Department of Mathematics and Statistics

A Necessary Balance: Alec and Harry Aitken 1920-1935
P.C. Fenton


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12.   Birth of George; breakdown

In March 1927 the Aitkens moved again, to 2 Sycamore Terrace, Corstorphine, one in a terrace of ten. Corstorphine was then, in Aitken’s words, ‘a country village, with its chestnut tree in the High Street, its occasional thatched cottages and its green country’.102

From our back green we look east to Edinburgh and north-east to the Zoological Park on the slopes of Corstorphine Hill, from our front we look across the plain to the Pentland Hills, of which we see the whole western boundary, from Caerketton on the northeast to West Cairn Hill to the southwest.103

The Aitkens’ second child, George Craig, was born on 18 April. Margaret was slow to walk and they worried about her, but she had just taken her first unsupported steps.

In a letter of 6 April Aitken complained to his brother Les: ‘I have just recovered from a surfeit of overwork followed by a bout of influenza, and am still in the convalescent stage.’ A week earlier he had experienced an unnerving distortion of light and feature looking out from Corstorphine Hill, ‘my first intimation of coming misfortune’.

On 3 June, in the course of his last lecture of the term,

[J]ust before I uttered the first word, a student entered a fraction of a minute late. Miss –, placing a tennis racket by her on the desk as she sat down. The slight noise diminished, like a remote train receding at night, the lecture room (now called “Room D” on the first floor) disintegrated and became a brown mist, yet concentrated at the point of noise, in a faint shimmer of vibrating heliotrope.104

Aitken was without sleep for 62 days. This period, intensely vivid in the Memoir, transformed him, and like the war marked a watershed in his life. It led him to reassess the limits of mind; as he later declared, ‘I reject the distinction between natural and supernatural.’105 Henceforth a mystical element suffused his writing, some of it of breathtaking beauty.

I would go for a walk before dusk along Broomhouse Road, beyond Corstorphine. The full moon rose, and soon was poised like a golden sovereign on the rim of Caerketton craigs, and in a little while the backs of sheep cropping the dewy grass would be afire with misty moonlight. Or again people in buses would all at once be transfigured by some light from eternity; or, walking along Princes Street between sunset and dark, I would seem to be pursuing, in all the multitude, some cloud of fire.106

‘Never before had I realised,’ he added, ‘how much we ourselves, our minds, our prismatic spectroscopes, make the world of our own colour and to our own shape. Our own, I say: but it is given from elsewhere.’ From where? Aitken did not commit himself. His experiences enlarged his conception of the external world but he was wary of speculating about its nature. It involved, however, nothing connected with human destiny. In 1929 he wrote to Pearl about his Aunt Cis’s recent death, recalling her ‘marriage and toil and motherhood and then death after lingering illness’.

[D]o you observe much evidence of a divine ordering of human things in all this? I find very little; all that I can see is the working of certain instincts of nature, the will to live and the will to produce new life, under the perpetual buffetings of chance and change.107

Margaret Mott wrote to me:

He told me once he was a humanist. He was a great believer in nature, and that’s what we were brought up on. ACA would sometimes talk emotionally about Christ, but he did not believe in church-going or institutional religion at all.108

On a more pedestrian level, the breakdown broke Aitken down. It took away the simple confidence many of us have for a lifetime that though the periphery might buckle the centre will hold. Then and later he suffered attacks of acute anxiety.

Keyed up, nervy – I can visualise it so well. ‘Must we?’ – you know, in a state. Very worked up, about a simple thing. It worried him if people came. He was the life and soul, but after they left he would slump. [...] I think that those states followed the breakdowns. And you know that photo, that you thought Father was 40 and I thought 28. I found it, and he is 28. That was before the breakdowns, and I knew it instantly. He had a different look.

Winifred wrote (in 1956): ‘I never know which (nerves or insomnia) is the cause and which the effect. At its height he has a raging intense mental activity […] He is now at the stage where he gets his sleep without any drugs, but he has great physical tiredness.’

Alec slept on the night of 4 August for the first time since 3 June. It was not until March 1928 that he was able to resume anything like a normal pattern of sleep, and effects of the breakdown persisted as late as 1933.

A letter from Aitken to Pearl written during this time is of considerable interest.

Winnie wrote telling you, I think, how overwhelmed with work I have been lately. For the last few weeks I have had the even worse experience of having my system poisoned for some obscure reason (symptoms similar in some ways to those at Cramond in March, 1925) and I have just emerged from weeks of insomnia and the depression of a poisoned mind. Please feel no anxiety now. Term is over and we soon go to the seaside for holidays. Since Margaret suffered from similar symptoms, though much milder, I can only suppose food-poisoning was at the bottom of the matter. I now understand Harry’s experience of last year, which I think must have been similar; he probably suffered from much the same depressions and hallucinations, and I dare say his, which the doctor did not understand, were due like mine not to nerves, but to blood-poisoning. My doctor at first put it down to nerves, but now completely agrees with my own theory, and has prescribed medicine which is proving effective, though I am not yet quite out of the wood. In the hallucinations I wrote poetry and composed music of a nightmarish kind, which, however, dispassionate critics say has a certain mark of – well – genius. They have quite a logical and definite meaning, though of a remote and extra-planetary loneliness. The workings of a toxic brain are rather weird. [...] Indeed it was the presence of my little family, and Winnie’s magnificent calmness and common sense, that was my salvation. I thanked heaven I was not a bachelor, and now of course I still do.

He added a postscript.

Here is one of the poems, written in profundis.

 THE LATER YEARS

 In the humble valley
 Shall I ever dally:
 No more shall I seek
 The misty mountain-peak;
 The toppling precipices,
 The fathomless abysses
 Till my life be done
 Shall I ever shun:
 No more by the waves,
 Or sounding ocean caves,
 No more upon the cape
 Shall I see the dawn take shape.
 The moon and the stars
 Are my prison bars:
 No more to the sky
 Do I raise my eyes on high,
 Only down to earth,
 To her that gave me birth.
 In the scent of the flowers
 Shall I pass the idle hours,
 In a grassy plot
 Shall I ever cast my lot
 And in the humble valley
 Ever, ever dally.

 This with spell-bound astonishment. Alec.

The restrained tone is impressive. He seems unaware of the real nature of what was happening to him, but that may have been for the benefit of those at home. The poem is the only giveaway; it creates a small shock, as if one had suddenly passed into a different air.

If Aitken was troubled by his feelings for Dorothy McBurnie prior to the breakdown, his newly felt dependence on his ‘little family’ and ‘Winnie’s magnificent calmness and common sense’ must have further strained his integrity. In the Memoir he recounted a waking vision of two figures advancing on him down converging glades:

one, my wife, as in the first years, clearly discernible, walking towards me down the right-hand glade; the other, a figure with veiled face, and mysterious, advancing at the same pace down the left-hand glade; nightmare fear seized me, and the vision dispersed before the triple rencontre.109

‘It may seem that the symbolic meaning of this hallucination is transparent,’ he added (transparent to whom?), ‘but one can jump too easily to conclusions.’

The breakdown further stripped Winifred of ambiguity and thrust her more firmly into the role of matriarch. Inevitably she was altered by the wrenching sight of Aitken in extremis, and in giving herself to his needs she drifted into an identity to which, in important ways, he was indifferent. It seems that they decided at this time to have no more children, the stresses of 1925 and 1927 having developed within months of the births of Margaret and George. In this too Winifred’s future was hedged in. I asked Margaret to what degree her mother’s life had been influenced by her father’s solitary nature.

Oh, a lot! She would have had the usual social sort of life in her family I think. She said to me a few times that Father had had his freedom, which meant his freedom from social commitments. I do remember sometimes I would hear Mother say, ‘We ought to have the So-and-So’s.’ Father’d get in a state, and then it would end by not having them and, as it were, dropping them. She must have withdrawn into herself. Then she got a lot of pleasure from embroidery, and the house, and planning the house.

Margaret is certain, however, that Winifred harboured no resentment.

She was keen for Father’s advance academically. She thought he was wasted in New Zealand, wasted in school teaching. She was the more ambitious. Father was gentle and without her might have stayed in New Zealand. She was behind him, and I think she was a main force of coming to Britain.


102  Memoir, 87.
103  ACA to Les, 6 April 1927.
104  Memoir, 88.
105  Miscellaneous Recollections Etc. II, 8.
106  Memoir, 94, 95.
107  ACA to Pearl, 26 Dec. 1929.
108  MM to me, 26 Feb. 1996.
109  Memoir, 93.
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