MacLeod - The Country Nurse Remembers: True Stories of a Troubled Childhood, War, and Becoming a Nurse

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 nurseor anyonewho 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 Nurses 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 nurses 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 Writers Life

Call the Midwife gave [us] the nursing profession in 1950s London. Now, a retired district nurse [gives us] the heartwarming and humorousyet often shockingevents 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 .

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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 EnglandBiography. |StepdaughtersEnglandBiography. | World War, 19391945Biography.

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

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 childhoodin fact, my life as wellwas very clearly defined by a Before period and the After: before my mother died in 1937, when I was just five years oldthese years are the lost time, the joyful timeand 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 mothers death, perhaps partly to have someone to look after me.

After my fathers remarriage, my name was changed from my mothers 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 stepmothers 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 timelearning about life as well as nursing.

I felt Mums 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-oneofficially an adult.