NURSE MABEL AND HER AMAZING FLEAS!: Angels of Mercy

Sunday, December 8

Angels of Mercy

In the First World War, nurses like Mabel (and my grandma) were sometimes called Angels of Mercy. I spotted these (with real wings - well, almost real) at World Travel Market in London a few weeks ago. They, and the WW1 officers behind, were promoting battlefield tours in Belgium. I have no doubt that the soldiers who were injured or killed there would have been only too glad to go on a Battlefield Tour with a nice cosy hotel every night - rather than experience the real thing.

One thing that is nice, though, is the way these nurses are laughing and having a good time. Grandma got a lot out of being a nurse, and looked back with satisfaction on her time on the ambulance train.

3 comments:

messymimi8 December 2013 at 06:13
No matter how many tours we take, we will never know how it truly was. Have the children writing this had such a tour, or a "virtual" tour?
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A Cuban In London12 December 2013 at 07:51
Indeed they would have chosen the hotel to the battlefield! :-)
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Darla16 December 2013 at 07:21
The nurses and the soldiers present a pretty tidy image of battles. Better than the real thing thats for sure.

Darla
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What's this about?

I'm Jenny. I'm a writer, and when I was a little girl, my Grandma had a mysterious knife. It was almost the only thing she had kept from her youth. But she would never tell me why she had kept it, and she never let me examine it closely. Years later, I found the knife and suddenly realised it was fashioned from a bullet, with Grandma's maiden name and the word SOUVENIR cut on it.

Then I remembered Grandma telling me how, as a lively teenager, she'd left her boring home and signed up as a nurse in the Great War without telling her parents. She said how she'd worked on an ambulance train in France, where she'd met my grandfather. So did he give her the treasured bullet knife? Or was there another mystery attached to it?

And so I've ended up working with Vanessa of London Dreamtime to help the children of Boutcher School to create an imaginative tale rooted in an imagined time. What better theme than the tale of a girl who left her home to work on an ambulance train?

But today's schools don’t smile upon stories of knives and bullets. So our heroine, Mabel, did not have a secret about a little knife. She had another secret....or, actually, five secrets...

Sunday, December 8

Angels of Mercy

3 comments:

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