My second granddaughter (aka GD2) is a midwife in Cambridge. There she has access to spotless facilities, the latest technology and the extensive expertise of a big teaching hospital. “You should read this memoir, Granny,” she said to me soberly the other day. “It’s astonishing.” So I did.
Anna Kent, a qualified nurse, was uneasy working in the comfort of the UK and vaguely dissatisfied with her very promising relationship with an eminently likeable and decent man. Although she has grown up in a comfortable, loving, supportive home in Shropshire, there are incidents in her past which haunt her. It’s the early 2000s. So she volunteers with Médicins sans Frontières (MSF), is accepted and, eventually, after some training, sent to the war-torn country we now call South Sudan for a nine month placement.
What she finds there is almost unbearable and she is plunged in at the deep end – sleeping in a tent and dealing with tragic, desperately serious medical issues every day as people come from miles around to access the pretty basic MSF clinic. Despite having no midwifery training she has to deal with women in labour, pre-eclampsia, retained placentas, sepsis and other things which fill her with anxiety and horror although she is actually good at what she does.
The trouble is that Anna is not strong mentally and very quickly gets bogged down in what she regards as her own inadequacy despite the warm support of her fellow nurse, James who becomes a lifelong friend. James has a long history of issues in his life (alcohol, drugs, failed relationships) but has come through it all to become a wise, kind adviser – and a fine nurse, now a gently un-judgemental Buddhist with a sense of humour. Perhaps we all need someone like James in our lives to be the still, small voice of calm. Another nurse, Anita becomes a wonderful long-term quasi-sister too.
As the months go by, Anna, to whom sharing problems doesn’t come naturally, becomes ever more distanced from her life in the UK. Only the here and now seems real. The horror can be discussed only with those who have seen it with her. It doesn’t take an psychiatrist to spot PTSD – it’s what left millions of men who fought in World War One unable to talk about what they’d experienced other than to former comrades. War zones and frontlines come in many different forms.
Once back in the UK Anna, still beset by guilt, trains as a midwife and then goes to Bangladesh with MSF to serve a huge refugee camp. Her accounts of the women she helps are very painful to read. And the ones she can’t help, obviously, are even more agonising. They haunt the reader as much as they do Anna. She’s a fine, graphic writer (she always wrote diaries) and her account of how, utterly terrified, she has to break up a dead baby to get it out of the poor woman’s body will stay with me for a very long time.
By the time she finally gets back to the UK her mental illness is severe and I couldn’t help wondering, despite all she achieves, whether she was ever actually cut out for field work. Her stress levels have made her physically ill and recourse to heavy drinking and smoking do nothing to help. Moreover, as a youngish woman, she craves for the “right” relationship (she details several failed ones) and children of her own. None of that goes well either although she does eventually find a settled life of sorts. And her daughter Aisha is, she says, the best thing which has ever happened to her. Not for nothing is the book subtitled: “My story of survival and keeping others safe.”
Published in 2023, this is one the most excoriatingly and powerfully truthful books I’ve ever read. Kent bravely and casually shares, in some detail, personal matters which most of us would hesitate to confide to our closest friends. Somehow, that simply adds to the authenticity. We believe every word she writes. And we are right to do so because she is no Raynor Winn. Her afterword carefully explains that she has changed details to disguise identity where necessary and that’s fine. Every writer of memoir (and I’ve done it so I know) has to do this. Moreover because she has, as far as possible, consulted the people she writes about, there are of course, some who asked to be omitted and she has respected that.
As any reader knows, some books disappear from consciousness almost before you’ve reached the last page. Others get right under your skin and stay with you permanently. This is going to be one of those. So thank you, Jasmine, for alerting me to it.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir
Cohen, Bernstein, Joni & Me continues at Upstairs at the Gatehouse, London until 1 February 2026.
