Saint Francis Psychiatric Hospital dominated the town where I grew up. The vast red-brick Victorian asylum stood in parkland, bordered by woods that massed towards the Downs, a long spine of hills separating us from Brighton and the sea beyond. It held the longest inner corridor in southern England, a third of a mile long, where shuffling patients picked up butts, and a blurred dread and melancholy tainted the walls nicotine yellow. A village retreat for the disturbed and fragile, with its own farm, laundry and chapel, where Gran and Mum would sometimes come to convalesce after breakdowns.
In 1980, I applied to be a porter there in a year break between school and university. Dad tried to persuade me not to apply, as if Mum’s depression were enough to cope with, and working with other mentally ill people risked further contagion. In the patients’ canteen I waited to be called for my interview. I took in the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of rickety chairs and tea-stained tables, ubiquitous pale blue plastic teacups, the rude clatter of metal trolleys, women in borrowed clothes, often too short and tight, men in gravy-stained suits with absurd high waistbands. An odd shriek amidst a slow melancholic drudge of repetition: confused conversations with no end and no beginning. I felt oddly calmed, listening, watching, distracted and sleepy in the familiar—I’d experienced it all before, already having visited Mum and Gran in asylums and discreet seaside convalescent homes—becoming so comfortable that I lost my grip, letting go my teacup and emptying its contents onto my lap. Trousers sodden and bottom sticking to the chair, I pulled myself up and attempted to dry myself in the patients’ toilet, with its rank splatter over the bowl that I’d come to recognise as heavily medicated freeform shit.
Mrs Nettles came to collect me in her grey East German prison guard suit. In the interview she didn’t mention the England-shaped damp patch on my crotch at first, but, after offering me the job, she advised me not to drink in the patients’ canteen anymore.
‘It’s very loyal and patriotic but you’re one of us now,’ she said.
I loved working there, trying my best to avoid voyeurism, being witness at a freak show. I found myself instinctively empathising, taking it all in but also sometimes revelling in the otherness, the defiantly different.
I’d recently finished reading Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and showed Mum a video of the film on her return from hospital after one of her nervous breakdowns, hoping she’d find some kind of kinship, familiarity, a home from home.
‘Why did you show me that film?’ she asked.
‘Bloody well unbelievable!’ Dad said.
Kesey’s McMurphy was a wild, charismatic rebel, a con faking madness to keep out of prison. Harry was a patient who’d been imprisoned after fighting with a prostitute in Brighton and attacking the policeman who’d arrived to arrest him. In prison he’d babbled and hurled himself at the walls and was sectioned to Saint Francis. Like McMurphy, he arrived onto the ward full of wild energy, joking and raving whilst handcuffed to a prison guard.
He was a sociopath who beguiled and wove spells. A tanned bear of a man with long blonde tousled hair, he burst through my flimsy defences back then. He ran barefoot, talked fast, harangued and freewheeled as if he were permanently drunk. Occasionally, he could be charming and funny, even thoughtful. I lent him books: Cuckoo’s Nest (naturally), On the Road (trusting him with my prized original UK edition paperback) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Orwell’s book was his favourite; he liked its subtle subversion of suburbia, the hidden humour appealing to his own disdain for the everyday and normal.
I witnessed his character change in an instant, starting with repetitive jibing of the nurses.
‘A fucking mess, a wonderful fucking mess! Eh, Paddy, what do you think?’
‘Less of the “fucking”, Harry.’
‘Never do much fucking, Paddy, you’re right.’
‘And less of the Paddy.’
‘Right you are, Paddy.’
‘Harry!’
‘Paddywhack, Paddywhack, Paddy whacked a Paddy.’
‘Last warning!’
Then suddenly he was running, roaring, and emptying a jug of water over the nurse. A shout for help from a crowd of cowering patients, and Harry was taken to the ground, four nurses on top of him.
‘I’m the crazy guy here, and I’m supposed to be looked after, not oppressed. What a sorry state of affairs.’ He caught me looking. ‘Hey, Adam.’ Harry never got my name right. ‘What do you think? It’s a fucking disgrace, is it not?’
A heavy knee to his chest and he went red in the face, struggling to breathe.
‘My inhaler, get my inhaler!’
Before he left for prison again, he returned all the books I’d lent him, folded page marks neatly turned back.
‘I’d like to have discussed them with you but my brain is frazzled. You know?’
I did know but I also knew not to tell him where I lived in case he came calling when he was released from prison.
Gordon was a retired bank manager on Kingston Ward. He sat on a big armchair, which he positioned to face out onto the grounds. He loved looking at the branches of a particular old oak tree and he’d sit staring at it for hours. I’d bring him a cup of tea—he preferred a cup with a saucer to a mug—and take the seat next to him. There was something relaxing being by his quietness and stillness. Sometimes he’d ask about my life outside the hospital and offer advice.
‘Keep living, son, and don’t get depressed if you can help it.’
Often he’d read.
‘The books in here aren’t really my cup of tea though.’
I wasn’t surprised. The library hadn’t much beyond Steele, Archer, Cartland and Wilbur Smith. I gave him Graham Greene’s The Human Factor, a perfect sombre book. The next day he’d nearly finished it.
‘I’ll get it back to you as soon as it’s done,’ he said.
A couple of days later I was back on Kingston. Gordon’s bed was bare. He’d slipped away from the nurses’ attention and slit his wrists in the bathroom the night before. A nurse handed me back my book. There was a note inside. ‘Thank you, it was very kind of you to lend me the book. I’ve always liked Graham Greene and I really enjoyed this one. All the best, Gordon.’
Suicide, a familiar chill, a curse running down Mum’s family line—I shuddered when I saw the stripped mattress, I knew the form. ‘As soon as it’s done’ he’d said, but I hadn’t been listening carefully enough. Thankfully, the bathroom had already been cleaned and so I took a cup to his chair and sat for a while and looked out. The oak tree quiet and unmoved against the shifting sky.
At thirteen, I’d watched out of my bedroom window as Gran’s tiny body, hidden under a bright red blanket, was carried on a stretcher into a waiting ambulance. I’d found her unconscious in our spare bedroom. She had taken an overdose and was brought to hospital but I wasn’t allowed to see her.
I did later visit her in a large Epsom asylum. The spartan isolation room along the hallway spooked me on the way to find her waiting in the dining room. Her worn bloodhound expression, drugs pulling down her features to reveal bloodshot, watery eyes, nicotine yellowing and roughening her skin in lines and crevices, a cigarette defiantly cupped in her mouth, a cup of tea shaking in her hand. She always had a carrier bag waiting for me full of fruit pastilles and Mars bars. We made each other laugh, me mimicking Frank Spencer and Brian Clough, her playfully supporting Arsenal against my team Chelsea, repeatedly shouting ‘arse n’ all’ to all and sundry, releasing a wheezy cauldron of sound from deep inside her chest.
‘Don’t get too close,’ she said, pointing at an old lady walking in circles by the door, wringing and tearing at her hands. Later, I had to squeeze past her to open the door. Her mouth was open wide as if she was screaming but nothing came out, but I could sense this high frequency hum vibrating through her body. ‘Is my son coming, is my son coming?’ she pleaded. I could only shake my head and say, ‘I don’t know.’ She pinched me hard on the arm and said, ‘You do know, I know you do.’
After a few months of working at Saint Francis, I was joined there by my best friend, Mark. Our friendship had grown away from the rigid confines of the town’s Grammar School, and the mock liberation of Sixth Form, where if you weren’t going round with a fixed grin all the time and having ‘a fantastic experience’ then there was something wrong with you. And they were right: there was something wrong with us.
I took every chance to blot out the all-too-real madness invading my family, and, together, we welcomed any distraction from the late-teenage sadness suffocating us both. We liked to escape with our packs and sleeping bags onto the Sussex Downs. From the highest point of the Beacon, looking north, rows of flat fields, skirted by newly planted woodland, joined the grounds of Saint Francis. We usually walked east along the highest ridge towards Lewes or Newhaven and Seaford, long stretches of bumbling hills and shallow ravines, ancient copses and stony bridleways. We would talk excitedly, sharing our outsider angst, excitement and belief that books and music mattered more than almost anything else. We both loved Jack Kerouac, The Velvet Underground, J D Salinger, Hermann Hesse and Sylvia Plath. Mark aligned himself with teenage outsider narrators Holden Caulfield and Esther Greenwood—the latter a thinly veiled disguise for Sylvia Plath—a curl to his lips as he viewed life through their young world-weary eyes.
Mark cut a fine figure in those days, a siren for both women and men with his tousled dark hair and delicate poetic looks. Sometimes he was Keats and other times in his tight red motorbike jacket he was Jules, the charismatic young postman from the French film, Diva.
Mrs Nettles saved certain jobs for polite middle-class boys, and weekdays Mark would often be sent to work as a theatre porter in the adjoining neurological hospital. Maybe I was harder to fathom and seen as more of a risk, as she kept me at Saint Francis. At weekends we had the chance to work together, driving the rickety hospital laundry van, with its wretched, stinking load of soiled bedding, the necessary distraction of a cigarette permanently in our mouths. Sometimes we took the van for a spin outside the grounds and rested up in a nearby field, chatting, sharing a joint, taking in the sun’s rays climbing up over the Downs.
We liked to lose ourselves in other people’s lives and stories whenever we could. One character’s life particularly touched us. Biddy was born in 1900 and had been at Saint Francis since she was fifteen, when her father had deposited her at the gates for lewd behaviour: kissing a neighbour’s boy. A farmer’s daughter still, she got up at the crack of dawn and spent her days busy and bent over, a willing helper, fetching and carrying for the nurses and tending the less able patients. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon she’d settle into her chair with her own teacup and saucer. ‘
‘My cup, see, it’s got a picture of the Queen, lovely.’
Proud, a quiet voice with no hint of rancour, apart from maybe a tinge when she talked about her father.
‘I told him I only kissed the boy but his mind was made, and I told him not to bring me but he wouldn’t listen. He had a temper, see.’
Biddy’s eyes blinked out from tight skin creases, her pupils shiny and bulbous, damaged by the lack of light of prolonged incarceration.
‘Love my tea, I do.’
Tipping the pot repeatedly into her cup and smiling. A smile of the contented; Zen and vacant.
We admired Biddy’s spirit and enduring stoicism. Sometimes I also saw my gran in Biddy, and, in turn, a glimpse of how Mum could become, the shuffling slippers and institutionalised pallor of tranquillising medication. But in truth Mum and Gran were already defeated, finding ways to give up the ghost; Biddy had a spirit that sought to get away. On Sundays, she busied herself handing out hymns and prayer books for the patients’ morning service. As the asylum organ groaned and struck up, she closed her eyes and her voice escaped wild and shrill, like a scalded cat let loose amongst the congregation.
Under the Downs, in the long shadow of Saint Francis hospital, is a nunnery where Mark’s friends and family met, a decade after we’d worked at Saint Francis, to commemorate his life and unexpected death. I gave a talk and the wind blew and chucked like a madman. The steeple wavered, and the building groaned and slammed, the choir’s voices trilling and booming like banshees (Biddy surely joining in!) and hanging in the rafters, before dropping like mist amongst us, touching us with a sense of togetherness, otherness, in shared dismay at his life torn away.
Mark’s body was never found after his last lone mountain hike in the foothills of Pakistan. When I think of him now I remember his weary smile and soft voice, and find myself laughing about the time we shared magic mushrooms under the Beacon.
All October I’d been picking them in the hospital farm’s sheep fields. Other porters had shown me how to wipe and dry them with paper, how to make tea with them, how many to eat to make things tingle, how many to scramble the brain. Tingle was for the afternoon shift at work—I’d need maybe ten—so that the harsh lights along the hospital corridors would slowly blur into gorgeous pinks and purples, and the newly buffed floors would sparkle and glimmer like an ice rink on a star filled night. The soles of my shoes sliding and skating along, my arms out wide, my mouth slipping into a wide, beatific smile when I met the patients.
I had a knapsack full from a recent mushroom harvest when I met Mark at Hassocks station, close to his home. We shared them out on the long footpath out to the Downs, eating a small handful at a time. Within minutes the stomach cramps and swirling waves of nausea started, but we were on a mission and knew to ride it out. We waited and then took more, and by the time we climbed over a stile to Wolstonbury Hill, we were sweating, in the grip of a tumultuous tsunami, senses all churned up and at odds with each other, excitement beset with anxiety, struggling to keep a lid on the madness, the horizon moving like a seesaw, the soft Sussex Down ahead taking on the shrouded outline of an Anglo-Saxon burial mound.
I’d learned from experience that angst and sadness usually passed and so I trusted somehow that this derangement would pass too, to breathe slower and let things happen. Time jumped forward and back, and then slowed, so that we seemed to be there a lifetime, with my gaze fixed on the top of the hill where sheep moved and shimmied against the clouds, marching one minute with iron masks ready for war, dancing in brown cage aux folles knee stockings the next, the clouds behind massing, re-forming, the orange mouth of the sun grinning in between.
Rain seeped from the sky to caress my cheeks. I lay down and drank it in. Mark was near, moaning (or was it a cow in a nearby field?), crawling on all fours to examine a patch of grass, wearing a small brown felt hat, that, with his protruding black curls, made him look less like Keats and more like Chico Marx. Then I was Harpo, squeezing my imaginary horn, looking like a cherub, cheep, cheep, cheep, a wig of sheep wool, no judgement necessary . . . so that’s why the sheep were marching: to cover my head.
Mark and I looked at each other and started laughing. Big teeth monkey laughs (that’s where we originated from, then!), the sun erupting out of the clouds and the sky suddenly going Van Gogh blue.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ said Mark.
‘No, you won’t,’ said I, the warmth of the sun calming, healing, making me talk as if I were Jesus. The thought of me as Jesus set us off laughing again. But I wanted the laughter to stop, for that bigger connected feeling to return, and then we were lying next to each other, long rays reaching down and baking the earth and our skin, everything chiming, the scattering clouds making patterns on our eyelids, the ancient past buried in the earth revitalised and reaching out, new grass rising, a bird passing above, our breathing slow and in unison, all one, all one big united world. At that moment we were closer than ever, love pouring out for each other, for everyone, for everything.
Mum and Gran carried through with their threats and are long gone, and Saint Francis was turned into luxury flats soon after Mark died, but its memories linger, ghostly expressions at the windows infiltrating my thoughts and dreams.
Mark had a relationship with my sister and died when their son, Den was eight. I’ve kept Den close ever since, unconsciously inculcating him into the spirit of my relationship with his father, taking him travelling and eating out from a young age (ticking off a list of thirty different ethnic restaurants on his visits to stay with me before he was sixteen), pulling him leftward and buying him music and books Mark and I had enjoyed. He’s his own person but sometimes I can see Mark clearly in him: the humane intelligence, the ever-present dry humour, the juxtaposition of steely independence and moments of vulnerability, a gentle understated communication that cuts to the core. Den is thirty-six, three years older than Mark when he died. We’re close friends, and it’s he who recommends the restaurants, books and records now.
Somehow, I managed to keep a pictorial record of my trip with his father: shots taken from weird angles, sunlight bleaching out colours, hats endlessly swapped, our faces distorted and gurning, eyes smiling, so that the camera seemed like it was tripping with us. The pictures sit in their own album (how could they go with any others?) and when I look at them that feeling of trepidation overcome by a tidal wave of understanding and love still floods over me.
I recently stayed with Den and showed him one of the photos. It’s a miraculous close-up of me and his father, a selfie before the term even existed: we’ve come down from the mushrooms and are sitting next to each other on the grass. We’re both smiling, and there, behind us, is the blurred, outstretched outline of Saint Francis.
*
Ghost of Saint Francis appeared in 2022’s autumn/winter issue of The Stinging Fly.
Alan McCormick Writing 