John Harding - The Girl Who Couldn’t Read

He stopped and turned. ‘Didn’t I tell you? No? Hydrotherapy, man, hydrotherapy!’

The word meant nothing to me. All I could think of was hydrophobia, no doubt making an association between the two words because of the place we were in. I followed him through a veritable maze of corridors and passageways, all of them dark and depressing, the walls painted a dull reddish brown, the colour of blood when it has dried on your clothes, and down a flight of stairs that meant we were below ground level, then along a dimly lit passage that finally ended at a metal door upon which he rapped sharply, his fingers ringing against the steel.

‘O’Reilly!’ he yelled. ‘Come along, open up, we don’t have all day.’

As we stood waiting, I was caught sharp by a low moaning sound, like some animal in pain perhaps. It seemed to come from a very long way off.

There was the rasp of a bolt being drawn and we stepped into an immense whiteness that quite dazzled me after the dimness outside. I blinked and saw we were in a huge bathroom. The walls were all white tiles, from which the light from lamps on the walls was reflected and multiplied in strength. Along one wall were a dozen bathtubs, in a row, like beds in a dormitory. A woman in a striped uniform, obviously an attendant, who had opened the door for us and stood holding it, now closed and locked it behind us, using a key on a chain attached to her belt. I realised the moaning noise I had heard was coming from the far end of the room, where two more female attendants, similarly attired to the first, stood over the figure of a woman sitting huddled on the floor between them.

Dr Morgan walked briskly over to the wall at the opposite end of the room, where there was a row of hooks. He removed his jacket and hung it up. ‘Well, come on, man. Take your jacket off,’ he snapped. ‘You don’t want to get it soaked, do you?’

I thought instantly that the armpits were already drenched, but there was nothing for it but to remove it. Luckily Morgan didn’t look at me, although as he turned toward the three figures at the far end of the room, he sniffed the air and pulled a face. I felt my own redden with shame, until I saw he wasn’t even looking at me and probably assumed the stench originated from something in the room.

Rolling up his sleeves, he strode over to the two attendants and their charge, his small feet clicking on the tiled floor. I followed him. The attendants were struggling to make the woman stand up, each tugging at one of her arms. At first I could not see the sitter’s face. Her chin was on her chest and her long dirty blonde hair had tumbled forward, shrouding her features completely.

‘Come on, come on!’ chided Morgan. ‘D’you think I have all day for this? This is Dr Shepherd, my new assistant. He’s here for a demonstration of the hydrotherapy. Get her up now and let’s get started.’

The sound of his voice seemed to have some magical effect upon the crouching creature, who stopped resisting the attendants and allowed herself to be pulled to her feet. She threw back her head, tossing her hair from her face. I saw she was middle-aged, her face well marked from an encounter with the smallpox at some stage of her life. She was a big woman, large boned, and towered over Morgan. Her cheeks were sunken and her eye sockets dark hollow sepulchres. She looked down at Morgan for a moment or so with a suggestion of fear in her expression, but perhaps respect too, and then lifted her eyes to me. It made me uncomfortable, this uninhibited regard. It was not like the look of a human being, but rather some creature, some trapped wild animal. It had in it defiance and the threat of violence and somehow at the same time something that tore at my heart, an appeal for help or mercy perhaps. I well knew what it meant to need both and be denied.

I stared back at her a long moment. I was all atremble and in the end I could not hold her gaze. As I looked away she spoke. ‘You do not appear much of a doctor to me. I shall get no help from you.’ And then, so suddenly she took them by surprise, she wrenched herself free from her keepers and hurled herself at me, her nails reaching for my face. It was fortunate for my already battered looks that O’Reilly, the woman who had let us in and had now come to help us, reacted quickly. Her hands whipped out and grabbed both the woman’s wrists at once in a tight grip. There was a brief struggle but then the other attendants joined in and the patient – for such this wretched being obviously was – was soon under control again. At which point she began once more to wail, making the pitiful sound I’d heard from outside, twisting her body this way and that, tugging her arms, trying to free herself but to no avail, for the two junior attendants who had her each by an arm were themselves well built and evidently strong. Having failed to free herself, the woman began to kick out at them, at which they moved apart, stretching her arms out, one either side of her, so that she was in a crucifixion pose.

‘Stop that now, missy,’ said O’Reilly. Her voice was as cold as the tiles, and it was obvious this flame-haired woman was as hard as nails; the words were spat out in an Irish accent harsh enough to break glass. ‘Stop it or you’ll find yourself getting another slap for your trouble.’

Morgan frowned, then looked at me and raised an eyebrow, a semaphore that I immediately read as meaning that it wasn’t easy to get staff for such employment and that you had to make the best of what was available. He glared at the attendant. ‘None of that, please, O’Reilly. She’s under restraint; no need to threaten the poor soul.’ He turned to me again.

‘Firmness but not cruelty, that’s the motto here.’ Then he told the attendants, ‘Get her in the bath.’

I expected the woman to object to this, but at the mention of the word ‘bath’ her struggling ceased and she allowed herself to be guided over to the nearest one. ‘Raise your arms,’ said O’Reilly, and the woman meekly obeyed. The other women lifted the hem of her dress, a coarse white calico thing, the pattern so faded from frequent washing that it was almost invisible, rolled it upwards and pulled it over her head and arms, with O’Reilly cooing, ‘There’s a good girl now,’ as if she were talking to a newly broken-in horse or a dog she was trying to coax back into its kennel. The woman was left shivering in a thin, knee-length chemise, for the room was not warm, as I could tell from the dank feel of my damp shirt against my back.

O’Reilly put a hand on the woman’s arm, guided her over to the bath and ordered her to get in. The woman looked quizzically at Morgan, who smiled benignly and nodded, and she turned back to the bath, even allowing a certain eagerness into her expression.

‘She is looking forward to a bath,’ Morgan whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth. ‘She hasn’t been here long. She’s never had the treatment before and doesn’t have any inkling of what’s coming.’

I saw that the bath was full of water. The woman lifted a leg over the edge and put her foot into it and instantly let out a gasp and tried to pull it out again, but the attendants immediately seized hold of her and pushed together so that the woman’s foot plunged to the bottom of the bath, whereupon she slipped and as she struggled to regain her balance the attendants lifted the rest of her and thrust her in, virtually face down, with an almighty splash that sent water shooting into the air, with more than a little of it raining down on Morgan and me. The woman’s screams ricocheted off the tiles from wall to wall around the room.

Morgan turned to me with a grin and a lift of the eyebrows, by which I understood him to mean that now I saw the necessity of removing my jacket.

The woman in the bath twisted around to get onto her back and lifted her head spluttering from the water. She tried to get up, but O’Reilly had a hand on her chest holding her down.