I wanted to beanurse—then realised girls CAN be doctors!
AS A girl growing up at a time when men and women had strictly defined roles, hospital-obsessed Sally Seth-Smith assumed she would become a nurse.
‘I am sitting in a ward on night duty I will soon be a staff nurse,’ reads her painstakingly neat essay — neat except for the fact that staff nurse has been scored through with a single line and replaced with ‘sister’.
It was only later, while at her small comprehensive school in Cumbria, Sally realised she might be able to become a doctor. ‘My mum was a nurse and my dad was a doctor, so I was always very interested in medical stuff. I used to have a permanent hospital for my dolls and teddies set up in my bedroom, where I would do ward rounds, check their temperature and stuff like that.
‘As long as I could remember, I had wanted to be a nurse and then someone said to me “You might be clever enough to become a doctor”, and I thought “Gosh, can girls be doctors?”
‘Men were doctors and women were nurses, and that was absolutely how it felt then.’
But a seed had been planted and Sally, who settled in Hampshire, has now been a GP for 30 years. Two of her children are also doctors, and her youngest son works in finance. She has two grandchildren. Sally smiles as she reads back her childhood dreams of a world where 2,000 people live on the moon, ‘England is like Switzerland with no fighting’, ‘the Russians no longer invade other countries’ and ‘the whole world is running out of food’. ‘It is just so me; socially, politically and ecologically aware — a lot of what I’m passionate about now, but I had no idea I had that sort of understanding or thoughts when I was 11,’ she says. But as eloquent as her essay is, Sally’s recollections of that time are tinged with sadness. Not long after she’d written her essay, Sally’s mother committed suicide. She had discovered that her husband was having an affair with one of her friends. Sally and her three younger brothers were almost immediately uprooted and taken to Cumbria by their father, who never discussed their mother’s death. It was only later that they began to piece together what had happened in their parents’ lives. ‘I was probably well into my mid-20s before I could really talk about it,’ says Sally, who has been married to her second husband Nigel, an electronics engineer, for nearly 20 years.