The White Garden (3 page)

In 1962 Ambrose bought the property from the Catholic Church.

It was a convent and school, built in the 1870s on a rise in the centre of a park. There were tennis courts, a playground and a swimming pool, and the whole place was surrounded by a row of pine trees inside a fence of iron railings. The bluestone buildings were tall and grim with many narrow windows and a slender belfry striped green with age. An air of the fairy castle

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played about the convent, mingled with a touch of the prison, a hint of the madhouse. You could imagine medieval ladies on horseback; peasants labouring in the fields. In the world enclosed by the iron railings there was fantasy at work, and Ambrose was attracted to this.

His colleagues said he had flipped his wig when he bought the convent. He would go broke, they said, with his fancy new style loony bin, and he would have to sell at a loss. They discussed the rumours they had heard about the beehives and the cultivation of vegetables and the making of bread.

The money came from Abigail’s family, from the Pearl Lingerie fortune. What would her old man say if he knew. Turn in his grave. Abigail’s father rested peacefully in the old seaside cemetery, close to the mansion built by
his
father, the house Ambrose and Abigail kept as their country retreat. ‘That house keeps me sane,’ Ambrose would say. ‘I’ll never sell it. It’s family history.’

At Mandala Ambrose replaced the Victorian stained glass in the convent chapel with clear glass etched with images from nature — leaves and birds, impressions of waterfalls. He put soft green carpet on the floor, and heaps of large green cushions.

You could lie on the floor of the chapel and gaze out at the trees and sky through the crystal scenes on the windows. Pause, breathe, meditate in the crystal chapel where bubbles hovered in the glass among phantom irises, blown by a mysterious breath, where a glassy spider’s web beaded with dew hung in the air. As the angle of the sun changed throughout the day, rays entered some of the etched lines of the images and the white light was split into its colours, sending rainbows gliding and waltzing across the surfaces of the room.

There were classes in yoga and meditation in the chapel where the frozen stillness of the windows led out to the moving world of sky and sun and shade. Through wisps of drifting ectoplasm in the glass came an illusion of space and more space, reaching out, stretching sideways. Invisible presences hovered in the glass itself. See them, look away, and they are gone. The haunting face of a lovely woman. Gone. A naked man about to fly.

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The White Garden

‘The crystal chapel is a haven of peace where the world expands and vision grows, where troubled spirits can heal,’

Ambrose said.

The matron of the clinic simply said, and said it often, that it cost a fortune in window-cleaning.

The chapel had to be kept locked. Patients could go there only under supervision because in a psychiatric clinic anything can happen. Patients might attack patients with cushions causing injury or suffocation. A lunatic could smash the glass and go berserk with slivers. Faces, throats, backs — these were never safe. Blood could be spilled on the smooth green carpet, splashed on the stone pillars, sprayed across the sweet airy windows. The chapel was locked for the safety of all.

It was an illusion of a chapel, a locked glass room for yoga classes where the patients, birds with clipped wings and crippled minds, fluttered and flopped and floated.

LSD was administered to groups in the chapel. The first time it was done, Ambrose invited his colleagues to join him in the experiment. It was his first experience with hallucinogenic drugs, and he was very cautious. He had read a great deal about the effects but was unprepared for what happened.

He felt, a few minutes after the injection, that he was gripped by something from the inside. He experienced a sensation of great helplessness and he fought against this. There was loud, unearthly sound, and he saw a terrible light coming towards him. Cascades of sound and intricacies of lines of light. Something was billowing, as if inside him there was a world enclosed in curtains that seemed to be made of some kind of flesh. It was all happening very fast, and the feeling of helplessness was paramount. Flesh, coloured with peach and flame, and the searing light and heat coming at him, with something, an edge of turquoise and emerald, coiling and twisting. He tried to reach out for this edge, to get hold of it, but it was also inside him. He seemed to move through a mirror, to see the great dark pupil of a ghastly eye. He would move through the mirror, back and forth, pulled and tormented. There was writing, tiny spidery writing in purple ink. He kept trying to read it, but he had lost the ability to read, to understand words. He knew it was English

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but he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. And then the words

‘head nor tail’ took on a life of their own and leapt at him, and he curled up on the floor like a serpent swallowing its own tail.

He felt and heard himself uttering the words ‘head nor tail’ as he tried to unwind, but he was locked in the twined and twisted shape. Light and heat were prodding him with vicious fingers until he screamed and everything became scaly and slimy and dark and the next thing he knew he was flat on the floor with tears all over his face.

Some of the others in the chapel were also weeping, but on some the drug had almost no effect. They just sat there in a kind of trance that wasn’t unpleasant except they were aware of what was going on around them and felt a strange kind of objectivity.

They knew their colleagues were writhing and screaming, but they were detached from feeling.

This was the beginning of Ambrose’s bold modern experiments using hallucinogens on the patients. He never knew how much would have what effect, and stressed the need for quali-fied, vigilant staff. It was strange, in this clinic where life was under such strict security, that the woman with the bee-sting was able to lie in the White Garden all night long, dead and undiscovered. The grounds are checked, but checked for move-ment, not for bodies. No patient was missing. Vickie Field was a visitor on this occasion, was supposed to have made her way from the clinic to the gate. Who would have thought she would go wandering down to the White Garden? And of course there were no dogs. Dogs would cause too much trouble with the patients. ‘I am a dog-lover,’ Ambrose said. ‘At home we have three beautiful wolfhounds, great animals, wouldn’t be without them.’ But at the hospital he allowed only fish and birds; once he had permitted a woman to keep a box of silkworms. But not cats or dogs. In certain situations, pets are beneficial for sick people, but not in the psychiatric setting, not among deluded people because anything could happen. As with the glass in the chapel, and the cushions, Ambrose had to be very careful. He often said to Abigail, ‘Anything could happen, you know.’

He made decisions about when patients could be trusted with such things as garden tools. The two women who looked after
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The White Garden

the White Garden were completely safe. When they said they would like to make the garden, Ambrose brought in Abigail to talk to them. Abigail was a fund of gardening information.

‘A White Garden doesn’t mean you just go mad with the white flowers,’ she said. ‘It’s all a matter of light and shade and dark greens and light greens and silvers and greys. The overall impression is a sort of shimmering whiteness. But you have to have elements of ivory and pink before you can get this effect.

The white flowers are the last things to fade in a garden in the early evening, when the light goes. First the blues and violets vanish, and then the reds and oranges. Then the dark green, then the light green, and next yellow, cream and white. The white ones seem to linger and hover — even when you’d think there was no light at all to reflect. It’s almost as if they store up light. And because they depend on insects that come out in the early evening they have strong fragrances that haunt the night air. I realise you won’t be seeing all this, but it is good to know about it.’

After talking to the two patients who would make the White Garden, Abigail remarked to Ambrose that they seemed to be very alert.

‘Alert, intelligent — mad as hatters,’ Ambrose said.

But the garden they went on to make was beautiful, and Ambrose described it in detail in his book
Illumination
.

A SMALL SAMURAI

IN LACQUERED VELVET

Ambrose wrote during the night, or in the early morning. The garden of his house — the house being a mansion built in the days when fortunes were made on the goldfields — ran down to the river. And under trees, above the water, was Ambrose’s study where he wrote, read, listened to music. On one wall was displayed his collection of guns; two of the walls were hung with valuable paintings. The fourth wall was all glass and faced the river. Ambrose wrote on an old Remington that had belonged to his father. It was a study of the relationship between religion and psychiatry. In the writing Ambrose had discovered his own fascination with delusion — the meaning of delusion, the mechanics of delusion and belief. Not all delusion was religious in origin, but much was. His work took him into places that were strange, wonderful and mysterious. He had travelled to Italy to look at a house that flew there from the Holy Land centuries ago. He searched for the place in the mind where hallucination and objective truth cross paths. He explored the possibility that everything might happen somewhere
in
the human mind. He wrote up the cases of his own patients who believed themselves to be someone other than themselves. There were Virgin Marys, Christs and Gods, Marilyn Monroes and Elvis Presleys. Movie stars and even characters from literature took over the lives of Ambrose’s patients. Jane Eyre sometimes screamed in an imaginary red room at Mandala.

At what point in the life of the ‘character’ does the deluded person enter? How can it be that a life is so sad and insignificant that the man or woman living the life must take on the persona of someone else? Where in the life and the mind does this happen, and how? Is it possible that dead people can inhabit the beings of living people?

Ambrose made minute study of the deluded patients in his care. There were some hospitals where doctors tried to
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The White Garden

‘cure’ delusion; and others where delusion was tolerated with a kind of amusement. But at Mandala the deluded patients were given the means to develop and explore their delusion and hallucination. The patients would live full and interesting lives, and the doctor would gather more and more information for his study of the condition. Shirley Temple, dressed in frills and bows, danced, sang and brought sunshine into the lives of other patients; Saint Teresa of Avila lived the life of a great Spanish mystic, and was a source of inspiration to those around her in the clinic. In
Illumination
Ambrose Goddard would tell the world of the meaning of delusion, where it comes from, and why and how it functions.

For the thirty or so patients at Mandala, Ambrose was the centre of the world, the key to everything. Most of the patients were women, and many of them were in the clinic for a long, indefinite time. In 1967 it was possible to keep patients in the hospital for years if necessary, as long as they belonged to a private hospital fund. In some ways Mandala resembled a boarding school for infantile women who are seen by those around them as unable to live ordinary lives, to rise to the demands of everyday life, unable to take part in the rituals of family, work, friendship. They were women who were not able to sleep, not able to wake up, to eat, to wash, to stop washing, stop eating, stop pulling out their hair, stop screaming, crying, tipping bowls of soup over the heads of their children. They couldn’t stop attacking their husbands with breadknives and gardening forks, couldn’t stop taking off their clothes in the street. They were afraid to leave the house, afraid to speak, afraid to travel by air or sea, to eat jelly or potatoes. They smoked like chimneys, drank like fish, fell down the stairs, swallowed prescribed drugs like sugar candy. They thought they were mosquitoes, imagined they were made from snow or butter, and supposed they were somebody else. They were saints and movie stars and members of royalty from the past or the present. Some of them sat in silence staring into space, occasionally rocking gently in their chairs. One woman knew she was a foetus and spent most of her time curled up in a cupboard under the stairs, sucking her thumb.

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Mandala was home. Handsome Doctor Goddard in his fine tweed jacket or else his lovely brocade one, all purple and black, with his crooked smile and bright penetrating eyes was their father, hero, lover, god. ‘I love you, Ambrose Goddard, Doctor Ambrose, Doctor God,’ they whispered as they fell asleep at night. In the heart of each of them was a conviction that Ambrose loved them too, would one day declare his love. Some women loved him so much they planned ways to kill him. He is mine. If I can’t have him, nobody can.

‘Doctor Goddard is coming this afternoon,’ the women would say, ‘and he is coming to see me, just me. For his visits I wear my satin slip with shoestring straps. Drop one strap. He looks down my cleavage with pleasure and I smile up at him. He holds my hand and looks into my eyes and then he grins in that way he has and when he says “Book her in for tomorrow morning, nurse” I know he means, he wants to be alone with me, to go to bed with me. I smile back at him and he pats my hand — and I
know
. If he turns back to look at me as he goes gut the door the spell will be broken and he will abandon me, will sacrifice our love to the demands of his great calling. But he doesn’t look back. Our secret is safe; our love endures. Together we live the ultimate romance.’

After a while, behind the tall doors of Mandala, behind the windows locked and barred, within the mist, beyond the veil, beyond the light, beyond the darkness, the women ceased to exist in any ordinary way. Their territory was edged by a long row of pine trees and a stone fence with high railings. Every iron bar was pointed with an arrow-head, or a fleur-de-lis. The women were contained.