A Weekend in the Garden

the long version

June 1951 in The Garden - a small cottage hospital in rural Kent when antibiotics were still regarded as new wonder drugs, the patients wireless-headphones as luxuries, and the first television set had not yet arrived. And where the hard-pressed staff had to deal with the heatwave, staff shortages, pile-ups on the new bypass, post-war austerity, their own and their patients’ personal problems, and the first effects of the three-year-old National Health Service. This story of one hot, hectic weekend in the hospital puts staff, patients, visitors - and love - under a microscope. Two men love the same woman and all three know in full what love means and costs; and that other love between staff and patients that was as tangible as the long hours and short pay. Whatever happens, the life of the hospital goes on and being a normal hospital, tears, laughter, grumbles, tragedy, joy and shining courage are part of its normal life. In the new novel from Lucilla Andrews, the second of the trilogy begun with *One Night in London*, we follow the lives of the four young people who worked together in ‘Wally’s’ Ward in the much-bombed St Martha’s Hospital on that traumatic night.