Book description
A young nurse's life is forever changed by war...
Orphan Mabel Court's dreams come true when she enters the Booth
Street Poor Law Infirmary as a probationer nurse. But it is August
1914, and her world is about to be turned upside down.
She soon meets Norah McLoughlin, another probationer, and the two
girls - together with Mabel's childhood friend Maudie, now a
music-hall dancer - become firm friends.
As war rages across Europe, they try to keep their spirits up but
when Mabel's fiancé Harry Drover is wounded at the battle of the
Somme, Mabel realises that the life she and Harry had always hoped for
is now an impossibility. Then when Maudie falls pregnant by an
officer, and Norah's young man is lost at sea, all three girls are
forced to face the fact that life will never be the same again...
Maggie Bennett was born in Hampshire. When she left school at
eighteen she started general nursing training and, after a year as a
staff nurse, she went on to train as a midwife. Her career was
interrupted by marriage at thirty-five, and she moved to Manchester
where her two daughters were born; she later returned to work as a
midwife until her retirement in 1991. Having been an avid reader and
scribbler all her life, she took a correspondence course in creative
writing after her husband's death in 1983, and started writing articles
and short stories. Her first novel,
A Child's Voice Calling
, was published in 2002.
