A Month Not In This World, An Inmate Of Parkside Hospital Macclesfield

A Memory of Macclesfield.

It was early summer in 1967 when suffering from a 'mental breakdown' I was admitted into Macc in the middle of the night, horror upon horror me and my mates had often talked about and even took the piss out of this place even though we lived over the hill in Buxton, it was a place we use to pass if we were on a coach trip to Blackpool, a monstrous unwelcome building, never in the memory of man did I ever think that one day in my twenties would i be an inmate there.

I was under the watchful eye of a fantastic Doctor Jarman who help me to settle in to a regime I knew absolutely nothing about, I'm not going to talk about my fellow inmates because they like me were in a state you could not grasp or even understand.

The one thing I would like to find out, out of the many occurrence's that I was experiencing in there was the time I had to undergo a Lumber Puncture it was a wicked operation I was forced into bent position whereby my chin was touching my knees held firmly in place by two burly 'medics' while what felt like a red hot poker was driven up my spinal Colum which missed the point of entry the first couple of times. I well remember the very large pool of 'water' I was lying in after it was over, it turned out to be Sweat from my body..

A small Plaster was placed over the entry mark and I was told to go into the Lounge and take it easy and rest.......this lounge was inhabited by around ten ~ fifteen men some of them were new admitters, one gentlemen I recall two nights ago when he was brought into my dormitory he was very tall about 6~3 and thin, he was apparently an ex POW from second world war for in the second night he woke most of us by standing at attention at the side of his bed shouting that they were using Acid Baths we took this to have been the enemy. Well he was sat quietly in a chair just staring at the young black female nurse, the only member of staff that was on duty in the lounge. Suddenly and with out any warning this tall gentleman leapt from his chair and grabbed the young nurse by the throat, she could do nothing and nobody took any notice, I ran over to them and managed to get him in a Full Nelson and after a short struggle broke his grip on her neck he continued to swing me around like a bloody rag doll but I hung on for dear life, I then heard the big Alarm Bell blearing out which our nurse had managed to operate, within seconds the lounge was full of staff one who injected the gentleman who was then placed in a 'cell'.

Nothing was ever mentioned to me about the incident and a few days later after a general talk with Dr Jarmen he said he thought I was well enough to be discharged.
I often wondered what became of our young nurse and if she was okay.

My problems didn't vanish overnight but I lived with it, the only thing that changed was I became aggressive in my usual passive nature but over the years have contained it.

No way did I want to end up in one of these places again.