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Like many others in our line of work, back in March 2020 I found that along with reeling with the shock of living through a global pandemic, with all the worries, frustrations and powerless feelings which came along with this, I was also busier than ever working as a child psychotherapist in the local fostering team for children’s services. Conversations between friends and all over the media about what everyone would do with all this extra time as the country shut down seemed perplexing to me, as our team was struggling to adapt overnight to keep everything going. We were overwhelmed and working longer hours, while feeling fragmented and separated from colleagues and friends.
One way that I managed, once the working day was over, was the way I always manage when things are tough – or in fact when things are any way at all. I read. Literature was my first great and absolute love, long before the world of psychoanalysis made itself known to me. From my earliest childhood through to the present, books have always been my comfort and my absolute ‘thing’. As a child, I would read through family picnics and on long car journeys, and for hours at weekends. And now I still read every night before I sleep, even if it is only a few paragraphs at midnight of whichever novel I currently have ‘on the go’. I studied English Literature as an undergraduate and then American Literature as a post-graduate, and had a long and (mostly) happy career as an English teacher before I decided to re-train in child psychotherapy. I still miss the uncomplicated, optimistic pleasure in teaching Othello to sixth formers. There is something in beautiful words which offers a balm to the troubled soul.
So, I was very excited this year to read Hamnet. Maggie O’Farrell has long been one of my favourite authors, and linked with Shakespeare, how could this novel fail to delight and entertain? Hamnet is Shakespeare’s young son who dies, as he did in reality, in 1596 aged eleven of the plague, which he cat