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
Famous quotes containing the words early, career and/or breakdown:
“Probably more than youngsters at any age, early adolescents expect the adults they care about to demonstrate the virtues they want demonstrated. They also tend to expect adults they admire to be absolutely perfect. When adults disappoint them, they can be critical and intolerant.”
—The Lions Clubs International and the Quest Nation. The Surprising Years, I, ch.4 (1985)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“With the breakdown of the traditional institutions which convey values, more of the burdens and responsibility for transmitting values fall upon parental shoulders, and it is getting harder all the time both to embody the virtues we hope to teach our children and to find for ourselves the ideals and values that will give our own lives purpose and direction.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)