About Lisa
Lisa’s story draws our attention to the historic ties of the hospital with the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in particular – RIE’s ownership of the Red Hill Pen estate in Jamaica and the enslaved people who lived there. As a person of Caribbean heritage, throughout her life Lisa witnessed extensive healthcare inequalities between the Caribbean countries and the UK, which are in large part a legacy of the colonial past. In her poem, she reflects on the hospital’s ties with colonialism.
Colonial ties of RIE are an important issue that is vital to address when considering the legacy of the hospital. To read more about how the NHS is addressing this legacy, read the reports on this website.
Blood Money
Watch that muscular snake coil
Round the staff of healing
They shape shift at night
Wake the sleeping
Send the wake to sleep
Symbol of commerce and medicine
Tongues laced with silver’s eloquence
Royal Charter inked with blue sanguinity
Blood thirsty, vex at island refuge
Covenants bind in soporific calabash
Giant red boars called Bad Man Duppy
Roast over the flames
White winged messengers in trees
Turn avenging angels at dusk
Heads of kings stamped in foolish gold
A guinea’s reward never claimed
At this patient’s sticky footprints
Sanctified by lamplight, licked by dogs
His own nine nights of feverish prayer
Behind him, pitted cheeked beauty
Proclaimed him conqueror of death
That rotten Kerr, a doctor
Snake been whispering in his ear
Been hissing of riches at Red Hill Pen
His executor reads, emotionless
‘Left his whole estate to the Royal Infirmary’
Trecothick claimed it as his own
Afeart the Sharpe end of Christmas
The trumpeter’s bloated organs
Distended with wine, women and song
Confounding the doctors’ inner lenses
Blind to his ‘gentleman’s symptoms’
His trump card his friends; midnight skinfolk
Notes from his swollen lips now whispers
Alarm. Fire. Cease. Fire. Advance. Stand Fast.
Old McPherson, tartan frayed on his burnt legs
Mosquitoes gorge underneath his kilt
On his death, his kinsman plays the pipes
Like the piping dead, already spectre
The lament for their kinsman
From the old country, disgraced and hanged
The Africans have headed for the hills
Stephen McCook, in rotten timbers
Barricaded in a bull ring of his own making
His house with no holy compartments
To contain the Ark of Covenant
To scatter the bull’s blood, atone for the children
Remember wee William and John
Their mother, Juliet, caught in Kerr’s curse
Birds of a feather crying ‘poor me one’, ‘poor me one’
Conservative by day, a menace by night
Plumped on prey, fly their way home
Blood money seeps into brickwork
The blush of bandages turn pink
The blush of crimes, not innocence
No chorus here, to Send Back the Money
The year Jamaica was illuminated
Miss Cressar broke this tainted contract
Of two snakes entwined forever
The day of Lady’s Privilege, perhaps
A declaration of love, in its own way
As bricks and glass fill infirm memories
Leave some space for Red Hill Pen
Lisa Williams
Commissioned for Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 2024
