Cruel Legacy by Penny Jordan Page A

time on her hands with her daughter living away from home, but that she had no skills she could put to use.
    'No skills?' the other woman had queried. 'You run a home, you've brought up a family, you drive a car. Don't worry, we'll soon find something for you to do!' And so they had.
    Elizabeth smiled to herself now, remembering how terrified she had been that first day, manning the reception desk at the Citizens Advice Bureau, and then six months later when she had been asked if she would like to train as a counsellor. She had protested that she was not experienced enough to give advice to others, that her life, her relationships were very far from perfect, and certainly did not justify her handing out advice to others.
    'The more problems our counsellors have faced in their own lives, the better they are at listening compassionately to the problems of others,' she had been told crisply.
    She sat down and opened the folder.
    She had recently attended a national conference on the effects of long-term unemployment and redundancy on people. She frowned as she read through the notes she had made. They were certainly getting an increased number of people coming to them for advice on how to cope with their unemployment—women in the main, anxious not just about the loss of income but the effects of their husband's redundancy and consequent loss of self-esteem on the men emotionally, and on the family as well.
    If tire gossip going round following Andrew Ryecart's suicide was correct in suggesting that it had been caused by financial problems with Kilcoyne's, it seemed likely that the town would soon have more men out of work. The company was one of the town's main employers, one of the last light engineering companies left in the area. There would be no alternative jobs for people to go to.
    Elizabeth nibbled the end of her pen. She had suggested at last week's general staff meeting that it might be an idea to put together a special package formulated specifically to help such cases. People were individuals, of course, with individual problems, but...
    'It's a good idea,' her boss had agreed. 'But we simply can't spare anyone to work on it at the moment, unless...'
    'Unless I do it at home in my spare time,' Elizabeth had offered wryly.
    'I'm sorry, Elizabeth,' her boss had apologised. 'But you know how things are: we're all suffering cutbacks and underfunding, just like everyone else.'
    That was true enough. Richard had been complaining that the hospital now seemed to employ more accountants to watch over its budgets than they did nurses to watch over its patients.
    'Richard, have you got a minute?'
    Richard paused, frowning as he glanced at his watch.
    'Barely,' he told the hospital's chief executive. 'My clinic starts in half an hour and I've got a couple of phone calls I need to make first.'
    'I really do need to talk to you, Richard,' the other man insisted. 'We've got a committee meeting coming up soon and we still have to go through your budgets.'
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    Richard grimaced, suppressing his instinctive response, which was to say that he was a surgeon, not an accountant. It was pointless losing his temper with Brian; he was just as much a victim of the financial cuts being imposed on them as he himself was.
    'Look, let's go into my office,' Brian suggested, taking advantage of his silence.
    Irritably Richard followed him, shaking his head when Brian offered him coffee. 'No, I forgot for a moment— you're a tea man, aren't you?'
    'I drank too much coffee when I was a student and a young intern,' Richard told him. 'They talk about working long hours now, but when I first qualified:.. Still, we didn't have the same pressures on us then that they do now, nor the huge diversity of skills and facts to learn. These days there seems to be a new drug on the market every day and a new set of complications to go with it, never mind all the new operating techniques, and then of course there's the