After her long journey and then her hesitation outside, this cold reception instantly stripped Rosie of her last shreds of self-confidence, and it was all she could do not to burst into tears. She stepped warily into a small area with a black and white tiled floor. It was enclosed by a wooden and wired glass partition. Matron shut the front door and locked it with one of the many keys she had on a chain attached to her belt. Then without saying another word, she went on through a door in the partition and locked it behind her, leaving Rosie trapped in what was virtually a cage.
The day after Mr Bentley had told Rosie about the date of her father’s trial, Miss Pemberton had called to tell her she’d fixed her up with this job. Rosie hadn’t liked the sound of it one bit, in fact she’d pleaded with Miss Pemberton to find her something else, but the social worker talked her round. She pointed out that Mr Lionel Brace-Coombes, the owner of the home, was an old friend of hers and he was prepared to accept Rosie purely on her recommendation, without checking her background. It was also a step in the right direction towards getting into nursing.
Once Rosie realized that no alternative would be offered her, she tried to be optimistic by looking at all the attractions the job offered. It was in north London, and Thomas Farley was only a bus ride away. She was to be paid one pound ten shillings a week, with everything, including her uniform, found for her. But perhaps the best thing of all was that absolutely no one there would know who she really was, not even Mr Lionel Brace-Coombes. Miss Pemberton had somehow managed to get her a national insurance card in the name of Rosemary Smith, and together they’d composed a whole new background for her. Rosemary’s mother was to have died from an infection following a miscarriage when she was six and her father had died last year from a heart attack. Rosie was amazed at how simple it was to change identity. Like a snake shedding its skin.
Miss Pemberton could not have been more encouraging or kind; she was determined that Rosie should make her new start with all the right clothes. She took her up to Bright’s department store in Clifton and bought her, amongst other things, the dark green raincoat she was wearing now. It had a warm tartan lining and a hood, and she could hardly believe she owned something so smart. Her suitcase might be a battered old one of Miss Pemberton’s but almost everything inside it was new. She even had a photograph of her ‘parents’ in a frame to give her new family history credence. Granted the small curly-haired woman and the tall man with a droopy moustache were just friends of Miss Pemberton’s, but the woman had a similar country-girl look to Rosie.
‘You can refer to me as your Auntie Molly, your father’s unmarried sister who helped care for you after your mother died,’ Miss Pemberton suggested, laughing as if she almost wished she was. ‘And give my address in Chilton Trinity as your home address. I’ll write to you just as an aunt would, so if anyone feels like snooping, as people do, they won’t be any the wiser. I can pass on information about Alan. You can always tell people he’s your small cousin.’
Mr Bentley had asked if she would keep in touch with him too. He suggested that she send the letters to his office, and he would reply as Uncle Herbert. Rosie knew by this that he didn’t want his wife to discover where she had gone, or his interest in her. Sharing her secret destination with him made her feel warm inside, as did looking at the leather writing case he’d given her as a leaving present.
But the happy, excited feeling she’d had when she left Bristol this morning was now replaced with terror as she waited, locked in. Through the wired glass which was at eye level, she could see a wide uncarpeted staircase. To the right and left of it were other closed doors, all with a small wired glass panel. The walls were painted a dull pea-green colour, the doors cream. It looked inhospitable enough, but it was a distant noise which really intimidated her. A wailing sound, not crying or screaming exactly, but a bleak sound of someone deeply distressed.
‘Is this what it’s like for you, Dad?’ she thought.
She had done what Miss Pemberton suggested and written to him. Thinking deeply on what she felt about him and putting it into words had soothed the torment inside her a little. She told him bluntly that she felt no sympathy, only deep shame, and that the only thing which might change the way she felt was if he was man enough to admit to his crimes and show some real sorrow for what he had done. Yet for all that she still softened her harsh words towards the end of the letter by saying she would keep the good memories of him in her heart and try to forgive him.
His reply had made her cry. He wrote like a child in big printing with no punctuation and almost every word spelled wrong. But his message to her was strong and clear: he had always loved her, he was proud of her and was very sorry he hadn’t been a better example. He neither protested his innocence, nor admitted any guilt, but said he was glad she was leaving Somerset because he wanted more for her than he’d got living on the Levels. He hoped she would marry a man who would cherish her and keep her happy.
Rosie had read and re-read the letter before she eventually destroyed it. Somehow those few, inarticulate words said so much about the man. He did have a gentler, decent side, he dreamed dreams, he ached for more than life had offered him. Rosie looked back and remembered the pride he took in his parlour. The furniture he’d bought at country house auctions during the difficult Thirties had been too grand really for a working man’s cottage. He used to run his big hands lovingly over the polished table and point out the skill of the craftsman who’d made it. She remembered too that it was him who’d awoken her interest in nature, telling her all he knew about birds and animals while they were out tramping the moors together.
She thought perhaps he was as much a victim as Ruby and Heather were, forced from when he was just a young boy to rely on his physical strength, all sensitivity knocked out of him by the harshness of the life into which he was born. She didn’t know why that should make him turn killer, but maybe too much frustration could do that to a man.
Just as Rosie was on the point of screaming and hammering for the door to be unlocked, at last she saw a girl coming down the stairs. She looked about nineteen or twenty, an exceptionally plain girl, painfully thin, with badly cut, short mousy brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She was dressed in a maroon uniform dress. Like Matron she had a bunch of keys on her belt.
With her unprepossessing appearance Rosie was surprised when she waved and smiled before opening the door. ‘Don’t look so scared,’ she said with a giggle as she let Rosie out. ‘It is a madhouse, but it isn’t quite as bad as it looks.’
The girl’s cheerfulness was a slender ray of hope, but once through the partition, the door was locked again behind her, the wailing noise was much louder and there was an unpleasant smell like stale vomit.
Rosie quaked visibly and the other girl laughed. ‘Don’t you go worrying about that noise,’ she said. ‘It’s only old Mabel, but they’ll shut her up soon. I’m Jackson. We get called by our surnames when we’re on duty, but I’m Maureen out of Matron’s hearing. I didn’t realize you were going to be so young. Rosemary Smith, isn’t it?’
Rosie nodded and tried to smile but tears filled her eyes.
‘Come on, love.’ The older girl patted her on the shoulder and took her case. ‘Let me take you up to our room – you’re sharing with me. You look as if you’re all in.’
Maureen led her up the stairs; the sound of their feet on the bare varnished wood almost drowned the wailing sound from above. She stopped on the first landing by a door. ‘This is the way through to the ward where you’ll be working,’ she said letting Rosie look through the viewing panel. Another similar heavy door was directly inside, beyond that a long passage. ‘It’ll seem like a prison to you for a while as all doors, the ones inside as well as these ones, have to be locked when you go in and out. But in a couple of days you’ll be so used to locking and unlocking you won’t even think about it.’
‘Are the patients dangerous then?’ Rosie asked nervously.
‘Some can be,’ Maureen said with a sh
rug. ‘But mostly the locking up is so we know exactly where they all are and what they are doing.’
The wide staircase ended abruptly on the second-floor landing, just past the door that Maureen said led to the ward for the more disturbed patients. From there on the staircase leading to a final door was narrow, carpeted and clearly a more recent addition to the house. Rosie realized as Maureen unlocked the door that they were entering the taller part of the building she’d noticed from outside.
‘This is the staff wing,’ Maureen said. ‘We all live up here, except for Matron, who’s got a flat on the ground floor. Because it’s separate from the rest of the building it’s very quiet. All hell can break loose downstairs and we can’t hear it.’ The door led into a dark narrow corridor and she opened the first door she came to. ‘And this is our room.’
After the bare wood staircase and the institutional bleakness of the rest of the place, the room Rosie was led into looked pleasingly comfortable, with twin beds with heavy cream bedspreads, two easy chairs, a dressing table and a big chest of drawers. There was even carpet on the floor and cheerful yellow checked curtains at the window.
‘The bathroom is right next door,’ Maureen said, sitting down on the bed nearest the window. ‘This is my bed. You get the two right-hand drawers on the dressing table and the two bottom drawers in the big chest. There’s bags of space in the cupboard. I haven’t got many clothes.’
Rosie just stood in the middle of the room looking about her and suddenly the events of the long day all hit her at once and she began to cry.
She had believed she was old enough and tough enough to cope with being sent to London alone, but she wasn’t. No one had warned her how crowded and frantic it would be, or how confusing the underground trains were. She went all the way to a place called Gloucester Road before she realized she was going the wrong way and by the time she found her way back to Leicester Square and the right train, she was on the point of tears. Everything was different from back home. People pushed and shoved, they had paler faces, smarter clothes and they sounded strange. She looked at the women’s high heels and sophisticated costumes and felt like a little country mouse in her heavy black lace-up shoes and white ankle socks.
Now she was in a place where dangerous people were locked away. In a couple of weeks her father and brother would be tried and hanged and she’d have absolutely no one she could confide in. She was so very scared. How was she going to cope?
Maureen looked aghast at the younger girl’s tears. She got up off the bed but hesitated, as if wanting to offer a comforting hug, but afraid of rejection. ‘Don’t cry. It’s okay here,’ she said, putting a tentative hand on Rosie’s shoulder. ‘I know no one really wants to work in a loonybin. But it’s not as bad as it looks and we have lots of laughs. I’ll go and make a cup of tea while you unpack your case. Later I’ll show you round.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Rosie sobbed, dabbing at her eyes ineffectually. ‘It’s just that,’ she stopped short, unable to pinpoint exactly what had upset her.
‘That you’ve never been away from home before? That Matron made you feel about as welcome as a dog flea? The locked doors and Mabel wailing? I know. It’s all too much when you’re tired,’ Maureen said sympathetically.
Rosie managed a weak smile. She thought Maureen was kind, perhaps it was just the unexpectedness of that which made her cry. ‘I suppose now you’ll think I’m such a baby?’
Maureen looked at Rosie appraisingly. She had gentle grey eyes behind her glasses and her warm smile made her pale spotty face seem less plain. ‘No, I don’t. Everyone’s the same when they first come here. I’m really pleased to see you; it’s been lonely in here on my own. Now put your things away and settle in; that will make you feel better.’
Maureen was gone for some ten minutes. As Rosie couldn’t hear anything, she assumed she must have gone back downstairs. Rosie hung up her clothes, put her case on the top shelf of the cupboard, then sat down on her bed.
Maureen had even fewer belongings than she did. No photographs, books or other clutter. She wondered if everyone who came to work here was an oddball, with nowhere else to go.
It was dusk now, and looking out of the window she saw their room overlooked the back garden. It was better cared for than the front, with a well-cut lawn, flower-beds and several wooden bench seats. It was some hundred foot long, surrounded by a high stone wall, with jagged glass along the top. There were many trees and a small summer house. Beyond the trees were fields. She began to feel a little less frightened.
Maureen came back in with two mugs of tea in one hand and a plate of buttered toast. ‘I thought you might be hungry, but this was all I could rustle up,’ she said with a wide grin. ‘I put extra sugar in your tea. It’s good for shock.’
Over tea Maureen rattled out the pecking order of the staff. ‘Starting at the top, there’s Matron, Miss Barnes that is, the witch who let you in. Then there’s Dr Freed, who comes in a couple of times a week. Sister Welbred and Staff Nurse Aylwood come next, but you won’t have much to do with them. Mrs Trow handles all the administration stuff, she comes in daily. Then there’s two trained nurses, you can tell them by their striped dresses. Below them are the chargehands, that’s us. We wear maroon, and you’ll get your uniform tomorrow morning. Then below us are the domestics. They do cooking, laundry and cleaning; some wear white overalls, some green, depending on what they do. Two of them, Clack and Simmonds, have a room downstairs, but the rest live out and work part time.’
Rosie thought this sounded like an army of people. She asked why she hadn’t seen anyone else around on her way in.
Maureen smirked. ‘They aren’t all here at any one time. They work different shifts and in the evenings there’s no need for so many. Whatever Matron or the nurses might tell you, us chargehands do most of the real work. Dishing out the patients’ food, feeding those who can’t manage it themselves, dressing them, washing them and cleaning up those who poop themselves.’
Rosie shuddered. Miss Pemberton had told her all that, and it hadn’t seemed that bad then, just like nursing, but now she was here it seemed horrible.
‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ Maureen said with a shrug. ‘They can’t help it, after all. I try and think of the patients as big children, I find it helps. One or two of the staff are a bit mean to them. I hate that, and I’m sure you will too, but don’t speak out, not if you want to keep your job, and try to keep in with Matron, otherwise she’ll make your life a misery. But most of the staff are okay. Linda Bell and Mary Connor are young like us. They’ve gone out to the pictures tonight, but they’ll be back later.’
Maureen went on to explain a little more about Carrington Hall.
‘It isn’t a bit like the state loony-bins,’ she said, ‘as people pay to keep their loopy relations here there aren’t hundreds of patients, only about thirty at the most. There’s plenty of staff, the food’s better, and it’s not so scary. I know what the other places are like. I worked in one.’
By the time Maureen said it was time for her tour of the building, Rosie was beginning to think working at Carrington Hall might not be as bad as she’d feared initially. But as they got down to the second-floor landing she heard some muffled banging and shouting noises coming from behind the locked door and shuddered.
‘We’re not going in there,’ Maureen said reassuringly, taking her firmly by the arm and leading her on down the stairs. ‘In fact you may never go in there. Matron doesn’t like the younger staff working there. I’ve been here three years and I only get sent in there occasionally when they are short-staffed. And don’t worry about the noises either – the people in there are nuts, remember, and it’s just their way of letting off steam.’
Through the two sets of locked doors on the first floor was a long wide corridor with highly polished brown lino and many doors leading off it. Although it smelled nasty, stronger still than it had downstairs, it was light and spacious with a long narrow window overlooking the front drive.
/> ‘The dormitories are down there,’ Maureen said, waving her hand vaguely. ‘Women in one, men in the other. The other rooms are isolation, treatment and bathrooms, but I’ll show you all those later. First I’ll show you the patients, they’re all in the day room.’
As it was peaceful on this landing with only a background hum of voices to show there were people close by, Rosie felt no sense of alarm. She stepped into the day room behind Maureen quite confidently, but before she’d even had a second to glance around, or catch her breath, a man lunged at her. He enveloped her in a bear hug, lifting her right off her feet, holding her so tightly she thought her ribs would be crushed. She screamed in terror.
‘It’s okay,’ Maureen called out over Rosie’s screams. ‘He’s perfectly harmless, just over-friendly. Now put her down, Donald.’ She slapped at the man’s shoulder. ‘Smith’s come here to help look after you, and she won’t stay if you scare her.’
To Rosie’s intense relief the man dropped her instantly, and backed away looking crestfallen. She saw he was quite young, perhaps in his twenties, and tall with fair hair. ‘I only w-w-wanted to s-s-say hullo,’ he stammered and slunk away with his head down.
Still reeling from the shock of this attack, her heart thumping like a steam hammer, Rosie got her first sight of the rest of the inmates, and as she did, her legs buckled beneath here. Nothing she’d ever encountered before had made her feel quite so revolted, or so afraid. She cowered and retreated back against the locked door, fighting the desire to scream again.
Fourteen or so ugly, misshapen faces and all of them staring at her. Dull eyes, sloppy mouths, some with runny noses too. Some were sitting, others stood frozen to the spot as if halted mid-shuffle by her unexpected appearance. The room was unbearably hot and stuffy, stinking of a pungent mixture of stale food, sweat and farts.