Egbert Jongevos at Gartnavel Royal Asylum (May 1874 – April 1875)
Lynnda Wardle
Spring
They bring me here in murky evening light,
beds in rows, rough with horsehair and straw
soft bodies snoring, crying, dreaming.
It will be my death bed –
that thought speeds through me like fire up the mizzen.
I spend the hours until dawn shouting for help
Ik ben niet gek! my voice no match for stone
until they give me bitter water to swallow
This place exposed, a sanctuary on its hill,
wind winding its way through every gap and hollow.
From here I gaze towards the sea,
the blue thread of the Clyde to Greenock,
where the Captain waits, smells me on the air.
My body leaks sweat, shit, piss –
he and the skinny cook will sniff me out
this messy trail for them to follow
Summer
In the airing court a man gives me rags
from the workshop to stuff my holes,
block the leaking from arse, nostrils, lugs,
my body’s failings, perfect for entry and exit
must be plugged, and my mouth, of course –
bawling to keep them at bay
hoping my hollering will confuse
as they sense the air, pass over
In the garden, I dig, drag stones
from soil dark and rich like back home.
With soft sun, potatoes flower, beans wind up their stakes,
although I will not eat them, and warn
my rag friend who laughs –
madness, he says, the idea their stems are electrical conduits,
green wires buzzing with current, red tips fire hot –
what pain if they snaked into fleshy hollows
invaded brain matter protected only by skull,
burned through memories of my mother bent over a pail,
my sister’s golden plait wound through with ribbon,
my father’s hands, broad like mine, dirt in the cracks,
the sweetness of bread and cheese eaten in a field
with the girl who let me touch her breast
only once. What would be left of me
if electric fire razed this sorrow?
Autumn
The beauty of three: father, son and holy ghost,
thumb, forefinger and middle fingers touch
flesh on flesh. My clatter-bane communications with God –
to hear his voice above all others, a whisper
sensed in the whistle of wind as gulls
wheel, twisting above the red city
white on grey, on white, turning
sky liquid as they tumble towards the river
Evening light slants across our beds,
dusty as sleep. I lie awake –
God, the Captain and the cook roar,
conspire, plot to pour electric fire
into my ears, down my throat
We will find you! We will kill you!
I am burning. Margaret, saviour with cool hands
holds my head as I swallow
Winter
This winter is greyer than any I have known,
bitter dark hardly lifts before returning.
My hands bleed from chopping wood, chilblains burn –
I’ll say nothing, my complaints bring more medicine,
or worse, a blistering of my neck. As I work
I think of boiled potatoes and beef, broth with peas,
porridge pale with milk, and cheese, not Dutch,
but still, firm and strong, waxy yellow
Spring
Purple crocus and clumps of snowdrops bob
in cold spring wind. The air is clean,
I turn dark sodden soil, plant seed
in raked-over ground. Egbert, I hear them call,
these shimmering forms. Egbert, kom binnen!
They know my name, as does the rag man from the airing court
Je bent veilig bij ons! they whisper
from three high windows
Let there be Light Again
Gartnavel Asylum, 1874
“In any age it is seldom that the mentally ill have been able to speak for themselves” *
this is where the mad come to rest
washed in, life’s foam line
sedimented along neat orchard paths
the yammering of the dead –
demonstrative, expansive,
their muffled holler sounding
against red stone walls
now heard only as mutter in the archive
not their words exactly, but daily detail recorded –
what they ate, how they bathed, slept
(or not) daily tasks marking time,
night terrors dulled by chloral draughts
as minders in the airing courts
picked their teeth, then went inside
Recovered, Relieved, Not improved, Incurable ** –
the archive still noisy with distant, inky cries
* Andrews, J. 1993. ‘The Patient Population’ in Let There Be Light Again : A History of Gartnavel Royal Hospital From its Beginnings to the Present Day, Jonathan Andrews and Iain Smith (ed.)
**Categories for dismissal from the Asylum
Clatter-banes
thoughts on the record of patient Egbert Jongevos at Gartnavel Asylum, 1874-1875
Two months after my partner, the poet Billy Bonar dies, I am offered his place on the Writing the Asylum project. I am raw, grief-stricken (what a word, stricken) and not at all sure how I will respond in my new inside-out, afflicted state. Will I be able to write from my own perspective, or will I have Billy whispering in my ear? I know his presence will be a peculiar challenge in this work, but intrigued, I accept the invitation. I am given the notes for patient Egbert Jongevos, sent as a pauper from Glasgow City to Gartnavel Asylum on 7th April 1874. The house surgeon describes Egbert in the admission notes as, ‘a seaman, single and a Protestant. This is stated to be his first attack of insanity and of 7 days duration, cause unknown.’
I wonder how to hear Egbert’s voice through the dry observations made by the house surgeon. As I transcribe the text I learn that Egbert hears voices, is terrified of electricity, has a strange affinity for the number three. ‘He declares that the Captain of a vessel and other parties are constantly annoying him with electricity; that they affect his privates and disturb his sleep.’ Egbert’s voice takes shape in these descriptions – fearful and lonely. Who is the Captain, the tormentor of Egbert’s waking and sleeping hours? The house surgeon mentions that Egbert is ‘morbidly afraid of medicine,’ and as the narrative progresses, he moves from an occasional chloral sleeping draught to nightly administrations, including bromide potassium (possibly to curb his masturbatory urges, which are also noted). In one passage, his neck is ‘blistered,’ a process used to induce smallpox-like blisters to divert the patient’s attention away from his mania or obsessions. No wonder he is afraid of medicine.
From the noisy archive *** I begin to hear Egbert’s voice. What trauma in his past caused such terror about his orifices being invaded? How did he come to be so frightened of electricity? Although electricity was already being used in the 18th century as a therapy for insanity, there is no indication, other than this morbid fear of electricity invading his body, that Egbert had undergone such treatment.
Occasionally I sense the frustration on the part of the medical staff: here is a patient clearly not responding to therapy or the increase in dosages. Descriptors ‘noisy’ and ‘demonstrative’ are repeated. It is noted often how much he likes his food, but also that he suffers night terrors and insomnia. Like most paupers it is probable he would have been put to work in the grounds tending vegetable gardens and orchards. Into this detail I project hope – might he have found some solace in outdoor work? He would have had no choice about garden duty, but could he have found it therapeutic, consoling, in the way that I find working the soil and seeing new growth an antidote to sorrow? He was at Gartnavel a full growing year – spring to spring – and I wonder if it comforted him to see the potatoes, beans, and brassicas he had planted thrive and bear fruit? A thread between Egbert and myself, a woman with her ear to the archive in 2022, begins to take form.
I undertake a number of what I call grief walks in the grounds of Gartnavel, inviting Egbert’s presence to accompany me. I have become used to living with ghosts, feel at ease with them. I have started wearing Billy’s old walking shoes which I am surprised fit me perfectly and are more comfortable than my own. Now I walk the grounds of Gartnavel, literally in his shoes, which somehow feels fitting and poignant. One cold February afternoon, I discover a heap of abandoned hospital beds in one of the courtyards of West House. The word ‘clatter-banes’ finds me later. A metallic boneyard, these broken beds sing for those in the noisy, demonstrative, grief-stricken places – this requiem a quickening between then and now, a throat-song of loss that binds us, three shadowy forms on a cold February afternoon.
I follow Egbert through the archive and beyond, searching for traces of his life after Gartnavel. In 1875, he is sent to Midlothian District Asylum. Then in 1881 he reappears in the Scotland, General and Admission Registers for Asylums, 1858-1918, admitted to Bothwell Asylum. He is discharged in 1885, then readmitted again in 1886. I also find his family records. Born in Hoogeveen in Holland in 1834, into a family of seamen, he is the eldest of four children. Unable to bear his loneliness in the poem I write about him, I imagine a sister for him, and then find this imaginary sibling existed after all. Although there are records of his siblings marrying, there is no mention of marriage for Egbert. Whatever the circumstances of his leaving Holland, he sailed into Glasgow alone, and lived the remainder of his years in and out of asylums until his death from phthisis in 1887.
The archive is noisy, yes, but also frustratingly silent. Where does he go in the year between 1885 when he is discharged, and his readmission in 1886? Where does he live? Who does he eat with, whom does he love?
On my final walk I look up at the windows of East House where Egbert lived for eleven months. The windows are grouped in threes. I think of Egbert’s obsession with three, the superstitious touching of thumb to forefinger noted in his medical records – to ward off evil perhaps? An acknowledgment of Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Or just a strange premonitory symmetry with a woman, her grief and his ghost, aligned briefly one sorrow-filled winter? Who can know. But I feel moved to bring him in from the cold. As I bend to tie the lace of Billy’s shoe that has come undone, I murmur in Dutch, Come inside, you will be safe with us, and hope Egbert will hear my song, find some comfort, through the veil.
*** A term used by Arlette Farge in The Allure of the Archives (2013), translated by Thomas Scott-Railton, Yale University Press
[Patient record for Egbert Jongevas, HB13/5/61]
Lynnda Wardle is a Scottish-South African writer interested in personal stories and how we make sense of our identities in the places we come to call home. In 2007 Lynnda was awarded a Creative Scotland New Writer’s award and was short-listed for the Fish Memoir prize in 2022 for her memoir ‘Her Blue Eye, Mine’ based on her experience of growing up adopted in apartheid South Africa. Her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies including Coin, Gutter, The Earth is Our Home, New Writing Scotland, thi wurd, New Orleans Review, Poetry Scotland, and Tales from a Cancelled Country.
She is a Scottish Book Trust Live Literature author and collaborates with others in facilitating writing workshops. These include the Writer’s Kitchen, bringing food and memories of food to the table; workshops as part of the Lapidus Water Stories project; and walking/writing projects with women from diverse backgrounds along the River Clyde and the Antonine wall. In 2022 she was selected to participate in the DeathWrites project (with Glasgow University) and began a series of poems on grief and loss with the Off-Page visual poetry collective.
Lynnda is currently studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow exploring Scottish emigration to the Eastern Cape in the 1820s.
W: lynndawardle.com
: @lynndawardle5
Insta: @lynndawardle
Egbert Jongevos at Gartnavel Royal Asylum (May 1874 – April 1875)
Lynnda Wardle
Spring
They bring me here in murky evening light,
beds in rows, rough with horsehair and straw
soft bodies snoring, crying, dreaming.
It will be my death bed –
that thought speeds through me like fire up the mizzen.
I spend the hours until dawn shouting for help
Ik ben niet gek! my voice no match for stone
until they give me bitter water to swallow
This place exposed, a sanctuary on its hill,
wind winding its way through every gap and hollow.
From here I gaze towards the sea,
the blue thread of the Clyde to Greenock,
where the Captain waits, smells me on the air.
My body leaks sweat, shit, piss –
he and the skinny cook will sniff me out
this messy trail for them to follow
Summer
In the airing court a man gives me rags
from the workshop to stuff my holes,
block the leaking from arse, nostrils, lugs,
my body’s failings, perfect for entry and exit
must be plugged, and my mouth, of course –
bawling to keep them at bay
hoping my hollering will confuse
as they sense the air, pass over
In the garden, I dig, drag stones
from soil dark and rich like back home.
With soft sun, potatoes flower, beans wind up their stakes,
although I will not eat them, and warn
my rag friend who laughs –
madness, he says, the idea their stems are electrical conduits,
green wires buzzing with current, red tips fire hot –
what pain if they snaked into fleshy hollows
invaded brain matter protected only by skull,
burned through memories of my mother bent over a pail,
my sister’s golden plait wound through with ribbon,
my father’s hands, broad like mine, dirt in the cracks,
the sweetness of bread and cheese eaten in a field
with the girl who let me touch her breast
only once. What would be left of me
if electric fire razed this sorrow?
Autumn
The beauty of three: father, son and holy ghost,
thumb, forefinger and middle fingers touch
flesh on flesh. My clatter-bane communications with God –
to hear his voice above all others, a whisper
sensed in the whistle of wind as gulls
wheel, twisting above the red city
white on grey, on white, turning
sky liquid as they tumble towards the river
Evening light slants across our beds,
dusty as sleep. I lie awake –
God, the Captain and the cook roar,
conspire, plot to pour electric fire
into my ears, down my throat
We will find you! We will kill you!
I am burning. Margaret, saviour with cool hands
holds my head as I swallow
Winter
This winter is greyer than any I have known,
bitter dark hardly lifts before returning.
My hands bleed from chopping wood, chilblains burn –
I’ll say nothing, my complaints bring more medicine,
or worse, a blistering of my neck. As I work
I think of boiled potatoes and beef, broth with peas,
porridge pale with milk, and cheese, not Dutch,
but still, firm and strong, waxy yellow
Spring
Purple crocus and clumps of snowdrops bob
in cold spring wind. The air is clean,
I turn dark sodden soil, plant seed
in raked-over ground. Egbert, I hear them call,
these shimmering forms. Egbert, kom binnen!
They know my name, as does the rag man from the airing court
Je bent veilig bij ons! they whisper
from three high windows
Let there be Light Again
Gartnavel Asylum, 1874
“In any age it is seldom that the mentally ill have been able to speak for themselves” *
this is where the mad come to rest
washed in, life’s foam line
sedimented along neat orchard paths
the yammering of the dead –
demonstrative, expansive,
their muffled holler sounding
against red stone walls
now heard only as mutter in the archive
not their words exactly, but daily detail recorded –
what they ate, how they bathed, slept
(or not) daily tasks marking time,
night terrors dulled by chloral draughts
as minders in the airing courts
picked their teeth, then went inside
Recovered, Relieved, Not improved, Incurable ** –
the archive still noisy with distant, inky cries
* Andrews, J. 1993. ‘The Patient Population’ in Let There Be Light Again : A History of Gartnavel Royal Hospital From its Beginnings to the Present Day, Jonathan Andrews and Iain Smith (ed.)
**Categories for dismissal from the Asylum
Clatter-banes
thoughts on the record of patient Egbert Jongevos at Gartnavel Asylum, 1874-1875
Two months after my partner, the poet Billy Bonar dies, I am offered his place on the Writing the Asylum project. I am raw, grief-stricken (what a word, stricken) and not at all sure how I will respond in my new inside-out, afflicted state. Will I be able to write from my own perspective, or will I have Billy whispering in my ear? I know his presence will be a peculiar challenge in this work, but intrigued, I accept the invitation. I am given the notes for patient Egbert Jongevos, sent as a pauper from Glasgow City to Gartnavel Asylum on 7th April 1874. The house surgeon describes Egbert in the admission notes as, ‘a seaman, single and a Protestant. This is stated to be his first attack of insanity and of 7 days duration, cause unknown.’
I wonder how to hear Egbert’s voice through the dry observations made by the house surgeon. As I transcribe the text I learn that Egbert hears voices, is terrified of electricity, has a strange affinity for the number three. ‘He declares that the Captain of a vessel and other parties are constantly annoying him with electricity; that they affect his privates and disturb his sleep.’ Egbert’s voice takes shape in these descriptions – fearful and lonely. Who is the Captain, the tormentor of Egbert’s waking and sleeping hours? The house surgeon mentions that Egbert is ‘morbidly afraid of medicine,’ and as the narrative progresses, he moves from an occasional chloral sleeping draught to nightly administrations, including bromide potassium (possibly to curb his masturbatory urges, which are also noted). In one passage, his neck is ‘blistered,’ a process used to induce smallpox-like blisters to divert the patient’s attention away from his mania or obsessions. No wonder he is afraid of medicine.
From the noisy archive *** I begin to hear Egbert’s voice. What trauma in his past caused such terror about his orifices being invaded? How did he come to be so frightened of electricity? Although electricity was already being used in the 18th century as a therapy for insanity, there is no indication, other than this morbid fear of electricity invading his body, that Egbert had undergone such treatment.
Occasionally I sense the frustration on the part of the medical staff: here is a patient clearly not responding to therapy or the increase in dosages. Descriptors ‘noisy’ and ‘demonstrative’ are repeated. It is noted often how much he likes his food, but also that he suffers night terrors and insomnia. Like most paupers it is probable he would have been put to work in the grounds tending vegetable gardens and orchards. Into this detail I project hope – might he have found some solace in outdoor work? He would have had no choice about garden duty, but could he have found it therapeutic, consoling, in the way that I find working the soil and seeing new growth an antidote to sorrow? He was at Gartnavel a full growing year – spring to spring – and I wonder if it comforted him to see the potatoes, beans, and brassicas he had planted thrive and bear fruit? A thread between Egbert and myself, a woman with her ear to the archive in 2022, begins to take form.
I undertake a number of what I call grief walks in the grounds of Gartnavel, inviting Egbert’s presence to accompany me. I have become used to living with ghosts, feel at ease with them. I have started wearing Billy’s old walking shoes which I am surprised fit me perfectly and are more comfortable than my own. Now I walk the grounds of Gartnavel, literally in his shoes, which somehow feels fitting and poignant. One cold February afternoon, I discover a heap of abandoned hospital beds in one of the courtyards of West House. The word ‘clatter-banes’ finds me later. A metallic boneyard, these broken beds sing for those in the noisy, demonstrative, grief-stricken places – this requiem a quickening between then and now, a throat-song of loss that binds us, three shadowy forms on a cold February afternoon.
I follow Egbert through the archive and beyond, searching for traces of his life after Gartnavel. In 1875, he is sent to Midlothian District Asylum. Then in 1881 he reappears in the Scotland, General and Admission Registers for Asylums, 1858-1918, admitted to Bothwell Asylum. He is discharged in 1885, then readmitted again in 1886. I also find his family records. Born in Hoogeveen in Holland in 1834, into a family of seamen, he is the eldest of four children. Unable to bear his loneliness in the poem I write about him, I imagine a sister for him, and then find this imaginary sibling existed after all. Although there are records of his siblings marrying, there is no mention of marriage for Egbert. Whatever the circumstances of his leaving Holland, he sailed into Glasgow alone, and lived the remainder of his years in and out of asylums until his death from phthisis in 1887.
The archive is noisy, yes, but also frustratingly silent. Where does he go in the year between 1885 when he is discharged, and his readmission in 1886? Where does he live? Who does he eat with, whom does he love?
On my final walk I look up at the windows of East House where Egbert lived for eleven months. The windows are grouped in threes. I think of Egbert’s obsession with three, the superstitious touching of thumb to forefinger noted in his medical records – to ward off evil perhaps? An acknowledgment of Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Or just a strange premonitory symmetry with a woman, her grief and his ghost, aligned briefly one sorrow-filled winter? Who can know. But I feel moved to bring him in from the cold. As I bend to tie the lace of Billy’s shoe that has come undone, I murmur in Dutch, Come inside, you will be safe with us, and hope Egbert will hear my song, find some comfort, through the veil.
*** A term used by Arlette Farge in The Allure of the Archives (2013), translated by Thomas Scott-Railton, Yale University Press
[Patient record for Egbert Jongevas, HB13/5/61]
Lynnda Wardle is a Scottish-South African writer interested in personal stories and how we make sense of our identities in the places we come to call home. In 2007 Lynnda was awarded a Creative Scotland New Writer’s award and was short-listed for the Fish Memoir prize in 2022 for her memoir ‘Her Blue Eye, Mine’ based on her experience of growing up adopted in apartheid South Africa. Her work has appeared in various publications and anthologies including Coin, Gutter, The Earth is Our Home, New Writing Scotland, thi wurd, New Orleans Review, Poetry Scotland, and Tales from a Cancelled Country.
She is a Scottish Book Trust Live Literature author and collaborates with others in facilitating writing workshops. These include the Writer’s Kitchen, bringing food and memories of food to the table; workshops as part of the Lapidus Water Stories project; and walking/writing projects with women from diverse backgrounds along the River Clyde and the Antonine wall. In 2022 she was selected to participate in the DeathWrites project (with Glasgow University) and began a series of poems on grief and loss with the Off-Page visual poetry collective.
Lynnda is currently studying for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow exploring Scottish emigration to the Eastern Cape in the 1820s.
W: lynndawardle.com
: @lynndawardle5
Insta: @lynndawardle