Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

Author:Janet Frame [Frame, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781742749150
Publisher: Vintage Books; Random House Australia
Published: 1961-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

20

So I went to join the strange people whom I had seen before on my previous stay at Cliffhaven; and on that first day among them, when I climbed the park fence and returned to Ward Four, I was greeted with ‘Pull yourself together. You’ve been in places like that before. Don’t pretend you’re not used to them.’ And I was marched back by the Matron herself who reiterated, when handing me over to Sister Bridge. ‘She’s used to these wards. She needs to be taught a lesson.’

Part of Ward Two was a new building made to replace the old refractory ward which had been burned, with thirty-seven patients, a year before I first came to Cliffhaven. The old Brick Building was still used as the sleeping quarters, accommodating the sixty-seven women of the ward.

In Ward Two the ‘new’ attitude was made easier to put into practice by the modern living quarters which consisted of a dining room, a ‘dirty’ dayroom where the continually ill patients were locked and where those with intermittent attacks were kept as long as their attacks lasted; a ‘clean’ dayroom, its walls hung with sea-and mountain-scapes, its furniture new and bright (as was the furniture in the ‘dirty’ dayroom), its wall of windows giving an occasional view of people passing and little dogs trotting and trees changing colour with the seasons, so that one did not have the feeling of being immured and left to rot in an abandoned dwelling. The rest of the building consisted of a bathroom with three baths, two sets of lavatories, one doorless, the other with the doors three-quarter-length, staff office, clinic, clothing cupboard and cloakroom, and storeroom, dining room and pantry. Doors led from the ward to the yard and across the road to the park, and through the yard to the Brick Building with its locked single rooms, dirty dormitories, and upstairs open dormitories. The hospital had learned the lesson of the fire. Under Dr. Portman, sprinkler systems had been installed in all the buildings and existing fire escapes straightened and new ones built for all the upper floors.

There were no people in strait jackets in Ward Two. Cynics used to say there was no need for them as the worst patients had perished in the fire; yet the more experience one had of Ward Two the more one realised that, in any case, strait jackets were treatments, or restraining processes of the past. Whereas in Treecroft the best-cooked meals (and the most plentiful), the gayest pictures, the brightest bedspreads were to be found in Ward Seven where the so-called ‘sensible’ patients lived, in Cliffhaven the brightest ward was Ward Two — that is, in terms of purely chromatic dispersion! And let no one imagine that the framed and glassed landscapes on the walls suffered from the attacks of the disturbed patients. Although the surroundings were not openly studied or even admired by the patients, they were not abused. Windows might be broken in the course of a day yet the pictures remained untouched and the flowers stayed in their vases.

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