E3: Pvt. Nurse Nicky and the Big Dark

DIA-W02: Pvt. Nurse Nicky faces a new fear in the Australian Outback
Scrubbing Squad: Hero Missions | Squad Diaries | Transcript

NARRATOR: Boots on, radios crackling, orders received, the Scrubbing Squad is standing by. Ready for real-world missions, adventure, and fun. And there is one hero they cannot start without. You. Report for duty. Heroes start here.

UNCLE JAMIE: Hero HQ calling all heroes. This is Uncle Jamie. Fall in, heroes: today's mission is about to begin.

UNCLE JAMIE: And it is Wednesday, heroes. Captain, the radio is yours.

CPT. JT PEG: Thank you, Commander. Wednesday, heroes, and Wednesday means Squad Diaries. Seventeen diaries, one shelf at Hero HQ, and every word in every one of them is true. Nothing added. Nothing invented. I check each entry myself, and I am exactly the right man for that job, for reasons the Squad enjoys reminding me of. Every ship keeps a log, heroes, and every hero keeps a diary. Today's diary belongs to Pvt. Nurse Nicky, Camp Medic of Recharge Camp, the calmest pair of hands this Squad has ever had. The entry is called: A New Fear in the Outback. Read it to us, Private.

PVT. NURSE NICKY: Kia ora, heroes. Hero HQ sent me to the middle of Australia, to the country they call the Outback: the wide, red, open land in the centre of the whole continent. My job was a Camp Medic's favourite kind of job. I make little wellbeing guides, simple books about staying healthy and calm, for children who live a long way from anywhere, and I was taking a boxful of them to a cattle station near a town called Alice Springs.

Now, heroes, a cattle station is like a farm, but so big you cannot see from one side of it to the other. Some Outback stations are bigger than whole cities, and your nearest neighbour can live hours away by car. I grew up on a small farm in New Zealand, and I thought I understood big and quiet and far apart. The Outback smiled at me, eh.

Because the children out there cannot ride a bus to school, they go to the most wonderful school I have ever visited: the Alice Springs School of the Air. Write that name down, heroes. People call it the biggest classroom in the world, because its students are spread across more land than some entire countries. The school travels to the children: in the old days the lessons arrived by radio, and today they arrive through the internet, so a girl at her kitchen table can put her hand up to a teacher who is hundreds of kilometres away. I sat in on a lesson, and then I gave my own little session on looking after yourself, and I kept it short and simple and practical, because your Camp Medic learned a long time ago that a lesson only counts if the person hearing it can use it.

That evening we ate around the campfire, and the family taught me to make damper. Damper is Australian bush bread, and here is the whole recipe, heroes: flour, water and a pinch of salt, mixed into a dough and baked slowly in the warm coals at the edge of the fire. No oven for hundreds of kilometres, and no need for one. We broke it open steaming and ate it with golden syrup. And with it came my favourite custom of the bush: we boiled the billy. A billy is a small tin pot with a wire handle, and when somebody out there says it is time to boil the billy, it means: stop now, sit down, rest, and have a cup of tea together. As a medic I will tell you plainly, heroes: that custom is medicine.

Then the fire burned low, and I walked a few steps towards my swag. That is another good word for your collection: a swag is a canvas bed-roll, and out there you sleep in it under the open sky. And that, heroes, is when the dark arrived. I thought I knew the dark. I did not know this dark. No streetlights. No houses. No cars. Not one electric light for hundreds of kilometres in any direction. Past the glow of the fire, the land had simply gone. And your Camp Medic, who has calmly bandaged everything from a shearer's thumb to a farm dog's paw, stood completely still, because I was frightened of the dark. A brand-new fear, at my age, in my own boots.

And here, heroes, is my stumble. The stockman's little girl saw me standing there and asked, are you all right? And I said: I am fine. Which was not true. I am the Squad's medic, and the first rule of my whole job is that pretending to be well is not the same as being well. And there I stood, in the biggest dark in the world, pretending.

Then the little girl slipped her hand into mine and whispered: I do not like the big dark either. And heroes, the moment somebody needed care, your Camp Medic came straight back to herself. I knelt down and did exactly what I do at Hero HQ. I said: take a deep breath, hero. We will sort this out, eh? And together we treated our fear the way a medic treats anything: gently, and one small step at a time. Step one: name it. We are frightened of the dark, we said, out loud, and a fear that has been named out loud is already a little smaller. Step two: three slow breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, because slow breathing is how you tell your whole body it is safe. Step three: one small brave look. Not down at the ground, where the dark lives. Up.

And up, heroes, was full of stars. More stars than I had ever seen in my life, and here is the secret of why. In a city, the electric lights fill the night sky with a soft glow, and the faint stars get washed out so your eyes cannot find them. Scientists call that light pollution. But in the Outback there are no lights to do the washing, so the sky shows you everything it has. Stretched right across it we could see the Milky Way itself: a great soft river of stars, and every single point of light in that river is a sun, unimaginably far away. That is our own galaxy, heroes, seen from the inside. The dark I was so frightened of was never empty. It was the only dark deep enough to show us how full the sky really is.

I came home with three things in my kit. A recipe: flour, water, a pinch of salt: damper, and the Squad eats it now on fire nights. A habit: name it, three slow breaths, one small brave look up: I prescribe it weekly. And one truth, the most useful thing in my whole medical bag: saying I am fine when you are not is not brave. Saying I am frightened, out loud, to somebody kind: that is brave, heroes, and it is the fastest medicine there is.

AUNTIE ELLIE: And that is the part worth keeping, heroes. Pvt. Nurse Nicky spends every single day asking the Squad how they truly feel. The night she finally answered that question honestly herself was the night her fear began to shrink. The bravest sentence in the whole Outback was not: I am fine. It was: I am frightened too.

CPT. JT PEG: Checked. Every word true, right down to the second helping of damper. That is what a diary is for, heroes. Next Wednesday, another diary comes down from the shelf.

CPT. JT PEG: Heroes, your mission, from Pvt. Nurse Nicky's entry. If you are four, five or six: tonight, when the lights go out, do Nurse Nicky's check with your grown-up. Name one thing you are not so sure about, out loud: maybe the dark, maybe something else: then take three slow breaths together, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and have one small brave look at the dark. If you are seven or older: that, and teach your family one true thing from the Outback at the table. What damper is made of. The name of the school where the lessons travel to the children: the Alice Springs School of the Air. Or why the Outback sky shows you more stars than any city sky ever can. You know things tonight that most grown-ups do not.

PVT. ACE: Ace here, heroes. Ace Mode version: if the dark is a lot, you do not have to look at it at all. Do your three slow breaths somewhere cosy, with your night light on or the door open just how you like it, and name your not-so-sure thing in a whisper, to your grown-up or just to yourself. It counts exactly the same. Same mission. Your way.

PVT. NURSE NICKY: And heroes: if somebody tells you they are frightened tonight, you are now holding the medicine. Kneel down and say it with me: take a deep breath, hero. We will sort this out, eh? Medics live on that. I would know.

CPT. JT PEG: Mission done? Tell a grown-up, tick Wednesday's box on your Squad Mission Chart, free at scrubbingsquadpodcast.com, and tick Pvt. Nurse Nicky on your Squad Roster: you have just met the Camp Medic herself. Back to HQ.

UNCLE JAMIE: Heroes, this is Uncle Jamie. Mission accepted?

AUNTIE ELLIE: Little missions. Big heroes. Heroes start here.

NARRATOR: Thank you for listening to the Scrubbing Squad Hero Missions Podcast. For free episode downloads, visit scrubbingsquadpodcast.com. Scrubbing Squad and Lobster Bob's Scenic Tours are the property of Mike J Midgley, operated under licence by Scrubbing Squad Limited. All rights reserved.

‍