Rosie Read online

  There was absolutely nothing to distract her gaze from these pathetic human rejects either. Not a picture on the grubby cream walls, no curtains at the barred windows, not even a rug on the brown lino floor. Aside from a dozen or so easy chairs there was nothing more than a stack of tubular chairs in one corner, and a table by the window.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Maureen asked, breaking the silence. ‘You’ve gone as white as a sheet! Let me introduce you to Brownlow. She’s another chargehand.’

  Rosie forced herself to smile at the middle-aged woman coming towards her, even though she wanted to run. The woman looked weary. The many lines on her face all had a downturn as if she had never smiled in her entire life. She wore a maroon uniform like Maureen’s, but also a cap and apron. Her hair was grey, her eyes dull.

  Maureen rattled out a hasty explanation as to how Smith had just arrived from Somerset. Brownlow held out a limp hand and made a very brief and stilted welcoming speech, but it was obvious she was disinclined to chat and soon went back to her chair.

  Trying very hard to control her fear and disgust, Rosie looked around her. To her surprise, Donald, the man who had crushed her, was not only the youngest of the patients, but the only one of them who looked anything approaching normal. In fact if it hadn’t been for his sloppy mouth and a somewhat vacant look in his mournful blue eyes, he could almost have been called handsome. He was at least six foot tall, of a slim, very straight-backed build with floppy blond hair which badly needed a cut. Compared with the other men he didn’t look scary.

  There were fewer men than women, but aside from Donald the rest of them looked over forty, wearing the same grey trousers and loose battledress-type flannel jacket over a shirt. One was rocking backwards and forwards in his chair, muttering something under his breath and rubbing his hands on his groin. The others remained staring at Rosie; one was dribbling.

  The women began to move again first, clustering in groups of two and three, and whispering to one another as they watched her. Unlike the men there was no uniformity about their clothes or their ages. The youngest appeared to be in her mid-twenties, the oldest perhaps over sixty. Some wore print dresses and cardigans, others wore skirts, blouses and cardigans. But all of them looked neglected with food stains down their fronts and unkempt hair, and they moved slowly, awkwardly, almost as if their limbs ached.

  ‘I’d better tell you who they all are,’ Maureen said, catching hold of Rosie’s elbow and drawing her away from the door. ‘Don’t be scared, they are all quite harmless, and some of them are kind of sweet when you get to know them.’

  Rosie couldn’t believe this. A wild-eyed woman of maybe thirty sat in a chair knitting furiously. She had coarse red hair which stood up like a brush. In one corner two very much older women stood huddled together, their arms linked. One had a terrible scar from her temple to her jaw line which pulled at her flesh so her eyes were on different levels. Her companion was so thin she was almost skeletal. But most frightening of all was a very fat woman sitting on the floor. Her partially bald head was terribly misshapen, with a huge bulging domed forehead. Her eyes were just narrow slits and she had virtually no nose, just two holes. Her dress was rucked up, showing long pink drawers, and she was picking at a nasty scab on her thin, mottled leg and grunting to herself.

  Maureen behaved as if she was just walking about amongst a class of children. Still holding on to Rosie with one hand, she bent to speak to some of them, telling them who Rosie was; others she just touched on the shoulder as if to acknowledge their presence. ‘This is Aggie,’ she said, stopping by the fat lady with the strange-shaped head. ‘And these are Alice and Patty,’ she said of the two older women with linked arms. Jacob sat rocking in his chair and totally ignored Maureen’s attempts to get him to speak. The wild-looking woman knitting was Tabby. ‘Like a cat,’ she chortled, knitting even more furiously. ‘I claw people too, so watch out.’

  ‘She does too, sometimes,’ Maureen agreed with a smile and patted Tabby’s shoulder in an affectionate gesture. ‘But that’s not why she’s called Tabby. It’s just short for Tabitha. But you aren’t going to hurt Smith, are you, Tabby? Because she’s nice.’

  The woman looked up at Rosie as if considering whether or not to strike out. ‘She’s got pretty hair,’ she said in a dull monotone. ‘Matron won’t like that.’

  That remark appeared to be based on an understanding of Matron, and as Tabby was the only one to speak aside from Donald, Rosie plucked up some courage and bent down towards the woman. ‘What are you knitting, Tabby?’ she ventured.

  ‘A dress,’ Tabby replied, and stopped knitting to hold up her work. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’

  Rosie agreed out of politeness. It was in fact just a long multicoloured strip no more than ten inches wide, with many holes where she’d dropped stitches.

  Donald seemed to have recovered from being told off. He came back to Rosie and this time put his hand in hers like a child. It was hot and sweaty, but the broad smile which accompanied it was friendly and unthreatening. ‘Wh-wh-what’s your n-n-name?’ he asked.

  ‘Smith,’ Rosie said in a faint voice. It sounded so peculiar saying a name she’d hardly got used to yet, and even stranger talking to a giant of a man who behaved like a small child. ‘And you’re Donald, aren’t you?’

  He nodded and grinned. ‘Are you g-g-going to be my f-f-friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Er, yes,’ she replied hesitantly, hoping that she might find it in her heart to care for at least some of these people eventually. At least Donald wasn’t ugly, and maybe his fierce hug was his way of getting attention. ‘Yes, of course I’m going to be your friend,’ she added with more conviction than she felt.

  ‘Smith will see you all tomorrow,’ Maureen called out in a loud voice. ‘And I want you all on your best behaviour, or else.’

  The relief at leaving the room was so great that Rosie slumped against the corridor wall outside as Maureen locked the door.

  ‘Tough, eh?’ she said with some sympathy.

  ‘They scared me,’ Rosie whispered. ‘I know I ought to feel sorry for them, but all I wanted to do was run out. I’m not going to be a bit of good here. I won’t even be able to touch them. I don’t know how you stand it.’

  Maureen smiled in absolute understanding. ‘Everyone feels the way you do the first time they visit a mental asylum,’ she said. ‘But we’ve never yet had anyone come here to work who didn’t get used to it within a couple of days. In a week I bet you’ll tell me you can’t remember any more what it was that gave you the creeps. But we’d better go and see Sister Welbred now, before I show you the rest of the place. By rights she should be in there now with Brownlow as they do the nights together. But I expect she’s having a fag in the office.’

  It was after nine-thirty when the girls got back to their room. Maureen lit up a cigarette and it seemed as if she intended to talk all night.

  Rosie was too stunned and sickened by all she had seen and heard to ask any further questions. They had run into Matron again who had curtly told Rosie she was to tie back her hair otherwise she’d insist on having it cut short. That at least made sense of Tabby’s remark. It seemed Matron didn’t approve of any femininity. Sister Welbred was odd too, a big, red-headed woman in her fifties with a slight cast in one eye. She’d been reading a magazine when they came across her in the office; a cigarette was hanging out of the corner of her mouth and she smelled of alcohol. She’d squeezed Rosie’s arms and said she’d soon get a few muscles in them, then laughed almost manically.

  Rosie had seen everywhere Maureen thought she needed to, the bathrooms and dormitories on the first floor, the staff dining-room and rest room on the ground floor, a treatment room and an isolation room. Rosie’s flesh crawled when Maureen waved one hand at some locked doors and airily said they were padded cells, and then the other at a place for electric shock treatment. She wondered too why no one opened any windows, for there were nasty smells lingering everywhere which weren’t entirely banished
by the strong aroma of disinfectant.

  Finally they came to a sitting-room on the ground floor overlooking the front garden, which was for visiting relatives. It was homely and comfortable with chintz-covered armchairs. Rosie asked if the relatives ever saw the patients’ upstairs day room and compared it.

  ‘There’s very few of them ever get visitors,’ Maureen said with a shrug. ‘They stick them in here, pay the bills and then forget them. Donald’s parents used to come every three or four weeks, but even they only come about once every three months now. The saddest thing is that I don’t think he needs to be in here at all, he’s only a bit simple. But no one is interested in my opinion.’

  But now the tour was over and they were back upstairs with Maureen rattling out stories about patients and gossip about staff. When Rosie yawned, Maureen blushed furiously. ‘Oh gawd, I’m sorry, you must be so tired and here I am gabbling on. Get into bed, love. We can talk some more tomorrow.’

  Rosie was almost asleep when Maureen spoke again.

  ‘Do you think you can bear it?’ she asked softly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rosie replied, wondering how she was ever going to conquer her squeamishness. ‘But you learned to like it, so maybe I will in time.’

  She thought Maureen was as odd as everything else here. She didn’t seem like a young girl. She gave the impression she was almost in charge here, yet terse remarks she’d made about other staff suggested she might be unpopular with them. It was strange too that she hadn’t once mentioned anything outside Carrington Hall, almost as if she never went out.

  ‘I don’t know what it’s like outside of asylums,’ Maureen said. ‘I was put in an orphanage when my mother died, and sent straight to Luckmore Grange when I was only fourteen. This place is paradise next to that.’

  Rosie wanted to hear all about Maureen but she couldn’t stay awake any longer. The last thing she thought before she sank into unconsciousness was that as soon as she was sixteen in October she’d get out of here. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to be a nurse any longer.

  Maureen was awake for a long time after Rosie fell asleep. There was a great deal more she could have told this new girl, but she hadn’t dared. She would find out soon enough, and in the meantime at least it meant Maureen had some company. But she had been truthful when she said it was paradise compared with Luckmore Grange. She still had nightmares about that place.

  Maureen Jackson was nineteen and she was happy enough working here in Carrington Hall. But then her idea of happiness was not being verbally or physically abused, and having three good meals a day and a decent room of her own. Until she came here, she’d never had any of those things.

  She was six when war broke out, living in two rooms in Peckham with her two older brothers and her mother. Maureen had never known her father, but very early in life she’d realized that her mother didn’t like her, because of him. ‘You’re just like your father,’ she would rage as she took a belt to her.

  When Maureen’s whole school was evacuated to Bognor Regis, all the other mothers were tearful, but not hers. Peggy Jackson was off up the road and into the pub before the crocodile of children were even ushered out of the school gates.

  Between September of 1939 and 1943 Maureen was sent to eight different homes, finally ending up on a farm near Bodmin with a crazy old couple who didn’t even bother to send her to school, much less feed her with any regularity. She was still there, a skinny, plain girl of ten, when she got the message that her mother had been killed. Not by a bomb, which might have gained Maureen a little sympathy, but knocked over by a car on her way home from the pub.

  She was moved then to an orphanage in Yeovil where she stayed until the war ended, then for some reason which was never explained to her, she was packed off back to London, to Northwood, another orphanage in Dulwich. When Uncle Ted, a man that did the gardening, began cuddling and fondling her, she had a vague feeling there was something bad about it, yet it was nice that at last someone cared about her. Ted was simple, but he used to give her sweets, and called her his little girlfriend. She trusted him and considered him her best friend.

  Then one day just before she was fourteen he pushed her down on some old sacks in his potting shed, and forced himself into her. It hurt terribly, but worse still than the pain and shock was the awful feeling that she’d been betrayed. She ran away from him crying when he’d finished hurting her, and kept well away from him after that.

  It was at a routine medical that they found she was five months pregnant. Maureen had innocently wondered why her tummy seemed to be getting fatter, but she’d never made the association between that and the horrible thing Ted did to her. When the doctor questioned her she was too scared to admit anything, and she just kept saying she didn’t know how it had happened.

  That was how she came to end up in Luckmore Grange out in Essex. They said she was mentally defective and it was the only place for her.

  She went into labour prematurely, and the baby girl died a few hours later. She was only fourteen and a half, and not one person showed her the slightest sympathy.

  Maureen was in that dreadful place for almost two years. Spending days in a gloomy locked ward surrounded by old shuffling women who peed on the floor and shat in their beds. She saw women so deranged that they pulled out their hair and tore at their flesh with their nails, and she heard them screaming from brutal electric shock treatments. For a while after losing the baby, she sat motionless, refusing to speak to anyone.

  But then one night as she lay in that dormitory, her skin crawling at the horrible sounds of madness all around her, the cackling laughter, sinister rustlings and strange moans, she knew if she didn’t do something, she’d soon be as mad as they were.

  All at once she saw she’d have to fight to prove she was sane. Any violence would mean electric shock treatment and a strait-jacket – they wouldn’t listen to any protests. The only other way was being sneaky.

  Offering to help the staff was the first step. They were a hard cruel bunch, doing a job that no one else wanted to do. At first they only belittled her, making her do the vilest jobs like cleaning up after the incontinent patients. But slowly she saw they were coming to rely on her and soon she was feeding the more helpless patients, making beds and running errands. A new young doctor was her real salvation; without him she might have been trapped in a twilight world for ever, expected to work, yet still locked away.

  The very first day he came into her ward, she saw that light in his eye that said he hadn’t yet been worn down by the hopelessness of mental institutions. She listened to him telling a belligerent nurse that the mentally incompetent were still people and that they must be treated with compassion, and she knew he was the one to help her.

  She dogged his footsteps every time he did his rounds. Offering him assistance with difficult patients, volunteering information about them. Then finally the day came when he asked her to tell him about herself.

  That was how she got the job here at Carrington Hall. She could barely read or write, which ruled out almost every other job, and she’d grown used to looking after the mentally ill. So she was sent here on a month’s trial, and now she’d been here for almost three years.

  She looked across the narrow divide between her bed and the new girl’s and felt so very envious of her. She had everything: she was pretty, she had nice clothes and even the photograph on her bedside table showed that she had loving parents. She wouldn’t stick it here for long.

  Watching the girl sleep with one arm curled around her head, Maureen felt a little guilty that she’d agreed to tell Matron every last thing about her. Rosemary seemed nice and it didn’t seem fair to spy on her and pass back information. But then Matron had insisted there was no other way, not unless she wanted to end up in another place like Luckmore Grange.

  Rosie awoke with a start as a bell rang.

  ‘Time to get up,’ Maureen said, leaping out of bed. ‘Put something plain on for now. You’ll get your uniform a
fter breakfast.’

  Rosie rubbed her eyes and got out of bed. She picked up her washbag and towel and went next door to the bathroom. By the time she got back, Maureen was already fully dressed.

  ‘Hurry up,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to be downstairs in five minutes.’

  Rosie wondered where the girl had washed and brushed her teeth. There didn’t appear to be another bathroom anywhere. She hastily pulled on her navy skirt and a white blouse, then brushed her hair and secured it at the back of her neck with a rubber band.

  Everywhere was silent as they walked down the three flights of stairs, presumably all the patients were still asleep. But Rosie could smell that distinctive odour of ammonia wafting out from under the locked doors and it was an unpleasant reminder not only of what this job would entail, but also of her brother Seth.

  At the foot of the stairs they turned left into the single-storey part of the building where Maureen had taken her last night to show her the staff rooms and laundry.

  Breakfast was laid in a small dark room just off the kitchen. The clock on the wall said it was only six-thirty and the small strip of sky she could see beyond a thick bush outside the barred window was dark grey. Rosie and Maureen were the first to arrive, and took seats at a table laid with eight places, but they were joined a few minutes later by two girls in their twenties, both in the chargehands’ maroon uniform.

  Maureen introduced them as Mary Connor and Linda Bell, the girls who she’d mentioned last night. She explained to them that Rosie had arrived while they were out and she’d shown her round.

  They appeared to be entirely disinterested, merely nodding at her. Rosie wasn’t sure if this was hostility or just because they were barely awake.

  Linda Bell looked the eldest, a buxom girl with short dark hair and bad skin. She sat down opposite Rosie and began pouring herself a giant portion of cornflakes.

  Mary Connor hesitated before grabbing the cornflakes box, and, perhaps aware that they were being rude, she looked at Rosie and passed it to her first. ‘You’d better tuck in too. You want to eat everything on offer at breakfast, it always seems for ever till dinner time,’ she said.