The answer was decided for me. I found work as a laundry assistant at the Oamaru Public Hospital, where I spent each day enclosed in the mangle room, drawing out the hot wet sheets as they appeared between the rollers, folding them and passing them to another assistant. Our faces in the steamy heat were flushed and sweating, and the conversation above the roar of the machinery was usually a shouted question and answer (‘Are you going to the Scottish this Saturday?’ ‘Are you coming to Mary’s shower?’) enlarged upon during the tea breaks, when the desirability of the ‘Scottish’ (a hall used for weekly dances) was debated, and Mary’s or Vivian’s or Noeline’s engagement ‘shower’ prepared for. I had no answers to the simplest questions: where had I been working before I came to the laundry? Was I ‘going out’ with anyone? Why didn’t I get my hair straightened? I could discuss the radio serial My Husband’s Love, which we listened to at ten o’clock each morning. I knew one or two racehorses, including Plunder Bar. I knew songs – ‘Give Me Five Minutes More’,
Only five minutes more,
Let me stay
Let me stay in your arms.
All the week I’ve dreamed about our Saturday date …
an outworn song even then, but I knew it. And I knew the names of Otago and Southland rugby favourites – the Trevathans, and the commentator Whang McKenzie. I felt out of place, however. (Siggy, Siggy, what will I do?)
Then one night, in the middle of the night, Mother had a heart attack. Waking, hearing the commotion, I was reminded of the night when Bruddie first became ill and we all woke and stood white-faced, shivering.
Now Bruddie came to my door where I stood in alarm. He spoke in the new tone used now by Dad and Bruddie when they spoke to me, as if I had to be ‘managed’ in some way, for fear I should break or respond in an unusual way which they could not deal with.
‘It’s all right. There’s nothing to worry about. Mum has had a heart attack. The doctor has given her morphine and they’re taking her to the hospital.’
I looked out to see Mother, seeming asleep, her face white as china, her long grey-white hair spread anyhow on the white pillow, being carried out on a stretcher. She opened her eyes and started to apologise for having fallen ill; then she closed them again. Dad and Bruddie went with her to the hospital, and I went back to bed. There was a dent at the foot of the bed where Siggy had been, and had leapt with fright out of the window. I looked out of the window into the tree-filled night. I heard the three o’clock morepork calling. And already the night was fading around the edges. I knew it was a night of the kind of violent change that always happens, and had appeared as a milestone in the landscape of our family.
In the morning, as it had been years ago on the first morning after Bruddie’s illness began, I woke remembering the complex fearful change in our lives. I longed for everything to be as it had been, with Mother quiet, self-effacing, providing; but it was not so; Mother had spoken at last, in pain. What if she died? No, they had said, with plenty of rest she would recover, although in future she would need to rest more, care more for herself, be cared for.
And while she rested warm and safe in the hospital, I could see the desolation in my father’s face – Dad, who always showed panic whenever he entered the kitchen and said, ‘Where’s Mum?’ and she was not there, even for the moment not there, perhaps in another room or out at the clothesline; but now she was gone from the house, and my father’s face showed his complete loss and bewilderment.
I made the breakfast. I brewed the everlasting pot of tea for Dad, crouched in his chair at his end of the table, but I did not extend my attention to the refinements he sought, demanded, from Mother – the tea sugared, stirred, shoes cleaned, back scratched. I heated the electric iron to iron his handkerchiefs and his shirt. He set his own blueys to soak in the wash-house tub, poking them with the copper-stick. He also set and lit the fire and fetched the shovels of railway coal from the heap in the lean-to by the back door.
Mother had spoken at last; in pain. The magic of fires in the coal range, hot meals, batches of pikelets cooked on the polished black girdle, the continued attendance of the servant upon the household, was over.
How dare she fall ill! We were desperate to have her returned to us, returned whole without pain.
I saw Mother in hospital. For the first time, as a result of her complete, dramatic removal from her family, I saw her as a person, and I was afraid and resentful. Why, she was a person such as you meet in the street. She could laugh and talk and express opinions without being ridiculed; and there she was, writing poems in a small notebook and reading them to the other patients, who were impressed with her talent.
‘Your mother writes lovely poems.’
What had we done to her, each of us, day after day, year after year, that we had washed away her evidence of self, all her own furniture from her own room, and crowded it with our selves and our lives; or perhaps it was not a room but a garden that we cleared to plant ourselves deeply there, and now that we were removed, all her own blossoms had sprung up … was it like that? And what of the blows she had, the search for cures, the two inquests, the daughter declared mad, the frail husband made strong only by his intermittent potions of cruelty?
Faced with the family anguish, I made my usual escape, the route now perfected, and once again I was in Seacliff Hospital. I knew as soon as I arrived there that the days of practising that form of escape were over. I would go away somewhere, live on my own, earn enough money to live on, write my books: it was no use: I now had what was known as a ‘history’, and ways of dealing with those with a ‘history’ were stereotyped, without investigation. Very quickly, in my panic, I was removed to the back ward, the Brick Building, where I became one of the forgotten people. When Mother recovered her health, she and Bruddie and Dad would visit me for Christmas and my birthday and on one or two other occasions during the year. It was recognised that I was now in hospital ‘for life’. What I have described in Istina Mavet is my sense of hopelessness as the months passed, my fear of having to endure that constant state of physical capture where I was indeed at the mercy of those who made judgments and decisions without even talking at length to me or trying to know me or even submitting me to the standard tests which are available to psychiatrists. The state could be defined as forced submission to custodial capture.
In the back ward I became part of a memorable family that I have described individually in Faces in the Water. It was their sadness and courage and my desire to ‘speak’ for them that enabled me to survive, helped by the insight of such fine junior and staff nurses as Cassidy, Doherty (both Maori women), ‘Taffy’, the Welsh nurse now living in Cardiff, Noreen Ramsay (who gave me extra food when I was hungry) and others. The attitude of those in charge who unfortunately wrote the reports and influenced the treatment was that of reprimand and punishment, with certain forms of medical treatment being threatened as punishment for failure to ‘co-operate’ where ‘not co-operate’ might mean a refusal to obey an order, say, to go to the doorless lavatories with six others and urinate in public while suffering verbal abuse by the nurse for being unwilling. ‘Too fussy are we? Well, Miss Educated, you’ll learn a thing or two here.’
Dear Educated, Miss Educated: sadly, the fact of my having been to high school, training college and university struck a vein of vindictiveness among some of the staff.
It was now my writing that at last came to my rescue. It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life. My mother had been persuaded to sign permission for me to undergo a leucotomy; I know that she would not have done so had not the experts wielded heavily weighted arguments – the experts, who over the years as my ‘history’ was accumulating, had not spoken to me at one time for longer than ten or fifteen minutes, and in total time over eight years, for about eighty minutes; who had administered no tests, not even the physical tests of E.E.G. or X-rays (apart from the chest X-ray whenever there was a new case of tuberculosis, a disease prevalent in the mental hospitals then); the experts whose judgment was based on daily reports by overworked irritable nursing sisters. I listened, trying to avoid the swamping wave of horror, when Dr Burt, a likeable overworked young doctor who had scarcely spoken to me except to say ‘good morning, how are you’ and not wait for a reply as he was whisked through the ward, found time to explain that I would be having a leucotomy operation, that it would be good for me, that, following it, I would be ‘out of hospital in no time’. I listened also with a feeling that my erasure was being completed when the ward sister, suddenly interested that something was about to be ‘done’ with and to me, painted her picture of how I would be when it was ‘all over’.
‘We had one patient who was here for years until she had a leucotomy. And now she’s selling hats in a hat shop. I saw her just the other day, selling hats, as normal as anyone. Wouldn’t you like to be normal?’
Everyone felt that it was better for me to be ‘normal’ and not have fancy intellectual notions about being a writer, that it was better for me to be out of hospital, working at an ordinary occupation, mixing with others …
The scene was carefully set. A young woman of my age who had become a friend but who had remained in the admission ward, the ‘good’ ward, was also spoken of as about to have a leucotomy.
‘Nola’s having one,’ they told me.
Nola’s having her hair straightened, Nola’s having a party dress, Nola’s having a party – why not you too?
Nola suffered from asthma and the complication of being in a family of brilliant beautiful people. I can make no judgment on her ‘case’ except to say that in a period before the use of drugs, leucotomy was becoming a ‘convenience’ treatment.
I repeat that my writing saved me. I had seen in the ward office the list of those ‘down for a leucotomy’, with my name on the list, and other names being crossed off as the operation was performed. My ‘turn’ must have been very close when one evening the superintendent of the hospital, Dr Blake Palmer, made an unusual visit to the ward. He spoke to me – to the amazement of everyone.
As it was my first chance to discuss with anyone, apart from those who had persuaded me, the prospect of my operation, I said urgently, ‘Dr Blake Palmer, what do you think?’
He pointed to the newspaper in his hand.
‘About the prize?’
I was bewildered. What prize? ‘No,’ I said, ‘about the leucotomy.’
He looked stern, ‘I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.’ He unfolded his newspaper. ‘Have you seen the Stop Press in tonight’s Star?’
A ridiculous question to ask in a back ward where there was no reading matter; surely he knew?
‘You’ve won the Hubert Church Award for the best prose. Your book, The Lagoon.’
I knew nothing about the Hubert Church Award. Winning it was obviously something to be pleased about.
I smiled. ‘Have I?’
‘Yes. And we’re moving you out of this ward. And no leucotomy.’
The winning of the prize and the attention of a new doctor from Scotland who accepted me as I appeared to him and not as he learned about me from my ‘history’ or reports of me, and the move by Dr Blake Palmer to have me spend less time in the hospital ward by using me as ‘tea lady’ in the front office and allowing me to have occupational therapy, where I learned to make baskets, to fill toothpaste tubes with toothpaste, and, from a book written in French, to weave French lace, and to weave on large and small looms, all enabled me to be prepared for discharge from hospital. Instead of being treated by leucotomy, I was treated as a person of some worth, a human being, in spite of the misgivings and unwillingness of some members of the staff, who, like certain relatives when a child is given attention, warn the mother that the child is being ‘spoiled’, spoke pessimistically and perhaps enviously of my being ‘made a fuss of’. ‘It will spoil her. Dr Blake Palmer will “drop her” and she’ll be back in the Brick Building in no time.’
My friend Nola, who unfortunately had not won a prize, whose name did not appear in the newspaper, had her leucotomy and was returned to the hospital, where, among the group known as ‘the leucotomies’, some attempt was made to continue, with personal attention, the process of ‘being made normal, or at least being changed’. The ‘leucotomies’ were talked to, taken for walks, prettied with make-up and floral scarves covering their shaven heads. They were silent, docile; their eyes were large and dark and their faces pale, with damp skin. They were being ‘retrained’, to ‘fit in’ to the everyday world, always described as ‘outside’; ‘the world outside’. In the whirlwind of work and the shortage of staff and the too-slow process of retraining, the leucotomies one by one became the casualties of withdrawn attention and interest; the false spring turned once again to winter.
When I was eventually discharged from hospital, Nola remained, and although she did spend time out of hospital, she was often re-admitted; over the years I kept in touch with her, and it was like living in a fairytale where conscience, and what might have been, and what was, not only speak but spring to life and become a living companion, a reminder.
Nola died a few years ago in her sleep. The legacy of her dehumanising change remains no doubt with all those who knew her; I have it with me always.
I was discharged from hospital ‘on probation’. After having received over two hundred applications of unmodified E.C.T., each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution, and in the process having my memory shredded and in some aspects weakened permanently or destroyed, and after having been subjected to proposals to have myself changed, by a physical operation, into a more acceptable, amenable, normal person, I arrived home at Willowglen, outwardly smiling and calm, but inwardly with all confidence gone, with the conviction at last that I was officially a non-person. I had seen enough of schizophrenia to know that I had never suffered from it, and I had long discarded the prospect of inevitable mental doom. Against this opinion, however, I now had the weight of the ‘experts’ and the ‘world’ and I was in no state to assert myself. There was the added fear of what might happen to me should I ever return to hospital. And there was still the fact, the problem that, had it been solved eight or nine years ago, I might have been left free to pursue the kind of life I felt I wanted to lead. A problem with such a simple solution! A place to live and write, with enough money to support myself.
There was also the frightening knowledge that the desire to write, the enjoyment of writing, has little correlation with talent. Might I, not, after all, be deluding myself like other patients I had seen in hospital, one in particular, a harmless young woman who quietly sat in the admission ward day after day writing her ‘book’ because she wanted to be a writer, and her book, on examination, revealing pages and pages of pencilled o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o. Or was that the new form of communication?
In spite of all, I felt joyful returning to Willowglen, where I could at last go out under the sky, where I could perform even the simplest of human functions without either being ordered to do so or observed while I performed. I could decide for myself what I wished to do, where I should be, how I should feel, how I should think of my future. The words decide and future, which had loomed so large in my childhood, had a new intensity of meaning.
After being and feeling a nothing and nobody, and forced into a continued state of physical and emotional submission, I felt as if the world would sweep over and engulf me, while I would meekly accept and act upon suggestions and orders from others, out of the habitual fear that had grown within me, in hospital.
Ah, but it was a delight to roam the hills again with my now many-kittened Siggy, to sit near the matagouri among the sheep, and try to forget everything but the sky swept with its arrows of cirrus clouds, which I used to try so hard to draw with my double B pencil. I borrowed a small tent from Bruddie, who had been having his own adventures in New Zealand and Australia while I was in hospital. I pitched the tent under the pine trees, so great was my need to be among the trees and under the sky, and at night I slept in the tent and during the day I sat writing in the railway notebook given to me by my father in his sad haste to make all as it used to be, everyone small again and he the king of the world. He had retired from the railway and was now working as an engine driver at the lime works, coming home each day clouded with white dust as if he had been in a snow storm.
My time sleeping in a tent was cut short. Wasn’t it rather … strange for me to want to sleep in a tent … people were talking … I gave up the tent for my old bedroom up at the house.
‘It’s nice to have Janet home again,’ people said, in my presence. ‘How is she? Would she like some shortbread?’
I joined the new town library and discovered William Faulkner and Franz Kafka, and I rediscovered the few books left on my own bookshelf. I began to write stories and poems and to think of a future without being overcome by fear that I would be seized and ‘treated’ without being able to escape. Even so, the nightmares of my time in hospital persist in sleep and often I wake in dread, having dreamed that the nurses are coming to ‘take me for treatment’.
Mother’s health had improved under the care of Professor Smirk of Dunedin. Periodically she visited his clinic and was admitted for short stays in hospital, where once again she became a ‘person’ in the company of those who were not members of the family. Although scarcely sixty years old, and still dreaming of buying her daughters a white fox fur, she was worn out by her living (I thought) for her husband and children, as if without her own life, like a stake cut from a grand tree, stripped of its own shoots and set beside flourishing plants, bound to them, taking the force of the prevailing wind, moving only as the wind moved while the sheltered plants trembled lightly with only a rumour of storm. My vision of my mother combined strangely with her presence – her white thinning hair, her toothless mouth, for she had never been fitted with comfortable false teeth, her hawklike Godfrey nose pointed towards her Godfrey chin, or, as we used to say, her ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’ chin, her used body in its Glassons Warehouse costume (it was her delight that Mabel Howard also bought clothes from Glassons) and McDiarmids ‘on tick’ wide-bodied shoes, her face serene as ever and her eyes always waiting to sparkle with humour about political or personal events. She had given up the Christadelphian meetings, disillusioned by too much quarrelling among the pacifists, but she was still a Christadelphian, lover of Christ. During the years of her married life Christ had been her one close friend. She still talked, however, and listed her childhood friends, ‘Hetty Peake, Ruby Blake, Kate Rodley, Lucy Martella, Dorcas Dryden.’ She remembered her boyfriends, too. And when Dad’s friend from the Wyndham days, Johnny and his wife retired to live near us in Oamaru, Mother’s diffidence made her unable to address Mrs Walker as Bessie. The strong feeling haunted me that Mother had never lived in her real ‘place’, that her real world had been her life within.
Her eyesight was now failing. Sewing buttons on the shirts and pyjamas and stitching the frayed cuffs of the ‘menfolk’, she had to ask for help in threading her needle. I sat sewing, too, and my thread through my needle was keen and swift as a tiny spear. ‘Janet, can you thread the needle for me?’ and with an inside fury at this sign of her helplessness, I took the needle, not gently, and threaded it with the lightning accuracy of my twenty-ninth year. She had never aspired, against the glories of her sisters-in-law, to be a needlewoman, nor had she time during the years to sit and sew, while we girls had long ago been makers for better or worse of our own clothes; and to see Mother helpless in a role which had scarcely claimed her once-keen eyesight, reserved for matters of the heart and spirit, for poetry, for the making of fires and the preparation of food, for looking at the beloved ‘nature’, I felt the terrible reduction in her life, a final subtraction which I could not bear to face. I knew, also, that I would never be close to her, for my past and my future life were barriers against the intimacy that grows between mother and daughter.
I could postpone my future no longer. I answered an advertisement for a housemaid at the Grand Hotel, Dunedin, my references being an old letter from the mayor of Oamaru, and the reference from Playfair Street, Caversham, ‘polite to the guests at all times … honest … industrious …’ and once again, moving towards my Future, I travelled south on the slow train to Dunedin.