CHILDHOOD
I am Welsh, born and bred in Cardiff, of a Welsh father and an English
mother; the eldest of four: two brothers and a sister; two of whom are twins. I grew up in Cardiff, in the suburb of Whitchurch; and,
briefly, as an adolescent lived in a tiny hamlet on the upper reaches of the
Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire, before I inadvertently ran away to sea when I
was twenty, soon after my mother died, and had many adventures over the next
five years... sailing two small boats... on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean;...later
emigrating from Wales to live in New Zealand, when I was twenty-six.
When I
was seven I was sent to a small private girls’ school in Cardiff -- on the
other side of the city from where I lived -- until I left at sixteen to go to
the local Polytechnic College for two years; (then another College in London
for a further year.) This meant that most of my childhood was spent on a
double-decker bus going to and fro to school and college, often four times a
day. It was my special time of refuge and departure into daydreams and nebulous
imaginings -- (approximately three hours per day, including all the long waiting
at bus stops) and this is my main memory of what life was like for me . . . as it
seemed to take up most of it . . . which is why I find myself beginning with it.
I am told
that from babyhood to age six, I was a very happy outgoing child: ‘living like
a sunbeam and shining like a star;’ but I changed, they said, and became
withdrawn and inward. For when I was six, I spent three months in an
orthopedic hospital for tuberculosis in my hips. I had not understood why I
was taken from my home, and put away, all alone, perhaps forever, for all I
knew, in something very like a prison. I shrank inwards to find safety from the
loneliness and fear of it all.
My whole
childhood after the age of six was lived in an inner state of isolation. (I
sucked my thumb till I was ten and a half.) I lived in my own dream world,
where, if I wasn’t full of strange fears and imaginings, I was full of ideas
for writing books and for planning impossible escapes from my mundane lifeless life.
I did run away, twice, when I was nine or ten, but both times after a few hours
found myself back home again. Suburban life suffocated me I longed for the far away
countryside, and something beyond that; I always knew I did not belong in this
World and yearned to go back to where I had come from; although I did not know
where that was.
All my
childhood, I knew, without a doubt, despite
all evidence to the contrary that my life would be very different from the
usual run of people’s lives and that I would have adventures in distant places
and one day live in another hemisphere and be on the other side of the World: I
had several secret ‘knowings’ as a child; a foreknowledge of things that I shouldn’t
know for they were in the future. They all eventuated, and came exactly true. One
of the worst was that I knew my
mother would die when I was still at home; and she did.
I did not
have any real friends. I feel sorry for the two I had: I was of not much use to
them; and, sadly, soon lost contact with them. I had no friends in my
adolescence. But I was not aware of it. I had endured solitude until I came to
love it. I found my own inner world was enough and it kept me company. I
thought I looked out but nobody looked in and so I probably was stuck inside. I
was like a wraith . . . as though I hardly existed . . . I did not have two
feet in this World but only one. . . . I don’t really know, but perhaps, my
long and lonely stay in hospital affected my whole nature; although the deeply
buried happy little girl never died, she popped out later in life from time to
time.
The most important person in my life was my mother.
I adored my mother. Our ‘just-home-from-school’ hug was the very best part of
my day . . . and our only contact, apart from her watching me in the bath, till
I was twelve, while she smiled and sang a song to me that she had made up about
me being a mermaid: a foretelling prophetic song that brought me much comfort
and direction later on in adult life . . . and apart from the times when she
would drive past my bus stop, on her way home from work and noticing me there,
stop and pick me up . . . and at night, when she came to give me a cup of warm
milk and tuck me in: for a nobody to be noticed is great comfort and I cherish
these memories of her when she did.
Although
I didn’t consciously recognize it, I know I very much wanted to be closer to my
mother but I did not know how; I did not know how to open up to talk to her; or
to anyone else, for that matter. I don’t remember having any real conversations
with my mother. But she smiled at me and I knew she loved me.
My
relationship with my father was similar . . . remote; but at the dinner table
he would sometimes ask me what I had learned in school that day; and his
listening to me was a healing balm I’ll never forget.
In my
years, between eighteen and twenty, my mother spent most of her time being
moved from one mental health nursing home to another. She committed suicide when
I was twenty and she was forty-six: a bottle of sleeping tablets. It took many
years to overcome my overwhelmingly deep grief.
When I was between five and seven years old I found
it hard to know what reality was and what it wasn’t and I would do things to
get attention because I was so lonely. One day when I was six, I put my arm in
a bandage and sling, and walked to school and spent all day there like that,
believing it was hurt. I had no insight at all that I was pretending. And I
told tall tales about having a great big sea chest full of dressing up clothes,
and truly believed I had it when I hadn’t. ...One needed many wonderful clothes
when one lived in a dark world and had many different lives so as to endure it.
...I had no friends there and in recess played on my own picking up hairgrips
and tiny things in the endless gutter that circled the concrete at the edge of the
grass.
I went to
a private school, down the road, when I was five; and to the local state
primary school, two miles away, when I was six; and another private school
again, at seven, a long bus ride away. ...My two brothers were sent away at seven
to preparatory schools and public schools, hundreds of miles away in England: (the
ghastly British boys’ boarding school system for the affluent.) I missed my brothers
very much. My rebellious sister went to the state high school over the wall next-door.
School was
one long endurance test. I had nightmares about it for the next twenty years. I
was shy as a mouse and went about unnoticed; until my last year of school, when
I broke out of my mould occasionally and became witty and found I could make my
peers laugh; and because of it, was thrown out of class occasionally. My
breaking out didn’t last long. I craved quietness and all my times of needed
respite were on the bus, and hid away in my room at home.
I was quite dyslexic -- but in those days it wasn’t
recognized with any sort of compassion. One was simply dumb and stupid and not
good enough. Nobody except my poor English teacher saw it. She went through a
stage of total frustration with me and marked every word in my essays with red
ink. After awhile, she gave up, and although my writing was still largely
illegible she gave me nine out of ten for content.
Writing
essays and stories was a joy and a ray of light in the dullness of my life: I
had not known that I couldn’t spell for I never took too much notice of the sea
of red ink; and so, my joy went undamaged and I wrote in my own form of
language and in my own version of spelling, to my heart’s content.
But, one
day, I knew that I could not spell -- or get numbers the right way round -- (I
was terrified of Math and Algebra) --- and so I made a conscious decision to
learn words. I suddenly realized that I either got the letters in the wrong
order, or back-to-front, or sometimes in peculiar mirror writing. And from that
moment of realization on, I read books and any writing that I came across, at a
snail’s pace while I studied and memorized the shapes of the words I was
reading. ‘Photographing’ the words and numbers in my head as I read them, so
that when I should need them I could recall my inner ‘photographs,’ which were
right, against my automatic way of spelling them, which was wrong. I worked so
hard at it that when I reached eighteen I could spell, quite readably, if I
didn’t go too fast. And twenty years after that I could spell almost anything. Words
were my treasure because I had to win them. They were as magical doors, opening
up a marvel of intricate puzzles which led to the most unexpected places when I
persevered with them. Words could take you into new worlds inside you, you
didn’t know existed and bring you out of your muddles and make you happy.
In my
young adolescence I would sometimes look out from my upstairs bedroom window to
the garden below and know that I could see strange fairy creatures like pixies
in mysterious vehicles, of some sort, going round and round in the garden and I
was frightened and tormented by it; for it happened often; and it bred fear in
me. I still can remember it clearly.
Much earlier,
when I was about eight years old, I saw -- real as anything -- he was really
there -- a pixie dressed in a beautiful suit of green sitting cross-legged on
the end of my bed. I stared at him in amazement then became afraid, and got up,
and trying not to look at him skirted my bed very cautiously and ran out.
In my
adolescence I often cried at nights wanting to be good, because I knew I
wasn’t. I did not know God, at all; neither did I believe in him then. I
remember that I had recently decided that he did not exist: he was only as
make-believe and imaginary as Santa Claus was; and I made a definite conscious
decision to reject all thought of God. ...All my childhood I could never bear
to hear fantasy stories read or spoken; they frightened me: I loved only was
what true and real; all else hurt me.
Not long
after this decision, I was fifteen years old, a wonderful thing happened. I was
in my room sitting on the edge of my bed, when suddenly I saw a beautiful
rainbow in my room . . . and yet, it was as though my room did not now exist; there
were no walls anywhere . . . there was only an expanse of light . . . I was in
a vast shining expanse of pure light . . . in a shining rainbow arch of
glorious light . . . in 180 degrees of glory . . . and suddenly I knew that I was in God . . . inside him . . . with him and in him . . . and I knew that I would know all wisdom and
knowledge because instantly I saw that he was ABSOLUTE and that ‘the buck ended there,’ with him.
From then
on, at nights, I would marvel that such a thing could ever be: to know
everything. I thought that to know such a thing would make a person very vain
and proud; but I wasn’t: for I knew that I was nothing. I mean, I KNEW I was nothing! I experienced the
reality of that . . . it was just true, the truth . . . and I marvelled in
myself that I could know this, for it was glorious, and I was so very glad and
very grateful.
I
remember that when I was six years old, (just before I went to the orthopedic
hospital,) while I was walking, by myself, to my ballet class a few miles away,
I would marvel about the wisdom of Solomon and Jesus. I have no idea how I
could possibly know about these people; my family was not religious. But the
memory of my wondrous pondering about these two people’s judgments and
decisions is strong in me, even now; and I cannot account for how I knew them.
About this
time, too, from the age of seven, for a few years, I would often stay with my
maternal grandparents for the weekend. They bought me a special little suitcase
for the occasion. When I was put to bed in my diamond-paned window bedroom in
the evening, I would sing and sing every song I knew and more besides that I
didn’t know until I fell asleep.
I filled
my whole childhood with singing. I would sing joyfully when my siblings were
being cross with me and when I was afraid; I learned how to comfort myself.
Music was a dream world for me a timeless wonder and sometimes I believed I heard
music in the air when there couldn’t possibly be any; music as deep as the sea which
moved in all its moods and movements up in the air and within me. Two or three
times a year, Christmas, Easter, etc., I was taken to an old Anglican church
and I would cry and cry brokenly through all the hymn singing; I heard it in a
place within me that didn’t live in the World and there was a great broken
longing in me . . . for I knew not what.
One day,
on my first weekend visit to my grandparents, I watched my grandmother, who I
loved very much, hanging the washing out and I thought, (and this was nothing
to do with the work she was doing,) ‘My Grandma Brooke is not very wise;’ and I
was so sad because she wasn’t; (in my childish thinking.) I remember being
stunned by this sudden revelation. It left a lasting impression in me about
wisdom; what it was and what it wasn’t; although I do not remember my own
analysis of it anymore; probably, because I knew I was nothing, which had
something to do with the acquisition of it.
As a child I was always aware that I
could see both sides of things; even from a very young age. I could always see
both sides of an argument or any issue before me; and so I could never join in
and take sides, for I was on both sides and at the same time. In school they
would not have me on the school debating team as I would not defend one against
the other, as I saw they were both right.
When I was eleven years old, I was sent away to
hospital to have my tonsils out. In the operating theater, perhaps under the
general aesthetic, I do not know, I saw I was . . . in . . . a huge vast
space of utter pitch-black darkness . . . .
but I was not afraid . . . there was such peace . . . then there
appeared a tiny single star moving faraway in the distance . . . and I knew it
was me . . . and that I was lost . . . but I had no fear. Then I saw two, tall,
cone shaped playground roundabouts, like pointed hats, positioned close
together, side by side, which pivoted and swiveled and turned in turning upon
a single central pole. And I saw the two feet of the two legs of a giant angel,
standing one foot upon each of the two roundabouts. The angel was so tall and
so vast that I could not see higher up him than his legs.
This
seeing was very powerful in me. I did not think that what I saw was strange, or
silly; because I knew it was true. And in the instant of seeing it, it became
indelibly etched in the spirit of my mind and heart; because even now I can see
and remember it so exactly.
As an
adult, and about eight years ago now, (in 2010) the seeing of it came back
suddenly, and as exactly as I saw it at eleven years of age, and the two
turning roundabouts with the two feet of the angel on them, perfectly confirmed
a book I was writing: ‘A Little Book...Open:
An Opened Person an Open Book.’
The
image came as an analogy and
confirmation of the spiritual truth I was writing, out of my own experience and
suffering: a person split in two and divided asunder: the person’s two feet
standing, one upon the Earth, the other upon the Sea; demonstrating our living
and thinking in two Worlds at the same
time; and that seeing and facing each other brought truth -- and in the
twinkling of an eye -- as the writing of life in God was read down the two
columns on the two edges of every page and for a whole book of pages of
revelation. My simple child’s mind and heart had originally been given it all
-- in embryo -- in a child’s picture: something a child would not reject,
whereas an adult might. I know that it was knowledge given me from before the
beginning of the World when I lived with God and was always in his presence --
just as we all lived with him before we were born.
Despite my
many difficulties, fears and loneliness, I am thankful for my childhood, at
least I had one that was quiet and gentle in a loving peaceful family, and it
was full of thoughts in wisdom-light which ultimately brought an
interconnecting kaleidoscope of wonder in all the things I saw and heard.
*
CHILDHOOD (a section of the book:)
Contact the author if you would like to read this book
© Judith M Evans Deverell, 2019
New Zealand
It is so hard for me to let this
book 'go public.' I want to run away and hide; but I cannot! I have a story to
tell . . . and in this book: DIVIDED ASUNDER I attempt to tell it. . . . I say,
'attempt,' because, really, that is all I have done here by assembling together
a whole lot of varied pieces of my writings, feeling that these would give
insight into my mind and reveal glimpses of this supposed 'illness' and the
effect it has upon a person's whole life.
But, oh, there is just so much
shame and stigma connected with schizophrenia. Just to mention, the word:
'schizophrenia' and then let slip that it was one's own 'diagnosis' sends shivers of fear
and revulsion through people; and this is all entirely due to the
misunderstanding about it.
Every sufferer's
experience is so different, no two alike; and I find it to be not an illness at
all, in the way I view it, but a gift: for in the end there is
triumph over self, and wonderful liberty, revealing God's glory; revealing, too, the painful-joyful truth that
it is sickness and suffering that is completely our path in him, leading us
ever closer to him and his eternal comfort; for he also suffered and we are of
him.
My schizophrenia was
simply what happened to me as I followed on to know the LORD, my only beloved, to know him in inexplicable ways that went beyond all comprehension. But it was where
he took me in his utterly immense, deep-set inner dealings with me; and all for his
joy and his own purposes in my life. Over the years he drew me nearer
and nearer and nearer to him in his incredible love, till I was nothing, and lay slain beneath his feet as his
footstool; for "he makes of his enemies his footstool:" and in my fallen self I was given to know that I was as his 'enemy:' this testimony was in me of him: "...every imagination
of the thoughts of my heart was only evil continually."
(Genesis 6:5) (And no one can understand this; and this is all, our
problem.) I was greatly loved...and all my suffering over the
years... documented in this book...was leading to one end: to have written in me: "A LITTLE BOOK, OPEN; An Opened Person and Open Book:
Revelation."
It has been very difficult to decide which of my writings to include in this book . . . for I would
look one way, for one people and then the other, for another people . . . one way writing for those who knew and
loved God, and then the other way, writing for those who didn't. And I think I
have sided, decided, on appealing to the latter; and for obvious reasons. I
wanted to help the general public, and the various medical professions, to understand more clearly, 'the other side' of mental illness: where all that is
suffered is the result of one's own life's choices in journeying through this world; and whether or not one's over-strained nerves and thinking causes disturbances in brain chemicals and then illness it is all an integral part of the process in the making of one's character... that
lasts, forever; and which, should, therefore, be considered of immense value, and all our suffering, no matter how awful it was, a gift to help us towards our heart's desire.
*
DIVIDED ASUNDER;
The Saga of a Gifted Illness;
Unlocking the Mysteries of Schizophrenia
*
