The Dark Threads (19 page)

Walking through the cold wind and rain, my face stinging as my tears flowed unchecked to mingle with the elements, I realised, through a throbbing sensation from within, that at least I felt more alive when I cried. It was worse not to be able to cry. And to feel dead inside was the worst feeling of all …

‘Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!'

The reappearance of the ‘Fuck you!' man returned me to the bleak hospital corridor. When he reached me he shuffled to a halt and stopped swearing. I was about to tell him again that, no, I hadn't got a cig, but this time he didn't ask. He stared intently at my face.

‘You're crying,' he said.

I pressed my hands against my wet cheeks. He was right.

LOOKING BACK 9

I
WAS FIFTEEN WHEN
I went with Dad to a meeting at the Pentecostal church he used to go to in his teens. I was struck by how happy and uninhibited everyone seemed, with a spontaneity similar to that I could remember from Salvation Army meetings: people shouting ‘Yes, Lord. Amen!' ‘Hallelujah!' ‘Praise Him!' and clapping their hands to the joyful choruses.

A teenage boy came out to the front and gave his ‘testimony'. He spoke about his life and how he had become a ‘born again' Christian. How different he was from the boys I knew. He seemed to have found a real meaning and purpose to life, and I longed to be the same.

All noise in the packed church subsided while a small man with a loud voice proclaimed the ‘Good News', that old, familiar story of Jesus Christ, Son of God, coming to earth to die on the cross and rising up from the dead so that ‘whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life'.

As I sat and listened to the Gospel, an old flame was rekindled within me. Would it be possible for me to regain something of that strong, simple faith I'd had in early childhood? Could the meaning and message of the gospel have any relevance for me personally in my day-to-day living?

It was time now for the ‘appeal'. Those who felt the call to commit their lives to Christ were invited to kneel at the front as a public declaration that they were asking Jesus to come into their heart. This ‘accepting Jesus', which could be done either publicly or privately, was what was meant by being ‘saved' or ‘born again'. My father made his way to the front, and knelt in tears.

I went home with the Gospel Message buzzing around inside my head. Something about that church got hold of me right from the start. It was like a powerful magnet pulling me to it.

I persuaded Jackie to come with me and we started going regularly. Someone gave us a tract about being ‘born again'. We took it into the Cellar Bar one night and, there in the dim lights and din, we read and reread it, discussing each part, hardly hearing the pop songs blasting out from the jukebox.

I spent restless months lingering in a kind of limbo, buffeted by doubts, but feeling a strong urge to commit myself. I thought I couldn't be ‘saved' until I could believe without doubts, since faith was obviously essential to salvation – ‘whosoever
believeth
'. Then, while I was lying awake one night, I realised something.

That's it! I thought excitedly. I don't have to wait until these conflicts and doubts go. I can come ‘just as I am'. I got out of bed, knelt at the side, and gave myself to Him who understands our innermost thoughts and feelings.

After that night, I tried hard to be a good Christian. I prayed daily, read my Bible and sought God's guidance in every aspect of my life. I was young, idealistic and very sincere.

After Dad returned to church I think he did try to curb his bad moods, but during yet another period of family squabbles, sulks and disruption, he told me he was looking for other accommodation. He said again I would have to hurry up and decide whom I wanted to live with – ‘her or me'. But I knew now that I needn't make that decision because soon I'd be old enough to leave home. Roll on sixteen.

By the time my sixteenth birthday came, my parents were still living together, and religion had become as much a part of my life as breathing. Stretched taut with spiritual yearning, I sought the fullness of God.

My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth
for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no
water is.(Psalm 63:1)

But questions, questions, questions, kept springing, unwanted and unbidden, to my mind. What did this mean? What did that mean? How could I know for certain that the Bible was true? And supposing I had got it all wrong. I mean, supposing that God didn't even exist? My mind was forever demanding answers, throwing up doubts, engaging in an intense intellectual and emotional struggle to understand, to believe, to know. I tried hard to blot the doubts from my mind, hold my critical faculties in abeyance and accept Him by faith as I buried myself more and more in a world of bibles, hymns and prayers.

I struggled over difficult theological concepts, prayed hard for spiritual enlightenment, strength and guidance … and I fell down before the resurrected Christ, saying like the father in the Bible story: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.'

Again, I felt the strength of that bond between Dad and me. We looked to our beliefs, hoping to invoke the power of God to smooth out our family problems. We wanted miracles. And why not? For did not Jesus Himself say that when two or more people were gathered together in His name, He would be right there in the midst of them? So together, just the two of us, we got down on our knees in my bedroom and prayed each in turn out loud, self-consciously at first, then more boldly as inhibitions and defences dropped.

How can I describe those sweet moments I spent together with my earthly father and my Heavenly Father, bound by cords of love, both human and divine? The sense of wonder and awe which filled my heart as we knelt before the throne of God defies description.

At least that's the way it felt at the time. But feelings, especially intense adolescent feelings, cannot be trusted. Of course, I know better now, having learnt such a lot since then. And yet, it's as if a small part of me was left behind in the past. It's still there now, wandering through the graveyard of lost beliefs searching for I know not what.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

E
VERY MORNING
I
PASSED
a bench in the grounds where a man sat dejectedly, body slumped forward, head down low. I could imagine his picture on a poster with a caption urging people to give generously for the mentally ill. Although not restrained in a building as past inmates had been, he seemed doomed to exist inside the prison of himself, forlorn and hopeless; one of society's misfits.

My mind barely registered seeing him until the day he wasn't there. Each morning after that, the empty bench reminded me of this man. Perhaps I should have attempted some small caring gesture, at least tried saying ‘Good morning' to him. And now it was too late.

But it wasn't too late for me to give Arnold a cup of coffee. Arnold, a day patient, was a stroke victim. The staff didn't make him join in the therapy like the other patients as he didn't seem capable, so he was left to sit and vegetate most of the time. Occasionally, a nurse, perhaps trying to be cruel to be kind, snapped at him to ‘Get a grip on yourself, Arnold!' He used to be able to get a grip; he used to be a senior police officer. But now he was ‘unfit for duties' as he could hardly walk or talk, couldn't use his hands properly and dribbled down his chin.

At breaks Caroline would wheel in the trolley and leave cups and two big jugs of coffee on a table in the middle of the room for us to pour. I noticed Arnold sitting there one day while the rest of us drank coffee. I waited for someone else to notice, but nobody did. ‘OK, Jean, you rotten coward. You
can't
get out of this one,' I said to myself. I was shaking inside as I stood up. I don't think it would have been a problem if there had been just the two of us, but I was self-conscious about walking over and speaking to him in front of a room full of watching people.

‘Arnold, do you take sugar?' I asked, wondering if he could understand and reply.

He nodded, and mouthed the words, ‘Two please' holding up two fingers. After that it was easy to get Arnold's coffee every day, and the way he always managed to stutter out a ‘Thank you', which later became, ‘Thank you, Jean', was deeply moving.

Mr Jordan rescued me from some of my attendances at the OT building by arranging for me to help in the library a few afternoons a week. The library was in the main hospital block, somewhere down those dismal corridors.

Mr Jordan introduced me to Hazel, the librarian, a slender, fair-haired, attractive young woman. She asked me which books I liked. I didn't read much now but had recently started rereading a book about Helen Keller. I'd always been interested in how people overcame various kinds of difficulties in communicating.

‘I'm reading a book about Helen Keller,' I replied.

‘Hell and what?' Mr Jordan asked.

‘Helen Keller.'

‘Hell and what?'

‘She said Helen Keller,' Hazel explained, smiling. ‘You know, the deaf and blind woman.'

The library consisted of a large room with shelves all round and some chairs. It had the appearance, if not quite the same atmosphere, of any local library. The main difference was that the chairs were often used by long-stay patients who sat staring into space and muttering to themselves instead of reading. To the left of this main room was a separate smaller locked room, a staff library. Occasionally I was given some books to replace on the shelves in there and found it contained interesting looking books. Hazel once caught me engrossed in the pages of
The Case of Mary Bell
and reminded me that these books were not for patients.

A white-coated male nurse came into the library one day with a few docile-looking patients.

‘They're from a locked ward,' Hazel informed me. ‘I'll introduce you to Toby. He's really cute.'

She called one of the patients over; a small ginger-haired man whose face was covered in pimples. Like the others, he seemed heavily sedated.

‘Toby, this is Jean,' Hazel said.

He held out his hand to me. ‘Hello, Jean,' he drawled. ‘I'm very pleased to meet you.'

‘Toby can sing,' Hazel said brightly. ‘Toby, show Jean what you can do. Sing your song for her.'

He looked at me, blushed, and stared down at the floor. ‘Aw, no,' he said coyly.

‘Oh come on, Toby, please,' Hazel said.

After some more persuasion, he sang to the ‘Happy Birthday' tune:

Largactil for me
Largactil for me
I do like Largactil
Largactil for me.

I smiled and clapped the circus show along with the others, but my guts were gripped by the same uneasy feeling I'd had at the day hospital when a nurse had cajoled an embarrassed Betsy into jumping about saying: ‘I am silly. I am silly …'

One of the patients who came often to sit in the library was Samuel, a short man with greying hair, who wore a shabby jacket with a dark-red bow tie. He would sit quietly, and then suddenly spring to his feet, shouting: ‘I hate the Nazis! I hate the Nazis! They killed my mother and my father and my sister.'

After his outburst he would return to brooding, before starting up again. ‘They say this is a hospital and they tell me I'm here because I am mentally disturbed. What does this “mentally disturbed” mean? I try to understand what happened to me and to my family. I ask myself why? WHY? It was sadistic, brutal torture and murder. They murdered my dear mother and father, my gentle sister. I hate the Nazis! I hate them!' His voice, slow and deliberate at first, grew louder and angrier, his face contorted in the anguish of remembering, then he slumped back into his seat and lapsed again into silence.

One thing soothed Samuel's troubled mind: Tchaikovsky's
Swan Lake.
Every few weeks Hazel held a ‘Records Hour' in the library. At the sound of
Swan Lake
Samuel's troubled expression was transformed into one of serenity. He would lean back with closed eyes, humming the tune and smiling contentedly as if the music had the power to transport him far away from High Royds, and further back than the horrors of the Nazi regime. Back, back, gently back to a happy, peaceful time that had been preserved somewhere among the dust and debris in his brain like a flower in the desert.

One day during the Records Hour, Samuel came in when I was playing a Supremes record. His usual tortured expression wrung my heart and, hoping to help ease his pain, I searched among the pile of records for his beloved
Swan Lake
. But too late. He stood still for a moment, listening to the Tamla Motown disco sound of ‘Baby Love'
.
Then he threw up his arms in disgust and stormed out with an angry shout: ‘RUBBISH!'

One of the perks of working in the library was Horace. Horace was a library helper from a long-stay ward. Before his admission he had been a tramp, sleeping rough, stealing food and clothing. It might have been easier for him as a young man but, having reached his sixties with health failing, it was a tough life, devoid of the basic comforts most people take for granted. He kept appearing before the courts for stealing and when the judge sentenced him to prison, which to Horace meant food and shelter, he would say gratefully, ‘Oh, thank you very much, sir. That's most kind of you.'

Finally, he was sent to High Royds, which had become his home. When there was talk of getting long-stay patients back into the community, poor old Horace was extremely worried that he might be discharged.

Horace was a great storyteller. He kept Hazel and me amused by telling us interesting stories about his life on the streets. He told of his escapades in later years of trying to get himself sent to prison, such as how one night he broke into a food factory, turned on the lights and helped himself to a pork pie. He was most indignant that the policeman who came to arrest him wouldn't allow him to finish his pie before taking him to the cells.

Horace's tales, like all life stories, probably contained a mixture of fact and fiction. He had the gift of telling his sometimes sad but mostly funny stories in a way that made them sparkle with life. Many times I sat with him while he rolled cigarettes or smoked Woodbines and recounted another instalment from the Life of Horace. He could make me laugh, no matter how tired and low I was feeling. Many of the staff, even, had a soft spot for this friendly, likeable, apparently simple chap who, behind their backs, could imitate them perfectly, demonstrating a shrewd perception of their little idiosyncrasies.

‘Guess who this is,' he would say to Hazel and me, then he would take off several of the doctors in turn, getting the voice and mannerisms of each one just right as he enacted a little scene.

Each week Horace did the ‘ward rounds', taking a trolley of books to the back wards, including some locked wards. Hazel suggested I accompany him. The first time I went with him there was a commotion in the corridors. A few male patients stampeded through with male nurses in close pursuit. Horace and I, who'd been wheeling the book trolley along the corridor, got caught up in this and, afterwards, I found myself alone up against the wall where I'd been shoved while people raced past. Horace had run off at the first sign of trouble, abandoning the trolley and me. I found him waiting for me further along the corridor.

‘Horace! You're not looking after me properly,' I teased him playfully.

After that, whenever we went on the ward rounds together, he assigned himself the role of my protector and proudly told Hazel and other staff members that he was looking after me.

I soon became aware that Thornville was not like some of the other wards. The back wards we visited, pushing the library trolley, were grim, overcrowded places, reeking of piss and shit, with beds sandwiched together. There were no pale, rosebud Ophelias among whiskery-faced women who dribbled and grimaced and spat. Trying to find romantic literary depictions of madness here would be as futile as trying to ride a rainbow or dance on clouds while the sky spewed out black, bitter rain over all that moved.

A few lost-looking souls shuffled around the area in front of the rows of beds where we stood with the trolley. The others, old, deformed, shrivelled, were sitting or lying on rubber-sheeted mattresses in a prison of beds. Belsen-thin. Sunken eyes. Rocking. Chewing. Saliva dribbling down their chins. Rattling the bed ends, beating their chests, tugging at clumps of hair, while snake-like tongues occasionally darted in and out of their mouths. I looked closer. No, they were not all the same. There were noisy patients, who reminded me of my brother in the way they banged, tapped, and made animal sounds, and quiet patients, with stone-fixed expressions. A mixed bag of misery.

Did the white-coated workers barricade emotions daily to separate and safeguard their minds from those who made up this overspill of drab decay? But I was unschooled and unshielded, still young enough to see and feel it all with open-hearted anguish.

To enter the locked wards, we had to ring the bell to summon the attendant whose eye would appear at the peephole. After stating our business, we waited, listening to the sounds of unlocking and unbolting. As soon as we entered, the heavy door was firmly closed, the large bolts drawn, the key turned. A chill feeling gripped my stomach. I was locked inside …

The first time I went into a locked ward, I followed the burly attendant apprehensively down the short, inner corridor to the main room. The keys that hung from his belt jangled as he walked. I wondered what to expect, but most of the patients in this male ward looked so heavily sedated that it was hard to appreciate the need for the lock or, for that matter, for the books we were bringing.

Yet, in all the sad, drab, pee-smelling wards we went into with the books, there was always someone, perhaps only one patient out of the whole ward, who still possessed the faculties and motivation to read. In one of the locked wards, Nancy, a small woman with big dark eyes and sparrow-like arms and legs, rushed to greet us each week and chatted to me excitedly about the books she'd read, before looking along the rows of books on the trolley to choose some more. Why was this woman being buried alive in here? I looked around at her companions to see whom she might converse with, but some were cabbage-like and silent, others were weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth.

How could anyone who had a mind sharp enough to think and reason survive in this bleak environment? Was it too much to hope that these books Nancy rushed for so eagerly each week were a lifeline for her? Could they help prevent soul-death? Even in this hell?

In a male locked ward a man in a similar position to Nancy had apparently found a different aid to survival, something to alleviate the boredom of the day if new, naïve visitors came. His name was Victor and the first time I met him, he came up to me, smiling, with his arm outstretched wanting me to ‘shake hands'.

‘I wouldn't if I were you,' a tired-looking male nurse warned me, but Victor was a small, thin man and I couldn't see any harm in it, so I allowed him to grasp my hand.

The handshake didn't stop at the normal stage. Still retaining his oh-so-polite pleased-to-meet-you smile, he squeezed my hand in an iron grip until I yelled in pain and the nurse, whom I now wished I'd heeded, managed to yank him away from me.