New Book by Carol Ann Creagh

Carol Ann Creagh

It started with a cheque...

One day I was rummaging through my memory box for old letters from my dad and I came across the little blue box that so long ago had contained my nurses fob watch. The Ingersoll watch now long gone but what the box still held was priceless. An old cheque dated 22nd Sept 1975. A time long gone but when I held that tiny piece of paper it transported me back to the foyer of Erskine House Nurses Home and my dad squeezing that cheque into the palm of my hand on my first day of nursing.

“That’s for emergencies” he said as he hugged me good bye and left me to stand on my own two feet for the first time in my seventeen years. That night I slipped it underneath my watch case lining and promised myself that I would never use it unless I was really desperate. I wanted my parents to know that I could fend for myself and as I still have that now faded piece of paper, I hope my dad would be proud that those emergencies never arose. Though that’s not technically true as I was broke many, many times during those three years but I was determined I wouldn’t use it.

Holding it in my hand it evoked so many wonderful memories of my three years training in the Belfast City Hospital. Outside, Belfast may have been tearing itself apart with a festering hatred, some spilling onto our wards, but inside those workhouse buildings and the high rise of Erskine House we found sanctuary.

So maybe it was a story to be told.

At that stage it was a thought but then a second event brought Angel City to life. My partner had to attend the Cancer Centre every day for seven weeks in 2022. A building I myself had frequented too often with my own cancer over the years. So, as I sat and waited and watched as worried faces lined up for their turn in the radiotherapy machine I looked out of the building towards Erskine House. Across the car park I counted three windows over on the top floor and smiled for the memories. Young nurses ready to take on adulthood under the watchful eyes of nursing officers and wardens. No thoughts of cancer centres or harsh treatments, all our thoughts were to when we’d get paid and where we’d spend it. Like any young girls we just wanted to have fun.

So, over the days waiting on my partner, I penned my story. Surrounded by the remnants of the stone workhouses I felt they spoke to me as I wrote chapter after chapter.

I wasn’t just writing the book I was actually sitting in the book.

But like my books before: -

Angels under My Bed. My Cancer journey & A Short Stretch of the Legs, My Penny Mile Camino, it was left under my bed for a year while I got on with being a mummy to six and a nanny to six.

But then at the beginning of the year a return to that carpark and that hospital for a scan but this time myself, I thought I owed it to that wee student nurse back in 1975 and all those other nurses to save their story to paper.

So, Anya from North Belfast, Mary from Derry and Brigid from Donegal began their great adventure into the world of books. Sharing shelves with the great and the good this accidental writer is so proud that her girls are finding their way.

During the writing I was like a protective parent and like any parent when it’s time to set them free it’s an emotional time as I hope the readers will grow to love them as much as I do.