"The Prof"

Paul, or "The Prof" as we liked to call him, was a gentleman of 60-something although he would never tell me what his age actually was.  He was a very well-read and clever man, having studied English at Oxford.  He was fluent in Italian as he had lived there and his ex-wife was Italian.  In his youth he'd had a job teaching Italian servicemen to understand English words of command.  His students called him "Professori" and that is where our nickname originated.  He really did look the part, with wild white hair and thick, tinted glasses. It was not unusual for him to wear a sweater which had a hole the size of a saucer at the back. He smoked untipped cigarettes through various cigarette holders, he had quite a collection, many of them antiques.  He was supposed to be suffering from depression, but I have never seen anyone laugh so much who was supposed to be feeling "low".  I don't know what medication he was on, perhaps it gave him the giggles, or perhaps it was me!

One day there was a very fat lady in the dining room eating a huge plate of mashed potato.  I said "She's the dietician" and Paul thought this was hilarious.  We also used to talk about what he called "Reeve's Law of Opposites", such as "dieting makes you fat", "mental hospitals make you mental", I wish I could remember all the others, but we were always finding incidences to "prove" this theory.  Paul also said that people were being turned into daleks on the ward.  People came in, and daleks went out.  He said that not watching the television all day would save us from being turned into daleks like the others.  And he drew me a fantastic cartoon of the ward populated by daleks going about doing the things that mental patients do, such as saying "I want to go home" all the time.  It was so funny because this is just the sort of ridiculous thing that people believe when they are in psychosis.  One day Betty, one of the older patients, was wandering around aimlessly as if she did not know where she was going and she bumped into a chair, and Paul said in a dalek voice "Gui-dance sys-tem not op-er-a-tional".  This was the sort of thing that made us laugh uncontrollably, to the extent that often the nurses would tell us to be quiet, and not to get "so hilarious".  I think perhaps they were a bit jealous of us being able to sit around laughing all day while they had to work.

Rebecca and I once ran up to Paul all giggly, exclaiming "Professor Paul!  Is it really you, can we have your autograph?" He was just coming out of the dining room and happened to have a sausage in his hand, which he then pretended was a cigar while he signed our bits of paper and put on an American accent like he was some sort of famous visiting doctor and told us to meet him in the recovery room later for "personal tuition".  The nurses used to hate it when we both sat on his knee.  So we did it all the more.

Paul said that he had been prescribed a drug for 6 months which you are not supposed to have for longer than 6 weeks.  He thought that this might have been the cause of the terrible problem he had once he went home, where he would go to sleep and not wake up for several days.  It was not unusual for him to sleep through social arrangements he had made, and his girlfriend got so fed up with this that she split up with him.  When Louis used to visit him, the only way to make him wake up was to get a ladder, climb up to his bedroom window, enter the room, and physically drag him out of bed.  Paul had lots of tests at the Maudsley Hospital in London, and they found that he was the only person in the world who had no seratonin in his blood whatsoever.

Because of this problem where he was asleep most of the time, I started to send him letters to keep in touch, and we had a lively correspondence for many years.  Sometimes I would include cartoons such as cuttings of Noddy and Big Ears captioned, "Dr Longton restrains a difficult patient".  We knew very little about Dr Longton's private life, so we made up a whole persona, where we said his hobby was Morris dancing and he kept goats.  If ever we saw a picture of someone who looked a bit like him in a magazine we would cut it out and think up a funny caption.  As well as writing funny stuff, Paul helped me enormously when I was doing English literature A level in evening classes.  We would discuss my essay titles and he sometimes gave me insights I had not thought of, and I always sent him copies of my finished essays.  I managed to get a 'B' grade after only one year of tuition, and he helped me to keep up my enthusiasm and see it through to the end, while in the past I had often dropped out of such courses.

Paul moved to the coast and got a flat overlooking the sea, so I saw him even less-often.  I was just thinking that I would visit him soon, when I had a letter from his daughter telling me that he had died.  His smoking habit had affected his heart and all the sleeping he did and lack of exercise probably did not help.  I am glad that he did meet my son, Callum, who was just two at the time.  Paul remarked that Callum "thought I was a climbing frame".  He was a very dear man and I miss him very much, I will never forget his wonderful intelligence and subversive sense of humour, and the way he kept me sane in an insane place.