The voice in the dark at Glanmor General, by Siân Pritchard

An original contemporary online feature.

Every Sunday at six, Teleri Brychan picks up a clipboard, a pen and a laminated card with the words ‘Radio Glanmor: what would you like to hear?’ and sets off on a slow walk through the wards of Glanmor General Hospital. It takes her two hours. She stops at almost every bed.

Teleri is nineteen, a second-year sound engineering student, and for the past three years she has been one of forty volunteers who keep the hospital’s radio station on air, twenty-four hours a day, from a converted storeroom next to the boiler room. The studio is about the size of a lift. The chairs do not match. One of the microphones is held together with tape. None of this matters to the people listening.

Tonight’s requests are typical. On Ward 9, a former miner called Ianto asks for a male voice choir. On the children’s ward, three different patients ask for the same pop song, and a fourth asks, very seriously, for ‘the one about the shark’. In a side room on the stroke unit, a woman who cannot speak points, letter by letter, at an alphabet board until Teleri has written down the name of a dance band from the 1950s and, underneath, a message: For my husband Elfed, married 61 years today.

Back in the studio, at eight o’clock, Teleri puts on her headphones and begins her show. Her voice changes the moment the red light comes on: warmer, slower, as if she is talking to one person rather than a building full of them. ‘Good evening, Glanmor,’ she says. ‘If you’re awake, you’re in good company.’

It is hard to overstate how much this can mean. A stay in hospital is often long, frightening and, above all, boring. Visitors leave at eight. Nights are full of beeping machines and strange noises. For patients who are too ill to read or too tired to watch a screen, a familiar voice and a favourite song can make a ward feel a little less like a ward. One nurse tells me that she has seen patients who had not smiled for days tap a finger in time to a request with their name on it.

Teleri’s own reason for volunteering is personal. When she was fourteen, her grandfather spent eleven weeks in Glanmor after a heart operation. ‘He was so bored and so scared,’ she says. ‘Then one night they played his favourite song and said his name on the radio. He talked about it for the rest of his life. I wanted to be the one doing that for someone else.’

At nine minutes past nine, she reads out the message for Elfed and plays the dance band. On the stroke unit, a nurse later tells her, the woman in the side room closed her eyes and moved her good hand, very slightly, as if she was dancing.

Teleri stays until the end of her show, then hands over to the overnight presenter, a retired postman called Gwyn who has done Sunday nights since 1994. She will be back next week with her clipboard. ‘People think it’s just music,’ she says, pulling on her coat. ‘It isn’t. It’s someone saying: we know you’re here.’

Radio Glanmor is described as a comfort to patients. How does the writer try to show this?

You should comment on:

• what is said
• the use of language, tone and structure
• other ways the writer tries to show that hospital radio brings comfort

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