Egyptian riverboat
watery asylum
With few financial resources, and no supportive extended family, my parents set up their first home in cheap, post-war, government housing. Our so-called “Commission house.” This was where they started their family. This first home was located opposite the sewage farm, and not far from the river outflow, just downstream. By the time the second child was on the way, my family were able to move to another Commission house, a little upstream: closer to fresh air, and riverside access.
Significantly, the new location was next door to my mother’s sister’s family. My aunt’s husband was a Catholic. For the next five years, I was exposed to the prevalence of domestic coercion in that neighbouring house. Even as a child, I observed that family violence was exacerbated at that time, by institutional pressure from the Roma Catholic Church on women in her situation.
The expectation was that she should do her religious duty and continue to produce additional Catholic offspring, even against her will. In a time when Roma Catholic families sometimes comprised ten children, or more, my mother’s Protestant sister resisted increasing the size of her small family. This independent attitude eventually brought my young aunt into direct conflict with her Roman Catholic husband, and oppressive Catholic Church dogma (unquestioned beliefs expressed as laws). I had heard—perhaps I overheard the big people talking—that my only uncle kept a rifle and an axe, under the marital bed. I felt exposed in close and disturbing proximity to a menacing site of concealed and gendered, systemic oppression, knowing no one was assisting or supporting the woman involved.
powerless
After living for several years under enormous pressures and ensuing stress, my only known aunt, and neighbour, enacted her defiance. One day, this maternal aunt walked unannounced, into the river, opposite her home. In broad daylight, fully-clad, my desperate young aunt, a strong swimmer, swam for her life, several miles downstream. She was captured; and quickly deemed to be insane. She was subsequently, incarcerated.
My aunt was then forced to spend most of the rest of her life, over five decades, in a notorious, high-security mental asylum. This was located hundreds of miles from her young family. I recall feeling, even at a very early age, that there seemed to be little concern or protection for women or girls in the community, even in their own home. I learned, prematurely, from my own observations and responses, that little value was placed on the safety, autonomy, choices, protection, or well-being of female people.
For over forty years, I woke up every morning in a group cell. I had committed no crime. They called me insane. I loved my kids. My Catholic husband forced me. I did not want more children. And I did not want the priest cursing and threatening me with damnation every week: telling me I must have more: four; five; maybe eight, children, for the Church, and for God.
One morning, I swam a delicious, long way down the river. The police picked me up at the shallow weir, five miles downstream. The two of them trapped me like an animal. They threw me into their Black Maria. Though I was a young woman, and mother, they were very rough. They stripped me of my wet clothes. They manhandled me into a workman’s shirt. They restrained me on the floor of the caged compartment. They drove the rest of the day, sometimes switching drivers, for maybe seven or eight hours. No contact. No windows; no water. We stopped just on dusk. “Welcome to Aradale!” they scoffed, laughing.
They marched me up the steep stairs of that that looming monstrosity, which they announced was a lunatic asylum. I was speechless; shocked. They stripped me again. They searched my whole body. Then they dressed me in a white gown knotted at the back. Every day after that was the same: comfortless; loveless; and mostly, bone cold. My existing children were lost to me. I lost count of the days, the years. They just disappeared. I disappeared. I was disappeared.
I can now identify that, as a pre-schooler, I became a chronically hyper-vigilant and anxious child. I was considered ‘highly-strung’ (Paediatric physician, personal communication 1961). I grew up with a strong sense of justice, but I had no language to articulate my fears or concerns in words. I constantly felt shocked and horrified by my aunt’s life of isolation and mistreatment, and later, incomprehensible disappearance. I felt powerless to change anything to defend her. I could not communicate my concerns, my distress, or my confusion, to anyone.
I felt bewildered as to why no one took any steps to protect my young aunt. I was too young to speculate then. With hindsight, I wonder if the possibility of unrevealed, unspoken mixed-race, Romani and/or the unrelated Irish Traveller group, background, meant there would be no support from authorities, such as the police. Could there have been possibly-dangerous recriminations against his own wife and children, had he intervened?