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I was recently asked to write a short blog, for an event at which I would be performing, to introduce myself and my poetry. I wrote (now slightly edited): I don't remember when I started making poetry. Possibly before I could write. I knew "proper poems" didn't have to rhyme, but somehow mine always did. The rhythmic brain game soothed me. Poetry was a distraction from my troubled thoughts and chaotic life. Later, when those became madness, it was a lifeline. If I could write four lines a day, I told myself, I must be real. When I wrote, the voices would quiet for a while to let the words emerge. Touching pen to journal-page was a physical act in a world to which I was no longer tethered. The poems didn't rhyme anymore; they were disturbing and surreal. A mirror to my mind. They helped to bring me back – or forward. Now I make poems about that time - mostly in rhyme; a safe lens through which to explore my madness, and a tool for educating others. It makes something fun out of what was once unbearable, and still soothes me. Having begun, I feel drawn to further explore my poetic history. It is a testimony to the power of art to heal, challenge, and create change, internally and externally.  I have dabbled in various forms of art and creative writing, but poetry was my first love. Apart from the little I acquired at school, I had no formal literary education, but I always “knew what I liked”. As a child I devoured verse that entertained me, and scanned well. If the rhythm was off, my small, pedantic brain would ruthlessly reject it. When I was six (already a prolific reader) my father bought me Robert Louis Stephenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. The book became an immediate favourite and when, just two years later, my dad was ravaged by cancer and quickly died, it was promoted to a symbol of his love. (I didn’t realise until much later that the poems were distinctly problematic, promoting, among other things, white British supremacy and damaging stereotypes of "good and bad children".)  Inspired, I practiced writing my own verses, some of which were published in our village magazine, all long-forgotten now. The day my father found out he was going to die, he wrote two poems of his own, both for me, as expressions of his love. Perhaps it was this profound example of how poetry could express those truths for which there were no ordinary words that inspired me to pour my anguish onto the page twenty years later, when madness gained its strangle-hold on me. When I began to emerge from that madness, poetry was a tool that lanced the boil of accumulated rage and turmoil I had become. The four lines I'd somehow promised my distant sane self I would write each day, no matter how meaningless, came easily, my output usually far exceeding that modest number as it bypassed my conscious mind to pour forth from my pen. For example:  …Evil is tapping on the vestry door cajoling wingless bats to play in streets where pavements shiver and front doors back away with looks of terror in reds and whites and blues and puces… …The blackness threatens. Colours shriek their warnings. The evil rapist chuckles. Birds fall, lifeless, from the sky. The angels weep. The survivors weep. Shafts penetrate. The sighted are saved by the tears of the sighted. The blind march on. (From Rage, the Rapist March 1991) Sometimes there was rhyme; familiar, and more ordered, perhaps originating from a place closer to the surface of my subconscious well of words:  Where barren branches softly tapped with fingers, twig-like, made of bone and bestial spirit, soundly trapped, attempted not a bellow, just a moan, now fists of iron batter til they bleed hot molten metal blood that scalds and scars and spirit howls and screams her raging need to slash pretense with swords of splintered glass… (from Rebirth, March 1991) Over months, I filled multiple journals with my daily outpourings, reading them back to myself aloud, to hear what was going on in the deepest parts of me. This had a restorative effect, very gradually returning me to some level of consensus reality in which I was eventually able to function again among the “normal folk”. It took some years following this crisis to allow my poetic soul a voice again, and my return to verse, while still autobiographical, was playful and light-hearted. I wrote about my resitance to exercise: I don’t want to go to the gym. My thighs may be flabby and fat, but we set too much store by the toned and the trim. I don’t want to encourage all that… (from Resistance, 2009) And a “sorry-not-sorry” apology to my feminist sensibilities for my inadequacies as a car-owner: I was stood in Tesco’s car park with my head under the bonnet looking for a part that had an oil-can's picture on it. I couldn’t find one anywhere – neither word nor can – so I wriggled out and glanced about for a helpful-looking man… (from Why use a Manual when you can use a Man 2009) A close friend died and I wrote long prose-poems to express my grief. But it took further years to properly return to poetry as a catharsis, a healing salve - and something new.  After the first Covid 19 lockdown, in my professional capacity (Founder and CEO of Hope in the Heart CIC), I attended an online training day entitled “An Introduction to Open Dialogue”. I knew a little about this revolutionary treatment for extreme emotional states diagnosed as psychosis, and was keen to learn more. I did not expect an intense personal reaction that would change the course of my emotional and creative life. Hearing about teams of practitioners who respond immediately and compassionately to an individual in crisis, placing that person at the centre of a loving and respectful exploration into what they need in order to recover, and involving those the person loves in the entire process, cracked me open. This contrast to the casual, dehumanising cruelty I had experienced three decades earlier was stark, and memories I had locked away came pouring out. I spent the next two days stomping for miles in the rain, ranting internally, then sobbing as grief replaced the anger. On the third day a poem emerged, to the psychiatrist who dismissed me then, and those who are still dismissing people like me to this day: You said I was psychotic, and you dosed me up with meds. What was happening in my head wasn’t there in normal heads. You said that hearing voices meant I clearly wasn’t sane and the things I saw were products of a sick, disordered brain. I wish it had occurred to you, instead of calling lunacy, to ask what I experienced; embrace the opportunity to gaze across the border and begin to hear the language of the fascinating territory that lay beyond my anguish… (from Ask Us: To a long-ago psychiatrist, and some current ones too. January 2021) This poem was cathartic in a new way. It allowed me to offload a corrosive hurt that I had carried for three decades; to articulately express the wrongness of how I had been treated, and the way I could, and should, have been supported; the way others should be supported now. It equipped me with a resource I knew I could use to affect change. It liberated and transformed a part of me that had been shackled and stuck. I read the poem to a maverick psychiatrist who had become a friend, and she wept as she told me “You’ve got to get this out there”. I felt intensely vulnerable, but I arranged for an associate to video me reading the poem, uploaded the film to YouTube and shared the link with trusted others in the radical mental health community. They responded just as positively as my psychiatrist friend, and my confidence grew.  This was the first, and most important, of an ongoing collection of poems about my mental health experiences that I now use to challenge mainstream services; psychiatry in particular. Each time I speak to a group of professionals about my history, peppering my account with poetry that usually hits its mark, I feel a little more heard, a little more healed, a little more restored and reconciled. Fellow psychiatric survivors relate to my words, and their encouragement further motivates me. Soon after personally experiencing the restorative power of framing a vital message within a piece of art, it occurred to me that this might also prove beneficial to others. Messages from the HeART was born soon after; a Hope in the Heart project developed alongside my colleague Sophie Coxon, which invites people with lived experience of all kinds to create art with a message for someone (or multiple someones) in power, and organises exhibitions and performance events for power-holders to attend, and receive the messages; a potent communication for artists and receivers alike. Inspired, like many others, by this project, I have created visual art to accompany my poems; paintings, drawings and 3D pieces, which feature in the exhibitions, and contribute to my ongoing healing. Since turning sixty in 2020, I have unexpectedly become a "public facing" poet, artist, exhibition organiser and "gentle activist", and learned to make short videos combining poetry and illustration.  I have also discovered zines; informal publications whose creation transports me back in time to the joy of childhood making. I have embedded poems within the pages of some of these, finding yet another level of catharsis. The messy, glorious imperfection of creating zines amplifies that potential to make something fun out of the formerly unbearable. Zines like those in the Madzines collection can challenge the mainstream, and create connections with others who relate to their content. Poetry will always be a special medium for me. Its evolution throughout my life, and its capacity to immerse and captivate, challenge, transport and transcend, in fusion with other artforms, has elevated it to ever-new dimensions. It still soothes me. But it gives me so much more besides.
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 2024: Hiroshima, Japan At 8.15 each morning in Hiroshima Peace Park a bell rings to commemorate the atmomic bombing that took place here, at the same hour, on the sixth of August 1945. It’s 8am and I’m walking through the park to the tree-covered benches opposite the A-bomb dome to listen for the bell. It’s my fourth visit to Hiroshima, and this time I’m here with my husband Alan and three colleagues from the UK, Hel Spandler, Professor of Mad Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and lead on the Madzines Research Project with which I have collaborated for the past 18 months, Jill Anderson, also of UCLan and Madzines, and wearer of many hats besides, and Danny Taggart, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology at the University of Essex and lead on the Truth Project. We four share an interest in restorative approaches to harm in the treatment of mental health and trauma, and we’re here because we hope there’s much that we can learn from the devastation and reconstruction of Hiroshima. Last night at dinner Jill suggested “Why don’t we all walk through the peace park together in the morning and listen to the bell?”  We mostly stroll in slience, contemplating our unusual mission and surroundings. I am awe-struck by the life force of this place that is so deeply associated with death. There’s an extraordinary vitality in the green of the grass, the vivid hues of flowers, the thick foliage of trees made lush by the humidity that steams the air. But it’s not just climate that contributes to this vibrancy. It’s the park’s surprising contrast to the monochromatic horror of those images, ghastly and iconic, that populate my generation's collective psyche when we think about this place.  As young peace activists during the Cold War, my friends and I all had the same A2 poster on our walls, depicting the debris-strewn wasteland that was this area in 1945. Taken in the aftermath of the bombing, the image showed the remains of just one building amid the rubble; an eerie, skeletal, strangely beautiful structure that, just days before, had been an exhibition and retail centre, and would become known as the A-Bomb Dome; the hallowed memorial that stands behind me now. Across the bottom of the poster loomed the demand “NO MORE HIROSHIMAS”. My friends and I were motivated by that image, and those words. We lived in Reading, close to London, closer still to the village where I’d grown up, and home to a sizeable community of radical groups and campaigners. We were situated in the “nuclear triangle”, uncomfortably near Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) Aldermaston, site of the research and production of nuclear weapons, Royal Ordinance Factory (ROF) Burghfield, where nuclear warheads were and still are assembled, and USAF Greenham Common, the US air base that was home to 96 American cruise missiles. Many locals were concerned not only about the roles of these establishments in a potential nuclear conflict, but also the health risks of living so close to three sites containing highly radioactive materials. The location of the Strike Command Headquarters in nearby High Wycombe, which controlled all the United Kingdom's front-line aircraft world-wide, was also a concern, as it seemed a likely target should a nuclear attack on the UK take place.  After the bombing in Hiroshima, scientists said nothing would grow for 75 years. But within months, the bright red oleander flower sprung forth across the rubble. Blackened tree stumps that had appeared dead began to sprout new leaves; beacons of hope for desperate survivors. Today, as the eightieth anniversary approaches, the established trees and gardens that have thrived for decades demonstrate nature’s triumph over humankind’s brutality. Birdsong serenades the few who walk the paths this summer morning, alone, in pairs or small groups, the early hour not yet ushering in the throngs that will arrive by midday; pilgrims of peace or curiosity. We four sit on benches beneath a wooden structure covered by abundant foliage; protection from the sun, whose fierce rays burn even this early in the day. A nearby American-accented voice observes “Looks like another scorcher”. A second responds “Sure does”. My back is to the dome, but I am very much aware of its proximity. It is 8.14. On That Day, I’m told, the sun was bright and people went about their business, mothers pegging washing on the line with babies tethered to their backs, older children hurrying to school, mobilised youth training with bamboo spears. The B29 plane, bizarrely named “Little Boy”, had already flown over the busy homes and businesses, toting its terrible cargo. The all-clear siren had sounded, indicating safety. At 8.15 a blinding light, a ball of fire unlike anything the citizens below had ever seen, exploded in the sky.  The bell rings; an incongruously cheerful tune that resounds around the park. I close my eyes for a long moment. When I open them, Hel is still there next to me. The trees and gardens, buildings, statues and paths remain the same. The river, one of seven flowing through the city to the Seto Inland Sea, laps quietly, keeping its terrible history to itself. Survivors of the blast remember burned and bloated bodies floating in the water a short distance away. (No-one survived this close to the hypocentre.) Injured people jumped in to escape the fires and searing heat, but the water was boiling and they died in their thousands.  A large black crow, perched on the circular top of a metal rubbish bin, is pulling at a plastic bag that’s sticking out. It raises its head and lets out a loud “caw”. Two more appear, and land on tree branches nearby. On That Day no birds remained. No trees or pathways stayed intact. In the time it has just taken for me to close my eyes and open them again, this landscape was destroyed, all life within a two-kilometre radius liquidated. The busy people, adults and babies, children and youth, simply disappeared. I feel gratitude that I’m alive. Grief at both the brutality and fragility that come with being human. And I feel a profound resonance with the experience of devastation and rebuilding that defines Hiroshima. I too have suffered a sudden, catastrophic end to everything I knew and held dear; a slow, painstaking journey to a new “after” that could never replicate the simpler “before”. While it may seem an incongruous comparison, the ravaging that comes with mental health catastrophe is also a hell that devastates. In the testimony of those A-bomb survivors (Hibakusha) who moved forward to rebuild their lives and city, and in the gradual journey of a place and members of its community through chaos, confusion and shame to restoration, transformation, and the resolute pursuit of peace, I see hope, and a way forward for survivors of all kinds – including me. For individuals whose internal landscapes have been blasted to oblivion, leaving only terror, psychic rubble, turmoil and hopelessness, the lessons of Hiroshima can offer a route out of despair, towards reconciliation and new beginnings.
The first time I passed through this unique city, thirteen years ago, as a tourist on my way to somewhere else, it changed my life in half a day, inspiring me to start an NGO (Hope in the Heart CIC) and develop a model of recovery that has since helped me and countless others, on several continents, to find healing, purpose and connection. I came here that first time expecting monochrome hostility. Instead I found a radiant, if complex, community that emanated welcome and exuded peace. Now, the chimes still ringing in my ears, I find myself picturing a close wartime neighbourhood, its members going about their morning tasks, greeting each other with a friendly “Konichiwa” and a respectful bow, with no idea that their lives will end, and history be made, in the next few moments. I am thinking also of the people who survived, a little further from “Ground Zero”, some of whom I have come to know, whose lives exploded along with the bomb, and could never be the same again. I realise anew how much my own recovery has been inspired by their example. What happened here was madness on a scale never before imagined. Its impact reverberated across the world, and is reverberating still. While the personal madness I experienced affected only me and my immediate community of beloved souls, multiple individuals and those who love them are experiening similar devastation every day; a global crisis with its own reverberating impact, desperately in need of a role model for resilience and recovery. My madness may seem small compared to the insanity that spawned the A-bomb, but both were cataclysmic in their own way. Each left an unrecognisable, hellish landscape where peace and hope could find no resting place. Until eventually, against all odds, they did.   In October 2012 I visited Hiroshima for the second time. I had been so affected by the city and its peace community when passing through the previous year that I'd felt compelled to return and learn more. It was these initial visits that inspired me to create Hope in the Heart, and share the lessons of Hiroshima with survivors of adversity in the UK and around the world. I stayed at the World Friendship Centre, a not-for-profit peace organization founded in 1965 by American Quaker Barbara Reynolds, “Where people from many nations can meet, share their experiences and reflect on peace”. The WFC motto is “to foster peace, one friend at a time.” Volunteers and staff are dedicated to providing a place to share the stories of Hibakusha (Atomic bomb survivors), unique tours of the Peace Memorial Park, and tailored experiences for visitors interested in the history of Hiroshima. It was here that I first met Soh Horie. The WFC’s then-director Michiko Yamane, who has since become a friend, accompanied me to meet Soh-san, intending to interpret for him. However, he had been practicing at the WFC’s regular English Conversation class, and I had the honour of being the first visitor to hear him give his testimony in my language.
A quiet, thoughtful man, with sparkling eyes, a ready smile and a deep, tangible intelligence, Soh-san greeted me warmly, apologising for his poor English. I assured him that, as my Japanese consisted of about five words, I had nothing but admiration for his bilingual skills.  Despite being somewhat technically challenged, I had brought an iPad to record Soh’s story, some of which, along with a written version of his testimony, you can see here. After showing me a photo of the lantern ceremony that takes place every August 6th, Soh-san asked “Do you remember what happened when you were five years old?” I responded that I had some vague memories, but nothing very clear. In fact, my most prominent recollection from that age is of standing in my family's garden talking to a neighbour over the fence while my mother gave birth to my brother inside the house, telling her “Mummy’s having a baby in the living room”. Soh-san’s memories are very different. He went on to describe how he had lived with his family, three kilometres from the hypercentre, on August 6th 1945; the day the US Airforce dropped the atomic bomb on their home city.  Soh-san recounted how he and his elder sister, aged 15, were walking along a hillside road, when suddenly a strong light flashed, followed by an overwhelming blast of wind. His sister covered his small body with hers, and they lay flat for a while and then found shelter. They managed to get home, where they discovered all the windows and sliding doors had been blown off by the blast, the tatami matting lifted from the floor. Before long, many badly burned people came to their house seeking shelter. Soh's mother dressed their wounds with bandages made from children's kimonos.  Illustration from the book "I will never Forget that Day" by Kiyomi Kohno, 14 when the bomb fell As his home filled with seriously injured people, Soh-san played outside. Suddenly "black rain" began to fall, heavy with radioactive particles. Soh-san hurried home, and saw his father's underwear among the laundry hanging out to dry. It was stained black. His father had been in his office close to the epicentre when the bomb exploded. He died from the effects of radiation six days later. The blackened underwear was eventually donated to the the Peace Memorial Museum. Later that Day, and in the days that followed, dead bodies near their house were cremated in the playground of the nearby Elementary School. Soh-san remembers the revolting smell. Now, annually, on the evening of August 6, a memorial ceremony for those cremated there is held in the playground. Soh-san attends it every year. Many more members of Soh-san's family, and Soh himself, have suffered the consequences of radiation exposure, including cancers, in the intervening years. Meanwhile, Soh-san has devoted his life to the pursuit of peace as part of the extraordinary Hiroshima Peace Culture community, and the wider global campaign for an end to nuclear weapons.  When I returned to England following that second visit I told my husand Alan about Soh-san’s experience. Twenty years my senior, and just a few months older than Soh-san, Alan has his own vivid memories of being five years old during World War Two, on a different continent, in what was then an “enemy nation”. Alan lived in North London during the Blitz. He told me about the war planes and doodlebugs he and his small friends watched as they flew overhead, the German prisoners of war who lived in his community. The scarcity and rationing of food, the children's gas masks, made to look like Mickey Mouse so they wouldn’t be too scary. When Alan first met his new baby brother Arthur, the tiny infant lay in an adapted cot, like an oversized gas mask. Their older brother Brian was evacuated to the countryside for safety, but Alan stayed at home. I was amazed by the clarity of Alan’s memories – that same clarity I’d seen when listening to the Hibakusha – and fascinated by the stories I had not previously heard him tell.  In 2019, as a collaboration with the wonderful Oleander Inititiatve and Peace Culture Village, I went back to Hiroshima with a group of UK educators I had recruited to attend an Oleander peace education programme. I was delighted to meet Soh-san again as part of the schedule. He was more practiced at giving his testimony in English now, and used a power point presentation to share it with the group. He still began “Do you remember what happened when you were five years old?” Later I told him “My husband remembers being five in London during the Blitz. He remembers playing on bomb sites and watching German planes fly overhead.” Soh-san replied “I would like to meet your husband some day”.  This summer – five years on - I organised for a group of valued work associates to accompany me to Hiroshima for another Oleander programme. This time Alan came too. My colleague Ray Matsumiya, who heads the Oleander Initiative, arranged for Soh-san to give his testimony to the group, at the World Friendship Centre, and for there to be time for Alan to respond with his own wartime story. Alan and I prepared a power point, and it felt deeply meaningful to introduce him to Soh-san on the first day of the programme. As always, our group was shocked and moved by Soh-san’s testimony, which began with the familiar question “Do you remember what happened when you were five years old?”. When he had finished speaking, Alan joined him at the front of the room, and told him “When I was five years old I lived in Edmonton, in London, one of the first places to be bombed during what would become known as The Blitz”.
Soh-san, and the group, listened attentively as Alan described his experience, showing slides, as Soh-san had just done, of his home city, his family, the devastation wrought by war. Two little boys from very different cultures had lived extremely different lives, each innocent and unaware of history playing out around them. Each had survived a world war that claimed too many victims on both sides. But Alan’s experience of survival had been very different to Soh’s. The effects of conventional warfare on London were extreme, and cataclysmic. It remained etched upon Alan’s memory forever after. But, unlike Soh, he doesn’t recall his childhood experience as traumatic. Although lasting trauma and memories of intolerable loss and horror plagued numerous British citizens for the remainder of their lives, within the turmoil all around him, five-year-old Alan remained sheltered; protected, and safe.  Alan ended his presentation with a photo of his family and neighbours celebrating Victory in Europe Day with a street party. He remembers asking his mother what they were celebrating. When she said “The war is over” he responded “What’s a war?” Born in 1940, war was all he'd ever known. After it ended, his community gradually went back to “normal life”. But life would never be the same for little Soh.  The impact of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was vast, catastrophic and eternal. It still reverberates today, tangible in the ruins of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a skeletal structure that looms in eerie commemoration over the river near Ground Zero; one of the few buildings that remained standing in the kilometre-wide wasteland where no life remained on That Day. In that same river, a short distance away, floated countless bodies, bloated and burned beyond recognition.  At five years old, little Alan played on the bombsites of East London. Little Soh stepped over the dead and dying and mourned lost loved-ones, and a vanished city. Now those once-five-year-old boys, unknowing enemies in childhood, today approaching their mid-eighties, clasped each other’s hands in friendship, recognition and mutual respect. Each expressed his appreciation for the other, and for this unique sharing of the stories that had shaped both lives. Each expressed his heartfelt wish for a world in which lives are no longer shaped by memories of war. A world in which nucelar weapons are never used again. A world where peace prevails.  Would your school, group or organisation like to hear Alan talk in person about his memories of World War Two, with contrasting excerpts from Soh-san's testimony, and accompanying artefacts and items from Hiroshima?
A Hope in the Heart creative workshop, based on the narratives, is also available, and can be tailored to your group's requirements. Please contact [email protected] for more information or to book. |
AuthorTam is the Founding Director/CEO of Hope in the Heart, an NGO based in London, England. Also a wife, mum, nana, poet, traveller. "gentle activist" and mental health survivor. She is currently working on a memoir about her not-always-intentionally eventful life. ArchivesCategories |
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