My supervisor was rapt, saying, ‘See, it just takes time!’ But I’m not stupid, I could see that the expert was helping him, meaning I’m pretty sure the expert was guiding his hand toward the letters.

I won’t bore you with any more examples, except to say that I gave up on the communication boards not long after that, and started on some other programs, such as seeing if the patients could dress themselves instead of being dressed, and you’ll be pleased to hear that that was nearly as successful as the communication boards.

I’d go onto the wards with a great pile of clothes in my arms and I’d sit down in a chair next to some drooling woman and I’d say, ‘Now, Mrs Mulligan – or whatever her name was – today you’re going to get dressed on your own.’ And I’d hand her a pair of woolly socks and she’d put them over her hands and wave them at me, like they were sock puppets, and I’d say, ‘No, no. Socks go on your feet. Here, let me do it.’ And then I’d have to put on her socks for her, which defeats the whole purpose.

None of this would happen without an audience of other nurses who had been at Caloola for years, who would hoot and carry on, because who was I to think that I knew how to do everything better than they did? Now I’m thinking back on it, I get how it must have looked to them – all of us young goody-two-shoes types coming in to tell them how to do things – and I don’t blame them for getting patients to play tricks on me, which they did, all the time.

For example, they asked me if I wanted to see one of the patients do a magic trick, and when I asked what it was the nurses said, ‘We call it Hide the Pea.’

I said, ‘Sure, that would be great, let’s play Hide the Pea.’

They said to the patient, ‘Go on, do your Hide the Pea trick.’ And he pulled down his pants and stuck a pea from his dinner plate into the eye of his penis and then he started laughing. It turned out he wasn’t a patient at all, he was another nurse, called in to set me up, but like I said, I had been told to expect all this and not to give up.

I don’t know how long I’d been there when I hit on my next big idea – taking patients into town to get haircuts so they wouldn’t have to wear the same bowl cut for years on end. I remember telling one of the managers, ‘I’m sure the local hairdresser would want a bit of extra business,’ and again she seemed to find it very funny because she said, ‘Very good, Snow. If you want to take some patients into town for a haircut, you hop to it. Let’s see what happens.’