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Prolific Writer
Join Date: Jun 2007
Gender: Male
Posts: 203
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Four Scenes of Brinford (1315 words)
FOUR SCENES OF BRINFORD
1
I’m sitting at a table with eight other people. At one end, a woman is serving potatoes onto a plate; the plate will then be passed along until it reaches the other end. This is a very ordinary rural scene: the shared house, the long table, the communal meal. The difference here is that, of the nine people sitting at this table, six have some sort of mental handicap.
Let us look a little more closely at those six. They are: Harvey, who has a mental age around three or four years old, and spends most of his time giggling to himself; John and Emily, a married couple who both have Down’s syndrome; Iris, who looks and listens to her surroundings, curious and quizzical, through milk-bottle glasses and a pair of hearing aids, marks of the birth complications that left her mental capacities needing assistance, too; Margie, seventy-nine years old, who has been sitting down to eat in this manner longer than many of the others at this table have been alive, and has had certain bizarre delusions for even longer; and George, moderately autistic and rather reserved – a kind man, but one who generally prefers to be left alone.
They are joined today by Susan, my mother (the woman serving potatoes); Berdine, a shy, pretty student from Dortmund; and me, Rudy, back to visit the place where I was born.
This is Brinford, a village set up specially to provide a home for people who occupy the middle ground between the level of insanity that requires using plastic cutlery in a room that locks from the outside, and the level of self-reliance needed to live in the outside world. Everyone here is either handicapped or a volunteer; they live together in houses like this one, and make things in workshops to sell, funding the community.
Berdine is here to work in her gap year. It’s a good idea, much more interesting than rescuing endangered species: after all, you can’t have much of a conversation with a turtle, whereas Brinford’s villagers, though they can be dizzyingly weird, are fascinating people to talk to; there is not one without an amazing history. Indeed, some – like James, a compulsive liar – have several. At the moment, though, Berdine is having communication problems. It’s not her fault: her English is very good, but she is trying to speak with Iris, who is always difficult to understand. Iris speaks in a very unclear way when she is excited, and she gets excited very frequently. Fortunately for Berdine, white-haired old Margie – always perceptive and helpful, despite her conviction that Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre lives in her wardrobe – steps in to translate whenever she sees Berdine getting confused. Berdine is learning to interpret Iris, but she still needs help sometimes.
My mother has finished loading plates. She says grace and we begin eating.
2
Berdine is standing in the front hall of the house, helping Harvey to put his coat on. She’s got his right arm into its sleeve, and she is trying to get the other sleeve over his left arm, but he is struggling and moaning, and altogether making things difficult for Berdine. My mother, watching, says, ‘Come on, Harvey; let Berdine put your coat on for you’.
But Harvey is having none of it. He shouts out, ‘No, I don’t want to! I don’t like her!’ and with a convulsive effort wrenches himself free of his coat altogether.
My mother steps in to take over and Harvey relaxes. Mum sends Berdine upstairs to change the bedding in George’s room: a much easier task, as George will simply ignore her, allowing her to get on with it. Berdine goes off looking crestfallen, as if Harvey’s approval really means a lot to her. I think about going after her and telling her that this doesn’t mean anything, that she’ll probably be his best friend tomorrow, but I decide against it: my mother gets annoyed when I talk about the villagers that way. That said, she herself will probably have a word with Berdine later, in private: just to reassure her.
3
‘Oh, it’s little Rudolf. Hello, Rudolf. Hello, my boy.’
‘Hello, Roger.’
Roger’s pale, bony hands lie inert on top of his blanket as he stares up at my mother, and at me. He used to be the most active of men: when I was a child we’d play long games of one-on-one football where he was Kevin Keegan and I was Ian Rush, and they would end after a period of hours with some ridiculous score like 92-89. But he’s old and ill now, and frequently consigned to his bed for long periods. It seems strange to seem him so thin and frail. In my mind he is still the very essence of full-bodied robustness.
I’m glad I came to see him, but I’m struggling now to think of something to say, and my mother, who might otherwise come to my rescue, is visibly struggling too. Roger looks at us nervously. As I finally open my mouth to speak, Margie enters. She looks across the room at the bed where Roger lies, and says, ‘Ooh, Roger, you are in a bad way’. Roger smiles faintly and nods in agreement.
I really wasn’t sure whether I should mention the Mr Rochester thing when I described Margie. It’s the plain truth – my room was next to hers, when I lived in Brinford, and I sometimes heard her talking to him in the evening – but I worry that I’ve held her up for ridicule. Margie is one of the kindest, most considerate people I know; when I was younger, she was always there; she always had time for me; she always knew how to help me, make me feel better. And she can do that for everybody. If the price is that she needs to talk to a character from a book at the end of the day, well, I can think of many worse things. If we only consider the madness of people like her, if we lock them away because of the faults in their thinking – if, in trying to help them, we deny them the opportunity to help other people – we are in danger of losing something that all our good intentions, all our generosity, will never bring back.
I think of what my mother has told me about the day Roger was brought to Brinford, terrified and sobbing, with his mother not long in the grave, and strangers all around him saying things he couldn’t understand. And I wonder if Margie was there then, to comfort him as she does now. I wonder also, as Margie lifts him gently from the mattress so she can put her arms around him, if once, on another sick-bed, the same peaceful smile now on his old face crossed his younger, less weary face, at the reassurance of his mother’s touch.
I never met the equal of Margie, for knowing what to do in situations like this.
4
I give up trying to get to sleep around midnight, and walk over to the window to look out at the hills behind the house. It looks like I’m not the only one awake: Berdine, too, looks at those dark hills from the paved terrace. Nothing moves for two, three minutes. Berdine stands still on the terrace, and I stand still at my window.
Then Iris runs out, shouting and waving her arms. Something has frightened her. Berdine strains to understand what she is saying, but it’s hopeless: even with the experience I have of Iris, I can’t make it out. So Berdine takes both of Iris’s hands in her own, and holds her gently until the fear has passed. Once Iris is completely calm, Berdine puts a hand on her shoulder and leads her back inside the house.
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