...of old men

Sunday was a pleasant day compared with the rest of the week. No shock treatment, church in the morning, in the afternoon a walk in the grounds perhaps up past the poplars away up the hill past the wooden building where some of the men lived, the old doddering ones who could only sit out in the sun and the younger mongols and imbeciles who gave a simple help around the farm and in the garden. A rope clothesline sagging with their striped ward clothes was stretched between two poles at the back door. Sometimes we saw a face peering at us from the curtain less windows; or a little group sitting in the sun staring, their lips moving in the way old people have, as if in their life they have never been able to say what they needed to say of have never had anyone to say it to, and now when they are old they babble on and on not minding the words, only to get it said in time. While you are alive and persist in the sovereign act of living you are surrounded by invisible courtiers of being which keep your self spruce and well fed, as the bees attend their queen; but when you are near death these courtiers neglect you or even join forces to kill you and acquire the inner, unkempt look of the dying. The unkemptness of these old men showed from within, beyond the shabby appearance of their braces hitching their pants anyhow, their unbuttoned flies, their flannel shirts bunched out, hanging loose.
When we passed their dining room and looked in at the bare wooden tables already laid for tea with the thick cup, plate and spoon at each place, I was depressed by the dreariness of a day where tea is prepared for immediately after dinner. After tea, no doubt, the old men were put to bed at once, in the daylight. I wanted to go in the dining room and put a white cloth and flowers on the long tables. The authorities in some of the hospital wards of the world had learned - it had been reported in the newspapers, with headlines - that flowers "helped." Could they have helped in this men's ward? Perhaps not. It seemed to be a place where there was no one home. I was reminded of the times my father used to come home from work and my mother was perhaps in the garden or the lavatory or talking to one of the neighbours over the fence, and a look of panic would cross my father's face as he walked into the empty kitchen.
"Where's Mum?" he would say.
And I was reminded of a poem we used to say at school, a mysterious poem beginning "'Is there anybody there?' said the traveler, knocking on the moonlit door." A traveler could knock for years at the door of that dismal ward; he could even shout, like the traveler in the poem, "Tell them I came!" and he could get no answer. The old men were dead though their mouths moved and they snaffled their tea and Borstal cake; though they sat in the gentle sun with their long sharp afternoon shadows, their only companions, lying motionless and dumb beside them.

[Faces in the Water, Frame, J.]