you had that was of use or value. Men grew attached to their socks: life was cut to the bone on a hard-bench ward, and this was a way to flesh it, make you feel more than a mere creature of the institution. Men fought bitterly to retain their socks, when the attendants decided to confiscate them. When that happened you’d lose your clothes as well as your sock and be thrown into a safe room in an untearable canvas gown, or you’d be straitjacketed, buckled and trussed like a game bird lest you break your knuckles hammering on the wall.
During the later years in Ganderhill I had a room on a good downstairs ward in Block F and enjoyed all the privileges the institution could give me. But in the early years I was usually up among the sad men, and often in a safe room in a strait-jacket. I remember the first time it happened, how a couple of attendants had begun talking about me while I sat smoking on the other side of the dayroom. Glancing over at me, the one attendant then told the other that I was here because I’d murdered my mother. Naturally I disputed this; I told them it was not me but my father who had killed her. They laughed and then for a while they talked of other things. But after a few minutes they were again discussing me, and again it was said that I’d killed my mother. Again I contradicted them; they told me not to get upset, not to get myself into a “state.”
This was rich. I remember that I began to rock backwards and forwards on the bench (a thing I couldn’t control) and my fingers were trembling violently. The Spider was making desperate scurrying movements, back and forth, backwards and forwards, so it felt, seeking with growing desperation some niche or cranny to crawl into. Rapidly the dayroom grew dark, and the two attendants sat watching me with animal intensity as my rocking grew violent. There was noise, screaming, then they had me pinned to the floor as the light ebbed and swelled. Then came the weirdly familiar clank of buckles, and the frenzied Spider, with the sensation of sudden constriction as they tightened the straps, at last saw his hole and slipped into it, and nothing more until he found himself in a safe room, trussed like a Christmas chicken and the single thought going round and round and round in his head that it was his
Not easy to think of those times now (perhaps it’s a mark of my so-called progress that I can dwell upon them at all) but it was to a great extent the work of those first years in Ganderhill to learn to endure such goading —which eventually I did: there came a time when I could hear them attempting to awaken the violence in me, when they’d murmur, one to another, about my mother, and instead of growing agitated—starting to rock and tremble, to scuttle about like a crab in search of a stone—instead of all that the Spider developed structures that could withstand provocation, he tirelessly rebuilt, he rehearsed with constant industry, and so became able to withstand the goads, and as this began to happen then so did the goading subside, and he was left alone. Life in Ganderhill began at that moment to improve.
I am sitting by the river, my furled umbrella leaning against the bench beside me. An overcast day, and very windy. I am drowsy from my medicine, perhaps this too helps me think of the early Ganderhill years without agitation. Other patients—John Giles, Derek Shadwell—would never do to me what the attendants did: with each other we had no reason to doubt, or lie. It occurs to me though that a function of the goading, deliberate or otherwise, was to force me to face and understand what had happened in Kitchener Street: this was why, you see, when I
Bad years, then, the early years, years of persecution. The first months were the hardest in this regard, before I adapted to their ways. (It is much more difficult to speak of those days: see how upright I sit on my bench now, staring at the pilings in the river as a screaming sea gull sweeps by in the gusting wind, and how white- knuckled my bony hands are, clasped on the handle of the umbrella.) For they would have made me their creature had I not found the means to resist. See me, then, in a cold tiled room at the front of the admissions ward, bathed and disinfected, stark naked and shivering: a long, ribbed, skinny boy, his pimpled skin white as milk, with terror in his eyes. They have taken my clothes away and are about to issue me the standard grays of the institution. So the old me, the lad from Kitchener Street, the Spider of London, has been stripped away; and before I assume the uniform of a lunatic there are these few minutes that I am naked in that bleak tiled room, that I am truly nothing, neither the one thing nor the other, and here’s an odd thing: I am seized, in those minutes of bare shivering nothingness, with a feeling so intense as to make me laugh out loud; and the attendant turns from the table, where he is busy with my few pitiful possessions, and frowns at me as I hop from foot to foot and try to stifle waves of an inexplicable joy—soon extinguished as I struggle into a shirt too small and trousers too wide, and a pair of thick- soled asylum shoes from which the laces have been removed. He has taken my pencil, and the few coppers I possessed, and sealed them up in a brown envelope with my name and the date scrawled on the front, and told me they’ll be returned to me when I leave. So while I entered that room as Spider of London, I stepped out of it a lunatic, unrecognizable to myself; and the terror, momentarily extinguished by that brief odd gush of hilarity, returned then, and all I was aware of was the touch of alien material on my skin, and the alien smells in my nostrils. Now I was afraid, desperately afraid, more frightened than ever I remembered being in my life before, and all I wanted was to be back in my room above the kitchen in number twenty-seven. But that odd laughter: I believe, now, that what I was feeling was relief.
John Giles was the first patient I encountered on the admissions ward, John with his great shoulders and shaggy eyebrows. He was admitted to Ganderhill the same day as me: when I first saw him he was facing a wall near the front of the ward and chattering to himself with great rapidity and animation. Beyond him, further down the ward, a little bald man sat on the floor moaning gently as he plucked repeatedly at the collar of his shirt, and beyond him, frozen to his spot like a statue, a man stood gazing at his own open palm and splayed fingers. I must have paused, there on the threshold, for I remember the attendant murmuring, “Come on, son, down we go.”
Down we went. A few men wandered the ward, most were locked in cells with barred gates for doors and bunks of solid concrete. These men wore canvas gowns and lay sleeping on the concrete with their knees drawn up to their chins. One man, his eyes wild and his hair standing up off his head in damp spikes, rushed to the gate as I passed and gripping the bars cackled at me till the attendant moved toward him with an uplifted hand and he shrank back with a whimper of distress. Halfway down the ward the gate of an empty cell was unlocked and rolled back on rattling metal casters. “Here we are, son,” said the attendant. “I won’t lock you up for the time being.” I stood there staring in: a small barred window high in the wall, a lidless, seatless concrete toilet, and a concrete bunk. “Just stay out of trouble, son,” he said, “and we’ll soon have you downstairs.” He was as tall as me, this man, whose name I later learned was Mr. Thomas. He turned and made his way back down the ward, glancing from side to side as with one hand he gently slapped a large key into the palm of the other. See me then: sitting on the edge of the concrete bunk with my elbows on my knees, my hands dangling limp between my legs, and my head hung low. There was a hot choking feeling in my throat;
I stared, blinking, at the floor and watched two or three tears fall between my feet. A shadow fell across the cell; I looked up, startled: it was John Giles, the giant. “Got any snout?” he said. I shook my head; he shuffled off.
I ate my supper in my cell, from a paper plate with a wooden spoon, and shortly afterwards I was issued a pair of blankets and three sheets of toilet paper. Then my gate was slammed closed with a great clattering
