When I was a teenager, I
inherited my Grandmother Isabella’s medical instruments and a strange string of
beads. Nobody knew their true story, because Isabella had chosen not to tell,
but a rumour remained. As I ran the cold glassiness of the beads over my hands,
I would wonder. Was it true that she had served as a doctor during WW1? Had
these beads really been given to her by a grateful German prisoner of war?
Imagining some wounded hero falling for Isabella and her stethoscope in a
romance that smashed through enemy lines, I promised myself that, sometime, I
would find out the truth.
Decades later, I dredged
up my skills as a research scientist and began my quest. Isabella had left so
little evidence that I was thrilled when she turned up in Edinburgh, even more
so when she materialised in the Imperial War Museum, and in the Wellcome
Library, my astonished whoop disturbed all the other researchers.
Then, one day, the
excitement was over. The research was done. My friends were intrigued by the
tale: it had a classic narrative arc and it was so unusual that it deserved a
place in the WW1 commemorations. But how was I to write it up? I had long since
deserted science in favour of art and storytelling, and years spent helping
people in the Welsh valleys tell their own tales had made me obsessive about
how stories were told. Worthy accounts that killed fascinating lives by merely
presenting a cautious list of facts drove me mad.
Idealistically, I wanted
readers to be able to slip themselves into my grandmother’s high-heeled
button-boots and race through the pages. I wanted people who would never have
considered reading a book about a WW1 woman doctor to find themselves gripped.
 |
| Isabella relaxing at a hospital on Malta during the First World War |
Should I try fiction?
Certainly not - the most important thing about this story was that it was true.
I spotted a course at Ty Newydd in North Wales: Creative nonfiction. Curious, I
booked in. And found the logical solution to my conundrum. Giving myself a working
definition - ‘Nonfiction written as engagingly as a novel’ - I tried it out.
It was hard, even harder
than writing up a Ph.D. thesis. Using the fiction-writer’s devices to capture
the truth without losing historical accuracy, introducing bias or committing
any other punishable academic crime made every word a challenge. But there were
rewards: a diary enabled me to feel each day of Isabella’s life in a French
hospital in 1915, an information gap tossed me into the world of ancient
questionnaires, and letters scribbled in the gloriously imperial accent of the
time gave voices to important characters, allowing dialogue to break up the
prose.
But one worry remained:
without access to Isabella’s feelings, was the book doomed to be dry, however
much I tried to make the prose live? I started thinking about two books I had
loved: Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with
Amber Eyes. It was not their conclusions that had kept me reading, it was their
descriptions of how they had reached those conclusions - their detective work -
that had made both those books unputdownable.
I was tempted - people
liked detective tales. That showed in the audience ratings for Saturday night
thrillers. I made my choice. Like de Waal and Tey, I decided to relish letting
the joys and frustrations of sleuthing become part of the tale, as they really
had been from the moment when I began to investigate until the dramatic end,
when the solution to the mystery of Isabella’s beads had finally revealed
itself and I had discovered the identity of their donor. But of course, I
cannot tell whether the book has done what I wanted - only readers can decide
that.
*
The Mystery of Isabella and the
String of Beads: A Woman Doctor in WW1, published by Loke Press, is available on
Amazon and by order from all good bookshops. The Ebook is available for seven
days at a reduced price especially to readers of this blog. Click here for the
link. And, if you enjoy the book, then please post a
review on Amazon about it too.
*
Katrina Kirkwood, @kkstories,
a former medical research scientist with a passion for stories, is Doctor
Isabella Stenhouse’s granddaughter. Equipped with two science degrees and an
art degree, she spent many years helping people in the South Wales valleys turn
their stories into mini-films before embarking on her quest to solve the
mystery of Isabella and her beads. An evening class in Cardiff and a course at
Ty Newydd got her started, while mentoring by The Literary Consultancy helped
her bring Isabella together. Following features about Isabella on the BBC
Antiques Roadshow, in national newspapers, and on local radio and television,
Katrina has been invited to write about her grandmother for numerous magazines
and blogs. She moved to Norwich last year.
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