by Anna Vaught
These fellows. All those you have heard described. They must wonder what their life’s work has come to be, wrestling us in and out of our rooms, penning us up in Caliban’s cave while they wait to prescribe from their cabinet and chart. But I know that’s not entirely fair. Dr Delmas, from the asylum in Ivry-sur-Seine, where I was at the beginning of the war, in Vichy France. I would like to see him again, one day, if it were possible (and as we know, possible can be stretched). We owe him our safety, still, because the Nazis were marauding, weeding out the feebles like me, like I came to know I was; the lunatics. When I am as strong as I can be, I want to find out. Another book to write, maybe? But on one thing, Dr Delmas was wrong: suicide is not caused only by insanity. Despair, rage, cage: this is also what I saw. When we are made prisoners, we go mad, if we were not before and, as I think we have all said, prisons are plural and various.
There is something else, though, and it bothers me night and day. If we killed Mussolini, we neither saved Hannah Karminski, Bertha’s beautiful work, nor killed Hitler. There was so much more to do, once we took the bad bird, once we shot the monster, that it breaks my heart. Bear witness to this: are you a madwoman or do you know one? Commune with others and shoot. I still have my Lebel. I’ve bought more, in fact.
Take them.
If you find tyrants. If it’s the only way.
When I got out—of St Andrew’s Northampton, I mean—and I don’t mean I escaped, like Augustine from the Salpêtrière: no, I was discharged, as I told you—I went first to your grave, Lady Gibson, and I took you something: a little swallow, then I added a sparrow, clever and tight-bound little ornaments. The birds with which you and only you communed gave us back our lives, mad girls, at different hours. Why don’t you, reader, go and see it? As you bear witness in reading, you are part of this story too, aren’t you now? I haven’t made up such detail. The grave was half-planned to be so plain; I could not bear it and was glad to help here. I suspect mine will be pretty, or at least shiny and expensive, though God knows where it’ll go. Near my friend? I’ve a flexible idea of home. Violet, you always said we would be buried near each other. Could that be true?
Could it? You had said: Ah Syracusa! You’ll get your pretty granite, alright. But don’t go expecting Zurich! I wanted to hit out at you. No tact and remarkably little grace for an Honourable, sometimes.
And yet. Oh God, what grace. What grace and understanding.
Violet Albina Gibson. The Honourable. Yes, you saved me.
******
Did all this really happen? Of course. But what do you know, who has not been mad? You must believe it, for I am a weird, haughty, naughty, beautiful Niluna of Finnegans Wake. I am my father’s daughter. Violet Gibson was not just part of history. She was history and she changed it with the birds of the skies and a polish of the cross she held up as she died; the detail she noticed and the imagination she sustained. I know this is a lot to take in, but a metamorphosis was hers and she let us help her. And we love her.
Remember.
Write, talk, fly, sing.
Don’t doubt her. Were you on the radio, immortalised in song? No? Well then.
Flanagan: Listen to this. Cricket. Ashes for England after fourteen years.
Allen: Irish woman, Violet Gibson, shoots Mussolini in the nose.
Remember. You’ll do that for me.
Won’t you?
Thank you.
God love you reader, and, like I said, feel free to annotate the margins of this Work in Progress. This strange story of women who lived and laughed and loved and left.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the archivist at St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton, who was quick to help me with information because, at the time of writing, the archives were closed as part of their move to storage elsewhere. For this book, my love and thanks go to my publisher, Bluemoose, and to Kevin and Hetha and my lovely editor Lin Webb. Thank you for all you do.
To my friends. All your kind attentions are too numerous to mention: you know who you are! I’d like to say a particular thank you to Alexi, Sarah and Susie. The encouragement of writers and those in the publishing industry has, again, proved invaluable, so special thanks to Peter Fullagar, who read the manuscript and talked it through with me, and especially to Heidi James for reading and cheerleading; to J. Hall, Ariel Kahn, Kate Armstrong, Alex Campbell and Avril Joy. For Kate Johnson, Julia Silk and also all at Influx Press, especially Gary Budden. For Thom and Sam at Dodo Ink. Stu Hennigan, Steve Clough and Lucie McKnight Hardy. Heartfelt thanks to Jordan Taylor-Jones. And for Sophie and Dave on the occasion of their marriage, Wiltshire, September 2018, with much love.
Thank you to our NHS. It is hard to get and maintain help, but I have always battled mental health problems and it is there, an enduring comfort to me. MHRS: God love you.
And an enormous thank you to my three boys, Elijah, Isaac and Caleb and to my husband, Ned, who insisted I write this book and read and corrected anachronisms with a clear eye; the title was also his. All errors rest with me. This book is, above all, for you, my darling, because most things are.
Afterword and a very special
thank you
At the beginning of this book there is a dedication to nursing sisters of Roscommon. There is a reason for this: during the writing of this book, something extraordinary happened. I had been trying to find out where Lucia Joyce had gone in her time away from St Andrew’s and discovered that, during the Blitz, some patients were evacuated to Bryn y Neuadd at Llanfairfechan in North Wales, which at the time was a sort of sister hospital. And through information on Bryn y Neuadd, I found Kevin O’Hara, the American writer and former psychiatric nurse, who told me that his mother and two aunts had nursed Violet Gibson in St Andrew’s. There were family stories handed down. His Aunt Nancy was still alive and ninety-five. She and her sisters had emigrated to America and from there Nancy, the remaining sister, shared information with me. Violet had been a great favourite of Kevin’s mother and aunts. Kevin wrote: “‘Lady Gibson rarely spoke to anyone,” Mom told us, “but one morning, out of the blue, she asked if I’d help her sew little pouches into the shoulders of her black dress. She’d go filling these pouches with breadcrumbs and sit perfectly still in the rose garden, where sparrows and redbreasts would alight on her shoulders and begin to feed. She did this for years, mind you, and we’d often tell her that her cheeks had been caressed by the wings of a thousand birds, and our words never failed to make her smile.”’ When I had this information, Violet Gibson felt finally... real.
While I was in Northampton I visited Kingsthorpe Cemetery, where Violet is buried a few footsteps away from the grave of Lucia Joyce. I placed on Violet’s grave a small bird: a sparrow—a passerine, like the birds coming to her hands. And also a swallow, another passerine, like the one on Fra Angelico’s pillar, which was sometimes there and sometimes not. And that was just from me, though if you recall, Violet asks Lucia to put a little bird there for her, so maybe…
You were history, Violet. And you definitely changed my life.
Reading and sources
This is a work of fiction based on real people; what follows is just a small selection of my own reading. The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders (Faber and Faber, 2011), a biography of Violet Gibson, is a wonderfully sensitive portrait of Violet Gibson side by side with a riveting one on Mussolini and on contemporary history. Lucia Joyce: To Dance In The Wake, by Carol Loeb Shloss (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2003) attempts, painstakingly, through reconstruction and close reading of Finnegans Wake, to allow a reader to see the father’s love for his daughter and reveal her. The article ‘Nineteenth-Century Hysteria and Hypnosis: A Historical Note on Blanche Wittmann’ by Carlos S. Alvarado in Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (volume 37, no.1, 2009, pages 21-36) led me on to many contemporary or near contemporary accounts of Charcot at the Salpêtr
ière. There are many accounts one might read of the past treatment of women in psychiatric institutions; based on her study of cases from the Homewood Retreat, Cheryl Krasnick Warsh concluded, in Moments of Unreason: The Practice of Canadian Psychiatry and The Homewood Retreat, 1883-1923 (McGill-Queens University Press, 1989) that ‘the realities of the household in late Victorian and Edwardian middle-class society rendered certain elements—socially redundant women in particular—more susceptible to institutionalization than others’. Whether women were mentally ill or if their families wanted to silence opinion, it was not so difficult to send them to mental institutions, thus rendering them vulnerable and submissive.
In 1887 (when Violet would have been ten), the American journalist Nellie Bly had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in New York City, as ‘Nelly Brown’, in order to investigate conditions there. Her account was published in the ‘New York World’ newspaper, and in book form as Ten Days in A Mad-House (the pamphlet was published by Ian L. Munrow, New York and can be read online at digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bly/madhouse/madhouse.html). The text is full of descriptions such as this, as the author goes about her routine of the day: ‘I looked at the poor crazy captives shivering, and added, emphatically, “It’s horribly brutal.”’
On Mussolini, Richard Bosworth’s Mussolini (London, 2002) is fascinating reading, but The Woman Who Shot Mussolini (above) tells the story of Violet and Mussolini side by side and I would recommend both, one after the other. Also Christopher Duggan’s The Force of Destiny. A History of Italy since 1776 (London, 2007). Blanche is discussed in Asti Hustvedt Medical Muses: The Culture of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris (W.W. Norton and Company, 2011) and Bertha in a full biography, The Enigma of Anna O. A Biography of Bertha Pappenheim by Melinda Guttmann (Moyer Bell and Subsidiaries, 2001). I have drawn on Selected Letters of James Joyce (ed Richard Ellmann, Viking Press, New York, 1975), the work of James Joyce in the various editions in which I had it, folklore, Dante, the Bible, Jewish history and sacred texts, the works of Samuel Beckett in the editions in which I own them; also stories by Hans Christian Andersen. And the texts of Freud, Breuer and Jung, John Clare, writings on saints and Fra Angelico and, of course, I looked everywhere for birds!