HEARING EYE Publications
Non Violent Action, August 2003
Out of sight out of mind
by Jeff Cloves
How the shadows of the first world war still darken our lives. The abominations of Belsen and Hiroshima seem like a continuation of that senseless slaughter and I guess we'll never be free from the weight of our awful knowledge.
Recently I was in London for the launch of the anthology In The Company of Poets. It contains 127 poets - among them peace campaigner Pat Arrowsmith - and fine poems by poets known and unknown. Unknown to me that is. Peter Campbell is one such, but his poem Night and Morning has been nagging away at me since I read it - appropriately - on the train back to Stroud. It has a footnote: First World War casualties were sent to Napsbury Asylum, often disappearing into the mental health system. Having lived in St Albans from 1955 to 1980 and been a diarist for a local paper for 15 years, I'm shamed I was unaware.
St Albans, a market town 20 miles north of London, was once ringed by what used to be called mental asylums. Of these, the Shenley and Napsbury hospitals were huge turn of the century institutions founded on well-meaning ideals of country air, rewarding work and self sufficiency. They were founts of enlightenment compared to their predecessors but declined into long stay asylums with locked wards and a population of the institutionalised and hopeless. Many of the abandoned lived their entire adult life within them but, in the 1980s, the survivors were turfed out into non-existent community care and the hospitals were sold as sites for young-exec housing.
In the '60s, the influence of RD Lang, David Cooper, and others, helped changed attitudes towards patient care and St Albans School of Art founded art and drama therapy courses and placed students in the local hospitals. Writers also introduced poetry therapy into these great brick battleships but their culture of enlightenment was opposed by one of drug dependency and defeat until the clamour for Care In The Community suggested a way out of the impasse.
One of our Stroud vigilantes, who has just returned to Kyoto, was in Stroud to attend an art therapy course himself. For over a year, Nobuhiro Hosoi stood in the High Street with his placard bearing a message of peace and reconciliation in Japanese. His was a calm and dignified presence, and Night and Morning would, I fancy, have spoken to him as powerfully as it does to me.
I'll quote it in full because, marvellous though it is, I find it hard to wholly understand and wonder if other NvA readers, too, are reminded of passages in Pat Barker's harrowing novel of militant pacifism during the first world war, The Eye in the Door.
The trains run down from Luton
Each hour throughout the night.
The clock of sanity lies winded on the floor.
Turn towards the thin partition,
Turn from the light.
The nurses' watch won't help you change this law.
The nurses read beside the passage door.
They read their stars and dream of nothing more.
The battered boys from Flanders
Rode this way from the docks.
They made them sweet and locked the passage door.
Turn towards the cold partition,
Turn away from their touch.
They've left those fields and joined a greater war.
Their names are scratched within the linen store.
The clothes you cadge are still the clothes they wore.
Men drove a railway eastward.
One spur beyond the halt.
It curved within, beyond the workyard door.
Turn away from the cold partition,
Turn towards their touch.
You have to wake, you have to face the dawn.
The pigeons land and strut upon the lawn.
They peck the bread the nursing staff have thrown.
The morning trains speak differently,
Their thunder tuned by sight.
The clock has changed its digits and its tone.
Turn from the thin partition,
Turn towards the light.
The floors are bright, the floorboards still unclean.
You lose the night, your ancestors are known.
Only the clock and you are in the wrong.