Appendix A. The Days of Our Years

‘The Days of Our Years’ was an address given by Francesca Bion in April 1994 in Toronto and Montreal, Canada. It was first published in The Journal of Melanie Klein and Object Relations, 13, No.1, 1995.

Before studying the work of original thinkers in the field of human behaviour and the human mind, it is surely valuable to know what influences and experiences contributed to their personalities, especially as seen through their own eyes. We are fortunate to have a record of Bion's own impressions of his first fifty years in The Long Week-End and All My Sins Remembered. Less fortunately, we are left with an impression of unrelieved gloom and of his dislike of himself. I tried, therefore, to present a more balanced view by publishing a selection of his letters to the family written during the following thirty years, giving it the title, The Other Side of Genius For those who have not read those books, a brief biographical outline may be the best way of setting the scene.

Wilfred Bion was born in 1897 in Muttra in the United Provinces of Northwest India where his father was an irrigation engineer. He had one sister, three years his junior. At the age of eight he was sent to school in England, never to return to the India he loved. His years in the prep school were unhappy ones. To a child of eight it must have seemed as though some incomprehensible and disastrous turn of events had deprived him of parents, home and sunshine, and had dumped him in an alien land inhabited by nasty little boys and cursed with an even nastier climate. It was more than three years before he saw his mother again – and then, momentarily, did

not recognize her. By the time he entered the senior school, he had adapted well, joined the “enemy” and enjoyed the next five years. He always said that what saved him was his large size, physical strength and athletic ability.

He left school in 1915, just before his eighteenth birthday, and joined the Royal Tank Regiment in 1916. He was posted to France