SHE GOES TO BED

This extract is from an article by Iris Wilkinson entitled She Goes to Bed, printed in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in January 1934. A month earlier, Wilkinson, 27, had been “admonished and discharged” from a voluntary ward at the Auckland Mental Hospital after a suicide attempt. The next day, however, she had to be rescued during a breakdown in a central Auckland street and was returned, at her own request, to hospital. The article, published nowhere else since, was rediscovered by indexer Julie Daymond-King.

The real “good companions” of an illness are books – but books of leisure and quietude. Even the frothiest little lady may have hidden deeps in her mind; and, though she may thank you politely for stories dealing with the love idylls of stenographers, or the detective abilities of newspaper men, at the bottom of her heart she’ll be bored stiff by this commonplace fare. Don’t forget – she’s a different woman. Try her with something like Charles Morgan’s exquisite novel, “The Fountain” – or, if she’s not afraid of being thought oldfashioned, with Kipling’s “The Brushwood Boy”, “Rewards and Fairies”, or the perfect “Jungle Books”. But most women are forced to lead such aridly practical lives that their minds close up like sea-anemones at “the enchanted voice whispering of better dreams”. I can’t think of any more likeable, amusing, well-written and easily-read series of books than Mrs Marion Cran’s gardening books. Before your very eyes her English gardens blossom, and not one of her volumes, which include, “The Garden of Ignorance”, “The Garden of Good Hope”, “The Lusty Pal”, and many others, is a failure. Guaranteed neither to bore nor to depress – even if your invalid doesn’t know an artichoke until she meets it camouflaged in sauce.

There are other things I would like to give anyone who, unwisely, has decided to be ill for a long time … a Copenhagen plate with seagulls streaming across its whiteness, a little rainbow of Dutch glass, one of the slim modernistic bronze or steel studies which shows the keen loveliness that is the twentieth century ideal … And though I wouldn’t allow a caged bird within yards of any sick-room, two or three placidly mysterious silver carp enjoying themselves wholeheartedly in one of today’s quaint oblong tanks

(never round, please, round bowls give fish myopic tendencies) would be most companionable, and so would a tiny Japanese dwarf rhododendron, with its apricot masses of blossom, sifting gold over its wise, old, dwarfish trunk.

And don’t insist that she knit, crochet or embroider, especially such futile things as a machine can do twice as well in a tenth of the time. Of course she may want to, in which case, shrug your shoulders, think, “women are queer”, and hie you forth to match embroidery silks.