My brother John and Schizophrenia

The phone rings, it's someone pretending to a be a policeman, I'm convinced of that. And I tell them so. I ring Celia and say I've had a weird phone call. They'd asked if I lived at an address that was Dads, feeling alarmed it may be burglars looking to turn over his house

I also ring Bill. Matt, Celias boyfriend said he didn't like the sound of it anyway and that they should come over to me. I'm sitting in the dining room, see a message on the ansaphone, as I start to listen to it I can't quite take in what the woman is saying. Something about my brother, John Nightingale. I see a police car pull up, simultaneously Matt's car pull up behind and Bill's pull up in front. What extraordinary co-ordination though too preoccupied at the time to consider it.

Two police officers walk up the path and I fling open the front door and say to them that I know. Ten seconds earlier I'd heard a woman's voice tell me my brother John had dropped dead. And how sorry she was. Fucking hell, what a message to leave.

I find out later he'd been having severe stomach pains for a week, the doctor hadn't come out according to the person he shared his house with. John collapsed in the kitchen, the other person dialed 999 but by the time the paramedics arrived – 25 minutes – it was too late. He was dead.

This was at 6pm. June 26^th 2006. I ring Alan, don't think it sunk in immediately. He came over and we discussed between us how we should tell Dad. We would go over together obviously. We sit in Alan's car outside Dad's discussing strategy. Dad has a serious heart condition. This must be treated very carefully. Dad opens the door, grinning, obviously pleased to see us bless him. It doesn't occur there is anything strange about us both turning up early evening like this.

We recce the kitchen looking for any alcohol for Dad. I find some in the fridge. We sit down and Alan takes the lead. We talk of this and that and after about twenty minutes realize this is protracted agony. Alan is telling Dad John isn't well. This is the understatement of the year. Dad leans forward in his chair and looks concerned, 'what's wrong with John' he asks. 'Is he alright?'. I can't bear the prevarication any longer. 'Dad, John's died'. This is such terrible news for Dad, less than four years after losing his wife he's now he's also lost his son.

Alan and I take an arm each and practically carry Dad to the car and drive over to mine. An incredible scene awaits us as we enter with Dad. The patio doors are open, Celia, Toby and Donna are there as is Bill. They've lit the log pit and massive flames light up the dying evening light. Somehow it's symbolic and comforting. Poor Dad is bewildered and who can blame him. It's a terrible shock. Stella comes over later, not entirely sober. I'm pleased to see her. We drink a lot and talk until the early hours. As ever, when the family are needed it's all there - in spades.

None of us know why he has died so suddenly. We speculate, was it cancer, he was a heavy smoker, heart disease? And now faced the prospect of a post-mortem. Which delayed the funeral by two weeks. I talked to the coroner who told me he died of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which I found shocking. Was this a disease you died from? It seemed inconceivable to me. There were no secondary causes, such as cancer or heart disease.

John was on a lot of medication for mental illness. He suffered from Schizophrenia. It started when he was just 18. It was a huge tragedy for my parents. He was truly gifted at sports. Perfect hand-eye co-ordination. A good-looking, very fit, intelligent and highly creative person. He had many talents. He was so brilliant at cricket he was picked for the Essex trials, which was fairly unusual in those days as we were a working-class family and there was, back then, a certain public school element to the game. His demon fast-bowling was legendary. The talk of how he bowled out an entire visiting team went down in local sporting folk lore.

Everyone talked about him and he had no shortage of girls either. He was also very musical, playing the guitar and harmonica. And greatly into music, particularly the blues.

He joined the merchant navy for a couple of years, saw a lot of the world going to most countries. This was at a time before the package holiday and cheap air travel, the mid-sixties. People went to Margate or Southend for their holidays but that was about as far as they ventured. John would come back laden with boomerangs and other strange artefacts from Australia, the South Seas, South America, it was so exotic and seemingly exciting and we always looked forward to his return to hear about his adventures.

He had a friend Lofty who was the ships bo'sun, he would visit us with John on his leave. I somewhat naively thought he fancied Mum as he would take us all out for drinks at the Double Six pub in Basildon. But realise now John was the subject of his love. I knew nothing about homosexuality back then, it was never talked about. I don't think it was reciprocated though as John had a very healthy interest in girls. We had notification he'd jumped ship in Las Palmas, got beaten up, arrested and brought home. We never did get to the bottom of what happened to him.

He was always the naughty one as a child. Getting into scrapes and sometimes a bit of a handful. But he did very well at school, in the 'A' stream throughout excelling in Art, English, Music and Sport. If cricket was high natural gift, music was his passion. He was a great fan of Sid Barrett of Pink Floyd and also Led Zeppelin.

But the music somehow triggered something in his brain. The most famous Jimmy Paige riff in the world was playing full volume on my parents radiogram, my mother was hoovering at the time, in those days hoovers weighed about the same as a small car today. John raised the hoover above his head and threw it into the Rayburn fire, smashing it to pieces. Mum was both frightened and angry. She was a very feisty woman, although quite small in height wasn't afraid of anyone of anything.

Of course, poor Dad got the brunt of it as he was expected to deal with him at every altercation. It was quite a hopelessly painful situation. There were no counsellors  back then. They had no help or advice. More and more frightening and inexplicable things happened. He beat up a girl who worked with me at the department store I worked in. She didn't tell me it was John that gave her the bruises on her face but I knew. I too, became increasingly frightened of him. He became fascinated with graveyards, working for a short time as a grave digger. Then frequenting them late at night.

He became more and more interested in the occult. Devil worship. Weird stuff. He'd sit for hours staring at a pen and then excitedly shout 'red' or 'it's the key' we couldn't comprehend his world and had no idea how to deal with it.

His laugh became increasingly maniacal and threatening. The police were involved several times in various incidents. Eventually my parents had to make the heart-breaking decision to have to call the police themselves in order to get him sectioned. As he would never be able to be treated otherwise. So it came to pass, he was sectioned at Runwell Hospital.

We were all traumatised by it at the time. Mental hospitals back then were weren't too much different to Victorian bedlams. And likewise the treatments. Draconian. And cruel. John would be given Electric Shock Treatments. And Largactol. Now known as the 'liquid cosh'. To visit a locked ward in a mental hospital in the sixties was truly to visit hell. Every so often he would be allowed out, he was now acting in a really 'mad' way. He seemed to revel in it. And after several years patients become institutionalized. As did he.

Sometimes he escaped, so we weren't even aware he was in the vicinity. I still lived at home with my parents and desperate to get out because of him. We lived in a small square of terraced houses with a walkway between each of them. This was how I went in at night if I'd been out, there was small brick building housing the bin cupboard and next to it the coal bunker. It wasn't unusual as I opened the gate to the garden to hear the creak of the coal bunker door open, hear the maniacal laugh of my brother and see the sinister whites of his eyes shining in the dark like demons as he sat crouching in the darkness. A sure fire way to cure constipation for the uninitiated.

And was an acid test and a half for various boyfriends and certainly sorted the wheat from the chaff. Although we laughed at the time it was a coping mechanism for the horror and real tragedy of it all. To see someone who had been so handsome and gifted, that we'd all been so proud of, disintegrate into a violent, shambling, bloated hulk was I'm sure devastating for my parents to deal with.

Looking back it's fair to say I spent about five years of my late teenage life and early twenties in fear of him. So much so, that after I married and had children, went to great lengths to make sure he didn't find out where I lived.

His rages were so frightening particularly as you never knew when they were coming or what exacerbated them. And whether he was going to physically attack you: as did happen. As he still possessed great strength, this wasn't something I took lightly. Textbook stuff, hearing voices, obsessed with devil worship which wasn't helped by the interest shown in it by bands such as Led Zeppelin and the Stones along with writers such as Alistair Crowley, violent outbursts, terrifying rampaging rages, some of his artwork was highly disturbing, depicting the devil and voodoo.

He was eventually diagnosed by psychiatrists as a Paranoid Schizophrenic: the epicentre of insanity.

Play on brother. John Nightingale. born 26^th February 1949 died 26^th June 2006. RIP