Hoorah for Health Workers!


In the latest in their Beyond the Secret Garden series examining how BAME voices have been represented in children’s literature in Britain, Darren Chetty and Karen Sands-O’Connor raise a cheer for some fictional doctors and nurses.


Discussing the postwar migration of health care workers from the Caribbean to Britain in a 2016 BBC documentary, Professor Laura Serrant commented, ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that those of us who migrated into England and the National Health Service saved it’ (Black Nurses: The Women who Saved the NHS). Amidst recent news that the first ten doctors to die from COVID-19 were all from the Black, Asian and minority ethnic community, and that 35% of patients hospitalized with the virus were from BAME communities (about twice their representation in the general population), we wanted to highlight some of the portrayals of health care workers in British children’s books from BAME backgrounds. British children’s literature has often quietly honoured the contributions made by BAME health carers, and now more than ever we need to make sure British child readers are aware of the historical and current roles that BAME Britons have played in keeping the nation safe.


Historically, African-Caribbean women came to Britain as nurses – not just after World War II, but during the Victorian period as well. Mary Seacole, the Jamaican ‘doctress’ who set up the British Hotel for soldiers on the front lines in the Crimean War, told her own story in 1857, but the first retelling for children came in 1909 in Henry Charles Moore’s Noble Deeds of the World’s Heroines. Moore’s account was an anomaly, however, and Seacole did not reappear until the 1980s, when Brent librarians Audrey Dewjee and Ziggi Alexander discarded biographies of racist Britons and replaced them with biographies that better represented their reading population, including one they wrote themselves about Mary Seacole (1982). Since then there have been several depictions of Seacole for children, including by BAME British authors Trish Cooke (Hoorah for Mary Seacole 2008) and, most recently, Naida Redgrave’s The Extraordinary Life of Mary Seacole (2019); it is the biographies


by BAME authors that are most likely to directly address the racism Seacole faced.


Many young readers in Britain, whether BAME or white British, have been cared for by one of the many nurses who came to Britain in the Windrush generation. African-Caribbean nurses were even represented in Ladybird books, whose 1963 People at Work: The Nurse included a Black nurse. White authors have often included Black female nurses in British children’s literature since, including in the 2001 Ladybird Nurse Nancy, where the eponymous nurse ‘is always neat and tidy and she works very hard looking after the patients at Story Town Hospital’ (n.p.) – all of whom are white. The informational book about doctor or hospital visits is a common introduction for child readers to the role played by BAME communities in the NHS. Lucy Cuthew and AndoTwin’s Busy People: The Doctor (2015) shows a British Asian GP who, despite her ‘busy day’ (n.p.) still manages to be gentle and take time with her patients.


Picture books also depict BAME health care workers in positive ways, often with child characters emulating them. One of the earliest picture book series to feature Black British children from a mainstream publisher was Petronella Breinburg and Errol Lloyd’s Sean series; the 1975 Doctor Sean depicts a ‘hospital’ run entirely by Sean and his sister. Tony Bradman and Eileen Browne’s Through My Window (1986) has the main character, Jo, waiting for her mother to return from work with a surprise. Jo’s mother, a nurse, brings Jo a doctor’s uniform for dressing up. Hena Khan’s Under My Hijab (2019) also features a mother who is a health care worker – a doctor, whose ‘bright pink hijab looks so cheerful tucked into her tidy white coat’ (n.p.). And Sasha, in Lauren Ace and Jenny Løvlie’s beautiful decades-spanning picture book The Girls, (2018) grows up to become a doctor.


16 Books for Keeps No.242 May 2020


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