Nurses

Over the years my students included four qualified nurses, If you are in Eastbourne, Brighton Stafford or Nottingham you might bump into one of them at your local hospital, unless they’ve gone home, that is. Home to Andalucia, where the only work available was – and probably still is - poorly paid agency work for the Seguridad Social. All the permanent posts were filled unless someone died or retired. If you were lucky you might swing a job at one of the private palaces on the coast. All marble and glass, these places’ patients were the rich Russians, Germans, Scandinavians and British. And politicians, local and national.

So, maybe, Rosa, MariaTe, Jennifer and Cristina have moved back to the little town where I used to live, maybe their English has been perfected by years of work for the NHS and they’ve finally got one of those dream jobs down by Puerto Banus. I remember Cristina did an on-line interview over Skype to gauge her English. She was just about OK in my opinion. I often wondered how much Spanish the interviewer spoke. Cristina passed and pretty much didn’t look back. Things were complicated at home for her. Cristina would have been 28 when she left. Seven years of short term contracts, agency work: “this and that”, as I’d told her not to say to anyone in authority when she got to Nottingham.

I never heard from any of them in person, but families (except Cristina’s) used to keep me posted. Rosa went two steps up the ladder and became an Advanced Nurse Practioner, her cousin told me, outside a filling station on the outskirts of town. Neither of us had much idea what that actually meant. Jennifer left the NHS, took a job in PR and events management and married a black guy from Newcastle. Her sister told me that, at the Mercadona checkout. The rest of the family had stopped talking to her.

MariaTe came out over in England. Her cousin Victor just dropped it into the conversation. He would have liked to himself, he told me once, He was a car-mechanic. I was probably the only person he ever told, aside from, well, you know.

“It’s different for guys, down here.” He said.

It’s three years now since we drove north, retracing our journey through Spain and France fifteen years before. I loved our little town, but sometimes it was just too small town for me.

And Cristina too, I reckon.