Every family has a secret. By uncovering mine, I liberated my grandmother’s sorrowful story

All families have secrets. Don’t they? Even if you think your family doesn’t, maybe it’s just because no-one has uncovered them yet. And that’s what happened to me. Out of a clear blue February sky, over a chatty lunch, a friend said: “You know about your grandmother? Her death in the asylum?” My grandmother, Charlotte Agnes Raymond, died at 36, leaving three children to the mercies of housekeepers. I knew that – but not the rest. 

My response was the starting point for the entire five-year project of researching and writing my novel, Lotte. I looked across the table and carried on as if the asylum was no surprise. “Oh yes,” I said, “of course I know.” What was I doing? In not acknowledging it was a family secret, was I colluding with an arc of shame that went back 90 years?

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Shame and fear were the emotions most associated with the great grey walls of the county asylums. A shame that touched so many families – there were 19,000 patients in asylums across Scotland in 1933. I assumed that was the reason why nothing had been said. It wasn’t easy to verify one way or another – my father and his siblings were all gone. 

So I turned to the Stirling Asylum archives – to my grandmother’s name, beautifully handwritten. Her forcible admission and her death only 10 days later. One record led to another. In the apparently deadly dry Valuation Rolls for Stirling, I found Lotte’s mother, Mary, plus her two aunts, Margaret and Jessie: three sisters who built a business up from small shops and rents from spare rooms. They leap out as virtually the only female property owners on the Roll. A group of forgotten women who found opportunities in the years around the First World War. 

Both my grandparents had come from very poor backgrounds but, partially thanks to the three aunts, they now found themselves in Snowdon Place in Stirling, still one of the best addresses in town. And an unusual address to find in the asylum admissions book. I wondered about the sort of social vertigo Lotte felt, comfortably off in 1933, the year when the Great Depression reached its peak in Britain. 

It was a period of turmoil in mental health services too. The records of the Asylum in the 1930s don’t project Gothic horror. Well, they are the official records. But what they do expose is a real dilemma among staff. They felt they were genuinely offering asylum – protecting the vulnerable from a harsh world. The problem was no one went home. Of those 19,000 patients, only a handful made it out through the gates. More died in the asylums every year than were discharged. With growing confidence, physicians looked for cures. But that search led to a new set of terrors – experiments on patients who had no rights. 

I still didn’t have enough for a work of non-fiction. I had only the bare facts of Lotte’s life and I had no one to ask. But I also felt a duty to try to go beyond the facts. And rather than condemn the physicians for their unenlightened positions – or judge my family for erasing Lotte’s memory – I wanted to try to understand.

To do that, I had to animate Lotte in my imagination. To place her in a created world where I could explore what it meant to be talented, to have ambitions, but to be trapped in a claustrophobic society with strict expectations. I wanted to show the options – or lack of options – that she had. The only way to do that was through the equivocal truths of fiction. 

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I had only the bare facts of Lotte’s life. I used the names, specific dates and locations, even where this threw up plot problems. It provided a framework; little hooks to keep the story attached to history. Locations were particularly important. I immersed myself in place, pored over old maps and walked the streets of Stirling till my feet rebelled. And because these were streets where I’d spent time with my father – they were points where I could bridge the generations. 

As I wrote, I felt I was overcoming a kind of grief for someone I’d never met and barely heard of. And I began to realise that the secret wasn’t necessarily kept through shame: my father’s silence might have been because he simply hadn’t been told. A silence designed to protect a young family from an awful reality, which ultimately became impossible to break. My grandfather’s way of dealing with grief. For me, creating Lotte on the page was a way of working through my own strange sense of loss. But for the reader, I hope it’s an insight into how we all connect with the past. And embrace our family secrets.

Lotte by Martin Raymond is out now (Indie Novella, £10.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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