Fourth Estate Philip Hoare - Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital

You might expect the biography of a building to be a dusty, hollow affair, especially one no longer standing, but Philip Hoare's Spike Island demolishes that pre-conception with poetic relish. The building is Netley's Royal Victoria Military Hospital, built in the Spike Island region of Southampton and completed in 1863. Florence Nightingale railed vociferously against its design--correctly, it was to prove. It was huge, using over a million red bricks and home to a thousand patients; postmen used to ride their bikes along the quarter-mile corridors that American GIs later drove their jeeps down. As the pink of the Empire it was built to serve faded from the map, Hoare relates, with veritable scholarship and dark exuberance, the horror tales that reverberated around its walls, from early psychiatric experimentation to the tragedy of World War I shell-shock victims. Wilfred Owen was a patient at Netley after the Somme, while doctors included Dr WH Rivers, who featured in Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, and a young RD Laing, who developed his distaste for brutal psychiatric method working there. Even Dr Watson revealed, at the start of A Study in Scarlet, that he had attended a Netley course for army surgeons. Hoare invests his tale with a gothic splendour, from the introductory history of the nearby Cistercian abbey that subsequently inspired operas, prints and tales, to his own pre-occupations, as a youth, with Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, David Bowie and then punk. At times he wears a brooding decadence on his sleeve like chevrons, as befits the author of Noel Coward and Wilde's Last Stand, but by bolstering his narrative with personal ballast, revealing intimate glimpses of growing up in a backwater, and the deaths of his brother and father, he also provides an evocation of the suburbs comparable to Edward Platt's Leadville. To a rewarding degree a reconciliation of Hoare with his origins and childhood environs, Spike Island speaks of the nature of fear and creeping memory, and lingers in the mind as hauntingly as the ghostly, shadowy presences it so movingly traces.--David Vincent

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