Julia Donaldson always knew her eldest child, Hamish, was different. His
intensely creative imagination that made her proud when he was a toddler
evolved into troubling behaviour as a teenager and psychiatric illness as a
young man. On November 30, 2003, Hamish took his own life. He was 25.
Donaldson, the bestselling author of the Gruffalo, has never spoken until now
about the tragedy that beset her family. We meet in her home in Bearsden,
Glasgow, less than a week after what would have been Hamish's 30th birthday.
A picture on the mantelpiece shows a handsome, blond man with a direct gaze.
The Gruffalo has sold 3.5m copies around the world, making Donaldson Britain's
favourite living children's author. She has four books in the Booktrust top
50, three more than JK Rowling. Sometimes, she says, she feels like the
mouse in her most famous picture book: “The mouse makes up the Gruffalo and
then the Gruffalo takes on a life of its own and the mouse is a bit
stunned,” she says. “I feel like that.”
Donaldson's achievements, however, are tainted by the years of trying to help
her troubled son, who exhibited signs of unusual behaviour early. “He had
two imaginary friends, Sammy and Boss. We had a wardrobe with a big mirror
in the door and that became his ‘lift'.
“I went along with this and made some buttons for it. He would get in and
press the buttons and then I would open the door and out would come Sammy or
Boss or Lola the cat. Sometimes a whole day would go by with him being
somebody else.”
These play sessions would later inspire Donaldson's Princess Mirror-belle
books, in which the central character's alter ego steps out of a mirror. But
looking back at diaries she kept, she now realises things were not right. “I
do think Hamish was born just wired up differently from other children.”
Psychiatric illnesses that manifest at a young age are often hard to treat.
But the lack of good child and adolescent psychiatric care and the struggle
to get the authorities to take an interest in Hamish's plight meant a
situation that was always going to be painful took on a Kafkaesque quality.
“Even as a baby he was so strong-willed,” she says. “Every nappy change was a
nightmare. At toddler or playgroup I was forever being summoned in. But we
were terribly proud of him. He had this fantastic imagination. Even the
bucking on the nappy table was impressive. I'd look at these other little
limp babies with scorn.”
Hamish was crawling at four months and at the age of three he was asking
searching questions about death. “He was a bright boy, but he could never
see the consequences of his own actions,” says Donaldson. In the early
1980s, when attention deficit hyperactivity disorder was practically unheard
of, there was little support for sufferers or their families.
“People just thought we were hopeless parents,” she says. The birth of her
second son, Alastair, whose nature is completely different, helped reassure
her. But the problems that Hamish faced grew with him.
By the time Hamish reached secondary school, his parents had moved from
Bristol to Scotland where the educational policy of the day meant that
children could easily be excluded from school without any alternative
provision. “He was always being excluded,” says Donaldson.
“Most children learn from experience, but Hamish wouldn't. He didn't ever do
anything criminally bad, but on one occasion he caused some disruption in a
video shop. I got a letter from the Children's Panel saying they might have
to have Hamish supervised by a social worker. The letter was meant to be a
threat, but I remember phoning and saying: ‘Please do'.”
Help, when it came, was patchy. Donaldson praises the Prince's Trust, which
took Hamish on two courses, but what strikes you listening to her is the
relentlessness of the struggle - to manage and care for him, to find help
and to get anybody in authority to listen.
“It was exhausting,” she says. At the age of 14, Hamish was too disruptive to
stay at home. Her other sons, Alistair and Jerry, were beginning to suffer
and Donaldson and husband Malcolm, a consultant at Yorkhill Children's
Hospital, faced difficult choices. “He was a strapping teenage boy,” says
Donaldson. “He wouldn't hit me, but he might push me and I could see
something dangerous could happen.”
Hamish moved to an assessment centre during the week and returned home for
weekends. Donaldson and her husband would visit twice a week.
“We saw him more than you would a child in boarding school,” she says. “But it
was a terribly wounding thing for Hamish. I don't think he ever quite got
over this idea of being rejected.”
Around the time he was 16, he had his first psychotic episode. “That was
awful, but in another sense it was a relief because at last people could see
there was something wrong,” she says. “It was a very severe episode. His
speech was terribly disjointed and he had all these weird gestures. He had
every delusion imaginable.”
The battles to get Hamish's condition properly treated continued. “They kept
just assuming it was drugs,” she says. “Later on Hamish did take drugs, but
that wasn't the case then. I'd have been delighted if I thought it was
drug-induced. I just wanted the truth.”
She is nevertheless in favour of the home secretary's decision to reclassify
cannabis. “I am in favour of the B-grade reclassification for cannabis,” she
says. “I'm very against drugs and I'm against hash. I'm not trying to say
that drugs didn't play any part in Hamish's illness. Later on Hamish had
much too much hash and it was horribly demotivating, apart from anything
else. I think it did affect him in the long term. But it was not cannabis
that caused Hamish's illness.”
At one point Hamish was sleeping on a friend's floor. When he awoke, the
friend had died of a heroin overdose and Hamish tried to resuscitate him.
“Some terrible things did happen,” she says. “He did fall in with some very
bad company.”
It wasn't until her son had a third psychotic episode in hospital that
Donaldson's views were taken seriously. Hamish was eventually diagnosed as
having a schizo-affective disorder, a psychotic illness that is coupled with
mood imbalance.
“I don't want to suggest that he never got help or that everyone who saw him
was uncaring,” says Donaldson. “But nobody knew what to do with Hamish. He
was always being excluded. He somehow wound people up in such a way that
they just wanted rid of him.”
Donaldson believes that Hamish's grim experiences in psychiatric hospitals
were exacerbated by an absence of any form of useful recreation. Recently
she became patron of Artlink Central, a charity that employs artists to work
with people suffering from illness or disability. Later this month, for
example, a group of learning disabled people will perform work they have
produced with the Scottish Ensemble and the composer Paul Rissmann.
The charity has helped children excluded from school, people with mental
health problems, autistic teenagers and women prisoners. “Hamish might have
benefited from that sort of work at so many different stages in his life,”
she says.
But Hamish never had the opportunity. Eventually, after periods in the
community, the local psychiatric hospital and treatment centres, one doctor
suggested he would be better off in Carstairs, the state hospital in
Lanarkshire.
“I was horrified,” says Donaldson. “But the way they painted it was as a
positive place. I thought he could try it and if it didn't work out, he
could go elsewhere, but it turned out not to be like that at all.” The only
good thing about Carstairs, according to Donaldson, was that everybody was
searched and so no illegal drugs got onto the wards. “I don't know why other
hospitals can't be more like that,” she says.
But the bureaucracy meant that many of the treatments they had been led to
believe he would be eligible for were not available to him. “He never got
any of the benefits,” she says. “Almost from the moment he got there we were
campaigning to get him out.”
In 2003, Hamish's maternal grandmother died at the age of 85. Then, in early
November, a close relative committed suicide. Around the same time Hamish
had been discharged from Gartnavel Hospital, Donaldson believes prematurely
and without adequate supervision. Drunk and psychotic, he hit his father.
The hospital refused to have him back and the police became involved. The
charge was dropped, but when Hamish learnt about his relative's death, he
was in Greenock prison.
On the day of his death, about a week after he came out of prison, Hamish had
a quarrel with his girlfriend. He had also taken cocaine. “I don't know
exactly what happened on the last day,” says Donaldson, “but he walked onto
the railway line and stood with his back to the train.”
Even in death, things were handled badly. The Transport Police called at the
house at 1am while Donaldson and her husband were sleeping. When their
youngest son Jerry, then 16, opened the door, instead of asking for his
parents, the police told him what had happened.
“Jerry ran upstairs and was sick,” said Donaldson. “I couldn't believe that
people whose job it is to break bad news to families could do that.”
The decade of Hamish's decline coincided with the decade of Donaldson's
literary achievement. The publication of A Squash and a Squeeze with Axel
Scheffler, in 1993, saw her picture books really take off. The arrival of
The Gruffalo in 1999 propelled her into a different league.
How did she manage to keep her life and her family together? “Malcolm and I
have a very strong relationship,” she says. “The books gave me huge joy. I
could compartmentalise.”
The bad times were interspersed with good ones. “I don't want to paint Hamish
as a monster,” she says. “He had a lovely, caring side and in Carstairs
several patients' mothers came and said how kind he had been to their sons.
Hamish was very loyal and did know that we loved him despite everything.
“We were grieving throughout Hamish's life. I didn't think he would take his
life but in some ways I think he was very brave. I wonder if a part of him
knew that he would be releasing us. Still, if I could have him back and give
him and hug I would.”
For more information on the work of Artlink Central, see www.artlinkcentral.org
This is a moving, in depth, enlightening interview. Thanks for your honesty and insight, Julia
Amanda, Aix-en-Provence,