Chapter: THE WOMEN'S INDUSTRIAL HOME SOUTHWOOD, SYDENHAM HILL

This is another of the Salvation Army Homes for Women. When I visited
Southwood, which is an extremely good house, having been a gentleman's
residence, with a garden and commanding a beautiful view, there were
about forty inmates, some of whom were persons of gentle birth. For
such ladies single sleeping places are provided, with special dining
and sitting-rooms. These are supposed to pay a guinea a week for their
board and accommodation, though I gathered that this sum was not
always forthcoming. The majority of the other inmates, most of whom
have gone astray in one way or another, pay nothing.

A good many of the cases here are what are called preventive; that is
to say, that their parents or guardians being able to do nothing with
them, and fearing lest they should come to ruin, send them to this
place as a last resource, hoping that they may be cured of their evil
tendencies.

Thus one girl whom I think I saw, could not be prevented from gadding
on the streets, and therefore had been placed here. Another young
woman was a schoolmistress who would not get out of bed and refused to
work. When she came to the Home she was very insolent and
bad-tempered, and would do nothing. Now, I was informed, she rises
with the lark, at 6.30 indeed, and works like a Trojan. I could not
help wondering whether these excellent habits would survive her
departure from the Home. Another lady, who had been sentenced for
thefts, was the daughter of a minister. She horrified the Officers by
regretting that she had gone to jail for so little, when others who
had taken and enjoyed large sums received practically the same
sentence. She was reported to be doing well.

Another, also a lady, was the victim of an infatuation which caused
her to possess herself of money to send to some man who had followed
her about from the time she was in a boarding school. Another was a
foreigner, who had been sent to an American doctor in the East to be
trained as a nurse. This poor girl underwent an awful experience, and
was in the care of the Salvation Army recovering from shock; but, of
course, hers is a different class of case from those which I have
mentioned above. Another was an English girl who had been turned out
of Canada because of her bad behaviour with men. And so on.

It only remains to say that most of these people appeared to be doing
well, while many of those in the humbler classes of life were being
taught to earn their own living in the laundry that is attached to the
Institution.

 That night, Dr. Rivers is haunted by images of the "treatment" he witnessed, describing his memories of the incident as "hallucinatory". He is distracted and unable to work on his upcoming paper, so he leaves his room to walk around a darkened London. Even then, the images from the afternoon will not leave his thoughts; the psychologist eventually returns home and goes to bed. Dr. Rivers dreams that he is walking down the eerie corridor of Queen Square Hospital, where he runs into the disfigured patient from that morning. The man is chanting the first lines of Sassoon's letter protesting the war. Suddenly, Rivers finds himself with an electrode in his hand and a man's open mouth in front of him. Dr. Rivers attempts to push the electrode into the patient's mouth, but it is too big. He realizes that the electrode has metamorphosed into a horse bit, which he is cruelly jamming into the patient's mouth. The psychologist is awoken by his own scream, deeply disturbed by the images his brain has created. Dr. Rivers notes that though his dream featured a scene of "oral rape," it did not feel sexual. He traces the dream to his discomfort with Dr. Yealland's methods; Rivers recalls that his own stutter had been getting worse throughout the day. Dr. Rivers speculates that the disfigured man in his dream must represent Sassoon, since he was reciting his letter, but he cannot figure out who the second patient could represent. Rivers remembers that he once scraped a spoon across the back of Prior's throat to try and induce speech and feels disgusted with himself. Suddenly, Rivers feels as though there is no difference between him and Dr. Yealland: both men are tasked with pushing ill men back into a deadly situation that they are trying desperately to escape. The silence of men like Callan and Prior is their protest against an unjust system, Rivers muses, and the doctors are the ones silencing the soldiers' protest by forcing them to speak. Trying but failing to avoid the realization, Dr. Rivers discovers the identity of the man he silenced and therefore, was seated in the dentist's chair in his dream: Sassoon

