The 'Whatsits' family grows: three new books in the hospital shop

If you visit the 'Sick Kids' Hospital shop, you'll see how our family of live-in characters is growing. There are now six books in the series including three new titles: 'Sandra the Spacer and her Magic Hat', 'Sam the Sensitive SATS Monitor', and 'King Leopold IV's Growl'. Each character has an important job to do which leads them into adventures.

Key character: The 'spacer' for use by young children with an inhaler (spot the magic hat)

Although the final versions are written by me and illustrated by Cate, each one has involved hospital patients and staff (see below) who have helped develop characters and storylines. The books are intended to be fun at the same time as helping to humanise the hospital's environment and equipment and make it familiar to patients, and are designed to be read to 4 to 7-year-olds. However, we're finding that older patients who appreciate less challenging books whilst in hospital, are taking to reading them too.

So, a bit more about each of the new titles:

Sandra the Spacer and her Magic Hat

One in 11 children in the UK has asthma, so perhaps it was no surprise when specialist asthma staff asked us to get involved in introducing the 'spacer', used with an inhaler by young children. We spent several afternoons in the waiting room of the asthma clinic, talking to children of all ages about their experiences and getting some of their character and story ideas down on paper. Many of these ideas made it into the final book.

Sandra the Spacer joins the toy basket but soon finds that, like the Blue Kazoo and Tara the Trumpet, the little girl never chooses her. Can Sandra's magic hat help? 

Key character: Peakflow meter (introduced in the story as 'Mr Peakflow', an over-enthusiastic PE teacher blowing his whistle and shouting 'breathe-ho!')

Sam the Sensitive SATS Monitor

Sam - essential even if irritating

The SATS monitor detects, via a sensor attached to a finger or toe, the levels of oxygen in the blood. One of the play specialists suggested it as a character as it is beside many beds, but is notorious for being noisy and at times over-sensitive, even raising false alarms. (Maybe we all know humans who are attention-seeking like this?) This behaviour can be particularly irritating at night, hence Sam's story in which none of the Whatsits get much sleep, even though in the end it seems that Sam was doing an essential job.

King Leopold IV's Growl

Why has Leopold got yellow teeth, and why is he saying 'ow' instead of growling properly?

Leopold by Iona

Anyone visiting the Sick Kids can glimpse Leopold at the main entrance if they look up. His job is to guard the entrance and look fierce and handsome. But in our story he seems to be in pain and is not doing his job very well. The Whatsits choose Keeky (the dental mirror) to investigate. Could his problem be something to do with all the empty Lion Brew cans under his perch?

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!

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