The Girl Who Couldn’t Read. John Harding
stay here you must. You have been committed. Believe me, this is the right home for you at present. Here you will get the treatment you need.’
Tears ran down the woman’s cheeks and she began wringing her hands. ‘But sir, I – I—’
‘There, there, calm yourself. Everything will be all right. It’s a great shock to find yourself in a place like this, I know. But it is your best chance of becoming well again.’ He smiled, handed the notes back to the attendant, turned to me and said, ‘Right, let’s be getting along now,’ and made for the door.
‘How long will it take?’ I said, as I struggled as usual to keep up with him.
‘How long will what take?’
‘For that woman to recover her health and get back to her child. She seemed perfectly sane and sensible to me.’
He stopped and smiled at me patronisingly. ‘To you, yes, because you have no practical experience. Here the woman is under no pressure, but what would happen if she were let loose in the world again and some little thing in her life went wrong? How many restaurants would she destroy then, eh? How many doctors would she beat up – or worse?’
I said nothing. I could see he would only grow angry again if I took him on.
‘You and I would not behave so. At least I know I wouldn’t, and I hope you wouldn’t either. But she will do the same again because there is a pathological illness of the brain underlying her actions. It’s a physical thing and not something that can be altered by “kindness”. Now do you understand?’
This last question was rhetorical and he strode on. I stared after him. How easily I could imagine him smashing something or striking someone, there was the irony of the thing! I couldn’t help but smile at his assuming me to be so peaceable too. Seeming, seeming! How simple it is to judge a sane man mad and a mad man sane! What a combination Morgan and I made. The lunatics had taken over the asylum.
I had an hour to myself before dinner and, although the Shakespeare called invitingly from my bedside table, settled down to read Moral Treatment.
The introduction itself was sufficient to make me understand Morgan’s hostility. ‘In the past,’ wrote the Reverend Abrahams, ‘a cruel and inhuman regime was practised against those unfortunates judged to be suffering from mental illness. They were treated more like animals than humans with souls. They were imprisoned, beaten, put under restraint and subjected to all manner of indignities. They lost all their rights and were often committed to institutions for life with no recourse to appeal. In most cases this treatment had no therapeutic value.
‘In twenty years of dealing with the mentally ill, I have treated them according to my Christian principles, with the result that the vast majority have had their symptoms sufficiently alleviated to be able to take their places in society and lead a contented and useful life …’
This was so at odds with Morgan’s philosophy that I found myself utterly absorbed. In the opening chapters Abrahams, who acknowledged himself a Quaker, explained the day-to-day running of his small hospital. Patients were treated as fellow members of the human race. They were kept busy at simple tasks such as gardening, sewing, carpentry and the like according to their tastes and abilities. During their leisure times they were encouraged to read, to take walks around the grounds, to play games both indoor and outdoor, including card games, chess, croquet and tennis; they were offered entertainment in the form of lectures, plays and musical gatherings. They were not made to feel different from the rest of mankind but wore their own clothes and were spoken to with respect by the staff. They were rarely locked up and only then on occasions when they were thought to represent a physical threat to themselves or others, which were rare. They were given wholesome and nutritious food. Above all, the people who looked after them, who were not doctors but ministers and trained nurses, talked with them regularly and listened to their accounts of what troubled them.
Under this system, according to Abrahams, the vast majority of his patients recovered, usually in a matter of months, and were well enough to be restored to their families. It was his firm belief that for most people mental illness was not a permanent state of being but a temporary crisis, brought about by some misfortune, which might be anything from a family death to a financial collapse. When handled with sympathy and kindness, patients recovered and became, with only a few exceptions, their former selves.
All of this was so reasonably argued, and put down in such a matter-of-fact way, with many examples of individual cases, that by the time I closed the book, I was already well on the way to being convinced.
Dinner found Morgan in affable mood. He discoursed upon his youth and his experiences as a doctor practising in an ordinary hospital, treating all manner of illnesses and injuries, and recounted anecdotes, some of which were genuinely amusing and others so concerned with the blood and gore often associated with doctoring that I didn’t consider them conducive to enjoying my dinner, although I made sure I ate my fill anyway.
At one stage he asked me about myself, saying he would like to know a little of my history beyond what he had seen in my application for employment, that he knew all about my education at medical school, but nothing personal about me. I improvised easily the rest of my background, cheerfully killing off my father, an attorney, when I was ten, when he was trampled to death by an unruly horse (‘You seem to have inherited his misfortune for accidents involving transportation,’ Morgan interposed at this point, a remark I could not help thinking would have been insensitive had either of the incidents he was referring to actually happened), and disposing of my mother by means of the scarlet fever, which carried her off when I was sixteen. The result of recounting my struggles as an orphan was to see Morgan look at me with something like admiration, seeing me in a new light, as I described the various vicissitudes I’d endured as I single-handedly worked my way through school. The whole was a mixture of truth and invention. It was a technique I’d used so many times before, it came easily to me – creating the background for a character, the bits in between the lines that aren’t written down.
‘Bravo,’ he said, pouring us another glass of wine and then lifting his in a toast that I copied. ‘Your unfortunate past has been the making of you. It has provided you with grit and determination to work hard. It will serve you far better than being born with a silver spoon in your mouth and treading the primrose path.’
I beamed with pride, feeling very satisfied with my new self.
Back in my room I spent a long evening absorbed by more of Moral Treatment. It was not the sort of book I had been used to. Drama, novels and poetry had been my literary meat and drink, and I had some difficulty following all the arguments put forward in it, although my interest always picked up when I came across any case history the author included by way of example. It was always people that fascinated me. Facts are too malleable to make me have much respect for them.
I heard the clock strike midnight as I struggled through the second half of the book, yawning all the while. It was no wonder I was tired. There was the business of the wreck and the injuries I had suffered. Besides the blow to the head, I had sore ribs and an ache in my back that made it hard for me to sit comfortably, no matter how I tried to arrange myself. Then there had been all the stress to my nerves of arriving here, the pressure of being a new, untried employee, the battle within myself to keep in line, to overcome my obstreperous nature and not speak against the hard treatment of the poor wretches who were my fellow inhabitants of this place, separated from me by that most fragile of borders, chance. The wine at dinner had not helped either, so that at some point, notwithstanding my determination to plough through to the end of the book and prepare my arguments for the morrow, I must have fallen asleep.
I had the dream again, the one that always seems to return in times of trouble. I was back on my uncle’s chicken farm, where I’d arrived the day before following the death of my mother. I’d never had a father; he’d run off before I was even born. I was eleven years old and my