Lesley Bowen M.D.

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1965

Lesley was blessed with exceptional beauty. But was it such a blessing, when it meant that although she only wanted to become a good doctor, few people would take her seriously—while the woman-hating Doctor Mark Crossman seemed actively to resent her?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“‘Me?’ she ejaculated, startled and without any regard to grammar.”

“He sounds to be treating me like a fever.”

“Leave the doctoring and suchlike to the men. You’ll have to deal with sights and situations no young woman should have to face, things from which it should be the duty of her husband to shield her.”

“In real life you have to make your own happy ending.”

REVIEW:

Gosh, being beautiful sure is rough! Poor Lesley Bowen M.D. knows all about it, the sad thing, and she is not at all abashed to whine about it for many, many pages at the start of her eponymous story. “I take my problem with me,” she explains. “I’m not being vain … it’s just my face. It causes trouble for me wherever I go.” Indeed, right there in Chapter One, it’s getting out of hand, causing her best friend’s fiancé to grab her in the doctors’ sitting room to profess his undying love. But Lesley knows better: “It’s not me he’s interested in, it’s just my face.” So, coming to the end of her residency at the hospital, she interviews to become a partner in the three-doctor GP office in northern England.

She only meets one of the partners, Frank Elland, because the other one, Mark Crossman, is away putting his father’s estate to rights. She has a lot of anxiety on her part about whether Mark will approve of her hire—he has a tragic past in which his beautiful doctor fiancée dumped him for a rich man, so he’s sworn never to have anything to do with women ever again! But she and Frank hit it off so well that she accepts the post.

She and Mark hit it off too, only in a more literal way, when she inadvertently backs into his car at a rest stop on her move to the new job. They don’t introduce themselves during their chilly encounter, so she’s not aware he’s her new partner. But then, he is so rude and unforgiving, she naturally “felt strangely drawn to this man …. He was a real man, a man’s man, the kind you could depend on in any sort of a crisis.” Lesley spends a lot of time thinking about this stranger: “If I’d met him any place else I’d have liked him a lot,” she decides. That’s quite a big leap to make after only two pages of frosty, clipped exchanges, but VNRN heroines are not known for their discriminating choices in men.

You will be shocked to find out that when they do finally meet, it does not go well. And it certainly doesn’t help that she looks just like his ex-fiancée! Mark is so “infuriating” in his behavior that Lesley almost feels sorry for him: “It was so painfully obvious that he did not know how to make his point without being unbearably rude.” Fortunately, Lesley’s previous infatuation with the man when he was a stranger drops completely, and we have about 70 pages of quiet routine, with Lesley going about her day-to-day, living a peaceful life in her rose-covered cottage with a fond elderly housekeeper who sets out cookies and hot malted milk for her at the end of a long day. Can I sign up for that?

Lesley tends to her patients and has dinner a lot with the local young lord, Damian Neerman, who is a race car driver and engineer who swears that Lesley is going to marry him right after these two big races he’s got coming up with a prototype car he’s working on. She’s not interested in him romantically, but spends enough time with him that Mark, even as he slowly warms to Lesley’s intelligent, hard-working competency—in spite of her wretched face—mistakes their friendship for something more. Damian, of course, isn’t satisfied with a platonic relationship, and attacks her in his car on a drive home from dinner, and after that incident, Lesley avoids being alone with him and won’t get in a car with him at all, feeling “safer” that way. Some friend.

Everything wraps up fairly predictably, complete with car crash and house fire, but the rapprochement at the end is remarkable in that in Mark’s (you knew it would be him) embrace, “there was no violence, no force behind it, just a gentle, compelling pressure.” A sad statement that an overt lack of pain in a pass is a novelty. We are treated to The Kiss, and manage to avoid a discussion of Lesley quitting her job—again, Mark proves his worth when he paints a picture of her continuing to work alongside him in clinic. He even tells her that she’s “sufficient unto yourself,” though he admits, “I’m not … I need you most of all.” 

If Lesley has an irritating tendency to go on about her face and Mark after the accident, these annoyances stop altogether after the first third of the book, and on the whole it is a lovely, relaxed stroll with an intelligent, dedicated young woman leading a charming life as she makes the rounds of her rural patients. All it lacks is a female friend to trade quips with, but even without her, Lesley Bowen makes for a gentle afternoon, especially if you can’t be in a country cottage with hot malted milk and cookies yourself.

East of the Sun

By Hermina Black, ©1952

The oasis hospital of St. Anthony of the Desert was comparatively quiet until the arrival of dynamic young Dr. Allerby. And what was Venetia, the attractive young Matron, to do about Prince Amin-Ali, now that she knew where her heart lay?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The shortage of red tape would have made an average hospital committee faint.”

“If that is Dr. Glennister Allerby it’s just wickedly wasteful of him to keep his mind on microbes.”

“Temper—temperament, and—much too good looking! Three things I detest in a doctor.”

“Heaven alone knows what orgies we’ll be up to, when you’re no longer here to control us, sir.”

“Other girls fell in love and got themselves kissed—but by what inadequate men, poor things!”

“Meggie moved away, looking really pretty with the help of the finest cosmetic any girl can have—happiness.”

“ ‘Kiss me!’ he commanded. ‘Homeopathic doses are all very well, but—I’ve never prescribed them—’ ”

REVIEW:
British vintage nurse romance novels have a certain feeling about them. They’re calm, with a bit of a stiff upper lip; there’s lots of conversation and tea, and not much really happens. Even the back cover blurb, above, exemplifies their quiet and contained nature. As an American—or maybe that’s really my low-brow taste—I prefer the camp and crash of a fabulously silly book like Cover Girl Nurse, but now and again, I do enjoy a nice cup of hot and a British VNRN.

East of the Sun, we are told repeatedly, is a reference to the song, so now whenever I see the cover I hear Tony Bennett crooning his heart out. Venetia Corliss is the young Matron (for a glossary of British terms, see Silent Heart) of a hospital in the desert, drawn because, in true colonial fashion, “Every now and then certain Europeans are born into the world who are attracted by the Arab races—living among them they develop a love and understanding which is as strong as any racial tie.” Well, let’s not get too carried away.

The PMO, or principal medical officer, or chief of staff, is Dr. Hammond, her godfather, but he’s having a bit of a health crisis and is off to England for six months to unwind. In his stead comes Dr. Glennister Allerby, who is quite the hot tomato—though our cool Venetia is unmoved. “All the nurses will fall in love with him,” says Farina, a princess and one of Venetia’s patients. “What nonsense!” Venetia answers. “You read too many romances.” Indeed, Venetia and Dr. Allerby cross swords almost immediately—but we all know what that portends. “When you begin by hating a man you almost always fall in love with him,” predicts the wise Farina.

Someone else is vying for Venetia’s affections—Prince Amin-Ali, the prime minister and also cousin of the desert country’s ruler. He is, in fact, the reason Dr. Allerby initially dislikes Venetia, as he finds a card bearing a suggestive message in some flowers Amin-Ali has given her. Dr. Allerby is a bit more openly bigoted, even hesitating before he can bring himself to shake the prince’s hand on their first meeting: “Plenty of Western women found Eastern men attractive, though the type of women who did, had always raised his disgusted contempt. … If she must philander, couldn’t she find someone of her own color?” What Dr. Allerby doesn’t realize is that however suave the prince is—he drives a powder-blue Rolls Royce and hands out emerald bracelets like they were candy bars—his suit with Venetia is doomed, because, after all, he is a “darned wog.” So much for that “love and understanding.” He’s also married, but that doesn’t seem to occupy a prominent place in Venetia’s consideration of the man’s romantic possibilities.

We’re told that Venetia doesn’t care for him because “he was Eastern to the core as far as his opinion of the place women should occupy in the world went.” Farina tells Venetia, “He would keep us veiled forever, if he could … We are for play-time, and not to be taken seriously in a man’s world. … He may have studied at a French university, but he is still only one step outside the harem. And he keeps his foot against the door!” But there’s a bit of a double standard at work here. Once Venetia and Glen hook up (you knew that was coming), she puts the handcuffs on herself: “She would have resented being ordered to do anything, once—after all she was his property.” After they are married, Venetia thinks, to resume working will be “a big temptation … but she knew she must resist. Dear as her work was to her—difficult as it might be to choose between her two loves, being Glen’s wife was going to be a full time job.” So it seems Easterners aren’t the only ones who go in for harems; is it any better that the Western version is apparently self-imposed?

Glen and Venetia get over their bad start by mid-book, after which we are regularly treated to nauseating syrup such as “the real be-all and end-all of life was Glen,” “without him she could never be whole again,” “how had she ever lived without him,” can you take any more? But if we are to plump up the second half of the book, something must happen beyond swooning. So Dr. Glen wanders into the garden at a party, finds Amin-Ali trying to kiss Venetia against her will, and socks the prince on the jaw. (Of course, Glen later is angry at Venetia for allowing herself to be sexually assaulted, and she agrees that she was “wrong on every count.” Nice.) This is where the real drama—if we can use the word in such a mild book—begins, because, “In men of his race, hatred is a dangerous and destructive flame.” Amin-Ali will avenge the insult, so Venetia spends a lot of time sick with worry about Glen’s terrible peril. There is indeed an attempt on his life—will he survive? And how can we possibly find the evidence that Amin-Ali was behind it? Not to worry, everything comes to light, and the prince is mysteriously disappeared by the country’s ruler, though no one seems to be overly troubled by this lapse in the rule of law.

East of the Sun is a pleasant little book, racial bigotries notwithstanding. There are some interesting minor characters, including Frances, a trollop of a nurse who stirs up trouble for Glen and Venetia. The luxurious touches make the book more exotic, such as when “the Rolls stopped, and the blue and silver uniformed attendant sitting beside the chauffeur, got out, and opened the door with a deep bow. And out stepped Frances Elland. The car slid away, while Frances, looking cool, and very smart, in her grey silk suit and feathered hat, came slowly up the steps.” (Some VNRN reviewers find these attentions to wardrobe patronizing, but I, for one, will shamelessly admit that I love them.) The settings are also alluring, as we spend a fair amount of time on shaded verandas with wooden slatted blinds or rooms with carved and gilded ceilings, walls of deep lapis lazuli flecked with silver, and deep chairs covered with blue morocco leather. It’s not quite as campy as some VNRNs, but it’s not meant to be, and it’s a thoroughly enjoyable book in its own right.

The Sunshine Nurse

By Sharon Heath
(pseud. Norah Mary Bradley), ©1969

Terry Chisholm made her prime concern the health of the delicate children she took care of at Sunshine House. Young and lovely, she considered no future for herself outside of her career as nurse. Even her best friend’s concern could not make Terry slacken her pace—until romance unexpectedly intervened. For when a youthful doctor and a handicapped sculptor misunderstood each others’ intentions, it was left to Terry to smooth out the emotional tangle. And once she had intervened, it was her own heart that became inextricably involved …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Perhaps he would discover that a blonde could be every bit as attractive as a redhead!”

“You mean that your pleasure at seeing me was not simply for my sake? Disillusioned and hurt, I maintain my usual exquisite courtesy.”

REVIEW:
Sunshine House, set down in the English countryside, is “a convalescent home for children whose parents can’t afford to take them away after a severe illness or operation.” The idea is, the parents meet Terry at the train station in London and hand over their sick children (including one boy diagnosed with “nervous deviltry and maladjustment”), who will be taken back to Sunshine House for weeks or months until they are deemed well enough to return home again, with apparently not one visit from their parents in the meantime. I cannot believe anyone ever thought this was a good idea.

A large cast of characters populates this book. Linda is a good friend of Terry’s who got sick and requires a place to go while she recuperates, and later while her boss is off honeymooning. Adrian Brooke is the indolent nephew of Lady Eskerton, who is a patron of Sunshine House. Adrian is a sculptor, but he injured his hand and now can’t work, so he spends his days flirting with Verity Gale, who is betrothed to Linda’s boss. Jonathan Hensley is a physician and the son of old Dr. Hensley, who cares for Sunshine House’s prepubescent occupants. Benjy is a four-year-old boy that Terry and her mother are raising after his parents died and his only living relatives didn’t want him. Bessie Hargreaves is a scullery maid with a sordid past—she married a man who she discovered, when she was about to give birth to their first child, was already married to someone else, and she lost the baby. Now she moons over three-year-old Maida, whose wretched, poverty-stricken mother dies while Maida is at Sunshine House, leaving her an orphan. Bessie wants to adopt Maida, but first she needs a husband and a home. Wait, there’s Ted Larkin, the gardener!

The two eligible bachelors (neither Terry nor Linda is a Lady Chatterley type, going for the gardener) are clearly destined for the two ladies. Of course, it’s a circuitous route to get them safely to the altar. Terry wants to help Adrian with his hand, and the two are always getting caught together by Jonathan Hensley, who incomprehensibly turns cold toward Terry. Linda insults Adrian, who incomprehensibly becomes infatuated with her. In the end, we have three engagements to celebrate, what with Bessie and Ted also hooking up. (Yes, this makes them eligible to adopt Maida.) Curiously, however, Jonathan doesn’t put the moves on Terry until after Benjy’s aunt and uncle from Australia turn up to claim him after all, when it turns out they can’t have kids of their own. “As long as you had Benjy to think of and love, I was afraid I wouldn’t stand a chance,” he tells her. “When I heard he was leaving you, I began to hope again.” A tad bit Oedipal to be jealous of a four-year-old boy; what’s he going to do when he and Terry have children of their own?

I suppose the re-telling can be a bit confusing, but the book itself is easy to follow and a decent enough read. You’ll occasionally come across some snappy dialogue, such as when Linda tells Adrian that she suspects that his girlfriends are “legion.” He replies, “Like the wedding presents in the newspaper reports. Both numerous and costly.” If you’re snowed in over Christmas break, it’s a pleasant afternoon on the couch.

Ring for the Nurse

By Renée Shann, ©1959

Sue Woodford seemed to have everything a girl could desire. She was unofficially engaged to handsome Dr. Don Langton—unofficially only because romances between the doctors and the nurses were not encouraged at Rosemead Hospital. When rumors began to circulate that Dr. Langton was paying considerable attention to lovely Vanda Corrin, Sue could do nothing about it. But then Don, in an unguarded moment, called Vanda “Meg,” and Sue slowly began to be aware that there was a closeness in Don and Vanda’s relationship that she could not penetrate. It took an emergency operation aboard a ship to make Sue realize whom she really loved.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“He’s just my type. Rugged and rather boorish and often so rude that one almost hates him.”

“ ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll emigrate to the colonies.’ ”

REVIEW:
The cover of this book certainly gets your hopes up. With that title, and its fantastic type, you expect this is going to be some sort of horror story. It’s not, and doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the cover. But it’s a nice enough little book, and besides, it’s British!

Sue Woodford is 20 or 21 (both ages are given to her), a nurse working in a small village hospital. She’s engaged to Don Langton, a moody doctor more than 10 years her senior who tells her, interestingly, that he has a “black monkey” on his back that he’s had all his life. “It made him moody and difficult, and sometimes it would perch there for days at a time.” She’s young and insecure, and always waiting around for him to show up on dates and hoping for a little reassurance from him that he cares for her. It’s a May-December romance that doesn’t seem to make either party happy.

There’s a new secretary at the hospital, Vanda Corrin, who displays unexpected medical knowledge at bus crashes. She and Don go way back, as it turns out; they were in med school together, and she is repeatedly described as one of the best medical minds of her generation—more brilliant even than Don—though a poor outcome with a pediatric patients has prompted her to give up her license, even though she was exonerated by the medical board. Don spends a lot of time with her, begging her to return to medicine, which naturally disconcerts his fiancée. Though he reassures nervous Sue that there is nothing between him and Vanda, when the two attend a medical conference in Paris, they have too many brandies, and before you know it they are smooching in a taxi.

However, young Sue has other options, as well. The young doctor Bill Stevens tells her repeatedly that he’s in love with her, is always asking her what’s wrong when she’s looking glum, makes himself available to her, and doesn’t pressure her very often to marry him instead of Don. So naturally she doesn’t think of him as anything more than a good friend. He’s concerned she’ll never respect him because, during a crisis when a significant portion of the medical staff has sampled the cafeteria’s canned meat for lunch and is carried off with food poisoning, Bill is called to perform a tracheotomy on a patient who neglected to put on her glasses and so swallowed a wasp, which has caused her throat to swell up like a balloon. He loses his nerve, and Vanda, who happens to be passing by at just the right moment, seizes the scalpel and saves the day and the patient.

Sue is unique among the VNRN heroines I’ve met to date in that she’s not a very good nurse. On one of his dates with her, Bill decides to himself that Sue is “competent and reliable, but she lacked that little extra ‘something’ that a girl needed to be really outstanding in her handling of patients. No, she’d be far better off to marry and have a family.” At the end of the book, when Sue finally does quit to get married (I won’t tell you to whom), her supervisor says, “Usually when I hear one of my younger nurses proposes to leave to be married, I’m extremely sorry. … But, in the case of Nurse Woodford, I must confess I don’t mind very much. I never thought nursing was for her a vocation and no girl makes a good nurse unless it is.”

That one of the main characters is a woman doctor is also something of a novelty. And while virtually every other VNRN insists on examining its male doctor’s hands, here it’s Vanda who is described as having hands that are “long and slender, with an odd strength about them. Capable hands. Perhaps a surgeon’s hands.”

Ring for the Nurse is a pleasant little book. Sue Woodford is, as far as heroines go, a bit of an annoying dishrag, but she does pull herself together for the final crisis, which involves dropping onto a ship from a helicopter and assisting with an emergency appendectomy. And we do have the brilliant Vanda as a counterpoint—even if she, too, is a bit spineless, chucking medicine at the first sign of trouble. (In fairness, our male heroes aren’t without fault, either, between Don’s undiagnosed depression and Bill’s losing his nerve over a fairly simple procedure.) The book on the whole is an enjoyable read, even if there isn’t a whole lot there to make it truly great. It’s not as good as its cover, but it’s worth the hour or two it will take you to buzz through it.

Wayneston Hospital

By Elizabeth Kellier (pseud. Elizabeth Kelly),
©1963
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Wayneston was a very small village hospital, having only one resident doctor, the young Chief of Staff, Ian Collington-King. And when Susan Brent came to work there as a staff nurse, the enigmatic doctor immediately roused her curiosity. Susan’s puzzlement grew after she confided her feelings to her fiancé, handsome Brian Draycott. For Brian was sure a scandal was attached to Dr. King’s name, and for his own purposes Brian was anxious to uncover it. Why had the brilliant young surgeon chosen to hide away in Wayneston? What had Brian to gain by discovering Dr. King’s secret? And why did Susan find herself in the storm center of an emotional battle between two men in her life?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTE:
“Am I interrupting one of those important female confabs?”

REVIEW:
When the story opens, Susan Brent has just graduated from nursing school, not an uncommon affliction for heroines of vintage nurse romance novels. (It seems that once you graduate from school, the only next logical step for a gal is to get married.) Susan has left her home in London and moved to a small town in Dorset to work at the hospital and to be near her fiancé, Brian Draycott. Brian is a partner in his uncle’s development firm, and he is in charge of buying real estate so the firm can put ticky tacky houses on it. He’s hoping to buy a lot of land that’s coming up for sale soon for himself and build a house on it, and then he and Susan will get married. In the meantime, they’ll go to dinner at his stuffy parents’ house and to the movies a lot. And after they’re married, “you’ll be able to quit work altogether,” as she’s told several times in the book’s first few pages, which she receives with nary a peep.

She first meets Ian Collington-King, the limping doctor who today would be called a hospitalist, at the local pub, almost colliding with him, and it was only his “quick action … that prevented her from being thrown off balance,” as he seizes her elbow. His companion, Mr. Treverly, who runs a house in the country nearby for retired gardeners, “did not appear to like Brian. But why not? she wondered.” Such are the mysteries of vintage nurse romance novels.

But there are more! At work Dr. King, as he is mercifully called, is mum about his private life. “Nobody seems any wiser about him now than on the day he arrived eighteen months ago. In some ways, he’s a real mystery,” another nurse tells Susan. He lets it slip to Susan that he was in Rhodesia when he was in the army, and naturally she tells Brian this. Brian thinks he has heard the name before, and with Susan’s tip he soon remembers that a Major Collington-King was “cashiered” (I had to look this up, it means dishonorably discharged) from the army for embezzling money from the mess funds to support “a particularly expensive wife” and spent six months in prison for it.

In person, however, Dr. King is a kind, benign gentleman. Susan feels “surprisingly at ease” with him, and when he gives her a lift back to town, she admires how he handles the idiosyncrasies of his battered old automobile, and she feels like she did as a child in her father’s car, “so wonderfully safe.” This is in sharp contrast to Brian’s shiny new Sunbeam, a powerful racecar that he drives too fast for Susan’s liking. We are given a tour of Dr. King’s superior surgical skills, and the de rigueur enthusiastic appraisal of his hands: Susan thinks he is “a more than efficient surgeon. His slim, long-fingered hands moved with an instinctive skill, almost as if they had no need to be controlled by his brain. … She once more admiringly acknowledged his expert adroitness.”

Brian’s godfather, Mr. Chadwick, is a crotchety unmarried wealthy old man with a blood disease that brings him to the hospital on a regular basis. Who is he going to leave his money to? Brian despises the old man’s relatives who hang around like flies but then uses Susan to get him onto the floor to see Mr. Chadwick after visiting hours are over. Susan resents this, but does it anyway.

Brian begins to suspect that Dr. King is trying to get Mr. Chadwick’s money and seems to become a little unhinged in his obsession with the idea. Even after they have a heated discussion about it in which he snarls at her for her “touching faith in [Dr. King’s] integrity,” she runs to tell Brian of an outing Mr. Chadwick took on his own one afternoon, arranged by Dr. King, and then about a letter that Mr. Chadwick asks her to mail for him to his lawyers. Brian becomes furious with each news bulletin and snaps at her, “I notice you’re quick enough to jump to the defense of Collington-King again.”

In the book’s climax, Brian makes a scene at a local dance, accusing Dr. King of assisting his godfather of buying the lot of land he wanted out from under him and donating it to Mr. Treverly’s charity, and then drives Susan home too fast and gets into an accident. But since she’s unconscious for most of it, the accident is not really exciting or interesting; it’s just over in three sentences.

This is a fairly plodding, quiet story. Not much really happens, and then it ends. It’s not hard to start mentally ticking off the boxes as we pass the obligatory milestones in the plot: Steadying hand on the elbow? Check. Deft surgeon’s fingers? Check. Warm smile and blushing cheeks? Check. It’s not badly written, but our heroine, Susan Brent, has a mere fraction of the starch of her nurse’s cap, and I do tire of hearing about her “well-shaped head” or her outfits replete with “tiny pearl earrings that set off the small ears and the fine shape of her head.” Her eventual rapprochement with—this should not be much of a spoiler—Dr. King isn’t much of a reward, since their previous relationship has been completely pedestrian apart from him twinkling his blue eyes at her. The cover is really the best thing about this book, so after you’ve admired that for a minute or so, just put it aside and be done with it.