When I went to school in St. John’s, for the first primary years, and then later again in high school, both my institutions were buried in the depths of the Waterford Valley, in the district known as Waterford Bridge. This was at the tightest point in the deep ravine that defines the southern and western approach to St. John’s. Historically, this was settled by Irish farmers, and the local place names - Kilbride, Waterford, the Goulds - still reflect the language they brought with them.
There were two ways to walk home, which pretty much everyone who didn’t live way out in the country still did in those days. Almost everyone in school had to walk westward up the valley. As far as I recall, the kids who lived east of the school went somewhere else. Who knows, that was terra incognita. For me, walking Option A involved a windy hike up Topsail Road, from what is now Hazelwood Crescent to Cowan Avenue, a dreary prospect which ran along a series of parking lots, and ended with a detour through an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium. I still have nightmares about that place. Even so, I usually walked this way anyway, because the other route could be even weirder.
Option B should have been really pleasant. The Waterford Valley is tree lined, runs past the verdant Bowering Park, and was supposedly much less windy and cold than the plateau above. My usual route involved looping around the somewhat spooky lawn of Corpus Christi church, and then taking a shortcut through the grounds of the Waterford Hospital, a.k.a. the Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases, but better known to the locals under the depressing nickname of ‘the Mental’. The Waterford still has a bit of a grim reputation in St. John’s. Even now only a handful of the city’s populace have ever been inside, and fewer still have had cause to wander the halls the way we did. When I was a kid the hospital was still full of people who in a more enlightened age and place would have been able to live quite productive lives in the outside world. Unfortunately, in those years it was still an asylum in every inch of the word, and almost a thousand people were living there. Most of them were not really victims of the sort of psychiatric diseases that should have required long-term hospitalization. Instead, family circumstances, poverty or general ignorance had seen them deposited to the Waterford. A lot of them were just a little odd or delayed, but had nowhere else to go. Those who were not violent or too impulsive spent their days wandering the grounds, seeking conversation, smokes and reassurance.
As children they were both fascinating and terrifying to us. Long-term residents were dressed in the sort of cast-off and remaindered clothes that only the desperate or indifferent would even consider. A lot of the men had a uniformly terrible haircut, what used to be called a ‘bowl’. Patients who might be in danger of injury would likely be issued with a cheap hockey helmet, along the lines of that sported by Borje Salming. They were not hard to spot. Every walk through there was an adventure. One might be trudging along, swinging your book bag when a heart-wrenching scream would come from an open window, where some poor soul reliving a past terror would be waving furiously. You’d be hearing that again at 2:00 in the morning in your nightmares, I’ll tell you. Another day, me and a couple of other lads were booting a soccer ball along in front of us as we cut through the landscaped grounds. All of a sudden a little old man appeared out of nowhere, and laughing manically, (really), grabbed our ball and took off into one of the buildings many tunnels. We actually had the temerity to complain, to a reasonably normal looking adult who was hanging about nearby. (Tell an adult - that was what you were supposed to do when a nut stole your soccer ball). A minute into our complaint, we realized the hopelessness of that cause. Our interrogator took a great interest in our case, and began questioning us in extreme detail about our ball in a ludicrous British accent. “Shit, he’s a patient too,” a guy named Chrissy whispered, and a minute later we were the ones running away, eventually flinging book bags and ourselves over a chain link fence while our now very agitated Sherlock Holmes shouted lunatic questions behind us. I can still hear his Monty Python voice: “Come back, chaps, we’ll catch that dastardly knave…”
On the other hand, there was a lesson to be learned there too. While the patients sometimes scared me, on the whole I lost my fear of the mentally distressed. Most of the patients we encountered were pretty odd, but so were a lot of the other people in the St. John’s of that era. There were no group homes or assisted living situations here then. People who were sick, mentally disabled, had Alzheimer’s, or suffered from depression and whatnot, who didn’t end up at the Waterford, often just stayed home. Lots of people I knew had weird people sleeping in the basement spare room, or spending their days staring out the window. It was just the way it was. The patients at the Waterford were just more exciting.
And passing by Waterford could sometimes offer moments of great dignity. One winter evening when I was in high school, on one of those very dark nights just before Xmas, I was walking the dog past the hospital. There had been a lot of snow that December, and the plows had pushed a huge snow bank onto the older part of the hospital’s lawn. One young patient had created a small snow fort on the biggest banks peak, and there he was marshalling an imaginary army into battle, defending his fort, rallying his troops. He had fashioned a small flag from a stick and a rag, and he waved it vigorously while shouting orders to advance and retreat, ducking from imagined artillery, encouraging his many troops by name. The general took no notice of me, and I watched him direct the battle until I was too cold to wait any more. An orderly also quietly watched over the scene, and ironically saluted me when I finally walked away. The patients’ caregivers had plainly decided that the general was safe fighting on the snow bank, and that he should be left alone to live in his imaginary world. Unlike so many of the people I passed there, who wore sadness and despair like a cloak, that guy was actually happy and fulfilled. A useful lesson too, about the power of imagination to transform your life.
The Waterford has changed immensely philosophically in the intervening decades, but physically it is much the same. Walk past it some day. Your encounters may not be as exciting as mine, but then you never know where enlightenment waits.