Chapter 11. After the Easter Holiday in Hospital: The Bottom's Eye View of the World

When she returns on 19 April she tells of how she met in the hospital a girl with the same symptoms as herself, who had had E.C.T. at about the same time as she had, ten shocks, and how this girl feels the same lack of continuity between childhood and now, the feeling of something lost, no background, so no future and no capacity to endure, to put up with things. Now she cries bitterly at the thought of the five years (it's really seven) of taking for granted all she is getting, how she has lost her principles and the self-knowledge that Jackie gave her, though she had the basis for it already. She talks further about what it is she has lost; she says this good thing comes from outside and comes into you, and then goes out again, and how she endowed Dr F with it; she adds that love is enduring, making the best of things, going on knowing that it is worth while—but now she has lost what you go on with.1 She insists that I do not understand—I only could if I had had the E.C.T. too. Now she says she feels this total ungenuineness that she has is something she did feel at moments before, and now she adds that at the hospital where she has just been she feels they thought of her as a ‘dead loss’, ‘another suicide one’.

For the next week or so she is feeling extremely persecuted by Mr X, maintaining that he enjoyed ‘buggering her up’, that he timed the break-up of his marriage on purpose, but insists that she cannot feel her hate of him. She moans, if only people