That English Girl

It is the early 1980s, Mrs Thatcher is ruling the country with an iron hand and Stevie is on a quest for change. Her marriage over, her job familiar. She decides to move as far away from her  past as possible and start again in the middle of nowhere, alone with her small daughter and her pets. Stevie knew about nursing in towns. She could manage a traffic jam and a high-rise block in her sleep. Patients were the same everywhere, she reasoned with herself as she drove over Sugar Loaf mountain at dawn and entered Wales. How wrong she was, how much she had to learn as she became a community nurse in rural Wales in the early 1980s. Stevie’s romantic images of rolling hills and lilting Welsh accents were soon replaced with the reality of surviving a terrain that ruined her car exhaust every other week. She found herself struggling to navigate the mountain paths while chasing the postman with a slip of paper containing the very long name of the farm she was trying to find. The patients presented the same problems as she was used to, but with many more complications that inevitably come with rural life. Stevie’s work varied from laying out patients with the help of a bricklayer on his first ‘hobble’ (odd job) to leaving a patient in the shed until the undertaker came the next dayWith tales as touching and sad as they are hilarious, Stevie’s exploits paint a picture of a time gone by and a district nurse trying to keep her head as a fish out of water. She started alone and scared, a stranger in a different land. She emerged from the experience wiser and humbler with new coping strategies, some dear friends, and an incredible recipe for Welsh cakes.

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