...of the institutionalised

This process is supervised by Mrs. Everett and Mrs. Pilling who share control of kitchen affairs and are responsible for the fire. It is Mrs. Pilling (the most trusted patient in the ward) who also arranges the making of toast over the open fire in the morning, the collecting of bread and cream, the carrying out to the side door of the full pig-tin ready for the golden-haired pig-boy to pick up on his way to the farm driving the leisurely old cart horse. When the tin has been loaded on the back he rummages through the food, bypassing the cold skills bog of leftover porridge and reaching for the more appetising dainties of discarded toast and sodden pieces of currant bun, all of which he stuffs hungrily in his mouth and, chewing contentedly, climbs again to the front of the cart and with a tug of the reins and a "Gee-up" sets the morose but patient horse on his way. Mrs. Pilling in her undemonstrative silent manner has an understanding with the pig-boy and though she recoils from his habits she has a stolid tolerance and respect for other people's peculiarities and is inclined to act out of character herself in order to preserve someone else's individuality.
She sometimes leaves a slice of staff cake on the pig-tin. It seems that she has no husband no children no relatives. She never has visitors. She never speaks of her personal concern; one is seldom aware that she has any. She has lived for many years in the hospital and has a small room at the end of the T.B. corridor; one is surprised on passing it to notice that it has a cosy appearance as far as that is possible in a room in a mental hospital. She is allowed to keep her overcoat. It hangs behind the door. There is a feminine smell of powder and clothes. At one time someone must have given her a potted plant; it now stands on a chair in one corner, and an old calendar of five years ago, presumably kept for its old-fashioned English country scene, hangs over the hole in the centre of the door so that the nurses may not peep in at her in the night She is allowed that privacy.
Her sobriety, her apparent acceptance of a way of life that will continue until she dies - these frighten me. She seems like someone who could set up camp in a graveyard and continue to boil the billy, eat and sleep soundly and perhaps spend the day polishing the tombstones or weeding the graves. One watches her for a ripple of herself as one watches an eternally calm lake for evidence of the rumoured creature inhabiting perhaps "deeper than ever plummet sounded". One needs a machine like a bathysphere to find Mrs. Pilling. A bathysphere of fear? Of love?

[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]