Call the Nurse
True Stories of a Country Nurse on a Scottish Isle (The Country Nurse Series, Book One)
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4.2 • 138 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud owners of a near-derelict croft house—a farmer’s stone cottage—on “a small acre” of land. Mary assumed duties as the island’s district nurse. Call the Nurse is her account of the enchanted years she and her family spent there, coming to know its folk as both patients and friends.
In anecdotes that are by turns funny, sad, moving, and tragic, she recalls them all, the crofters and their laird, the boatmen and tradesmen, young lovers and forbidding churchmen. Against the old-fashioned island culture and the grandeur of mountain and sea unfold indelible stories: a young woman carried through snow for airlift to the hospital; a rescue by boat; the marriage of a gentle giant and the island beauty; a ghostly encounter; the shocking discovery of a woman in chains; the flames of a heather fire at night; an unexploded bomb from World War II; and the joyful, tipsy celebration of a ceilidh. Gaelic fortitude meets a nurse’s compassion in these wonderful true stories from rural Scotland.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Exotic travelogue meets medical adventure in this nostalgic autobiography of an English nurse who left London to embrace the remote Scottish Hebridean island of Papavray. In 1969, the now-octogenarian MacLeod became the isles' medical lifeline, falling in love with its quirky populous and vanishing way of life. Her debut recounts an abundance of local charm and lore, including the sloppy celebration of Hogmanay, to sweetly daft Celtic logic, to brushes with local ghosts. But the stories of gut-wrenching medical and human need are the most evocative. In one case, a 13-year-old girl becomes pregnant through incest and then inexplicably risks her baby's life to reunite with the dad; in another, a 36-year-old woman is found chained and filthy in her family home, abused for over a decade for having an out-of-wedlock baby. Elsewhere, a man beaten by a drunken dad and who lost a beloved wife and son in a shooting ends his days sick with cancer, alone, bitter and "resolved never to love anyone or trust another soul as long as he lived." MacLeod is generously non-judgmental, believing that the wild, rugged islands "are full of odd, reclusive families. Usually it's all right. Just different."
Customer Reviews
Call the Nurse
Well written stories of life on a remote island. The descriptions of the land and weather bring sights and smells to the reader. I will definitely read her other books!
Call the Nurse
This is such a beautiful story, set on a primitive, remote island north of Scotland. The people and their lives are vividly described by the District Nurse, Mary J. MacLeod.
Descriptions of the island itself are truly amazing. The lives of the people are difficult and hard to imagine. They come together to help each other in sad, often tragic circumstances. But there are many life-affirming events draw them even closer together.
It is a harsh and draining way of life, but they prefer living as their ancestors did. And Nurse MacLeod and her family truly love this way of living and working.
Call the Nurse
A lovely read. Painterly descriptions of the dramatic seaside landscape and its matching weather. Touching stories of the beauty and tragedy of the isolated island life.
The simplicity of these island stories revealed a vein of the deeper pain and joy of every life.