Christian Watt was born in 1833 into a fishing family in Buchan and wrote a vivid memoir of her eventful and difficult life while she was a patient in a mental asylum. She married a sailor who became a fisherman, and as the mother of nine made the best of the physically exhausting life of those who made their living from the land and sea. A spirited, intellectually questioning woman, she was seen by some as lofty and stuck up. She refused to consider the gentry as in any way superior to her or others. This account describes her struggle to make ends meet after her husband drowned, and the desperate mental state it reduced her to. His was the last in a line of bereavements, following the loss of four of her seven brothers, her mother and father and two of her children. The following extract records the first episode of a condition that worsened until she was declared insane and put permanently in the asylum in Aberdeen, where she lived for the last forty-seven years of her life.
My elder son was at sea, but I had still seven bairns to feed and clad. I wore myself out with hard work. In buying fish at the Broch market I could not compete with the Fishermerchants, so got little to barter for food in the country. I was sick with worry, neither eating nor sleeping, for I had no money except my son’s allowance of 4/–. I know now I should have gone to the Parish for help, but I was far too proud. It may be wrong but that was how we were brought up; and selling your possessions is a degrading game.
Eppie Buchan, a St Combs woman who lived up the New St at Broadsea, commented on my growing so thin. I said, ‘It is hard to be provider’. She gave me a bag of tatties which were most welcome, for I had been raking in the sea for everything edible for us to eat. When the bairns had gone to school and the little one was still asleep, I would put my arms round Ranger the doggie and break my heart crying …
There is a time to laugh and a time to weep, a time to mourn and a time to dance. These were the second great tears in my life. How I missed my mother, who had also known grief. Sixty years have passed and I see her now, resting her heavy creel on a dyke to get her breath. Both my parents are safe within the veil of salvation, but how I wished I still had them when I lost my man.
[…]
For the doctor had asked me to go for a rest to Aberdeen Royal Mental Asylum. After a great deal of thought I consented, for something must break. I worried so much about my hungry children and who would look after them. My sister-in-law had no room, and her mother was over seventy. My cousin Mary said she would keep an eye on the bairns, as my daughter Isabella was only ten – but she kept the house, washed and baked, cooked and put the young ones to school clean while I was in the Asylum. Charlotte the youngest was not quite two, but past the worst stage …
I boarded the train at Fraserburgh. My cousin Mary and her daughter Annie saw me off, also my daughter Isabella. It was a sad day in my life. We passed Kirktoun Kirkyard. The tall lums [chimneys] of Philorth House [where she had worked as a maid from the age of eight] stood above the trees, I could see the kitchen and parlour ones reeking …
Then Cornhill was on the outskirts of the City of Aberdeen amid a large garden. Forbes, the Laird of Newe, had generously donated ten thousand pounds towards the building of the new asylum. I entered by a small gate set in a high granite dyke, and was admitted. The nurse who gave me a bath commented on how clean I was. We went through endless corridors, and in each section I noticed the door was firmly locked behind us which gave an eerie feeling. Finally I went to bed tired after my journey.
We were washing our faces at five o’clock in the morning for breakfast was at six. Not even the pangs of sheer hunger could have forced me to eat in the diningroom. That was a sight the King and Queen should go and witness, for if you are not humble before, once you have seen it you will be, and value good health and every other blessing you have got from the depth of your heart. Patients were gulping and stomaching their porridge in such a slovenly and distasteful manner … when I feigned some excuse to skip dinner, the sister said, ‘If you work in the kitchen you can eat there.’ The Physician Superintendant was … a kindly, skeely man, genuinely interested in his patients. I spoke with him for an hour, and then I was fixed up with a job in the kitchen. I did not want any of my children to visit me, for it is not the sort of place bairns should see, especially if they are very young …
Being in the asylum is a terrible stigma.… When I came home I found folk constantly trying to shun me as if I had leprosy. The usual pattern was to smile and be pleasant for a moment, then make some kind of excuse they were in an awful hurry to do something. I went to the farms in the country, and in many places where they could see me coming I found the door barred in my face, once it got around I had returned from the asylum. It was a terrifying experience …
I was told at both Philorth and Strichen House, in my absence somebody else had taken their custom. I have gone as far as New Deer selling hardly anything. It was a sad defeat to have to return with a full heavy creel and a heavy heart. I could see it was not going to be easy to make a living, and it seems impossible for the public to be sufficiently educated to the fact that a mental disorder is an illness …
So now so many doors were closed to me it was hardly worth my while going to the country, but I plodded on. Though I was ‘sodger clad’ I was ‘Major minded’. It seems that under great mental stress insanity takes over. The odd thing in many cases, the patient knows all that is going on. I called at Witchill House, as I usually did, by the back door.… I asked the housekeeper if she wanted fish, she said, ‘I must ask Madam,’ whom they call her Ladyship.… In Witchell a long lobby like a street ran the whole length of the interior. The housekeeper had to consult Madam in the drawingroom at the far end. I had tip-toed in to hear Lady Anderson’s reply which was so loud I heard it all, ‘Tell her we are supplied by a Rosehearty merchant since she went off the round and it is not necessary to come back.’ She added, ‘Under no circumstances give her tea or anything that might encourage her. We can’t have a mad woman coming about the place.’ I retreated to the back door. They were none the wiser. The housekeeper delivered her message and I thanked her with a courteous smile, just as if nothing had happened. I had a strong urge to go back and hit the wifie.