Review
A harrowing true-life account of one of Ireland’s hidden shames, says Ben McNair.
- Birds' Nest Soup
- (Attic Press)
The Other Big House.
This is the memoir of Hanna Greally, who spent the best part of the 1940s and 1950s in a psychiatric hospital in the Irish Midlands.
Taken there by her mother, for a short rest, she is soon, in the parlance of the institution, ‘Mentally well, but unclaimed’. Hopes that her mother will claim her, and take her back to the life that she knew, are soon endangered by her mother’s pressing need, through economic necessity, to let Hanna’s room to lodgers, and then by her mother’s untimely death. Her brother and aunts have no intention of claiming her either, despite her best efforts, both through her own letters, and the letters that her doctors write saying she is well enough to be let go.
The stigma of ‘The Big House’ is one of the reasons for their reluctance, but it is also the fact that their lives have moved on, while Hanna’s has been seen to stagnate in the time that she has spent away.
Greally talks about various aspects of life in St Loman’s psychiatric hospital, the dances, the work she does in the laundry, a possible romance with another patient which leads nowhere. She talks of the nurses who see the patients as a nuisance, and of their unpleasant and sadistic nature, but she also talks of the kinder nurses, the doctor who looks into her release, and of the strong relationship she forms with Rosie, an older patient who is so institutionalised, she does not want to leave.
The narrative of the book could easily have succumbed to melodrama, but what makes it truly heartbreaking is Greally’s matter-of-factness. It is when she starts referring to time in terms of ‘Another three years passed’ that the horror of her predicament hits home.
This is the third release for this text, with forewords and afterwords to the 1971 and 1987 editions helping to put the book in historical context. Although the text ends on a note of optimism, the epilogues relate that Greally went on to live a full and long life after her ordeal, and the book is a fitting testament to her character, and the strength of the human spirit.
