Friends of Miss Reece by Susan Hill is the story of a boy who is regularly left by his socially busy parents in the care of the Cedars Lawn Nursing Home. Here he is exposed to sickness and death and “it seemed to him that the whole of adult life was about these things, the sickness and temperatures and bowels and dying, of the patients in the nursing home. He was not afraid. He had always come here.”
At the nursing home, his only friend was Miss Reece, a woman who has been lying in bed unable to move or speak or do anything for herself for many years. She is being taken care of by Nurse Wetherby, a mean woman who hated her job and believed that Miss Reece was “nothing but a filthy, dirty mess.”
Then something happened to Miss Reece and, for the boy, nothing will ever be the same. What happened how what are the implications, find out by reading the short story by yourself.
Susan Hill is a British short story writer, novelist, playwright and critic. She was born in 1942.
