The Country Nurse Remembers Read online

  Praise for Call the Nurse and Nurse, Come You Here!

  “Julia MacLeod shares unique and enchanting experiences as a nurse in rural Scotland. Her stories will ring true with every nurse—or anyone—who has ever cared for a family or a community, whether in Scotland or America. Call the Nurse is a delightful read.”—LeAnn Thieman, author Chicken Soup for the Nurse’s Soul

  “Cozy and chatty … A lovely account of ordinary people thriving in an extraordinary landscape.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “The book feels like a letter from a friend who has an eye for travel writing…. With a nurse’s no-nonsense manner, MacLeod relays tales of adventure, finding humor and humanity in her experiences…. For James Herriot fans, without the animals.”—Booklist

  “MacLeod proves to be an engaging narrative writer who uses humor and vernacular to her advantage. Should be of interest not only to medical professionals but to all readers who want to escape to a slower way of life.”—Library Journal

  “This lively and heartening memoir evokes both the hardships and the humour of island life.”—The Scotsman

  “This charming, bracing reminiscence of life on a remote Hebridean island captures a vanishing world filled with memorable stories and characters…. Mary J. MacLeod makes you care, moves you, amuses you, shocks you, teaches you: This is a surprising, satisfying memoir.”—Floyd Skloot, author of In the Shadow of Memory and The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life

  “Call the Midwife gave [us] … the nursing profession in 1950s London. Now, a retired district nurse [gives us] the heartwarming and humorous—yet often shocking—events on a remote Scottish island.”—Sunday Post (UK)

  “A charming tale, packed full with reminiscences, rather in the manner of the recent hit TV series, Call the Midwife…. Her tales of joy, trouble, drama, and comedy are warm and humorous, telling of a bygone era.”—Westcountry Life, Western Morning News (UK)

  “Julia MacLeod has written a book which encapsulates Hebridean life during some decades past … with a sensitivity that reflects her nursing career.”—Lady Claire Macdonald of Macdonald, from her foreword to Call the Nurse

  “Not only about medical travails and emergencies, but also stories of friendship formed with steadfast people, children lost and found, farm animals that wander a little too far, and rumors of a ghostly apparition whispering a hidden secret. Extraordinary, heartwarming, and at times a little bit tragic, Nurse, Come You Here! captures the essence of a rugged, close-knit rural community.”—The Biography Shelf

  Also by Mary J. MacLeod

  Call the Nurse

  Nurse, Come You Here!

  Copyright © 2015 by Mary J. MacLeod

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  First North American Edition 2020

  First published in 2015 by Luath Press Limited, Edinburgh, United Kingdom under the title Hush! The Child is Present.

  Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Arcade Publishing® is a registered trademark of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: MacLeod, Mary J., author.

  Titles: The country nurse remembers : true stories of a troubled childhood, war, and becoming a nurse / Mary J. MacLeod.

  Description: First North American Edition. | Published/Produced: New York : Arcade Publishing, 2020. | ©2015

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019043261 (print) | ISBN: 9781950691296 (hardcover) | ISBN: 9781950691302 (ebook)

  Subjects: MacLeod, Mary J.—Childhood and youth. | Nursing students England—Biography. |Stepdaughters—England—Biography. | World War, 1939–1945—Biography.

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043261

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Cover photographs: The author at the age of three with her mother; the author as a young student nurse

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, whose love I knew for so short a time.

  And to my baby sister, whom I did not know at all.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE ‘BEFORE’ TIME

  The Child

  Mummy

  The Early Years

  Grandparents and Aunts

  Auntie Jinny

  Great Aunt Louisa and Grandmother

  Crib

  Fun, Floods and Peter the Pup

  The Shire Horses and Crib—Again

  Understanding

  THE ‘AFTER’ TIME

  The Stucco Bungalow

  Return to Meadow View

  Aunt Lizzy

  Daddy and Mildred

  A New Mother

  Life at Daddy’s Bungalow

  The Great Flood

  Changing Times

  THE WAR YEARS

  War

  Evacuees

  Auntie Jinny Again

  Will I See Again?

  Wartime Events

  Hay and Fire

  The Plane Crash

  Tig and Trouble

  Tragedy

  Things That Go Bump

  Pigs, Mice and Puzzles

  Make Do and Mend

  The Bath Blitz

  Busy Times at Meadow View

  Animals

  Train to Auntie Jinny

  The War Effort

  Good Intentions

  The Great Escape—That Wasn’t

  Prisoners of War

  A Wartime Birthday

  Words, Words, Words

  A New Teacher

  Mice Galore

  The Salvage Competition

  The Scholarship

  The First Day

  The Pictures

  ‘Peace in Our Time’

  GROWING UP

  Great News

  Robert

  Last Days of School

  No Longer ‘The Child’

  INTO THE BIG, WIDE WORLD OF WORK

  The Nurses’ Home

  New Acquaintances

  The First Working Day

  Some of the Patients

  A First

  A Day Off

  Moving On

  The Surgical Ward

  ‘The Bloods’

  Sveto

  The Toy Car

  Dancing

  Learning All the Time

  Fire and Water

  The Ball

  Night Duty

  ‘The Window Incident’

  Duck and Shout

  A Disappointment

  Church

  Swimming

  Plans

  Goodbye

  Better Times

  Sick Nurses

  Ham Green

  Jasper

  Farewell to Ham Green

  The Old, Old Wards

  God’s Blessing

  Time Rolls By

  A State-Registered Nurse

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I thank all those members of my family and my friends who have encouraged me, especially my ‘techno wizard�
�, without whose help this book and others would probably not have been written.

  INTRODUCTION

  The story is of a confused, chaotic and repressive childhood lived in the West Country before, during and after the Second World War.

  My childhood—in fact, my life as well—was very clearly defined by a ‘Before’ period and the ‘After’: before my mother died in 1937, when I was just five years old—these years are the lost time, the joyful time—and the events that followed after.

  At her death, I was shunted from one relative to another, attending three different schools in as many months. My father was a man of his time, not expecting to look after a child himself, so he married again, only nine months after my mother’s death, perhaps partly to have someone to look after me.

  After my father’s remarriage, my name was changed from my mother’s choice of Mary to Julia. My father started to tell me that this new ‘Mum’, Mildred, was a better mother than my own would have been. Then my stepmother told me that my mother had not even wanted me. All these things made me an unhappy child, but I did not realise that I was unhappy. Things were just the way they were.

  My experiences are set against a background of the Second World War. Evacuees came (and went); Father built an air-raid shelter; a plane crashed in the village; my stepmother’s parents and cousin were bombed out in Bath and came to live with us for a while; German prisoners of war worked for my father for a while. There were sirens and air raids, and although the village escaped lightly we spent many nights in the shelter as bombs landed around us.

  I gleaned what I could from playground talk, but my concept of events, local and global, was patchy, inaccurate. I was not allowed to listen to the wireless or read newspapers until late in the war, but those events that did enter my consciousness were to have a lasting effect on me and shape the way I thought for many years after.

  I won a scholarship at eleven years old and tasted freedom from home, eventually choosing to study medicine and train as a nurse at Bristol Royal Infirmary. The hospital rules were severe but consistent, and I was ‘growing up’ all the time—learning about life as well as nursing.

  I felt Mum’s control gradually loosening, and I slowly began to have my own opinions and develop my own character, priorities and sympathies. I finished my three-year training, passed the final examinations and gained State Registration when I was twenty-one—officially an adult.

  The ‘Before’ Time

  The Child

  ‘Hush! the child is present.’

  Firmly, my grandmother admonished Grandfather. He had been sitting in his big leather armchair with his head in his hands. Crying, he had just murmured, ‘I do grieve. Indeed, I do grieve!’

  I was ‘the child’—I knew that. And I knew why he was grieving.

  Mummy

  I was only five years old when my mother died. To me, she was the person who was always there, always loving, always ready to soothe or cuddle: able to find the lost doll, to locate the ice-cream van when we heard the ‘ding-dong’, to tuck me up in bed. I was safe, secure and fortunate—without knowing it. I took her presence and her love for granted. Then, suddenly, she was not there any more.

  I had been taken to my grandparents’ home nearby one day. They said, ‘Mummy is not very well, but has gone away to hospital to get better and will soon be coming home again.’ But she didn’t come home again—ever.

  My memories of that time and of my mother are fragmented, and I only pieced them together over a number of years. At the time I was not supposed to think about her—it was ‘bad for me’, she was ‘best forgotten’, I was told: I certainly did not dare ask about her or reminisce about ‘when Mummy was alive’. It seemed that they all thought her death did not matter to me too much. ‘The child does not appear to cry over her mother,’ they said.

  It mattered—oh yes, it mattered a great deal—but those were the days of the stiff upper lip, when children were to be seen and not heard, and we certainly didn’t ask questions. In those days, a motherless child was a ‘problem’.

  Fathers rarely attempted the care of small children; some woman in the family was always found to do this. I knew nothing of the current attitudes, of course, but I could feel an atmosphere in the house, almost of embarrassment, that told me to remain silent: not to cry when among people and to hide away from all these things that I was deemed not to understand. I was not aware that I was miserable and lonely. Things were just the way they were.

  I heard all the talk, or snippets of it: ‘She does not understand,’ ‘She’s a quiet child anyway,’ ‘She will soon forget—she is so young.’ But I didn’t forget—not for a minute.

  Everyone talked about ‘it’ among themselves, but only once did anyone speak to me about Mummy’s death, and that was immediately after she died (at least, I think it was). My father told me: ‘Mummy has gone to see Jesus.’

  At first, I wanted to ask why she could not come back when she had seen Jesus, and why had she not taken me with her to see Him? But I was a product of the old-fashioned attitudes, and had no proper religious teaching or understanding. I had a bluff, preoccupied, unimaginative father who was doubtless in shock and grieving. So I kept all this worry to myself, and only by what I overheard was I able to understand that my mother had died. I knew what that meant. Death. And dying. I don’t know how I knew. I think it was to do with a chicken that had been killed by a fox.

  I remembered that the chicken had also ‘gone to see Jesus’.

  The Early Years

  Mummy had been slim and rather elegant in the tube-like dresses of the 1930s. Naturally, as a small child, I did not think of her like this. Mummy was just Mummy: she smelled nice, had a soft voice and wore pretty dresses. I was an adult before I found a photo of her, and even now I have but three. One of them shows a smiling lady holding the hand of a small, rather thin little girl in a sun hat, walking along a seaside promenade. I must have been about four. Neither of us knew that this would be the last picture of us together: in less than a year, she had gone.

  Another lovely memory of mine is her blowing up balloons for Christmas. I recall Mummy and my father putting up paper chains and then sitting by the fire with the balloons. I know that I sat watching them, and a warm feeling, even now, tells me that we were a happy threesome. My father had more ‘puff’, so he did the blowing, while my mother tied the balloons’ necks. But she was not very good at it, and they kept zooming off across the room. I loved that!

  I remember some words exactly.

  ‘Why do you try to take the long end through the knot?’ my father asked.

  ‘I’ll try the short end,’ Mummy replied.

  Pause.

  ‘You’ve done the wrong one again,’ he said.

  ‘I did the short one, so now it is the long one’s turn!’

  Why should I remember such trivia when there must have been many other conversations that I overheard? Could it be that the atmosphere of love and joy etched this little piece of nonsense in my mind?

  Then there was the doll episode. Again, I must have been about four, because I was going out of the front door by myself to play with some friends on the communal grassy area in front of the houses. I had in my arms a fairly large doll called Margaret. As I went down the steps, Mummy came running out, calling, ‘Don’t take your dolly—those boys might get her again!’ By which I gather ‘those boys’ had caused trouble with Margaret before.

  I must have been an adventurous child. We moved house soon after this, and there were some derelict buildings on the opposite side of a wide, shallow stream which ran in front of our house now. I was warned sternly by Father not to go there, as they were unsafe, and, so far as I remember, I did not go into these buildings but spent much time standing beside the stream looking at them. Occupied in this way one day, I was startled by an old man emerging from one of them and shouting at (or to) me. I was terrified, and, in my hurry to escape, I fell into the stream.

  I was in no danger: the strea
m was so shallow, and this ‘ogre’ of a man was kindness itself, pulling me out, establishing, with difficulty, where I lived and returning me to my mother. She was not at all cross but wrapped me up, cuddled me to get me warm, and then made the old tramp a cup of tea. Father, however, was cross when he came home, but, as always, Mummy smoothed things over by saying, ‘She didn’t go into those houses. She was only looking at them.’ I remember my father’s ‘Hmm.’

  My next two adventures must have happened in the few months before her death. I had a tricycle and was persuaded to go out with some friends who were also the proud owners of similar small trikes. Near our home some new houses were to be built, and the roads had been laid out and partially surfaced ready for work to begin. Since they were totally free of traffic and ran down the side of a hill, they were considered by my friends (all of whom were a good three or four years my senior) to be most suitable for a good ‘whizz’. And they were!

  I began to whizz with the rest, but the trike was new, and, unfortunately, I had not mastered the use of the brakes. Faster and faster I went! I remember the shouts of encouragement behind me. We were all totally oblivious to the dangers. The road ended in a T-junction, and I failed to negotiate the corner and was unable to stop. I careered across the road and hit the newly installed curb with my head.

  I woke sitting on a stool in the workmen’s hut, with a grubby but kindly man sponging the warm sticky stuff that was pouring from a cut on my forehead. At that moment, my father arrived, having been fetched by the other children. Pressing his handkerchief to my head, he wrapped me in something and carried me to the car. Holding the mangled tricycle out of the open driver’s window with his right hand—I remember that so vividly—he drove me home to a distraught mother who was being regaled by the children’s tale of accident and blood—much embellished, I believe. Sometime later, I recall Father saying to my mother, ‘I want to give those chaps something for their kindness.’ I don’t remember what they received.

  While still with plasters all over my face, I went to call on a little friend. On her doorstep was her very old spaniel, sleeping soundly. I was very fond of dogs, so I bent to pat him, startling the old dog, which had not heard my approach. Frightened, he turned quickly and bit instinctively. My already battered face received several additional bites, as did my neck. For some reason, instead of knocking on the door, I ran all the way home, once more with blood pouring from me and terrifying my poor mother. But I know that I received love and comfort. Perhaps I had been foolish, but it was an accident and that was the end of the matter.