CHARACTERS
MATRON: The protagonist. (35) Principled, capable, ambitious, responsible, determined but troubled, secretive, socially inept, a shopkeeper’s daughter with a terror of slipping back into the working classes. Small in stature with a weak chin. She suffers with her feet. An unsupervised supervisor. Left in a highly responsible position with hardly any guidance by a distant manager, like the governess in ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ hoping to prove herself, but destined to fail. (Does she also see ghosts?) In her Journal entries she will prove an unreliable witness, creating a gap between what the audience knows from the dramatic scenes and what the Matron reports.
ELLA: The antagonist. (21) A quick witted, cheeky young nurse, a natural leader,
passionate about her profession but rebellious. Fiercely loyal to her working class family. Quick to anger, a tense ire spoiling her pretty face. (What if these traits are thwarted? A quick-witted character is thought by others to be slow, unintelligent because of her background). Rebellious, she is given something (petty rules) to rebel against. Her family loyalty leads her into trouble at work. A magpie collector of bits and pieces, she
accumulates things in order to restore what is missing, her father who has recently disappeared, abandoning the family.
FLORA: (26 but seems younger) a new nurse with a trunk full of treasures, innocent, untrained, in Ella’s thrall, gauche but tender. Helpless and persistent. Wears pince nez. (Although this is a radio drama, I find I need to visualise the characters in this way, choosing significant physical characteristics.) Escaping a disapproving middleclass family. A vulnerable protector struggling to be content with less.
MARY POAD (TOAD): (40) An intemperate laundress, big hearted but superstitious, wary, lazy, hungry, defiant, unclean, her cheeks bulging as if she’d been caught eating forbidden food. A dirty laundress.
April (Arrival)
In April 1912, with TB endemic amongst the urban poor, a new matron arrives at
Stannington Children’s Sanatorium and is greeted by disordered wards and filthy visitors sleeping in the corridors. The patients have lice, someone is stealing their food from the kitchen, and their milk has been watered. The small live-in nursing staff is ill-dressed, undisciplined, immature and overwhelmed, but Matron is impressed by the house with its high domed ceilings and its vast grounds. Feeling herself lucky to have been appointed to this responsible position, she approaches the task with strong determination. She can and will change things. The staff and patients deserve better. She is critical of the previous matron who has let standards slip and sends her first monthly report to the Managing Director in the form of a journal. Matron’s Journal for April is a confident list of requests, questions and complaints. But she receives no reply. 177
May
Matron disapproves of young Nurse Ella’s fraternising with the patients and warns all her nurses about too much caring. Ella and Flora have been seen playing games with patients and sitting on their beds. According to matron, indulging the patients in this way makes them needy, weak, and more vulnerable. Matron institutes roll call. She spends the little money she has on nurse’s uniforms. A seamstress is summoned. In their new uniforms the nurses visit the nearby village. Their clothes provoke astonishment and laughter.
Matron’s Journal for May is more emphatic. Still no reply.
June
Obsessed with contagion,178 which her staff either don’t understand or ignore, Matron requires frequently boiled bedclothes, putting pressure on hapless Toad who stares at her
177
While the synopsis for THE MATRON is linear, the perspective of the audience shifts, inspired by unreliable narration provided primarily by Matron’s (spoken) journal entries to create more complicated movement, which will be enhanced on radio by a shift of tone.
178 Nursing tubercular patients was particularly unpleasant: infectious sputum, pulmonary haemorrhages, frequent vomiting especially during mealtime, and the high death rate made this arduous work. The highly contagious tuberculosis bacilli made it extremely dangerous work, and not a few nurses became tubercular
with dim contempt. According to Toad, voicing a common belief, TB is spread by vampires, not dirt. 179 Matron threatens to sack Toad, but in truth, she would be difficult
to replace as all the locals are frightened of working at the sanatorium. Matron prays for guidance. She disapproves of parents visiting, coming as they do from the overcrowded, infected city slums. She ejects a coughing feverish father, whose wife has already died of the disease. He threatens to return, but his child dies. (Or he dies. Or both die.) Matron feels terrible but she cannot falter, there are too many others to think of. It is like a war which must be fought at any cost. She suggests the erection of a perimeter fence after she sees a man walking in the grounds at dusk. Is it a thieving intruder from the nearby village? A desperate parent hoping to catch a glimpse of his child? The father she has recently ejected? Or his ghost? Matron’s Journal for June hints at weariness and disillusionment. This time she receives a reply. The Director is relying on her to sort things out, further promotion is hinted at if she proves self-reliant.
July
New patients arrive. Perhaps more than they can handle. Matron exhorts her troops. (The drama and imagery of a war is evoked: loyalty, heroism, morale.) They are fighting a common enemy. She expects them to rally round, but Flora must be disciplined again for showing too much tenderness. Nurse Flora finds an unhealthy excitement in comforting, tending, and cheering her favourites. Her fondness seems to hide a deeper longing. She is forbidden further contact and sulks; her need for intimacy clashing with Matron’s stony detachment. As she encounters greater obstacles, Matron’s July Journal is paradoxically upbeat, the journal becoming a way of creating and controlling reality.
August
There is an outbreak of scarlet fever, which seems to justify Matron’s attitude towards visitors. Ella proves herself to be capable and hardworking during this crisis and Matron begins to grudgingly value her- and maybe more, a growing attraction and tenderness for
and were admitted as patients. Many did not survive.
www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=3928
179 Before the Industrial Revolution, folklore often associated tuberculosis with vampires. When one member of a family died from it, the other infected members would lose their health slowly. People believed this was caused by the original person with TB draining the life from the other family members. Paul Sledzik and Nicholas Bellantoni, ‘Bioarcheological and biocultural evidence for the New England vampire folk belief’, in American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol 94, (1994), 269–274
Ella is felt, then quickly supressed. They take a walk together. Being close to Ella arouses in Matron pleasure and excitement. Although they never touch, Matron feels the sensation of touching. They work to the point of exhaustion but there are deaths amongst the
children that dishearten all. Morale is low. There’s a thief haunting the hospital too. Flora’s trunk has been broken into and a costly silk scarf is missing. Matron begins to cough. Ella asks for, but is denied, a weekend home and takes offence. In the face of numerous setbacks, Matron’s August Journal expresses progress, denial and outright lies.
September
Toad is fired for thieving when she is found in possession of a pie from the kitchen. She is questioned but will not confess to taking Flora’s scarf. Defiant until the end, she curses the hospital and the Matron as she is driven away. Thoughts of Ella never far from her mind, Matron takes to walking alone at night, her restlessness an articulation of her longing. Unbalanced by her visions of intruders, thwarted in her efforts to tighten the hospital regime, abandoned by surly staff and absent management, Matron becomes convinced that the figure haunting the grounds is one of the nurses playing a cruel trick. Suspecting that they are plotting against her, Matron opens and reads their letters home. Flora’s letters are full of hidden animosity toward her suffocating family who do not approve of her vocation. Ella’s letters contain indications of the chaos and poverty at home, an absent father and hints that it was she who stole Flora’s scarf for her poorly sister who it is feared is suffering from TB. Frustrated and guilty, Matron burns the letters. Matron’s September Journal entry is paranoid, guilty and self-justifying.
October
Matron has lost weight. She has lapses of memory. At night she is either too hot or too cold and sleeps badly. Always remote, refraining from touching anyone even in the most casual way, she is now a virtual recluse, spending days alone in her office. Ella finds Matron’s privacy, her distant formality, baffling and impossible to breach. She cannot help but push against it, sneaking into Matron’s study and penetrating the recesses of her desk, she finds nothing- metal pen nibs, stationary- while Matron, obsessed with vengeful and passionate thoughts of Ella, sobbing and breathing with difficulty, haunts the
perimeter checking for intruders. From this entrenched position, her October Journal entry is desperate and delusional.
November
Realising that her family have not been receiving her letters, Ella goes to see Matron, who claims ignorance. Then, overcome with remorse, she grasps Ella and they almost kiss. Later, embarrassed by her own needs, she contrives to fire Ella for her refusal to
participate in an upcoming royal visit. (Matron wants, subconsciously, to be touched by royalty as a cure for her as yet undisclosed TB.) Matron’s November Journal entry is a return to normal. She has dealt with her problems and proclaims herself back in control.
December
At lunch for visiting minor royals, Matron (like Chekhov) has a haemorrhage at the table and the shameful secret she’s been hiding is revealed. She’s been suffering from TB since before she took up her position. Now the infection has invaded her pulmonary artery resulting in massive bleeding, blood gushing uncontrollably from her mouth. Nursed by Flora, Matron is grateful for the loving care she previously tried to deny others. Delirious with fever, she’s visited by a presence- and understands that this is the intruder she’s been seeing in the grounds- the spectre of her illness. If she recovers, Matron vows to re-instate Ella, if she can find her.