by Jean Davison
A young woman was humming along to the radio and I noticed that she, like some of the others, looked to have what today would be called ‘learning difficulties’. I felt saddened at the thought of what kind of life people like her must have. It was only when she stopped and looked at me that I realised I’d been staring. I felt uncomfortable.
‘Hi! My name’s Caroline. What’s yours?’
‘Jean.’
Caroline had a bad squint and the whites of her eyes kept showing; that’s when you could see her eyes at all, for they were hooded with heavy lids. Despite her loud, extrovert manner it seemed she was heavily drugged. A small, turned-up nose looked to have been stuck on to the pale face. Her short, dark-brown hair, which fell over her forehead in a longish fringe, had been given a ‘basin’ cut. She was wearing a grey skirt with a white blouse, which reminded me of my old school uniform, and white ankle socks.
‘How old are you, Jean?’ she asked.
‘Twenty.’
‘Get away with you! You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you? You look about sixteen. Only sweet sixteen. Guess how old I am?’
Mr Jordan smiled. ‘This one will talk you to death,’ he said to me, nodding at Caroline. ‘She’s driving me crazy.’
‘Take no notice of him, Jean. He’s only jealous ’cos I beat him at dominoes.’
Some good-natured bantering went on between the two of them, then Caroline returned her attention to me.
‘I’m twenty-one and I’m a bit backward,’ she said. This last bit of information was given in the same matter-of-fact way as the first. ‘I live over yonder in the big hospital. I’ve lived there a long time. But I have got a dad. He’s a Youth Leader. Not that he cares owt for me or else he wouldn’t have put me away, would he? Mr Jordan got me my job here. I come over every day to make the tea and coffee, wash up and keep the place tidy.’
She started humming the tune of the Dylan song again. After a while she stopped and stared at me. ‘I’d like us to be friends, Jean,’ she said.
‘Yes, I’d like that too,’ I said, clasping the trembling nicotine-stained hand, which had been thrust across the table at me. Caroline had the kind of loud voice and raucous laughter that could grate on your nerves, but there was something endearing about her. I liked her for her acceptance of me. She was open and friendly.
Among the patients who were drawing, there was a lad of about nineteen with dark, bushy hair and grey eyes that glittered like steel in the sun. He was trying to draw me. I was given paper and a pencil and told to draw Melvyn, the fair-haired young man sitting opposite me in a trance-like state with his eyes half closed. Melvyn had a fixed smile upon his thin lips, which I found later was his permanent expression.
‘He’s a happy lad is our Melvyn,’ said Mr Jordan. ‘Never stops smiling.’
This latter point was proven at lunchtime when Melvyn was sick into his plate and he just sat there retaining his Cheshire cat grin while Sue, a pretty, auburn-haired student nurse, groaned as she cleared his plate away. ‘Oh not again! If it’s not Geoff, it’s you, Melvyn.’
‘What do you mean if it’s not me?’ Geoff, the lad who had been drawing me, looked up indignantly from shovelling huge spoonfuls of sponge pudding into his mouth, using his spoon and his thumb in a way which reminded me of my brother.
‘Well, you’re often sick, Geoff, through being greedy.’ She brushed some crumbs from her lilac woollen mini-dress.
‘But if I don’t eat the food it goes in the bin,’ Geoff said, becoming agitated, ‘and I don’t believe in wasting food. I’ve been brought up never to waste food. It’s a sin to throw food away when people are starving.’
‘Oh, here we go again,’ Sue said, smiling.
None of the day hospital staff wore a uniform, and the patients addressed Sue and the other student nurse, Ray, by their first names. This did help to create a better atmosphere than over on the wards but, even so, I couldn’t help wondering what I was doing in such a place. What would Mike think if he could see me now?
After lunch and pills we sat in the lounge and most of the patients leant their heads back in the easy chairs and slept. Geoff came and sat in a chair opposite me, studied my face carefully, and continued his drawing. Every now and then he tore up his sheet of paper, strode round the room muttering, banged his fist down heavily on the coffee table (much to the annoyance of the sleeping patients), then started trying to draw me again. During the next hour or so, whenever I glanced across at Geoff I found him studying my face for his sketch. I was relieved when Mr Jordan sent many of the patients, including Geoff, over to the OT department in the main hospital. He told me to stay at the day hospital for today and play draughts with Elsie.
Elsie was an elderly patient, a frail, thin woman who frequently rocked back and forth, and her jaws were constantly engaged in a chewing motion. The draughtboard had been assembled on a small coffee table when Mr Jordan called me over.
‘Jean will play draughts with you,’ he told Elsie, who looked up and gave me a gummy smile. ‘Do you know how to play draughts, Jean?’ I nodded. ‘Good. I’ll leave you to it then,’ he said, and left the room.
Elsie had already moved a black draught so I moved a white one but then Elsie also moved a white one.
‘Are you black or white?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, moving another white one before also moving a black one.
At first I tried to keep the game in some sort of order and teach her to play, but she was too confused. Finding it impossible to get her to understand, I started letting her move whatever and wherever she wanted when it was her turn. Sometimes she thought she’d won, sometimes she thought I’d won. The rules had been turned upside down, abandoned, and, as game after game proceeded in the same haphazard way, I began to feel like Alice in Alice in Wonderland. The more fed-up I was getting, the more Elsie seemed to be enjoying herself. Her sad, wrinkled face became animated, she chuckled merrily each time she ‘won’ and, with the excited enthusiasm of a child, she kept setting the pieces up for another ‘game’. About an hour and several games later I’d had more than enough.
‘Let’s have a rest now,’ I suggested, as yet another game came to an end, but Elsie was happily rearranging the pieces.
‘This time you can be black and I’ll be white,’ she said.
I stared at the draughtboard with aching eyes. When I didn’t move, Elsie looked at me expectantly.
‘Oh, I do like playing with you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t enjoyed myself so much for ages. Go on, Jean. I think it’s your turn to move first this time, isn’t it?’
Of course I hadn’t the heart to refuse.
I was eventually rescued by Caroline’s appearance with the tea trolley. After tea break Sue said we’d got time for a few group games before the ambulances came. The patients who had been to the OT department returned and we played a game where Sue asked each of us a question. If we got the answer wrong we had to do a ‘forfeit’ decided on by Sue. When my turn came to do a ‘forfeit’ Sue told me to go outside and shout ‘Hot peas!’ six times. There was nobody nearby in the hospital grounds, thank goodness, but I still felt stupid and stood hesitating on the gravel path by the door.
‘Hot peas,’ I said self-consciously; it came out in a soft, hoarse voice.
‘I said shout it, not whisper it,’ Sue reminded me.
‘Oh well, it’s only a bit of fun,’ I told myself, trying to enter into the spirit of the game.
‘HOT PEAS! HOT PEAS! HOT PEAS …!’
Everyone laughed. But then the game took a darker turn.
We went back inside and Betsy, a plump, reticent patient, was told to stand in the middle of the floor and jump up and down, turning round, while repeating the words ‘I am silly!’ She smiled coyly, turned crimson, and looked down at the carpet.
‘Come on Betsy. Start now,’ Sue urged her.
Poor Betsy began jumping and turning, obviously feeling embarrassed. ‘I am silly,’ she mumbled.
‘No
, you’ve got to keep on saying it until I tell you to stop,’ Sue said, giggling. Betsy, looking terribly uncomfortable, paused to catch her breath, then she started jumping round again. ‘I am silly! I am silly! I am silly! I am silly …!’
This ‘therapy’ was interrupted when Mr Jordan came into the room. ‘Jean, your ambulance has arrived. Sit down, Elsie, it’s not yours. Now, is there anyone else for Bradford? No, it looks like there’s only you today, Jean. See you tomorrow.’
The ambulance driver, a balding man with a paunch, winked at me as I climbed inside the rear door. When we rounded the bend in the drive he pulled up, opened the door and beckoned to me. ‘Come and sit up front with me, luv,’ he said.
He helped me up on to the seat beside him, and resumed driving.
‘No point sitting in the back on your own, is there? It’s nice to have some company, especially when it’s a pretty girl like you.’
His eyes wandered briefly from the road to my knees and I knew I should have stayed in the back. He chatted in a pseudo-friendly manner, swiftly bringing the conversation round to sex.
‘Attitudes towards sex have changed, haven’t they?’ he said. ‘When I was young, lasses of your age were mostly virgins but nowadays it’s … well, that’s not the fashion today, is it? I bet you’ve had lots of lovers, haven’t you?’
Of course I should have told him to mind his own business and insisted on riding in the back. But I was much too passive in those days. I let him prattle on, wondering if this was his usual ‘patter’ for any young woman or whether he was trying to take advantage of a mental patient.
‘A lot of the lasses I’ve carried to and from that place are bonkers and sex mad.’
‘Are you sure it’s them and not you?’ I asked coolly.
‘Aw, come on luv, don’t be offended. I know you aren’t like that, but you wouldn’t believe what some of them are like. I’ve lived a lot in my time but some of them can even make me blush! I’d a young girl in here a bit since, only about sixteen she was, and she’d had it more times than I’ve had hot dinners. She kept going on about the size of the penises she’d seen. She said, “You should’ve seen the cock I saw last night. It was a whopper! I’ve seen some big ’uns before but, blimey, nowt like this! People tell me I’ve got a big mouth but I had a job on getting it in that, never mind anywhere else!” Yep, you should’ve heard her and she couldn’t have been a day over sixteen.’
He began to laugh loudly and I gripped the sides of my seat as the ambulance swerved.
‘A whopper!’ he said, between bursts of foolish laughter. ‘Can you imagine it? A whopper!’
The whole world’s gone mad, I thought, as his senseless laughter continued. And I’ve got to learn to live in this sick, crazy world.
LOOKING BACK 6
‘YOUR DAD TRIED TO strangle me.’
Mum was sitting on the garden wall, crying, in the middle of the night. I found her there after Dad jerked me from sleep by dragging me out of bed. He barricaded himself in my bedroom, with furniture up against the door.
‘Strangle you? Oh, don’t be so dramatic.’
‘It’s true. And that’s your father who you think is so wonderful!’
I stood shivering on the doorstep in my pink, baby-doll pyjamas. ‘It’s cold and dark out here. Come inside, Mum.’
‘Not yet.’
I hesitated, then stumbled towards her, wincing as I stepped from cool, damp grass on to sharp pieces of grit. I heaved myself up to sit on the wall beside her, my bare feet dangling above the gravel path. Slipping my arm around her shoulders I let her sob against my chest. But I didn’t believe what she’d just told me. I couldn’t.
Over the next few days my bedroom remained barricaded. I could hear Dad crying inside. My parents were cracking up. Whom could I talk to? There had never been any other significant adults in my life. No family gatherings, no kisses and cuddles from grandparents, aunts, uncles. As a child I’d been taken to visit my grandparents but remembered no affection from them. They were dead now except for my mother’s father, an alcoholic.
So whom could I talk to? Certainly not Brian, who tapped on milk bottles and jingled coins. Who could help my parents? I stared at the living room wall where a watery boiled egg Dad had thrown had splattered down the wallpaper and Mum’s attempt to wipe it off had made it worse. ‘It has to be me,’ I whispered. ‘There is only me.’
I went upstairs and listened, nervously, outside the barricaded door. I knocked lightly. No reply. ‘It’s me, Dad,’ I called.
‘Go away,’ came an anguished voice from inside.
‘OK, but I’ll come back later. I want to talk to you.’
My aim was to be gently persistent. This approach worked for I was subsequently admitted several times over the next few days. I sat on the bed next to him and held him in my arms while he broke down and cried. His pain became my pain. At first we didn’t say much: we just hugged. I was fourteen and still innocently unaware that such physical and emotional closeness as ours could be unhealthy.
‘I feel worthless and guilty, and …’ his voice trembled, ‘… and scared, Jean. Really scared.’
‘Scared?’
‘Yes. Of losing control. Hitting your mum or summat.’
‘But you wouldn’t really harm her, would you?’ I asked anxiously.
He sobbed while I held him tight.
‘I’m no good. Did you know I was a thief? One day in my teens I cycled to a church meeting on a stolen bike with a jar of stolen meat paste in my pocket. Something happened to me in that meeting, Jean. I felt the presence of God; it’s hard to explain. I repented in tears and became a Christian.’ He paused. The room was silent except for our breathing. ‘It was good,’ he continued, ‘for a long time.’ He sighed.
I was waiting for the ‘but’. I knew there’d be a ‘but’.
‘But then I got in with a bad crowd and started sleeping around and stealing again. I’ve been in prison for house-breaking. Your mother was too good for me but I dragged her down into the gutter with me. Do you still love me, Jean, now that I’ve told you these things, now that you know I really am no good?’
I kissed him on his cheek in reply.
‘You understand me much better than your mother,’ he said.
We cuddled up close, as we used to do when I was a little girl.
After a while, he rolled over to face the wall and wept. I stood up, feeling sticky-hot, and smoothed my school uniform.
‘Tell me what to do, Jean. I wonder if I should see a doctor.’
‘Oh yes, Dad. Let’s try that.’
Dad was admitted to a dermatology ward. His ‘nerves’ were aggravating, if not causing, a crippling skin condition; angry sores covered his feet and he couldn’t walk. Away from the suffocating tensions of home, he seemed much better.
It was when I visited Dad in hospital that I first experienced a strange sensation. I knew where I was and what I was doing but my head, arms, legs, my whole body and everything around me in the brightly lit ward seemed unreal, as if I was in a dream. After about half an hour this weird dream feeling lifted, but I was left anxiously wondering what was wrong with me.
I absconded from school at break one afternoon when the dream feeling came on strongly, and I spent the rest of the day sitting on my bench in the cemetery. The empty feeling in my stomach told me when it was teatime and I slowly ate my toffee bar.
Last night Dad had woken me up to send me to the ‘big bed’. A lot of shouting was going on downstairs and I heard a scream, followed by a silence that was even more worrying than the noise. I’d strained to listen, alert and tense, my head buzzing with questions and fears. The front door slammed. And then a long silence, broken only by the sounds of the night – a tap dripping, a dog’s bark, a creak in the floorboards, a distant car, wind against the window. A heavy pain hung darkly at the back of my eyes. It throbbed more violently on each of the several times I got out of bed during the night. But I had to keep getting up and tiptoeing to the l
anding window to see if Mum was still sitting on the garden wall. In the morning Dad told me how he’d gone for Mum with a stick but ended up crying at the thought of what he’d been about to do.
I screwed up my toffee-bar paper and stuffed it into my blazer pocket. The pain behind my eyes was still there. Rubbing my forehead helped to ease it, but I was so tired. Clutching my satchel to my stomach I stared from my bench at the row upon row of headstones. Nobody was in sight; there was nothing to disturb the peace and quiet. The beauty of the white and pink carnations on the nearest grave lifted my spirits. The world might be splintering but here in the healing calmness of this place, with lovely flowers for company, I was safe. A sudden chill in the air broke the spell and reminded me that I had more to think about than pretty flowers. Dad was not normally a violent man although I remembered that once, at Madras Street, he’d bruised Brian with his belt. Recently he’d told me how he feared losing control. Well, supposing he did lose control? What would he do?
And what was I to do? I didn’t want to go home. School was unbearable. I was too damn shy to breathe. And now, on top of it all, Dad had told me to decide who I wanted to live with – ‘her or me?’ How could I even try to choose between them? I hated being fourteen and too young to leave home. Dare I run away? Where to?
The following day I thought my absence at yesterday’s last lesson hadn’t been noticed when Mr Clark said nothing to me while calling the register. But as the class filed out he stopped me at the door.
‘Why weren’t you at your last lesson yesterday?’
‘I felt funny, sir, so I went home.’
‘Why didn’t you tell a teacher if you felt unwell?’
‘I … I don’t know, sir.’
‘You don’t know!’ he said, placing his hands on his hips, which made his black robe billow out. His dark, beady eyes blazed and the image of a black barrel which had sprung to mind was replaced by that of a mad monk. ‘You don’t know!’ he said again, this time emphasising each world slowly as his head wobbled from side to side. ‘Well, you’d better think long and hard about it, hadn’t you?’