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.