Eveline McGrath An Odyssey: A Twentieth Century Story

Eveline McGrath was born into a turbulent 1918 near Banbridge, Ireland. Aged two, at her most boisterous, she moved to live with her grandparents. There followed the Sack of Balbriggan by the Black and Tans, then Ireland's partition and her attempts to run away, and the start of her schooling. Denied friendships, she fell in love with reading. She enjoyed summertime visits to her family when she went to school with them when the school systems in north and south did not align. At Balbriggan, visits and news by letter from members of her larger family told stories of America, South Africa, Australia, Scotland, England and Ireland. She heard the stories of her grand-parents' lives in the 19th century. Cousins came to live with her after her beloved aunt died. Her granny fell ill, when Eveline took over the heavy chores of housework in a household with no modern conveniences. When her aunt and uncle returned from Johannesburg, while dark cumulonimbus of war gathered again, Eveline secretly applied to train as a nurse in Kent in England.
Her career as a nurse trainee was complicated by illness, which put it in jeopardy. Lifelong complications from her illness, she kept private. On recovery, friendship with another nurse in her year helped her through training. They took casualties from Norway raids, from Dunkirk, from the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. When she was treating an Irish soldier from Dunkirk, he gave her a sense of the evil they were facing. She then decided at completion of training to become an army nurse. Spells at Maidstone, Leeds Castle and Goodwood House followed.
She departed in secret aboard ship from Scotland for what turned out to be North Africa. In tented hospitals she nursed casualties from Operation Torch, while she also battled an incorrect supply of clothing and a shortage of underwear. From Beni Messous near Algiers, she moved to B獼e. She dated an officer from HMS Penelope, a medical officer from a tank regiment, an officer from the signal corps, a commando and a vet. As the campaign moved to Italy, after a spell at Bizerte, near Tunis, she transferred to Bari, then on to Torre Annunziata near Naples on the volcano of Vesuvius. This was a period punctuated by a series of violent surprises on top of the early mass use of penicillin and a mysterious appearance of mustard gas.
She celebrated victory at a party at the Royal Palace of Caserta. Her first flight in an aeroplane occurred when she and a friend hitched a trip to post-war Venice. She had breaks in Sorrento and Amalfi. Then she posted to Florence, and to Rome where she met and assisted Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty, who was then becoming famous for his earlier exploits as the wartime "Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican".
After the war she finally lived with her mother and sisters at Banbridge. Agency nursing work followed in Belfast and in Dartmoor in England where she nursed Florence Nightingale's former doctor. She threw over training as a midwife to look after a family member and then took tuberculosis training. When she failed to get a job in a new blood transfusion service in Northern Ireland, and it was made clear at the interview by the behaviour of a member of the interview board that this was on religious grounds, she moved to the new Irish Republic. She turned down the possibility of working as a nurse in the Korean war, worked at tuberculosis nursing at St. Mary's in Phoenix Park. Then she trained at and set up a hairdressing business.
After marriage she relinquished nursing. A few years later she sold the hairdressing business. She later returned to business. Her mother came to live with her and died aged 88 in the house of this daughter sent away to live with her grandparents. Aged 57, Eveline returned to nursing. She nursed former Taoiseach, John A. Costello, in his final illness. She then went to work as a nurse in St. Paul's Hospital and Special School in Beaumont and after four years became Matron.