I wondered how much Snow knew about what was going on at Caloola before she went to work there, and about the kind of things she had seen. I assumed that she wouldn’t want to think about it any more, let alone talk about it, but as there was only one person who could answer my questions, I wrote to her, and it turned out she couldn’t wait to fill me in.

Chapter Nine

Dear Jack,

So you want to know what it was like to work at the old loony bin, do you?

Caloola.

I haven’t thought about the place for years. Trust you to head out there and have a bit of a stickybeak. I wish they’d let me out to go with you. I could have given you the full tour.

The job I applied for was a Normalisation Aide. In case you don’t know, that was a new position for nurses who didn’t want to do things the old way, and who wanted to do things the new way, which was to treat the people in the loonie bin with respect!

We were going to find out which patients were smart underneath all the dribbling and shaking they did.

You probably won’t believe this but I was pretty naive. I bought into all that politically correct stuff in those days, but then I was only a few years out of the nursing college.

I remember sitting in some lecture and nodding, all earnest, while they told us that we wouldn’t be calling the patients spastics or retards any more, we’d be calling them ‘people with intellectual challenges’ or else ‘people who are handi-capable’, if you can believe that!

We wouldn’t be thinking of ways to just shut them up and keep them quiet, we would be thinking of ways to get them to communicate. I couldn’t wait to get started because I was actually thinking to myself, ‘I’m not just going to be feeding people mashed potato and wiping their bums, I’m going to be helping these people.’

And then I met them, Jack.

I don’t want to sound smart, but honestly it did only take about a week for a person with those kinds of ideas to get a real wake-up call.

Let me tell you about the first day I walked into the place. I would have been about twenty, with two years of nurses’ training, and then six weeks of lectures on ‘normalisation’ still in my head. There was a big stone arch out the front of Caloola with the year 1864 carved at the top, and I remember looking at that arch and thinking, ‘This is one of the last old cruel places, and I’m going to be making a difference.’

And just as I was thinking that, a crazy lady with Albert Einstein hair came out of nowhere and chested me.

I got such a shock, mainly because I could tell straightaway that she was a patient and I couldn’t work out why she was on the loose. She was wearing a canvas smock – I’m talking now about one of those cream-coloured ones made of that hard material that the patients can’t tear up and shove down the toilet – and shoes with no laces, but she was also wearing boxing gloves.