Between 1931 and 1972, the French writer Georges Simenon (1903-1989) published 75 novels featuring the celebrated Detective Chief Inspector Maigret. Simenon was incredibly prolific and produced several hundred books, though it is through Maigret that he is best known. There have been numerous films and also two British TV series, starring Michael Gambon and (later) Rowan Atkinson as the master sleuth. The whole Maigret series is available in English in a fairly recent issue from Penguin.
While the nation has been doing various obsessive pastimes during lockdown, like running from Land’s End to John O’Groats without leaving the house, or bingeing on masses of TV boxed sets, I set myself the task of reading the entire Maigret series from 1 to 75. At this moment, I am midway through #74, with a slight sense of sadness that I shall soon reach the end.
I’m sure that the series isn’t intended to be consumed all in one go in less than 6 months. At a conservative estimate, this equates to over 12,000 pages. However, it has been interesting to move through time with the author and his characters in a period of over four decades. Maigret is a large man often seen smoking a pipe. A raincoat and a hat are also part of the image. Simenon was anxious to get away from novels that glorified the criminals, gentlemen thieves and aristocratic murderers, and wanted to portray the decent but difficult role of the police, as they operate between the criminal fraternity on the one hand and the upper class establishment of the judiciary, so Maigret himself comes from rural stock, his father having been an estate manager at a chateau.
In contrast to, say Sherlock Holmes, Maigret relies more on instinct and getting to know his victims and suspects, rather than on brilliant leaps of deduction. As a result, there is a characteristic cycle where at first he is not sure in what direction his enquiries are leading. This makes him appear ill-tempered and taciturn. Later, things start to fall into place, though often he is left weary or saddened by the outcome. He makes it clear that he does not wish to judge the actions of others: that is for the courts.
Although we occasionally encounter Maigret’s first name, Jules, we are not told the given name of his wife, who appears as Madame Maigret throughout. She has extreme patience for all his foibles, cooks devotedly and usually manages to greet him by opening the front door when she hears him on the stairs coming home. I imagine that there has been plenty of feminist analysis of her contributions to Maigret’s life and well-being.
Over the 40 years of action, there are some small changes. There is the occasional mention of technology, like a computer, in the later books. When makes and models of car are mentioned, these probably move with the times. However, most of the collection is in a largely undefined temporal space of mid-twentieth century Paris. Sometimes other parts of France, or even abroad: Belgium (early works – Simenon was born in Belgium), England and the USA. Each book is firmly set in a month of the year and the weather is often described. So too, is the food and drink that Maigret and his colleagues consume at the host of bars and bistros they frequent. In the later books, Maigret is drinking less alcohol, just as well as his levels of consumption are at times alarming.
What’s missing almost entirely from this chronicle of Maigret’s career is World War 2 and the German occupation of much of France. WW2 is hardly mentioned. In one book, the German bombing of a railway station in northern France is a key event, but otherwise you would hardly know. To some extent, this may mirror an awkward period for Simenon himself. Because of his surname, it was thought that he might have Jewish ancestry, but after the war he was in trouble from the other side as he had negotiated some film rights with German studios. He was notionally banned from publishing for five years but seems to have eluded this by moving to North America from 1945-55. He lived mainly in Switzerland after returning to Europe.
To write 75 novels about one character must have required an amazing ability to retain the details from each book. I’m not sure how Simenon remembered all the details about Maigret and his colleagues, so that they maintain a consistent identity through the series. Maybe he had a card index? Maybe just in his head? Nonetheless there are very few inconsistencies that I picked up in reading the series. Occasional details, so that an injury to the right eye later seemed to affect the left, but very little else.
The other element that relates to ageing and cognition is how the output of artists changes over time, and sometimes how this appears to reflect incipient dementia, for example in the case of Iris Murdoch. Simenon was publishing Maigret novels from the age of 28 to almost 70, so you would expect some changes in his writing style and choice of subjects. Some of this appeared to have been reacting to his market. For example, earlier books are more likely to have artisan settings, whereas later ones feature more cases among high society or very rich people. Later books are perhaps more likely to be set in Paris, especially Montmartre, laced with pimps and prostitutes, and one imagines that these were especially popular themes with his readership.
Simenon did publish a few books after the end of Maigret but at a slower rate. What caused him to stop writing Maigret novels, I don’t know. His later years were blighted by the suicide of his daughter in 1978 and surgery for a brain tumour in 1981. Whether the antecedents of either of these events contributed to the end of Maigret, we cannot really tell.
Your name is a sad one,
[Probably?]
Because all you do is cry
And shout…
And cry…
I wish I knew who you were
[Probably?]
But there’s only sadness
And a long dead
Sense of being forgotten.
I used to cry with you
[Probably?]
Til the tears made an ocean
And I drowned
In the salt and pain.
I want to get to know you
[Definitely!]
Or do I want to reme…
Remendar? Mander?
To un-forget!
A memory of helping a patient with dementia whilst volunteering in my local hospital as a prospective medical student – patient details have been changed to preserve confidentiality.
Outside, it’s a warm peachy Thursday evening. Inside the bright incongruent hospital, it is the start of my two hour volunteering shift. I am making my way round the patients and their entourages of drips and catheter bags, trying to make them feel welcome and at home in this alien environment.
Bay three, bed four is where Betty lays. She is a new patient to the ward; I only know her name because it is on the whiteboard above her bed. I smile at her and introduce myself, asking how she is. She tells me she is doing “just fine”. A funny phrase for someone in hospital.
Betty looks at me with twinkly vacant eyes and a bemused crinkly smile and I feel a huge sense of compassion towards this lady, who despite things is so optimistic and happy. I ask if there is anything, I can get her – a sandwich, a drink?
“I’d love a cup of tea.”
I tell Betty I’ll be back in a second with a mug of tea (we can pretend it’s a tea cup) that she takes strong, milk and no sugar. Just how I like mine too. I try my best to make mug of tea that is up to Betty’s standards with the hospital tea bags and bring it back to her like a proud child. A nurse is helping to sit her up, so I leave it on her table and get a smile from Betty in return as I quietly slip away.
Having spoken to all of the patients who wanted to talk and gotten several sandwiches and mugs of tea for them I decide to return to Betty. I want to see how my tea went down. As I near her bed I get another vacant smile and my heart sinks a little as I see a cold mug of tea on her table. I ask her if she’d like me to make her another. Perhaps the nurses took a while, or the doctor came to see her.
“I’d love a cup of tea.”
I nod and head off to make another. I’ve worked out how to make the tea a decent strength, the trick is squeezing the tea bag. Pleased with my work I return to Betty and place the mug of tea in her soft wrinkled hands. She takes a tentative sip and smiles at me. Happy that she is happy I leave to help the health care assistant make some of the now empty beds up as some patients head home.
I made Betty five mugs of tea on that shift. She never drank any of them. Betty has dementia the ward sister tells me; you don’t need to make her any more tea. She frowns ruefully at the cold mugs of tea I hold helplessly in my hands.
But as the last five minutes of my shift approaches, I go to the tea cart and I make a strong mug of tea, milk, no sugar and I take it over to bay three, bed four and I hand it to Betty. Because seeing her vacant eyes twinkle and her crinkly mouth smile was worth a thousand mugs of tea.
The Centre for Dementia is based at the Institute of Mental Health on the University’s Jubilee Campus, and it is one of several mental health research groups based there. The Centre focuses on interdisciplinary research, mainly in psychosocial aspects of dementia, though the group includes colleagues who undertake biological research too. We are proud of the broad range of collaborations that we have both within the University of Nottingham but also externally.
The Centre does not employ staff, who usually have their contracts with the University or the NHS, so it does not carry a large budget. However, it does administer a small annual allowance from the Institute of Mental Health which, in previous years we have used to support such things as patient and public involvement events. Towards the end of the last financial year, we realised that we hadn’t been able to spend our allocation as we might have intended and time was fast running out. If the money wasn’t spent by the end of March, we would simply lose it.
The bright idea that occurred to me was to buy a pile of books and to use them as prizes in a competition. At the same time, we wanted to promote the profile of the Dementia Day to Day website, and to encourage contributions from new authors. Hence, the Grand Blog Competition. At first, we planned to limit the entry to people with connections with the Centre for Dementia, but we soon scrapped that idea, and threw it wide open. We were also able to publicise the contest to cohorts of medical students as one of the online resources for the hastily-developed online (Moodle) module for Health Care of Later Life.
I recruited two additional judges, Dr Kevin Harvey from the School of English (and of course, the editor of Dementia Day to Day), and our erstwhile PhD student Dr Anni Bailey, who is currently working with Independent Age. The rules were circulated as widely as we could manage and a deadline of end of July was set.
Altogether we received about 20 entries. Most were straight prose, though three were poems and one included a photo of a mighty sunflower. We were pleased with the number of medical students who entered, and we had one entry from a person with a diagnosis of dementia. I am sure that competition judges always say this, but we really were impressed by the high standard of the entries. The judges conferred in the second half of August, holidays having imposed a little delay. We managed to agree a means of scoring and then focused on selecting our prize winners. This worked quite smoothly though there are definitely a couple of entries who came very close and left us regretting that we hadn’t more books to distribute. We didn’t rank the prize winners, so there is no official first or second prize. The winners are listed below – look out for these and other entries coming up on Dementia Day to Day!
The prize winners seemed very pleased when they were contacted. We are now working out the best way to distribute the books to the winners. We hadn’t thought of doing certificates for participants but we did have a request for this, so we will be sending them out. We plan to post all the entries on the website as we are most grateful to everyone who took the trouble to contribute. So, look out for them!
Was it worth running the competition? Yes, definitely, we obviously have blogs that would not have been written otherwise, and several of them are brilliant. Will we do it again? To be discussed, I think, the administrative task is not inconsiderable. If someone wants to help, please let me know….
The winners were:
Marianne Scotland: I’d love a cup of tea
Eleri Clarke: A unique kind of grief
Rosemary: Presumptions
Steve Litchfield: Beauty survives gale force winds
Peter Riley: Blue horizons to a grey dawn
Karen Harrison Dening: Advance care planning through the COVID lens
Zarina Karim: Dignity comes first
Tom Dening
28th August 2020
“He has no insight” I hear them say
as they begin to peel my rights away
first it’s my home and then it’s my care
from who I see to what I can wear
I’m not supposed to like kisses,
the Judge says I don’t have capacity,
but deep inside I am yearning with
that same 30 year old tenacity,
“He wouldn’t understand”
“It would only make him distressed”
I hear them whisper to each other
As my Wife’s passing they haven’t confessed
I’m left in a cloud of unknowing,
Confused as to where she has gone
But not to worry I suppose
For I overheard this morning
To this world I “will not be long”
This account of the late stages of her mother’s dementia was published by the French writer Annie Ernaux in 1997 but its first British publication was in 2019. It has been published by the independent publisher, Fitzcarraldo, who publish mainly writings in translation, fiction and non-fiction.
The story of the book is itself poignant. Ernaux’s mother started to develop signs of dementia in about 1982. Her daughter took her to live with her the following year but this did not go well, and so the mother spent her last two years in a long-stay hospital ward. It is this period that comprises most of the book, and it consists of a series of short passages written after individual visits to see her mother in the hospital. It was not originally intended for publication – indeed, Ernaux could not bear to look at these notes for some time after her mother’s death – hence the ten-year lag before the French publication of the book.
It is not a long book, less than 80 pages, but it conveys powerfully the atmosphere of the hospital ward and the fluctuating mental state of Ernaux’s mother. The senses are assailed by strong smells, odd sights, distressing sounds, and the floors are often sticky with urine. Or Ernaux finds faeces in a drawer where she expected there to be chocolate. Ladies are often exposed wearing nappies or else no underwear at all. The possessions that Ernaux brings in for her mother, clothes or personal effects, mysteriously disappear and are never seen again. We should bear in mind that this is a care setting over thirty years ago, so nowadays there might be more emphasis on personalising the care offered. Nevertheless, everything that’s described could be seen in some or other care setting right now.
There are references to earlier times in the lives of both women. Clearly, the mother was not one to waste time on unnecessary displays of fondness, but it’s also clear that they have a very close if ambiguous bond. Much of the time, the changes in her mother’s decline are unbearable to behold. There are instances when the mother will suddenly use stock social phrases that she did in the past. At times there are moments of real connection. But there’s a lot more frustration and desperation. The title of the book was taken from the last sentence in an unfinished letter by the mother to a friend, probably the last thing she wrote. It is obviously apt.
The impact of the mother’s death upon the writer is brilliantly observed. An ordinary visit takes place on 6th April. On 7th April, she is dead, and everything is different. Except things are the same, like the sprig of forsythia that Ernaux brought in the day before and placed in a jar of water. It often happens that someone has a life-limiting condition, like severe dementia, and yet the actual day that they die comes as a complete surprise. Its timing seems arbitrary. It’s hard to believe that, for example, there’s nobody to go and visit any more. This book gives a great account of that shock and the rending feelings that accompany it. A tour de force.
I Remain in Darkness, by Annie Ernaux. Published by Fitzcarraldo, London, 2019.
ISBN 978-1-910695-97-5
Tom Dening
January 2020
Nicci Gerrard is a well-known journalist, author and campaigner. Her book about dementia is an elegy for late father, who had dementia in the last years of his life. She has researched it thoroughly, speaking to many people living with dementia and their families as well as to a range of clinicians and dementia researchers. As well as this, she draws on literature and art.
John Gerrard developed dementia gradually so that it was impossible to say when its onset was, especially as he was somewhat absent minded to start with (though well connected with and knowledgeable about nature). His state declined rapidly following a hospital admission which for various reasons was extended to five weeks. He was discharged a shadow of the person who had been admitted. The shock of this change led his daughter to launch John’s Campaign, which advocates for family carers to have the right to be with their loved ones in hospital and not to be restricted to brief visiting hours.
The book follows the journey of dementia through its chapters, especially once the author starts to discuss the process and impact of diagnosis. Thus we move from the general business of ageing through such matters as adapting to the diagnosis, how dementia affects carers, the importance of home, hospitals and the end of life. There are many insights both from Nicci Gerrard’s own experience and from the people she speaks to. One chapter, for instance, is about the issue of shame – how people, both those with the condition and those around them, often have a period of heightened and potentially painful self-consciousness, a feeling of being at risk of being exposed. There is a lot of embarrassment in the early stage of dementia, it appears.
Nicci Gerrard takes a stance between undue pessimism about the unrelenting course of dementia on the one hand and facile acceptance of living well with dementia on the other. She describes the experiences that she meets head on. This is fairly uncompromising material and challenges the reader to think about what dementia is about and how it challenges the integrity of a person’s nature.
By the time of death, however, matters are more peaceful. Following death, there are a variety of ghosts of the departed person that one can call to mind, seeing them at different stages in their life. This ability to move about in time gives a longer perspective of the person’s life that acts to promote restitution and to put the years of dementia into context, in a way that was perhaps impossible during the heat and dust of caring for them. So what does dementia teach us about love? I think that the book maybe leaves this question open, though it addresses well what bereavement teaches us.
What Dementia Teaches Us about Love by Nicci Gerrard, published by Allen Lane, 2019.
The somebody is Wendy Mitchell as she was before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 58. She was a highly active, well-organised NHS manager with a responsible job, able to deal with nursing rotas for a hospital in her head. The dementia first declared itself with a stroke-like episode that came out of nowhere. Over time after this, she became aware of fluctuations in her ability and a sense of fog in her mind. Remaining at work required being super-organised to stay in front of her tasks though, in the end, even she was unable to keep up.
By the time she received a diagnosis, Wendy Mitchell was not surprised though even so it had a big impact. She documents various things that she had enjoyed that came to an end – running, baking and driving, for instance. However, her organisational talents have helped her to remain independent. This may appear effortless ('you haven’t changed’, people frequently say to her) but actually it is at the cost of a big effort. For example, to go on a train journey requires attention to every detail of the route, including obtaining pictures of landmarks that she will pass between arriving at the station and her eventual destination. She needs to set alarms on her iPad so she doesn’t leave her suitcase on the train. She also talks eloquently about how she is prone to paralysing anxiety, which of course makes her cognition worse, and how she has learned to deal with it. Mainly this is a matter of letting it pass, but also of seizing the moment when she is feeling capable.
It behoves us as health professionals to bear in mind what a small part we play in the course of someone’s life with dementia. Most of it is spent doing ordinary things, time with family and friends, adjusting to small changes as they happen. This book reflects that – there is not too much mention of contact with the NHS. And what there is salutary. There is little on offer beyond the diagnosis, and the NHS as her employers were a great disappointment as the only option on offer appeared to be health retirement with no discussion of adaptations that could have been made to supprt her at work.
The Wendy Mitchell she used to know had been quite a private person. She would listen to others’ troubles but rarely venture her own. After dementia, this changed as she made the decision to go for everything that was offered. This included participating in research, speaking at conferences, and in the end writing a best-selling book. She reflects on how dementia made this possible.
Finally, the book is a declaration of love for her two daughters. She is determined that they will not be her carers. She has been attentive to them all their lives and she continues to be so, though she also has to accept that she needs their support too. The front cover shows them as little girls on Blackpool beach. One can imagine Wendy insisting on the picture being included.
Somebody I Used to Know by Wendy Mitchell. Published by Bloomsbury, 2018.
I have just started my second year of the PhD in dementia care, and as attendee of the Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) meetings at the IMH, I have frequently met with people with dementia and their family carers and talked with them about their caring experience. Although different for everyone, the experience of dementia seems, to some extent, to be similarly shared by the agents in care, especially in regard to the challenges that the condition poses to their relationship within the family. I talked to a family carer whose story was so emotionally charged that it inspired the poem below. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the carers and people with dementia who are involved in the PPI group at the IMH, and whose personal accounts constantly enrich our understanding of dementia care.
The following poem was inspired by the narratives of a spouse of a person with dementia.
Being one self, being yourself, being me!
A difficult time is when your image in the mirror is to be matched with your real self. Is this you at the mirror? Is it your imaginative self? A matter of image that I expect you to own? Or maybe it is just you looking the way you would like me to see you?
A difficult time is when all these questions have no meaning, when the image in the mirror is a person you do not know.
A difficult time for me is when you look in the mirror and you see a stranger, a person you blush for, to whom you feel attracted to. You begin to ask me when you can meet this person again, you are falling in love and you share this feeling with me.
A difficult time is when I see you are happily in love with someone else, an image in the mirror perhaps, yet you do not feel the same for me anymore.
A beautiful time is when you still share your emotions with me, no matter towards whom. We are still together.
A difficult time is yet to come.
This novel, by Bernard MacLaverty, follows a retired couple through their weekend trip to Amsterdam. The novel is not specifically about dementia but, as Gerry the husband has some difficulty with his memory, it’s not completely out of our scope on this blogsite either. On the surface, not much happens during this long weekend. They arrive, they visit the Rijksmuseum and the Anne Frank house, their flight back is delayed by snow falling at Schiphol airport. (Reminds me of being stranded there by fog many years ago…)
Like the author of the book, Gerry and Stella are originally from Ulster but now live in Glasgow. He was an architect of modernist buildings that are now falling out of favour, and she was an English teacher. Stella was from a poor rural background and pulled herself up with the aid of the travelling library. Both are from Catholic backgrounds, his faith long lapsed, hers strong and tending towards piety.
As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that Gerry has a serious problem with alcohol. He is surreptitious in his behaviour, concealing half bottles of spirits and disposing of them in corridors in the hotel. He becomes anxious if he is unable to see where the next drink is coming from. At times, he is obviously intoxicated. It may well be the alcohol that contributes most to his memory problems but who knows if he is on the road to dementia. His drinking is of great irritation to Stella, who for her part drinks wine only by the half glass. Her reason for coming to Amsterdam is to explore the possibility of leaving Gerry to join a religious order but she is disappointed to find out that the community she has chosen is no longer a religious one and besides she is now too old to join it anyway.
But the core of the story lies back in the Belfast of the Troubles, when during her pregnancy Stella was shot in the stomach and almost died. Whilst losing consciousness on the pavement, she pledges her life to God if her baby is allowed to survive. It is evident that this incident (scarcely surprisingly) has affected her greatly and she still experiences flashbacks that would be consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It isn’t clear if the impact of the shooting is a factor in Gerry’s slide into alcoholism, but it is quite plausible that it is.
Midwinter Break is beautifully written. It observes the interchanges between the ageing couple convincingly and also conveys the grey and chilly atmosphere of Amsterdam in winter. The tension between past and present is maintained throughout. Especially poignant is Stella’s realisation that her opportunity to serve God in the way she had planned cannot happen. The resolution of all the threads is probably cautiously optimistic but not mawkish or sentimental.
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Midwinter Break by Bernard MacLaverty. Published by Vintage, 2017, ISBN 9781911214212
Cover image courtesy of Penguin Books
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