by Bill Douglas
She went in, dialled her parents, and got an immediate response. Father. She pressed button A and heard the money drop. “Father, I’m ringing from a phone-box, so must be quick. Could Becky and I come again for a few days please?”
Silence. Maybe it wasn’t okay. “Yes, Heather. When?”
“Would today be possible?”
“Yes. I could collect you in an hour or two.”
“Thanks, Father. I’ll be ready.”
She re-joined Mrs Allen and Becky (who was still dozing). “Thanks, Mrs Allen. I’m Heather.”
“I’m Moira. I’ll walk with you – if you’re going home.”
“Yes, good. I’d love to hear more about you and your husband.” She didn’t want to tell her neighbour John was in the loony bin.
Moira talked readily about herself and her family. “We’ve been here thirty years – we’re Brummies.” That explained her accent. “We were in our thirties when we married and moved here… We’ve one son, in London – we rarely see him… We’re retired civil servants – I was Ministry of Labour, Joey Social Security.”
Especially interesting. They might know about employment rights and benefits. They rounded into Green Drive. “I’m talking too much. You must be bored,” said Moira.
“No – I’m interested in what you’re telling me.” Though preoccupied with getting home – and a need to be ready for her parents – she’d been listening. Moira was friendly, and could maybe be trusted. Elsie and Mattie apart, she lacked friends here.
They were nearing number 86. “Will you come in for a drink, Heather?” The older woman was looking at her.
“Thanks, I’d love to, but I can’t.” She explained about her parents coming.
They were outside number 86. Moira touched her on the sleeve and they both stopped. “Look, Heather, I know it’s been hard for you, with your husband away and ill. I was in Mattie’s shop when you had a problem the other week. If there’s any way Joey and I can help you, please don’t shy off asking.”
Moira sounded genuine, like she cared. “Thanks Moira.” She paused, fighting back tears. “You know John’s in hospital?”
“Yes, and I guess it’s Springwell? I saw the DAO outside the house. It’s a place any of us can go if we’re too stressed and need treatment.”
Heather nodded. “I’ll see you after I’m home again.” She wheeled the pram home. A new friend, who spoke positively about Springwell and recognised Sam!
Becky was still asleep. Good. She set about packing. Must greet the car from the pavement, otherwise Mother would come straight into the house.
22
Saturday 12th May 1956 – in Aversham, then Bolsall.
When the Riley drew up, Father was alone. He wouldn’t have come in anyway.
From the back seat, Heather asked, “How’re you keeping, Father?”
“Fine.” His stock reply. He’d surely lost some weight, but seemed fit enough.
“And Mother?”
“She’s got a headache. She’s resting.” Father sounded casual about Mother’s suffering. Yet they’d always seemed devoted to each other.
For the rest of the journey they didn’t speak. She was occupied cooing and singing to Becky. When they got there, Mother was still in bed.
Father shouted “Heather’s here.” He turned to Heather. “Do go up.”
She lifted Becky and went up to the darkened bedroom. Mother lay propped up by a pillow. “Heather darling, and little Becky, how lovely to see you. But don’t come near in case it’s a bug.”
“It’s good to see you too, Mother. I’m sorry you’re not well.”
“Oh, I should be better by tomorrow. I’ll stay here tonight.”
“Sounds wise.” A bit of role reversal – felt okay. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, my hero looks after me well. I’ll say goodnight.”
“Goodnight Mother. I hope you’re better by tomorrow.” Going downstairs, she wondered. It wasn’t a work day for Mother, so what was this headache about? A bug?
“Poached egg on toast for tea, Heather?” Father shouted from the kitchen.
“Yes Father.” She got Becky’s tea ready.
Tea passed without conversation. Becky needed her attention, and Father sat eating in silence. Between spoonfuls for Becky, Heather devoured the poached egg on toast. Father had never been into cooking, but this was nice.
After the meal, Heather tapped into Father’s financial expertise. “Standing orders don’t cost you. Tell your bank manager about your situation. He should advise. And let us know if you need money. We’re still not badly off.”
“Thanks. But you said –”
“We’ve stopped going abroad.” He smiled. “Travel’s getting wearisome.”
They were communicating pretty well, and here was an opening. “You know, I’ve never heard from you and Mother about your early days together.”
“Another time, Heather.” He yawned and rose. “I said I’d join your mother, and I must catch up on my sleep.”
As she took her sleeping child upstairs, she had no inkling of how memorable and disturbing the morrow would be.
Sunday 13th May 1956 – in Bolsall.
Heather awoke to the smell of frying. It was eight-fifteen and time to rise. She donned her dressing gown, peeped into Becky’s crib, then went downstairs.
“Darling.” Mother, smartly dressed and transformed, stood beaming. “What will you have for breakfast?”
“Fried eggs please, Mother. It’s good to see you up.”
“I feel better. Whatever it was, I’ve shaken it off.”
Mother rarely smiled like this. “Wonderful, Mother.” She smiled back.
“How did you sleep, darling?”
“Well, thanks. Becky’s still teething, but slept most of the time.”
“Good. You had quite a scream when you were teething!” Mother laughed. “But you were a lovely baby, and much admired.”
Mother was in top form. And Father sounded okay too, as he shouted from the kitchen, “Breakfast’s ready.”
“I’ll get Becky down, Mother.” She dashed upstairs and was greeted by a wail as she picked up her half-awake child. A cuddle, a nappy change and a clean pink dress later, she and Becky were down for breakfast.
“May I, Heather?” Mother took the spoon and, cooing gently, started feeding Becky the gooey stuff from the jar. This was a side to Mother she’d rarely glimpsed.
“Will you come to church with us, Heather?” Father asked.
It was Sunday. “I don’t think so. Do women still have to wear hats?”
“I wear one,” said Mother. “But you’re younger, and nobody would think you lacked respect if you didn’t.”
She hadn’t been to church for years. Now agnostic, she’d been baptised and, in her teens, confirmed in the Church of England. Maybe she should go and pray for John. Did that nurse hint at needing the Almighty’s help? “Well,” she hesitated.
“Oh do come, darling. Our friends would love to see you again – and our lovely grandchild.”
That settled it. “Thanks, but no. I’m tired – might fall asleep and snore through the sermon.” Mother’s friends would cluster around and Mrs Snape would no doubt ask, in that loud posh voice, where her husband was. ‘He’s in the asylum, Mrs Snape, and I got him in there’. No, she would stay put.
Her parents didn’t offer to take Becky. Too rusty on nappy-changing?
*
That evening, with Becky upstairs, she joined her parents in the living room for a post-meal cup of tea. Mother and Father huddled together on the settee, looking toward her as she sank into the armchair.
It was unusual to see them sitting like this, holding hands. Nice. Also, she and they were bonding (Bowlby’s term) as fellow adults.
Father coughed. His expression had changed – he looked edgy. And Mother looked serious, almost stern. “Heather, there’s something we need to tell you,” Father began. He was holding Mother’s hand, and she too was nodding
. Their expressions vied in glumness. What catastrophe was this?
“Please understand that this is very difficult for us.” Mother was pleading?
God, let them get a move on. “Yes. So?”
“I’ll cut to the chase.” A favourite saying of Father’s in the old days. “You had an older brother who died before you were born.”
The ‘terrible thing’ Granny mentioned all these years ago! “An older brother?”
Mother was almost shouting, pleading, as she told Heather for the first time. “Our Edward – we named him after the King.” She was sobbing into a handkerchief supplied by Father, who put an arm round her.
Heather waited. This wasn’t real. She couldn’t find words.
Father continued with the revelation, in a low controlled voice she hadn’t heard before. “Born in 1910, Edward was a fine outstanding scholar, about to study Classics at Oxford. Then –” He faltered, then regained control. “He was killed in a motorbike accident in the summer of 1928.” The control went, and Father too was weeping, his chest heaving, all the while cuddling his sobbing wife.
A brother who died five years before she was born. Tragic. Why hadn’t they told her? How hadn’t she known? Eyes blurred, she remained silent, an intruder into private raw grief. She should leave the room, and she felt like fleeing. But she sat immobile, except for her face working to control the tears. She was a part of this grieving – for her brother, whose very existence she’d never been told about.
After a time – it felt like hours, but was probably only minutes – her parents regained some composure.
“Edward dying seemed like the end –” Mother choked off, dabbing her face with a large handkerchief.
“But life went on.” Father’s voice was cracking. “We tried to escape the torture by moving far from Edinburgh. I got the manager’s job here in Aversham, and your granny moved in with us. Nobody here knew us or what had happened.”
“We were devastated, darling. My head hasn’t felt right since,” Mother said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Father replied. “It was years before you came along. We, and Granny, thought it best not to say anything when you were little. I’d thrown myself into work and taken on a lot in this community; your mother was on a five-and-a-half day week.”
They’d tried to forget, to escape their misery by blotting out his memory and not talking about him. “He was my brother. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We’re so sorry, darling.” Mother looked gaunt, exhausted.
“Maybe someday you can understand and forgive us,” Father added.
There would be no answers tonight – maybe not ever. She’d had enough. She raised herself unsteadily. “I need my bed. Good night.” She turned, ran up to the bedroom, where Becky lay sleeping, and quietly, firmly, closed the door.
Aspirins – one, two, three, stop. Maybe this would soften the raging within. She stretched out on the bed, banged her forehead against the pillow, then twisted to lie on her back, staring at the ceiling with unseeing eyes – until, mercifully, Becky’s crying brought her back to the here and now.
23
Saturday 12th – Sunday 27th May 1956 – in Springwell.
Survive? John was regaining strength. Escape? He couldn’t see a way.
Now his mind was blocked, like it wasn’t his own. Over the next few dreary routine-laden days, waves of hopelessness kept coming to replace his fury and torment over his lovely Heather. She and Becky could manage better without a lunatic husband and father. He’d be in there forever and nobody would care. In fact, did he care? He might as well be dead.
Suicide? But how could he top himself anyway – imprisoned, closely guarded? With braces or a belt, he could have tried hanging; but he didn’t even have shoelaces, and the sheets were too coarse and strong to do anything with. The windows had bars and were too near the ground anyway. Overdosing was out – with everything stashed in a locked medicine cupboard in the office – as was poisoning, with the bleach locked away. The cutlery was either rubber or too blunt to go through paper.
No. He’d decided against trying suicide. Yet at nights the thoughts kept coming and rolling around in his head. Suicide was a crime. Ridiculous. It was his life, and his choice whether to try ending it. And they could scarcely prosecute if you succeeded. Though technically, couldn’t they do your family? And what if you botched it? Yes – even to attempt it was a crime.
And suicide was a mortal sin, condemning you to eternal damnation, old Father Murphy had said. You’d no right to kill any human that God had created. God would punish eternally anyone who acted to end their misery? Scary stuff, that didn’t square with the central messages of Christianity, about love and compassion.
No, he would not kill himself. But somebody might kill him. Maclean’s warning about ‘the odd violent psycho’ had been noted; though so far John hadn’t seen much to worry about in his fellow patients.
He saw plenty glowering, heard a lot of groaning and grunting, and longish muttering and ranting (often into empty space, and ignored by the white-coats – unless directed at one of them). Tensions simmered between a few patients and sometimes these erupted into noisy skirmishes, whereupon the parties were speedily rendered unconscious. And each protagonist was taken to a cooler – yes, there was another adjacent to the one he’d been in. But no, if there were psycho patients (whatever that meant; maybe everybody locked in the bin was one), he hadn’t seen behaviour he’d consider seriously threatening.
Not scary, though sometimes weird. Strangest was a guy, didn’t look much older than himself, who stood babbling, face twitching, in the dayroom one evening.
He’d strained to follow the babble, but it sounded like nonsense verse. Then suddenly the man froze, silent and statuesque. Was this a game? The man was still, bent forward, his eyes staring ahead, like a figure in a tableau.
“Don’t touch him.” Clark now stood facing the man. He waved a hand in front of the man’s eyes without producing a blink. “A catatonic stupor, I think. Is it, Sir?”
“Yes, Clark, that is correct.” Sarge pushed past Clark, bawled an obscenity and pinched the man’s arm – without response – then held up a large safety pin. “Now, we’ll see if the patient’s kidding.”
Sarge yanked the man’s trousers down and stabbed the buttock firmly through the long johns. Predictably savage. Amazingly, there was still no response, though the man’s face seemed to redden. “Classic. Sort it, Clark.” Sarge walked off, trailed by a white-coat.
“Get back,” ordered Clark to the assembled patients. “Fairnie probably knows everything that’s going on.” From a tin in his pocket, Clark took out cotton wool and a piece of plaster, then looked round. “Chisholm, the man’ll be okay. Best if you don’t stand gawping.”
He’d been mesmerised by the horror show. “Sorry.” He moved away.
There was more menace among the white-coats. Sarge was an outstandingly sadistic bully, gratuitously shoving or kicking patients or grabbing them by the lapel and headbutting. With John, the assaults were verbal – sneering or taunting. Well, sticks and stones… Keep the head down – and someday the dark alley!
Though none of the white-coat underlings could begin to rival Sarge’s brutality, John was cautious about them. Mullen and Clark and associates he’d thought were okay. Yet they too could behave a bit like camp guards in that war film where the captors looked nice guys but were ruthless killers. No – any white-coat could be menacing, as a player in this regime. But Sarge was a sadist, out to do him. Niven had shown similar form – good riddance from the ward.
He was getting to know one or two patients. Opposite at lunch yesterday, a small balding middle-aged man kept grimacing. Afterwards, in the dayroom, the man came to sit next him, tapped him on the forearm, and whispered in his ear, “Ssht. You mustn’t tell anyone.”
Mysterious, but he was to be the repository of something important and confidential. “I won’t,” he whispered back.
&nbs
p; The man whispered, “I’m called George – my real name. But,” he paused, glancing around, “I’m a famous science fiction author.”
Gosh, he was in the company of the high and the mighty. First Ginger the lord, now George the best-selling author. John too glanced around. There was nobody near, though a distant white-coat seemed to be looking their way.
“Science fiction – sounds interesting.” He didn’t read science fiction and didn’t know names of authors from that genre.
“My books are –” George sprang up from the chair, looked quickly around, then sat down and whispered into his ear. “I get my plots via rays from Jupiter.”
John tried to digest this information. “Uh-huh.”
George continued, “I’ve not told anyone my pen name, and nobody here knows of my writing.”
Intriguing. “What is your pen name?”
George’s face twitched, and he whispered, “Ssht. I cannot tell that to anyone, not even you.”
“But how will I know I’m reading your books?”
George glanced around quickly. “You won’t. And they mustn’t know I’m famous, or the thought police will torture me. I know they suspect, as they all watch me closely and they’ve extracted energy from me.” A white-coat was approaching. “Mum’s the word.” And with that, George moved away speedily.
They hadn’t spoken since. But today after breakfast he saw George, finger on lips, winking at him conspiratorially.
The fellow patient he liked most was Ginger – ‘m’lord’ had settled for this name. John was pleased when they managed to pair up for the airing court.
“My estate’s in Bedfordshire. I should be there now, instead of my little brother. He put me in the loony bin.”
“Why? You don’t seem mad.”
“I’m not, but I did crack up. Thought I could rule the world and everything rocketed out of control. They stuck me in a private asylum – a palace compared to this dump. Manic-depressive, they said, and wouldn’t let me out. Miserable runt said the money’s running low and got me sent here. Much cheaper – huh!”
