A knowledge of History and English Lit

was as good as a torch or a candle

on the mazy staircases and corridors.

The front wards housed the acute admissions,

Jane Austen coupled with Thomas Arnold,

those but lately troubled or giddily hurtled

in and out of revolving doors.

Sense and Sensibility wed Muscular

Christianity; exemplars and guidance

for the minds out of time; the first heavy

steps of downward drift for the young man

convinced of his pregnancy, pushing

out gasps of pain in the cafeteria

when the foetus frequently kicked.

Until the day he slipped into Case Conference

and announced there'd been a miscalculation

and his period had just started.

 

We imagined that in due course he'd find

the back wards where catatonics posed

undecided, obsessives described perfect circles

and chronic schizophrenics orated

oracular monologues to the castle walls.  

The ward names were receding to obscurity,

the bit-players of history, nearly men and women

and sundry adjuncts, like Lady Jane Grey,

Anne Hathaway and Elizabeth Woodville;

as if a cruel joke were being perpetrated

and the administration blocks burst

with the sound of unquenchable sniggers.

Here were the grandiose deluded figures,

those abducted by spaceship on witnessing

Kennedy's assassination, who conversed

each day with The Eighteenth Angel

in line of succession, informally known as Sue.

 

His historical and personal regression

would plummet further thanks to modern medicine,

the body outliving the decline and rot

of mental faculties. Domiciled in overcrowded

dormitories named after only minor royalty,

the Lords and Earls of Beauchamp and Leicester,

where history paused and then arrested.

Where wanderers became walkers, then sitters

and babies, shrunk to vegetative stasis;

the stink of stale urine and compacted faeces;

the packing of bed sores and shaving blank faces.

Food and drink, waste evacuation,

dwindling visits, forgotten relations.

Only case notes bore glimpses that here was a human

and thumbing through records of former endeavours

provided much-needed respiration,

blowing colours back into frozen cheeks.

 

At our comfortable chairs in The School of Nursing

we read Erving Goffman on Institutions,

cribbed and crabbed the asylum-museum.

In theory, of course, we all wanted closure;

but off in the distance, beyond the horizon,

as remote as a workers' revolution.

Always this sense of an emanation,

a progress of sorts, a pregnant narration;

we little guessed how quickly outward ripples

dissolved at the edges; thought the thickness

of walls to be as permanently planted

as political and economic systems.

These were both twilight years and perestroika,

an evening so swift it passed unnoticed;

old certainties and communities vanished.

The new estate offers affordable housing;

the bell-tower survives in silent homage.