A tale of ordinary madness: the pressure of life with dad

As a journalist and editor for nearly 30 years, I have come across countless depressing stories about mental illness. The most infamous ones almost always involve assault, rape or murder, but all of them leave me with a heavy heart.

In the aftermath of the worst cases, the same question is asked: how could this happen? Then an identical discussion ensues: how do you balance the rights of the mentally ill with the security of the public at large?

The government will reignite this debate tomorrow when it makes a second attempt to get the highly controversial Mental Health Bill on to the statute books. If it succeeds, the bill will give doctors significantly greater power to 'section' mentally ill patients into hospital care and to force discharged patients to take their medication.

From the mid-Sixties when, as a six-year-old, I first became aware of his illness, until his sudden death in 1996, I lived with and around my manic-depressive father, Ron. He was neither a rapist nor a murderer. Apart from liberating a bench from our local park ('to save it from being vandalised'), he committed no crimes. But once or twice a year his moods would become 'bipolar', switching from a soaring high to a spiralling low as we, his family, clung on in his dizzying slipstream.

Each time we asked the same questions: why do we feel that we are on our own with this? And why is there nowhere for dad to go where he will be properly looked after? Five people in every thousand suffer from manic depression and there is no known cause.

In my father's case, I grew up believing his illness had developed as a result of traumas he suffered while on National Service in Germany during the Fifties, but there is, as far as I know, no evidence for this connection.

The 'sportiness' was part of an image that he earnestly assumed for himself, during this high phase, which was to do with being ambitious, positive and hungry both for self-improvement and the 'improvement' of those around him.

'These bloody kids need to get out more,' he would say to my mum. 'Meet more people, get involved.' He formed a street football team and dragged me along to matches where his raggle-taggle gang played local youth clubs or other street teams.

He cursed my lack of enthusiasm as I moped on the touchline, embarrassed by what I saw as his out-of-character behaviour. At times like this I had a little insight into how my mum must have felt when various doctors asked her about my father, for I felt like the 'sick' one. But dad was patently unwell.

As his mind raced, his attention would drift. He would drag me off to a match or on a long walk and I would see his eyes go dead, glaze over mid-sentence. He would forget what he was supposed to be doing or suddenly break off in the middle of a rant as if uncertain what he had just said or why he had said it.

He flung all the windows of the house open, whatever the weather - 'It's too bloody warm in here, Peg. Aren't you warm?' - then put on his Frank Sinatra records at full volume. I came to loathe 'Nice'N'Easy'. Once, he developed a fixation on the song 'Something In The Air' by Thunderclap Newman, and played it all night, over and over. 'This is beautiful, Mart,' he said to me and there were tears in his eyes.

In the evenings he would pace up and down our small front room, one arm behind his back, his fist clenching and unclenching. Sometimes my mother would pluck up the courage to interrupt him: 'Oh for God's sake, sit down, Ron.'

Eventually one of these tantrums, or some particularly extreme example of bizarre behaviour, would make the doctors' stance - their reluctance to listen to my mother's pleas, or take heed of her many letters - impossible to maintain.

On one occasion he turned up at Edgware General Hospital, where for many years he worked as an electrician, and hung a huge, wooden cross on the tennis courts - a religious zeal was also part of his high mode. The doctors were finally persuaded that he wasn't his normal self.

I loved my father, dearly. When he was well he was the most affectionate, caring and supportive dad any son could have. Nothing was too much trouble for him. 'Educated' during the war, he left school in his mid-teens and had a series of manual jobs - jeweller's assistant; electrician's mate; hospital porter; kitchen washer-upper - always craving something more creative and artistic.

When Ian and I both passed our 11-plus exams to get into grammar school he was delighted. When I came to write a book about my relationship with my father I was well aware of the category of recent literature labelled 'misery books', and anxious to avoid it. I did not have a miserable childhood.

There were moments of anxiety and times when I felt physically threatened by my father but he never, in the 36 years that I knew him, caused me any physical harm.

The Observer.uk