I got a big piece of cardboard and a permanent marker and I copied a list of ‘values’ from one of my normalisation lectures, and I can still see it. It was something like:

We respect:

• The right of every individual to achieve their maximum potential.

We behave:

• With respect toward the patients in our care.

We are accountable:

• For the decisions that we make.

I took that card in and put it up in the staff room with little balls of Blu Tack and tried not to care when people came along and put graffiti on it and changed it to read: ‘And remember, don’t feed the animals’ on the bottom, because all of us Normalisation Aides had been told that there would be opposition to what we were doing and to just ignore it and soldier on.

Part of my job was to introduce these new communication boards that were all the rage then. They’re like boards with big letters on them in squares, and the idea was you’d prop them in front of a patient and you’d hold the patient’s arm by the elbow and let their finger dangle over the board and you’d see what kind of message they’d punch out.

I asked one of the Caloola managers what was the best group of patients to give the communication boards to, and she said, ‘You can try it on whoever you like, Snow, and we very much look forward to watching.’ I could tell that she was being sarcastic but I thought that was typical because she was ‘old thinking’ and I was ‘new thinking’, and as soon as the ‘old thinking’ people saw what us ‘new thinking’ people could do, they’d all jump on the bandwagon.

I asked one of the male nurses to help me get a group of patients together so I could demonstrate how to use a communication board. He was grinning at me nearly as much as the manager I’d asked, but at least he agreed, and said, ‘Sure, let’s get some of the Front Ward patients together.’

Although I didn’t really know it then, the Front Ward patients weren’t disabled, but they were completely crazy. I don’t know if the male nurse went out of his way to get the freakiest patients he could find, but when I got to the classroom he’d set up there were ten men there and they were all grinning and mewing like cats, and all of them had those white, white three-day-growth beards that you see a lot of in mental hospitals because nobody would have wanted to go near them with a razor.

I tried not to worry about it, and I went around and handed out the communication boards. I told the patients what they were for and how they were supposed to use them and I said how I was looking forward to hearing what they had to say and not to be frightened because, once we all got the hang of it, they would be able to use them to communicate and how exciting would that be?