The Girl Who Couldn't Read

by John Harding

  The sound of his voice seemed to have some magical effect upon the crouching creature, who stopped resisting the attendants and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. She threw back her head, tossing her hair from her face. I saw she was middle-aged, her face well marked from an encounter with the smallpox at some stage of her life. She was a big woman, large boned, and towered over Morgan. Her cheeks were sunken and her eye sockets dark hollow sepulchres. She looked down at Morgan for a moment or so with a suggestion of fear in her expression, but perhaps respect too, and then lifted her eyes to me. It made me uncomfortable, this uninhibited regard. It was not like the look of a human being, but rather some creature, some trapped wild animal. It had in it defiance and the threat of violence and somehow at the same time something that tore at my heart, an appeal for help or mercy perhaps. I well knew what it meant to need both and be denied.

  I stared back at her a long moment. I was all atremble and in the end I could not hold her gaze. As I looked away she spoke. ‘You do not appear much of a doctor to me. I shall get no help from you.’ And then, so suddenly she took them by surprise, she wrenched herself free from her keepers and hurled herself at me, her nails reaching for my face. It was fortunate for my already battered looks that O’Reilly, the woman who had let us in and had now come to help us, reacted quickly. Her hands whipped out and grabbed both the woman’s wrists at once in a tight grip. There was a brief struggle but then the other attendants joined in and the patient – for such this wretched being obviously was – was soon under control again. At which point she began once more to wail, making the pitiful sound I’d heard from outside, twisting her body this way and that, tugging her arms, trying to free herself but to no avail, for the two junior attendants who had her each by an arm were themselves well built and evidently strong. Having failed to free herself, the woman began to kick out at them, at which they moved apart, stretching her arms out, one either side of her, so that she was in a crucifixion pose.

  ‘Stop that now, missy,’ said O’Reilly. Her voice was as cold as the tiles, and it was obvious this flame-haired woman was as hard as nails; the words were spat out in an Irish accent harsh enough to break glass. ‘Stop it or you’ll find yourself getting another slap for your trouble.’

  Morgan frowned, then looked at me and raised an eyebrow, a semaphore that I immediately read as meaning that it wasn’t easy to get staff for such employment and that you had to make the best of what was available. He glared at the attendant. ‘None of that, please, O’Reilly. She’s under restraint; no need to threaten the poor soul.’ He turned to me again.

  ‘Firmness but not cruelty, that’s the motto here.’ Then he told the attendants, ‘Get her in the bath.’

  I expected the woman to object to this, but at the mention of the word ‘bath’ her struggling ceased and she allowed herself to be guided over to the nearest one. ‘Raise your arms,’ said O’Reilly, and the woman meekly obeyed. The other women lifted the hem of her dress, a coarse white calico thing, the pattern so faded from frequent washing that it was almost invisible, rolled it upwards and pulled it over her head and arms, with O’Reilly cooing, ‘There’s a good girl now,’ as if she were talking to a newly broken-in horse or a dog she was trying to coax back into its kennel. The woman was left shivering in a thin, knee-length chemise, for the room was not warm, as I could tell from the dank feel of my damp shirt against my back.

  O’Reilly put a hand on the woman’s arm, guided her over to the bath and ordered her to get in. The woman looked quizzically at Morgan, who smiled benignly and nodded, and she turned back to the bath, even allowing a certain eagerness into her expression.

  ‘She is looking forward to a bath,’ Morgan whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth. ‘She hasn’t been here long. She’s never had the treatment before and doesn’t have any inkling of what’s coming.’

  I saw that the bath was full of water. The woman lifted a leg over the edge and put her foot into it and instantly let out a gasp and tried to pull it out again, but the attendants immediately seized hold of her and pushed together so that the woman’s foot plunged to the bottom of the bath, whereupon she slipped and as she struggled to regain her balance the attendants lifted the rest of her and thrust her in, virtually face down, with an almighty splash that sent water shooting into the air, with more than a little of it raining down on Morgan and me. The woman’s screams ricocheted off the tiles from wall to wall around the room.

  Morgan turned to me with a grin and a lift of the eyebrows, by which I understood him to mean that now I saw the necessity of removing my jacket.

  The woman in the bath twisted around to get onto her back and lifted her head spluttering from the water. She tried to get up, but O’Reilly had a hand on her chest holding her down.

  ‘Get the cover!’ she said to the other women.

  They reached under the bath and pulled out a rolled-up length of canvas. The patient tried to scream again but it came out as a wounded-animal whimper that pierced both my ears and my heart.

  ‘Let me up, for the love of God,’ she begged. ‘The water is freezing. I cannot take a bath in this!’

  O’Reilly grabbed the woman’s wrist with her free hand and placed it in a leather strap fixed to the side of the bath. One of the other women let go the canvas and repeated the operation on the other side, so that the woman was now firmly held in a sitting position. Then the attendant returned to the canvas, taking one side of it while her colleague took the other. I saw it had a number of holes ringed with brass along each edge. The woman stopped her screaming and watched wild-eyed as the attendants stretched it over the top of the bath, beginning at the end where her feet were, putting the rings over a series of hooks which I now saw were fixed along the bath under the outside rim. The woman was fighting frantically, trying to get up, but of course she couldn’t because of the wrist restraints, and when this proved to no avail she began thrashing about with her legs, which were under the canvas and merely kicked uselessly against it. O’Reilly stood back now, arms folded, on her face the grim satisfied smile of the practised sadist. In a matter of half a minute the canvas was secured snugly over the top of the bath, the edges so tight it would have been impossible for the woman to get a hand through even if they had not been shackled. At the very top end there was a little half circle cut into the canvas and from this the patient’s head protruded, but the opening was so tight she could not pull her head back down into the water and drown herself.

  While this was happening the noise in the room was hellish, the woman’s screams and curses alternating with bouts of calm, when she sobbed and pleaded first with O’Reilly, then the other women and finally with Morgan. ‘Please, doctor, let me out, I beg you. Let me out and I promise I will be a good girl.’

  This all came out staccato, for her teeth were chattering, leaving me in no doubt that the water was indeed as freezing as she claimed. When these appeals fell upon deaf ears, she began screaming again and pushing her knees vainly against the canvas, which was so tightly secured it moved scarcely at all.

  One of the women went to a cupboard, took out a towel and gave it to Morgan. He dried his face and hands and tossed the towel to me and I did the same. Then he shrugged. ‘We may as well go now, nothing more to be done here.’

  He strolled over to where our jackets hung, and began putting his on and I followed suit. I must have looked puzzled and he said something that I could not catch because of the screams of the woman echoing around the room. He rolled his eyes and motioned toward the door. O’Reilly strode over to it and unlocked and opened it and we passed through. The door clanged shut behind us with a finality that made me shiver and I thanked my lucky star that I was not on the wrong side of it, or one like it. The cries of the woman were instantly muffled and Morgan said, ‘She will soon quiet down. The water is icy cold and rapidly calms the hot blood that causes these outbursts.’

  ‘She seemed calm enough before she was put into the bath,’ I said, forgetting myself and th
en realising I had perhaps sounded a note of protest.

  He began walking swiftly, so that again I had trouble keeping up. ‘Momentarily, yes, but she has been given to fits of violence, such as you witnessed a little of, ever since she arrived here a week ago. The hydrotherapy has a wonderfully quiescent effect. Another three hours in there and –’

  ‘Three hours!’

  I could not help myself. It was unthinkable to me that you could put someone in freezing cold water in the fall and leave them like that for three hours.

  He stopped and looked at me, taken aback by my tone. Before I had time to think about it, I raised my hand to cover the bruise and was suddenly conscious of how I must appear to him, with my too-small jacket and my bashed-about face.

  ‘I know it may seem harsh to the untrained spectator,’ he said, ‘but believe me it works ninety-nine per cent of the time. She’ll be as meek as a newborn lamb after this, I assure you. And I’d go so far as to wager that after another three or four such treatments there will be no more violent fits. We will have her under control.’

  ‘You mean she will be cured?’

  He pursed his lips and moved his head from side to side, weighing up his reply. ‘Well, not exactly. Not as you probably mean.’ He began walking again, but this time slowly, as though the need to choose his words carefully forced him to slacken his pace. ‘We must be sure of our terms here, Shepherd. Now, she will not be cured in the sense that she can be released and live a normal and productive life. Immersing her in cold water will not repair a damaged brain. So from that point of view, no, not cured. But think of what madness involves. Who is most inconvenienced by mental affliction?’

  ‘Why, the sufferer, of course.’

  ‘Not so, or rather not necessarily so. Often the patient is in a world of her own, living a fantasy existence, in a complete fog, and does not even know where she is or that the mental confusion she feels is not the normal state of all mankind. No, in many – I would even go so far as to say most – cases, it is the people around her who endure far more hardship. The family whose life is disrupted. The children who are forced to put up with bouts of abuse and violence. The poor husband whose wife tries to hurt him or turns the home into a place of fear. The parents who are too old to restrain a daughter undergoing a violent episode. And, not least, us, the doctors and attendants whose duty it is to care for these unfortunate beings. So not a cure for the patient, but one for everyone else, whose lives are made better because the illness is being managed.’

  We continued walking in silence for a minute or so.

  ‘So the patient can never resume her place in society, then?’ I asked at last.

  ‘I would not say never, no. After a period of restraint, of being shown again and again that making a nuisance or herself will gain her nothing, a patient will often become subdued. It is the same process as training an animal. The fear of more treatment leads to compliance. In the best cases it becomes the normal habit. Oh, I know some may not like to admit it, but it’s a tried and tested regimen. It worked for King George III of England, you know. He went mad, but after a course of such treatment the merest hint of restraint would cool his intemperance and he was able to take up the reins of government again for another twenty years.’

  2

  After our visit to the hydrotherapy room, Morgan took me on a brief tour of the institution. We began on the second floor, where the dormitories were arranged along a long corridor that must have run a good deal of the length of the building. Most of the women slept in large rooms accommodating twenty or so beds, although some were in smaller rooms, and a few were in isolation.

  ‘It may be that they are violent or that there is something about them, some habit or tic that is a nuisance to others that makes them a victim of violence, or simply that they continually make a racket and keep everyone else awake,’ Morgan explained. ‘We try to keep things as peaceful as possible.’

  Each sleeping area had a room nearby where two attendants alternately slept and kept watch. ‘Is this to prevent the patients escaping?’ I asked.

  ‘Escaping? Escaping?’ He looked askance at me. ‘Good God, man, they cannot escape, because in order to do so they would first have to be prisoners. They are not; they are patients. They do not escape; they abscond. Or would do if we were to let them. Anyway, the sleeping quarters are locked at night so they cannot wander.’

  I surveyed the length of the corridor and the many doors. ‘What about the risk of fire? Surely if one broke out, there would not be time to unlock all these doors?’

  He sighed. ‘You may well be right. I have my doubts about some of the women we are forced to employ and fear that in such a case they would think only of saving themselves rather than chance their own lives getting the patients out.’

  ‘I’ve seen a system where the doors in a corridor are linked and locked by a device at the end of the row that secures or releases them all at once.’

  He stopped and stared at me. ‘I know of only one institution that has such a system. Sing Sing prison. How came you to see it?’

  I could only hope he didn’t notice my momentary hesitation before replying. ‘I didn’t mean I’d actually seen it, sir. I meant that I had seen there is such a system. I think I read about it in the Clarion or some other newspaper.’

  He resumed walking. ‘I’m sure we cannot afford such luxuries. The state will fund these things for lawbreakers, but not, alas, for lunatics.’

  I could not help clenching my fists at the idea that prevention from being burned to death in a locked room should be considered a luxury, but said nothing. I was not here, after all, to take up the cause of the lunatics.

  On the ground floor we visited a long bleak room with bare wooden benches around the walls, bolted to them, all occupied by inmates, and in the centre a table covered by a shining white cloth, around which sat half a dozen attendants. The entire room was as spotless as the tablecloth and I thought what a good job the attendants must do to keep it so clean. I would later mock my own stupidity for this assumption. At either end of the table were two potbelly stoves, whose heat I could only feel from a few feet away when we approached them, but even if my own experience hadn’t told me they were inadequate to the task of heating such a large room, I would have known because the women on the benches were shivering and hugging themselves for warmth. The backs of the benches were perfectly straight and you could tell they were uncomfortable from the way the inmates were forced to sit upright upon them, the seats being so narrow the sitter would simply slide off if she slouched. Each bench looked as if it would accommodate five people, which I could tell from the fact that every one had six women sitting on it and looked unpleasantly crowded. These inmates were all clad in the same coarse, drab calico garment I had seen on the woman in the hydrotherapy room. On one side of the room were three barred windows set at more than five feet from the ground, so that even standing, let alone sitting, it was impossible for any but an exceptionally tall woman to see out of them.

  When I mentioned this to Morgan, thinking, but not saying, that it was a poor piece of design, he said, ‘That’s the idea. We do not want them looking out – it would be a distraction.’

  I had to bite my tongue not to ask distraction from what, since the women had absolutely nothing to occupy them. There was no sound from any of them and they all seemed subdued, staring blankly into space, or down at the floor or even sitting with their eyes closed and possibly dozing, until they became aware of us, whereupon I sensed a ripple of excitement pass around the room.

  A woman stood up and approached Morgan. She stretched out a hand and tugged his sleeve. ‘Doctor, doctor, have you come to sign my release?’ she said. She was old, perhaps sixty or so, with a bent back and a brown wizened walnut of a face.

  Carefully, he lifted her hand from his arm as if it had been some delicate inanimate object and let it drop gently by her side. ‘Not today, Sarah, not today,’ he told her. ‘Now be a good girl and sit down, for you know we
have to see you can behave properly before there can be any talk of release.’

  I was impressed he knew her by name – he’d told me there were some four hundred patients in the hospital – which made him smile. ‘She’s been here thirty years, since long before my time. She asks me the same thing on every occasion she sets eyes on me; she does not realise she will never go home.’

  While this had been going on, other patients had taken their lead from Sarah and risen from their seats and a great hubbub of chatter had sprung up. In response to this disturbance the attendants rose from the table and busied themselves taking hold of those who were walking about and leading them back to the benches and where necessary pushing them down onto them. ‘Now behave!’ I heard one attendant snap at a young woman. ‘Or you’ll be for it later.’ Instantly the woman turned pale and meekly went back to her place.

  Eventually all the patients were seated again and after a few more stern words from the attendants, the chatter died down and silence reigned once more. Some still looked at us, with what seemed like great interest, but most resumed their earlier pose, and simply sat and stared empty-eyed straight ahead, not even making eye contact with the women sitting opposite them on the other side of the room.

  ‘What are they doing here?’ I whispered to Morgan.

  ‘Doing? Doing? Why, man, you see for yourself, they are not doing anything. This is the day room, where they spend much of the day. They will sit like this until it is time for their evening meal.’

  ‘When do they have that?’

  ‘At six o’clock.’

  It was presently only four o’clock. I could not help thinking that if I were made to sit in total silence with nothing at all to occupy me, even if I were not off my head to begin with, I soon would be.

  Morgan looked at me angrily, and I wondered for a moment whether I’d actually spoken my thoughts aloud, but being sure I hadn’t, I saw I had irritated him by the tone of my questions. He took my queries as criticism of the regime, which, I began to see, they were, since I was so appalled by what I was seeing that I could not prevent a certain disbelief creeping into my tone.