Pure Mental

By Eamon Shanley

Witnessing systemic neglect and ill treatment while working in a mental asylum, a young man struggles with his conscience and is forced to re-evaluate his core beliefs about himself and his perception of others.

The story is set in the early 1970s, the era of flower power and free love. It is the time of John Lennon’s mantra, ‘All you need is Love’ and Bob Dylan’s, ‘The Times They are a Changin’.
It follows the journey of Jim, a young and naïve Irishman, to London to start his training as a psychiatric nurse in a large mental asylum.
Jim was shocked with what he saw behind the high walls of the institution. The world he had entered seemed frozen in time, bypassed by the major changes taking place outside of the institution. The asylum was an enclave where intimidation, coercion and violence towards inmates were accepted practices. Staff wielded their power indiscriminately and were answerable to nobody.
Ironically Jim also experienced another side of this world where there was mateship, laughter and camaraderie and even romance. He felt accepted and valued by his new mates. He was becoming one of the boys, the ‘Broxton Boys’.
However there was a disturbing side to becoming one of the boys. There was a price to pay. He had to put aside his conscience and adopt an attitude that was lacking in humanity.
His growing acceptance of abuse as normal was abruptly challenged on meeting up with another worker. It was Matt, an ex-inmate from a similar institution, with a mission in life - to bring about change in the way inmates were treated.
Jim was confronted by the realisation that fitting in with his mates meant becoming complicit in what was happening. He just couldn’t continue telling himself that he was ‘just passing through’ as an excuse for doing nothing and accepting things as they were. He had to decide which side he was on – his mates, his colleagues and a good life or his conscience and Matt. After uncomfortable soul searching he agreed to go along with Matt.
Their plan was to expose the ill-treatment practices of the asylum. It was a risky plan. In the short time he was working in the asylum there, Jim had become very aware of the power of the staff and their resistance to change. After all the asylum had successfully resisted change for many decades.
Informing on staff would put them in danger. ‘Snitching’ on their mates was the greatest crime they could commit. If discovered repercussions would be savage.
The stakes were high and Jim doggedly clung to the hope that their efforts, however meagre, would eventually lead to the undoing of this abusive and corrupt institution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eamon Shanley
• Release date: Oct 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9780994161628

Eamon Shanley

Eamon Shanley PhD is a practicing psychiatric/mental health nurse. He has been working in this field for several decades including as Professor of Mental Health Nursing. He has published many articles and books on mental health and is a member of the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses. He lives in Warrnambool, Victoria, Australia with his partner, Maureen. This is his first fictional publication.

Book preview

Prologue.

Shafts of light from the narrow windows spaced along the dormitory wall fell on the rows of sleeping, snoring, coughing men in their narrow beds either side of the aisle.

With the dormitory stretching before me I felt uneasy, even afraid. It was difficult to see if they were awake or asleep. Yet, in the light cast from one of the windows I could see two men staring at me their heads half covered by their bedclothes. They lay still with just their shark-like eyes following my progress intently as I walked past. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck.

Every night when going on duty I would walk through this dormitory to the office. After what happened last week I should have changed my route. I knew I was a stupid stubborn fool. Perhaps it was pride that made me stick to my routine. I knew there was a risk of it happening again. Maybe sticking to my route was to show the inmates that I wasn’t scared but I think it was more about showing my colleagues that I wasn’t going to be intimidated by them. I’ll be damned if they were going to get the better of me!

Despite my bravado I felt alone and vulnerable. I had come to realise that the lunatics in the beds on either side, although locked up in here, were not the really scary guys. The really scary ones were on the other side of door I was heading for. They were the ones who ruled this world behind these walls. These guys lying in their beds had little control over their lives. The other ones had. Yet ironically they had the same future. Neither was ever likely to leave this institution. Their worlds ended at the main gate.

There was an unchangingness about this place. Time meant nothing behind the walls. I could imagine walking down this same dormitory twenty years from now with the same patients just different names. There would be the same musky smells of sweat, the same sounds of creaking bed springs, the same oppressive atmosphere and the same gloom.

This was a separate world with its own unspoken rules, an enclave that the changes of the sixties had passed by. Although the year was now 1970 this institution was still in the dark ages.

It was the musky smell that suddenly triggered the flashbacks of fear back to just one week ago. I was back being kicked around the floor by a madman who wanted to kill me. Thinking about it my heart was suddenly racing. I felt the sweat gathering on my face and a tightness in my chest and in my head. I was back lying on the dormitory floor, looking up at the underside of the mattress, smelling the sweat and damp of the bodies in the beds around me, feeling the hardness and coldness of the floor beneath me.

I was defenceless, petrified, waiting for the next kick. Here it comes! Wallop! Sliding away like a hockey puck on the polished parquet floor. Between beds now, exposed. More defenceless. Which way to roll, crawl? Back forward, try to stand up? I don’t know. How to escape? Under the next bed. Wallop again on my legs. Got in. Safe under the bed. This time grasping hands. Missed me. Move back to the other side. Wallop, another kick on the back. Lights. Shouting. Was that me shouting? More feet moving fast around the bed. Bare feet. Funny how feet differ. Lumpy chunky, skinny, stumpy, hairy, all moving in pairs at different speeds. Patients voices, confused, shouting or was it me that was confused and shouting? Where’s the shoed feet? Where are the staff? Why aren’t they here? What’s keeping them?

Then the flashback finished as suddenly as it started. It was over in a blink of an eye. My mind came back to walking down the dormitory. My breathing slowed. I was conscious of the sweat running down my forehead and my back. I wiped my face. I was shaking from the recollection.

That night a week ago I had eventually managed to slide under the beds and get to the door. I was lucky to have got out of the dormitory alive.

Of course Connolly had given me a warning. His ominous threat at the end of a pointed finger was clear, ’Shaw, you’re on your fuckin’ own.’ The warning had echoed through my brain ever since he said it. Yes, I knew I was on my own. I had known that for some time now. But I didn’t think it would happen like this. He was a dangerous bastard. In that dormitory it really hit me that I was on my own. Was this the price of breaking rank? That’s why there were no shoed feet hurrying to my rescue. I had been hung out to dry.

I was convinced that it was the cleaner Tom who had saved my life that night. It was that beautifully polished floor that allowed me to slide with the kicks. And at that time Tom was probably sleeping in his bed oblivious of his part in the drama. Nobody else was there to help.

Since that night my world had begun to crumble. I was exhausted from being unable to sleep and when I did I had terrible nightmares. I had become scared of walking through the ward on my own, more jumpy when anybody approached me from behind, more fearful of the dark and constantly wary even outside the ward. I didn’t know when the next attack was going to come but I knew when it did Connolly would be behind it. I was no longer safe.

A loud cough from one of the inmates stopped my ruminations and I quickened my pace between the beds coming closer to the light at the end of the dormitory. I noticed the bed had the cot sides raised. At a distance I couldn’t make out the face of the person in the bed. I wondered, was it Nick. When I got closer I leaned over the raised cot sides and looked down at the prone figure. The illumination from the low light on the bedside locker cast shadows across his face. The face was unmistakable. It was Nick. He was still here.

His ashen gaunt face now looked more like a skull than the head of a living human being.

Nick looked much worse than when I had last seen him. He should be in a proper hospital. His skin was pinched and tight across his face. His eyes were more sunken than before. Traces of dry food were caked on his chin and his cheek. Yet my heart lifted. Maybe, finally, they were going to do something with him.

‘Hello Nick, how’s it going?’

Not a flicker of a response. Yet, as I stood there looking down on Nick, I felt the stirring of hope. At least he was out of his cell.

My thoughts were interrupted by a sudden outburst of laughter from the other door leading to the office.

‘See you later Nick.’

Time to face these bastards.

Chapter 1. Leaving.

No flags, no fanfare for the start of my big adventure! No weeping mother or clinging girlfriend, no sad friends or stiff lipped father. No need. I was happy! I was off to London leaving my home in the small village of Dunrath in Ireland.

The excitement on the inside was bursting to get out. I was leaving. I was already celebrating with a thumping heart and a swelling chest and a sense of elation that nearly lifted me off the ground. My family and most of my friends had accepted for some time that I was labelled for export. We all were – all of Ireland’s youth. It was only a question of time before I was to leave. And this was my time! And I was off to London to work in a mental hospital!

My bulging canvas rucksack, packed with a few clothes and my Murphy transistor radio, was strapped to my back. I had finished my three year nursing course and was about to embark on another in London, this time in psychiatric nursing. The afternoon I was leaving seemed no different from all the other afternoons in February 1970 with its overcast sky, the threat of rain or sleet and a cold north-westerly wind. Yet it felt different. The gloom of the day didn’t affect me as I straddled my trusty 200cc Triumph Tiger Cub motorbike, kicked it into a spluttering start and with a grin and a wave to indifferent neighbours spluttered out of the village.

My protection against the weather on the 250 mile journey was a thigh length, heavy black leather coat I had worn usually when fishing, a pair of gloves whose lining at the index fingers were torn, fur-lined black shoes, rubber over-trousers, and a scarf covering my mouth. The main defence the bike offered against the wind and rain was a windscreen made by my father from a straight rectangular piece of perspex. None of my attire was avant-garde or even fashionable. It was a jumble of items I had collected in my life in our small village but I didn’t care. So what if I looked odd. These things were unimportant. I was on a mission.

The first part of the 250 miles journey involved riding to the port of Dun Laoire in Dublin to catch the night sailing to Holyhead, North Wales. Heading out of the harbour the boat rose and fell with the waves. Not enough, I thought. I’d like the bow of the ship to rise into the sky and bang down with its nose pointing into the rising waves and then rise again to the sky. I stood on the deck in the rain and spray exhilarated by the movements of the sea and the excitement of being on a great adventure. Fifteen minutes later I was cold, wet and holding onto the freezing cold iron of the ship vomiting my guts up. We had only just passed through the harbour mouth and not yet catching the early breakers of the swell in the Irish Sea.

An eternity later, in the grey cold light of a Welsh early morning, we disembarked. Food? I knew I should eat something before the long trek to London but I would have been more prepared to stick needles in my eyes than look at a plate of food. All I wanted to do was curl up somewhere warm and die. By ten am I was out of Holyhead town and on to the A5 heading for London.

Within two hours I had cold hands, cold feet, cold face and cold, cold knees - cold to the bone and oh so painful. Progress was slowed by ice and snow on the road through the mountains in Snowdonia in North Wales. The bike struggled up the inclines and I was conscious of the gusty winds off the mountain sides jolting my bike sideways. I was constantly vigilant especially when the trucks off the ferries from Ireland whisked past me pushing me as they drew abreast with me and then just as they passed me catching me in their slipstream. It was difficult keeping balance especially where the roads were icy. Uphill, downhill, my feet were almost always off the foot rests in trying to keep balance.

As the afternoon progressed the cold had permeated my whole body. I lost the sensations in both my index fingers, my knees were not just cold but very painful and now I couldn’t feel the goggles on my face and even lips were numb.

The sense of adventure that had excited me for many months was gone. In its place was a high level of anxiety. Was I going to end my life under the wheels of a Gallagher’s Removal lorry in an obscure place in North Wales?

I must have been mad to have thought of doing this. What was I doing on this road? I had just started the trip and I wanted to go home and maybe get the train. This was certainly no fun. So far it was hell!

I was becoming worried about the failing light. The sky becoming overcast and dark in mid-afternoon and my fear of being hit from behind by a car or heavy vehicle in the diminishing light increased. I turned on the parking lights as it became darker. Then I used the main beam. Although I was very cold, I was reluctant to stop to get warm because of the rapidly failing light. I felt alone and worried.

My eyes started to fail. I had difficulty in making out the road ahead. Was it the cold that was affecting me? I had never felt so cold. Mile after mile of countryside then suddenly I saw a Bed and Breakfast sign. I stopped and sat with the engine running. I realised that it wasn’t my eye sight that was the problem. The light from the main beam had gone dim and seemed to be flickering its last pulses. I switched off the engine then tried the lights. Nothing! Not a sausage! The battery was dead! I sat in silence. What the fuck was I going to do? The alternator must have failed.

I had been on the bike for five hours and now getting off the bike was a huge effort. Once off, I could hardly walk to the door of the Bed and Breakfast. It was a stiff kind of mechanical walk. I felt like a Zombie. I prayed that there would be a vacancy. I knocked on the door with my numb, frozen hand. A thin young woman answered. My face was so numb that I'd difficulty in articulating words. She nodded and motioned for me to take the bike around the back.

Once inside the warmth of the house I made my way to my room. There I stood in the middle of the floor relieved to have found this wayside sanctuary. It was warm and safe. I didn’t care what the room looked like or its furniture. Anywhere out of the cold and dark was good.

In front of me beside a narrow bed was a wardrobe with a door mirror. I immediately caught the reflection of the alien creature staring back at me with small red eyes. Its face had a vague resemblance to me but looked bluish white behind a short beard of red hair, drained of blood and showed no signs of the freckles that characterised its normal appearance. Its face had the indentations around its eyes and on its nose left by the goggles. Red marks scarred its forehead from the white helmet it had worn. Its body looked thin in a leather coat that was several sizes too big. The shiny trousers were hanging off him with the crutch almost at his knees. Where was the bright eager adventurer of yesterday shaking small village Ireland off his feet? All I wanted to do was to get warm. I threw back the bedclothes and flung myself down on the bed, boots, leather coat and all, pulled up the bedclothes and curled up in a foetal position for warmth. This was much more scary than I realised. I was truly alone, away from my family. I hoped tomorrow will be better. I drifted off....

I slept badly, got up early. It’s great when you don’t have to dress. You’re already warm and ready for action. I went down stairs for breakfast at 6.30am. There were three young fellas already in the dining room talking about the day’s work on a local farm. Their accents sounded funny. Welsh or was it English?

‘You’re not from round these parts?’ the tall one with the pimples asked.

‘No,’ I answered, ‘how did you know?’

The three laughed so uncontrollably that the young woman from the kitchen rushed in.

‘Something the matter?’ she asked with a worried face.

This cause more gales of laughter. Its infection changed me from being embarrassed to joining in the laughter. The woman coloured and retreated into the kitchen.

We poked fun at each other’s accents. It was all done in good humour and by the time we had finished breakfast we were all on good terms. English people weren’t so bad, I thought. They don’t all have voices I’d heard on the BBC. These accents were so strange. I had never heard them before. They poked fun at my accent and I tried to mimic theirs. When I asked them the distance to London they looked at me askance. Why? Why do you want to know that? To them it was as far away as the moon.

‘You’re going to London on that thing?’ Paul with the pimples asked, thumbing in the direction of the bike. ‘You must be fuckin mad! When are you expecting to get there? Next Saturday?’

After the teasing had subsided I explained about my bike problem and they agreed to give me a push to start it. I felt good inside. The fried eggs, bacon, and beans and cups of hot tea filled me with enthusiasm. I felt human again. All three came out to help get the bike going. Even the woman came out and she offered me a bar of Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate for the journey, ‘to keep you warm.’ I gratefully accepted and offered to give her a lift to London in exchange. Despite encouragement from her other three guests she graciously declined.

My enthusiasm failed to be challenged by the grey misty morning light and cold that hung in the air. My only concern was getting the bike going. When the English boys pushed me to start the engine my spirits soared and the engine reignited and my sense of adventure spluttered into life. Away to London I went. With the mountains of Snowdonia behind me travelling through the flatter plains of the English Midlands was not so challenging. However by now I had come to accept that I was no Easy Rider blazing a trail down Ventura highway. The reality was somewhat different. I was crawling along on my 200c bike with a homemade perspex windshield that offered little shelter from the winter‘s cold of North Wales and England. I was doing between thirty five and forty five miles per hour depending on the inclines of the hills with a freezing cold wind in my face.

As I drove along listening to the varying drone of the engine I had time to reflect on what I had left behind. The small village in Ireland, the bottling shop of the pub across the road where I poured Guinness into bottles and corked them at the age of fourteen, the orchards where we followed the seasons timetable in picking strawberries, soon afterwards raspberries and then apples and pears, all for the Dublin market. Later, in the cold wet ground we picked potatoes with frozen hands and numb fingers. I was a year out of school when my father, the village sergeant called in a favour from a local politician who got me a job in an office. I recalled how badly bullied I was by my boss there. He was a tall bald taciturn man whose only pleasure in life seemed to have been to make my life a misery. I resolved never to be in such a vulnerable position again. I momentarily recalled my fear and dread as I walked behind him on regular visits down the echoing corridor, his leather shoes banging on the wooden floor, towards the boss’ office. I wanted to say, ’fuck off. Stick your job up your arse’ but couldn’t. By then my father had retired and there were plenty of mouths to feed.

I remembered the exact position on the page of the Dunrath Independent newspaper for the advertisement looking for men and women to train as nurses caring for people with learning disabilities - and get paid for it! I recalled thinking ruefully, men as nurses? There must be a mistake. I looked again. The hospital was run by the St John of God Brothers. That was okay. I applied. I smiled to myself thinking I didn’t have a clue what it was about but it was a training. What a wonderfully satisfying job it turned out to be. I threw myself into my work.

Sitting there on my bike I thought with pleasure at my time there. I wondered how Jamie Jeffries was getting on with his new bicycle Santa had got him. Was John Pinkerton managing to get on better with his mother after he had bitten her? I realised now that working there had changed me. It gave me a purpose and direction in my life that I never had before. I knew I wanted to spend my life helping others. Whether it was altruistic or selfish reasons it didn’t matter. I could make a difference to people’s lives by just being me. And it made me feel so good about myself. So here I was sitting on this bike heading for my destiny…

Why London? I recalled how easy it was to decide to go to London. It was because it was a place where nobody knew me. Ireland in the late 60s was a claustrophobic place. There I was known as the son of Pat Shaw, the nephew of The Bull Connell, the grandson of the Bob Shaw. I knew there was more to me than my family’s position in the village. The family name had defined my place in life. If I stayed at home it would stop me from being anybody or doing anything other than fulfilling the expectations of my name. When I was 12 years old I had told a mate that I would like to study and go to university. He laughed and for the next few months I was jokingly called, and referred to as ‘Professor.’ Even the school teacher joined in the ridicule. My father asked, ‘what were you thinking of, saying that? Making a show of us.’

I could be a genius or a fool, a psychopath or a saint, a creative artist or a criminal. Yet if I stayed in Dunrath I would always be nothing more or less than my family name. All that was different in me would be smothered under other people’s expectations of who I was. I would be expected to know my place. But now I was breaking free from the restrictions of Dunrath and the religious bigotry and hypocrisy that pervaded every part of my life. I was going to a place where nobody gave a shit about me, a place where I could be myself. At home I could not express me as I really was. But in London I would become a revolutionary! I had a mission! I felt strong and confident and knew I could join in with the changes that were happening outside Ireland. And also get a bit of action in the ‘Free Love’ scene. I could be a part of something that shakes the windows and doors of the established order. And I couldn’t wait to get there!

Chapter 2. Arriving.

I arrived at Broxton Village on Friday mid-afternoon on Friday, tired hungry and very cold. The village was on the outskirts of London. As I entered the village I could see the high brick chimney that marked the hospital's location towering over the houses. I felt a huge sense of relief. I had reached my destination.

I rode on through the village with its small collection of mainly brick and Tudor style houses and passed the Red Lion pub that was to become so familiar to me. On the other side of the village I came to and followed the high ivy covered wall that bordered the road and became excited when the battered sign stating 'Slow Hospital Entrance' came into view.

I turned into the low archway on the left hand side of the road and stopped in this forbidding grey stoned entrance and waited while two dark uniformed men emerged from their gatehouse. They viewed me with indifference and directed me to the Central Male Nursing Office.

Once through the narrow archway, the road broadened and the vista expanded into another world of lawns and trees and freshly dug flower beds. This world populated by large brick villas and housing blocks seemed to stretch into the distance. I was shocked. Where were the imposing gothic buildings full of gloom and foreboding? Where were the barred windows with pale staring faces? Instead there were landscaped gardens, magnificent towering trees and manicured lawns. There was nothing oppressive about this place or anything to indicate that this was an asylum except for the few solitary figures dotted throughout the grounds, staring, preoccupied, lost in their own thoughts.

Several gardeners were working at a flower bed outside the first large block that I passed boasting the name 'Broxton Male Nurses Home.’ Further on, despite the chill of the winter's late afternoon, a middle aged woman sat on a wooden park bench beside the road in a light pink dress staring into space. She didn't look up as I drove past her slowly.

I found the Central Male Nursing Office which was the focal point of movement of mainly men dressed in dark grey suits or white coats. These male nurses passed in and out through its entrance singly or in animated groups like bees entering and leaving the hive. Later I found out they were checking a notice board for ward changes. The Central Male Nursing Office itself was a crowded noisy place with six nurse managers sitting at desks chatting, making entries in ledgers and answering phones. I said who I was and why I was there and waited.

A quick call to a Mr King, a fifteen minute wait while I sat thawing out and Mr King known derisively as ‘Big Trousers’ and his side kick Andrius, the ‘Knocker Upper’ appeared. Mr King had got his name from his predilection to wearing Humphrey Boggart type trousers that came up to his chest. Andrius had got his nickname because of his responsibility to call the nurses for early shift at six am. Mr King presented as a large round pompous Englishman, whilst his sidekick was a diminutive narrow faced sharp-eyed rat-like Pole. They were the guardians of the physical environment of Broxton Male Nurses Home and the self-appointed keepers of the moral integrity of its residents particularly in upholding the rule that no women were allowed in day or night.

We left the Central Nursing Office together. I pushed my motorbike, relieved to walk after being so long in the saddle. Andrius walked alongside while Mr King drove his car the hundred yards to Broxton Male Nurses Home.

‘You’ll like living there’, Andrius reassured me, ‘it’s okay, it’s very nice. You’ll see. Not like the way it was when patients were there’.

I stopped walking and looked at him. ‘You mean I am going to be living in a ward?’

‘No, no! Not a ward. All the patients are gone. It’s very nice. Just like a hotel.’

I parked the bike outside the front door and followed Andrius up the steps and into the building feeling a bit apprehensive. Inside Broxton Male Nurses Home, the austere drab fittings and sparse furniture gave lie to Andrius’s assertions. It certainly was no hotel. Still I didn’t mind. It was good to have arrived.

In his office Mr King carried out the formalities for providing information about the accommodation and outlining the facilities - where the one public phone and ablution areas were, where the dining room was located three hundred yards away in the Female Nurses Home. He outlined the procedures; what to do with white coats, personal clothes, keys when lost and fire, and a list of ‘thou shall not’ rules - no sticky tape on walls, no electrical equipment, no overnight visitors, no alcohol, no parties and definitely no women. My head was buzzing.

They showed me to my room, room nineteen, on the second floor. It was like every other room in the building. The door had a brass door knob below which was a large keyhole that accommodated a heavy iron key that was responsible, over the next year, for ruining the pockets of several of my good pairs of trousers. The heavy door opened outwards. It had the outline of a small observation window now painted over with green paint that matched the green paint of the door, the corridor walls and the room walls.

Light entered the room through a narrow wooden sash window on the wall opposite to the door. Mr King led the way into the room and walked over to the window, leaned down on it and closed it with a bang that echoed down the corridor. The weights banged as they settled.

‘Just airing the room after the last resident’. Mr King seemed to need to justify the window being open to the damp winter cold.

‘No fear of being burgled here, ‘he continued, ‘what keeps people in keeps others out’. He pointed out that the window could only be opened four inches - a remnant of its former days as a ward.

He added in an attempt at humour, ‘this prevented even the most anorexic of patients from vacating their accommodation unannounced.’

The window looked out onto two neglected tennis courts which backed onto the high perimeter wall that guarded the asylum.

Examining the room more closely I could see that the furnishing was meagre. It consisted of a narrow single bed, a bedside locker that bore the scorch marks of numerous cigarettes and coffee cup rings, a straight-backed chair and a shallow built-in recess in the wall with a rail for storing clothes.

Room nineteen was located one third down the long straight echoing corridor. Its floor was of highly polished maple wood. Andrius spent most of his day patrolling the corridors pushing a large floor polisher in front of him. Even inside the room with the door locked, one could not escape the low sound of the polisher nor every footfall, every door bang, every key clang and every fart that occurred in the building.

After showing me my room and walking me to the ablution areas at each end of the corridor Andrius announced he was heading home for the weekend and said his goodbyes. Mr King became somewhat restless. 'I'm usually off early on Fridays,’ he stated in the resigned tone befitting of a martyr.

He paused at a door at the end of the corridor on the ground floor, peered at the name on it, ‘Stephen Hughes’, knocked and stood aside. A dark haired man about twenty five years old flung the door open outwards, hesitated, scanned both of us and moved towards us quickly pulling his door shut behind him.

With a beaming smile he said, 'Ah, Mr King, can I be of any assistance?’ He