The Story of a Clinical Neuropsychologist

Barbara A. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000755015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

From a disadvantaged childhood to becoming one of our best-loved clinical neuropsychologists, this exceptional book tells the life story of Barbara A. Wilson, who has changed the way we think about brain injury rehabilitation.

Barbara's story shows how it is possible to have a fulfilling career alongside a successful family life, even when faced with the deepest of personal tragedies; the death of her adult daughter Sarah. Clinical and neuropsychologists will recognise Barbara's influence on rehabilitation practice and her tireless aim to get what is best for people needing neuropsychological rehabilitation. It will inspire those with brain injury and their families who may struggle to make life meaningful, as well as encourage readers to stick to their beliefs and triumph in the face of obstacles.

Part One

1 Early life

Wartime years and primary school

I was born in 1941 during the Second World War. My father was away fighting in France and my mother, who lived in south London, had to travel out of London to give birth because of the danger of bombing. Consequently, I was born in Tunbridge Wells, in Pembury Hospital. I was only there for three weeks, however, and then we moved back to London where I spent much of my childhood. Although a full-term baby, I only weighed four and a half pounds and was always told I looked like a skinned rabbit when I was born. It seems that my mother had a difficult forceps delivery and the right side of my face was squashed in. I put my poor visuo-spatial and musical skills down to the fact that I sustained some right hemisphere damage at birth.

My earliest memory is of being in a vehicle at night with what I now believe were laurel leaves brushing at the windows. I was alone and frightened. No one could have known about my fear and the leaves brushing against the window so could not have told it to me over the years. My mother said later, that at the age of 2 or 2½, I was taken from Belgrave Children’s Hospital to an evacuation home in Sussex. Now I believe the vehicle was an ambulance and I was being taken from London to Sussex. My mother did not come to the evacuation home with me even though I was so young. She had, I believe, arranged the evacuation through an aunt of hers. I remember the woman I stayed with was unkind to me. I recollect two horrible things she did. She always pushed my head under the water when she was washing my hair, which terrified me, and when she went out shopping she would neither let me go with her and her children, nor would she let me stay in her house. I had to wait by the wall in front of the house. I do not remember anything about her husband or her children, just these two things she did to me. I must have been no more than 3 years old at the time. When I was older and talked to my mother about this period, she said that she was in hospital in London and heard two women talking about this little girl who was being badly treated and she realised it was me. The village I was in was near Horsham so it is not clear how these women knew the story. According to my mother, she went down to the village and had me moved to the care of another woman, who was kind to me. I don’t remember anything about the second evacuation home.

I returned to London in 1945 before my fourth birthday in October, so I must have been in Sussex for about two years. I assume my mother kept in touch but this period is very vague. I remember that my father returned home at the end of the war seriously wounded. He was in a hospital outside of London and my mother, my Aunt Dot (my father’s older sister) and I went on a bus to see him. We took some strawberries and I remember Dot and my mother being very excited that they had found these strawberries, which, I believe, cost them a great deal of money, at least it was a great deal for our poor family. I was eager to see my father and had convinced myself that he would have a wooden leg.

When we reached the hospital my father was in bed with a splint on his leg. I was allowed to feel this through the blanket covering him and it confirmed my belief that he would have a wooden leg. He did not, of course, but he later told me that he won a five pound bet for being the man with the most war wounds in the hospital. At one point he asked me to go and talk to a man further down in the ward (I think he wanted to speak to my mother alone). I went to talk to this man who started to cry. My dad said afterwards that the man’s wife and child had died in the blitz (the bombings in Britain during the war) and I may have reminded the man of his dead child.

My dad came home and for a long time his wounds meant he needed help. My mum had to cut up his food and help him dress. He had scars everywhere including many stripes like scars across his arms. He tanned easily but these scars always stayed white. He also said he was the only person with four belly buttons; one was his natural one and the other three were from gunshot wounds to his stomach. Stomach problems plagued him for the rest of his life and he could only eat bland foods. As an adult, I cooked him a meal with garlic. He ate it but was very sick afterwards. His favourite meal was haddock with poached egg, which I thought was horrible. For many years my dad had nightmares about the war and would start screaming in the night. At one time we lived in a single bedroomed flat in Camberwell, which I shared with my parents, and these nightmares woke me up. My dad said frequently, “I am living on borrowed time.” So many of his friends and comrades had been killed that he felt he should not have survived. He sometimes said “Harry (or Tom or someone) came last night.” This person would be a soldier my dad knew who had been killed. He said this was evidence of ghosts but my dad was such a sceptical man and an atheist that I am not sure he really believed in ghosts. Today, I think his problems would be recognised as post traumatic stress disorder but this term had not been invented then.

One of my earliest conversations with my dad was about bananas. I had heard of bananas but never seen or eaten one. “What do they look like?” I asked. He said something like, “They are long and thin with yellow skin, white inside with a black part running down the middle.” My father craved a banana but they did not sound too pleasant to me. Because eggs had been hard to come by during the war, we were supplied with dried egg powder. This came in large circular tins; the powder was mixed with water and then cooked. The result looked something like an omelette. I believe it was because I was used to dried egg powder that I never developed a liking for real eggs. I never eat boiled, poached or fried eggs although occasionally I will eat an omelette. Our food during the war was rationed. Each person was allowed so much butter, sugar, milk and so on each week. Ration books were allocated to people to enable them to purchase their allocated amount of the foodstuffs. The ration books were of different colours (for different products) made of a stiff, rough paper. They had tickets in that were torn off and given to the shopkeeper in return for the goods. We had an adequate but not luxurious diet. I remember being sent to a nearby shop with a ration book to get something for my mother and I lost the ration book. What a disaster. My mother was distraught. I do not remember the resolution of this catastrophe, only the terrible anguish of my mother. Nowadays I think she should not have sent a 4-year-old shopping alone!

My father’s taste in food may have been bland but my mother’s was not. She had grown up in Bristol, a seafaring city with many foreign ships and access to food and had eaten exotic foods since she was a young child. (Incidentally one of the boys she claimed to know was Archibald Alexander Leach, later named Cary Grant, who was a bit posher than everybody else and would insist that one day he would become a film star!) My mother loved snails, for example, which many British people find repugnant. We lived in Brixton, a very cosmopolitan part of the world even then in the 1940s. (Another name drop is that of David Bowie who later lived in one of the streets near us also in Brixton.) We had neighbours of many nationalities particularly West Indians, Nigerians and Cypriots. Because of this we had access to foreign foods long before the rest of London did. One of my mother’s favourite foods was dried salted cod. This was purchased as a very hard sheet of dried fish, which needed to be soaked for several hours. My father called it “toe rag”. I ate some of it but it was very salty so I never ate very much. There was one little shop in Brixton market that I loved. It was owned, I think, by a man from Eastern Europe. From the ceiling hung long sausages and there were barrels of fish in brine. At this time such shops were virtually unknown and the word “delicatessen” never heard. The herring in the barrels cost four (old) pence each and one or two of these was a special treat for me. They were a little like the roll mop herrings of today but much tastier. The smells and sights of this shop impressed me as a young child. Brixton market has always been special and I remember the clothes of the Africans, the accents of the Jamaicans and the fights that would break out between the Cypriots and the local white people. There was racism, which was most evident on a Saturday night when the fights broke out and also evidenced by the KBW (Keep Brixton White) signs painted on the walls. Mostly, the different nationalities stayed in mini ghettos: for example, the West Indians lived in Somerleyton Rd and Geneva Rd. Thank goodness things have changed, a little, in the twenty-first century and overt racism is now a crime. I changed later, realising how awful racism was when I was at grammar school, aged about 12 years. I was spouting the racist remarks I had heard in Brixton when I realised the whole class had gone very quiet, I then realised that one of our class mates was black. I had never thought of her as black before. She was just a girl like the rest of us. I felt terrible for her and at what I had done; from that moment on I have hated any kind of racism.

Until I was 9 years old I had to go to hospital at least once a year with ear infections and ear abscesses. I remember terrible earaches, trips to the doctor and to Belgrave Children’s hospital in South London. The National Health Service began in 1948. Before this, when I needed a doctor my mother would be worried because she did not know how much she would be charged and whether she could afford it. I also remember having to go to convalescent homes after I came out of hospital. I am not sure whether I really needed to go or whether my mother persuaded the authorities to take me to give her a break. I did not like the convalescent homes and, in particular, I did not like the condensed milk on bread we were given for tea.

At the age of four, soon after returning from Sussex, I was in a shop with my mother. She was being given some change and I could not understand how she knew the change was correct, it seemed too difficult. I remember thinking, “Maybe I am backward because I can’t work this out.” Obviously I was not backward and I taught myself to read before I went to school. I would ask my parents about letters on cereal boxes and on the shops we passed when taking the bus or the tram. I learned the letter “W” because we regularly passed “Woolworth’s”. My dad and his sisters read avidly. All three were intelligent but uneducated. They liked debate and discussion. My mother did not read books and obviously had a learning difficulty: nowadays I believe she had a phonological loop deficit and could only retain two items in immediate memory; she would have made an interesting single case study. She always said she did not learn to walk until she was six and wore leg braces and went to the “silly school”. She had problems with writing. All her letters were capitals and she did not understand about punctuation. She loved singing, however, and had a wealth of songs, which she sang to me regularly. I realised from the age of about eight that I was cleverer than her and would sometimes take advantage of this. She also had a significant hearing problem and wore a hearing aid that would frequently whistle. Yet she was the kindest person, who would always help, was very supportive and loyal and I know that she and my father loved me despite sometimes showing benign neglect.

Before I started school I went to a day nursery, as my mother worked full time as a waitress. The only thing I remember about this nursery was that they made us lie on camp beds in the afternoon to rest. I had not rested during the day for as long as I could remember and I resented it. My first school was Stockwell Road Primary; I started there just before I was 5 years old. I remember some visitors coming soon after I entered the school and the teacher asked me to demonstrate my reading skills to them. They seemed to be impressed. I liked school but did not stay there long as we managed to rent a flat in the Lewis Trust buildings in Camberwell. This was a council flat for which we paid six shillings and three pence a week (just over 31 pence in today’s money!). Even in those days (1947) this was incredibly cheap and was recognised as being in a rough part of the world – although I did not realise this at the time. One advantage was that the flats were opposite a bus garage, which became a playground when I was a little older. The other advantage was that there were plenty of children around so there was always someone to play with. My mother found a child minder there, Mrs Ryland, whose daughter Sylvie was the same age as me. My earliest memory of my hatred of potatoes comes from this time. Mrs Ryland regularly gave me potatoes which I could not eat. I remember dropping them down the back of her sofa. My aversion remains to this day.

At school I developed a reputation as a clever but rebellious child. As my father was a rebel, I think I inherited this streak from him although not always in the same ways. He was left wing politically and remembers having stones thrown at him when he marched for the young socialists in the 1920s. He would not let us stand up for the national anthem as he was against the royal family. He used to say “I would not let the queen use our lavatory,” and I had a visual image of the queen coming to our door saying, “Please can I use your lavatory?” with my father saying a stern “No.” He had been christened a catholic and his family were from Ireland two generations back but he, himself, was a convinced atheist. My Aunt Dot was, too. She would say, “I would love to believe, it would be comforting but I can’t.” My mother was from a Quaker family and more conventional, although I felt her belief system was a mixture of religion and superstition.

My primary school teachers were religious and adored the royal family. Because I loved and admired my dad, conflicts were bound to arise. One day I was talking about religion at home and my father said, “There is no such thing as god.” Of course, I went to school the next day and said this to the teacher, who was horrified. She called in the headmistress, who decided to ask my mother to come to the school. My mother, being a conventional soul, agreed with the teachers, thought I should never have said such a thing and scolded me. I, too, knew that the teachers would be shocked, but I liked the idea of shocking them. Later, when I was in my last year at this school, in 1953, Stalin died. My father had some admiration for the Russians because of the way the Russian soldiers had fought during the war and we did not know at that time all the terrible crimes Stalin had committed. So my dad had some sympathy for the Russian regime. About a year before this, King George the sixth died. I was at school when this happened. The headmistress came into our classroom to tell our teacher, Miss Foster, that the king had died and they both started to cry. I was amazed at their behaviour and that evening told my father. When Stalin died, I remembered this and said that it wasn’t mentioned at school even though the head and the teachers had cried over the death of the king. My dad said, “Nobody cried when Stalin died did they?” Being the rebellious child I was, I repeated this sentence back at school the next day and, once again, shocked the teachers.

NOTE: During the Second World War there was a tremendous admiration and deep respect by the British for the Russians, for all they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis; it was recognised that their massive war effort was possibly the chief reason for the defeat of Germany. In Jean Lucey Pratt’s (2015) wonderful autobiography about the Second World War, for example, she wrote (11 March, 1942): “saw a film recently in which Churchill and Stalin appeared. For Churchill – a few polite claps; for Stalin – a roar of applause”.

Both my parents worked full time. My father was a painter and decorator and must have recovered well enough from his war wounds to return to work quite quickly. He seems to have changed jobs fairly regularly because there were times when my mother would be very anxious about whether or not he would find a job quickly. On a few occasions we looked out of the window to see him coming home and my mother could tell by his walk (or maybe by the things he was carrying) if he had lost a job or, on other occasions, if he had managed to find a job. We did not have much money but we never seemed desperately poor and there was always money for presents at Christmas and birthdays or to go to a museum or to Southend on bank holidays.

The war was a constant topic of conversation. I remember my father talking about his “demob” suit (all soldiers after the war were given a demobilisation suit) and, at some point, six war medals arrived. I have already mentioned the nightmares; another aspect of the war which affected my father for the rest of his life was shrapnel (bits of metal from bombs) that had embedded themselves in his body. Every now and again a piece would work itself through his skin. I remember a particularly nasty piece coming through quite close to his eye. If I remember rightly, he received compensation for these bits of shrapnel that emerged from his body. He spoke about the war frequently and said that once he swapped shifts with a mate; he was doing his mate a favour but the mate was killed and my father survived. Nowadays, as I said before, he would be diagnosed as having “post traumatic stress disorder”. He certainly had flashbacks, intrusive thoughts and nightmares.

There were times, however, when I was left on my own for long periods. My parents would sometimes go out at night leaving me alone. I was often left alone during the day too when they had to go to work (and presumably Mrs Ryland could not look after me or my mother could not find a child minder). She would leave my lunch (or dinner as we called it then); this would be eaten pretty much straight away. I spent hours playing with paper dolls, living in an imaginary world. I also had a plan in case my parents never came back. This was to walk round to Aunt Vi’s to tell her what had happened. Her house was within walking distance and I knew how to get there. At about this time I started to pretend I had an imaginary family with many brothers and sisters and pets. I called these imaginary times my “pretends” and whenever I was lonely or unhappy I would escape into my “pretends”. This lasted until I was 18 and left home! We were not allowed pets in the flats and I had to wait until we moved before I could have any.

We then moved to Foreign Street (which has now been demolished) in Loughborough Junction, which is halfway between Brixton and Camberwell. We had the basement flat with my Aunt Vi, her husband Uncle Arthur and my two cousins, Peter and June, living above us. Living in Foreign Street was a good time for playing outside. Halfway up the road were some bomb ruins (houses which had been bombed during the war) where I collected milkweed and dandelion leaves for my pet rabbits. There were other bomb ruins further afield and these made great adventure playgrounds for the neighbourhood children. If these existed today, children would not be allowed to play in them for health and safety reasons but we thought they were wonderful and we had a freedom my own children and grandchildren have not had. There were also lots of other children in our street and in the adjoining streets. I remember a little girl from a Polish family called Yanny (I think her name must have been Janina). She was a tomboy and I liked her. She had lots of brothers and sisters and I believe the family was considered rough, that is, even rougher than the rest of us. My two good friends from school, Irene Storrar and Christine Trayling, lived in the next street. At the end of the road was a little corner shop called Sledmar’s, known to us kids as Sleddy’s. We spent our pocke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface by Michael Wilson
• Preamble
• Part One
• Part Two
• References