Having introduced Rebecca, Louis, and Paul, perhaps it would be good to tell you about the things we got up to. Someone once said that on a psychiatric ward, the doctors are the Daddies, the nurses are the Mummies, and the patients are the Naughty Children. And that's what it can be like.
Our little gang met up every morning after breakfast and the Community Meeting, and we would either sit in the "Games Room" (where nobody ever played any games, it was really the smoking room) or go for a walk in the hospital grounds, which were huge and beautifully rural, with a river and fields of white cows. In years gone by there had been a farm on which inmates worked to supply some of the food for the hospital.
On one of our walks we collected twigs of pussy-willow which had the pussy paws on them. I suppose it must have been Spring. There was a bench by the river and Louis took a photo of Paul, Rebecca and I sitting on it and laughing, it is a picture which I treasure. I am wearing an old pair of glasses which had been all done up with wires by my Dad because they had got broken. They were not really the right prescription and I could probably see better without them. My parents wanted to get me new glasses, but the staff kept saying that it would be a waste of money because my eyesight would be affected by the medication and so they should wait until I was on a "maintenance dose". Then they would ask me why I would not go shopping in the local town on the bus, from the ward. How was I supposed to see the numbers on the buses? My Dad thought this was ridiculous, he did not care about whether the glasses would have to be changed again, but the ward staff would not let me go to the optician. They did insist, however, that I went to an appointment for a cervical biopsy, at a hospital miles away, which I think could have waited until I was better able to cope with it. But more about that later ...
In the photograph, we are all sitting very close together, which shows how close we were emotionally, we all have cigarettes (the boredom of the ward quickly turns light or moderate smokers into heavy smokers), and Rebecca and I are smiling in a banal, drugged-up way. When we were getting ready for the walk, I had problems doing up my shoelaces. God only knows what damage these drugs do to your brain, when they render you unable to do something which you learnt to do when you were three. Louis actually had to do them up for me. If you are wondering what Paul was doing with a camera on the ward, he was always smuggling in stuff that he was not supposed to have, such as herbal medicines and pornographic postcards.
On the ward, you become close to your friends very quickly. You care about them like they are family, and you help them out as much as you can. In fact, the patients look after each other much more than the nurses ever do. I noticed that an old Irish man called Edward had not been out of the ward for weeks, and I persuaded him to let me take him for a walk, which he enjoyed enormously once he was out. He was a Catholic and he thought the Pope was after him or something. I can't imagine why the Pope would be after such a nice man, and I told him so, and he seemed comforted by this. If you saw someone struggling to carry a cup of tea because their hands were shaking (a side-effect of medication which is especially common in the elderly), you would rush over to help them. If a forgetful patient had lost their handbag, you would look for it. If someone was being chased by a gang of nurses with a needle, you would let them hide under your bed and say you hadn't seen them. If someone ran out of cigarettes, you would give them a few of yours, especially if they were making roll-ups from butt-ends they found in the ashtrays (I told someone, a homeless man called Jed who taught me how to play Black Jack, that he could get TB this way). And always you would be prepared to listen to somebody's story, even if you had already heard it many times before.
Paul actually had a beaten-up old dark red Ford Capri parked in the carpark in front of the ward. Its MOT and tax had run out and that was Paul's excuse for leaving it there. One day the four of us sneaked out into the car with the nurses looking at us through the windows, obviously worried we were planning to escape. But in the car Paul had stashed a bottle of Chianti, which we hastily opened and swigged away at, giggling and shouting out the windows, "We are off to Mexico! Arrrrriva!!!" We had this dream of all going to Mexico "when this is all over". We never did, of course, but it was fun talking about it.
It was quite usual for ambulances to come and go at the entrance to the ward, either bringing in new patients or picking up blood samples. They always left the keys in the ignition, and one day I got into the driver's seat but chickened out of actually driving it away. However, I did manage to steal the driver's hat. My sister visited me in her car and I had a go at driving it around the hospital grounds, it was fun because I had not driven for so long. Amazingly, I did this with the blessing of one of the nurses. "Aw - go on then!" she said after I pleaded to be allowed to.
Sometimes there were concerts in the main hospital building, and Paul insisted that we go to one. He did not tell me anything about it beforehand, so when this tiny man in Austrian nederhosen came on the stage, dwarfed by his piano accordian, I could not stop laughing. His name was Billy Moore and he had been on Channel 4's "Eurotrash". He did not seem to mind us laughing, or asking him to play "Jumping Jack Flash". Some of the long-term patients were there, doing ballroom dancing in the aisles or just jigging around. At the end of the concert I got Billy's autograph and Paul called me a "groupie". I also went to what Paul used to call the "Munster's Disco". I remember dancing my heart out to Michael Jackson's "Beat it". Louis said later that he fell in love with me that night, watching me dance. At the disco there was a man with only half a face. He was known as "the Major" and he had been in some sort of jet fighter accident. I found seeing him so disturbing that I had to have "extra chlorpromazine" that night, to be able to settle to sleep. The nurses are not really supposed to alter your dose without you seeing a doctor, but they often do. It was so funny, everyone in the queue after me was saying "I would like extra chlorpromazine too, please", as if they were ordering a gin and tonic, and the nurse was letting them have it!
Paul and Louis got up to a few capers of their own. Louis had been discharged from the ward and Paul was "on leave" at home, so Louis went to visit him. They were walking around the local town and happened to be standing outside a Chinese takeaway when a van drew up, a man got out with a huge cardboard box containing ten bottles of wine, and said to Louis "Sign here please". He assumed because Louis looked Chinese that he worked at the takeaway. Louis, thinking quickly, signed with a false name, and they ran off with the wine.
On the same weekend, they went hunting for magic mushrooms. Louis knew where to look, and they found quite a few, which they dried into a hallucinagenic tea. Paul actually brought some back to the ward with him, stuffed in a coffee bag. It looked quite an innoccuous brew, but I was being Miss Goody-Two-Shoes and following Dr Longton's advice to the letter when it came to such things, so I did not try any. I did drink alcohol sometimes though, which does not really mix with medication, as it accentuates its effect.
One evening a friend of Louis took us out to a local pub in the car, and we all got quite pissed, including the driver. I had had my section lifted by now because I was being more co-operative, and when you are a voluntary patient you can more or less come and go as you please, but you are not supposed to actually leave until your consultant says you can, although technically you could. The day I had my section lifted, Paul gave me a lovely card saying "Congratulations!" It was so hard, to get it lifted, it took months, and I had to be so compliant and I felt as though I was being constantly assessed by the nurses, so I could never relax. One of them told me how to get out of the ward. She said "Don't let any of the nurses see you crying, and when you have home leaves, be very positive about them and say they went really well, and impress upon the doctors that you have no objections to staying on the medication long-term, because you feel so much better on it". A few months later, after I had been discharged and I had stopped my medication, Dr Longton said to me angrily, "If I think you need to be on lithium I will take you in and MAKE you take it!!!" I think he felt threatened by someone so obviously doing better without the modecate he had made me have, in injections, after he had incorrectly diagnosed me as having Schizophrenia when I am actually probably Bipolar.
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