I have scoured everything so only hope is left: the other side of anger, the restoration of all my wasted years.

These are the words I write when I enter the Bridewell. Not in body, but in spirit — if there is any point to writing it surely must be this — entry. To enter via language into the secret heart of things, into the otherwise invisible. This residency is not a physical one and I cannot begin with the body, so I begin with words.

According to my reading, the Bridewell is an early modern house of correction for unfortunates like ‘idle strumpets’ and ‘…the great number of beggars fallen into misery by lewd and evil service, by wars, by sickness or other adverse fortune…’, now taken off the streets by officers called beadles. They are put to work making lace or mortar or any other number of trade goods, defects in character reformed through work.

A house: not a prison. Correction: not retribution. The language of promise.

Inevitably, then, betrayal — its seed buried in every promise. If vagabonds and disorderly women are here to be reformed, then punishment follows when discipline fails. More factory than penitentiary, whippings and hard labour abound. The bridewell legacy is a complicated one, woven across the axes of charity and cruelty — rare is the clean narrative that is also true.

—-

Norwich is a palimpsest, each layer of history bearing traces of what came before. If I press close enough to my reading I can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, newness revealing itself at every peel of the virtual page.

Bridewell Alley today is a narrow, cobblestoned passage tucked away in Norwich’s centre, easy to miss unless you’re looking for it. The Tudor buildings lean in close, upper storeys jutting over the alley like sentinels; everywhere brick and flint softened by centuries of rain.

At the end of the Alley stands the Museum, housed in what was once the city’s house of correction. The air inside is cool and still, faintly redolent of old timber and plaster. Exposed beams cross the ceiling, oak darkened by generations of woodsmoke; the floorboards shallow valleys worn over time.

This stillness bears little resemblance to the Bridewell in its prime. Then, a cacophony: the clack of looms, the scrape of tools against stone, the rhythmic thud of flax being beaten. Shouts — moans — the crack of the whip. The air thick with stench: unwashed bodies, human waste, damp straw, dye’s acrid tang.

I imagine stepping into cells no larger than closets, the windows small, barred, and set high in the walls — designed to let in just enough light for work while preventing escape. In winter the stone weeps with damp; summer makes each cell an oven.

The courtyard is still here, now clean and open, where benches rest beneath a single sycamore tree.

—-

I read about Peter the Wild Boy, found feral in the woods near Hamelin by George I and his hunters and brought back to Britain. Efforts to civilise him bear little fruit; one day he goes missing and cannot be found.

In 1751 the Bridewell is ravaged by fire. One of the prisoners refuses to leave and has to be dragged from the building. I see him now: face hirsute and blackened with soot, eyes wide with something that is neither terror nor resolve; knuckles white against the doorframe. Fire paints his shadow long across the stone courtyard.

Before he went missing, the Wild Boy was paraded at court as a human pet, having been brought back to Britain as a ‘present’ for George I’s niece, the Princess of Wales. The public’s fascination with him was riddled with grotesque distance. The parish register of Northchurch states that ‘many men of some eminence in the literary world have published strange opinions and ill-founded conjectures about him’. He was a fool, people said, and a beast; so they collared him and made a fool of him.

Later the Bridewell burns and he is found yet again, unwilling to leave the inferno.

200 years later, geneticists suspect that Peter had Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, a rare chromosomal disorder characterised by developmental delay and intellectual disability, with reported high rates of self-injury.

What makes someone cling to a burning prison? Perhaps the utter absence of instinct; perhaps the promise of being scoured. Sometimes pain demands more pain.

—

When Peter was found wandering near Norwich, he was wearing a leather collar inscribed with: “Peter the Wild Boy from Hanover. Whoever will bring him to Mr. Fenn at Berkhamsted shall be paid for their trouble.” A man more than grown now, his silence was complete — he never learned to speak more than a few words. And what words would be adequate? What language might carry the weight of his life?

I think of Peter as I wander the annals of the Bridewell’s history, his wildness met with collars and confinement. I think of the beggars and vagabonds with their defects of character. The idle strumpets with their inconvenient hungers.

—

Time collapses sometimes; the walls between years grow thin. I imagine walking through modern Norwich but find myself listening for echoes. The sound of the loom, the beadle’s approach, Peter’s wordless humming.

I’ve been trying to understand something about confinement, about the moment when captivity becomes preferable to whatever lies beyond it.

—

I write this sentence at the start of my residency: I have scoured everything so only hope is left: the other side of anger, the restoration of all my wasted years.

I return to it at the end of my residency and find that I have scoured very little.

Instead, more layers; history is not a cleaning but an accretion.

Time is not a straight line, Tomas Tranströmer tells us; it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side. I press my ear to the wall and listen. I think I make out footsteps. Perhaps they are my own. Perhaps they belong to someone else, walking out of the labyrinth — toward a future I cannot yet imagine, bright wilderness of scoured things.

Lisabelle Tay is a Singaporean writer and poet. Her poetry appears in Anthropocene, Bad Lilies, and elsewhere, including New Singapore Poetries (Gaudy Boy, 2022); her debut pamphlet was Pilgrim (The Emma Press, 2021). Her fiction appears in Sine Theta Magazine and elsewhere, including NO FLASH (National Gallery Singapore, 2024). She was part of the 2023 Black List Feature Lab with her screenplay MOMO, which is currently in development.

From June to December 2024 National Centre for Writing was delighted to host four writers in virtual residence: Joyce Chua, Marylyn Tan, Lisabelle Tay and Jerrold Yam, with support from the National Arts Council of Singapore.