about one or two, sat clutching the head of her mother. Only she set it in the war in Birmingham. She claimed to have seen a man's head cut off. The way she told it she was in the WRAF and she said that a chap landed a bi-plane at the camp she was stationed at and that, once on the ground, the man stood up and started to wave. Suddenly "the top wing of the plane shot forward and cut his head off. It rolled right up to my feet!" Sound familiar?

I used to ask her about the piano and the men but she just ended up selling our piano, which I loved, when I didn't believe it was the same one. She claimed that the other piano was in the pub that my "father" owned. The Ship. She said she used to take us there on Sundays. I have no other memories of that pub though.

I said I was wearing a white, frilly dress, she told me I had got black paint all over it by embacing a newly-painted black pole at an Aunt's that I'd never heard of. The psychologist told me that traumatic memories turn to black and white when you start to get over the trauma. It was my mother's blood on that dress.

I used to ask her "Who was that lady on the stage when everyone was throwing things at her?" Margaret insisted I meant the Columbia Films woman with the torch. I said it wasn't her but, obviously, Margaret was not going to tell me the truth.