Rosie

by Lesley Pearse

  It was Donald who rang the bell for help; neither Mary nor Rosie could get to it, surrounded as they were by clawing, yelling people. Rosie was absolutely terrified in the few moments before the day room door burst open and Simmonds, Maureen and Gladys Thorpe, one of the nurses, rushed in. She had no idea what to do for the best and was paralysed with fear by the screaming all around her. Although she felt a surge of relief as the reinforcements arrived, she was appalled to see Simmonds punch Tabby in the mouth, and Maureen grab Archie’s arms, twisting them up behind his back.

  That day both Tabby and Archie were dragged out of the day room, Archie to be put in one of the isolation cells along the corridor, Tabby to be plunged fully dressed into an ice-cold bath and held there by force until she was quiet again.

  Back in the day room it was left to Rosie and Mary to calm the other patients down, which involved separating the men from the women and forcing them to sit at opposite ends of the room. As Rosie had received no prior warning that this sort of fracas was common, or any instructions about how to deal with an emergency, she felt helpless, shaking with fright for some hours after it had all quietened down.

  She learned later that she should have rushed to the bell first, before even attempting to intervene and then she should have gone up behind the perpetrators and caught them securely by the arms, and pushed them hard against the wall, if necessary banging their heads against it. Such brutality was unthinkable to Rosie, and she didn’t believe she’d ever be able to do it.

  One thing she soon learned, though, was that patients involved in such incidents were always punished. Tabby not only got the cold bath, but spent the rest of the day in isolation without any food and her knitting was taken away. Archie got similar treatment, but without the bath as he wasn’t considered hysterical, only an opportunist who used any upset to attack someone. Rosie heard too that in extreme cases they got electric shock treatment, but apparently the threat of this was usually enough to silence anyone, without the necessity of going through with it.

  After that first fight, Rosie found she handled herself better in similar incidents, grabbing the person who started it before anyone else became involved and shouting for silence like a sergeant major, the way Maureen did. She began to see why Sister Welbred had made that remark about developing muscle on her first night here. She also learned to read advance signals from the patients that they were likely to lash out, and often by leading them away from the rest of the group to talk gently to them, it was possible to defuse them.

  Rosie remained very anxious about the second-floor patients. However hard she tried to stop lurid pictures from forming in her mind when she heard patients up there screaming, they came anyway. When the laundry bin was being wheeled downstairs each morning, the stink of faeces wafted everywhere. She had seen for herself a line full of rough linen shifts hanging up and was told that was all the patients up there wore. A hamper marked ‘strait-jackets’, the odd-shaped feeding cups used for patients unable to hold ordinary ones, all these things served to create unwelcome images in her head. A veil of secrecy seemed to surround that floor. Again and again she had asked questions, only small unimportant things like, could the patients feed and bath themselves? What sort of treatments did they receive? But her questions were always evaded, or fobbed off with a joke.

  Although Rosie had learned to pick up the early warning signs of trouble and brace herself for it when it came, it was far harder to cope with the nausea which came with the vile jobs. Rosie didn’t mind wet beds, she was used to that. But to deal with a grown man who had messed himself was quite another matter. It didn’t help reminding herself that she’d cleaned Alan’s bottom hundreds of times in the past. To be cloistered in a bathroom with an unattractive stinking adult and to be forced to scrape the mess off him, then wash him was absolutely disgusting, and she didn’t think she would ever get used to it.

  But perhaps the most disconcerting thing of all in Carrington Hall was confirmation that there was no treatment or medicine that could cure the patients or even make them a little happier. There was a doctor, Dr Freed, who came a couple of times a week and treated any injuries or infections, but the reality was that these poor people were only fed and cleaned, imprisoned in a ward with no mental stimulation or physical exercise, until death released them.

  It was an awful job. Rosie thought it must rate as one of the worst in the entire world, but as Maureen had said on her first night there were lighter moments too, and it was those which made the job bearable.

  Like when Maud emptied a bowl of rice pudding over Albert’s head because he kept begging her for it. A heart-stopping moment when Aggie went missing, only to be found later sitting in the broom cupboard, singing to herself. As Aggie could barely walk, how she’d managed to shuffle through the day-room door when it had been left unlocked for only a few moments and hide herself quite so quickly was still a mystery. Then there was Alice and her new shoes. She liked them so much she insisted on carrying them instead of putting them on her feet.

  And Donald. He was always at her side wanting to help. His merry smile was real, not the dopey, vacant grin the others had. There was nothing physically repulsive about him; in fact, when he slipped his hand into hers it felt very much like having Alan back beside her. She really liked him.

  But at the end of the day it was Linda and Mary who cheered Rosie most. She hadn’t had another girl to chat to since she left school and she’d forgotten how good it was to have female company.

  Linda Bell was one of the funniest people Rosie had ever met. Her humour was the dry kind – startlingly wicked observations, sharp one-liners – rather than clowning. Upstairs in the evenings she would mimic people so accurately she actually seemed to become that person, with the facial expressions, the movements and the voice. On one particular occasion she’d stood outside the bathroom door while Rosie was in there, and launched into a tirade of complaints in Matron’s voice. Rosie had slunk out, apologizing profusely, only to find it was Linda, and Mary Connor was further along the landing doubled up with laughter.

  Mary was a tonic too. She could take the most trivial of incidents and turn it into farce or tragedy with a little of her very Irish embroidery. During afternoons in the day room she giggled a great deal too and Rosie found it infectious.

  If it wasn’t for them, Rosie might not have been able to rise above the shock of finding Jacob lying in bed one morning rolling excrement into balls in his hands. Or Albert frantically masturbating in a corner of the day room, or Maud dripping with blood from wounds she’d inflicted on herself after finding a sharp piece of glass out in the garden. Linda and Mary made her see the humour in even the blackest moments, and assured her that one day she’d be as casual about such things as they were.

  Rosie hadn’t formed a real friendship with Maureen though. She was fine to work with, but her dirty habits made it impossible to really like her. Linda had been right in saying she didn’t wash; the smell of stale sweat hit Rosie each time the girl undressed. She often sat on her bed picking her nose then eating her findings, then moved on to squeeze her spots, or pick at her feet. On top of these habits which made Rosie cringe, Maureen was very dull company. She lived, breathed, ate and slept Carrington Hall. She didn’t care what was happening in the world, at the pictures or even further down the road. All she could talk about was work.

  Rosie found she couldn’t stay in bed any longer. The sun was shining outside, a beautiful misty September morning, with the promise of another warm day. She got up, had a bath and washed her hair, put on the new green checked skirt and toning sweater Miss Pemberton had bought her, made her bed and Maureen’s, then went down to get some breakfast.

  She had her day off all planned. This morning she would explore Woodside Park and find the nearest library. She intended to buy a suspender belt so she could throw out those uncomfortable garters, and get her first pair of nylons. In the afternoon she was going to take the bus to Hampstead and find the shop where Thomas worked. S
he hoped he might be free later in the day so they could catch up on each other’s news.

  Breakfast was officially over at seven, but there was an understanding that on a day off, as long as the staff turned up before nine they would still get something to eat. The food for the staff at Carrington Hall was something Rosie couldn’t fault. It was well cooked and plentiful, as if there was no such thing as rationing. Yet the moment Rosie walked into the dining-room and saw Matron sitting there reading a newspaper and drinking tea, she wished she’d gone straight out.

  A week of working at Carrington Hall had changed her views on some of the things which had intimidated her on her arrival, but Matron wasn’t one of them.

  Mary Connor summed Matron up perfectly in one word – ‘odious’. Linda had gone a stage further to describe her as a putrid smell which tainted the very air the staff breathed. Everything Rosie had observed about the woman so far had led her to believe that she thrived on spite. She was always watching, lingering outside the staff room door, peeping through glass panels on doors, waiting to catch people out. Worse still for Rosie, she sensed the older woman was singling her out for extra nasty treatment because she resented that Mr Brace-Coombes had employed her without consulting her. As Mary had laughingly pointed out, Rosie was in for it. She didn’t look meek enough, she was too attractive and, even worse in Matron’s eyes, some of the patients had taken a great liking to her.

  Nothing Rosie had done so far had met with Matron’s approval. Not the taking in of her uniform with Linda’s help, or the way she’d mastered putting her hair up in a tight bun. She hadn’t liked it when she came in the day room and found Rosie teaching Patty and Alice to do cat’s cradle with a piece of string, and she claimed that Rosie got the patients over-excited when she heard she’d been playing ‘Oranges and Lemons’ with the whole group. Yet even Sister Welbred, who disapproved of anything which might make her charges anything less than docile, had remarked on how contented and amenable they had all been that evening when she came on duty. Rosie had been blamed for Aggie’s disappearance too, even though it was Maureen who’d forgotten to lock the day room door.

  According to the other girls Matron had a perfectly good kitchen of her own, or she could ask Pat Clack to bring her meals to her private flat, but they assumed her only reason for using the staff dining-room was so she could keep a closer watch on them.

  ‘Couldn’t you sleep?’ Matron said sarcastically over her newspaper, her thin lips curving into a sneer.

  ‘I wanted to,’ Rosie said. She knew most of the staff spent a good deal of their day off in bed and she felt Matron was implying she was abnormal. ‘But I’ve always had to get up early. I suppose it’s a hard habit to break. Anyway I wanted to go to the library.’

  She sat down nervously at the other end of the table from Matron and helped herself to corn flakes. Pat Clack came in with a fresh pot of tea and didn’t help the strained atmosphere by giving Rosie a beaming smile. The cook had decided Rosie was her friend ever since she had commiserated with her over a nasty burn on her hand a couple of days earlier. Rosie guessed Matron didn’t like that either.

  ‘Scrambled eggs, lovey?’ Pat suggested, but her tone implied she would get her anything she desired.

  ‘Whatever you are doing,’ Rosie replied nervously.

  Matron picked up her newspaper again. Rosie ate her cornflakes and hoped the older woman would ignore her. But a gasp and a rustle of the paper suggested she was about to say something more.

  ‘Those murdering monsters from your part of the world are coming up for trial next week then!’

  Rosie knew instantly who the woman was referring to and her blood seemed to turn to ice.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked, trying to sound innocent. She hoped she wasn’t blushing.

  ‘The Parkers. The father and son who murdered two women and buried them on their land. Surely you know about it?’

  ‘Oh, them.’ Rosie nodded and put another spoonful of cornflakes in her mouth, hoping that would be a good enough excuse for not speaking.

  ‘All the strangest people seem to come from the West Country. They’re all interbred of course. I worked in Stoke Park in Bristol. Half the staff there were as mad as the inmates.’

  Rosie felt this was a deliberate attempt to goad her, so she merely shrugged and didn’t reply.

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t go there to work instead of trailing all this way to London. Why was that?’

  Rosie almost choked on her cornflakes. ‘A friend of my family’s suggested I came here, because I wanted to work in London.’

  ‘But this is so far out of London, and hardly a well-known institution. I find it a bit strange your mother should agree to allow you to go so far from home.’

  Rosie’s heart began to flutter. It sounded as if Matron was digging for information. ‘My mother died when I was little,’ she said with a touch of defiance. ‘My aunt wasn’t very keen for me to go so far away, but I wanted to come to London.’

  Matron sat back in her chair and her smirk was almost triumphant. ‘So you were rebellious even at home?’

  Pat Clack’s return with the scrambled eggs was the perfect excuse for not answering the question. Rosie began to eat quickly, intending to make her escape as fast as possible. She kept her eyes on her plate, aware Matron was studying her.

  ‘Girls often try to fool me,’ she said after a few minutes’ silence. ‘They apply for jobs here to cover up something they’ve done. You see, people believe no one looks too closely in mental homes. We’ve had them all here. The thieves, the runaways, the ones who’ve just had babies adopted and those just out of prison. I always find out though. I’ve got a nose for such things.’

  Back in her room ten minutes later, with Matron’s words ringing in her ears, Rosie was hastily making certain there was absolutely nothing amongst her belongings to give Matron grounds for further suspicion. A sixth sense told her that her room would be searched today. She took out the letter from Miss Pemberton that had arrived on Saturday. As she had promised she had signed it ‘love and kisses, Auntie Molly’, and there was nothing in it to make anyone doubt that it was genuine. Just a caring note saying she hoped Rosemary was settling in and not finding London too big and strange, and that she hoped to hear all the news soon.

  Rosie refolded it very carefully, noting how she had done it, putting a pencil spot on the top fold, then slid it back in the envelope. She put it in the drawer with her underwear, carefully placing a hair grip on top of it, so she could tell if it had been moved. Then taking a couple of sheets of writing paper and an envelope from her writing case, she put those in her handbag.

  She would write to Miss Pemberton in the privacy of the library and post it while she was out. Suddenly she didn’t trust the system of leaving letters to be posted downstairs. She would make a bet that Matron steamed them open and read them, before they reached the post-box.

  By mid-morning Rosie was sitting on top of a bus on her way to Hampstead. She’d been to the library and she had Gone with the Wind and the first of the series of Jalna books, which she’d always wanted to read, in her bag. She had also bought a pretty white suspender belt and a pair of nylons and put them on in a public lavatory before catching the bus.

  The excitement of wearing her first pair of nylons and seeing London at last from the top of one of the red buses she’d so often seen in picture books had driven Matron and Carrington Hall right out of her mind. From talking to Linda who knew London well, she had discovered that this whole part of north London from Woodside Park, through Finchley and on to Hampstead was one of the best areas and not exactly a representative view of the city. But she wasn’t anxious to see the drearier, poorer parts today, or even famous places like the Tower, Buckingham Palace or Trafalgar Square. She would find them all on other days off. Today she was happy to see fine big houses and flower-filled gardens and revel gleefully at how surprised Thomas would be to see her.

  The last time she had written to him was ju
st after Mr Bentley had told her about the trial being in Bristol. She had said she would be moving on, but at that time she didn’t know where. She said she would write again once she was settled. But she hadn’t written – a surprise visit was much more exciting.

  The conductor called out ‘Henlys Corner’, and the bus went across a wide, very busy road, with a big showroom full of gleaming new cars to her right. All at once Rosie found she was in the real London, as seen so often in films and the Picture Post: long rows of shops, with three or four floors above, interspersed with rather grand blocks of flats with names like Albemarle Mansions and white marble steps leading up to them.

  Flats were intriguing to Rosie. Until she went to Bristol to live, the idea of several homes on top of each other was totally alien to her. She thought she’d like to live in one of these places; through the glass doors she could see tantalizing glimpses of thick red carpets, glossy varnished doors and a lift beyond, and she supposed the flats themselves must be even more posh.

  The shops too were quite different from those in Bristol: elegant dress shops, restaurants and milliners. She saw one selling nothing but flowers, and so many jewellers. She imagined the people who lived around here were all very, very rich.

  Even the old bomb sites here and there, seemed less ugly than ones she’d seen in Bristol. Ivy and rosebay willowherb had scrambled up over the piles of rubble and seemed to transform them from eyesores into ancient ruins. Rosie suddenly got the feeling that in London anything was possible. She could get to be a nurse, a secretary, or even run that lovely flower shop, if she wanted it enough. Maybe she might end up living in one of these smart flats too.