T. Clifford Thompson
Writer and Mental Health Patient
Cliff Thompson has been in and out of institutions for much of his life, including a stretch in prison for attacking his mother with a hammer. His book, entitled They Came for Tommy: testimony of a survivor of a satanically evil family, gives a fascinating insight into the mind of someone suffering from delusions. He is clearly an intelligent man although his writing seems to suggest he has a different reality from those around him.
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Chapter One
The 1960s: Swinging Like the Rope
That Supports the Hanged man's Neck
In 1964, when I was 11, my mother Margaret Thompson told me mockingly "what long eyelashes you have!" Two or three years earlier she had seemed gratified when I cried out in fear at the sight of her face. Also in 1964 mother took a photo of my father Trevor Thompson while we were on a camping holiday in Scotland. He was eating in the open air at the time, and the picture showed him with food lodged beneath his cheek. It was as if my mother were recording at an early stage my father's trepidation about his swallowing reflexes.
I have hazy, fragmented memories of life in Wiltshire in the 1960s. Two little girls, trying to punctuate the atmosphere of evil and despair in our household, rang at our front door circa 1966. One of them was holding a rabbit called Fluffy and mother mocked the rabbit's name to me. I remember my father rushing out of the back door from the kitchen at breakfast time to be sick, with my mother and elder brother not batting an eyelid. I have a memory I can barely credit of my brother, seated next to me at the breakfast table, laughing when my father coughed or sneezed blood whilst involved in a head to head argument with my mother, who just glared implacably at him as he bled.
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Copies of his book are available for £2.50 from Cliff Thomson at:
Flat 9, Lawn Court
26-27 Park Road
Bexhill-on-Sea
East Sussex TN39 3HZ