Ha-Ha

by Jennifer Dawson

Genres: Classics; Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A prizewinning, semi-autobiographical debut novel that explores a young woman’s struggle with mental illness at Oxford University in the 1950s—for readers of Ottessa Moshfegh, Melissa Broder, and Sally Rooney.

“I wanted the knack of existing. I did not know the rules.”

These words from Josephine, the heroine of Jennifer Dawson’s remarkable novel, encapsulate the journey of a young woman grappling with mental illness amidst the hallowed halls of Oxford University in the 1950s. Originally published in 1961, this novel met with critical acclaim, and is a rediscovered classic perfect for fans of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

During her first year at university, Josephine experiences a breakdown following the death of her overbearing but beloved mother. She’s confined to a psychiatric institution, where she encounters the harsh forms of treatment offered at that time. Amidst the turmoil, she finds an unexpected connection with Alasdair, a fellow patient, igniting a journey towards recovery.

Praised as “luminous” by The New York Times and “a singular, elegant novel” by The Guardian, and with a new introduction by Milk Fed author Melissa Broder, The Ha-Ha offers a moving and fresh perspective on struggles with mental health and the process of self-discovery.

Release date: November 11, 2025

Publisher: Scribner

Print pages: 176

Sample

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
“THEY WERE all very kind at Oxford,” I assured her, for she had seemed to think they were not. “No one shunned me or ripped my stockings or took my bicycle on ‘loan.’?”

“So,” said the Sister, nodding as she slid the enormous bundle of silver keys into her pocket. “So. That was good.”

She smiled and waited for me to go on. She was a German, I thought. Her voice moved up and down so, and her “r”s were so rich and long in her throat.

“So.” It seemed the right occasion, that first day, to go on. “So you see, I could not have been unhappy there. In fact I had no enemies at all. The other students were all very friendly and pleasant, and used to wave as they passed and cry: ‘How goes it?’ or ‘Press on regardless.’ Most encouraging. But in fact I never needed any encouragement. My favourite hymn had always been ‘Glad that I live am I,’ to which Mother could add an excellent little alto part.”

“Really. Is that so?” the Sister nodded again, folding her starched apron carefully up in front of her and sitting down on the wireworks of the bed. I had not had time to make it up yet. “May I? May I make myself at home? So. That was good.”

She had only just come in and introduced herself as the ward-sister, and I had only just moved up here, to the second floor, to the “side-rooms,” as they were called, from the other ward that was always full and noisy. The room was very small, like a cupboard, with an iron bedstead down one half, and a wicker chair and a door on the other. It was a change of view I had only just been given, and when the Sister folded up her apron and sat down, I saw that the room was now mine, and that she wanted to talk.

“So, that was good,” she was repeating. She leaned back against the bed-end and stared at me. She was small and dark, but her eyes were large, and so full of a devouring emotion that I thought she might swallow me. “The intellectual, academic world must have been a very great experience. In Germany we call it studenten…”

But I have forgotten now what she said they called it. For that was a year ago and my mind was full of other things then, surprise and expectations.

It was true though that Oxford had been a very great experience. You see, in my adolescence and at school I had never really been au fait. I used to get into trouble for thinking of the wrong things and letting them loose verbally, and as no one ever told me what the right ones were, I was in the dark most of the time. But at the University, I discovered, there was no rule of this kind. You were allowed to think of what you liked, without any hindrance.

The Sister leaned over and searched my face with her yearning eyes. “So,” she cried, “I see that you made some good friends at that very famous chair of learning? You…” she fumbled for the word, “you…”

While she searched for the word I climbed over the bed on to the window-sill to see what it was like—this new world that I had just been given. It was evening. From the ward beneath came that prolonged, even, and rhythmic clapping that I was so familiar with. I could picture her so well, Mrs. Dale, standing by the linen-room door in the twilight of the dark green corridor, clapping and applauding no one in particular, while the nurses picked up their aprons and handed in their keys. I remembered too how stuffy it had been in the evenings, and how my hopes would rise when the evening hymn started up, and the curtains were drawn across, and the night nurses started to arrive.

“So, you made some fertile friendships at the University?” the Sister pressed, rearranging her words tenaciously. “You found a rich inheritance?” she pursued. “Then perhaps when you leave here…? to pick up the threads…?”

No. I had not made any friends, even there. For apart from Helena, who would drop in for a hot milk-drink in the evenings, and bring the “Battle of Maldon” for some translation (which she was not very strong on) I had never been caught up in the student world.

I used to envy them though, as they shouted across the Broad, waving from their bicycles as though they did not mind about the ungulates and the horned mammals having been there before them—got there first, so to speak. I used to envy them as they called down from top windows in Walton Street, or spoke across the library-desk:

“Are you playing tennis this afternoon, Jane?” and the reply would come “pat” before I had even had time in my mind’s eye to string the racket so that the ball did not slip straight through the frame, while I was still wondering whether it was really cat-gut:

“Sorry, I’ve got an essay-crisis.”

I had often tried to describe Oxford life to Mother. I would tell her how they dressed and spent their time. I used to describe college balls and essay-crises and afternoons on the river and vacation trips and coffee-parties when they would stay up till midnight talking; I told her about how they sometimes fell in love or got engaged, and Mother would say that it took all types to make a world and that she would not like her student daughter to become too “fast,” to which I would agree.

I once said I thought they were like good riders who never came off their mounts, and she reminded me that we need more than one spill in life if it was to be a rich one and a good one. To which I agreed. Mother smiled and said her girl had plenty of imagination.

“Why do you not, one day, when ‘the moil’ [meaning my final examinations] is over, ‘when the battle’s lost or won,’?” she said playfully, “try to write some little sketches about Oxford life and personalities and your college idols, remembering all sides of the picture…”

No, I had not made any firm friendships, even there.

“You see, unfortunately,” I tried to explain to the Sister, “unfortunately I did not seem able to learn exactly how the appropriate reply fitted on to the prior remark, and a lot seemed to depend on this in undergraduate circles. With me the two never seemed to dovetail.”

There had always been that strange hiatus, that funny in-between gulf that other things took possession of when you were off your guard, and surprised you unawares: the purple buddleia with the butterfly clinging, the kangaroo, the groves of spotted bananas, and the egg-eating snake with the enamelled prong in his throat (for piercing the shell with). They had always been there, these other things, and when the undergraduates spoke again or stood there waiting for me to affix the right reply, I was, if you see what I mean, a little flummoxed, a little behindhand; not quite up to the mark. I had been tapped on the shoulder, so to speak; I seemed to be reduced to silence by the things the others got round so easily.

And then the laughter came. For when they spoke again, those members of Oxford University with whom I consorted, I could only laugh. Gale fumbling with the zip of her evening gloves; Prue pouting over her make-and-mend or struggling with the little portable wireless. And outside were all these strange things, spotted or quilled or feathered.

“It was because of all the other things,” I explained to the Sister, “that I usually ended in laughter.”

Unfortunately, it did not go unnoticed, and one day at the Principal’s little termly tea-party for her third-year students, the laughter happened once too often.

She was pouring out tea, and one of the guests, a Miss Veronica Piercy, was discussing the yearly “Mission” to the University.

“I am afraid, Lady Stocker,” she was saying, “that we are drifting near to a spiritual holocaust. Much as I admire these Aldermaston Marchers, and racial demonstrators, they surely tend to forget that in spite of all the material threats to our valuable Western contribution to civilization, a much graver one lies ahead in the form of a spiritual waste, a spiritual vacuum. For the blank apathy of the masses…”

There we all were, in a row on a striped Regency settee, in afternoon dresses—Miss Piercy’s was a pale violet mohair—passing the painted, transparent cups and the daintily rolled sandwiches that had been set before us. Lady Stocker nodded politely, and another guest cried with a great rush of approval:

“I, Lady Stocker, I couldn’t agree more.”

As we sat there I could see the even-toed ungulates marching through the waste, and files of armadillos with scaly shells, and hosts of big black flies. The door opened… it was only the maid in a starched cap carrying the silver kettle, but the laugh I gave shocked even the Principal.

The animals… the animals… I wanted to tell them all about the animals, but would they understand? They say the English are great animal lovers. I don’t think this can be strictly true though. I supposed at least that I was a great animal lover; that is how I explained my laughter when the Principal summoned me afterwards and suggested that I saw a specialist. I could just never get them out of my mind at Oxford. They were always there, the things of the jungle, making their appearance “when one or two people were gathered together.”

I suppose they thought I was laughing at them, and I did not always have time to take them aside and explain why I was laughing; consequently, I didn’t make many friends. Mother used to explain to her friends when they supposed that life at the ’Varsity must be a gay whirl of social activity, that I found them all rather thin; rather peripheral and light weight. That I “ran through them all rather swiftly.” But as you can see, this was not strictly true, and as I did not like deceiving Mother or her friends, I should like to have taken them aside and explained why it was that life was not for me (though it was for some people), a “gay round of social activity.”

“Excuse me,” my hand went to my mouth apologetically. “Excuse me; I seem to have made rather a long speech about a very trivial story.”

I was surprised at it, but the Sister seemed interested. “Go on,” she said.

“Nothing. Nothing else.”

“Nothing? Is that all? And have the animals retreated?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she laughed approvingly, stopped abruptly, and stared thoughtfully ahead.

“When one is adolescent,” she began, appealing to me with her dark, sympathetic eyes, “when one is adolescent, one often gets caught up in one’s thoughts and dreams. That does sometimes happen to many of us. But,” she leaned over and tapped my hand playfully, “you are no longer adolescent. That is all over now.”

It was all over, Oxford, the students, the Principal, the animals, and Mother’s friends. It was all the past. It was all ancient history.

“Look at the geraniums,” I pointed them out, lolling in the big central bed in front of the main hospital doors. My window looked down over the drive that ran round the bed to the massive stone Gothic entrance hall. The cats were stalking round the few remaining cars, and someone, a man, was pacing up and down, bending over to light a cigarette, and stopping at the main door to talk to some invisible person within.

It was evening, and the broken piano was starting up down below. I could picture them standing round, shuffling through the hymn book for “Jesu, Lover of My Soul” before the lights went on and the night came. Soon the woman in red who always stood at the window would be delivered of her baby and would be rocking it up and down to the stars instead of wringing her hands. And there beyond the drive and the pine trees and the high grey hospital wall was the hill, parched and yellowing and solitary, that Judas Iscariot and I used to peer at carefully every evening.

I pointed it out to the Sister.

“We used to stand there every evening in the dormitory staring at it.”

Judas would pick out the Gaumont tower with her spyglass, and the rusty sheets of iron on the waste-patch, the ice-cream van, and the children sliding and riding pramwheels down the slope. But we always came back to the hill. It was our religion.

Then one night when we were standing there as usual, I saw in a kind of preview that Judas was going to sigh and shut her grey melancholy eyes and start her poem: “There is a green hill far away without a city wall.” And the terror would come to me: those final jumbled, confused lines that left me trembling, but which seemed to satisfy her so deeply:

“And now I wish the passing night had borne my breath away.”

But that day it was different, because I suddenly saw that if I shifted a little, if only I moved slightly, the dormitory would break up like a kaleidoscope pattern, and she would no longer be Judas Iscariot at all, and I would no longer have to be sitting there among the rows of iron beds with the pink plastic pots underneath.

The Sister blinked and smiled, and understood. “So you flew away.” Her voice modulated sharply. “I think that was good. And so you flew away like a bird out of a snare… a snare such as the foresters make in the country where I come from, of damp black twigs.”

A trumpet came from the barracks. The night nurses began to cycle up the drive. The sun had disappeared behind the hill. I knew it would soon be dark. But night was no longer an ally as it had been then, when the air grew stuffy and the electric lights would click out until there was only one small circle of light in the middle of the rows of beds, and the nurses would shuffle to and fro round this island bringing you paraldehyde, that stung your eyes and throat and tasted of seaweed and the dark bottom of the sea.

It was good, this night, and I used to think that if there were a God, he was a God of darkness, and that day was just what happened to be left over for men to do what they liked in.

“And so…” The Sister broke abruptly into my thoughts. She rose and smoothed her apron back over her dark cotton dress. “That is all over.” She was suddenly firm and rather severe, as though she had listened too much for too long. “The past is a dream that is over, and one looks to the future to see what is there.” She emphasized the past and the future as though we were all Eurydices who must not look back.

I examined my brown and green mottled room. I thought about the future.

“Then I suppose I shall be leaving quite soon, now that I am better?” Only there was the problem that I did not know where to go now that Mother was dead. She had married rather late, and by the end there had only been the two of us at our house in Wookens Walk.

“Dearie.” The Sister sat down again. “Nothing is thought that far yet. For the moment, tell me, can you regard this as your home? Can you? You must be working before we think of anything else.”

Work? I did not know anything to work at. At College I had specialized in Anglo-Saxon and become interested in the Ormulum. I described that ancient poem to her. “I was very keen on that.”

But she did not know it: she was still very ignorant of English literature and hoped I would teach her. But she thought it more likely that for the moment a suitable form of work could be found through the social worker. It was the P.S.W.’s job, I learned, to “place” people, to see them on to their feet in the real world.

“But it is real here,” I protested, at the window, pointing it out to her. I wanted to remain here at the window looking out on to the beds of geraniums, and the hot gardens, and the ward opposite where I could see them moving about.

“What is that block on the other side?”

“That is the male side of the hospital.”

“And what is that like?”

She was doubtful. She was not interested. “Like this, more or less.” She began fidgeting with her note-books.

I peered. It seemed like this one, across the drive, except that where our windows had looked on to the bare airing-court, their view was unblocked. I could see men walking about in its day-room, and at the windows two boys and an old man in a black beret crouched on a chair clutching something. At intervals in between them glided the white-coated figures of the male nurses.

“As soon as you are working,” the Sister was repeating, “as soon as you have flown from under the leaves, back to the busy sky… she laughed triumphantly at the metaphor… “Is it good…? we will only then start worrying about the future. When the committee have regraded you.”

The committee? Regrade? I knew they graded eggs and milk, I did not know that they also had this word for humans. “Regrade me?… As what?”

“You came under certificate,” she brought out with a sigh as though she were repeating a lesson she was tired of. “Why should that make any difference or upset anything?” She waited with pursed lips. She waited. “Why should it, dearie?”

“Why?” I repeated mechanically without seeing quite what she meant, or what she was waiting to see upset.

Her eyes were half-closed as though she were praying. “You are not frightened of labels, are you dearie? If you had come here because of some injury to your leg or arm you would not be made miserable by…”

But I was not miserable. I could assure her of that. I had escaped from the other ward; I had escaped from the fowler’s snare, had I not, I asked myself. And besides that, the sun had shone for two months and it had not rained once. The nights were hot. The walls were hot when you walked near them. The grass was brown with it, like tobacco, and the leaves creaked with dryness when the birds touched them. The sunshine had become a kind of habit, I wanted to walk out there where for so many months I had only stared, and forget about the barren peach tree of the airing-court, and the well-beaten paths. I could not have been miserable then, even if there had been anything.

“It is grey with drought,” I noticed, “and on the other side…?”

“What dearie?” The Sister adjusted her glasses.

“The hill,” I pointed out. “The Green Hill Far Away.”

“Ah yes, the hill.” She folded them up again with a snap. “It wants a drink.”

We talked. She told me she had escaped from Munich in 1938 with other non-Aryans, and Munich she had been very fond of. She described the city, her home, her parents, her father. Her voice rose higher and higher. She blinked away the tears.

She smiled and I smiled. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Dearie,” she cried and clasped her hands over my knees and shook them. “In Germany we have a phrase, a proverb, which means that one passes from knowledge to ignorance and there life begins. That is where I was once, that is where you are now, yes?”

There were heavy footsteps at the other end of the corridor. She leaped to her feet. “Dr. Clements! Don’t sit there dreaming on the window-sill or he will decide you are withdrawn and preoccupied and not ready for…” I was afraid she was going to say “the real world.” But instead she said, “a working day.”

At the door she turned back smiling.

“I am glad of my new patient… Shall we say, my new, most sympathetic neighbour? I think my ward will be richer for her, and I think sometimes I shall want to drop in here for a talk about life. In the meantime, I must run, and you must be patient till we find the right medium for you to flourish in when you are regraded.”

“How about the wild life round Munich,” I asked her. “The badger, for example, did they flourish?”

“I was always too short-sighted to see any,” she replied gaily.

She was gone. I went back to the window and stared at the heavy grey-green of the hospital entrance, and the electrically illuminated sign that had just clicked on over the door: “Gardenwell Park.”

I had not acknowledged it until they had whisked me away from the dormitory, trailing my goods in a blanket, half an hour ago. I had thought of the hospital simply as a kind of net that encircled my mind as well as my body: that always seemed to stretch just a little farther than I could think, and to extend just a little farther than I could run when I wanted to escape. I had never thought much about its name or its exterior or what went on outside the green dormitory walls.

The block opposite was only a heavy dark smudge among the trees. The curtains had been pulled across its dayroom windows, and nothing was alight now except the name over the doors and the gleaming white of the gravel drive.

The Sister’s footsteps were pattering fainter and fainter beside the Doctor’s, and her voice was shrill beside his. A key tinkled, a door slammed. The hymn had stopped; so had the applause. There was silence; it spread round me in wider and wider circles as I sat there by the rickety shutters watching the fluttering stars.

How well I remember that first night! It was all so clear then, as though I had woken after a dream to see a dazzling light on the ceiling, and had run out to find that thick snow had fallen in the night, and everything was changed and new; as though I were about to run laughing out into all that whiteness.

“A month or so,” the Sister had said. But a month did not seem a very long time. I was already awakened and free, and the rest did not seem a matter of importance at all.