dovegreyreader scribbles

Barney...

2013-05-25T00:15:00+01:00

Some of you will know this already from Facebook, and my thanks for kind messages...we've said goodbye to our ageing Labrador Barney this week. Bought for the young Gamekeeper by the Tinker from a very local breeeder and given the Kennel Club name RobsMate Barney, just because we could and because everything that had gone before seemed so posh, and we weren't.

Heading for fifteen is a good age for a Labrador but it was the rightest moment in the grand scheme of things, having half-made the decision twice if not three times in the last year or so. We'd decide, get ourselves psyched up and then be confounded when his creaking joints miraculously un-creaked and he would look us in the eye, say 'Not likely,' and skip out of the kennel, bouncing round the field like a puppy.

We'll get him through the Winter and give him a lovely warm garden Summer we decided, but not another Winter. But in the end it was clear he was in a lot of pain, and trekking up to the woods with us out of faithfulness rather than pleasure, yet if we left him behind he howled until we came back and we could hear his gruff, high-low cuckoo bark (Barney's very own distress call) echoing around the valley.

It's the toughest thing about pets isn't it, this departing, and the closing of that chapter of your life spent with them and all that has happened in that time. For us, three children grown and flown. Barney was never a small dog, the huge paws gave it away even as a puppy and he would emerge from his kennel like a jump jet, bouncing three feet off the ground on the spot and greeting you with the same unbridled joy every single time. But for all that he was a gentle dog, he really let the canine side down because he adored cats, they weren't for chasing they were for licking; Rocky would take any amount of it and Magnus too. And he was a scamp too, unguarded rubbish bins were always for emptying and scattering around the garden.

We gave him a fine last day on Thursday, last walk to the woods, last Bonio, last hugs, before our lovely vet came to us at home and wafted him off on his peaceful journey in a corner of the garden that Barney loved whilst cradled in Bookhound's arms.

I took Nell up to the woods, now a carpet of bluebells, whilst it was in progress. Up the green lane, through a vale of sniffly tears and it occurred to me how often we have walked that thinking path, and what emotions must have been taken up and scattered there through history.

Holloways have so many uses.

To our surprise the vet recommended that we let Nell see Barney before we buried him, so we did and it was quite extraordinary. They have had a lovely rapport this last year, he endlessly tolerant of her playfulness and puppy ways, she looking up to his seniority in the pack (it was always Barney who initiated the call for someone to go out and feed them at 5pm) and always keeping an eye out and waiting for him to catch up, the slowest ship in the convoy on any walk.

Nell rushed across to Barney, him looking for all the world as if he was asleep in the sun, and did her usual rolling-around-look-at-me-Barney-aren't-I-gorgeous routine before realising that something was different, eventually just sitting by him quietly and calmly, looking at him and at us. How normal it all felt and how odd that we invest dogs with so many human emotions and characteristics, yet feel we should spare them that moment to understand and say goodbye in whatever way dogs do it, who can know.

We tucked him up and had a little ceremony, and as luck would have it the Tinker and I had lifted all the daffodils ready to plant elsewhere, so bless him, Barney will be pushing up a grand display over in woodshed corner come the Spring.

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The Children's Nurse - The True Story of a Great Ormond Street Nurse ~ Susan Macqueen

2013-05-24T00:15:00+01:00

Yes, it's time to drag out the 1976 funny-hat-blue-belt photo again (fourth year of training, finals taken, results awaited) and tag another post under The Sufferings of Student Nurse collection, and If I'd known then what I know now I think I would have been rightly terrified at the mere thought of my student nurse ward allocation to Cohen CD, Infectious and Skin Diseases at Great Ormond Street, on March 10th 1974. My last ward before heading off to secondment at the London Hospital for the SRN part of the training that combined RSCN (Registered Sick Children's Nurse) with it.

I know the exact dates because (this being me) I still have my Pink Book with all my ward experience logged and signed. It was on Cohen CD that I worked under the tutelage and eagle eye of Sister Macqueen, (the author of The Children's Nurse - The True Story of a Great Ormond Street Nurse) for the next twelve weeks. Tucked in my Pink Book I have even discovered a scrap of paper with some of the Cohen patient names and diagnoses, obviously an attempt to drill it into my head in readiness for a ward round, and reading it now I am even more retrospectively terrified at how my twenty-year old self gaily dealt with such things as tubercular, e coli and meningococcal meningitis and herpes encephalitis amongst other things, and with never a thought that somehow I might catch something. And then the young teenager with epidermolysis bullosa, a debilitating conditon where the skin blisters and falls off at the merest touch... her distress was not surprisingly manifest in tantrums and teenage angst, and the daily bath sheer, unmitigating torture for all concerned.

But imagine my delight when I heard news that Sister Macqueen, known to us then as Sue ( though never to her face of course, heavens the earth would have opened up and swallowed us) had written a book (with the help of a ghost writer) about life as a nurse at Great Ormond Street. Being a completist with regard to my shelf of books about G.O.S I ordered a copy there and then, but this being me and wanting it yesterday, I downloaded the Kindle version too.

Sue Susan Sister Macqueen (old habits etc) had actually completed her initial nurse training at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge where she first encountered the GOS nurses out on adult secondment as part of their combined adult and children's nursing course...

'... their GOSH uniforms marking them apart from everyone else...the pink nurses were renowned for their attention to detail, not only in the way they looked, but in the way they cared for their patients..'

It was all enough to convince Susan (OK, I'm over it now, I'm sixty this year after all) that she wanted to do her post-registration paediatric training at GOS and that is where she headed at the earliest opportunity. With her nerves in shreds (no...I can't imagine this, she was a formidable ward sister) Susan walked onto 1A, the ward that would put the fear of god up most of us bright young things, Cardiac.

It is an indication of the terror that Susan, though already a qualified nurse, felt out of her depth amid the noisy hubbub that was an old GOS ward. The wards in our day, now almost obsolete, were a rare mix of medical and nursing care of the highest standard to the backdrop of the laughter and shrieks of children playing and riding tricycles up and down the corridor, and with the radio singing along in the background.

Do you remember that song Lullaby of Broadway, a hit again in 1976. Wiz and I were both staff nurses on the same ward, 2DE (metabolic diseases and burns) and as soon as we heard that song on the ward radio we'd all head for the corridor for the tap dancing bit...no matter what you were holding...baby... potty... syringe.

Sister Macqueen might have had a bit of a conniption and of course that would not have been possible on Cohen where she became sister in 1972, the year that I arrived at Great Ormond Street to start my training. Cohen was all about barrier nursing... masks, gloves, gowns and hand-scrubbing a way of life, and your hands were even more sore than usual. Susan recounts many tales of life on the ward, the small details all very familiar to anyone who worked at GOS during that era...Z-beds in the waiting room...'specials' providing one-to-one nursing care...the old Engstrom ventilators...

Amongst all my own memories of Cohen ward several stand out....

The day that I was supervising a nurse more junior than I was, though she was considerably more confident, and made that very plain indeed. She was getting her first taste of caring for a baby in an incubator and we had run through what she needed to do, it was only changing a nappy and I had said I'll join you in a minute and probably nipped off to do some observations or something. Imagine my horror when I returned to find that she had lifted the lid of the incubator and put it on the floor (germs...OMG) in order to handle the baby. When I pointed out that this wasn't what we did her reply was priceless...

'Dont be ridiculous, you don't expect me to be able to do anything through those stupid holes in the side do you?'

I think I was more terrified that Sister Macqueen would come around the corner and see this debacle in progress, and I often wondered quite how long it was before Confident Student was cut down to size...she would have been, no question.

'I tried to be firm but fair with the nurses and students who worked under me...I demanded a lot from them. If my nurses worked hard, I made sure I praised them and made them feel at ease...'

Conversely, step out of line or slacken off and you would be told in no uncertain terms. No risks can be taken in the hospital environment full-stop, but on Cohen ward any short-cuts could lead to further infection for a child already compromised, or to a nurse catching a serious illness. We learned the form very swiftly indeed.

Susan Macqueen put all that experience of infection control on Cohen to good use, eventually becoming the hospital's leading expert on the subject, and responsible for ongoing excellent outcomes in the management of hospital-acquired infections in children, before also working at the Department of Health, all of which is charted in the book. In that case I now feel quite reassured by the fact that it was Sister Macqueen who examined me on the first of five practical assessments completed during our training. My Aseptic Technique under her watchful eye (2nd April 1974) must have been up to snuff because I passed and I have her signature to prove it (click on this picture, it should enlarge) and I would still use it now and did, even on the cat's stitches.

Susan describes herself as a firm but fair ward sister and interestingly, before I had even opened the book I was pondering my experience of working with her and, in my mind, had used the exact same words. She talks in some detail about that role and I found it fascinating to hear about it from the other side, ward sisters were slightly terrifying goddesses in our eyes, little did we even imagine they had a social life...or a home...or a boyfriend. Surely they slept, immaculately uniformed and poised in a cupboard on the ward before jumping out and apparating right next to you the very same second that you'd decided to cut that corner, or touch that door with your hand, or...or... And who knew about the love-hate ongoing battle of words and sparring with Dr Marshall, the Australian ward Consultant, who was also the physician for the Chelsea football team.

I have another lasting memory of Cohen too...

It was night duty and the ward desk had a line of visibility through to the vase of flowers in the front hall of the hospital. There were always white flowers in the arrangement, and one would be collected by a nurse when a child had died to be placed in the child's crossed hands when they were laid out. On one particular night I saw Wiz, my flatmate come down to that vase not once but three times, it's a salutory reminder of what we were all dealing with at the age of twenty, though thankfully with the support of each other and sisters like Susan Macqueen to guide us through it all.

A lovely book which it has given me much pleasure to read, though I am aware this may also be because the old alma mater is so close to my heart. But if you are enjoying the current run of nursing and midwifery memoirs then certainly add this one to the list.

Beating the Bounds ~ Holloway by Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

2013-05-22T00:15:00+01:00

I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink....

Edward Thomas knew much of holloways and Robert Macfarlane quotes this poem in his latest book Holloway, produced with fellow writer Dan Richards and artist Stanley Donwood. The book is a slim but rich and intense fusion of words, observations and drawings compiled after the three returned to the holloway that Robert Macfarlane had explored with Roger Deakin in 2005. That excursion is recounted in The Wild Places...

'There is wildness everywhere,' Roger had written once, 'if we only stop in our tracks and look around us.' To him, the present-day and the close-at-hand were as astonishing as the long-gone and the far-afield. He was an explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.'

The holloway (known in Devon as a green lane) just a few yards from our front gate, has become a special place to us in the nineteen years that we have lived in this house, and as I Beat the Bounds with renewed enthusiasm I am getting to know every inch. I spot every new heap of badger or rabbit digging, each newly broken branch, each recently shifted stone.

It now occurs to me that this of course is the rabbit's own 'holloway'.

Our green lane is little known or used by anyone else; perhaps a few horse-riders, the man from the RSPB who comes to do an annual bird count, and may be just very occasionally some Sunday bikers who, having found it on the map, have to ride it perhaps on the Climbing Everest principle, because it is there. It occurred to me as I walked up with Nell the other day that it is largely us and our footfall that are now wearing and keeping the path patent and passable.

'They are landmarks that speak of habit rather than of suddeness. Like creases in the hand, or the wear on the stone sill of a doorstep or stair. they are the result of repeated human actions. Their age chastens without crushing. They relate to other old paths & tracks in the landscape - ways that still connect place to place and person to person.'

According to Robert Macfarlane none of these paths are younger than 300 years old, in which case maybe it's our turn in history to know and connect with this one, and we never fail to wonder about that history as we walk.

Who may have built the stone sides and what labour it must have involved...

...and who may have used it, and how.

And we think about odd things too... what if a horse and cart were coming down as one was going up, well then what... that debate kept us going the full length of the holloway one day.

Can you drive a horse and cart backwards in a confined space...

Would this little place, about half-way up, with some extra width have made a passing place...

I'd buy a seat and make it a Sitting Place

And a special treat, some words especially for you all from Robert Macfarlane, and a request....

"I have come to realise, in the eight years since I first wrote about holloways, that many people share my fascination with these sunken lanes, which have been harrowed down into the landscape by the passage of feet and rainwater (and sometimes 4x4s...). People have sent me photographs of the holloways they know, the paintings and sketches they have made of them, maps with their locations indicated, or the stories, memories and folklore they associate with them. Something about the idea of a path trodden by unknown predecessors, something about the everyday pleasure of walking and following these lanes, and something more mysterious about the symbolic power of the holloway as an image (tunnel, rabbit-hole, vortex, portal to the underworld), seems to draw the imagination of many.

Last year, the artist Stanley Donwood, the writer Dan Richards, the letter-press printer Richard Lawrence and I self-published a small book about holloways from first principles. The first principle being a lump of lead. That lump of lead was melted to cast fresh type, which was used to set the text, which was then hand-printed onto soft thick Somerset wove paper pages, which were then ordered, stitched and bound, to make an ISBN-less book in an edition of 277. A year on, Faber and Faber have published a hardback version of that book, *Holloway*. They have also set up a site where people can post their own images of holloways and sunken paths. So - if there is a holloway you know or have known, it would be wonderful if you considered adding it to the gallery. The first few have begun to appear. I have this notion that, if the gallery gathers enough images, we might tag each of them to their location on a map, and in this way create a holloway cartography. The holloways don't need to be English or British, though, or especially old or deep. There's one from Normandy already up there. And perhaps the youngest holloways are barely a few inches in depth; perhaps holloways run through cities rather than only through the countryside.

The site is here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/holloway/ I'm told you have to be a member of flickr to be able to post; I'm also told that if you're not, it's easy to join. But I know little about the internet and its ways. If flickr defeats you, as it has defeated me, you can always send your photos to johng@faber.co.uk, with a quick note saying they're for the holloway gallery, and with any info about location, photographer and such like for a caption. Thank you!"

My photos are in already so please do send yours too, and now scroll down where Magnus awaits with gifts.

Prize Draw copies of Holloway by Robert Macfarlane

2013-05-22T00:14:00+01:00

Hello chums, Magnus here.

Not a lot to report to be honest, I'm plum tuckered out keeping the Tinker stocked up with fresh rabbit. I leave him half a one, carefully dissected, outside his front door every morning because I can never resist having a little nibble first, but it's all demanding and exhausting work and between you and me they all seem less than grateful.

Now as regards this holloway, well I don't go up there much but of course you-know-who is out there every five minutes flaunting those ridiculous ears...

And Faber are kindly offering FIVE copies of Holloway by Rob, Stan and Dan (we're good mates, the chaps know a decent cat when they see one) so names in comments as usual and I will draw the winning numbers in about five rabbits' time.

Thinking about Oklahoma...

2013-05-21T19:25:13+01:00

...and sending good wishes and warm thoughts to anyone affected by this devastating tragedy.

I've just been watching the news, and the massive tornado cutting a swath through those communities, and trying to imagine 200mph winds and how terrifying that must have been. I'm hoping America have the U.K. equivalent of Shelterbox and the means for people who have lost everything to create at least a temporary home very quickly.

And then the most heart-warming moment of the woman being interviewed on Sky News at the site of her flattened home, and grieving the loss of her dog, at which point out crawled the missing dog from underneath the debris, almost right next to her and into her arms.

Take care America, as always at moments like this, we are thinking of you.

Grace and Mary ~ Melvyn Bragg

2013-05-20T00:15:00+01:00

I wonder if anyone else heard Melvyn Bragg on the radio recently, taking no prisoners as he urged the BBC to up its game with Arts programming in the face of increasingly high-standard competition from Sky and Channel Four. He was forthright and very direct ( thank heavens we still have people who can be, and broadcasters who will air such ascerbic criticism of themselves...I love the BBC for it) about programmes shifting from BBC One to the remoter outpost of BBC Four, as well as reducing in frequency, and as far as I can tell only seem to 'star' Alan Yentob these days. It would be nice to see a few new presenting faces. Sky Arts have snapped up super model Lily Cole who has a Cambridge double first in Art History as well as modelling for Alexander McQueen, Auntie would do well to take heed.

Anyway thus was Melvyn perfectly positioned upon my radar when his latest novel Grace and Mary arrived. I can't proclaim much success with his previous novels, and given the focus of this one on ageing and dementia, I wasn't hopeful that Melvyn and I were about to become friends, but on this occasion some disparate planets aligned favourably.

I watched the recent six part series The Village (a BBC success in my book, though not a universal one I gather) because it ties in wonderfully with some of my Beating the Bounds research in connection with our village war memorial. Two lads from the farm that surrounds us here died in the Great War and are named on the memorial. Having harboured all manner of imaginings about how that loss may have impacted on the family, and getting quite caught up in the emotion of thinking about them walking these fields, and what their last visions of home may have been as they lay dying in the trenches (maybe that view from our window even) I decided to find out more. I found out plenty about the family and it has all been a real revelation (which I am still writing up for a future post) but the BBC series gave me some context (fictional or otherwise) for how life may have been lived here at the time.

Grace and Mary, though set in the present day, is also interwoven with a narrative of village life through the Great War. John is visiting Mary, his elderly mother, in a nursing home..

'The mother and son meet mostly in the middle of the last century. After the war. Her disintegrating memory can still take her there... Now she is in her tenth decade, he has just gone seventy, and slowly the roles are reversing... they can still draw warmth from the embers of those days...'

John is treading a gentle path through the miasma of his mother's vascular dementia...

'It was as if it had been sent up from the deep to punish the audacity of the human race in so steadily and cleverly increasing its life span...this creeping undergrowth which strangled the roots of thought.'

Convinced he can still reach the mother he knows, John recreates the story of Grace, Mary's mother. In re-telling the story of Grace's life, and Mary's, and this mother she hardly knew, John hopes to rebuild memory for her, clinging valiantly to the glimmers and brief improvements he hopes this brings to Mary's condition. Except as we know, there is little that can be done to reverse the relentless progress of vascular dementia as it wreaks its trail of destruction...

'...broken and frayed, silted up, chokingly webbed in the intricate threads of ageing...'

Judging by many of my previous reading encounters with this subject, and for reasons various, I expected to find this all thoroughly depressing and far too painful to read. When someone you love has suffered this it can make for hard-earned reading pleasure best avoided. I felt sure I would be waving the white flag of surrender by page fifty, but Melvyn Bragg has been through this too, with his own mother, and his sensitivity to his subject and the depths of love and endless patience, and soothing and caring that John offered his mother won me over, as did the interwoven narrative of Grace.

Writer's take many routes with the subject of dementia and this may be one of the few that has worked for me. I'm a nurse for goodness' sake, I should be able to cope with it, and in real-life I can, but on the fictional page I am highly and subjectively censorious. I need to read of endless kindness being offered to anyone suffering from dementia and the minute an author strays from the path of compassion I'm afraid I just get too upset, invoke reader's prerogative, close the book and move on.

In Mary's world, as constructed by Melvyn Bragg, and in the ideal world that we would hope all dementia sufferers would be cared for, the nurses are endlessly patient, understanding that there will be 'differences of days' and these must be accommodated. When Mary spits her tablets back at them, or becomes abusive, they leave her time to regroup before trying again. But they do try again and with kindness, and they coax the food into her, and sips of drink from the spouted cup, and doubtless those drinks are within reach just in case Mary can manage it herself, and her personal care is dignified and thorough.

It is all sad and poignant, not sentimental... ultimately strangely heartening and giving me the courage to read on.

Strong-willed, single-minded and very determined, Grace's resilience will also be tested to the limits as she mourns the loss of her own mother who died shortly after her birth. It is well-recognised that childhood loss, even of an unknown parent will need to be grieved many times over and Grace is no exception. Finding her way in the world she eventually finds work as a maid in a local home for the wounded soldiers of the Great War.

You can perhaps now see how my walking, watching and reading planets aligned... the lads from the farm and The Village (with a lead character called Grace, brilliantly portrayed by Maxine Peak) all segueing perfectly into this book.

There is a moment in Grace and Mary when Grace and her employer are discussing fiction...

'Agnes enjoyed talking about the characters - were they believable? That was the crucial thing, she said. if you didn't believe in a character how could you possibly go on? And did the writers cheat with the plots?'

No cheating with plot that I noticed and I believed in every one of the characters, even the shadowy and deceitful Alan who Grace falls in love with in the convalescent home, and his embarrassed and evasive parents who Grace finally plucks up the courage to visit when it becomes clear ... no I couldn't possibly spoil it.

But talking of the word, do you remember the days of 'convalescence'??

Days of rest and recovery and recuperation from illness that would set you up properly for life again.

Now it seems you are just so many days post-op/post-viral/ post-chemo until you are well enough to go shopping again.

Themes of memory and loss, recollection and reconnection surround an underlying sense of belief ... in faith, in self, in the soul and in others, and in human nature to prevail for the greater good, as Melvyn Bragg weaves together three generations of a family in Grace and Mary to create a novel that I couldn't put down, and that I knew had been quietly and profoundly moving as I turned the final page.

Just to say...

2013-05-19T11:51:48+01:00

Some of you may recall, as part of the Edward Thomas project on here a couple of years ago, a lovely post that included some pictures of a beautiful, hand-illustrated and bound edition of Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop, done by ninety-year old Harold Page, Fran H-B's father.

Fran has been a daily visitor here for years, comments regularly, and we meet up occasionally, and indeed Team Edward Thomas saw that work for real as Fran brought it with her when we took tea with author Matthew Hollis as part of the project.

On arriving in Sussex for a few days walking the South Downs with Fran last Monday, before I headed into London, she broke the news that Harold, now ninety-two, had been taken into hospital the day before. All was stable and family support was in place, and Fran had very much wanted my visit to go ahead.

We talked a great deal about her Dad during my stay, and I was almost brought to tears by the sight of the most beautiful book, hand-written and bound by Harold which displayed some of his work as a gift for members of the family. As an artist, with architect's training, Harold had quickly excelled at the art of calligraphy which he took up as a hobby in his seventies, rapidly gathering in diplomas which should have taken many years to achieve.

I had never met Harold, but I learned from Fran that he was a quiet, gentle unassuming man, immensely modest about his talent and utterly thrilled when he saw that blog post and imagined others seeing and enjoying his work.

It was with much sadness that I received Fran's e mail to say that Harold had died suddenly but peacefully on Friday afternoon, and I just wanted to send Fran, her Mum and her family, our love and thoughts and to wish them gentle days ahead.

Harold Page has left the most incredible legacy in his art work and we can but hope for an exhibition, or even a book eventually, I can promise you it would something to behold.