Happy Birthday! by Catriona

I'm going off piste today, ignoring the question and choosing instead to say a slightly belated happy birthday to a dear old friend. The NHS, Britain's health service, was 75 yesterday.

Now, it's not as strange as it might seem for me to be celebrating a government welfare programme. For one thing, I'm a raging pinko (like that's breaking news). Also five of my family are or were NHS medical professionals. Not to mention the fact that the NHS - in the form of the doctor's surgery and pharmaceutical dispensary five minutes down the road - make it a lot less scary to live seven thousand miles from my parents as they head for ninety. 

(Recently one of them woke up not feeling well, phoned the doc at 8am, opened the door for his home visit at 9.30, and got their free prescription for a wonder drug, which one of the practice nurses delivered on her coffee break since it was raining. Just saying. (And if anyone in . . .  oh, let's say the US . . . wants to argue that this is paid for by high taxes - Call for the smelling salts! - here are some facts: a worker's contribution to the NHS is a smaller percentage of their income than the corresponding contribution to Medicare, Medicaid and OSHA. (And then there's your health insurance. And then you pay the doctor.)))

Give me a minute to climb down off my soap box.

Where were we? Oh yeah. But most of all, I'm celebrating the 75th anniversary of the NHS because I wrote a novel IN PLACE OF FEAR, that's set at its birth. The 5th of July 1948, sees my heroine, Helen Crowther, shaking in her boots as she prepares to go to her first day at her new job, working as an almoner for the NHS.

An almoner - or medical welfare officer (eventually medical social worker) - was a great job to write for a lazy researcher like me. There was a lot of mother-and-baby groups and as well as bonkers contraception, stringent hygiene practices (also slightly bonkers), WWII-inflected nutrition advice (Who needs oranges when we've got rosehips?) and endless new wheelchairs, dentures and spectacles as far as the eye could see. BUT - crucially - no actual medical stuff to make myself learn and then get wrong anyway.

And if there's a more entertaining / toe-curling scene to be written (also, fingers crossed, read) than a shy-ish working-class girl having to talk to a strait-laced young man about fertility issues in 1948, I've never written it.

It was also one of my less torturous title-finding exercises, this book. I called it THE UPSTART, but that didn't say "crime". So then I floated FROM THE CRADLE, which is the first half of the original NHS motto: From the cradle to the grave. But that was too similar to another recent book. So I tried TO THE GRAVE, but that would have been my third recent grave-based title. I idly checked out IN PLACE OF FEAR, on Amazon. And couldn't believe it had never been used for a crime novel.  It was sitting right there, waiting: the very title of Aneurin Bevan's (father of the NHS) monograph on the welfare state, published in 1952. Whoopeee! 

Which of these is more important? The one on the left. Which of these is a better read? I couldn't possibly comment.  But, as IN PLACE OF FEAR comes out in paperback, and I immerse myself in planning the second of Helen's Edinburgh adventures - in which a man dies of unknown causes in the Fountainbridge public baths - I can't put my sentiments about the NHS any better than I set them out in the acknowledgements two years ago:  

    "Last but immensely not least I would like to thank the National Health Service: cleaners, porters,        orderlies, auxiliaries, therapists, administrators, technicians, paramedics, nurses, doctors, volunteers,     and of course medical social workers. I dreamed this book up in 2019. I wrote it in 2020. Getting to        compose a love-letter to the NHS was one of the few bright bits in that dreadful year."

Since it's not just a paperback launch (but also an anniversary) and I'm right here in the UK, I'm having an event. I'll be at one of my favourite independent bookshops - Atkinson Pryce in Biggar - on the evening of the 10th of August saying three cheers for the NHS and gaun yersel, Helen.  Details here

AP didn't redecorate for the book but look at what a happy accident their livery and my jacket are:

 Cx