Words Unlimited

Book of The Month - June 2013 - Born in The NHS

Born in the NHS is one of those books that’s hard to categorise. It offers a fascinating slice of social history – families in sickness and health, the changing roles of health professionals – over the last seventy years, but it’s no dry academic study. The book – a collaboration between two poets, Wendy French and Jane Kirwan – is brimming with life, real people and their dramas. It is also thoughtful, reflective and packed with things you didn’t know but might now be glad you’ve found out.

 

The idea for the book began with conversations between Kirwan and French about growing up in medical families. French’s father was a GP in Wales, Kirwan’s parents were both doctors, originally from Ireland but working most of their lives in Northampton. Both poets have also worked in the NHS and have extended family members still active in it and have a wealth of material to draw upon.

Alarmed at recent cuts and changes to the NHS, they felt the need to document, from their own lived experience, what they knew and valued about the Service. But it isn’t quite a documentary and neither is it a polemic, as they are keen to point out in the foreword, rather it is a ‘personal and impressionistic account.’  

It’s perhaps best described as a miscellany as it includes, prose, poems, anecdotes, memoir, facts. Presented as an A-Z, once you’ve read the introductions, which outline fascinating family histories, you are free to dip in and out.

Try, for example, under T for TUBERCULOSIS, Kirwan’s piece ‘Lipstick.’ Pre-NHS, pre-widely available antibiotics this disease was an ever present threat and highly contagious. The piece shows Kirwan’s medical student mother at a dance in 1931 cutting off the top of her lipstick that has been hastily snatched and used by ‘Maura from the bank.’

In P for PARAMEDICS French gives us a brief history of the ambulance service, something that developed out of the First World War. It is as recent as the 1970s and 1980s that ambulance drivers make the shift from offering transport to offering first treatment. This is followed by a highly moving poem ‘Running Late,’ about a cycling accident, that becomes all the more poignant when we discover the cyclist is French’s niece.  

This juxtaposition of fact, history, statistic against deeply felt personal story is effective throughout and makes the book compelling.

Born in the NHS offers unique, valuable insight into a national institution that has been around for such a short time. Required reading, I reckon for the under 40s who may have come to take it all for granted.

It’s also an excellent example of creative collaboration – what happens when poets talk to each other, how writing grows new writing – plus it marks the start of a new publishing venture – The Hippocrates Press.

This is a book that every home should have.

Failure? It’s just another writing opportunity

I picked this image up via a twitter link that led me to the Facebook page of a Lara Crippa.  I don’t know who you are, Lara, but if that is your artwork it speaks volumes to me as writer.

Amazing, isn’t it, how you can almost glimpse a whole novel in an instant of thought. There’s the vision you have in your head, soaring towards completion, then there's the reality of turning that vision in to 300 pages of prose that others might want to read. 

Interesting, then, that on the same day I found this image, I read this piece in The Guardian, 'Falling Short: seven writers reflect on failure.'

The seven - Diana Athill, Will Self, Anne Enright, Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood, Howard Jacobson, Lionel Shriver - are pretty frank about failure in relation to their writing and the rest of their lives.

It might not be a bad idea to clip the article and keep this image somewhere you can see it on the those days when the writing just won't go in a straight line.

It never will!

As Anne Enright says:  "Failure is easy. I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work ... Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do. It is built in."

But this is not to suggest all is doom and gloom. It's how you handle the paradox that counts, as Will Self says: "...this is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this – nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously 'creative.'  On the contrary, it often occurs to me that since what successes I do manage are both experienced and felt entirely in solitude, there must be many others who are the same as me: people for whom life is a process to be experienced, not an object to be coveted."

Margaret Atwood puts it succinctly: ‘Get back on the horse that threw you … you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.’

Easy, then. No such thing as failure, just more writing opportunities…