Passage of Light & Shade

A Passage of Light &

ShadeB Y N I C O L A W H I T E

A STORY ABOUT THE ROYAL ED INBURGH HOSPITAL

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4pp COLOUR COVER A5 200 OBJECTS BOOKLET BY NICOLA WHITE 2.indd 1 06/11/2013 16:45

A PASSAGE OF L IGHT & SHADE 2





A selection from the reflective journal and papers of Eilidh Moss,

research student.

36pp MONO TEXT A5 200 OBJECTS BOOKLET BY NICOLA WHITE.indd 1 06/11/2013 16:46

2 A PASSAGE OF L IGHT & SHADE



6th June, 2013

Doctor Dunbar, my supervisor, says I have an undisciplined mind.

If I ever get this PhD, I don’t think I’ll call myself doctor like he

does. It’s confusing – you imagine having to keep saying No, not a

real doctor. On the other hand, it’s a good answer when idiots ask Is

it Miss or Mrs? As if your marital state was key information for

paying your electricity bill.

Doctor Dunbar’s right. How did I get on to electricity bills?

To tame my undisciplined mind, he says, I need to keep a

journal. No one need ever look at it but me. The point of a reflective

journal, Eilidh, is to trace your thinking processes during the construction of

your thesis. Research, he says, is a process of recalibration. You start

with a question, then try and answer it, and in answering of it, the

question changes.

I’ve settled on my thesis title. It’s going to be ‘Architecture as

Cure: New Craig House and the Blueprint of Moral Management’

Sounds like a real book. Something to be quoted in footnotes.

But what is my central question? The one that will lead me through

my work. How about:

Can a building make you sane?

* * * * * *



8th June, 2013

This morning I found a great quote from Thomas Clouston,

the man responsible for building New Craig. He was physician

superintendent of the Royal Edinburgh Asylum and a typical

Victorian patriarch – sure of himself, energetic, bearded. He writes

about how – in the late 1880s – he studied all the asylums of the day,

then drew up ‘experimental plans made by me and a patient of mine

who took a great interest in the matter.’

Isn’t that interesting? He included a patient’s point of view.

They worked on it together. I never expected that. And he talks

explicitly about the architecture as part of the treatment, saying the

aim of the design is to ‘secure the best chance of recovery, happiness,

safety and comfort.’

I think I could be on to something.

13th June, 2013

Like all the psychiatrists of his day, Clouston was described as an

alienist. The mad being alien to the well, presumably. His patients

were lunatics. The hospital was an asylum. All these words consigned

to the bin of history. The terms become sullied and we move on,

finding something fairer, like ‘facility’ and ‘service user’. Fair, but not

exactly poetry.

I don’t think asylum is a bad word, necessarily. It sounds like

sanctuary, safety, a place apart from the world’s troubles. Who

wouldn’t want that?

* * * * * *



Photograph ref. RE/PL7/D/011.

View of New Craig House, c. 1895

It is such a huge building that the photograph can’t contain it, and

it tumbles down the line of the hill, bristling with turrets, chimney

stacks and tiny roof temples. A big square tower tops it all. Some

scholars claim it was modeled on a typical country house, but the

scale of it suggests some kind of massive beaux-arts hotel. It’s been

described as Italianate, as neo-Gothic, as French, even as Jacobean

revival. It borrows its looks from the past, but in a way that no-one

can quite pin down.

Another quote from Clouston: “This charming hill had attracted

my covetous attention from the time I went to Morningside. Nothing

more lively than its old trees, nothing more cheerful than the views

in every direction from it, exists in Edinburgh or Scotland.”



Photograph ref RE/PL7/D/034.

Corridor interior with staff c.1895.

The corridor is elaborately panelled in dark wood, stuffed with

furniture, crystal wall lamps, potted plants, even a wally dog on the

mantelpiece. It does look like a well-staffed mansion here. I don’t

know if that’s a maid or a nurse, that girl in the long white apron and

cap. The woman in front looks like she’s in charge, her stiff black

dress makes me think of the word bombazine. There’s a man with

a moustache in the background, blurred with hurry.

* * * * * *



20th June, 2013

Exciting day. I finally got inside the building for a quick tour. It’s

about to be made in to luxury flats, so this might be the last chance

anyone gets to see it as it was. Well, not really as it was – Napier

University had it for years, the few bits of furniture are blandly

modern, and walls are pasted now with woodchip paper and studded

with exit signs and fire alarm boxes.

I had to try and imagine the feel of the wards, the communal

bathing rooms, the once-genteel drawing rooms. There’s the great

hall, of course, double height, impressively gloomy. The upper

balconies are barred most ornately with wooden screens against

those who might jump off. The hall is where the asylum dances were

held, right up into the 1980s. In Victorian times, journalists would

come and observe the lunatics en fête.

The corridors stay in my mind most of all. The potted plants

and rugs are gone, but the space allowed for circulation is generous

and well thought out. Main passages are divided up into shallow-

arched bays.

Every second bay is lit by a skylight, some round and spoked

like wheels, some with square-paned windows. It reminds me of

somewhere I know, but I can’t place it. The young man showing

me round was in a hurry.

‘All right?’ he said, standing at the end of the corridor. I followed

after, passing through falls of light, shade, light, shade.

The corridors in the other part of the hospital are long and

institutional. The main part of the Royal Edinburgh is a bit like a

town – buildings of all types and ages. There’s a 60’s tower block,



30’s pavilions, sheds, portacabins, glasshouses. Up here on the

hill, the rose and yellow bulk of New Craig and its surrounding

parkland feel like a country estate, a retreat. Built for the nobility

in a time when such things were thought to be innate rather than

lucky circumstance.

* * * * * *

21st June, 2013

A librarian just told me there are letters written by New Craig

patients in the archives, hundreds of them. I’m suddenly excited

by the idea that I could include patient’s opinions of the building

in my thesis – set their impressions against Clouston’s view that

the architecture would aid recovery.

* * * * * *



Flat D,

145 Marlborough St,

Portobello

24/6/13

Dear Mum,

I felt very upset after talking to you last night. I felt you were

accusing me of deliberately trying to distress you, when I really

had no idea it was New Craig House you stayed in when you were

unwell. You never talk about that time, so how can I have known?

Think about it.

This isn’t about you at all, this is about my work, which is very

important to me. I can’t just choose another thesis subject. I hope

you can understand that, and that you can see it more calmly since

we spoke. It’s very frustrating that you can call me but I cannot

call you. If you got a phone line in at the croft, you wouldn’t need

to walk to the box in the rain. I worry that if you broke a leg or

something, you wouldn’t be able to raise the alarm.

I can almost hear you rolling your eyes from here, so I’ll sign off.

Your obedient daughter,

Eilidh xx

* * * * * *



Extract from tape transcript. Interview with former nurse

Agnes Beattie, who worked in New Craig in the 1930s/40s

‘Old Craig House was all ladies then, an eerie old place, but the furniture

was lovely. Supposed to be haunted. Of course, New Craig had its own ghost

too. Not that I ever laid eyes on her, I don’t believe in that kind of thing.

We had enough excitement in the hospital, if you know what I mean,

without making up hallucinations.

‘All the nursing staff slept in the hospital then, some of us along the

yellow corridor between wards 23 and 24. That was the route the ghost

was supposed to favour.

‘Anyway, some of the younger ones refused to do night patrols in case

they’d see her – the Grey Lady they called her. She wore an old-fashioned

dress that swept the floor. Some said she was a nurse. My friend Molly

Gordon, god rest her, she swore she saw her one night, this misty figure

standing very still over the bed of a patient who was in a bad way. But

in the middle of a long nightshift, you know, you can’t trust your eyes.

We’d be sleeping standing up...’

I shouldn’t let myself be distracted by this kind of thing, but

what an intriguing idea. A conscientious ghost, a watcher.

* * * * * *

5th July, 2013

I dreamt last night I was walking the corridors of New Craig House,

looking for something. I started to open a door when I realised that

there was something terrible behind it, and I woke up from fright.

I never did get back to sleep.

* * * * * *



8th July, 2013

I’m in the reading room now, on the very top floor of the library.

This is where you access the archive for the Royal Edinburgh.

It’s quiet and clean and light-filled – one glass wall looks out on

a decked balcony where no ever goes, another glass wall overlooks

the reception, where you surrender your belongings, your food and

coat and bags and liquids, to a locker. Only pencils are allowed in

the Reading Room.

I’ve been issued with a little green member’s card, which makes

me stupidly pleased. I have the impression that the other people

here are doing work that is both important and terribly obscure.

Some tables have big lecterns made of black foam on them, so that

old books won’t be strained as they’re opened, and there are small

and large pillows for the same purpose, and slinky chains covered

in knitted silk to gently hold down the pages. The archivist said

these are called snake weights. I love these trappings, the white gloves

that some of us wear, the linen ribbons that tie files closed, the dull,

orderly colours of those files. I could just put my head down on one

of these book pillows and snooze the day away.

Whenever someone leaves or enters, the door gives a kind of

sigh or suck, as if the air in here is so rarified it has caused a vacuum.

The archivist wheeled in a trolley for me. She’s called Amy and

is perhaps Japanese, perhaps not. She always wears black, and makes

me feel untidy, scattered.

Why am I rambling?

She has brought me boxes of patients’ letters from the early years

of New Craig. I am allowed one file at a time. Each letter or paper

scrap is held in a see-through sleeve. Some are in neat copperplate,

some scrawl.



Some writers use every scrap of the paper then start new lines at an

angle to the old, until the whole is indecipherable.

Thankfully, some patients do talk about the building. A little:

“I sleep in a large room with a lot of people and I don’t like it at all…”

“I have to go to a hall of immense size for any food.”

Most appeal to families and friends for their release:

“Charlie when you were ill I would have laid down my life for you. Will you

do nothing for me now – there is no hope for me at all in this dreary place.”

“You do not know what I suffer here – I know I deserve nothing from any of

you but what it would be to be among you all and getting the kindness and

good food and the companionship of you all again…”

squashed in the margin of this letter:

do

write

to

me

It is immensely moving, to see the very marks they left on paper,

more than a hundred years ago. Some sound very lucid to me:

“You must either become a low panderer to the personal vanity of

Dr. Clouston himself or live in constant and chronic war with his staff.”



And this woman caught my attention, probably because it mentions

the beach near my flat:

“I do not know why I am being kept here, or what reason the people who

brought me here gave for doing so. I was told the people at Portobello thought

I was going to drown myself, but I never had any such desire or intention, but

very much wish to live as long as possible, especially now, when except for my

being brought here, everything was on a fair way to come right.”

Her name was Jessie Venables, admitted in 1900. I asked Amy

the Archivist if there was any more information about her, and

she brought up the case files for me to see, big bound ledgers of

admissions, diagnoses and treatment – fascinating.

It said Jessie was ‘raving in a most incoherent manner’ when

admitted. A policeman discovered her hiding in someone’s garden

following reports of her walking in the sea. Yet in her letter she

sounds so clear. Maybe you can appear worse on the outside than

you are inside. I think usually it’s the other way round.

Anyway, Jessie was discharged just a month after she came in.

They say she was ‘much improved’.

Walking to the bus stop, I suddenly remembered something Amy

said about the letters. She said they’d been attached to the case notes

as evidence of the patient’s mental state.

I didn’t think it out at the time. That means they never got to

their destination. All those earnest arguments, the appeals to bonds

of love and affection. Plucked from their envelopes and shut up in

a file. The patients left wondering why no one answered.

* * * * * *



Croft 165,

Salen,

Ardnamurchan

Friday, 12th July

My Eilidh,

There is always a heron at the lochan that I pass on the way to

the store and phonebox. It flies away usually, but today it didn’t.

Do you think it has decided to recognise me?

There is a deep peace here that I love. I really don’t need a

phone or a computer. I have friends. Sally in the next croft calls by

every day and she is even more of an old woman than I am, so don’t

worry about me keeling over and the cat eating me, or whatever it is

you fear.

You want to know what I remember about Craig House, about

the building. I’m not being awkward, but I really don’t remember

much at all. My head was not good and the drugs they gave me were

stupefying. The building was grand, but shabby, and often it was

cold. I remember the big hall that you mention. Mostly I remember

the terrible lack of privacy. I think that’s what has given me a horror

of crowds.

We all have to find our way, find what’s right for us. Look at you

now, you’ve found a passion and focus at last, and I’m very proud of you.

Wouldn’t your teachers be amazed that you’ve turned out academic?

I’ll phone on Sunday as usual.

Much love,

Mum

* * * * * *



23rd July, 2013

I’ve asked my mother twice now, when it was she was at the hospital,

but she says she can’t remember the date. She must remember what

the year was, at least. I know she doesn’t like me asking. I was born

in 1972, so it must have been some time before that.

I could go up and visit, talk to her face to face, maybe show her

some of the photographs from my research. That might prompt

something. It’s bad to shut things away. Everyone knows that.

I asked at the reading room desk if they had patient records

for the sixties, but they said no, these things are confidential until a

hundred years have passed. Seventy-five if the person is deceased.

Unless you are a relative.

I’m a relative! I said.

Well, you need to bring in the death certificate, they said.

I felt terrible. Couldn’t explain it was my mother I wanted to

know about and she’s not dead. I pretended it was nothing urgent.

I keep getting pulled away from the physical world, into the

stories of patients, into wondering about my mother. The building,

that’s my focus.

Stone, wood, plaster, glass. Things you can touch..

* * * * * *



25th July, 2013

Today I put in a request to view all the archive photographs from the

Royal Edinburgh Hospital. I was hoping I could track the physical

changes to New Craig over the decades. Three big boxes came out

on the trolley, each one full of a huge mix of images, many with no

information or date. Just reference numbers. Some of the interiors

are definitely New Craig, but others are harder to identify – could

be Mackinnon house, or one of the other buildings.

All day, I looked at them.

Black and white press photographs – a visit from the Queen

Mother, people being presented with honours or bouquets, nurses

lined up in frilly starched hats and cuffs.

Two stark, cold-eyed images show the process of Electro

Convulsive Therapy. Before. During.

The next set were professionally done, large prints featuring

patients engaged in occupational therapy. By their clothes, it’s the

sixties. Someone at a potter’s wheel. A woodworking class. Men in

suits stuffing toy bunny rabbits. Were they put in suits for the day,

for the photographer, or did they always look so neat?

I confess, I did look out for my mother, without success.

There was a little album of colour snaps from the 90s that were

cheerier than the rest – outings, parties – everyone in fancy dress,

smiling. You can’t tell who is staff and who is patient. For that

evening they were clowns and wizards and geisha girls. Behind

them, on the wall, is a poster headed ‘Resuscitation’.

I came across another press photo, another line up of doctors

and nurses. One day, before it reached this box, somebody got hold

of this photograph and scratched every face out – angry white Xs

and spirals are scraped where the heads should be, almost through



the paper in places. I sat with it on the table in front of me. So much

bad feeling coming from such a small rectangle.

Toward the end of the day, I came to a series taken on a women’s

geriatric ward, perhaps in the ‘70s. Their eiderdowns are patterned

with huge cheery flowers but this only serves to mock the bed-bound

ladies with sunken cheeks and open mouths, like wee birds.

One woman sits in a shabby metal chair, smiling down at the

stuffed cat tucked under her arm. Her slippers seem enormous on

the ends of her broomstick legs. On a nearby bed, an old-fashioned

baby doll waits, face down, for its bed companion, its ancient

mummy. Tears pricked my eyes. Ridiculous. I tried to pay attention

to the window detailing.

Then they were closing the reading room. Always prompt.

I stood to show willing, and gathered the photographs. As I did

I noticed a detail in one of the geriatric ward photos. In a corner

bed a woman looks up into air, half smiling at nothing. But in the

window behind there’s a reflection – at first I took it for a curtain, but

it seems to be the long belted dress of a woman. Yet there is nothing

in the room that corresponds to the reflection, and no curtain. The

old woman smiles at the place where a figure should be.

‘We’re closing – now.’ The person behind the desk says, calmly.

Outside, the cobbles are wet and gleaming. I feel soaked in these

people I’ve seen. Photographs are made from light. Across all the

years, their reflected light has entered me. I want to go home and

just sleep and sleep.

* * * * * *



29/7/13 13.14

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Supervision Session 29th July

Dear Ms. Moss,

I was sorry to hear you are unwell, and that it was consequently

necessary for you to cancel this morning’s supervisory session.

The university has asked us to request doctor’s certificates in

the cases of absence through illness. Since you did not reschedule

the meeting in good time, perhaps you could supply this.

Due to my heavy workload and summer vacation, it won’t be

possible for us to meet until September. Could you let me know

that your work is indeed progressing. I cannot over-emphasise

the importance of supervisory meetings.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Derek Dunbar (Dr.)



30/7/13 18.51



RE: Supervision Session 29th July

Dear Dr. Dunbar,

I am sorry that it was not possible to cancel our session with you

in ‘good time’. The flu came on very quickly over the weekend.

I cannot provide a doctor’s certificate, because I didn’t attend the

doctors. I believe people with flu are discouraged from spreading

germs in waiting rooms.

In terms of my progress, I am gathering patients’ accounts of

the architecture. I know you have some misgivings about this, but

I really think it will be worthwhile and add a qualitative dimension

to the aesthetic and sociological. The Patients’ Council have been

very helpful and have arranged interviews with several past patients.

There was also a delay in gaining further access to the building,

but I am to be allowed a full day inside it this Friday.

Be assured that my research progresses well, and I look forward

to discussing it when next we meet.

With best wishes,

Eilidh Moss

* * * * * *



1st August, 2013

I think Dr. Dunbar knows I’m avoiding him. It might not have been

real, viral, flu I had, but I honestly couldn’t leave my bed. I slept for

days and now I cannot sleep at all. The view of my bedroom bores

me. I’m not sure I’m smart enough to do this thesis justice. I feel like

a fraud.

It was so bright this morning, I finally got up from my bed at six

and walked down to Portobello beach in the quiet. The tide was far

out. I couldn’t stop thinking about Jessie Venables standing on that

very shore more than a hundred years ago.

I walked out to the waterline. Foam slid towards me, drew back.

Again. Again. Mesmerising. I didn’t mean to walk right in, but then

found myself wet to the knees.

A man shouted ‘Hey you!’

I turned and gestured, patting the air in a way that I hoped he

would read as everything’s fine. He shrugged and walked off after his

dog. He didn’t raise the alarm. No coach and horses came to take

me off to Morningside.

Was that what I was after? Like mother, like daughter. Or did

I just want to feel close to Jessie?

We all have times when we don’t understand what we do.

* * * * * *



2nd August, 2013

I’m back in the reading room, back at work. It’s suddenly festival

time again, and they’ve set up tents in George Square and stalls

selling belgian waffles and gourmet burgers. None of that circus

reaches us up here, the high scholars of the library tower.

I was just going to write something silly about how this room is

my personal asylum, when I noticed the cameras for the first time.

Dark glass spheres hang from grey sockets in the ceiling above

every single table. This is a panopticon, not an asylum. Everything

is visible to the masters. I tilt my laptop screen towards me, so that,

if anyone is watching, they cannot see these words.

Thomas Clouston didn’t approve of women using their minds.

He said, “All the brain energy would be used up cramming a

knowledge of the sciences, and… there would be none left at all

for… reproductive purposes.” He thought education made women

barren, and that a future Britain would have to import uneducated

women from other countries to continue the race.

Not so benign as he first seemed. His views were of the time,

that’s the best I can say.

* * * * * *



9th August, 2013 (My second tour of New Craig)

They said I could stay as long as I wanted, but couldn’t let me have

keys, so effectively they locked me in. I had a number to call when

I finished.

I brought my camera and a notebook for observations. On one

of the big fireplaces in the Great Hall there’s a strange coat of arms –

a naked man, horizontal, floats above a castle and below a hand with

an eye in it. Weird, masonic stuff. (since writing this I discover it is the

surgeon’s coat of arms!)

The building has a confusing layout – deliberately so? I read

somewhere that there were secret staircases just for the staff to

circulate in, and that tunnels ran between the buildings and down

to the town, but I never found them. As I wandered about, I kept

thinking I heard movements in other parts of the building. But that’s

the way old buildings are.

New Craig was designed for paying patients, the gentry, but

when the NHS came in, there were no more divisions between rich

and poor. So how was it for people to come from modest cosy homes

to this rambling place, this cold castle? I certainly didn’t feel more

sane for being there, and that’s supposed to be the point of my thesis.

Because I was on my own, things that were probably quite

ordinary seemed eerie:

I opened a door in the basement and found a room carpeted in

autumn leaves a foot deep.

I found a hatch at the top of a small staircase and entered a low,

attic-y space above the Great Hall. Ropes and pulleys stretched

the width of it. I think they’re for letting the big chandeliers up and

down. The space seemed untouched for many years. There were



some old clothes there, and graffiti scratched in the plaster. I looked

close to read it. This is Me – it said with a small arrow pointing at

something – a twist of paper, like a rawlplug – sticking from the wall.

I pulled the twist from its hole and unwrapped it.

It was a tooth. A person’s yellowed tooth. This is me. I put it

right back.

Wanting the light, I climbed up to the square tower and spent

too long looking out. The castle rock was straight ahead, the Forth

bridges visible beyond. I was thinking that the view hadn’t changed

so much since 1900 and with that thought came an odd sensation,

like I was looking out of somebody else’s eyes.

Reading this over, it all sounds rather fevered. It’s hard to

explain. Being alone in New Craig felt like walking around in my

own dreams, the same empty corridors and odd discoveries, and

a sense of someone watching over me.

* * * * * *



Notes from an interview with Henry K,

a patient at New Craig House in the 60s and 70s. 14/8/13

Henry was the first of my interviewees. He struck me as very dapper

– he wore a cravat and a yellow jumper, but his accent was not posh.

His face was very lined up close. He pronounced hospital ‘hose-

bottle’. He wasn’t that happy about me using a recorder.

I kept being distracted by the fact that one of his lower front

teeth was missing.

He talked entertainingly about other New Craig patients, saying

that there were people there from before the war, many of them

‘Dukes and Duchesses and whatnot’ abandoned by their families.

He said that the grandeur of New Craig was a deliberate attempt

‘to keep us in our places.’ He talked of the doctor’s coffee room

where a patient who had been a musician played on the Bechstein

while the doctors listened over their china cups and saucers.

I couldn’t get him to focus on the architecture for long, he

wanted to talk about how the medical establishment mismanaged his

care. He seemed to see a grand plan or dark game behind what had

happened to him, something mapped out. I told him that I thought

the world was more random than that, and he looked, not exactly

disappointed with me, but as though I had failed a test, just as he

expected.

At the end, I asked him about the ghost stories. ‘People like us

can’t admit things like that,’ he said, ‘you have to be careful.’

* * * * * *



16/8/13 10.03



Subject: Supervision Session Tuesday 10th September

Dear Ms. Moss,

Please confirm that you can attend a supervisory session

on 10th September at 9.30am. In advance of this, could you

send me your thesis outline and draft first and second chapters,

say by 3rd September, to give me a chance to absorb them.

I have to say I am concerned with our lack of contact over the

summer, and am anxious to see progress. I need to remind you

that unless delivery targets are respected, your place on the

postgraduate programme may be at risk.

Best wishes,

Derek Dunbar (Dr.)

* * * * * *



16th August, 2013

Doctor Dunbar is a mean, cold-blooded reptile. I thought doing a

doctorate would have its creative side, and that Doctor Derek might

be an inspiration, a real mentor, but he makes the whole thing full

of doom and grind and anticipatory disappointment.

Three weeks to pull together some chapters. Yikes. I have been

avoiding it. Now I need to just get down to it, but I’ve an interview

scheduled for tomorrow with Helen, another ex-patient. Can’t cancel

her, though I wish I could.

* * * * * *

Extract from an interview with Helen M, patient at various

points in the 60s, 70s and 80s. 17/8/13

I don’t know how to process what Helen told me. My head is still

reeling, I can only write the words out from the recording.

‘… when you first came in they would give you quite strong

drugs, chlorpromazine, I think. They dosed you up, then eased off

until you could just about walk, but oh, you shook and you slavered.

Dreadful. … some of the staff were harsh people. They would talk

about you as if you weren’t in the room. ‘She’s getting so fat.’ That

kind of thing. I liked the Irish nurses or the ones from the islands

– they treated you softly. Thing was, I was so ill, but because I had

trained as a nurse myself, they gave me a baby to mind.

What? A real baby?

Yes. The staff didn’t have time to look after her, so I had her

during the day, and they would take her at night, but really it didn’t

help me at all. Didn’t help my anxiety.

I don’t understand – what was a baby doing in the hospital?



They were more progressive back then, in ways. When mothers

came in with puerperal psychosis, they brought the babies in too,

so that a bond might be formed. But this mother was so ill, she was

practically catatonic, and so I walked the baby around the corridors

all day. It wasn’t until she left I could get any rest at all. I’m still

in touch with the mother, and the baby is fine, apparently, turned

out to be an academic, she says. Eilidh. She named her after one

of the nicest of the island nurses. Oh. Same as your name …’

* * * * * *

chlorpromazine n. a drug derived from phenothiazine, used

as a sedative and a tranquilliser, esp. in psychotic disorders.

Formula C17H19CIN2S.

* * * * * *

puerperal psychosis n. a mental disorder sometimes occurring in

women after childbirth, characterised by deep depression, delusions

of the child’s death, and homicidal feelings toward the child.

* * * * * *



Croft 165

Salen

Ardnamurchan

Tuesday, 27th August

My Dearest Eilidh,

I didn’t tell you because there was no point in telling you. I didn’t

want you to feel that your life had been blighted in some way by

spending your early weeks in a ‘loony bin’. And perhaps there

is some guilt there too, that I couldn’t take care of you as I would

have wished.

When you used to beg me for a brother or sister to keep you

company it pierced my heart, but I couldn’t go through that again.

It was a long time before I could even hold you in my arms.

It is chemicals that do these things, Eilidh, just chemicals in

the head. Nothing to fear. You have never not been loved.

Mum,

XX

* * * * * *



29th August, 2013

On the very first page of this journal, I wrote the question that

was my quest:

Can a building make you sane?

What kind of idiot asks a question like that? I feel as bad as

if I went into a refugee camp and interrogated people about their

tents – the colour of the canvas, the sleeping arrangements, whether

they preferred the flaps closed or open, as if those petty details could

erase the trauma and conflict that brought them there.

I’m back to square one. Maybe even not on the board.

Buildings do affect people’s wellbeing. I still believe that. And

the patient that drew out the plans for Thomas Clouston believed

it too. Architecture is not nothing. But it certainly isn’t a cure.

Compensation perhaps.

My mother couldn’t bear to look at me. A young women with

schizophrenia and a bunch of Gaelic nurses carried and dandled

me in her place, down long corridors I feel I can almost remember.

The light fading in and out from bay to bay.

I thought I was on one side of a fence and these people, these

patients, were on the other. But there is no fence.

* * * * * *



2nd September, 2013

I went back to finish looking at all the Royal Edinburgh photographs

today, that last box. I had this feeling she was there, and she was.

It was almost the last photograph, as if she’d been hiding from me.

Nurses and patients play croquet on the lawn in front of New

Craig. There’s a tree in full blossom behind them. The grass is

spangled all over with daisies. A nurse takes her turn with the mallet

and a group watches. Among the group are three young women,

standing together. And one of them is my Mum. She is looking down

at the grass, one hand fixes her long hair behind an ear. She is very

thin, but she does not look unhappy.

Behind her, in the shadow of the tree, a figure stands in the

shade, just a dark silhouette. Her head is obscured by a low branch

of blossom. She seems to be carrying a sideways bundle. A little

bundle that could be laundry, could be me. Yes, her dress is long

and sweeps the ground. But that was the fashion in 1972. There

is no reason to think there is anything odd about her.

* * * * * *



Flat D, 145 Marlborough St,

Portobello

5th September, 2013

Dear Mum,

Apparently, I only have to change once at Fortwilliam, so the bus

should have me with you at 4.15 Saturday afternoon. You don’t

have to meet me at the stop, I can walk to you.

I’ve been granted a break from my studies, a term’s grace to

sort out what I’m doing. Doctor Dunbar says it’s not unusual to have

to re-think things, he’s been very understanding, actually. But don’t

worry, I won’t stay with you all that time, just a week or maybe two.

We’ll see how it goes.

We don’t have to talk about when I was a baby or about New

Craig, if you don’t want to. It will be lovely just to sit in the porch

beside you and share the view, catch up on some reading.

It is odd, though, don’t you think, that I was drawn to that place,

that subject. I’m like a salmon going back to where it was spawned,

and not knowing why it’s doing it. I got a bit too drawn in, I think, let

myself fall into some weird imaginings. I’d love to ask you one thing.

Did you ever feel a presence there, something strange but benign?

Sorry, I said we didn’t have to talk about it and I’m doing just that.

You know I’m not superstitious, but a few of the things that have

happened over the last couple of months, well. There’s more things

between heaven and earth than I can get my head around.

That’s for sure. See you Saturday.

Your loving daughter,

E Moss BA, MA, not yet PhD



Ever/Present/Past

The history of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital spans 200 years, covering

many lifetimes and diverse experiences of the psychiatric system. These

experiences, some sad, some heartening, some funny and some down

right odd, give a different insight into the everyday life of this hospital

and the ways in which it has changed over the years.

When Artlink was set the task of capturing the hospital’s history

it decided to approach the whole project in the same way it runs

its workshops. First start with the individual; learn from their

experience; then see where it takes you. The artists involved in

the programme became researchers, meeting with individuals,

slowly unearthing stories, collating these experiences, offering

new perspectives, turning their research into artworks. The result

is EVER/PRESENT/PAST, a year long programme curated and

co-ordinated by Artlink which exposes the history of the REH

through events, talks and exhibitions.

Nicola White’s story is a fictional snapshot of the hospital’s

history. A way of capturing the many different experiences we have

encountered over the years, transforming them into a short story

that re-imagines the patient’s experience of the hospital.

Nicola met with patients and staff, spent time in the Lothian

Health Services Archive and navigated her way through a mountain

of personal accounts of life within the hospital. We were aware

that for the writer the sheer volume of experiences could be

overwhelming and that for everyone involved that these experiences

might be incredibly sad and at points, disturbing.

Nicola, began to take little bits of people’s stories and weave

together a fiction that takes in the Victorian life of the hospital,

as well as giving a very personal account of experiences of

a young woman and her mother in the 1970’s and present day.

Artlink would like to thank everyone involved in the creation of this

story. Your life experiences, the many years you have spent going in

and out of the hospital either for treatment or to work, could never be

encapsulated within one short story.



However we hope that A Passage of Light and Shade dignifies the

patients experience by giving a little insight into one imaginary

patient’s time within the hospital.

Alison Stirling and Trevor Cromie

Co-curators EVER/PRESENT/PAST

Thanks to: Artlink Director Jan-Bert van den Berg for his invaluable

support and guidance throughout the project.

Author’s note

In creating this story, I drew on the archive of the Royal Edinburgh

Hospital and on the testimony of former patients and staff.

The incidents are based on fact, but the contemporary characters

are imaginary and not intended to resemble any actual persons,

living, dead or supernatural.

The reading room is based on the Woolfson Reading Room

at the University of Edinburgh Library, and the reference numbers

are invented.

The Author

Nicola White grew up in Dublin and New York and worked in

Glasgow as a contemporary art curator and as a television and radio

producer. She now writes full time. Her first novel, ‘In the Rosary

Garden’ won the 2013 Dundee International Book Prize.

Sincere thanks to: Alison Stirling, Trevor Cromie, Dianna Manson,

Neville Singh, The Patients’ Council of the Royal Edinburgh

Hospital, and Laura Gould and all at the Lothian Health

Services Archive.



Credits

A Passage of Light & Shade is published by Artlink in an edition

of 1000, November 2013, as part of a series of commissions

commemorating 200 years of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital

© Copyright 2013 the author and publisher.

The EVER / PRESENT / PAST project has been co-curated

by Trevor Cromie and Artlink’s Projects Director Alison Stirling,

the exhibition has been realised in collaboration with the Talbot

Rice Gallery.

Design by Nicky Regan, Submarine Design

Written by Nicola White

Edited by Alison Stirling and Trevor Cromie

Images courtesy of Scran.

Front cover: 000-000-092-897-R © Lothian Health Services Archive. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk

P5: 000-000-041-365-R © The Scotsman Publications Ltd. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk

P6: 000-000-092-996-R © Lothian Health Services Archive. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk

P 33: 000-000-487-112-R © Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland; B/64297. Licensor www.scran.ac.uk

Artlink promotes diversity, drawing on lived experiences to inform creative

responses which are both relevant and enduring.




A STORY ABOUT THE ROYAL ED INBURGH HOSPITAL

Artlink Edinburgh and the Lothians13a Spittal StreetEdinburghEH3 9DY Tel: 0131 229 3555Website: www.artlinkedinburgh.co.ukBlog: www.artlinkeverpresentpast.wordpress.com Artlink is a company registered in Scotland No. 87845 with charitable status. Scottish Charity No. SC006845.


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