My Darling Derry

15 July 2019

In this blog, Derek’s elder daughter, Sally Festing, shares some of her personal memories of her father, and why he was driven to set up a charity dedicated to finding and addressing the sources of mental health problems. 

 

Sally with Derek

 

In January 1949, Dr Derek Richter, a neurochemist with a particular interest in mental health, vented his frustration at the scarcity of funding in the field. “I am getting tired of this perpetual fight to get small sums for research,” he wrote, “when our colleagues working on cancer and TB are almost embarrassed by the money being thrust at them.”

Sally Festing: 

In 2015 I mused in my Diary:

“All Derry’s friends agreed, he was a modest man. And it’s true, the limelight never interested him. He’d have found celebrity vulgar but he wanted his contribution to be valued.

“In social settings there was a constant, barely-contained tension. He pulled himself self-consciously upright and smoothed his hair. He fidgeted, looked at his watch, jangled his keys or sitting, swung his feet from the ground, persistently and sometimes distractingly. Was he shy, or elsewhere? Impatient or a mixture of all three?

“He missed his chance for the Nobel when he moved from Hoppy’s lab¹. … But he knew his ability. 

… It’s 18 years since he died. What have I been doing to let things slip so long?”

¹Hobby’s Lab is Prof. Frederick Gowland Hopkins, Biochemical Laboratory, Cambridge 

Derek’s two siblings, his sister, a talented artist, and a brilliant brother, both developed schizophrenia. Outside the family and their medics, even my father’s close colleagues were not aware of this, and we children had no idea that an aunt and an uncle were in mental hospitals during our formative years. There could be several reasons for this: the stigma, the guilt, or because he felt having a personal reason to understand mental health might diminish his efforts in the eyes of others. 

Being the survivor entailed a tremendous urge and obligation to discover the cause of their incarceration. During the war, he left the bio-chemistry hothouse to retrain in medicine. He became a noted neuro-psychiatrist, and with determined drive, the mover behind the creation of the Mental Health Research Fund in 1949, which later became known as the Mental Health Foundation. This year the Foundation is celebrating 70 years of pioneering new ways of looking at mental health and improving the lives of people experiencing mental illness.

To me, the background percolated through gradually. Not until twenty years after his death, have I inherited hundreds of family letters, diaries and medical notes. These provide insight into Derek’s personal experience and how it affected the call for collaboration and research, becoming the driving force of his life.

The archive has become the source of a slim collection of poems, ‘My Darling Derry’ (2019) -his Mother’s words which publishers Fair Acre Press are selling in aid of the Foundation. 

Two days after writing my 2015 diary notes, I drafted this prizewinning poem first printed in The Interpreter’s House:

What Wikipedia Doesn’t Say About My Father –  

That these were the days of lobotomy, ECT,

injections with testosterone, thyroid and prolan

though nothing necessarily helped. That his sister 

was screaming god knows what, throwing her ‘voices’ 

about the house, so he covered his ears. 

Years later, when he sang in his car and it was a tune 

she played on the piano, the notes wept 

through him like ink in water. 

That it wasn’t long before his brother 

went crazy too. My father didn’t curl up, he burgeoned,

had to solve the riddle and it jerked him 

this way, that way – such a wind. When he arrived 

at my bedside in his bike clips, I could hear

his galactic heart-beat. 

That he didn’t pretend to be perfect, 

and daytimes, when we sang as we tramped –

and people passed us, and I was embarrassed –

he went on singing. He needed to conform 

but he didn’t small-talk, he jangled his keys, 

looked at his watch and explored the scramble 

of proteins in the brain. 

That he fell in love with his garden. 

Dug long into summer evenings. Had a passion 

for sowing things – sugar snaps, 

runner beans, roses, pansies – pick them

and they come again. Sweaty, showering soil, 

he invoked the Rubaiyat: And look – 

a thousand blossoms with the Day 

Woke – and a thousand scatter’d into Clay!

That he left us to follow his dream, a quest 

he often pointed to. See the Pole. See

the Great Bear. There they were, 

the constellations naked. If you suit your pleasure 

by borrowing women – well, 

you’re risking trouble. 

That you can bungle your Nobel prize 

the way an astronaut hurtles through space 

in a race which loses the moon (everyone’s afraid 

of something).

That there were cracks in the sky.