Tuk-Tuk to the Road. Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
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tie-dye, eye-poppingly short skirts and an undercut, a hairstyle synonymous with dog-on-string ketamine-heads, not public school girls. This, combined with her ridiculous sense of humour, was perhaps what I loved most about her. But was this necessarily an indication of what would happen a few years later? Did fate already have Jo in its clutch?
At the end of GCSEs, Jo left our school to do her A-Levels at Lancing College. It was then that things started to go wrong. She was miserable at Lancing from the outset, and my diary entries from her first term there speak of her unhappiness and desire to leave. On my part, I missed her terribly. But it wasn’t until the following summer that I realised quite how unhappy she was. We were walking along the street in Thames Ditton one afternoon when I noticed some marks on her arms. I had never seen self-harm before, never heard of it even, but I knew those marks were self-inflicted. Nowadays self-harm is a recognised condition and rivals anorexia for newspaper column inches. A 2006 survey shockingly revealed that 25 000 teenagers are treated in British hospitals every year for self-inflicted wounds, but ten years ago it wasn’t something you ever heard about.‘What are those marks on your arm, Ferret?’ I ventured. She looked sheepish and smiled that nervous smile you do when you know you have done something wrong. Then she admitted she had done them to herself. They were tiny scars at that point—barely visible—and she assured me that she wouldn’t do it again.
These assurances were soon forgotten. My diary from October 1996 records: ‘I went to stay with Jo last weekend…I don’t know what to do about her at the moment…she’s cutting herself regularly…who the hell do I turn to for advice?’ I felt helpless, out of my depth. We met up a few times during that term to go clubbing in London, and Jo covered up her arms with bandages and lied to anyone who asked. In November we celebrated our eighteenth birthdays dancing the night away at the SW1 club in Victoria with a load of friends, going home long after the sun had come up. In spite of the cutting, she was still the old Jo, full of laughter, energy and mischief. I could never have foreseen what lurked in the shadows of the immediate future.
A week later she was taken to a psychiatric hospital near Tunbridge Wells.
And that’s when we lost Jo.
It all happened so quickly. One minute she was there—unhappy yes, but still Jo, still able to come out and have a laugh and celebrate turning 18. The next minute she’d gone, enveloped by the dark cloak of depression. Four weeks after she had been admitted, I went to visit her in hospital with her father and brother. The first shock was the hospital itself. Just before we arrived, one of Jo’s fellow patients had cut themselves in the bathroom and there was blood everywhere. Someone else had kicked a door in. The whole place reeked of unhappiness and disquiet. Then there was the shock of seeing my friend. The Jo I knew and loved was vibrant, hyperactive and quick to laugh. The Jo I saw that day in hospital was a mere shell, hardly able to speak, her limbs a morass of self-inflicted wounds. She was also under constant one-on-one supervision in case she tried to harm herself. How on earth had it come to this?
Jo spent the next four years in and out of various psychiatric institutions in the south of England. She should have been doing her A-levels and then a degree, out there having fun. Instead she was on a cocktail of antidepressants and locked into a spiralling addiction to self-harm. As the months and years ticked by, I began to lose hope of Jo ever being able to escape from the abyss into which she had fallen. She took overdoses and cut herself so badly that she frequently had to be stitched up—with 128 stitches on one occasion. At one stage, voices in her head urged her to cut herself and to kill herself and others; thank goodness she had the strength to resist. It was heartbreaking to see her so unhappy and to see such a beautiful girl destroying her body like she was, knowing she would be scarred for life. I can’t begin to imagine how her family must have felt.
While Jo was battling depression, I was leading a very different existence as a student at Edinburgh University. It was extraordinary to think how much our lives had diverged in such a short space of time. We had gone from seeing and speaking to each other daily to barely having any contact at all. My letters went unanswered, my calls were unreturned and when I did make the journey south to see her she was usually uncommunicative and numbed by drugs. Because I had never experienced depression and couldn’t relate to her condition, I became frustrated with what I saw as an increasingly one-sided friendship; Jo didn’t seem to care at all. It was naive of me to think that the normal rules of friendship still applied, to expect anything from someone who was so ill, but I didn’t understand that when you feel like Jo did you become socially disabled and unable to communicate even with those closest to you. It was only when my own life crumbled during my second year of university, in 1998, that I understood what this felt like.
In a single week, my father lost his business, we lost our family home and my parents split up after 26 years of marriage. It was a massive shock and before long I was experiencing severe panic attacks, which lasted for the next three years. I now knew what it was like to not want to speak to people, to feel like you have fallen down a black hole from which there is no perceivable escape. Depression can make you very selfish; you’re so caught up in your own problems and paranoia that you become disconnected from the world outside your own head. Jo had always been a compassionate, thoughtful, loving person, but she was so ill at times during these four years that it was as if she was locked in a glass prison, able to see and exist within the outside world but unable to communicate with it.
Looking back on it now, I see the fact that Jo recovered as little short of miraculous. She plumbed the very depths of depression and yet made it out the other side. Pinpointing the reasons why someone suddenly overcomes such an affliction is almost as hard as comprehending why and how they succumbed to it originally. In Jo’s case it was a combination of factors, namely the right medication and the love and support of her family, friends and…ferrets. Above all, though, I put it down to her extraordinary strength of character. Many people who suffer from depression give up hope of ever seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The darkness is so consuming that they can’t believe it isn’t terminal. But even at her lowest points, Jo held on to that vital shred of hope that she wouldn’t feel like that for ever. Her recovery should be an inspiration to all.
In the summer of 2002 Jo went to Thailand with her friends Hannah and Niki. It was a seminal moment. When she went on that holiday I knew she’d made it, that we’d got Jo back again. Little did I know that a small incident on that holiday would have such major ramifications, for it was here that she first encountered a tuk tuk, the ubiquitous three-wheelers that crowd the streets of South East Asia. It was love at first rev, and at that moment Jo dreamt up the notion of one day driving a tuk tuk from Bangkok back to England. Since Jo has never been the most conventional person, it was with only a slightly raised eyebrow that I greeted the news of her plan upon her return, although I’m not sure I ever truly believed the scheme would come to fruition. My doubts were coloured by my own experiences of hair-raising tuk tuk rides in Bangkok, which had always left me slightly deafened and vowing to take a taxi next time. Plus, I doubted one would make it as far as the city’s airport, let alone England.
I should have known better. Jo is the most determined person I know, and this little plan of hers was here to stay. For the next four years, while Jo did a psychology degree in Brighton and I clambered up the ladder in the world of television production in London, the dream simmered. She would occasionally mention it in passing, but I didn’t really think she meant business. Meanwhile, Jo was quietly gathering information and maps and beginning to show a very unladylike interest in mechanics. In September 2005, Jo and two of our other great friends from school, Anna and Lisa, came to stay with me for the weekend in Norfolk. At supper one night in the local pub, Jo piped up,‘Right, guys, I need your advice. I’ve got a year off before I start medical school next autumn, and I’m wondering whether to take the plunge and do this tuk tuk trip. Either that or I go and do a master’s degree.’ Fuelled by wine and lots of laughter, our vote was unanimous: the tuk tuk it was. None of us gave a moment’s consideration to how she would do it or who she would go with, but we all thought it was a wonderful idea and celebrated with several more glasses of wine.
The following week Jo called me: ‘Ferret, will you do the tuk tuk trip with me?’ she asked, her voice filled with excitement. My immediate reaction was to say yes—how could I resist the temptation of such an adventure? This was the