Nursing
Nursing exposes you to traumatic events. Wearing a uniform doesn’t protect you from the impact of feeling. You are trained to understand what patients and families are experiencing. You are in the thick of it, often without warning. In the emergency department a patient arrives dying, and then dies, and the family waiting outside in the corridor don’t want to believe you. They want you tell them something different.
As a student nurse, when I was 18, I felt the impact on my first ward on Christmas Day. Brave and beautiful, she was only 24, and her husband and small child sat on her bed while she opened her presents. He had bought her a cream jumper with matching hat and gloves that she would never wear. She knew that and so did he. On Boxing Day she died.
The emotional response in the face of this exposure was to tuck it away after a little cry, and to then carry on with the job. I suppose after twenty years of tucking away lots of memories, the suppression of them worked loose, at an unconscious level the need to re-enact those experiences must have found a way out of me so I could express them.
Childhood
The experience of coming from a large Irish catholic family was that we never went on a plane. Once the back seat of the Morris Minor van was filled, we smaller children would sit on the floor, and stare out of the rear windows at the cars following behind. Holidays were either day trips to the seaside, or sometimes we stayed in a seaside chalet. Depending on my age at the time, there could be up to eight of us in the vehicle, plus a dog. My mother had fourteen children, but two of them died before I was born, and some of my older siblings had flown the nest before I made my entrance. So they wouldn’t have been going on holidays with us younger children.
I was never bored. My parents had enormous energy, and never tired of talking to us. My father regaled us with his own life as a child – he left school aged around ten and half and began selling kindling wood, making enough money by the time he was fourteen to buy a donkey and cart. My mother was one of four daughters, and her mother died when she was four, and the sisters ended up being separated and my mother sent to an orphanage.
I was born in England, but I knew I was from a big Irish family. The stereotype comments always the same. ‘Did your mum and dad not have a television?’ ‘Did they not practice the rhythm method?’ I think I was eleven when I found out this wasn’t a dance. As before I thought it was an Irish jig! My parents were strong and confident, however, so I was easily able to shake them off.
My childhood was a constant adventure, and if not being filled with stories of the past, filled with dramas made by my siblings.
School
I went to a convent school and was taught by nuns, and for a while thought this meant I had to be holy. Or at least very good. I saw these nuns as not having committed a sin in their life, or ever having a bad thought. The Mother Superior was very quietly spoken and would stand ramrod straight on the stage for assembly. The hall would become completely silent. It would be possible to hear the rustle of clothing, but not even this if she was cross. She would hardly have to do anything to express this emotion, a small lift of one hand, a raise of her eyebrows – and everyone would know.
I remember one particular day when the school was gathered, Mother Superior slightly shaking with anger. Disgrace had been brought to the school! Girls were fraternizing with the workmen on sight! Smoking! Behaving in an unladylike manner! Well, it only took for her to say this and I fainted clean away. She was meaning me. My friend and I were 12 at the time and were in love with one of the men. We took endless trips to the loo so that we could pass him. We put roll-on-perfume on our knees. As standing as he was in a deep hole, laying pipes, he would smell the perfume better from our knees than if on our necks.
When I came to, Sister Oliver was fanning me wondering what caused me to faint. I then learned it was the lower sixth form girls that were the ones in trouble. They had rolled up their skirts – and they were smoking cigarettes too. I never did anything naughty again – at least not in school. Instead, I started reading, real adult books. Mills and Boons with lots lovely love stories that I thought were real.
Sad times
In any large number of people, the law of averages determine that the probability is that some are going to die young. In a large family it is the same. From twelve siblings, there are more than a couple of dozen grandchildren, and even more great grandchildren. These siblings come together for weddings, christenings, parties. They never expect to come together for the funeral of one of their own children. It changes you. It changes conversations. It changes everything.
Reading
I stopped reading romances when I was 18 and went onto to reading crime stories. Strangers on a Train made me fall in love with the genre. To kill a Mockingbird made me fall in love with the characters. A whole new world had opened up to me. I could go anywhere, be anywhere, as long as I had a good book I was complete. On holiday, all I wanted to do was read. There has only been a handful of times in my adulthood where I haven’t read a book. The day my father died and the day my mother died were two occasions. I confess I read on my wedding night (only for ten minutes and only after he was asleep).
Reading is my constant love – it always will be. I just wish time would stop. So I could read forever.
Liz Lawler grew up sharing pants, socks, occasionally a toothbrush, sleeping four to a bed. Born in Chatham and partly raised in Dublin, she is one of fourteen children. She spent over twenty years as a nurse and has since fitted in working as a flight attendant, a general manager of a five star hotel, and is now working with trains. She became an author in 2017 when her debut novel Don’t Wake Up was published by Twenty7.
