‘If you have a youth with inherited nervous instability, brought up in a solitary atmosphere and with the fear that unseen and punishing powers are all around him, he tends to run away from them in the only way he can – namely, into a world, in the first place, of fantasy and fairy-tale; he will not face his difficulties fairly, and becomes progressively less able to do so. At first, he thinks merely of some clever way round of avoiding punishment and if it develops further, and there is no clever way round, he goes into himself, and into a world of fantasy, and makes an imaginary solution for himself and comes to believe in it.’
Read the above carefully. Now substitute a few words for others. For example; ‘he’ becomes ‘she’, ‘inherited nervous instability’ becomes ‘powerful imagination’. The ‘the fear that unseen and punishing powers’ becomes ‘fear of infection and germs and disease.’ ‘some clever way round of avoiding punishment’ becomes ‘ways of trying to avoid falling ill’.
You get the idea. .
The first paragraph comes from defence barrister Sir David Maxwell Fyfe’s opinions of one John George Haigh. With the alterations I’ve made you get me.
Don’t get me wrong. I was the first-born of a couple who never knew illness, born with a condition that was still being researched. Sort of in the guinea-pig stage. Even my own great-grandma condemned me with ‘that child’s never well’. My Mum, especially, took hold of what she knew (very little was actually known) and with her natural maternal instinct did her to keep me from being taken away into hospital. More often than not, she didn’t succeeded. The idea that she was incapable of looking after me hurt her. She did her best to care for me, following her instinct to keep me safe, even if it meant not allowing to mix.
(She talks, even now, about how she was told by the specialist, not to love me. Change me, feed me, but not to love me, as I could die. She said that one day she was watching me in my cot and it was too much. She picked me up and held me.)
I knew nothing but love, because that was all my Mum could give me. But with this atmosphere, it was easy to live in my imagination and then at first passively and then actively avoid human contact. No big fancy psychological reasons. I was just taught that humans were dangerous, could indirectly contaminate and kill me. This, and the fact I was bullied mercilessly, help me dislike my fellow humans and made me into a misanthrope.
My condition; it will never go away. The best way to describe it is like I’m a dog on a chain in big yard. I can move around freely but eventually that chain will stop me going past certain boundaries. Even when I’m (comparatively) healthy, I still feel constrained, although most of the time I’m not aware of it. But if I try and go even a couple of hours beyond the time I should have my medication and well, the chain tightens and I’m trapped again. Even with my medication, even taking the greatest of care, the life-threaten illness can threaten.
I know I write rubbish most of the time on this blog, making heroes out of villains (especially John Haigh and Howard Unruh) and making stupid unfunny jokes for shock value, but it’s the only way I know. If you have it drummed into you that the only way you can avoid death is to avoid a certain species, it’s only natural to examine this species en masse and find faults, and exaggerate those faults and occasionally side with those who brought an end to members of this species.
No, I’ve not dissolved anyone in a bath (technically wrong. It was a barrel) of acid, but I don’t want to, I tend to ignore people than interfere with them, I don’t hate them, I just find wrong in everything they do. And when you have no control over something simple like your own body it’s easier to shut yourself away and close everyone out, especially when you’ve been taught that mixing with other people can bring disease and illness to you that will make you seriously ill and maybe even dead.
(I believe that John and Emily Haigh also loved their only child. I believe they sincerely believed they were protecting him from contamination, but he turned to doing his best to harm and destroy, to cheat and lie and thieve, to get people to trust him and take everything from them, and ultimately kill them, to get what he thought was his own back on a species that he was taught was nothing but harmful to him by their existence. That’s why all the pictures of him taken by newspaper and newsreel photographers show him smiling. That’s why all the letters he wrote from the death cell are upbeat and relentlessly cheerful. No, NOT because he was mentally ill, but, like a certain type of misanthrope, he realised that what he’d been taught about human beings was right, and this made him laugh and shake his head at their ways. That fact that he was facing execution only made him laugh more, as he’d been proven right).
I first got hold of a copy of ‘Haigh; The Mind of a Murderer’ by reporter and author Arthur La Bern back when I was around thirteen, from Stalybridge library. It was the first full-length True Crime book, dedicated to one murderer, that I’d ever read. I went back home and read it in one sitting. I’ve read it again recently, purchasing a copy from the splendid clearing station that is the Abebooks website. And everything came back. Mostly forgotten ideas and acknowledgements that this person is exactly like me. THAT’S why I’ve got time for him, not for what he did, but how he was brought up.
And yet, I am loved. . .

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