Foreword

FOREWORD

A Town Unlike Alice describes the friendship of schizophrenic Alice and Cathy, a kind and inquisitive arty type. The Overture and Blackberry Axioms establish Cathy's originality and imaginative way of thinking, her dramatic encounter with Alice occurs next in Motif and is explored further in Dialogue One. Cathy is apprehensive but her heart is touched by Alice's distress and the revolted embarrassment and attempts to suppress Alice by the people she is with, Cathy befriends Alice and sees her world of abusive epithets, the terror and revulsion of ordinary people, the mentally ill having to sleep rough and her mental tortures at first hand. The scene is set in the mid 80's when many big psychiatric hospitals were closed and very ill people thrust out into a cold and aggressively hostile society to cope as best they could, a policy cynically called Care in the Community. Cathy comes to recognise the humanity of Alice and her essentially human preoccupations, Alice is not “Other” nor very different to anyone else: having come too close, can Cathy reconcile her amour propre with her jealousy of Alice's needs and demands? Will no-one else help Cathy with Alice, help Cathy take the strain and help her with her own contradictory feelings?

A Town Unlike Alice is my take on the parable of the Good Samaritan; the experiences of schizophrenia are my own, one individual's, I promise you I don't foam at the mouth or run around waving knives whatever the mythology may have suggested. You could pass me in the street and never know.