The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Colney Hatch had been purpose-built in 1850, to accommodate 1,220 of the lunatic poor, and was one of the largest of the expanding public asylums that nineteenth-century alienists and psychiatrists had gradually filled to overflowing with longterm patients.

  The Colney Hatch of Jess’s hometown Broughborough was called Arden Gate, and it too was purpose-built, covering acres of land on the outskirts of the industrial city. It was more rural than Colney Hatch, its late-Victorian and Edwardian redbrick buildings landscaped into what had been handsome parkland belonging to a long-demolished Jacobean stately home. Its owners had fallen on hard times and disappeared from Debrett’s. It had an ancient well-spring and cedars and a lake with water lilies and a water tower. Jessica Speight’s father, Philip Speight, had designed the small new Modernist therapy clinic by the gatehouse, and he sat on the NHS board.

  (In what had been Susie’s Southgate, in the twenty-first century, a new branch of an extremely expensive private psychiatric institution called the Priory would open its doors to the rich. It took in those suffering from drug addiction, alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, depression, bipolar disorder, OCD and other mental afflictions, and charged them several thousand pounds a week—a far cry from Colney Hatch and Arden Gate. Psychotherapy for the Rich, not Psychiatry for the Poor. Some of the clients’ fees were paid by their insurance policies. Some of them were paid by their parents or spouses. A very few of them paid for themselves. Many, including Susie and Jess, would think it all a bit of a racket.)

  Susie had told Jess that even some of the really old-fashioned asylums were now being infiltrated by psychiatrists with modern views, who didn’t believe in mental illness. She had expounded this theory as they walked side by side on one of their many strolls along the canal, through the changing seasons and past the eternal unchanging anglers with their bags of maggots and their old bicycles and their patient tethered dogs.

  Anna had gone ahead on the towpath, looking back from time to time to check that the mothers were still following, while Vincent lagged behind.

  Susie was in two minds about it. Of course some of the wrong people got locked up and certified, everybody knew that. But, then again, some people certainly couldn’t cope on their own, could they? They needed somewhere safe to be.

  She could have managed Vincent at home, perhaps, but her husband, Trevor, wouldn’t have it. It wasn’t fair on the other kids, said Trevor.

  ‘I’m lucky that I’ve only Anna to worry about,’ said Jess, wondering as she said it how Bob and Anna would get on during the coming weeks, months, years.

  ‘Yes,’ said Susie, watching Anna as Anna watched the jerking progress of the moorhens. ‘Yes, I can see she’s the apple of your eye.’

  Jess found Susie comforting. Her dry, matter-of-fact descriptions of what Jess very soon discovered to be the experimental programmes of R. D. Laing and his colleagues were calm, fair-minded, not what you might have expected from a woman of her background and her 1950s NHS training. The anomalous and erratic behaviour of her son Vincent had softened and broadened her attitudes to others. Susie had widened her categories of the almost-normal (although clearly husband Trevor hadn’t) to take in Vincent and Anna, some of the long-term patients at Colney Hatch, the schizophrenics at Kingsley Hall, and the adult Down’s syndrome son of one of her regular patients in Arnos Grove.

  This young man, Eddie, exercised Susie’s sympathies a great deal. His mother was either recovering or more probably not recovering from a major operation for bowel cancer (Susie was on a rota to visit to help with the colostomy bag) and what would happen to Eddie if the mother died? It didn’t bear thinking about. It was a lot to ask of Eddie’s sister, she’d got children enough of her own. The mother had expected Eddie would go first, but it looked as though he wasn’t going to. You didn’t know what to hope for. Life expectation for Down’s isn’t all that long, said Susie, but they do need their mum.

  Jess could listen to this kind of conversation for hours, engrossed.

  In the summer, the moorhen chicks had scooted around on the surface of the water randomly like balls of mercury, with ugly little pink and yellow necks and greedy beaks. Jess had read somewhere that the chicks had a high mortality rate, because the parents built their nests of twigs and flotsam so badly that they were always collapsing and going under. Half of the eggs would drown. She wondered what percentage of that summer’s chicks had survived, and if that bird pecking stupidly at a plastic bag near Anna’s feet was from one of the broods they had seen in September.

  Some species produce good mothers; others, not so good. Very few species produce what women call ‘good’ fathers. Feminists were at this time busily espousing the bits of sociobiology that suited them, and ignoring the rest. Seahorses are good fathers, and so are some spiders.

  ‘Yes,’ said Susie, ‘Kingsley Hall was Liberty Hall, that’s what I heard. No rules, no discipline. The patients did what they liked; they didn’t have to take their medication if they didn’t want. They could stay in bed all day if they fancied. They could paint the walls with shit if they wanted. I daresay that works out well for some. There’s no two alike, after all. I’ve a friend who works in the psychiatric ward in St Anne’s. Grim, she says. Hard cases. Screaming and yelling, and trying to slash their wrists and hang themselves all day and all night. It’s nice at Marsh Court. Don’t you think it’s nice at Marsh Court?’

  Jess didn’t know. She hadn’t anywhere to compare it with.

  They were comforting one another, that much she did know.

  There are no two alike.

  Ahead walked Anna, unique Anna, in her warm brown jacket and her long dark red wool skirt with orange amoeba-shaped blobs on it, with her scarlet crocheted beret on her head. She wore short black rubber boots. She still couldn’t do laces. Well, she could do them, if you stood over her and reminded her of the process, step by step, loop by loop, but it seemed simpler to buy her shoes without laces, jackets without too many buttons. The propagation of Velcro had been a blessing to Jess and Anna.

  It was autumn, but the sun shone on them that day.

  Anna was like nobody else on earth. She was Little Stupid, the Simple Sister, the Dumb One, the Idiot Girl, the Pure Gold Baby.

  She wasn’t dumb, of course. She was sociable, she liked company, she liked talking. But she had loved the film Dumbo. Most children love that film. Most children instinctively sympathise with the Dumbo character in any narrative, if the tale is rightly told. Much depends on the teller, and on the naming of names. Dumbo’s mother, Mrs Jumbo, had been certified as mad when she lost her temper with the other elephant children for mocking her son. Jess had cried when she had seen this movie, and so had Anna. Jess hates Disney (to this day), but Anna is in tune with Disney, and, in the company of Anna, Jess forgets her superior and snobbish understanding and enters the world of innocents and sobs with the rest of us. Through Anna, Jess had joined a new sorority.

  Jess did not take Anna to see Bambi. No doubt she would find it for herself in years to come, but Jess did not think it a good idea to expose Anna to the death of Bambi’s mother.

  Anna was by now a pretty girl on the verge of puberty. She had lost the golden-baby smile, the round confident trusting sunny face of playgroup infancy, but, with her clear fair skin and head of fair short-cut curly springing hair, she was still a pleasure to the eye, and not only to Jess’s eye. She was perhaps on the rounded side, but attractively so. If she was a little gauche and awkward in her movements, this only made her seem pleasantly shy, though at times overeager to help.

  Anna loved to help. This was her nature, her innate nature.

  Vincent, in contrast, was not a helpful boy. He was small and fierce and wiry and often angry. On the other hand, his reading age was much higher than Anna’s, and he was basically more dexterous, despite the tics that attacked him as it seemed randomly. His prognosis, Jess suspected, was better than Anna’s, whatever ‘better’ might mean.

  Treatment of, and attitudes
to, the mentally ill had deteriorated in parts of Africa after the advent of Christianity. As we have seen, Jess had attempted to deal with this in her thesis. Christianity had proposed a different, an unattainable norm. Christianity was unfashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. We thought then that it explained nothing. We didn’t believe in drugs either, as psychiatrists do now. We didn’t talk about serotonin and prozac and lithium. We were not of the chemical generation.

  We knew people who had experimented with LSD, we knew quite a few people who smoked hash and ate hash brownies. Some of us smoked the stuff ourselves. But we didn’t see our planet as a chemical material world, made up of particles from the Big Bang. We tried to look through the doors of perception. We thought there was something to see, on the other side.

  As Jess and Susie walked along the towpath that October, and that November, and that December, and through the flow of a year to the next year and the next, the euphemism ‘care in the community’ hadn’t yet been coined. The Community Care Act didn’t come in until 1990. In the sixties and seventies, there were no beggars squatting in doorways on Oxford Street or nesting in pigeon-fouled sleeping bags under the motorways with hungry verminous dogs. The vulnerable were looked after/ swept away/ brushed aside/ immured in cold malevolent institutions/ allowed to lie in bed all day at Kingsley Hall. The Community Care Act was created as the community fragmented, possibly for ever.

  Some argue that rural communities look after their frail and dependent members better than urban communities, but others argue that the countryside is stoked with hostile prejudice and intolerance. It depends on whom you ask, on which subgroup you choose to study, on which groups you use as your control. It depends on the premise on which you begin to conduct your investigation. It depends on whether you are a Wordsworthian or a Benthamite. On whether you are Mungo Park, essentially a Wordsworthian of the Enlightenment, or Dr Livingstone, an obsessed Darwinian Victorian.

  Both were Scots.

  Jess, collecting Anna to come home for the Christmas holidays, had brought a present for Hazel, nicely wrapped in gold paper and with a label on it saying ‘Happy Christmas from Jess and Anna’. It wasn’t a very daring or exciting present (of hazelnut chocolates, which they knew she liked, or said she liked), but Hazel greeted it with delight and an appearance of surprise, and gave both Jess and Anna a big hug. Hugging seemed to come so naturally to Hazel, why couldn’t everybody hug like that? Such simple things are so hard for so many.

  Maybe Hazel’s mother had hugged her a lot when she was a baby. Or maybe she hadn’t hugged her enough. Jess didn’t know and didn’t like to ask. She would never know Hazel well enough to ask. But she was able to respond to the hugging.

  Anna had made some presents in the Marsh Court prefab workshop to take home for her mum and her new step dad and her old schoolfriends. They were in a special silver carrier bag with butterflies and ladybirds and fishes gummed all over it, haphazardly but happily, by Anna.

  Christmas isn’t a good time for a lot of people. It’s worse, of course, for the single and the lonely, or so everyone always says, but it’s pretty bad for those with too much family, and most of us in our thirties fell into that category. Sometimes some of us longed to be single and lonely, as we tried to satisfy the claims of parents, children, ex-husbands, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, lame ducks, excommunicated alcoholics, lonely depressive poets and other riff raff. None of us had houses big enough to take in a tribe, or kitchens large enough to cook for a clan, yet somehow the tribal expectations of a large gathering had descended upon us. These were frenzied festivals of foregone failure.

  In view of all of that, Jess and Bob’s party could be counted a success.

  The Christmas tree was chastely decorated with dangling orange clementines and white candles, and the room with oiled paper wooden parasols, gummed paper chains made by Anna, gorilla masks made by Bob. The riot, the mayhem, the broken lavatory bowl, the singing! It was an all-age-group, day-after-Boxing-Day party, eating up everybody’s leftovers—we brought our plastic boxes of giblets and cold turkey and cold Christmas pudding and brandy butter with us at midday, and stayed on for hours. Jess and Bob and Anna had been up to Broughborough for a couple of days, to authenticate Bob as legitimate husband (the Speight parents hadn’t been to the wedding) and, according to Bob, had spent most of their time sitting round a giant jigsaw portraying ‘The Wreck of the Medusa’, avoiding eye contact. (We think he made that up.) Jess’s unmarried sister, Vee, had been there too, rather impatient with the whole thing, thought Bob. But Anna liked Auntie Vee, who had given her a beautiful tambourine with golden bells and scarlet ribbons, which she had purchased in Egypt, where she was working for the British Council—an imaginative, noisy and perhaps provocative present, which enlivened the party.

  (Vee spent most of her working life abroad, in flight from Jess, Anna and her parents.)

  Anna was happy. She loved parties. We were all happy. We were letting our hair down, congratulating ourselves on having once more got through the main event of Christmas Day, on having jumped the highest fence of the season. Children were marauding, running round the house and out into the street in little gangs, and we were lying back on Jess’s African cushions, smoking, chatting, drinking, comparing notes on the dying year. We were wearing long skirts, high leather boots, flared trousers, necklaces. (Some of the men wore necklaces too.) Jess looked good: her nut-brown hair was very long in those days, tied back with a yellow chiffon scarf, and her freckled arms were garlanded in many-coloured cheap Indian bangles. Sexual happiness glowed from her skin and flaunted itself in the deep cleavage of her blouse. Bob kept glancing at her proudly, a look of satisfaction and possession. We talked of the schools our children went to, the films we’d seen, the books we’d been reading, the affairs our friends were having with one another. We didn’t talk about property prices.

  Maroussia talked about the Secret Garden. She was involved in a community project in Camden, restoring a lost garden which had lain untended for many decades in a triangle between three residential roads. Her own garden backed on to it, and she and some neighbours had devoted time to discovering the lease and the deeds, and had embarked on clearing it. They had had a big bonfire of hacked elder and sycamore and bramble on Guy Fawkes’ Night, and some of us had attended, with our traditional offerings of sausages and baked potatoes and parkin. (Anna, away at Marsh Court, had missed this fun, but listened eagerly to the reports. She was always a good audience.)

  Maroussia didn’t mind getting her hands dirty, she didn’t mind nagging the council for the public good. And she didn’t get herself televised while she was doing it, although she had a public face and could have tried to use it. That’s not how things worked, not in those days.

  Steve the poet, Steve our own depressed poet, had thrown himself into the slashing and burning, finding company and an escape from his heavy habitual grief. He wasn’t very handy with an axe or a spade, but he made himself useful. He had written a poem about the reclaiming of the Secret Garden which was published in the London Magazine, and which he now read to us at our post-Christmas party. It was a good poem. He was a good, though not a prolific, poet, a well-published poet. And yet he exuded a terrible white sweat of failure. His large white face and his slack lips and his damp black hair and his home-knitted old blue jersey and his nervous stammer all spoke of invincible pursuant despair, of the furies that followed him. I didn’t think he looked at all well that Christmas. He was overweight, I saw that he couldn’t stop eating—he munched his way through half a dozen mince pies. I wondered if one day soon a neighbour or a rent collector would find him dead in his bed.

  Steve read his poem, and we listened respectfully, because we felt we ought to. And it was a good poem, it was our poem.

  Then we listened to Jim, because we had to.

  Jim was working on a Granada documentary about colonial Africa and the newly independent states. The Gold Coast had long been remade and renamed as Ghana, and Nigeria had celebrat
ed independence as Nigeria, but more recently Northern Rhodesia had become Zambia, Nyasaland had become Malawi, and Bechuanaland had become Botswana. Southern Rhodesia was the sticking point in the decolonisation of Africa. Jim tended to overwhelm us with tedious self-important inside information (in this instance from his Foreign Office contacts and a South African Afrikaans campaigner for civil rights), which made us all feel ignorant fools. And was meant so to do. We could see that Jim’s wife, Katie, was getting restive as Jim told us how Rhodesian premier Ian Smith had spoken to him personally on the phone only a week before, but Jess was intrigued by this story.

  I think this may have been the moment when she first mentioned, at a seeming tangent, the secret children, the lobster-claw children, the Cleppie Bells of Zambia and Bangweulu. I don’t know how many of us picked it up, I’m not sure if anyone else was really listening, we were all a bit knocked out by lunch and leftovers and Jim’s discourse, but I listened and retained the reference. It’s the kind of thing I do tend to remember. (I didn’t know what the phrase ‘Cleppie Bells’ meant, at this stage, but I remembered it: it had a tragic ring to it.) She didn’t say much about them, just that most of us adjust to what we have or have not, we regress, we revert, we accommodate ourselves to our missing limbs, to our little stumps and stunted digits, to our deafnesses, our blindnesses, our incapacities. They had been very simple people, she said, the people of the lake. Pygmy hunter-gatherers and fisher folk. They wouldn’t like the new industrial prosperity of the copper mines.

  This could have been a politically reactionary aside, in support of colonial oppression, but I didn’t think it was.

  I don’t know why I remembered it so well, but I did, and do.

  Katie was visibly and audibly about to get more than restive, and Jess broke off from her thoughts about normality and deviance to call the children back from the street and the backyard for the indoor fireworks display. Do you remember those indoor fireworks? They are illegal now. Health and Safety forbids them, though they seemed harmless enough, indeed touching in their humble harmlessness. The fireworks came in harshly tinted badly printed cheap oriental oblong cardboard packs, of acid reds and greens and yellows, and they displayed a mild variety of small activities: there was a little pyramid cone called Mount Fuji that smoked and puffed, a terrible grey worm of obscene ash called the Great Serpent that grew and grew, some little poppers, some paper flowers that expanded in a glass of water, a ball of hyperactive powder that whizzed and fizzed and then self-destructed, and a handful of stumpy sparklers.