A Long Lost Locker and A Last Look Round

In BlogthoughtsFromABroad I told you about the closing of the Old Luttrell Memorial hospital in  February of this year.  This beautiful old partially-listed building has been empty for 5 months now, boarded up and looking dead and unloved, a blot of inactivity in the centre of a small seaside town. Nobody has decided yet what is to become of it but believe me, if they don't do something positive, they'll be needing a lot of buckets come the winter: that roof leaks.

A colleague at the New Operating Theatre said: "I went to look round and all the lockers in the changing rooms were open: yours is full of junk. You ought to clear it."
"I did." (I remember Blogging about it)
"Your Changing Room Locker."

Silence.  I've not used that changing room for many, many years.

"There was a key in the door."

Obviously honest folk worked at The Old Hospital - a locker open for 12 years and it hasn't been ransacked?  I said as much and Jayne looked at me pityingly. "Who'd want anything that smelt like that?"

I went after work, parked in the Doctor's Bay (now just used as a Shopper Bay for anyone who can't find parking on the High Street) and rang the Casualty Bell.  It didn't make a sound - actually I'm not sure it worked even when the Hospital did - and it took a lot of Heavy Rattling before the Guard heard me.  He nodded at my ID and ushered me inside the dark shell.

Alone I wandered through the shadowed Out Patients and up the Old Back Stairs. Windows that never did latch rattled in the wind. My right hand automatically reached out to touch the rubbed-bare wood of the bannister's ornamental ball at the turn in the stairwell.  No matter how many times that got painted, it always wore back to wood grain within a year because so many people swung round on it as they passed. I paused after two flights. Where was the bloomin' changing room?  The stairs narrowed and rose again so I climbed the last and steepest flight up into The Gods, on the same level as Theatres but on the opposite side of the roof, a fire-escape away from my old workplace.  I really had forgotten this part of the building existed.

The Changing Room was full of dozens and dozens of steel lockers. I went to Number 24 and turned the key.  If I tell you I found SEVEN pairs of old work-shoes and THIRTY THREE pairs of tights (Eleven of them still boxed) it'll give you some idea of the odour.

I piled through the rubbish, chucking everything out.  I found handwritten notes requesting me to contact Personnel, Occupational Health and the Sewing Room.

I found a draft of a poem I'd written when the TeleLink to the Mother Hospital (25 miles away) first opened.  It was ditched in  1998.

There were two brand new uniforms at the bottom of the locker, still in their plastic bags, size 10, but they were TWO uniforms ago ... I've gone from navy to white since their stripey days and haven't been a size 10 since the Millenium.

I found the little gold fob watch my Westminster colleagues gave me when I left there.

I found £3.30 in change, including a 1961 florin that had been masquerading as a 10p piece until they made them so much smaller more than 10 years ago.

I found a Daily Telegraph, dated 22nd December 1992.

The hospital felt weird and hollow as I returned to Casualty to be let out and locked out again. The light was wrong, the smell was wrong, the sound - or rather the silence - was wrong.

What will become of such a rabbit warren of a place? who can do anything with it, it being partially Listed and split into such odd compartments.  There was talk of it becoming a Civic Centre, an Arts centre, a concert hall even. But my fear is that in the current economic climate, it will just be left to rot because nobody has the kind of money it needs to turn it into anything serviceable again.

I think this really is 'Goodbye' now, Luttrell Memorial Hospital.  Rest in Peace.