Deep Fried Bananas...

...The first job this to-be cleric accepted in the working world was far from - though some might equally argue darn close to - that which he holds now as Rector to the faithful and to the faithless.

It was as a porter in what in those days was cheerily called still a 'lunatic asylum' that I earned an initial crust in some months between end of school and commencement of University. One of those old-school places indeed, isolated and set deep into wooded country on top of a steep hill, far away from other persons and places.

You could argue - and you would not be wrong - that it was built with the very notion of ensuring the 'mad' were out of sight as well as out of mind. You would also - were you in search of a spot in which to learn ease of heart and soul - give your frontal lobe for a place so beautiful, tranquil and naturally curative. (Young Wordsworth would have approved the place indeed. Older Wordsworth though might also have given the nod to the separation as much as the isolation.)

For myself I was quite at home at once. Not, I haste to advise, from the psychiatric perspective whatsoever but from the instant recognition that this was somewhere not at all far from one's very recent experience as a boarder at a minor - very - public school. Two institutions with but one face, by and large. (The one crucial, compelling and utterly delightful difference of course being that this latter place was stuffed to the gills with humans of the young and female kind in the guise of nurses to the infirm!)

Due separation between and betwixt staff and inmates was essentially the order of the day. Doctors in traditional white coats, nurses - be still my beating heart - in pale striped lilac with dark navy-blue belt and black stockings. Even porters had our grey coat to be worn over civvies at all times. (An attempt by oneself to liven the look with a discarded parental bowler hat not being met with much if any approval.)

We - the porters - resided in the Old Fire Station, where we rested, chatted and smoked all day when not actually on active service. Which was most of the day. The Old Fire Station was aptly named as it contained the Old Fire Engine - a relic from the days when it could not be relied on for the regular fire service to make it up the hill in time should flames engulf the place.

The Old Fire Engine though indeed old and by then utterly redundant, gleamed and shone from stem to stern. This was not through the labours of the porters naturally, but from the constant and loving attention of Old Harry. He - said Old Harry - would probably not even get a look-in in modern psychiatric medicine circles they being quite unable to care for the dangerously deranged, let alone offer anything to someone merely mildly loopy.

You could tell Old Harry was 'mad' because he was tall, thin, badly dressed, grinned too much at nothing and would from time to time rub his hands together with a quite manic fury as if intending to set a blaze going between his very palms.

That there were at least two psychiatrists about the place who would have fitted that very same description should not be overlooked in any general typology of insanity. Fair point perhaps that said psychiatrists did not spend many of their waking hours scouring the hospital in search of discarded cigarette butts from which to make one decent smoke, but on their wages the need was not exigent.

There were certain set and none too intrusive duties for porters to accomplish, the rest of our time being spent in search not of discarded tobacco but of tea and sex from the nurses. All right, so the tea came easy but the sex thing was altogether more testing. There were indeed parties in the Nurses Home and these were the very stuff of legend as they should be. On duty, however, those good gals were mostly too professionally proud of their officer rank to be won over by the allure of the NCOs that we porters were. Hierarchy mattered in the old NHS and three cheers for that say I still.

Mixing with patients was inevitable, if not actively encouraged. It was their home after all and we but guests therein, pottering or portering about as required. One young male inmate and I did become quite pally - both pretty bright, not entirely sure of the world around us but deeply curious of all that life might bring etc., etc. We would chat for hours in the mutually shared canteen, until duty or medication called either one of us away.

Our burgeoning friendship was duly noted and one day the summons came for me to attend a briefing with a head honcho psychiatrist dude, who dutifully informed me that although he quite liked his patient making some form of contact with someone not on the clinical side of the fence - from the rehabilitative point of view - he ought in fairness - howsoever much this might be a flagrant breach of confidentiality - advise me that the young fellow was current residing in the place - as an indefinite guest of Her Majesty - because some few years earlier he had - in a fit of pique it seems - murdered his dear Ma and his dear Pa!

This, as you can imagine, came as something of a shock to the system. For sure one had several peers who had opined parental slaughter as the only way forward - the next big thing. One had indeed, oneself, occasionally imagined a world in which no adults of any kind, let alone familial ones, existed. But to realise that one had been seated but across a canteen table from a youth - for he was little more - who had actually and forever taken this fell step into darkness and horror - was a trifle soul-fathoming and heart-puzzling to say the least.

Although cautioned that one was not actively at risk of slaughter from the fellow - not being of immediate blood relation (one could see why he had few if any visitors) - it is perhaps not surprising that from that moment one supped with a longer spoon than previous. Rather than meet and greet, I would nod and pass by. One could see the sorrow in his face, but one did not have the maturity to match the crying need.

From time to time the fellow would appear quite thoroughly 'wasted' - as was the word of the day - seemingly not merely away with the fairies, but utterly broken. Lethargic, shuffling, inert almost. Having a bad day? Trapped in some web of remorse? Not as such it turned out. For what one was observing was a man - a young man as ever - seeking to recover from and to make sense of a recent ECT 'treatment'.

Howsoever many hundreds or indeed thousands of volts would be passed through his brain in what could only be considered a pretty crude attempt to mend his mind, I know not. I too was not there long enough ever to know whether being deep fried that way did him much long-term good. All I could observe was the immediate harm.

Poor child. I cannot imagine his dear - if slaughtered - mother would have wished on him such suffering in search of a cure. Even then I think I would rather have prayed for him. Which I did and which I do still even after all these years. And I am equally sure she - his mother - did and does too.

Which certainty is the guiding light for all and for always. Love eternal - unfailing, undaunted - the ultimate, glorious, true madness.