A cross between a palace and a prison
Alongside the humour in my novel, Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home, Matty’s story tugs at the heartstrings. But readers differ in what they find particularly poignant. One early reader told me, I was all right until I got to the nuns.
The most tragic part for me came when I was researching ballroom dancing for the teenage Matty’s Friday nights at the Stanley Hall. A video of a busy ballroom in the 1930s brought home to me how much life she’s missed.
I transferred my sadness onto Janice, the young social worker, who fantasises about Matty’s youth when she joins a class in 1990. Janice assumes that Matty’s dancing days would have been over once she was admitted to Ghyllside Hospital in 1939. But Janice was wrong.
A typical Victorian asylum was constructed like a country house crossed with a prison, both in terms of the architecture and the regime. Most had beautiful ballrooms where male and female patients – strictly segregated for the rest of the week – danced to live bands.
When plotting my novella, Stolen Summers, it made sense to set some scenes in the ballroom of my fictional asylum. That’s where Matilda met Eustace, the dancing partner I introduced in the previous post. I had fun selecting music for the band to play and have assembled a playlist:
Matilda’s first sight of the glittery ballroom is so incongruent with the rest of the hospital, she can only laugh. You might too if you can imagine how grand this ballroom must’ve been in its heyday:
