Writing About Secrets

Several years ago, thinking up the plot of a novel, I wrote a paragraph about a man walking through a gate into a convent garden. His name was Liam, it was 1963. I knew the mood of that scene, he was grief-stricken, in mourning and couldn’t express it. I wanted to know why, and wanted to know what happened over the next 50 years. I had a sense of his wife, Connie, a doctor; she was somehow dark and dangerous and would be the focus of the story.

The novel was inevitably going to describe quite drastic changes, not only for Connie and Liam and their Catholic family, but more crucially in the practice of medicine. That was it for a while. I wrote other things but Liam’s character kept popping up, standing inside that gate. I knew that the convent garden was under threat and he would try to restore it, but not why.

Liam’s gate, and the garden he was walking into, were both links to my life from 4 to 17. I went to a convent school, was taught by nuns. My convent and its garden were demolished a few years after I’d left. I was terrified of the building, dreamt about it regularly. The original garden has never cropped up in any nightmare; I’ve invented it instead into an overgrown sanctuary.

In the end Don’t Mention Her mainly follows Connie. None of it is actually true, no five-year-old died in my family, no characters are based on people I knew. I had no history to call on, apart from parents who were doctors. But I did have a sense as a child of a deadening, of loss and of secrets. Looking at Don’t Mention Her with its fictional characters I realise that despite all the invention it is full of something that is very familiar, something that was around the house in my childhood and un-named.

It might have been a fear of failure, of blame, or anxiety about either. It might have been the much more present threat then of death. My parents both started working before regular use of penicillin, when TB was a constant, before vaccination for polio.

In the fifties the ‘family doctor’ in the UK, or GP, worked alone or with only a few others; there was no practice nurse, there were no hospices, more mothers delivered their babies at home. I would hear the phrase when I temped for the receptionist: ‘I’m under Dr X, we all are.’  Dr X had looked after that family from birth to death, day and night, with the occasional trip by the patient to the hospital for surgery.

In The Guardian recently, the report of a GP’s suicide mentioned not just that she was being treated for bi-polar disorder but her ‘work-related stress’: she was dealing with the ‘death of a patient’. And, interestingly, she’d had to retire because a patient had complained about her blog mentioning her disorder.

As children, there were no conversations at meals about patients. And it wasn’t just silence about work. Both my parents’ lives had been marked by siblings dying. My father rarely spoke. Despite having six children my mother also worked, she had switched to full-time in public health. She was more communicative, but she was always rushing. Occasionally she’d talk about polio, the children she’d treated, how the sugar lump transformed vaccinations, of her experience when pregnant of taking chest xrays for TB; of the prevalence of rickets before the government started handing out Vitamin D in orange juice. But on some things she was less forthcoming.

She came from a part of Ireland that, in her great-grandparent’s memory, within their stories, was a world fatally damaged by years of famine. She was angry, and at the same time had no desire to go back to Mayo. There had been too much death, mostly from TB, even within her memory.

But maybe it was my father’s silence that marked us most profoundly. His first wife died in childbirth as did the baby. He was left with their first child, a toddler aged two. And none of this was ever mentioned. We didn’t know that our oldest sister had a different mother, and neither did she until she was twelve. Years after he died, and shortly before her own death, my mother talked about it briefly. She believed that he’d felt responsible. But he’d refused to say a word.

Various relatives lived with us while they were assistants in the practice. I remember over-hearing a cousin taking a phone call about some tests; he reported the results to my mother. The patient was a girl I’d been friendly with since we were four. I could tell from their muted voices and expressions, it was serious. Kathleen was an only child, adored by her Catholic parents. Soon after her funeral, her parents split up.

Medicine has changed, Clare Gerada in the BMJ describes the new stresses on medical staff: ‘The NHS is exposed daily to negative stories in the media. Its staff are accused of being lazy, cruel, and uncaring, and the service is blamed for failing to meet necessary standards. Doctors, nurses, and managers are seen as villains and are berated by journalists….. who overlook the fact that the NHS still tops the list of what makes the public feel proud about being British.’

Well, the NHS, as we knew it, is disappearing into Virgin Care etc; they allegedly don’t pay taxes on their profits, and soon the health service might no longer be part of our heritage. And no one mentions it.

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Jane Kirwan’s poetry collections Stealing the Eiffel Tower (1997) and The Man Who Sold Mirrors (2003) and Second Exile (poems and prose written with Ales Macháček) were published by Rockingham Press.

She won an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 2002, has been commended and won prizes in several competitions including the National and Hippocrates; has read poetry on Czech television and festivals in the UK and abroad. In May 2013 Hippocrates Press published Born in the NHS, an A-Z of poetry, prose, memoir and facts written with Wendy French, ‘conceived’ when they were talking about the threats to the NHS. Don’t Mention Her is her first novel.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing