Julia Paradise Read Free Page A

these attacks of drowsiness she had taken to talking in snatches of German. As a child she had heard her father speak German at home, although to all intents and purposes English was her native tongue. Her husband spoke no German. These cravings for rest were accompanied by sleeplike states at odd times throughout the day—‘waking daydreams’ the Reverend Paradise called them. Even during meals and conversations with visitors to the mission the missionary’s wife would literally fall asleep on her feet.
    On a long journey through the Interior on an evangelistic mission with a group of English teaching and medical missionaries his wife had begun to suffer from certain disturbances of her vision. The group had as one of their number an English doctor, who administered sedatives. But when this course of treatment was withdrawn, the disturbances of vision returned, and he called them by another name: hallucinations.
    Put simply, she began to see animals which weren’t really there. This zoöpsia took many forms: a tribute to the imagination, had they been deliberate invention. She saw mice, rats, insects, snakes—her imagination seemed to select the classically loathsome creatures. One of her most persistent hallucinations was a small brightly patterned snake moving across the floor in the periphery of her vision. Her zoöpsia was accompanied by a terror of real animals. The mere touch of fur, even in a coat, caused her nausea. Her pet miniature dog, which formerly she had fawned over, now revolted her and she had killed it with a walking stick in a fit of terror.
    A serious problem, in the light of their Christian mission in this country, was that the patient developed a virulent sinophobia, referring to the local people, even the Christian Chinese with whom they worked, as dogs. She also began to suffer from serious hallucinations of fire. She felt that she actually was, or was about to be, trapped inside a burning building. These hallucinations consumed her, threw her into paroxysms of terror to the point where she could smell the smoke, hear the crackle of the flames and the screams of the other victims, and feel the heat of the fire on her hands and face.
    She had returned with her husband to the little mission school twenty miles outside Shanghai where they presently lived and worked. She had become abusive even towards their European colleagues. She was an embarrassment to her husband, but a cross he had to bear. She was deliberately rude to visitors to the mission and flew into terrible rages with her husband. She threw tantrums in which she banged her head against the wall, ripped the buttons off her clothing and exposed herself.
    Her dementia worsened to such an extent that she began to live more and more in her room. She lived in a kind of twilight world pretty much divorced from the daily life of the mission school. She lived the sheltered life of an invalid and became increasingly dependent on medication. She alternated between periods of torpor and flashes of brilliant hallucination during which she would sometimes write late into the night in her penny notebooks, the common paper-covered books into which the pupils used to copy their exercises.
    During these ‘creative’ periods she would sometimes leave her room and roam the mission grounds and the countryside around the mission in an agitated condition. At other times she would catch the train to Shanghai and wander night and day through the dangerous and unsanitary Chinese quarters with her camera—one of her delusions was that she considered herself to be a ‘serious’ photographer. It was during these periods that her behaviour was more likely to be violent and anti-social, and she became a regular visitor to the cells of the police precincts of the International Settlement. She had embarked upon one of these escapades the previous evening and the Reverend Paradise had walked the streets all that morning looking