The Whisperers - Robert Nicolson

THE WHISPERERS – ROBERT NICOLSON

First published in 1961, The Whisperers, by Robert Nicolson was made into a film in 1967 featuring a towering performance by Dame Edith Evans as a lonely, impoverished old lady beset by dangers and demons both real and imaginary. In many ways, the film is actually better than the book due mainly to the inspired casting, though that's not to say the book isn't also worthy of attention.

Walk into any town or city centre and you can spot all the elderly people shuffling between shops but not actually buying anything, or sitting at bus stops though never actually catching a bus, or sitting in the public library though not actually reading any books, or heading in an out of doctors surgeries for no real reason at all. We've all seen them. “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” asked The Beatles but just as importantly where do they all go to after having spent the day roaming the streets?

In the case of Mrs Ross, the main protagonist in The Whisperers, it's back to her dingy flat littered with empty milk bottles and stacks of musty newspapers retrieved from litter bins, whereupon she eats jam sandwiches and drinks endless cups of tea whilst listening to voices coming from her water pipes which may or not be real. At night when lying in bed the voices continue. Are there really people in her room or are the voices all in her head?

Her son visits one day and without her knowing, stashes a box on top of a cupboard that she eventually discovers and on opening it finds it contains £800 in used notes. In her confused state she believes the money must be hers. Her son, however, is a petty criminal and the money, of course, is stolen.

The safest place to keep the money is on her person so with the notes posited under her layers of jumpers she sets off into town to inform the National Assistance Board that she will no longer require their hand-outs. Whilst waiting to see a member of staff at the Board's office she falls into conversation with another woman there who on discovering Mrs Ross has £15 in her handbag invites her to a pub and then to her home where she plies her with drink.

Mrs Ross falls into a drunken stupor and the woman promptly relieves her of the £15 then gets her husband to dump Mrs Ross's listless body at the bottom of some steps.

Mrs Ross wakes up in hospital where after having removed her layers of clothes the doctors have discovered the money hidden on her. From there on everyone from the police, the National Assistance Board, health care workers and psychiatrists take an interest in this dotty, lonely old lady. All of them wanting to help and to get her back to normal. Or rather, to so-called 'normal'.

The Whisperers is a strange choice of book to turn into a film but much to his credit, director Bryan Forbes made an extremely good job of it. Being a black-and-white film focusing upon the lives of working class people it falls easily into the category of 'kitchen sink drama', sitting comfortably next to such films as A Taste Of Honey and Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.

The obvious comparison to make would be with the films of Ken Loach but just as easily I would say the best film to compare it to would be Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and the book, of course, to Anthony Burgess's book of the same name upon which Kubrick's film is based.

In A Clockwork Orange, the authorities use an aversion therapy called the Ludovico technique to turn Alex – the violent, young Droog – into a model citizen. This involves administrating drops of a liquid drug into his clamped-open eyes whilst strapped to a chair and being forced to watch films of sex and violence – all to a soundtrack of Ludwig van Beethoven.

In The Whisperers, Mrs Ross is packed off to a psychiatric hospital and put under the care of the doctors there. The treatment meted out to her isn't noted but it should be remembered that the story is set in the late 1950s / early 1960s and back then treatment may well have included ECT – electro-convulsive therapy; or perhaps the drug Largactil, more commonly referred to in those days as 'the liquid cosh'.

When she's finally released, all her eccentricities have been stripped away leaving her as but a shadow of her former self, or even perhaps as her true self revealed: Mrs Ross had always been a nobody who has never had nothing. Importantly, however, the whispering voices she used to hear have all been banished.

The story then shifts its focus upon Mrs Ross's estranged husband who she hasn't seen in years. He is found to be living in a doss house in Manchester and is approached by the authorities in the form of the National Assistance Board and advised it might be of mutual benefit if he moved back to live with his wife so they may take care of each other. He takes up the offer and moves into her flat and into her bed, though they are by this time complete strangers to one and other.

Mrs Ross's husband takes full of advantage of the situation by spending the vast part of the money given to them by the National Assistance Board on drink, gambling, and prostitutes. He eventually gets a job as a driver for a local gangster but after witnessing a murder has to leave town, never to be able to return again.

Come the end, Mrs Ross is once again on her own. Roaming the streets, sitting in the public library, retrieving old newspapers from litter bins, and at night lying in her bed back to listening again to the voices of the whisperers.

The Whisperers by Robert Nicolson and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess were both written at around the same time and by coincidence were both dealing with the same subject, that being the intervention of State-sanctioned so-called 'therapy' upon the individual. Both books deal with the erosion of free will or perhaps to put it more bluntly the attempted murder of free will and the subsequent after-effects, whether the so-called 'help' (or murder?) is administered with good intentions or not.

A Clockwork Orange is the more lurid and extreme whilst The Whisperers is subtle and very gentle in its delivery. Both, however, deliver essentially the same message, that being: When authorities and the holders of power intrude upon an individual - or upon any given situation - to assert their own standards and morality, rather than making things better the situation and outcome is invariably made worse. It's a lesson that history teaches us over and over again but apparently to no avail.

The Whisperers for some reason doesn't appear to be a very well-known book though it deserves to be as it's without any doubt a classic of its kind. The film even more so.

John Serpico