Early on, she met up with two officials
also on their travels - James Grigor, inspector of science and art for the
Scottish schools and Murdo Morrison, superintendent of schools for the shire
of Inverness.
Grigor
and Morrison kept an eye out for her and arranged lifts by boat or car.
They became good chums on the journey - and later on - lifelong friends.
"Two
nurses at Crieff, a prosperous little
place, were lodged in one cottage with a nice white-capped maid. They
had a complete dispensary. Several nurses were in lodgings where their
meals were served them, by their landladies, in their own sitting rooms
before a coal fire. "
At Oban she was met by the county's health
representatives:
"With
their help, a map, the mail coaches, the mail boats and a few motor tours
for tourists, for whom the season was only just closing, I got to see
many of the district nurses in Argyll. I found that almost everybody was
named Campbell - many of the nurses, three out of the four honorary district
secretaries of the nursing service, and practically all of the patients!
The most moving place of all to me in Argyllshire was the island of Iona,
where every stone and every bit of sand a moor, held a prayer.
From
there she travelled "with quickened pulse" to Stornoway and
her ultimate goal - the Outer Hebrides
"In
the Hebrides, the Highlands and Islands Medical and Nursing Service had
special administrative problems. Every doctor and nurse had to be Gaelic
speaking. Those in the Catholic islands had to be Catholics and those
in the Presbyterian islands had to be Presbyterians.
She
described Lewis as "like no
other part of the planet" where she met with unending kindness by
families people in living in the traditional black houses - people sharing
the same roof as hens and cows.
"But
I will say this for the black houses - they were the only warm ones I
found in Great Britain.
"Two
of the six days I spent on the island of Lewis I gave to Ness - a village
of several scattered hamlets where about four thousand people lived, nearly
all in the black houses. To reach the Butt of Lewis and Ness, I took the
twenty seven mile drive across the moors in a baker's cart. The two fine
nurse-midwives had arranged for me to stay at an inn called Thule House."
Then
she engaged a motor to drive her the 36 miles to Tarbert at the tip of North Harris where she found Miss Maclean "an exceptionally
fine nurse living in a cottage hospital with a small operating room and
accommodations for four or five patients. Miss MacLean did a generalized
nursing service, including midwifery, for eighteen scattered villages.
She was lucky that the physician for that area, Dr Ross, lived at Tarbert
so that she could get in touch with him quickly. Both doctor and nurse
thought their chief difficulty lay in getting about. The winds were so
terrible that bicycles were almost useless and they had to walk miles
over the moors to reach their patients."
"Of
all the islands I have every known anywhere, from the Mediterranean to
Canada, Barra is the most beautiful.
The whole island had only about twenty two hundred people, who lived
along the coast where they fished, caught lobsters, and tilled their bits
of crofts. The road, the only one, runs around the thirteen miles of coast.
There had never been a motorcar on it. The only doctor on Barra, under
the Highlands and Islands scheme, rode a horse.
She
met "Nurse MacMillan, the Queen's Nurse at Castle Bay (who) took
me for a walk of several miles along the west coast, seeing patients en
route and stopping with Father MacIntyre and the schoolmaster for tea.
He lived near the church and school in a group of crofts called Craigston.
It was a happy afternoon"
The
following afternoon she went to see Nurse Gatt. "After tea, I went
with Miss Gatt to see a baby she had brought into the world at five o'clock
that morning, and its mother
. when we had made the mother and baby
Margaret comfortable, and built up their peat fire, we started back across
the bay which was a mile wide at that point."
They
then got soaked but made it back to the North Bay where the priest Father
MacDonald, irritated that a female visitor had been offered the bed at
the post office usually kept for commercial travellers, arranged for his
housekeeper to prepare his guest room usually kept for bishops.
"Although
it was nearly ten o'clock at night, they had a fire ready for Nurse Gatt
and me and had cooked a fish four our supper. They dried out our wet things,
and were so kind with their simple resources that I shall never forget
them. Then the housekeeper, who had lent me her clothes, filled a hot
water bottle for me and put me to bed in the ecclesiastical bed chamber.
"
Heading
the next day for Eriskay she was asked
to take two sickly and motherless children, Kitty and John, to the cottage
hospital on South Uist.
"(Eriskay)
had no doctors but a splendid Queen's Nurse-midwife, Miss Martin, in whose
work I was keenly interested. Her nearest physician, on South Uist, could
reach her on call when the seas were not too high.
"At
Ersikay we were warmly greeted not only by Nurse Martin but by Father
MacIsaac, the secretary of the Eriskay District Nursing Association, eighty
per cent of whose founds were met out of the Highlands and Islands grant.
I left the children with Father MacIsaac while I went with the nurse to
see some of her patients.
"The
poorest-clad children that I saw anywhere on my travels in the Hebrides
were those of Eriskay. Later, when I was back at Edinburgh, I went into
a shop, and then went broke - buying warm woollies for them. All of the
nurses who had been kind to me needed things for their work and it was
a joy to send them but Eriskay was the only district where I found the
children markedly underclothed."
On South Uist she did not heed an old
woman's warning in Gaelic and went to on climb Ben Kenneth and got caught
in mists and got lost. The old woman went to her rescue and brought her
in for a tea and a scone and a warm fire. Conversation was limited - the
old lady only had Gaelic.
"I
doubt if she had ever met an American woman before. She ran right to me
and grasped my hand and shook it and beamed. The thought of her and of
her poverty haunted me long after I had gone back to the inn, where I
wrote down her name. She was so great a lady that I did not dare to send
her anything that would like repayment of her hospitality. When I had
gone back to cities, I chose two large, colored pictures of animals and
children, nicely framed, and sent them to her. I thought she wouldn't
mind a gift like that.
The
next day she went on to meet the nurse on Benbecula - and discovered the hazard of quicksands.
"The
nurses in those parts visited some of their patients on bits of islets,
fordable at low tide only. They tried to make their crossings then, in
order to save boat hire, and often ran danger form the incoming tides
and from the quicksand. Their work was heroic.
On North Uist I caught a mail cart that
dropped me off with the Fergusons of Clachan who handled the mails and
ran the only store. They kept me to tea, warmed me, and located the district
nurse-midwife for me to meet. North Uist had four of these wonderful women
and a doctor - all under the Highlands and Islands Grant and with keen
local committees.
Words
actually failed Mary at the end of her journey:
"The
time had come when I must leave the Hebrides. I have tried to tell what
they meant to me. To the Frontier Nursing Service, in after years, all
that I gathered from these islands was to mean more than I can put into
words.
Her
final visits on the mainland Ullapool "where I spent a day and night
in the study of the nursing thereabouts. This, the northernmost part of
Scotland I reached in my travels lay in moors of indescribable beauty."
"At Dingwall, Dr MacLean and his wife
overwhelmed me with courtesies, driving me everywhere, feeding me lavishly,
and introducing me to their dogs and their friends. From Dingwall I went
to Inverness to see Dr MacDonald.
He too was all that is kind."
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