ABSTRACT
In the months after 8 January she did manage, with very great difficulty, to extricate herself from the family for whom she had been working. At first, it was only to find another ‘au pair’ job; she said ruefully, when telling me about it, ‘People only have to look at me to know I will work for nothing.’ Soon, however, as I have said, she acted on her so long standing wish to do nursing by getting work as an assistant nurse in a mental hospital, in a ward with violent patients, but only stayed there a few weeks, because, although she felt she did the work well, she was so terrified that she spent all her time off sitting in a stupor on her bed. Incidentally, she maintained that she had had no instructions about how to deal with violent patients and had only discovered by chance, through seeing a note about a patient she had attended to single-handed, ‘This patient should only be approached by two nurses together.’ She also told me she found she had contracted ‘nits’ in her hair and that she could only have got them in the hospital; but, she added, she felt she was so frightened that the lice could easily have been spontaneously generated out of her own terror.
