ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the stories of segregated lives and looks at three aspects of these stories: their silences and omissions; personal accounts of loss, separation and rejection; and tales of hospital life. George Coley remembers how, as a young man, he was taken early one morning to Bromham Hospital. Several of the tales of hospital life were shared in the telling, either through joint contributions, or through a narrator telling a shared story. Wartime in Bromham Hospital was a shared story on both counts. Several members of the group had spent the entire war in the confines of a long-stay hospital. The war brought changes to the regime at Bromham, albeit temporary ones. The stories of the time were of people’s experiences of war within the confines of an institution. The pre-war regime, with its old priorities, was reinstated and that feeling of being ‘useful’ was swept away.