Buyers rush for Nurse Edith's story

The memoirs of a district nurse from the Black Country are set to top the Sunday Times bestseller list after being republished.

Nurse on Call, by Edith Cotterill, of Tipton, which first came to the attention of Century Hutchinson in 1986 and rose to fifth in the chart last week after just three days.

A fresh interest in nostalgia and the raw stories of a nurse in World War Two prompted its second printing.

Ivan Warren, the late Mrs Cotterill's son-in-law, said: "It's a pretty incredible achievement. She always had a lovely turn of phrase, which you can see even in the poems she wrote at school.

"That same humour comes through in this book. It's very amusing and very poignant at times."

Educated at Wolverhampton Girls High School, Mrs Cotterill, formerly of Horseley Road, Tipton, took up writing after the tragic death of her teenage daughter Judith from a brain tumour.

Mr Warren said: "The book brings home so much about life. Though my mother-in-law was a district nurse, she suffered her own tragedies.

"But she rose above those tragedies with a tremendous humour and an appetite for life and compassion for her patients.

During her training in the 1930s, Edith's long hours on the wards included encouraging leeches to attach to patients and the disposal in the furnace of amputated limbs.

After the birth of daughters Judith and Elizabeth, she returned to work in the 1950s as a district nurse.

Edith Cotterill died, aged 80, in 1997.