14.

THE LUMSDENS WERE GRANTED A VISIT on December 23, 1964, as was their legal right, for one hour in the afternoon in the presence of Dr. Gallagher, Supervisor Nurse Bagley, and a guard. Smoking was prohibited; who knew what Mrs. Lumsden might do with matches?

Daisy was consequently brought downstairs and encouraged to repeat her story. One could only imagine Daisy’s shame, perhaps, and confusion enclosed in that room with the doctor who had examined her, and her mother. Mr. and Mrs. Lumsden looked excited, surprised, at the sight of Daisy in a new dress.

“You growed a real lady now, Daisy!” cried Mr. Lumsden shyly, embracing Daisy who at once began to cry, “Dada! Oh, Dada!”

Dr. Houze wrote triumphantly to Mr. Farquar of the visit, citing Dr. Gallagher’s report that Daisy had stated in front of her father and mother that it was her own wish that she not go home for Christmas and that she did not wish to go home at any time. When asked why, she had stated that when home on a previous occasion, her mother had told her that she must have intercourse with mother’s boyfriend. Daisy said that out of fear she had allowed this to take place. The father admitted that he had had knowledge of this fact. Mr. Lumsden was “meek as a lamb,” in spite of what he had said he would do when he came up there. They were allowed to visit with Daisy for one hour in the visiting room in Cottage M.

“My father said it was a terrible thing she done to me and he was mad as hell,” said Daisy loyally to me, forty-five years later. She would always stay loyal to her father.

“And I said to my husbant on my wedding night I’m sorry I’m not a virgin for you Joe, and he said, ‘I forgive you, it wasn’t your fault.’”

Mr. Farquar, Q.C., responded before Christmas with a piece of information of his own: a note written by Daisy to her grandfather, Henry Hewitt. She had passed it secretly to her father during the visit when the guard was not looking. And he had slipped it into his pocket — dear, meek Mr. Lumsden, trusted and esteemed. The note was brief, full of unanswered questions. Had she written to Henry Hewitt — “gran’dad”— because she knew by now he was the only one who could read and was therefore powerful, the one who might enable her release and might possibly take her in?

Dear Gran’dad,

Just a few lines to say hello. I want to come home.

I can’t stand this place. I really mean it this time.

I bet to now.

Love, Daisy.

Christmas Eve, Daisy eloped with Eddie Green, Steve Henderson, and Marcie Evans.

It had not lasted long. “I couldn’ keep up with them ’cause I was menserating,” Daisy told me. She had forgotten to put pads in her purse. She was doubled up with cramps as the four sped toward Memorial Avenue after supper, owls hooting through the trees that lined the icy lake. It was a cold, crisp Christmas Eve night.

Strains of carols had drifted down as they ran behind the gym: “Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the new-born King…” What would happen? The boys knew how to escape the patrol guards on the grounds. They had planned everything. They were to catch a bus in town to Toronto. Boys had more freedom than girls, Daisy knew. They could go around the grounds, and had passes into town if they got Good Behaviour.

Eddie and Steve had already dropped bags out of the second floor window at the back of their cottage. The bags contained a change of clothes (institutional clothes would be a sure giveaway in town) and some bread and cake they had pushed in their pockets during supper. The girls had grabbed their smokes in the basement Smoking Room and sneaked out through a side door by the canteen at the end of the tramway. Smoking was allowed for a half hour after supper. They had met up with the boys behind the school door at the back of the Administration Building. They could hear the Orillia Band striking up, and faint cheers and clapping as they kept running up the road between tall trees. The Superintendent’s house was to the right, then the darkness. The sky glittered with stars. The town lay fifteen kilometres somewhere down the road to their right. The boys knew.

Daisy fell as they reached the road — and freedom — her purse rolling down the culvert, her smokes and makeup and a dinner roll tumbling out. She got down on her hands and knees in the dark, fumbling to find everything, fearing the patrols. Marcie and the boys kept going as had been agreed: “Each fer ’isself.” Daisy crammed everything into her bag and began stumbling down Memorial Avenue, the boys and Marcie distant shadows. On the other side of the road loomed farm buildings, including the barn where dead babies were buried, their ghosts hovering in the night air, alive.

Bewildered, she turned back toward the institution, stumbling down the drive, clutching her purse in the dark.

“There she is!”

“Who goes there?”

What happened next is vouched for only by Daisy, sworn on the Bible at her insistence. A flashlight suddenly appeared around the corner of the Nurses’ Residence, Building 47. It lit up her face. “It’s the girl,” someone said.

“Where are the others? We know there’s four of yer.” One of the attendants shook her roughly by the arm.

“Take your frigging hands off of me!”

“Watch your mouth, you little bitch, or we’ll clean it out for you.”

She was escorted to the Superintendent’s Office, hands clamped on each shoulder, where Dr. Houze, Nurse Biggs, Nurse Supervisor from Ward “O-2,” and Nurse Chalmers of O-3, grim-faced, were waiting. Each nurse attendant and male attendant on duty at the time would be penalized and lose pay over this. “Here’s one of ’em, sir.”

Dr. Houze wrote something down in the Minute Book. “You’re a very foolish girl and now you must face the consequences.” The attendants took Daisy away.

“Where are the others?” Nurse Biggs cried when they were back in the Ward. “Tell us!”

“Dunno. ’Ow the frigging ’ell should I know?” said Daisy sulkily. She wasn’t going to squeal on Marcie and the boys.

Nurse Biggs slapped her hard.

“Bitch!” cried Daisy.

Nurse Biggs shook her again.

“I ain’t done nothing bad. I can live where I like. I’m not a Ward no more.”

“That’s what you think, smartass.”

“Well, I came back, didn’ I, you old sods.”

She was dragged to the bath area, where an old tub stood in the corner. “Where’s the others you run off with? Answer us! We know you know.”

“Take yer friggin’ hands off of me! I don’t know nothing. I ain’t going in there!”

Nurse Carswell was already running the water, ice-cold, and Nurse Chalmers had brought in the sheets. “This’ll take the mouth off her,” one of them said.

“Out of control…”

Daisy struggled. She dug her teeth into Nurse Biggs’ arm. “Watch them teeth, Ethel! Little tom-cat!”

They had stripped her down. “I was menserating but it didn’t make no difference,” said Daisy, angry at the memory. Her belt and pad were pulled down; her brassiere yanked off. She was submerged in the tub “for hours,” she later insisted.

“Hold her down, Ethel!” said Nurse Biggs. Nurse Carswell had torn up the sheet in strips, ready, Daisy recalled, agitated at the memory.

“They tortured me. I was rolled up tight in ice-wet sheets of cloth. I couldn’ breathe I was so cold. They put me in a ice-cold tub of ice water — the cold pack treatment they calls it, an’ me menserating. They didn’ care.”

“Where’s Marcie Evans and Eddie Green and Steve Henderson from C? Where they going to?” The icy strips of cloth tightened as they held her down in the water.

“To T’ronto,” Daisy sobbed. “On th’ bus from th’ station in town.”

The nurses looked grimly at each other. Daisy was hauled to her bed; her arms pushed into a canvas straightjacket. An attendant pulled the laces tightly at the back and knotted them. Daisy was weeping as she lay on her front, her arms twisted behind her. She was left on her bed in that position for the entire night.

“That’ll learn ’er,” someone said.

She was eighteen.

How much of this was to be believed in the confusion of memory? Daisy would not have been immersed for “hours” in icy water. The time recommended for “water treatment,” or hydrotherapy, according to the Nurses’ Handbook was twenty minutes.

Hydrotherapy was a common therapy used on mental patients who were agitated, violent, and out of control, as a means to calm them down and prevent them from hurting themselves. Contrary to expectation, being wrapped tightly in cold wet sheets produced heat in the body and a dangerous rise in temperature that could cause convulsions if not monitored. Twenty years after the incident, the Mental Health-Psychiatric Nursing Textbook, written by nurses Cornelia Kelly Beck, Ruth Parmelee Rawlins and Sophronia R. Williams (and published by C. V. Moseby Publishing Company in 1984) cautioned student nurses that “wet pack” treatment was not to be used as a “punishment,” which surely begged the question.

Yet why should Daisy not be believed? There was the truth of the record-keeper, and the truth of the patient. Nurse Chalmers had summed up the entire “elopement” episode in the Clinical Record in one sentence: “December 24, 1964. Eloped from Smoking Room during Christmas Concert; was returned later.”

Ella Lumsden visited her daughter after the New Year. She had known at once. “What the ’ell they done to you?” she cried out in the visiting parlour. “They got you drugs!” Her mother had pushed her face close to Daisy’s. It was a garish face, with too much powder and that gash of lipstick. So she had cared then.

“Oh, she knew they’d drugged me, I was all drugged up stupid,” Daisy told me, her voice shifting, taking on Ella Lumsden’s aggressive tone.

Her mother had whispered harshly for the guard not to hear. “Stick ’em up your cheek nex’ time, don’ swaller ’em, Daisy. Next time I come you pass ’em to me, secret-like.”

“Speak up over there!” called the guard.

It was here Daisy recalled saying: “Can’t I frigging talk to my own mother without you guys pushing in?”

“That th’ secret,” her mother had whispered. Daisy had no idea what the pills actually were, only that they were called “meds.” She had no knowledge at the time that she was taking Mellaril, only that she was “drugged.” She had not been told; it was not for her to know.

She was to pretend to swallow them, but push the pill with her tongue up into her cheek, and take it out later and hide it in something under her mattress. Keep them for her mother, Ella had whispered again. She promised to come back.

Ella Lumsden would then take the pills to the “Clarke Ins’tute of Psych’atry.” And to her MPP, Donald MacDonald.