Our Country Nurse: Can East End Nurse Sarah find a new life caring for babies in the country?
Introducing Sean Dillon - terrorist, assassin, hero - in his first three adventures from master storyteller Jack Higgins.EYE OF THE STORMSean Dillon is a hired killer. The IRA, the PLO, ETA – he’s worked for them all. Now, with the Gulf War raging, the Iraqis need his services for an apocalyptic strike at the heart of the West. But British Intelligence are on his trail – they have hired a killer to stalk a killer; a mortal enemy who is hell-bent on revenge. As the lightning strikes and the bullets fly, Sean Dillon will discover how it feels to be at the eye of the storm…THUNDER POINTA diver discovers a priceless treasure off Thunder Point: a German U-boat containing proof that Martin Bormann escaped from Hitler’s bunker, bearing the most explosive secrets of the Third Reich – and the devastating document known as the Windsor Protocol. For the sake of national security, the U-boat must be destroyed, no questions asked. Sean Dillon, Britain’s most wanted terrorist, is about to be made an offer he cannot refuse…ON DANGEROUS GROUNDA deathbed confession from a Mafia kingpin reveals details of a top-secret treaty, believed lost in a plane crash in 1944. To keep it secret the British and Chinese governments will do whatever it takes. Soon, Sean Dillon enters the fray; his feared expertise tested as he battles ruthless killers and higher unseen powers to expose treacheries, colossal truths, and risk everything he loves in an explosive quest for justice.
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First published by HarperElement 2016
FIRST EDITION
© Sarah Beeson MBE and Amy Beeson 2016
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photograph © Stephen Mulcahey
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Source ISBN: 9780007520091
Ebook Edition © August 2016 ISBN: 9780007520107
Version: 2016-08-01
In memory of the late
May Paulus, Desiree Knox Whyte and Pat Wrennall:
wonderful health visitors, mentors and friends
Contents
In 1969 17-year-old Sarah Beeson – then Sarah Hill – arrived in Hackney in the East End of London to begin her nursing career. Six years later she went into health visiting, practising for over 35 years in Kent and Staffordshire, building up a lifetime’s expertise and stories through working with babies and families.
In 1998 Sarah received the Queen’s Institute for Nursing Award. In 2006 she was awarded an MBE for Services to Children and Families by Queen Elizabeth II.
She later married and became Sarah Beeson. Now she divides her time between Staffordshire and London.
Amy Beeson spent her childhood in rural Staffordshire. She is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, a scriptwriter and copywriter, and runs Wordsby, a branding and communications business. Amy studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, followed by an MA in Writing and Performance for Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York. She has won prizes for poetry, has had several plays performed and was a young playwright at the Birmingham Rep where she met her husband, writer Takbir Uddin. They now live in London with their daughter, Ava.
The early autumn sun made my eyelids flutter as my brand new green Mini sped round a sharp bend at which was yet another signpost promising that the village of Totley lay a short distance ahead of me. It seemed complicit with every twist and turn of the Kent countryside to keep the hilltop village from my eagerly searching eyes. It teased me, revealing woods, then a flash of a farm at the end of a long muddy road, and the odd white weather-boarded cottage tucked away in the brambles at the edge of a copse. I was starting to feel like the place I was searching for didn’t really exist; adding to my apprehension that the whole thing was a misunderstanding and when I arrived they’d tell me there had been an error and I hadn’t got the job at all. After all who’d want a twenty-something health visitor straight out of training?
The road was never straight for more than a minute. I’d driven all the way from my parents’ new townhouse in Staffordshire and I was desperate to be in my first home – just me, no brothers and sisters or flatmates – just me for the very first time in my life. To my great relief the raw countryside eventually gave way to high wooden gates that exposed only the numerous chimneys belonging to the big houses of the county set. And at long last a sign which read ‘Welcome to Totley’. I sighed; it was beautiful and quiet and so different from the streets of Hackney – it was like arriving in another world, as my eyes delighted in the beautiful stone walls nestling cottages with bow windows and front doors separated from the pavement by only narrow porches. I felt my spirits lift and drummed along to the beat of ‘Higher and Higher’ by Jackie Wilson on the car radio.
The steeple of St Agatha’s Church peeked out almost reticently from behind aged yew trees. As I cruised past the church a cacophony of bells rang out proudly from the belfry giving my arrival in the village a dreamlike feel. The heavy oak doors opened and wedding guests poured into the churchyard, idly nestling amongst the neglected gravestones having a quick solitary smoke or chatting in clusters of acquaintances. I looked on and smiled as the bride and groom surrounded by their closest family and friends were photographed by a man in a grey flannel suit with long sandy hair, a cigarette dangling from his lips as he forced elderly aunts in floral A-line dresses elbow to elbow with young groomsmen in stripy ill-fitting suits with yellow carnations in their buttonholes. The bride was radiant in a wide-brimmed floppy white hat and an empire-line scooped neck gown. Her dress billowed out in the breeze as she tightly held onto a small bouquet of indistinguishable pink flowers. Her bridesmaids enthusiastically tossed confetti over the happy couple, their shallow long-handled wicker baskets hung over their arms like handbags filled with yellow carnations.
