by Jean Davison
Anita asked me the way to the toilet and when I replied, ‘About halfway down that corridor and it’s on your right,’ she waved her hand and asked hesitantly in hushed, self-conscious tones, ‘Is that my right?’ Later that day, while washing the mountains of crockery after dinner with several other patients, Anita picked up a damp dishcloth and began to ‘dry’ the plates with that, before turning to whisper to me, ‘Is this a tea-towel?’
‘No, this is a tea-towel,’ I replied, handing her a spare one from the radiator, but my brain was so fuddled that I found myself looking at the dishcloth and thinking ‘Dishcloth? For washing up?’ and then at the tea-towel and thinking, ‘Tea-towel? For drying? Yes, I am right.’ And I realised how much Anita, too, was probably painfully aware of her confusion, aware that part of her mind wasn’t functioning properly, scared that she didn’t know where the toilet was or how to distinguish between dishcloths and tea-towels. She glanced at me with eyes that showed the humiliation of being unsure, of having to ask; the pain and fear of feeling your mind is disintegrating, your whole world is crumbling. I knew I could so easily fall from the tightrope to land on the same side as Anita but, fortunately, I managed to keep my balance.
Dr Copeland and Mr Jordan used to tell me I was different from the other patients. But now I had to ask myself, was I really different? I could see so much of myself in the others. In patients such as Edith saying ‘I shouldn’t be here’; in patients such as Anita saying she didn’t want any treatment and hadn’t been right since having ECT; in patients such as Katie who wanted to believe in a God who loved her. And it didn’t stop there. No matter how bizarrely a patient talked or behaved, I could see in each one of them an uncanny resemblance to some facet of myself.
I was sitting among some elderly patients who might be hospitalised until they escaped in death and, seeing in them a reflection of myself, I was thinking my situation was as hopeless as theirs. But then the mirror image faded as I realised that at least one big tangible difference between them and me was that they were old and I was young. My life stretched out in front of me; I might have over seventy years of it left. I wasn’t ready yet to give myself up for dead.
I went across to the OT block before Sister had a chance to ask me why I wasn’t there. Everyone was sitting on wooden fold-up chairs in the hall. The Head Therapist was waving her arms about at the front leading a sing-song, accompanied by another therapist playing the piano, to the sound of lots of rattling cans. Each patient was holding two cans.
‘Come along now. Let’s have you all singing and rattling your cans in time to the music.’
I took my place among the other patients. A therapist handed me a song sheet from the musical The King and I and two Pepsi cans filled with something that rattled. So there I was sitting rattling my tin cans, asking myself for the hundredth time how this could be happening to me, and singing about not letting anyone suspect that I’m afraid.
We stopped for a tea break and a tall, thin woman, who was bald except for a few wispy tufts on top of her head, rushed up and flung her arms around me.
‘Jean! Oh, hello, Jean. It’s so good to see you.’
I looked at her, trying in vain to recollect who she was.
‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’ she asked, looking a little hurt. ‘Oh, Jean, it’s me. Georgina.’
‘Georgina! But I thought …’
‘You thought I’d snuffed it, didn’t you? I was in a coma for ages, but here I am. Back from the grave.’
Back from the grave seemed an apt description for someone who looked more like a walking corpse than the Georgina I’d known. She pulled a chair up and brought her cup of tea over.
‘The doctors didn’t expect me to live,’ she said. ‘When I came out of the coma Dr Shaw was bending over me saying I was the luckiest person alive because I’d pulled through against the odds. Lucky? Why can’t they understand that I want to die? I think people should have the right to take their own lives if they want to. Don’t you think so, Jean?’
Good old Georgina was forcing my brain to creak into action. A brain that could barely manage to think further than dishcloths and tea-towels was being pushed back into thinking about the deeper issues of life and death.
‘Perhaps so,’ I said slowly, pulling my thoughts together and trying to sort out my views. ‘If I had a terminal illness that was leading to a slow, agonising death, I’d like to have the right to speed things up a bit if I chose. But don’t you think when you’re feeling better, you might be glad they didn’t let you die? I know it’s awful to feel depressed but these feelings can pass.’
Georgina looked thoughtful. She shook her head. ‘If I decide I want to die, I should have the right to kill myself. Oh well, here’s to another failed attempt.’
I wondered if it wasn’t so much that she’d attempted to kill herself and failed, but rather that she’d decided to take all the risks but allow fate to make the ultimate decision. How much longer could she go on playing Russian roulette with her life?
My parents came to visit me. Brian brought them in his battered old Mini. I saw Brian only briefly when it was time for my parents to leave. He stood looking around the ward and I saw him watching Agnes banging her head. I thought Brian’s face showed a mixture of embarrassment and curiosity. He seemed anxious to leave.
On another visit my father came alone. We sat facing each other at a Formica-topped table in the dining room where patients normally sat with their visitors. He began telling me his troubles: how Brian and Mum were getting on his nerves and so on. My expression might have made him realise that I didn’t want to hear all that. He stopped. ‘But I shouldn’t be burdening you with my troubles now, should I?’
After an awkward silence he put his hand on the table and moved it along in crab-like motions. ‘Look, Jean. I’ve brought my pet crab to see you.’
‘Dad! I’m not a child any more,’ I said coldly.
He looked hurt. I felt guilty, knowing he’d meant well. We sat in silence while I stared miserably at the now collapsed crab lying flat on the table.
Celia, my newest friend who I’d met through Mandy, visited before leaving for Paris with her fiancé. The following day Celia’s sister, Helen, came to see me, much to my surprise. I’d only met her once before when I’d had tea at Celia’s house. She was such a warm, friendly person that my shyness with her soon melted. We planned to go to a beginner’s course of dancing lessons when I left the hospital. When I left the hospital … My optimism grew. Things were going to be all right.
Mandy wrote to me. She’d just got engaged and her letter was full of happiness as she described her ring and wedding plans. She said she wanted me, her best friend, to be a bridesmaid and that I’d better hurry up and get out of hospital so I could go for my dress fitting.
‘Does anyone want a mint?’ piped up Hilda.
‘Yes please. I’ll have a mint,’ said Ada, a new patient.
I broke off from reading Mandy’s letter to watch as I’d been wondering before what would happen if somebody took Hilda up on her offer. Ada came over to her holding out her hand for the mint.
‘You can’t have one,’ Hilda retorted indignantly.
The two women glared at each other, then Louise intervened.
‘If you’ve got some mints, Hilda, then give Ada one. Have you got any or haven’t you?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ replied a subdued Hilda. Louise could be quite formidable.
‘Well, why do you keep asking people if they want a mint when you haven’t got any?’ Louise snapped. ‘You’re bloody mental. No wonder you’re in this place.’
I chuckled to myself, but then another little drama unfolded and this one pained me.
Lisa stood up and announced: ‘Life’s too short for arguing, isn’t it? Let’s have some fun. I’m going to make you laugh.’ She danced, clowned about in front of us, told some jokes, tried to organise some party games, while all the time her eyes looked sadder than sad. She got no response from her audien
ce except from Louise who sighed, yawned, and said, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Lisa, sit down and shut up. Can’t you see you’re getting on everyone’s nerves?’
Lisa continued her comedy routine. Perhaps at some time in her past she’d been the life and soul of the party. Not here. She was the saddest clown I had ever seen. She tried hard to organise some games, tried to get participation from her drugged, unhappy audience, tried hard to make us laugh and it was so sad that it made me feel like crying.
It’s all there in a mental hospital: life in caricature; the whole gamut of human emotions. Like Edith, I used to think ‘I shouldn’t be here’ and, looking back, I don’t suppose I should have been. But who should?
For a time, I lived with these people and my fate became entangled with theirs. But only for a time. From the shadows of a mental hospital ward, I listened and waited and watched the world – the world of Agnes, Louise, Edith, Lisa and all the other patients, of the doctors, nurses, bleak corridors, drugs and ECT. That world was painfully confused. It was dark and long and narrow, like a tunnel. But somewhere outside was a different world, bigger and wider with plenty of room for me. I decided that if it still wasn’t too late, if I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in a drugged semi-functioning state, then one day I would write a book about all this.
I leant back in my armchair in the day room and took stock of my life. Now I was back as an in-patient, this time in a ‘chronic’ ward where most of the other patients were old women with, seemingly, no hope. They were waiting to die. Whatever aspirations may once have flowered inside them had withered. My heart ached for them but my sympathy, like my good intentions, was no help at all to them and a threat to my own well-being. So I was trying desperately, though somewhat unsuccessfully, to be unaffected by my present surroundings, and to close my eyes and mind to the sadness of those around me.
Sometimes I seemed to be doing extremely well in this respect. I had even got to the stage where I could smile at the jokes in the book Helen had brought me, while the patient sitting next to me was saying repeatedly in a pathetic, pleading voice: ‘Please God, let me die, let me die, I can’t bear it, I can’t go on …’; while Agnes opposite was banging her head sharply with the palm of her hand, screaming, ‘Damn you, God! Damn you, God! Damn you!’; while Edith, whose vacant, senseless expression cruelly mocked her words, was saying for the umpteenth time to anyone who cared to listen that she most certainly should not be in here, but that she was scared of the outside world.
Iris, as usual, was not saying anything but was causing the most disruption. She was a tall, well-built woman who was probably in her mid-seventies. She walked with a stoop and looked as if she was carrying the whole world on her bent shoulders. Her deeply lined, ashen face, with a permanent frown, was a pathetic picture of woe. Her eyes revealed the depths of misery and despair. I had never seen such sad eyes. She rarely said anything and spent her time plodding up and down, back and forth, pacing the ward, much to the annoyance of staff and patients alike. The nurses would shout at her to sit down and keep still, but really they were asking the impossible. She was so restless she could not sit still for more than two minutes. I think she really did try and, at times, I felt indignant at the nurses’ lack of patience with her, but I tried to accept that they had a difficult job.
This day, Iris was pacing about as usual and the ward sister and another young nurse were talking about her. As psychiatric staff sometimes do, they were talking about her as if she wasn’t there, or as if they assumed that she was too ill to be fully aware of what they were saying.
‘She used to be a dancing teacher,’ Sister was saying.
‘Really?’ said the other nurse. ‘Well, who’d have thought that?’
‘Oh yes, it’s true,’ continued Sister, ‘and some of her pupils became well known. She was really good, you know. She won lots of medals and trophies.’
‘Good heavens, she never did, did she?’ said the other nurse, who seemed to me to be unbelievably naïve. Surely she didn’t think that all the patients here had always been in their present state?
I glanced anxiously at Iris and I knew she was listening. She was listening and remembering. I wished the nurses would go away to the office if they were to continue this conversation.
‘Hey, Iris,’ the sister called to her. ‘It’s true, isn’t it, that you used to be a dancing teacher?’
Iris didn’t answer. She just kept pacing about looking utterly forlorn and dejected as the nurses continued talking.
Suddenly, she stood still and, for a moment, the expression in her eyes changed, and I thought her memory had awoken to something connected with happier times long ago. Almost at once, however, her eyes seemed to cloud over with bewilderment and confusion. She stood there as if in a trance and then she said in a flat, apathetic voice before she continued her wanderings: ‘My dancing days are over.’
I thought about her dancing when she was young, happy and healthy. I thought about her being presented with those medals and trophies, which she was once, no doubt, so proud of. Where were they now? Of what use were they now? ‘My dancing days are over,’ she had said. I thought about those words …
… I still do.
Outside, life was going on. Outside, people would be laughing, crying, hurrying to and fro about their business or strolling in the sunshine. Babies would be crying; children would be playing; all would be living. I had been part of that world once and, ‘God’ willing, I would be part of it again. Most of the poor souls in this ward never would. ‘I’m scared of the outside world,’ Edith said over and over again. ‘It frightens me.’ Hadn’t it once frightened me? Hadn’t I once said I was more scared of living than of dying? Certainly, life outside held many problems and there was, indeed, much sadness there. But had I been so blind as to see only the sadness and not the happiness, the evil and not the good, the wrong and not the right? What a distorted vision. Now just as Edith was afraid of the outside world, I was afraid of this inside world. Surely, a sick mind, depression, could never be healed in a place such as this hospital. A place where hope is destroyed, aspirations frustrated, light and humour repressed. A place where people die and yet their bodies live.
I wandered out of the dull, stuffy ward into the bright sunshine. The contrast to the depressing atmosphere of the ward was enormous. The sky was blue with not one cloud in sight. The occasional breeze, which rustled the leaves on the trees, cooled the baking air. Overhead, the birds were chirping, and in the distance in the fields the baby lambs were playing.
I walked as far as the bench shaded by the tree near the day hospital and sat down. I still felt weak and ill physically, but inwardly I could feel a deep sense of peace, and sitting there in the bright sunlight, watching the birds fighting over their food, and feeling the gentle breeze ruffling my hair, I was aware of a sense of balance, harmony, perfection, which was far beyond the comprehension of us creatures bound by earthly restrictions.
It was a feeling to be enjoyed, not thought about and analysed. If it was merely ‘a feeling’ then perhaps it would burst like a bubble under the critical eye of analysis. No, I dared not dwell on what I was feeling, or even think about it at all, lest by thinking about it, it would be lost. God? Does He exist? I still did not know and, at that moment, it did not really matter. It was enough to feel that there was ‘something’. In a world of many wrongs, some things were right, beautifully right. I wanted to be in this world and to take my rightful place within it. With all my heart, I wanted to live and be whole. And with so strong a desire for this, a natural healing process was able to work unhindered.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SOMETHING TREMENDOUSLY IMPORTANT HAD happened to me, something beyond the grasp of my understanding. How could I ever be the same again? But here I was, back as an in-patient, back on drugs, and feeling as fragile as a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. So where was the victory? Yet I was sure that a turning point had been reached. It was all up to me now but, having stumbled upon a
reserve of inner strength and serenity, I did have the ability to make it. I knew I did. Be careful, Jean, I warned myself. Don’t get too optimistic. Remember that old joke about the light at the end of the tunnel being the headlamps of an oncoming train.
I still saw getting off pills as a necessity but decided that next time I would cut down gradually. Meanwhile, I directed all my energy into preparing for a future in the ‘outside world’. I got my parents to fetch me the shorthand textbook I’d bought years ago. Office work might be boring but I was hardly in a position to be choosy. And now that I was facing myself with clear-sighted honesty, I would delay no longer in being honest with Mike. I wrote to him in New Zealand and told him everything.
While the other patients were sitting around the TV in the evenings and weekends, I went into the Quiet Room with my shorthand book and set about the task of forcing my brain to work. I had to start from the beginning even though I’d supposedly been learning shorthand at OT for quite some time. As when I’d been a schoolgirl trying to do my homework, there were certainly distractions to learning here. One such distraction came in the form of a tall, slim young woman called Annabel.
Annabel wore an immaculate bright red trouser-suit with black patent leather high-heeled shoes and a crisp white blouse with a ruffed neckline and a black bow at the front. Her fair hair was cropped short and fell in a fringe over her pale face. The bright red lipstick she wore, which matched her suit, did not detract from her blue eyes, which gleamed with intense brightness. She paced about while keeping up a constant monologue as she acted out her personal dramas, often reaching a frightening pitch of aggression with threatening words and gestures.
‘This is a brothel! Why have they taken me to a brothel? I will not remain here. Mother! Fetch my coat at once. I wish to go home immediately. Do you hear me? And you, young lady, with your oh-so-saccharine smile, you are the owner of this brothel!’
