Chapter 30 — The Tests

Childhood experiences described as tests and exorcisms, the return of memories involving alcohol and water, and learning to preserve what can be known without forcing the gaps closed.

The Tests ↑

There are parts of my childhood for which even the name remains uncertain.

At different times I heard experiences described as tests.

At other times the word was exorcism.

The words are not equivalent.

A test suggests that somebody was trying to discover something.

An exorcism begins with a conclusion: that there is something within the person which must be driven out.

As a small child I was not in a position to distinguish the theology, the intention or the institutional language.

I experienced what adults did.

The explanation belonged to them.

Words That Came Later ↑

One difficulty in writing this material is that I have known some of the events for much longer than I have known what to call them.

A childhood memory does not necessarily arrive carrying an adult label.

There can be a room.

There can be people.

There can be fear.

There can be something put into the mouth.

There can be restraint.

There can be religious words whose meaning the child does not fully understand.

Years later somebody may call the event a test.

Somebody else may call it an exorcism.

Then another problem begins: do I remember the event, or do I remember the later explanation of it?

The answer can be both.

That is why I try to keep the layers separate.

Water ↑

The recent return of one part of this material began in a remarkably ordinary way.

A doctor had been encouraging me to improve my hydration.

I needed to drink more water.

There was nothing threatening in the advice.

But I began reacting to it.

I was waking during the night.

Something unwanted kept pressing towards awareness.

I tried to push it away and return to sleep.

Then nurses also began reminding me to drink more water.

The reaction became stronger.

I knew the pattern well enough to recognise that something was happening.

Sometimes a memory would continue far enough for me to recover enough of it to understand something through the tears and shaking which could accompany the process.

At other times access would close again.

The memory would disappear almost as though it had never been available.

This one kept returning.

A Pen and a Piece of Paper ↑

One night a nurse came to take my blood pressure and carry out the usual observations.

I woke while she was filling my glass with water.

Something connected.

I suddenly knew more than I had known when I went to sleep.

I asked her for a pen and paper.

I did not want to lose what had just become accessible.

I wrote down what I could.

My recollection of the words is approximately:

“They made me drink water which was straight alcohol.”

I think I asked the nurse to make sure the note was kept because I was frightened that I might again lose access to what I had remembered.

The piece of paper eventually remained in my wallet.

I could take it out later and read it.

That mattered.

For once I did not have to rely entirely upon the memory remaining available.

I had left a message for myself.

Port and Sweet Vermouth ↑

As more became accessible I recognised alcohol as part of these childhood experiences.

I remembered port.

The name of the other drink was harder to retrieve.

I knew there was another one.

I had a vague image of the bottle.

Different names moved through my mind and disappeared again.

Then the word came back.

Sweet vermouth.

The recovery of the word itself was interesting to me because it showed how memory could operate through association.

I had an adult memory of vermouth which was entirely separate from the childhood event.

Years later I knew a menswear business opposite the Paddington Hotel. The owner had severe morning shakes.

I remember Shirley pouring a large measure of a drink into a glass for him shortly before opening time.

He needed to get it to his mouth before the shaking caused him to spill it.

Within a short time he appeared remarkably settled.

I remembered the drink as something normally associated with mixing rather than something most people drank in that quantity by itself.

That adult memory helped the name return: vermouth.

The two memories remain separate.

One provided a route to a word which belonged to the other.

Being Made to Drink ↑

What I remember from childhood is not choosing to drink alcohol.

I remember being made to drink it.

And I know now that this was not one isolated occasion.

There were multiple instances.

I cannot give them an honest number.

If I think of two occasions, I know there were more.

If I think of three, I still have the sense that there were more.

If I try four, I still do not arrive at an answer I trust.

So I will not manufacture a number simply because a number would make the account appear more precise.

What I can say is that it happened repeatedly.

Port was involved on more than one occasion.

I also remember another alcohol which, in part of the memory, appears clear.

Earlier, the name “sweet vermouth” returned to me through another adult memory. I am not yet confident enough to say that the clear alcohol and the sweet vermouth are necessarily the same thing.

That may resolve as more becomes accessible.

For now I keep both pieces rather than making one replace the other.

At the Top of the Path ↑

There is another part of these experiences which I remember much more physically.

On at least one occasion I was carried from wherever the drinking had occurred and placed on the ground near the top of the pathway which ran between the church and the presbytery.

I must have remained there for some time.

My impression now is that I slept off at least some of the effects of the alcohol before trying to get myself home.

I was not capable of walking properly.

I remember trying to move but being unable to stand steadily or take ordinary steps.

My mother found me.

Again, one of the strongest physical memories is of her scooping me up.

She carried me home on her hip.

I was no longer a toddler, yet I was sufficiently incapacitated that she had to carry me.

That image tells me something which the missing details cannot: whatever I had been given had affected me profoundly.

Herbie Came Again ↑

My mother went to Herbie.

That was a pattern in my childhood.

When something happened which she could not resolve herself, particularly when the church or convent was involved, Herbie was one of the people she turned to.

He came and tried to ask me what had happened.

I do not think I was capable of telling him enough for either of them to understand it.

I am not sure that I understood it myself.

I had been given something.

I had become incapable of walking properly.

I had been left near the top of the path between the church and the presbytery.

My mother had found me and carried me home.

Those facts were available in some form.

The explanation was not.

That distinction may be one reason these experiences remained so difficult to place for so long.

Do Not Drink the Water ↑

Another fragment which survived was the knowledge that I should not drink the water.

For a long time I had no useful explanation for that reaction.

Water should be neutral.

Water should be safe.

Yet decades later, ordinary advice about hydration began disturbing me before I understood why.

What eventually began returning was a connection between being told that I was being given water and being made to swallow alcohol.

I am more certain now that these experiences were repeated than I was when I first began writing about them.

What remains uncertain is the exact number of occasions, the complete sequence of each occasion, and whether all of the alcohol memories belong to the same form of “test” or to several related practices.

I do not yet know which event came first.

I do know that alcohol, the presbytery, the pathway between the church and presbytery, my mother's intervention and Herbie trying to understand what had happened belong somewhere within this cluster of memories.

That is presently enough.

Tests or Exorcisms ↑

The terminology matters because what adults believed they were doing could have shaped what they felt entitled to do.

There were adults around me who believed intensely in Satan, possession, sin and Hell.

I had already been described in religious terms which made me a problem rather than a child requiring protection.

Within that environment, conduct which would otherwise have been recognised as frightening or abusive could be given a religious purpose.

If an adult believed that a child contained something evil, almost any response could begin to look righteous to the adult administering it.

That is one of the questions which now interests me most.

Not whether the supernatural explanation was correct.

I do not believe it was.

The question is what adults permitted themselves to do because they believed it.

Genevieve ↑

The name Genevieve belongs somewhere within this material.

I have associated her particularly with an exorcism.

I am not yet prepared to turn that association into a complete chronology.

There are other nuns and other experiences around it.

Some memories are clearer than others.

Some parts have been spoken about at different times and may already exist in counselling reports, correspondence or earlier pages of my website.

Those records need to be placed alongside what I can now remember.

For the moment I retain the connection:

Genevieve.

Exorcism.

And a period of childhood in which adults were apparently trying to determine something about me which I could neither understand nor escape.

What the Adults Thought They Saw ↑

There is an uncomfortable possibility running through much of this history.

A frightened child's response can be interpreted according to the beliefs of the adult observing it.

A child struggles.

The adult sees resistance.

A child becomes distressed.

The adult sees evidence of evil.

A child dissociates or becomes less responsive.

The adult sees something leaving.

A child becomes confused after alcohol or fear.

The adult sees confirmation of whatever theory produced the procedure in the first place.

I cannot know exactly how the adults involved interpreted every response.

But the possibility matters because a belief system can become self-confirming.

Everything the child does can be turned into further evidence that the adult was right.

No Successful Answer ↑

There may have been no response available to me which could have proved that the premise was wrong.

If I protested, I resisted.

If I cried, something was wrong with me.

If I became quiet, the procedure had worked.

If I later could not speak about it, there was no complaint to challenge the adult account.

That structure resembles other credibility traps I encountered later in life.

The interpretation holds authority because every possible response is absorbed into it.

The Child Did Not Design the Test ↑

This is why I now try to turn the question around.

For much of my life the implied question was:

What was wrong with me?

Now I ask:

What were the adults doing?

What did they believe?

What did they give me?

Who authorised it?

Who knew?

What records, if any, survived?

And what would those acts be called if the religious explanation were removed?

The child did not devise the procedure.

The child did not supply the theology.

The child did not decide that alcohol, fear or coercion were appropriate ways to investigate anything.

Those decisions belonged to adults.

The ACE Score ↑

Years later I encountered another very different form of assessment: the Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire.

My first ACE score was four.

I liked the simplicity of the instrument.

It allowed difficult areas of childhood to be identified without requiring me immediately to tell the complete story behind every answer.

Later I encountered a broader variation which allowed significant adults and other adults responsible for a child to be considered rather than restricting the questions narrowly to the immediate household.

Using that broader wording, my score became six.

Alcohol contributed to that change.

I do not treat four and six as though they were measurements produced by exactly the same instrument.

The important difference was conceptual.

Some of the adults who most affected my childhood did not live in our house.

They were nevertheless adults with authority over me.

An assessment which looked only inside the family home could miss much of the environment in which my childhood actually occurred.

The Number Is Not the Childhood ↑

An ACE score is useful.

It is not a biography.

Six does not describe Germaine's piano room.

It does not describe Herbie's key beneath the steps.

It does not describe being shot.

It does not describe alcohol being put into a child's mouth.

It does not describe religious terror.

It does not distinguish one protective adult from another abusive one.

The number identifies categories.

The life exists underneath them.

That is why questionnaires can help me without replacing the story.

Writing Before It Disappears ↑

The piece of paper from the hospital belongs to another change in my life.

Years earlier, when something surfaced unexpectedly, I could lose it again.

Now I knew enough to act.

I asked for a pen.

I wrote down the fragment.

I kept it.

That did not prove the whole history surrounding it.

It proved something much simpler:

at that moment the memory had become available and I had recorded what I could access.

Later I could test it.

I could compare it with earlier disclosures.

I could look for documents.

I could see what else returned.

Preserve first.

Interpret later.

One Thing ↑

That is where the work of the previous chapters meets these very early experiences.

I do not have to reconstruct every test tonight.

I do not have to explain every exorcism in order to say that something happened.

I do not have to force a date onto a memory which does not presently carry one.

I can write:

port.

Sweet vermouth.

Water.

Genevieve.

Presbytery.

Tests.

Exorcism.

Then I can stop.

That may be the one thing for that day.

Where Block Three Ends ↑

This block began with Germaine and a piano.

It moved through Herbie, the adults around Yea, the consequences of the psychiatric record, the work with Julian and the unexpected return of traumatic material through meditation and the body.

It ends here without pretending that the earliest material has now been resolved.

In some ways I have reached further back precisely because I have become better able to leave things unfinished.

There are still gaps.

There are still disputed accounts.

There are still memories which may disappear and later return.

There are still records I have not recovered.

What has changed is the method.

I no longer have to choose between believing everything and believing nothing.

I can preserve what I remember.

I can identify what somebody else said.

I can test what can be tested.

I can correct what proves wrong.

And I can leave the unanswered question where it belongs.

One step at a time.