There but for the Grace…
Simon Jarrett welcomes Emma Henderson’s painful and unblinking take on life in a ‘mental handicap’ hospital
Title: Grace Williams says it loud
By Emma Henderson
Publisher Hodder and Stoughton, 2011 (325 pages)
It is now 35 years since the resettlement programmes from the old asylums, the long-stay hospitals that housed tens of thousands of ‘mentally handicapped’ people, reached their height. The life, the events and the secrets of those institutions are now a memory in the minds of those who lived, worked or visited there. Soon they will remain only as recorded memory, archives and the product of people’s imaginations.
Emma Henderson’s novel about the life of Grace Williams, a ‘defective spastic’ dispatched to a mental handicap hospital in Hertfordshire in the 1950s, is therefore a welcome addition to the small library of imaginative literature that describes the experience of people with learning disabilities in these institutions. Along with Alan Mayer’s Tasting the Wind and David Cook’s Walter and Winter Doves it stands as a testament to these often forgotten, or unacknowledged, lives.
Struggles
Henderson’s tale is inspired by the experiences of her older sister Clare, who lived for many years in a long-stay hospital and who died in 1997. Grace was born in 1947 with a body that was difficult to control. She also struggled to speak. Things worsened when she contracted polio aged six.
When Grace was 11, her parents could not cope with her and her three siblings, and finally gave in. She was taken to the strange, parallel world of the asylum. Despite her apparent inability to communicate, Grace had an active, observant and sensitive mind.
On day one she met the debonair and charismatic Daniel, part-French, an armless epileptic or ‘fitter’ with a rakish antique-dealing, Gitane-smoking father. Daniel understood her, straight away. She grew to womanhood in the asylum, her life a mix of rich thrills and fulfilment in her relationship with Daniel and mind-bogglingly casual and unfeeling sexual and physical abuse at the hands of staff and, at times, other patients.
Grace left the hospital aged 40, resettled to a residential home in the London suburbs, where she learned the fate of Daniel, from whom she was separated by his sudden and unexplained disappearance 20 years earlier.
Crazed logic
Henderson is particularly strong in capturing the contrast between the monotone, unfeeling inhumanity of the asylum and the colour-rich, warm, evocative memories Grace holds of her childhood years with her family. These memories fight a losing battle to stay with her as the asylum world becomes her world.
When she leaves this odd universe that has enfolded her for 30 years, the colour and warmth flood back into her life. She wonders at the vibrancy of the local market and gazes at the possessions and photographs she is finally able to keep in the newly-acquired privacy of her own bedroom.
The sheer bizarreness and crazed logic of the hospital world are artfully captured. Henderson does not flinch from acknowledging that the asylum has been Grace’s life and that in it she finds episodes of happiness as well as misery and cruelty.
This novel is a striking addition to the shared cultural memory of the asylum period.
