6.

THERE WERE THREE LONG ROWS OF IRON BEDS with grimy coverlets. Daisy tried not to cry, to be strong and brave for Jesus, as Captain at The Nest had urged. In the centre of the ward were two nursing stations, said the aide, who was dressed in blue with a blue-and-white headband, which was how you knew she was an aide. Aides wore blue, nurses wore white, assistants wore green stripes. Opposite the stations were the four Punishment Rooms, two on each side, so the nurse on duty could keep watch. “You don’t want to end up in there,” warned Nurse Chalmers, supervisor for Ward O-3, from her station in the Cottage.

Inside the guard, or punishment, room was a narrow bed and a window. Daisy told me that she and the girls would often sneak in and look out of the window. The dorm had long drab walls with shards of plaster peeling from the ceilings. The ward was separated into one area for those who were unclean and incontinent — Daisy would not be with them as an ex-Army girl — and those who were clean in their habits. The drugs were kept next to the Nursing Office where Daisy had no business ever to be.

“This is your bed. Use only this,” said the young nursing aide, not unkindly. “Do not switch beds, and always answer your name at Roll Call.” Her name was Miss Abbeyfield, but Nurse Chalmers had called out “Abbey” to her. “The other girls will be up soon.”

The bed was like the others, crammed inches away from the ones on each side. It was an iron bed with oval iron bars at the head. It had one grey blanket and a hard pillow. There was a strong odour of urine, poop, stale blood, and dust that Daisy was not used to after her fresh room at The Nest, where Captain had insisted on the windows being kept open one inch whatever the weather for “fresh air.”

“Where’s my, my bedside table?” Daisy asked timidly, putting down her small cotton overnight bag between the beds. She couldn’t see any down the long dorm.

“Ugh. Hey, Vera, this one wants a bedside table!”

“Where she think she is, Château Laurier?”

“Use under the mattress, for your lipstick,” whispered a thin young girl later, who had something wrong with her lips. Daisy didn’t want to look at her. She did not want this terrible, ugly girl called Alice — there was something very wrong with her — for a “buddy.” She did not want to be in this terrible ward with all these girls and young women who had come shambling and stomping into the dorm, hundreds of them it seemed. They were loud, ugly, misshapen girls, frightening really. They grabbed at their tooth-brushes and surged to a doorway at one of the dorm where there was a bathroom. Too, they were pulling down their knickers already, pushing for the toilets — there was no door to the toilets, Daisy was alarmed to see. She was shocked to understand that you had to pee in front of everybody, at a row of open cubicles, the nurses and aides watching, opposite a row of filthy sinks. And once the door was locked at the end of the room at night, you couldn’t get up and pee again until the morning, even if you wanted to badly. You had to keep the pee in.

She felt sobs coming; she wanted to go home, back to The Nest and First Lieutenant Lovering, she whimpered to Abbey, who, with her round kindly face and rosy cheeks, surely must be kind.

“You’re in Ward O-3, Daisy, in Cottage O, and this is where you’ll stay.”

Ward Admission Record, Ontario Hospital School

(Department of Health – Hospitals Division)

Daisy Lumsden:

Ambulatory female. Admitted 3:00 p.m. August 23, 1959.

Height: 64 inches. Weight: 80 lbs.

Condition of person (indicate cleanliness, vermin etc.): Clean, no vermin.

Condition of hair: Brown, free from vermin.

Admission care given: Routine tub bath.

Articles on Patient: None.

Attitude of Patient on Admission: (cooperative, resistive, disturbed, excited, violent, threatening, etc.): Cooperative, but can be explosive.

Signed: Beatrice Gormers, Reg. Nurse.

(Supervisor in charge, Infirmary.)

Dr. William Serson had been the medical doctor on duty that August day in the new Infirmary where Daisy, a first admission under the guardianship of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, had been held with other girls in the isolation ward until the assessments were done. The old Infirmary where Daisy’s mother, Ella, and other Hewitt relatives, as well as her father’s sister, Effie, had been kept, stood further down a steep slope on the institution grounds, unbeknownst to Daisy. It was occupied now by the overflow of patients from other Cottages, for the population of the hospital had reached almost 3,000 by 1959.

Dr. Serson had sifted quickly but decisively through Daisy Lumsden’s documents, including the two Physicians’ Certificates of Incompetence as per section 12 of the Mental Hospitals Act that had been forwarded from the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital: “...the certificate or certificates, when accompanied by the forms mentioned in subsection 1 of section 20, shall be sufficient authority to any person to convey the patient to the institution … and to the authorities thereof to detain him therein…”

“Another member of this family for you, and who knows how many more there are in the hospital,” the psychiatrist, Dr. Edmunds, at the Toronto Psychiatric Hospital had written dryly in the accompanying note. The Lumsdens and the Hewitts had produced, apparently, at least twenty-one retarded children between them, which meant that Daisy was the third generation designated as retarded.

Three generations mentally retarded! Both sides of the family affected, though “the parents were not blood relations,” the psychologist, Mr. Stanstead, at TPH had commented under “Family History.” Mr. Gooding, the psychologist at Orillia, had been most interested in the genetic aspect of the case, and drawn up a family tree of the Lumsdens and Hewitts going back to the patient’s great-grandmother, who had been an inmate at Rainhill Asylum in Liverpool, England. This “tree” was still in Daisy’s file.

There was no end to the degeneracy of this family. The Lumsdens were all backward or mentally deficient. On the maternal side, the patient’s mother, Ella Lumsden, née Hewitt, an “Imbecile” and potential arsonist in childhood, had been a patient in the Hospital for the Feeble-Minded in 1937, along with her brothers and an illegitimate nephew. Her older sister, Henrietta (a patient at the Cobourg Asylum) had had an illegitimate son at age sixteen named Cuthbert who was placed at the Orillia Hospital for the Feeble-Minded by the Toronto Children’s Aid Society at age six. An incorrigible child by all reports; he had bit the teacher in the Backward Class and called her a “sod.” Cuthbert Hewitt was still in Orillia, in his twenties now, a patient in Cottage B (for low-grade males), something that Daisy Lumsden need not know, of course. Dr. Brillinger, colleague and fellow physician, agreed.

As to the rest of the Hewitts, the Toronto Social Service Index (TSSI) on Adelaide Street had put out a call for information on the younger boys Oswald and Wilfred, now men in their late thirties, who had attended Jarvis Vocational School and done fairly well there in the Backward Vocational classes; TSSI wanted to follow through on them for the records.

Mr. Gooding, the psychometrist, had assessed Daisy ’s I.Q. at 54 — mid- or half-moron level — even though at one point the psychologist at CAS had given Daisy a score of 66 when she was nearly five, and Mr. Stanstead, at Toronto Psychiatric Hospital, had given Daisy a score of 62 on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales when Daisy was seven and a half. Mr. Gooding seemed not to notice the discrepancy in results, the dramatic drop in Daisy’s performance, or make allowance for a child in shock over the journey from Toronto, over the affront of an intimate physical examination, or over finding herself cast into a new life in the middle of nowhere.

She had been too frightened she would fall off the narrow examining table to cry out as she lay with her feet in the stirrups, legs apart. “This won’t take a minute.”

“They brought you into a room in isolation in th’ Infirm’ry with other girls. Oh, there was about seven of us,” Daisy recalled. “Then they told you to undress for th’ physical. You had to line up in a straight line and step forward when your name was called. Girls and boys separate. They put their hands and fingers all over you, in your ears, in your mouth, up your vagina, everywhere, you lay on your back upon a table. You had to open your mouth wide and say, ‘Ahh.’ And be weighed on a scale and measured. Their hands was all over your breasts squeezing — mine was small, I was just a kid of twelve nearly thirteen,” she said. “What right did they have ter do that? I was just a kid.”

“Physical completed: 11:45 am,” the report stated. She had been given the usual mandatory tub bath, her hair shorn. Short stumpy tufts now stuck out from her head down to her ears. She was ugly now, she knew.

She remembered crying after her hair was shorn, to stop nits and lice, they had said. “I want to go home, I want to go back to my Mommy and Dada,” she had wept. And they’d laughed and said, ‘Your parents are no good. You’ve been taken away from them and that’s why you’re here.’ An’ I cried all the harder.”

She had been “withdrawn and dull,” Mr. Gooding had noted during the psychological examination: “A defective-looking girl. Conversation limited due to intellectual defect.”

Yet the physical examination had also shown a strong, healthy girl, noted Dr. Serson as he went over the results from Mr. Gooding. (“Head size normal: circumference 53cms”). Inoculations were in place; the Wassermann test was completed (“Negative”); her genitourinary system NAD (“No Apparent Disease”). Number concepts good. She could spell simple words like “cat” and “dog.” Overall, a sweet and obedient girl, he noted (this was important). Some masturbation.

Dr. Serson hesitated on the final pronouncement. First Admissions into Orillia that year, 1959, had been in the ten to fourteen age range, all “moron” level: twenty-four males and only twelve females; thirty-six in total.

There was a shortage of menial help on Ward O-3 in Cottage O for the female patients. He wrote down briskly: “Classification, Half-Moron. Placement: Ward O-3, Cottage O.”

Without hesitation, he assigned Daisy to morning academics in the Orillia school in Group 20, moron group, and Ward Work in the afternoon, adding: “Custodial” (“for life”).