3

I had not liked the hammering in the male occupational therapy room. The female occupational therapy was much more gentle. In the warm summer afternoons it seemed to me to be a civilized place. At three o’clock two of the patients made tea in a great, blue enamel teapot.

The men worked at a table in one corner.

That day I was helping to put a string seat on a stool. The old man I was helping was impatient with me. He pushed me out of his way. At either side of his forehead there were deep scars where his skull had been cut into many years before in an attempt to help him. To him the making of the string seat for the stool was very important. When the sister came to ask him how he was getting on he shook his head as though the job were going badly. I decided that it would be best for me to leave him to himself.

I sat and talked to Larry, who was making a carpet. Larry had been a merchant seaman. He was about forty, small and lively. I only knew him from meeting him at occupational therapy. He was in a different ward from me. Some of the things he told me were very strange.

‘. . . The anchor locker is right up in the peak. And these Indians must have stowed away in it. And when we dropped anchor to wait to start getting through the Canal there was blood and bits of arms and legs and gut and all sorts coming out of the anchor port. You see, when the anchor goes down the chain whips round and round. It’s lashing about all over. And these Indians must have been sat on the chain. They didn’t stand a chance. The old man said there must have been two men and a woman in there. He worked it out from the bits we found. The first mate was badly for a week.’

Having told the story he got his tin box out of his back pocket. He said, ‘I’ve had this box for nearly twenty years. I wouldn’t like to lose it.’ He always said that when he took the box out for a cigarette. It was a flat tobacco box. All the paint had been worn off or had been scraped off and it was polished bright. He offered me a cigarette. He offered me one every afternoon, and every afternoon I told him that I did not smoke, and every afternoon he said that I was very sensible.

I went and looked out of the window. There was a lawn and, beyond, part of the male wing of the hospital. I could see into one of the wards. I did not know which ward it was. There were people moving about. They seemed to be shifting furniture.

I thought that it might not be a real ward that I was seeing. Perhaps, if I left the window where I was standing and went into the male wing, I might not be able to find the ward where the furniture was being shifted. Perhaps it only existed for me looking out of the window. Yet, if I could see it, it existed as much as it could exist for me. Even if I went across and found the ward, I would only be able to see it, and, even if I tried to get more assurance by touching the walls and the furniture, I could never be absolutely certain that it existed. Even if all the doctors in the hospital came and told me that it existed, I could never be sure.

I thought that, for me, everything might be an illusion. I remembered that I had often thought about the possibility when I was about eight or nine. I had thought that I might be dreaming everything and that I might wake up and find I was really a little girl.

Two rooks came down and walked about on the lawn.

There was no way of being sure what was going on outside myself. Two and two only made four inside my head. Outside my head there was no such thing as mathematics, only in other people’s heads—if there were other people.

Everyone lived inside his head. But people who were well and sane imagined that it was possible to get outside. That was how a man could fall in love with a woman.

The rooks could not find anything. They flew away.

I had a picture of my mind as a long tube. It started at the top very thin and almost transparent and went down getting wider and wider and rougher and stronger until it was like the trunk of a tree. At the bottom it was planted in the ground. But when I looked at the top again I found that it stretched up and up, getting thinner and finer so that it became like a strand of cobweb that reached up and up, right into the sky. That frightened me. The danger was that the cobweb part at the top might break off and float away.

I told myself firmly that my mind was not really like that. I told myself not to think about my mind. I should be like a rook, and not know that I had a mind. When people were healthy they did not know that they had minds, just as people did not know that they had kidneys unless there was something wrong with their kidneys. And I remembered that Dr Strick­land had once talked to me about the different parts of the brain so that I would know that there was not really anything that could float away. It was all inside the skull, safe and sound.

But they had cut into the old man’s head.

They would cut a piece off the brain, but if I asked them to cut a piece off my body they would refuse.

Perhaps Dr Strickland had many patients who asked to be turned into women. He might be sick of hearing it. Probably he became angry with them.

I tried to imagine him getting angry with me. I imagine his shouting, ‘Get out, you gruesome creeping thing—you cater­pillar!’

I wondered why I had thought of a caterpillar. After a moment’s thought I decided that it must have been because caterpillars turned into butterflies. That pleased me.