Why did my mother go mad?
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.
