OPENING WITH AN enigmatic arrival in 1970s’ London, Amelié Skoda’s novel, Beth-nal Green, follows a young woman’s sojourn in the metropole to pursue a career in nursing. Suyin’s complicated act of leaving Penang offers a point of departure for questions about empire, family and self-hood. Skoda’s upcoming appearance at the George Town Literary Festival (GTLF) is a homecoming of sorts, given that her mother—a former National Health Service (NHS) nurse—hailed from Penang. We speak with her about her debut novel, and its interro-gation of the oft-overlooked link between nursing and migration.
FROM SOCIAL HISTORY TO LITERATURE
[…] Suyin thought constantly about how she might get away. She had seen the recruitment posters outside the Cathay Theatre advertising training and jobs in English hospitals. Every year they came back, looking for more girls to recruit. Were there no nurses in England? Suyin wondered.[2]
Skoda’s novel is, at heart, a story of migration. Suyin—named after the famed Johor-based doctor and novelist, whose transnational medical trajectory offers a foil to Skoda’s main character’s journey—is persuaded by the possibility of finding nursing work, and takes up the offer to leave for London’s East End. As a trainee at the titular hospital, she becomes part of an inter-national workforce, notable for a period characterised by rising xenophobia.[3] In this literary exploration of the British medical profession, the social world of patients and multinational nursing professionals hailing from across the Common-wealth emerges. Whether Asian, Caribbean, or Irish, the trainees at the core of Bethnal Green navigate what it means to move to London and live with the vast changes of the 1970s, unfolding both in the city and their distant homes.
“[W]e expect absolute commitment from every student,” a tutor impresses upon the trainees as the programme begins, “you should consider yourselves married to your job.”[4] But the transformation of a profession bound by strict codes of moral-ity governing the home and workplace was already underway during the novel’s temporal setting; a transition that the charac-ters grapple with in love and life. Skoda’s choice of temporal setting was not just out of a fascination with the period of her parents’ youth (although this was certainly an influence), but also because of its historical significance. As Skoda noted, “the world was changing for women, and legislation was coming into force around equality, discrimination and employment rights. Those conversations would have been on people’s minds at the time, and part of the atmosphere for women working in jobs like nursing.”
Skoda, a former journalist, began research in the post-Brexit environment, which offered an opportunity to channel her outrage at heightening anti-immigrant rhetoric. “I was always aware of the vital role East and Southeast Asian nurses of my mum’s generation had played in Brit-ish healthcare,” she remarked: after all, the NHS has always been a multinational enter-prise. “The history and function of the NHS, then and now, is inextricably linked with migration, and that’s not something that gets talked about very much.” Although this dynamic raises broader questions about how the system effectively removes vital human resources from their countries of origin—echoing, if not exactly replicating, imperial logic—this does not deny the agency of those seeking upwards mobility abroad, particularly when similar opportunities eluded them at home.[5] For all its ubiquity, there is surprisingly little literary representation of the link between nursing and migration in Southeast Asia, which constitutes “an essential piece of British and Malaysian social history.”
THE FEELING OF INFRASTRUCTURE
The hospital was more than just a building. We need it. Suyin cheered with everyone else at the end, but she felt dread rising inside her again. Bethnal Green Hospital was not just her workplace; it was also her home. Could it really be taken away? [6]
While Skoda took inspiration from her mother’s career, the events in Bethnal Green are largely invented. Yet the physical setting is rooted in historical fact. Archival work helped her reconstruct period-correct meals, uniforms and floor layouts of hospi-tals, while visits to the site of the real-life Bethnal Green Hospital (now occupied by apartments) provided a spatial and archi-tectural scaffold. Rather than constraining its scope, this grounding was generative, setting the parameters within which the characters’ inner worlds emerged. Learning to see London anew was crucial for mapping Suyin onto spaces such as the Home Office and Chinatown.
Writing thus involved “conveying some of that atmosphere and emotional tension which naturally came about from that research.” In doing so, a sense of what it felt like to work inside a hospital emerged, while foregrounding the shared humanity between its professionals and their patients. Yet not all was well: the spectre of efficiency and administrative rationalisation was strongly felt, and so too the constant pros-pect of deportation for those who failed the programme.
Bethnal Green Hospital was situated in East London, where Skoda’s mother worked and trained. Its history was decidedly radical. The mobilisation of the local community in response to its impending closure, and the dedication of its staff to keep working even after closure was confirmed, made it a case study of how hospitals were more than just vital infrastructure, and seen as belonging to local communities.
