Look Back in Hunger Read online

  I wish this particular night had been uneventful really, because that would have been preferable. I was partnered with a male nurse who obviously saw young students as fair game, and each night his conversation would be laced with dirty jokes, unsavoury suggestions and requests to meet up outside work. Suffice it to say, he wasn’t my type, and I began to long for my block of nights to be over, as it was intolerable. I was ambivalent about whether to report him, as it was a grey area and he never stepped over the mark (or at least he could have argued that he hadn’t). On the final night he was even more frisky than usual and endlessly harassed me whenever we were on our own. I’d made it perfectly clear, in as polite a way as possible, that I wasn’t interested, and I was nearing the end of my tether. He, on the other hand, seemed to be a combination of enormously frustrated by my rejection of him and quite excited. We were sitting a few feet from each other when he leaned towards me and said (and how could I forget these words of love?), ‘It’s like seeing a piece of meat in a butcher’s window that you can’t afford.’ Then he half threw himself at me and half just fell over on top of me, trapping me in my chair.

  Well, what do you do? You’re in a mental hospital in the middle of the night and a colleague is rubbing himself up and down you. I shouted, ‘Help!’

  Almost immediately, two patients—a depressed woman and a man with anxiety—appeared from their rooms and as soon as he became aware of their presence, he immediately pulled back from our surreal embrace and sat in his chair as if nothing had happened. I, however, was slightly shocked and found myself being comforted by two people I was supposed to be looking after.

  ‘You should report him,’ the woman said.

  I didn’t. Should I have done? Maybe. But I was too new, too unsure of myself and the matter was never mentioned again.

  I’m aware I’m making myself sound like some ridiculously sultry beauty that men can’t resist. But, although I wasn’t unattractive, I still wasn’t your traditional idea of a gorgeous lady. It just goes to show that looks are not that important to pervy men, I suppose.

  After doing general psychiatry, I then specialised in different psychiatric disciplines for two years. I did a few months on a ward for the elderly, which I found heartbreaking. At the time, an experiment involving a new drug for dementia was being carried out on the ward and an unfortunate side effect was that it made those who took it smell very strongly of fish. So not only were the poor old buggers struggling to communicate, but also no one wanted to go near them. On this placement, we also did visits in the community and I had been assigned a woman in Peckham to spend some time with. I was supposed to assess how she was coping at home. When I was dropped off by the lovely minibus driver in front of her shabby prefab, I felt apprehensive, as it was my first home assessment. I knew she was suffering from a schizophrenic illness in which paranoia was a feature, but I made the mistake of thinking, Ah, she’ll be a nice old lady. We’ll drink tea and have Rich Tea biscuits and it’ll all be fine.’

  But no. The minute I got through the door, I could tell she really wasn’t in good shape mentally. Added to that, she was a big, sturdy, south London woman, tough as old boots. And she appeared very, very paranoid indeed. She shoved me away from the door and started to push a pretty hefty chest of drawers up against it. Part of me wanted to laugh, so strange was this whole situation. But I retained a professional demeanour and gently remonstrated with her, while attempting to wrestle the chest of drawers off her and push it back to its original position. Without any warning, she gave me a hell of a whack in the shoulder and, bloody hell, did it hurt. It took me totally by surprise and I just didn’t know what to do. She was muttering under her breath, mostly stuff I couldn’t understand, but she managed to make it perfectly clear that if I intervened again, I would get more of the same. So what to do? My first instinct was to leave and get some help, but every time I tried to get near the door, she whacked me again. After a couple of pretty hard punches, I gave up on that idea and resigned myself to trying to strike up a conversation and keep away from her fists.

  Six hours later, I was still pretty much in the same position. All my clever escape ruses had been foiled (all right then, there weren’t any). I had to sit tight and wait for my knight in shining minibus. He arrived right on time and knocked at the door and I managed to shout that I was trapped and she wouldn’t let me out. Eventually he managed to force his way in, but not before she’d had a couple more pops at me. I emerged with him, blinking in the afternoon sunlight, battered, confused and extraordinarily embarrassed by being trapped in a house and battered by a seventy-nine-year-old woman.

  So, my life on a ward for the elderly: more exciting than I’d assumed.

  My next stint of training involved a period on the adolescent unit at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, and that was not easy either. There were many anorexic girls, who would go to enormous lengths to hide the food that they didn’t want to eat. In suitcases, under beds, in wardrobes, in piles of clothes, in plant pots. In fact, everywhere you looked there was unwanted food. For someone who loved their food and had always been taught that it was a sin to waste it, these few months were unpalatable in so many ways.

  I felt sorry for most of the people in the unit. Adolescence is such a hideous time anyway, let alone when you have a mental illness tacked on top of the hormonal rumblings, hypersensitivity and doubts about whether you are going to fit into the world. In some ways, I was glad to move on.

  We spent a day a week in the school of nursing throughout the training period, and the array of teaching staff was a glory to behold. From tight-lipped and snooty through to humorous and delightful, they attempted to knock us into shape, with some difficulty at times. One lovely teacher was an innocent, who perhaps shouldn’t have been allowed out in the real world. One day, while we were discussing a ward which contained quite a number of dangerous forensic patients, she advised us to avoid the place if we possibly could.

  ‘Why’s that?’ we asked.

  ‘Because there’s a lot of budgery goes on up there,’ was her straight-faced reply. We laughed a lot afterwards.

  Speaking of ‘budgery’, the nurses’ home attracted some unsavoury characters, inside and out. The ‘Carry On’ reputation of nurses’ homes is well deserved to some extent and there were few who did not take advantage of the supply of nurses on tap. Of course, there are far more men in psychiatric nursing than general nursing, so it’s reasonably even. And then, of course, there are doctors. I steered clear of doctors on the whole, apart from a few encounters. I remember once having what I suppose you’d call a date at the local pub. Not very relaxing, as a few of the patients from the long-term unit of the Maudsley would come in and occasionally wreak havoc. The speciality of one was to run in and do a sort of SAS assault course of drinking everyone’s pints in one gulp. By the time anyone was stirred into action and tried to grab him, he was long gone.

  Back to my so-called date, a sweet little doctor, who at some point during the evening turned to me and said, ‘I want to see you again, when Cassiopeia is in the ascendant.’ Twat. Never saw him again.

  I had a few scary encounters in the environs of the nurses’ home. One night I was in my car, just pulling out of the car park to go out. It was getting dark and a man approached me and tapped on the window. Unthinkingly, because most of us don’t have our pervert radar on 24/7, I wound down the window, at which point he stuck his penis in through it, heading for my face.

  Everyone asks, ‘Did you wind the window up?’ Well, I tried, but in those days I had a cheap little car with manual windows and it seemed much easier to roar off, leaving him there shouting abuse and wondering what to do with his erection.

  One night, after a fairly mad party, I was in my little room and, hard as I tried, I could not shake off the feeling that there was someone outside my door. I’ve no idea why. There was no noise at all; it was just a very strong sense. The feeling got stronger and stronger and, despite the fact that I always scream at the screen wh
en women in horror films decide to go into battle with psycho killers bearing only a pair of nail clippers, I just had to look to reassure myself that my instinct was wrong.

  I opened my door to discover a man standing staring into my room, his face about three inches from mine. I screamed, shut the door and barricaded myself in. I think I was the only one in that night, which made it even more terrifying. So I sat on my bed, clutching my knees, and listened to him smash up anything available for smashing— not much to be honest, a sad old pot plant and a phone in the hall. I don’t think I slept until it got light. And no, we never found out who it was.

  I remember a friend of mine who was a nurse telling me that she got into bed one night, read a magazine and then put it down on the floor, as she was tired. As she leaned across to turn off the bedside light, she saw the magazine slide under the bed. What would you do?

  Well, the door was at the end of the bed, so she stood up, ran along the bed, took an almighty leap off it and got out of the room before whoever it was grabbed her. He escaped out of the window and was never found either.

  Throughout much of my training I was going out with Ian, a nursing assistant on the learning-disability unit. He was a really good laugh. On our . first date we went to see The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and then had Kentucky Fried Chicken afterwards. It was bloody great. Ian loved a drink and a dance and would always get stuck right in the middle of a pogoing sesh if we went to see a band. Inevitably he would break his glasses and they were covered in Sellotape and plasters most of the time.

  We lived together for a bit and he would frequently head off to town to meet his friends, a motley crew known as ‘the Family’. One night he came back, off his face, at about three in the morning, and stumbled into our bedroom followed by a cab driver, who was obviously terrified he wasn’t going to get paid. Funnily enough, I wasn’t too happy about that.

  One year Ian asked me if I would come on a working holiday with him to Butlins on Hayling Island, as they were short of staff. We had a great week, even though it was hard work, as a lot of the kids were severely disabled and one or two had to be held all the time.

  In many ways it was just like a normal Butlins holiday. We went to the beach, attended discos and ate mountains of chips. The fact that we had many seriously disabled kids to look after was the only difference. There were little chalets where staff slept in rooms next door to the kids. It was a very joyful holiday. The kids were hugely excited, and so were we.

  While I was there, I made friends with two fourteen-year-old boys with Down’s syndrome. One day, one of the boys got very jealous of the other, whom he seemed to think I was favouring. Off he went to a member of staff and told them that I had been ‘fiddling’ with him in the bushes to get me back for favouring his friend. Thank God, the staff member had a word with me privately and said that he had done this before.

  After the adolescent ward and the ward for the elderly, I worked on the drug unit and the locked ward for those at risk to others or themselves.

  The drug unit was a bit depressing and slightly too close to home. What I found weird about it was that all the ‘patients’ were young men and women of a similar age to me, who had no identifiable ‘illness’ as such. They would come in for roughly six months and, on the whole, were put on methadone, a heroin substitute, the amount of which would gradually be reduced. Hand in hand with this there would be group therapy sessions in which they would all talk about their addictions and their hopes for the future. The main problem was when they got back home and dived straight back into their old social lives, which involved drugs.

  I’m afraid the success rate wasn’t great, and we always used to say that more patients there got off with staff than off drugs. The staff were roughly the same age as the addicts, most of whom were charming and personable, and it was difficult at times to maintain a professional distance. One had to bear in mind, though, that many addicts are very manipulative people who would do anything to get some drugs. It was not unheard of for nurses to end up having relationships with drug-unit patients, and indeed a few nurses left the unit and moved in with patients.

  This was not a problem on the locked ward, however, where the vast majority of the people we cared for were very disturbed and occasionally very dangerous. A typical incident involved a well-known actor who had been brought in by the police, having been found hanging from the ledge of his bedroom window. He was in the manic phase of bipolar disorder and was very disinhibited and emotionally labile. Every morning we would attempt to have a group session, not always easy when people are so ill. I will never forget the scene one day: an unkempt gang of patients sitting round while one huge, naked man lay on the floor with matches between each of his toes chanting, and the actor jumping on to a chair and trying to lead everyone in a chorus of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’.

  They didn’t join in.

  The whole issue of violence in psychiatric hospitals is tricky. I firmly believe that incidents of aggression can be kept to a minimum if you have good nurses who are well trained. Rising tension can be nipped in the bud and any flare-up handled with the minimum of injury if nurses work as a team and know what they are doing. Also, once you know someone very well, it is so much easier to pinpoint their boiling point. One has to understand that a lot of people who go through psychiatric hospitals are very frightened and don’t understand what is going on and therefore the way you treat them is so important in terms of gaining trust and building a relationship. Right, that’s the lecture over.

  My final ward was a general psychiatry one which specialised in disorders like epilepsy. By this time I was nearly qualified and was often put in charge of the ward on my own, a pretty stressful situation the first few times. Thankfully, I never made any massive faux pas and passed my final nursing exam. At Brunel, I got a 2:1 social sciences degree and I thought I was likely to get some high-flying research job in telly. Little did I know.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ACTRESS, TV RESEARCHER OR NURSE?

  In 1982 I rather hoped that, armed with my degree, I could rule the world. So, while still at college, I scanned the media pages of the Guardian and decided that surely I would be needed in the world of television. I couldn’t really find much that was appropriate, apart from an ad for a series on racism, for which they were looking for researchers.

  The whole area of race had always interested me and, having worked in a multicultural area for so long, I was still surprised and shocked by dinosaur-like attitudes. A metamorphosis had been taking place for quite some years, which saw us as a society moving from purely white to mixed-race, and the second generation of Afro-Caribbeans and Asians were establishing themselves. Many of the older generation, including my dad, still seemed to be mired in old attitudes, but the genesis and rise of, for example, the alternative comedy scene addressed political issues like race and gender, and I wanted to be part of it.

  Although I was aware of it and it sounded like my cup of tea, I didn’t actually get involved until some years later. The first wave of comics who worked at the Comedy Store included Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, Alexei Sayle, Rick Mayall and Ade Edmondson, Jenny Lecoat and many others. I didn’t go and see comedy at that point. I don’t know whether I thought I would feel too envious that they were doing it and I wasn’t, or whether I would be intimidated by it and it would put me off trying to do it. I had a vision of myself on a stage doing stand-up and, I suppose, I feared that any interposing of real life might push that fantasy further away.

  I applied for the research job at Channel 4. I think they had specified that they were looking for individuals from different ethnic backgrounds, but I ignored this, reasoning that it was important for there to be at least a few white people on board.

  I was actually interviewed by Trevor Phillips, now head of the Commission for Racial Equality. The interview went all right and I awaited the outcome with a reasonably optimistic heart. Of course, it wasn’t good news and I didn’t get the job—what
did they want with a stout white woman with no experience? I have always had the ability to move on and look forward, so I did.

  I had it in my head that I’d like to have a bash at stand-up. Apart from the lifestyle of the comic, which I thought would be amazing, I assumed the hours would be good. After all, surely it would just involve going to a gig, doing your half an hour and going home. What could be better than that? Compared to nursing, it would surely be a piece of piss. At the time I couldn’t really connect comedy and nursing, but, looking back now, I realise that the amount of verbal abuse I got as a nurse and the way that I had learned to let it wash over me (mostly), set me up as a bit of a tough old bird able to deal with hecklers.

  I have to hand it to them, psychiatric patients are much better at heckling than audiences are. There is something about them that enables them to twist the knife once they’ve pushed it in, and I felt that if I could withstand the onslaught of drunks, schizophrenics and misogynistic men with personality disorders, surely I could cope with the verbal abuse that was coming my way.

  For me, the personal rewards that come with doing stand-up are huge. I think it’s a natural human instinct to want people to concur with your world view, even against their better judgement. Added to that, we all like to be able to elicit a laugh. Humour is so important. It knits people together, it disperses tension, it sets up a delicious us-against-them mentality and it gives people a great night out. We all know that laughing releases chemicals in the body that improve our wellbeing and make us happy, and there is nothing quite like standing in front of a crowd of people whom you have made laugh. To me it is not really about the ‘high’ that many comics describe; it’s more a feeling of intense satisfaction that you have clocked up another victory and connected with people. And the more scary the gig, the greater the satisfaction. The harder you’ve had to work in order to win them over, the greater the sense of winning a war. I also felt it was very important that I got across some of my views, that I was able to take a whole new set of comedy targets (i.e. men, Tories, racists and bullies) and extract comedy out of them, to show people that they could laugh at these things as well as mother-in-law jokes and jokes about black or disabled people.