PEEL-BEHIND THEIR EYES. Book 1 (Complete)

Chapter 2. Therapy

Patient: Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Robert Peel

Address: Grimsby Police Station, N-E-Lincolnshire

Subject: possible Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Initial thoughts:

DCI Peel, whilst on duty, experienced a traumatizing event, records show that while he and a colleague were investigating a suspect connected to a stabbing, both were set upon by said suspect and at least one other. His colleague, a Detective Stephens, was brutal beaten and stabbed, injuries which he later died from. DCI Peel himself was severally beaten and left for dead. To be allowed back into service, DCI Peel was ordered to attend therapy. Reluctantly agreeing, DCI Peel has been cleared for duty after passing his initial evaluations. The following are excerpts from these sessions.

Question: Reading your personnel file, Robert, I see that you followed in your father's footsteps, he too being a Detective Chief Inspector, you must have been proud of him. I wonder, did he bring work home with him, it's extremely common in such stressful careers as his and yours to continue with cases even in the home. Do you feel like you had a comfortable middle-class childhood, Robert?

(Suggested conflict within the household, and social class, introduced to illicit defensive response)

Robert: A child from a middle-class upbringing? Come on Doc, you know better than that, there was nothing middle class about it, not unless you think an abusive father and an inattentive mother, maketh the middle-class man, eh!

No, not middle-class anything, no, I was beaten up from the lower classes of the north, and then dragged down to the south, to the city, to London. You see, if there's one thing that got me to learn real good, real fast, it was a beating, sometimes not even my own beating, my mother took many a good shot from my father's drunken fists. She was never a fast learner. And I have never been proud of him, I am ashamed of him.

You see, back then, in the 70's, things like that were the norm, not that anyone admitted to such goings on, no one talked about such things. Most women back then took their beating seriously; it was their contribution to the relationship, whether they wanted it or not. Society would sooner turn a blind eye to their suffering than admit that such things happened.

Some men, steel men, coal miners and the like, hard workers, hard men, they did their graft and came home covered in a hard day's grime. There'd be fuck to pay if tea wasn't on the table, that would be when their wives, our mother's, felt the palm of their hand.

You see Doc, there's only so much toil a person can take, only so much back-breaking a man can take before tensions had to be relieved. So, whether their tea wasn't on the table, or there wasn't a crisply folded newspaper by a full packet of number 6 ciggy's on the arm of his favorite chair, she was going to get it anyway, all he had to do was decide what she had done wrong. She always did something wrong you see, even when she hadn't.

Question: But your father wasn't a working class man, he didn't do back-breaking physical work, mind breaking maybe. He was an intelligent individual who had climbed to a position of power and responsibility, so why do you think he was so full of anger, enough so, that he was prepared to visit that anger on the people he loved?

Robert: Yes, yes, I know, my father wasn't a steely or a coaly, he was a copper, but believe me, back then, back in the 70's, when Briton was lovingly called 'The sick man of Europe' coppering was a hard job. Trade Unions were calling for strikes up and down the country, the price of petrol had shot through the roof, then there was the three-day working week, electric shortages and the unending unemployment line. They called 1978-79 'The winter of discontent' you know!