The Secret Scripture Read Free Page A

in the halls under the rain, and for a few of the more popular sort I even played piano accompaniment, chopping out the notes and chords for them, more of a hindrance than a help to them perhaps. But none seemed to me to equal the strange privacy of my father's voice.
     
    And a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour, is a true hero.

chapter two
    Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
    (Senior Psychiatrist, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital)
     
    This building is in a terrible condition, how terrible we were not completely aware until the surveyor's report. The three brave men who climbed into the ancient roof report many timbers on the verge of collapse, as if the very head and crown of the institution were mirroring the condition of many of the poor inmates beneath. For inmates I should write patients. But as the place was constructed in the late eighteenth century as a charitable institution for the 'healthful asylum and superior correction of wounded seats of thought' the word inmate does always spring to mind. How healthful and how superior can only now be guessed. Actually in the mid nineteenth century there was a period of great enlightenment in the asylums, under the revolutionary ideas of various doctors, when strait jackets were used sparingly, a good diet was deemed wise, and plenty of exercise and stimulation of thought. Which was a great advance on the practice of Bedlam with its roaring beasts in chains on the floors. Somehow it all got worse again afterwards, and no sensitive person would choose to be the historian of the Irish asylums in the first part of the last century, with its clitori-dectomies, immersions, and injections. The last century being 'my' century, since I was fifty-five when it turned, and it is difficult wholly to give one's heart and attention to a new century at that age. Or so I found. And find. Nearly sixty-five now, alas.
    With the building showing its age so forcefully, we will be obliged to leave it. The department says the new building will start almost immediately, which may be true or may be cant of a sort. But how can we go till we are assured of a new building, and indeed, more philosophically, how can we prise many of the patients out of here, when their very DNA has probably melded with the mortar of the building? There are those fifty ancient women in the central block, so old that age has become something eternal, continuous, so bedridden and encrusted with sores that to move them would be a sort of violation.
    I suppose I am resisting the thought of going in my mind, the way any sensible person does when a move is mooted. No doubt we will manage with all the usual mayhem and trauma.
    Similarly the attendants and nurses have become as much part of the building as the bats in the roof and the rats in the cellars. Which are both legion I understand, though I am thankful to say I have only seen rats the one time, when the east wing went on fire, and I saw the dark black shapes running from the lower doors, out into the farmer's corn meadows beyond the hedges. The light from the fires threw a glare of a weird marmalade colour into their backs as they fled. I am sure when they heard the firemen give the all clear, they snuck back in in the new darkness.
    So, we are to go sometime. I am obliged therefore under the new laws to assess whatever of the patients can be put back into the community (whatever that is, O Lord), and exactly what category of patient each other patient is. Many of them will be shocked even by new decor, modern plaster walls, good insulation and heating. The very moaning of the wind in the corridors, even on still days – how is that? possibly a vacuum created by heat and cold in different areas of the hospital – will be missed as the tiny background music of their dreams and 'madnesses'. I am sure. Those poor old boys in black suits made by the hospital tailor long ago,