The Pure Gold Baby (22 page)

We become, in our latter days, unnecessary. I wasn’t any longer enjoying my work, as I had done in my thirties and forties, when I thought it was useful, when I thought it was leading to a better world order. I hadn’t yet concluded, as some do, that it was a form of neo-colonialism, but its impact on the client populations had been negligible. And maybe, yes, I agree, maybe even malign. Not even the wise can see all ends.

Jess and I agree that we have come to hate fund-raising professionals and fund-raising techniques. They are disgraceful and distasteful. The cold-calling, the faked handwriting on appeal letters, the celebrity endorsements, the celebrity auctions, the television bonanzas, the vanity of pop stars, the ridiculous little free gifts designed to induce guilt and misery. The biros, the free Christmas cards, the stick-on personalised address labels, the small unwanted devalued devaluing coins.

Once Jess was sent an unsolicited gift umbrella intended to symbolise the need for shelter of some forgotten and afflicted overseas minority. It had no doubt been assembled, very cheaply, by another forgotten and afflicted overseas minority. Jess didn’t know what to do with it, so she used it, as an umbrella, to keep off the London rain. It lasted for ever. She forgot which organisation had mailed it to her, but continued to shelter under it on rainy days as she walked along Upper Street or the Blackstock Road or Southampton Row. She had it with her, in her bag, on this summer day, which threatened a thunder storm.

So what were we doing, on this charitable excursion? Supporting Sylvie, who was supporting some good cause sponsored by old Bob Germen, whom neither of us knew? What was this spree, this outing, this pilgrimage? What lodestone drew Jess on this journey? What guilt, what hope, what compensation, what restless seeking for a forgotten image?

The tour of the residential facility and the outreach departments of Wibletts was stressful for many of its participants. The well-wishers and parents and fund-raisers were shepherded around in little droves, gazing at stables with small ponies, at herbaceous borders, at small forestry plantations, at hutches with guinea pigs, at a shallow pond with ducks and moorhens, at a de-luxe indoor swimming pool, at classrooms and study areas and dining halls and ping-pong tables and an IT centre and a woodwork studio. Everything was well provided, and well and expensively maintained, but then it would be well maintained for an Open Day, wouldn’t it? This was Psychotherapy for the Rich, not Psychiatry for the Poor, as notoriously practised at Colney Hatch and Friern Barnet (see here, if you are interested, the work of the mother-and-son team of analysts, Hunter and Macalpine). Everyone spoke a little too cheerfully, a little too heartily. Jess was reminded of her first nervous visit to Marsh Court, when she had been on the lookout for signs of abuse or distress, but had been too anxious to look very carefully. She remembered Hazel, the caramel-skinned and golden-eyed Hazel, Hazel who could teach the deaf and the tuneless to sing, to lift up their voices in song.

She could not identify the Hazel of Wibletts. Maybe there was one. She hoped there was one.

She thought again of Pearl Buck, and of the story of the child who never grew. It was much in her mind. She had read it very recently, in a tattered battered little 1952 edition which had arrived from the outlying shelving of Boston Spa to her desk at Humanities Two in the British Library on the Euston Road, humbly apologising for its condition, assuring readers that it would shortly be on its way to the binders. It had brought tears to Jess’s eyes, with its strange mixture of obligatory optimism and honest despair. Buck had inspected many institutions while looking for a safe home for her daughter Carol, and however often she had recited the tale of her tours and sanitised or exaggerated her impressions, however much licence or fiction she had employed, her tale of these inspections still rang true. Jess recognised them all. The headmistress-type who instructed her charges on pain of punishment to walk properly with heads high and backs straight, and who taught them how to hold a hand of cards and look as though they knew how to play a game of bridge. The young man who saved a sanatorium from filth and squalor and brutality, who rescued babes, children and adults from a regime where food was thrown on the floor as for dogs, and bodies hosed down like cattle. Elderly Uncle Ed, the kindly principal with his pockets full of little sweets, who believed in the combination of a good discipline and a social spirit.

Good care homes, warned Buck, perish when their founders retire or die. You need, as a parent, to keep a watchful eye, all the time. You need to be vigilant, and make your presence felt.

Care homes and research into mental impairment require private funding, said Buck. The state will fund research into armaments and warfare, but it has no interest in the handicapped. It is up to you. You are on your own. You have to raise your own funds.

Buck was a good earner. She’s not much admired now, but she was a good earner. She still is a good earner.

That was how it was in America in the 1950s, and how it is now in Britain in the third millennium. Some mental-health issues are hot and attract research money, but most of them aren’t and don’t. (There is big money, smart money, in autism research.) And care is expensive. Staffing, we were told, was more than one on one in Wibletts, at the luxury end of the caring market.

But Wibletts was a home to some hard cases, distressing to witness, and there was evidence that summer afternoon of its daily difficulties. Not everything had been tidied up or brushed under the carpet. Some examples were on display, intentionally or unintentionally.

Nothing could disguise the pain of the shock-haired bespectacled boy who could not cross the threshold of the canteen, of the pale girl with brown braids and braced teeth who through terror could not release the handle of the classroom door.

They both had threshold problems, we were told.

The girl’s fingers stuck to the well-polished brass handle and could not be prised away. Her face was contorted with anguish. The boy could not move his feet. He tried to put his foot across the line of the doorway, but he could not do it. He lifted it, advanced it and then withdrew it.

No physical barriers blocked them, no strait jackets constrained them. Both these children were able bodied, but they were paralysed by some inner prohibition, some flaming invisible sword that debarred them from movement and transfixed them in stubborn postures of refusal. Patiently the staff coaxed and manoeuvred, calmed and cajoled them, but the terror held its grip, and eventually the visiting group and our guides had to unlock another set of doors and retreat, leaving the frozen children in possession of the small spaces which they had occupied and from which they dared not move. Perhaps the visitors had disturbed them. But perhaps this behaviour was normal to them, a daily performance.

Jess could not tell. She had never seen these particular behavioural manifestations before, although she was well read in behavioural problems. She wanted to question the guides further, about lintels and limens and spatial prohibitions, but she did not wish to make herself conspicuous. She followed, silently, as the group left the purpose-built classrooms and converted dining areas and was ushered up the pink-carpeted staircase of the main house towards the Map Room, advertised in the brochure as the building’s architectural showpiece, where the Holden family archives were still kept. This, we assumed, was out of bounds to the inmates, or patients, or clients, or customers, or paying guests, or sufferers, or whatever else the residents were correctly or incorrectly called. But we, the privileged, were to be allowed a viewing.

Portraits in dark oils hung on the lower walls of the stairwell, and on a plinth at the stairwell’s turning stood a noble, baldheaded, eighteenth-century bust of black marble, suggesting a blend of Roman and Christian philanthropy. One of the oils portrayed a dark sombrely clad silver-haired churchman in clerical robes with white bands, but there were also, as we ascended, lighter portraits of sand-coloured explorers and big-game hunters in khaki shorts with lions and wildebeest.

Jess paused at the threshold of the Map Room, in the aperture of the high doorway, her mind troubled.

The threshold was curiously marked by a slightly buckled punched-brass ribbon strip, dividing the crushed and well-trodden dusty pink carpet of the stairs and the landing from the golden polished wooden blocks of the Map Room’s parquet and its vast and richly patterned oriental carpet. The room within, at least on first sight, gleamed with luxury and polish, with scholarly calm and tranquillity. Two of the walls were lined with leather-bound books in ornate shelved cages, imprisoned by diamonds of gilded ironwork grilles. The lower open shelves contained lavishly illustrated ethnographical studies of the People of Many Lands and aged copies of the
National Geographic
. The third wall was covered with elaborately illustrated maps and sepia photographs. Manuscript letters were displayed in glass cases, and in one of the three large window bays stood an antique globe as high as a man. There were small tables with intricate hardstone inlay, and one larger table with a plain deep oxblood-red lacquered surface on which lay a half-assembled jigsaw of the map of Africa, an original late-eighteenth-century hand-tinted Spilsbury dissected map, showing the delicate pale turquoise of the sea and the faded pink tectonic plate of the continent of Africa, showing the rivers and lakes and states and kingdoms of Africa at the time of Mungo Park.

The softly spoken and deferential guide reverently ushered the visitors into the room, and Jess stepped forward, over the brass metal strip, into Africa.

This was the Africa where Felix Holden had died, explained the guide. The bookshelves housed a fine collection of atlases and of travel books, many of them first editions, recounting the explorations of Mungo Park and Dr Livingstone and Speke and Stanley and other pioneers. There was a large section devoted to the journeys of missionaries, with accounts of their missions and settlements. There were volumes of sermons deemed suitable for infant congregations in open-air gatherings or in corrugated-iron missionary churches. There was a section on tropical diseases and medical research in the nineteenth century, which had been the subject (we were told) of an interesting book by Dr Jaynes from the Wellcome Institute. Scholars were permitted access for study, and the work of missionaries, after a century of neglect, was now receiving renewed academic attention. The family was very proud of having kept the collection together. Many private libraries are dispersed and sold when their owners die, but this had been preserved, catalogued, cherished. The Holden legacy was more or less intact.

‘We like to think that Felix Holden’s good work continues, though in a different form,’ said our well-spoken guide. ‘We lend items for exhibitions,’ she said, ‘but we keep the core of the collection here. We like to feel it is at the heart of our work.’

The guide wears a long off-white cotton skirt, and a neat blue short-sleeved shirt, and serviceable leather sandals. She is a nun, a nurse, a carer. Jess does not really take to her.

Some of us were wondering about the insurance costs. Insurance in a home for the physically unreliable cannot come cheap.

Jess is glad Anna is not with her. There are too many things to knock over in this room.

We were directed towards one of the most valuable items in the Map Room, which lay enshrined in a glass-topped cabinet, protected by green baize. The guide folded the soft covering back for us, so we could gaze at a letter written in a firm, sloping, looped hand. It was from William Wordsworth to the young Reverend Felix Holden. Felix Holden had corresponded with William Wordsworth in the 1820s about the Scriptures and the Heathen and the Simple-Minded and his sense of vocation as a missionary. He had felt a calling to help the simple people of the world, directly inspired, he claimed, by Wordsworth’s poetry. He was interested in the concept of the simple savage. He wished to know Wordsworth’s view of the correct translation of the words ‘feeble-minded’ and ‘faint-hearted’ in the epistles of Saint Paul. Were these conditions one and the same? Jess, who has sometimes wondered this herself, is oddly touched and shaken by his words. He had also asked Wordsworth for practical advice. Should he give up the comforts of Oxford and travel to Africa? He felt sure that in the great continent of Africa some revelation, some vision, awaited him. The knowledge of the crime of slavery had profoundly affected him, the antislavery campaign had moved him deeply. The African people had been cruelly torn away from their villages and their shining rivers and their huge savannahs and their palm trees, and they had been shipped in shackles into torment. He felt called upon to right the wrongs done to an innocent race, to heal the woes inflicted upon them.

He looked to the poet as to a source of moral comfort and enlightenment.

There lies the poet’s reply, or one of his replies, for some of the correspondence appears to be missing. It is from Wordsworth, verifiably in his own hand, although the signature has been thriftily cut away by some Holden vandal.

The poet advises caution. He speaks of the noble impulses of youth, which should be tempered by reason and good sense. The young man should consider his own flock, his own sheep. There is much work to be done among the poor and the simple here at home, in England. The poet mentions a young friend of his who had been for a while carried away by a romantic longing to travel and see the world, an impulse which should not, the poet suggests, be mistaken for a true sense of vocation. (The young friend, as Jessica suspects, was almost certainly John Wilson, he who had written to Wordsworth about
The Idiot Boy
, and who became not a missionary or an explorer but an opinionated literary critic, writing as Christopher North.)

Wordsworth’s letter was sensible, kindly, paternal. But Felix Holden had not heeded the warning. He had followed his noble impulse, and some years later, under the auspices of the London Missionary Society, he had set off for Africa, where he had died. We do not know if Wordsworth knew either of his departure or of his death. But the name of Holden did not perish: it was remembered still, we were assured, through the communities he had helped to found.