hospital on the coast to benefit from the bracing sea breeze.17
Astonishing as it may sound to us today, as late as the 1950s some children’s respiratory hospitals still operated a drastic system recommended and described in 1919. In order to provide ventilation, children slept in dormitories which were deliberately kept draughty. Pamela’s dormitory had brick walls no more than a yard high. The rest of the space up to the roof consisted of wire netting. The floor was concrete and the children slept on iron beds. The idea was to strengthen their lungs and stiffen their resistance to cold and hardship. In the winter, as snow and sleet blew through the wire mesh, the children would pull the beds into the center of the room and huddle away from the wind and ice. Pamela recalls how they were taken on walks along the seafront in order to benefit from the sea breeze and then put to bed for two hours during the day to recover.
Playtimes were restricted to half an hour a day, parental visits to an hour at most. Hugging or kissing was discouraged. To reach the hospital my parents caught a bus, two trains and another bus, only to sit at a table with Pam for an hour. When my father had to work on Saturdays our mother would visit accompanied by an aunt as she lacked the confidence to travel by train alone.
Children were not allowed to cry. If they cried or complained, they could be locked in a room with barred windows. Pamela remembers staring out through the bars, crying for our father to come and take her home. There were no beatings or threats of physical violence, but children were “sent to Coventry” for any misdemeanor.18 This punishment involved complete isolation, effectively a form of solitary confinement. For a specified period, the child would be treated as though they did not exist. Any child who tried to contact them would suffer the same penalty themselves. Pamela recalls several occasions where she was shut away in a cupboard or small room, without food or drink, and not allowed to go to the bathroom. Once, she was so thirsty she drank her own urine.
One day Pamela escaped. She passed through the dormitory, into the corridor and out through the front door unobserved. The train station was only a few hundred yards away. She reasoned in her young mind that if only she could get on a train it would take her home. She boarded the first train to arrive and hid in the baggage compartment. By then, her absence was noticed. The nurses raised the alarm. Police delayed the train and searched each carriage. They found Pamela hiding among the luggage. Why had she run away? She did her best to explain. The hours locked in silent rooms, the punishments, the restrictions, the abuse. No one listened. She was taken back to the hospital and found herself in a locked room once more. She lost all track of time. It was light when she entered the barred room, then dark and quiet, and light once more when they let her out.
There were twelve girls in Pam’s dormitory. She was the only one to survive. Time after time the staff carried a small body to the morgue. Occasionally, some of the other girls managed to sneak in and hide underneath the bed where the body of a friend lay. So intense was their need for attachment and love. A close bond developed between the girls. While they were together, they were safe.
Pamela bonded particularly closely with a girl called Heather. They became best friends. One snowy night, as the girls drew the beds into the center of the dormitory, Pamela climbed into Heather’s bed to keep her friend warm. When she woke up in the morning, Heather’s body was as cold as ice. She had died during the night. Pamela was eight years old and her best friend died in bed beside her.
My parents knew none of this. Pamela wrote home using a standard form of words, a template provided by the hospital staff. She found a whole sheaf of these letters in a drawer after our mother died. Each one was almost the same as the others and almost exactly the same as those the other children wrote. Often the main text was written up on a chalkboard for the children to copy down. My sister says that anyone seeing her writing then, at the age of seven and eight, would assume it was written by a younger child. The inmates were only taught for two hours a day and at a very basic level, how to write their names, how to copy letters. Was it assumed that there was little point in educating them any further? They were not expected to survive.
My sister does have fond memories of some of the staff, particularly the matron who treated her kindly when news came that our Great Aunt Marie and then our Granny Pease had died. I was born at our Great Aunt Marie’s house. Our parents could not afford to rent somewhere of their own at that time. So my grandfather’s sister and her family took them in. Pamela remembers her hearty kindly laugh. It remains with her to this day and was one of the memories she clung to at the hospital—a warm, resonant laugh, the sound of family, the sound of home.
My mother’s recollections of the matron were rather different. After four years without Pamela, my parents decided that enough was enough. She had to come home. The matron traveled to Yorkshire by train to persuade my mother that Pamela should remain in hospital.
“You do know that if she comes home it will be the death of her,” the matron said. “It’ll all be your fault.”
“Then if she dies, at least she’ll die at home,” my mother retorted.
Whether it was at our mother’s insistence or, as Pamela believes, because the hospital needed the space, my sister came home. If the pain of separation had been intense, that of reunion was almost equally strong. Pamela was a very sick child. Worse, she came home cowed and institutionalized.
It was many years before any of us heard the full story of what had happened, but we felt the effects of it. Pamela was distant, reticent, subdued. She felt unable to ask for anything, shocked whenever she heard me asking for treats. She would rather steal than ask. She would sneak into the pantry and take cookies or candy. This was just one of the effects of life at the hospital. No one dared asked for anything.
Pamela would chuckle to herself when my mother warned me not to ask for things whenever we went to anyone’s house. We had to wait until it was offered. We should never ask.
“But how will they know what I want if I don’t ask?”
Pamela smiled at my childish logic but was inwardly terrified at the prospect of ever asking for anything or telling anyone how she felt.
Talking to Pamela years later I recognize all too well the classic symptoms of institutionalization. It is something I have seen time and time again around the world. I see children who have lost the ability to laugh or cry, who keep silent for fear of the consequences. I see children who have lost all spark and vivacity, children who turn in on themselves and find it hard to engage with others, children who are no longer children. They spend their time people watching just as Pamela tells me she did. They quietly observe what’s going on to assess how best to survive.
For some years afterward, Pamela was convinced that if she did anything wrong the authorities would come and take her away. A doctor summoned her into his office the day she was discharged from hospital. Her parents were coming to fetch her, he told her. They were taking her home.
“But let me tell you this, Pamela Pease, if you tell anyone what has happened here, we know where to find you. We can come and take you back at any time.”
She was also convinced that I “wanted her gone,” that I resented her and wanted her to go back.
Pamela had good reason to think so. I did resent her. This sister I had only known from a photograph and from parental absences was now back and taking center stage. I was only around five or six years old when she came home and was used to being the focus of attention. She was a sickly child and I thought my parents handled her with kid gloves. She was always ill and lost a lot of time at school. I feigned illness to get attention or threw myself down the stairs in an attempt to avoid lessons. Whenever my sister became upset she would
