Home life
Raving loonies
Alice Thomas Ellis
There seems to be a lot of madness around at the moment. The streets of Camden Town are filled with people seeing visions, many of them flown with wine, but not all. Once upon a time we used to have au pair girls and some of them turned out to be demented. I can see how it happens. There they are in some remote cantonment and Mama reflects, 'Mon Dieu, Marie Claire is acting very strangely. Let us send her for a change of air to Grande Bretagne where she can look after some little Eng- lish enfants.' The girl arrives and she seems a bit odd, but you rebuke yourself for
exhibiting English insularity and tell your- self that the inconsistencies in her con- versation are due to her imperfect grasp of the language. You have to do this for a while because you can't accuse a more or less total stranger of being insane until she has definitely proved herself to be so. I began to worry about one girl when a simply enormous vase vanished from her room. It was bright orange, bulbous in shape and about three feet high. She helped me look for it through the course of an entire day since I could not leave the topic alone. How, why and where could she have put it? She seemed to be denying all knowledge of its existence while con- tinuing to peer under beds and behind curtains. I'm still puzzled by it all. How could she have caused this most unwieldy and conspicuous object to vanish into thin air? I'm cross too, because it used to look nice in the autumn, filled with colossal chrysanthemums. Then she began to tell us in broken phrases how her father had murdered the maid. This was chilling enough, but the really worrying thing was that as she spoke a little smile of pleasure played around her lips. 'Come on, Bea- trix,' we would say. 'You can't be trying to tell us that your father murdered the maid?' But yes,' she would respond. 'He cut her all up into little bits.' And she'd smile. I should of course have popped her on the plane then and there but I havered, until the day I saw her crossing the road talking loudly to herself, her eyes fixed in a mad glare on something intangible while the children made their own way through the articulated lorries. I rang her embassy where fortunately they kept a sort of welfare department who turned up, took one look at her and promptly whisked her off home for treatment.
Then we acquired an Egyptian girl who fancied herself as a plumber. She was always trying to improve the lavatory cisterns and adding shower attachments to the bath. One day, bleeding the radiator, she unleashed all the water in the central heating system and shortly afterwards she left. The last we heard of her she was in the psychiatric wing of a hospital having driven the wrong way round Hyde Park Corner insisting that that was the way they did it in Egypt and she was in the right while the other drivers were in error.
The subject of lunacy is on my mind because I'm beginning to feel a little unhinged myself and it has occurred to me to wonder whether it is living in England that drives people mad. Everyone is so singularly unhelpful. Some months ago we had a professor of psychology staying with us and round about midnight he nipped out to the car to get his pyjamas. One minute later he was back with a mad Austrian woman who had rushed up and grabbed him. I thought at first she was merely having a panic attack, because I have friends who do that, but after a few moments it became clear that she had gone completely off her head. She said that everything was yellow and asked with
pitiable intensity whether we understood the meaning of the roses. We rang the surgery and were told by the doctor on night duty that nothing would induce him to visit a foreign mad person who wasn't on the panel. We rang a shrink who had nothing to suggest. She seemed to have no recollection of where she lived, so in the end we rang 999 and two ambulancemen came and took her away. I telephoned the hospital in the morning to make sure she was all right and they could find no trace of her. I spoke to five different departments, who denied all knowledge of her. I suppose this is only because computers have taken over from night porters, but it does give one furiously to think.
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