Everbleak: Rituals & Entertainments (part 1)

My favourite event of the entertainments calendar was the annual 4 Sisters nun race. All four wings of Everbleak had their ‘champion’, and they would be in training all year. It was just one circuit of the hospital, but it always got bloody. Blunt weapons only.

Dr Ralph Blowe

The annual 4 sisters nun-race, 1962. Sister Maria of South Wing takes the lead.

It would be wrong to just portray Everbleak as a place of dark melancholy, howling and mental aberration. It was (and is) all of those things of course, but it also possessed a strong sense of community and (despite the milk-souring faces of the nuns) all kinds of warped fun and entertainment.

Apart from the annual carnival (covered in a previous blog), there were a host of other events and revels to look forward to throughout the year, and staff and inmates all participated. Only the nuns were stand-offish when it came ‘fun’, but even they had their annual 4 sisters race, widdershins around the hospital perimeter. It was like the Palio medieval horse race in Siena, Italy. But with nuns. Each wing would be represented by a single, chosen nun wearing a wimple in the ‘colours’ of their crew. It was a short but brutal race, invariably ending in hospitalisations (conveniently nearby), or occasionally, death. After one such fatality (Sister Moran of the North Wing by decapitation), 1938 saw a ‘blunt weapons only’ rule applied to the race. The week of the race aroused such a febrile, factionalised atmosphere, that fights often broke out amongst the supporters of the competing crews.

Doctor Di Popolo performs the ‘Carving of the Saint’ ceremony in the Everbleak staff quarters, watched by an over-excited ward sister,

The nuns were also connected to another annual event: July’s ‘carving of the saint’ ceremony. It was they who had ‘acquired’ the mummified remains of St Anthony somewhere in the Middle East, and had bought him to the crypt of their makeshift chapel at Everbleak. Debate still rages about who possesses the actual St Anthony, because there are (currently) 7 bodies, 5 heads, 29 hands, and 233 fingers or toes in circulation throughout the Catholic Church.

The ceremony involved removing a small slice (known as a ‘skin relic’) from the mummified remains with a special holy carving knife and serving fork. The skin relic was then grated onto the faithful’s pasta in the manner of a pungent black truffle (to which it shares a similar taste and odour, apparently). The ceremony can hardly be described as ‘fun’, but it certainly entertained the pious. The subsequent and predictable breakouts of diarrhoea were far less entertaining though.

One of Everbleak’s favourite games was called ‘Blagger’ (or ‘Shove Johnny Shove’), which could last anywhere between a few seconds or several years. The aim of the game was to pretend, convincingly, to be somebody else – e.g. patient becomes doctor, nurse becomes patient, and clown becomes nun. Within the confines of an asylum though, Blagger takes on a whole range of added dimensions and dynamics. There were already people playing Blagger without even knowing it (through insanity and schizophrenia), and some deliberately using it for deception (e.g. patients trying to get access to the nun’s secret cake locker in the East Wing). Others merely took on personas and dressed-up for their own infantile or demented amusement. The longest game of ‘Blagger’ on record lasted for 7 years and 3 months, when Audrey Timmermans – a newly arrived inmate with acute pyschosis – managed to pass herself off as a laboratory assistant in the Everbleak Institute. She was only discovered after hacking an orderly to pieces for looking at her ‘like a sarcastic catfish’.

Regular boardgames like Monopoly and Scrabble were mostly banned: either because the inmates of Everbleak would lose / eat the pieces, or because they’d invariably end up with someone being shanked or assaulted.

We look at some other popular games and rituals in future blogs.

A game of Blagger (Shove Johnny Shove). Rufus tries to pass himself off as a nun.

Some children in the 70’s and 80’s would look forward to visits from the Balloon Lady (Esther McDoone), but most were utterly terrified by her demon-possessed clown act.