Held in Mind: a Memoir

New to the podcast excerpting my memoir on intergenerational trauma, motherhood and mental health? Start here...

“This is stunning. Memoir is such a fascinating genre isn’t it? And you write it brilliantly.”

Clover Stroud – author of four memoirs including the Sunday Times Bestseller, The Giant on the Skyline

Held in Mind: A Memoir

In the absence of a ‘well’ mother, can it ever be possible to become a ‘good enough’ one yourself? Does mothering your own mother risk an inability to adequately meet the emotional needs of your children? This is a memoir about intergenerational trauma, dependency and loss. It is about the consequences of allowing yourself to be held in mind while you try to hold onto the ones you love.

In 2019, Lindsay embarks upon a therapy journey that coincides with never-seen-before discoveries at her childhood home. Together, these reveal she is the latest in a long maternal line living with a mental health condition and the legacy of trauma. Lindsay’s story, along with those of her mother and grandmother, echo and collide across the generations under the shadow of deadwood in a house where tempers flared and sparks flew.

Will therapy give her the tools to undo unhelpful coping mechanisms of a lifetime? Will she allow herself to be vulnerable in a way that will see her mental health and relationships heal? Will the scars of the past ever fade or is she destined to inflict similar wounds upon the next generation, no matter what she does?

Exclusive to Lindsay's Substack Members' community, listen to excerpts from her memoir.

Episode Eleven:

Episode Ten:

January 21st 1946

Helen’s letter to Tom suggests for the first time her fragile state of mind. Her contradictions.

I do wish people wouldn’t fill my mind with doubts, for mine is a love that needs encouragement. So Tom, if you have even the least bit doubt please tell me now. I have searched my mind but I’m afraid I shall have to wait till I am more settled.

I stopped at the word ‘afraid’ just now. In fact I stopped writing to you for nearly an hour. It’s not you I’m beginning to doubt but myself. This letter must sound very complicated. I don’t have to go into detail, but Annie just came in there and we got talking about Religion. She was telling me I must have absolutely no love for you if I doubt you in the least. She thinks I live far too much by public opinion. But I don’t, Tom.

This letter gets worse and worse. I’m not even taking time to write it sensibly. I’ve just had a good cry since Annie went upstairs. Nothing is very clear. Please don’t go off the deep end about all of these disturbances like I have. I hate the idea of anyone feeling sorry for me.

Please don’t say anything to anybody back home. Your father, I’m quite sure, must think a lot of me too and the reason for his warning is because he doesn’t want to see us getting hurt.

I love seeing that pause in the letter writing. Her need to step away from the page and tell him about it when she returns. The way that her sister, Annie, knows exactly what to say to rile her up. It makes me think about the sisterly dynamic at Lochgreen. Two sisters and a soon-to-be sister-in-law all working together in service to the Collins family, their own inevitable dramas playing out in a below-stairs way.

In amongst all the stuff I found at Auchengate was a long poem written by Margaret, my grandmother’s youngest sister. There were photos, too, that revealed so much about the family dynamic. Their differences. Here is one taken at their elder sister Lizzie’s wedding. Helen is the tall one in the middle of the back row, wearing the hat. I’d discover while writing this memoir that she dreamed of becoming a milliner.

Helen, back row centre, and Margaret second from right. Annie far right.

My grandmother was known in the family as Ella and chose to revert to her birth name of Helen, it seemed, only when she met Tom

These lines say a lot about Margaret’s opinion of her older sister, but speak to the version of Helen / Ella / Gran that I knew. Her hopes would be dashed, of course. I think she thought that marrying Tom and being the wife of a sawmiller would somehow be a step up from the poverty of her childhood. Maybe her nature and early life traumas played their parts in fuelling this fantasy, too?

All four of my grandparents lost a parent in childhood, which may not have been unusual in the 1920s and 30s but I can’t imagine the horror of this now. Tom was 9 when his mother, Mary, died at the age of 29 from TB. I posted about her in this Note on Friday. Helen was 11 when her father died of a heart attack at 39. It’s the reason why, three years later, she was sent from Maddiston, a small village later absorbed into the town of Falkirk in Scotland’s central belt, over to Ayrshire to work in service. Her elder sisters, including Annie, had gone before her.

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Helen and Tom’s sister Mary in Troon, 1945. This is the photo Helen eventually sends to him. He’d called her a ‘smasher,’ to which she replies in a later letter, ‘Aye - a window smasher.’

Tom and Helen at Auchengate in 1948. I played in and around that saw shop with my cousins growing up. Little sense of danger.

1996, and embroiled in a summer-long game we called The Auchengate Olympics

Tom and Helen on the left. Tom’s father – Alexander – in the middle and second wife – another Mary – beside him (late 1940s). Alexander was the one who encouraged Helen’s drinking while Tom worked away for long stretches at the mobile sawmills in the Scottish Highlands.

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And finally some memoir-adjacent words from the autumn, which flesh out a bit more of my mother’s story…

What we're not yet talking about when we're talking about mental health

LINDSAY JOHNSTONE

·

22 OCTOBER 2023

Read full story

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Serialising memoir in this way on Substack is such a rich experience. Being able to share audio, images and backstory all in one place has helped me to see how much scope we have to make something new here. That a text doesn't only live in bookbound form. In fact, if anything, here it can breathe.

If this story is resonating with you, I’d love it if you'd tell someone else. Just another human who has lived a life. And if you've enjoyed the preview linked here, or the other free episode I shared on Christmas Eve, remember you can hear every episode, and access all other Member benefits including my Seasonal Sessions, Writing for Better Mental and Physical Health course and all the other Member benefits for the price of a ☕ and a 🍰.

Join us there? You’d be so very welcome.

Episode Eight:

Episode Seven:

Episode Six:

Episode Five:

“I slipped out the door and navigated up the narrow staircase that bisects the house, past the high wall where scores of Herald moths used to overwinter on the dark brown textured wallpaper.  The perfect camouflage. There’s a walk-in cupboard at the top of the stairs beside my old bedroom, which had been Mum’s and before that, my grandparents’. The right-hand side of the cupboard has open shelves running its length, and if it weren’t for the wicker washing baskets filled with long-forgotten clothes she’d bought and boxes of obsolete 8-tracks, you’d see two small hatches facing one another at the very back. These hatches – with their small keys resting temptingly in the locks – were off-limits to me as a child. This, of course, made them all the more exciting to imagine exploring. I remember once attempting to convince a school friend that these locked cupboards were secret passageways to the other two houses at Auchengate, then putting her off with tales of haunted tunnels when she’d asked to have a look.

When Mum was a girl, these hatches had served as hiding places, too, but for her mother’s empty brandy bottles, not small children. After one such discovery, she’d barricaded herself in the front room she danced in now as her father launched bottle after bottle from the top of the stairs to smash off the wall beside the front door. He had been infuriated by the drinking, the rages. Couldn’t understand what drove his wife to punish them all like this.   I imagined the moths in their scores, wings and walls rippling with the disturbance.”

Episode Four:

Episode 3:

The First of the Letters

WW2 may have officially been declared over months previously, but in early 1946 many were still awaiting their demob. My grandfather, Tom, was no exception. A sailor in the Merchant Navy, he was stationed at Granton north of Edinburgh on Scotland’s east coast. The sawmill, Auchengate, that his family owned and ran was on the other side of the country on the outskirts of Troon; a distance of around 80 miles. He was due to return to the family business, but had no idea when.

Map of Scotland, 1946: Troon on the west and Granton on the east

In his first letter, you’ll hear him trying to work out the best way to get to Helen when she’s due to be in the middle of the country visiting family in Falkirk the following weekend. I absolutely fell for these details. This insight into the sorts of planning and negotiations that had to be conducted by letter and the odd phone call that we, now, take for granted.

Those musing on the train timetable, too. I travel through Glasgow’s Central Station most weeks. My daughter does so daily. Waverley Station in Edinburgh, too, when I go to the office, having first passed through the other stations he mentions in this letter.

As a teenager, I spent more time than I care to remember being transported along those same routes. Sat in the freezing cold, inappropriately dressed, at Troon station waiting for a train that could be half and hour or more away. At bus stops waiting for buses to take me back to Auchengate that passed even less frequently. Never would I have thought of my grandparents doing the same thing many decades earlier. To me, they were just the old people I lived with.

But do you know that feeling? When you come to learn that places you know inside out, and which in some ways felt they ‘belonged’ to you actually held significance to others in your life? Where are those places for you? What does it feel like to be there, now?

Of course, midlife changes all that as the time stretching in front of us is matched, if we’re lucky, but the time that has already passed. We might look back with a different perspective and connect to those who lived before us in unexpected and helpful ways. And that’s what sits at the heart of this memoir. The healing that can come from looking back. Asking questions. Making connections. Folding others’ stories into your own. I feel those train tracks as invisible threads, connecting the past forever to present.

Their love affair had started less than two weeks earlier after they met by chance at a New Year party held at Auchengate by Tom’s father, Alex. My grandmother, Helen, worked in service to the Collins family at a nearby house, Lochgreen, alongside Tom’s younger sister, Mary. Mary had invited Helen to that party and the couple were then inseparable for the next ten days before he had to return to Granton.

We pick up with them here in the first of the hundreds of letters they sent to one another following this intense time together. They’re making plans for a future that they believe will save them, yet they have no idea what that future will bring. This narrative acts as an origin story of sorts. A contrast to the therapy narrative which – initially at least – appears unsatisfying.

Lochgreen House, Southwood, Troon 1940s or 50s

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Episode One:

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