Transcript
Joe Dunthorne (0:01)
BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. It was the spring of 1957 and my great grandfather could feel that something was wrong. He had experienced depression before, but this time was different. Whenever his wife Lily went out, even to the grocery store, he was overcome with the certainty that she would not come back alive. If his daughter in law was a few minutes late to meet him, he believed that she had been in a fatal collision. Siegfried and his wife Lily were now living in Chapel Hill, a leafy town in North Carolina. After his long career as an industrial chemist, 26 years in Germany, a decade in Turkey, another seven years in America, he had finally retired. He knew he should try to relax, spend time with his grandkids. But instead there was anxiety, listlessness, problems in the bedroom, and the more or less constant feeling that he and his loved ones were about to die. His eyes prickled forever on the edge of tears that never came. His older sister Elizabeth came to visit him, flying over from Washington D.C. with her son. They enjoyed their time together. But on the day she packed her bags to leave, Siegfried started to get agitated. It was not a physical sensation, no shortness of breath, no pain or palpitations, just an overwhelming sense of impending calamity and the knowledge that he could do nothing to stop it. He was sure his sister was going to collapse on the driveway or get sideswiped by a truck, or that a mid flight engine fire would fill the cabin with noxious smoke. He rose from his seat, walked out to the porch and started beating his head against the wall. He did this as though trying to bring the house down around him while yelling that he should, as the nurse would later write on his admissions, let himself, under the first passing automobile. I'm Joe Dunthorne and you're listening to Half Life. This is episode six, Tranquility. Well, I actually only had the phone number of this very impenetrable medical records company Corporation. That's right, with like a million phone menus. And yes, in 1957, my great grandfather was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit in America. Calling the medical records company, I was conscious that my request to track down his paperwork from almost 70 years ago was a slightly hopeful one. The guy on the phone is like, what's, what's the name? That's like Siegfried Merzberg. He's like, what's the year? The birth year? And I was like 1884. And he was. I felt like he was gonna hang up the phone the moment I said that. But yeah, he somehow did know that records existed, even though he wouldn't Give them to me. And then I set Mum on the case. Four weeks later, my mother had struck up an apparently lifelong friendship with the woman in the hospital records office. Across multiple phone calls they had formed a bond sufficient that the woman had happily descended into a distant basement, retrieved and copied the handwritten documents and a week later it all arrived by airmail free of charge at my parents house in Wales. You managed Mum to get the Hospital Records, 1957. Is this your years as a historian coming useful or is it just your charm? As soon as my mother received it, she phoned me and the first thing she said with a note of disapproval was, you're going to be very happy. From his 11 days in hospital, here were 45 pages of observations, sleep charts, medication records, Freudian analysis and an extremely comprehensive report from the admissions nurse. First thing that happened to him when he got into the hospital. It's an unbelievably detailed initial nurse's physical, which is incredibly invasive. Oh, here we go. Yeah.