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					Porirua Ladies - Part 2 00:00 Ngaere points to marks on the Seclusion Room door. Ngaere: That’s the leg of the bed when they’ve bashed the bed to bits and broken it. They’ve over the years hammered the door with the leg of the bed. Ngaere, Rita and Bruce in the Seclusion Room. Rita: This was the infamous straight-jacket, and that was laced across the back. Ngaere: The arms went down on the insides. These were only used if people tore that up (pointing to the night-dress). You couldn’t put people in here and tearing that up, they use to wrap it round, not with the intention of suicide, but they’d wrap it around their wrist and cut the circulation off ... or around their neck. Ngaere: So if they once started to tear anything - sheets, night-dresses - you’d have to put them into canvas. Rita: And this was canvas. Ngaere: This was canvas - very warm, but it wasn’t always a stitched canvas, it wasn’t always a stitched blanket - it could be just one big canvas sheet. You’d have to take the bed out, you couldn’t have sheets. Anything that would tear up into strips you couldn’t have, because they could wrap it around and cut the circulation. So it would go from this when they first came in, which has got kapok in it, and they could tear that up. And kapok in here - with the shutter shut and the door shut - you would suffocate. So that had to go out, and whether it was torn up or not you swept everything out. Same with the mattress, if it had kapok in it - that had to go out. Ngaere: And you’d go into canvas which has got straw in it. You’d have a straw pillow. If they tore the canvas up and the straw was on the floor it was very warm. You’d have to take the bed out as well of course. You’d look in and you wouldn’t see a soul in here and you’d have to come in and feel all around in the straw. They’d be as warm as toast, stark naked, ‘cause they wouldn’t keep a canvas gown on. You couldn’t have this because they would tear it up and the premium thing was their safety. So, they’d have the straw all over the floor but they’d be as warm as toast. I remember saying to somebody once, "Isn’t it disgusting that these people are lying under straw". And this bloke, it was one of the doctors, "What are you going on about - a horse lies under straw and it’s as warm as toast". And I thought how right he is. Ngaere: These people were warm - the straw kept them warm. And all you could see was straw. And of course this [locking window] would be shut. All the staff had a key like that attached to your person. You couldn’t lock it and walk away and leave it there because you were tied to it. So that was safe as far as the glass was concerned. Rita: It’s a marvellous old lock. It’s been there for so many years. It’s amazing isn’t it. Ngaere: The same old lock that’s been there forever. Look at that. Ngaere demonstrates the double locking mechanism. Ngaere: We all had a key that would lock it once. But if you wanted a safety, some of the seniors had a check-key that you could turn it twice. And it was only a check-key that would open it. I used to hate check-keys because if there was a fire and you were the only one [on], who has the other key? You’re supposed to know of course. Bruce: You can actually hear the lock: one, two. Ngaere: It’s not every lock that would do that. Bruce: And you had a male key and there was a female key. The male key opened the male side. Ngaere: Well this is one of the keys ... that shaped key would open both sides. Bruce: This was a grand master this one. And then you had a master key that the senior staff... Ngaere: I had a master key when I was night supervisor, and that would open male and female doors. Bruce: The grand master was held by the medical superintendent, the administrator... Ngaere: And the senior doctor who was on-call at night. Bruce: And the master key would have been held by doctors, the matron and senior staff. Ngaere: I always had a master key on night duty because I had to get into everywhere if I could, because I was going around all the wards and I had to have access. So I had a master key, and I had it on my key ring for years. Ngaere moves over to the doorway of the Seclusion Room where there is a small observation hole. Ngaere: That was the observation glass. Somebody ripped it off the wall and somebody put it back like that - but there was no glass in it, I don’t know if there was any glass in that. Bruce: Yes there was. Ngaere: But somebody’s attacked it with a spoon or something because they wouldn’t have had any knives or anything in here, so how they managed to ... You should see the four corners of the room if you look into it properly. Can you see? You could look in there without opening the door every time you came [past]. Staff, when you walked past when there was someone in here in seclusion, any staff walking past would just look in and make sure they were all right because you’d leave the light on. But you could just look in and see, even if they were down there. But that [observation hole] when it was repaired wasn’t repaired as it should have been, it was near enough because we had medication by that time. Ngaere: But it was cosy little room. Ngaere leaves the Seclusion Room and moves into the corridor. Ngaere: Well its time we had a cup-of-tea... Thank you. It’s time we had a cup-of-tea. 08:03 Meg talks about E.C.T. treatment. Meg: But one thing I could never understand was what governed the amount of current that they put through your head. They didn’t explain that, nobody had anything explained to them. I had a nurse holding my hand if ever I was going to have "treatment", she would come and hold my hand. Not always the same nurse, but someone who I felt I trusted and that made it a lot better for me if she was there I was able to overcome that feeling that they were against me, that they were trying to kill me. But in the old days, back in the 50s, they use to do it to large numbers of people - y’know maybe 20 people or something. They used to have them spread on the beds and you used to have to walk past all these comatose people to have your "treatment" - there they all were, just flaked out. Meg: You just knew you couldn’t fight them. You didn’t have any defences against them at all - the doctors, the nurses - you just knew you had to submit to it. But that’s not what they do now. I don’t think they’d dare to do that now - not the way they use to. I wouldn’t like to be in that situation again. And the people who I learnt to distrust then I still distrust - even today, and I always will. Because we meet them socially quite a lot and if I can avoid them I will. I don’t like them very much. 10:26 Bruce and Ngaere have a cup-of-tea while looking through the Official Visitors Book. Bruce: I’ll get you to look at this book here. Ngaere: Do you realise it must be darn-near-seventy-years since I looked at these books. Bruce: This is the "Official Visitors book of Porirua Hospital". Official Visitors were the safe-guard put in place by government for the patients and the staff. Also written in these books were the reports from the inspectors. The date here is the 28 November 1887. Ngaere: That’s actually when this place was opened - 1887. Bruce: And it just says "Dean MacGregor - inspector: On the January 31st 1888, have carefully examined the asylum and the inmates and found everything satisfactory". A lot of the entries are "visited asylum, found all well" and that’s all that’s stated, and this comes up quite often. "Visited asylum, saw patients at tea, heard no complaints". Ngaere: Have you come to Annie McVicar? Bruce: No. Ngaere: Somebody shut her in a room here once, they thought she was a patient. Took her bag off her to. She was about as tall as me, as short as me - whichever way you like. She use to wear a hat with a rim. She had a funny little coat that had a bit of rabbit fur around the top - year in and year out, every time she came. She had this little bag, and she use to walk round and somebody thought that she was a patient ... she was trying to get out the door and so they put her in a room. Oh, she was wild. Bruce: She writes here "On April 20th visited the main building and annexes. The shortness of staff is very apparent. The charge nurses are very worried in their wards. The matrons do all they can but are also very worried. Hope that the situation improves. I have authorised the burning of patients letters." Ngaere: The Official Visitor use to collect their letters as well and she would sanction whether they were sent or not. She didn’t know these people very well all the same. Bruce: I don’t know quite who signed this, I think it might be Mr Bothamley. "5th April 1950 - I visited this institution this afternoon seeing Rauta and the lower buildings. In each case, saw and spoke to many patients. I had a good look through all the wards and day-rooms but received no complaints. I then asked to see F Ward and the female section because I’d heard it was not all it might be. I found that this ward is capable of handling about 80 patients and at the moment it is accommodating about 130. I was informed that patients were arriving at the rate of 750 yearly - roughly forty-percent of which are voluntary boarders. Many of these are old people who cannot be cared for at home. I am fully aware that this whole institution is badly overcrowded - something like 300 too many patients - but want to say that this overcrowding has been going on for many years till one gets tired of being told 'that when such-and-such a new building is complete it will be relieved'. I’ve reached the stage where I’m beginning to doubt that the surplus will ever be overtaken under present methods of administration. The sleeping ward I saw would make a wonderful page in ‘Truth’. The beds were placed hard against one another on both sides of the ward and the centre isle had no less than sixteen mattresses - shake-down beds on the floor with scarcely room for a nurse to walk. These shakedowns were so placed that the head of each bed overlapped another so that the patient had to sleep with their head on the feet of the next patient... Ngaere: What ward was that? Bruce: F. "...This I considered is a lamentable state of affairs for a public institution and should be remedied forthwith." That is quite a good slap. Ngaere: Of course the beds were exactly as he said - there was no room to walk between the mattresses on the floor and one persons feet were at the other persons head, and there was no room to put your foot - it was terrible. Ngaere: If you’re not bloomin’ careful I’ll have to have another cup-of-tea. 16:48 Meg talks about the reduction of her world. Meg: And the funny thing is, is that you reduce your world to the size of the hospital - what freedoms you have. That’s the boundary, the perimeter - the ward, the hospital. And you begin to live life within that very confined circle. You stop thinking of people on the outside or what’s happening out there. And you make your plans for your life within that circle. You think if I’m going to be here another twenty years if I do this-or-that might be handy, it might give me a little bit more freedom. And in the beginning you think in terms of perhaps being there for the rest of your life. And the way to cope with that is to reduce the size of your world - make your world very little. That’s what I always did. So people found it hard if they came to see me I’d often lost interest in that world outside, I was just operating in the hospital: that was unhappy as far as they were concerned. I know how they feel, if you go and see somebody in a hospital and they don’t recognise you - that’s very awful. And I think the thing is I didn’t really recognise them because I didn’t want to think about the real world. The real world for me was just the world of the ward and my relationships within that ward with the different people there and the nursing staff. So my world just came to be little. Meg: The kids were quite upset to come and see me. I wouldn’t know what it was that they were doing. I’d sort of stopped being a mother I think ... hmm. 19:35 Ngaere reflects in the Seclusion Room. Ngaere: The whole place had a very, very distinctive smell - particularly this ward. You can use your own imagination as to what it smelt like - a lot of these people were doubly-incontinent, and they used to paint the walls. Odd things, that their mental condition didn’t tell them they were on the wrong plane. Yes, this place had a smell all of its own. It’s gone now: food, faeces, urine and yet it would be one of the cleanest wards in the hospital because it was scrubbed so much, washed so much, patients were bathed so much and yet it had that terrible smell. Ngaere: There were some things that you had to do that didn’t come under the nursing banner - but you did it. There use to be some pipes that ran through there it must be (pointing to the roof) - hot water, hot air - and of course this room was always warm - which never ever helps. Ngaere: Another smell I can remember would be something ... It has to be sharp, sharp, take your breath away when you inhale. Take your breath away when you’re giving it, let alone when they’re given it. I can’t think of anything that would even compare with it. It was like a burning smell. If somebody had been given Paraldehyde down the other end of corridor we’d smell it here, especially if it had been spat around or thrown about. But it was effective - almost instantly effective in some cases. But you only gave it in dram lots - half-a-teaspoon, a teaspoon full would be a lot of Paraldehyde. But what else? Nothing else that we knew of. It didn’t seem to have a hang-over like a lot of other medications do. Y’know, if you have Chloroform you would get a bit of a hangover, but they didn’t seem to have a hangover with Paraldehyde - except the smell. You could smell somebody up the other end of the corridor that had had Paraldehyde. We should have saved a little bit for these occasions - just to let you have a sniff. Ngaere: But you’d walk into the dining room down at the home - you’d get your pedigree smartly. They’d say "who’ve you been giving Paraldehyde to" and you’d hardly be in the door. Smell you from here. Probably somebody had sprayed you with it. Ngaere glances around the Seclusion Room. Ngaere: It looks terrible, and you must admit it looks terrible. But what would you have done under the same circumstances - that the patient had to be safe, had to be secure, had to be warm - wouldn’t keep clothes on. There was nothing else really that you could do. There were pipes up there - the heat - but sometimes the heat wasn’t enough, sometimes it was too much and you couldn’t breathe. But at least they were safe, and so was everybody else. And that’s what a lot of people seem to forget that everybody else was safe as well as the patient. It wasn’t easy, at times it was really tough. But I think most of us in those days accepted exactly what it was and we were mainly a very happy mob. But no, I can’t think of anything that could have been done by the authorities or us, there was many a time we’d have liked to have done something, but you couldn’t do much because of the safety of everybody. Y’know the patients were safe, they were well fed, they were warm, what more can you ask. 25:00 Meg’s thoughts as a patient. Meg: I had a patient set on to me when I was in Villa 9 - which is the Women’s Refractory. After F Ward they moved it up to this Villa 9 as they called it. I’d only been there about two days and I was talking and must have annoyed the nurses for some reason and they went and got this girl called Ramari, and they got her to... they set her on to me. She pulled a great patch of hair out of my scalp. She was quite fearsome. And they just stood there, in the doorway and said "Alright, have you had enough?" And then they took her out and locked the door on me and I was just left there with this bundle of hair and a bald patch on the top of my head. They were shocking, there were some really really shocking nurses who were just there for the money and had no education at all - who had come down from TeKuiti or somewhere like that, and Porirua Hospital was paying big sums of money - relatively speaking - and so they’d get jobs there. But they didn’t care about the patients or anything. Meg: They absolutely hated me - I don’t know why. I think I had too much to say. And this girl Ramari, she fought me, I didn’t fight back. But she was told to punish me for what I’d done. Later on I became a friend of hers, and she eventually died on the railway tracks down at Porirua railway station. So she came to an unfortunate end. So, there are certainly lovely nurses there - like the one’s that would hold my hand when I was having "treatment", calm me down so I wouldn’t be frightened. But then there were these other ones who were a bit monstrous really. Not very nice. Meg: So what were we talking about? Fear. Yeah, I am afraid of being locked up. To be locked up for several days is pretty awful. And you just have to go to the toilet on the floor because they don’t put anything in there for you to go to the toilet in. And yet they just leave you and leave you and leave you. So they sort of reduce you to an animal even if you weren’t beforehand. Maybe that’s part of their idea of how to deal with troublesome people. I’d broken my guitar - I think that’s why I got sent there... yeah. Meg: But also, once you’ve been a patient, I think one of the really scary things is that you don’t have any credibility anymore. Every time I go to a specialist with some illness that specialist reads beforehand that I am on this drug and that drug, and usually just gives me hell, just dismisses everything I’m saying and is really horrible. And I know it’s because they start of with preconceived notions ‘Oh, I must be a nutcase so I’m probably going to tell lies and make things up.’ That’s quite fearful, especially sometimes it’s really important that people believe you in what you say and if you have no credibility it puts you at a terrible disadvantage. Y’know, you get so exasperated - ‘ Oh, what’s the use’. What’s the use of trying to warn people - they don’t want to hear. Meg: So I keep very quiet, I don’t do things like going in marches and demonstrations and things like that because I’m scared I might end up with the police locking me up - that’s the last thing I want is to be put in a cell and locked in. So I just think no, that’s not for me. And when Alistair and the kids went on that, y’know the [1981] Springbok Tour, where everybody got out and demonstrated, and they were at Rintoul Street when things were getting very bad. But I didn’t go with them because I said to myself ‘what if I should get locked up, maybe I’ll go too far, maybe I’ll antagonise some policeman and he’ll drag me off’. I just can’t afford that, no matter what the cause, I’m not going to make a martyr of myself. I’ve done all that, I don’t want anymore of it. I just want to be in rooms that aren’t locked, and relationships that aren’t locked and yeah... Just, y’know coast, coast along. 32:15 Ngaere reflects on the changes in treatment. Ngaere: Well of course medication made the patients more co-operative and would be a little bit more normal. A lot of them went home with medication. Prior to that there was nothing, so you had to talk fast or move fast. But the people here - they were warm, they were fed, they were bathed and they were cared for in a community here where they couldn’t have been out in a public community. They couldn’t care for themselves in any way a lot of them. So it had to be here, where else was there going to be. And I think taking everything all round - a lot of us grizzled and groaned and moaned, people groaned about it, but what else was there - where else was there? Ngaere: There were a lot of people, and they all belonged to somebody. And I think, if anybody asked me, they should all be here still a lot of these people. They shouldn’t be out on the streets trying to look after themselves. A lot of them, it’s only care and comfort and having somebody to take notice that they were even able get where they are. But who’s looking after them? Who’s seeing they’re warm with clean clothes and a bath, something to eat. Are they sick or well? I worry about them out with no one now. I shouldn’t say no one - there is someone looking after them but not everyday. 35:04 Meg reflects on Porirua Hospital Museum. Meg: The museum at Porirua Hospital is very interesting but it doesn’t really capture the feelings of helplessness and the disgrace of being there, the humiliation of being treated practically like an animal. Those things are the invisible things that I don’t suppose anybody would feel unless they’d been through it. The E.C.T. machines didn’t do anything to frighten me, I wasn’t frightened when I saw the old fashioned kind and the modern kind - it was interesting, but it doesn’t really give you a feeling of awe or fear. Maybe more the little room - Solitary - with the straight-jacket type clothing, yes I think that was getting nearer to it. Meg: You might say the walls can speak but they don’t really - not the way it's ... The way it’s all set up now looks just so innocuous and you have to pinch yourself to think ‘were people locked up in here, were they really suffering the way I’d heard they’d suffered?’. Y’know, they were frightened out of their wits. Meg: They do their best though - they can’t have real people showing how they feel about being there. It just doesn’t translate so much - the fear and the people who spent years and years of their lives. Y’know maybe put in hospital when they were 14 or 15 years old and when they turn 30 they’re still there in Porirua Hospital. There’s not people like that now, but when I was there one friend of mine had been there 21 years and that was one of the really frightening things. But I don’t think the old F Ward - the museum, I don’t think it shows you really the depth of like the miseries of people who lived there, not because they don’t try - because they do, they’ve got a good museum, but I don’t think people would have that profound feeling of despair and desperation that the patients there had - humiliation. 39:20 Ngaere's final thoughts. Ngaere: Met some lovely people here - they were psychotic but they were still lovely people, and their relatives, their children. Y’know, it’s not what people think - sometimes it was worse, but mostly it was a wonderful life for all of us. No, I’d never regret any of it, and I think under the circumstances of what was known about it all and what was available for their help the hospital administration did extremely well with these people. A lot of it was not as good as it should be, and a lot of it was better. I haven’t got any shame of anything I ever did. But when people start maligning the hospital I feel very poorly about it. And when patients say "I can’t do that because I’ve been mad ... somebody told me I’m mad" - it’s sad. We’re all mad at times, but y’see you could always bring your key out of your pocket and say "I can’t be ... I’ve got a key". Mm.