Rosie discovered in the next day or two that boredom was one of the worst things about Carrington Hall. Cleaning and making beds was quite pleasant, and she surprised herself by very quickly becoming used to the disgusting way the patients ate, their nasty personal habits and the occasional puddle on the floor. The horrible noises from upstairs still worried her and Matron’s malevolence made her very uneasy. But sitting in a stuffy room for hours on end watching patients shuffling about or rocking in their chairs made her feel she might just go mad herself.
Yet if it was boring for her and the other staff, at least they had one another as a diversion, with meal breaks and little jobs to do. The patients had absolutely nothing with which to amuse themselves. Not a book or a puzzle or even pencil and paper. It was no wonder most of them moved so slowly. Rosie felt they all badly needed some exercise. She felt like a caged tiger herself, but after work she could go outside and walk if she wanted to. The patients never got that opportunity.
On her third afternoon, however, the sun was shining and Matron sent a message up to the ward that Rosie and Mary Connor could take those able to manage the stairs down to the back garden.
The ripple of excitement which went round the day room proved that this was a rare treat, but Rosie was surprised to find that Maureen was not in the least put out at having to stay upstairs with Aggie and a few others. She said that Rosie would soon find out what a chore it was.
It took almost an hour to organize outdoor shoes and coats for eight of the patients and get them down the stairs, and Rosie could only suppose that this was what Maureen meant. But once outside, they all seemed suddenly more animated, grabbing each other’s arms and excitedly pointing things out as if they’d been taken on a holiday. Patty and Alice sat primly on a bench. Tabby put down the knitting she’d insisted on bringing down with her and prowled around peering into the bushes. One of the older men got down on his hands and knees examining the grass minutely. But it was Donald who really seemed to get the most out of it; he ran around like a small boy pretending to be an aeroplane.
At first Rosie didn’t dare relax for a second, her head swivelling from one side to the other watching out for everyone. She had visions of them eating snails or tripping up and hurting themselves, but in no time at all they seemed to be calmed by the fresh air, happy to just wander, or sit and look around them. Mary was sitting with Patty and Alice, looking at a magazine.
It was force of habit that made Rosie start deadheading some of the pansies and dahlias, and pulling up a few weeds, an almost unconscious action she couldn’t help.
Donald startled her by suddenly appearing at her elbow. ‘Can I h-h-help?’ he said, reaching out for a lupin.
‘Not that one,’ Rosie said. ‘That’s a flower. I’m only pulling out the weeds. They don’t belong here, you see. They are horrid things which choke the pretty plants.’
‘B-but it’s got no f-f-flowers,’ he said, looking at the spiky leaves in some surprise.
‘That’s because it’s flowered already this year,’ she said evenly. ‘If we leave it here, next June it will have big blue or pink flowers again.’
She showed him which ones were weeds and he surprised her by catching on quickly and pulling out dandelions and chickweed with enthusiasm.
‘I like g-g-gardens,’ he said. ‘I had a lovely one once, b-b-before I came here.’
‘Can you tell me about it?’ she asked. He was kneeling down beside her now and he had colour in his cheeks from running around. Although she hadn’t forgotten the incident on her arrival in the ward, he had wiped out her initial fear of him by proving himself to be very gentlemanly and capable. He intrigued her, she wanted to know more about him.
‘It had a pond, with fishes, and lots of trees,’ he said. He looked very thoughtful and he’d quite lost his vacant expression. She also noticed he’d said a whole sentence without stuttering. ‘I wish I still lived there.’
‘I had a nice garden too,’ Rosie said, thinking of the Bentleys. ‘I felt so happy when I was out in it digging and planting. We could pretend this is our garden, couldn’t we? Watch things growing together, learning the names of the flowers.’
Donald smiled suddenly, showing perfect white teeth. ‘You’re nice, Smith. I like you. Sh-sh-show me some f-f-flowers now.’
‘Tell me about Donald,’ Rosie said to Maureen later, once they were back in the day room. It was nearly five and Mary had gone down to the kitchen to get the tea trolley. Although Mary was the friendliest of the staff, happy enough to talk about her family back in Ireland, nights out at the local dance hall and boys she’d been out with, she didn’t want to speak about the patients at all.
Rosie had come to the conclusion that she was a bit of a dolly daydream. She was too lazy to look around for a more appealing job, so she blanked out the aspects she didn’t like about this one, just marking time until the off-duty hours. Maureen was quite different, she lived, breathed and slept Carrington Hall; in fact she had no other interest.
‘His parents are stinking rich,’ she said and pursed her lips as though she resented that bitterly. ‘They live in Sussex somewhere. They’ve got another older son and daughter who are quite normal. Dr Freed thinks Donald was brain-damaged by forceps at birth. He lived at home until he was about fifteen, but he started wandering around the village, talking to people and stuff, and I suppose he made people nervous. You remember how he hugged you on your first night here? Well, he does that when he gets excited, and he’s very strong. What I heard was that some girl went home crying to her mother and they thought he’d hurt her, you know.’ Maureen stopped, blushing furiously.
Rosie knew Maureen was hinting about rape and a picture of Seth flashed into her mind instantly. But she squashed it; she might be ignorant about mental patients’ behaviour and their sexuality, but Donald didn’t seem a bit dangerous to her.
‘I can’t really believe he did that,’ Maureen went on. ‘He’s never showed any sign of anything like that since I’ve been here, all he does is hug people. Some of the men here are horrible, they get their things out and play with them and stuff,’ she grimaced. ‘But Donald never does. Anyway I suppose someone talked his parents into sending him here, just in case.’
Rosie thought that was very unfair and said so.
‘I know,’ Maureen agreed. ‘And if he stays in here much longer he’ll get as bad as old Jacob and the others. Still, I suppose he’s luckier than most; if his parents couldn’t afford to send him here, he’d be in a State asylum.’
Maureen was very fond of talking about the State asylums. According to her the patients there were treated like cattle; if they couldn’t feed themselves they went hungry, left in their own filth for days on end and at the mercy of any sadist who happened to take a job there. She spoke with authority, but Rosie wasn’t sure she could entirely believe everything she said. In truth she couldn’t really believe people would allow such terrible places to exist.
‘What about all the others?’ she asked. ‘Why is Patty’s face so badly scarred?’
‘She got that in another loony-bin,’ Maureen’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Her family are rich too. She was quite normal until she got some illness, when she was in her twenties. I don’t know what it was, but anyway it made her go peculiar. Apparently she got very sexy with men, started running around without any clothes on and eventually they got her committed.’
Rosie wanted to smile at this. Carrington Hall might be Maureen’s absolute favourite subject, but sex and sexual deviants were her second. ‘So was it a man patient who scarred her?’ Rosie asked, almost expecting to hear he was some sort of pervert too.
‘No, of course not,’ Maureen scoffed. ‘In State asylums the two sexes are segregated. It was a woman. She attacked Patty with a knife, opened her face right up and judging by that scar the doctor who stitched her up must have known as little about sewing as I do.’
Rosie’s knees went a bit wobbly at this. ‘Is that why she came here?’ she asked.
Maureen nodded. ‘She was one of the first patients when this place opened. I’ve heard that she used to help with the meals and everything back then. But her brother was alive then and by all accounts he came to see her almost every week. When he died, no one else came instead and she just withdrew into herself. She looks about sixty, doesn’t she? But she isn’t, she’s only forty-three and according to Matron her family are always late paying her bills now. So I expect soon she’ll be shipped off somewhere else.’
Rosie felt very sad as Maureen told her about other patients too, and ashamed at herself for being so revolted by them. She had always imagined that mental asylums were full of totally insane people, maniacs who would attack on sight, like those in horror films. Now she was finding that although there were some like this – Maureen said there were dangerous patients on the second floor – the vast majority were merely of limited abilities. Many of them were brain-damaged at birth or as a result of childhood illnesses, so that while their bodies had become adult, they had retained the mental age of a small child. Perhaps even more pitiful were those like Tabby who had once lived a normal life, gone to school and then on to a job, but something had pushed them into depression which had rapidly worsened into mental illness. From what Rosie could gather there was no real treatment or medicine, and it seemed to her the patients would only get worse from being understimulated and virtually ignored.
But saddest of all to Rosie was the discovery that every single patient in Carrington Hall came from a well-off family. She could remember families on the Somerset Levels who had a simple son or daughter, but poor and uneducated as they were, they did not have their feebleminded offspring put away, they just accepted them, with all their limitations.
Chapter Six
The six-thirty alarm bell rang in the corridor. Like a robot Rosie sat up, rubbed her eyes and sleepily swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Then she remembered. It was Tuesday and her first day off. Maureen was dressing, but without even bothering to speak to her, Rosie slumped back on to her pillow, and closed her eyes.
Later, when she woke again, she thought it must be mid-morning. But a check on Maureen’s clock revealed it was only eight. She stretched out luxuriantly, smiling to herself in happy anticipation of the day ahead.
Today was only her eighth day at Carrington Hall. But it seemed to her as if she’d been here weeks. Each day had brought new shocks and sometimes she felt like she was edging her way round an active volcano which could erupt at any minute.
Nothing, aside from meal times and Matron’s hostility, was predictable. The day could start calmly with all the patients sitting quietly, then suddenly with no warning, and for no discernible reason, one of them would hurl a shoe or a plate at the window, or grab another patient, and all at once mayhem would break out.
The first time it happened was on Rosie’s fourth day. The other girls said that the patients had all been on their best behaviour until then, because she was new and something of a distraction. Tabby started it. She found that someone had pulled her knitting off her needles and she leapt on Maud, the youngest woman, presumably because she happened to be closest. Mary and Rosie jumped up to separate them, but as they moved so did everyone else in the room and George, one of the older men, fell over Aggie as she sat on the floor. Aggie screamed at the top of her lungs and started everyone else off. Archie seized the opportunity to try and throttle George.
It was Donald who rang the bell for help; neither Mary nor Rosie could get to it, surrounded as they were by clawing, yelling people. Rosie was absolutely terrified in the few moments before the day room door burst open and Simmonds, Maureen and Gladys Thorpe, one of the nurses, rushed in. She had no idea what to do for the best and was paralysed with fear by the screaming all around her. Although she felt a surge of relief as the reinforcements arrived, she was appalled to see Simmonds punch Tabby in the mouth, and Maureen grab Archie’s arms, twisting them up behind his back.
That day both Tabby and Archie were dragged out of the day room, Archie to be put in one of the isolation cells along the corridor, Tabby to be plunged fully dressed into an ice-cold bath and held there by force until she was quiet again.
Back in the day room it was left to Rosie and Mary to calm the other patients down, which involved separating the men from the women and forcing them to sit at opposite ends of the room. As Rosie had received no prior warning that this sort of fracas was common, or any instructions about how to deal with an emergency, she felt helpless, shaking with fright for some hours after it had all quietened down.
She learned later that she should have rushed to the bell first, before even attempting to intervene and then she should have gone up behind the perpetrators and caught them securely by the arms, and pushed them hard against the wall, if necessary banging their heads against it. Such brutality was unthinkable to Rosie, and she didn’t believe she’d ever be able to do it.
One thing she soon learned, though, was that patients involved in such incidents were always punished. Tabby not only got the cold bath, but spent the rest of the day in isolation without any food and her knitting was taken away. Archie got similar treatment, but without the bath as he wasn’t considered hysterical, only an opportunist who used any upset to attack someone. Rosie heard too that in extreme cases they got electric shock treatment, but apparently the threat of this was usually enough to silence anyone, without the necessity of going through with it.
After that first fight, Rosie found she handled herself better in similar incidents, grabbing the person who started it before anyone else became involved and shouting for silence like a sergeant major, the way Maureen did. She began to see why Sister Welbred had made that remark about developing muscle on her first night here. She also learned to read advance signals from the patients that they were likely to lash out, and often by leading them away from the rest of the group to talk gently to them, it was possible to defuse them.