The Skeleton Cupboard (12 page)

As I read, Marion sighed. “Poor woman.”

“Are you OK for me to go on?”

Marion nodded.

“‘I got here on a hot summer day, a June day, and so that is what they called me and that is what I am known as now. Later on, when they found out who I really was, I refused for them to give me back the name that my mother had given me. I was June Day, and I still am June Day, and when I die soon, I will die June Day.'”

Sixty-five years ago, June, who'd been deemed “simple-minded,” had arrived pregnant at the asylum. There she had an illegitimate daughter, who had been conceived when June was raped, repeatedly, by the father of the family for whom she worked and by his sons. Her daughter—Marion—was taken from her, and June had stayed in the asylum ever since.

The file also mentioned a man called Frank, aged eighty-four—June's boyfriend. Frank had entered the asylum as a sixteen-year-old boy, with learning difficulties and epilepsy. He too had spent his entire life in the place. June and Frank didn't want to leave their home; they were resisting rehabilitation.

“Would you like to meet them, Marion?”

She took a sip of water. “No, I wouldn't.”

I had no idea what to say.

Marion went on, “But I wonder if you could?”

What?

“Could you meet them for me and then tell me about them?”

This wasn't what I was expecting and seemed an unusual request. I paused to think about it.

“I'm sure I could, Marion.” I hesitated. “But how will that help you?”

Her eyes welled up with tears. “I never missed having a mother until I found out that I had one. Now I really don't like how it makes me feel.”

I suddenly felt very young and inexperienced. I wished I knew more about Marion's life—her childhood and her upbringing—but I couldn't ask her to share anything she wasn't ready to. I had nothing to say, so I kept my mouth shut.

“You meet them,” she said. “Tell me about them. Then perhaps I could meet her with you.”

*   *   *

I felt a weird kick of nostalgia driving back onto the grounds of the old psychiatric hospital. It'd been a few months since I was there. I found myself thinking of Imogen, of course.

I passed the abandoned villas. In the distance was the overpass. I remembered running after Imogen in the rain. It didn't feel real.

A group of teenagers from the adolescent unit passed the car, on their way to morning roll call at the school. A few of them glanced in at me as I drove by, but there was no recognition. These weren't the kids I'd known in my time here. It stung, somehow.

It was autumn, and the day was bright and crisp. I glanced at my watch—shit, already late. I drove on until I got to the complex of refurbished villas. The elderly long-stay residents here were the opposite of the kids I'd just seen. They were completely institutionalized—no “care in the community” for them.

I was listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” As I pulled up alongside the villas, Freddie jammed and I ejected the cassette. I parked. I am ashamed to confess that even though I was late, I spent time rewinding the shiny brown tape tightly back into the spools of the cassette; I was procrastinating.

To be honest, I was pretty freaked out. I wasn't used to talking to people with mental disabilities. We'd only had a few lectures covering communication strategies. I hated myself for my anxiety. It felt discriminatory.

*   *   *

The place wasn't what I was expecting. It seemed cottagey and homely. I couldn't see any staff, but I guessed that no one wore a uniform, and so when a very kind elderly gentleman came and greeted me, I was relieved.

“Welcome,” he said. “How can I help you?”

I dropped my bags and extended a hand. “Hi. I'm here to meet June Day.”

He shook my hand formally. He looked about eighty and reminded me of George from my first placement in the outpatient psychiatric department a year ago; I felt safe.

“So good to meet you,” I said, “and sorry I'm late. Took a couple of wrong turns!”

“We are happy to have you here safe and sound. I think you should meet June.” He took my arm and led me into the body of the unit.

I glanced around at the residents. Some were what I had feared: One seemed to be dribbling, rocking his head from side to side while biting the back of his hand; another was standing facing the corner and moaning as he hit his head. A shriek made me jump.

The gent squeezed my arm reassuringly. “Don't mind Clive. He gets excited by new people.”

“Not a problem for me. I'm happy to be appreciated.”

My heart was racing.

The wallpaper was a very 1970s brown-and-orange geometric pattern, but fresh. A TV was on, and a number of residents were sitting around watching a bland daytime program.

We got to the end corner of the room and stopped.

“Here's June.”

June was well into her eighties and sitting in a chintzy chair with what looked like doilies draped over the armrests; one of her legs, which looked rather edematous, was propped up on a matching chintz footstool and clad in a skin-colored stocking.

Her voice was soft and croaky. “Who's that, Frank?”

“She's come to talk to us. New.”

“Hello, dear.” June patted the seat next to her. “Please do sit down.”

I sat.

“Frank, some tea, please,” June said.

Frank did another small nod of his head and went off, I presumed, to make tea. Shit, that was Frank, the boyfriend. I didn't know what to say.

“Well, you are very pretty.”

“Thank you, June.”

“We like pretty.”

Then there was a very, very long nonconversational pause as June smiled and stared at me.

Frank brought the tea on a tray. It was beautifully presented under a tea cozy, with patterned cups and saucers.

“June,” I asked, “shall I be Mother?”

“Yes, dear. Yes, please be Mother.”

June and Frank turned out to be wonderful company and they told me everything.

As I knew, Frank was eighty-four and had been admitted to the hospital at age sixteen. That made sixty-eight years, but he was proud of those sixty-eight years.

“They thought you were the devil, didn't they, Frank?”

He nodded.

“They thought he was possessed!” June smiled and winked at me. “Tell her what you do here, Frank.” June didn't give Frank time to speak. “I run this ward, but Frank runs the whole hospital, don't you, Frank?”

Frank gave a small nod and went a little pink.

June winked at me again. “What do you do, Frank?”

Frank said nothing.

“Shall I tell her what you do, Frank?”

Frank nodded.

“You deliver the post to the whole hospital, don't you, Frank?”

Frank nodded again.

I took a sip of tea from the dainty bone-china cup.

“How long have you been here, June?”

June cackled. “Forever, my dear. I have been here from the beginning.”

I took another sip of tea. “Do you think you could tell me about how you came to be here, June?”

June looked at Frank. Once again Frank gave a slight nod.

“No one knew my name, because when I arrived here, I wouldn't speak to anyone. I had been sent here because I was going to have a baby and so I was a fallen woman. I was pregnant because while I was a kitchen maid not far from here in a large house, I had been forced against my will to have relations with the man of the house and his sons. I wasn't the only girl who was forced regularly, but I was the one that had a baby. I was the unlucky one.

“I got here on a hot summer day, a June day, and so that is what they called me and that is what I am known as now. Later on, when they found out who I really was, I refused for them to give me back the name that my mother had given me. I was June Day, and I still am June Day, and when I die soon, I will die June Day.”

I knew those words. They were exactly the same as those in the testimonial in her file. She was well rehearsed.

“June, I wanted to talk to you about your daughter.”

“Yes, dear?”

“I was wondering whether you wanted to know more about her.” I anxiously clutched the bone-china cup in my hand.

“No, thank you, dear.”

I was stunned but felt I should try again. “June, you have been told about your daughter, haven't you? That she knows who you are?”

June stared at me and nodded.

“In fact, it was her granddaughter—your great-granddaughter—who traced you via a school project looking at family trees.”

June smiled at me.

“I've met your daughter, June. Would you like me to tell you about her?”

June shook her head. “No, thank you, dear.” June leaned right back in her chair and closed her eyes. “Time for my nap now. Thank you for coming. Good-bye, dear.”

Frank turned to me. “Would you like another cup of tea before we go for a walk?”

*   *   *

Later that morning I met a very kind charge nurse who explained to me that he and other staff had spent a lot of time with June talking about her daughter and that June was adamant that she was not interested to know her at all. Afterward Frank took me for a short walk to a sister asylum down the road. Except there was no asylum anymore—it had been decommissioned and replaced with a redbrick estate of new-build commuter homes, each one looking exactly the same.

On the way Frank told me the history of his home for the last sixty-eight years. Even though I'd spent six months here, I'd never heard it before.

The asylum had opened in 1922 on the site of a Victorian manor house where there were airplane hangars. The airfield was abandoned after the First World War and nine male “lunatics” were sent there and given the job of setting up their own home by converting the hangars into wards. Frank, just a teenager, was one of the “lunatics.”

Soon more male patients joined the site and more buildings were built. Dormitory blocks were erected alongside sports fields and a tennis court, a large recreational hall and nurses' accommodation. The site operated around a working farm with chickens, pigs and dairy cattle. The residents worked the farmlands, as well as operating the workshops, laundry, sewing rooms and kitchens. Here was a self-sufficient community where everyone had a role and felt they were part of something.

Women were eventually brought into the hospital, and so the site was segregated to accommodate the sexes and keep them apart. After the Second World War and with the formation of the new National Health Service, the “colony,” as it was now called, expanded, and by the 1950s there were almost 1,500 residents. Male nurses joined the workforce, and an indoor swimming pool was built.

The “abnormal” were separated from the “normal” and they became their own distinct community. Sadly, due to urban expansion, the place soon became a dumping ground: Villages no longer existed, and the large towns that were being created had no interest in supporting their most vulnerable. Communities no longer looked after the “village idiot” because there were no longer any village communities. The asylum soon became overcrowded. Frank told me that in the male dormitories the beds were so close together that a person could ride a bicycle across them, and patients were dying because nurses simply could not reach them in an emergency.

Then in 1961 Enoch Powell gave his famous “Water Tower” speech, in which he questioned the efficacy of large institutions because they were expensive and overcrowded. Get patients out of the asylum and back into mainstream society, he declared, and the notion of “care in the community” was born, which Margaret Thatcher famously brought into effect in the 1980s.

It's a nice idea: ideologically sound but so ridiculously unworkable. After so many years of segregating the “lunatics” from the rest of society, where was the community who would welcome these “social lepers” back with open arms and care for them again?

It was all about deinstitutionalization: Patients were put on “social skills” programs in order to one day blend back into the community—a community that just did not bloody care and was frightened by and intolerant of difference.

Our walk stopped as we reached the redbrick estate that had been built on the site of the sister asylum. Frank looked into the distance, and as I followed his gaze, I saw a person, head bowed, shuffling into the estate.

“Who's that, Frank?”

“That's his home.”

I watched the small figure shuffle toward a house.

“I don't understand.”

Frank said nothing and so for a long time we stood still and watched. And then the sirens wailed and the blues and twos came and scooped up the small figure and drove off.

Frank looked at me and shook his head. He didn't seem to want to talk about what we'd just seen.

Later I was told by the charge nurse on June and Frank's ward that the stooped, wandering figure was an ex-resident who made a regular pilgrimage to where he had once lived before the asylum had been demolished. Every time he returned to what he considered to be his home, he was taken away by the police, who were summoned by the anxious housewives living in the new redbrick estate.

As we walked away, Frank simply said, “This was our community.”

*   *   *

I had a six p.m. meeting booked with Chris in my office and I was nervous. Two more patient sessions before her: my sensate focus couple and, before that, Daisy and her daughter.

Mrs. C. filled me in. “Daisy's child is a monster.”

“How?”

“She screams all the time.”

“Thank you, Mrs. C. Can you ask them to come in?”

“It's only her. Daisy didn't bring her monster.”

“Thank you, Mrs. C. Ask Daisy to come in, please.”

The door opened. It was Henrietta with a big mug of coffee.

Oh God, I felt smothered. Maybe there was something to be said for Chris's distant style.