I’m writing this in a lovely flat lent to me by friends to work in. It’s set in a former mental asylum in Wales – an impressive gothic stone structure surrounded by well-tended grounds dotted with octagonal wooden gazebos, with views all around of the distant green mountains. In it’s nineteenth century heyday, this place housed a community of over a thousand patients – ranging from the seriously insane to people with epilepsy and more than likely several ‘fallen women’. A beautiful place with a sad history, and a great environment to re-engage with writing about my mother’s depression.

Summer is not a good time for writing, I’ve discovered that time and again. My head is simply not in a place of concentration – sometimes I even find it hard to read. But as autumn sets in and that ‘new school year’ feeling brings freshness and resolve, I can pick up this blog and my book again. I like to think that fallow time is not wasted – it’s a space to let things settle and to explore what else needs to be considered.

One outcome of this summer ‘break’ was the chance to go through some boxes of papers that we had stored in my sister’s garage eight years ago, while clearing out my mother’s house when she moved into a nursing home. There wasn’t time to sort out much of it then, as we needed to sell the house quickly to pay for the care fees, so we simply gathered anything vaguely interesting and put it away for later. It got buried for a while under the accumulated junk of modern life, but finally this summer I persuaded my sister to retrieve the – now slightly damp – boxes for me to investigate.

I hadn’t been certain that there would be anything of use to me, but what I found proved to be a revelation. My mother never really kept regular diaries – except for three years during the war when she was a schoolgirl – but she did from time to time write down her feelings and experiences on scraps of paper, often in scribbled pencil. She wrote from the heart, with scant punctuation, as one would a diary – and yet some of these pieces I’m sure were intended as short stories, as there are occasional notes showing that she intended to expand a certain section or give more detail at a later stage. Pages are missing or badly stained, or written on a shaky train – sometimes the handwriting  is just indecipherable, so reading them has been a process of guesswork at times.

While occasionally descending into romantic cliche (she was a great reader of fiction and had clearly absorbed some of its tropes) her writing has amazing freshness and immediacy – it made me feel almost breathless at times with the powerful emotions both expressed and reflected in her description of the landscapes around her. In these writings she describes a painful affair with her married boss – the love of her life – as well as a later romantic encounter on the beach of Nice with a penniless drifter, when she travelled to the South of France as a young woman. There are sad reflections on her marriage to my father (‘the story of the marriage that died’ – although they did stay together) and some very troubling pieces from her later years of depression.

What interests me is that these are what she decided to keep – there must have been more, as I know she attended a creative writing class for a time, but very little evidence of that exists. My guess is that these pieces express the most vivid and deeply-felt times of her life, and were also probably the best writing, writing she could well have been proud of. What a pity she didn’t do more.

All this has reinforced for me that the purpose of my writing this book is to find out ‘what happened?’ This young vibrant, creative woman, passionate in love, full of promise – where did she go? Somehow she got buried inside the mother I knew who was sad, angry, embittered, lonely, unable to break out. I feel a great need to honour and reclaim that young woman, to explore her life and understand the challenges she faced, and perhaps finally to set her – and myself – free.