1
RESILIENCE
‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’ – Friedrich Nietzsche
The actor Brian Cox advises drama students: ‘Always carry a picture of yourself as a child because that’s who you are.’ The photograph in his own pocket shows a young boy, sitting in a high chair, with a ‘gorgeous smile’. It is a memory of a childhood in post-war Dundee which was, he told us, ‘blissful up to a certain point and then it went belly-up’. His father, a shopkeeper, died suddenly when he was eight and his mother had a series of nervous breakdowns. It was deeply traumatic and disorientating, yet he frequently draws on his early experiences when he is acting and believes that having suffered as a child adds emotional depth to his performances. As he put it with a wry smile: ‘It’s given me an understanding of certain things.’
We met Cox at his flat in Primrose Hill, a bolt-hole from his West End theatre days where he stays when he is in London, although he lives mainly in New York. We sat at a table, squeezed between an exercise bike and piles of old theatre programmes, playbills, magazines, posters and boxes of diabetes pills. ‘You should see the other rooms,’ he said in his distinctive Scottish growl. He is, by his own admission, a bit of a hoarder – his wardrobe in Manhattan is bigger than his wife’s closet. ‘Hoarding is all about control,’ he explained. ‘I’m a bit of a control freak. It’s to do with surviving. You’ve had to learn to let go in circumstances where you wouldn’t want to let go.’
Cox is famous for playing rich and powerful men – Titus Andronicus, King Lear, Winston Churchill, Hermann Göring and most recently Logan Roy, the cruel, mesmerising media mogul in the television drama Succession. But his own background was neither wealthy nor influential. His father Charles’s death, which came just three weeks after he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, was an enormous shock. Cox remembers coming home from school and seeing an elderly neighbour standing on the steps of his house, crying. ‘She said to me, “Oh Brian, poor wee Brian,”’ he recalled. ‘Then I went up the stairs and the front door was open. As always in times of incredible stress, the table was packed with food. My mother was sitting hunched on an armchair by the fireplace. She looked at me and burst into tears, then I realised my dad had gone. It had been very sudden.’
More than three hundred people came to Charles’s funeral, but Brian wasn’t allowed to go – he remembers being told to watch television all afternoon instead because he was so young. It was supposed to be a treat, but he felt robbed of the chance to mourn. ‘It marked me,’ he said. His father left behind enormous debts and the family went into ‘survival’ mode, struggling to make ends meet on a widow’s pension. ‘We did have a couple of times when we had no money and we didn’t have any food so I would go to the local fish and chip shop and ask for batter bits from the back of the pan,’ Cox told us. ‘That would be our tea on a Thursday.’
His mother Mary, a spinner who had worked in the jute mills, simply could not cope. ‘My mum had not been well for a long time, really since I was born; she was always not quite present and at one point she actually ran away,’ Cox said. Her mental health deteriorated dramatically after her husband died. The actor remembers one particularly unnerving moment when he walked in on his mother alone in the kitchen. ‘I came home and I could smell gas. She was on her knees and the oven was open; she said, “I’m just giving it a wee clean.” I only realised in hindsight that it was a suicide attempt. Then she really got very ill. It was pretty bleak.’
Eventually, she was taken away to a psychiatric hospital. ‘It was the conflation of events. Nobody was to blame, nobody is to blame in these situations, it’s just – how much can you take? How much can you put up with?’ Cox said. ‘And it was hard, it was really tough. She was quite large, then she became very little.’ He remembers visiting her after she had been given electric shock treatment, ‘which was pretty awful. It destroyed most of her memory, it was there to destroy memory – that which was painful. It’s a drastic treatment, and it certainly affected my ma. She was never right, she became very eccentric and very funny. There was an innocence about her, but she was also tough.’
Brought up after that by his three older sisters, Cox would spend hours in the local cinema, watching films back to back, partly to keep warm but also to escape from the harsh reality of his life. That was the source of his ambition to be an actor. He joined the Dundee Repertory Theatre at the age of fourteen, then got a place at drama school in London. He knew he had to get away from his family and home town to succeed. Cox has won multiple awards, and now regularly attends Hollywood gala dinners and is photographed on the red carpet, but he says it is the struggles of his early life that define him, giving him an inner strength as well as a sense of urgency. ‘I realised I wasn’t going to waste any time,’ he told us. ‘I was wise enough and blessed enough to see how people start blaming their lives and say, “I shoulda coulda woulda”, and I don’t go for any “shoulda coulda woulda”, I just think “Do it.”’
He paused when we asked him what he would say to his eight-year-old self. ‘I would want to say, “it’s going to be OK, you’re going to be OK, it’s tough now but it will pass and these will be great memories for you”,’ he replied. ‘“They can’t take away that your dad was your dad and your mum was your mum and your sisters were your sisters and your brother was your brother. That’s a given, but move on. Don’t dwell, keep going, keep moving, keep trucking.”’
Resilience is a defining characteristic shared by many of our interviewees who have overcome trauma. They come from myriad worlds and have had widely varied careers, requiring contrasting skills, but they almost all appear to have the same psychological robustness that comes from knowing they can survive. The idea that, as Nietzsche put it, ‘that which does not kill us makes us stronger’ is at the heart of many of the stories that human beings have told themselves throughout history. There is a reason why the prince must hack through a forest of thorns to reach Sleeping Beauty, or why Odysseus must face so many challenges on his perilous voyage home after the Trojan War. The heroes have to surmount obstacles to prove they are worthy. So often, whether in mythology or reality, it is the ‘grit in the oyster’ that makes the pearl. ‘Grit’ and ‘resilience’ have become twenty-first-century buzzwords, skills ‘taught’ in schools and on management courses; but survivors do not have to cultivate these qualities in special classes as they have acquired them the hard way through their personal struggles.
The Canadian psychiatrist J.T. MacCurdy studied the public reaction to the Blitz and found that, to his surprise, people in London who survived the bombs became braver over time rather than more scared. ‘We are prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration,’ he wrote in his book The Structure of Morale. ‘The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.’ The clinical psychologist Frances Goodhart, who counsels families on bereavement, says a similar process takes place in those who face adversity in their early years. ‘Children and young people who experience loss or trauma have to deal with grief. They will have had to learn to accept the reality of the loss, acknowledge the pain, adjust to new environments and invest in the reality of their new life. But these tasks help people to develop strengths that carry them through personal loss. Certain individuals can harness these new skills not only to cope but to thrive and achieve great things.’
The businessman Stuart Rose sees it almost in medical terms. ‘Early trauma is like a vaccine, it gives you the antibodies to fight future pain,’ he told us. Rose is one of Britain’s most successful and best-known businessmen, a multi-millionaire with a reputation for having the Midas touch. The former Chief Executive of Marks & Spencer and Chairman of the online supermarket Ocado, is now Chairman of the clothing brand FatFace and the supermarket chain Asda. He has the Savile Row suits, well-stocked wine cellar and silver-fox charm of a man who is comfortable with his fortune – although he has in recent years replaced his Bentley with a more environmentally friendly electric car. But the immaculate Kensington town house where we went to meet him could not be more different from his first childhood home.
Rose spent his earliest years living in a freezing-cold caravan in Warwickshire. One of his first memories is of his father digging a ditch outside the caravan to create an outside loo. ‘As he was digging he found a Dinky toy. I remember him repairing it with great care and I had it as a birthday present.’ Life improved for a few years when his father applied for a job working as a civil servant in Africa and there were blissful afternoons for Stuart and his sister on the beach after school, surrounded by palm trees, blue sky and sun. Then, when he was thirteen, the family returned to England; he was sent to a Quaker boarding school, where he was miserable, and his parents became increasingly unhappy.
The moment of inoculation with the trauma vaccine came when Rose was twenty-six and just starting out in his retail career as a trainee at M&S. He remembers how, as a junior member of staff, he took particular pride in making sure the jumpers were neatly folded on the shelves. His life seemed under control and he was on a trajectory to a comfortable management role. Then, as he put it, bluntly: ‘One day I woke up and my mother killed herself.’ His mother, Peggy, had struggled with depression for years. As a child he would be told that: ‘Mummy has a migraine,’ but he soon realised that ‘Mummy didn’t have a migraine, Mummy was depressed and didn’t want to get out of bed.’ It pains him to say that ‘today it would probably have been sorted out with a bit of therapy or a few simple pills. But she had a doctor who gave her more than a few simple pills, he gave her tons of pills, enough pills to kill a battalion.’
Rose had seen his mother on the Saturday before she took her own life. That Sunday she had gone to bed ‘with a migraine’. Rose went to work on Monday morning, ‘worried about her but no more than normal’. He remembers thinking on his commute that he should ring her, but when he got to the office he became distracted by the busy weekly stocktake. ‘I didn’t think about ringing her until nine o’clock. She killed herself at 8.30 a.m.,’ he said. ‘She had had a bath, gone into the kitchen, drunk a bottle of whisky, taken a pile of pills and she was dead on the kitchen floor.’
His father had come home and found her in the kitchen, and she was still there when Rose arrived at his parents’ flat that evening. He went straight into ‘organisation mode’, ringing undertakers and coroners rather than bursting into tears. ‘My father was stupefied, my sister was very distressed, I had to do something,’ he explained. ‘I had a little mental checklist of all the things I had to get done, I kicked into “Right, someone has to take control” mode.’ He can’t remember ever crying after his mother’s death. ‘To be honest with you I didn’t feel the effects of it until quite a long time later,’ he confessed to us. ‘I stuck it in a box, tied the box up, stuck the box under the bed and off I went. When I went back to work nobody mentioned it. There was, as there still is today, a huge [attitude of] “We don’t talk about suicide.”’
It was ten years before it really hit him, and the trauma eventually took an emotional toll. ‘It’s easy for me to make excuses, but I’m sure the subsequent break-up of my first marriage probably wasn’t helped by that. There was a lot going on in my head but I never talked about it. I didn’t go to a therapist. I didn’t talk to my wife about it at the time, I didn’t talk to anybody about it.’ Rose, who has since remarried, still sometimes feels a cloud descending on him. ‘Churchill had the “black dog”. I do get the black dog, but I beat myself up and say, “Right, OK, you’ve had three days of this, snap out of it.”’
Despite his achievements, awards and accolades, he still has a surprising amount of insecurity. He is in his seventies, but he works six days a week, and astonishes the Ocado drivers who bring his groceries to the door by quizzing them in detail about their delivery routes. He admitted to us: ‘The workaholic bit has only come because I’m terrified of failure and I’m terrified of being unwanted and having no earning capacity. None of us know what’s going to happen. I’m not going to have to worry where the next meal is going to come from but I have restless dissatisfaction, which I think is a positive thing.’
He is convinced that dealing with tragedy so early in life ‘hardened’ him and gave him the qualities needed to succeed in the ruthless world of business. Having lost a parent in such horrific circumstances, he can handle the most cut-throat takeover bid or disloyal colleague. ‘I think I’ve always been quite a good observer of events and I’ve taken the long view and been pragmatic,’ he told us. ‘Life deals you all sorts of things, don’t always take everything as bad. How do you turn a negative into a positive? Nobody is trapped. What’s more tragic than death?’ When we asked what he wished he’d known when he was young, he replied bluntly: ‘Don’t get complacent, it might all disappear.’
There is evidence that adversity – at least in reasonable levels – can indeed make people emotionally stronger. Experiments with young squirrel monkeys have shown that early exposure to brief stressors made them more resilient later on. Those that had been put under pressure were less anxious in new situations than the monkeys that had not previously been exposed to stress. Researchers have observed a similar phenomenon in humans. The Swiss psychiatrist Manfred Bleuler – the son of Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term schizophrenia – studied the impact of schizophrenia on the children of schizophrenics in the 1970s. To his surprise, he discovered that they were often highly accomplished. ‘One is left with the impression that pain and suffering can have a steeling – a hardening – effect on some children,’ he wrote.
The footballer Raheem Sterling has described the impact of his tragic and traumatic childhood. ‘When I was two years old, my father was murdered. That shaped my entire life,’ he wrote. His mother left him and his sister with their grandmother in Jamaica while she went to work in England, and he remembers feeling jealous of the other children who had their mums. When he was five he joined her in London, but life there was tough. As a child he would sometimes wake at five in the morning to help his mother clean hotel toilets before going to school. His older sister would take him on three buses to get to football training every day. Yet the family’s struggle gave him the strength and determination to succeed in one of the most competitive sports in the world. ‘My mum sacrificed her life to get me here. My sister sacrificed her life to get me here,’ he later explained. ‘My whole mission was to get a proper contract so that my mother and sister didn’t have to stress any more.’
The psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi believes there can often be a ‘paradoxical benefit’ from severe stress. ‘Some people call it post-traumatic growth, others talk about resilience,’ he told us. Of course, not everybody receives such a boost. Many survivors of childhood trauma are left with a debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder. Ghaemi thinks the long-term effect may be as much about people’s innate character as the context in which they find themselves. ‘It has to do with the interaction between your traumatic life experience and your personality. There’s a parable in the Bible where Jesus says that if you spread seed on dry, parched earth it’ll never grow, but if you place the same seed in fertile land it’ll grow beautifully. The earth is your personality, the seeds are the adverse life events.’ Those with a ‘manic personality’ are most likely to gain strength from adversity, he suggested. ‘They have all the traits of resilience, they’re positive, they’re future-oriented, they have large social networks. They tend to be very charismatic people and they’re also creative people, so they might find creative ways of dealing with the negative life experience they had. Franklin Roosevelt had a manic personality – he was always very energetic, bubbly, charismatic, funny, talkative – then he got polio. He came back from it spiritually transformed into this fighter for the poor and the sick and the dispossessed.’
The rapper Professor Green, a multiple Platinum artist who has headlined at all the big music festivals including Glastonbury, is one of the most successful musicians of his generation as well as a respected mental health campaigner and entrepreneur. Stephen Manderson (his real name) has also been through far more trauma than most people. He grew up on a council estate in Hackney, east London, when it was notorious for its ‘Murder Mile’ rather than its bearded hipsters and sourdough bakeries. His mother was just sixteen when he was born. She left when he was one, and his father was hardly around.
He was brought up by his grandmother and great-grandmother, who also cared for his disabled uncle. There were six people living in a small flat; his great-grandmother slept on a chair in the sitting room and his grandmother did three jobs. ‘What [better] example could I need of how to be a hard worker?’ Manderson told us. ‘She put grit in me. I’m not saying she was always in a good mood. She was working three jobs a day, and then coming home and having to do everything that she did as a parent and also a carer. But I’m quite happy that I’m not my father or mother’s son, because I don’t think they were old enough or equipped enough to give me the upbringing that would have seen me achieve what I have.’ When he was starting out his grandmother sometimes attended his concerts, although she never fully appreciated his work and referred to rap as ‘that talking music’.
Manderson was a clever boy, but he hated going to school. Having been abandoned by his parents, he thinks he subconsciously feared that his grandmother and great-grandmother would not be there when he got home if he left them to go to his classes. ‘I suffered anxiety from as young as I can remember,’ he told us. ‘I’d say, “Nan, Nan, I’ve got a belly ache,” and I just didn’t have the language, the tools or the understanding to know that that was anxiety.’ He played truant so often that he was eventually excluded from mainstream education and ended up in a pupil referral unit. Surrounded by criminality and violence from an early age, he witnessed his first stabbing when he was eight, learned to roll a joint at the age of nine and was dealing drugs in his teens. The ‘Green’ in his stage name is a reference to cannabis.
Then, when he was twenty-five, his father took his own life. Manderson told us: ‘I got woken up by my nan on a Wednesday morning and she just blurted out, “Stephen, your dad’s dead. He’s hanged himself.” It happened the night before. I never knew he had any problems, it completely came out of the blue. I was in a rage, I remember punching a wall. I was angry. I was sad. I was confused. I just went through a whole spectrum of emotions very quickly.’ The rapper’s cheeky-chappie manner evaporated and his voice cracked as he described the overwhelming feeling of incomprehension. ‘My dad was not a violent person at all, he was so passive, but he hanged himself,’ he told us. ‘I wanted to know: for every time that he didn’t have enough courage to come and pick up his son, how did he have the courage to take his own life?’ Manderson was furious as well as devastated. ‘He took away from me – from us – the opportunity to sit down and have a beer, to go to the pub and play pool, to have those conversations that you wo...
