The Barns

 

A memoir chapter

THE BARNS

The injury as hinge

I used to play in the barns as a kid. Childhood memories. Formative experiences. If anyone asks what turned me to the goth subculture, it is probably this, imprinted.

Crumbling whitewash on top of ancient stone, the surface coming away to dust a centimetre deep. Cobwebs. Ancient cobwebs holding whitewash and stone dust in their nets. The spiders had abandoned the place. I hunted them and found some. Overcoming the fear of them. You never really do. It is hardwired into us from a time in evolution when we were tiny rodent-monkeys and spiders were bigger than they are now. That is probably a factor in my love of the Alien films, and of AvP.

There were four barns. One was modern: corrugated sheet metal and plastic walls on a light metal frame. The others were like castles, but not as old. Dark. Disused. Full of interesting stuff. Old farm machines, some made of wood from the late nineteenth century, some made of metal from the early twentieth. Straw and baler twine on the floors. In the remote rural village there were other farms and other barns besides ours — old stone, larger metal, some out of bounds, some easy for kids, some in use and some not. Many were full of hay and sometimes straw. My dad taught me the difference when I was young. Rectangular bales made by the machine-vehicles of the twentieth century.

My dad’s voice, my dad as a young man in his twenties, telling me not to play in there. My scary mum shouting at me with anger — her habit, to get her voice heard against her siblings, and because her curious child was less a zombie than she intended — frightening me into docile submission. I had to sneak into the barns when daddy was at work and she was nowhere, because I had been dumped in a room by myself long enough to get bored and escape into the environment. Eventually she would collect me, her anger tamed by worry, reminding her to be soft. It is the only time she was. I would be punished for it later, through what I learned years afterward is called neglect, and a gamut of psychological injuries I have no cleaner word for than torture. She blamed me for her worry because I did not switch off when she ignored me. I needed to explore. I went into my imagination. Picture books about castles overlapping with the barns I could actually walk into.

The barns were full of junk my dad collected from markets, car-boot sales and antique stores. He was a dreamer. Old milk churns for when he got some cows. Wooden chairs that needed restoration. Things which even then sat in antique shops for next to nothing and now sit there as historical artefacts at ludicrous prices. Dad was always working. He taught at a school to repay the mortgage on the semi-derelict farmhouse and barns he had bought at auction with money his own father lent him. Back then people could still do that. The economy tanked. By the time it was my generation’s turn I was living on benefits in a council flat. We did not have the money, and the steady work my forefathers had was not there. We had been affluent for several generations. I am the one who broke the chain. Not for lack of trying. Depression took me in my teens, if not before, and did not lift until my forties. I have since moved into privately rented rooms. I am still on welfare.

A factor is that my father did not pass forward what previous generations had passed to theirs. A factor is my mother’s destructive manipulation, which left all of us burnt out. They had a sadomasochistic relationship that spilled into the 2.4 nuclear family and made the unit largely a face-value arrangement, irrespective of whether anyone in it was stable or happy. My dad was superhuman for the most part, albeit old-school in the physical punishment he delivered for whatever my mother said I had done. She made those offences up, to control him and to lock me for trying to escape her. There was hatred and hurt. It is still there. It is why I could not compete with peers at job interviews. They had confidence. I had imposter syndrome, and the insecurities of a child put in isolation and hurt — physically, emotionally, mentally — until I got away, by which time I was a legal adult.

Twenty years later I was diagnosed with autism. Nobody wants to hear about the comorbid PTSD from childhood abuse. So I return to the barns. My inner landscape has them imprinted, deeply.

I should have played in the old barn.

My skull cracked on the cement floor of the new one. The dogs had led me in. They wanted to go there and asked me to open the door. They could not work the handles. There was food stored inside. They were hungry.

In that barn one of the dogs told me their spirits can leave the body in dream. They remember it better than humans do. To train me, to show me, she told me to climb onto a wonky heap of furniture — doors leaning against the wall. I did. She tricked the other dog into banging the heap with her body, and I fell.

I was found. For a short window my parents gave me the love I needed, because concern had reached them. I was semi-conscious. I woke days later in bed with bandages on my head. I remembered flying out of my body and around the barn, which is what the dog had shown me. We can do that.

Later, when I had recovered, the dog who felt guilty came back to the same doors. She banged them again and got her foot stuck underneath. She was sharing the pain, saying sorry, saying she deserved it for hurting me. I understood. I went to rescue her and in her shock she bit me. I understood then, in the simple pattern of it, what had made my mother the way she is. The dog taught me that. Pain, then bite. Worry that arrives too late and turns to punishment. I did not have those words. I had the pattern.

I did not know then what animal shamanism or spiritism involved. I only knew the dogs were more aware than the parents who were supposed to care for me. The forgiveness between the dogs and myself, and the sharing of pain, was a lesson my parents did not know. I did not know how to teach it to them. It took a long time to find words. I knew I had to understand the lesson in its own context, and also distil it into terms I could transmit and apply. It affected my behaviour and my emotional-cognitive function in all things. I became it. I took it in as a tool, an imprint. To remember it by, the sharp pain was necessary. I have always carried regret for not being able to say it to them succinctly. It choked my heart and my throat for years and stopped me communicating. They call that autism. I believe it is PTSD — and that one becomes the other as the brain and the emotional-cognitive systems hardwire themselves into a configuration. I was seven years old.

The later languages arrived the way such languages do: sideways, and late, and more use than the official ones.

My father intended, at one point, to convert the barns into art studios. Galleries are whitewashed. Whitewashing a thing, in the metaphysical sense, means covering its true history so that a face-value image can be presented. A painting is that face-value image, and also a portal — into a representation of the real, or into a fantasy, or into both. Interpretive psychology is a portal of the same kind. Neurodivergence is another name for alternative routes of comprehension and integration. The whitewash on those stones was never only paint. It was already the problem of what gets covered so the surface can be shown.

I came to the World of Darkness the way a lot of countryside children came to cosmology: through Dungeons & Dragons first, which is about castles, and therefore about the barns, and about dragons, and therefore about Wales. Wales, for me, is not a flag. It is forest and fields and farms and waterways and hedges and the wet ground under the coast and the river. It is also the railway that ran toward the steelworks and the city on the horizon. The games know that split. Nature as tooth and claw, the hunt; nature as pastoral cycle, seasons, ecology working as a whole. The whole has to accept brutality. Wholeness is not the same as niceness. There is a right place for the thing we fear and which disgusts us. The slaughterhouse is one symbol of that. More ordinary, and closer to how I actually met it, were the corpses of animals fallen in the fields and rotting down through the levels of ecology, and the skulls and bones you find if you walk enough.

The five games of that pentacle were sold as personal horror. That was accurate. They became a format for processing what had already happened, and one incident in particular — the primacy of the injury, the head wound, psychology meeting a damaged brain and an autistic brain, the association of that damage with thinking that will not stay in the box. Werewolf dealt with fetish: the bound object, the spirit in the door, the animal teacher. Wraith dealt with attachment that does not release. Vampire dealt with survival. All three, in their way, dealt with living on very little. Growing up in that countryside extended naturally into Changeling and Mage, the other two points of the pentacle. Voodoo and spiritism, which I met later as frameworks rather than as tourism, did the same work: they had a place to put the dogs. Transactional analysis and Jungian shadow work did some of it in a more European vocabulary. None of these systems is a diagnosis. They are maps that can hold a cracked skull, a guilty animal, a flying-out-of-the-body, and a mother who bites because she is in shock.

The academic language cannot assimilate that level of awareness. It can name autism. It can name PTSD. It cannot quite say that the dogs taught the child a pattern the parents could not teach, and that the child then spent decades trying to distil the pattern into words that would travel. Only the shamans have a structure which both comprehends that and transmits it. That is why storytelling is what I learned as a cultural root. Not as decoration. As the method.

The barns are still there in the inner landscape, whitewash crumbling, cobwebs holding the dust, the modern floor waiting, the old stone darker and safer and full of nineteenth-century wood. I return to them because that is where the imprint was made. The rest — the welfare, the interviews I could not win, the diagnosis, the games, the work of trying to say it — is aftermath. The hinge is a seven-year-old on a wonky heap of doors, a dog who wanted to show him how spirits leave the body, and the cement coming up to meet the head.

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