Some Thoughts About The Author
Sometimes, I think my character was formed because I grew up in a mental hospital. Not exactly in the hospital, you understand, but in the grounds of it.
My father was a nurse there and we lived in one of the hospital’s staff houses. As a child, I probably saw daily as many mentally ill people as sane ones. This wasn’t quite as worrisome as it sounds. Most of the patients who wandered the grounds or worked in the gardens and fields of the hospital’s farm, were wartime shell shock victims and consequently gentle creatures who simply couldn’t stand the noise of the outside world nor the raised voices that so often come with a regular family or business relationship.
Nowadays, many people claim to have PTSD, the modern shellshock, but they seem to be aggressive rather than withdrawn and private, which is how these damaged men spent their days. The hospital my father worked at wasn’t the only one in the country; there were many. Two world wars had left hundreds, if not thousands, of damaged people, living but hidden proof of the horror of war.
If you want to imagine my daily childhood scene, watch a zombie apocalypse movie where people with staring, unseeing, eyes fail to respond to any attempt to communicate. Such a start leaves a mark, if you’re an imaginative child.
