by Jean Davison
I couldn’t wait to get out of my school uniform that night and into my red skirt and domino-spotted blouse. My new suspender belt dug into my stomach even though I was stick-thin. Nylon stockings always made my legs itch, but I was getting used to them. I felt really grown up, especially with my lightly-padded bra making the most of what I hadn’t got. I back-combed my hair, brushed blue sparkly shadow onto my eyelids and painted my lips ‘sugar-pink’.
Before the show started, the packed theatre was buzzing. The moment they came on stage, hysteria gripped the audience. Beatlemania, the papers called it. Everyone was standing on their seats, yelling and screaming like crazy. My mates were already doing the same. I clambered up onto my seat and we screamed ourselves hoarse. I couldn’t make out who was shouting what in the deafening din, but I knew Carrie would be yelling ‘John’, Julia ‘George’ and, for Sylvia and me, it had to be ‘Paul’. We could neither see nor hear the group that we’d paid so much money for, but the show was fantastic. It must have been.
When it was over, we hung about in the dark cobbled alley at the back of the theatre, along with a crowd of other hopefuls, waiting for a glimpse of the Beatles leaving by the back door. Policemen shooed us away. My brand new stockings were laddered from ankle to knee but that didn’t matter. We roamed the night-time streets of town, arms linked, singing Beatles songs at the top of our voices.
What a come-down after the Beatles show to be back in my school uniform, back in the role of a shy, quiet schoolgirl. Oh, if only I’d stayed at my other school with my friends. We’d be sitting at our desks now, whispering and giggling behind our hands, sharing our feelings about that special event.
I decided it was the situation which had already been created in my class at Rossfields that made it impossible for me to change things. In Geography, a note was passed to me, which read:
Dear Jean,
Sally and I have decided not to let you come in our team in Gym. Nobody likes you in this class.
Joyce and Sally.
PS: Send us this note back or we’ll smash your face after school tonight
It seemed my only chance of breaking the shyness barrier would be with people who didn’t already know me, so I resolved to leave school as soon as it became legally possible.
I was scribbling on my notebook in a music lesson, working out how long before I could leave Rossfields if I didn’t stay on to take GCE O levels. Miss Barr, the music teacher, wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing. She was a lively, young-looking woman with curly red hair and twinkling green eyes. When the class started altering the words of a song we were singing, she even joined in herself with the fun. At my previous school with my old friends I’d have been enjoying joining in too. There, I’d been caned for talking, laughing and clowning in class. Here, I could only observe the scene with discomfort through that invisible barrier of shyness, which separated me from my classmates as effectively as stout prison walls.
The laughter got louder till the class was in uproar. Our form teacher, Mr Clark, was attempting to take an English lesson in the classroom next door. He strode into Miss Barr’s room and, with eyebrows that formed one bushy line right across his forehead, demanded to know what was going on.
Next day, after calling the register, Mr Clark said, ‘Stand up those of you who fooled about in yesterday’s music lesson.’
At first no one moved. Then Bobby Spencer stood up. ‘Come on now. Everybody stand up. It was all of us.’ Chairs scraped as pupils stood up. ‘Is everyone standing?’ Bobby asked, looking around. ‘Come on, Carol and Daphne, you too. And you, Stephen, don’t pretend it wasn’t you as well.’ Then Bobby’s eyes fell on me and he said nothing. More chairs scraped as more pupils stood up until everyone was standing. Except me.
How I wanted to stand up, to be like the others, but I had not, as everyone knew, been making a noise, so I remained self-consciously seated. It is a strange feeling indeed to be the only one seated in the middle of a room full of about thirty people. I felt isolated, vulnerable and very small. Gulliver in the Land of Giants.
I continued to count the days to leaving Rossfields. The long months limped on, dragging me with them. When I felt it would never end, when I felt I could stand no more, I caught a glimpse of my fifteenth birthday on the horizon. Getting there. Despite my problems at school and at home I did well in my mock GCE O Levels. I failed abysmally in Maths and Cookery but achieved good results in my favourite subjects of English Language, Literature, Scripture Knowledge and History. No way could I stay on an extra year or more to take my exams. Any job, no matter how boring, would surely be more bearable than school.
More miserable months passed. Not long now. I was glad I’d been born in time. Mandy, being a few months younger than me, had to stay on at school longer. She was off sick when I left.
No more school. Fifteen. Old enough to leave Rossfields. At the end of my last day there, while the other school-leavers were hugging, weeping and saying their goodbyes, I buttoned my gabardine raincoat, slipped out of the school gates and headed down the road. The relief I’d expected to feel didn’t come until later. I dragged my feet as if I’d got weights tied to them. One glance back. And then eyes down on the blurring grey pavement. No one to say goodbye to.
CASE NO. 10826
She finished school at 15 but did not take any exams.
Dr Prior
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CAROLINE HAD AN OLD worn pop record called ‘The Heart of a Teenage Girl’, which she played over and over again on the record player at the day hospital. Amidst clicks and scratches, Craig Douglas’s voice filled the room with laments about the brevity of the teen years.
‘I’ve missed out on an ordinary teenage life,’ Caroline said wistfully. ‘I’d love to go to places where ordinary teenagers go. Do you go to discos, Jean?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, tell me about them. Describe in detail what it’s like there. Please,’ she begged, her eyes shining in anticipation. I felt uncomfortable. Here was someone who was envying my life, a life I was so dissatisfied with but which, in comparison to hers, was indeed a life I ought to be counting my blessings for.
‘Go on, describe a disco to me,’ Caroline persisted.
So I told her about the coloured, flashing lights, the noise, the dancing. I didn’t want to make Caroline’s sense of missing out on something harder to bear, so I tried not to make them sound as exciting and wonderful as she seemed to think they were. But I didn’t say that discos are places where sometimes teenagers become screwed up with drugs and get their lives ruined. That’s what happens in mental hospitals, too, I thought cynically, so Caroline will know enough about that.
‘Oh, I’d love to go,’ Caroline said again, with more enthusiasm than ever after my description.
The following Monday Caroline was not at the hospital. She had run away at the weekend, presumably in search of that ‘ordinary teenage life’ she’d never had.
My thoughts kept returning to Caroline. Would she be exploited, raped, murdered? She was so vulnerable, anything could happen. And was it partly my fault for telling her about discos? My worries and fears for her safety increased with each passing day.
I tried to avoid sitting with Geoff at lunchtime because it was true, as Sue had said, that he was frequently sick. I groaned inwardly when he sat beside me with his plate.
‘Did you know…’ he began as he shovelled in huge mouthfuls of mashed potato.
‘Geoff, don’t eat so quickly or you’ll be sick,’ I pleaded.
‘Did you know,’ he began again, ‘my mother tried to abort me.’
Marlene raised her eyebrows. She was a young woman in her late twenties who was always feisty despite medication that made her drowsy. ‘It’s a pity she didn’t succeed,’ she said unkindly.
‘I wasn’t speaking to you. Speak when you’re spoken to.’
He turned to me again. ‘Yes, it’s true. When she was pregnant with me she tried to have an abortion. But it didn
’t work.’
He was looking at me as if expecting a reply but I didn’t know what to say.
‘She tried to abort me!’ Geoff said again, pausing from eating to bang his fork on the plate in a way that reminded me of my brother.
‘Did she?’ I said lamely.
‘Yes. That’s why I’m like I am.’
Marlene said, ‘What do you mean, Geoff? Are you saying you’re brain damaged because she tried to abort you or did she try to abort you because she knew you was going to be brain damaged?’
Before Geoff could respond to this, an eerie scream filled the air, followed by a crash, and Vera was writhing on the floor.
‘Mr Jordan, come quick! Vera’s having one of her fits,’ somebody yelled. Mr Jordan bent over Vera who smacked him and kicked him with her flailing arms and legs. When she came to, tears were rolling down her face as she looked around in a daze.
Vera was a friendly, jovial woman in her forties who caught the same bus as me on the three days a week that she attended the day hospital, and on these journeys my shyness with her had gradually disappeared. She invited me to her house for tea one Thursday, and this became a weekly occurrence.
‘You will still come for tea today, won’t you?’ Vera asked me almost as soon as she opened her eyes.
‘Yes, of course I will, if you feel well enough to want me to.’
‘Oh yes, I’m all right now,’ she said. ‘I so much look forward to you coming.’
Still dazed, she was trying to light the wrong end of a cigarette and smiled when she realised this.
‘Seeing me like you did just now hasn’t put you off me, has it?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Don’t be daft, of course it hasn’t,’ I said.
Although Vera behaved on the surface like a cheerful, extrovert woman, she seemed very lonely and unsure of herself.
After tea at Vera’s that evening, I dutifully swallowed my medication. Vera opened various plastic containers and filled her palm with an assortment of pills. Her ten-year-old daughter, Jill, came to sit on a pouffe in front of her mother who, with an upward sweeping movement of her palm, caught all the pills in her mouth and swallowed them down without a drink in one gulp.
‘That was a little trick I do to amuse Jill,’ Vera explained.
I wondered if it would have a bad effect on Jill, growing up seeing pills swallowed like sweets, but, worse still, Vera said that when she told a nurse at the hospital how she sometimes felt unable to cope when Jill was boisterous, the nurse told her to give Jill a small amount of crushed Largactil to ‘quieten her down’.
Later that evening, when Vera’s husband was at the pub and Jill was in bed, we got talking about Caroline’s disappearance.
‘I’m worried about Caroline,’ I confided.
‘Oh, don’t worry about her,’ Vera said. ‘She’s tougher than you think, Jean. People like her are born survivors.’
I doubted strongly that Caroline could have learnt in a mental institution the kind of survival skills she would need in the outside world.
‘Remember Georgina telling us how she ran away from a mental hospital when she was Caroline’s age?’ Vera said, still trying to reassure me. ‘Well, no great harm came to her, did it?’
‘No, not from running away,’ I agreed.
Georgina was a day patient who often talked to Vera and me about the mental institutions she’d been in over the last forty years. Her stories chronicled the dark history of the psychiatric profession. She told of padded cells, ice baths, insulin treatment, ECT without anaesthetic, having to eat with wooden spatulas … And now Georgina had become the ‘star patient’ of students’ training classes. Somehow, through it all, she had been able to retain a strong sense of humour, but every now and then she tried to kill herself, her last attempt being only a few weeks ago.
‘It’s not easy to die,’ Georgina told me. ‘I haven’t got it right yet, but one day I’ll succeed.’
Georgina lived with her married daughter. She came to and from the hospital by ambulance as she was agoraphobic. Vera and I encouraged her to come with us for a cup of tea at the little café a few minutes’ walk away from the hospital drive. She managed to do this several times, but as soon as we left the hospital gates she would turn white and cling nervously to us.
‘I’m scared of people,’ she said on her way back from the café one day. ‘Not of people like you two, or the other patients, but of all the people outside.’
‘And they’re probably scared to death of us,’ Vera said with a smile.
‘Do you think people outside can tell just by looking at me that I’m different from them?’ she asked touchingly. ‘Would you know I was a patient, Jean, if you saw me in the street and didn’t know me?’
‘Not unless you were going about wearing a badge that says “HIGH ROYDS MENTAL HOSPITAL” on it,’ I said.
Georgina laughed but she kept a tight grip on my hand as we walked back to the hospital. It was true that no one would have known just by looking that this woman, who always took the trouble to wear make-up and dress smartly, had been in and out of mental hospitals throughout most of her life. That she could function only inside the mental hospital world after all those years of being a patient didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that she could function at all; that something positive in her personality had managed to survive intact through all the years of treatment.
A few weeks after Caroline’s disappearance, the police brought her back. She had hitchhiked to London, spent some nights sleeping rough in a park, and been to an all-nighter disco. Thinner but starry-eyed, she described the disco in glowing terms and then went on to tell us about the cold, dark nights in the park with strange men who ‘wrap themselves in newspapers and sleep on benches’. She didn’t sound too sad to be back ‘home’, and spoke as if she was telling us about an enjoyable holiday. I supposed for her it had been just that. A kind of holiday when, at least for a while, she had been transported away from the hospital world.
Some weeks later Caroline was found to be pregnant though it was thought that this might have occurred since her return to hospital. Either way it didn’t make any difference. An abortion brought a swift solution. Poor Caroline. Barely out of her teens, she had lived so much and yet so little.
Like Caroline, I, too, was transported away from the hospital world for a while. This was when Mandy and I went for a fortnight’s holiday, staying in Belgium and visiting Holland and France. I had a reserve of savings in the bank from my working days and this seemed as good a reason as any to draw out some money.
When Mandy and I applied for our passports we got the ten-year type, planning to do more travelling in the future. We said we wanted to visit exotic places, see other cultures, meet interesting people, but for me all this excited talking was just a tenuous dream. Drugged, drowsy and depressed as I was, diagnosed as sick and submerged in a life centred on a mental hospital, any dream of future living seemed as unreal as the dream of the old woman with wrinkled stockings falling about her ankles who tugged at my sleeve as we passed in one of the dismal hospital corridors. ‘I must tell you this,’ she said, with saliva dribbling down her chin and on to her shapeless floral-print dress. ‘I’m really a princess and will soon be crowned Queen of England.’
I couldn’t imagine going abroad without writing about it, so I packed a notebook-cum-diary along with my pills. Sitting in our hotel bedroom in Ostend, staring at the blank page and chewing my pen, I realised with dismay that even writing had become just another difficult and tiring chore.
I watched Mandy, who was sitting next to me on our peach quilted bed, writing enthusiastically about our holiday so far. She handed it to me to read, then I copied what she’d written into my diary, making the excuse that I was too tired to do my own writing. I did the same for my postcards. We’d been to the same places, done the same things, so her description would suffice, I told myself. What did it matter?
But later that night, staring through the window up a
t the dark Belgian sky, I asked myself when and why had I relinquished the ability to live; to feel, laugh, cry, and to write? Of course it mattered! What was I doing? Living by proxy?
Our hotel was described in the brochure as ‘situated in the heart of the night life’. In a stiflingly hot and crowded disco, the young man I’d been dancing with for most of the evening suggested we go for a walk. After searching the crowd for Mandy and eventually finding her locked in the arms of a continental Romeo, I arranged to meet her back at the disco later. She disentangled herself from her man long enough to agree to this. So off Claude and I went, hand in hand, to stroll around the streets, breathing in the cool night air.
Claude was tall, handsome, polite and charming. He was used to speaking only in French so, not surprisingly, had a few problems understanding my English, working-class, northern accent.
‘Slow down, slow down. I am trying to listen to you, translate what you are saying into French in my head, and then I have to translate my thoughts back into English so that I can answer you. It is not easy.’
Perhaps the cheap wine I’d been drinking in the disco was taking effect as I began to relax and enjoy myself. It turned midnight but the streets throbbed with life, and music from the bars and discos filled the air.
We turned into a quaint little bar where Claude bought me a gin and tonic. I learnt he was a schoolteacher with an interest in history, politics and current affairs. He asked my opinion on Britain’s entry into the Common Market. How abysmally little I knew about anything other than a mental hospital, I realised with shame. I wasn’t knowledgeable enough in current affairs to have an intelligent opinion, but I bluffed it, feigning the language problem whenever I got really stuck.
After leaving the bar, we walked to the sea front and watched the outline of a ship, all bright lights looming up out of darkness, as it approached the harbour. There, beside the water, he kissed me passionately and made bold sexual advances, but when I asked him to stop he did so immediately.
‘Please forgive me,’ he said. ‘You, Jean, are different from other English girls I have met. You are very sweet.’
