She remembers the last time she saw her, in an agitated state in the psychiatric unit at Hastings Hospital. “Don’t come in,” she warned Redgrave, then in her early 20s. “The germs will get you!”
And she remembers a phone call from her father on the day Nanie died, aged 87, telling her not to come from Auckland for the funeral. “Your grandmother had a miserable life,” he said.
Redgrave’s new memoir, The Unfortunate Lunatic, is the story of her search for Evelyn – not the “mad grandmother” who behaved so oddly but the intelligent, acerbic, rather snobby woman she never truly knew.
A trained nurse and midwife, Evelyn was hospitalised when Redgrave’s father, Jim – one of five children – was just a few weeks old.
Author Tess Redgrave’s grandmother Evelyn Macalister, right, and Evelyn’s sister, Isobel, as schoolgirls, circa 1910. “The photo haunted me,” she says. “Why did my young grandmother look so sad?”
That kind of thing wasn’t talked about back then, although research suggests a vulnerability to mental illness can be passed down through the generations.
A journalist, novelist and former editor of Auckland University’s alumni magazine Ingenio, Redgrave too has suffered black periods throughout her life, including a crippling bout of clinical depression in her mid-30s.
“The more I began to think about it, the more I understood my grandmother was marginalised in my family’s history because of her mental illness,” she writes.
“As I took my daily dose of lithium, I started to feel a powerful link to her. I knew she was a part of my story, and I wanted to bring her in close.”
The title of her book doesn’t refer to Evelyn but to her father, Christopher Hume Macalister, Redgrave’s great-grandfather.
The 33-year-old doctor, who suffered from what was then termed “recurrent melancholia”, choked to death on a sip of milk in 1896 while a patient at Ashburn Hall asylum in Dunedin.
A week earlier, he’d attempted suicide by stabbing himself repeatedly in the neck.
Christopher Hume Macalister, Redgrave’s great-grandfather, died in distressing circumstances at 33 after spending time in a mental asylum.
A booklet on the Macalisters by a family historian referred to Christopher dying at 33 from “ill health”. After applying for his coroner’s report, Redgrave discovered the truth was much grimmer.
Newspaper reports revealed the family had brought a case against Ashburn Hall for neglect, leading to a government inquiry into what the presiding judge called the “treatment of the unfortunate lunatic Macalister”.
Now back in Hawke’s Bay, Redgrave completed a Master of Creative Writing while working at Auckland University and in 2018 published her first novel, Gone to Pegasus, about two women in the suffrage movement in Dunedin in the 1890s.
“Very quickly, this character William, who was in and out of Seacliff [psychiatric hospital], came into the story,” she says. “Obviously that was my great-grandfather and I knew the next thing to do was investigate him further.
“The weird thing is that I thought if I had any issues in my background, it was him, when I’d grown up with a grandmother doing some pretty peculiar things. It came quite late when I suddenly realised she was a part of the story.”
Redgrave’s memoir is a fascinating and often disturbing insight into the history of mental health care in New Zealand through the lens of her family.
Evelyn was first hospitalised in her 20s and later given electric shock treatment, cycling in and out of care all her life. Among the meticulous notes she kept was a list of what she took with her into hospital each time: her handbag, her pearls, her Bible, and writing paper.
“One of the most moving moments in her letters is when she writes, ‘I want to go home to look after the home’. That’s the line that really undid me.”
Evelyn’s erratic behaviour and the many difficult decades Jim Regrave spent helping to care for her damaged him, too.
“I feel a lot of compassion for my father,” she says. “He was terrific in many ways, but he didn’t have that attachment and warmth in his childhood from which he could build an emotional world.
“I feel huge compassion for my grandmother, too, which I didn’t have before, when she was just my mad grandmother. Now I’ve found her as a real person.”
In her memoir, Redgrave traces a history of mental illness back through multiple generations of her family.
The Unfortunate Lunatic also candidly navigates Redgrave’s bumpy ride through marriage, motherhood and sexual identity while struggling to keep her own demons at bay.
Her two adult children and sister have been “incredibly supportive”, she says. When her son told her she was about to become a grandmother for the first time, she asked to be called Nanie.
“One of the big things about writing the memoir has been understanding what was behind me and around me that might have affected who I am, because I had no sense of that as a kid.
“For me, a big part of it is being seen by the world, and that requires me to stand in my own shoes and be comfortable with that in a way I haven’t been before.”
The Unfortunate Lunatic by Tess Redgrave (The Cuba Press, $38) is out now.
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with a focus on social issues and the arts.