The Dark Threads

by Jean Davison

  ‘Perhaps you’ve been doing the wrong jobs. Have you ever thought of being a nurse?’

  ‘Fat chance when the only experience I’ve had of hospitals is as a mental patient.’

  ‘Well, working as an auxiliary would be a start. I’d be happy to give you a reference. Think about it.’

  About a week later I received a letter from Pastor West saying he’d spoken to the Matron at a local general hospital and she was willing to interview me. If he didn’t hear from me by Tuesday, he’d assume I wanted him to cancel it.

  When I went for my next appointment with Dr Armstrong I had a letter in my bag ready to post, agreeing to Pastor West’s proposal. It was my father’s day off work. He said he’d come to the hospital with me and then we could go for tea afterwards at a fish and chip café.

  When I told Dr Armstrong about walking out of my job, her face tightened into a frown. ‘You know, Jean, I think you really need to come into hospital again for a while.’

  ‘No!’ I said, panic rising in me.

  ‘But the rest would do you good.’

  Rest? Oh no, I wasn’t going to fall for that one again.

  ‘We could try different types, strengths and combinations of drugs more freely in the hospital where we could keep an eye on you and decide how best to treat you.’

  I shuddered at these words, remembering my previous stay.

  ‘Actually, I think we might be able to admit you tomorrow because there’s room at the moment in a really lovely ward. If we delay, the vacancy might go and that would be a shame because I’m sure a nice rest would do you the world of good.’

  Were we talking about the same place? We were talking about a mental institution and she was making it sound like a holiday camp.

  ‘Do think about it, dear,’ she said. ‘Thornville’s a lovely ward.’ Much emphasis was placed on the word ‘lovely’.

  I don’t believe this, I thought. Isn’t there anyone I can trust? But then, she hadn’t seen the hospital from the same angle as me, so perhaps she genuinely did not know.

  ‘That’s the ward I was in before and I hated it,’ I said icily.

  She pushed back her glasses, which had slid to the end of her nose, and frowned. ‘Well, all right then. But what will you do? What are you going to do about a job, for instance?’

  ‘I’d like to be a nurse. Well, not a nurse, I know I couldn’t do that just now but I mean an auxiliary,’ I said hesitantly, feeling myself blush.

  ‘Well, that’s a nice thought, dear, but I don’t think … Now, how can I put it? You want to work in hospital because you’ve been in hospital and you want to help people get well, don’t you? That’s lovely. But I think at the moment we should be looking at how we can get you well. I’m certain the best thing for you would be to come back into hospital and get yourself nicely rested.’

  ‘No!’ I said, horrified. ‘I’d get worse.’

  ‘Is that your father I saw with you?’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t want me to go back into hospital either,’ I said anxiously. I was afraid, as I had been when Sister Oldroyd tried to bully me into having further ECT, that a ‘mental illness’ diagnosis meant my own wishes and views could be overridden.

  She drummed on the desk with her pen. ‘Actually, I think there might be an alternative to admission seeing as you’re so set against it. How would you feel about attending a day hospital? An ambulance would take you there each morning and bring you back home at teatime.’

  ‘Yes, I’d agree to that,’ I said weakly, feeling the last remaining ounce of confidence in my ability to do the sort of job Pastor West had suggested draining out of me. I had given the auxiliary job a lot of thought and had wanted to try it, but now I felt embarrassed at having mentioned it to Dr Armstrong. Of course I couldn’t work. I was too sick.

  ‘Now, if you’ll take a seat in the waiting area, I’ll just have a quick word with your father.’

  In the café Dad and I ate our fish and chips in silence for a while. He seemed subdued since speaking to Dr Armstrong.

  ‘What did she say about me?’

  ‘She said you’re a nice girl but you’re a sick girl,’ he replied, his voice trembling a little.

  ‘A sick girl. Yeah, I guess that’s right,’ I said, prodding the haddock on my plate with my fork while I mourned again the loss of my mental health. The thought I sometimes harboured that maybe my distress wasn’t really an ‘illness’ was fading. After all, three psychiatrists – Dr Sugden, Dr Prior and Dr Armstrong – couldn’t all be wrong.

  Could they?

  The night after Dr Armstrong had suggested the day hospital, I tried to tell Mike the truth. He thought I was still working at Dobson’s. In the Old Crown after several barley wines I managed to steer the conversation to psychiatry. There’d been something on TV recently about psychiatry and teenage depression. It seemed a useful starting point.

  ‘No, I didn’t see that programme,’ Mike said. ‘But I know enough about mental illness.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘My uncle went off his head. Murdered his fiancée.’

  ‘Murdered her?’

  ‘Yeah. About twenty years ago. He was living with us at the time. I came home from school that day and let myself in. Mum sometimes didn’t get back from work till a bit later. I opened the living-room door. Blood everywhere. Carpet. Sofa. Even the curtains.’

  ‘Oh, Mike. How awful!’ I reached out and squeezed his hand.

  ‘Anyway, they sent him to Broadmoor and operated on his brain. Turned him into a suitably safe cabbage. He’s in High Royds now.’

  ‘High Royds?’

  ‘Yes. A strange place. But it’s a good job there are such hospitals. They do their best for the poor sick buggers.’ He took a few gulps of beer. ‘They even put on dances for them. You won’t believe this but there’s a large ballroom actually inside the hospital.’

  ‘Is there?’ I asked blankly. I’d been to one of these dances myself when an in-patient.

  ‘Yes, really,’ he said knowledgeably.

  Mike went to fetch more drinks. I closed my eyes and saw it all again. People sitting on fold-up chairs around the sides of the hall rocking back and forth, writhing, grimacing, twisting, looking as if their mouths were stuffed full of chewing gum; inmates staggering around to the sound of a band playing ‘White Christmas’; the staff joining in. Oh yes, they’d tried: paper hats, streamers, balloons and … Lord, the terrible sadness was almost tangible

  Me at eighteen. Newly admitted. Shoved down the rabbit hole into a world like nothing I could have imagined. I had found a vacant chair next to a woman who was jerking and drooling. I sat gulping water from a polystyrene cup, though a side effect of Largactil ensured that my mouth remained distressingly dry. But, hey, I was lucky. Better dry than drooling. Achingly, I’d watched sad-eyed patients in fancy hats doing a Largactil shuffle across the dance floor. Dreaming of a white Christmas? Hardly.

  Another memory of that Christmas dance. Me ‘waltzing’ around the hall with a man with vacant staring eyes. I hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings by refusing to dance. It might have taken him courage to ask. He held me stiffly and moved like a robot. We shuffled around the polished, wooden floor, out of step with the music and, as I looked at those strange, lifeless eyes that were close to my face, I felt as if I was trying to dance with a corpse.

  ‘Uncle Lionel enjoys those hospital dances,’ Mike said, putting our drinks down on the table, ‘though he can’t keep pace with the music. He shuffles around the dance floor like death-in-life.’

  ‘Ooops!’ Back in the present with Mike, I fumbled in my handbag for a tissue to mop up some drink I’d just spilt on the table.

  ‘Relatives can go to these dances. I got invited to one and went along for a laugh,’ he said.

  ‘For a laugh? Oh yes, of course. I expect it was very funny.’ I don’t think Mike even noticed the angry sarcasm in my voice. ‘What were the patients like?’ I asked.

  ‘Some really sad cases.
But others seemed perfectly normal on first impression. I asked a girl to dance. Looked about nineteen, quite pretty. Thought she was a nurse in civvies. It turned out she was a patient.’ He shook his head and raised his eyebrows at remembering his mistake. ‘Amazing. You wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong with her.’ He paused to take a swig of his beer. ‘Except she talked a load of rubbish,’ he added with a smile.

  ‘Oh, did she?’ I said, feeling disappointed that he hadn’t managed to talk to one of the many patients who didn’t talk rubbish.

  ‘Well yes, of course she talked rubbish,’ he said, sounding surprised at my naivety. ‘Don’t forget she was a mental patient.’

  I finished off my drink quickly. It left a bitter taste. Had the girl really talked rubbish or had it just seemed so to Mike because that’s what he’d expected of her? I was definitely not going to tell him about me.

  On the night before I was due to start at the day hospital, I went to bed late after spending the evening with Mike. I was sitting up in bed sipping Horlicks and thinking about my life as I gazed through the gap in my curtains at the pale moon, a silvery disc suspended for aeons in a vast expanse of dark sky. The future looked bleak. Tomorrow an ambulance would be drawing up outside our house to take me to the day hospital which stood in the grounds of the main hospital.

  ‘I’m a sick girl,’ I whispered into my mug of Horlicks, warming my face in the comforting steam. ‘A sick girl. What does that mean? Will I ever get well? Have I ever been well?’

  LOOKING BACK 5

  ‘LOOK AT THIS,’ JULIA said, thrusting a Daily Mirror at me. There were just the two of us in our kitchen. I looked. It was a photograph of a football crowd.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, pushing a stray lock of unruly red hair out of her eyes. ‘We could pick one person in the crowd, anyone at all. Take her for instance.’ She pointed her finger at a young woman’s round, smiling face. ‘She’s a person just like you and me. She thinks and feels and eats and sleeps and laughs and cries and… Everything about herself and her day-to-day living is as … er … as big to her as what our own lives are to us. It’s her world. Yet to us she’s nothing but a face in a crowd, just as we would be to her. And what I’ve just said could apply to any single one of the billions of people in the whole world.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ I said excitedly. Off we went into one of those delightful conversations in which we were cresting the same waves.

  And then we began thinking about ‘time’. We were thirteen. Soon, tomorrow would be today, and today – this very day now – would be yesterday. Years would pass. We would die. More time would pass. One hundred years. Two hundred years. Today would belong to history. Nobody on earth now would be alive then. And nobody could do anything about time. It just went on and on.

  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly.

  ‘Look, it isn’t half-past six yet,’ said Julia, her greenish-grey eyes wide and serious. ‘But it soon will be and there’s nothing anyone can do to keep hold of this minute.’

  ‘But it isn’t half-past six right now, this very second,’ I said. I realised I was clenching my fists as if in a futile attempt to capture and hold that minute; to hold in abeyance the past and the future, retaining the NOW. That’s when we started working ourselves up into a frenzy, gesticulating madly and raving about it being now, right now, this very second now. Never before had now seemed so now-ish.

  But even as we were experiencing this heightened awareness of the present, the clock kept ticking, the minute was spiralling beyond our reach. The red second-hand on the clock moving quietly, steadily, reached and passed the number twelve. We leaned our heads back, exhausted at our wrestling match with Time, and laughed at the way our feelings had reached a pitch of intensity as we’d tried – almost literally – to hold infinity in the palm of our hand.

  Time wouldn’t stop. Of course it wouldn’t. And things were about to change. At age thirteen, the pupils in our class had the option of transferring to a new comprehensive school where we could sit for GCE exams. Notes were sent to inform our parents. My mum and dad, with their usual lack of interest in my schooling, said I could please myself. I tingled with excitement. Rossfields was a ‘posh’ new school. It even had tennis courts and showers. I loved the idea of bringing books home to do homework. My friends, like most of our class, didn’t share my enthusiasm and wouldn’t be going. I’d be forced into making new friends and this, I told myself, would be good for me. I planned to try very hard to overcome the painfully intense feelings of shyness I experienced with everyone except my five best friends.

  On my first day I knotted my maroon and grey striped tie with pride. It matched the grey skirt and maroon cardigan. I’d never worn a school uniform before and I liked the idea. A uniform, I thought, gave a sense of belonging. I picked up the brown leather satchel I’d bought from a jumble sale, and set off with a mixture of anxiety and optimism. A hole in the bottom left corner of my satchel proved just the right size for my ruler to keep dropping through as I hurried along the paths in the cemetery taking a handy short-cut.

  There were about thirty pupils per class, a fairly even mix of boys and girls. The school seemed so big and impersonal, though at my previous schools I’d been in classes of forty. I spent my first week at Rossfields trying to find my way round endless staircases and corridors, trying to remember the names of teachers who wore strange black gowns. And, most important to me, trying to find the courage to speak to my new classmates. Standing alone in the playground, I missed my friends so much.

  I did manage to make a new friend in my class. Her name was Mandy; a tall, slender girl with large brown eyes and black curly hair. My hand shook as we held a book we were sharing, and conversation was so hampered by my social anxiety, until, very gradually, my shyness with Mandy lessened. Then, just before the results of the end of term exams were given out, we were told the pupil with the highest marks would go up into the A1 class. That was me!

  After the holidays I went to join my new classmates in Room 10. The noise I could hear before entering the room told me the teacher was absent. A girl sitting with her feet up on the desk greeted my arrival by shouting: ‘We don’t want you in this class.’ I sat down self-consciously at the nearest vacant desk and was promptly told to ‘shift’ by a girl who claimed it was her desk.

  Later that day I held back my tears as I walked home through the large cemetery. Crippled by shyness, I became the only pupil sitting alone in every lesson at a double desk; in Cookery I worked alone at a table for four.

  Our house was dirty, smelly, and untidy, and, I’m afraid, so was I. I can picture myself with my greasy hair, just long enough to hide my mucky neck, straggling over the grubby collar of my crumpled school blouse. My grey socks were meant to be white, and I wore scuffed hole-in-the-sole shoes. At my old school, who cared? There I’d watched kids as scruffy as myself playing at pulling nits out of their hair, lining them up on their desk, and giggling at the popping sound each egg made beneath the pressure of a thumbnail. But no one cracked nits on the spanking new desks here.

  When the schoolgirl teasing turned vicious I was ill-equipped to deal with it. My self-confidence in social situations was smaller than a peanut. I was bullied constantly. Without one single friend in my new class, I drifted away on a piece of flotsam and became an outcast.

  And I was losing touch with my five best friends. We’d grown up together: played, laughed, cried, quarrelled, fought, hugged, shared secrets for so long. How could it all just end? I read a Charlotte Brontë poem that reminded me of Rainbow Land days, sensed something precious was fading, and wept.

  We wove a web in childhood,

  A web of sunny air;

  We dug a spring in infancy

  Of water pure and fair…

  Of course, there was my new friend, Mandy, with whom I spent summer Saturday afternoons sitting by the lake in the park eating crisps and drinking orange juice. But it wasn’t the same: none of the imaginat
ive games or the shared intimacies or the giddy fits of giggling, the whoops of sheer joy.

  My diary, the red-bound book with a silhouette of a girl with a ponytail on the cover, became my best friend and confidante. ‘I hate being in this class,’ I wrote. ‘I’m so lonely and miserable.’ Around the time I was writing this, my new form teacher was writing on my report: ‘Jean is coping admirably with her work and has settled down well in her new class.’

  CASE NO. 10826

  27 January 1971

  Dr T Smith

  Consultant Psychiatrist

  High Royds Hospital

  Dear Dr Smith

  re: Miss Jean Davison age 20

  …………………………………………….

  I should be very grateful if you would consider taking Miss Jean Davison over as a day patient.

  She suffers from chronic schizophrenia and has been working until three months ago. She is not well enough to go back to work but not ill enough to necessitate admission to hospital. Dr Dean has been consulted in this matter and he would be very pleased if you could find your way clear to accepting her as a day patient.

  Yours sincerely

  R Armstrong

  Medical Assistant

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHEN THE AMBULANCE ARRIVED at our house I noticed the curtains of a bungalow opposite being pulled to one side. Another neighbour kept turning to look while walking past as a nurse opened the rear door for me. Well, let the nosey parkers stare if they’ve nothing better to do, I thought irritably.

  My old wounds smarted as we turned into the familiar driveway and I saw again those thick stone walls, the imposing frontage of the grim institution. But, instead of bearing left to continue up the main drive, we took a sharp turn to the right and jerked to a halt on a gravel path outside a small, whitewashed building that looked like a detached house enclosed in a neat garden.

  A smart-suited man of about forty greeted me at the door. He shook my hand warmly, and introduced himself as Mr Jordan, the day hospital charge nurse. He took me into a room where about ten other patients were sitting round a large table. They were drawing or knitting. Bob Dylan’s voice floated out from the radio in the corner singing one of my favourite songs: ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.