by Jean Davison
At breaks Caroline would wheel in the trolley and leave cups and two big jugs of coffee on a table in the middle of the room for us to pour. I noticed Arnold sitting there one day while the rest of us drank coffee. I waited for someone else to notice, but nobody did. ‘OK, Jean, you rotten coward. You can’t get out of this one,’ I said to myself. I was shaking inside as I stood up. I don’t think it would have been a problem if there had been just the two of us, but I was self-conscious about walking over and speaking to him in front of a room full of watching people.
‘Arnold, do you take sugar?’ I asked, wondering if he could understand and reply.
He nodded, and mouthed the words, ‘Two please’ holding up two fingers. After that it was easy to get Arnold’s coffee every day, and the way he always managed to stutter out a ‘Thank you’, which later became, ‘Thank you, Jean’, was deeply moving.
Mr Jordan rescued me from some of my attendances at the OT building by arranging for me to help in the library a few afternoons a week. The library was in the main hospital block, somewhere down those dismal corridors.
Mr Jordan introduced me to Hazel, the librarian, a slender, fair-haired, attractive young woman. She asked me which books I liked. I didn’t read much now but had recently started rereading a book about Helen Keller. I’d always been interested in how people overcame various kinds of difficulties in communicating.
‘I’m reading a book about Helen Keller,’ I replied.
‘Hell and what?’ Mr Jordan asked.
‘Helen Keller.’
‘Hell and what?’
‘She said Helen Keller,’ Hazel explained, smiling. ‘You know, the deaf and blind woman.’
The library consisted of a large room with shelves all round and some chairs. It had the appearance, if not quite the same atmosphere, of any local library. The main difference was that the chairs were often used by long-stay patients who sat staring into space and muttering to themselves instead of reading. To the left of this main room was a separate smaller locked room, a staff library. Occasionally I was given some books to replace on the shelves in there and found it contained interesting looking books. Hazel once caught me engrossed in the pages of The Case of Mary Bell and reminded me that these books were not for patients.
A white-coated male nurse came into the library one day with a few docile-looking patients.
‘They’re from a locked ward,’ Hazel informed me. ‘I’ll introduce you to Toby. He’s really cute.’
She called one of the patients over; a small ginger-haired man whose face was covered in pimples. Like the others, he seemed heavily sedated.
‘Toby, this is Jean,’ Hazel said.
He held out his hand to me. ‘Hello, Jean,’ he drawled. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you.’
‘Toby can sing,’ Hazel said brightly. ‘Toby, show Jean what you can do. Sing your song for her.’
He looked at me, blushed, and stared down at the floor. ‘Aw, no,’ he said coyly.
‘Oh come on, Toby, please,’ Hazel said.
After some more persuasion, he sang to the ‘Happy Birthday’ tune:
Largactil for me
Largactil for me
I do like Largactil
Largactil for me.
I smiled and clapped the circus show along with the others, but my guts were gripped by the same uneasy feeling I’d had at the day hospital when a nurse had cajoled an embarrassed Betsy into jumping about saying: ‘I am silly. I am silly …’
One of the patients who came often to sit in the library was Samuel, a short man with greying hair, who wore a shabby jacket with a dark-red bow tie. He would sit quietly, and then suddenly spring to his feet, shouting: ‘I hate the Nazis! I hate the Nazis! They killed my mother and my father and my sister.’
After his outburst he would return to brooding, before starting up again. ‘They say this is a hospital and they tell me I’m here because I am mentally disturbed. What does this “mentally disturbed” mean? I try to understand what happened to me and to my family. I ask myself why? WHY? It was sadistic, brutal torture and murder. They murdered my dear mother and father, my gentle sister. I hate the Nazis! I hate them!’ His voice, slow and deliberate at first, grew louder and angrier, his face contorted in the anguish of remembering, then he slumped back into his seat and lapsed again into silence.
One thing soothed Samuel’s troubled mind: Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Every few weeks Hazel held a ‘Records Hour’ in the library. At the sound of Swan Lake Samuel’s troubled expression was transformed into one of serenity. He would lean back with closed eyes, humming the tune and smiling contentedly as if the music had the power to transport him far away from High Royds, and further back than the horrors of the Nazi regime. Back, back, gently back to a happy, peaceful time that had been preserved somewhere among the dust and debris in his brain like a flower in the desert.
One day during the Records Hour, Samuel came in when I was playing a Supremes record. His usual tortured expression wrung my heart and, hoping to help ease his pain, I searched among the pile of records for his beloved Swan Lake. But too late. He stood still for a moment, listening to the Tamla Motown disco sound of ‘Baby Love’. Then he threw up his arms in disgust and stormed out with an angry shout: ‘RUBBISH!’
One of the perks of working in the library was Horace. Horace was a library helper from a long-stay ward. Before his admission he had been a tramp, sleeping rough, stealing food and clothing. It might have been easier for him as a young man but, having reached his sixties with health failing, it was a tough life, devoid of the basic comforts most people take for granted. He kept appearing before the courts for stealing and when the judge sentenced him to prison, which to Horace meant food and shelter, he would say gratefully, ‘Oh, thank you very much, sir. That’s most kind of you.’
Finally, he was sent to High Royds, which had become his home. When there was talk of getting long-stay patients back into the community, poor old Horace was extremely worried that he might be discharged.
Horace was a great storyteller. He kept Hazel and me amused by telling us interesting stories about his life on the streets. He told of his escapades in later years of trying to get himself sent to prison, such as how one night he broke into a food factory, turned on the lights and helped himself to a pork pie. He was most indignant that the policeman who came to arrest him wouldn’t allow him to finish his pie before taking him to the cells.
Horace’s tales, like all life stories, probably contained a mixture of fact and fiction. He had the gift of telling his sometimes sad but mostly funny stories in a way that made them sparkle with life. Many times I sat with him while he rolled cigarettes or smoked Woodbines and recounted another instalment from the Life of Horace. He could make me laugh, no matter how tired and low I was feeling. Many of the staff, even, had a soft spot for this friendly, likeable, apparently simple chap who, behind their backs, could imitate them perfectly, demonstrating a shrewd perception of their little idiosyncrasies.
‘Guess who this is,’ he would say to Hazel and me, then he would take off several of the doctors in turn, getting the voice and mannerisms of each one just right as he enacted a little scene.
Each week Horace did the ‘ward rounds’, taking a trolley of books to the back wards, including some locked wards. Hazel suggested I accompany him. The first time I went with him there was a commotion in the corridors. A few male patients stampeded through with male nurses in close pursuit. Horace and I, who’d been wheeling the book trolley along the corridor, got caught up in this and, afterwards, I found myself alone up against the wall where I’d been shoved while people raced past. Horace had run off at the first sign of trouble, abandoning the trolley and me. I found him waiting for me further along the corridor.
‘Horace! You’re not looking after me properly,’ I teased him playfully.
After that, whenever we went on the ward rounds together, he assigned himself the role of my protector and proudly told Hazel and other staff members
that he was looking after me.
I soon became aware that Thornville was not like some of the other wards. The back wards we visited, pushing the library trolley, were grim, overcrowded places, reeking of piss and shit, with beds sandwiched together. There were no pale, rosebud Ophelias among whiskery-faced women who dribbled and grimaced and spat. Trying to find romantic literary depictions of madness here would be as futile as trying to ride a rainbow or dance on clouds while the sky spewed out black, bitter rain over all that moved.
A few lost-looking souls shuffled around the area in front of the rows of beds where we stood with the trolley. The others, old, deformed, shrivelled, were sitting or lying on rubber-sheeted mattresses in a prison of beds. Belsen-thin. Sunken eyes. Rocking. Chewing. Saliva dribbling down their chins. Rattling the bed ends, beating their chests, tugging at clumps of hair, while snake-like tongues occasionally darted in and out of their mouths. I looked closer. No, they were not all the same. There were noisy patients, who reminded me of my brother in the way they banged, tapped, and made animal sounds, and quiet patients, with stone-fixed expressions. A mixed bag of misery.
Did the white-coated workers barricade emotions daily to separate and safeguard their minds from those who made up this overspill of drab decay? But I was unschooled and unshielded, still young enough to see and feel it all with open-hearted anguish.
To enter the locked wards, we had to ring the bell to summon the attendant whose eye would appear at the peephole. After stating our business, we waited, listening to the sounds of unlocking and unbolting. As soon as we entered, the heavy door was firmly closed, the large bolts drawn, the key turned. A chill feeling gripped my stomach. I was locked inside …
The first time I went into a locked ward, I followed the burly attendant apprehensively down the short, inner corridor to the main room. The keys that hung from his belt jangled as he walked. I wondered what to expect, but most of the patients in this male ward looked so heavily sedated that it was hard to appreciate the need for the lock or, for that matter, for the books we were bringing.
Yet, in all the sad, drab, pee-smelling wards we went into with the books, there was always someone, perhaps only one patient out of the whole ward, who still possessed the faculties and motivation to read. In one of the locked wards, Nancy, a small woman with big dark eyes and sparrow-like arms and legs, rushed to greet us each week and chatted to me excitedly about the books she’d read, before looking along the rows of books on the trolley to choose some more. Why was this woman being buried alive in here? I looked around at her companions to see whom she might converse with, but some were cabbage-like and silent, others were weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth.
How could anyone who had a mind sharp enough to think and reason survive in this bleak environment? Was it too much to hope that these books Nancy rushed for so eagerly each week were a lifeline for her? Could they help prevent soul-death? Even in this hell?
In a male locked ward a man in a similar position to Nancy had apparently found a different aid to survival, something to alleviate the boredom of the day if new, naïve visitors came. His name was Victor and the first time I met him, he came up to me, smiling, with his arm outstretched wanting me to ‘shake hands’.
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ a tired-looking male nurse warned me, but Victor was a small, thin man and I couldn’t see any harm in it, so I allowed him to grasp my hand.
The handshake didn’t stop at the normal stage. Still retaining his oh-so-polite pleased-to-meet-you smile, he squeezed my hand in an iron grip until I yelled in pain and the nurse, whom I now wished I’d heeded, managed to yank him away from me.
LOOKING BACK 10
I WAS NEARING MY seventeenth birthday when it became impossible for me to continue being a Christian. Questions and doubts had long been rocking the boat but what finally capsized me was to do with the Christian doctrine about hell. Accept Jesus as Saviour or be damned for eternity? No peace of mind for ever and ever? Surely nobody deserved that? Many people on earth were suffering enough and if God wouldn’t at least grant them relief in death, then what kind of a God was I supposed to be believing in? Of course, I had to reject the ‘sweetness’ of my religion along with the ‘cruelty’. Things couldn’t be ‘true’ or ‘not true’ just because that’s how I wanted them to be. I had to let go.
But how could I let go of Him who meant everything to me and replace Him with – nothing? I read my favourite, beautiful hymns once more. Wanting, needing, to believe so much, the hymn book’s clear, black print dissolved into a blur of tears.
A grey cloud descended over me. As a result of my belief system breaking down, I was suffering the devastating loss of ultimate meaning. What point was there in anything? Why bother to breathe? In bed I gazed up at the sky through the gap in my curtains, and wept and tossed about feverishly, gripped by a sense of misdirected energy. It seemed that life was a maze leading to dead ends no matter what routes we chose. Did we have any choices anyway? How could Christians reconcile free will with predestination? Wasn’t Judas’s fate mapped out for him long before he was born?
My thoughts went shooting off freely down unexplored avenues, having been unleashed from the basic assumptions on which my sense of ‘reality’ had been founded. God? Heaven and hell? Eternal suffering? Good/Evil? Right/Wrong? The old ‘black/white’ world of childhood collapsed. I was confused with so many different ideas, many of them nihilistic. No God? No free will? No ultimate meaning? These ideas can be difficult to assimilate amidst the turmoil of being ‘sixteen, going on seventeen’.
My old questions about right and wrong turned into: on what values or basic assumptions should we base our morality? If I couldn’t sort that one out, how could I have any opinions or know what decisions to make in the day-to-day issues which confronted me? And how could I sort out my views on matters like abortion, euthanasia, pacifism, politics, capital punishment and so on, if I didn’t even know on what to base my views?
The concept of ‘I’ and ‘me’ provided me with more than enough food for thought to choke upon. WHAT AM I?– the Jackpot Question – became of central importance. I felt desperately alone, fearing that no one else on earth had ever wondered what a human being is.
It wasn’t just that this teenage religious thing had soured. No, my grief over lost beliefs went deeper than that. All my life Jesus had been the Friend who was always there. Admittedly, I’d had strong religious doubts around the age of twelve when I left the Salvation Army. But I’d never lost Him completely before. Not like this. How was I to make sense, alone, of this world around me, which I was so painfully dissatisfied with?
The ‘new me’ emerged. Jean the Christian became Jean the Rebel. I wore shorter skirts, heavy eye-liner and was drinking, smoking and swearing like the rest of them. Caught up on a merry-go-round of a social whirl, I was out every night at pubs, nightclubs and discos, often until the early hours of the morning. I kept my conflicts and confusion about religion and life to myself. Nobody must know I was not the modern, carefree teenager I was pretending to be.
I remained hung up about questions of right and wrong. When kissing and petting, as I frequently did with boys I neither knew nor liked, I felt I was not acting in accordance with my true feelings. I needed to be me but I needed to belong. So I kept trying to pull the two opposing needs together into some kind of uneasy compromise. I did keep my virginity though, still saving it for the ‘right’ boyfriend, if such a person existed. Boyfriends could go so far but no further. Definitely no further.
I tried to weather the violence and misery around me with a cynical and detached ‘Well, that’s life’ attitude. I never even thought of going to the police when I was set upon and badly beaten up one night. Or when, on another night, while walking home alone in the dark (I wondered if it was my fault for doing that), a beer-smelling man dragged me on to some waste ground. He pinned me flat on my back in the mud and gravel, his strong animal-hungry body heavy on top of me. Was it at some time dur
ing the lengthy and sickening sexual assault he subjected me to that a part of me finally accepted that life was just a load of shit piled up on top of shit? I told Mum about the sex attack but she didn’t seem interested. That hurt. I told Dad and he said if this had happened I must have ‘asked for it’. That hurt even more.
Teenage life seemed so gut-achingly depressing. Of the old friends I knew from way back at junior school, Shirley had an abortion at fifteen and Sylvia joined a cult at sixteen. A previous boyfriend, Barry, committed suicide at seventeen …
And the drugs scene saddened me. I went to the Tempest Folk Club a few times with Phil who was a nice lad when he wasn’t too stoned on acid or snow. Leaning against Phil’s shoulder, the words of one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, mingled with the woozy thoughts in my head.
Through an alcohol haze I grieved for lost innocence, while thinking: Hey, Mr Tambourine Man, I know now that you’re a heroin dealer.
I learnt to type at night school and left my job at the factory for a typing job at Lee’s, an electrical wholesalers. It was less boring than the assembly line – but not much. Mandy, my old friend from Rossfields, worked at a shoe shop near Lee’s and we began meeting at lunchtime each day. We soon got to know each other much better than when we were schoolgirls and our friendship grew strong. At that time Mandy seemed more ‘innocent’ than me and my other friends. This appealed to me, perhaps because I kept wishing I could regain some of the innocence I felt I’d lost.
