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Mabel Cooper on the challenges that faced her on the outside after 25 years in a long-stay institution.

My name is Mabel Cooper. This is part of a story about St Lawrence’s Hospital, in Surrey, where I lived for 25 years. Because I cannot do my own letters I asked my friend Jane to help me to write this.

I was born in 1944. When I was 11, I went into the hospital because they said I needed a lot of care. They said I could not learn to read or do anything, so nobody tried to teach me. I think they misdiagnosed what I could learn and do and they did not prepare me for the outside world. If they had prepared me for the outside world I would not have found it so hard when I came out in 1980. I think that if people were trained in the long-stay hospitals they would be prepared for the outside world.

I learned hardly anything. When I came out, I even had to learn how to speak. I could always speak, but I did not in the hospital as a protest, because they always told you to shut up. In the hospital I went to a centre with my friend Eva, one of the nurses, to put ribbons on birthday cards because that was all there was to do. You did not use your brain, only your hands. In the hospital you did not get money like you do outside. You only got coloured coins and they were only worth a packet of sweets.

In the hospital the clothes were horrible because you have to wear other people’s clothes. There was a big cupboard. You went and helped yourself. The clothes went to the laundry and when they came back someone else would wear them. Now I only wear my own clothes but I still find it hard to choose.

You didn’t do any cooking because all the food was brought up from the big kitchen. It was standing on the ward from 11 o’clock until half past 12 so it was horrible. Since I’ve been out, I’ve learned how to cook and I like doing chicken curries.

In the hospital I never saw children as children are. They wore the same clothes as the adults (with the bottoms cut off). So I thought the children outside were midgets because I had never seen children running around and doing the things they do.  

I didn’t go out except when my friend Eva invited me for the weekend. But where would I have gone anyway? You couldn’t go into the shops or the pubs because the hospital didn’t allow it. You did not have any money, only those little coloured coins. I did not know anywhere around the hospital until I went to a halfway house. It used to be for people that went to work outside so Eva wrote for me to go there. I had to learn how to use the buses and trains because in the hospital I had never done it.

In the hospital men and women were kept apart. They did not want the women in the hospitals to have babies so they kept the men on one side and the women on the other when they had dances or pictures or went to church. But people still managed to have boy and girl friends and when they went to church they used to pass letters under the seat because they could not mix. Some of my friends from the hospital have got married since they got out. Good for them!

Mabel Cooper is a service user with learning difficulties.