Dante’s Beach, Ravenna

My mother Joyce was a very beautiful woman who became what ‘normal’ people call ‘mad’. My question has always been: why did she go mad? But also: did she in fact go mad?

She had meditated under a blanket with the Beatles and the Maharishi in Bangor in 1967. She had been the life and soul of every party. But that was not, I feel, the explanation.

She died in poverty in 1982, aged just 50, in a hospice in distant Newcastle upon Tyne where she had returned from Kent in desperation to live in the derelict two-up two-down where she had grown up. I was there with her throughout that final year. ‘Paranoid schizophrenic,’ some doctor once told me, whatever that means. For let us not forget the Russian proverb: ‘The paranoid is always right.’

Her only sibling, her brother Arnold, had died, shot down over Stuttgart in July 1944. Her father was long dead, her mother senile.

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The cause of death was lung cancer. She was a heavy smoker. But what really killed her, I am sure, came much earlier. She believed that my father Tom, a successful dentist and qualified hypnotist, was behind a conspiracy to destroy her. I try to believe that this was not his intent. But it was certainly his effect.

When........

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