My search for Sophie
My mother wanted to protect us from Sophie’s more extreme paranoid ideas, so we were not taken to see her as children. But, as we got older, Jane told us about her; the good bits and the weird bits, shielding us from the worst. It was difficult to grasp who she really was or what had really happened to her. On the one hand, she was the brave, creative spirit who had written poems and lost everything; on the other, she was the person who sent angry letters scrawled in mad ink, which seemed to fizz by themselves on the hall table and made my mother cry. Between the poet and the witchy old lady lay a blurred wasteland. The sadness of it made me feel sick.She was there throughout our childhood, just out of sight, her shadow cast across family life. We saw an image of her, refracted through my mother, unclear and dreadful. Nottingham, where she lived, was a mythical, frightening place where I imagined it was always raining. At the same time, my mother managed to make us understand that our grandmother was a special, rather amazing person, albeit damaged and impossible to deal with. This complicated knowledge was a burden, as if we were learning to hold something very dense and heavy. Other kids in the playground would laugh about straitjackets and psychos, chanting, “They’re coming to take you away!” and “He needs locking up!”, stuff they picked up from TV, and I would think, “But you don’t know. It’s real.”My mother visited her twice a year. A date would appear circled in felt-tip in the family diary, beside the single word “Nottingham”, and tension would build as the day approached. She would leave early in the morning, distracted and grim, and return the same evening, exhausted and volatile. It was the only time we saw her smoke, the evening after a Nottingham trip. Looking back at those years, we did talk about it, but there was nowhere for the distress and guilt to go. Sophie lived as she did and made demands on Jane. Jane could not adequately deal with her demands, partly because they were often impossible, and partly because she found the situation too upsetting. There was no solution. Life crashed on.I first met my grandmother when I was about 17, by which time I was genuinely keen to see her and my mother thought I’d be able to deal with the experience. Sophie was living in a dilapidated council flat and had moved all her belongings into one room. A complicated, web-like arrangement of string snaggled across the windows and was attached to the door with drawing pins. This, she explained, was to catch burglars. She had sprinkled talcum powder on the sills in case intruders got in and left footprints.She cooked us a cake made of margarine and chocolate in a frying pan and insisted that we filled the kettle very slowly, “to avoid too much gas coming out of the taps”.The reality of seeing her was both shocking and a relief; for someone who had loomed so large in my imagination, she was tiny. She came to the door wearing electric pink lipstick, fishnet stockings, complicated shoes that she had made out of cardboard and string, and a nightdress under a coat tied with an old ribbon. She had dyed her hair yellow with turmeric rice and curled it with pipe-cleaners. Despite her disturbing milky eye, she had a dreamy smile that could make her seem suddenly young, and she looked disconcertingly like my mother.I tried not to feel appalled by the squalid little room, by the pile of ripped fabric and clothes on the bed, by the faint smell in the air. At the end of that first visit, just as we were leaving, she held me back by the arm to whisper, “If you want to make a baby, you must do it! Don’t let anyone stop you! Don’t let them hurt the baby!” Her urgency made me queasy - I’d barely kissed anyone, let alone tried to make a baby. I escaped from her grasp and bolted to the car.From then on, I would sometimes join my mother on her visits up to Nottingham and, once I had passed my driving test, I would go on my own, or with James, butterflies in my stomach as we headed up the motorway. It was never as bad as I expected. The trick was to live in the moment with her, to walk the tightrope and ignore the drop of her past. If you looked down and recognised the loss, you would go spinning head-first into dizzying sadness.Because she hadn’t always been this person. She was once Joan Adeney Easdale, a teenage girl with two volumes of poetry published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, reviewed in the national newspapers and invited to tea by Vita Sackville-West. But how had the slightly self-conscious, glossy-haired girl, photographed dancing round a birdbath for the Book Society News in 1931, become the old woman who ranted about sex and politics, cut up Christmas presents in case they hid a listening device in the lining, and approached the manager of the local Marks %26 Spencer with her own hand-stitched prototype for what she called a “freedom bra”?Was there any continuity of personality connecting these two women? And what had been the exact story of the mental illness that had so ruined her adult life? These were the questions that, some time after her death in 1998, forced me to contemplate researching, and then writing, about my grandmother’s life.For a life with holes in it (and there are gaps of nearly 10 years in the narrative, which I have been unable to fill), there was still quite a lot of material to go on. First-hand accounts from my mother, aunt and uncle, her social worker in Nottingham, a couple of friends in Australia. There were her poems and a clutch of papers held by the BBC. Her mother’s journals and memoir. And, most importantly, a bundle of letters she wrote as a young woman to the writer Naomi Mitchison, and a bundle written to her mother before and during her illness. I gradually pieced together a picture of who she had once been and how she had fallen apart.Joan was born in 1913. Brought up by her mother, Ellen, she and her older brother, Brian, shared a somewhat bizarre childhood. Ellen was highly strung and self-dramatising, and focused all her energies on the creative imagination of her children. One of her most disturbing theories was that she had conceived Joan through some mysterious process, whereby a poetic being had “pressed” her in her sleep, inseminating her with the Spirit of Genius. Under Ellen’s eagle eye, Joan and Brian spent their evenings inventing games, putting on puppet shows in the sitting room or the garden shed, and giving concerts and dramatic performances to whoever would come along. They were genuinely talented (Brian would go on to win an Oscar for writing the score to Powell and Pressburger’s film The Red Shoes), but the pressure of constant maternal surveillance did little for their personal development.Photos of Joan capture a girl of great innocence. She sits under a hedge, clutching her knees with her head thrown back, laughing at something her brother has just said, or stands looking out to sea in a billowing cotton dress and long pigtails. Her poems are a strange mixture. Some are childishly playful:She was in love with a window-cleaner,So every piece of wash-leatherMade her heart beat keener.She was in love with a window-cleaner,So she walked under every ladder,For doing this he first had seen her.Others reveal a dark imagination that was already aware of unhappiness and adult fallibility. She wrote the eerily prescient The Lunatic when she was 17:I’m tired of walking in the dark,With only a tall blank wallRising over me, grey and stark.I’m tired of raising my voice to callTo they who walk outside -The men who stretched so wideA chasm between themselves and meBecause I signed my name as Christ.When Joan sent a few poems off to the Woolfs in 1930, they were immediately intrigued. Virginia Woolf wrote of her to Hugh Walpole: “The girl poet is my discovery. She sent me piles of dirty copy books written without any spelling; but I was taken aback to find, as I thought, some real merit … it may be a kind of infantile phosphorescence; and she is a country flapper, living in Kent, and might be from behind a counter. Very odd.” In his review of Joan’s A Collection of Poems, published by the Hogarth Press in 1931, Walpole described her work as “astonishingly adroit, acute, accomplished”. Her second volume, Clemence and Clare, was published in 1932.After this bright beginning, Joan fell in love with my grandfather, Jim Rendel - a young geneticist with a pet chameleon and a passion for ballet - and they married in 1938. She threw herself enthusiastically into her new life, believing that she could combine writing with domesticity. And, for a while, she managed it. She wrote plays and talks for the BBC. She worked on a biography of Mrs Beeton. She finished her 60-page poem, Amber Innocent, which the Woolfs published in 1939.But pressure to be competent at domestic things sat in direct opposition to Joan’s desire to write. She had her first baby - my mother - in 1940 and, as the strains of the war took their toll, she struggled to find the space, time and focus for her poetry. Two further children, Polly and Sandy, followed. Problems between Joan and Jim were exacerbated by living in communal establishments dictated by his work, where they shared meals and living space with other scientific families.Joan became more chaotic and unhappy and finally sought psychiatric help in the late 40s, in the hope that it might save her marriage. Her analyst told her that she should give up writing altogether and concentrate on being a good wife and mother. She took this advice so completely to heart that she burned every piece of work she had ever kept, every diary, notebook and poem, in a big bonfire in 1951.Then Jim was offered an exciting research post in Australia, and she reluctantly agreed to join him. The family arrived in Sydney to find a pre-fab bungalow built on the edge of mangrove swamps, the place buzzing with mosquitoes. The roads were still dust tracks, the buses infrequent. In the staggering heat of the Australian summer, Joan had three growing kids to settle and bush fires to contend with on shopping trips. “The paper is delivered by the baker in swimming trunks,” she wrote to her mother.Her mental health deteriorated quickly, and even a move to accommodation in a more pleasant area didn’t help. Some days, the children would come home from school to find her still sitting at the uncleared breakfast table where they had left her that morning. She became convinced that there were spies in the roof. She saw Jesus Christ in the living room. It was eventually decided that she would go back to England for a holiday and return to Sydney when she felt stronger. She said goodbye to Jane (then aged 13), Polly (10) and Sandy (six) and caught a plane.She never came back.After a few weeks of relative sanity, Joan suffered a full-blown psychotic breakdown in the autumn of 1954 and was admitted to Holloway Sanatorium at Virginia Water, Surrey. She would remain there for several years. Schizophrenia, treatment (drugs and hefty bouts of ECT), loneliness and living in an institution all combined to dismantle the person she had once been.She missed her children terribly, but gave up on the idea of ever returning to Australia. Jim couldn’t cope with her illness and divorced her. By the time she discharged herself in 1961, she no longer wanted anything to do with the past. She attacked her mother and denounced art and culture. She tried, unsuccessfully, to find work and then lived in a state of precarious destitution between London and the south coast. By the end of the 60s, she was calling herself Sophie - or Sophia - Curly.In some ways, it’s amazing my grandmother’s story didn’t end here, but she had a strong instinct for survival. Thus her decision to make Nottingham her home seems to have been both arbitrary and sound; the city absorbed her and for 20 years allowed her to be “her own person”. She lived to 85.On her gravestone, four names circle a Celtic cross: Joan Adeney Easdale, Joan Rendel, Sophia Curly, Sophie. And underneath: Poet, Mother, Free Spirit.I can’t join all the pieces up, but in writing my version of her several lives, I hope I have shown her to be a remarkable woman.%26#183; Extracted from Who was Sophie? The lives of my grandmother, poet and stranger by Celia Robertson published by Virago at %26pound;15.99.
Tags: fires, gap, health, Mental Health, mental illness, myth, shock