The Huts

Mental Health Hospital c1965-75.

Cherry

Huts73

back to the ward.
Cherry

Huts74

pub and stuff
Cherry

Huts76

casual sex. Only for the young.
Cherry

Huts77

another quickie
Cherry

Huts78

live and love

Huts79

return to ward duty
Cherry

Huts80

poor old Wullie
Cherry

Huts82

meltdown and melodrama
Cherry

Huts83

dark deeds indeed.
Cherry

Huts84

The very last huts. boo-hoo
Cherry

huts (rewrite) part 3

Wullie the Pole wheels a trolley into the space between the doors of the kitchen and dining hall. The tables are set out for breakfast, but the hatch...
Gold cherry

huts 2 (rewrite)

'I'm looking for Ailsa ward.' I speak too quickly, trying to sound as confident as him, almost stuttering. But if I stuttered I would have died. The...
Cherry

huts 1 (rewrite)

The security guard with a pencil moustache, slides open the window of the lodge at the hospital gates and addresses me as ‘sir’. I’m given directions...

huts 4 (rewrite)

Heebie-jeebies, I can’t sit still to read through the file on Norean Kileen. Try not to be too obvious. I spy on her as she waltzes down the corridor...
Cherry

huts 5 (rewrite)

The office is too warm. I sit squelched and sweating under the pall of Wullie the Poles’s Senoir Service , nose buried in files, eyes shifting...
Cherry

huts second week (first draft)

Monday is Monday in anybody’s language. Black and wet outside and our miserable Monday weather seeps inside and ages me. I hunker down, bury hands...

huts second week, second day (first draft)

Our first formal class, critical theory in mental handicap nursing, takes place in the defunct maternity ward, in the old hospital. High ceilings,...
Cherry

Huts IX

I poke and pick and ease my tongue into a hole where a tooth should be, but that doesn’t stop me smiling when the day shift lets go of me. I take the...
Cherry

Huts Xish

After work my luck doesn’t change. On my way home I slide on a wet standing stones in the burn, and batter my knee off a submerged rock. I juggle...