The Mary Tree - inspirations for a short story on BBC Radio 4 set at Little France

with Kind permission of Peter Stubbs edinphoto

'The Mary Tree' was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 31st January and is available on i-player here until 30th February 2016.

In each year since I've been writer-in-residence at the 'Sick Kids', I've written a Christmas or winter-themed short story for adult readers. The first two were set at the current Victorian building at Sciennes, but for my final year, I decided to focus on the place to which the hospital will move in 2017 and where building is already well under way - Little France at Edinburgh's southern edge. 

Short stories are mysterious and can be inspired by something as slight as an overheard snatch of conversation, a memory, the sight of a single shoe left somewhere. But for me they often arise from specific places.

I started taking the bus out to Little France and walking around the building site for the new hospital, circling its high white enclosure fence and watching the cranes soaring and the buildings growing. I also walked through the public parts of its established neighbour, the Royal Infirmary. 

I was curious about the name Little France and its history. Some say it's called after the residence of servants to Mary Queen of Scots, some believe it to be named after the French cloth workers who settled in this area in the 17th century. But in either case it is well documented that Mary Queen of Scots had stayed at nearby Craigmillar Castle, a fabulously evocative hilltop site which Illustrator-in-residence Cate James and I had visited with some patients as part of another of our hospital projects in summer 2015. 

It's also well documented that Queen Mary was responsible for planting various trees around Scotland, including one at Little France which stood close to what's now the hospital's main entrance and was said to be planted in 1566 when she was staying at the castle. People still remember it being there in the 1950s, protected by railings as an ancient monument, but reduced from its former grandeur to a blackened stump by that time.

From the Bartholomew 'Plan of Edinburgh and Leith', Edinburgh Geographical Institute 1912. National Library of Scotland.

There's always research involved before finding the essence of a story. It's as if the story has always been there and the writer has to dig for it in a process of gradual discovery. For this one I consulted tree experts, both about historic trees and about tree cultivation. I studied historic maps of the outskirts of Edinburgh which recollected the tree, including this one from 1912. I found a 1905 postcard of the tree online (above). Brainstorming always helps, so I took my 'ingredients' to some youngsters on one of the hospital wards who helped me tremendously with ideas as seen in the storyboard. Their story isn't quite the one that I told in the end, but has some similarities.

My story 'ingredients' - a teenage boy, a strange lady with a pramful of dogs, the building site for the new Sick Kids hospital, young trees, and the distant memory of a very old tree - prompted this storyboard of ideas from some young patients

However, there is always an element that arrives mysteriously; that offers itself up at the right moment. In this case it was a display of images, glimpsed as part of a temporary exhibition at the Royal Infirmary: lungs, looking so very like tree roots. 

This final element, together with a quirky old woman who had been forming in my mind and a teenage boy from Craigmillar began to link into a narrative that belonged to the area of landscaping and tree-planting happening now between Old Dalkeith Road and the perimeter fence of the Sick Kids building site. Of course the teenage boy turned out to be there because he was visiting his mother in the infirmary, with a lung complaint. And of course her name was also Mary.

Airways and blood vessels in lungs visualised in 3D (exhibition at ERI - Edinburgh Imaging + NHS Lothian)

A lofty neighbour for the new hospital

 During the late summer, as building work has been getting going on the site of the new hospital at Little France, Cate and I went to visit its elderly neighbour, Craigmillar Castle, with two families we met at the Hospital. Peering down at the building site from its hilltop, this mediaeval castle knows a thing or two about surviving for several centuries.

We had a fascinating time exploring the Castle and talking about the similarities between the buildings -- both adorned with unicorns. But the differences were greater. The Castle's defensive location and its tiny, hidden away doorway, are designed to keep its enemies out. When it opened in 1895 at Sciennes, the Sick Kids Hospital boasted an 'ever open door'. And the new design has a wide, accessible doorway.

Staci and Grace reckon that these two buildings can be friends, despite their differences. The roofless Castle will keep a watchful eye on its young neighbour and send it occasional envoys of birds with messages.

The girls also noted the dark dungeon of the castle where prisoners were given the waste water to drink and where they would have been tantalised by the scent of bread baking in the kitchen next door. We agreed there would be no dungeons at the new hospital!

How to move a Hospital part 3

In the story we're creating about the move of the hospital between Sciennes and Little France (more here), we've got the old and ailing sandstone building as far as Cameron Toll. All the shops at the Mall try to give her a hand on her way towards the new site. Children in the hospital created some shops and told us how they and their contents could help. Cate put them together in a lovely picture and I wrote a poem with the children's ideas. Here they are:

The Hospital Parade

At Cameron Toll

the shops lend a hand:

a music shop provides

a jangly, loud band

to lead the Hospital parade

in a long caterpillar

with a precisely-penned map

towards Craigmillar.

The hospital gets repaired

with lego and loom-bands

the get well gift shop gives her

flowers and perfumed bags.

Out come the cupcakes

and curious cats

the bike shop sends a Giant

the pet shop, mice and rats

who with high-speed hamsters

on their exercise wheels

burrow under the hospital

and begin to spin a reel.

Powered by panting rodents              

the hospital and patrol

pull away from the shopping centre

now known as Cameron Roll.

If you're in the hospital you can now see all three parts of the journey so far on the wall between the main entrance and Ward Four. Here's Cate having a look at them.

Our next stop on the journey to Little France is Craigmillar Castle from where the new hospital site can be seen. And building has already started!

We'll be going to the Castle next week with some families from the hospital to Imagine how an ancient castle might advise a hospital who is about to transform into something very new. But we've already had a few ideas from seven-year-old Eva in Ward 3. We told her about all the unicorns on the crests in the castle, and then we showed her our own unicorn above the Hospital main entrance. She did us a lovely drawing of both and then got them talking to each other.

Creaky boilers and pink thread

Cate and I have been enjoying some forays into the Sick Kids' past via the Lothian Health Services Archive held in the University of Edinburgh library. If you go back 100 years or so, the documents themselves are fascinating, penned in beautiful copperplate handwriting on crisp cream paper. Even the simplest messages are committed to paper and put in the mail: 'May I call on you tomorrow afternoon?' Today we would just send a text.

On our last visit we chose to look at documents from 1895, being the year that the hospital moved into the current site at Rillbank. There were piles of detailed specifications handwritten by the architects George Washington Browne, and stitched together in thick documents with pink thread. Then in reply came tenders from ironmongers, glaziers, plumbers and builders, and suppliers of equipment -- cots, mattresses, fire grates, lift doors, heating apparatus, the furnishing of the board room. Some of the items mentioned are still there, and I particularly enjoyed the £43 estimate for the carving of the Royal Arms over the entrance hall from messrs Beattie and Hay.

The minute books of committee meetings give witness to complex plans for the moving the hospital. There were complaints about delays in the delivery of an ironing machine, and a very prolonged exchange of letters with the boiler fitters from London. In the initial months after the hospital's opening in late November, there were complaints about both certain wards being far too cold and yet the stoking of the boilers creating such heat locally that it cracked plaster and fuelled concern about the danger to the building by fire. Finally in June 1896, the company agreed: 'we are most anxious to settle the matter in a friendly spirit', agreeing to put in a new boiler of greater capacity and coat the basement pipes with plaster. The correspondence was still going on in August 96. During the current cold snap, we're all aware of the vulnerability of our boilers and think of this going on on the scale of a hospital must've been a great worry.

Finally the minutes deal with plans for the opening ceremony with Princess Beatrice attending. Invites were issued to 400 guests and because the hospital wasn't properly occupied until late November, a party of convalescent children were brought in for the ceremony on 31st October. Reducing the number of patients prior to removal to Rillbank was also discussed. 

As plans begin to be realised for the next move of the hospital to Little France, it's interesting to reflect on the similarities and differences that 120 years make to such a process. I'm pretty sure there won't be many hand written bundles of paper stitched together with pink thread!

More from the archives here