Whitecroft

My mother had been transferred to ‘Whitecroft’ a hospital at Gatcombe a mile or so outside the Island’s capital town of Newport. The staff at Whitecroft, said my grandmother, were better able and better equipped to deal with her peculiar illness. Her general health and mental condition were undoubtedly deteriorating, made worse insisted my grandmother, by constant medication and sedation.

‘Pills, pills and more pills’, hissed my grandmother.

The consequent quashing and restriction of any thought process by the patient was for the orderly convenience of the irascible guardians in starched white uniforms, who squeaked up and down the long dark corridors like bullies off to school.

'All the pills in the world won’t get rid of her Voices,’ I whispered to my grandmother.

I was proved right. One day I watched, as my mother was being helped to the toilet by one of the nursing staff, I noticed her tiny frail hand reach out and tap the door handle at least four times before entering. Sometimes when sitting up, my mother would dust her water tumbler with a clean handkerchief for the whole hour we were sat there. Often, she would be seen scrubbing her slippers in the hand basin before venturing back down the ward, her feet and slippers soaked through.

When we returned home from the hospital my grandmother would go to the kitchen to make supper and then after she would sit in her armchair whilst I sat crossed legged upon the rag mat in front of the shining black range that glowed red and smelt of soup. We would listen to the crackle of her radio until it was time for me to go to bed leaving her to her snuff box and the ten o’clock news.

Pulling the blankets and eiderdown tight about me in the chilly darkness my thoughts turned to the day’s events and then to Shirley. I would imagine that I was staying in the glow of the cheery embers of her fireside, dreaming that we were chatting over steaming mugs of cocoa and a secret cigarette before Shirley would call it a night and retire to the sun, moon and stars of her bedroom, leaving me to contemplate the wonder of it all in the dancing firelight of my fantasy.

As I lay in the cold sepia of the musty back bedroom at Grans, I sensed that Shirley knew that I was thinking of her, somehow, I was sure she knew and that she was very close by. The feeling was as intense as it was strange, but it felt safe and comforting.

Night and dream came spinning downy soft all about me.

Soft feathering stars all about me dancing.

‘Night Shirley… God bless, Gus