Sometimes a labour of love becomes a phenomenon. It’s a lot like that with Angel City. This book is the third in author Carol Ann Creagh’s portfolio and she could never have imagined the reaction to this story about three friends nursing at Belfast’s City Hospital.
It rips along from the minute Anya Corrigan pushes open the doors of the Italian restaurant in Botanic Avenue for a long awaited reunion with her two best nursing friends. Even before we pass through into the restaurant, Amya is reminiscing, and so the story of training, socialising, nursing and the Troubles begins.
Her memories go back to 1975 when the teenagers meet and live together in Erskine House nurses’ home. These three very different characters immediately bond through the dreadful pressures of hospital life during the Troubles.
However, being young energetic women, despite the rules they sneak off to enjoy the nightlife of Belfast; romances come and go and work becomes a vocation. For the author of this book those memories are very personal - to all intents and purposes she is Anya.
Carol Ann Creagh is a retired nurse practitioner with 43 years’ experience in the health service. Her memories are deep rooted, fascinating, disturbing, funny - and they came flooding back one day when she was sitting in the City Hospital cancer unit waiting for her partner.
“I was able to see Erskine House and my eyes went up to the 13th floor and the third window along and all of a sudden I was back there with my two friends about to embark on a career in nursing,” she says. “The words just kept coming; I wasn’t about to write a book, I was actually sitting in the book.”
And so the story unfolded, from finding her room in the nurses’ home to the wards in the City Hospital’s old workhouse buildings and on to her placement in Purdysburn working in the locked wards. She describes assisting in many agonising procedures - operations, lobotomies and ECT treatments for patients suffering schizophrenia, psychosis and paranoia - and of Ivy, who lunged at her, drawing blood as she scraped her nails down the young nurse’s arms.
Then there was the heartbreak of losing little Joshua when working in the baby unit and her time in casualty where death and injury during The Troubles took their toll; being faced with a patient with a hatchet embedded in his head was not easy...
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Throughout this Anya grew close to two other student nurses: Mary McClafferty, who nursed in Africa after qualifying; and Brigid McGorian, a livewire, a social butterfly destined to marry three times.
Then there’s the bus outing to Donegal for Brigid’s 18th birthday. When the bus arrives at the border checkpoint the girls and their boy friends are confronted by “burly soldiers with blackened face and rifles at the ready”. Not a pleasant chapter to put it mildly, with shades of the Miami Showband killings.
Precious Memories
When the author of this book was doing a spring clean she rediscovered her memory box, which triggered many memories but also contained something really precious: the cheque for £20 her father pressed into her hand dated, 22nd September 1975, her first day in hospital. “‘That’s for emergencies,’ he said, and hugged me goodbye. There were many emergencies during the three years of training but I never cashed the cheque, it is priceless.”
Eventually the day came when the three Angels graduated, fully fledged in their chosen career.
Phenomenal Reaction
The book was written and published last month and since then Carol Ann has lived in a whirlwind. A mum of six and nana to six, she has the backing of her family; indeed, her son Conor designed the cover showing the old workhouse where it all began - and where I had my first child!
“I’ve become a commercial traveller as the books are flying out of the shops so I keep delivering more and more,” she tells me. She’s travelled to Cookstown, Ballycastle, Newry, Donegal, Lough Derg and Crossgar.
Hospital shops can’t get enough and of the 1,000-strong initial print run there are fewer than 100 left so talks of a reprint are urgently underway. It sold out in nine shops in the first three weeks, with one bookseller taking Boris Johnson’s book off the shelves to display Angel City. Waterstones have reordered five times.
“And I’ve a special friendship with the post office... I’ve sent copies to readers in Australia, Switzerland, all over the UK and Ireland, north and south,” Carol Ann says. “It seems City Hospital nurses are all over the world and they are loving the memories.”
And many of them nursed with Carol Ann - during a talk to a nurses’ group she was approached by one woman: “Remember me? You sold me your motorbike!” A woman of many talents.
Full details at carolanncreagh.co.uk
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