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James Bridgwater

News that James was found dead in his flat on 26th September came as a massive shock and, like so many others, I asked myself what more could have been said or done to help and support him before suicidal thoughts arose. But it can take a sudden trigger or supreme act of courage to open up about deep traumas. I’d had chats with James about his epilepsy, for example, but not really gained an insight into the long-term emotional impact this might have had. In an incredibly synchronistic way, I’ve just heard from someone whose husband can still not speak openly of his feelings after trying to resuscitate his father when he hanged himself. 

 I was so concerned to know what underlying forces shaped his life and contributed to his colourful, characterful nature that I had to buy his book Confessions of an Emotional Shipwreck. I wish I’d read it before. ‘How little you can tell about someone’s internal mental condition by outward appearances’ he wrote. Indeed! The book contains many revelations as to the mainsprings of such a challenged but engaging personality.

   In making sense of them I have to start with the traumatic event that overshadowed his whole life. Shortly after he was five, his mother lost control of the car on a hairpin bend. Without seat belts in those days, she was catapulted through the windscreen and ‘as clear as if it had been burnt into my memory using a high power laser beam’ he writes, was ‘seeing her lying face down on the tarmac about five metres in front of the car.’ The devastating impact of such an experience is unimaginable, embedded as it must be in the psyche of a 5-year old and forever. 

   One emotion he recollects was of anger at being the last to be told she had died but a frustration persisted at not knowing the cause and his suspicion that he was responsible for his mother’s death. ‘I must have distracted my mum or at least done something to cause her to stop giving the road all her attention.’ He found it hard to confide in his father. ‘Having been a naval officer family for generations … keeping such weak things as emotions was inbred by now,’ he writes and ‘It really is a thing for the diary when I or my dad shed a tear.’ 

   The physical repercussion for James had been five stitches on his chin when propelled into the back of the front seat, possibly precipitating later epileptic episodes. Perversely he would sometimes fake fits at boarding school, one benefit being that he could enjoy comforting sessions with the matron who had no children of her own. What a complex of emotions he had to live with. No wonder that it gave rise to bouts of irrational behaviour with an ill-fated disposition to take out his turbulent feelings at times on other human beings. One such incident saw him commit a serious assault with a sharpened knife on an innocent pedestrian in the early hours and get sentenced to 3 years at the Portland Young Offenders’ Institution for ‘attempted malicious wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm’. He served 18 months and was released on 5th December 1991. A far more enduring punishment was the criminal record which proved an ‘invisible millstone round my neck’, and certainly in the jobs market.  

   Potent as these adverse experiences were, it does no justice to James’ memory to dwell on them. Immensely more salient is that, despite these profound setbacks, his character shone through as he asserted his own sense of direction in life.  

   One crystal clear aim was to advance his education. He enjoyed being ‘a star in the intellectual firmament’. The range of his attainments is remarkable: at Marjon a degree in Literary Studies with Theology and Philosophy; a B.Sc in biochemistry at Manchester Metropolitan University; and after his detention at the Young Offenders’ Institution resourceful enough to land a TEFL placement for students in Hungary. He preferred the Czech Republic but they did not accept anyone with a criminal record. He took great pleasure in teaching children about poetry, especially limericks, Ogden Nash and the immortal line: “God in his wisdom made the fly and then forgot to tell us why.”  ‘At last I was doing something worthwhile with my life,’ he writes, ‘and it made my dad proud.’ His academic ambitions never waned. In 2023 he seriously considered taking a degree course at the Arts University Plymouth.

   Most telling are the attitudes that underpinned his successes. At Plymouth College where he boarded and took his ‘A’ levels (in the three sciences) he had the temerity to correct his headmaster for the inadequacy of his quotation that ‘Money is the root of all evil’. He knew with ‘pinpoint accuracy’ and told him so that “It’s the ‘Love of money which is the root of all evil.’ Have a look in the first letter of Timothy, Chapter 6, and Verse 10,” he added. That took some bottle!

   But he’d call himself to order too. One day he felt so bad that he described himself as being like a spider crab but then felt obliged to add ‘Now of course I shouldn’t be so presumptuous as to assume that spider crabs don’t feel good just because of how they appear to me. Maybe all crustaceans feel fantastic.’ I loved this sideswipe at his potentially inappropriate analogy. He revelled in words and was highly amused to learn that a fear of long words is Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalioophobia, so much so that he had to write a poem about it for the writing group. The word is enough to trigger the phobia! 

   Coupled with this playfulness was a basinful of determination. ‘Once I’ve started something I don’t like to stop part way through. I’m much happier getting to the end. This applies to everything from smoking a cigarette or listening to a song up to reading a trilogy.’ But living in the moment was also an imperative. The axiom he generally used as an excuse for having done something a little reckless, foolish or irresponsible was ‘Be spontaneous as one may be dead this time tomorrow.’ A most poignant observation today. 

   He was all for trying things out (like using porridge for glue at the Young Offenders’ Institute!) and admits he ‘experimented with LSD, amphetamines, magic mushrooms and ecstasy. ‘Something about the hallucinogens really worked for me,’ he writes. 

   If things didn’t work out in life, he would console himself by saying “it’s not the end of the world,” and he positively welcomed the offbeat. ‘Things which don’t quite follow the line or are slightly off kilter have often been the ones to appeal to me. I liked people who challenged the expectations, norms and mores of the surrounding cultural ocean, rising up out of it like a volcano off the coast of Iceland or Hawaii.’ Hear, hear! ‘Normal people worry me’ was a sticker he put on the front of one notebook.  

   He was a sucker for the odd, unusual or simply bizarre. A poem such as Autobiography of a Lungworm, a track entitled Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals or a record label Earache would capture his attention. His tastes were famously eclectic. Foodwise, he’d happily entertain catfish and giblet stew and his Hungarian TEFL escapade held out rich sources of new culinary delights. Then, of course, there was fashion. In the late 80s he’d seen the Woodstock film with much tie-dyed material in the audience. He expanded into batik work with some original thinking: ‘A little bit of marking out words and simple shapes using bleach straight from the nozzle of a toilet Duck added some possibilities. Thus I developed a taste for garments which were individual and unique’. We saw this talent blossom to great effect in the eye-catching gear he often wore and that gave so much authentic vibrancy to the Script-in-Hand-Theatre performances. He berated the fact that ‘Over the last years I seem to have been witnessing people’s individuality fading away.’ He had little time for the risk-averse. ‘These days it seems to me people are too wrapped up in cotton wool and are certainly doing that to their children.’ 

   When someone’s hi-vis free-spirited personality stood out as strongly as James’s, it’s vital to recognise the correspondingly greater need for empathetic friends. James tells an enchanting story of how one friendship was born. He was out shopping in Plymouth one bleak mid-winter evening with banknotes in his pocket but no change when he was accosted by a rough sleeper in his 60s, ‘a chap who looked so gaunt he made an anorexic skeleton look obese.’ 

  “Hey buddy, can you lend us a dime?’ was his greeting. 

   James writes that ‘Usually if asked for money by an apparently destitute soul I’d ignored them or said I had enough problems of my own. But for some inexplicable reason that time I had replied “I’ve got no change at the minute, but wait here and I’ll give you a £1 coin when I get back!” 

   James duly coughed up the £1 coin whereupon the dosser asked for his address so he could pay him back the next day. Feeling it could do no harm he did so with this result. 

‘When Steve John Dixon Wilson had rung my doorbell the following morning just after 9 o’clock with a pound coin I realised that retired RAF Cornishmen didn’t say anything without meaning it. Thus begun a friendship with ‘Dogend’ Wilson which lasted for 20 years or so,’ and who earned James’s extensive gratitude on looking after his one-eyed wonder cat Alice when he was in Hungary. 

   Cats have to take pride of place in James’s friendship league, right from his college days. He says, ‘I couldn’t establish a link with anyone at college on anything even approaching the level of dedication and devotion I had encountered with the cats.’ A whole succession of them graced James’s home: Tabatha, Brum, Ting, Rags and the incorrigible Alice, or Squeak and a ‘galumphling’ as he also called her. He tells such touching stories of his contacts with them. How can you ever measure the soothing value of a purr, the comforting stroke or peaceful pawing in a lap at times of stress? And with ears always ready to take in the most private of confidences. I was delighted to hear that James’s latest cat incarnation, Kiki, has been found a forever home with his neighbour. 

   James did find solace in religion and a personal meaningfulness in one sacrament. ‘Ever since my time in rehab I don’t take communion wine as it means every Sunday I reflect, while others are taking theirs, on all the misery I have seen or heard of which alcohol is responsible for.’ His favourite hymn of all time, incidentally, is an Advent one with ‘very strong imagery in the lyrics’: O Come, o come Emmanuel.  

   So what can we take from the iconic example of the life that James led? His legacy might well be the lessons we can learn from the richness of his experiences and let play into our everyday lives. We can each take what we will. Most fundamentally, what sings out for me is the need to nurture our own individuality, to identify what lends our life most meaning and to carry that through on whatever path that leads us. And surely in tandem with that must be the call to embrace our differences. That’s what ultimately distinguished James and delighted us – he was refreshingly different in all so many ways. That was his gift. Thank you, James. 

P.S. ‘I’ve always enjoyed making people laugh.’  

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