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Buddleia Dance On The Asylum
Stephen Burrow
Melrose Books ISBN 978-1-907040-01-6
Burrow’s account is a personal one, chronicling his professional life and changes, as he starts work at a mental institution in the 1970s and returns to the same hospital in the 1980s and 1990s. This gives him a unique insight and appreciation of the changes in mental health care over the same period; paralleled by the dilapidation and eventual dereliction of the hospital he works in.
Throughout the journey, the Buddleia is seen as a metaphor for the striving institutions, staff, patients and himself; represented physically by the Buddleia that rampantly starts growing over the shell of the decrepit hospital buildings.
In order to protect the identities of all the patients and staff, Burrows uses pseudonyms and never names the hospital itself. An alert reader will be able to hazard a very good guess by page 4 thanks to the unique planform of the hospital’s footprint. Further reinforcing clues are given through the text.
This is Burrow’s journey and not that of the hospital itself. Yet his descriptions of working through the ranks in the austere 1960s institution, the workings of the wards, and the characters in both the staff and patients will bring Cane Hill vividly alive. In some cases, far too vividly:
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"Old Whitey, is the old blighter still about? What I wouldn’t give to see him again!"
"You wouldn’t want to wish that on yourself, now. He’s dead!"
"Oh, what a shame. What a character he was. How come, anyway?"
"Well, it’s as I say, you win some, you lose some," the Nursing Assistant says, casting a wary glance towards the Mauritian, but gathering
confidence that his sardonic view might be appreciated. "He took himself off on his wanders, one day, and never came back. His decomposing
body was found weeks later- wait for it now – under the office of the Director Of Nursing!" he intones in an exaggerated emphasis at
which even the Charge Nurse smiles broadly.
"Never!"
"Never say never! Honest as true as I’m standing here. Wandered into the cellar area and got himself locked in – must have
starved to death, poor bugger. Can you imagine him, down there, cussing and hallucinating for all he was worth, minus his
medication, until his dying breath? Tragic, tragic."
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These vignettes, sprinkled through the text, send frissons down the spine: Cane Hill is transformed from a decayed ruin
full of hospital junk into a vibrant community where people worked, played and died. I now realise I spent a considerable time alone
rummaging through the very same pitch black basement where Whitey met his fate; and it was a sobering thought.
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