Life Worth Living by Lady Colin Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

psychiatry, especially Freudian psychiatry, enjoyed a better reputation than it does today; when the surgical skills for dealing with genital malformations were still in their infancy and when scandal was a horror most people would do anything to avoid, it was reassuring and plausible.
    But in truth her recommendation amounted to the essential destruction and reconstruction of my personality against my will. No human being with empathy or compassion could have devised such a stupendously cruel approach to a medical problem, and sure enough, within minutes of meeting her, I took a definite dislike to this sadist even though I had no idea whatshe had in store for me. She was a caricature of German womanhood, with a manner better suited to the role of guard in a Nazi concentration camp than to encouraging people to trust her with their most personal considerations. When she informed me at the end of our meeting that I should prepare myself to be hospitalised the following day, I asked her if she was aware that the day after that was my fourteenth birthday. ‘I know that from my notes,’ she responded coldly.
    ‘But surely I could go in the day afterwards,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be having a party.’
    ‘There are other priorities now,’ she told me, leaving me with the impression – accurate, as events proved – that she had deliberately chosen the date to show me who was boss. It was the first sign I received of her cruelty, and it put me on my guard.
    Forewarned is forearmed, and I was full of foreboding as Mummy drove me home. Every fibre of my being screamed out that something awful was going to happen, and though I hoped against hope that I was wrong, I knew in my bones that I wasn’t.
    The following day, Mummy drove me to the hospital, which was run by nuns. It was loaded with significance for me. It was where Aunt Flower, Daddy’s sister, was taken for shock treatment every time she ‘went off her head’. She was not really mad, but prone to depressions which were a result of having been prevented by the family from marrying the man of her choice. As she was no great beauty (hence the nickname pretty as a flower), no one else had ever wanted to marry her, and over the years the loneliness and frustration had taken their toll.
    So began the most terrifying three weeks of my life. Much of that time is lost to me, for the psychiatrist’s methods were unorthodox, to say the least. Not once did she conduct a session without first knocking me out with sodium pentothal. Although I did not know that her aim was to brainwash me into accepting a role I did not want, I was sufficiently sensible to know that she was doing something I did not wish her to do, otherwise she would not have had to resort to such subterfuge. She also put me out every time her husband ‘treated’ me. Your guess is as good as mine as to what his treatment involved, for they never did any of the tests, such as chromosomal or ketosteroid tests, which were appropriate to my problem. The result was that I was unconscious for much of every day, Saturday and Sunday excluded, and hovered between being hung over and depressed or apathetic when I was awake.
    As I was normally high-spirited and enthusiastic at the worst of times, this was a new and unwelcome experience. I did not like it in the least, and, from that day to this, I have hated not being in possession of my faculties, hence my distaste for any form of intoxication.
    In the late afternoons and early evenings, I usually had a lot of adult company. Mummy invariably came; Daddy often dropped in on his way home from work, and various aunts, uncles, and good family friends such as the Countesses Kobylanska and Potworowska all visited, bringing white grapes and commentingon the quantity of flowers in the room. My brother, sisters and friends were banned, however, and nights were lonely after everyone had left for dinner, as there was no television or radio. I was therefore reliant on books