Ingrebourne Centre in the grounds of St George's Hospital, Suttons Lane, Hornchurch, Essex, RM12 6RS

Time	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
8pm?	BREAKFAST	BREAKFAST	BREAKFAST	BREAKFAST	BREAKFAST
9.15	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES
10am	MORNING COFFEE	MORNING COFFEE	MORNING COFFEE	MORNING COFFEE	MORNING COFFEE
11am	LARGE GROUP	LARGE GROUP	LARGE GROUP	LARGE GROUP	LARGE GROUP
12pm	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES
1pm	LUNCH	LUNCH	LUNCH	LUNCH	LUNCH
1pm?	SMALL GROUP	ART?	SMALL GROUP	SMALL GROUP	ART?
3pm?	AFTERNOON TEA	AFTERNOON TEA	AFTERNOON TEA	AFTERNOON TEA	AFTERNOON TEA
4pm	Monday	Tuesday	HOUSE COMMITTEE?	Thursday	JOBS ADVISORY COMMITTEE?
5pm?	TEA	TEA	TEA	TEA	TEA
6pm	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES	CHORES
7.30	Monday	Tuesday	RELATIVES GROUP	Thursday	Friday
9pm	Monday	Tuesday	SOCIAL	Thursday	Friday

Wednesday 3.7.1963 Ingrebourne

Extracts from: AR1963 Breakdown

We were looking for "St Georges's Hospital" Hornchurch. We drove through the Essex lanes into the outer suburbs of London and away from the Hornchurch shopping centre into a pre-war residential quarter. Then the hospital was on our left. Garden grounds behind iron railings and a rambling post-Victorian brick hospital amongst the lawns. The Centre lay behind one of these brick buildings. "Lay" was the word for it was a low white boarded building with a two story brick front. We went in through one of the side doors, the building had no front door. It had not any smell either. No carbolic, just the warm summer's air, and it was quiet with the quiet of a lived in peace.

We walked round the corridor until we met an informal mannered young woman in a bottle green uniform who told us she was Miss Tilly. The immediate practicality was to be shown my bedroom, a small room with three beds in, where my parents put my case and said goodbye.

Miss Tilly found a markedly pregnant girl, who she asked to show me round. We went upstairs into a small hall with chairs around the walls and a billiards table in the centre.

"This is the group room. You'll see what happens here in the morning. We use it for games and socials when it's not being used for groups".

The aurora of mystery hung in the innocuous looking room. No one could really explain it.

Sometime that sunny afternoon, I walked to the door that I had come in at and stood looking. Soft green lawns, punctuated by individual expression of trees and backed by lombardy poplars against the sky. The world I had rejected lay in a seductive pose before me, but I felt not a shadow of doubt that I must die, only a sense of irony and the natural response of my soul to an aspect of the world that I loved almost to the point of visionary perception.

My bedroom had one other occupant at the time, a young married man called Fred. He was lying on his bed when I went in a little later, reading. The four walls held us within each other's sphere. I had to form a living relationship for the first time since death.

I remembered reading about prisons where one did not ask why the others were in, but I asked Fred, and he said he was there because of the way his mind went every now and then. He could not understand suicides. There were quite a few like me here. I would meet some of them tonight. He was a friendly character, but one with whom I would have had nothing in common anywhere else. Spiritually I felt he was bigger than me for he had confidence, was not an intellectual, and got on with girls. I took shelter close to his shadow that evening.

The patients congregated in the kitchen: Sitting around on hard chairs, or on the stoves and draining board, and brewing tea and coffee. There was a teenager about my own age, called Jacky, who had a sexulant athletic figure, vitality and beautiful cheeky looks. Her hair was black and she wore black tights and jumper. She was like a full grown imp perched up on the edge of the draining board. I felt very pleased that a being like that treated me as a legitimate existence.

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Thursday 4.7.1963

Between ten and eleven in the morning, Ingrebourne's content is swelled by the arrival of day patients flush with the tense nerves of outside existence. Cups of milky coffee are drunk amidst a hub-bub of conversation in the sitting room, and then it is time for group.

About forty is a good size group. The chairs are mixed armchairs and hardbacks and arranged around the walls facing inwards. One sits where one likes. Two girls were particular about their seats and pushed the pads up, sometime before group, as a sign that they were reserved. Doctors, nurses and social workers also sit where they like. There are about four occasional tables in the room with ash trays on, which are pulled by patients into positions where the largest number can reach the ash trays.

The patients are of all ages above sixteen and of both sexes. I have heard that they tend to be of above average intelligence. They come from most aspects of middle and working class life. The occasional retired person. A contingent of housewives, one or two broken down nurses, manual workers, young intellectuals, clerical workers, shop assistants, unemployables and lay-abouts.

They talked about personal relations, family squabbles, how they felt about one another. It was all interesting and vital to a coordinated life, but wildly irrelevant to the question of god and the universe.

After lunch they had a small group of about ten with just one doctor. Nobody seemed to be going to talk about anything, so I asked my question:

"You talk about things like arguments, but don't you ever discuss big things like religion?"

Friday 5.7.1963

In Friday's morning group, a women [Yvonne] talked about extra sensory perception of deaths. The doctor suggested she was merely expressing a desire that these people would die, but her dignity was greater than his as if the experience had been too strong to be dismissed so easily.

The Friday afternoon meeting was called "Jobs Advisory Committee". All the "committees" were open to everyone, but less people attended than attended the morning group and doctors were not present. I was, apparently, welcome at the Jobs advisory although I still had a job. This was the committee where the outside world intruded poignantly. It was the committee where mentally unstable people discussed and sought advice on the constant rejections that they met looking for employment. To receive treatment in a neurosis centre is a brand. Many who saw Ingrebourne as an organisation they were proud to be associated with admitted to prospective employers that they had had mental disorders, but the social workers were more realistic and advised us not to mention our illness.

Friday 5.7.1963 evening

CND. Civil Defence debate at Friends Meeting House, Billericay.

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Twice a week we had an afternoon period devoted to painting. As counterbalance to the destruction of analysis, I felt it was essential to strive to create in these groups rather than use them as an extension of analysis. I chose to paint the most hopeful moment of my dead romance: a picture of myself and [Mary] sitting in a sunlit glade of a wood talking. I was fresh then and I wanted to say simple things. I wanted to say how beautiful love had been.

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[Valerie] struggled to act as secretary to one of the committees, but could not stand the criticism in a group when her minutes were presented.

"I can't do it, I can't do it"