I never saw him and I never knew him, but it's a big place. Massive. In fact, I never saw no coloured people at all. But then again it's difficult because of the drugs. They affect your memory. The medication, as they like to call it, it can make you scream and then they just look at you and that's when they remind you that you're mad and that you'll not be going anywhere. I would find myself walking up and down corridors, talking to myself, thinking who the hell is this crazy bastard in my head, and then before I knew what was happening the nurses would be all over me, holding me down, forcing more stuff down my throat. They used to talk to me like they were my friends, then suddenly they would turn on me and that would be it. All men, never any women nurses, and they would trick you into thinking that everything was fine and okay, but it wasn't like that. And slowly, you know, I think I began to get the idea of what was going on. You'd see people coming in who looked alright, like you could go up to them and ask them how things were on the outside. Then the next time you'd see them they were zombies and they didn't know you, and that's when you realised that something was seriously wrong. But like I said, I didn't see no coloureds. I didn't see anybody like David Oluwale. I decided I had to get out of High Royds, but it wasn't that easy. I must have been getting better because I saw a doctor one day, and you didn't get to see them that often. But I saw this doctor and he even smiled, and before I knew where I was I found myself in an open ward. I thought to myself, you know, this is your big chance so you better take it. And so I absconded, but they caught me in the next village, or so they said, I don't remember. In Guiseley, I think it was. They brought me back and this time they locked me in a room by myself with only a bucket for a toilet. They let me out in the morning, but kept an eye on me. I went to Occupational Therapy, which everybody called OT, and I learned a bit about printing. The females did sewing and knitting, or they made baskets, but they gave the males different things to do. I used to wish I was back in prison, because you have more freedom in prison. Also, they don't give you medication in there, so you don't twitch as much and there's less nightmares. There's plenty of coloured blokes in prison. I might have seen this Oluwale fellow in there. At night they'd take me from OT back to the room with the bucket, and they'd lock me in. After I'd gone down the drainpipe and absconded the first time I thought, I'm not doing this again. But they weren't going to take any risks now. They watched me like a hawk. I never really did see how big this place was, but it was huge, I knew that. But by now all I wanted was to get out of there. It had been years, and nobody visited anymore, and I was sick of seeing old men picking up tabs from off the floor and shuffling around like they didn't know their name or care anymore. I didn't want to be like them. They were in their seventies some of them, and I didn't want to end up like that. If somebody gave them a sweet they were so grateful they looked like they might cry, but they were the ones who gave me the will to get out. It wasn't the doctors, for I hardly ever saw them. In fact, there was nobody to talk to about how you really felt about things, so you just kept your mouth shut and pretended to behave and hoped that the drugs wouldn't make you any more mad. Eventually it worked for me because one day they didn't take me back to the room and lock me in. They put me in a Nissen hut type of place which was a more open kind of ward, and I slept in there for a while. Maybe a year, I don't know. You never really knew much about time in High Royds. This place was better, but I'd still rather have been in Armley jail, because there you definitely knew about time and you've got your wits about you. But it's hopeless once they put you in the loony bin. It's hopeless trying to hang on to anything. Before you know what's going on they turn you into a bloody zombie and there's nobody to talk to. The nurses have got their jobs to do, but they're more like guards or prison officers. And the guys in OT, they sometimes told you straight out that it would be easier training chimpanzees. Basically, you've lost control of your life, but I was lucky. Luckier than most of them, because I got called into the doctor's office and he told me that I was going to be discharged. I said nothing because I didn't believe him. Then I realised that I didn't want to go because I didn't have any connection with the world anymore. Not since I'd gone down the drainpipe then been dragged back again. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anything about life out there and it was frightening to me. The thing is, not only had I not seen any coloureds in High Royds, I don't know if I'd ever seen any at this time, apart from when I was in prison. I was more of a country person, not a city type, and we just didn't have any. But he could have been there and nobody would have known as the place was so big. But when they eventually said to him 'You're discharged' he'd have had the same worries as the rest of us. I mean, where are you supposed to go?
I look over the low fence of 209 Belle Vue Road. The garden is a riot of overgrown weeds and shrubbery. A blue minivan lies derelict in the yard. Beyond the minivan, at the end of the long narrow garden, stands the three-storey house. There are six neatly spaced windows on the top two floors, three on each. The ground floor boasts a bay window. The curtains are variations of white and green, and they don't match. The curtains that hang in the bay window on the ground floor are white, but their dignity is compromised by the fact that not only do they hang askew, they are also badly twisted. Traditionally, curtains block out all light. They block out the day. The world. But not these curtains. To the side of the front gatepost somebody has hand-painted '209'. Blue string holds the brown gate shut, but much of the fencing to either side of the gate has collapsed. The gate serves little purpose. This was David's home. The place he hoped to return to when the High Royds doctor said, 'You're discharged.' This large three-storey brick house with a crushed Marlboro packet lying discarded by the gate; a place that boasts no television aerial on the roof. Back in the thirties this must have been a highly desirable neighbourhood for the street is broad and the houses suggest grandeur and affluence. But by David's time — by the fifties — this area was full of transients and prostitutes; and little has changed. Today a woman (Miss Dorton-Smith) lives here alone, but she will not answer her door. The door remains closed. I walk around to the side fencing. The labyrinth of jungle hides two more minivans, one red and one white; and the skeleton of a motorbike. The house, the garden, the vehicles, have all been 'let go'. Abandoned.
The next time I saw David must have been six or seven years after the dance. I was walking down towards the university and he was walking up. I hesitated for a moment because he had changed. He'd put on an awful lot of weight and the bounce had gone. It was just no longer there. And the light had also gone from his eyes. David was a man who was in the habit of making strong eye contact, but I looked at him and saw that the light had definitely gone out. And then he told me that he'd been in hospital, and I thought 'oh shit'. Around this time people were beginning to become conscious that Armley jail wasn't the only place that could brutalise these men. We stood together by Woodhouse Moor and talked for a while, and I just assumed that he still lived at Belle Vue Road where he'd been living before. But it was only later that my husband explained to me that David probably appeared strange because he was so pumped up with drugs. After this meeting by Woodhouse Moor I met him next at a dance at Jubilee Hall where he was a bit more talkative, and I seem to remember he was mixing in quite a lot. And then one of the Ghanaians confirmed everything for me, and he told me that David had been drugged while he was in the mental hospital and that's why he'd been behaving a bit strangely of late. And then after a few months or so, David disappeared again into Armley jail. By this stage I'd already decided that I was going to watch out for him. Armley jail had a fearsome reputation, for the wardens and officers often had fascist pins on the inside of their lapels, and they'd flick them at you if you were visiting a coloured prisoner. But they didn't frighten me. I wouldn't let them.