“Nothing is wasted,” my mother would tell me if I ever complained about a job, a man, duty, drudgery. And if the wheels were ever really coming off, she’d say, “You are stronger than you think.”
She said and did lots of things, of course. She never stopped outputting from the age of about five. After she died, aged 79, on 13th September 2021, we (and when I say “we”, I mean her four children) collected her aphorisms and more in an “Alphabet of Mama”. But this little Festschrift is nothing compared with the vast archive of prolific writing, notebooks, diaries and even an unpublished novel that she bequeathed to posterity, on top of her immense and remarkable body of artistic work, including the selection of unforgettable Maudsley paintings currently on display at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in south London.
But it was these two go-to sayings that stood her, and her four children who loved her with passionate intensity, in the greatest stead throughout her extraordinary but not always easy life.
My mother, born Charlotte Fawcett in Oxford on 29th May 1942, and her sisters were unironic fans of a homespun prewar poet with the pen name Patience Strong. They’d quote Strong’s simple comfortable words about quiet corners and rose gardens to each other at times of trouble and anxiety, which, in the Fawcett side of my family at least, were almost always with us.
The wellspring of this Weltschmerz, the Old Faithful of angst, was the matriarch of the five Fawcetts, the beloved Bice, or Grandma to us.
A former ballerina, Bice had a Wasp American mother, the official translator into English of the novels of Thomas Mann for Knopf, and a Russian Jewish father, a professor of palaeography who was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton with Einstein. Bice’s father had fled the pogroms in Russia. Her sister Prudence had died of asthma. Bice knew bad things could happen because they already had. According to our mother, Grandma had lost every hair on her body and head after a back-street abortion in Munich in the 1930s aged 21, the result of a love affair with a trainee doctor (and Nazi, one supposes, as everyone in the professions had to be) called Lothar. She never mentioned any of this. But she managed to pass on something of this nervy dread, like mother’s milk, to her children.
In the rarefied Fawcett household in Combe, Berkshire, as I recall, no car journey was considered non-fatal until the family member in peril on the road or rail network—usually the Paddington stopping train to Hungerford—had arrived in one piece.
No project or excursion was contemplated without hours of catastrophising by the sisters and mother, who would stand by the Aga gripping mugs of cold coffee as they discussed all the hazards of a shopping trip to Sainsbury’s in Newbury. There was no need to stress-test anything—to Bice’s grandchildren, it was as if the whole of existence was one long stress test.
Bice married a boy she’d first met in the playground of the Dragon School, Oxford, who was distinguished in every way. After Rugby School, James Fawcett, or Grandpa to us, went to New College, Oxford, where he scored a double first followed by a prize fellowship at All Souls; he had a brilliant war on battleships and in naval intelligence, and was decorated for having helped sink the Bismarck.
My mother was born in 1942, in the middle of the war, behind Sarah. She was a Pears soap cutie with bubble curls and a gap-toothed smile. Like so many war babies, she had a memory of a strange man in uniform turning up one day at the house—in her case, in Park Town, a gracious crescent in north Oxford—and being told that this was her father. She was three.
In 1946, she had a baby brother, Edmund. “I hated him,” she would say. She didn’t hate him—she adored him, but “wanted to be the only one who did”, which explained jealousy to me from an early age.
Edmund was followed by Philippa, a little sister whom Mama also adored, then after a long gap, Sophia.
Charlotte wasn’t a boy, and she wasn’t musical in a house where her father played piano to concert level and never travelled without a dummy keyboard to drum Rachmaninoff or Brahms in departure lounges.
She couldn’t read until she was seven in a house where her father was a war hero, a prize fellow of All Souls and later a QC and the founding president of the Commission on Human Rights, and who wrote books on international law and outer space, was knighted by the Queen and could not drive past a lamppost on a motorway without counting it.
She felt plump, spotty and hairy in a large family of competitive thinness, musical ability and cleverness, a house of anorexia, anxiety and alopecia.
She was not the apple of either parent’s eye, she was not the oldest, not the youngest, not the only girl, but she possessed qualities that kept and carried her through all the days of her life. She had genius. She had uncontainable creativity coming out of every pore.
Also, “I was Nanny’s favourite,” she would say, as if that was why she survived childhood in a house where her whole family was “mad”, as she told her many doctors later, and the atmosphere “tense”.
“I was Nanny’s favourite, so it was alright.”
In the Park Town house, her parents gave Charlotte a box of paints. “I could handle them well and I immediately began to paint, without instruction,” she recalled. “It was something I could make my own and be clever at. None of the others could paint.” She was five, and began to teach herself. It must have been a survival mechanism. As she told her older sister Sarah years later, “If I don’t paint, I die.”
Edmund remembers this facility she had, right from the start: “As her kid brother, my strongest memory of Charlotte as a future painter is that she was always looking and sketching. Somewhere I have a slip of paper with a drawing by her in red pencil of a running peasant with a sack on his back. She did it when we were small. It’s from a Bruegel Calvary crowded with maybe 100 figures, but this one’s poise and movement caught her eye. Without stopping, he’s turned his head to see what the fuss is about.”
My mother had her first breakdown in her teens and was investigated for various conditions around the same time, including an overactive adrenal gland and hirsutism (we never found her to be particularly hairy). Aged 16, she was expelled from her convent, Mayfield, for whistling at boys in the car park. To her dying day, she maintained this was a false accusation as she couldn’t whistle.
She went to Westminster Tutors, got a place at Lady Margaret Hall to read English, and then a very good second, despite having told her dons in her viva that “Julius Caesar died in battle” and improving on Marlowe’s line about Helen of Troy so it went, “Was this the face that sank a thousand ships?” She would maintain her versions were more accurate than the originals.
“But in a sense”—that was always a warning that she was telling you what we call her truth—“Caesar did die in battle,” she would argue.
She was not conventionally pretty, but she was sexy, in the smoky style of a Juliette Gréco or Marianne Faithfull. Jolie laide, or, as my mother would say of someone whose style she admired, “Elle a du chien.” She’d tell me of Roman holidays as a teenager, when men would fuse themselves to her from behind as she crossed a road, with one hand clamped on each of her buttocks. She was unshockable.
She met Stanley, our father, at a lunch at All Souls, where her professor father was the domestic bursar. It was a grand Encaenia affair and they were both glamorous, bohemian undergraduates. She sat between Stanley and another storied undergraduate called Alasdair Clayre, a young man who, my mother said, “played the lute”. Stanley had just won the Newdigate Prize for poetry and made her laugh and follow him to America. “I thought I was marrying a poet,” she would say, somewhat darkly.
She gave up Oxford in 1963 as Stanley was headed to the US on a Harkness Fellowship. As Stanley writes in his first volume of memoirs, “We left Southampton on 23 August 1963, arriving in New York five days later. Charlotte had already been to America quite often. Before going to All Souls, James Fawcett had worked for the Foreign Office, being posted to New York where the United Nations was newly established. He had also served in Washington, DC, as General Counsel of the International Monetary Fund.”
She had Alexander (Boris) in New York in 1964, then came back in 1965 to complete her English degree, pregnant with me, at Lady Margaret Hall. She was married with almost two children but the college insisted she was called “Miss Fawcett” at all times. Leo was born in 1967, and we moved back and forth from England to America, until Jo’s birth in 1971. It was around this point—after moving house and country many times, and having announced she couldn’t stay in the US after the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King were followed by that of Bobby Kennedy in 1968—that her genetic predisposition to anxiety became something she could no longer live with or control. It had begun to control her.
As her discharge summary put it: “In 1967… became very upset and panicky over several incidents when her two other children daubed faeces all over themselves and their playroom. After this began to obsessionally clean the whole house daily, and follow people round with a damp cloth. Her obsessional cleaning activities continued largely unobserved until she became upset and anxious when pregnant again in 1971.”
Al and I had removed Leo’s fully loaded nappy and with the instinct of mischievous disruptors that has never properly left either of us both, we had done the worst thing we could have done.
Things accelerated when we lived at Nethercote for a year, in around 1970, in the cottage on the family farm. It was glorious for us—idyllic—but not so much for my mother, who was in sole charge of three small children while our father wrote books on population and the environment and travelled the developing world. She had no car nor mod cons. There was a sputtering Rayburn cooker in the corner of the small kitchen, which looked across the river to a bracken-clad hill; no dishwasher (my father used to say, “Tunisian women don’t have dishwashers”); no washing machine; but what the cottage was well equipped with were copper pipes that were poisoning us.
We threw up lustily until my parents had the copper pipes taken out. It was around then that my mother was plagued with intrusive thoughts and understandable doubts that, with three and then four small children in a cottage in the country, anything was ever clean. And nothing could ever be clean enough.
As my brother Leo has pointed out to me, RD Laing wrote in The Divided Self that in any family there is one person who is the designated sick person, who represents the “crazy” of the others (I am paraphrasing Leo’s summary here). The mad one is not mad, or no madder than anyone else—they just have chosen insanity as a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.
In our family, that person would be my mother.
My mother had, among other neuroses, the classic fear of dirt, especially urine and faeces, products which are repeatedly and freely generated by small children. She would stand at the sink washing her hands till they were red, raw and chapped, and then we would watch her try to turn the tap off with her elbows—so she wouldn’t have to touch the taps again with her hands—fail, and carry on rinsing and soaping them for what seemed like hours. At bedtime, she would line us up and make us hold our hands together so we didn’t touch anything. One by one, we’d file into the bathroom and wash in a preordained order, as she chanted a reminder: “Hands, face, bottom, teeth, hands, face.”
She had OCD before OCD was even a thing, let alone a label that David Beckham would claim for himself as he aligned the Diet Cokes in his fridge in the Cotswolds for Netflix. She had, her professors confirmed, the worst case of obsessive-compulsive disorder her many doctors had ever seen. She was, I am proud to say, the patient zero of OCD.
As children, we accepted her rituals as we accepted everything else, even if she did sometimes take the rituals to extremes; we understood “at one level”, as she would say, that they stopped her going even madder. They were her hedge against insanity—or worse, as I would discover. “This is to verify that Mrs Charlotte Johnson was admitted to this hospital suffering from an acute anxiety neurosis with obsessive-compulsive rituals,” one of her medical letters reported, sent from the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital.
The letter is dated 3rd April 1974. She’d married in 1963, aged 21, and so we were nine (Alexander), eight (me), six (Leo) and Jo was only two.
She’d only cracked, then, after a pretty demanding decade of being a very young married mother, looking after four small children, washing, cleaning, cooking and entertaining while ping-ponging between London, Exmoor, New York, Washington DC and Brussels—all the time, trying to paint.
One year, she homeschooled us while we camped in the then Fawcett residence in St John’s Wood, in a large detached villa next door to Paul McCartney in Cavendish Avenue, known as “Cav Av”. Lord’s was a mere cricket ball’s throw away at the end of the road. You could hear the thwock of leather on willow—or is it willow on leather?—and the rippling applause of the crowd from our nursery window on the third floor. It was a very happy time, for us. I still have my exercise books, where she taught us fractions, clocks, times tables, the gases and “how to draw a squirrel”, as she would recall years later. It was a happy time for her too, I think.
In 1973, we moved from Primrose Hill to Brussels, and in February 1974 she had another breakdown, and left, before being admitted to the Maudsley. She always told us the rupture was awful. “I hated leaving you children,” she would say, searching our faces for signs of lasting trauma and anger. Our father heroically held the fort and kept the show on the road with a motley succession of au pairs and housekeepers from many countries.
It was a difficult year for everyone, most of all for my mother and father. But I’m sure that for her it was also, secretly, a release. She used hospitalisation as a period of proper respite from being a wife and mother—and that respite unstopped a tremendous gush of creative energy.
“My husband and I were not making each other happy, to put it mildly. It was ghastly, terrible,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2008, with tears filling her eyes, as the journalist noted. “The children used to come over from Brussels to see me in hospital. They’d run down the passage and it was sickeningly painful because then they’d go away again. It took me a long time to recover.”
Leo is the only one of us who has read her volumes of Maudsley diaries—he says it took him years to recover—and they disappeared after her death and I’m still searching for them. Luckily, Leo photocopied them, and it occurs to me that all her papers, together with her artistic work, should go to some library or into some illustrated biography, as they reveal so much about the experience of a modern British woman artist, the early experimental treatment of mental illness and the relationship between OCD and Parkinson’s (with which she was diagnosed in her early forties).
As her Times obituary noted, “Artistically, Johnson Wahl’s time in hospital was productive. She created 78 paintings and held her first exhibition, which sold out. Much of her art from this time has a dark tinge, with bold black outlines and vivid expressionism. A self-portrait screams anguish and pain, with a haunted face and oversized, outstretched hands giving the distorted figure a Christ-like aura. ‘I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,’ she said.”
After her death, I went to see Patricia Allderidge, the art historian and curator of my mother’s exhibition in 1974, and asked her where and how on earth my mother had found space and time to paint 78 paintings—which she showed at a historic exhibition called “Hands” at the hospital—amid her punishing daily schedule of analysis with professors, aversion therapy and group therapy.
“She had this little studio down in the basement of the Maudsley among the heating pipes… I don’t expect it still exists,” Allderidge told me. Then she recalled working out what the invitation to the exhibition should be like.
“We had been discussing the invitations and whether, as it was the 1970s, they should be really bold and have a dash of colour on them. I walked in the morning she finished It Has Not Worked. She was standing beside it, paint still wet on the picture, paint still wet on her hands, looking almost like she does in the painting. And she said, ‘If I kill myself, will you promise to go ahead with the exhibition?’ And I said, ‘Yes,’ and then joked, ‘Isn’t it a good thing we printed the invitations in black after all?!’”
When my mother left the Maudsley, she gave the painting to the hospital as a leaving present but also as a parting shot. Her treatment, which involved electric shock therapy and daubing her hands and arms and personal possessions with urine and faeces, including dog shit, had not worked. “She could talk about how she felt without me having to analyse it or punish her or do any of the dreadful things they did to her at the Maudsley. As far as I am concerned, it was patient abuse—it was an early primitive form of aversion therapy,” Allderidge told me.
I don’t remember whether we children went to the exhibition—those months are a bit of a blank—but it was a smash. A sellout. Jilly Cooper bought Canteen With No Food. Harriet Bridgeman, who went on to found the Bridgeman Art Library (now known as Bridgeman Images), bought Group Therapy.
“The editor of FT took rolls of cash out and wads of notes and paid for his painting on the spot,” Allderidge said, and added that it was surprising the Maudsley laid it on, “because they couldn’t have had any idea what was in it.”
As Allderidge explained, it was the first time the Maudsley had ever held an exhibition by a named patient—and how remarkable and groundbreaking it was, to have an artist who was so unashamed of being a resident inpatient in a mental hospital that she was prepared to exhibit her work in her own name.
The New Statesman reviewed it along with shows by Henry Moore, Winslow Homer and Mervyn Peake. “For a very few days, a very remarkable exhibition of paintings by Charlotte Johnson was recently held in the Maudsley Hospital. With one exception (a fine, sensitive example of her work as a professional portrait painter) they were all painted in the hospital when she was a patient there,” wrote Robert Melville.
“The experience turned her, for the time being, into a highly talented primitive, solving complex compositional problems as if they didn’t exist. Her own verbal account of the pictures is a document about mental disorder, but the pictures themselves are straightforward, strangely blithe images of anguished states of mind, tied to actual incidents and situations… I doubt anyone can claim total immunity from phobias and irrational fears, but they cling to Johnson like leeches. One hopes that it’s a closed period in her life, but her pictorial treatment of it reveals an astonishing gift of visual storytelling which she should not abandon.”
She did not abandon it. When she died, she was working on at least three pictures.
As Raymond Levy, her late professor, explained to me: “She left [the Maudsley] because she had to go back to Brussels to you.” Levy knew that her treatments hadn’t worked—and why.
“The mother’s work is never done—you complete a task and you have to do it all over again. There is no end to the work and therefore the worry,” he said.
I asked him if he ever got to the bottom of what caused it. “Four small children and feeling out of control and having a husband who was in charge of waste at the EEC,” he mused. “That is a wonderful, ironic coincidence.”
When I saw the painting It Has Not Worked, the painting she gave to the Maudsley upon her discharge in late 1974, it was a low point. It was my mother’s clear message to us that she was not better, a message emphasised in thick black outline by her painting First Supper Home, which shows her screaming with her head thrown back, as we all stare at her expectantly over the dinner table, gripping cutlery.
She came home, but she was shortly admitted to another clinic, St Josef in Flanders, and then, one by one, we were sent off to boarding school in Sussex. We had a wonderful, exhilarating childhood, and two remarkable parents. It was an adventure and we always felt loved, but 1974 was—for me, anyway—the end of childhood.
It’s sad, even as a middle-aged daughter, to read her discharge summary, which suggests that, although the Fawcett pilot light of neurosis always burned within her, it was Johnson family life that made it blaze. To read that she was “very depressed” and had been “intermittently suicidal” for more than four months.
DIAGNOSIS: Obsessive - Compulsive Neurosis.
CONDITION ON DISCHARGE: Improved.
PROGNOSIS: Guarded: this will initially be affected by her ability to return to previously achieved levels of functioning while back in contact with the stresses of her family context.
It is also difficult to read that she sacrificed her own health to come back to us, to a house where she could not paint in peace—and to the mother’s work that was never done.
But, as ever, nothing was wasted, especially in hospital, where she had carved out that precious time to paint. “She was always forming pictures, even when she was talking to other people,”Allderidge told me. “Even the most depressing, horrifying scene was making a work of art for her.” She was stronger than she thought. She was stronger than we thought, too.
Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, where this 50-year retrospective is being housed, was built in 1928 with a villa system and houses like a boarding school, with a swimming pool block, chapel, grounds, flowerbeds. On either side of the museum’s gracious wide staircase, there are two Elgin Marbles-type writhing naked figures. They are by the sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber and became famous as “Raving Madness” and “Melancholy Madness”, the only remnants of the baroque buildings from when the hospital was at Moorfields, then called New Bedlam.
This is where It Has Not Worked and some of her other paintings are in the permanent collection. To find it, I climbed the stairs between “Raving” and “Melancholy” and turned left, into a gallery, and there she was. Recreated, in brushstroke after brushstroke in a basement room in the Maudsley Hospital, half a century before.
Standing more than life-size in a blue, above-the-knee skirt and blue roll-neck jersey, brown hair hacked, eyes fixed on the distance, three-quarters face, cheek bones highlighted in grey. She had painted her soul and her suffering on her face. Outstretched arms hang pendulous, hands outsized, and thick fingers telescopic and articulated, her gold wedding band prominent on her ring finger.
As I stood there, the curator, Colin Gale, approached. He did not comment on my tears but just spoke about my mother, the artist, as we both stood gazing at her self-portrait.
“People find her paintings tremendously poignant and moving,” he told me. “I’ve been here 22 years and—put it this way—I learnt about your mother through these works, and I knew about her way before I knew about the rest of your family! Here at the hospital and museum I always thought of the rest of the family being interesting only because you are related to Charlotte, the incredible artist,” he continued, amiably.
“And I don’t like to lead people to her because of anything else but her and her talent. We value her honesty and her execution, her uncompromising vision and skill.”
She would have liked that. She never sought publicity, only recognition, and if she did not paint, she died.
She could not solve her problems, but she could paint them—and that was just as important.
With the exhibition at the Maudsley in 1974, the first by a named inpatient, she painted her way into history, and the fact that I am writing this with such pride 50 years later is the proof of that pudding.
I’d like to thank Colin Gale, Patricia Allderidge, the late professor Raymond Levy, Nell Butler—who organised a retrospective at the Mall Galleries in 2015, and wrote and produced an accompanying book, Minding Too Much—and everyone else who has brought this show to fruition, on behalf of all Charlotte Johnson Wahl’s family, her devoted children and grandchildren, friends and extant swains—some of whom came to her funeral in 2021—and her admirers across the world. May their tribe increase.
Special mention must be made of my father, Stanley, who always encouraged and acknowledged her talents and her work.
“But I’ve done nothing,” she would say, even though she was, as Butler would always insist, “the real genius of the family”.
She was always the least boring person in the room. I think about her daily, I dream about her constantly, and we all miss her more than we can say—but what an extraordinarily deep, rich and important legacy she leaves.
What It Felt Like: The Maudsley Hospital Paintings of Charlotte Johnson Wahl is on at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind from 11th December 2024. More information and opening hours at museumofthemind.org.uk
