Nurse Sally’s Last Chance

By Anne Durham, ©1967 

Sally Marston had been in continuous hot water for a long time, until in desperation her family persuaded her to take up nursing as a last chance to settle down. But what made any of them imagine that that would keep Sally out of trouble?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Most girls go all round the world to get at what they want to say, and after one has found out, one is too tired to care.” 

“Tea was a meal that saved one from getting irritable in the arid length of hours between lunch and the evening meal. It was sacrilege not to make the most of it.”

“Number Fifteen has just slopped over herself her new bottle of orange squash and the other dimwit who came with you is making heavy weather of mopping up. Go and see how much you can add to the confusion.”

REVIEW:
Right out of the gate I could not help but like Sally Marston—who is not a nurse; at book’s end she has only just finished the preliminary probationary period in the first weeks of nursing school. When we meet her, she has volunteered to wash the dishes even though she loathes the job and is ferociously attacking the chore: “If you were doing something noisy and useful like washing up, she told herself grimly, the chances were that people would leave you alone.” At 19, she already has a rather dismal career: She’d been tossed from boarding school after sneaking out for a late date with smooth operator Frank Sandford, more than a decade her senior, and “that clot of the girl who shared her room had forgotten to open the window and Sally had been caught.” From there she had lurched into a job at a stable she abruptly quit, then to one at a hotel that had also ended disastrously, so now she is skulking around the house feeling at loose ends.

Dr. Bruce Carmichael, the town GP, “is so good-looking it oozes out of his ears—and doesn’t he know it! He’s so pleased with himself, you can sense at, even from his back view!” He is caring for her parents: Her mother was injured in a train wreck that occurred while she was on her way to attempt to soothe Sally’s mishaps, and her father has some unspecified cardiac issues, inferred to be caused by worry about his wife, so she feels responsible for both her parents’ health concerns. Dr. Bruce also takes it upon himself to suggest that Sally become a nurse, her “last chance” of landing a decent career after her early spectacular debacles, though the details of these fiascos are slow in coming and in fact impossible for the reader to guess—quite the rarity in a VNRN. Sally agrees to go, because she does not want to burden her parents further, and he pulls some strings to get her into a training program. Fabulous Sally is not exactly grateful: “Who does he think he is, to talk to me like that? Honestly, he expects that I shall be thrown out! I’m going to stay here and I’m going to qualify, just to show him! If it’s the last thing I do, I’m sticking it out to the bitter end.”

Of course, Sally runs into none other than the cad Frank in town, who takes up where he abruptly left off after ghosting her a year ago, feeding her a convoluted story about a concussion and lost addresses, etc. etc. But “she was sick and silly over him, though she knew he was no good,” and after sneaking out late to see him her first week, she’s locked out of the dorm again—clearly having learned nothing from boarding school—but nice Dr. John Weaver rescues her and get her safely back inside. It’s not long before Frank stands her up again—and again Dr. Weaver is on hand to tuck her into his car and buy her a jolly lunch at a charming country inn.

Gradually the plot threads of her earlier mishaps uncurl, and extend grasping tendrils to try to wrap her up tight again. The fun is digging layer by layer into the complicated mess, slowly unearthing more clues that still don’t make the end obvious—but it must be confessed that when all was finally revealed, I didn’t entirely follow the whole plot. As the story trots briskly along, we watch Sally interact with the three men in her life, always entranced by Frank, bounder that he is; irritated by well-meaning Dr. Carmichael; and pleased by Dr. Weaver. She has a good friend in roomie Cerise Oldham, who is unfortunately not the witty, interesting stereotype, but a friend is a friend regardless. The writing is occasionally humorous—every letter Sally chucks at Cerise to read ends up skidding under the dresser, for example—and Sally is an interesting and entertaining character to spend 188 pages with, which is a long length of time to keep this reader engaged. If in the end her romantic choice is rather obvious, this is the only straightforward aspect of the book, which makes it an excellent chance that you will thoroughly enjoy Nurse Sally’s Last Chance as much as I did.