Mary J. MacLeod has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 4 ratings. The most-rated is Nurse, Come You Here!.
Call the Nurse
Summary
Recalling the classic works by James Herriot and the new British hit Call the Midwife, a nurse’s heartwarming adventures with her family while practicing in rural Scotland. Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband, George, encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud and startled owners of a near-derelict croft house - a farmer’s stone cottage - on “a small acre” of land. Mary assumed duties as the island’s district nurse. Call the Nurse is her account of the enchanted years she and her family spent there, coming to know its folk as both patients and friends. In anecdotes that are by turns funny, sad, moving, and tragic, she recalls them all, the crofters and their laird, the boatmen and tradesmen, young lovers and forbidding churchmen. Against the old-fashioned island culture and the grandeur of mountain and sea unfold indelible stories: a young woman carried through snow for airlift to the hospital; a rescue by boat; the marriage of a gentle giant and the island beauty; a ghostly encounter; the shocking discovery of a woman in chains; the flames of a heather fire at night; an unexploded bomb from World War II; and the joyful, tipsy celebration of a ceilidh. Gaelic fortitude meets a nurse’s compassion in these wonderful true stories from rural Scotland.
©2012, 2013 Mary J. MacLeod. Foreword c. 2013 by Lady Claire Macdonald (P)2013 Audible, Inc.
Nurse, Come You Here!
Summary
Mary J. Macleod and her husband left the London area for an idyllic place to raise their young children in the late '60s, and they found the island of Papavray in the Scottish Hebrides. There they bought a croft house on a "small acre" of land, and Mary J. (also known as Julia) became the district nurse. At the age of 80, she first recounted her family's adventures in her debut, Call the Nurse, where she introduced listeners to the austere beauties of the island and the hardy charm and warmth of the islanders. The anecdotes in this new volume take us to the end of her stay on Papavray, after which the MacLeod family left for California. Once again we meet the crofters Archie, Mary, and Fergie, and other friends. There are stories of troubles, joy, and tragedy, of children lost and found, the cow that wandered into the kitchen, a distraught young mother who strides into the icy surf with her infant child, and the ghostly apparition that returns after death to reveal the will in a sewing box. There are accidents and broken bones, twisters that come in from the sea, and acts of simple courage and uncommon generosity. Here again a nurse's compassion meets Gaelic fortitude in these true tales of a bygone era.
©2014 Mary J. MacLeod; First North American Edition 2015 (P)2015 Audible, Inc.