Arctic Nurse

By Elizabeth Gilzean, ©1963

Staff Nurse Sharon Lindsay’s crusading zeal lands her in trouble at St. Mary’s Hospital—and her sudden departure for a nursing post in the Arctic seems too much of a coincidence. Though she longs to prove her worth, Sharon is bewildered by conditions in a land of ice and snow, where the greatest heat is generated by her clashes with Doctor Ross Clarke—that unbearably rude man who insists on believing the worst of her!

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I think I’ll find myself a nice long illness so you can nurse me. How about it?” 

“A pretty face is something of a treat.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Sharon Lindsay, who has always fought against unfairness since she was a small child, has gotten herself into hot water by attending a rally in Trafalgar Square organized by the unions, who are pushing for better pay for nurses. “It wasn’t that she had taken up nursing for the money attached to it,  but when it came to getting less in her pay packet than the ward maid did—well, it hurt one’s pride.” She should also be fighting against a system that dictates what she is allowed to do in her allegedly free time, but that’s a cause for another day, because after a scolding from the Matron, Sharon is sentenced to a month of night duty. 

That same evening, she attends a lecture about life in the far north, and when she comes home, she has signed up for a year’s tour of duty in the Arctic—so much for standing up for unfairness. Soon she’s on the plane, landing on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory Nunavut. There she meets the grumpiest jerk in the entire Arctic Circle, Dr. Ross Clarke, who starts out being a complete dick and never relents until the final chapters. “You’re not only a nuisance but a menace! I suppose you’re hoping to overwhelm us northern types with your glamour. You’re wasting your time, I can tell you,” he says at their first meeting, and pretty much everything else he says to Sharon is more of the same.

When Sharon arrives at Cape Mercy, where she is to be working, it turns out that there is only a first aid station, where patients are few and far between, and those that they get usually only stop over briefly on their way to get real medical care further south. Ella Emerson, wife of the local missionary and mother to six living children—one died of polio—divulges that they wanted a nurse to deliver babies (Sharon has had no experience with that) and because “if you must really know, I got desperate for another woman to talk to.” So in her time in the Arctic Sharon does very little nursing, as the two Inuit (called Eskimo in the book) patients seem to largely care for themselves in the week or two they are in residence, with few visits from doctor or nurse.

Of course, social entanglements abound. The young daughter of the French-Canadian mine boss, Ariel, is furiously jealous of Sharon the minute she arrives, as she is apparently worried that the scathing Ross might be lured away by Sharon’s bumbling ignorance. But it’s Ariel’s widower father, Marcel, who puts the moves on, and the book takes the curious attitude that women should know how to fend off gropers. “Hasn’t anyone taught you how to keep a man like that at a distance?” Ella asks after rescuing Sharon from being “pawed.” Then Sharon’s ex-boyfriend, Dr. Alistair Gaskell, who was never actually told that he’s an ex, shows up, complicating Sharon’s life further.

One of the problems with this book is that Sharon falls in love with one of the most horrid characters I’ve met in a VNRN, a man who is incessantly rude up to the page where he kisses and proposes at the same time. When Sharon tells him, “We don’t really know one another yet,” he answers, “Not know one another yet? When I’ve had you in my thoughts ever since you arrived!” as if that is in any way relevant—and then he spends the next few weeks deliberately keeping away from her, which is apparently supposed to spur her affections or deepen their relationship in some way.

The other problem, one that should not be difficult to anticipate, is the racism toward the Inuit characters. One young man, Itsawik, is the product of “a charming Eskimo custom,” in which “if an Eskimo thinks very highly of a friend, whether he’s another Eskimo or a white man for that matter, he will lend him his wife,” and now Itsawik, being half white and half Inuit, “had failed to find a place in either of his worlds”—though it is confessed that the white population won’t accept him as an equal. I will, therefore, be making a donation to Tungasuvvingat Inuit, a nonprofit service provider for Inuit people in Ontario, in a small attempt to atone for the sins of this book, or at least mine in publicizing it.

The upside to this book is that as far as armchair travel goes, it is outstanding. Elizabeth Gilzean was born in Quebec and grew up in British Columbia, qualifying as a nurse at age 21 and working in Canada before moving to England and also working there as a nurse, while beginning to write romance novels in 1958 at age 45. I have to wonder if she herself didn’t spend some time working as a nurse in the Arctic Circle, the depictions of life and the world there are so detailed. It must be confessed that the six books of hers that I have read have earned her a C+ average, though she is capable of some excellent writing, as in Doctor Sara Comes Home and Next Patient, Doctor Anne. If this book is problematic in some ways, it also is not a complete loss, even if the cover absolutely is.

Nurse Kelly’s Crusade

By Nell Marr Dean, ©1969

Beautiful Kelly Jarman was a dedicated nurse, but she was also a young woman in love. And now her heart was torn between her professional pride and her personal emotions. At Harbor Hospital in San Francisco where Kelly worked, she led the demands of nurses for better pay and greater recognition—demands that handsome intern Cass Sterling looked upon with scornful disapproval. Kelly could not stop loving Cass, but she could not desert a cause in which she deeply believed. Nor was her decision made easier when jet pilot Marty Randolph offered to take her away from this scene of heartache. It took a shattering crisis, and a dramatic hospital battle against disaster, to show Kelly the way out of her painful dilemma, and into the arms of the man who was right for her.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“What happened to that darling little girl who had bubonic plague, I didn’t hear any more after she left Pediatrics.” 

“We think it’s marvelous that you have two men chasing you.”

REVIEW:
Kelly Jarman works in San Francisco but commutes to her home in Menlo Park, here surprisingly located across the freeway from the San Francisco airport (in reality it’s 20 miles south of SFO), where she lives with her two lively roommates, while her younger sister Babs—newly divorced with a one-year-old son—lives nearby. It’s not clear what Kelly’s titular “crusade” is, because though the nurses are planning a mass resignation from their jobs to get a pay differential for nights and weekends and Kelly is going along with the idea, she’s not really involved in any part of the organization of the effort. She does crusade hard to discourage Babs, however, from opening a makeup and jewelry store, believing that Babs doesn’t have the brains or perseverance to make it work, to the point that she moves to Telegraph Hill in the city so she won’t be around to help with the bookkeeping or manning the store on occasion. Not sure if that’s the most admirable cause to be working for, but maybe that’s just me.

Neither does Kelly seem very interested in the men she is dating: airline pilot Marty Randolph, who takes her out every week or so when he’s laying over in San Francisco, or Dr. Cass Sterling, the intern who has years to go before he can start paying off his medical school debts, not to mention a likely two-year stint in the Army. When Cass tells her he doesn’t have the money to marry her, she suddenly decides “she was only a convenient date” and snaps, “Whatever made you think I was interested in marriage? What’s between us but a few dates?” So Cass, surprisingly thin-skinned, stops calling.

Meanwhile, Marty flies Kelly to Texas, where he is planning on starting a small airline company—and fickle Kelly thinks this expensive venture is a way better idea than Babs’: “With you and Dave so much in love with flying, your venture should get off to a good start. I’ll admit it takes vision to make dreams come true.” And capital, marketing plans, an accountant, FAA paperwork—Babs took a class and studied her brains out, but Kelly still thinks her sister is wasting the legacy that their (of course) dead parents left her—until a man who knows how to put up shelving starts hanging around the store. “He’s what Babs needs—a man who will never kill her spirit but who will give her only so much rein,” Kelly says—not realizing that she herself has given Babs no rein at all while constantly trying to kill her dream. Seems like it’s all about the gender of the dreamer with Kelly. And while she’s “appalled” that Babs is spending her money on a business, when Marty says he can’t marry Kelly due to lack of funding, Kelly is quick to offer Marty her own money, knowing less about his business plan and character than she did about Babs’. Kelly may not have a crusade, but she does have hypocrisy in spades!

Then there’s a huge ship accident just outside San Francisco Bay, and Kelly curiously decides that her best course of action would be to drive to Fisherman’s Wharf and get on a fishing boat heading out to rescue survivors—because a nurse with no supplies on a boat is going to be so much help out there instead of in the emergency department—the walkout has kept her steadfast in refusing to go to the hospital where she could be of real help—and who should climb into the same boat but Cass Sterling? When she tells him she thinks she’s should instead to go to the hospital to help out there during the emergency, he barks, “You little bonehead, you’re doing nothing of the sort. You’re going to stand by your convictions. You believed in resignation once. You believe in it now.” Um, because a mass casualty changes nothing, even temporarily? “She was glad that he had such a way of making things seem all right,” after his persuasive, intelligent, respectful argument.

Of course you know Cass somehow recovers from his concerns about money and proposes—guess who Kelly has been in love with all this time?—and never mind that her salary and legacy never come up as a solution to Cass’s financial problems in her conversation with him they way they did when Marty proposed—why is a single nurse’s money never a consideration to a doctor who “can’t afford” to marry when they are both financially capable of feeding and housing themselves independently?

The best thing about this book is the armchair travel in San Francisco—Gumps, North Beach, Broadway and its “tasteless” clubs, Telegraph Hill. But the main characters have no sense—even Kelly’s roommate enlists in the Air Force apparently to convince her unsteady boyfriend to propose—so if the book is a quick, easy read, the advantage there is that it will be over so much the sooner.

Dr. Garrett’s Girl

By Miriam Lynch, ©1970 

Why did the name of Dr. Kennett Garrett turn every face hostile, and seal all lips? Lovely young nurse Julie Garrett desperately wanted to find out. For she was Dr. Garrett’s daughter, too young to have really known him, when he died, and now back for the first time in the closely knit New England town where he had practiced. Quickly Julie found work in the office of Dr. Robert MacDougall. Soon she had lost her heart to the handsome young physician, and earned the hatred of the beautiful, willful woman who wanted him for her own. But the trials of love paled beside the threat of terror as a shadowy figure tried to force Julie to give up her search for the key that would unlock the doors of mystery that surrounded the past—and free her to find happiness with the man of her dreams.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He could be impatient with middle-aged women with lives of such paucity that they wasted his time and their money with imaginary ailments. Once Julie heard him snap at one of them to stop reading medical columns in magazines and go home and scrub her kitchen floor and thank God for her good health.” 

“He, like all doctors, never wrote anything that could be deciphered without eyestrain and loss of temper.”

“They tell me it’s not cause for gossip these days if a girl goes to a man’s apartment at dinnertime.”

REVIEW:
Julie Garrett is on vacation when she arrives in Riverford, the town in which she spent her first six years, and where her father, Dr. Kenneth Garrett, was the town doctor. She’d wanted to see her early home, but is startled when the proprietor of the shabby and struggling hotel turns her away after she reveals she’s Dr. Garrett’s daughter: “I don’t have a room in the place for you. Just remembered,” he tells her convincingly. Confused, she stumbles into the current doctor’s office and meets Dr. Robert MacDougall and finds that he is “someone she had fashioned in her hopes and dreams.” He, of course—overworked, over-dedicated small-town GP—is clueless about the mystery that makes door after door close in Julie’s face after she accepts Dr. MacDougall’s desperate plea that she accept a job in his overrun office and looks for an apartment to rent, to find only a room in the house of elderly spinster Charlotte Spencer, who is clearly lying to Julia when she denies any knowledge of Dr. Garrett. 

Of course there is the usual rich, evil woman longing to hook Dr. Robert, and she is Flavia Harrison, a widow with a four-year-old diabetic son and heir to the fortune of the Lawrence family, who founded the hospital, school, and even Dr. Garrett’s education. She literally stomps over Julie at their first meeting, as she pushes her way past a room full of patients for an “urgent” confab with the doctor, who seems unable to tell her to take a number. Julie is not able to say no, either, remaining at her job for only the crumbs of attention of the overworked doctor who never has time to thank her for her overtime: “He was completely absorbed in his work, and he evidently saw no reason for praise or comment on her long hours and hard work.”

Then the calls in the night, a rasping voice croaking, “You’re not wanted here,” the letters adorably composed of cutout newspaper letters stating the same, the slashed tires, all convince her that she’s wasting her time pining after a man who cares not for her and who is so clearly in the sights of a very determined woman. On the verge of packing her bags, she meets Craig Farnsworth, Flavia’s brother, and now Julie is the one being chased—taken out every night for dinners and dancing. Robert, damn him, amiably chats up Craig in the office when the young man pops in to wait for Julie at the end of the day, “did not even seem to notice that she had a suitor,” such a cute word!

You can see the natural disaster peeking over the horizon at mid book, so you will not be surprised when it starts to rain. The river, so close to a community of poor folks too proud to ask for help, begins to rise. Curiously, this also coincides with a  huge surge in disease requiring hospitalization, so Julie is sent to help staff the local hospital, where she works about 30 hours straight without sleep or even meals—and for once, no “note of recognition or hostility. She had simply been one of them, working as hard as she could to keep death at bay.”

While on her hospital tour, she cares for an attorney, Martin Balfour, as well as her landlady, Charlotte Spencer, both of whom cough up more than a little pneumonia-associated phlegm as they reveal that they, along with Julie’s father and Eleanora Lawrence, town darling and original heir to the town founder’s fortune, were a firm foursome as young people—one wonders if Charlotte hadn’t been, along with the two young men, in love with Eleanora. More truth unfolds—though it’s hard to see how this will improve Julie’s standing in town—though it is perplexing why she is held responsible to such a high degree for alleged sins of her father, who had died 20 years previously—not much to think about in small towns, apparently—but so too does the truth between Julie and Robert emerge, so there’s half an unsurprising happy ending for you.

Though the writing is not much more than average, I did appreciate this book for the actual surprise, after 500+ nurse novel reviews, this book offered in the reason for Julie’s ostracism, as well as in its climactic scene, in which the motivations and villains are laid bare. If the repercussions—does the villain get away with it, as it seems they will? Will Julie be accepted by the community at last?—and the problem of the heroine falling in love with a man who barely recognizes her existence and who promises only that “although he left her often, he would always come back to her” are left unanswered, overall this is a book with at least a bit of novelty to it that makes it worth reading.

Nurse at the Cedars

 By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

He took Susan to his private island to be his private nurse. The old gentleman had only two weeks to live when Dr. Scott Murdock gave him a new wonder drug. Then it looked like he might pull through—and Doctor Scott and Nurse Susan began to find they had more than medicine in common. The country doctor had won the heart of the city nurse. But when greedy relatives, who expected their rich uncle to die, found him convalescing instead—real trouble rocked the little island!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Relax, Merrill. I’ve had breakfast, and I rarely gobble up nurses before lunch. You are perfectly safe.” 

“If just one more white-clad individual comes at me with a treatment tray and a needle big enough to vaccinate a horse, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions!”

“There’s two schools of thought about raising kids. One was to bring ’em up the way they ought to be; and the other was just to let the FBI handle it later on.”

REVIEW:
My copy of this book was sent to me by a reader of this blog, so the first thing I have to say is Thank you Joanne, for thinking of me! Secondly, I am relieved that Peggy Gaddis here has produced something she’s not often capable of—a good book. Here we find Susan Merrill nursing Mr. Cantrell, a rich man of 68 at a hospital in Atlanta when he decides he would prefer to go home to his estate on an island off the coast of Georgia to die—he has subacute bacterial endocarditis (and there’s an overly dense explanation of the disease that seems like it was lifted from a medical textbook for you to wade through) and has two weeks to live. Of course, he’s decided to take Susan with him as his nurse.

There she meets Dr. Scott Murdock, who is called “Dr. Murdock” throughout the book, even during tender scenes between him and Susan. He is an orphan (Susan, of course, is, too) whose education, residency and present clinic in town were all arranged and paid for by Mr. Cantrell, so since the gentleman’s diagnosis he has been burning the midnight oil researching treatments and has come across an experimental medication that might prolong his life by years, and he persuades Mr. Cantrell to try it.

Then the expected happens: Two greedy nephews and a niece show up, hoping to witness their relative expiring before their eyes and leaving them all the dough, and they are not at all pleased to find the old man is recovering! As Susan and Dr. Scott endeavor to cure the old man while protecting him from his family, they naturally and perfunctorily fall in love as the book hits the halfway point, and 14 pages later Susan essentially proposes. “I should have waited for you to propose to me, all formal and everything, I suppose. I guess I—well, sort of jumped the gun, didn’t I?” Given that they’ve only known each other two weeks, um, yes, you did, honey. But it’s actually a nice change from Gaddis’ usual method of the heroine becoming deeply hurt and insulted over her man’s inability to declare a love she has blindly refused to see.

To be honest, not much happens for a bit, though there’s a lot of flurry with the relatives and the insinuation that one of them might resort to murder, but it never comes to that—the old man conveniently drops of a stroke, as you knew he had to. Now there’s just the reading of the will, and you can probably guess the outcome of that scene, which concludes with Susan slapping the niece! Unfortunately this scene occurs only on page 102, and the rest of the book is a bit of a slog, with many characters coming and going from the house and long discussions about the various lawsuits that will follow, but though this does bring the book down somewhat, overall it is still a good one for Gaddis. The heroine really is a strong character who doesn’t metamorphose into a silly kitten the minute her man is near, and indeed when he tries to send her back to Atlanta, she refuses to go and tells him, “Hush trying to give me orders.” Gaddis does like to latch on to words—here someone is speaking “huskily” or “nodding soberly” every page of the first chapter, but she seems to have decided to reach for her thesaurus as the book progresses. Overall, it’s a satisfying achievement for Ms. Gaddis, so if you are curious to see what she can do when she’s firing on most cylinders, Nurse at the Cedars is not a bad opportunity to find out.

Send for Nurse Alison

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1965
Original title: Only Time Will Tell

Alison Gray wanted so much to forget the unhappiness of her last weeks at St. Hilda’s Hospital that it seemed providential when Merlin Bleckworth asked her to come as industrial nurse in his father’s factory. But was Merlin only interested in her professional ability?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Too much agreement is as bad as too much argument.” 

“Life’s not too bad. It’s a great deal what we make it, and the unexpected turning up—like your theoretical thunderstorm—can often be a challenge and quite interesting. It depends how we tackle things.”

REVIEW:
Alison Gray was training to be a nurse when she fell hard for the young cad Dr. Graham Hoyland, who never returned her affections and ended up marrying the daughter of a rich patient. From her tragically broken heart Alison recovered, throwing herself into her studies so that now, a year later, she’s graduated with top honors and is able to work alongside Graham in the ED with nary a flutter to her healed heart. Nonetheless, when the hospital matron out of the blue tells her, “I feel it is important for you to get away for a time,” suggesting Alison take a job in a hospital far away and giving her no reason why this is “the best course for her to take,” Alison curiously is suddenly certain that this is what she should do so that “she need never again have to come into contact with Graham Hoyland or his wife-to-be.” That afternoon she tells her friend Lisa she’s resigning, with no plan for what she’ll do next, only “the strangest feeling everything in my life is being arranged for me.” How convenient!

So she and Lisa head off for a three-week vacation—can you imagine such a thing?—when Alison leaves her job, and when that’s over, as she’s driving out for an interview for a  job she doesn’t want, she sees a small boy fall off a cliff—he and his brother are hunting for gull’s eggs, yum yum—and rushes to his aid. Another car, “a big, opulent estate car,” pulls up, and handsome young Merlin Bleckworth bounds out, assists with the rescue, and helps drive the young victim to the hospital. From there it’s only natural that he should take Alison to dinner, learn she is a nurse, and offer her a job caring for the workers at his family’s industrial manufacturing business.

They drive to his house that night, where Alison is welcomed as one of the family—subjected to frank, heart-to-heart conversations with the housekeeper, his sister, and his mother, all of whom hint to varying degrees that Alison should stay and marry Merlin. When she doesn’t run screaming from the building, they pop her in the old nurse’s suite—the last nurse they had, now leaving to get married, lived in the house—and the next day driver her out to the factory. There she immediately aids with a young worker who has crushed his foot to a jelly, doses an anxious man with a toxic medication no longer in use, diagnoses him with too much stress from living with his in-laws who won’t let him work in their garden, and suggests to Merlin’s father Joseph, the owner of the firm, that he build housing for his factory workers. Then she flies everyone back to the family manor in her invisible jet.

This all having taken half the book to cover, now pretty much nothing else happens. We meet a new character, Dr. Ian Meltham, whom Alison immediately identifies as “a philanderer.” He incessantly pesters Alison for a date, though she never once agrees, except for the time they meet by accident in a department store, where Alison’s ability to say “no” departs her, and she is coerced into having tea with him—and the ensuing scandal requires pages of maneuvering to recover from! Merlin’s would-be girlfriend, the “tall, extremely slender, elegant girl with jet black hair and slanting green eyes,” falls for Dr. Meltham halfway through the book and is therefore completely wasted as one of those evil, scheming gold diggers out for our heroine’s man—though she does show up at the house to ask Alison in a “deadly quiet tone” if she is in love with Dr. Meltham, and Alison randomly decides the woman is on the verge of a “hysterical attack” and diagnoses her with bipolar disorder and calmly talks her out of what we are told is mania, but the description reads more as if she’s just upset and under a lot of pressure from her family to marry Merlin.

Truthfully from this scene on it seems that Alison is the one who has lost her mind, as, realizing she is in love with Merlin, “she would make no plans, no special moves, to draw him towards her,” so she plans to move out of the area that very afternoon without telling anyone because she decides she’s not going to be dumped again, a sentiment that has not haunted her one bit through the year after Graham picked someone else and all the time she’s been at Merlin’s home. Of course there’s an accident that rights everything again, but all through the book runs the theme of trust, and after this very bizarre stunt of Alison’s, It’s hard to believe anyone would ever trust her, again much less propose marriage to keep her from sneaking off. I, on the other hand, having been disappointed and blindsided by the wild leap of her otherwise sturdy character, was not sorry to see the back cover close on Nurse Alison.

Hospital of Bamboo

By Juliet Shore, ©1965 

Vivienne and Toby, nurse and doctor in a military hospital in British North Borneo, were both victims of broken romances and unwilling to become involved again. But they seemed fated to find their names linked—even though Avril Wade did her best to come between them.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“People were as they were created, and it was much more important to be likable than to be pretty.” 

REVIEW:
Vivienne Carlson has decided that “having had much of the smooth in her chosen profession a little of the rough would do her no harm,” so she has signed up for a stint in Indonesia. She’s left her young man, Graham, at home, and we know how that’s going to work out! He hasn’t written in six weeks, but when the unusually thin missive finally arrives, it’s to tell her that not only is he dumping her, he’s already married the other woman!  Well, the gossip at this small outpost would be more than she can bear in her heartbreak, so her best friend helpfully tells everyone that Vivienne has dropped Graham for Dr. Toby Chiltern! How embarrassing! Especially when the gossip reaches Dr. Chiltern’s ears! 

When she corners Dr. Chiltern to apologize, however, he does the obvious and chivalrous (and clearly self-benefitting) thing—he offers to be her beard. “If this rumor helps you at all, why not leave it? I don’t mind in the least,” he tells her, helpfully pointing out that “we will have to act it up a bit,” so they start going out on faux dates, which they both enjoy maybe slightly—and predictably—overmuch.

Now comes the big wrench, in the form of Avril Wade. She was once Toby’s fiancée, but the night before their wedding he caught her in the arms of his would-be best man and headed for the hills of Indonesia. Avril will have her man and her revenge in the end, and is so devoted to this cause that she has become a nurse and chased Toby to the Far East. I mean, that’s dedication! When she hears that a nurse in her own hospital is about to be sent to Toby’s, she trips the woman on the stairs, causing her to break her ankle, and then wangles her way into the spot. Upon arriving, she immediately arranges a date with Toby—which rankles Vivienne to a degree that surprises no one except Vivienne herself—to announce her intentions. Toby, however, remains unimpressed with Avril, but agrees to keep their former relationship a secret from everyone, including Vivienne.

Avril, the usual foxy vixen with “sultry lips and veiled, long-lashed eyes” and a vigorous work ethic devoted solely to her own appearance, then proceeds to play the entire staff like the virtuoso she is, convincing everyone that Vivienne is a driving, mean harpy. She even reads Vivienne’s diary, discovering to her delight that Vivienne and Toby’s relationship is a sham. “It was too pathetically easy to stir up strife among innocent people and be made a heroine for doing so,” she exults. Toby, however, is immune from Avril’s machinations, and soon declares his love for Vivienne—and she, amazingly, realizes she was never in love with Graham at all, and that Toby is her true love!

The pair arrange a four-day vacation on the beach, where Toby intends to press Vivienne to marry him right away after their few weeks’ courtship: “Don’t keep me waiting long,” Toby pleads, failing to mention for what exactly? But Vivienne knows: “Women have feelings, too, Toby. I want you. We’ll just have to be patient a little while longer. Although I love you I feel I hardly  know you, and I want to know you very much.”

But then pesky Graham turns up at the hotel where Vivienne is waiting for Toby to join her later that day, as they are travelling separately. Graham wants to apologize in person for destroying Vivienne’s hopes and dreams, and just happens to be in the neighborhood. Though annoyed by Graham’s egotism, she agrees to meet with him. “With luck she could get Graham out of the say, assured of her present feelings and future happiness, and then proceed to welcome Toby with all her hungry heart and its yearnings,” because of course she is not going to tell Toby that she is meeting Graham.

On his side of things, Toby is blackmailed by Avril into driving her to the same town he is headed to on his vacation, as she casually mentions that she still has Toby’s old love letters, and it would be such a shame if anyone else should see them. “He would have liked to tell Viv all about Avril and her threats, but she might wonder why the confidence had not been made sooner”—um, yeah, and she isn’t the only one—so he continues the lie by omission with the excuse, “He loved Vivienne dearly and she must be protected from his ex-fiancée at any cost.”

But what a cost! Toby and Avril show up at Vivenne’s hotel just as Graham is pecking her on the cheek in goodbye. She is compelled to introduce everyone, and now hypocritical Toby is pissy that Vivienne hadn’t mentioned the meeting. “He became furious and miserable by turns. Didn’t she know her own mind, then? I love you one minute and kissing somebody else the next.” So Toby spends most of his vacation ignoring Vivienne and frolicking with Avril on the beach, “subjecting her to humiliation never dreamed of by Graham, who had at least made a clean, sharp thrust in ending their fare.” Back at the hospital, Toby continues to play up to Avril. “It was all rather sickening. Not once had he approached her to try to patch up” their relationship, mopes Vivienne back at the ranch.

Of course there’s the usual crisis that brings the pair together again, Vivienne being amazingly generous and forgiving of the really horrible behavior of her boyfriend. But overall this is an entertaining book with some very pretty writing ("Flies merrily buzzed in, met the blast of DDT in the antiseptic atmosphere and drunkenly barged out again”), interesting characters (as usual, the villainess Avril is the most intriguing person in the book), and minimal racism (though I will be making the usual donation on behalf of the White Doctor Foundation). You could certainly do a lot worse than to spend some time in Hospital of Bamboo.

Senior Staff Nurse

By Hilda Pressley, ©1965 

Annette was confident that she could return to her old job as staff nurse at the Royal Hospital and face her ex-fiancé David without a qualm. But how would she really feel when they came face to face? Was there really ‘nothing so dead as a dead love’?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Since when was human behavior consistent?” 

“Any person’s the richer for having loved. Nothing—either time or distance—can take away the effect of love. It builds something into a person, into their character. Something permanent.”

“It’s only too easy to make all the virtues—trust, kindness, simplicity, meekness—appear like foolishness, instead of sterling qualities.”

“There’s far more to people than proteins, fats, carbohydrates and so on.”

“Time and love are strangers to each other.”

REVIEW:
A year and a half before this book opens, Annette Cochrane and her fiancé, resident anesthesiologist David Hadley, had argued over her wish to complete her training before getting married. “I don’t want my wife working. I’m earning enough for both of us,” he’d trotted out. But she’d gone anyway: “I want to feel I’ve achieved something before giving up,” she replies, already having given up “the secret ambition she had once had to specialize” as a scrub nurse. So off she goes to a hospital a hundred miles off for six months more training while he waits around for her to come home. Or not, as it turns out when she comes back that he’d been taking out chief nurse Janet Hughes in her absence. But he’d suggested they end their engagement, so she’d slipped off her ring and gone off for a year of surgery training.   

Now back at the hospital, she’s doing her best not “to fall in love with David all over again, suffer the same heartbreak.” He’s being very helpful with that, acting all cold and snippy, yet still always seems to be around for one reason or another. She starts dating the new surgeon, Andrew Knight, who seems to have fallen for her in a big way, but every time she takes him to her apartment, David is there visiting her roommate. Meanwhile there are the usual troubles with her colleagues: the chief nurse is cool and unfriendly, and one of her subordinates is deliberately sabotaging her, but Annette is ultimately able to negotiate her work difficulties. After many dates with Andrew, he eventually proposes, but she is still waffling about whether or not she still loves David, and goes “all sentimental every time he came into her mind,” deciding it’s “habit for her heart to gyrate every time he came near her or touched her.” Sure it is! So we spend a great deal of time watching Annette and David slowly drift into the painfully obvious ending we saw from the first chapter.

It’s curious that this book presents working as one of two choices: one either marries and gives up her career or becomes “a hard-bitten, career-driven woman who thinks of nothing but work and expects everyone under her to do the same.” Annette decides out of the blue, halfway through the book and after having gone to considerable trouble to maximize her nurse training, that “there were more important things in life than achieving an ambition,” thinking that “marriage can be more important for a woman than a career.” It’s an odd position for someone who was hell-bent on finishing her training at the expense of her relationship. The most irritating part of this is that in the end—spoiler alert—when she’s ready to chuck her career David replies, “My darling, you don’t have to. It’s entirely up to you. But the fact that you were willing to—” He doesn’t say what that does for him, but it made me want to throw up, and was an irritating way to end a book that had been largely only dull up to that point.