The story of Wrest Park Hospital–‘Wrest in Beds’, as Barrie liked to call it–has all the right elements for a J. M. Barrie play. As with Peter Pan and The Admirable Crichton there is an almost Shakespearean removal to somewhere ‘other’, an Eden-like place apart. For those men who have witnessed the carnage of Liège, Mons and Ypres, Wrest is indeed a kind of Neverland. There is a potentially explosive triangle of the three women in command: Nan Herbert, Sister Martin and Hannah Mackenzie. There will also be a forbidden love affair, intermixing of the social classes, death, and yet more death. Lurking in the background, Prospero-like, is the figure of Barrie–controlling, stage-managing, listening: noting down incidents for future use. (Private Paddy, who slept with a fishing rod so that he might have first chance in the morning, cropped up in the 1917 play Dear Brutus.)
If this were a J. M. Barrie play, the first act would now be drawing to a close. Wrest Park Hospital is no longer needed as a convalescent home, the War Office decrees, as there are ‘no more convalescents available’. After just one month of ‘unbelievable happiness’ for all, it closes on 8 October 1914. The curtain rises again on 20 November that same year. On a bitterly cold Friday night a hundred bloody, broken and lice-infested soldiers are being stretchered in, fresh from the Front. There is now an operating theatre at Wrest Park, X-ray rooms and inexhaustible hot water for the line of baths in the stripping room (or ‘Louse House’). There are four ‘ambulance cars’ parked in the stable yard. The hospital has, in this short space of time, moved up a gear. It is now being run on a ‘base hospital’ footing as a unit with nearby country-house hospital Woburn Abbey. It receives its wounded direct from the Western Front.
The nightmare of the war is being discovered at first hand. With the arrival of the soldiers a direct contact is established between the quiet life of a Bedfordshire village and the grim business of shot, shell and bayonet. Yet the tone of Nan’s letters to Bron in London is upbeat, invincible–what one might, in 1914, describe as very British.
The work has been terrible, but I begin to see chinks of daylight ahead, and I think in a week it will be going more or less like clockwork. They underestimated the number of nurses needed, and we’ve had to pour in whatever help we could get; but it’s been almost impossible to get even temporary ones…The men are rippers and are already feeling and looking better, and the wards are beginning to buzz with faint talk and ribaldry.
Where is Hannah in the midst of all this? Mackenzie family legend has it that Hannah once worked as a matron in a war hospital. It’s hard to see where she fitted this in (including the training; it took three years just to qualify as a nurse). She was, we must assume, talking about Wrest Park. She was the housekeeper, but perhaps she felt like the matron. The men saw her as the matron. She was matronly! Always ready with her sympathetic tone, a rallying quip, a special treat, a cigarette. Whereas that wee slip of a thing, Miss Martin…Matron? Och, Ward A was in a terrible muddle, that was plain for all to see.
For several weeks there was no time for Nan to write in her diary. She took up her fountain pen again to record the disintegrating relations between staff at Wrest Park Hospital. Miss Martin was the problem. ‘Poor Miss Martin now began to show how extraordinarily unfit she was for Matronship, and the inevitable troubles followed’, Nan wrote. ‘She tried to please all and in so doing failed to please any; she failed in the handling of the domestic staff, which was natural enough, but also failed to inspire the Doctors with confidence.’ There is a photograph of Miss Martin posing timidly in the Italian gardens. All is lush and in full flower; it must date from that ‘blissfully happy’ month of September, but our Matron looks faun-like and hesitant. The doctors were right: ‘poor Miss Martin’ does not inspire confidence.
‘She was always afraid of being short of nurses’, Nan continued,
and ransacked the country for them. All through those weeks an assortment of nurses came and went–two or three who drank, one who took drugs, stewardesses [kitchen staff] who wanted to do war work, and probationers [trainees] who preferred sharing a chair with a patient to finding an empty one!
Pity Miss Martin–young, anxious, ineffectual–having to assert herself over an attic full of excitable probationers. Nan came to the conclusion, from her vantage point up in her sitting room (perhaps looking down on trysts in the Italian garden), that ‘nearly half the nurses were mischievous and at any rate superfluous’.
But this was nothing compared to the terrible relations between Miss Martin and the housekeeper. Nan described it as nothing less than a ‘blood feud’. Matron and Hannah Mackenzie were slogging it out for ascendancy, ‘neither losing any opportunity to slit each other’s throat–Matron clumsily, Hannah with the utmost skill, lashing the men-folk into a state of outraged chivalry on her behalf’. We don’t have Hannah’s side of the story, so we must imagine the scenario. Their ‘outraged chivalry’ suggests that Hannah presented herself as victimised, unfairly treated, insulted. Matron was probably presented as sabotaging Hannah’s role; denying her authority; even denying her most natural maternal instincts.
Should the soldiers not enjoy cut flowers by their beds? Didn’t the poor wee laddie from Kirkcaldy get left with not a drop of water one morning? Didn’t Mrs Mackenzie have a right to know when Nurse Martin took her luncheon, so that she could keep her eye on those nurses? With Dr Beauchamp now ‘tied to her little finger’, Hannah ‘steadily fanned his dislike of Miss Martin’. I can hear her voice as she fills a bone-china teacup for the doctor: ‘And now Miss Martin is preventing me–yes, actually preventing me Dr Beauchamp–from doing the rounds of Ward A and Ward B with the boys’ letters. Aye, aye, I know, I know. Would you credit it?’
Throughout that winter, J. M. Barrie was used by Nan to soothe the staff spats at Wrest Park Hospital. He was a good, sympathetic listener, more interested in the servant classes than those they served (in 1917 he was to write a war play about three charladies, intended to ‘make the Society ladies…toss their little manes’).10 He gained the reputation of being a ‘sensitive arbiter’ between the different factions at Wrest. Outwardly, Barrie did not take sides. But he was a man in thrall to powerful women, fixated on his mother, renowned for his dramatisations of the innate superiority of women compared to the weakness, even silliness of men.
The playwright was photographed with the cook Hetty Geyton and her girls in the kitchen, apron on, as if ready to pluck a dozen pheasants. ‘What a ripper,’ as Nan might have said, recording the moment with her Kodak. Did he also regularly cross the flagstone corridor to Hannah Mackenzie’s snug seat of power? ‘Oh, Mr Barrie! Well now! What a surprise! And me just finishing my sewing and everything all anyhow…Sit thee down, sit thee down, I’ll ring for tea.’ I can hear her soothing voice with its mournful cadences, barely rising and falling, as she imparts the latest goings-on. And Barrie, hand to drooping Edwardian moustache, nodding sympathetically, one foot on the fender, crumbs of Dundee cake on his tweed jacket.