11.

“DAISY IS A SNEAKY, SEXY GIRL and has to be watched around boys,” Nurse Chalmers recorded in the Ward Progress Sheet that February day in 1964. “Lazy in Ward Work and untidy about self.”

The change in Daisy Lumsden could be traced back directly, of course, to that fateful visit home over the previous Christmas, in 1963, that Nurse Chalmers had strongly opposed. The mother, Mrs. Lumsden (a virtual imbecile bordering on idiocy) had appeared at the door of Ward O-1 downstairs unannounced, without due notification, yelling obscenities and demanding it was time her daughter Daisy was let out as she was sixteen (she knew the law) and they couldn’t keep her locked up in that prison forever. When argued with — the Lumsdens had been given the visiting rules — she had told Nurse Chalmers to “stick ’er thermom’ter up’er arse.” This last comment had been struck through in the records, possibly by Nurse Chalmers herself. Nurse Chalmers had slammed the door, whereupon Mrs. Lumsden had thrown herself to the ground, beating her fists on the tarmac, tearing at her clothes, and exposing her dirty pink brassiere. What was one to do with such a woman — throw a bucket of water over her?

“She’s ’aving fits,” Mr. Lumsden said meekly.

Nurse Chalmers had objected. But Superintendent Dr. Houze had demurred. The CAS of Toronto had granted probationary access over the phone to Mr. and Mrs. Lumsden for Daisy to go home over Christmas, as was their parental right. There had been no trouble before on visits on the odd occasion she had been allowed to spend the weekend when she was younger, and Daisy was a sweet-natured, obedient girl, and a good ward worker.

“Precisely,” Nurse Chalmers had said.

Daisy had returned obviously distraught. Something had happened, something serious. “Did anybody touch you? Did a man do anything to you, Daisy?” Nurse Chalmers had shaken her. But Daisy stayed curled up on her bed and would not move. Tense, moody, and irritable, the girl complained of pains in her stomach. Too, there was blood on her nightie though her menstrual period was not due. (Nurse Chalmers had checked the Menstrual Charts in her office.)

Nurse Chalmers sent her at once to the Infirmary. During the physical examination Daisy had apparently broken down, and confessed to Dr. Serson that she had been forced to have sexual intercourse “all weekend” by her mother with her mother’s “boyfriend,” a man she’d picked up outside of 999 Queen Street (the Queen Street Mental Health Centre, as it was called then). Her mother had given her drugs, she claimed, though she could not name them when asked, and could only guess they were her mother’s sleeping pills. She also insisted that she had had intercourse “lotsa times,” and that her mother had paid her boyfriend to do it. “She took off my clothes, I couldn’ struggle I was too drugged up, and she paid him money to have sex with me.”

Of course, it was obviously the other way around. Mrs. Lumsden had pimped out her daughter. Not the first time this had happened with their girls and no doubt not the last. Nurse Chalmers pursed her lips.

Daisy had known from her training at The Nest that what the man was doing with the thing between his legs was bad, very bad. Afterwards she had smelled the rotten, fishy smell nothing would ever wash away — his spunk. Daisy had struggled, she had wept: “No, Mommy, no please!” But he had done it anyway and she had helped, pulling Daisy’s legs up over his shoulders. She had gagged, then shook from all his jerking, his hairy bum going in and out, up and down. “Dada!” she had screamed. But of course he was at work, the night shift at Christie’s Biscuits.

She stayed huddled under the blanket all weekend — day after day, and between the times the man came back. She could not eat or sleep. She had to drink in the end, and the pills were in it she knew. The next day was Christmas; snow was falling against the grimy window and bells were ringing through the city streets.

She had hurriedly pulled on her skirt, sweater, shoes, and black stockings that Monday morning, then caught the bus back to the Hospital School in Orillia where she was met by an aide. She trembled, yet was glad in a dull sort of way to see the lights above at O-3 dorm winking through the dusk.

“Are you sure, Daisy…?” Dr. Serson had hesitated a moment on the examining table, creating a silence at the heart of things Daisy did not have enough words for. Dr. Serson did not know what to make of what he called her “story.”

“She sticks to her story,” he wrote in her record.

How much credibility should one give to these claims? Daisy was, it had to be borne in mind, an imbecile, mentally retarded, he frowned to himself. And so there had been no follow-up. How could there be with a mother such as Ella Lumsden? No torn hymen was acknowledged, or bruises noted; no vital sperm swab was taken to be sent to the laboratory for proof. If she had been raped all weekend as she claimed, sperm must surely have still been present in the vagina and cervix. But how valid was an imbecile’s’s memory? It was pointless for the hospital to take action, superintendent Hamilton hedged.

There was a hurried consultation as to who had given permission for the visit, knowing the parents were deemed “unsuitable,” the mother virtually dangerous. Best to pass over the incident. Besides, who would they take action against? A nameless man? An unpleasant shadow of slum life. Daisy was now safely back under the protection and strict standards of Orillia, thought Dr. Serson and Superintendent Hamilton, which was why segregation of the mentally retarded was so critical.

The Lumsden girl would, of course, have to be removed from school. She certainly was no longer the “quiet senior girl” liked by teachers and staff, fond of reading, cooperative with workers, neat about herself. She had sung in the choir and been a Girl Guide. Miss Gormley, teacher of Group 28, had reported that Daisy would not remain in the classroom but spent her time “in the basement with the boys.”

“You will now be a full-time Ward Worker,” said Nurse Chalmers grimly.

“As if I care!” cried the new Daisy, her blouse loosely buttoned, mouth reddened with lipstick. “I never learned nothing in school, anyways.”

The class records, however, showed a remarkable advance in three years from Group 20 through to Group 28. Daisy was reading at a Grade Five level in some subjects. She had recited the first verse of “In Flanders Fields” more or less correctly up on the stage on Remembrance Day: “In Flander fields poppies all blow / Between th’ crosses, rows on row…”

“Why’re we locked up here like prisoners, we ain’t done nothing wrong! Why can’t we be with the boys like normal teenagers?” she flashed.

“Because you’re not normal. And you can wipe that muck off your face.”

She had lain in bed in the dorm, at first, refusing to budge. Everything hurt down there where the Captain had said was a girl’s treasure, to be kept pure for Jesus, something she no longer was. Daisy wept in secret, fearful of Patsy finding out, or Isabelle. Isabelle was now a Monitor — well, of course, after singing that lovely solo at the Christmas pageant before the Mayor and everyone — another Nest girl making Captain proud.

Now she turned her back to them at bedtime.

“Hey, you really give it to Chalmers, kid,” said Marcie at break.

“You gotta smoke?” Daisy challenged, though she could not even inhale, and always choked.

“What’s it worth?”

“Whatever it take,” said Daisy, suddenly excited.

“After what happen I thought who cares? I might as well have some fun in that place. Me an’ Marcie Evans used to sneak off down to the basement and meet boys in the Smoking Room, regular, boys like Eddie and Steve,” Daisy recalled to me. They sneaked down the backstairs and through a door a male attendant unlocked just for Marcie. Daisy did not ask why; she now knew.

She felt a surge of power. She did not have to do what the nurses said. She was over sixteen a year ago, which made her seventeen, going on eighteen, said Marcie. “You ain’t a Ward no more, Daisy.”

Marcie lit up a ciggy, tossing the match to the floor. “Let the fucking place burn down!”

Daisy smiled at me, remembering: “Oh, I liked the boys all right. Hell, I was just a normal teenager! That was all I thought of, trying to talk to the boys, you know.”

And she and Marcie did. They whispered and passed notes in school behind the teacher’s back before Daisy was thrown out. They also made signs with their hands in Sunday service. Crossed hands meant, “I love you.” Yes, there were all sorts of little opportunities here and there, despite segregation, to talk, to touch briefly, to promise to be some boy’s girlfriend, and to marry him. Marcie showed her how to sneak the keys off the hook at night when the aide was sleeping a restless exhausted sleep, to tiptoe down the backstairs lit by dim lights to the underground and to waiting boys.

Every morning, the nurse gave out tobacco and rolling papers to the older patients who wanted to smoke, right after recess; you had your own tin with your name etched on it and nurse called out your name. Daisy and Marcie joined Eddie and Steve regularly for a smoke at break. Steve was Marcie’s boyfriend and Eddie was now Daisy’s. Both boys were from Cottage C and were older. They had been in Orillia for a very long time, longer than they cared; almost forever.

The stuff Eddie told them! He had been “gang raped in the arse” he said, by older men in the showers, predators, on his first week in Cottage B, before they pulled it down. Daisy had not known boys could be raped. She did not ask for details. Eddie looked upset.

He was only fourteen when it happened, and they was much older than him and had big cocks hanging to their knees, he said, his eyes scrunching up. He had been pushed against the tiles, the tile walls in the communal stall. The older boys, some of them men, grabbed at his cock. He had not known what was happening at first. He had started crying. Then they had pushed themselves into him, one after the other. When one was done, another was on him. He was sobbing and hollering for an attendant, but that did not stop the men. “I was all torn up and bleeding but the showers washed it away and stuff. The attendants didn’ do nothin’ ter save me. They didn’ like seeing the men jerk off all the time over the beds so they looked away, you was on your own. Unless they wanted some themselves,” he added bitterly.

That was the time he had gone to the can in the middle of the night in the short little nightshirt they gave you that only went to your knees. The night attendant followed him. Laid him over the bench in the Day Room in the dark. “But first I had ta take him in my mouth and swaller ’is jiz. Then he did it to me from behind like, ’til he finish, the fucker son of a bitch.”

Daisy’s hands jerked to her face in horror. She was hearing truths she had never suspected.

“He didn want me doin’ it to nobody but him,” said Eddie obliquely.

Steve broke in. “Tell her about morning lineups, Ed.”

“Oh them. They makes you stand in a line naked, you’re just out of bed, and they call you ‘fuckin’ retards’ and one pull your balls.”

“Ugh, he deserves to rot in hell!” cried Daisy, puffing desperately at her cigarette and coughing and sputtering with each drag.

“No. No! Not men! Women. The women attendants pull our dicks and give us hard-ons. They’re worse than the men in how they get their jollies.”

Marcie gave a short, harsh laugh.

Eddie was eighteen, a man. Forgotten by his family on the outside a long time ago, he mourned softly. His dad had come to see him once when he was six or so in the Children’s Dorm, and had never come back; his mother had never come, not once. Abandon him, that’s what. When they got out of this place he was going to marry Daisy, he promised, and they would have a place of their own and babies. Mr. Deane said he was doing good in woodwork. Mr. Deane was the instructor, a good fellow, one of the best. But some of the attendants on their Ward beat them plenty, he said. Once, they put his head down the toilet bowl and flushed it, all because he did not eat one day. There were good attendants and there were bad. They had this other punishment in two lines facing each other down the corridor and when it was your turn you had to get down on your hands and knees and push a rubber along the floor with your nose. “Eat dirt,” the attendant would say. “Eat worms, boy.”

“Yeah, an’ that’s not half of it.” Eddie took a deep breath, and dug his cigarette into the sofa. “There was the pervert.”

Daisy listened attentively. She wanted to know everything, especially about a pervert. Something was opening up in Daisy’s heart she had never suspected about the Good and Evil that the Captain at The Nest had divided the world into. She longed to tell the Captain about the evils done to these boys. The world seemed to swing in reverse.

“Yeah, well, Hicks,” Eddie’s face tightened, “he takes the girls too, him and Charlie Duggan from G, down behind the boathouse and to the far end of the beach on Thursday cook-outs and — you know — does it to them. They says, “You tell anyone and you know what you get.” Daisy shivered, for she knew only too well; she had seen what wet sheets did when those old women mouthed off.

“But it’s what he makes ’em do on Ward Work that’s perverted!”

Daisy’s eyes widened, but she had to hear it out. There was no end to this evil. She knew that male attendants sometimes helped out on women’s wards, as their strength was needed to hold down difficult women or ones having seizures. But it seemed Mr. Hicks made the girls he was in charge of open their blouses as they scrubbed the floor. This way, their tits hung out as they leaned over. “And then he jerked off inside ’is pants.”

Daisy nearly choked, puffing madly on her cigarette. Marcie gave another harsh laugh.

“An’ don’t he like little boys, too. Tell her, Ed.”

“Yep, they played with them too, took ’em down the basement.” There were little recesses, rooms here and there in the walls of the tunnels, and that’s where they took them, so nobody could see or hear what was going on. Then Eddie, who had been promoted to “shepherd,” in charge of helping new boys on the dorm, looked after them when it was over. He told them to stop crying. He mopped up their tears and got them some different underwear, as some was bloody, he said. He did it because he was a monitor, a “shepherd,” “an’ a shepherd looks after ’is sheep.”

How much of this testimony could one believe, coming, as it were, from mentally retarded patients? These stories, incidents, and remembrances represented the truth that they clung to. And yet, why should one not believe them? There was the truth of the officials, of the staff and of the professionals; then, there was the truth of those who lived it on the inside, on the Wards.