The past can ambush you. Out of nowhere. ‘You know about your grandmother? Her death in the Asylum?’ It’s not something you expect over lunch.
I’d said, yes, of course – but I had no idea. And yet, as I found out, it was all there in the public records. How my grandmother, Charlotte Agnes Raymond neé Candow, had been admitted - well, sectioned - into Stirling Asylum in 1933.
I’d always known that she’d died young – my father was the oldest of three children and had been eleven at the time. It was a tragedy, but my grandfather had remarried, and life went on. The nature of her death, the Asylum, had never been mentioned.
It was all a bit of shock, to say the least. To make sense of it, I spent the next three years writing a novel, Lotte . The bare bones of what happened are all there in the meticulously recorded Asylum archives held by Stirling University.
In 1933 my grandparents were living in Stirling - Snowdon Place - then, as now, one of the best addresses in town. Pretty good for a couple who had both come from a social layer many rungs below Snowden Place. She was a private patient in the Asylum – in itself a rarity.
Read more 'Oh bugger, I better shoogle again' - Sharon Small on Nightsleeper 20 of the best TV shows to watch right now But beyond the awfulness of a young mum of three dying at thirty-six, nothing was ever said. As family secrets go, it’s a safe bet that asylums figure strongly. The shame of ending up beyond the grey walls of these mig.