by Susan Tarr
Days and weeks merged. Malcolm considered that perhaps this life of his was as good as it got. He’d made more friends since he’d learned to talk more, including Davey and Joe. And there was Martha. He started to list them off on his fingers. Mr Antonio, Jack, Mrs Green, Sandy…
Most staff at Seacliff Mental Hospital were kind. It was like one big family. There were those who got on with everyone and those who plain didn’t. From what he’d gathered in his listening, he thought that was pretty normal. He made a mental note of those he admired most, counting on his fingers, first one hand and then the other. There were many more than ten. And as he watched them daily go about their work, the number of them grew. By doing this exercise, he was able to focus more on those who were kind and less on the few who were not.
Nice ones were those like Big Harold (though he was a patient) and Bill The Blacksmith, who made pokers for the staff members’ fires, and boot lasts. Big Harold’s job was to hold the farm horses steady while Bill prised their old shoes off and then worked over the hot forge, hammering, forming and correcting the piece of steel he’d fashioned to fit each hoof. Big Harold held the horse firmly by its leather halter, stroking the velvety muzzle, crooning and breathing in the straw-scented horse breath. Malcolm sometimes stood next to the horse’s rump to watch.
Bill said to Big Harold, “Next I’ll show you how to heat the iron until it glows white hot.”
The horse clattered off on four newly shod hooves.
Big Harold said he paid careful attention to everything Bill did or said. He knew he was fortunate to be working with him. To Malcolm, Big Harold held out a hunk of stiff leather, saying, “Bill gave me my own leather apron. Ain’t he the best, then?”
Malcolm longed to work with horses. He remembered when the draught horses hauled carts of coal from ward to ward until the big lorries took over. Earlier, many farm workers had their own horse and every horse had its own cart. Some of the other carts didn’t have a horse, though. Laden with coal and supplies, they were pulled by harnessed men up the hill to the wards high above. Malcolm recalled them doing this when he was a wee lad exploring the grounds. He remembered glimpses of half-naked men and women, in separate grassed areas walking around in aimless circles. He hoped he would never have to do either of those things.
Reclaimed bits of scattered memory like disjointed jigsaw pieces made not a lot of sense. He wondered if his brain might be dying and he along with it. Or he wondered when he would turn into a stranger so that others might not recognise him, or he himself.
He hoped that wouldn’t happen soon because right now he was happy and interested in the horses.
CHAPTER 22
The Farm
Everyone knew the patients ran the hospital. The farms, the grounds and the laundry with the heavy mangles and all that ironing – those were the really big jobs. And the sewing room where they darned socks all day or made uniforms for the staff and clothes for the patients – the whole set-up. The boot-maker took care of the basic essentials for staff and patients alike while the painters and the upholstery workshop workers repaired furniture.
Jack said all of the trades were represented in this self-sufficient farming community with much of the work carried out by the patients, those who were experienced in these fields. Mostly those capable – regardless of whether they were staff or patients – worked long hours because of staff shortages.
Jack said there seemed to be a big change in place. He said there were lots more female nurses than he ever remembered. Male nurses and attendants once dominated the psychiatric nursing profession, as the work was deemed too physical and dangerous for women.
Malcolm made a mental note of how many female nurses there were compared to male nurses and attendants. Often the nurses commenced at 7am and finished after 8pm. They worked four days on with one day off, then four days on with two days off. He compared them to the patients who worked all day and every day; the patients had no rostered off days.
When he saw them wander back to their wards late in the afternoon or evening, depending on where they worked, some patients looked dead beat. He wondered if this kind of job was the same as people did outside the hospital, only the staff and the people outside were paid in money each week whilst he and other patients were paid in mutton pies and tobacco.
These thoughts and others like them had him thinking more about the outside world, and his place in it.
Jack would explain more to him.
For now he observed the nurses’ behaviour when the doctor did his ward rounds. There was a definite regimented structure in place for the nursing staff that brought to mind a new memory about some lead toy soldiers. If a charge nurse happened by, the juniors would stand politely with their hands behind their back and say Good morning, Sister or Good afternoon, Sister. Matron did her rounds with the doctor from 9.30am and each ward attendant or charge nurse walked behind the pair to stand at the end of each bed with their hands behind their back.
In the main kitchen it was always cheerful.
Jack was saying, “The patients milk all those cows. They’re a basic part of the whole establishment. Those who’re able to help, at least, or those who want to.”
He explained again how Seacliff Mental Hospital was essentially conceived as a prison, but the then Medical Superintendent, Dr Truby King, had turned it into an efficient working farm by combining various medical treatments and procedures with labour. Unless they were physically incapable, the patients were trained as farm workers, which had the end result of improved fitness, exposure to fresh air and the occupying of their minds with healthy outdoor activities. The ongoing benefits were the nutritious diets enjoyed by both patients and staff, for Dr Truby King insisted the staff ate the same meals as the patients to keep things fair and square.
Malcolm thought about all of this as he drank his milky tea. Whole, was what they were. Without the mad ones there would be no hospital, without the hospital there would be no mad ones, without – without – without-
But the horses and carts were important too. So he left the warmth of the kitchen to go back to his current job, mentally noting the approaching cart loaded with muck from the pigsties, the horses plodding over to the dump and back, an endless procession, all day long. Ah, but to have his own horse…
Malcolm was to work in the vegetable gardens. Mostly women worked in the flower gardens – weeding, trimming, planting out and weeding some more. He was fit and strong so he worked with the men in the main gardens. There were many gangs of workers in different groups. For every ten patients working there was a supervisor. Some of the patients hoed and a few of them never knew when to stop until someone took the hoe from their hand and shoved them in the direction of their ward to have lunch or tea.
“Damn fine workers, that lot,” someone said of them. “Digging and grubbing and hoeing without stopping. Some of ’em can’t talk to save ’emselves, but they’re damn fine workers.”
Malcolm was part of a group of damn fine workers. He dug row upon row of spuds, brushing the soil off before dropping them into sacks. He didn’t hoe.
He wondered if he could get a job on the fencing gang. That fencing gang, under the control of Bill Morris, would be well into their day by now. They mended as well as built new fences. They had put them up from the hospital all around the coast to Puketeraki, a settlement on the craggy bluff above Karitane.
“Jack, how far is that? From here to Puketeraki?”
Malcolm saw him at smoko.
“It’s a bloody long way, son.”
Because Jack had worked at the hospital for so many years, he’d had lots of different jobs: kitchen, pigs, fencing, gardens. As Malcolm saw it, Jack was a source of great knowledge. He wanted to try everything too.
Maybe he’d go with Bill Hight on horseback, droving a mob of cattle to the nearby slaughterhouse. Only he’d never been on horseback so that might be a bit of a problem. Perhaps the piggery would be just fine and dandy. Or the chickens. He would like t
o feed and collect their eggs. Or perhaps join the bush-felling gang with Bob McMillan or Arthur Little in charge. He looked toward the sun, gauging the time. Yep, they’d all be hard at work in the native bush, chopping and sawing. Any excess wood from the surroundings was carted to Dunedin to use as firewood for the public hospital.
Though he knew the lawnmowers were reserved for others, he considered what it might be like to get hold of a lawnmower instead of a horse, or be part of the gang clearing scrub. Instead, after digging up tons of spuds, day in and day out, he was to plant seedlings from trays in the glasshouses. Cabbages, Brussels sprouts, cauliflowers… He worked on his knees for hours at a time until he feared his legs would never straighten up again. Yet he was being useful – and that was surely good.
Some said the atmosphere at the hospital was like that of a large working community, a description often used in general conversation within his hearing. Patients capable of working were asked to help with various duties, partly because of the staff shortages (due to the war years). Some were not asked. They were told. He pondered why that might be. Probably because of their poor communication skills, someone thought their answers would be unintelligible and best be taken to mean Yes.
Only those considered dangerous weren’t asked to do anything. More often than not they were confined to the high-walled yards attached to their specific wards, supervised constantly by attendants. At night, for the safety of staff and patients, they were locked into single rooms.
When the weather was fine, along with beach picnics, some were allowed to go fishing. Malcolm didn’t enjoy fishing after the first time he went. All that water disturbed him and there was something about the glazed eyes of the fishes that stirred up half-memories that troubled him.
He would hitch a ride in the hospital van to Karitane, a coastal settlement a few miles north of Seacliff, along with those who did enjoy fishing. He waited on the jetty or on the high concrete wall until they returned. Sitting in the sunshine, looking around, he enjoyed being away from the hospital, being a regular bloke.
Dr Truby King had long ago established a fishing business at Karitane. Those patients who caught fish were said to be contributing greatly to the fishing industry. Originally there was a fishing crew of only one attendant and three patients who, reportedly, caught tons of fish. Half were smoked and used in the kitchens at The Building and the rest were distributed daily to other public institutions in the South Island, as far away as Seaview Mental Hospital in Hokitika, on the West Coast. Along with dozens of fresh eggs.
The other hospital farms shipped their excess produce around the country in much the same way so that each was helping the other. Years later a much larger fishing vessel was brought in and doubled as a pleasure boat to the delight of those patients interested in the sea.
Everybody said the sea had health benefits.
He had no inclination to try fishing again. He was still holding out to go on the fencing gang with Bill Morris.
CHAPTER 23
Cats, Cold and Companions
The hospital was in a state of frenzy. Staff raced about with sacks, wheelbarrows and garden spades. Some patients galloped around with their shovels while others screamed, tore out their hair, or scratched tear-streaked faces and arms until they bled. Some stood in the garden rocking to and fro, their eyes wide in shock, soundlessly crying.
Malcolm grabbed his wheelbarrow and hurried to the kitchen to find out what had caused this outburst.
Mr Antonio already had most of the story pieced together. Apparently one of the male staff, and no one was letting loose exactly who that person was, had been instructed to dispose of the wild cats and keep his yapper shut about it.
There were large numbers of cats at The Building: orange, striped and grey, black or white, or mottled combinations, and dozens of kittens of each and every colour imaginable. Over the years some had become ward pets and some individual pets, of both staff and patients.
So, as Malcolm saw it, there were cats that yowled, meowed and kept up a racket the whole night, but those cats took care of mice and rats.
And mated publicly to the amusement of most.
So the staff member was instructed to dispose of the wild cats. Belatedly he was ordered to explain to his superiors exactly how he’d done it. Meat scraps from the kitchen laced with a powerful sedative from the ward.
At this part of his story, Malcolm’s eyes widened and Mr Antonio winked largely at him.
“That’s on the low-down, boy.’
Malcolm nodded. Sure enough, he’d seen his cobber, Joe, leaving the kitchen with a plate covered over with a tea towel. He stifled the laughter bubbling inside. Was it appropriate to find these shenanigans amusing?
Apparently Joe was close-mouthed about lacing the meat. He scattered the bait far and near and then went off home to his cosy bed in the village. In the early morning he returned to carry out the rest of his carefully-formulated plan. His intention, he later explained, was to collect the sleeping cats and kittens into sacks, load up a wheelbarrow and take them to the rubbish dump where he would shoot them and bury their remains. The gun was his.
However, circumstances orchestrated against him. Some cats had been fed in the ward kitchens so only nibbled at the baited meat. Some wandered, dazed, into the middle of the road, and were dispatched by various vehicles driven around that early morning. Seems the drivers fully expected those cats to dart out of the way as they usually did. In fact, not one driver had thought to apply the brakes, so now there were a fair few upset drivers griping on about their ‘mental state’. Other cats drowned in the farm water troughs, or wandered into styes and were eaten by the pigs. A fat ginger tom from Malcolm’s ward staggered into the path of the lawn-mowing tractor to be splattered over the laundry hung to dry in the early sun. For this cat, Malcolm was truly sad.
A fair few sleeping cats were carefully buried in the gardens, beside the standard roses or between the rows of cabbages and leeks. Unfortunately, the individual doses were insufficient to actually kill the cats. Once this news was broadcast, the patients who had buried ‘dead cats’ raced helter-skelter to dig them up again, so they could be collected into sacks, loaded into wheelbarrows, and killed humanely over at the rubbish dump by a bullet.
Though Malcolm spent the whole day searching the hospital grounds, he didn’t find one live feline to transport in his wheelbarrow. Did cats truly have nine lives, and if so, how had they used them all up?
Patients who witnessed the carnage had immediately gone madder than they were originally thought to be. For days on end dead cats were discovered in the most inaccessible places: curled up in the copper spouting thereby turning the fresh water rank; under the floorboards of the wooden wards, creating a right pong; even in the linen supplies where they’d made a nest for their latest litter.
For days to come the staff and patients were in a weird state of shock. True, the cat infestation had reached toxic levels, yet seemingly each cat had found that one person, whether they were staff or patient, who considered it their own.
Soon the hospital was over-run with rats and mice.
Malcolm was frozen blue and shuddering, even though he wore two jerseys, and miserable before the unrelenting winds. Wet brown leaves swept into whirlwinds then clung to his trouser legs. He recalled the time when the snowflakes last fell, the blanket of white turning the hospital into a castle, draping Mount Charlotte like cottonwool. The hospital woke that morning to silence. Snow continued to drift over the hills. The late mornings and early nights cut into the day, eroding the daylight hours until, somehow, it was time to sleep again.
Locally it was called ‘the great snow’.
Often male staff members would ski down through the white farm paddocks just for the hell of it. Details later emerged of how they also skied down to guide crowds of stranded passengers and train crew up from the Seacliff Railway Station, through a foot of snow to rest, eat hot food and sleep in warmth in the concert hall.
Y
et this day, standing alone through gale and tempest, Malcolm was bitterly cold. He longed for the change, when the howling wind and biting rain would cease, and snow begin again to fall. In his imaginings it had already changed; he heard the gentle swish of a spring breeze, studied the dew caught in spider webs, and realised he was content.
That was a feeling to be kept inside.
It was a secret.
“Take these pills, Malcolm. There you go.”
“Am I sick?” he asked. The new pills were blue and his pill quota usually stayed the same.
“These are to make sure you don’t get sick.”
A chill quickened the back of his neck.
“Am I getting The Treatment?”
“No, not you.” The nurse shook her head, smiling. “So there’s nothing to worry about, is there then?”
The pills slid down into his belly.
“They’re for your condition,” she added kindly.
He wasn’t convinced. He’d heard of the typhoid outbreak at nearby Orokonui Hospital; how, of the four cases, the two youngest had died. He’d heard how their kitchen was at the bottom of a long hill so the meals for the top wards were taken up on a cart. On the return trip, the bodies were brought down. Perhaps he had typhoid.
A young woman, Esther, called to him from her armchair by the window. She was winding colours of wool into strands then cutting them into lengths.
“I take those pills now. They don’t do any harm. Maybe they don’t do any good either.” She giggled.
He’d already figured she was about his age.
She lined up a hank of wool and snipped it with the scissors. A pink-uniformed nurse stood guarding the scissors.
He gave a single nod, relieved to know he wasn’t the only one on new medication. There was an empty chair next to Esther, so he sat among the piles of coloured wool, thinking back to Julie and her stack of coloured rags, and that part of his life back at the house up Maclaggan Street. The tightening inside his chest began again, making him oddly glum, yet he knew he must hold on to his memories if he were to live well. It was his goal to remember as much as possible.
