The Islands in the Bay – Chapter (083) Hospital Visit

 

Abbottsford born Marion Monaghan moved to the Island the previous summer and immediately became infatuated with a young man twelve years younger than she was and they had a torrid Summer romance, until she came to her senses in the Autumn.

But not before she had been put through a long hot intimate summer workout by farmers son Derek Wilson which had kept her well limbered up, but in the end, she accepted the absurdity of dating a boy of 22.

 

She was a School Teacher at St Joan of Arc Junior School in St Pierre and on Monday morning she was walking towards the building carrying homework she had been marking over the weekend, when she tripped and fell on the steps, and got a rather nasty gash on her leg.

So Johnny Lemon, the School Head, offered to drive her to the Bellevue Cottage Hospital.

 

The hospital was originally built by the army during the Great War when Beaumont Manor was commandeered by the Medical Corp for convalescing officers before returning to the front, but as the war went on, they found they needed to expand beyond convalescence.

After the armistice it remained War Office property but fell into disuse between the wars but was quickly brought back into service following the outbreak of World War Two.

The island played a much more active role between 1940 and 1945 with a radar station at Spaniards Point and two anti-aircraft batteries, and barrage balloons outside St Pierre and Spaniards Creek and the hospital saw more action as a result.

Two years after the end of the war the military left the island, leaving the fully equipped hospital mothballed but intact behind them and the Manor house became the Beaumont Manor Hotel.

The hospital would have remained in mothballs indefinitely had it not been for an outbreak of poliomyelitis on the mainland during 1949 and again in 1950 meant that the powers that be decided to get the hospital running again, if only in the short term, but a polio outbreak, coupled with high numbers of TB patients, meant that the short term lasted into the 1960’s when it was decided to update and improve the main buildings and add on a large extension.     

The hospital and the attached medical centre catered well for the islanders’ basic needs, but for more important treatments and surgeries, patients needed to travel to the mainland, which they would need to do by ferry, water taxi or some other vessel or in extreme cases a helicopter.

 

Johnny drove her to the hospital, and he parked as close to the entrance as possible and walked her inside and after waiting for a few minutes they were attended to by Nurse Kevin Holland.

“Oh dear what have you been up to?” Kevin asked

“Not looking where I was going, I suppose” she replied.

“Well let’s take some details and then we can get you sorted out”

 

After booking her in with Heather Edwards they sat in the waiting area for about ten minutes before the Nurse called her and took them into a cubicle.

“You don’t need to stay” she said

“Are you sure?” Johnny asked

“Absolutely sure”

“Well call me when you’re done, and I’ll pick you up” Johnny said

 

After Johnny left, Kevin went through the basics with her, and ten minutes after that he was cutting the leg of her tights after which he irrigated the wound.

 

Kevin Holland was born and bred on the island and had worked at the Bellevue Hospital as a Nurse for five years, and he lived with his brother who was the St Pierre Harbour Master, and he had something in common with his patient because he too had dated someone considerably younger than him and, in his case, it lasted a year.

Stable girl Lisa Scott was a much younger woman than Kevin.

It was very flattering for him at the time to have a stunningly attractive girlfriend on his arm, and his mates were well impressed, and at the time he looked upon her merely in those terms.

At first, he couldn’t believe she would possibly be interested in an older man like him.

Even though they laughed and joked together, and she flicked at her hair flirtatiously, he was flattered but he never thought it would lead anywhere, to think it would, was the stuff of cheap fiction, or so he thought, but he was wrong.

But it could never last because they had absolutely nothing in common, except the sex, which was good, but it was the bits in between the sex where real relationships dwelt.

Lisa wasn’t happy when he broke up with her, but he knew she would find someone better than him.