Ep. 34: The People of Denbigh Asylum, Part 2

In this episode, Sarah reads the story "The Quietude" by Simon Thirsk from the book Dangerous Asylums, edited by Rob Mimpriss, which is based on real-life events. The narrator is the brother of a patient at Denbigh Asylum and tells the buildup to his brother's insanity diagnosis and the lasting repercussions this had on his family.

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Transcript

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Behind the Walls of the World’s Psychiatric Hospitals! I’m your host, Dr. Sarah Gallup. So this past week I went back and listened to my first episodes on Oregon State Hospital, Fairview, and Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, and let me say, WOW. Thank you all for hanging in there and making it this far! I was really surprised by how much change I’ve noticed from the beginning until now, and there’s still plenty of room for improvement and growth, but if you’ve noticed any positive change in this show so far, it’s because of your support and encouragement. I’m having a blast making these series and watching my little show keep growing. Thank you for sticking around, and thank you to those of you who are just joining us along the way.

Today’s episode is going to feature a long story from the book Dangerous Asylums, edited by Rob Mimpriss. I decided to just read this one story (a) because of the length but (b) because it features so many key elements that we’ve discussed throughout the show: themes of trauma and loss, the impact of mental illness on family members, the stigma and shame surrounding mental illness, and resilience. You may find yourself getting frustrated or angry with the narrator and other people in the story at various moments, and I just encourage you to notice those feelings and be curious about them.

Again, fair warning to all listeners, this episode has quite a bit of Welsh language in it, and I will do my best. I’m looking up pronunciations to the best of my ability, but listeners in the UK, especially Wales, please forgive my inevitable blunders.

So come on in and get comfortable as we go behind the walls of Denbigh Asylum…

Today’s story was written by Simon Thirsk, and his bio in the book Dangerous Asylums reads as follows: “Simon Thirsk is chairman and a founding director of Bloodaxe Books Ltd, one of the UK’s foremost poetry publishers, which is in its fourth decade. His novel, Not Quite White, a satirical view of how Welsh language and identity is threatened by the English incomers Wales needs in order to survive economically, was published by Gomer in 2010, and his television play, Small Zones, starring Sean Bean, was broadcast on BBC2 in 1990. He has lived in Wales since 1997” (Mimpriss 128).

This story is entitled “The Quietude”:

You ask me, Annabel, why I have forbidden you from marrying on pain of your inheritance, why I have put it in a Coda to my Will and Testament that you, favourite of all my grandchildren, should forfeit everything if you have children. I have evaded your questions. Now I am persuaded by my conscience to write the reasons down. Oh, how my heart aches for you to understand. I mean no cruelty to you, Annabel, quite the reverse, I want to save your suffering!

I used to be devout. Fifty years ago I turned away from Him because He never answered any prayers and, even if He did exist, may as well have not. Nothing in the intervening years has made me doubt my atheism, not the Great War which took my sons, nor the Depression which took most of my fortune, nor anything else. Only you, Annabel, only you with your love and kindness make me doubt it.

I shall state it plainly: there is madness in the Davies blood. There, I have written it. Madness in our blood. Four words I have feared all my London life to hear. I found your grandmother, Angharad, in a lunatic asylum; I rescued her, and married her.

Let me write calmly, that is only half the story. I was not an only child, as I led all of you to believe. I had a brother Sion, who had to be consigned, first to the asylum (which, if it was not God’s will, it was the Devil’s and, heaven protect me, caused me to meet your grandmother) and then to the Workhouse where we abandoned him. Sion and I had a sister, too, Alwen, who was also stricken.

My difficulty is that you have that look so much about you, I cannot put it from my mind. I cannot allow you to undo all the good work I have done by letting the Davies blood go bad again. I see from your looks and your personality and voice that you will breed that madness into your children. It is only because I love you so enormously, and fear so greatly if you conceive, that I have contrived to disinherit you if you should marry.

Today you left a Bible at my bedside and asked if I wished you to call the Minister.

Shame on me!

I fear I may have misjudged everything.

If God exists, then I am truly cast to Hell.

I have had a thousand dreams and nightmares about Hendre Ddu: that barren, rocky hillside with mountain of Tryfan looming over us menacingly; we had been brought up to believe it was a sleeping dragon, there to protect us from the English, ready to rise up one day and breathe its fire.

You and your parents, Annabel, have lived through terrible hardships: the Depression and the War to End All Wars. I have done my best to shore up our finances, and not entirely in vain.

You cannot know what life was like for us out there in the mountains when I was young: a different century, a different age: ours was a life of bitter hardship, cold and hunger, with God and Chapel our only solace.

Ours was a different land, no steam trains, metal ships or cars, and a different language.

There were only five of us at Hendre Ddu: Mam and Tada, Sion, my sister Alwen, and myself, and even then our sister, Alwen, druan bach, had come into the world defective. Mam put her lazy eye and strange gait down to the difficulties of childbirth: lack of air, she said. Yet, despite her handicaps, Alwen was never a trouble; she helped Mam cook and clean, though, truth to tell, her contributions were slight. She liked to sing in her strange, shouting, out-of-tune voice. Sometimes the older children picked on Alwen, but Sion always stood up for her and punched the culprits, proudly making their noses bleed, even though he got beaten for it with the tawse.

Anti Mari said we should ask the Relieving Officer for the Poor to issue an order consigning her to the Workhouse for the good of all of us. “Woe betide you if Alwen ever had a child,” she warned once. I know now she believed her condition was attributable to inbreeding in Mam’s family. Anti Mari saw the Devil in every chapel-goer’s shawl.

“My heart bleeds for you living up there on that remote hillside,” she would enunciate in her affected, genteel accent. “Look at the state of you! I do so hope Hendre Ddu will not be the death of you all.”

However much care we took to be washed and clean-clothed, we never once warranted seats in the parlour, even during the worst of our tragedy. We were disdained, too, by her husband, Uncle Dai, who was always too busy with his council committees or judging the livestock competitions in the summer shows, to spend time in the kitchen with the likes of us; Anti Mari saw us as little more than charity.

We knew we were the poor relations. Her very sympathy and kindness made us feel ashamed of ourselves and of our life and Hendre Ddu. Though Tada had grown up with her, even he seemed bewildered by her obsession with antimacassars, politeness, and polished silver. Yet, if we turned up our noses at going or tried to find urgent jobs to do on the farm, Mam scolded Sion and I and reminded us of her sister-in-law’s kindness and hospitality. Whenever we were there, Alwen would clutch on to Mam and hide her face from Anti Mari’s glare.

“It must be so hard with such difficult children,” she would tell Mam, “what with you not being able to read and write yourself and Alwen being as she is.” She would throw Tada glances which might have been sisterly concern except that they said something else: “How could you have married her, knowing where she came from?”

I understand now what a terrible ordeal life must have been for Mam, fetching and carrying water from ffynnon– the spring – keeping food on the table, struggling to rear her scraggy hens and grow a few leeks and potatoes on the small plot of earth she and Tada endeavored to cultivate near the house: even the soil had to be carried up from the valley and mixed with peat brought down from the tops. I remember so well how our faithful horse, Glyndwr, struggled to pull our heavy cart up the hill and restrain it from running away going down.

Man worked without respite. Even in the evening, when we read aloud or sang, she would be busy darning, sewing, and knitting.

If life at Hendre Ddu was hard for us, it was brutal for the animals. I remember running to Mam crying the first time I saw Tada taking the skins off still-warm stillborn lambs, to put them like waistcoats on to the orphaned live lambs whose mothers had died, in order to trick the new ewe into fostering by smelling like their own offspring. The few that were still rejected were adopted by Alwen, who kept them warm in our kitchen, feeding them from a bottle with a cloth stuffed in the neck as a makeshift teat. How she mourned for the ones that died! For all her limited understand, she had a way with animals. I can picture her now, incubating chicken’s eggs in her bosom and laughing in delight when they hatched. She rescued wounded mice and baby rabbits that the cats brough in and secreted baby animals in her blouse, laughing when they wriggled and tickled her with their fur or down. The lambs she raised with milk from healthy sheep were always our fattest, the town butcher sought after her pet lambs and paid well for them; she always cried.

Tada used to say that Heaven would be like the best summer of our lives for all eternity. In the summer of 1875, the summer of my seventeenth birthday, Annabel, he died; and no sooner was the worst of winter passed than God sent floods.

The rains came hard and lasted weeks, washing down the mountainsides and across the narrow plateau past Hendre Ddu, in torrents.

Mam and Alwen were crossing the ford in the old cart when the tragedy struck, barely a hundred yards away from our front door.

Had Tada not died, or Sion been older and less bent on proving himself, we might have noticed that the pin which held the front wheel on its axle shaft was loose; had I been better at heavy work or able to earn more money…if lots of things that I have wasted too much of my life pondering…then Mam and Alwen might not have gone to town. Only for pennies had they gone, to sell socks Mam had knitted and eggs that Alwen had collected in the market; pennies that seems as nothing to me now.

We must have known it wasn’t safe because we had gone to the ford out of concern.

One moment they were there, sitting in the cart, Glyndwr struggling to pull them through the fast-moving weight of the water which was high on the wheel, then the next the wheel was slipping off the axle, Mam shaking the reins and urging Glyndwr on and us shouting at her to warn her not to. She couldn’t hear through the noise of the water and rain. Glyndwr continued to pull. Then, as if in a nightmares, the wheel came loose, tipping the cart, which must have been partly floating in the water; because the current started to take them.

I saw Alwen clearly, standing up and screaming out of her love for Glyndwr, and Mam trying to calm her and at the same time, rocking her body forward as if to move the wagon by her weight.

Then Sion, running down the track towards the flooding nant, shouting to Alwen above the noise of the water, “Stedda, cariad, stedda lawr!” Sit, darling! Sit down.

Slowly, the cart had toppled onto its side. Even then, I had no thought of mortal danger. The water was barely even waist high, yet it had behind it the momentum of its fall of several thousand feet all down the mountain, and its eagerness to go a thousand more down into the valley, taking everything in its path. For a moment Mam seemed to be trying to hold out her bag to us, perhaps knowing they were lost, wanting us to have the pennies from the socks and eggs; in my nightmares I have many times held out my hand to save her, to be left with only the money.

It is hard to know now what is my memory and what is dream, yet I also have an image of Alwen toppling through the air into the water, and of Glyndwr, trapped in the traces, legs flailing, struggling to right the cart, and Mam sliding almost gracefully across the bench seat of the cart, into the rushing greyness of the nant. And then of Glyndwr, battling to keep his head above the water, fighting the current as it relentlessly overpowered him, the cart, and everything.

And all the time the rain, the rain, the rain, falling steadily in sheets from the heavens.

There was a moment when I glimpsed them, Mam and Alwen, faces in the water, being swept away.

In my memories I hear Alwen screeching out, a terrible panic in her voice, but I doubt I could have heard anything above the noise of the water and the rain. I could barely hear Sion shouting as he waded in the swollen nant beside me, vainly reaching out his arms to the cart, now jammed against rocks and Glyndwr, still fighting to keep his head in air, only a yard from my brother’s outstretched hand.

I know that I was shouting, screaming, fearful of losing all of them, knowing in my heart of hearts that Mam and Alwen were already lost.

Then I was running along the bank, chasing after shadows in the water, following where they should be, unsure if I saw their heads as they were being swept along, or just eddies in the water. Was it their heads or faces, disappearing and reappearing, or only my imaginings? In truth their dark wool clothing would have been completely waterlogged, and must have dragged them quickly down to their deaths.

In my nightmares, I see Mam’s face, fear in her eyes, and I hear Alwen’s screams and see the terror in hers. Even after all these years, I still awaken sometimes, soaked in my own perspiration, blinded by my tears, having lived through it all afresh.

Sion had waded back to the bank and had then run past me. He, too, must have believed he had glimpsed them; perhaps he had. I saw him racing to where the water cascaded over the edge of the plateau in its spectacular waterfall pointing and shouting, “There they are! There they are!”

He kept on pointing and shouting long after I knew they must be gone. “Look, there’s Mam! Look! Alwen!” Hope stays alive far beyond reason.

Did I catch a glimpse of Alwen’s body as the current pulled her over the waterfall? Did I see Mam alive again? It is hard for me to distinguish memories from nightmares now. I do have one clear memory of Sion beside me, shouting at me as he tried to go into the water again above the edge of the waterfall and of me grabbing his arm and trying desperately to hold him back.

He turned towards me, his face uncomprehending, shook himself free and waded in.

I thought for a moment that he would throw himself over the edge after them, or be swept away by the current too, but he stayed where he was in the shallows; even so the weight of the water must have been huge.

When he turned back towards me, his face was twisted in the twilight and he seemed to be grinning. I believe that, in that moment, I saw grief, self-blame, and loathing on his face, and an awful grim which was to become common feature on that face: an awful, ugly grin that I can only attribute to madness. 

I waded out towards him, struggling against the pressure of the water, trying to coax him back to the bank, to comfort and console him.

I managed to catch hold of his coat but he shook himself free, staring into my face, I don’t think he even recognized me. 

“Ble maen nhw? Ble maen nhw? Ydn nhw adre?” he demanded – Where are they? Where are they? Are they home?

Then he waded out and raced off again to the path and down the hill to the next plateau, I had no option but to follow, my wet clothes chapping against my legs.

Sion was like a man possessed. I followed him all the way down to the valley where our tributary joined the Conwy [Conway], wanting him to be right and willing him to know best, but carried more by gravity than conviction, knowing, in my heart, that it was already useless.

Somewhere in the fears and panic of that night, Sion lost his reason. That, at any rate, is what I believe, Annabel. You must judge for yourself.

It must have been two mornings after Mam and Alwen had been swept away that I came to my proper senses. It had stopped raining and Sion was sitting in the chair staring at the cold fire. He looked up at me blankly. “Ti’n iawn?” I asked. – Are you all right?

“Ydw. Iawn,” he mumbled like an automaton, and got up from the chair and went out into the yard in a way that roused my concerns.

I got up quickly, pulled on some clothes and went out after him.

I was sure he would know what to do, who to tell.

He was staring towards the nant where the water had subsided almost to its normal, shallow flow. A hundred yards away, between two rocks, I could see the cart jammed on its side. The eyes of Glyndwr, his body still trapped in harness, stared accusingly at us, mouth open with the bit still in it. The sight of him was awful.

It is a strange thing, Annabel. Although I had not yet cried for Mam or Alwen, suddenly I did for our poor, gentle door, Glyndwr, who never asked for much and never complained and was always compliant. Perhaps I was not yet able to comprehend the enormity of what had happened to my mother and sister; or perhaps it was because I had not yet seen their bodies. If you can answer that question, Annabel, you are a wiser human being than I.

I became aware of the dogs howling and released them from the tethers to their kennels. They hung around me, whining, wanting food. I realized they could not have been fed for two days or more. I thought then of the sheep. Although they doubtless have been quite unaware of our absences, we would need to check on them, too, after all the rain. 

There was so much to do, too much for me to even contemplate. If I ever needed the strength of my older brother it was then. It was not until he lifted his twisted face and asked, “Lle mae Mam ac Alwen?” – where’s Mam and Alwen – that I finally understood that something was terribly wrong.

I felt a chill run down my spine, as if I had seen a ghost. A kind of hysteria rose up in me then.

I told him to stop fooling around.

He laughed.

I slapped him.

He barely noticed. I was fighting back tears and anger.

I steadied myself, knowing that this was important.

“Do you not remember?” I said, carefully.

“Cofio be?” he snapped – Remember what?

“Mam and Alwen were swept away by the nant. Echnos.” – by the river. The night before last.

“I’m getting married today,” he said, looking directly at me as if he hadn’t heard what I had said. “I lost the ring in the nant. Have you got it?”

There was a demented look on his face and that bizarre smile which kept appearing and disappearing. Shock can play strange tricks on the mind, I know now. I have seen it in the faces of soldiers coming back from the front. Looking at him was like looking into the face of an evil spirit. It shook me to my bowels, I could not have been more horrified to be looking into the face of the Devil himself. It is Sion’s face I still see in the Salem picture, in the face at the window, in the shawl, even knowing that the faces are only in my mind.

I was trying to think, yet every time I decided I must go to town for help, a panic rose in my bowels and hysteria swept my head. Leaving Sion alone, going to Anti Mari. I knew I would have to talk to the policeman, God knew who else. I knew what needed to be done, yet somehow I could not face it. I think a little of the madness had overtaken me, too. Was that wicked of me, Annabel? I fear St. Peter will think so. I have much to answer for.

It was two more days before we saw Mam and Alwen again. Eventually, the policeman came up to Hendre Ddu on foot and found us in our living nightmare. Seeing him coming up the path raised guilt and fear in me. I knew I had done wrong.

I don’t remember when I first heard Denbigh Asylum mentioned. It crept into Anti Mari’s conversation gradually: the suggestion that this was where Sion should go “for his own and everyone’s good.”

“It is an institution that was built especially for the Welsh,” she told me. “They take the twpsyn a dwlali in from all over North Wales. It would be a mercy to you both.”

Anti Mari persisted, of course, in trying to wear me down. She recruited the Minister and his wife to her cause, cornering me in the vestry one rainy Sunday after chapel, plying Sion and me with tea and Welsh cakes.

“If you won’t take reason from me, then perhaps you will take it from the Minister,” she told me, as if it had all been rehearsed, Sion sitting there in his Sunday best, the words addressed to him as much to me.

They patiently explained that the asylum was not a prison, that it was a hospital where people who suffered sicknesses of the mind could be cured, made better.

Two days later, they took us by surprise, all of them arriving together, three smart traps with their fine horses in shining brasses and properly dubbined leather. Sion came in shouting that the wedding guests were arriving. 

Dai pulled up first, Anti Mari looking determined at his side, and the Doctor in the back. The Minister and his wife were in the second vehicle, looking most concerned. In the third trap was a man I didn’t recognize.

I don’t think we had ever had so many important visitors at Hendre Ddu.

Anti Mari introduced the man I didn’t know as the Relieving Officer. I suppose I knew then more or less what was coming.

Anti Mari took Tada’s old chair at the head of the table and commanded Dai to bring the basket to her, whereupon she then proceeded to push aside the clutter, spread a cloth and then lay out a dazzling array of fresh bread, cold sliced meats, and pies with a dexterity and speed that took us all aback.

The sight and smell of such a banquet immediately excited Sion. We had not eaten a woman’s cooking since the accident. I was filled both with gratitude and love for her but, at the same time, great apprehension and foreboding. The Relieving Officer, I noticed, stayed by the door. He looked very formal, like a solicitor.

Sion was staring at the spread with the eyes of a starving man before a feast, but kept saying, “Where is my bride?”

It was not until we were all eating again, or rather pretending to, and Sion was quiet, that Anti Mari said something that helped me begin to understand what plans were in hand.

“We are not here to punish you,” she told me. “You have been most loyal to your brother. We are here to help you. You will thank me for this one day.”

And then she turned to the Doctor.

“Have you seen enough?” She asked.

He reached into his inside pocket and took out a certificate which he laid on the table and signed before handing it to the Relieving Officer who put it before the Minister to sign. The Relieving Officer then produced his own document, which I feared for a moment was intended to certify me, too, but on which I managed to read the words Reception Order, though I had no comprehension then of what that meant.

I looked from one to the other of them, feeling like a child again, a child who knew he had done great wrong but not what it was he was guilty of.

Once both forms were signed and handed to him, the Relieving Officer stepped forward and addressed Sion.

“It is my duty to inform you that you have been certified insane and that we shall leave immediately to convey you to the North Wales Counties Lunatic Asylum.” He looked at me. “Will you accompany us, please?”

My heart was in my mouth and my mind felt plunged into black depths. I was both angry and racked by grief at the same time. And I think, Annabel, there must have been a cowardice in me, too, a fear of facing an unknown future alone.

What would be the point of my life if Sion was taken from me? That is what I was thinking. I had lost Tada, Mam, and Alwen, and now my brother. I could barely manage Hendre Ddu as it was; with Sion gone, there would be no point in anything. Oh, how it shames me to think of what a pathetic cringing creature I had become.

Don’t judge me harshly, Annabel.

Within an hour, I had assembled Sion’s clothes, helped him up into the Relieving Officer’s trap, and we were setting off to Denbigh. The Relieving Officer drove us, barely speaking.

North Wales Counties Lunatic Asylum was like a palace. I had seen stately homes from afar, such as Bodelwyddan, but this seemed bigger, set in fine grounds and on good land behind the town with its ruined castle on the hill and huddle of terraced houses around it.

I was aware of the many faces at many windows watching us. I held my brother by the arm, and spoke to him as I might to an animal I was trying to coax into a pen. I confess I was a little apprehensive, fearful that I might myself be mistaken for the certified man.

Sion stared aghast at the place and looked at me questioningly. For a moment, I feared he would run off.

“This is where you spend your mis mel,”– your honeymoon – I told him. “It is a fine hotel.”

My heart could not have been heavier and yet a part of me felt great relief.

The Relieving Officer led us in. 

Then the Matron appeared, a businesslike woman in a white uniform with a white cap. She smiled familiarly at the Relieving Officer and they shook hands warmly; then he handed the certificate to her and introduced us.

I still felt a nagging doubt that I was betraying my brother. There were many worse than him: people who sat in corners, rocking, some who howled and some who smiled serenely but took no account of what was going on around them at all. Out of sight, I could hear screaming and insane shouting and I glimpsed people strapped to chairs, yet there were many who appeared normal. I supposed I had expected to see the padded cells and straitjackets Anti Mari had spoken of, but I saw no sign of these on that visit. There were far more people and it was all far larger than I had imagined. It crossed my mind that I should take Sion now and run away, yet I didn’t.

“One’s attention is drawn to the anomalies these poor unfortunates exhibit,” Matron told me, “yet there are many others whose senses had previously taken leave of them but whose reasoning has now come back.”

“Where are they?” I asked, looking around.

“Why, they have gone back home,” she told me proudly. It had not occurred to me that the committed could be cured.

She introduced me to some patients whom she described as “convalescent,” which I found most encouraging. Some were talking, playing games, and, she assured me, returning to normality.

“We find they are greatly helped by strict routine and cleanliness,” she told me. “Imposing discipline leads to inner order; and cleanliness is next to godliness. But we also use other treatments where the doctors deem that necessary.”

She leaned forward towards me, confidentially. “Sometimes, I must warn you, it is necessary to adopt stern measures.”

Sion was shown to a dormitory where he sat on a bed and kept on asking, “Is it time for the wedding now? Is it time for the wedding now?” and “You have got the ring?” Have you go the ring?” over and over. He appeared not even to notice when I bade my farewell.

You are kind to me, Annabel, you nurse my dribbling and incontinence with no complaint. My movements are becoming less. It is harder to get up. Last night I wet the bed. I beg you to forgive me. My laziness shames me. I am reminded that Alwen, too, wet her bed nightly. Later, it became an affliction from which Sion, too, suffered, and so must be dormant in the Davies blood. Do not fret, I shall soon be gone. You will be rewarded richly, albeit that I have placed your not-inconsiderably fortune in trust to be discontinued in the event of children.

I hope now that you begin to understand why.

So far, though, you have only half the story.

I have tried to set out clearly why I have set such strict provision on your inheritance. You are the favourite of my offspring, cleverest and most beautiful and understanding. You are also the only woman, and I do believe it is the females who are responsible for begetting madness.

It is more than just your resemblances to Mam and Alwen that persuades me that I am right.

I have not told you yet about Angharad, love of my life, matriarch of what I might boastfully call our dynasty, here in London. I believe that Mam’s and Angharad’s blood come together fatally in you. I fear hugely for the consequences.

My Maker will shortly judge me and find me so much wanting in many regards, but at least I shall not bear the guilt of allowing you to reawaken the Davies madness.

There are many things in this world that cannot be explained. Love is one of them.

Outside the window, as I sat with Sion one morning the following spring, a girl passed, dressed in white. In the brightness of the day, she dazzled me; she could have been an angel; her quiet beauty was so plain to see. For a moment, our eyes met and I felt myself possessed of a most strange feeling, as if something was shared between us: not words, not even thoughts or ideas; trust perhaps, and love most certainly. Neither of us smiled, or even acknowledged each other.

A moment later when I looked again, she had disappeared like a sunbeam when a cloud passes. Later I discovered that this was how Angharad was. Mostly, she skittered away from people, like a dog that longs to be petted but is frightened of being beaten. Sometimes when she was particularly affected, she would scream at people who came closer than two paces.

I turned my attentions back to Sion and announced that we were going for a walk outside.

As often happened between us now, Sion responded to my encouragements by becoming babyish, stopping for tantrums or to take his clothes off. He seemed particularly to relish the attention of being dressed.

So absorbed was I in my task on this day, that I was not aware of Angharad coming to stand very close behind me, watching over my shoulder.

As she was later to tell me, voices in her head advised her to judge my character by the buttoning of Sion’s breeches and the lacing of his boots.

When, finally, I did sense her presence and turned, I found myself so close to her that I could see every pore in her clear, pale skin and feel her breath. No doubt that lack of etiquette was part of her condition, but the feeling it gave me was not one of apprehension, or even excitement, but one of great calm, of wanting to touch her face as one might want to touch a beautiful porcelain figurine. I cannot describe the texture of her. It was as soft as pink snow, and as ephemeral as the reflection of a single swan in a calm, deep, lake like the Ogwen, reflecting blue sky, soft clouds and our greatest mountains in it. In my personal turmoil, she filled my heart with stillness and hope, as her soft ripples engulfed me.

Without a word her hand slipped into mind, and it was as if a flame was re-ignited in my heart, a flame I had thought extinguished forever by the events I have recounted and which I, in my feebleness, had been all but overwhelmed by. I was assured afterwards that she had never done this to anyone before except her family.

Perhaps in nature, it is only when a woman can be entirely certain of her suitor that she is able to release him from the purgatory of his imagination and admit him to the heaven she has constructed for him to share. Learning forward with no provocation on my part she let her lips brush against mine. 

“Mae gen ti lais arbennig,” she said. You have a special voice.

My first kiss from a girl, barely even that; the first words I had heard her speak. Now it was I who was struck dumb. As I struggled to regain my composure, she laughed very gently.

If I am fortunate enough to see angels soon, I can’t imagine they will be more beautiful.

Angharad and I were married barely twelve months later by the chaplain in Denbigh Hospital. Sion, as my best man, held the ring and didn’t run away with it; Angharad, restored to health, glowed like a supernatural being; her father gave her away and her family lined the front row, smiling approvingly. If my side of the hospital chapel was empty, it was because I wanted no taint on our love. Anti Mari had disqualified herself from my love now. 

We travelled to London on the train and took refuge with Mam’s brother, Rhodri. The Roberts family had recently returned penniless from Patagonia, and were struggling horribly to make ends meet distributing milk. It was a foothold in the capital for all of us. And we were determined to succeed in the capital where we had failed, each in our own way, previously. And, through hard work and dedication, succeed we did.

I of course took Rhodri into my confidence about Angharad and Rhodri and the Davies blood, but he assured me he would judge Angharad for herself. He agreed with me, though, that we must keep Angharad and Sion’s treatment in Denbigh secret forever, such is the malice with which people would otherwise certainly judge us.

“Strangers see the Devil too easily in foreigners,” he wisely said. “And we Welsh are foreigners here.”

The human mind is balanced on sensitive scales, Annabel, too sensitive in some for the weight it has to bear; those who know men who came back from the War will know of what I speak. I scarcely recognized my boys, your uncles, when they came home on leave to London, before returning to their deaths on the Western Front.

Believe me, Annabel, grief and loss can be weigh enough to unbalance a mind forever.

After her sons died, Angharad increasingly sought solace in her head, despite the concerns of your mother and her sisters. The voices that she heard now had been joined by her sons, speaking to her from unmarked graves in no-man’s-land. In the truth of her imagination, I believe, she was very often with them.

I visited Bedlam, as they call it, once to try and sell them milk. Though not as bad as it is painted, it made me shiver to go in there and to remember how we fought for your grandmother’s life. I could not again consign her to the asylum, so she stayed with us, not locked up or consigned to an upstairs room, but loved and cared for by her children and grandchildren. Do you remember her, Annabel? That angelic smile she wore, those tears she often shed for no apparent reason. And that porcelain skin. You were very young. You loved to hug her. And she loved all of you, too.

I wish she had lived to see the Armistice. I could not hold her in this world: she died in 1917, in my arms, I suppose of grief or madness.

I have had to watch your face each day, Annabel, as you read my jottings, conscious of your every twitch and frown; if old age brings wisdom it is only in having greater sensitivity to others, and perhaps a little knowledge, precious little, all things considered. 

I have lain here on what will be my deathbed these last two days, my sheets a little ink-stained, but my task done. This will be the last time I shall write. Do not mourn me; there is a time for us to die. Surely when the old leak urine without notice, and cannot tell the difference between passing stools or wind, then it is time.

Put garlic around my neck, Annabel, and a stake through my heart. I shall be happy to go; I have already lingered far too long.

First let me finish this with a postscript.

If I have not yet made it plain, then let me do so now: this story if for you, Annabel, and those who come after; you will know whom to trust with its secrets. All my life, I have feared my own descent into madness and the hell and torment of that state.

I suppose it may be viewed as some small triumph that I have stayed sane and made my way in an often insane world; or perhaps my madness was to so much fear it. In any event, I shall be relieved to be relieved of life.

Sickness of the mind was something of which I had known nothing before its manifestation in Sion. What little I know now lends the lie to all of Anti Mari’s superstitions: if families in days gone by felt constrained to keep their defectives hidden, it was because of views like hers.

Old men should be at peace before they die but I am not, because I fear for you.

I am grateful for your attentions, Annabel. No one could have done more, attending my incontinence, preserving my modesty and pride. I have no secrets now from you. 

Oh, how I wish that I could grant you to have children, Annabel, to know the joy of the love that babies bring to a woman, the fulfilment: Angharad was transformed; her babies’ cries and children’s play silenced her voices all the time that they were young.

You asked today if I am sure I have bred madness into you and into this family?

I answer honestly: I do not know.

I do know that my aunt condemned our Mam and us as children most cruelly and unscientifically, before ever we were born. I know our tragedy was not due to incest, bestiality or evil deeds too awful even to utter. I know it because I trust my heart and what it tells me.

Was Anti Mari wrong, therefore, to pronounce on madness, as she did? “Mae o’n rhedeg yn y teulu,” she said. It runs in the family.

Is it only from her I have that belief?

“It is the Devil himself at work,” she used to say.

And you ask, Annabel. “What if the Devil was at work in her? Or what if there is no devil at all?”

Such good questions you ask! I am an old man, I should be left alone, let me sleep.

My mind wanders, my strength ebbs. I scribble on, my words more precious to me than to you.

What last morsels of wisdom can I give you before I am gone? The Bible gave us precious little, of that I am certain. Look around you at the world: it has little sign of the God that I once believed in.

Look! The twentieth century since Christ, and still He hasn’t returned.

The Great War has shaken our beliefs to the core. Two sons dead in the Somme within a few days of each other. Two of four hundred thousand English and half a million Germans? For what? The vanity of kings and generals and fools. Imagine all those millions praying and God ignoring them.

Thank God for daughters, it is they who carry on the line, and thank God for farmers who produce our food. To Hell with fighting men who kill each other, with War, ambition, and the rest. Titanic mistakes, Annabel. All those good men taken.

Something Anti Mari said has come to mind. “Once insanity has lodged in your soul, you are lost to God for eternity.” But what if she is wrong? How could she know that? It is just another pronouncement. If one of her pronouncements is false, then all are suspect. And the thought that you might carry the madness is also suspect.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps me thinking that of you is madness. If so, the Coda to my Will and Testament is an injustice. Find it, Annabel, burn it, let the first Will stand alone. It is in your hands. 

There! I have done. I wish you and your children well.

If there is a God, I am content to face Him.

--

There is an afterward to this story that reads as follows: “This document was found by her daughter amongst the papers of Annabel Davies, pioneering female psychiatrist and campaigner for women’s rights, who died last year aged 93. She spent a lifetime researching whether what is now called bipolar disorder is hereditary. Her findings were inconclusive. Her daughter, also a psychiatrist, carries on her work.”

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this on the show yet, but I used to teach college writing and literature, and I feel such a strong pull to analyze this story like I would in a literature class, but I’ll refrain. It’s such a beautiful and heartbreaking story in so many ways. I hope you enjoyed it as I did.

Again, that story is called “The Quietude” by Simon Thirsk and can be found in the book Dangerous Asylums, edited by Rob Mimpriss. I’ll include a link to the book in the Facebook group and Instagram page.

Next week I want to switch gears a bit and look into the spooky and lore surrounding the North Wales Hospital. So if you’re curious to know what may still be lurking around, stay tuned.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve set up a Beacons page – it’s similar to linktree, if you’re familiar with that – so it provides a place where you can access my Buzzsprout page, Facebook page, Instagram page, email, etc., all in one place. I’ll include that in the show notes for this episode, but if you want to write it down, the address is https://beacons.ai/behindthewallspodcast

If you liked this episode, there’s a place on the Beacons page for you to buy me a coffee for $3 or however much you’d like to contribute. It’s just a one-time gift, so no monthly subscription required for that. I also have options for other ways to support the show by requesting a message from me or a social media shout-out or asking me a question – as long as those aren’t questions or messages related to psychological concerns. I can’t give out therapy advice unless you’re one of my patients. And, since my patients are all at a state hospital without access to podcasts, I’m just going to assume that none of them are listening.

Also, as I generally mention, if you like the show, please share it with a friend. Please rate, review, and subscribe wherever you’re listening, but especially on Apple Podcasts. Big thanks this week to Stephanie and Elise for your very kind feedback on the Facebook page. It means so much to me! I love, love, love reading what you all have to say. I know it’s helping make this show better each week.

I think the narrator of this week’s story embodies the spirit of Maya Angelou’s quote: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Until next time…

Beacons page: https://beacons.ai/behindthewallspodcast

Mimpriss, Rob, ed. Dangerous Asylums. Bangor: North Wales Mental Health Research Project, 2016.

Find it on Amazon: https://a.co/d/gOotuX4

Thirsk, Simon. “The Quietude.” In Dangerous Asylums. Ed. Rob Mimpriss. Bangor: North Wales Mental Health Research Project, 2016. 28-61.