The photo is faded now, browned at the edges with a curl in each corner. The look of sheer joy on our young faces with him clinging on tightly to my old duffel coat, his feet only just off the ground. My very first bike. Stabiliser-free, painted red and blue with small white rubber tyres. How I used to love the freedom of cycling down the drive at speed, looping past the old hay barn, scattering pigeons and guinea fowl as they crossed my path. I don’t think I often offered my brother a ride on the back rack, but I must have been feeling generous that day, valuing his companionship as I did.

That time when it had been raining and the excitement of riding through deep puddles alongside the lake with my legs held high to avoid a soaking. Until the front wheel hit a pothole and I went straight over the handlebars, cruising along on my palms and chin. The look of fear on Mum’s face as I came sobbing into the house. Her bundling me into the car and driving recklessly fast to the nearest A&E.

During the holidays we could go for weeks without seeing other children, my brother and I reliant on each other’s company. Our elderly neighbours always welcomed us in, offering art materials to play with, marmite and cucumber sandwiches to quieten our mouths. Dad working in London all week and Mum so often absent, shut in her bedroom with the curtains drawn and the familiar request of ‘Just let me sleep.” 

The 1960s were a time of generous prescribing of anti-depressants – plus the offer of psychoanalysis for those with the means – particularly for women. Freud was heralded by many as the one who demystified the role that melancholia and a sense of loss could play for an individual, leading to self-hatred and self-destructive behaviour. I wonder now whether all that time, isolated in the countryside with two small children, compounded Mum’s sense of despair? Fifty years on I’ve realised that even back then she was being sent away for ‘rest and recuperation’ in residential spaces that offered support to those with depression and issues of addiction. I recently found the drawings I’d sent her, saying how much I’d missed her, and that my brother missed her too, as he was too young to write himself. 

Sometimes I chose to remove myself, step away from the everyday and seek out a sense of seclusion, but not so far from human life that I’m totally alone. There’s the lookout which I love deeply, perched on a clifftop, but I would never stay there alone. The route to help would be far too long, far too treacherous by night. I could lay undiscovered in those fields for days.

It’s strange to think that my parents chose to move from London to such a remote place with a baby, a very small child and a suitcase full of Mum’s fears and sadness. Was it the wistful belief that fresh air and the countryside would make everything better? I now know that she lost herself while we lived there. That my brother clung to me and we both clung to Dad when he was around. My memories are vague and mostly formed by these old photographs: of elaborate fancy dress parties Mum and Dad would host in the garden, of friends visiting for weekends and my brother and I singing tauntingly ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’ as another bottle of red wine was drained in the middle of the day. There were people present in this world but they were always adults. I remember sometimes going to children’s parties and getting hiccups or feeling sick, waiting with the child’s parents for Mum to come and collect me, but have no memory of a single children’s party being held in our home.

I don’t think I ever wondered if Mum was lonely. I read that loneliness and depression are linked and can be increased through social isolation. Most of the studies have been conducted with people over the age of fifty, but there’s nothing to say that a woman in her early thirties couldn’t experience the same deepening sense of loneliness and despair. Although we moved back to London a few years later maybe it was too late for Mum? Life changed for me, attending the local primary school and all my friends living within walking distance. For Mum she recreated her sense of detachment by continuing to spend much of her time in her bedroom, curtains drawn, door closed and empties partially hidden under the bed.

At the age of seventy five, during a two week stay in a psychiatric hospital, Mum kept a journal. 

‘What is depression? A slow dragging pain that envelopes the sufferer, twisting like some sort of shroud, a shroud with tiny fragments of glass which tear the flesh as it passes. It consumes the victim, binds itself closer and closer to her. The more they try to detach themselves the more binding it becomes, throwing up sickening fumes that are inescapable. Oh, it is Hell, depression, eating everything it meets. Every minute I am fighting against the miasma. Each breath drawn in is like heavy dark sadness – rather despair.’

I never retreat to bed when things get challenging. Never stay in bed when I’m ill. More and more I wonder how much I deny myself based on Mum’s behaviours. Yet I share her urge to create, seeing writing or art or anything vaguely creative in the way that she described as a strange, inexplicable way of feeding the mind. Maybe it was to counter her physical absence that she filled our homes with colour, always seeking out ways to utilise the light. 

As I write the trees cast their shadow on the orange wall, the sun warm on my back. When talking about our shared inability to crack a joke my brother said ‘We didn’t do funny.’ Somehow in those few words he had encapsulated so much of our childhood.