Airing Courts and A Long Stretch of Ha-Ha
Elizabeth K Reeder
I
When she comes to work she often thinks about walls: the illusion of stability they provide; their often hidden nature; of the dampness of these hurriedly-built structures beneath her hands and the hands of those who spend time here. There is not enough air here for everyone. The high windows are mostly kept closed and it is often claustrophobic.
II
She, the daughter of a ghillie, grew up in the shadow of a grand old house with its sloping lawn. From the house there was an illusion of a continual stretch of manicured grass, but in reality about half way downhill a curving wall had its top flush to the grass, but dropped down abruptly, steeply on the far side, with a formidable ditch at its base, in an arrangement that kept livestock within their assigned grazing areas while the view pristine for those at the manor.
III
At work there are two airing courts, which are far too small for the numbers of patients who would like to benefit from them. On one spot of lawn they set up a tent and each morning place a few chairs outside its flapping sides, so there is an appearance of rest about it.
There is the open-air hospital too, a summer-only building, with its back to the looming stonework of the main asylum, which is camouflaged by a few trees. It’s a rickety building that has one long narrow wall, and two short sides that are equally skinny and, at a glance, all three are mostly windows. Two whimsical stilts support its open front, which is mostly air.
Each day that has good enough weather – and the Glaswegians amongst them define this perhaps more broadly than some – a small group of well-behaved, deserving patients spend time here in short shifts.
They never say it, but the paupers are less likely to be on this rotation, and the distinction between deserving and less so is built into the very design of spaces at the asylum.
Where would she placed be if she ended up here? Or if he did?
IV
By day her father called this half-hidden wall a ha-ha. A fad of the time, a privileging of a certain type of view. At night he told stories of wolves that used to range the place and how they could have leapt this wall with ease.
Once her brother had tried to jump free of it and it had ended, predictably, with broken bones that perhaps simply made visible other things that needed healing.
V
On a good day, she might think of these airing courts as providing the nature cure, with access to the hope and resilience and the flow of fresh air. Gales, slashing rain. Bracing. Refreshing. Restorative. This might have held some truth for TB patients, as the fresh air rattled free the phlegm. But at Gartnavel, the idea is that you can forget the racing: of a mind, of the thoughts connecting one place to another, of times bound together, of agitations adhering to each other in such uncomfortable and persistent ways, of a body that is stayed by the restrictions of walls both obvious and obscured.
VI
To build a wall takes effort. To build a wall with hidden purpose takes even more. An asylum ha-ha is different, she learns. On the day of her induction the matron walked her down there to show her the clever design, which turned out to be a type of inversion of the wall she knew as a child. Here the ditch came before the wall, and it was deep, halting, and had the effect, from the asylum side, of making the wall inaccessible. From the outside, the wall appears low and serene, the grass greener on this side, and the whole impact is benign.
At other places around the grounds tall sharp metal palings are more obvious in their intent of containment.
VII
The men in her family had been known to punch walls. And to be kind. And to love and to threaten. And to be both let loose and heeled by the dog.
VIII
To be aired is to be discussed. To have air circulate around what can be too tightly bound. There is birdsong around the outbuildings, sometimes, but more persistent is the silence. How we speak one thing and hide another. How we assert something is kind and yet know full well its impact is as effective as a punch. She is not unbiased, and she understands how close this place might be for herself or those she knows and had once loved.
IX
She wouldn’t say they didn’t try, the architects and the gardeners, but this flimsy summer-construction didn’t even half-protect them from the winds that raced across the place. A razing wind, she thinks. Razing. Razed. Blazing. And she wouldn’t be surprised to find this building one day succumbed to a different sort of destruction, for there were potential little fires everywhere here: walking, talking, shouting, taking the ha-ha at a run.
X
You’d think it a cure, the open air. But one man lasted only a few minutes. He could feel the air in his lungs, the brightness of oxygen, and it was way more than he could handle, so used to a tight, damp ridden room as he was.
He clutched his arms to his chest and swirled his whole torso above his hips like a pestle in a mortar. His eyes rolled and he made a fragile noise she imagined might sound like the sweep of a lighthouse. Then he found the ground and stilled. The open air had let him range too wildly and he lost all definition. Give my place to a different lad or lass.
She walked him back up the hill and, as soon as they were close enough, he placed a hand on the stone wall of the main building and pressed himself against it. It was solid. She understood and waited. Lungs take in what they can and themselves are defined, have moveable, stretchable, contractable limits. When he knew himself enough to stand again and walk, he did so with narrow inches between him and the building but he held back from knocking his knuckles against it as they walked. Back in his narrow room, he wrapped himself up tight in his blanket, swaddled. The pressure against his chest, the weight of it, defined him. Eventually he would find his way to a window seat in a communal room, and then arrive at a tolerance for something more open. Then he was gone.
XI
She had wanted this to be the job for her, so she could show she could do better this time. But it turns out that it is not the job for her. The airing courts are the worst. Pretend things; illusions of freedom.
She looked pleasant for the photographer, sure, she could do that, but she would be lying if didn’t admit to the urge to take to a fast run towards all the hidden ha-has and leap, hang the consequences.
XII
In her short season here (before she finds a temporary office job that is even worse, and before she goes north seeking seasonal work picking fruit and digging up tatties, and before she eventually finds her way to a small leased holding), she imagines this place out of hours in a haunted and bewitching dark, wonders about moon-shadows cast by buildings, permanent and temporary, by those sharp palings, and by deceptively built boundaries. She has, unsurprisingly, never been brave enough to visit.
XIII
But now, years later, as a crofter and caretaker, she knows how her body is capable of transforming under the moon and knows how the ha-ha would provide no more than a playful little challenge for her. The seamless earth becomes real as she changes her form and she is as comfortable in the night as in the light, is as comfortable with a pressure pushing at her ribs as with boundlessness nakedness, and she knows how often she has already leapt into the sky trusting her body in the open air.
Commentary
For Writing the Asylum, I was sent a few images of the open-air wards introduced to Gartnavel in the 1900s. At first I thought I might visit other Scottish open-air hospital sites (there’s one near where I live up near Kingussie) and write them together in some way. But then, Scottish winter and Covid in the family happened and, you know, the project stayed more online. I read into open-air hospitals, looked at the layout of the Gartnavel hospital grounds, read about who were patients at the asylum. Then, on the day I’d set aside to write this, I was listening to The Allusionist podcast, and they were talking about obscure words and ‘ha-ha’ was one of them. It’s a strange type of wall-ditch-deception. Its etymological source is unclear, and existing conjectures are unsatisfying, but one online source said that it was linked with saut de loup, which translates as wolf jump. As far as I know, there were no ha-has at Gartnavel, but there were walls and palings aplenty. When I sat down to write, with notes about other things, my narrator arrived and the open-air hospital, airing courts and ha-has all came together in this piece of short fiction.
[Photographs of open-air wards at Gartnavel, HB13/15/14 and 15]
Elizabeth K Reeder is a writer. Her two most recent books are An Archive of Happiness (Penned in the Margins), a novel, and microbursts (Prototype Publishing), a collection of her hybrid writing, which is a visual/design collaboration with Amanda Thomson. She lives in Strathspey, when not teaching creative writing at University of Glasgow. She comes from a family that is familiar with mental illness, and it’s a topic she often includes in her writing. She co-runs #DeathWrites (with Naomi Richards and Amy Shea), which is a RSE network of thirty Scottish writers who are writing about illness, death, dying and grief, and she is currently an Endangered Landscape Artist in residence with Cairngorms connect alongside Amanda Thomson and Robbie Synge.
Airing Courts and A Long Stretch of Ha-Ha
Elizabeth K Reeder
I
When she comes to work she often thinks about walls: the illusion of stability they provide; their often hidden nature; of the dampness of these hurriedly-built structures beneath her hands and the hands of those who spend time here. There is not enough air here for everyone. The high windows are mostly kept closed and it is often claustrophobic.
II
She, the daughter of a ghillie, grew up in the shadow of a grand old house with its sloping lawn. From the house there was an illusion of a continual stretch of manicured grass, but in reality about half way downhill a curving wall had its top flush to the grass, but dropped down abruptly, steeply on the far side, with a formidable ditch at its base, in an arrangement that kept livestock within their assigned grazing areas while the view pristine for those at the manor.
III
At work there are two airing courts, which are far too small for the numbers of patients who would like to benefit from them. On one spot of lawn they set up a tent and each morning place a few chairs outside its flapping sides, so there is an appearance of rest about it.
There is the open-air hospital too, a summer-only building, with its back to the looming stonework of the main asylum, which is camouflaged by a few trees. It’s a rickety building that has one long narrow wall, and two short sides that are equally skinny and, at a glance, all three are mostly windows. Two whimsical stilts support its open front, which is mostly air.
Each day that has good enough weather – and the Glaswegians amongst them define this perhaps more broadly than some – a small group of well-behaved, deserving patients spend time here in short shifts.
They never say it, but the paupers are less likely to be on this rotation, and the distinction between deserving and less so is built into the very design of spaces at the asylum.
Where would she placed be if she ended up here? Or if he did?
IV
By day her father called this half-hidden wall a ha-ha. A fad of the time, a privileging of a certain type of view. At night he told stories of wolves that used to range the place and how they could have leapt this wall with ease.
Once her brother had tried to jump free of it and it had ended, predictably, with broken bones that perhaps simply made visible other things that needed healing.
V
On a good day, she might think of these airing courts as providing the nature cure, with access to the hope and resilience and the flow of fresh air. Gales, slashing rain. Bracing. Refreshing. Restorative. This might have held some truth for TB patients, as the fresh air rattled free the phlegm. But at Gartnavel, the idea is that you can forget the racing: of a mind, of the thoughts connecting one place to another, of times bound together, of agitations adhering to each other in such uncomfortable and persistent ways, of a body that is stayed by the restrictions of walls both obvious and obscured.
VI
To build a wall takes effort. To build a wall with hidden purpose takes even more. An asylum ha-ha is different, she learns. On the day of her induction the matron walked her down there to show her the clever design, which turned out to be a type of inversion of the wall she knew as a child. Here the ditch came before the wall, and it was deep, halting, and had the effect, from the asylum side, of making the wall inaccessible. From the outside, the wall appears low and serene, the grass greener on this side, and the whole impact is benign.
At other places around the grounds tall sharp metal palings are more obvious in their intent of containment.
VII
The men in her family had been known to punch walls. And to be kind. And to love and to threaten. And to be both let loose and heeled by the dog.
VIII
To be aired is to be discussed. To have air circulate around what can be too tightly bound. There is birdsong around the outbuildings, sometimes, but more persistent is the silence. How we speak one thing and hide another. How we assert something is kind and yet know full well its impact is as effective as a punch. She is not unbiased, and she understands how close this place might be for herself or those she knows and had once loved.
IX
She wouldn’t say they didn’t try, the architects and the gardeners, but this flimsy summer-construction didn’t even half-protect them from the winds that raced across the place. A razing wind, she thinks. Razing. Razed. Blazing. And she wouldn’t be surprised to find this building one day succumbed to a different sort of destruction, for there were potential little fires everywhere here: walking, talking, shouting, taking the ha-ha at a run.
X
You’d think it a cure, the open air. But one man lasted only a few minutes. He could feel the air in his lungs, the brightness of oxygen, and it was way more than he could handle, so used to a tight, damp ridden room as he was.
He clutched his arms to his chest and swirled his whole torso above his hips like a pestle in a mortar. His eyes rolled and he made a fragile noise she imagined might sound like the sweep of a lighthouse. Then he found the ground and stilled. The open air had let him range too wildly and he lost all definition. Give my place to a different lad or lass.
She walked him back up the hill and, as soon as they were close enough, he placed a hand on the stone wall of the main building and pressed himself against it. It was solid. She understood and waited. Lungs take in what they can and themselves are defined, have moveable, stretchable, contractable limits. When he knew himself enough to stand again and walk, he did so with narrow inches between him and the building but he held back from knocking his knuckles against it as they walked. Back in his narrow room, he wrapped himself up tight in his blanket, swaddled. The pressure against his chest, the weight of it, defined him. Eventually he would find his way to a window seat in a communal room, and then arrive at a tolerance for something more open. Then he was gone.
XI
She had wanted this to be the job for her, so she could show she could do better this time. But it turns out that it is not the job for her. The airing courts are the worst. Pretend things; illusions of freedom.
She looked pleasant for the photographer, sure, she could do that, but she would be lying if didn’t admit to the urge to take to a fast run towards all the hidden ha-has and leap, hang the consequences.
XII
In her short season here (before she finds a temporary office job that is even worse, and before she goes north seeking seasonal work picking fruit and digging up tatties, and before she eventually finds her way to a small leased holding), she imagines this place out of hours in a haunted and bewitching dark, wonders about moon-shadows cast by buildings, permanent and temporary, by those sharp palings, and by deceptively built boundaries. She has, unsurprisingly, never been brave enough to visit.
XIII
But now, years later, as a crofter and caretaker, she knows how her body is capable of transforming under the moon and knows how the ha-ha would provide no more than a playful little challenge for her. The seamless earth becomes real as she changes her form and she is as comfortable in the night as in the light, is as comfortable with a pressure pushing at her ribs as with boundlessness nakedness, and she knows how often she has already leapt into the sky trusting her body in the open air.
Commentary
For Writing the Asylum, I was sent a few images of the open-air wards introduced to Gartnavel in the 1900s. At first I thought I might visit other Scottish open-air hospital sites (there’s one near where I live up near Kingussie) and write them together in some way. But then, Scottish winter and Covid in the family happened and, you know, the project stayed more online. I read into open-air hospitals, looked at the layout of the Gartnavel hospital grounds, read about who were patients at the asylum. Then, on the day I’d set aside to write this, I was listening to The Allusionist podcast, and they were talking about obscure words and ‘ha-ha’ was one of them. It’s a strange type of wall-ditch-deception. Its etymological source is unclear, and existing conjectures are unsatisfying, but one online source said that it was linked with saut de loup, which translates as wolf jump. As far as I know, there were no ha-has at Gartnavel, but there were walls and palings aplenty. When I sat down to write, with notes about other things, my narrator arrived and the open-air hospital, airing courts and ha-has all came together in this piece of short fiction.
[Photographs of open-air wards at Gartnavel, HB13/15/14 and 15]
Elizabeth K Reeder is a writer. Her two most recent books are An Archive of Happiness (Penned in the Margins), a novel, and microbursts (Prototype Publishing), a collection of her hybrid writing, which is a visual/design collaboration with Amanda Thomson. She lives in Strathspey, when not teaching creative writing at University of Glasgow. She comes from a family that is familiar with mental illness, and it’s a topic she often includes in her writing. She co-runs #DeathWrites (with Naomi Richards and Amy Shea), which is a RSE network of thirty Scottish writers who are writing about illness, death, dying and grief, and she is currently an Endangered Landscape Artist in residence with Cairngorms connect alongside Amanda Thomson and Robbie Synge.