An Accidental Psychiatric Nurse.

Part 13. Lost Souls: Kontainment, Katyn and Mrs K.

The Penrhos Polish Home was on my patch. The plot was once the site of Penyberth, an historic farmhouse dating back to the Middle Ages that had played host to poets and pilgrims but was stubbornly destroyed to build an RAF training camp, parts of which were famously set on fire in 1936 by Saunders Lewis, Lewis Valentine and DJ Williams. A landmark event in modern Welsh nationalism and commemorated in Tân yn Llŷn. At the same time, the Nazis had already established internment camps, the prototypical Death Camps which eventually propelled a small number of surviving Poles on their journey to Penrhos, joining other survivors from Soviet labour camps. After the war the camp became a home for Polish ex-servicemen and by the time I arrived its residents had been drawn from all parts of the Polish diaspora, many of them refugees from both Nazi and Soviet oppression. Pilgrims of an unwilling sort. One of these was Mrs K. Mrs K lived in one of the gentrified barrack blocks which, despite being modernised, could not hide their original use. It didn’t take much imagination to see its resemblance to other ghosts of camps from the past too, the ones hiding in German, Polish and Siberian forests. Every plot of land has a plot to reveal according to Clare Wills’ opening essay in ‘The Family Plot’.

The first essay explores the long-hidden tragedy of Ireland’s homes for unmarried mothers and their babies while the second essay describes the silent complexities of the depiction of abortion in fiction. The two essays are connected by themes of unwanted pregnancy and society’s (and by proxy our) willingness to abandon mothers and children caught in a No Man’s Land of moral disapproval. Consciously or unconsciously, the Irish nuns and backstreet abortionists filled this moral vacuum, doing society’s dirty work behind closed doors. ‘The Family Plot’ in the title is ambiguous and multilayered – literally when families are buried together, one on top of the other – and ironically when the remains of Irish babies are disinterred from unmarked mass graves, their passing not even registered by the institution or the state. Plots of shame. In these awful cases of the unwanted and unborn, ‘Plot’ is a conspiracy between families, nuns and the funding authorities who sent mothers to these places. Adding insult to injury, the sub-plot is that these were also money-making institutions, gleaning cash from private adoptions and forced labour. ‘Plot’ as narrative is a further layer of meaning that Wills addresses in her discussion of abortion in the arts; more accurately, she argues that art has largely lost the plot when it comes to the ‘real’ experience of abortion, using it as a device to develop a story while neglecting the lived (sic) experience. Losing the plot, or more usually finding a plot when none exists, is a defining characteristic of mental disorder and historically containment has been society’s response. ‘Life Pushed Aside: The Last Asylums’ is the last essay in the collection and it’s this one that reminded me of Mrs K.

Like all good writing, ‘Life Pushed Aside’ makes you think and reflect, especially if you have an interest in the history of asylums, the pre-Largactil era of Psychosurgery and Art Brut (I knew this genre as Outsider Art). Using autobiography, archival research and genealogical detective work, Wills tells a story of lives lost in what she calls the ‘after life’ of Netherne Hospital. The concept of ‘after life’ is strikingly literal, referring to those patients on back wards destined to see out their days in containment, their previous lives over and their lost souls now existing in an institutional after life. Discovering the scraps of artwork left behind by one Netherne patient, J.J.Beegan, Wills sets about bringing the artist back to life and finding meaning in his pictures. She speculates that the strange figures drawn with charred matchsticks on Izal toilet paper represented people from his past life, a virtual community of familiars drawn from memory, a reminder of who he once was. Mrs K may have been doing the same thing.

Mrs K had great presence: dark-haired, elegant and aloof; she wore bright red lipstick to appointments but gave very little away. All of her male relatives, including her father, were among the 22,000 members of the Polish elite murdered in the Katyn Massacre. With her mother she was deported to a slave labour camp in the USSR and together they were released when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, making their way to the UK via Iran and the Middle East. I don’t know how a person is meant to process this kind of trauma and neither I suspect did the post-war London psychiatrist who performed the leucotomy on her. Perhaps it was the charismatic neurosurgeon, Wylie McKissock, mentioned by Wills in her essay: “he was quite prepared to travel down to whatever the hospital was on a Saturday morning and do three or four leucotomies and then drive away again.” My difficulty engaging with her was undoubtedly due to the emotional and intellectual damage this procedure had inflicted on her rather than any putative underlying mental disorder. It seems to me now that the leucotomy was, to say the least, a crude form of internalised containment – Wills points to this in the Netherne records where lobotomies were sometimes justified in the management of unruly behaviours and emotional states.

While Mrs K was verbally reticent, she freely expressed herself through art. She and J.J.Beegan were kindred spirits; like him, she used whatever was to hand, mostly cardboard, tin foil and string, creating beautiful human forms that she hung from the ceiling in her room. Her room started to fill up with these angel-like figures around our heads and I was none the wiser as to their significance. Wills’ interpretation of Beegan’s drawings seems as good as any to me, that Mrs K’s creations were of people from her past life, specifically her family whose lives were taken in Katyn forest.

Mrs K took her own life in a desperately dramatic way. Maybe there was a better afterlife waiting for her. The Polish Home has changed hands and the plot will get a new lease of life. Life goes on.