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.

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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 mighty institutions ran deep. So easy to condemn the unenlightened attitudes of our ancestors from our progressive heights. But the more I dug around, the more complicated it became.

By the 1930s, mental health medicine was developing fast. The professionals in the asylum had no sense they were incarcerating people. They believed that they were protecting patients from the world – giving asylum.

What was missing, and what gave the asylum its grim role in public imagination, was the lack of a cure. In the records it was clear - hardly anyone went home. A few far-seeing physicians searched for something that could restore lost souls. But their explorations with drugs and electricity and, latterly, surgery, were the stuff of further nightmares. The more I dug into the records, the less certain I was of who I should be holding to account.

And the more secrets I found. Every family has a myth. Ours was that my grandfather had built up his business from not very much in the 20s and 30s. My grandfather was a remarkable man. Well read, self-educated, he had gone from grocer’s apprentice in Birkenhead, via military service in Salonika to a respected retailer and property owner in Stirling.

What the myth didn’t include was three remarkable sisters – Jessie, Mary and Margaret who had already built up a thriving business through the First World War and beyond. Mary was my grandmother’s mother, widowed early and working with her two sisters. JM&M Nimmo was a well-known Stirling clothes shop up until the business was sold in the 1980s.  

Stirling District Asylum in LarbertStirling District Asylum in Larbert (Image: free)We understand now that women are written out of history. This was yet another example. But as I tracked how they bought shops and properties, dull tomes like The Valuation Roll for Stirling 1931-32’ came alive with their determination to inch out of economic precarity.

By this time I was hooked. As one document led me to another, it wasn’t just my sense of family history that was disrupted. The pages of the Stirling Observer in the mid-1930s gave a much broader picture than our stereotyped images. In 1933 I expected breadlines, widespread distress - and the local media had plenty to say about destitution in the mining industry. But it wasn’t hard times for everyone.

There were also plenty adverts for Mediterranean cruises, for cars that cost more than the average house and the formerly desirable mink coat. The sharp contrasts and the unforgiving attitudes to the undeserving poor expressed through Sheriff Court reporting and letters pages were sobering, and totally familiar in the context of 2024 socio-political discourse.

The 1930s were anxious times. The wounds on bodies and psyches inflicted by the grief of WW1 were still raw and open. Each year brought a sense of deepening international crisis – as if the sacrifice hadn’t been big enough and more tears were required.

Martin Raymond's novel is a moving family tale

I had to work from the archives. There was no one to ask about the family circumstances that led to the asylum. I’d found out too late. With too few facts to create a non-fiction narrative, I decided to create a fiction around the few people I’d known, alongside others who I made up. But I kept always to the spirit of the period.

As I wrote I wrestled with the morality of it all too. I’d tell myself that I was bringing forgotten stories to life. It’s the thing writers say a lot. But the dead have no lawyers or rights. They were not consulted on my decision to tell the tale. Once, when I was about the same age my father was when he lost his mother, I took some heirloom postcards into school as part of a WW1 project. Beautifully embroidered lace postcards sent from France to my other, maternal, grandmother. The night before, my mother carefully took a rubber to the messages pencilled on the back. History lost. She didn’t want the innocuously cheerful messages shared. Sharing is very 21st century.

I recognised fairly late in the task that perhaps my father wasn’t concealing what had happened to his mother. Maybe he had never known himself. Secrets get buried early. And what options did my grandfather have? Not much in the way of community mental health services in 1933.  By the time I had written Lotte, I decided not to judge. I leave that to the reader.  

Lotte is published by Indie Novella and is available in all good bookshops and online