there’s nothing doing at Ally-Pally. Under the colossal biscuit-barrel vaulting of the roof the immense building is hollowed out, empty except for a café and roller-skating rink of varnished pine upon which leotarded teenage girls scour around and around. The excursion party from Friern wanders this way, then that, smelling the mustiness of a different kind of institution. They stop to marvel at the enormous organ, with its three-storey-high pipes — Busner doesn’t mind, he’s only concerned to point out to the doubting Marcus how very normal the enkies are — they do not tic or jerk, their footsteps are halting, true, yet only to the same degree as any others of the elderly who have been long confined. Marcus, unimpressed, turns away from him, devotes his attentions to Voss, Ostereich and McNeil, taking them by the arm in turns, gently guiding them through the echoing chambers, speaking to each of them of the great changes wrought upon the world since their immurement. Always he’s careful to relate these momentous external events to those smaller alterations in their own regime that may have trickled down to their buried awareness. Do they recall, he asks, some of their fellow inmates going out to work on London County Council farms? This, he tells McNeil, would’ve been in the late twenties, after the great convulsion of the General Strike, when it was believed — in the wider world as much as the restricted one of Colney Hatch — that energetic employment prevented the diseased mind from dwelling on its fantasies — lascivious or socialistic. Or how about the red and yellow cards that some of their fellows used to wear about their necks — did they remember this practice? Did they register its falling away? They might be pleased to learn that this was but the bureaucratic evidence of a revolution in hygiene, sanitation and the elimination of the diseases that had decimated their peers. — Observing Marcus, so doltish in his interactions with the fully socialised, yet capable of assisting these post-encephalitics with such delicacy and finesse, Busner reflects yet again that the psy professions are