Picnic Books

As I step in to take the controls of this blog from Mike,  I am not too hopeful about my chances of maintaining the standard of genius set by his pie anecdote. It remains to be seen whether this week will bring me any food mishaps and their ensuing hilarity, but for now I’m going to turn the blog into a time machine and spin it all the way back from 2050s comedy to 1750s grit and grime. I can’t promise jokes and I’ve just realised that my book doesn’t have a single pie in it, but what our blogs do have in common is the fact that we’ve both begun them without many ideas of what to write. I’m therefore hoping you’ll make a comment or ask a question and give me some inspiration for the rest of my sojourn in the limelight.

Before this time machine that I’ve just invented arrives in 1750s Chester, where Kill-Grief is set, we need to make a brief stop in February 2008. That was when Tory peer Lord Mancroft gave a speech that made me lament “why couldn’t you have waited another year until my book comes out?” Lord Mancroft caused a brief outcry when he condemned the nurses at Bath’s Royal United Hospital as “grubby, drunken and promiscuous” – and also applied this verdict to the rest of young British women for good measure. Nurses were understandably not amused, but Lord Mancroft certainly wasn’t the first to have considered them a rather unsavoury group.

Kill-Grief begins Picnic’s historical fiction list in early 2009 and focuses on an 18th-century nurse, Mary Helsall, who is desperate to escape.  She wants to be free from the drudgery of hospital life, from the stench of disease, from the lecherous surgeon and spiteful Matron – but most of all to be free from her own past. Mary finds something in common with the hospital porter, Anthony – they both dream of an independent future without anxiety and resentment. In their world, however, the only freedom is temporary – it is provided by gin.

When I was researching 18th-century hospitals (initially for a non-fiction paper, and later for Kill-Grief), one aspect of the literature stood out – or rather, didn’t. Among pages of detailed and impeccably researched information about medicine, surgery and the relationship between the Enlightenment and the growth of voluntary hospitals, there would often be no more than a sentence or two about nurses. Not very complimentary sentences either. Time and again I read that nurses were all drunk, neglectful slatterns – until, that is, Florence Nightingale came along and turned them into angels overnight.

From looking at original hospital records, however, I could see there was more to early nursing than that. The records hint at a complex group of people with their own fears, abilities, conflicts and foibles. Like today’s nurses, they were individuals doing what they could to cope with the pressures of exhausting work, inadequate resources and sometimes violent patients. Even those who conformed to the stereotype must have had reasons for their behaviour.  The more I learnt about life on the 1750s wards, the less surprised I was that the staff turned to the only anaesthetic available – drink.

 Kill-Grief, however, is not really about hospitals. Like the nurses who attended Lord Mancroft at Bath, its characters have lives and problems beyond their daily work, and this is where the real story lies. The young hospital staff in Kill-Grief – Mary, Anthony and their colleague Agnes – also have to contend with people’s contempt for them, because they share with Lord Mancroft’s carers a flaw that society still deems unforgiveable in the young. They aren’t perfect.

The characters each have their individual past and their individual present. In Mary’s case, this involves an entanglement with a smuggling gang and a damaging infatuation with a handsome thief-taker. She is first and foremost a woman, who also happens to be a nurse. In male-dominated mid-18th-century society, there is no outlet for her growing interest in surgery – or is there? Her ambitions find a parallel in Anthony’s determination to become a watchmaker, even though he has previously abandoned an apprenticeship and descended into the grip of gin. Together or apart, they must choose between sober uncertainty and drunken oblivion.

I’m told that when blogging it’s best not to go on too long – I probably have already, so I’ll finish for now by  summing up Kill-Grief as a love story with drink, disease, surgery, prison dungeons and lots of mud. Plus a bit of smuggling, wrecking, and murder. As for Lord Mancroft’s comments about modern-day nurses, well – he would certainly find plenty to complain about in an 18th-century hospital, if he lived to tell the tale.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 12:01 am and is filed under Kill-Grief by Caroline Rance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.