Shuttlecock by Graham Swift Read Free Book Online Page A

the hospital grounds these spring evenings, as the light fades and the more disturbed patients are ushered inside and put to bed. In some ways I would rather be there, sitting with Dad under the cedar tree, than in my own back garden at home, or even with Marian feeding the ducks on the common. The hospital is like an old red-brick country house of another age, set amidst trees. Except for the blue and white notices, the modern extensions and the iron bars across the lower windows, you wouldn’t know. There are rose beds, yew walks, ornamental ponds and the sort of sculptural trees (cedars, maples, copper beeches) that you associate with private estates. All this is surrounded by a high brick wall; and the hospital grounds themselves are set within fields and woodland, though the suburbs of South London are less than a mile away. It’s a strange thing that we put mad people in these walled-in parks, as if we recognize that though they have to be confined they need to rub against nature. But then, as I’ve said, the people in mental hospitals aren’t mad, no – or if they behave like mad people, this is only what you’d expect in such a place – so there seems nothing abnormal about it.
    Since I’ve been visiting Dad I’ve been making my ownprivate study of the inmates. I cannot decide, still, whether they are prisoners or whether in some way, unlike you or me, they have broken free. Don’t we all, secretly, want to have their privileges? The hospital staff cheerfully condone behaviour that elsewhere would, to say the least, be frowned upon; and the same indulgence is somehow expected from visitors. It’s like entering a foreign country where you must bide by the native customs. So when you see a man walking down a corridor with what looks like – and, indeed, it is – a turd in his hand – you say nothing. Or when a figure, in an apparently drugged lethargy, at one end of the ward, suddenly starts to beat his head, in archetypal fashion, against the metal bars of a bed-frame, you do not stop and stare.
    Only once have I seen the hospital staff perturbed on behalf of their visitors’ sensibilities. This was almost a year ago, a Sunday afternoon, when the weather was especially hot. The inmates were scattered over the lawns, some lying in little groups, some sitting with visiting relatives, some sprawled alone, in shady places, fast asleep. Some of them wore handkerchiefs with the corners tied in knots over their heads as sun-hats, and this fashion seemed to have caught on, like the crazes which sometimes sweep through children’s playgrounds, so that the only activity seemed to be the appropriating of handkerchiefs, the making and trying-on of the finished caps. The nursing staff, with their white jackets, were also lounging drowsily on the grass, and nobody seemed to mind their apparent non-vigilance. I was sitting with Dad, not on our usual bench under the cedar – somebody had got there first – but on one of the five or six benches ranged in front of the rose beds. This is a popular place for visitors, and on fine Sunday afternoons each rose-boweredbench is occupied by a patient and usually a middle-aged or elderly couple. Some of these visitors are often quite smartly dressed – like the sedate old couples I see sometimes watching the bowls matches on Clapham Common – the women in pastel suits, hats and white gloves, the men in linen jackets. And I swear they come on these visits because they actually enjoy it – a day out to some exclusive private garden.
    In the midst of this general relaxation I suddenly noticed – several other eyes must have noticed it too, but the odd thing was that this event went, at first, quite unregistered – that one of the patients on the edge of a group away to our right was removing his clothes. He was a tall, gaunt man – over seventy, I would have said – with white hair, in a grey hospital suit. Before anyone made a move to stop him he had taken off not only his