Going back to work after my son was born was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. I didn't want to leave my baby. And actually I wasn't in a fit state to return to work. I had postnatal depression.
I arranged a contract at Credit Lyonnais while I was still on maternity leave, and sent my child to a nursery at 3 months old even though I wasn't starting work for another month and a half after that: this was to accustom him to the nursery routine and deal with any problems before I had to face the long commute to London every day. Looking back, I know now that I did not have to return to work quite so early: I had enough money to take at least 6 months off, and had I done so I might have coped better.
But Credit Lyonnais had even worse problems than mine. I arrived in January to find there was nothing for me to do. The job they had had in mind for me had been hijacked by a rival department. I thought this was odd, but decided to make myself useful anyway. So I spent the first week reorganising the department, clearing out cupboards and getting to know people.
It quickly became apparent that the rival department was intent not only on hijacking projects, but taking over the department itself. I had inadvertently walked into a fight to the death. Not only that, but the department that recruited me decided to field me as their main protagonist in the fight. My opponent was a senior official from France, backed by the full might of the French senior management. Even had I been emotionally stable and physically robust, I would have found this difficult. In my fragile state, I never stood a chance. It was a disaster from beginning to end.
Technically, what we were doing was setting up a new bond trading desk in London and moving the bond trading book from France to the UK, which is actually quite fun to do. My opponent made life difficult for me, though. He wanted me to come in at 7 in the morning because that's when the traders started. He had a point: we did work closely with traders. But we were not providing live support to the trading desks - we were doing a project. Being in at 7 am was simply not necessary. And my contract said nothing about starting at 7 am: I would not have agreed to it if it had. As I lived some distance from London, being there at 7 would mean having to be on a train at 5.30 in the morning, which as my (by then) 6-month-old baby's nursery didn't open till 7 was a non-starter. My opponent was shocked. In his book, a woman with a baby that young shouldn't be there at all. But I was, and I was in his way.
Things progressively went from bad to worse, and I eventually wrote formally to senior management saying I could not work with this man because of his attitude to me. Predictably, they responded by terminating my contract. But unusually, they did an exit interview. I think I achieved more in that interview than in the whole of my time at Credit Lyonnais. The senior manager asked me how I saw the situation, and what he should do. I said that I thought the evident fight for supremacy between the two departments was incredibly unhealthy: people feared for their jobs and productivity was crashing. And I said that he should make a decision as to which department would survive, and which staff would be made redundant. He did as I said. Three weeks later the department that had recruited me was no more, and all the staff had either been transferred to other jobs or made redundant.
This was not the end of Credit Lyonnais' difficulties, though. It was slowly destroying itself from within. I have never encountered a company so intent on self-immolation before or since, and I hope I never do.
Credit Lyonnais was disastrous for me. I was already on the way down when I went there: but while I was working productively I could keep the negative thoughts at bay. But working for a company that was tearing itself apart reinforced my own negativity. By the time the fight got going in earnest I was seriously depressed.
The traumatic birth of my son, followed by my son's feeding difficulties, had left me feeling a failure as a mother. Now it seemed I was a failure as a worker too. There seemed little point in staying alive: I actually thought everyone would be better off without me. And I became increasingly disconnected from reality. I remember watching the crowds of people walking along the City streets, black and white and grey....they looked like ants. I didn't see them as anything to do with me. Whatever street they were scuttling down, it wasn't the same street as the one I was on. My street was empty, and I was alone. But once I was at home, I really was alone. I cut myself off from my friends and my family, withdrew from my husband. Fortunately I didn't cut myself off from my son. He was the only person with whom I could connect.
The final straw came as I crossed the road outside Cannon Street Station one day. A car was coming.....I nearly didn't step out of its path in time. I felt nothing: it wasn't that I wanted to die, more that I couldn't be bothered to move fast enough to avoid it. I found myself wondering idly what it would be like to be hit. Fortunately I came to my senses and got out of its way. But at that point I realised I needed help.
I didn't know who to turn to. I knew that I should see a doctor, but I hated doctors. Doctors had intervened to save my son when he failed to thrive, but their intervention to save him had hurt me deeply. No way was I going to talk to a doctor about how I felt. Especially the doctors who had dealt with my son. Why did dealing with my son's failure to thrive have to hurt me? Why couldn't there have been a solution that worked for both of us? It sounds unreasonable, and in many ways it was. I couldn't resolve it in my mind. I read everything I could find: I went over and over what had happened, trying to work out what had gone wrong and what I could have done differently. In fact I reacted to this in the same way I had to the loss of my job in GALM 1, only much, much worse - obsessing about what had gone wrong to the point of being unable to sleep, unable to eat, filling my time with pointless activity, anything to take my mind off the horror.....
In the end I contacted my midwife. She was no longer responsible for me, but agreed to see me. We had a long talk, and she eventually persuaded me to see a different doctor, one unconnected with the horror. I went to see this doctor, who suggested antidepressants. I refused medication: I felt that I wanted someone to help me unpick the tangled web of negative thoughts and emotions, not numb me so I couldn't feel or think any more. Maybe I was wrong: maybe medication would have calmed me enough to enable me to think clearly. But it's easy to be wise after the event. At the time, medication was the last thing I wanted. Deep down, I was desperately lonely: my self-inflicted isolation had cut me off from all the people who might have been able to help, and I felt there was no-one who was even interested in how I felt. Anyway, the doctor referred me to a psychotherapist as an emergency case. It was the start of eight years of therapy.
Therapy didn't help to start with. In fact if anything it made things worse. After I lost my job at Credit Lyonnais it was some months before I found another job, but I was on the job market the whole time, so my son had to stay in nursery. I was stuck at home with no job and no baby, bored and miserable. I took to roaming around the shops to keep myself occupied. And I read. Huge amounts of psychological stuff. It helped me to understand the deep roots of my depression, but it didn't cure it. I remained in the black hole throughout that summer.
Once again, Nat West came to the rescue. In the autumn of 1995 they called me in again to do the same job that I had done before, only for exchange-traded products in capital markets this time. I spent a mostly happy four months at Nat West, finally leaving when it became clear that what Nat West IT were prepared to do wasn't what I wanted to do. We agreed to part on good terms. And I planned never to go back. It had dawned on me that although my husband didn't earn much, I could take a career break while my son was tiny....we would be poor, but at least I could spend the time with my son in his early years, and maybe have the second baby that I wanted.
But it was not to be. What happened next was the worst time of my entire life. Worse even than the mental horror and near-suicide of the Credit Lyonnais days. At least then I felt nothing much: if there is one thing that depression does for you, it blunts emotions. But by the time I went to SBC Warburg, I was no longer depressed. I was angry - furiously angry. And the result was two years of almost unbearable pain. Pain that I still feel, even now, whenever I think about what happened there.
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