Early Career and Breakdown
He wanted to travel, but family pressure made him take a bank job in Cardiff which ended in a breakdown that marked him permanently. One evening after reading poetry he became increasingly manic. He started shouting that he had conquered time and could now control his own destiny and that of others. At that moment he heard a crash outside and through the window saw a motor-cyclist dead on the road and his bloodstained passenger staggering up the path towards him. Vernon, convinced he had willed this to happen, promptly collapsed. The next day he took a train to Repton, attended chapel, and burst into Dr Fisher's study and attacked him. He was committed to a mental hospital in Derbyshire. He tried to leap from a window to see if angels would save him. After a year he returned home to Cardiff.
He started work at Lloyds Bank in autumn 1925 and, after transferring to the St Helen's Road branch in Swansea, he remained there, with little responsibility, for much of his life. He joked that his father had been the bank's youngest manager and he was its oldest cashier. He battled with managers who wanted to promote him as his only interest was having sufficient time to work on his poetry.
Read more about this topic: Vernon Watkins
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