I think that after last week’s memoir it would be good to go back once more to my childhood and my schooling after the war. This was initially at a Girl’s Private Day School Trust, chosen by my parents, an all-girls private primary. Croydon High School was near enough for me to walk to in about half an hour, at first with a parent, then later on my own. I must have been there for 3 years, from 8 years old to nearly 11. My father was usually the one to take me, on his way to the station at East Croydon, as he had returned to his job as Professor of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at London University. The path from our house led through a couple of footpaths to one which ran high up above the railway—the mainline from the coast at Brighton into Charing Cross. I loved the trains—of course, all steam engines in those days. Halfway along that footpath was a prefab owned by a greengrocer, where we could occasionally get bananas, now that the war was over.

Many decades later I walked that route again—and the shop was a ruin. I had a strange startled reaction, that I don’t remember ever having before. “Oh my goodness—it must have been bombed!” was my instant response, jolted into an anachronistic idea. It shows how deep the scars of war can run. I still occasionally dream of bombed-out buildings, rubble and ruins—but then, I suppose that’s a common dream symbol.

My memories of school then are rather vague. I wasn’t unhappy and I worked well. Apart from being very upset by being teased at first for my cropped head, I was not bullied—the teachers must have seen to that quietly.

Photographs of the time show me as a happy little girl with an impish, mischievous look. My best friend, Sandra, was at a different school. She was the granddaughter of the local vicar and lived with her grandparents and mother in the vicarage, two doors down from us, so almost all my out of school time was spent with her and her younger sister, Lueen, or my slightly older brother John.

Leading up to our 11th birthday, we all had to sit the 11 plus exam to decide where we should go for secondary education. I was told by my parents that I had done well. Well enough to be offered a free place at a Grammar School a little way away in Selhurst; not quite well enough to have a free place in the Higher School where I was. My family was not particularly well-off among the middle classes, as academic salaries were notoriously low. My father was a professor and Head of Faculty of Electrical Engineering at London University. My mother’s very small private practice in the new-fangled psychoanalysis was similarly very small. I, of course, had no idea of the sacrifices they must have made to put my brother and I through fee-paying schools, but they never complained or made me feel guilty. Indeed they continued to pay for my lengthy training in medicine and my upkeep well into my mid-twenties.

My parents did something that must have been unprecedented then, possibly not common even now. Having no doubt assessed the pros and cons of both schools and approving of both, they actually asked me to make the choice! It was a momentous event in my life. I stared at my plate for a few intense moments—and I can describe the plate better than any memory of my feelings. It was cheap wartime china, part of a set, but with a pretty, brightly coloured design called ‘Indian Tree’. I can see it now, though the last plate and teacup went the way of all things breakable many years ago.

Apparently what I actually said—and my father was so struck by this that he told people about it on a number of occasions—“I think I’d like to go to the new school. I like new worlds to explore.” Some 70 years later I think that characteristic is still recognisable in my life, though the ‘worlds’ have been interior ones of the mind and relationships rather than in exploring the physical world around us!

So, at a little over 11, there I was on my way to Selhurst Grammar, an excellent school educationally, with an amazing headmistress, six bus stops away, in one of the slummier and poorer districts of Greater London. I was labeled as ‘posh’ from the beginning, something I’d never thought about before.

I wasn’t bullied, but certainly regarded as a bit shocking, especially my accent and when I admitted we had a maid to do the cleaning and food preparation. I tried to explain that she had to let in the patients as my mother was a doctor. No good. I can still hear the note of slight scorn with which Barbara—I think that was her name—said “Huh! So what . My mother goes out to clean other people’s houses and then comes back to clean our own.”

What of course neither she nor I could have known was that these ‘maids’ were part of a very humane and beneficial social experiment to bring people out from the mental hospitals where so many had been inappropriately neglected and the general welfare of the ‘insane’, ignored for centuries. Few of the general public have any interest in the history of mental illness and I can’t say I blame them for that.

We are talking about the late 1940s. The mental health act of 1959, which allowed for patients with mental illness to have the vote or even be discharged and live in the community again, is many years off. Just as bad was the plight of those who were sent, often as children, to ‘subnormality’ hospitals, as learning disability was known.

My mother, as a psychiatrist trained in the 1920s, knew all about mental institutions. Her best friend at College, Dr Doreen Firmin, had become Medical Director of a very big Subnormality Hospital, St Laurence’s in Caterham, where she had already started all the moves, along with other pioneers, to change these patients’ lives and status. One way was to train them, then allow them out ‘on licence’ to work as maids and gardeners, or other servants. This was still a time when quite a number of non-aristocratic households would have a maidservant or manservant, so it was not as demeaning as it may sound to modern ears, quite the contrary.

So down the years, we had a series of youngish—or not so young—women, who would be trained further by my mother, in her inimitable gentle and understanding way to do this type of work. Most didn’t stay very long, six months or a year at most, not because it didn’t succeed, but because the women benefited greatly. They were given skills, treated with kindness and respect and instead of having to say that they had come out of a mental hospital they could reasonably talk about their last job as maid/housekeeper to an eminent doctor. They were certainly a colourful and interesting addition to my—mostly uncomprehending—everyday life, but I wouldn’t have wished it any different. Indeed, I am quietly very proud of my mother and her colleagues.