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You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast.

My name is Thomas Jones.

And today I'm talking to Claire Wills, Professor of English at Cambridge and currently a fellow at the Columbia Institute

for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Her books include The Best Are Leaving on Emigration and Post-War

Irish Culture. Her piece in the latest issue of the LRB is on Netheran Hospital, a psychiatric

hospital in Koulsden, Surrey, which opened in the first decade of the 20th century and closed in 1994. It's a companion piece, in a way, to have won the LRB published six months ago, on the mother and baby homes in Ireland, so we'll be talking a bit about that too. Hello, Claire, and thank you very much for joining me. Hello. You begin your

piece by describing a visit to an exhibition of Art Brute in Paris several years ago and among the

pictures on display were drawings by an artist who signed himself JJ Began who had been a patient in the

1940s at Netheran Hospital and this struck you because your mother worked at Nethern.

And did seeing those pictures bring back memories you hadn't thought of in a long time?

Well, yes.

It's always a bit of a shock when an experience you think of as quite private and personal

is encountered in a different framework when you meet your own past framed differently.

And it was quite literally framed because I was seeing pictures on a wall.

It's not that I'd forgotten all about Netheren or anything like that.

My parents are quite elderly now and they like to reminisce.

My father likes to remember the cottage in which he grew up,

...