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her problems. She’d been fourteen when she had first composed a letter to the Western Infirmary up in Glasgow about nursing training. When she had received a polite and businesslike reply telling her she couldn’t be considered until she was eighteen it had seemed such a long way away.
    All through school and after - when she had done a course at commercial college to learn how to type and do shorthand, activities which didn’t interest her in the slightest; when she had gone to work at Murray’s - eighteen had been the magic number. It had twinkled on the horizon, out of reach but edging slowly closer, full of hope and promise, offering her the opportunity to fulfil a dream which had matured over the years into the desire to do something useful with her life: to help others, to make a difference.
    She could remember every detail of the time she had spent at Blawarthill Hospital when she’d had scarlet fever as a child. Being carried down the stairs at Radnor Street wrapped up in a red blanket, her mother and Granny waiting anxiously on the pavement by the horse-drawn ambulance which was to take her away.
    Sadie, a young mother who’d already lost one child to the dreadful disease, had been pale and silent, her face stricken with grief and fear. Granny, a comforting arm laid along her daughter-in-law’s thin shoulders, had smiled at Liz and told her to be a good girl and get better soon. Her father had been standing on the pavement a step or two away from his mother and his wife.
    Liz, only eight years old, had known that her brother George had gone off in a closed carriage like the one to which she was being carried - and had never come back. One afternoon, without any sort of an explanation, she and Eddie had been taken to his funeral. Liz watched the small white coffin being lowered into the ground, turned to her mother and asked, ‘Is that heaven down there? Where they’re putting Georgie?’ No one had given her an answer.
    About to be put into the ambulance, her father opening the door for the nurse who was carrying her, Liz made the terrifying connection between what was happening to her and what had happened to her wee brother. Turning to her father, she reached out for him.
    ‘Daddy, Daddy! Don’t let them put me down the big hole!’
    But William MacMillan, his face shuttered, had taken a step back from his daughter’s outstretched arms. Without a word of farewell to his daughter or comfort to his wife he turned on his heel and walked back into the close. The next thing Liz knew she was in the darkness of the ambulance, weeping as though her heart would break.
    And then, small and scared and lonely, Liz’s paroxysms of grief had subsided to an exhausted sobbing, and a nurse at Blawarthill had laid a cool hand on her hot brow and told her that everything would be all right. The woman had sat with her and talked to her, offering much-needed comfort and reassurance to a very frightened little girl.
    Her mother had been allowed to visit once a week, and even then they had only been permitted to look at each other through a window. They hadn’t been able to talk to each other. Her father hadn’t visited at all.
    But Liz had survived, gradually regaining her health and strength, and eventually being allowed to go home. She had never forgotten the kindness of that nurse, and of the others who’d looked after her during her six weeks away from home.
    As she grew older, Liz came to realize that nursing was what she wanted to do with her life too.
    Now, at long last, she had got there - only for the dream to be cruelly snatched out of her reach by her own father. She’d always believed he would have preferred it if Georgie had been the one to survive, not her. He was proud of Eddie but he didn’t seem to think daughters were much use for anything.
    Liz groaned, and pulled her knees up more tightly. She tried not to revisit the bad memories too often. Sometimes they seemed to crawl up to the surface of their