The Door Out of Hell

"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside - the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day" - Enoch Powell, 1961 "Before me, nothing but eternal things were made - and I shall last eternally. Abandon all hope, all you who enter." - Dante, Inferno 1961: the first upside-down year since 1881! Men plumb the abyss and venture into space. War-criminal Adolf Eichmann goes on trial for his life. The Penguin Press publishes Lady Chatterley's Lover and is prosecuted for obscenity. 1961: not another year like it until 6119! Cold-War Britain cowers beneath the nuclear threat - of Mutually Assured Destruction with just four minutes warning. The race is on to break the MAD stalemate with a First Strike Capability. Atom secrets leak out and spies turn up everywhere. To bolster its own self-esteem, society finds whole classes of people to disparage and degrade: "cretins," "spastics," "mongols," "schizos." and every "homo" is a Red spy in the making. Out-of-work school-leaver Alan Hall accepts a gap-year job he'd never imagined: as a nursing assistant in a psychiatric ward. On-the-job he learns to care for people with appalling disabilities, from deaf-blind babies to adults exhibiting symptoms of florid mania. Drawsheets and restrainers, steel-faced doors and ECT, alarm-buttons and "chemical cosh" - this is nursing at its roughest, and his baptism is dire. Unexpectedly he comes to view the ward as a haven of sanity from a MAD world. until a mystery patient comes and goes in the night. They say mental nursing is a job fromwhich there's no escape - but Alan has a place at university. Alone of all the staff and patients, he can walk through the door whenever he likes. the door out of Hell! Clark Nida has travelled extensively and had a variety of jobs in England, Scandinavia and America. A PhD algebraist by training, he has been a mental nurse, a police researcher, a systems analyst, a psychological experimenter and a senior academic. He has also flown aeroplanes, sold encyclopaedias door-to-door and launched his own company writing software. He now lives quietly in Whitby with his head in the clouds and his boots deep in ammonites.