Call the
Nurse
True Stories of a Country
Nurse on a Scottish Isle
MARY J. MACLEOD
Foreword by Lady Claire Macdonald of Macdonald
ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Lilly Mae,
18 October 2008
Copyright © 2012 by Mary J. MacLeod
Foreword copyright © 2013 by Lady Claire Macdonald
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
First Published in the UK by Mainstream Publishing, under the title The Island Nurse
This book is a work of nonfiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases, names of people, places, dates, sequences or the details of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publisher that, except in such cases, not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of the book are true.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
MacLeod, Mary J.
Call the nurse : true stories of a country nurse on a Scottish isle / Mary J. MacLeod; foreword by Lady Claire Macdonald of Macdonald.—First North American edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-61145-831-2 (alk. paper)
1. MacLeod, Mary J.—Career in nursing. 2. Nurses—Scotland—Hebrides—Biography.
3. Nursing—Scotland—Hebrides—History. 4. Hebrides (Scotland)—Social life and customs. I. Title.
RT37.M195A3 2013
610.73--dc23 2012047981
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
by Lady Claire Macdonald of Macdonald
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
Nostalgia
ONE
On Papavray
TWO
Meeting Alistair
THREE
A ‘small acre’
Katy
FIVE
A nurse’s nightmare
SIX
Back to work
SEVEN
A castle and a corpus
EIGHT
Deep ditches and high hills
NINE
A ceilidh and a cold corner
TEN
Flora and Annie
ELEVEN
Jaynie’s baby
TWELVE
Bones and boats!
THIRTEEN
‘The terrible, terrible thing’
FOURTEEN
The terrible, terrible truth
FIFTEEN
The wedding
SIXTEEN
Disaster at Dochart Bay
SEVENTEEN
A fragile Fergie and a shopping spree
EIGHTEEN
Something on the shore
NINETEEN
Nicholas
TWENTY
God’s country
TWENTY-ONE
Farewell to Chreileh
TWENTY-TWO
The return to roots
TWENTY-THREE
Andrew
TWENTY-FOUR
Wedding bells (without the bells)
TWENTY-FIVE
Searching the seas
TWENTY-SIX
Shearing in the sunshine
TWENTY-SEVEN
Rowing boats and rucksacks
TWENTY-EIGHT
Peat, trees, and trouble
TWENTY-NINE
Just another day
THIRTY
Silent stones and a sad spirit
THIRTY-ONE
Helping hands
THIRTY-TWO
The signpost
THIRTY-THREE
A bonny baby and some cheery children
THIRTY-FOUR
DIY island style
THIRTY-FIVE
Echo House
THIRTY-SIX
To the rescue!
THIRTY-SEVEN
‘Arry’s island
THIRTY-EIGHT
Old folks’ secrets
THIRTY-NINE
John and Joanna
FORTY
Days of ice and fog
FORTY-ONE
Lucky Johnny Peg-Leg
FORTY-TWO
Fire!
EPILOGUE
Just a dream?
GLOSSARY
FOREWORD
Julia MacLeod has written a book which encapsulates Hebridean life during some decades past. The role of the narrator is perfect, that of the district nurse. Julia speaks through the book with compassion, with understanding and respect for her patients and their families, and, when appropriate, with humour. She brings an authority to the book and her story through having lived the life herself, with her family.
Julia MacLeod writes with a sensitivity that reflects her nursing career. Her story and its patients and incidents are treated differently in all their many aspects. This book is a most dignified account of many incidents ranging from amusing and also sad to tragic, and all linked throughout with the family of the narrator, and the experiences of each family member.
Life in the Highlands and islands of Scotland was never easy. This book vividly illustrates that fact.
AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The island where I lived and worked is in the beautiful Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. To ensure the privacy of the islanders, the name “Papavray” is purely fictional.
I would like to thank my husband, children, and friends for their help and support (particularly my ‘techno-wizard’) during the writing of this book, and the people of the island for just being themselves.
PROLOGUE
Nostalgia
Yesterday, I dozed in the garden and dreamed of the remote Hebridean island of Papavray. Quite why would be hard to say, as it is many years since I lived there, and now I am sitting in the warmth of a Cornish summer. The wild, exposed islands of the north are a far cry from Cornwall’s mild and gentle weather.
So why do I feel homesick when I listen to the ‘Hebrides Overture’? Why after so long do I smell peat smoke as it rises in blue snakes from the white chimneys of tiny croft houses? And feel the soft, damp air on my face and see again purple mountains, tumultuous seas and small, nameless islands in the bays?
Perhaps it’s the birdsong? The skylarks are singing now. When they arrived on Papavray, it was a sign that spring was here and the brief but beautiful summer was not far behind.
I have a sudden feeling of nostalgia and instead of the colours of the garden I see the outline of the islands, behind which the sun sets in a blaze of gold, turning the rocks to pinks and reds, and the sea to shimmering amber, before sinking to leave the quiet scene to the long northern twilight. I remember the sights, sounds, and smells of Papavray so well that it might have been on
ly yesterday that I lived there, instead of all those years ago.
We had long cherished a dream of something better than our frenetic lifestyle in the south of England: something gentler, uncluttered. Perhaps returning to the land of George’s forefathers?
For years it was just a dream, but this was a dream that came true!
ONE
On Papavray
It was a dreary December afternoon in 1970 as I struggled up the slippery path to the croft house on the hill above. My blue uniform and the silly hat that I had anchored with a very nonuniform scarf were no protection against the rain that was being hurled in from the sea by the blustery wind. I was cold and wet, but I knew that a cheery welcome and a warm fire awaited me, and after I had attended to my elderly patient her sister would bustle about to give me a ‘wee cuppie’.
I paused on the steep slope to get my breath, pretending, as I always did, that I was just admiring the view. And what a view! Even in this weather, the island was beautiful in its wild, rugged way.
Papavray is a remote Hebridean island about 20 miles long. Numerous lochs take great bites out of the coastline so that you are never out of sight of the sea. Today, that sea was turbulent with white-topped waves crashing noisily on the rocks, sending spumes of spray far into the air. The mountains on the neighbouring islands were softly clothed in floating tendrils of mist.
Above the noise of the wind, I could hear the excited voices of young children. Wiping the rain from my eyelashes, I glanced at my watch. The little school on a nearby promontory was breaking up for Christmas and, as arranged, my youngest son, Andrew, would soon be meeting me at my patient’s house. A year ago, when we moved here, he had joined the 14 other pupils of the island’s only primary school and had already begun to acquire the sibilance and lilt of the gentle island tongue. He was making friends but had one big disadvantage— he did not ‘have the Gaelic’. One does not speak Gaelic—one ‘has the Gaelic’. Or not, in our case! It was 1970, but the more remote Scottish islands still retained this as their first language. Most of my older patients spoke a rather quaint form of English as their second language, while some spoke only their native tongue.
I climbed on up to the croft house above and knocked on the door. Of course I had been observed from the moment my car drew up on the narrow track far below, but I still found it difficult to just walk into people’s houses in the manner of the locals. Calling a greeting, I stepped inside and removed my sodden coat, hat, and gloves. I even took my shoes off, as they both contained a small lake of rainwater. I had not yet completed a year as the district nurse on Papavray, and I still had some notion of looking ‘smart’ when on my rounds. Later, I would learn that welly boots were better than shoes and that umbrellas were useless in the wind but good as walking sticks on slippery slopes and for fending off territorially minded dogs.
‘Come away in, Nurse, and warm yourself by the fire. Indeed, it’s terrible weather we’re having the day.’ This was Mary-Ann’s delightful greeting as I dripped my way inside.
Minnie, my dear old patient, was in the downstairs bedroom. ‘Ach, Nurse. You’ll be gie wet. And so busy you are, and me here needin’ a bath.’ I usually got her up in the mornings to sit by the fire, but today was bed-bath day.
‘I’m sorry to be so late, Minnie.’
‘Ach, I’m no mindin’. I have my wireless.’
Minnie was almost completely paralysed as the result of a stroke some years previously, but she never complained. Over time, we became much more than nurse and patient, and when she died I felt that I had lost a friend. On this December day, we laughed and chatted as I worked, and after a while I heard Andrew’s arrival. The timid knock and shy ‘Hello’ were followed by much motherly tutting over his wet things. MaryAnn loved children and, like so many island women, was never happier than when fussing over them with cocoa and clootie dumpling, so Andrew was only too happy to accompany me on my rounds when necessary. The patients and their relatives plied him with all manner of goodies. I believe they thought that I didn’t feed him very well. I was English, and the islanders had little regard for ‘fancy English food’. Good old-fashioned stodge was what had kept them full for generations.
Nicholas, my 12 year old, a much sturdier boy, had been about to start at the senior school a year ago, just as we left the bustle of life in the south for the peace and tranquillity of Papavray. So, instead, he now attended the grammar school that served several islands and the area of mainland where it was situated. Sixty miles by road and as many more by ferry meant that he and two others from our remote village had to stay in the school hostel or in ‘digs’ from Monday to Friday of each week. At first he hated this but settled eventually, never becoming a good scholar but using his personality to get him by. He was very popular with old and young alike, and as a tall lad with a cheerful grin he did not want for girlfriends—even at the tender age of 12! Nicholas and Andrew were five years apart but were great friends: every weekend would see them fishing or boating or roaming far and wide. They helped the shepherds with the shearing, watched calves being born or just sat at various firesides listening to crofters’ tales. It was a very different childhood from that which they would have known in the south. Our two older children were not with us on the island, having left home before we moved. Elizabeth was in college in London while John had left another college after a term, having decided that the academic life was not for him. He had a job of sorts and lived with a group of friends in the capital.
My husband, George, had been completing an overseas contract, but when he finally came to live in Dhubaig, our village, he became a sort of Jack-of-all-things-electrical for the island. We were afforded much amusement by the crofters’ plaintive requests for George to breathe new life into various dying devices. Electricity had only come to the islands in 1950 and many remote glens still had none, so most of the crofters’ electrical possessions had been purchased in the first excitement, and 20 years later they still expected them all to work perfectly. How often were we told ‘This was a good, good kettle’? Interestingly, many of the croft houses had electric irons, kettles, and so on but still no indoor toilet. I knew of two that had no toilet at all! During one summer, I gained intimate knowledge of this deficiency as a result of too many cups of tea.
As Andrew and I stood in the little hall, pulling on our stillwet coats, we could see that the rain had stopped. A huge silver moon was on the horizon, casting its own eerie glow to join the fading light of the gloomy winter day. There was a freshness in the air that spoke of calmer, drier weather to come.
‘It’s going to be fine for Dad coming,’ Andrew said, echoing my thoughts.
George was coming home for Christmas and would be with us some time the next day—weather permitting, of course. He had flown in from South Africa and was driving up from Heathrow in time for our second Christmas on Papavray and our first in our house: we had lived in a caravan while the rebuilding took place.
‘And Nick and Elizabeth and John,’ continued Andrew excitedly, as we hurried to the car. The family invasion this year would include Elizabeth’s latest boyfriend, Jeff . . . or was it Jim? Or Paul?
‘And Nurse Robertson is coming to do your work over Christmas, isn’t she?’ Andrew was jumping down the hill in leaps and bounds. ‘And you won’t be called out or anything, will you?’ he added anxiously.
I shook my head. No night calls for five days. What bliss!
We drove the eight or nine miles over the hills to the wilder side of the island, to our home in its acre or so of land facing the sea and the distant mountains. The sky had cleared and the winding road was bright in the moonlight, while the dark waters of small lochs sparkled among the reeds. Twinkling lights showed from the other islands and the moon was painting a silver path across the sea.
Later that evening, when both boys had gone to bed, I sat alone by a huge peat fire. I was sleepy but determined to catch up on my photo albums. I have kept a chronological record of our lives before and since
our arrival on Papavray, but I am not good at putting the results into albums. In fact, I had not inserted any at all since our first sight of Papavray. There had been several packets of photos on the sideboard for some time now, and I had to get down to the task before the family arrived. They definitely did not share my enthusiasm for photos!
I sorted them into order and began to arrange them onto the pages of an album, but inevitably I began to study them, remembering the incidents and the people that they portrayed. It’s like spreading newspaper over the carpet before decorating: one always crawls around reading long-outdated news. So it was with the photos.
There was the beach, the caravan and Alistair’s boat. And the sunshine! What a contrast in the weather at that time, two summers ago, from the bitter cold of the night outside as I sat so cosily by my fire. Each photo evoked memories and the amazement that we had felt as events had worked steadily towards our present life.
TWO
Meeting Alistair
For a long time, we had been disillusioned with the way of life in the south of England where we lived, and George’s work was pressurised and unrewarding. We had begun to cherish a dream of something better, gentler, a different environment altogether. Scotland, where George’s father was from, came to the forefront of our minds. For years it was just a dream, but then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, it came true. And it all began the very first time that we set foot on this Hebridean island.