Sarah Beeson - Our Country Nurse - Can East End Nurse Sarah find a new life caring for babies in the country?

Suddenly, I was worried about my appearance and took my compact out from my large brown leather handbag and inspected my face. I cleaned my black-rimmed glasses with a tissue and popped them back primly on the end of my pale-skinned nose. I bit my lips and pinched my cheeks to give myself a hint of colour and rapidly ran my fingers through my tangle of long dark hair. Futilely I attempted to pull at the edges of my shorts towards my bare knees and cast a withering look at my raffia platform sandals looking mockingly up at me.

Taking a deep breath I knocked on the bright-yellow door of Mrs Farthing at Primrose Cottage. There was no answer. I tried again and waited a few minutes but nothing. I tried my own front door but it was locked. I could feel panic rising within me – what if there really had been a mistake and no one was expecting me at all?

My anxiety was broken by the sound of a squeak and a clanging of metal, shortly followed by the appearance of an old man with a crinkled tanned face and salt and pepper hair making his wobbly way down the street on a boneshaker of a bicycle. He was whistling to himself, completely unperturbed by the inharmonious clatter and whining of his transportation. He was balancing metal buckets on each side of the handlebars and a ladder was resting lengthways across his lap. When he saw me dawdling on the pavement outside the row of cottages his face lit up and crumpled even further at the eyes and mouth.

‘Hello there, Nurse,’ he called cheerily. ‘She’ll be out the back. We couldn’t stand waiting indoors, not on such a beauty of a day.’

I smiled but didn’t know what to say. Was this Mr Farthing?

He hopped nimbly off his bicycle and opened the door to the side passage. ‘Follow me, Nurse,’ he instructed as he took the metal buckets filled with chicken feed with him down the narrow dark tunnel. Obediently I followed. As he emerged ahead of me into the sunlight he called, ‘Flo, the Nurse is here. She’s arrived!’

Flo Farthing had the same tanned skin as her husband, her greying dark hair swept neatly up into a bun. She was deftly picking tomatoes from a vine, standing completely at ease in a garden filled with bed upon bed of flowers, fruit and vegetables. It’s like Mr McGregor’s garden, I thought pleasantly – any minute now I will see a fat little brown rabbit popping out from a watering can. There were mature fruit trees at the back and I was sure there was a goat grazing on a stretch of pasture that ran along the end of the lane. Mrs Farthing was neat as a new pin and wore a white fitted knee-length shirt dress with green leaves and vines on it. She was diminutive and comfortingly plump, her arms and legs muscular and bronzed from a life lived outdoors. When she saw me her face lit up and she hurried towards us, hens half-flapping away at her feet, eager to get to the metal buckets of feed Mr Farthing was carrying.

I stretched out my hand and introduced myself, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Farthing. I’m Sarah Hill, the new health visitor.’

‘Well, I’m very pleased to meet you, Nurse,’ she gushed. ‘But we’ll have none of this Mr and Mrs Farthing business. I’m Flo and he’s Clem. You follow me – I’ll take you up to the flat and get the kettle on. As you know, Clem and I are the caretakers for the clinic. I keep it spick and span and look after you ladies, and Clem does any odd jobs that need doing. We’ve given your flat a good set-to this morning, haven’t we, Clem?’

Clem nodded in accordance with his wife and tossed a handful of feed to the clucking hens. ‘I’m going to check on Bessie.’

I looked enquiringly. ‘The pig,’ explained Flo. ‘An Essex we got from Joe Rudcliff at Treetops Farm for fattening. And right soft Clem is about it too. Calls it Queen Bess for crying out loud.’ Clem said nothing and hurried away to the pig sty at the back of their cottage garden. ‘You mark my words, Clement Farthing, come Easter that porker will do very nicely indeed.’ Flo’s words disappeared on the cool early autumn breeze. She rearranged her face from scolding to motherly and said encouragingly, ‘Follow me, dear. We’ll pop in through the back gate.’

‘You have a beautiful garden,’ I said admiringly.

She beamed with pride. ‘We’ve been here over 40 years. Since the day we were married.’

Flo expertly picked her way through poultry, garden produce and tools to the back lane, where the goat was thoughtfully chewing on someone else’s washing line. I thought of all my belongings left unattended on the street and felt uneasy. It seemed funny to be going in through the back door.

‘I think I better go back to my car and get the boxes to carry up to the flat first,’ I suggested weakly.

‘No need for that. Clem will do it. You don’t need to lift a finger. Give me your car keys, Nurse.’

I reluctantly pulled out my precious keys from the pocket of my denim shorts. ‘CLEM-eennntt,’ called Flo loudly. Clem popped his head up over the garden fence. Flo chucked the keys at him without saying a word and he gave a little half-salute and scuttled off to do her bidding.

A few yards down the lane was a tatty-looking gate that stood between two enormous blackberry bushes, with a rusty catch on it. Flo struggled to open the rusty catch and gave the gate a good kick; in response it opened with a shrill squeak.

‘I’ll get Clem to oil that tonight,’ she said more to herself than to me. ‘This is the garden. You go into the clinic through the front door of the cottage. You see there’s a side passage next to that little car park – well, that’ll bring you from the street right to your garden. The stairs are at the back to give you a little bit of privacy.’

She tutted as we walked down the long narrow plot, past the ancient apple, pear and cherry trees, neglected vegetable patches and an abandoned greenhouse. I looked at my garden longingly. It had so much potential. This was good earth. I could save a fortune if I got it going again.

‘I hope you don’t think Clem and I have been neglecting our duties,’ whispered Flo. ‘Only Nurse Hunter, who was the old district nurse who lived in the cottage until three months back, wouldn’t touch the garden. Wouldn’t let us lend a hand neither. She let it go to wrack and ruin. It’s criminal.’

‘Oh, dear. I like gardening. Perhaps you and Clem could help me restore it to its former glory, if it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Would you like that, Nurse?’ I nodded enthusiastically. ‘It would be an absolute pleasure. I’ve got a good feeling about you,’ she whispered conspiratorially, nudging me gently in the ribs.

‘Didn’t the new district nurse want the cottage?’ I asked as Flo rummaged in her pockets for the keys.

‘Oh, that one. She’s not much older than you and she likes a good time. No, Nurse Bates didn’t want to be in Totley. She turned down Ivy Cottage and opted for the bright lights of Maidstone. Wants to be near all them discotheques and swanky restaurants if you ask me.’

I quite liked the sound of Nurse Bates already. I was only in my mid-twenties; maybe I should have opted for nightlife over country life too. I’d been so thrilled to be offered the job and the flat that I hadn’t really thought about how much I was giving up by moving to the sticks. Oh well, too late now, I said to myself. And I really was quite excited about my garden. I’d done plenty of going out during my Hackney days – it was time to be grown-up off-duty as well as on, I resolved.

‘If you don’t mind me saying, Nurse, you’re the youngest health visitor I’ve seen – by a long way.’

I smiled. I didn’t say actually the youngest in the country by all accounts.

Flo produced the keys and held them up to my face. ‘Want to open the door to your new home?’ she asked with a twinkle in her grey eyes. I eagerly took them off her and rattled the heavy old key in the archaic lock. Flo ceremoniously pushed open the pale-blue door with a flourish and stepped back to let me cross the threshold to my new home.