walls were hung with soothing seascapes and sunset-occupied skies, where two-toned autumnal rugs matched the golden bedspreads, and where floral curtains bunched themselves across wide-opening unbarred windows. The door of the admission ward stood unlocked, in the modern way, and the path led to a lawn, bright green like a lawn in a shop window where a wax man is mowing. In the centre, a marooned willow wept, with no pool. Birds flipped themselves, dry and hot, in the empty birdbath. Circling the lawn was a high red brick wall, dressed in a seemly way with slowly burning ivy. A country retreat? Yes, a country retreat. Gentle patients, exclaiming at the beauty and calm of it all, wandered in and out of the ward, or sat, at meals, in the light airy dining room, with napkins matching the tableclothsspread in front of them. They said grace. They pursued civilised conversation.
Park House squatted directly opposite the door of the hospital kitchen, like a dirty brick imbecile waiting for food. Its buildings were old, and leaked in the winter, water running down the inside of the plaster walls. The dayroom, blessed with a timely and multiple personality, served as dayroom, dining room and playroom, a huge space lined with long heavy tables like cast-off banquet tables, and long wooden benches, split and seamed with dirt, and shiny from being sat on. And the people who played and dined and spent the day there? They were the violent, the uncontrollably deluded and hallucinated, those who had murdered or would murder, the sadly deformed, the speechless. And up on the wall, sitting primly and securely in its wire cage, the electric clock looked down, saying tick tock , tick tock , the way clocks are supposed to. It was a strange, unreal sound, like the sound of knitting; it was as if someone had mistaken the Last Judgment for an afternoon tea party or a sewing bee. For what communication could the clock hold with that world, where time, tribal and primitive, told itself not by hours and minutes but by years of the lion and the panther and days of the hurricane; by hours of getting up, using the toilet, eating, going to bed; by days of sausages and saveloys, of bathing, of hair being combed with kerosene to discourage the lice, of head operations, of official inspections. The weeks had no name, nor the months, nor the years. Once, on a privileged walk, there was for me the Time of the Striped Waterfall, but I am not sure if it actually happened, for I was butcher-frocked and hallucinated, with my name on a list called Prefrontal Leucotomy.
The patients of Park House could not, of course, be taken to the Hospital Hall. The way there led through winding, urine-scented passages, past dormitories where ghostly, wildly staring men exposed themselves, standing in rows by the windows, or pressed their faces up to the glass, like people trying to climb in orout of mirrors. Sometimes we learned weeks afterward that a dance had been held at Hospital Hall, or a concert to which members of the public came, and where the superintendent had got up and given a talk about the New Attitude; or that the patients had performed a play there, under the supervision of an enthusiastic young doctor, and local drama clubs had been invited, along with newspaper critics, who had used the words âpromisingâ, âtalentedâ, âtherapeuticâ. One day, when a wildly struggling woman was dragged into the ward, we learned that she had been the lionâs back legs and tail in Androcles and the Lion .
Ah, well, perhaps we were our own drama. There were two Christs, one Queen of Norway, no female Napoleons; there was Millie, as round as the full moon, who had dressed up as a man, taken an axe, and murdered three people on a lonely farm; there was Elna, who had held her child under the water in the washing tub, holding it there till it no longer struggled; there were those whose arms were folded close in cloth or canvas straitjackets; and there
Park House squatted directly opposite the door of the hospital kitchen, like a dirty brick imbecile waiting for food. Its buildings were old, and leaked in the winter, water running down the inside of the plaster walls. The dayroom, blessed with a timely and multiple personality, served as dayroom, dining room and playroom, a huge space lined with long heavy tables like cast-off banquet tables, and long wooden benches, split and seamed with dirt, and shiny from being sat on. And the people who played and dined and spent the day there? They were the violent, the uncontrollably deluded and hallucinated, those who had murdered or would murder, the sadly deformed, the speechless. And up on the wall, sitting primly and securely in its wire cage, the electric clock looked down, saying tick tock , tick tock , the way clocks are supposed to. It was a strange, unreal sound, like the sound of knitting; it was as if someone had mistaken the Last Judgment for an afternoon tea party or a sewing bee. For what communication could the clock hold with that world, where time, tribal and primitive, told itself not by hours and minutes but by years of the lion and the panther and days of the hurricane; by hours of getting up, using the toilet, eating, going to bed; by days of sausages and saveloys, of bathing, of hair being combed with kerosene to discourage the lice, of head operations, of official inspections. The weeks had no name, nor the months, nor the years. Once, on a privileged walk, there was for me the Time of the Striped Waterfall, but I am not sure if it actually happened, for I was butcher-frocked and hallucinated, with my name on a list called Prefrontal Leucotomy.
The patients of Park House could not, of course, be taken to the Hospital Hall. The way there led through winding, urine-scented passages, past dormitories where ghostly, wildly staring men exposed themselves, standing in rows by the windows, or pressed their faces up to the glass, like people trying to climb in orout of mirrors. Sometimes we learned weeks afterward that a dance had been held at Hospital Hall, or a concert to which members of the public came, and where the superintendent had got up and given a talk about the New Attitude; or that the patients had performed a play there, under the supervision of an enthusiastic young doctor, and local drama clubs had been invited, along with newspaper critics, who had used the words âpromisingâ, âtalentedâ, âtherapeuticâ. One day, when a wildly struggling woman was dragged into the ward, we learned that she had been the lionâs back legs and tail in Androcles and the Lion .
Ah, well, perhaps we were our own drama. There were two Christs, one Queen of Norway, no female Napoleons; there was Millie, as round as the full moon, who had dressed up as a man, taken an axe, and murdered three people on a lonely farm; there was Elna, who had held her child under the water in the washing tub, holding it there till it no longer struggled; there were those whose arms were folded close in cloth or canvas straitjackets; and there
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