Twigs and Toads

Each afternoon I counted the washing lines from the moving window of the train into Town. I liked how the backs of the old redbrick terraces at Willesden and Kilburn jutted out in a blocky way. When the train went underground I read the ads inside.

My mother and I got off at Great Portland Street and walked past stately white pillared big non-homelike buildings. For a whole year from 2pm to 3pm, Monday to Friday  I had my appointment at The Clinic.

I was 6.

I was seeing a psychiatrist.

What had I done? Had I smashed the sitting-room windows by chucking a brick? Tortured the neighbour’s spaniel? Set fire to a street litter bin?

Not guilty.

Had I refused, kicking and screaming to attend school? No, I wore my brown blazer and my panama hat and sat next to my new friend Ishbel Montgomerie. The teachers were snobbish and irritable but Ishbel was able to teach the things that mattered. Like how to eat my packed lunch.

‘Now this is the skin which we don’t want’. She peeled and discarded the spare layer of my boiled egg with assurance.I liked learning from Ishbel.

 As a ‘problem child’ the main problem must have been to find one. However my mother was certain there was something the matter with me. She had her teaching qualification and we lived in a detached house with ‘leaded light’ features so she was entitled to proof and cure.

One Spring evening when the cherry trees were in blossom along the leafy verges of Barn Way she asked me did I want to go and post a letter. Walking along the pavement to my big red tip-toe purpose the primary teacher who taught in a different school to ‘save her the embarrassment’ informed me:

‘And did you know Elsie that every time you open your mouth a little toad jumps out?’

I said nothing but I knew that this was not true.

Somehow, probably after a number of letters and phone calls, she was able to refer me to the Children’s Psychiatric Office in Harrow and hence to Dr Kaufman and The Clinic.

So who was Dr Morton Kaufman?

He was a man. A youngish man with short dark brown hair and olive skin. He had a relaxed Miami Florida drawl.

He liked young children.

He was not a paedophile.

 The Clinic was an ok life. I now only had to go to Buxlow, my private ‘dame school’ with its ratty teachers in the morning. On the way home if it was pouring with rain my mother treated us to a cab from the taxi rank outside Wembley Park Station and we got a warm dry lift on the comfy high leather seats all the way to our front door. Sometimes she would buy flowers from the stall next to the station entrance. She was not confident at flower arranging and scorned the ‘arty-crafty’ mothers who enjoyed cookery and present-wrapping and Christmas trees, considering them to be less intelligent than herself, so I was allowed to arrange the small bunch of daffs or tulips in a vase.

Dad came home from work later and I have no idea who looked after my sister when we were out. Nobody at home asked me anything about my treatment and I doubt if the neighbours or our relatives abroad knew. They rarely visited and my mother told them I was ‘gifted.’

But what happened in our hours together which seemed neither too short nor too long? It’s an open question.

Here was a human at ease in a large room with too many grey upholstered chairs and bland pictureless walls. He did not feel the need to fill it with urgent purpose or to present himself as a Big person.

I was given a big box or male and female and child-like bendy toys. Impressed by the quantity of my bounty I flexed their limbs back and forth. He did not prompt me to use them to act out domestic drama and I lacked the initiative to do so unprompted. I also had a big box of crayons to play with.  I doodled a big lopsided stocking.

I sometimes walked over to the second floor window and gazed at the view of the spreading plane trees and tall white buildings. I knew we were near Regent’s Park Zoo, it was close by on the London Underground.

I tried violence on him but I am not much of a thug. ‘I’m going to kick you,’ I said and did so lightly on his shin. ‘I could kick you back’ he said. That surprised me but he didn’t. When I offered to hit him he held my hands back in a light grip. I didn’t try again.

After a couple of months I asked him why I was here. He offered the truism ‘as the twig grows, so grows the tree.’

I couldn’t picture myself as a warped twig or a straight grown-up tree but it seemed like an explanation.

And I wrote. Not the home journal he gave me, where my sole entries were Monday – Clinic, Tuesday Clinic etc. I had two blank pages every weekend and a sense of waste. The hardback A5 dignified bluelined pages deserved more, but diaries demand an active life or at least an active mind. I was an observer not an activist.

I wrote letters. Letters to the child or young adult who I imagined to be the patient in the room after I had left. ‘Hello, my name is Elsie’ and a few details. I then invited my perhaps new friend to write back. I folded up my hard-to-read scrawled unlined white sheets and inserted them into the sides of the grey upholstery ready to be found. After a few 2pms of blankness I asked Dr Kaufman why no-one wrote back.

‘Perhaps the cleaners throw them away.’

I had seen overalled cleaners working in the corridors with hoovers and dusters. I stopped.

My Clinic year ended. He gave me the box of dolls to take home. He bought me roller skates, telling my mother I needed to go out and play more. I did. On my fifteenth birthday, after years of invisibility he sent me a gold and blue enamel star of David on a chain. I placed it my jewellery box next to the one from my Aunt Hilde.

Looking back on this strange self-contained interlude in my young life I think he was good for me. An adult who took me seriously and did not blow up in my face when the whim took him. I never had that at home.

And, after 55 years I look back at the person I was – I am the author I have the right to be the most important character here. I see a matter-of-fact little person who had been given a narrow life. What would help me from then on, though I did not yet know it, was, and still is, my openness to the wider world.