Passerines

Here she is again, the Honourable Violet Gibson. She’s feeding the birds in the garden of St Andrew’s Hospital, Northampton. That’s where she ended her days. Because in 1926, Violet shot Mussolini. She wasn’t a great shot. She’d also previously tried to shoot herself and failed at that. She was beaten by the crowd, that day in Rome, when she shot Il Duce. She experienced prison, lunatic asylum, then deportation, not realising where she was going.

Home?

No. She was incarcerated for life.

But what if…

What if she had had help, that day in Rome? What if she had not missed, had not only grazed the nose of Mare Nostrum?

What of Lucia Joyce, similarly abandoned by her mother and brother, in the same psychiatric hospital? How would it have been if she got to do things differently; could go back and forward? Now, how would any of that be possible?

What has this to do with Anna O or Blanche? With Dr Freud, Dr Breuer, Dr Charcot? With Vienna, or the Salpetriere in Paris. And why did Violet’s father, Baron Ashbourne, meet James Joyce, Lucia’s father, before he left Dublin for Trieste? And if Violet shot and  didn’t miss, then history is changed, as well as the lives of women whose freedom was radically curtailed, whose madness was…questionable; who were abandoned,derided, or turned into exhibits.

I will publish a proper synopsis very soon, but it is one hell of a road trip, this – and what happens has much to do with the birds, the passerines…Some of this is true; some of it is imagined, but the latter for the sake of adventure and sweet liberty.

From the end of chapter one, where Violet speaks of Lucia,

‘I know that was a long sentence. I made like Joyce. Oh but Oh God and the snotgreen sea, I am determined. I’ve made her dance, just a little. And here’s a shorter sentence: so keep up.

“Come to us, passerines. Soon enough, we will come with you.” ‘

‘Where are Violet and Lucia, Nurse Archer? Are they accounted for? It’s not exactly scientific, but at my desk just now I thought…I sensed…a disturbance.’

‘They are in their rooms, doctor, and night medicines administered. Both seemed agitated; we have given extra, as per notes.’

Dr Griffith finds he cannot concentrate, takes up a bible. Remembers birds of childhood.

Let him see.

Remembers.

As a boy, turn of the century thereabouts, his father made him go to scripture memory competitions. Welsh Baptist family. Now his eyes are moist. He was good.

Psalms.

Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest.

Proverbs.

Like a sparrow in its flitting, like a swallow in its flying, an undeserved curse goes nowhere.

Down the corridors of the asylum echoes a turbulent commotion and alarms fly. This was the bit the staff heard. They’d missed the whispers, glissando of the winged helpers no louder than a heartbeat through a greatcoat; rustles of paper and scratches of soft pencil; tremendous change: you couldn’t stop it now.

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