A Short History of Headley Court and Its Garden
(neither of which is as old as it looks)
WHEN THE FIRST TWENTY-FOUR DAYS have passed, the patients at Headley have time to look around them and wonder at its strangeness. Headley looks like a perfect Jacobean masterpiece, conceived by a gentleman creative genius some time in the 1700s. Except it wasn’t. It was originally a pretty ordinary farmhouse, bought and rebuilt by a very newly rich Victorian, Walter Cunliffe, at the end of the nineteenth century, and he didn’t much care for Gothic or Arts and Crafts or any of the prevailing aesthetics, so instead he made a grand house from a period he did like, built by the architect Edward Warren, copying the styles of two hundred years before, including a huge and weirdly wonderful garden. There are even features that imply actual Jacobean presences – the Pepys door to the billiard room – and the Cromwell Room, which has panelling on the walls that came originally from a house owned by the Lord Protector’s sister.
The panelling bought Cromwell’s ghost with it, apparently. The Lord Protector floats about through the walls, and even today medics and patients talk about feeling his presence as they work late or walk dark corridors alone. Perhaps he means to be there, observing what he started. It was on his watch, during the English Civil War, that a bill was passed recognising the government’s duty of care to the soldiers killed or wounded in its service.1 The first dedicated military hospital opened in London as a result, and then two more, staffed by doctors and nurses recruited from among the widows of soldiers. A short experiment but a precedent set. Restoration in 1660 meant repudiation and closure for any institutions created in the Interregnum, with responsibility for military health-care reverting to individual regimental colonels, although the building of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea went some way to redressing the old wounds.
Inside even the new buildings, more strangeness. Part of one of the gyms at Headley, its walls covered in mirrors, had a wide yellow track painted on the floor that wound through the whole area. It wasn’t a metaphor, it had a practical purpose: so that everyone knew not to leave things lying on the track, because that was where people walked on their big legs for the first time, and they needed the way to be clear. But the metaphor is irresistible. Follow the yellow brick road, where the wizard at the end turns out to be their own reflection. And it was good the first couple of times, but then what the patients mainly found was that the yellow brick road, and the gym, were no longer enough. They were too small, too busy and not real. Real life has things left in the way, and where they can’t decide entirely where they slow down or speed up. Real decides where and when, and real is better. Then they looked out of the windows and noticed that the garden was real, all around, so they stepped through the doors of the main house, and went to find it.
In 1912 Country Life magazine came to Headley to write a feature about the house. It was probably the crowning moment of its architect’s life, although, like so much else in the period, what the article did was capture part of the British way of life that would soon be blasted away in the First World War. They wrote about everything, including the bits of Cromwelliana, but they particularly liked the garden. So do I, and because it looks today much like it did then, here’s what they said (and it’s hard to resist a bit of Edwardian lifestyle magazine language):
Headley Court is approached from the north along a broad drive flanked by well-trimmed yew hedges. The south side […] is laid out as a large lawn, broken by topiary work. The main gardens lie on the north-east side and are made the more interesting by the provision of a great bathing pond. A practical point with regard to the pergola pillars is also worth noting. They are of grey slate, which has weathered to the colour of sea-worn oak and has the great advantage that it is, for all practical purposes, everlasting. Very attractive, too, are the many lead figures which have been employed. There is one gay-looking person busy with pipe and drum. In a fountain basin in the north-east garden several chubby little boys sit on over-turned vases […] and at the south-west two classical figures keep watch over the big yew sundial. In the lower walled garden there is another sundial of very original design. Among the most striking features of the gardens are the yew hedges; those surrounding the lawn are broken at regular intervals by wedge-shaped clumps or buttresses of clipped golden yew projecting into the lawn and giving an admirable contrast of colour.
They weren’t exaggerating about the big yew sundial. It takes up a whole lawn, all the numbers, precisely located, even the gnomon – the part that casts the shadow – and the family who commissioned it probably never even saw it fully grown. But everyone at Headley in its twenty-first-century life knows it well. Gigantic sundial, taller than a man on his long legs, and it only tells someone the time if they go up a ladder or look out of one of the upstairs windows. The yew hedges and walls make long corridors, to private places, past topiary rabbits and trains. There’s an orchard, cherries and apples, for the big house, and a nuttery (but no one has called it that for at least fifty years because it’s never a helpful word in a place with a designated psychiatric unit), with hazel and cobnut trees. And a proper Victorian greenhouse, for delicate plants and vegetables, just like in Downton Abbey. Nothing is hard or too formal, just carefully shaped to lead the visitor around the place, pleasingly. It was a wonderful mind that made that garden. Even the bricks in the walls are beautiful, and the walls themselves contain and define the garden, not in a confining, wall-y way, just evenly paced breaths, as those who come here look out, letting their brain make sense of it one component at a time. Walls, beautifully made and placed, walls can set people free, at their own pace, and calmly, no worrying about what lies beyond the horizon.
In 1987 the hurricane that struck the south of England took away many of the really big trees, and they were replaced by flat, cheaply maintained lawn, but the yew hedges were untouched and the garden didn’t really change its overall form. The remaining panes of glass in the greenhouse were smashed, and weeds grew up and out of it, and the topiary got a bit straggly, especially the rabbits, and the orchard trees went unpruned.2 But it was still essentially the same place that Country Life had photographed in 1912. Somehow, despite the destruction, still a place full of unusual and fanciful elements, according to the post-storm survey, with ‘the remnants of an exceedingly interesting garden’.3 Remnants are something they know their way around at Headley.
Like everyone else at Headley in 2009, the garden made itself useful immediately. It turns out there was a whole harvest of new goals growing amid the walls if patients and therapists knew where to look for them. There is a long grassy slope down to the main lawn. Getting up and down it on new long legs became the main metric to successful prosthetic fitting and use. No acronym, no checklist, no gym reps, just can you do the lawn yet, can you do it in the wet, can you get back up the slope?, any fool can get down it. Walking the garden’s paths, purposeful movement, seeing where they take them and how they take them there, not walking between parallel bars or on a machine or staying on the spot, going somewhere, leading far away from the main building, with gravel – GRAVEL, no one can wear prosthetics on gravel, according to the rule books – but they can if they practise enough and are prepared to fall and get scuffed.
There’s also long grass, wet in the rain, slippery, where they couldn’t see where they were placing prosthetic feet, and fallen apples all over the ground in the ghost orchard – try watching out for those when walking. The long paths had stone edges: walk along those one prosthetic foot in front of the other, like children do with arms spread and hands flat, keep balanced as long as possible, all the way to the end, then faster. A pile of old wooden railway sleepers lying in a heap just somewhere: walk up and down on those, on and off the end into the grass and weeds. Focus, fall, roll, go back in the gym and tone up the muscles needed so no falling next time. Faster.
They needed a physio to support them as they went further and further out along the paths, and they found one in particular keeping step with them, thoughtfully, and with a Thera-Band in his pocket (all working physios stow one of those resistive latex bands somewhere). He’d been the physio at Birmingham when Mark Ormrod was extubated and in Afghanistan, and was now at Headley as complex trauma clinical lead, and he knew about choices and goals, and that the garden offered so many more of those than the gym alone. Go up the slope while being pulled backwards by the Thera-Bands, or being dragged forward, so they have to lean back and redistribute their weight and still make the joints work. Improvise with whatever is there. The gardeners have left their wheelbarrows behind this morning – so push a wheelbarrow, then a loaded wheelbarrow and then, leaning down, take a heavy spade, dig it into a pile of grass clippings, load and lift it up and turn to tip it into the wheelbarrow, and push the wheelbarrow they just loaded up, and then a lawn mower just like they’d done at home and could see now that they would do again. Almost everyone enjoyed the competition, seeing who could do what faster than all the rest, up on to big legs, weights, heavier weights, longest in the garden, weaving a racing track around the trees in the orchard and the nuttery trip, on the rotting apples, get up, go on. Get to the end first, and keep moving where the end is so the competition never ends until darkness falls and the physio, who is surprisingly forceful when he needs to be, orders them inside.
But at the end of the autumn of 2009 the gardeners came and cleared up the apples and mowed the long grass, and all the difficult things were easy again. But they didn’t want to go back in the gym and sit on a boring Swiss ball, or walk up and down boring ramps in a full room where the lights were bright and unnatural and cleaning never quite managed to shift the smell left behind by human beings straining with all their might. Where they’d come to terms with what they saw in the mirror, but they didn’t need to see it all the time, every step and every second, every pulse beat and every strain. Their physio found that he was frustrated too, because he wanted to push a few limits himself. He saw how the garden was making them feel really better, all of them, including him, not just more adept with their new bodies and their skills. How they stood on the lawn and laughed and planned, hands on hips, balanced. They were growing in a garden that might help everyone to flourish and discover the remnants of themselves, which had once been extraordinary and were still there, under the damage of the storm. So within one garden he conceived of another, specially and newly made to grow challenges in. He’d read The Secret Garden at an impressionable age, especially the part where Colin, who might have been one of Sir Robert Jones’s crippled children, says to Dickon, who works in the garden: ‘You said that you’d have me walking about here same as other people – and you said that you’d have me digging. I thought you were just lying to please me. This is only the first day and I’ve walked – and here I am digging.’4 And because of that, I always think of the physio as Dickon; when I told him, he laughed in that way that meant he didn’t really mind.
So when the physio first talked about building a special garden to meet challenges in, his patients thought it was a brilliant idea and demanded, because they are soldiers, an assault course, designed for prosthetic wearers. Good idea, he got what they were going for, but unhelpful name. So he came up with test track – like the Formula One teams have, with, as they put it, many different kinds of turns and corners. So he stood where the long main lawn rolls down from the main house at Headley, halfway down the gravel path and turn left. A patch of boring flat lawn became the test track, built in a figure of eight within an oblong enclosure. It fitted neatly into the old dividing lines of the garden’s brick walls and yew hedges.
The test track was everything in the main garden that helped with walking and movement all rolled into one easily time-able course. It’s still there, and if you can go to one of those open garden days they sometimes have, you’ll recognise it immediately. The pathways are all different – gravel ones, cobbled ones, paved ones with insets of gravel and cobbles, a section made from split logs laid with the semicircle upwards (especially mean, this one) – and all have extra difficulties sneaked in, such as cambers, unexpected humps, slopes, uneven edges, bits sticking up, trip hazards. So not the perfect space it looks from a distance – and this was a serious problem when the contractors came to build the garden. They tried to level everything – no gradients, no humps, no edges, no cambers – but life, said the physio, isn’t like that; it’s not the yellow brick road without encumbrances. On the short journey round the track we need to find all the sharp edges and surprises that you find on the longer journey round life.
The track goes up and down stairs of varying height and depth to flat spaces with multi-step units, as though Mr Escher has dropped by and left one of his puzzles behind for them, up and down, keep their balance, lift their knee for a six-inch drop or a three-inch one. Life has lots of unexpected stairways, and the body needs to be ready for them, strong enough: for instance, in the pub they like, with some chairs by a fireplace that they get to up a badly lit, tight set of steps round a corner, while carrying an overfilled mug of coffee in one hand and their iPad in the other, so the banisters aren’t much help. Life is about having things in both hands that can’t always be put down, so they raced to the multi-step unit in the walled garden every day and practised until the light went or the surprisingly-forceful-when-he-needed-to-be physio chased them inside and off their legs.
The minute the track went down, it was full of testers. There were banisters and resting places for those at the beginning of their journey, who needed something to hold on to and somewhere to stop and gather themselves, but no one stayed on these very long. Time trials, endurance trials, like the wet grass in the orchard, doing the circuit wearing a welder’s mask so their vision was occluded, learning to feel what they walked on through their foot units and their titanium joints, trusting their own steps. That really woke up their central nervous system. Texture, substance, felt at the knees, not at the toes. Even on rainy days, never mind that the prosthetic workshop lot said don’t get the £20,000 microprocessor wet because the track was even more difficult when it was slippery – even more real. In the heavy snow of 2010, when all the garden was covered and white, out they went with the physio, who suggested snowball fights, provided they bent down and crumped the snowballs together without help and then hurled them and dodged the ones hurled back at them. (The medical term for this process is the rehabilitation of ballistic upper limb muscle power.) Those snowballs, thrown at Headley in 2010, were small frozen miracles of what humans can do when they really try. Snow marking out new lines on the walls, making the garden something completely different – as magical as the freezing of the Thames – and the sound of laughter in the cold.
Next stop along the pathway: the real world beyond the walls. If they’d shown they could take the worst of circuiting the test track and still remain upright, and they weren’t having anything but minor niggles with their socket, easily fixed by the prosthetics workshop, then it was off to London for hard-core long legs boot camp. There are some things not even the walled garden at its best can prepare them for: mainly, crowds. In crowds they will inevitably be jostled, and it can all be too much. Wearing shorts can help, because people see their prosthetics and they adjust, but not in the crowds flowing over city bridges and on busy shopping streets, heads down, headphones in, looking at screens, moving fast and focused, intolerant, used to bumping and being bumped.
So when they were ready, a whole group of them led by the physio took a train to Waterloo Station, through electronic ticket barriers, down to the tube, flowing with the crowds, escalators with their metal-teethed steps, out for the entire day, no chance of slipping back to their room at Headley to switch to stubbies or back in the chair. Embankment tube by the river, over the footbridge where the wind suddenly gusted hard over the water, through the crowds, and past the sudden distraction of the bad busker, and down a really tricky set of stairs to the skateboard park claimed from a concrete undercroft on the South Bank.5 They have ramps there too, and ledges and banks and sets of stairs, and on boot camp afternoons they have their own set of Headley patients using them while the boarders stand back in amazement. And then a riverboat, getting on a riverboat from the bankside, sailing and standing on a deck watching the city go by but the wind making the water choppy, and then Tower Bridge, where there were plenty of steps and stairs, and back to Headley in the evening. A whole day without the chair, in the real world, and every day after that meant time at their full height, balance, strength.
It was thought, before 2009, that people who had both their legs amputated at the thigh (bilateral transfemorals, which gets shortened to bi-lats) would never walk, no matter who they were or why it happened. Most of the physios and prosthetists who went to Headley were told this when they trained at college. There might be one or two exceptions, but not enough to count. Bilateral transfemoral amputees never walk. One day there was a fire alarm at Headley, and everyone had to exit the house quickly and assemble in the gym until the all-clear sounded. One of the prosthetists who had been told this at college looked across the gym and saw four bilateral transfemoral amputees standing on their legs, chatting, laughing, waiting to go back to work. Bilateral transfemoral amputees are limited by their own recovery and the technology of prosthetics, that’s all. Much remains to be done by others, but ask what you like of them, and they will get up and do it.