The Chaplain’s daughter

Gillean McDougall

Mima always said we were never going to be Matron’s pets. I would see the others sucking up, volunteering for the dirty jobs, eyeing up the medals pinned to the bosoms of the older ones, putting their names down for extra training. We didn’t care; they were all feeble anyway. You could barely tell one from another. Mima used bribery and flirting to get us a two-bed room so we didn’t have to go in the dormitory. It was at the end of the back corridor next to the boiler room, but it was worth putting up with occasional noxious fumes and banging noises for the extra warmth. My bed, against the party wall, was warmest. That was Mima’s excuse when she crept in beside me. And I really didn’t mind.

And oh, the work was hard, and the poor souls in the Asylum often drove you to distraction yourself. If the nurses all looked the same, every one of the inmates seemed to have a different problem and we were always on the receiving end of the mess. We were tired and footsore and our hands were red with scrubbing. Sometimes I just needed to get out in the grounds, pulling off my cap, knowing I risked a punishment if someone saw. Just to get clean air in me. The grass under my feet was better than the Asylum corridors. I would put my hand on the slender trunks of the silver birch trees and steady myself against that strange white bark, the dark crevices peeling away showing something else inside.

If it was raining, I’d jink inside the wee Chapel with its smell of new wood and candle wax and putty. It hadn’t been built long, and the glaziers had just fitted fancy stained glass windows showing St Dorcas and St Luke. Dorcas is patron saint of nurses, but she looked snooty with her flowing robes and Holy Willie phizog. I didn’t think I was like her and I didn’t feel saintly. A new chaplain had arrived with the building and Mima said some folk had mistaken him for an inmate. He was wandered; bushy white hair standing on end and he never finished a sentence, just let the words drift away.

He came with a wife and a daughter. The wife was stout, and wore a toque hat, always. Straw in good weather, barathea when it rained. And on a Sunday, black fur that looked like Matron’s cat Bobby had curled up on her head. They moved into one of the staff cottages and apparently the mother was away much of the time Doing Good Works. The girl didn’t look like either of them. She was a pretty thing, with fair hair cut in the latest style. The kind of hair that goes curly in the rain. And stylish in her clothes. She was that slim. And kind of English-spoken when I heard her say yes and thank-you and how do you do?

She walked in the grounds a lot and once I saw her drawing the trees, sitting on the grass with her knees pulled up and a board resting on them. I liked that she liked the trees too. One day I saw her in the kitchen garden and she was wearing a light coat like a kimono, jade green with a pattern of cranes flying. She was hugging herself, looking at the sky and turning around and around. I wondered if she did any work; thought she probably didn’t need to. I wondered what her life was like in the wee cottage with her funny-looking mother and father reading the Bible all the time. Sometimes I’d walk along the back road, memorising the windows, seeing clothes hanging on the line, imagining which white linen might be hers.

One day I was with Mima washing windows in one of the top floor rooms and Mima said oh there’s your girlfriend. I cleaned the stoorie pane with my rag to see her better. She was going from the railway station to the cottages, head down, swinging a carpet bag. She looked like she was in a fierce mood, unlike herself. I thought maybe she’d been away Doing Good Works, too.

Mima said I had a pash on her. Don’t be stupid, I said, I don’t even know her name. Maybe I had. I’d never seen anyone like her before, so whenever I saw her, I couldn’t stop looking at her. She was so…refined. Mima mocked me and sang one of her funny songs. That day she made kissing noises and sang Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I’m half crazy all for the love of you.

Mima wasn’t refined. She called me her ‘swanky girlfriend,’ but only when we were on our own. It annoyed me that she behaved one way when we were with other people and then another way when we were alone. Anyway, put a uniform on us and we all look the same.

I’d gone to the Chapel that morning just to get away from the madhouse. That was the first time I spoke to her. In the gloom, I was looking up at the windows again, trying to make out what St Dorcas was wearing, and there was a touch on my arm. A cold hand, made me jump.

‘Are you here to pray?’

She was so light, it was as if she wasn’t there at all. She was asking a question, but it sounded like she was assuming an answer and that made me panic.

‘No, no, I’m sorry,’ I stammered, ‘I just came in, I’m on my break.’ I jammed my cap back on. It wasn’t strictly true. I was skiving, but she didn’t look like she would know that word. She smiled and moved away and started tidying the hymn books. I looked at her again as I left, took in her clothes, which were not like normal clothes. Everything long and straight and trailing; the colour was of ivy, her small hands like leaves.

I started going to the Chapel on a Sunday, which made Mima laugh and turn over in bed when she wasn’t having to work. I’d watch the girl sitting in the front pew with her mother as her father shouted from the pulpit. It was always something of a mad rabble on a Sunday, even though we only brought the best patients. They were likely to shout back, or laugh loudly, or urinate, or burst out crying. Sex and religion, that’s what Mima says puts most of them here in the first place.

The daughter always sat quietly, looking neither right nor left. I couldn’t put an age on her. She could be sixteen or twenty-six or even older. Her clothes were always rich but shapeless, as if she’d stepped out of the pages of a fairy tale. The colours were of the Asylum gardens, but in rain or cloud or fog – dense, deep pinks; ochre shot with bronze.

The staff summer concert was coming up, but the weather was bad and so plans to have a stage outside had been abandoned. Everywhere was dank yet warm; our collars stuck to our necks. Mima wangled it so we got to help out with the Pierrots; it meant we got time away from the stinking wards and I was always happy about that. Mima was doing the stage makeup and I helped them with their outfits. They had borrowed a costume from the Theatre Royal, a real manky thing it was, full of holes, and copies had been made in the sewing room out of old bed sheets. They were laundered, right enough, but it made me chuckle to think of the doctors who fancied themselves as entertainers wrapped in the same filthy linen we’d stripped off the beds.

They were singing All the Nice Girls Love a Sailor and Mima was singing along and doing actions to make me laugh when there was a shout behind us.

‘We need a nurse out here!’ One of the handymen, bellowing from the door.

‘I’ll go,’ I sighed.

The man was looking down into the trees, then at me.

‘What? What is it?’

He pointed towards the back road.

She was standing in among the silver birches, her skin like milk. So slim and bare, you’d hardly have noticed. A shout caught in my throat and never made it out. She was naked, her arms stretched out, and I could see the dark of her sex, her eyes closed, the rain starting to spit. I made towards her, my boots skittering across the gravel paths.

‘No, no,’ I was close to her now, against her, trying to shield her from the eyes that I knew would be on us. ‘What are you doing? You shouldn’t be out here like this, where are your clothes?’

She opened her eyes and looked at me, but I could tell she wasn’t really seeing me. She was like one of them in there, in the buildings behind us, her look vacant and dead. Mima would say one slate loose and another yin falling. I took hold of her arms and that’s when I saw the silver lines criss-crossing, from her wrists to her elbows, some silver and some not silvered yet. The strange progress of colour to not colour.

Mima cannoned into me from behind.

‘My God. My God.’

She still had one of the costumes in her hands, getting wet with the rain now and I took it and put it over the girl’s head, pulling her poor arms into the sleeves roughly, hoping she might come to herself but she was dumb, her skin clammy in the rain, her narrow white feet stuck with twigs and leaves. Between us, Mima and I got her back into the Asylum, where the handyman was watching us while trying to look like he wasn’t. Matron appeared and when we made to take her to the wards she said no, bring her here, and took us to the matron’s sitting room where there was a fire. We were sent away then, just as the chaplain arrived, looking even more wandered than usual and stammering. As he pressed past me, I smelt the damp of his coat and something like whisky.

Well, the Pierrot that was now short of a costume was not happy and Mima said under her breath oh for God’s sake and I didn’t want to do it anymore, any of it. Mima looked at me sidelong for the rest of the day and then there was the show to get through, but I wasn’t in the mood. Someone said the chaplain’s daughter had been taken away and I wondered where.  We had to sit by the stage so we could help them change their costumes and every time I put their stupid arms in those Pierrot sleeves I thought of her and wondered where they’d taken her.

The last song was Auld Lang Syne and Mima took my arm even though there was just the two of us and I found that I was crying. Up above the stage was the big painting where it says ‘By love, serve one another,’ and I’ve never understood it, any time I’ve been in that dining hall. When the trusties are slapping down the plates of stew in front of you, is that serving ‘by love’? Maybe God and St Dorcas mean something else.

Mima’s grey uniform felt coarse that night as it slid from her. She kicked it under the bed, she was in a hurry, but I insisted on hanging it up and giving it a brush. We opened the window wide in the heat. She curved herself around me, pushing her mouth against my hair and I didn’t mind, didn’t mind at all. She hummed My Wild Irish Rose, she is dearer by far than the world’s brightest star.

You’d think you would get used to it, with all the mad folk around the place. I thought I’d got used to it, that nothing could surprise me now. I think it was because I least expected it, with her fine ways and uprightness and gowns. Seeing her in among the silver birch trees with her cool skin, the water running down her in pearls, the silver on her arms making sleeves of finest gossamer. How she held them out to me as a child would. The Pierrot costume enveloping her like a shroud.

I didn’t go back to the Chapel after that. The girl never came back, and eventually the chaplain and his wife went away too, and a new man came. Black haired and good looking – Mima set her cap at him, but I knew that was just blethers and she was only doing it to annoy me. They say there’s going to be a war and everything’s changed at the Asylum but still the mad folk come. I still walk the grounds when I need clean air and put my hands on the tree trunks to keep me steady.

When I go past the Chapel now, I only look up at the stained glass from outside. Of course, the view is very different from there.

Commentary

It was something of a luxury in planning the Writing the Asylum project to have an overview of all the contributions as they came in. I was touched by the enthusiasm of the participants for the challenge, and very moved by their writing. Somehow my own contribution got edged out in my mind as I worked on assembling and editing twenty-seven other pieces.

I have been writing about Gartnavel for some years now, mainly in creative non-fiction and in particular a memoir about my family experience of mental ill health. I’ve thought a lot about the geography of the Asylum and its broken buildings, as well as the way this beautiful site has been absorbed by the growth of the city around it and has become a busy medical campus. I thought I might recycle some of that writing in this project, and then realised it wasn’t something I wanted to do. The least I could do to stand alongside my fellow participants was to write something new!

A couple of happy coincidences directed my thinking – the writer I thought would love the archive photos of theatrical and musical performances at Gartnavel chose something else as a subject, so those sepia images of staff in party dresses and Pierrot outfits were unused. And the person I’d hoped would write about the little Arts and Crafts Chapel chose not to take part. So, rather late in the day and well beyond my own deadline for submissions, I started to consider a short story around those elements. It’s worth noting that at the time the story’s set, asylum staff would be more involved in providing entertainment to a fairly selective body of patients than is the case nowadays. The whole area of leisure pursuits in treatment of mental ill health has rightly been turned on its head, with involvement primarily for patients being seen as central to recovery.

I’ve always been intrigued by the chapel-that-never-was at Gartnavel: the imagined design of an elaborate church which would unite East and West Houses and communities in worship. A plan that failed because of lack of funds. The small chapel which served as its replacement was eventually built by 1904, with stained glass added in later years, and was my own portal to Gartnavel back in the 1970s. More recently, it has become the home of Cancer Support Scotland where I was lucky to volunteer for a year before the Covid lockdown. I saw in the bright and cheerful re-purposing of the building a true embodiment of moving from darkness to light – Reluceat, let there be light again, being Gartnavel’s motto.

Any kind of illness occupies a liminal space between health and recovery. We probably are not familiar with our own medical records in any detail, but we can access the records of Gartnavel and other health archives with a few clicks on our computer. The documentation of patient notes gives unwitting testimony of the prevailing attitudes of the day, and in the treatment of mental illness this is perhaps most interesting of all. I was very much struck on reading some of the Gartnavel records, to find that 19th century patients were affected by many of the stresses we encounter now – lack of work, too much work, alcohol, large families, infant mortality (thankfully no longer the multiple stillbirths sometimes recorded), relationship difficulties. People were just like us in their responses to life events affecting lifestyle choices and sexuality. In understanding mental illness, the Gartnavel psychiatrists had to make room for developing thinking as Victorian treatment models moved towards Freudian theory.

I’m interested in the boundaries of madness, where the ill person engages with close family, because I walked that territory with my father. The absence caused by him leaving to have in-patient treatment and then returning. The secrets which could not be spoken, at least in the 1980s. How life is changed by mental illness, and how many of us have to learn to live with continued vigilance for a loved one’s mental health as well as our own. And, I think, a kind of lived sadness that comes with mental ill health. My story started to take shape from my leaning into all those spaces. My dad recovered, after a variety of medications were tried out on him; it was only a dozen ECT treatments that made him better. I’ve occasionally observed that for me he died somewhere during his illness, even though he lived on in relatively good mental and physical health for many years. Certainly, the father I thought I knew was no more. When he did actually die, my grieving was muted because I had been through it already. So, the protagonist in my story is somehow affected by a similar grieving.

When I am at Gartnavel, I am in that liminal space, the space where I first encountered my father’s mental illness and had to make choices as to how I would deal with it. Now that I myself have lived beyond the age where it beset him, I have found a way to make peace with that anxiety. For me, writing about it helps. And writing about many other things. As I contemplated a story set somehow around the Gartnavel Chapel, I was thinking about family and liminality. A liminality of light and air and colour, too. Similarly, relationships which do not settle but ebb and flow; give and take. Of uncertainty, and living with it.

I wanted to give an impressionistic quality of the place, and chose to set the story around 1910 – the Chapel would have been recently built, and Sigmund Freud’s writings would be coming to the fore in European psychiatric treatment. My characters might not have understood the delicate playing out of their relationships…but something was a-coming, in more ways than one. The area of same sex relationships had its own history. In the early 1900s closeness was often explained away as a passionate friendship, which was quite acceptable.

My own appreciation of Gartnavel is tied up with the buildings, the landscape, and the memories of emotional pain the site contains. And also of healing that might be found there, and hope for the future, and happiness. Let there be light again, for all of us.

As I ready this piece for submission, I wonder if I’m not just writing the same story over and over again in my work. I think that’s something a lot of writers do. So be it. If I’m writing the same story of love, care, family, landscape, asylum and post-asylum, questioning, uncertainty, how we cope, how we don’t cope…well, I’m happy with that, and the process is ongoing.

[archive photos of Concert/Theatrical groups in HB13/15/7-9]