A CONSPIRACY OF RAVENS

Our local Lunatic Asylum was called Stone House and was situated at Stone quite close to Dartford. It was built in the eighteen sixties specifically for the insane of the area. A menacing looking place, designed in what was described as a Tudor Revival style by James Bunstone Bunning it was rumoured that a pair of Ravens had lived there from the day it had opened. Old Mrs Giles said a pair was called an Unkindness of Ravens and claimed to have caught a glimpse of them when passing on the bus. I didn’t altogether believe her because she had once declared she had seen Satan disguised as a Rag & Bone man one Sunday afternoon in Tooley Street. In any case at that stage I had no understanding of collective nouns and didn’t know what was meant by the mysterious Unkindness she spoke of. Quite apart from all that as the only Ravens I was familiar with lived in the Tower of London I was nevertheless quite fascinated. Once I stumbled upon the pages of Edgar Allan Poe I was even more entranced.

Whenever we passed Stone House either on the bus or on foot my mother would shudder and, showing a modicum of compassion which was unusual for her, comment that it must be dreadful to end up there and she pitied those poor souls locked up inside. When I mentioned the Ravens she said they were probably crows and went back to shuddering. Aunt Mag said it was well known that Ravens were dodgy buggers and could certainly give rabbits a run for their money and during the Great War they had even been known to hunt down cats and kill then eat them. I wondered if there was a Stone House cat and if so, did it realise that it might be in danger of becoming bird prey. I was certainly more concerned about the possible fate of the cat than the well-being of the patients. To be fair, back then, there wasn’t a great deal of patience or understanding from anyone for those afflicted with mental illness let alone people as young as me.

In the totally modern 2020s we have developed a much more relaxed attitude that could even be said to border on blasé. We are decidedly Cool about psychiatric illness, and keen to accept all manner of unusual behaviour that years ago would have seen us definitely concerned. I’m old enough to remember the horrified whispers that followed Poor Pauline Prentice around Northfleet High Street simply because she had a tendency to remove items of clothing in public, particularly if she had to wait too long in the queue at Ripley’s the greengrocer. Even Aunt Queenie called it Shameful and as most of the other aunts agreed, Queenie had little to boast about herself as far as shame was concerned.

In Coronation Year tolerance was thin on the ground for those who couldn’t pull themselves together after having a baby or who claimed to feel so despondent about life that they took to their beds on a semi-permanent basis. Just imagine if we all did that! On the other hand there were times when something called a Nervous Breakdown, which people do not suffer from these days, was called for such as when the young husband of one of my older cousins simply went to pieces when she left him. His despair and the reasons for it were certainly recognised but there was no rush to his side to offer assistance or to counsel him. In fact there was a tacit acceptance that it was better by far to stay well away until he came to his senses. His behaviour was seen as unacceptable and it was better by far to ignore it because even more scandalous was the fact that the marriage had crumbled in the first place. After all that money had been spent on it and her poor father working those extra shifts down at Vickers even with that bad back of his. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Because I was what my mother called Fanciful it did not take long for me to firmly associate all variants of mental disturbance with Ravens and to this day I still do, pairs of them hovering on the fringes of every radio discussion or every informative magazine article. Of course back in the mid1950s there were no radio or television talk programmes advising the afflicted on how best to cope, no self-help groups where pressing problems might be discussed, simply the glaringly obvious social ignominy that announced to the world that the sufferer did not have sufficient backbone to deal with adversity. As a group of average working class citizens we definitely lacked empathy and I clearly recall one neighbour making the comment to another that she didn’t have much time for recently bereaved Lil Shrimpton who couldn’t even behave herself at her own sister’s funeral, and wept like a baby. What a way to behave! And following Uncle Paddy’s unfortunate fatal accident celebrating the end of the war, within a month Aunt Martha was reprimanded by her sisters for still being tearful for surely to goodness weeping day and night wasn’t going to change things was it?

Perhaps the stiffness of those upper lips in times past had something to do with the fear of ending up in dark and hostile places of care like Stone House even though some of those structures distinguished themselves by harbouring exotic birds of myth and legend. We children called them Loony Bins and jeered at others who had relatives incarcerated within although I stopped doing so when I discovered that my paternal grandmother had been a long term patient at Barming Heath near Maidstone. My father didn’t call it Barming Heath but instead referred to it as Oakwood Hospital but he did so in a low voice. My mother only discussed it with folded arms and tightly pursed lips and said it was the need to go into such a place that had led to my poor father being brought up in a children’s home from the age of four, dear innocent little soul. He on the other hand always maintained that the children’s home hadn’t given him an entirely bad childhood because there were always eager philanthropists in the community only too willing to pay for riding lessons and visits to the pantomime and sometimes outings to the British Museum, particularly for those boys who were seen as being well behaved. He tried hard to ensure he always came into that category. But there was no convincing my mother who thought that flighty good-for-nothing older sister of his, Connie, should have taken care of him even if she did turn out to be merely a half-sister in the end. Blood’s thicker than water after all – or it should be. The fact that Connie was only fifteen years old herself cut no ice at all because such a thing would never have happened among the Constants where abandoning a child no matter how tenuous its ties were to the family was unheard of.

For my grandmother it was not Stone House that meandered across restless dreams complete with fluttering Corvids, but Colney Hatch, once the biggest institution in Europe, housing almost three thousand patients. As a three year old I was already aware that at times my behaviour was in danger of driving her there because she told me so and although I had no idea where this place of horrors might be I was mindful that I should tread more carefully to avoid her ending up there. Later I learned it was just North of London, but near a crossroads which was always a bad sign for some reason and had at one time housed the wife of Aleister Crowley and also someone suspected of being Jack the Ripper. These facts were moderately interesting but once I became a student at Wombwell Hall and had fallen in love with Miss K Smith, certainly not as noteworthy as her announcing that our very own Stone House had been home for years to the famous war poet, Ivor Gurney. I didn’t like to ask her what category of unacceptable behaviours had led to his incarceration. Had he wept too copiously at a sibling’s funeral perhaps? Did he have a habit of removing items of clothing if forced to wait too long in queues? Eventually I read somewhere that he had suffered from something called Manic Depression but I had little idea what that entailed and certainly didn’t believe whoever it was who told me that it could be easily cured with electric currents through the brain.

As we grew older and attitudes towards mental health issues underwent a change, being incarcerated in places like Stone House became less of a reality and although our mother still shivered theatrically when the place was mentioned, my aunts showed no interest whatsoever and my brother’s only interest revolved around whether or not the Ravens I had told him about were still there. Had Britain’s most legendary bird actually returned to the South of England? There was a time, he told me, just a couple of hundred years previously, when they had been widespread across the British Isles but persecution by the gamekeepers of the Victorian era had all but destroyed their population. Bernard, by this time was ten, and had become ever more obsessed with ornithology. He informed me that these members of the crow family were uniquely intelligent, fantastic mimics and he would so much like to own one. When I mentioned that keeping one might be quite unkind he said that they loved, more than anything else, interacting with people so they would welcome being owned. I have no idea whether that assertion had any truth in it.

It was to be many years before we spoke again of Ravens, then via a long distance telephone conversation in the days of fax machines and direct dialling around the globe but before mobile phones, texts and emails. Our mother had begun to exhibit signs of dementia and was to be Assessed in the very place that had previously held so many fears for her, the greatly dreaded Stone House. We discussed those fears and wondered if she still had any memory and knowledge of them. Had her qualms ever in fact been entirely rational? Would the idea of an assessment carried out in that terrible place fill her with even greater trepidation and anxiety? Would it perhaps remain just a half-worry from a time that no longer had any reality or substance in the context of life in the frenzied 1980s. Had the Asylum, the Loony Bin become merely an insubstantial fragment of times past like the Workhouse or the Village Stocks or being Transported to Australia?

We spoke for a long time and although I doodled a procession of Ravens across the notepad beside the telephone, we reached no conclusion. Eventually Bernard said he hoped the birds were still there, not just one or two but perhaps three or even four. A Conspiracy of Ravens he added after a short silence, certainly not an Unkindness.