The Silent Women

By Avril Joy

In 1875, Simone Gastrell is conveniently committed to Long Meadows Asylum by her adulterous husband. Distraught but not defeated, she meets the silent women whose lives within the institution are ordered and defined by men. Alice Semple, a herbalist and wise-woman, does not speak, but gives testimony in her notebook. Phoebe Baines, a fr

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linen Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739177799

Book preview

THE

SILENT

WOMEN

Notes from an Asylum

AVRIL JOY

Published by Linen Press, London 2023

8 Maltings Lodge

Corney Reach Way

London W4 2TT

www.linen-press.com

© Avril Joy 2023

The right of Avril Joy to be identified as the author of this work

has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,

by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated

without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other

than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this

condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is a work of fiction. All the characters, incidents, events, organisations, and places portrayed in these pages are either drawn from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover art: Arcangel

Cover Design: Avril Joy and Zebedee

Typeset by Zebedee

Printed and bound by Lightning Source

ISBN: 978-1-7391777-9-9

For Elsie, Freja and Lilah

About the Author

Image Missing

Before becoming a full-time writer, Avril Joy worked for twenty-five years in Low Newton women’s prison in County Durham. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including Victoria Hislop’s The Story: Love, Loss & the Lives of Women. Her work has been listed in the Bridport, the Manchester Prize for Fiction, the Fish Short Memoir and the Raymond Carver Prize. In 2012 her story, Millie and Bird, won the inaugural Costa Short Story Award. Her novel, Sometimes a River Song, won the 2017 People’s Book Prize for outstanding achievement. Her poetry has appeared both in print and online. In 2019, her poem Skomm won the York Literary Festival poetry competition. Avril lives with her partner near Bishop Auckland in County Durham.

www.avriljoy.com

https://avriljoywritingdays.substack.com/about

Books by Avril Joy

The Sweet Track, Flambard Press, 2007

From Writing With Love, Createspace, 2014

Millie and Bird, Iron Press, 2015

Sometimes A River Song, Linen Press, 2016

Going in With Flowers, Linen Press, 2019

this One Wild Place, Linen Press, 2021

Praise for Avril Joy’s writing

Sometimes a River Song

An amazing, accomplished, beautifully written book. Masterful storytelling. Gorgeous, captivating, innovative lyrical prose…(we) want to recognise its inspirational content to women all over the world that despite an unfair society one can lift oneself out of misery through the strength and love of the women who fight together for a better life. A magical book that speaks to every sense and to your heart.

– The People’s Book Prize judges

Avril Joy has produced a work of haunting beauty which celebrates the courage and resilience of the human spirit.

– Jenny Gorrod, Dundee Review of the Arts

An amazing, beautiful book with echoes of Eimear McBride. Avril Joy knows how to draw you into the story, right into the soul of the narrator. Aiyana’s voice is the voice of the river. I could have gone on listening to that song for ever.

– Kathleen Jones, author of A Passionate Sisterhood

A tour de force. The narrator’s voice sings… I can almost hear the insects and the dip of the oars… original and beautiful… I read it in one great gallop.

– Sharon Griffiths, The Northern Echo, author of The Accidental Time Traveller

A great feat of literary imagination…this beautifully written novel will enchant readers, young and old, across the world.

– Wendy Robertson, author of Writing at the Maison Bleue

Completely stunned by it! The power of Aiyana’s voice, the exquisite rendering of the river setting and life around it, the characters – it is incredibly engaging, immersive and moving. And although there are shocking and brutal events, there is beauty and hope in abundance, not to mention love.

– Isabel Costello, On the Literary Sofa

Triumphant …This book, with its hopes for Aiyana being dashed and thwarted so many times along the way, could so easily have fallen at the last, but the conclusion, brought about by Aiyana herself, whose spirit is unbroken, is triumphant. I felt, by the end, that I had been reading an epic tale, not a novel – rhythmic, mystical, poetic.

– Alison Coles, Book Oxygen

Going In With Flowers

Poetry is a natural place to express the most intense feelings. But for it to work it has to be more than just expression; it has to be transformational…Avril’s poems have that quality. Skomm is an absolutely shattering poem and it’s not going to leave me.

– Clare Shaw

Women in prison are neither seen nor heard, their stories seldom told and even more rarely understood. Avril Joy spent twenty five years teaching in prison and as well as teaching, she listened and tried to understand. She wanted to give the women she’d known a voice so they could be heard. In this selection of scene-setting prose and powerful poetry, she has succeeded brilliantly.

– Sharon Griffiths, Northern Echo, Eastern Daily Press

Avril’s work is unsparing but humane, a plea for understanding for those women on the margins of our society who all too often end up in prison, doubly victimised. Buy this book, keep it by your bedside and read it over and over again .

– Caroline Beck, journalist and gardener

Listening to Avril Joy yesterday was a treat. She is simply captivating. She also made me cry. Not an easy task with my heart of stone…I’ve been thinking about Lisa since yesterday. Her words about her have left such an imprint on me.

– Phil Mews, Author of Orphan Boys

The highlight of Durham Book festival 2019 was Writing from Inside. Inspiring readings and stories of prison life from all three writers… I was close to tears at times at the beautiful poetry and emotionally charged stories from the writers involved – a special event.

– Natalie Crick, poet

A little madness in the Spring

Is wholesome even for the King,

But God be with the Clown,

Who ponders this tremendous scene-

This whole experiment in green,

As if it were his own!

Emily Dickinson

He who reveals the secrets of a prisonhouse must have been in it. Even so, gentle

reader, is it with lunatic asylums; therefore, to tell thee that I KNOW whereof I affirm in this little book and am prepared to PROVE every statement made therein, is to tell thee that I have dwelt in asylums for lunatics. Whether as matron, keeper or patient, I leave to thy discrimination.

The Bastilles of England, Louisa Lowe, 1883

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

Books by Avril Joy

Praise for Avril Joy’s writing

Epigraph

The Asylum

September 1875

May 1875 – 5 months earlier

Patient Confinement

Long Meadow

Phoebe Baines

Medical Officer

William Blakely

The House Committee

The Visitors’ Book

The Infirmary

The Visitors’ Book

Alice Semple

Matron

Simone

Alice Semple’s Notebook

Simone

Resident Medical Officer and Superintendent

The Superintendent’s Cottage

Simone

The Treatment of Patients

Phoebe Baines

Chief Attendant

William Blakely

The Airing Courts

Simone

Phoebe

Simone

Alice Semple’s Notebook

The Visitors’ Book

Upstairs

Patients’ Letters

The Letter

The Chaplain

The Chapel

Simone

A Magic Lantern Show

Alice Semple’s Notebook

Simone

June

Simone

Medical Officer’s Quarters

Restraint and Seclusion

Alice Semple’s Notebook

The Visiting Room

The Visitors’ Book

Simone

The Superintendent’s Cottage

Fatal or Dangerous Accidents

Simone

Phoebe Baines

Alice Semple’s Notebook

Simone

Blakely

Alice Semple’s Notebook

The Visiting Room

Simone

The Superintendent’s Cottage

Matron

Mrs Corey’s Kitchen

Upstairs

Simone

Alice Semple’s Notebook

Violence Towards Patients

Simone

July

The Chaplain

Simone

Phoebe

Alice Semple’s Notebook

The Superintendent’s Office

Simone

The Superintendent’s Cottage

August

Alice Semple’s Notebook

Simone

Phoebe

Simone

The Chaplain

The Superintendent’s Office

Simone

Alice Semple’s Notebook

Phoebe

Simone

September

Death of a Patient

The Superintendent’s Cottage

Phoebe

Fatehpur Sikri – India – April 1876

Author’s Notes

Acknowledgements

The Asylum

To the north, a wild and uncultivated fen, where paths vanish under water and hollows fill with winter rain, where reeds lay down in the wind and bittersweet hides. And deep in the black soil, the fossil beds, ammonites as big as a man’s fist. To the south, chalk downland, a covering of lady’s bedstraw and a spring-fed stream flowing into the Cam, gin clear and mineral rich, where brown trout nose the watercress. To the west, the pumping station, where the new steam pumps move water, day and night. To the east, Keeper’s Wood.

The purchase, three hundred acres known as Long Meadow, is made by the agent, John Tiplady, in November 1855. The Asylum is to be situated a good distance from city and village boundaries so as not to trouble their inhabitants. Yet, as the walls, chimneys and water tower of the new County Pauper Lunatic Asylum rise, they come to dominate the view. There is not a soul in the County who does not know the name Long Meadow, who does not wonder what might transpire behind its walls, or what power lie in the hands of its newly appointed officers. Truth be told, there are none who do not fear incarceration with no prospect of release, who have not dreamed of the darkness that lies in wait on their doorstep. Except perhaps those who work there, good and bad. Those who make a living from madness.

September 1875

The air is ripe with the scent of rotten apples and damp earth. Seed heads rattle in the grass and the wet, yellow leaves of willow stick to the boots of eel catcher, Michael Corey, as he makes his way to the river. Above him the sky is autumnal blue. The smoke from Long Meadow’s chimneys and the low throb of the pumps hang in the air. He is hoping for a good catch to sell in the town market. For wicker hives and griggs fat with silver eels. And enough left over for chopped eel, fried in best butter, for tea when his mother comes home from attending the mad women of Dormitory Twelve, women who believe they speak with Jesus, who claim to be the Queen herself. Women who believe that eels have taken root in their stomachs and suck their lifeblood.

The newspapers had championed it ‘to better the condition of lunatic paupers,’ or so the Chronicle said. But now he wonders at it. This parade of the afflicted seen in the fields and along the river, always accompanied by their attendants. A circus of lunatics. Are there not better places for such a project? The filthy disease-ridden cities for one? It should never have been built on their land, so the locals say, and he agrees, though he is mindful that the land is no longer theirs. It has been parcelled up and sold off. Now there are new ways to make a living, as in the Asylum, ways that pay as much as thirty-five shillings per annum for a mere attendant.

Michael Corey steps onto the riverbank, wades in among the rushes and reaches down in anticipation for the first hive. But his hand alights on something softer than wicker. There is cloth beneath his fingers and there is flesh. A limb. An arm, he thinks, full grown, half-hidden in the reeds. And there is more.

With all thought of eel and hive forgotten, he wades further in and begins to heave and drag a body up through the mud and onto the bank. The shock and the effort leave him breathless. He looks down on the corpse he has pulled from the river. It lies green and swollen in the grass. He puts his hand to his chest. His heart is alive and beating fast, thank God. He takes off his hat and offers up a prayer.

May 1875 –

5 months earlier

Patient Confinement

71. No Patient shall pass beyond the grounds of the Asylum until discharged by due authority, unless the temporary absence of such Patient be permitted under the power contained in the said or some other Act; or unless the Resident Medical Officer and Superintendent shall give express directions for that purpose.

Rules for the Government of the Pauper Lunatic Asylum situate at Long Meadow – prepared and submitted by the Committee of Visitors thereof, by virtue of the 53rd section of the 16th and 17th VIC. CHAP 97

Long Meadow

A Room Adjoining Dormitory Twelve

Simone Gastrell

She dreams of the child. She dreams of spinning glass, of an ascension of larks. A sky blistered with wings. She dreams of the black water’s edge, a tangle of river weed as she is sucked under, her skirts dragging her down. She wakes breathless. Her head aches and the familiar, sweet, scent of rotting hyacinth curls about her. She opens her eyes, looks up, and wonders where she lies.

Then she remembers.

In the dark, airless silence she hears the beating of her heart.

A cold sweat on her skin, she sits up, lowers her feet to the stone floor, moves across to the window and draws up the canvas blind. A sky like a bruise, a pale moon with a ghostly trail of stars hang above her and the distant thud, thud of the pumps echo the beat of her heart. She turns from the window. Moonlight spills into the room, falling on the wooden chair and table, on the mottled cover of a Book of Common Prayer, on the buttons at the cuff of a linsey dress draped on the chair back. It settles like snow on a corner of the iron bedstead and in the narrow gap beneath the locked door. It lights the blanched face of the counterpane, the whitewashed walls, the waxen bed linen. Nothing here familiar, no colour, no comfort, no ornamentation, no ceiling rose, plaster cornice, curtain, carpet. All absent. All leeched of colour. But then on the corner of the pillowcase a freckle of dried blood, set in the heat of a wash. The blood of another woman? Who might she be? Did she inhabit this room? Is she now gone from Long Meadow? A glimmer of hope, a ruffled feather on a raven’s wing, catches her. Perhaps such a woman walks freely in the world. If so, then how? How might a woman captive, entombed, be set free?

Simone turns back to the window and reaching out to the world she has lost, presses her forehead and her palms on the windowpane. She is the wax flower under glass, taxidermy beneath the dome, butterfly, bird stilled, captured, unheard. If only she had foreseen what was to come, she would have shaken off her grief, escaped the house, run, thrown herself on the mercy of strangers, gone into hiding like a deer in the forest. But her reason had been veiled in laudanum and her will, bound, contingent, subjugated at their whim.

She peers out into the night. Beyond her lie outbuildings and a stretch of grass scattered with the small stone crosses of a graveyard. She can make out a chapel roof and further still the black, yew hedges and high walls of her confinement. In the far distance are trees, their feathery tops clotted with nests. A wood, perhaps a forest? She knows nothing of where she is. She knows nothing of how her incarceration might end, though she fears that only a man will have the power to free her. The husband who put her here, the doctor and apothecary who lent their signatures, an officer of the Asylum. Perhaps a man such as William Blakely, Medical Officer, who boasted of the cleanliness and godliness of the place, who told her how the walls were painted regularly, how as a private patient she would be entitled to a room of her own, to this room, adjoining Dormitory Twelve. William Blakely, the man who had greeted her on the forecourt and escorted her in.

It is dusk when she steps down from the carriage onto the gravel drive. At first sight, the Asylum appears like a fine country house, not unlike the one from which she departed but an hour ago, with gables and parapets and an ornamental porch. But as she raises her head and looks skyward, a chill runs through her. Its very size is forbidding, the stretch of its wings east and west, the looming body of its tower. It is as if a giant bird hovers above her blotting out the sky and the last of the day’s light. She approaches the steps, her heart fast, her mouth dry. She stumbles. He reaches out and offers her his hand. It is warm and strong, and she takes comfort in it.

In the Receiving Room, every surface is cold and slippery, porcelain and metal, tile and sink. There is a weighing machine and a bath. On the walls are cabinets filled with bottles, boxes, cartons. In the corner squats a chair of rough-hewn wood with leather straps on its arms. She is weighed and must bathe under the supervision of a female attendant dressed in a grey gown with white, starched collar and cuffs, crimped hat, apron, and a belt hung with keys. Simone is issued with two green linsey dresses, a cap, four pairs of knee length drawers, stockings, boots, an underskirt and two nightshirts. The attendant says she must wear these for now, but may wear her own clothes, once laundered, seeing as she is admitted as a private patient and not a pauper.

She is a private patient. Of course. Her husband Everett has money enough and will not want the world to think him anything other than concerned for his wife’s welfare. Poor man, they will say, what a tragedy, have you heard? A wife in the County Asylum. Drowned the child, so they say. He pays for her to have every privilege and comfort you know.

And he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Is this to be her life now and no reprieve but at Everett’s bidding? Her fingers fumble at the buttons on the cuff of the dress. A familiar, sharp pain has started up on the right side of her head, making its way down through her neck to her shoulder. Its pulse is insistent. If only she could close her eyes, lie down in the cool and dark, somewhere away from the sour smell and flickering of the gas lamps.

The attendant escorts her upstairs to a narrow room where she is seated behind a desk. Blakely enters and sits down facing her. He smiles but all the while he is watching. She cannot avoid his attention. She looks for something to fix on in the room, away from his gaze, but it is empty, soulless. She cannot escape. How he observes her, looking again and again into her eyes, as if seeking out an explanation, as if searching her very soul. He presses questions upon her, makes notes on all manner of things: her height, complexion, the colour of her hair and the condition of her tongue, her appetite, peculiarities and marks. He wants to know every intimate detail, everything from the regularity of her menses to the consistency of her bowels.

She is photographed wearing the linsey dress.

He asks if she has thoughts of taking her life. He asks what she remembers of… he hesitates, ‘the accident,’ he says, using the word as if it is in question.

‘I have no recollection,’ says Simone.

‘Have you ever had thoughts of harming a child before that day? It would not be so unusual,’ he adds.

‘No,’ she answers. She puts her hand to her temple as if to press away the pain.

What of her child, the stillborn? What of her marriage? Her husband? Her jealousies? The accident? He refers to the paper in front of him. Though she views it upside down, she can read the title, Admissions Form, and she recognises Eames’s writing, her husband’s physician, and the words suspicion, and intentional.

She swallows hard. Her head throbs. She does not know how to answer. His face shimmers with stars and there are flashing lights at the side of her vision. Her arm grows numb and she fears soon she will be unable to speak, at least sufficiently to give a sensible account of herself. The pain tightens in a band about her head.

‘I have a headache,’ she says. ‘Please. I beg you. May I sleep now?’

He offers her a poultice of opium and vinegar for her head. The attendant escorts her downstairs, through a series of long corridors and a silent dormitory of sleeping women, to what is to be her room. Once in bed and with the poultice administered, Simone falls into a deep, dream-troubled sleep. Until the moonlight wakes her.

She moves away from the window leaving the blind drawn so that she might watch the sky and climbs back into bed. Her headache is fading. Dull now. Moonlight wanes, replaced by the rose light of dawn. Then voices. People calling out their goodbyes, leaving, going out into the break of a spring day. She pictures them free, under a wide cloudless sky, breathing in the cool morning air.

A morning to be up and out, the kind of morning she and Constance would set out early with a picnic of breakfast rolls, freshly baked by Cook, salted meat, cheese, preserves and ginger beer. A day to linger in the water meadows, with the cuckoo flowers and the small blue butterflies, Constance playing with her Dutch dolls, Simone with a book open on her