14 JOAN TUGWELL

 
 
 
 
MENTAL HEALTH TESTIMONY ARCHIVE

JOAN TUGWELL
 
C905/14/01-04/VHS 01 of 01
Original on DVC-Pro
Copy on VHS

Interviewed by Premila Trivedi
Camera by Faye

Transcribed by Julie Sharman
September 1999

[Start of DVC Pro tape 1 of 4 – Start of VHS tape 1 of 1]
[Camera: `C905/14 Tape number one, Joan Tugwell’]

`Right… yeah, so just try and enjoy it…ok…ok Joan… Joan, it’s really good to have this opportunity to… to meet with you and talk a bit about your life. I wonder if we can start… if you could tell me a bit… about where you were born, and when, and maybe a bit about your family?’

`I was born on July the 5th, 1928. I was born in Army Barracks… near to Colchester… then we went to London… and… when we was about four, or five, I mean… well we never knew what it was to have meals, when I was a child. All… all our meals consisted… was bread and oxo or bread and jam, and sometimes we’d go and stand in the gutters at London… in the… in the gutters at London, Kensington, and my mother and my brother would sing… and… to try and get some money… you know. Sometimes we had a bun and a cup of tea each if we had enough money, or else we used to share a cup of tea and a bun, so we never… really knew what it was to have meals, and then one day, I think we was about four… there was a knock on the door, downstairs… and mum went downstairs, and… she answered the door, and she came running upstairs… very quickly, and she locked the door, right… and she said `They’ve come to take you away’, and… of course they were knocking on the door but mum wouldn’t open the door, so they said to mum, `If you don’t open the door, Mrs Tugwell, we will knock the door down.’ So mum opened the door. There was five… five of us children. Well, I tell you… we always… before… before that, they took us away, but before that… we was always being beaten up by my… dad. He used to come in about… well mum and dad. He used to go out drinking, ‘till about three or four o’clock in the morning, and we’d be… five of us, in one bed, and when dad come home he used to say, `I’ll give you something to cry about’, and he would beat us up with a stick. Anyway, when eventually… these men, said `We want you to… to take you away from your mum… you can come back tomorrow’, and one of them said to me, `There’s a car out there... would you like a car ride?’, well with me never been in a car, before… I went running downstairs, and I shouted to my sisters, `Come on Sylvia, come on…’, it… and we… you know… I sat in the car waiting for them. Eventually they got my other sisters and my brother off of my mother… and they took us to a home… and in the dining room in the mornings, you used to have the boys on one side and the girls on the other side… and I will always remember those songs, `When I Grow Too Old To Dream…’, and `When the Poppies Bloom Again…’, because they used to play that… you know in the dining hall, and we was in the home for about six months, but… we had to go to Court to show all our bruises and wheal marks. Anyway, after about six months, we went to Court, and my mother was there, and they said to my mother, `You can have the children home, but if you have anybody come to see you within two weeks, we’ll take the children off of you…’. Anyway, after two weeks, my mother decided she wanted to move, so… she said to me and my twin sister, `If you two… you two go to school… and I’ll… I’ll take Edna and Barbara with me to the new home… I’ll come and fetch you… during the afternoon…’. The teacher said, `Joan and Sylvia Tugwell, you’re wanted outside’, and there was these two men, I don’t know if they were Policeman or what they were, and they said, `Where’s your mummy?’. I said, `She’s going to fetch us, after school…’, and he said, `No, she’s abandoned you.’ She abandoned me and my twin, yeah? So we went back to the home, and then… one day… well it took two weeks for the police to get my other two sisters off my mother, but we, by then had already stayed in the home. Then one day we had a… a couple came to us… a young couple… and they said, `We’re going to foster you… you… we’re going to be your new mummy and daddy’, and I said, `We’ve already got a mummy and daddy’, and they said, `No, they don’t want you’. So we went with foster parents in Uckfield, Sussex, and they was very, very kind to us. They always dressed us nicely, I mean and…’

`Right…’

`Always had lovely clothes, we had nice food. We always used to go to seasides… they always took us out somewhere nice, and… come… my mother was allowed to visit us… for one hour, every three months. So in eight years we only saw my mother… thirty two hours… you know, four eights are thirty two, so… in eight years we only saw her that long. When…’

`Can…?’

`She… when she used to come and see us, my foster mother used to say to me, `There’s your mother out there, she’s waiting to come in, but she won’t come in ‘till dead on time and she’ll go… dead… off dead on time. She’s not going to stay no longer than an hour’, and we used to see her out there, and we used to think `mum’s out there waiting’, know what I mean, and… she used to give us a thru’penny [ph] bit each to put in our money box, or some sweets. Anyway, I… during the war, my foster father, who joined the RAF and.. he went abroad… and then one day, when we was at home, my mother said… foster mother said to me, `Here’s your mother here, she’s come to take you off of me…’, and I said, `Well I… we want to stay with you’, we didn’t want to go home with mum. So I run away for two hours.. and… after two hours I came back home again, and my real mother said to me `Where have you been?’. I said, `Well I didn’t want to come home with you, I want to stay with Mr and Mrs Smith…’. Anyway… after a while we went, but my foster mother was hanging on to the front door and she was screaming out, `They’re mine… they’re mine… you didn’t want them… I… I love them…’, and then we got… when we got home, my… mother said to me, to me and my twin sister, `I’ll make sure the Smiths don’t write to you any more’, because that was their… their names, Mr and Mrs Smith… `…and I’ll make sure you don’t write to the Smiths.’ But… I did keep in contact with them, and… then… my mother went to divorce my father… the one that was cruel to us, and she found out he’d already died… of TB. He’d been wounded at Dunkirk, he got well of his injuries. So she, you know… anyway, she met another man, whose name was… oh whatever was it… Fletcher… Scotch bloke, who… Scotch Canadian, and she married him and he was a marvellous… father, and he was in the RAF, and he come out the RAF and we went to… Canada for a fortnight… he took us there. We went there just about two months after the war. Then, after seven months, my mother didn’t like his mother, because she was always telling my mother how to do her housework… anyway… he come back to England… dad… rejoined the RAF. Then he got posted out to Bulawao [ph], Southern Rhodesia in Africa, and we went out there with him as well… and I think there was the only six years of happiness I’ve ever had.’

`Right…that sounds… sounds like a fascinating childhood. I mean, I wonder, can I take you back a bit?’

`Yes… yes…’

`Because you said that… the first years of your life, you were quite poor. Can you… can you remember any more about that? What kind of… what kind of house did you live in?’

`Well I… I mean the house, I can remember the house. All they had was two rooms… was a living room, and my mother slept… slept on the sofa thing, and us five, we slept in one bed… all five in one bed. You only had a small bedroom, so we just had those two… two rooms, but…’

`And was that in London?’

`In London… Kensington, yeah…’

`Right…’

`That’s where we used to stand in the gutters, and mum would sing… to get us some money and… I remember… a woman said to my mother once, you know, `Clear off and take your five dirty kids… kids with you… [inaudible]…’

`So would you children be outside while your mother was singing?’

`We used to stand in the gutters with mum… [inaudible]’

`Right… and what kind of people would give you money?’

`Well, I mean I was a bit too young to know, but I know they used to give my mum some money, you know what I mean?’

`Right…’

`And then there was a café there and… as I said… if we had enough money, we’d have a cup of tea and a bun each… if not, we’d have to share a bun… between two, and have a cup of tea, between two, and the other four would do the same. My mother… and the other three… three children.’

`And can you still remember the songs your mother used to sing?’

`I can… by then… I can remember `When I Grow Too Old To Dream’, and `When The Poppies Bloom Again’… that was in the home, but then…’

`Right…’

`But… no… I can remember just… when we used to sit down to dinner, which was bread and oxo… what I mean, that we had… we was having bread and jam the day that we was taken away. We never knew what it was to have a… a meal. Yeah, we never sat down to a proper meal, we’d never had it anyway.’

`And was your father living with you at this time?’

`Oh right… I don’t know… I don’t know what happened to dad… I think he left mum, because you know… because… she… she… mum used to try and make us laugh, she said, `Come on kids… you… I’ll make you laugh’, ‘cause she knew that we was very unhappy and that… I mean…’

`And can you tell me a bit about your brothers and sisters?’

`My brothers and sisters… well… my sister’s married now… the sister, my eldest sister, she’s married and… and she’s got about four children… several grandchildren… but… I’m afraid I don’t have anything to do… with them now, because… when my mother was dying of cancer… they used to live with my… she used to live with my sister and her husband. She had a room of her own… and they charged her £50 pound a week… and… they… used to make her life miserable… what I mean… she had all her meals and that in her room… and then… I used to go and visit her, about every three months, from hospital… I mean that’s when she was dying of cancer, and that… sometimes… ‘cause I used to ‘phone my mother up, she would be crying and said that the family had been nasty to her… and… made her cry. And… when… when I used to go home to see my mother, I used to take a lot of stuff with me… for her… and when I’d gone, you know, my sister would say to… my mother, that `Does Joan think we don’t give you enough to eat, that she gives you all this?’, but there again, I never… I used… never used to come back empty handed. Mum always used to buy me a cooked chicken or a gateaux… give me a couple of hundred cigarettes, and fifteen pounds, and… I was never allowed to… you know, see my sister and her husband. If I wanted to go to the toilet upstairs, mum would make sure that the coast was clear, before I’d go. She said, `It’s alright, you can go upstairs now’, and you could come in. And…’

`That… that sounds like quite a difficult relationship?’

`It was…’

`How… how was it when you were young? When you were four or five? [both talking together]’

`Oh, it was alright then, you know… when… when we was taken to… away from our foster mother and we went with… foster people, I mean my real mother, and we sort of… foster people in Uckfield… my twin and I was on one side of the road, my sister and brother was on the opposite side of the road, and round the corner was my other sister. So we used to be alright then, but… err… oh, when I went to Broadmoor [ph] that day, he used to come and see me there, but… since I’ve been out, they… I didn’t have nothing to do with them because… I feel they could have done more for mum. They… they made her life miserable… and I know… I mean… I mean I forgive my mother for what she done to us, when we was children, it wasn’t really her fault, I mean ‘cause… dad used to give her a good beating as well, I mean try and gas her and things like that, and… I went to my sister’s house for the funeral to my mum… back then, but… they had all her money. Mum was going to leave a lot of money to me, but I didn’t get a penny, but it was mum that mattered, not her money… know what I mean… so… I… I… I said, I didn’t wish to have any more to do with her, not the way she treated my mother. Sometimes she’d have to be on her own all day long, and it was freezing cold in her house, mum… and I used to say my feet were freezing when I used to go to visit her, and she said, `They won’t put the heating on ‘till half past five when they come home…’, and…’

`Yes, it sounds quite difficult, then… yes. When… when you were young… can… can you tell me a bit about how you felt when they came to collect… came to take you away from your mother?’

`Well we kept running round and round the tables… so that they wouldn’t get hold of us, you know what I mean? And mum said… mum said, `Keep running round the table, don’t let them take you, otherwise…’, and then the man said, `You’re coming back tomorrow’, and this is when I seen the car outside and I went and got in the car, I was excited ‘cause we were going for a car ride…’

`Yes…’

`’Cause I thought… that I was coming home, back to with mum the next day…’

`Yes…’

`Until we discovered that it wasn’t to be…’

`And did they take all five of you in the car together?’

`They took all five… yes… all five of us.’

`And where did they take you to?’
`To a home… in… in London… I don’t know the name… the name of the home…’

`Right…’

`But… oh, they looked after us very well there, what I mean… and… I remember once, when we was all going out for a walk in two’s, up the… up the road. There was a woman, she felt sorry for us all, so she bought us all an ice cream each and I… broke a bit of the corner off, and as I blew it, the ice cream went on the… pavement… and I cried all the way there and all the way back, because I wanted an ice cream… but… they looked after us well there… and…’

`Yes… and did you… did you have a… a bedroom of your own there, or did you share?’

`With our foster parents, yes… we had… we had our own bedrooms, with our foster parents. No… in the home, I can’t remember really, in the home, it was so… such a long time ago… this is sixty six… sixty five years ago.’

`Yeah, right… but do you remember in the home, having meals, of girls and boys sitting separately?’

`Yes. The girls was on one side and the boys would be on the other side of the dining hall. We had good meals and that… and even though we was only about five, but we used to help some of the nurses out with the children, you know… tidy up the linen cupboard and things like that…’

`Right… and did you go to school at that time?’

`No, I didn’t go to school then.’

`Right…’

`No, I don’t think that… well, I don’t think we… I don’t know how old we were when we went to school. We didn’t go to school until we went with our foster parents… and we went to this school in Uckfield, Sussex, and…’

`Can you remember how long you stayed in the home? How long did you stay in the home?’

`In the home… oh, well we was in the home… the first time for six months, and then put back with mum… and then, oh about five or six months, as I said, Mr and Mrs Smith came and said `We’re going to… you… we’re going to be your new mummy and daddy’, and I said, `We’ve already got a mother… mummy and daddy’, and they just said `They don’t want you… your mother’s abandoned you’, I mean…’

`How did it feel when you went back to your mum after you’d been in the home for six months?’

`Well we felt… felt glad about it, and we were very excited.’

`And did you all go back? All five of you went back to your mother?’

`No, they kept my brother in the home. They kept him in the home… and… my mother took the eldest sister and the youngest sister with her, and left me and my twin, at school, she abandoned us, so… she wasn’t coming there for us.’

`Right…but did she take care of you otherwise, before that did she?’

`Well she took care of us as well… as well as she could… but it was the money problems were there… but… I think when we went back, I don’t think we went street singing, but I… no…’

`Mmm. So still quite a lot of money problems?’

`Oh mum had a lot of money problems… well the thing is… is… they would drink the money away. I mean if they went drinking ‘till about three o’clock in the morning, went out… I mean that’s where all the money went, on drink, so therefore… we had to go without food… well… so… so that meant we had to sing for it… in the… in the gutters, stand in the gutters, down the market square.’

`Right…’

`As I said, I can remember this woman saying to my mother, `Clear off and take your five dirty kids with you’…’

`Yes. And then you went back to the home after your mother abandoned you?’

`Yeah, they took us back to the home’

`Yes. How did you feel when they told you?’

`I felt terrible. We was crying like anything… and a Policeman gave us a bag of aniseed balls each, and sixpence each, and we was playing about with him, and… and making out we were playing with marbles and that… but… err…’

`And did you go back to the same home?’

`Same home, yes… but I don’t know the name of it, but… it was a very good home, they looked after us well.’

`Right… and then… can you tell me a little about how you met Mr and Mrs Smith?’

`Well they came to… they… they came to the home, Mr and Mrs Smith, and… that was when she said we were going to be your mummy and daddy, and I said, `We’ve already got a mummy and daddy’ and she said, `Your mother’s abandoned you, she doesn’t want you’. So we went to our foster mother. It’s very funny because she must have known what time we was going to get there because there was already a dinner on the table for us when we got there. I remember arriving there… and she said, `I’ve just put the dinner out’ and I thought she must have really timed it well. And we lived in Frankfield Road then, in… Uckfield… and… we had… a gran, a grandma and a great grandma, uncles… uncles and aunts, I… I mean… and we had a very good time with them all.’

`Were there any…?’

`Mum used to take us to the seaside and aunts out to Brighton [???] and things like that.’

`Were there any other children?’

`No… well, my foster mother, she had a baby boy, and… when he… she hold… was holding him in her… in her arms when he was fifteen weeks old, and she thought the baby looked a bit funny, so she said to my foster father, `Alf, I think there’s… you know, the baby looks funny’, and he looked at the baby and he said to my foster mother, her name was Dorothy, `The baby’s dead…’. It had died in her arms, and she found out… she couldn’t have any more children… so that they decided to foster a couple of children. They fostered me and my twin. Then they fostered a little boy… William Patrick Maclean he was… a little boy, but he was a bit of a nuisance, she had to… make him go back to the home, then she… adopted a daughter, Carol… no… her name was Janet… and then, but this Janet, she never used to treat my mother very well. She used to treat about… like a bit of dirt, but as I say, with my foster mother, we couldn’t have wished for… a better home, you know, I mean… Christmas time there was always a… we had pillow… pillow cases packed full with gifts… all on the table at home. Go up to Gran’s and get them up there… we had a marvellous time and I often look back on that time…’

`So it’s quite… quite different from your experience with your own mother?’

`Yeah, oh yes… yes. I… I felt sorry for my real mother really, but I mean because… she came to see us every three months, so she must have loved us mustn’t she? If she came… then, but… we used to have… a Social Worker. The Social Worker was somebody that used to come to the home, about every month, to see if we was happy with our foster mother. She would… take us into the living room on our own, to question us about Mr and Mrs Smith. Were they good to us and did we get good meals and… they… they were good to us, and they dressed us very nice, and we had the best of everything.’

`Right. Can you remember what kind of… what kind of house did they live in?’

`Well it… the first house… well, I’ve… wait a minute… the first house… was down Frankfield [ph] Road. I can’t remember a lot about that, and then we moved to 60 Alexandra Road, in Uckfield, and in that house she had two living rooms, had… a kitchen… upstairs she had three bedrooms… and although… I remember once… she left my… they left me and my twin sister. On the same day [???] they used to sometimes go for a drink and leave us on our own, and… and we was only about eight or nine when they… they left us as well. So one day I… I took a ha`penny out the money box and went and got some sweets, I said, `Mum and dad won’t know we’ve had some sweets’, and we was playing with the bagatelle, and we accidentally left a sweet stuck to the bagatelle so when my mother came home, she said, `Where did you get the sweets from?’, and I said, `Oh well somebody gave them to us, we kept them’, and she said, `Did you take some money out the money box?’, and I said `Yeah, I took a ha’penny out’. Well… you… you could get… a quarter of sweets for a penny, then, down there… but she… she wasn’t very pleased to think we took it out, but… I thought if they didn’t… they shouldn’t have really go and left us. They used to go out drinking and leave us, but… we never got any good hidings or anything off them. They was always kind, you know what I mean?’

`If… if you did do something wrong, what would they do as a punishment?’

`Well, I think my dad used to give us a smack on the back of the legs. Oh… I was… [laughs]. My foster mother… when my foster mother used to hit me, smack us if we weren’t… I used to hit her one back. I took my shoe off once and hit her on the head with it… [laughs].’

`[Laughs] What did she do?’

`She… when I used to go and visit her, she always used to say to me, `You were… you was always the cheekiest of the two’. She said, `You always used to hit me… when I smacked you on the back of my legs’… and… we had… been in the war there. The war was starting when we was with our foster mother, and we used to go up to gran’s house and we used to sleep underneath the table, if the siren used to go, we’d all used to… we used to have our bedding underneath the table.'

`Did your gran live nearby?’

`Granny… Granny Farley [ph] yeah, but… went to gran’s house… we used to go and visit her… and then Granny West [ph] and that… lived in the same road as we did in Upfield in Alexandra Road… they lived just across the road, so we used to go and see them, and Uncle Jim and Uncle Jack, what I mean… and we had an auntie that lived at Groombridge [ph], and an uncle… and we used to go to them, and have holidays with them…’

`So you…?’
 
`We had a very nice time.’

`Yeah… so you had quite a big family then… big, new family?’

`Well they… when the… [inaudible]… we had a lot of relatives, a lot of aunts and uncles and that… and on the Sunday night, we would… go to grandad’s grave, and then we’d walk onto a pub, and my mother used to say to my twin sister and I… you two sit outside, we’ll go and get you a glass of lemonade each, and a packet of crisps. So… we used to enjoy that, I mean…’

`Right..’

`As I said, we was always going to seasides and that…’

`Right… it sounds…’

`And sometimes… we’d go to Aunt Edie’s house, and spend a week with her there…’

`It sounds like a happy time?’

`Well, yeah we did have some… yeah, there was happy there… but… as I said, when mum took us back again, when we was fifteen, we were old enough to earn our living… again…’

`Right… Can… can I just take you back a bit? What about when you went to school? Can you tell me a bit about school?’

`Well, we didn’t go to school… not until we was with our foster parents. We didn’t go to school before…’

`Right’

`And we went to school and… well… we used to play the school teacher up a bit. When we used to come out of class, I would get a handful of stones and throw them in the window… and the teachers used to say, `You wait Joan and Sylvia Tugwell until you come to school the next day’, but we enjoyed school. We used to have cookery lessons and things like that… what I mean…’

`Was it…?’
`And… it’s not… I didn’t go to school a lot… but I learnt a lot you know… since I… left school, I’ve learnt a lot as I go along, but… you know..’

`Can you remember what… what did you particularly like when you were at school?’

`Oh, I used to like the cookery lessons, I think the best. We used to make… make cakes and things like that, what I mean…’

`Right… right…’

`I… I don’t really remember a lot, sorry…’

`Yes. And, so… would you say you were happy at school or not really?’

`I was happy at school, yeah… I think it’s got a…’

`And you had friends?’

`Yes, we made friends. Yeah, so…’

`Ok… and while you were with Mr and Mrs Smith, did you still have… you still had contact with your mother?’

`She was allowed to visit us for one hour… every three months, four times a year… and…’

`Right…’

`We would see her outside, and… and mum would say, `She’s not coming in until dead on two, and she’d go dead on three’. She said they didn’t get on well together.’

`And how did you used to feel when your mother used to visit?’

`When she used to be there?’

`Mmm’

`Oh, we felt pleased to see her and that, but I mean… we were quite pleased to see her, and she used to give us a kiss and a hug, and know what I mean… and…’

`And then, would you go out with her or would she come into the house?’

`No, she wasn’t allowed to take us out.’

`Right.’

`No… no she wasn’t allowed to take us out. We had to see her in the living room, and my foster mother would leave us on our own, with mum… know what I mean? And she wouldn’t even make her a cup of tea, what I mean, she… she didn’t like my mum, know what I mean… I think… the fact is, because mum abandoned us, that was you see… it wasn’t really mum’s fault, that she abandoned it… it’s ‘cause dad… used to… well he tried to gas her one day. He punched her face in, and had her head over the gas stove and he used to want to gas her, but my brother managed to pull him off, I mean… so she had to put up with a bit of… from him, I mean…’

`And when you were with your foster parents, where abouts was your mother living?’

`She was still… oh, I’m not quite sure whether she was still in London or where… I don’t know where she was living at the…’

`Right… right…’
`And then she… she would go across the road and then visit my sister and my brother, for an hour, and then she would go round the corner and visit my sister, for an hour… she was over there… an hour with the three of us, so that was… she would spend three hours in the afternoon, visiting all her children…’

`Right… ok. Can you just tell me Joan, a little bit about… what was life like in Uckfield? What kind of a place was Uckfield?’

`About what?’

`About Uckfield… what kind of a place was it? Was it…?’

`Oh it’s a very nice place, Uckfield. And… well… I don’t know, it’s a bit… job to remember though, it was so long ago… know what I mean?’

`Yeah, that’s ok… that’s ok, don’t worry. That’s… so you had a lot of relatives around?’

`We had a lot of relatives…’

`Mmm’

`You… well… on my foster mother’s side, yes… and dad’s… my foster father. But he joined the RAF so he had to go away, but I mean, so… we never had a chance to say goodbye to him. The next time I knew about him, was he’d… died of cancer of the lung, know what I mean, so… ‘cause I wrote to my foster mother, when I come… and said, `How is dad?’, and she said, `Didn’t they tell you? He died of cancer’. So we didn’t have time to say goodbye to him… so we just left mum there screaming… at the door… and shouting `They’re mine… they’re mine… you didn’t want them…’, what I mean…?’

`Yes. And how old were you then?’

`We was about, I don’t know… fourteen or fifteen. Old enough to earn our living… ‘cause Peter would say to me, `Your mother was artful because she took you home when you was old enough to earn your living… ‘cause we had to get a job… and… we never used to get on with her very well when we first went home because… about Mr and Mrs Smith and… bless her [???], she used to say, `I’ll make sure you don’t hear from the Smith’s, I’ll make sure you don’t write to the Smith’s’, but we used to… what I mean? Behind mum’s back we used to write to… write to them, and… when I joined the Army, I used to go and spend my leaves with them, and… all that time be… up to my mother died… my real mother, she never knew… that I had been corresponding with my foster mother. I… I did sometimes want to say to her, `Mum… I’ve been seeing Mrs Smith’, but I thought… I didn’t want to hurt my mum’s feelings… and… so when she died, she died thinking that we… we still had nothing to do with our foster parents. She wasn't aware that I was seeing her, and when I was in Hellingly I would go and spend five days, once a fortnight, with my foster mother, but… the… well it’s funny because when we was in Broadmoor, I used to have a visit in the morning from my foster parents, and then they’d say in the afternoon, this and that [inaudible] you’ve got visitors. And they’d say `Your mum and dad’s here’, and I said, `Mum and dad’s already been’. They said that `It’s your real mum and dad’. And it… it’s just as well, one come in the morning and one lot in the afternoon, they didn’t clash.’

`Well it sounds like quite a difficult situation, for you having to keep them…separate?’

`I had to keep it quiet, yes…’

`Yes… so when… when your mother came to collect you from Uckfield, saying that she wanted you back… you… you weren’t expecting that?’

`No… no I didn’t know until… I didn’t know until that day… when my foster mother said that `Your mother’s come to take you home’. I run away for two hours and… I’d been hiding and I said to somebody, `My mother’s come to collect me’, I remember saying, `Well I don’t want to go home’, and I thought… after two hours I thought that she’d be gone. But when I went home, she said `Where have you been?’, and I said, `Well I didn’t want to come home with you’, so you know, she wasn’t very pleased about that… what I mean?’

`And then she just said to you that you had to go with her?’

`Pardon?’

`Did she just say that you had to go with her?’

`We had to go… and… my foster mother was screaming her head off, and she was saying, `They’re mine, they’re mine, you didn’t want them’, what I mean? You abandoned them.’

`That must have been very difficult for you and your twin?’

`It was… it was difficult for us, yeah, and… as I say, it’s a shame that we didn’t say… goodbye to dad, know what I mean? My foster father, we never had the chance to say cheerio to him. I was never to meet him again, know what I mean?’

`Yes, that’s…’

`But… when I used to go home to my foster mother, she used to pray to God every night to take her… and I used to say to her, `Well if you was to die… what am I going to do without you?’, and she’d say to me, `You’ve got friends’, and I’d say, `Friends are… friends are not you’, know what I mean… `It’s you that I love’, do you know what I mean?’

`Mmm… mmm’

`But she would kiss dad’s photograph every night before she went to bed, and… one day she went to church, to listen to the carol singers and the church was in the same road as she lived, Alexandra Road… and she was waiting for the carol singers to start… and all of a sudden she collapsed. As she collapsed, so she died. She died, in the church… ‘

`Right…’

`And so she got her wish… I mean…’

`When… when was that, that she died?’

`She… well I think she must… it must have been about fourteen years ago…’

`Yes…’

`But… I was up at Hellingly… when they said to me… `Your mother’s dead’, I couldn’t believe it because… I mean, when I used to go home for five days, we used to have a nice time together. She always used to cook nice meals and that for us… but we always used to go and have a lay down in the afternoons because she… with me being on a lot of medication, used to make me tired… she’d feel like it… and… we had lovely meals we had with her… what I mean…’

`Sounds…’

`And we used to… well, I used to go to jumble sales a lot, do you know what I mean… and get some good stuff, and she always said to me, `You get some good stuff’.’

`Did she come with you to the jumble sales?’

`No she didn’t, no…’
`Right…’

`She didn’t come with me to the jumble sale, no…’

`Sounds like you had a very special relationship…?’

`Oh, she was ever so nice…’

`…with her…?’

`I mean the pretty little dresses that we used to have when we were small, you know… all gathered, nice… nice straw hats with bows on and that… and little flowers and that… and… all nice shoes and socks, we… she… she really took pride in how she kept us, know what I mean?’

`Mmm. Lovely. And what was life like when you went back with your mother?’

`Well, it wasn’t too good really. I mean it wasn’t so good as where we were with our foster mother, but we had to get a job. So I went and got a job in this shop at Norbury… that was… in Croydon… that was in Croydon, Surrey, with… she’d moved from London to Croydon, Surrey, and then I… I got a job in the end making paper bags, and that was quite interesting really… and then… of course when the war started… well, it had already started before we left our foster mother, but when we was at home with our real mum, I used to work on a… indoor shelter… we had my work on there. Instead of us going to work, the boss would bring the work to us… so we used to do it on that, and if the siren went or any bombs falling… we used to go inside, underneath and… shelter. I mean if we could hear the doodle bugs… ‘cause when the engines used to stop, you knew they was going to fall somewhere, what I mean? Then we had an outdoor… and… and…’

`Did…did you stay in… in Norbury during the… for the whole of the war?’

`No I just was working at Norbury, but we was in Croydon, Surrey.’

`Right…’

`Just on the out… well near Thornton Heath… Thornton Heath Pond.’

`Right…’

`Used to see all the barrage balloons up.’

`Right… but you weren’t evacuated, you stayed there?’

`No, we stayed there…’

`For the whole of the war?’

`Yeah, but… and… in the… [inaudible]… we… we stayed there until my mum got remarried and then we went to Canada. We went to Canada three months after the war. If it hadn’t taken so long for us to get all our passports and everything, we would have been going to Canada during the war, but… but we went to… Toronto, Canada…’

`Right…’

`We had a nice time…’

`Yeah…’

`On the ships and the trains… lovely times on the trains. Marvellous…’

`Can I just… can I… can I just take you back a little bit, back to that time in Thornton Heath, when you were living… did your mother have her own house or were you living in a flat or…?’
`When we went… when… when we was taken away, you mean?’

`Yeah…’

`I think it was a flat above a shop, because there used to be a shop as… when she went downstairs, to…let the two men in and when they… she came up, screaming her head off and said `They’ve come to take you away’, I mean…’

`Right… right…Ok… and… about the war as well, it must have been very frightening for you, as a young woman?’

`Well… it was frightening, the war… what I mean… and we used to have an outdoor shelter and an indoor one, that’s when we come round to mum, an Anderson and a Morrison [ph]… I don’t know which one was which… the Morrison inside and the Anderson outside, and we had a Corgi dog, and he would know… what was happening. He used to be shaking like anything, he knew that… the bombs were coming over…’

`Right…’

`And we was very lucky really because, one of the bombs fell on the factory… in the same road as we lived, but down the road…’

`Right’

`Yeah, so we was very lucky it didn’t fall on us…’

`Yes… yes… and were there people that you knew, who got killed in the war?’

`Pardon?’

`Were there people that you knew? Did any of your neighbours get injured or…?’
`No… but… I tell… we had a girl who was a lodger at our house, and one of the… the bombs, I think… fell near one of the… the Davis Cinema, in Croydon, and she lost a leg… she lost a leg, the girl that lived with us… and some people were killed and that… in Croydon, Surrey when the bomb dropped. I think the worst was when you called a doodle bug… you would hear the doodle bug and then all of a sudden, it’d go quiet, and you knew it was going to… fall on some… somewhere in Croydon, Surrey, but the…’

`Mmm’

`And then… all… when the all clear went, we used to come back out and go back into doors and…’

`Right, and were you… you were working as well, at that time?’

`I was working… the man used to bring the work to my house. I was making paper bags. Don’t sound a very good job but… I mean it was very interesting that… [inaudible]…’

`And did you…?’

`We did start at the factory to begin with, and then he said, `If you all stay at home, I will bring the work to your home… you won’t have to come to work… and we had to do the work properly, just to stay, know what I mean?’

`Yes… and did your sister and your mother do that work as well?’

`No, I don’t know what my twin sister done… I don’t… then. My mother wasn’t working… I don’t think my mother ever… ever did go to work.’

`Right… right. You… you said earlier on that you joined the Army? When was that?’

`I joined the Army when I was about twenty one… I think twenty two. I was in the Army for four years. I trained as a Switchboard Operator, and… there was that many Switchboard Operators… I went and worked in the… All Ranks Cook House [ph] know what I mean? But… when I sat to be… an Operator… Switchboard Operator, there was twenty five of us sat… to have the test… and the Officer would plug into me and she would say to me, `I’m not going to say nothing to you, the girl has got… describe it [???], has got all the calls to put through to you… you’ve got to deal with them all and I will just listen in, and I will tell you afterwards’, and… when we’d all finished, there was only five of us passed, out of the twenty five, and I was one of the five.’

`That’s brilliant…’

`She said to me, `Congratulations, you’ve passed…’

`That’s excellent.’

`I liked it in the Army, but…’

`Yes… and… and so were you working as a Switchboard Operator for the whole time?’

`Yeah, well, in fact there were so many Switchboard Operators that in the end I worked in the All Ranks Kitch… Cook House… where they… all the… they came and had their food and that, so I was in… in charge of a lot of girls in there, what I mean?’

`Right…’

`And…’

`Right… and did you live there as well… on the Army base?’

`We lived… we lived in the camp. I was actually in the Army, when the King died… in 1952, ‘cause I went and told the Captain, I said that the King had died, and she said, `Are you sure?’, I said, `Yeah, I just heard it on the wireless.’ I was also in the Army when… they had an air show… near… near… I don’t know, was it… and not at Aldershot, I don’t know where it was… and… an aeroplane flew up in the air and it killed thirty five people on the ground. So I can remember that.’

`Right…’

`So now they’re trying to get some money out the Army for me, here… so that I can go on holiday…’

`Oh right…’

`So they asked the Army. I don’t know how they got in touch with the Army but… I can remember my number… WB 362728. [Laughs].’

`And did you have to wear a uniform?’

`Yes… we used to wear a khaki uniform when we used to work, and you’d wear the green walking out uniform when you were… used to go out… and if I used to see an Officer coming down the road, I used to make out I was looking in a shop… shop window, and when I got back to camp one day, he said to me, `Every time you see an Officer you make out you’re… so you don’t have to salute’, I said `You feel a fool’… the fact that if anybody’s saluting, you know what I mean, so… [inaudible]…’

`[Laughs]. So, you quite enjoyed that life in the Army?’

`Well… I did love part of it [???]… well it… we had to go to a cloakroom, and we had to look after Prince and Princess George of Denmark for three days… I mean… and… I was standing outside with my cap off, and a man passed me by and he said, `It’s a lovely day isn’t it?’, and I said, `Yes…’, and all of a sudden the Military Policeman said to me… `Private Tugwell, do you know who that man was?’, I said, `No, I don’t know’. He said, `That was the Prince George of Denmark and you’ve got your cap off’.’ [Laughs].

`Right…[Laughs] Yes… so… was your sister in the Army as well?’

`No… no, it was just… no, I was the… my brother joined the Navy, and I had a boyfriend in the Navy…’

`What did your mother say when you decided to join the Army?’

`Oh she didn’t mind, know what I mean? But… so I lived with my mother from about fifteen, until I was about twenty one or twenty two… and then I didn’t live with her any more.’

`Right… then you…’

`As I said, I… I… had a nervous breakdown… which I spent thirty three and a half years in hospital…’

`Right… right… ok… and… so you were in the Army for about four or five years?’

`I was in the Army for four years…’

`Right…and where abouts were you based?’

`Well… we joined up at Manchester, then we went to Catterick [ph]. I was with [inaudible], Oswestry [ph], Aldershot, Hants…’

`Oh, so you moved around…’

`Went… to Aldershot twice… yeah…’

`Right, you moved around quite a lot…’

`And you’re making… you make a lot of friends in the Army, we used to have a good time, and then… they wasn’t too strict with us, know what I mean… and I caught rheumatic fever while I was in the Army, so I had to spend it… a good time… in hospital.’

`Uh huh… and did they look after you well?’

`Looked after us very well, yes… because… rheumatic fever, that was a serious thing to have.’

`And did you recover from that ok?’

`Yes, I recovered from that alright. Then I just went about my duties as normal.’

`Right, ok...’

`You know… I… I didn’t used to like the… parade so much, I mean… or if you’re doing drilling for about half an hour, know what I mean, there’d be… a bit scary really because you think, in case you’re going to make a mistake. But… when… I did join the Army and was in the barrack room, we were number company, number one platoon. We won the best drill cup, and the cleanest barrack room, so we had two cups… our squad. And when we had a passing out parade, you had all these people come to see us passing out.’

`Did any of your family come… to see you pass out?’

`No… no, the family didn’t come down…’

`Mmm… and were they very strict in the Army, so that…?’
`No they was alright. I don’t know about… they were… about with the men. I mean you see it on the television and these NCO’s, they look a lot… a right load of bullies and that, but no, we never had that. No… and I mean we quite enjoyed ourselves… and… I went with two other girls and we went to Scotland for Christmas and then New Year’s Eve, and… oh, and New Year’s Eve… all the drinks were coming out but I never drunk then so, I used to put them in everybody’s flower pots…’

`[Laughs]’

`Or give it to somebody else, say, `Do you want a drink?’…’

`Mmm’

`And… I’ve… I’ve only been to Scotland once but I love Scotland and I love the Scotch people… I thought they were very nice… lovely and friendly…’

`Right, so you made good friends in the Army then?’

`Made… made some good friends, yes…’

`Yes… yes…good. So what happened after you came out of the Army?’

`Came out the Army? Oh… I came out… out the Army and… well I… I… had it… well I had agoraphobia of the streets, and I wouldn’t even want to walk in the streets any more. I used to feel like… collapsing on the pavement, so my foster mother phoned up… St John’s, Aylesbury, Bucks, and asked if they’d take me in, and they took me in… as a patient, down the…’

`Right…’

`And…’

`So… just… just to go back a little bit. When you…when you left the Army, did you move in with your… did you… where… where were you living?’

`I went with my mum and dad to begin with yeah, but… they… they lived… it was… living in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, that’s how I went to St John’s, but they… mum used to… come to me and she’d say to me, `We’ve only just got to cross the road, get on a bus… and we’re two minute’s walk when we get the other end’, and I’d say I would only go down on the pavements…’

`Mmm’

`…so I had there, so…’

`Did that… did that suddenly come on, the agoraphobia?’

`Came all of a sudden… and… I just… felt panicky in the streets. You know what I mean, I wouldn’t go anywhere in the streets, I wouldn’t… go shopping anywhere, when I… and… as I say the hospital took me in and I was there for… about ten years… eight years… eight, nine… eight years…’

`And you’d never had any of those agoraphobic symptoms…?’

`No… oh…’

`…before?’

`Touch wood… I do sometimes… I… I get panic filled as… and… and for… but no I’m not… frightened of the streets any more, it’s just that I’ve… I’ve got a back problem so I have to keep sitting down so I can’t enjoy that… can’t enjoy going shopping.’

`Right… right…so when… when you moved out of the Army you… you went back to live with your foster parents?’

`Went into hospital… I went to my old foster mother and then… in only a few months, I went into hospital, and I was there for thirty three and a half years.’

`Right…so your foster mother was quite worried about your agoraphobia?’

`My foster mother was worried as well…’

`Yes…’

`And… and they… they used to visit us…’

`What did you think when she suggested that you go to the hospital?’

`That was my real mother said it. Well, I went in because I knew I had to. I had to have some form of help… and I had… ECT… electrical treatment I had… and then I had… what was it…? Insulin… modified insulin, I had that… and… in the… where we went, when we slept upstairs, there used to be two dormitories, and they were both housed… thirty patients in each, and they was so close together, the beds, you used to have one patient up… one down, one up, reverse… so you wouldn’t be breathing into one another’s… faces during the night.’

`Right…’

`And then… oh, I don’t know, I… I had a nice doctor there, his name was Dr Watt [ph] and he was very good to me, and… then I had lapse of memory and found myself in Broadmoor.’

`Right…’

`And…’

`Shall we just… just stick with St John’s for a minute? When you… when you first went there, did you… did you know what kind of a place you would be going to?’

`No…’

`No?’

`Not really, no…’

`So you just knew that you needed some help?’

`Yes.’

`And what happened when you went to the hospital, can you remember?’

`What, when I was in hospital?’

`When you first went there?’

`Well…’

`Can you remember seeing…?’

`No, just that they put me on medication straight away, and they put me on ECT… electrical treatment. I had it… quite a few of those, at different times.’

`Right…’

`And that seemed to... cure me, know what I mean… but there you wasn’t allowed to go out in the streets anywhere, like that… to… you know what I mean… you had to stay at the hospital all the time.’

`Right…’

`Only once I was put in the padded cell… at St… at… that hospital, there. It was awful being in the padded cell because everything’s padded, all the floors, the door was padded, so nobody couldn’t hear you, so… if you suffer from agoraphobia then it used to be terrible, what I mean… ‘cause you knew, you couldn’t knock anywhere because they couldn’t hear you. They had a little spy hole on the door, which they would look in to see if you was alright now and again, but you had… had this… mattress, you know, a canvas… gown and that, what I mean…?’

`Right…’

`You couldn’t tear nothing.’

`Right… What had you done to be put in the padded cell?’

`I don’t know what I’d done… I’d done something…’

`Right…’

`I don’t know what it was I done…’

`Right… right…’

`But… there again, there was… I… had a duodenal ulcer when I was at St John’s when I first went in hospital, so I used to be on milk drips. I had it for ten days… I had that… and… they were very good there, what I mean… but I couldn’t understand how I was supposed to… gone round from ward to ward saying I was going to kill Dr Watt [ph], I don’t remember that. I don’t remember going to court, but my mum and dad, who were in court and… dad was behind me. He said, I kept saying to you `It’s alright Joan, you’re… we’re there for you’, but they kept put… putting… pouring bottles upon bottles of Paraldehyde [ph] down me. They was really doping me up, what I mean, all the time because I was shouting and that. I don’t remember nothing.’

`Yeah…’

`I remember when I came round, and I thought to myself, well this is not St John’s, and I shouted out, and the nurse came and I said, `Where is this place… not St John’s?’, she said `No, you’re in Broadmoor.’ I said, `Broadmoor?’’

`[Inaudible]’

``What am I here for?’, she said, `You went round from ward to ward… saying you was going to kill Dr Watt [ph]’, and that, and I said he was my favourite doctor, I just couldn’t believe it.’

`Right… right…yes that must have been a big shock for you then, to… to find yourself in Broadmoor suddenly…yes. So, you’d… so you’d found life in St John’s, you’d had ECT there?’

`Oh, they’re very good to you there, E… and… modified insulin… and that, and…’

`Can… can you remember having the ECT? Can you… remember…?’

`Oh I remember sometimes… I’d be laying on the bed and… they would… they couldn’t get my vein, so she’d put some stuff on either side of my… and she said, `We’ve got to give it to you straight.’ She put the thing on, and they’d turn on. I think they give you a fit. You have a… a fit, and… that. And when you come round you’d have a real bad headache, and… they’d make your head ache terrible…’

`Yes… yes…and can you remember any other side effects?’

`No… no… no side effects.’

`Right… right…’

`I did it on… on modified insulin, I think I had a couple of fits on them. They had to take me off… ‘cause some people had the deep… insulin, you know what I mean they…’

`Right…’

`But I had it modified, and I used to feel real funny… what I mean, and they said, `Well you’ve had a fit, so… take you off’.’

`Right. But you feel that the ECT did you good?’

`There, it did do me good.’

`Right… right… and were you able to go out then…?’

`I could have gone out with my mother. Could have gone out with her, but… I didn’t go out with her but… but really, it was in Broadmoor that they really cured me… of the agoraphobia.’

`How… how did they do…?’

`The fear of the streets, they have… it’s very nasty to have it, what I mean, it’s…’

`Right… and how did they cure you in Broadmoor?’

`On ECT there… electrical treatment there…’

`Right…’
`And I had six lots of… six weeks of sleep treatment. They put you to sleep, for six weeks, they… give you sleeping tablets every four hours, and you wasn’t able to drink or anything, or eat, and they… they would give you Complan… and they’d bath… you know, give you a bed bath and… changed all your clothes all your clothes and that, and changed the bedding… and… make you sleep again, so… for six weeks I knew nothing.’

`Right…’

`But when you… when you’re coming off of sleep treatment, they cut down the tablets and you get a withdrawal fit… they’re terrible, you know… they give you a fit. ‘Cause I shouted out one day, I thought… I feel funny, you know what I mean, my tongue was sore… and I shouted out, and they said, `You’ve had a very bad fit’. I said `Can I get up for a cigarette?’. They said `No… ‘, I said, `Oh go on…’, but they let me get up in the end… and… Jimmy Saville used to… come to Broadmoor every two weeks, and he would… say hello to everybody, give you all a hug… and all the family would ask to get an autograph from him. He has his hair done at Broadmoor.’

`Oh…’

`Yeah, and his mother came once, and I said to her, `Are you proud of Jimmy?’. She said, `I’m very proud of him’. Of course when she died he was very upset… and one day they said to us `You’re going for a coach outing’. This is at Broadmoor… and believe it or not, it was Jimmy Saville that ordered the coach. We had thirty two staff, thirty two patients. Each patient had a member of staff… and they took us to Windsor Safari Park. And of course, a lot of the children had recognised Jimmy Saville and they’d all be round him… and, we… as I say, we went to Windsor Safari Park, and then he stopped at a shop and he went and asked for fifty six ice creams… [laughs] and they couldn’t believe it at the shop… it was fifty six. He said, `I’ve got a coach… coach load there…’ and we didn’t bother running away or anything ‘cause it would spoil it. But there was another time we went on an outing, to… Heathrow Airport, but we was the other side. We could see the planes taking off and coming in, and we… they would take packed… lunches and that with us, we had… we had something nice to eat and drink… we had tea and that, we had a nice time. And I think they started taking the men on the outings, and someone would abuse the privilege. They would run away, so it spoilt it, what I mean.’

`So when you went was it just women?’

`No… there was… only women on our… of all… on our ward. They’ve got two wards, you had Lancaster House and York House, that’s for the two… but the men had all the other wards. There was several wards for the men… and… we used to go to the OT from there… they call it the Mini Hanger… it’s where you do things for factories and… things like that, and they would put me on… in charge of all the people round the table… make sure they’d done the job. I’d do it, but some of them were… very ill, they shouldn’t have been in Broadmoor, because their minds had really gone, know what I mean… and… we had one girl there… Diane Bromley, and her uncle was Boris Karlof, the film star.’

`Oh…’

`And what she’d done, I think she put herself and the two children… in a car… put the exhaust pipe on. It killed the children but didn’t kill her… but gave her brain damage…’

`Right…’

`And she would walk up and down all the time and say… `Diane dies… Diane dies…’. I think about every six months she would come round for about twenty minutes, and she would really talk posh… ‘cause I used to take the mickey out her, and then she would get up, and… walking up and down, and say, `Diane dies…’, and ‘cause you’d got to feed her… keep walking up and down, feeding her as you go along…’

`[Inaudible]…’

`And… they used to have another… fourteen or fifteen year olds there… and… they… there was always somebody committing suicide every day. We always knew when somebody had died… what I mean…’

`Right…’

`Because the staff would… would shut the Day Room door and… and they would stand there so you couldn’t see through the keyhole, and we used to say, `I suppose somebody’s committed suicide’, and they were right… don’t they… it was all the youngsters that were committing suicide…’

`Right. Ok, Joan…we’re going to… I’ll probably come back to that… we’re going to have to stop now, because it’s the end of the tape… [laughs], and maybe it’s a good chance for you to have a bit of a…’

[End of DVC Pro tape 1]

[Start of DVC Pro tape 2 – VHS tape 1 continues]

[Camera: `C905/14 Joan Tugwell, tape number two’]

`Ok, Joan…I wonder if we can just go back to… when you first went into St John’s? I know it was a long time ago, but can you remember anything about the hospital, what it looked like at all?’

`No, I know it’s very nice there. I mean, the… the staff are very friendly and that but… I can’t remember if we done any work when we was there. But… it… it was a big place then, and… it was just on one ward they had sixty patients as I said, in two lots of dormitories, thirty… patients sleeping in each dormitory. One up and one down, because they are so close together, so you have… so they’re not breathing into one another’s faces of a night time. I know the staff and that… that weren’t very nice there… what I mean, and… at Christmas time they used to take me round… from ward to ward, and there’s… it was very nice there… but we wasn’t allowed out anyway. You didn’t… really have your freedom when you’re… we did sometimes… sneak out when we shouldn’t have done, and… I made my boyfriend run all the way down the pub and back again, because I was an alcoholic then, so… [inaudible] and I shouldn’t have been… and… this was… one day I went to… the old lady’s ward, I landed up there… was drunk as anything and… they said, I… I said, `Good evening’, I climbed the gate and I passed out. And when I come to I was in a padded cell, but with the door open. ‘Cause there again, when I had a duodenal ulcer, after they took me off the milk drips that day, there was a patient had grabbed Sister… [inaudible] I think it was, by her hair… and she couldn’t get her hands off, so I had to go and help to get the girl’s hand off the sister’s hair, and then she said to me, `Will you come to me on ward fourteen…we’ll take you over to ward fourteen’, and I was a patient, and she said, `All the other patients just watch…’, they were grabbing my hair… `…and yet you’ve just come off a milk drip and you… you come and help me’, what I mean… she thanked me. That is why… she said she never locked me in the padded door because she remembered…but unbeknown to them, I had a little bottle of rum, in my jacket pocket and that was in there… and I drunk that, you know what I mean… they… said to me, `Where did you get the drink from?’. I said `It was in my…’, and left my clothes in the padded cell on a chair, what I mean… but she didn’t lock me in because she was grateful for what I’d done for her.’

`So you were in the padded cell drinking your bottle of rum?’

`[Laughs] Well, they hadn’t locked the door but I had… I thought `Oh, I’ve got a small bottle of rum in…’, and so I drunk that as well… ‘cause I was an alcoholic. But… no touch wood, I haven’t drunk for about fifteen years. Only if sometimes it’s anybody’s birthday up here… they have a drink, you know what I mean… sherry or something, but… I don’t drink now.’

`Tell me… tell me about this boyfriend of yours… that sounds interesting?’
`Which one?’

`You said that you’d got your boyfriend to go down the pub…?’

`Oh, David his name was. And… umm… he used to say… I’d say, `Will you run down the pub?’, he said, `Well if anybody sees me… I’ll get in for [inaudible]… and I used to say him `Oh, don’t be such a yellow coward’, you know what I mean… `…go down and get me a drink’. And he used to come all the way back in, with the bottle of drink… and we had to drink it quick, because you had to be on the ward by seven o’clock. You could walk round the grounds, and… I don’t even know if they had a canteen there, I suppose they did, but… we used to walk round the grounds and… and as I said I got drunk once, and they said, `Where did you get the drink from?’. I said, `Somebody got it for me…’, I didn’t tell them who it was, I mean… and… that was it… [???]’

`So…so you and David used to meet in the grounds…?’

`Used to meet in the grounds, yeah…’

`…of the hospital?’
 
`’Cause they… they didn’t…they wasn’t mixed wards and men had their wards and the females had theirs. And…’

`And… did many patients have girlfriends or boyfriends?’

`I think they used to yeah, but… [pause]… there… oh, I haven’t had time to think about it… [pause]. I know the… I couldn’t understand because I got on with the staff so well. They used to come and find myself in Broadmoor, from Severalls Hospital, ‘cause… you know, I… I used to like this doctor, he was very nice to me, he was very friendly, and I got on with him ever so well, and to think that… I’m supposed to have gone round from ward to ward saying I was going to kill him… I wouldn’t kill anybody, I’m not… I’m, you know… I… I’m a… I’m not like that, I’m very sentimental towards people, what I mean… and I like to make friends and that… but… to go in from there was a shock.’

`So you can’t remember doing that at all?’

`No, oh no, I was… completely suffering from loss of memory, and… mum and dad said when I was in court… from… the hospital, I didn’t know then, neither, and… dad said, `We was behind you…’ and there’s a couple of Police women were holding onto me because I was shouting at the Judge or something, and dad said I said to them, `Joanie… dad’s here…’, what I mean… he said, `You didn’t know…’, and they had several bottles of paraldehyde they poured down my throat, mouth… I mean they… absolutely doped me up. But as I said, I… from there I went to Broadmoor and I was really shocked when I woke up and… I was like on a canvas, rubber mattress… two rubbers pillows, and a canvas… nightdress, and two canvas rugs, and… very cold because you can’t wrap yourself… in warm in them and… and when I shouted out… `Where am I?’, and they… and Sister came and she said, `You’re in Broadmoor’, and I said, `Well what am I… doing in Broadmoor?’. She said `You… went round from ward to ward from St John’s Hospital and said you was going to kill Dr Watt’, and I said, `He was my favourite doctor’, and… anyway, in Broadmoor. Oh, well it wasn’t too bad in Broadmoor really because… you had what you call the mini hanger there… that is where you call the OT, where you do… lots of work and that for factories. The factories send in jobs for us to do… and… I used to have a table with about eight patients round it, and they were very ill, mentally, and I had to make sure that they… they was doing their work properly… and you know, I used to keep them… occupied with all the work as well.’

`What… what kind of work would they be doing?’

`Well they were doing like… pencil, you know, adding… you know, putting pencils… counting them, and they were putting them in little cases. I forget what the other job is… did all sorts of things, and… when you are… when you go to the… mini hanger you were sort of… were locked in, you can’t get out anywhere, and you can’t leave the mini hanger, not until all the… tools are… are collected. What I liked about it… in the morning time, they used to make an earn of tea with no sugar, and another one with sugar, and we used to get a nice crusty bread roll and a lump of cheese…’

`Oh…’

`And we used to have that, what I mean…’

`Right…’

`And then the… mind… mind you, I used to injure myself a lot in Broadmoor. I used to put my hands through windows or I’d find a bit of glass and cut myself, like that, but I didn’t really want to. I think it’s a… fact is that you… you’re like an animal… you know, shut in… I mean, you know, you can’t get out anywhere… and… if… it… not because I really wanted to do it, it’s just some kind of an outlet… then I had sleep treatment, six times I think… six times in six weeks, and… you don’t know what you’re doing for six weeks, ‘cause there’s… they… they give you sleeping tablets every four hours, they dope you up well… and… they… used to give you Complan… give you a bed bath and… change your bed and that, and ‘cause… while I was there, sometimes, if somebody used to shout at me… any of the members of staff, because you couldn’t get away with them, I automatically attacked them. Well I didn’t really attack them… I went for them, I used to grab them, know what I mean, because… I couldn’t stand the nagging, and then… they would put you in your room, for a week, without smoking. But you would have your friends, sometimes… and they would say, `Do you want a cigarette?’. They called me `Tug Boat’ there… and they would put a cigarette on a bit of newspaper and put it underneath the door. I would smoke the cigarette… then put the end back on the newspaper and pass it back to the girls out in the passage way, and then when the staff come in with your medicine or with your meals, they would say, `You’ve been smoking?’, and I say, `No I haven’t… it must be coming from the corridors’, `We can smell the smoke in here… who gave you a cigarette?’, I said, `Nobody, I’m not… and nobody didn’t give me one, so I…I can’t give you no names’, I wasn’t going to split on them… and sometimes, the staff would say to me, `Do you want to get up for a cigarette?’, and I’d say to them, `Well I thought you put me in for a week’, you know what I mean, `…without a cigarette’, and they would say to you, `Well, do you want a cigarette?’, and I said, `Yes…’, `Well come on then…’, and let me have a cigarette. When you was alright they give you ordinary bedding back, but on Lancaster House you’re not allowed any furniture, in the rooms… no furniture at all… no chairs, no dressing tables, nothing… you had to… undress out in the corridor, and put your nightdress in… on… and then go into your room, just like that.’

`So you had to undress in the corridor?’

`Uh huh… yeah… undress in the corridor… in front of everybody else… [laughs], and you had five male nurses on there…’

`Right… can… can you…?’

`And the men used to give you a bath… oh, that was more embarrassing than ever… you had to go and have a bath with them. I remember John Hodges, like I… I know I did put one male nurse in hospital for three months, I… attacked him… umm… well he used to throw buckets… bowls of water over some of the patients, and some of them were very elderly, and I used to say to him, `That could be your mother or your grandmother you’re throwing the water over…’. Then one day they was giving me a paraldehyde injection, and he twisted my neck and he spit in my face… and as he was going out backwards, and I said `I’ll get you… one of these days’. After three months, three girls said to me, `Ian Baines is round the corner on his own, if you wanted to get him’. Apparently, I put him in hospital for three months. But I… I know that he’s still working in Broadmoor, ‘cause I’ve seen Broadmoor on television, and it’s mentioned his name ‘cause they’ve got… a new ward’s opening there…’

`Right…what…?’
`There was an… another time… I say, you do the canteen there… you don’t go to the canteen… the only time you go is on a Christmas time… you go to the shop otherwise… you put in a… you know… a… a ticket in… well write out what you want and give it to the staff, and they would get it for you. On day I went in the office and Sister McGee [ph] was in there, and I said to her, `I haven’t got any canteen to come… Mac… but I…’, she said, `Well you can sit there, be quiet… and she gave one girl… her canteen and all of a sudden… and a woman came in, she weighed eighteen stone… I was only eight stone then, and she came in… f’ing away and blinding, worried about… `Only… forty cigarettes… I got… I own… Boots The Chemist, I’ve got shares and that…’ and… and they said, `Well [inaudible]…’ she said, `I can only give you what’s here’, but the Sister had blocked herself in. She had a wall here at the back, she got a table there and she got the [inaudible], and this girl went in, that way, do… to… tried to strangle this Sister, so I had to get out and I thought to myself, `Well… I can’t… see her being strangled’, so I looked on the window sill and I thought perhaps there might be an alarm but there wasn’t, there was a fire bell there, so… a dress in Broadmoor is called a `galatier’, you don’t call it a dress, it’s called a `galatier’. That’s if you wear their dresses, otherwise you could have your own clothes. So what I had to do, I had to put my hand on… the Sister… this girl’s dress, at the back, and keep yanking her, until we had gradually her off, and then another patient would come and she’d say, `I can hear everything in the… in the hatch way.’ I said, `Go and ring the emergency bell, say Ellen’s trying to kill, you know, Sister McGee’. You see you have thirteen staff on but twelve went for tea all in one and left one on her own. Anyway, they took this patient away, and they took Sister McGee, she went somewhere, and they gave me a cup of tea and a cigarette, then afterwards I said, `Where’s Mac?’. They said `She’s down Douglas Unit’, so I went down Douglas Unit, and I knocked on the office door, and they said, `Who is it?’, and I said `It’s Joan Tugwell’. Well the Matron opened the door, and she said to me, `I want to thank you’, she said, `You saved Sister McGee’s life…’. Her hair… Sister McGee… her hair was all out like that, and all marks on her neck, and she said to me, `I’ll never forget you… as long as I live… you… you saved my life’. Know what I mean… I was proud of that, what I mean… and that… nearly got me… but it didn’t get me out of Broadmoor, I had to do that… although…’

`That’s amazing…’

`Mum and dad fought for nine years, because I shouldn’t have been in Broadmoor in the first place, and they fought for nine years… and every time… you’d see the Tribunal, you’ve got to wait two years before you can see them again, and you’d have a letter to say, `Well…’, but I was turned down, and I was supposed to have been psychopathic disorder… and that was section forty five… [inaudible]…’

`Uh huh…’

`So it wasn’t so bad as some people.’

`So, was this your foster parents or was it your real mum and dad?’

`What?’

`That were fighting against… get… trying to get you out of Broadmoor?’

`My real… my real parents…’

`So you…’

`Well my real mother and my…’

`And your stepfather?’

`My… my stepfather, he… he was a marvellous man and… and they used to come to see me nearly every week at Broadmoor, and… he used to say `We’d… we’re doing all our best to get you out… you shouldn’t have been here in the first place…’. A lot of people say I shouldn’t have been there… but… there, when you have your meals, you have… like a… three cooked meals a day, and for dinner time you got a choice of three dinners, a choice of two puddings, and the same again at night time. You’d get a choice of two dinners and that then… and… what… they used to have dances… we used to go to York House. That’s where… the girls over in York House, if you was good enough, you went to York House from Lancaster Ward. But I used to… want to keep smashing the crockery all the time… I couldn’t… every time I saw a cup, I smashed it and I used to… and the Sister said to me one day, when I… I… the girl in front broke her cup and saucer, I was in the back table, and I just broke… broke the cup on the saucer. Instead of the Sister saying to me… well she didn’t say anything to the girl in front, but to me she said, `Tugwell that’s the last time you come in the dining hall’, so I had a bit of crockery and I went… like that… that’s why I’ve got a small hand, smaller than the other… like that… and I cut the tendons clean through… and… I had to have an operation, and they tied the tendons in knots. But… I used to put my… well it was sometimes I used to… with this other girl, she committed… well she didn’t commit suicide but she cut herself once too often, Ann Millet [ph], but… before that they used to say, `I want Joan Tugwell… and Ann Millet… I want both their arms put in plaster cast, from the shoulder to the finger tips… so we couldn’t… do any damage, or you know, break the windows or anything. I don’t know how I broke windows, I couldn’t… I wouldn’t be able to do that now, what I mean… just put your…’

`Can you remember when you started cutting yourself…? Was that when you went to Broadmoor that you started cutting…?’

`Oh, I never done it before… and only when I went to Broadmoor… I’d never done it… and… you used to go out on the court there, you know, as you go out… and, you could smoke when you like out there, and we used to look for a piece of glass, you know. The staff would say, `Joan Tugwell stop looking for pieces of glass, and you Ann… I know what you’re looking for, both of you…’, so…’

`And what…?’

`Used to hide it in our mouths so they couldn’t find it.’

`What would happen when you’d cut yourself, would the staff… be sympathetic?’

`Well, you… you… well, I mean, sometimes I… I wouldn’t believe it was blood thirsty, I used to watch the pool of blood getting bigger and bigger, then they’d come in, and… of course you’d get the doctor and they’d have to stitch you up… and…’

`And would they give you… would they give you an anaesthetic?’

`Yeah, oh yeah, they’d numb it and that… but there used to be another patient there, she said to me, `Will you break my hand for me?’, so I said, `If you put your hand in the door, there’s a slit in the door…’, and I would… shut the door quick, if she left her hand there, but she would take it away, and in the end, I did break it, but… I saw one of the staff taking her down to Douglas Unit, and I said, `What are you taking her down there for?’, `Well look, she’s been trying to break her hand’. I thought, `I had done that, but I…’. The girl gave me a packet of cigarettes, to… do that.’

`Why… why did she want you to break her hand?’

`She wanted me, I don’t know why she wanted me to, so… she hadn’t got the guts to do it herself, so I used to say, `If you put your hand in the door…’, I had to put my hand in the slit, and… of course she kept banging the door all the time, I said to her, `They’re going to wonder what’s happened’, what I mean…’

`Mmm…’

`But… umm…’

`Yes… so what…?’

`They… well you wasn’t allowed a wireless there really, not in your room, you couldn’t have a wireless or anything else… and if you… when I first went there… you was allowed one cigarette… no, allowed… just one hour in the morning, one hour in the afternoon, one hour in the evening to smoke, and I said it was a bit ridiculous ‘cause you was cramming as many as you could into that hour. Eventually they got it where… when you done your work, then you could light up.’

`Right’

`You’re not allowed a lighter yourself, the staff has to give you the lights.’

`Right… and…’

`You’re not allowed them…’

`Where… where did you get the cigarettes from, did you buy them?’

`You know from the canteen… but… my mother used to bring me in money, and my foster mother. They didn’t… you wasn’t allowed the money yourself, I mean, and… I used to go up to… when I went… eventually left the mini hanger and went up to OT, upstairs, and we used to make all stuffed… toys and things like that… and we used to get £1.35 I think it was… one pound something… that’s what we had a week…’

`Right… right…’

`And sometimes on a Friday afternoon, you… I would do all the sweeping up, for the Sister… used to sweep all round, and she would give me a packet of cigarettes for nothing which is nice. She… very nice Sister, she was in charge of you while you were working… and then sometimes you had cinema on a Friday afternoon, you could go to the pictures. You had them in the corridor, and then the men would be allowed to go… come out to you, and go to the pictures, so I used to… have a boyfriend there, where… I used to see him… every time we had pictures… and then.. sometimes you would have a dance which would be in York House. You’d have dancing over there, the men were allowed to come over, and all the chairs were all the way round, and… dancing and that, and then… during the break time they would give you a plate… of all kinds of things, sausage rolls, sandwiches, everything is… everything was so… nice, what you had there…’

`And how… how often would you have those dances?’

`Well quite often we had it. Quite… dancing… because, instead of the York House girls going into their dining hall, they had to have their meals on… in their rooms, you know, because… the… their dining hall was… getting ready for the dances. Then you would have a sports day, where… in the morning you’d do… well you’d have straws like when… lucky… lucky numbers and you’d have all that, and in the afternoon it’d be all the running events and that. I never used to go in for that. You know…’

`Did you used to go and watch?’

`I used to go and watch, and I used to take part in the morning but I didn’t… take part in any of the running or anything. But… a couple of times, they said to me, `Would you like us to put you in, to go to York House?’, I mean they’d be more freer over there, I mean you’d got your own furniture… not your… well, they give you the furniture… they got that… and… of course as soon as I went over there, and as soon I saw… a china cup, I… I’d say to everyone, `I… I think I’ll have to go back to Lancaster, I’m only going to smash it’…’

`Mmm’

`And in the end, because of me… Lancaster House, everything was… wasn’t breakable. You know, it’s… beaker things, you know… do… nothing would break.’

`Right…’

`I tell you… I… it was horrible to think… I… I thought to myself, `I’ll never be able to conquer crockery again, know what I mean… I’ll always want to smash it, but… I have got over that.’

`Mmm’

`It’s a awful thing to have, you know… you sit there and you think… Sometimes if we’d been playing cards with the staff, another staff would give them… a mug… a cup of tea, and I used to say, `Oh, can you remove that cup?’. I don’t know why that was.’

`Yeah…’

`It’s the fact that you couldn’t get away from it, but… I wasn’t the only one that used to smash up… there were quite a few of us…’

`Yes…’

`Then I had Ann… she cut herself once too often, and of course, the staff didn’t see her, so she bled to death. She was about thirty something…’

`Really? So…’

`And we had another girl there, and they more or less seemed to dope her up all day and all night, every day… Sheila Green her name was. And they said one day we’re going to take her… they was going to take her to a hospital, and… they said, when they got in the ambulance, she was shouting all the way… to the… other hospital, where she was going. As soon as they got through the gates, she collapsed and died… [inaudible]…’

`Goodness…so did you see quite a few deaths, in Broadmoor?’

`Oh… I mean I didn’t see… I… err… I always knew… when…when the staff used to shut the day room door up, you knew that somebody had died because… and the girls said, `I can’t see through the keyhole, they’re blocking it up, they’re standing up against it’, and then eventually, you know, we… we was late going down for tea, and then we would go down and have our tea, and of course you were shut in there… and then the Sister said, `You might as well know that so and so has just committed suicide…’. This went on nearly every day. One day they didn’t have a domestic to wash up… so they asked me and Ann, if we would do the washing up. They locked us in the kitchen. When she came back, she looked in the cupboard… she said, `Where’s… all the crockery?’, she said, `You haven’t thrown it out the window?’, I said, `Yes… [laughs]…’ and we’d thrown it all out the window… and…’

`What… what punishment did you get for that, can you remember?’

`Nothing… no… but… there was one… if… if all the crock… all the cutlery is not correct… now once there was a knife missing… so we all had to go in our rooms at half past five. We looked everywhere. They searched us, and then… when morning came we went in the dining hall and the Matron came, and she said, `I’m very sorry about you all having to go to your rooms, ‘cause a knife was missing, but the domestic had accidentally taken it home with her.’ So she said, `I’m going to give you all a packet of cigarettes each…’, so she gave us all a packet of twenty cigarettes… so…’

`Goodness… she sounds quite kind…?’

`Oh yeah, you know, it was alright yeah…’

`Mmm’

`And at Christmas time then… you’d go in the dining hall and the tables would be laid up… ever so nice for Christmas… and at Christmas, you would hang a pillow case outside your bedroom door… the Sister would tell you to put one out there, and you used to find bits of moldy cheese, toilet rolls, everything in there… then you take… then they give you a bag… and… the night staff used to give us a cup of tea in bed… that morning… and then… we’d go in over the dining hall and we used to get presents and that from the staff as well as… our own families, ‘cause the… you know the Sister would say to me… `Joan Tugwell, you’ve got a couple of parcels’, and… there’d be one from my twin and one from my… my parents and that… and… we used to have a lot of people come round visiting. We had Rolf Harris come round… round as well as Jimmy Saville… and… we had another man that was a star… they used to come round… look at you… you used to think sometimes you… as if you was put on show, know what I mean, they come round…’

`Mmm’

`They were very nice, I mean… you had a nice dinner, and the staff… the office staff would serve you… not the nurses… the… ‘cause nurses used to sit with us… and the staff… and they would wait all on us, know what I mean…’

`And would you have a proper Christmas dinner?’

`Pardon?’

`Would you have a proper Christmas dinner?’

`Yeah… oh you had a proper… turkey and everything, yeah… Christmas pudding… everything, yeah… about everything anybody could have had… know what I mean…’

`Yes…’

`But… sometimes some of the staff were… a bit rough with the… with some of the patients, but… old John Hodges [ph] and… he used to sort of torment us really, but… in a way, he… he was a bit soft hearted. John Turner [ph] was nice. He was… he… when they had the… took me from York House once onto that ward, he said, `I’m very sorry, they had to… put you back down in the Douglas Unit, but…’, he said `I… I’ve got no option’, know what I mean…’

`So what… what was Douglas Unit?’

`Pardon?’

`What was Douglas Unit?’

`Douglas Unit, well… it’s still really… it’s all on Lancaster House… it’s… down there you’d have a member of staff and… used to be like the punishment down there, but you would have a member of staff down there… and they would keep their eye on you… well, I’m lucky to be alive I suppose, ‘cause… one day I… I tore a sheet into strips, and I put it round my neck, and I tied it up in several knots. I passed out and then come to again, and… I passed out, and when I come round again, I hear all this noise and I said, `What’s happened?’, they said, `Well you… you’re lucky you’re alive because if the… Nurse so and so hadn’t have been on you would have been dead. She knew that you was doing something, because she could only see your feet through the inspection…’, and… they knew that’s… that I’d done something, so they… had to cut it off, but… they give me oxygen to bring me round, what I mean…’

`Did you have any nurses that you particularly liked?’

`Nurses?’

`Mmm…’
`Oh… in… in Broadmoor you all have… what you call your favourite nurse… and I forget the name of the Sister I used to have… Delia Street [ph], yeah, I had Delia Street [ph], and each patient would have their own favourite members of staff, or Nurse Jury [ph], Juke Box Jury we used to call her… and… other patients would say to you… `If I see you trying to get off with Doreen Scott, you’ve had it because she’s my girlfriend’, and then I had… like the ulcer returned, when I was in Broadmoor, so they put me in the sick bay, and when Delia Street [ph] was leaving… well I managed to get a present for her, and when she came, I gave her a going away, you know, leaving present, and… she came in and she… really had a good old chat with me.’

`Good…’

`Sick bay there… they… used to… more or less like a hospital ward really… but they had one patient there, Emily, she was eighty five… eighty five, and she was deaf, dumb and blind… but when she went to Broadmoor, she could work alright… she… she could see, hear and talk, but… she died at… a couple of hours after I… I went round to say cheerio to everybody when I left, Broadmoor.. and I went to see Emily, and I said, `Ta ta Emily’, and she died I think two hours afterwards. And I think it’s terrible to have a lady of eighty six deaf, dumb and blind, in a place like Broadmoor. Because… she would try to get… had a like a cot bed for her to… but she used to try and climb over the side so they used to have to put a harness on her and tie it… the side, to the bed so she couldn’t hurt herself, and… of course they had to do everything and that for her… and it was a bit disgusting sometimes I think in Broadmoor, you… having other patients that really were mentally ill and they shouldn’t have been there in the first place… ‘cause if you don’t do as you’re told in there, you get some of the… not all the staff, but… you know, like this Ian Baines and they… as I say, he would throw bowls of water over them if they didn’t have a wash, and throw it over them…’

`Mmm’

`And I used to be so mad with him, what I mean, to.. think you could take like that…’

`And… did you… you, in Lancaster House, you all used to have your own room?’

`[Whistling in background] You… oh you had to have your own room… there’s no rooms… no… two rooms… all you had was just a bed in there. You had no furniture, and no nothing, and you had no bedstead, you was on the floor. Had a mattress on the floor and had… bars up at the window… and they would open the shutters during the day time. But it’s more or less you’d say like… a… a prison cell really…’

`Would they lock you in at night?’

`Pardon?’

`Would they lock the doors ever?’

`Oh yeah… they’re locked all the time, twenty four hours… well, yeah, locked up, and you wouldn’t get much sleep really because you’d get… some of the patients would be kicking on the door all night, shouting, and things like that… and… well it was a horrible thing really, but I mean, you know, you couldn’t get out…’

`Yeah…what about if…?’

`And sometimes, when I used to be going off to sleep during the… my eyes would go off into my head, and I used to think that I… I’m never going to see properly. I suppose it was the… the tablets… reaction to the tablets, make your eyes… and I used to see quite a lot of the other patients walking about with their eyes going right up in their heads…’
`Mmm… yes, yes… I… I think that is a side effect of medication…’

`Yeah, it was, yeah…’

`Yeah…’

`Well, if you’re coming off the sleep treatment you have a withdrawal fit…’

`Right… right…’

`And sometimes, in… in the summer time, they would leave you out in the court, all afternoon, and we used to be on some medicine… I forget what it is, and it would make you itch… burn and itch in the sun… and I think… I can’t… think what it is at the moment, but we used to itch like anything, and they used to put Calamine lotion on you... and we used to say sometimes, `Can we go in?’. They’d keep you from about two until about six o’clock, out in the boiling sun, and it was only a small court really… but you keep walking round and round…’

`So what was there to do in the court… just to walk?’

`Just walk around. When I first went there, I had to have… I was on double escort. I had… a staff either side of me when I was walking around the court. Then I had to where you only had the one… know what I mean. Then… then you had it just… where you walked on your own, but if they… we used to look on the ground, and they used to say, `Stop looking for glass’, what I mean… but… we used to look… see what we could get. If you had a magazine, they would remove the pins inside… you know, the middle pages, they would remove all those bits… and you can’t believe what I cut myself with once. Somebody said to me, `If you have a packet of polo mints and… with the holes in, break them in half, and you will… cut… so I done… what was it… done… that… with a polo mint… and they said to me, `What have you cut yourself with?’, but I said, `I’ve already eaten the evidence… [laughs]’. I had it as sweets afterwards. Yeah, you’d be surprised… just with a polo mint…’
`Mmm’

`But… we used to sometimes put the clips above the door so they couldn’t see it. They would search all your room and say `Where is it?’, and then sometimes they’d get it, it was up on… above the door.’

`So you learnt to be quite devious…?’

`[Laughs]…’

`…while you were there? [laughs]’

`Yeah, and… if you… if you used to have your meals in your room, you used to have a cardboard plate to have your dinner on… with a bit of cardboard to eat it with… or a cardboard cup with your tea in there. They would give you two cardboard cups of tea and… I mean trying to… have… have a bit of cardboard to try and eat your dinner with because you’re not… allowed no cutlery when you’re in your room.’

`When would you eat in your room?’

`Pardon?’

`When would you eat in your room?’

`Well, when it was meal times. If you was on punishment, know what I mean… they were on punishment, you know what I mean…’

`And then they would lock you in your room?’

`I got locked in all the time, yeah…’

`Right…’
`The only time you see anybody, is when it’s… they give you your medicine, or… when they… give you your meals, that’s the only time… and… there…’

`And what about if you wanted to go to the toilet?’

`No, you have a pot in your room… you have to go in there… have all that.’

`Right…’

`Very embarrassing it was… over there really because you see, you had male nurses that… they used to give you a bath as well, what I mean… they got… I think you got used to it in the end. I think why they… had to have the male nurses in case they… somebody was really stroppy and I mean some of the girls… sometimes, when I used to have a fight, I used to have about twenty staff trying to hold me down, because they come from York House as well. They ring the bell and they all come over… and get you in that way, but they were very handy with their paraldehyde injections, and they were very painful. You know… and sometimes they would leave the needle in, to make it more painful, what I mean, so they…’

`Right…’

`They didn’t really seem to make me sleep, know what I mean…’

`Right, and then they’d inject you and then just put you in your room?’

`Yeah… but the paraldehyde injections didn’t seem to make me sleep, know what I mean… but… they used to give a lot and that… and…’

`What…?’

`We had another girl there, and… I think sometimes she just wanted to start attention. She would tie her neck up and she would know that the staff would be going to her soon… well one day they put her round the wing. It’s worse round there because, you’ve got the door shut and you can’t hear the staff at all. Well, we was putting on our coats to go to the mini hanger, and they said to this girl, she was in the room, `We’ve got a parcel for you, I’ll be back in a minute…’, so what she done… she tied her neck up, but the nurse that said, `I’ll be back’, was asked to do another job… so when she went back to the wing, the girl was dead. She had… killed her… she didn’t mean to kill herself, but… she thought with the staff saying `I’ll be back with the parcel… she’ll find me’, but they didn’t… and she was dead, she’d gone…’

`Right… oh… if somebody did commit suicide, were the nurses supportive to the other patients, did they explain to you what had happened, or did they…?’

`No I don’t think they really did. Just say… `You might as well, so and so’s committed suicide’, but there was all the fourteen and fifteen year olds that was doing it… the youngsters, youngsters, know what I mean.’

`Right…’

`They was all ages. We even had a woman in there… who was sixty nine years of age, and she was in an old folks home and another patient there, pulled all her hair out the back… Isobel Kay [ph] her name was… and they’d put her in Broadmoor. Now you wouldn’t think a woman, nearly seventy, put her in there… but she was a harmless… and… and we used to have another… girl in there, but… old Betty. She used to make us laugh really, and the staff would say to her, `How are you to Bet… how are you today Betty?’, `Well, I’m better than what I was, but I’m still not so well as I was… when I first came in…’ [laughs], and if any of the staff had gone to the toilet, she’d put `Gone for a wee wee’ on the chair, so they used to have to take in… we used to have some laughs, do you know what I mean…’

`Yes. What was the… did you make friends with other patients?’

`Oh yeah… I had a lot of friends there, yeah, we… sometimes if we… we played Bingo on a Sunday afternoon, and we’d have some good prizes… the patients that would… done the Bingo… you’d have like twenty cigarettes, or a packet of tea, two pound of sugar or… boxes of chocolates, everything like that. And… Ann, she would say to me, `What number do you want?’, and I’d tell her, but she’d bring it up and she hadn’t really got that number, and she would say… and I’d say `House’, and you’d have another girl who would say, `You lot are cheat… are cheating’, and Ann would say, `Do you want a smack in the mouth?’. `No…’, `Shut it…’, what I mean and then… [laughs]… but… though sometimes we used to play Bingo, I played for one of the patients that wasn’t able to do anything for herself… because we had a… a patient there, Joan Barnes and apparently she’d been in a side room at another hospital, and she’d never been out of that room, so when she came to Broadmoor, she didn’t… sit in the chair like we do… she’d sit with her head that way, with her knees in… and they had to teach her how to sit in a chair… properly, but you had to… she was very… she was a bit dangerous to begin with, know what I mean, and she was one of the… patients that Ian Baines [ph] used to chuck the bottle… bowls of water over. She wasn’t well enough to wash herself, know what I mean, but… they used to try and get up, and they just… they all had to sit in the chair… but they locked somebody up for ten years, she never come out the room for ten years where she was. So they sent her to Broadmoor, and yet she… shouldn’t really have been there, what I mean she was… very mentally ill…’

`Mmm… yes…’

`And I used to say, `Joan…’, her name was, `…I’m playing Bingo for you…’, and then I’d say… got house… and they’d give her a bar of chocolate. If she didn’t like it she wouldn’t eat it. Then you get another one, she would eat it quick like anything.’

`Mmm. What other things did you do to keep yourself amused? Like you said you played Bingo…what else?’

`Well I mean… no I mean during the week time, we used to go… you’d go to the mini hanger or you’d go to the OT… or you had pictures on a Sunday. But you just watched the television there really. They had arm chairs, like these, but a bit more upright, to make sure that you wasn’t sitting too comfortable, and you couldn’t go to sleep in the arm chairs… weren’t made so that you could really sit properly in them, know what I mean…’

`Mmm’

`They had them right up like… and you couldn’t really have a sleep in the chair, know what I mean…’

`Right… So…’

`But… eh?’

`If… could you… could you describe a typical day for me at Broadmoor? Like what time would you get up… in the morning?’

`Well you’d get up in the morning you know, I think about seven o’clock I think it was… at seven o’clock. Get washed and get dressed. I… I remember one girl, she… she did… the hot… the hot water was very hot, so she decided to make us all a cup of tea with the hot water out the tap… then one of the Sisters came along and she’d say, `Now you can all tip those cups of tea back down the sink… where did you get the hot water from?’, and Veronica would say, `I got it out from the hot tap’, which she did, what I mean but…’

`And where did she get the tea bags, or tea from?’

`Well she had the tea… she had the key to the locker… where I keep… where… where… but you’re not allowed bottles or anything, but you can have your tea…’

`Right…’
`And she made it like that.’

`Right… ok, so you’d get up about seven and…you’d…?’

`About seven… and what I liked about… sometimes, of an evening time, early in the evening, one of the staff would say to you… `Do any of you fancy chicken and chips?’. If I come round, if you’ve got money, tell me what you would like and I’ll go to the shop outside, I’ll go… and…’, and we used to… all be sitting round with our chicken and chips, or fish and chips, staff and all, we’d all be joining in together, so that was… that was nice to have that.’

`Yes… yes…’

`There was a lot of little… what… what got me about Broadmoor… well, if a… a… men are in prison, and somebody dies, they’re usually allowed to go to their funeral, but you’re not allowed to do that in Broadmoor, because I lost my twin sister, and I lost my… stepfather, and I didn’t go to any of their funerals, know what I mean…’

`That must have been very upsetting for you?’

`I was told not to tell the other patients when my twin sister died, but… I did… I… they said, `What… what was the matter?’, and I said, `Sylvia’s died’, and they was upset about it as well, and they give me some sleeping tablets, know what I mean, because I was very upset… and dad died three months after my twin, so I mean that was…’

`And did… did any of the staff talk to you about how you were feeling?’

`Oh they did, yeah… and what they would do… if… see on… Lancaster House, well and… and York House, they… staff would read your letters before you got them, so therefore if anybody had died, the Matron would come round, and take you on one side in the room, or she come round with the Priest, and she would say to you, `So and so has died’, you know what I mean…’

`Right…’

`But when my father died, he… his letter must have slipped through without being seen, because… I can’t understand mum, she put… `You’ll be glad to know that died… dad died peacefully in his sleep’, he had thrombosis of the leg… travelled to his heart. He was in the RAF for twenty nine years. He died in a RAF hospital. I was so upset about that. Then another time, ‘cause I was in the Army, you had a man came… to see us… ‘cause he’d see ex-Service patients and he used to come and see me. He used to bring me sixty cigarettes in at a time, but he asked to see another patient and she was nothing to do with the Army, but he used to see her, and he used to bring her sixty cigarettes and that… anyway, the… the Matron told him off… said that `You don’t visit other patients that are not ex-Army’…’

`Right…’

`So when he went home, he… he said to his wife, `I don’t feel very well, I’m going to lay down for a while’. Well his wife didn’t go up to him ‘till eleven o’clock, and he was dead. He had… put something round his neck and a pillow over his face, and he had committed suicide, because he was told off… and not to bring other patients… not to visit other patients, only Joan Tugwell, she’s ex-Army.’

`Goodness…’

`And that was… in the newspaper, and that was terrible to see that.’

`Yes…’

`But you think his wife didn’t go near him for four hours…’
`Oh that sounds terrible… that’s terrible…’

`Then she went up at eleven o’clock, she found that he… had committed suicide, you know…’

`So how did…?’

`And he was ever such a nice man.’

`Yeah. How did you find out what had happened to him?’

`Well I… I think the staff told us… Matron…’

`Right…’

`[Inaudible]… you… you… because we did used to have a newspaper to look at, and she said `You’ll see it in there that he… he committed suicide…’. It said in the paper that he’d… had been to Broadmoor to visit ex-Army… patients there, what I mean…’

`You must have felt terrible…?’

`Oh I felt terrible…’

`…when you’d heard? Mmm…’

`I did… ‘cause he was so nice, and I just couldn’t believe it. And sometimes, if… some of the patients never had any vis… any relatives, they would have, is it League of Friends? Or some… some… something like that. They would go up and see them as well. But…’

`So how…?’

`I had…’

`How often could people come to visit you… in Broadmoor?’

`Well you could have a visit every day… and… what they would do, they would let you make a tray of tea, and… and my stomach used to go over ‘cause I knew how I felt towards crockery, and I used… they used to make the tray up and you’d take a tray of tea in, and so you and your visitors could have a cup of tea and that, and… but I used to say… my mum used to keep the cups over that way so I couldn’t get to them, I used to say, `Oh can you just… put…’, it was terrible…’

`And where…?’

`It’s terrible to have a fear of crockery, know what I mean…’

`Mmm. Where did you see your…your visitors?’

`We had a visiting room.’

`Right…’

`And then… my twin sister made friends with a Police Sergeant, and… my twin sister would come with this Police Sergeant, and then one day, when I knew that my twin sister died, I thought I wouldn’t see Irene any more, but she used to come once a month, to visit me, even though Sylvia had died… and she was ever so good to me, but she died with a clot on the brain. Went to the hospital evening time… was dead by three o’clock in the morning…’

`Oh dear…’

`And she was very good… they… there was no restrictions about visitors, know what I mean…’
`Mmm… and…’

`I don’t think… if anybody was on punishment, I don’t… I think they still let them see their visitors, you know what I mean… went straight in your room, you went… undress and straight in your room again.’

`Yes… and how often would your parents come to visit you?’

`I’d see them about once a month I think, both of them, but what used to get me was my… foster mother would come in the morning, the foster parents, and then they’d say at two o’clock, if they… announced your names, you got visitors. And they said, `Joan Tugwell’, and I said, `But my mum and dad came this morning', `But it’s your other mum and dad have come’, know what I mean. And they never clashed. If my… real parent mother, had seen the book that had been signed by Mr and Mrs Smith, they would have known that the foster parents had been…’

`Uh huh…’

`But I managed not to let them know.’

`Right… and did your visitors ever get upset at seeing you in Broadmoor?’

`Yeah… yeah… mum used to cry sometimes… and dad would used to say, `Watcha you old mate, your dad loves you’, what I mean… he’d go like that…’

`Yes…’

`Come with his trilby hat with his little feather. He was my… stepfather, but he was marvellous… he was a marvellous man. He made mum so happy, know what I mean…’

`Yes… yes…’
`This year she died after him, like that…’

`Right… and… you said you had a boyfriend in… in Broadmoor, that you used to go to the pictures…?’

`Yeah, David… well he had… he had a great big scar round his head, and I said to him `What’s happened, why have you got that scar?’, and he was shaking all the time. You had to get his cup of tea and everything for him. Apparently when he was in the Army, they got… told him he’d got to scale down a cliff… and he said he didn’t want to, he was frightened, so while he was climbing down the cliff, the rope snapped, and he… I think he fell 250 feet, he had some terrible… and… they used to come to the mini hanger, and he used to buy me cigarettes or things like that… and then one day somebody said to me `David died…’, and he died, know what I mean of his… head injuries, I think what he had had… but why they sent him to Broadmoor when he’d… he’d had such terrible injuries to his head… because he was shaking all the time, so I used to get his cup of tea and his cheese and that and… and he used to say to me, `When you get out of here, I’ve got a nice wireless for you’. He was always saying that `When we get out…’, what I mean… but…’

`And did… did you have any other boyfriends while you were in there?’

`I had another bloke that I used to sit and snog with at the back of the…when we used to go pictures [laughs]. We’d sit at the back and have a… a kiss… or a kiss and a cuddle at the back there…’

`And what would happen…?’

`But what we used to say, `When you get out we’ll have to meet up’..’

`And what would happen if the staff saw you having a snog?’

`Well they… they… they … they never… they didn’t bother, you know what I mean…’

`Right…’

`You’d have it like in the corridor of the pictures… and you didn’t have to go really if you didn’t want to, but… you couldn’t… you can’t smoke while you’re in the pictures, what I mean… couldn’t smoke like that…’

`And if… so if… if two patients were getting friendly, the… too friendly…?’

`They didn’t bother no…’

`…they didn’t bother?’

`And on York House they used to have a lot of lesbians over there… and they used to shut their eyes to it. They used to say, `Let them get on with it because we’re not… it’s… no… they’re not doing any harm’, what I mean… just [inaudible]…’

`Well… I was interested, you were saying about the special dresses…?’

`Well it’s a ‘galatier’…’

`…at Broadmoor?’

`A dress… well, you could have your own clothing. You have four of everything. If you wanted something out the store room then you had to put something back. But if you wear their dresses, it’s called a ‘galatier’, it’s not called a dress… that is why, when… this girl tried to strangle Sister McGee [ph], I had my hand on her gallatia [ph] to pull her off the Sister…’

`Yes…’
`And last year… I… I did have a letter from Sister McGee [ph], ‘cause Broadmoor got in touch with her, and she’s retired from there, and she wrote to me and she said, `It’s our wedding anniversary as well’, and I had a card right on my birthday, and she said, `I’ll drink an extra glass of champagne, to do for you’. The other week I was out shopping with… one… one of the Sisters… no, one… one of the nurses… no, I don’t remember now… Carer… and lo and behold I saw this sister… coming up Broadmoor… Sister Rogers [ph], and I said to Pippa, `That’s Sister Rogers from Broadmoor’. She looked at me, gave me a big smile, and if I’d been on my own, I would have said `Sister Rogers from Broadmoor’. She used to treat me like a bit of dirt sometimes, ‘cause she used to have a girl there, and… she would say, `Can I have that pair of trousers?’, or something you’d got on… `Can I have it? I’ll swap with you’. So one day, you know, Sister Rogers had me for it… she said `You keep swapping clothes…’, and I said, `Well it’s not… not my fault’, and she was going on and on… so I said to her `One of these days I’ll kill you’, and I just said that. So… I come out the office, I think there was about half of dozen of staff, marched me down to my room, but… all the girls come out the day room and Sister Rogers said `Back in the day room’, and they said, `No, if you touch Joan, we’ll touch you’, what I mean, `’Cause you’re outnumbered’. That’s how you have your mates like that, but they said, `We’re not going to touch her we’re just going to put her in the room’, and they’d put you in a room, what I mean…’

`Right, so the patients…?’

`If sometimes you… if sometimes you… you wasn’t feeling very well… and you were asked to go in your room, you wasn’t allowed to get up when you did feel alright… you had to stay in for all the day…’

`Yes…’

`You’d stay in all day… so `Can I get up?’, they said `No.’ And you had… not punishment, but…’

`Mmm… so you said that the other patients were… trying to help you?’

`Help me, yeah…’

`Yeah, so…?’

`Know what I mean, so `If you touch Joan, we’ll touch you’.’

`Mmm. Would that happen quite a lot, that the patients would support each other?’

`Oh they would, they’d stick up for one another, what I mean… they used to go round…’

`Right…right and…’

`There was only one time, we… there was a nurse and there was a patient in the dining hall, and she said that she was going to attack the… the staff… and she said, `I don’t want none of you, you can all hear… none of you is to go to her aid… this is my show… and I don’t want any of you… get up and there’ll be trouble’, so that’s the only time, I had to sit and watch a member of staff being attacked. And when the staff come in the dining hall, they turned round to me and said, `Joan Tugwell… surprised at you… watching her being beaten up.’ I said `I had no option’.’

`So when you saved Sister McGee [ph], did any of the other patients get angry with you for… for…?’

`No…’

`…going to her rescue?’

`Oh no, I think they were pleased about it, know what I mean… ‘cause I mean… know what I mean… they’re not all… you do get some… girls in there for murdering… people… there was a girl, and… and… when she was sixteen she was at home… and she had very good school mate, you know, and they was… together watching the television at home… and she had something happen to her like a blackout or something, and when she came to, she found out her friend… she’d killed her friend at… when she was… and she couldn’t believe it… and every year, every June, she used to cry her eyes out because she knew that was the day that she killed her friend, and she said she just couldn’t believe it… that girl…’

`Right…’

`And, she used to show us how to do ballet dancing… that was Ann Millet [ph] her name was… and she used to make us quite laugh a lot. Well one day, an inexperienced nurse gave her an injection and crippled her in her leg, and she had to drag her foot off the ground, and I said, `Well can’t you sue her?’, she said, `No, being in Broadmoor I can’t sue her for damages… that is the one who… who bled to death… you know, Ann… when she… well her arms were so full of scars there wasn’t nowhere to put any more of anything…’

`Right, yes…’

`But… she was a bit a favourite with staff, what I mean, she was the… staff pet… I didn’t know why [inaudible]… she was alright… was alright with me, know what I mean…’

`Did you find generally you got on well with the staff?’

`Yeah… yeah… yeah, we did… Doreen Scott, Nurse Scott there… and… the Sis… when I cut my hand, Sister Rogers’ mother… I forget what her name is, she said to her mum, `You go and put Joan’s hand underneath the tap, she’s… she’s cut the tendons clean through’, and I said, `Your mother can leave me alone’, but… and… so I had to have an operation and that…’

`Right… and did you go to a General Hospital to have the operation?’

`No… no… and they had… their own operating theatre there… and… which is very good… though, that Broadmoor… if you was physically ill, they would look after you alright… though… I mean you… you’d see the doctor and he’ll say `Right I’ll give you an operation’, and that, what I mean…’

`Right… and how often did you see a doctor… a Psychiatrist?’

`Well they used to be over there… every day… and I used to have… a favourite doctor, and one day he left Broadmoor, and he became an Officer… a… a Naval Officer… and in… one day I was in the mini hanger, and they said, `Joan Tugwell you’ve got a visit’, so I went up and I said, `Who is it?’, they said, `It’s Dr Marjot [ph]’, and I was the only that… that visited him… visited me… and when he went, I said to the staff `I don’t suppose he brought me anything?’, she said, `He’s brought you two large boxes of chocolates and two hundred cigarettes.’ He was the only one… I was the only one that he… he came to visit…’

`Gosh…’

`And he’d been a doctor all those years, Dr Marjot [ph]. He was a… a Commander in the Royal Navy. He would have been higher up than Prince Andrew, he would have been over him if he’d been on the same ship. That was nice of him to… to come and…’

`That was very kind’

`I must have got on with him somehow, what I mean…’

`Yes… and were there any other doctors that you remember who were particularly nice, or…?’

`No… [both talking together]… I… I can’t [inaudible] any… no… I… I think you only had sort of like the one doctor, and he would… kept… they do a ward round every day… what I mean, you go in the office in… and sometimes they would alter your medicine and that for you. When, in Broadmoor, you… they called `gallery’ at… twenty five past seven, you had to go to bed at twenty five past seven… but what you’d do… you would have your medicine, but one girl would keep a cigarette alight… ‘cause they… the staff thought they were all out, and she would go in the toilet, so each time, when you had your medicine, you’d go in the toilet, say `I’m just going to the toilet before I go to bed’, and we was all… having a puff in there. If sometimes the girls didn’t want their sleeping tablets, they would pass them all along to somebody at the back.. if you didn’t have it… you know, they’d… make out they’d taken it and then, pass it on to another patient if they knew they…’

`Would the nurses watch you taking your medication?’

`They usually do, what I mean, but they did… not all the time because I mean they could make out they’re putting their hand… a tablet in their mouth and have it in their hand, know what I mean… and they would pass it to another patient that really wanted… and I tell you another thing we done at Christmas time, you wouldn’t believe it, but… a girl said, `If you drink some perfume… scent… it can make you drunk’, and we was all in the toilet drinking this perfume… oh, it made me feel sick, but she got drunk on it though.’

`Right [laughs].’

`Yeah…’

`Oh it sounds like you had some good laughs as well as… some difficult times in Broadmoor. Ok, thanks, we’ll stop here for a bit because… the tape…’
`Yeah, can we stop a minute, yeah…?’

`Yeah, sure…’

[End of DVC Pro tape 2]

[Start of DVC Pro tape 3 – VHS tape 1 continues]
[Camera: `C905/14 tape number three’]

`Ok Joan… you were telling me before about how you used to cut your arms. I mean did they ever try to do anything to stop you doing that?’

`Well they used to try and stop you do… doing that. They used to put you in your room and that… that was… Ann Millet [ph] and me… they… used to put our arms in plaster cast, both our arms, from the shoulder to your finger tips so that you couldn’t do it, and I still used to try and break the window, even though I had plaster cast, I used to go like that…’

`Uh huh…’

`Ann used to be able to bite hers off… she’d actually bite the plaster.’

`Would they put both your arms…?’

`Both… in the arms, so they had to do everything for you, and sometimes if you went on a visit, you’d be sitting like this, with two arms, know what I mean… and then mum would say `Ooh, what have you done to your arms?’, and I’d say, `Well they just put plaster cast.’ Once, I… when I was in the mini hanger, there… I went in the wash place and there was a china cup in there, and I broke that, and I cut that hand so bad… it took them… an hour and a half to stitch it up because it was that bad.’

`Gosh…’

`And… I know now that I’ve… I’m… eventually going to lose this hand because it’s getting smaller and smaller. They did say it was disintegrating. I think it’s all the injuries I’ve done. It’s not really because you want to do the injuries, because sometimes, if you suffer a bit from claustrophobia or… as I… and you were shut in a room, what I mean you… be surprised what you’d do…’

`Mmm…’

`Although I just can’t believe that I put my hand through a glass window pane. I couldn’t do that now, but… you just put it through and… you don’t really think of the injuries and that you’re going to get… and… we would… take a bit of glass in and we used to put it… under our tongues, so that the staff used to say, `You… open your mouth…’, and you… they couldn’t see nothing but it was under your tongue, what I mean… and… you would go in your room and you’d cut yourself and that and then… the staff would come in and find you.’

`Did many of the women used to cut themselves?… Or was it…?’

`No, not many, really. It seemed to be the same ones all the time. Ann Millet [ph] was… the one because she absolutely… was absolutely covered from underneath to her arms up… with cuts all over the place. I… wondered how she could cut herself any more. But she cut herself once too often and… she died… you know, the staff went in to give her her tea, and found out she was dead, and… in a big pool of blood, from her arms…’

`Right…’

`I don’t think she meant… she didn’t think she was going to bleed to death I don’t think… know what I mean…’

`Right. Right. So you had quite a lot of marks on your arms and a lot of scars?’
`Yes… yes… yes… yes…’

`Yeah?’

`And… sometimes, when I used to go to Hailsham, you’d get a lot of children would say to other children… and they would be all staring at my arms, you know what I mean? And it’s a bit of embarrassment really because… when the weather’s hot, you don’t always want a long sleeved… you know, it gets… so if I wear a short sleeved jumper then… people will say to me `What have you done?’, and I’ll say, `Oh, I had an accident…’, even… even though I hadn’t, know what I mean, but I… never used to say to anybody `I cut myself’.’

`Did you ever have to have any skin grafts or anything?’

`Yeah, I was… I had the tattoos taken off. We used to… do our own tattoo. One girl would show me how to do it. She’d put `Joan’ on my arm, and then… what we did, we’d have an ashtray and we would spit in there, and you’d get the charcoal… we used to get that from the OT, they never knew we’d took it, but we saw it and that… and we used to spit in the ashtray, go round like that, get it all black… then you have a needle, with a bit of cotton in and you’d get it in this black stuff, and you’d… go like that, with something… like as I say, like jelly [???], and then you keep pricking it, all the time until it goes numb, and then when it goes numb you know you’ve done it. Sometimes, the arms the next day… would be… be quite red, you know what I mean… and the staff would say, `You’ve been… tattooing yourself again’, know what I mean…’

`And would they get angry… I mean would they punish you for doing that?’

`No, they never used to get angry really, not there I don’t think. I mean because, this girl that used… done mine, she used to do her own as well, but I had… Joan, Sylvia, Mum and Dad on there… and on my fingers, something `Love’ and then… there… across there… [laughs]…’

`And did you… what made you decide to have them removed?’

`Well I had them when I come out of the hospital… it… I went to… when I went to Hellingly… I had to go to East Grinstead, the Burns Unit… and I had to go there. One at a time, do the… they do one arm at a time, take all the skin off, know what I mean, and… you’d have quite a bad arm really. It was quite sore when it come round. Used to spend one day at the… hospital, and the… the staff, from Hellingly would take me in the morning and they’d come and fetch me in the afternoon, or evening time they’d take me back home again, and then I’d have the other arm done. They didn’t quite do… the… arm properly, the second one, know what I mean… you still can see that you’ve got tattoos on. I think… I mean you feel ashamed of people seeing your arms but… I… I got so used to seeing them myself, I don’t always think about them until somebody’ll say to me, `Well what have you done to your arms?’, if… you don’t know what to say, what I mean… and… you don’t tell… everybody you’ve been in Broadmoor because… I got a friend in Hailsham, Barbara Grinham [ph], and… I said to her one day… she said to me one day, `I tell people that you’ve been in Broadmoor and they don’t hold it against you’, I said, `If I hear you telling anybody, you’ll be in trouble’, ‘cause I used to wonder when I was round, round meadow road, why so many people… knew that I’d been in Broadmoor, because it’s not a place… ‘cause I mean… what it is, I mean, we didn’t have to be like some of these men, they… do murders and they go to Broadmoor, and they think you’re all the same… they think you all… have done a murder and… and dangerous, but… I wasn’t really. I didn’t do a murder and I would never do one. As I said, I saved a life, but… I said to this friend, `If I hear you telling people, you’ll be in trouble, what I mean…’, so I haven’t `phoned her up for about eight weeks, so I’m not going to have somebody that tells… ‘cause… people think you’re dangerous, that’s what they automatically think. I’m not dangerous, but people think I am… or sometimes the people will say to me, `I wouldn't like to get on the wrong side of you’, and I said, `Well I wouldn’t advise you to… but I don’t go looking for trouble and I don’t beat people up’, know what I mean… but…’

`Do you… do you think a lot of the women in Broadmoor were there wrongly?’

`Lonely?’

`You know, do you think a lot of the women shouldn’t have been there… in Broadmoor?’

`Oh [inaudible] [both talking together]… I mean some of them… they was really mentally ill. I mean as… as I say, this one that she… had in the infirmary, she was deaf, dumb and blind… been like that for years… and she’d… she’d never been in Broadmoor. She should have been in like… in a nursing home or somewhere… somewhere they could look after her… I mean, she had to be fed, they had to do everything for her. She would try to get out her chair, and… climb onto the table so she had to be restrained, in bed and also in the arm chair to stop her from hurting herself…’

`Right…’

`But… as I said, they… some of them are… are real… so really mentally handicapped, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, ‘cause when I was in the mini hanger, I was in charge of quite a few of them round the table. I had to keep them in their job. I had to make sure they was doing the job properly, and make sure they’d got enough to do, because they was… they was too mental to… to do it. I think Broadmoor needs to be sorted out really, put… I mean they’ve got the good in with the bad… what I mean.’

`Right…so were you… you were in a position of trust then… [inaudible]?’

`Well they did used to… they used to say to me… `Will you… will you… want you to take charge of the table…?’. Seem to be… everywhere I’ve been I seem to have been… asked if I would… you know, take charge.’

`Right…’
`The same happened with Hellingly, I’ll tell you in a minute, but I… they put me in charge there of the shin pads. I keep charge of everything… you know…’

`Right. So when you were in Broadmoor, did… what… what was happening to your agoraphobia all this time?’

`What happened?’

`Mmm’

`Well, I… I mean, when I had… electrical treatment, that seemed to get me over it. Its got me over it… but now I have the back problem so… I still can’t really walk the streets now. I mean I feel bitter towards it… to think that’s how my illness first started… agoraphobia… and panic turns… and now… I have to suffer with my back, so…’

`Right. So when you were in Broadmoor, you didn’t have agoraphobia, or any panic attacks?’

`No I didn’t really seem to have that, what I mean. Sometimes… well sometimes you… you’d feel a bit of a panicky turn when you were in your room, and then… I mean you’d tell the staff though, you know, and they’d come and give you a bit of medicine or something… better…’

`And… and the treatment you had at Broadmoor was ECT?’

`ECT… and if sometimes they couldn’t get the vein, they used to give it to me straight. They used to put white stuff on… and then put a thing over, and then switch on, when you were still…’

`And can you… [both talking together]?

`I didn’t really feel… feel it when they switched on, know what I mean?’

`So you can’t remember how that felt? You just remember the headache afterwards?’

`Afterwards you had a very bad headache afterwards, and you… you’re face would be very red… and they used to do quite a lot of people there… and you’d be surprised what electrical treatment can do… because some of the patients are really mentally handicapped… can’t do anything, and when they’ve had, say a course, so like that was six to eight… electrical treatments, you’d be surprised how much better they were. I mean a lot of people say that they shouldn’t have the electrical treatment, but I’ve seen it do wonders, and… when I was in St John’s hospital, we had two… female patients there, and they was… very mentally ill… and they had leucotomies… cut their hair… and… one went home and another one used to go from work from St John’s… and yet…before that, they couldn’t do anything, they was too ill. And that done them good as well… leucotomies.’

`And… and what other treatment did you have in Broadmoor?’

`In Broadmoor?’

`Yeah…’

`Well I used to have a lot of tablets, medicine. I had parald… no… I’m still on that now, Promazine… they… I think… they call that sparine and then they had another medicine that we was on… so if you went out in the sun, the sun would really… make you irritate and scratch and be red and that… and… Tuinol at night time… they give you… six [inaudible]… and what gets me is… you’re all asleep, and they’ll come along about twelve, or half past twelve in the morning, and wake you up to give you another one. They would wake me up, they would say to me, `Come on, wake up… we’ve got your sleeping tablet here’, I said, `Well I was asleep’…’
`What…?’

`But you… you had to have a… a repeat.’

`What would happen if you refused to take the medication?’

`Well they’d come and shove it down you. I mean they’d get hold of you… put it down you some way…’

`Right… right…’

`As I say… I think it was a bit ridiculous waking you up to put you back to sleep again… [laughs].’

`And… I think you mentioned before, you had sleep treatment?’

`Sleep treatment, six weeks at a time… yeah…’

`Right…’

`When you first go on it… you see the doctor and he’ll say `Right, I think I’ll put you on sleeping tablets’, and the nurse would say, `Right, go and get undressed, and get into bed’. You’d have an ordinary bed in…, but on the floor, but not a bed stead, and they would come and give you six grains of Tuinol [ph] and then therefore, every four hours, for six weeks. So… as I say… for forty two days… six hundred and forty two… I was asleep for forty two days and I had that about six times, so I… I spent quite a lot of… time asleep, what I mean…?’

`Do you feel…?’

`I just can’t really believe it, it was…’

`Yeah… did you feel that treatment did you any good?’
`I don’t think so really. I think we got back to our old tricks again afterwards, know what I mean…? But… they… after a while they… they cut you down gradually off of these sleeping tablets, you know what I mean… instead of giving you two they give you one when they start to cut down, and then you would have a withdrawal fit. Everybody has one of those. It’s a nasty experience when you come round, you don’t know what’s happened and they would say to you, `You’ve just had an epileptic fit’, and I said, `Why was that?’, they said `Because you’ve come off the tablets’, and sometimes you have it where your eyes go right up in your head. I used to be walking around with my eyes up in my head, and I used to think `I’m never going to be… right again… I’m always going to have my eyes up in my head’, and I think that was in…’

`Did they give you any medication? Did they give you anything…?’

`They did sort of give you something make… you know, to…

`Yeah…’

`…react… you know make…’

`Yeah…’

`’Cause you was having a reaction to the medicine.’

`Right’

`But I used to see quite a lot of other patients. They’d be standing in the corridor and their eyes… right up like this and I… I said, `What’s the matter with you?’, what I mean…’

`How did you get out of Broadmoor in the end?’

`Pardon?’
`How did you get out… of Broadmoor?’

`Well because I saved Sister McGee’s life. It’s… it’s… funnily enough, I… to save her life, and then… I had to Dr Blue [ph], she came up and… Severalls Hospital… and… the first thing she said to me was, `You saved a Sister’s life, are you proud?’, and… when I was going to come out of Broadmoor, the… somebody said to me `You won’t last five minutes’. I’ve been out twenty three, nearly twenty four years I’ve been out now… and I have… seen a member of the staff from Broadmoor, in Hailsham… I just couldn’t believe it when I… looked at her and I said, `Do you…’, my project worker, Pippa, `…that’s Sister… umm… what was her name, I forgot it again now? From… Broadmoor… Sister Rogers’. I said, `That’s Sister Rogers’. Had I been on my own I think I would have spoke to her and said, you know had… told her how I was getting on and that, but I mean she’d probably be surprised. ‘Cause when you come out of Broadmoor you have two members of staff with you to take you to another hospital, they still don’t trust you on your own. They took me to Severalls Hospital…’

`Right, and… so how long had you been in Broadmoor all together?’

`Thirteen years, two months…’

`Thirteen years, two months?’

`Thirteen… thirteen years, two months, yeah…’

`And before that you’d been ten… ten years in… St John’s?’

`I had… I had eight and a half years at St John’s. I had… thirteen and a half years in Broadmoor. I had one year, fifteen months in Severalls Hospital, and ten years in Hellingly.’

`How did you feel about leaving Broadmoor?’
`At Broadmoor?’

`Yeah, about when you had to leave?’

`[Both talking together] I missed it to begin with really because… you… you… you… you’re more or less on your own. You’ve got to… you’ve got to fend for yourself, you know… ‘cause in Broadmoor everything’s more or less done for you… your meals are there and everything, what I mean. I went into Severalls Hospital… I didn’t like it very much there, they… they wanted me to come out practically as soon as I’d been there. You know, I used to go drinking a lot… and… one day I… got drunk and I went back to Severalls Hospital and there was a girl, she knew I had a lot of self inflicted injuries from Broadmoor… and she said to me, `I bet you haven’t got the guts to cut yourself… with a razor blade… I’ve put four razor blades on your bed’. I went into my bedroom and I saw the razor blades. I went like that… and… I passed out in less than… well I think it was about ten seconds I think I was out for the count. I think the other patients gave this girl who gave me the razor blades, they gave her a good hiding because she’d given me the razor blades… you know…’

`What was…?’

`I was out for the count, I mean I… I… I stopped breathing, I had to have the kiss of life to bring me back…’

`Right… and did the staff punish you for that or what was the staff’s reaction?’

`No they… no, I went to… I went to a General Hospital… and I remember coming round about a couple of minutes, and they said, `You’ve got twenty eight stitches in your arm’, then I came back, and I went to a hospital called Black Notley [ph], and I had my arm up in a contraction, this one… and the other one was having blood transfusions. Then the domestic would say in the mornings to you, `There’s a cup of tea there’, and I’d be like that, and I said `Well how can I feed myself when I’ve got both arms up?’, and… I think I must have been in intensive care or something, ‘cause my real mother, she ‘phoned up… three times in one day. I heard the Sister saying `Yes, Mrs Fletcher’, ‘cause we didn’t take my stepfather’s name, us girls… `Yes, Mrs Fletcher, you nearly lost Joan’, know what I mean… and mum ‘phoned up, I think it was three or four times that day, and she’d… keep ‘phoning up and make sure I was alright. She couldn’t come to visit me then, because we was too far away, but… I was in… in a hospital for several days, and when I come out… and I had like a ball come up, like a round ball come up in my arm… and I had to go back and they had to cut it open to get the stuff out, what I mean… and I had to have my arm back up in a contraction again. I would never’ve done that if I’d been sober. I mean you really have to be drunk, I mean… ‘cause you wouldn’t have the guts to do it otherwise.’

`So had you left the hospital to go to the pub or something?’

`Yeah, we used to go to… you was allowed to go out, and… we used to… I used to go drinking, I used to get drunk… and sometimes it… not because I wanted to get drunk. Sometimes if I had these fears, the panic turns, you know, that would help you a bit. I… I don’t think now, but I must admit, I’ve got two bottles of sherry in my fridge, in case… if I thought I ever suffer from… a fear… you know, phobia, fears and panics, I would probably have a drink to make me forget, although I know I mustn’t drink, know what I mean…’

`Have… I’m interested in how you found Severalls after Broadmoor, because you said you were allowed to go out at Severalls?’

`Oh yeah, more or less. They didn’t really look after you very well in Severalls] Hospital, you had to do… sort of everything yourself, know what I mean? You can’t… they was in Colchester that was. That’s where we was born, in Colchester… and that would be there…’

`And did you have your own room, at Severalls?’

`Yeah, we had our own rooms, yeah… that’s how I come to cut myself, because… I’d put… she’d put the razor blades on my bed… there…’

`Right… right… and did you have… OT and work?’

`I think we did, I can’t quite remember now, what on earth they did. I was only there fifteen months, but they kept wanting to push me out all the time… and I knew I wasn’t quite ready to come out… so therefore… I got in touch with my foster mother, and I came back to Uckfield… and then they… I managed to get into Hellingly Hospital.’

`So you came home for a little while?’

`I… come back for ten years… [laughs]… from Severalls into Hellingly Hospital ‘cause I… I wasn’t… I still wasn’t well enough sort of to be outside, I knew that, but… I don’t… from Hellingly we used to go down… walk all the way into town, do your shopping, all the way back… and… well, some of the staff were very good in Hellingly, but… the… the other ward that we was on, the staff… all they thought about was playing snooker, table tennis, and watching the television, and I would say, `You’re lucky you get paid to play games and watch the television’, like if we was watching a good film on a Sunday afternoon, along would come a nurse, and turn it over to football, and I would say, `Well, we was watching the film’, and then she’d turn round and she’d say to everybody, `You wasn’t watching that film was you, you want to watch… football’. I said `They don’t know what they’re doing or they’d tell you…’, know what I mean…’

`Yes… and… just to go back to Severalls, were the staff… did you find the staff helpful there?’

`Well, they were helpful but they… wasn’t there much, you know, they seemed to disappear all the time. We’d sort of be… sort of be left on your own… I can’t really remember a lot about Severille’s… ‘cause I mean that was… twenty… twenty three, twenty four years ago, know what I mean…’

`Right, so… so then you left Severille’s, and then you went back to Upfield?’

`I went to… I went… I went to Severille’s and I come out… and the same day I ‘phoned up my foster mother and she said, `If you come back to Uckfield, I’ll see if I can ‘phone up the doctor from Hellingly and see if they’ll take you in’. So, they said they would take me in… to Hellingly and… err… we used go to the OT from there… and we used to do shin pads for… foot… for footballers and that to go underneath their socks, and we used to… we used to have to glue them first… then sit them down on some foam, and… then if the… nurse was going to go on holiday, he’d leave me completely in charge. He’d just say to… `Make sure they bake them like in the oven…’, they had a thing… hot thing to bake… to make them round, and then, `…make sure they’re doing their work properly… and… and can you do the packing and supervise them all?’ what I mean, so I had to supervise the other patients and…’

`Was that after you’d been at… at Hellingly for a while?’

`I was in there for ten years, and…’

`Right…’

`Well it wasn’t really my cup of tea, you know… not really. [Pause]…’

`But again, it was interesting that you were put in a position of responsibility…’

`I was put in… yeah…’

`…like in Broadmoor you were…?’

`And when the man used to come up from the factory he used to say to me… say to her… `She’s so quick on those shin guards’, you know… I used to do a lot, and at Christmas time we used to get a… a Christmas box from the factory, and well I would get really nice… lot of cigarettes and that, what I mean… it was a thank you from the man. He said that `You do them so good’, but I used to… used to have to make sure they glued them properly otherwise they wouldn’t stick down on the foam… if they wasn’t glued properly… and…’

`And did… did the other patients used to do what you told them to do?’

`Yeah they did… and I had… I remember… I had another boyfriend there… John Muir [ph] his name was… and he used to be a [inaudible]… years ago, he used to make hats for film stars and that… and he used to shake about a lot, and I didn’t realise he’d had Parkinson’s disease, ‘cause when I used to take him up to my room, if we wanted to watch the telly or go and have a cup of tea, I used to say to him, `You’re spilling tea all over my arm chair’. I didn’t know he had Parkinson’s disease, but when he died… I realised then. He died… he… he was such a nice man, he’d always give me ten pound twice a week. He’d give all the other patients cigarettes you know, they used to say, `Have you got a cigarette John?’, he’d always be good to them. But… he kept going in and out of Hellingly and one day the staff at Hellingly said to me, `Could you go up to Horham [ph] ward? You’re boyfriend’s up there and he’s in such a bad state, he’s asking to see you’. So I go up and see him. You had a canteen there, so like after supper you could go down the canteen, you could have a cup of tea, lemonade… or… sandwiches if they’ve got them, or rolls… buy… chocolates and things like that… be down there… and, well you could go into town if you wanted to because… they didn’t really know where you were and that, what I mean…’

`Right… and what…?’

`And then sometimes… every Monday night, our ward would go to the pub on a Monday night… another ward would go on a Tuesday night. Each ward had their own night to go drinking, know what I mean… and they used to take us in the mini bus… [inaudible] [both talking together]…’

`Did the staff go with you as well?’

`Used to have two members of staff with you, what I mean…’

`And they’d take you to the pub?’

`Take… take us to the pub, yeah. We had this chap there, his name was Walter Denton [ph] and he was a lovely chap really, and… they… when the Hellingly started to close down, they sent him to a place in Eastbourne… and… he used to come up to Helinglai, as a day patient, maybe once or twice a week… well one day he went missing. He didn’t arrive home, and… when I was in… in Hellingly, the newspaper come and took a story off me… and then I put in there that Walter Denton [ph] was missing, and the Police would come up, searching all day long, looking in the woods to see if he was laying in the woods and that… or if he was in the ditches anywhere. Anyway, one day I went shopping, in Hailsham from Hellingly, and I was sitting on the seat waiting for… another nurse to… to do some shopping, and a woman came up to me, and she approached me and she said to me, `You’re Joan Tugwell, I saw your photograph in the newspaper… don’t worry about Walter Denton, he’s very much alive, he was picked up by Social Services and taken to Brighton.’ Well I had to get in contact with the Police and they came to me and they said `Who was this woman?’. I said `She was quite sane, she… she just came up to me in the Co-op, and said to me `You’re Joan Tugwell, I saw your… photograph in the newspaper’, and she said… knew where… that Walter had been picked up by Social Services at Brighton’, but I don’t know what happened then, I think they stopped the search then. A bit awkward once as… not long after I’d been to Hellingly… used to walk up the road to get a bus into town. I was with the other girl, and she came up to me, and she said, `Where does this bus go?’, I said, `Oh, into Hellingly’, but anyway, she carried on walking, must have walked into town. Anyway, when we got back, I went to her ward and they’d found out there was a girl missing, and I said to them, that there was a girl… it was her birthday and all that day… she came up to me and asked if that was the bus going into Hellingly, I said, `Then she walked into Hailsham… she walked into Hailsham…’ and apparently what she’d done, she went to Boots The Chemist, and bought some… sort of stuff, you know, detergent or something… though we nicked the stuff… and she drunk it all and she’d… she… when they found her, all they found was a hand… well they… it was a…’

`Oh…’

`It’d been eaten up most of it… and they found her, know what I mean… and of course the Police questioned me. I said, `Well, I was with Eric Stone, he used to… the other one had done the film’, I said, `And she asked us… if that was the bus going to Hailsham?’, I said, `…but she carried on walking instead of standing at the bus shelter’, and she had actually gone into town to get some stuff from Boots to… kill herself, know what I mean… it was her birthday and all that day…’

`That’s terrible…’

`They had all her cards on the mantelpiece. They questioned me a lot about it. There was another time, in Hellingly, there was… a girl, she had this anorexia… and… they couldn’t get her to eat anything, so they sent her to another hospital. Anyway, when she came out of the hospital, she came back to Hellingly. Anyway, there was two men, and they said, `We’re going to… going for a… going to get a taxi, we’re going to Beachy Head’. They asked this girl if she wanted to go with them, so she said, `Yes, I’ll go.’ When they got the taxi back the taxi driver thought it was very suspicious that they hadn’t had the girl with them. There was two men, they said, `Where is the girl?’. They said they don’t know where she is… I think she jumped over Beachy Head, but the Police asked them, did they push her over? And they said, `We didn’t push her over, she went over… herself’, what I mean…’

`Oh dear… that sounds terrible…’

`I would never go to Beachy Head now, I think… I don’t… [???]… because I feel… it’s not because you want to really jump over, you feel something draws you to do it. I’d never be able to go on a ship now because I’d feel I’d want to jump over the side even though I didn’t want to…’

`Yes…’

`Your nerves really… agoraphobia and fear… fears and that… ruins your life, what I mean, because you don’t really get over it, not properly…’

`So Beachy Head was quite… I mean Eastbourne is quite near Hellingly…?’

`Well yeah… yeah, well they’ve got… they tell you it’s not far and at… Beachy Head, they tell… well you get people from all over the world come and… jump over there…’

`Yes… yes…’

`But… no I won’t go there…’

`Yeah…’

`’Cause I mean some people will stand right on the edge and all the… [inaudible]…’

`But…when you were in Hellingly and you used to go out… where would you go?’

`Well we used to go shopping, we used to go into town… do some shopping, or sometimes we’d go in a café and have something to eat or, I mean, or… a cup of tea and that…’

`And…?’

`We used to get the hospital… they used to have a special bus that would… go into Hailsham from Hellingly, it was a hospital one. You had to pay and that, but…’

`And would you have to have staff go with you?’

`No, we used to go on our own. Well we all… well I… I went with a young bloke and when we was coming back he… he said to me, `Look what I got inside my coat’, and he had a proper gun… great big pistol… and he’d just been and bought some bullets… and I said, `Is that a real gun you’ve got in there?’, but they didn’t know, he was on Parkhurst… Park House at Hellingly and he said, `Next time I go home I’ll bring you a gun’. I said, `I don’t think I’ll want it.’ But they never did… they never found out that he had the gun on him, but… in Hailsham it was very easy to go and buy and gun I think… and the bullets, if you’ve got the money, what I mean… they didn’t… seem to question him but I think he… he said he had some at home… and he said, `Would you like a gun?’, I said `No…’.’

`Oh dear…’

`I didn’t want one partic… but I couldn’t understand because… I was in my fifties, and he was only in his twenties, but he seemed very fond of me, what I mean… he was very proud with me, sat with me on the coach and that and… and that and he said `I’ll see you again sometime’, and I said `Well, mind your gun doesn’t slip out your jacket…’ [laughs]’

`[Laughs] The wards at Hellingly were they mixed or were they men and women?’

`No, you’d have men and women.’

`Right…’

`…on the wards and it was terrible, if you wanted to go to the loo you’d got to queue up, and you got men and women queuing up, know what I mean… used to be like that for…’

`For the same toilets? They used the same toilets?’

`The same toilets as we did… men and women shared the same. And…’

`What about the sleeping arrangements?’

`Well I had my own room. They had a very small dormitory… but most of them did have their own rooms and that… and I used to have budgerigars when I was there… I used to have Billy and… and Sammy, the two budgerigars, and… when I went to my mum’s funeral when she eventually died, I had to ask the nurse if she would look after the budgies, but she turned the heating off, it was so cold, but they were still alive, but… I was quite annoyed with her. I come back downstairs and… `You’ve left the birds in the freezing cold room… but you should have left the heating on with the window open’, but… umm…’

`Would they…?’

`Sometimes you used to have… some patients come from other wards and there used to be… you know, they used to be… very aggressive and that, what I mean. You’d get them, they’d come out and they’d start throwing the crockery and that all over the place, and you had to sort of be careful.’

`Uh huh…’

`Then they were putting them in their room and so and give them some medicine and that, but…’

`Yeah… would…’

`One of them’s... you… they seem sometimes they could get the better of you, so if… when I… if somebody had touched me I used to go to hit them back and the staff would say to me, `Don’t hit them’. I said, `Well, she’s just hit me, so I’m going to hit her back’. She kicked my ankle as well… kicked my shins, so I hit her back, what I mean. I used to get into trouble for retaliating back, but I didn’t see why I should be hit and not be… hit back, know what I mean…’

`No… no…’

`Because… they would know… and this one girl, she was… all the time just… heavily sedated, but she used to come round the… we used to have like a corridor to have your meals, and she’d be sitting on a table on her own. She would throw everything your way, like my way… so I used to throw it back and the staff used to say to me, `Don’t throw it back to her’. I said, `Nurse, she’s threw her crockery over to me… I throw it back to her’, and she knew better, ‘cause she used to throw it to the people in front or at the back of me, so I’m… I’m a… I’m a person… I… I don’t know… if anybody hit me I have to hit them back, what I mean, I… I…’

`Did the staff never take your side and tell her?’

`No not really, they used to take her side really. They used to say to me, `You shouldn’t do it’, and I used to say, `Well why should I let… people do that to me?’, ‘cause I know… one girl she kicked me on the leg there, and I hit her on the shoulder and she was in an arm chair. She went flying with the arm chair, and she was out for the count for eighteen hours, they kept asking me what I’d done. I said, `I just… she kicked me… hard on the leg, so I punched her’, I said, `…and she went flying with the arm chair’. They said, `We can’t get her to come round’. I said, `That way you’ll have… we’ll have a bit of peace then…’, though she did come round eventually.’

`And did they punish you in any way or…?’

`No… no… didn’t punish me…’

`Yeah…so on the ward at Helinglai…there were separate bedrooms, and then you shared the washing facilities?’

`Well they… they… the bedrooms you didn’t have… the men wasn’t in… you… they had their own room, the men…’

`Right…’
`And I felt sorry for… one of the night staff, ‘cause sometimes there’d only be one staff on… and a girl would… had a fit once. We was all asleep… and the Sister couldn’t leave her to get in touch with another member of the staff, so the girl died… in the fit, she didn’t come round. That’s… the… Sister felt terrible about it, but she said, `I had to stay with her’, and I said, `Well why didn’t you wake us up?’. She had to stay with her ‘cause she was having this bad fit, but she died in the fit. I think she swallowed her tongue or something like that, I… I think they used to put a key in to try to stop them swallowing their tongue…’

`So at night there would just be one nurse… on duty?’

`Sometimes only one on…’

`Right…’

`Or sometimes you’d have two…’

`Right…’

`But I dare say the staff at Hellingly used to kip well. I mean you used to go out, to the toilet and they’d be fast asleep and I used to say to them… in the morning time, `When I went to the toilet you was all fast asleep’. `No we wasn’t we knew…’, I said, `No you didn’t, you was all fast asleep’, know what I mean… [laughs].’

`What about during the day time, how many staff would be on?’

`Well you’d have a few… you had a couple of men and a few female nurses, but we used to have one nurse… I don’t know if she was Chinese, or what she was, LuLu… she was lovely, and when we used to beat eggs, she used to say to us sometimes, `Would you like a fried egg?’, ‘cause if she wasn’t on, the other staff wouldn’t bother cooking the eggs, you know, we wouldn’t get them at all, they just… stay in the larder… and then sometimes she’d get some cheese, and if you had jacket potato, she’d say, `Would you like some cheese, you know, in there…?’, and…they… actually they stopped her from doing it, told her she shouldn’t look after us like that. She… really spoilt us, I mean she… but they told her off for doing that.’

`So you didn’t like the staff much at Hellingly?’

`I liked some of them, not all of them no… they… no, I think… umm…’

`How… how did…?’

`Some of… some of the wards they was… very good, they, you know… on the elderly peoples’ ward they really looked after them well. You know, they really were… what… you know…’

`Mmm… How…’

`But not on our ward, and they don’t like it if you know what’s going on. They don’t like it if you can stick up for yourself. They like you… they like to do things that they shouldn’t do, and don’t like you to see it, or… remark on what they’d done, you know, as wrong. They don’t like it if you… say, `Well you done so and so’, they’d say, `How did you know?’.’

`Yeah… so were they very different, the staff from the staff at Broadmoor?’

`Oh, the staff were very different altogether…’

`Yeah…’

`’Cause I mean… I think even in Broadmoor but… I think they really did care about you there, what I mean. As I say, if you was physically ill, they soon get the sur… the doctor and you see the surgeon and you have an operation… didn’t neglect you or anything like that… but, in Hellingly they did have some very nice staff, but not on Thelma ward where I was…’

`And were you on the same ward for the whole time?’

`I was on Thelma ward. No, I went to… Lime ward, I was on that one to begin with… then I went to Thelma ward, and… there used to be an elderly patient there, and she would never go to bed for the staff. She’d always go to bed for me. They would say to me, `Can you go down the little day room and see if Agnes will go to bed for you, because she won’t go for us’. And I used to go to her, `Agnes… and… ‘, and it… all the way round and she would point to all the bit… all the way round, and eventually I would get her into the small dormitory, and she would get to bed and the staff would say to me, `Thank you very much, but she won’t come for us.’ There’s another time, Joan Castledine… I got very friendly with another patient on… Thelma ward, and… her… her daughter, you know, used to take me and Joan out, you know, take their daughter… take their daughter out and me with her… and sometimes on a Saturday night I would… well I would go and get eggs, sausages from town and that, and cook, Joan and me, we used to have a nice tea… and they used to let me do that… but eventually she had it where she… had cancer of the stomach and she went to Eastbourne District General, she died… but her… her daughter still used to come to see me, and even Agnes, the one that wouldn’t go to bed, when her people used to come in, they used to go into a little day room and they used to call me down there any say, `You know, mum likes you’. I said, `Well if she won’t go to bed for the staff she goes for me’, and they used to bring me a lot of stuff, and they used to come and see me after she died.’

`Right…’

`And so I think I must have been the motherly type… [laughs]’

`Yes… what about your relationship with other people on the ward? Did you have other friends on the ward?’

`Oh we did have friends. We had another bloke there, was from Broadmoor, Jerry his name was. I felt sorry for him really because… he hadn’t told anybody where he’d been, and the staff had a… a party… not the staff from our ward but the others had… had a party in the little… little room… and this big man come out and he was drunk, and he said to Jerry, `I… I know you Jerry… you went to Broadmoor because you tried to kill somebody’, and Jerry’s face went red, and I said, `Oh, don’t go for him’. `Oh…’ he said, `…and I hadn’t told anybody, now everybody knows…’. They all knew on the ward where he’d been, because… eventually the nurse said that he died of cancer, what I mean…’

`And was there a stigma about people who had been to Broadmoor?’

`Well we had to report him, now… I had to tell the staff I said that to… that he… he came out in front of all the other patients, he said to Jerry, `I know you Jerry, you went to Broadmoor because you tried to kill somebody’. I said, `And Jerry went… very red and I thought perhaps he would have gone to attack the nurse, but he didn’t, he just sat there’. Now he’s gone… he’s… I don’t know where he’s gone to now, because gradually they closed Hellingly down. I think that’s the worst thing they could have ever done… because, some of the patients that went out in the community… couldn’t cope… and they had a girl… they looked after her very well. She was a brother and sister relationship, and she was completely deformed and she was two years old when she went to Hellingly, and the staff used to spoil her. They used to give her hugs and things like that. Wendy, her name was… and when she was about thirty something, they closed Hellingly down, so they sent her to Brighton to another mental hospital in Brighton. Why she was in a mental hospital I don’t know… and… because she couldn’t talk… well for the… for the first two weeks she was alright, and because she didn’t have the love and care that the staff gave her in Hellingly she stopped eating, and that was on one way… and she died of starvation. So if she’d still been in Hellingly she would probably have still been alive today. But going out of Hellingly, I mean she might have been a brother and sister relationship, but… and she could never talk, but one day she was watching Diane, Princess Diana, I think, getting married, and she had tears all down her face, so she knew… but she could never sit straight or lay her… you couldn’t lay her straight, she was completely folded up.’

`So some of the staff were quite kindly at Hellingly?’

`Oh yeah… a lot of them. I mean, down… down the old lady’s ward they looked after them very well down there, and I used to make the beds sometimes down there… before I go to the OT, what I mean, I would make the beds down there.’

`And did you get paid for any of this work?’

`Yeah… I used to get paid fifteen pound for making the beds.’

`And would you do that every day?’

`Yeah, I’d do that every day. But what I used to do in my spare time, I used to clean cars… people’s cars. I used to say to them, ‘cause my money problems… a bit tight then, `Do you want your car cleaning?’, and I would clean it inside and outside, and they used to say to me, `You know, the car there it looks like brand new’, and… you know, quite a lot of people said, `Will you clean my car?’’

`What was…?’

`So during my spare time I was cleaning people’s… the staff’s cars for them.’

`Right. You sound like you had quite a busy life?’

`[Laughs] I did…’

`Yes, yes. What did you do for your entertainment in Hellingly?’

`Well… [inaudible] me… you’d have… more or less have to… entertain yourself. Like… I know at Christmas time they… each of the wards would have parties and that, what I mean… but… then you would more or less run your own. You’d have all the things and everything like that… but…’

`Yeah…and did you have… like, in Broadmoor you’d had dances and cinema, did you have…?’

`In Broadmoor, yeah…’

`…any of that?’

`You’d have pictures there, you’d go pictures on a Friday afternoon… and every now and again you’d have dances in the York House.’

`Yeah, but in Hellingly did you have anything like that?’

`No…’

`Dances?’

`Well only a… more or less like… no we didn’t have any dances. I don’t think we had a dance hall there. One day they… there was a meeting with the members of the public, when we was at Hellingly and they came up to Hellingly and they knew that they was going to… close down Hellingly, so one man was going on and on and on… `They’ll be calling at our house’, he said, `..be in that garden’, and all of a sudden I stood up and I said, `You all make me bloody sick’, I said, `It’s not the patients that are doing all these sex offenses and murders out in the community, it’s the new people that are doing it, people out in the community, not patients that are doing it’, and they all looked around at me and… well everybody stopped saying it. I was so fed up with hearing them running us down, saying what we… what we would be like. That we would be going round the houses, knocking on their doors… no such thing.’

`And, when Hellingly was due to close, did they discuss it with you? With the patients at all?’ [Both talking together]

`No… no… no… they… they asked me… if I’d like to go out… to have a house outside, but I think it took me three years. Well, I had my name down for a… went to a flat, but it took me three years before I could get out. You miss it to begin with because you’re sort of on your own, but I had Jean next door, and… she was always in my flat, I was in her flat, we’d… go for cups of tea in one another’s places, or one Sunday she would cook a dinner for me, and the other Sunday I would cook one for her. But… she died… she went in a coma one morning…’

`And how did she…?’

`She died…’

`Had she been in Hellingly?’

`No, she hadn’t been in any hospitals…’

`Right…’

`And I used to go… she used to have a dog, and I used to take another woman’s dog, and Jean and I would go up… like the A22, or we’d go in the field and let both the dogs… off the leads and let them run around, but… we was always together… and there was another lady. She said to me, `Would you look after my cat for a couple of weeks, Tiggy?’, and I said, `Well, considering I’ve been in… hospital for thirty three and a half years, and I’m ex-Broadmoor, can you trust me?’, and she said, `Why shouldn’t I trust you?’. So I had to go and let the cat out in the morning. I’d give him his breakfast first, let him out, bring him back in again, three times a day…and when she come back, she was sort of… well… she would pay me and that, wanted to give me some money and that, but… she died all of a sudden. When they told me that she died, I was so upset about it… ‘cause I thought about the cat. I was worried about if the cat was going to miss her, but her son was very friendly to the cat, he loved them, know what I mean, so when they all moved, they took the cat with them.’

`Right… right…’

`But round the horseshoe, you’d… it was terrible round there because.. we used to have all the children used to play football out there, and they would let their ball go into other peoples’ gardens and ruined all their flowers, and… sometimes, the residents wouldn’t let the children have the ball back, so their… mother’s used to ‘phone up the Police and get the Police down, and the Police said, `Can we have the ball back?’, and they said, `Well we do our gardens, make them look nice, and the children keep putting the balls over the wall…’’

`Mmm’

`But…’

`Yes… so… just going back to Hellingly before… before you left Hellingly, can you remember, how did you feel when they first talked to you about possibly moving out?’

`Well I didn’t really… well they just asked me if I… if I’d like to go out and I just said I would, you know what I mean… I’d consider it to going out, but…’

`’Cause how did you…?’

`They used to be very good to me, every three months they used to take me to Harlow, Essex, to see my mother when she was dying of cancer… didn’t cost me nothing, but it used to cost the hospital… used to pay thirty six pound, for the wear and tear of the car because they’re voluntary workers that take you, so I would go and see mum… when she was very ill.’
`Right…’

`Or sometimes a male nurse would ‘phone up my sister nearly every night to ask how mum was, know what I mean… and they were saying that she was dying and that… but Hellingly was very good like that.’

`So your mother had cancer while you were…?’

`She had cancer of the bladder…’

`Right…’

`And when she went to the hospital they said to her, `We’ll put her in a side room because she disturbs all the other patients, she shouts about’. I said, `If they had cancer of the bladder I suppose it was painful…’

`Mmm… yes, yes…and they… so they’d take you to visit her?’

`Pardon?’
`They would take you to visit her?’

`They would take me to… well… we used to get… a voluntary driver would take me. To begin with, I… I had to have a member of the staff, the driver wanted a member of the staff, and after that, I’d just go with the driver on my own… and… then he used to take his girlfriend with him, and she had people living in Harlow, Essex, so when he came to Harlow, Essex to visit my mum, she was able to… the driver and her was able to go to this… her own house, while I was at my mother’s place…’

`Right…’

`But as I say, I wasn’t allowed to talk to my sister while I… or her husband, and… if I wanted to go to the toilet, mum would say to me, `I’ll see if the coast is clear, ‘cause I don’t want no trouble between you two…’, but I knew that my sister treated my mother rotten, when she had done. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the last day I went there. Male nurse took me… and mum was in bed… and I think they must have given her a Morphine inject… morphine… and this is… October, and she said to me, `It’s my birthday today’, and I said, `No mum, not until December the 22nd’, `No, it’s today…’, and she said `Look at all this linen on the shelves’, and there was no shelves there. My sister must have known that was the last time I was going to see my mum alive, because she said, `We’re going outside’, well… to begin with, mum was crying, when we first went there, and I bent down and I said, `Oh, come on mum, don’t cry… I love you’. She said, `Me too, I love you’. This is my real mum, `I love you…’, and she stopped crying and… then my brother cooked us a dinner, which is unusual… let me, well it was only ‘cause I had the nurse with me, then she’d start crying again. I said, `Oh come on, mum’. Anyway, when we was going to go, they all… everybody went outdoors, when I was with mum, so she’d say, `That pot plant that he gave me, I’m going to have it on the table’, and… I went back three times to say cheerio to my mum. I don’t know what made me do it, I’ve never done that before. When I come out the third time I said to my sister, `Oh’ when she come out, and she said, `Here’s some money for you from mum’. I said, `Well I don’t want… won’t take mum’s money’… `Well she won’t need it any more…’, it never dawned on me that I wouldn’t see her alive again… otherwise I don’t think I would left her, I would have stayed there, but it wouldn’t be… surprise me, if my sister and her husband didn’t overdose my mother with Morphine. I still say they gave her more than she should have done…’

`Really?’

`She went too quick.’ [Pause]

`Why… why do you think your sister was so against you? Do you think it was…?’

`Well, no… I mean I was against them because the way they treated mum…’

`Right…’

`And I used to say to mum, ‘I don’t want nothing to do with them’. I mean, if her… Edna’s children used to go and do some shopping for my mum, she used to have to give them a lot… a lot of money. They’d do it… wouldn’t do it for nothing, know what I mean… and… mum used to say to me… used to say, `They’re not going to get a penny of your father’s pension.’ She had all the money in the wardrobe, but when she died… they had it all, they didn’t give me a penny. I was the only one that took flowers to the funeral, and they all cried except for me at the funeral, and I thought, `What a two faced lot’. They couldn’t have cared… they made mum’s life miserable. They treated her rotten in there… they treated her like a… well, like a certain… I mean she had to have her own room, she wasn’t allowed to join them, know what I mean…’

`What… what about your other… you must have another sister and another brother?’

`No… I got a sister in America, she’s in New Jersey, and she did ‘phone up my sister and said that `Joan must be upset now that mum’s… died’, you know what I mean… and I would like to get in touch with my sister really, also my brother… I… I don’t know if he’s still alive. I’ve got a sister… a brother somewhere in England… but I haven’t seen him since about 1948…’

`Uh huh…’

`Fifty… or so years ago…’

`Right… right…and this… just going back to the sister who your mother used to live with… did…do you feel that she had… any feelings about the fact that you’d spent so long in psychiatric hospital?’

`What my sister?’

`Yeah…’

`No… umm….’

`Or do you think she was alright about that?’

`No she… she used to come and visit me sometimes, know what I mean…’

`Right…’

`When I was in hospital…’

`Right…’

`And… I couldn’t forgive her…’

`No…’
`’Cause when I used to ‘phone mum up she’d be crying her eyes out and I’d say, `What’s the matter mum?’, `Oh’, she said, `They’re being horrible to me’. And she said, `Wait a minute, I’m going to sit down because you… ‘cause of the cancer, she had to sit down on the stairs and she used to say, `That’s better’. They used to go out and leave her… ‘till the early hours of the morning, and the house would be…in the country on it’s own… but when I used to go to see her, she’d be… the curtain would be on one side and… and the driver would say to me, `There’s your mum’.’

`When… after you’d been on these visits to visit your mum, and you went back to Hellingly if you were upset or you were worried, did the staff used to talk to you?’

`Oh they was very good. Though… nurse Falkener [ph], he would ‘phone my sister up nearly every night, and my sister would say, `I’m going up in the bedroom’, ‘cause otherwise mum could hear her on the ‘phone downstairs…’

`Mmm…’

`So she would tell the nurse that my mother was deteriorating, know what I mean, and the nurse would tell me. He would say, `Your mothers…’ , then when he came to tell me she’d died… I didn’t cry because I’d… I’d already done all the crying before, I just had no more tears left. He said, `Your mother died this morning’, and I couldn’t cry, what I mean… and he… he took me down to the house and I stayed at my sister’s house for three days. Now they didn’t treat me too bad but… I couldn’t forgive them. I mean the… I know mum… abandoned us, and that… my twin and I were just kids, but she was still my mother. She… it didn’t matter what she’d done, I… I still loved her but I mean I never stopped loving her. When she died it broke me, you know what I mean… I was broken hearted when she died…’

`Yes… yes…so that sounds very upsetting. I mean could you… when you came back to Hellingly after the funeral, were the staff supportive then?’

`Oh they were very… they were very good to me, know what I mean… asked me how she was and that… I mean…’

`Yeah… and… and did you have friends as well, other patients?’

`Yeah, patients there… ‘

`Yeah…’

`And then… I used to be… and I used to help the domestic a lot. I used to go in the kitchen of a night time, and help her do all the washing up for her and she… you know, the domestic would come down to me and… and talk to me and that… when I used to get friends with her, what I mean… but… I found it was very noisy down that end because… there was about three doors and they used to slam, slam, slam all night and I used to shout out, I was very… cross because they used to wake me up, what I mean…’

`So… what… what kind of treatments did you have in Hellingly?’

`Pardon?’

`What kind of treatment did you have in Hellingly?’

`In Hellingly? I just had… well I didn’t have any… I didn’t have anything like… ECT or… or, you know, injections or anything like that, just the tablets… the medicine. I’ve always been on the medicine that I was when I was in Broadmoor and I’m still on the same medicine as I was when I was in Broadmoor. If I didn’t take the medication I would get… very upset. Sometimes, I know sometimes I… I feel like, when I wake up in the morning, I feel… it’s as if I can’t cope with life, even though you’re in the community… and sometimes I’ve felt like having a good smash up in the kitchen but I’ve managed not to do it, ‘cause it seems like I wake up in a bad mood… and I seem to get better as the morning goes on… the fact that… I have three cats and… I’ve got to get them their breakfast, I’ve got to cook Blackie’s [inaudible] and sometimes it seems too much, because… I don’t have a cup of tea, not until I’ve seen to my cats. They have to come first.’

`It sounds like…’

`I feel sometimes when I wake up, well I feel like a good cry when I wake up in the mornings, I don’t know why that is. I feel… I could cry my eyes out. Nothing’s upset me or anything… just feel like a good cry. I think it’s… the fact is… that I have a… well, since I’ve been out of… Hellingly, I found out I had breast cancer, so I… I went to see a lady doctor, I wouldn’t see the man doctor… and she said, `I think you’ve got breast cancer…’, so I went to Eastbourne District General and I had a biopsy done, and he said, `You’ve every indication you’ve got breast cancer, so I had an operation for it… right… and… the first time, I was at home… but oh, I did have a… a Social Worker, that’s it… used to come and visit me from Hellingly, and she said, `I’ll look after your cats…’. Well, I come out the hospital before I should have done. They said, `You can’t go out’, I said, `I’m going out today’. When I got home at five o’clock in the evening, I found out she hadn’t fed my cats all day. She turned up about half past five. She blushed, her face went red, and I said, `You can redden… you haven’t fed my cats all day’, and on the Sunday, Tibb [ph], the Ginger one, he’s dead now, but he kept falling about and he’d had like a stroke or something, but I did ‘phone up a nurse up at Anderston’s [???], that’s where some of the patients from Hellingly went… and she came down… both days of the weekend to see the cat, and… kept falling down. He seemed to have got better then, but… I had to take him to the vet… he gave him three injections…’

`Mmm… that sounds…’

`And lay… and then lay on the settee next to me, and after two hours he seemed like he had a fit… oh, he was screaming, he went on his back… screaming and… I held him in my arms and `There…’, I said, `Come on, Tibb [ph]’, you know, I said, `Don’t go and die on me but he died in my arms.’
`Oh dear…’

`So the man next door, he come and buried it for me.’

`Right…’

`So he was underneath my window…’

`Right… that’s sad…’

`But I didn’t really trust that Social Worker, you know what I mean, I didn’t feel…’

`No…no…’ [Both talking together]Right… that sounds…’

`Thurstine Bassett who I met when I was at Hellingly because we’d done a video there. He’s been coming to see me for about thirteen years…’

`Right…’

`About five or six times a year…’

`Right… I’m going to have to stop you Joan ‘cause of the… the tape’s running out…’

[End of DVC Pro tape 3]
[Start of DVC Pro tape 4 – VHS tape 1 continues]

[Camera: `C905/14, Joan Tugwell, tape number four]

`Ok, Joan, we were talking about your… how your mother died, and… while you were in Hellingly. When did you get discharged after that… was that… [inaudible]?’

`I got discharged about… three years I think, after we went… umm… no, I think it was about two… just over two and a half years. Mum died three months before I come out. She knew that I was coming into the community, and she was very excited about it. But I can’t understand why she went downhill, so fast… I… I didn’t… perhaps the… my sister gave her too much morphine, because when I used to see her before, she used to be chatting away and everything… then the next time when I see her, she was dying, and… and she seemed so confused, because she was saying it was her birthday, and it wasn’t until December the 22nd… and…’

`So she was quite excited about you moving into the community?’

`She was very pleased [both talking together]… she was very pleased about me coming out in the community, ‘cause she used to say to me, `Oh, I’d love to see that day, you know… when… dad and I tried for nine years to get you out of Broadmoor…’, but, as I say… I know… I’ve run mum down a bit by saying she abandoned us and things like that, but at the same time, I… I forgave her, she… she was my mother, she gave us life… what a life I’ve had, but.. she gave us life and… she was my mum, so… I… I… but…’

`Yes… yes…I mean your mum was very hopeful for you coming out. How did you feel about coming out, I mean did you have high… hopes…?’

`Oh, I felt pleased ‘cause I was coming out. When you used to go down to the flat they used to… they gave us a key and I used to go down there and see the things… what it was like down there, but… when I eventually moved out into the community, all I had was a bed, my mother’s television, and because I didn’t have much money then, I had to sell mum’s colour television, to get a black and white one. I think I had four tables… I had four chairs and a table. I had no carpets, I had no light bulbs… I had no fridge, I had nothing to cook on… no cook… nothing, know what I mean… so… Jean, my friend next door, she supplied me with the bulbs… and… eventually I got… my settlement benefit so…’

`Right… and how… how did you make friends with Jean, was that after you moved in?’

`She lived next door to me. When we was moving in, Jean came out of her door, out of her flat, and she said to me `I’m Jean, I’m your next door neighbour’, and she said, `This is my friend, Ann… I go out with Ann quite a lot’, and introduced Ann to me. And she said, `When I come back I’ll have you in my place and give you a cup of tea and that…’, but she came in and I… she came into my place, and I said, `Jean, I’ve got no electricity on’, I didn’t realise… that when a house is vacant, they turn all that off. And… on the Monday, and I said… ‘phoned up Seeboard and I said, `Can I have… the electricity on’, and he said, `We’ll do it on Wednesday’, and I said, `It’s no good, I’m in here today, Monday, I can’t sit in the dark… can’t make a cup of tea or anything.’ And Jean was really disgusted, and I felt like… I wanted to sit down and I felt… like I wanted to have a good cry ‘cause I thought to myself, how could they send somebody out in the community like this? I think sometimes Hellingly was a bit dubious about giving us electrical… stuff, you know, because they thought perhaps we… I suppose they might well get a shock or… get electrocuted or things like that but… I think it was a very poor arrangement to come out in the community with nothing.’

`Didn’t they… didn’t they arrange for furniture or…anything like that?’

`No… no I had to buy the stuff eventually… ‘cause I had my settlement… money… they gave… five hundred pound, but they would only give me so much a week. They wouldn’t get it all in one go, so you had to get it… buying things. Sometimes Jean gave me some stuff and things like that, what I mean…’

`So…’

`And eventually I got my carpets down, the fridge and the cooker…’

`Right… and did you literally go from Hellingly to the… to this new…?’

`I went straight to the… to the flat…’

`Right…’

`From Hellingly’

`Right, and did nobody come with you? Did anybody from the hospital…?’

`They came [inaudible] [both talking together]… to take the bed. They unpacked the bed and the chairs and tables, but they didn’t… they didn’t have… I said to them, `I’ve got no carpets or anything’, and they said, `Well, there’s nothing we can do about it’, I mean…’

`And then did they just leave you to get on with it?’

`They just left me to get on with it.’

`Right…’

`And the lady across the road, she said to me… while Jean was out, she said to me, `Would you like to come over for a cup of coffee?’, and she asked… the bloke that brought us from Hellingly and he said, `No, it’s alright’. So I went had a cup of coffee with her, and then when Jean came back, I said, `Jean…’, I said, `I’ve got no light bulbs… I’ve got no electricity on…’, and… well, I ‘phoned up from her place and he said, `I’ll come and turn it on Wednesday’. I said, `That’s no good to me, I’m in here today, Monday… I can’t be without electricity’, you know, so Jean supplied me with the bulbs… and sometimes I couldn’t understand about if the electricity wasn’t working, Jean would come and show me that the twitch… switch had gone round… I mean, and she’d show me how to do all that… ‘cause if… I was always running to Jean if the electricity wasn’t working properly.’

`Mmm… how did you find suddenly being in a flat on your… on your own? Did that feel very…?’

`I felt a bit lonely in a way because… for thirty three and a half years I’d always been with somebody, a lot of people… and you come out to the community, and I found… that the neighbour upstairs was very noisy, if they had children they’d be running about… the grandchildren come to visit, be running about and… then I had another bloke come in, and he married a girl from the Philippines, and he said to me once, `Would you like to come and clean my flat out before I bring the wife?’ and I… I think he had sixty bottles… of milk… that had all gone mildew… and I had to empty all those bottles and wash them all out. He gave me twenty pound… and I was pleased with the twenty pound because I didn’t have a lot of money. Then when… we used to have a shop round our way, the… Rita and Tony used to run it, so if I didn’t have enough money for food, or I had to wait for my money… I would go round the shop and say could I have it on tick. They would let me have some things and then pay for it… when I had my money. They was very good like that… and… well we… to begin with, I… I went up to… went up to [inaudible]… up to Hellingly, just to make the beds from there… and I said to the… man one day, the Charge Nurse, I said, `I’ve got no food at home’. He said, `There’s salad her that hasn’t been touched… take all that home with you’, and… err… they came to do some films of me indoors, you know, some… two other women come, they… paid me fifty pound and said, `Can we take a lot of photographs?’. So they photographed me looking into the fridge, and all there was, was two pints of milk, and this salad. There was no other food… for me, what I mean…’

`Mmm… mmm… so who were these… who were these two women, that were taking photographs?'

`Well… I think the Thurstine Bassett knows who they were.’

`Right… right…’

`But one of them, she… was very nice, and she went out to Canada and took her sixteen year old son out there, and he went out swimming and he drowned… Madeline her name was. They just came to my flat, and I had a big pile of photographs, I mean I don’t know where they are, I think somebody must have had them. I have got one or two photographs at home… but they… they took… well they must have took about nearly a hundred photographs…’

`Right…’

`I had to be all different ways, know what I mean?’

`Right, yes…’

`And… well they asked me if I minded doing it… I said `No’. She said, `Well we’ll pay you fifty pound’ and she gave it me there and then. I said that well it didn’t matter but she said, `Well take it…’, what I mean…?’

`Yes… yes…’

`And they was there I think, all afternoon. I was a bit fed up with it in the end, ‘cause the different ways I had to keep turning, know what I mean, and I’d say, `Well do you have to keep on?’

`Yes… yes… Can you please… describe your flat to me, that… the…?’

`The flat?’

`…flat that you moved into?’

`It just had one bedroom and one kitchen. But the… the kitchen was very big, and Jean, in her place, was very small… and she used to… when she used to come to my house for a cup of tea, she said, `Oh, this kitchen’s so big’, well I couldn’t do with it, if it was mine… and… there was Jean… Jean not having a lot of money, when I did get money… or I didn’t have money, I used to get a lot of things on the catalogue, and… when I used to get my resettlement money, I was always giving Jean a tenner, or something there and then… and she didn’t want to take it. She was only getting forty something pound a week, and I… I felt it was… up to me to see that she was alright… and I… eventually got myself into debt. At the moment I’m still paying off two clubs, even though Jean’s been dead… three and a half years, I’m still paying off debts for the things that I bought for Jean. They’re nearly paid off now. I spent hundreds on Jean. I used to buy her… she was an animal lover, so she used to have a lot of ornaments… I bought her a horse and foal, and that was seventy five pound, but I’ve nearly paid the two clubs off now. I got myself nearly a thousand pound into debt. But with Jean not having much and with her being so good to me, I didn’t begrudge her a penny…’

`Right…’

`I was glad I made her happy while I knew her, for those ten years… and since Jean’s died, things haven’t been the same. I’ve… I’ve never met anybody quite like Jean, she was… the perfect… know what I mean…?’

`Yeah… that was…?’

`And the fact is that I spent the last evening with her was terrible really because I mean… I don’t think I would have left her, because then I kissed her on the cheek, and she said, `Ta ta Joan… I’ll come round tomorrow and see if you’re alright’. I was having a lay in bed, and I heard a noise outside, and I saw the ambulance, so I get dressed, and I said… they said, `It’s Jean’, and Jean come out in this chair thing. She had a airway in her mouth, and I said `Ta ta Jean, see you when you come back’. And somebody said to me, `She won’t be coming back’, and she died four days… and… I was so upset about that. I went to the funeral, at Eastbourne, and we went in a little side room, waiting for the coffin, and when I saw the coffin come through the gates, I absolutely cried my eyes out, and the people in church or in the chapel, they had to wait for me to stop crying before we could do the service. Jean’s mother was in the front, because if anybody dies you’re always in the front, and… I… I was looking at Jean’s mum all the time I was at the funeral, and… Jean’s favourite colour was red, and on top of Jean’s coffin was all these red flowers… and her mother was watching all the time, and then when the curtains was going to close, Jean was going to be cremated, I heard her mum say, `Ta ta Jean’, what I mean…’

`Mmm’

`And that… and all the people had come over from New Zealand, back to the funeral, and when I went outside I saw Caroline… I still… she still… friends, you know what I mean… and I said to her, `Well Caroline, what can I say?’, I said, `I loved Jean very much she was a damned good friend’, but I said, `I love you too… Caroline’, know what I mean. She lives in a warden run place now, and she… she will sometimes still give me money and that for my birthday. When I see her I say, `When I see anybody with a short hair cut outside that looks like Jean, I want to look at them all the time’, and she said, `I’m like that as well’. She came all the way from London to live in Hailsham to be with Jean.’

`Right…’

`The only time I regret… was… that I… I spent ten Christmas’s on my own… ‘cause Jean’s mother used to say it was a family affair, so I never got invited to Jean’s house on Christmas Day and I used to… know I was completely on my own. I used to wonder what people and that were doing, know what I mean?’

`Mmm’

`I used to think `I bet she’s having a good time and that’, know what I mean?’

`Yes…’

`It was very depressing to be on your own at Christmas time…’

`Yes… it is.’

`Now… I come up to Grangemead, I come up to Grangemead…once a week, the staff are very good up here. You’re called `clients’ you know, up there, and… they have all sorts of things, like bowls or… exercises… or we do… they play Bingo, or we have quizzes… then you have dinner here. The dinner that I have here is better than the meals that I get at home…’

`Do you have Meals on Wheels at home?’

`I do have meals on wheels… the only thing I find about Meals on Wheels… they come at half past eleven… so then about four o’clock I’m just as hungry again so I’ve got to cook another meal, which I think is a waste of money if you’ve got to have two meals a day…’

`Yes…’

`Because when I have a dinner here, I don’t need a proper meal when I go home. I just get like… maybe scrambled egg on toast or something like that, something easy, what I mean… ‘cause I don’t…’

`Yeah…’

`’Cause the meals are very good here and you get a choice of three… and you get a choice of the puddings and that…’

`When… when you came out of Hellingly how did you find things like cooking for yourself?’

`About what?’

`How did you find cooking for yourself, because in the hospital you didn’t have to cook?’ [both talking together]

`I used to make a hash [???] out of it… used to be burning like anything. Jean would come to me and she’d say, `Oh, turn that chicken down, you’ve got it… you’ve got.. you…’, had it on miles too high, but I used to enjoy doing cooking, know what I mean, but… Jean was… always there to show me what to do, what I mean? And…’

`So did you… do you feel you had to learn?’

`I did have to learn because… and apart from just doing a bit of cooking on a Saturday evening for a friend of mine, at Hellingly Hospital, she eventually died… she died of cancer as well, but… I used to… do the chicken, roast potatoes and… Thurstine Bassett who does videos… and that… he used to come to my house every so often and I would always cook him a meal ‘cause I had the space… and I… I used to cook him a nice… chicken, roast potatoes and that and he would enjoy it… but now that I’ve had to move out and I’m down Meadow Road, the kitchen is that small I can’t even get a washing machine in there, so I don’t cook for Thurstine any more… ‘cause I’ve got the draining board, the sink and the cooker, and when I’m washing up it goes all over the cooker.. and when I… what… what got me down was to think I had such a rotten life and then I… suddenly discovered I’d got a lump… and… I went to the lady doctor and she said `I think you’ve got cancer’, and I thought to myself, out of all the bad luck I’ve had… now I’ve got cancer, know what I mean… so that… and… I saw Mr Allen at Eastbourne District General, and I was seeing him on the Thursday, and I would be in hospital by about Monday or Tuesday and have the operation the next day. And I had to have a second operation, they thought I had… another lump underneath there, but I think it was fatty tissue, and they took thirteen pieces of the lymph nodes… the lymph nodes… they took thirteen pieces of that out. Now, I did have to go into the hospital every six months, now I don’t have to go for a year, so I’m hoping that… I’m so frightened that I’m going to die of it because… you say to people, I said, `I’ve had… I’ve had breast cancer’, and they turn round to you and they say, `Oh you know so and so… she had breast cancer… she had all of the… all clear after five years, then she went and got it back and died’, and I said, `Well thank you very much, you’ve cheered me up’. See people don’t really think when they say that…’

`No…’

`I’m so frightened… that if I’m going to get it back again, I think to myself, I think I’ve had a… pretty miserable life, I mean I still seem to be… but touch wood I’m… coping with it. He’s very good… Mr Allen, at Eastbourne District General, what I mean…’

`Yeah… are you still on… on medication for the breast cancer?’

`I’m on temoxifan…’

`Right…’

`I have to take two… I was going to stop taking them and Dr Dunkley [ph] said, `If you stop taking them, you could get breast cancer’. I had somebody say to me, `You’re lucky that you’re on temoxifan’, I said, `I’m not lucky, I’ve already had the cancer’, what I mean… but I have to keep stopping it. Having it all the time… I don’t know… you… we… we have to… how long we have to have it for… but it’s vital to take two every day… ‘

`Yes… and do you still…?’

`[Inaudible]’
`Do you still have to go to the hospital for check ups?’

`Well… when I saw him in June this year, he was so pleased with me, he said we… `I don’t need to see you for a year’, so… and…’

`That’s good’

`He used to always… pulling my leg when I go there and say to me, are you behaving yourself, and… I was so grateful to him and his team, for what they’ve done for me, so I sent them a nice Christmas card and I thanked them for what they’ve done for me… and he said to me in June he said, `Thank you very much for the Christmas card for me and my team… it’s nice to know somebody appreciates it…’.’

`That’s nice…’

`A lot of people run down Eastbourne District General… you don’t pay for your treatment, you don’t pay your food… everything’s free. I thought the food was good, the treatment was good… and… they don’t… I mean you could wonder about if you want to anywhere, what I mean… they don’t say `Where are you going?’ or anything. The staff are very nice, so… I…’

`Did…did you have any feeling at all that… they were treating you differently because you had a long psychiatric history?’

`Did they treat me any different?’

`Yeah…’
 
`No… no…’

`No, so you felt there was no discrimination?’

`I don’t know… if the staff on the ward at Eastbourne District General, I don’t know… well they must have known somehow, they’d seen my arms and that, but… I don’t think the… they… I don’t think they’d tell them that I’ve been in Broadmoor, but… you do get… other people that say, `I’ve told people that you’ve been… in Broadmoor, and they don’t hold it against you…’ and I say, `If I hear… you telling anybody, everybody that I’ve been in Broadmoor, there’ll be trouble’, what I mean…’

`Mmm… mmm…’

`I used to wonder why so many people say to me, `Was you a prisoner?’, and I said, `I wasn’t a prisoner, I was a patient there… in Broadmoor, but…’, I said, `I never killed anybody. I saved a life, which I’m proud of what I mean… I’m… I’m…’, it’s… it’s nice to know that you have saved a life, what I mean, it’s something to be proud of, but I would like something, just to say that I did save her life, so… Thurstine Bassett [???] did write to Broadmoor, and said that I was out in the community and… `…there was a Sister by the name of Sister McGee… Joan saved her life… as a near fatal attraction’, and apparently her son’s working at Broadmoor, Sister McGee, so the son took the letter home to his mum, and I had a… a birthday card right on the day of my birthday, from Sister McGee… ‘

`Lovely…’

`Yeah…’

`Yeah, that’s good. You… you were saying that… about people making comments about you having been in Broadmoor. Have you found that since you’ve been out of Hellingly that people… you know, in the community, what kind of attitude have they had… towards you?’

`Well I don’t know, they seem to be alright, you know. John and Sylvie are the other side, and they… they’ve got their daughter and the grandchildren, they’re all very friendly with me, what I mean. I don’t really… and the people across the road, they… give me a lovely armchair, a brand new one. They said to Sylvie, `Do you think the lady next door…’, which is me, `… would like three arm chairs?’, but I’ve only got room for one… they know I’ve been in Broadmoor but they’re alright with it, know what I mean? But you might get… some people they get the wrong end of the stick, they automatically think… because you’ve been in Broadmoor you’ve murdered somebody, but not… as I say, there’s a lot of innocent people there… elderly people… they go there when they’re sixty nine or seventy, and…’

`And… and what contact do you have now with the psychiatric services? Do you have to go and see a psychiatrist?’

`I see… I’m supposed to see the psychiatrist here, but I refuse to see him, ‘cause he was showing me all different signs, of rude words in… in…. in you know, his own… and I thought to myself, he should see the psychiatrist, not me. I see Dr Duncan… Dr Duncan gives me all the medication what I should be on, he does all that. I have a psychiatric nurse here. I have Keith, who’s my social worker, what I mean, so I do see other people, and I have a… a nurse here as well. Another… in the office… Margaret Lewis… she takes me to Eastbourne District General when I have to go for check ups, for cancer, know what I mean… touch wood, I think I’ve got rid of the cancer. Let’s hope so, what I mean.’

`Uh huh…’

`What life I have got left I would like to… have a bit of peace…’

`Yes, definitely… definitely. Do you… out of those people that you have… that you see, like the… the Psychiatric Nurse… and Keith… and the Psychiatrist… who do you feel is the most helpful to you? Who do you feel is the most supportive?’

`Well I think… well I think Dr Duncan myself, because he… what he does… and… Keith… Keith’s marvellous, I mean… if I ‘phone up Keith he’ll… say to me, `Shall I come down?’. He’ll come down to my place and he will have a talk with… he’s always there. He… he’s a very nice man, I mean, he don’t… he’d do anything for anybody…’

`Right, and he’s a Social Worker?’

`He’s a Social Worker. He’s only been my Social Worker, I think, under a year… but… I… he’s very… very nice… very soft spoken and that… but… very nice man, he’s very helpful, and the staff here are very helpful, what I mean… they…’

`So… at the moment you… you’re living… ‘cause you moved from your flat to a bungalow, did you?’

`To… to a bungalow down Meadow Road. Now… that is very quiet, except… because I’ve got cats the neighbours didn’t really like it, one side she… her daughter said to me… `There’s twenty eight cats around here’, and I said, `Did you count yourself while you was at it?’, that didn’t go down very well. So I said, `I’ve only been here five minutes, so don’t start on me, because you’ll start on the wrong one’. My cats… I know not everybody has… I’ve got no visitors to come, except for Thurstine Bassett, I’ve got not relatives to come and see me or write to me, so the cats are… well, I’m… I’m an animal lover so… the cats are my life. I wouldn’t be without them.’

`And how many cats have you got?’

`Well I’ve got Blackie and Lucky… plus a ginger one, he comes in… and because he’s been coming to me every day, I have to give him the same amount of food, because I don’t think he goes home any more, and I can’t let him starve. If I can, I let him lay indoors, and sleep… while Blackie’s out, or if Lucky doesn’t come across him, ‘cause Lucky goes for him a bit…’
`Right…’

`But… with Blackie, I… he’s a problem really because I had to get a stool and stretch up high to put his food… up on somebody’s garage roof… ‘cause he won’t come down.’

`Oh dear…’

`He’ll come down in the winter time, and when he’s inside he will take… probably take my arm chair, he’ll want my bed, he’ll want the bed with Lucky, and… and then he wants to lay on top of all my clothes… then he gets in the wardrobe and lays on my clothes in the wardrobe and… he changes position. I had to go and buy like a summer deck chair, it was a padded one, so that I could sit and watch the television in peace, while he sleeps in my arm chair…’

`[Laughs] Oh dear. Have you always been an animal lover?’

`I’ve been an animal lover… always have been. But when I’m on the television, I never watch any programmes to do with animals, like Animal Hospital, ‘cause I know that there’s going to be something sad. I did watch, a few weeks ago, and this elderly couple, they had this little white dog, and a lovely little thing… and the… the vet said, `I think we’ll have to put it down’, and the couple were holding it while they gave him the injection and he died in their arms, and I didn’t stop crying all evening. I cried all the evening, and I cried the next day, I kept thinking about this dog and…’

`Yes…’

`So I don’t watch anything about animals…’

`No…’

`’Cause if I know it’s going to be sad, that somebody’s going to have an animal put down. I’ll watch it if it’s a friendly programme about animals, but not anything to do with vets or anything I won’t watch.’

`Yes. You said when you were in Hellingly, that you had two budgies… what happened to them in the end?’

`Yes I had two budgerigars, and I used to feed about twenty five cats.’

`Really?’

`And when… they done the video of me, up at Hellingly they… they took a… video of me feeding twenty five cats. And when the staff from Hellingly saw it, they wasn’t very pleased because they didn’t… they told me to stop feeding these cats.’

`And were these cats who lived in the grounds… of Hellingly?’

`Around the grounds… twenty five of them. There were twenty five but they… collected them up in the end, I don’t know if they was going to have them put down, because…there was three cats and three traps… and I let them, all three out… and this man came up to me and he said, `Have you let those cats out that trap?’. I said, `Yes’. And… he said something to me, and I said something rude back to him… but I used to see him… trying to get the cats to put them in the cat flap, but they reckon that… the cats all went to homes. Whether they did or not, I don’t know.’

`Right…’

`But I know one of the nurses said to me once, `If I see the cats round my house I’ll… I’ve got a gun, I’ll shoot them’, what I mean, I used to say, `Well I’ll shoot you as well.’ I was such an animal lover and… sometimes the staff in the kitchen, especially the man that was washing up, when they used to have a lot of food over from the staff restaurant… well food over from one day… been all round the wards, he used to save me a lot of meat and that and… and… and I used to have five great big… packets [???] of… full of food, and I used to go all round Hellingly feeding all the cats. They used to call me `The Cat Lady’.’

`Right…’

`But I said… when Hellingly staff saw that on the video they wasn’t very pleased… when they said, `Saw you feeding the cats which you shouldn’t have been doing’, and I should have been doing that… to me, I should be doing it.’

`What happened to your budgies in the end…your budgerigars?’

`Oh, they died.’

`Right…’

`When… when… I took them home, from Hellingly Hospital, I took them home to… Meadow Road, and when I had budgerigars I never… they was never shut in their cages, only at night time. They used to get up on the pelmet, or up on the window sill, two of them… I always had two… and they used to be kissing one another, whistling away there, and at night time I had to put them in their cages of a night time and cover them up, but… as soon as… first thing I done in the morning, was let the budgies out and I had to make sure that the cats didn’t get in the living room, ‘cause I had the cats there as well.’

`Right… right…’

`But they walked… Blackie and Lucky walked in on me… then when I went down… when I moved from Meadow Road down to [deleted], Lucky went missing for a year and ten months… and the man in the garden next door said to me, `Look at that horrible black cat in my garden’, and I said, `That’s my cat, that’s Lucky that went missing…’’

`Oh, and he’d come back after all that time?’

`He came back to me. He’s like a baby… if I go in the kitchen to get myself something to eat, and I think, hark at the children outside. It’s not them, it’s him crying…’

`So your cats…?’

`And I have to go back inside again… and…’

`Your cats sound like they’re your family…?’

`Yeah, like a family… but I mean…’

`Yeah…’

`Umm… they’re quiet and things like that, but I just… I’m… I’m an animal lover so I… I just love them, I mean… sometimes, when I never used to have a lot of money, but… as long as they… the cats had their food, or the budgerigars, I didn’t mind so much about myself. They say to me now, `Your cats live better than you, they get… coley… they get… I… I get tins of salmon for them. I get portions of chicken… and cat food…’

`[Laughs] Yes… yes, they seem to be doing very well. Can I ask you about… how you… when you came out of Hellingly you had to learn to cook, you said…’

`Cope?’

`To cook’

`Cook?’

`Yeah, and how did you manage money? Because that was…’

`Well not… well I… I didn’t… start until the… resettlement benefit come through, but… then when all that went, I was very hard up for money as I said. I used to go round the shop and Rita and Tony, and… I used to get something nearly every day on tick. By the time I got my pension I had to pay it all out, so I was back to square one again.’

`Right… and did you have a Psychiatric Nurse who was helping you to sort out any of your…?’

`I had a… well it’s… well I don’t have her now, what I… had… to… to stop her from coming, but she used to come down sometimes to see me… when Jean come down… she come down to comfort me, and that I mean… she was there. She was… it was a good job I didn’t go with her to the funeral, because she turned up half an hour late, and the funeral was over, but I went with two wardens from the… Elizabeth Court, they took me… and… helped me see Jean, know what I mean? But… in the end I had to… who did I get in the end? I had to stop her and then I had… do remember the staff, came here one day. I thought they were Jehova Witnesses. I wasn’t going to let them in, then they came to me and they said, `Would you like to come up to Grangemead?’. I said I didn’t know where… for the elderly up here… so I… I came up here, I come up here every week, but I’m… if I want to talk to them, I can talk to them on the ’phone, I have their telephone number. They’re very helpful and the staff are very nice here, I like them, know what I mean…’

`Right…do you have…?’

`And at Christmas time you all get a nice present off the staff, know what I mean, and you have… a lovely… I come up here for Christmas dinner… [inaudible]… I come up her for Christmas dinner…’

`Right…and you’re quite happy coming here?’
`I’m happy coming here, yeah…’

`Yeah…’

`I come here again on Thursday…’

`Right…’

`Yeah…’

`Right… and how… what else do you do during the week?’

`Nothing, only… the crossword puzzles all of the time, I’m hooked on them… and… I… I like the television, I like watching that a lot. I like the quizzes on there. I like `Fifteen to One’, and `Countdown’. If I can beat them by making up the words or… adding up the letters at the end. I do quite well sometimes.’

`Have you always enjoyed doing quizzes… and crosswords?’

`Yes… well… with the crossword puzzles, when I went in hospital the first time, I had a couple that used to come to visit me, and they brought me a crossword puzzle book, and I’ve been hooked ever since then. I spend a lot of money every week on… crossword puzzle books, but I enjoy them.’

`And, were you doing crossword puzzles when you were in Broadmoor?’

`No… no… they didn’t have them… there were books there…’

`Right. What about when you were in Helinglai? [ph]’

`No, I never done any there neither…’

`No…so it’s…’
`It’s ever since I’ve been out in the community…’

`Right…’

`But… now I… when I go out with Pippa, we go round all the shops to see… whether I can walk round, or she’ll go round, see if I can get some more… books… I shall go again tomorrow, and see what books I can get.’

`Right…’

`I suppose… they say it’s not really a waste of money, I think… you learn a lot I think by doing crossword puzzles, you learn about… about different people and places, so you know, you get all that, ‘cause… sometimes when I do the quizzes here, they said to me, `You know… know a lot’, I said, `You learn it by doing crossword puzzles…’

`Yes… yes… yes. Can you remind me, why did you move from your flat to the bungalow?’

`When?’

`Why?’

`Why?’

`Mmm’

`Well, ‘cause about the noise. I had a man upstairs, and he was very noisy and he used to have his washing machine on… during the night, and his kitchen was above my bedroom, and I used to hear the spin dryer. He would walk about, from about four o’clock in the afternoon ‘till about nine… ‘till he went out drinking, and then he would come back drunk, and I could hear him falling on the floor and I said to him, `Well I don’t go in the kitchen because your bedroom’s above my kitchen, but I don’t go in my kitchen to make a noise for you’, what I mean… I kept telling about it. Well, now and again, I had little pebbles, and I kept throwing them up at his windows to… make him be quiet, what I mean… you know, I’d get and… but he was very noisy.’

`Right… so you decided you wanted to…’

`I come out to… [deleted] but, it’s so quiet there, you could hear a pin drop. It’s nice not to have anybody living above you, because I think the fact is that I had to put up with so much noise when I was in mental hospitals, people banging, shouting about, that even sometimes if I hear children shouting about, it annoys me. Any kind of a noise… so… I just like it to be quiet. But sometimes it’s too quiet.’

`Mmm’

`It was the noise and… you’d be a funny feeling in your ear… and it affects your hearing…’

`Yes…’

`The quietness…’

`And where you live now is very quiet?’

`Yes…’

`Yeah…’

`Though when I go home tomorrow after… no, Thursday afternoon from Grangemead, I won’t see nobody until Monday…’

`You… so you don’t have many visitors?’

`No, only Thurstine Bassett [ph], when he comes…’

`Right…’

`He comes down for Christmas, my birthday… other days, and he comes down… he does the `Fun Run’. Sometimes he does it… in Hailsham, like with the Hellingly… staff come up there, they… run from there… but otherwise, if it wasn’t for Thurstine I would have nobody. ‘Cause, when you see other people having visitors, especially at Christmas time, you feel it… what I mean, I think you can see all the people going in there, and I think they’re having a lovely time… but we do have a good time up here though… we can have…’

`Yeah… yeah. Do you keep in touch with any of the other patients that you were in Hellingly with?’

`No… no… I think nearly all the ones that I knew died… in there… but, I don’t know where a lot of them have gone to but… that was a sad day I think when they closed Hellingly, because… Eric Stone, he done a video… at the same time as me up at Hellingly, and as soon as he come out… he come out into the community, and he went downhill and he died… know what I mean… I… he was so sad when I saw him, because… he was in Hellingly for sixty six years. He was twenty… two, I think when he was in Hellingly and he come out when he was… eighty six I think he was… eighty six, eighty eight. He died… and he was… ninety four I think when he died.’

`Right…’

`He used to walk all the way into Hailsham, that’s why they interviewed him and me because… he’d been in hospital the long… longest time as a man, and me as a female, I’d been in… and they asked me if I’d do a video.’

`Right…’

`I had to be filmed going in shops in Hailsham… I felt a right twit [both laugh].’

`Yes… I was going to ask you… I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now… sorry I’ve gone completely blank. So… when you… when you came out, did you ever have the feeling that you actually missed Hellingly at all…?’

`I did miss it…’

`…or you missed hospital? What… what…?’

`I did I mean because you… you were sort of on your own.’

`What…?’

`I mean after being thirty three and a half years with a load of people, and then you come out in the community and you’re on your own, you do feel… feel it a bit, what I mean…’

`So was it the company you missed, or was it the work…?’

`The company I think… yeah, the company…’

`Mmm… right, yes…yes.’

`As I said, I… had a good friend in Jean, and we was always at one another’s houses everyday… she’d come to me and she’d say `Do you want a cuppa?’, and I’d go up to her place and have a…’

`Right, and…’

`But she didn’t have much… much money, so I used to spoil her. I used to buy a lot of things out the catalogue, and as I said, I’m still paying off two debts… now one… they’re only about fifty something each, because one was five hundred odd and the other one was four hundred… and I got them right down to just over a hundred for the two of them…’

`Right… good…’

`I’m not bad off for money now, because I get attendance allowance. I always… also get income support, and that was the Council, that wrote to me and said, `We think that you’re entitled to Income Support, because the Government says you cannot live on less than a £116 pound a week, so they granted me… income support, I… the fact is, I wrote to them and I said I didn’t have any money anywhere… been in hospital for thirty three and a half years, they don’t pay you to be in hospital, so therefore, I’ve got no banking account anywhere. So… and then they granted it, you know they… well Keith done a lot to get it for me, he was... Keith was good. Came up here one day and I saw Keith, and he ‘phoned up the DHSS, and then Keith said to me, `They’ve granted you your income support’.’

`Right…and…’

`Sometimes people say to me `You get a lot of money’, but I think it’s about time I had a bit of happiness whatever…’

`I think so… I think that’s right…’

`[Both talking together] ‘Cause I mean I don’t know how much longer… I’m going to live. I don’t know, I hope I’m not going to die just yet, but…’

`Yeah…’

`I want to be happy for the first… well…’

`Yeah…’

`I’d… remaining… the years I’ve got left, what I mean…’

`What.. what…?’

`I want to be happy, you know what I mean?’

`Mmm. What hopes have you got for the future? Have you…?’

`I don’t think I’ve got any hopes really… [laughs]…’

`Uh huh…’

`Just be the same, and be coming up here… seeing Thurstine Bassett. Umm… he… I… I ‘phone him up sometimes… and… he… he’s been a brick [ph], I mean he’d never miss coming… five or six times a year for over thirteen years… and he… only met me at… Hellingly when I done the video, and it’s the only time he met me, and he’s never let me down…’

`That’s brilliant…’

`He’s got a nice wife… as well…’

`Yeah, that’s lovely…’

`A good wife…’

`So… so looking back on your life, Joan, you’ve obviously had a lot of difficult times in your life… what do you think’s kept you… made you… helped you survive… through all those difficult times?’

`I don’t know really. Will power I think… must be will power…’

`’Cause you certainly seem to have kept your spirit?’
`I miss the family. I miss my mum and that… and my foster parents, ‘cause my foster mother died as well. I miss all them…’

`Mmm… mmm…’

`I miss my twin sister… ‘cause she died of alcoholic poisoning, because she used to come to Broadmoor to visit me and she would be drunk. She took to drink I think because she was worried about me being in hospital, so she…’

`Yes…’

`…drunk herself to death… she died of alcoholic poisoning.’

`So there’s been a lot of…?’

`So she didn’t see me get out of hospital neither’

`No… so there’s been a lot of sadness in your life… a lot of loss?’

`It’s been all sadness I think really…’

`Mmm… mmm…’

`From the day I was born practically… what I mean.’

`Right…’

`When I come to look upon it and I think… well… and… sometimes they’ve said to me here, `Life’s been very unfair to you’, I said, `Through my childhood, thirty three and a half years in hospital, come out in the community, get breast cancer…’. I don’t think I could have any more bad luck than what I’ve had.’

`No…’
`Don’t think I could stand any more.’

`No…’

`But so I say… when I wake up in the morning, sometimes I feel like a good cry because.. I know what kind of a day I’ve got to have, know what I mean… I think…’

`And have…?’

`I’m going to be on my own…’

`Yeah… how do you cope in that situation… when you wake up?’

`I just have to pull myself through. I think the cats help me. If I didn’t have the cats, because… I spend practically twenty four hours a day looking after them…’

`Right…’

`They’re a great comfort to me, what I mean…’

`Right, yes…’

`Although the neighbours don’t really like it… when you have cats, but I mean… I said to them, I didn’t go there to please the neighbours, I went there to please myself…’

`That’s right…’

`But Syvlia and John, they’re very good to me, what I mean… especially at Christmas time and birthdays and that…’

`Mmm’
`Sylvia’s very good and… she’ll say to me, `You want to come in for a cup of coffee?’, and I’d go in with them. There’s only one side, I don’t have nothing to do with the lady at the other side, because… she says that I have a wireless in the bedroom… said they’d report me to the council, and I hadn’t got a wireless in the bedroom. It’s just… she supposed to be deaf, but she can still hear noises…’

`Mmm…’

`So… well, because the lady in there… because I’m talking to Sylvia and John, the lady next door won’t talk to Sylvia because she’s friends with me… she waves to the other lady but she won’t wave back. She’s ninety, but she… but I’m not going to have somebody domineer my life. I think now that I’m out in the community, I do what I want… I go where I want and not what other people want. I don’t have anybody… telling me what to do and what not to do. I don’t take no orders from nobody, and I’ve made that clear… that you know, nobody tells me what to do… and like that…’

`And I think it’s that… that spirit of yours which has helped you survive up to now I think, you know…[both laugh]… so I’d like to thank you very much indeed for talking to me…about your life…’

`Well I’ve really enjoyed myself with… with you and Kay… no… is it Kay?’

`Faye…’

`Faye… I’ve really enjoyed myself… and to tell the truth I was dreading it… to begin with because I thought to myself, what’s it going to be like? But now, I… I’ve really enjoyed the day… and I’ll be able to tell Pippa tomorrow all about it…’

`Yes…’

`Tell… tell Keith when he…’
`Uh huh…’

`And it’s been a pleasure meeting you both, what I mean… I…’

`Great…’

`…appreciate what you’ve done for me… what I mean…’

`Yes…’

`It’s nice to have somebody nice and friendly to talk to, what I mean…’

`Well it’s been very interesting for us… [both talking together]’

`[Inaudible] I mean… as I said, I was dreading today but now I’ll… I’ll miss…not today… I shall miss you too… what I mean… I miss my…’

`Well, we’ll we see…we’ll see you again when we launch the videos, so…’

`I hope I have a video’

`Yes you will definitely, we’ll send you one, that you can… see…’

`And we… we ought to go along to… come along with me to Keith would you, and… I’m… every… ooh sorry…’

[End of DVC Pro tape 4 of 4 - End of VHS tape 1 of 1]