The Asylum

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

She followed him over to his car, for the state of which he felt the need to apologise, as she climbed in beside him.

  ‘Do you know the way?’ he asked her, starting the engine and backing out of the parking space.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll direct you. Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I take all my first dates there.’

  He shot her a look, not entirely certain that she was joking. Her face was deadpan, as she gazed out of the window, and he smiled at her black sense of humour.

  As soon as they left Upper Horsebridge Road, they were plunged into the deep Sussex countryside, with fields and woodlands on either side of the quiet road.

  ‘Right, here,’ she directed, and Morton indicated and turned down The Drive, a road devoid of traffic and not much wider than his car. It was lined with tall hedges and trees, the branches from which arched over the road, necessitating that Morton switch on his headlights.

  ‘Well, this is creepy,’ he said, as they climbed a slight incline and the hedgerow opened out to reveal a cluster of large brick buildings, deserted silhouettes against the dim sky.

  ‘Getting scared?’ she asked with a light laugh.

  ‘No, but I am wondering if there are any security guards around,’ he said, inexplicably drawing the car to a veritable crawl. He leant forwards, squinting at the detail picked out by the headlights. ‘That looks like the main entrance over there, doesn’t it?’ he asked, pointing at a two-storey brick building with a domed clock tower and five gabled dormers extending from its tiled roof.

  ‘I’m not sure we need to check in at reception, Morton,’ she teased. ‘Just park up here and we’ll have a wander around.’

  He stopped the car, switched off the engine and climbed out.

  ‘Ready?’ she asked, shining the light from her mobile phone at him.

  He headed around to her side of the car and she laced her arm through his, and together, in what was now categorically the strangest date on which he had ever been, walked towards the main entrance of the former asylum, as though it were the most normal thing to be doing.

  Unsurprisingly, they found a solid metal sheet bolted over the doorway with the scruffy words Insanity is Fun! spray-painted on it. Entry was denied, despite the metal’s being severely dented, scratched and having had one corner levered back in someone else’s failed attempt to get inside.

  Morton stood back and studied the building. On the ground floor every window was blocked up by the same metal grills as were in place over the main door. On the first floor, not a single pane of glass existed in the windows.

  ‘What a sad place,’ J said, pulling on his arm and leading him around the back of the building. ‘You just can’t imagine being locked up somewhere like this, can you?’

  ‘No, it’s awful,’ Morton agreed.

  They both stood still and took in the vast run of shadowy buildings in front of them. The vague attempts at keeping trespassers and vandals seen at the main-entrance building had been abandoned for the rest of the site, perhaps owing to the near-impossibility of the task.

  ‘Want to look inside?’ J asked, shining her mobile over to a side entrance, the door to which was lying burned and smashed a few feet away. She left his side, walked to the doorway and, pressing one hand on the brickwork outside, held her phone inside, arcing the light left and right. She stepped inside and beckoned him over: ‘Come on, it’ll be good for your job.’

  Though he wouldn’t admit it, Morton didn’t especially want or need to enter the former asylum, knowing that there was little to be gained for his research into Louise Peacock’s time here eighty-seven years ago. Still, he found himself striding over to the dark entrance and entering the asylum. He stood still for a moment, allowing his eyes the time to adjust to the darkness of the place. To the right of where they had entered, a hastily thrown-together concrete-block wall had been erected to bar entry to the main building, but in the opposite direction the narrow corridor ran into an endless dark tunnel. Above them, the ceiling was damaged and all around them the green painted walls were peeling badly. Rubbish—largely consisting of empty beer cans and empty wine and spirit bottles—was strewn all around at their feet.

  ‘Let’s see where this goes,’ she said, pulling him reluctantly down the corridor.

  They stepped over large holes, which had been burned into the wooden floors, and avoided particularly large puddles of broken glass from the often-smashed windows, through which Morton could see that it was now almost completely dark outside.

  At the end of the passageway down which they were walking was another corridor, this one running perpendicular in direction and being much wider and much higher.

  J shone her mobile-phone torch in both directions, the light glancing off the walls and onto a series of eerily open doors.

  Morton followed J to the first door, where they peered inside. It was a large room, which could easily have been a dormitory. At one end were the remnants of a smashed fire place and on every wall was scrawled an abundance of graffiti. Indecipherable symbols, squiggles and signatures and, above the door, the haunting blood-red words YOU’LL NEVER LEAVE.

  J shuddered and reached out for his arm, showing her vulnerability for the first time.

  The destruction to the next room was even more pronounced: the windows, including the frames had been completely smashed out and burned in the centre of the room, creating a corresponding, large scorched hole in the ceiling above, revealing darkened glimpses of the room above.

  ‘It’s an amazing place to explore,’ she said in a low, quiet voice, ‘and I know technically we’re trespassing, but what makes someone feel the need to come in here and smash a window, or start a fire? It’s utterly mindless…’

  ‘No idea,’ he said, as they reached the end of the corridor.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ she gasped. ‘Look at this place.’

  ‘This must be the hall,’ Morton surmised, as he took in the space. Despite having suffered the same vandalism as elsewhere, there still remained a ghost of the rooms’ previous splendour. The lower third of the walls were wood-panelled with the upper two thirds plastered and painted white, leading up to a grand, vaulted aquamarine ceiling, where there were a series of elaborate gold roses, and presumably from which had once hung magnificent chandeliers. On the wall opposite were painted the words IN A MAD WORLD, ONLY THE MAD ARE SANE.

  ‘Well,’ Morton whispered, ‘I can safely say this is the first date that I’ve ever been on to an asylum.’

  J laughed and moved towards him. ‘I can safely say that it’s been the best date that I’ve ever been on.’

  ‘Really?’ he questioned. ‘Me, too.’

  She leant in and kissed him on the mouth.

  He pulled her in tighter, as their lips locked.

  After a few seconds, he broke away. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Sounds worrying,’ she said. ‘But, yes.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘What!?’

  Chapter Four

  Typically, the post arrived late this day. Morton had been dressed and ready to go for some time, when finally, just as he had expected, a brown envelope, stamped with the GRO logo, dropped onto the doormat. He quickly tore it open, reading the contents, as he hurried from his flat.

  When and where died: 20th November 1924, Hellingly Lunatic Asylum

  Name and surname: Louisa Peacock

  Sex: Female

  Age: 22

  Occupation: Wife of Stephen Peacock, general labourer

  Cause of death: Strangulation. Suicide whilst of unsound mind. No PM.

  Signature, description and residence of informant: Certificate received from H. Davenport-Jones, coroner for the western district, East Sussex. Inquest held 22nd November 1924.

  Strangulation, Morton read again, jumping into his car. Louisa Peacock had hanged herself at the age of twenty-two, and just over three weeks later, her husband, Stephen had remarried. Even by the standards of the day, where
necessity sometimes obligated a hasty second marriage, this had happened very quickly in Morton’s opinion. Given that Stephen Peacock had never mentioned his first wife to his son, Morton was left with the impression that perhaps the first marriage had not been a successful one.

  As he switched on the engine, he noticed that the skies above him were heavy and ominously grey. Rain was imminent, but he didn’t care. He still had a giant spring in his step from the date last night. It couldn’t have gone any better. Ending the date in the ruins of a former asylum had rather bizarrely heightened his attraction to her.

  He grinned idiotically, as he drove, remembering her reaction to his not knowing her name.

  ‘But how would I know it?’ he had asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but you could have asked sooner,’ she had giggled. ‘What if I’d been called Helga...or Bertha?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ he had answered. ‘Besides, I knew it began with a J and I couldn’t come up with any awful names beginning with that letter.’

  ‘Jocasta?’ she had suggested. ‘Oedipus’s mother?’

  They had left Hellingly soon afterwards and he had returned her to her car, said goodnight and had gone home to bed. Not that he’d slept much. He had spent much of the night thinking of her; thinking of Juliette and wondering if perhaps that made him Romeo.

  A paranoid worry, which came accompanied by tiredness when he woke this morning, that perhaps she hadn’t felt as enraptured as had he, was dispelled with a short simple text message: LOVED last night. Do it again? Jocasta xx. He had instantly responded in the affirmative.

  Morton’s thoughts for the whole drive to Lewes were an endless looping replay of last night. The journey itself was a perfunctory blur, and he was almost surprised to find that he had arrived at the small pot-holed car park beside East Sussex Record Office. Thankfully, there were two vacant parking spaces. He took one and headed inside the building.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said cheerfully to the slim and painfully shy assistant, whom he had dubbed Quiet Brian.

  ‘Afternoon,’ Quiet Brian responded, quietly.

  Morton signed to confirm that he would adhere to the rules, then placed his bag into a locker. Carrying just a pencil and his notepad, he climbed the stairs and entered the archive. Immediately, his spirit sank to the floor. Miss Latimer, the ageing spinster, who never smiled, was behind the help desk, or no-help desk as it was, when she was defending it.

  ‘I’ve got a table booked,’ he said. Any pleasantries between the two of them had been dispensed with a long time ago.

  ‘Name?’ she asked, as she always did.

  ‘Morton Farrier,’ he said, adding a mumbled, ‘…same as last time.’

  ‘We were expecting you this morning,’ Miss Latimer rebuked. ‘Your desk could have been used by somebody else.’

  ‘Yes, sorry about that,’ he apologised.

  She ran her finger over the desk plan, though really there was no need. Every time Miss Latimer was on duty, he was placed on the worst desk available. Without fail.

  ‘Three?’ he guessed.

  She nodded: ‘That’s right.’

  He walked over to table three, situated directly below the air conditioning outlet, which was set to mimic some inhospitable arctic climate. On top of the temperature problem, the desk was also awkward to access, being squeezed in front of a particularly large bookcase.

  Morton placed his notepad and pencil down on the desk and looked at his watch. Just two hours left before document-ordering closed. He hurried over to the raft of multi-coloured indexed folders on the opposite wall. Scanning along the rows he quickly found the file, for which he was looking: EAST SUSSEX HOSPITALS, WORKHOUSES & ASYLUMS. He carried the file to his desk, pressed himself into his chair and flicked through until he came to the section headed EAST SUSSEX COUNTY ASYLUM. He was pleased to see that there were several pages of documents pertaining to the asylum, although most of the more recent files were noted as being closed to the public, owing to privacy.

  Morton carefully studied the list of documents, checking both the title and time-period for their relevance to this job: Catering Committee Minutes (1978-1982); Re-certification Books (1925-1961); Management Team Minutes (1977-1981); Hospital Visitor logs 1919-1930; Staff Housing Rent Accounts (1934-1957); Register of Tuberculosis and Transferable Deaths (1949-1967). He was quickly disappointed to find that patient casebooks for the period in question had not survived, although he was relieved to see that HE 25/3, Female Patient Index Register 1919 –1925 existed and was open to the public. He filled in a pink document-request slip, then carried on searching the files to the end. There was a discouraging lack of further records, which might have contained a reference to Louisa Peacock’s incarceration in the County Asylum.

  He replaced the file on the shelf and, performing a mutual pretence of the other’s non-existence, placed the document-request slip into the tray on the table directly in front of Miss Latimer. As he walked back to his desk, he thought about Louisa’s death certificate. It had said that there had been no post-mortem, but the informant had been the county coroner, meaning, therefore, that an inquest must have been held into the circumstances surrounding her death.

  Morton jumped back up, squeezed out of his place and began to hunt out the index file for coroner’s reports. Time was short, and the quickest solution would ordinarily be to ask the member of staff on duty to point him in the right direction, but he’d sooner abandon this job altogether than give Miss Latimer the satisfaction of some snide retort, which would inevitability accompany her reply.

  As he continued to check the titles etched on the file spines, Morton spotted Quiet Brian heading in his direction. ‘Excuse me,’ Morton ventured. ‘Do you know where I would find coroner’s records, please?’

  Quiet Brian nodded and pointed to a shelf in the far corner, which Morton would have taken an age to reach, if he had been forced to check every shelf himself.

  ‘Thank you,’ Morton said, hurrying over to where he had just been directed.

  He found a fat red file entitled RECORDS OF CORONERSHIPS IN EAST SUSSEX 1882-2002 and pulled it from the shelf. The records for the county had been divided into three sections: Eastern District; Western District; and Brighton and Hove. If they existed, a coroner report for Hellingly in 1924 would be found in the Western District, through to which Morton hastily thumbed his way.

  Under the Western District, he found another index, which referred to a further eleven sub-headings. Only one was of interest to him: COR 1/3 INQUEST PAPERS, 1903-1927. Turning to the relevant part of the file, he found pages and pages of references to inquests, which ran in chronological order, giving the date and the surname of the deceased.

  He flicked through several pages until he reached November 1924 and there he found the reference details for Louisa’s inquest.

  COR 1/3/1929: PEACOCK (22 NOV 1924)

  Morton picked up a document-ordering slip from the nearest desk, taking a surreptitious glance across to the help desk to check whether Miss Latimer had filed his last request. It wouldn’t have been the first time that she had left a slip sitting in front of her under a veil of feigned ignorance of its existence. This time, however, she had processed it. In fact, he was fairly certain that the document was among those, which she had just emptied from the dumb-waiter that ran up and down between the Reading Room and the unseen strong-room below.

  ‘A present for you,’ Morton said with false brightness, as he offered his new request slip to Miss Latimer.

  She glowered at him and took a moment before deigning to uncross her arms and take the paper. She dropped it down to the desk in front of her and crossed her arms once more.

  ‘I believe my other document might be ready,’ he ventured.

  ‘Is that so,’ she said, not moving an inch.

  ‘It looks like it’s that one there,’ Morton pushed, pointing to a dark leather-bound volume with E.S.C.A. etched in gol
d on the spine. ‘I presume that E.S.C.A. stands for East Sussex County Asylum?’

  Miss Latimer sighed, unhurriedly turned, took the book from the pile and handed it to him.

  Morton wordlessly took the volume over to his desk, making careful note on his pad of the reference details. The outside of the ledger was badly damaged, the leather covering peeled back at the edges, revealing the cardboard beneath.

  Opening the thick volume, he saw by the large red and black alternate letters on the far right of the page that it ran in alphabetical order. He carefully flipped through to P, where he found the entries were arranged by date of admission. The first page only covered the years 1903 to 1907, so he moved forwards until he found the first entries for 1922, the year in which Louisa had married Stephen Peacock. He ran his finger down the list of surnames and found her just above the bottom of the page.

  Date of Admission: 8th June 1924

  Admission Register Number: 3423

  Name of Patient: Louisa Peacock

  To What Union Chargeable: Hailsham

  Situation: Female wing. First floor. Dorm B.

  Removed, Recovered or Dead: Died

  Date: 20th November 1924

  Having copied out the entry, Morton checked that there were no further mentions of Louisa, including under her maiden name, but found none. She had only been in the asylum for five months before committing suicide. He wondered, sadly, how bad things must have been in there for her?

  He closed the volume and, knowing that the coroner’s records would be another few minutes yet, spent some time reviewing his notes on the job. He still had a list of questions about Louisa and Stephen, some of which might be answered by the coroner’s report, depending on how thorough it had been and if it had survived in its entirety.

  A light ping sound from the other side of the room drew his attention. It was the dumb-waiter, announcing a delivery of fresh records. Morton stood up and carried the admission register over to the help desk, where Miss Latimer was typing something into the computer. He waited patiently for a few moments, but time was running out and she was showing no sign of switching attention from her work.