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The rest of Susan's analysis, after 8 January 1959, could be looked on as consisting of her struggles to realize in living the achievements of this day, constantly losing them as she guessed she would, but gradually coming to face what it really was that she had symbolized by the mad white horse blocking the way forward.
In the months after 8 January she did manage, with very great difficulty, to extricate herself from the family for whom she had been working. At first, it was only to find another ‘au pair’ job; she said ruefully, when telling me about it, ‘People only have to look at me to know I will work for nothing.’ Soon, however, as I have said, she acted on her so long standing wish to do nursing by getting work as an assistant nurse in a mental hospital, in a ward with violent patients, but only stayed there a few weeks, because, although she felt she did the work well, she was so terrified that she spent all her time off sitting in a stupor on her bed. Incidentally, she maintained that she had had no instructions about how to deal with violent patients and had only discovered by chance, through seeing a note about a patient she had attended to single-handed, ‘This patient should only be approached by two nurses together.’ She also told the she found she had contracted ‘nits’ in her hair and that she could only have got them in the hospital; but, she added, she felt she was so frightened that the lice could easily have been spontaneously generated out of her own terror.
After one more living-in job, but this time able to ask to be paid—in order that she might have some money to contribute to care for her mother, who was by now seriously ill—Susan finally managed, through a friend, to find work in an office and a very small rented room of her own.
During this time she did only one drawing; it was before taking this step of getting work that did not mean living in other people's houses, which she said she had come to loathe.