Kit Cavendish—Private Nurse

By Margaret Malcolm ©1965 

Kit had always taken care to keep her work as a private nurse quite separate from her private life—but she was unable to prevent this happening when she took a job in the Baylis household. And as things turned out, she was quite right to be apprehensive about it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Whether we liked it or not, there’s only one world for everybody to share, and the sooner we realized that we had no right to expect a bigger or better share than other people, the more we would enjoy what we had got.” 

“You know, with a face like yours, anyone would imagine you had a sweet, sympathetic nature. Always ready to lay a soothing hand on a fevered brow—metaphorically in this place, of course. But how wrong one would be!”

REVIEW:
Kit Cavendish, who has been working as a private nurse for the past year, has just been hired to care for a wealthy gentleman recovering from a broken leg sustained when he fell while having a heart attack—so he has two ailments to recover from. As it happens, this man lives just outside Kit’s hometown, which she left six years ago for her training. She no longer has any family in the area to bring her back before now, but she accepted the job because she thought it might be fun to go back and see her former haunts. 

It isn’t. It turns out there’s a big new factory in town—owned by her patient, Ralph Baylis—and as a result, “Where there had been fields and farms and perhaps a few isolated houses there were now rows and rows and rows of small, ugly houses, each exactly like its neighbor,” built to house the new workforce. Then there’s a young man from her past, Victor Wrinch, who is now an accountant for the factory. Years ago he’d had some unrealistic ideas about his relationship with Kit, who was too nice for too long about it, until the day she found “she had had to be almost brutal” to clue him in to her disinterest in him romantically. But when she arrives in town by train, Victor is the one waiting to meet her at the station, telling her that he and Ruth Baylis, her patient’s wife, had decided on Kit for the job: “Someone intelligent who could keep him occupied with other interests so that he doesn’t have time to worry” about the factory. Or the fact that Ruth Baylis—incidentally 20 years Ralph’s junior and his former secretary—has stepped into the role of running the business while Ralph is home doing nothing at all out of fear that he might have another coronary. Unfortunately, you can see the trouble coming a mile away, because how could a woman possibly run a company well? “When a woman thinks she’s as clever as a man—or cleverer—she always goes too far, simply to convince other people. And she doesn’t care what methods she uses either.” Another option for this story line—and a more interesting one at that—would have been that Ruth actually was good at running the company, but Ruth starts out mean and lying, so we know something shady is afoot.

Then who should show up but Jason Heathfield! (If I’m going to snark about the Baylis’ age difference, I should also mention with raised brow that he’s 14 years older than Kit.) He is the cardiologist on the case, and had abruptly ditched Kit four years ago for no apparent reason; of course, “she could never marry any other man” after that. So now she has Jason’s slightly warm—or is it just slightly less cold?—demeanor to negotiate on top of the family drama, which includes not just the mystery of what Mrs. Baylis and Victor are doing at the factory, but Ralph’s son Noel (from a previous marriage) to fend off and Ruth’s niece Sue, an overworked and underappreciated Cinderella. Noel likes to play around with life and women, and while Ralph is hoping Noel will come to work at the factory, Ruth just wants to keep her current position as boss and uses Kit as a vehicle to tarnish Noel’s reputation with his father. Sue, of course, is in love with Noel but doesn’t stand a chance, due to her shy demeanor and Kit’s outstanding and forthright personality.

Then one day, out for a walk, Kit meets Jason just as she is setting out a huge picnic, and she asks him to join her. In the course of general conversation, he says something vague and obscure and covers her hand with his—“She knew beyond doubt that what he had said was much more than a mere generalization. He had expressed a personal hope—and one which concerned not just other people, but themselves.” She’s a bit of a mind reader, and she needs to be, because that’s the end of that conversation, except he promises never to let her go without a fight again! Until Kit is abruptly sacked by Mrs. Baylis, and Jason says not a word as she packs up and heads back to her old hospital job in London. “She realized you’d got too strong a character to be got round, so she’d made up her mind you’d got to go”—Victor tells Kit, explaining that Ruth wanted to keep Ralph an invalid and out of the office so she could keep the top job, while Kit wanted exactly the opposite, as she knows it is best for Ralph to be healthy and occupied.

In the end Jason comes around and explains why he’s been such a curmudgeon, but it’s hard to start liking a fellow on page 184 when he’s been an aloof ass for the previous 183. Some of how the tangles are tied up make for sweet endings, particularly the way Ralph Baylis wins yet simultaneously makes peace with his unhappy, frustrated wife. I wish Ruth Baylis hadn’t been such a shrew, as it is easy to dismiss the real problem of there being few real outlets for intelligent gifted women in the 1960s when the woman in question is a scheming harpy. But overall this book is a good read with interesting characters and plot developments—if only the book’s hero had been included in either category.  

NOTE: This author should not be confused with the pen name Margaret Malcolm, under which author Edith Lyman Kuether wrote the novel Headless Beings, her only book.

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.

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.

Nurse at Ste. Monique

By Juliet Armstrong, ©1966

That foggy London morning, when someone tried to snatch her handbag, was to have far-reaching consequences for Maura O’Shea, sending her winging across the seas to a new life in the sunny West Indies. It was indeed a far cry from the renowned St. Matthew’s Hospital in London to the little nursing home at Ste. Monique, but Nurse Maura was to find that the emotional problems facing her there were far, far greater than ever they were in London.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
Maura O’Shea is the Irish stereotype, red-haired and feisty; “You could deal out a very smart box on the ear, if you thought a chap deserved it,” she’s told. She is working in London when right there on the first page her handbag is stolen and she is knocked to the ground. “A tall man, carrying a suitcase, strode over to her and lifted her to her feet with his free arm, firmly but gently, as though she were a precious piece of china.” Do we think this gentleman makes an appearance on the last page of the book as well? We sure do! His name is Paul Lasalle, and he is in town on business for his plantation (yeesh) in the Caribbean. Because the robber is soon nabbed, he is required to come back to town to testify at the trial in a few weeks, so the pair go out regularly before he heads back home. But his brother, Claude, is also in town—and he’s a more social fellow, frivolous with his emotions, soon taking her out on a regular basis and calling her “darling,” which makes Paul’s eyebrows rise concernedly when he returns, and he’s a bit too brusque for Maura. “Was it that he suspected her of setting her cap at Claude, and regarded her as on a lower social level than the Lasalles?” 

But Claude has to return to the Caribbean soon, and Maura tells him she’s not going to see him any more—so he shows up and proposes marriage. It’s arranged that she will sail to the Caribbean in a few weeks, and at the first stop she gets a telegram telling her to get off there, though she’d planned to finish her trip at another island, and when she steps off, she’s met by Paul, who tells her that Claude has gone back to his ex-wife—whose existence surprises Maura. When Paul tells her he will pay for her to fly back to London on the next flight, instead of being grateful, she’s rude: “You’re in a great hurry to get me out of the island! I might have the plague!” she snaps, not at all grateful that he’s trying to help her out of a huge jam. Instead she takes a room in a boarding house and gets a job at a nursing home, but Paul warns her that the nursing home is on the verge of going bankrupt, because although it’s a profitable business, the owner, Mrs. Martin, took on a lot of debt to finance its startup and is having trouble paying her creditors as well as the business expenses. Again, is she thankful for the tip? No, she is not!

Yet he keeps popping around to see her or take her to dinner, and they inevitably squabble, mostly about his concerns about the men she is dating—his motivations transparent to everyone except Maura, who thinks, “How hard and distrustful he could be, how lacking in charity”—although one time when they are driving to dinner and she has fallen asleep in the car she dreams that he gently kissed her lips … and then suddenly, out of nowhere, Maura decides “to part with him finally and forever, would be utterly unbearable”! This is one of the worst sorts of plot twists, completely inconsistent—even if completely predictable—with the character we have followed in the last hundred pages. Yet she still argues with him at every turn, and then does her best friend Phyllis a bad turn when she dates her boyfriend and he thinks he’s fallen in love with her. Only a series of crises with both Paul and Phyllis—again, completely predictable—sort out everyone’s true feelings, although one of the crises, which lands Paul in the hospital, is so bizarre it’s hard for me to imagine Paul would ever look at Maura again.

In the meantime, Maura is being quite rude to a coworker who, it must be confessed, is not a nice person, though she should know even at 22 that she’s not helping the situation. Oddly, she is reluctant to visit Paul in the hospital but finally goes a week or two later, “cost her what it might in pride,” though it’s clear to me that she owes him a lot more than a visit—but he’s left the hospital days ago. She meets the nurse who had cared for him there, and now she’s stupidly in agonies that Paul has fallen for his nurse, wondering if she “was the reason for his silence”—and never mind that she hasn’t reached out to him at all, either, so maybe he’s wondering about her silence, but “she was too proud to ring up the Lasalles, as she would have loved to do.” Maura is her own worst enemy, and it’s a little difficult to understand what all the men see in her. And now she’s decided to leave the Caribbean in two weeks, another smart decision. Then her feud with her co-worker lands her in hot water at the immigration office, as she’s been working without a permit, and is told to leave the island the next day. What will happen next?

The obstacle with this book is that Maura is a stupid and not very likeable person. She deserves little of the good that happens to her and all of the bad. But the writing is good, even if I found nothing for the Best Quotes section above, and the other characters in the book are interesting. If you can tolerate a very predictable plot (but then, aren’t all VNRN plots very predictable?) and a foolish heroine, it’s not a bad read.

The Nurse and the Crystal Ball

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1969

When Sue Whittier unpacked her suitcase, 3000 miles away from the nurses’ dormitory in Maryland, she found a fortune-teller’s crystal ball under her nylons. It was a friend’s idea of a joke, but Sue—who didn’t believe in such things—wished it could tell her what she was letting herself in for. She had driven to California to be with Dave Harding, the man she had walked out on seven years ago just before their wedding—a dying man now who had written, begging her to come. And she had … Even though seeing David would mean seeing his half-brother, Marv, too—the secret reason Sue had broken the engagement. Still, she was prepared for that. What she wasn’t prepared for was finding another old love of Dave’s at his bedside: Gloria, the blonde he had married on the rebound, the wife who had deserted him two months later and has now returned—with a son she claimed was his. But was it true …? Sue didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her that here was a woman who could not be trusted …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I am going upstairs to Mr. Harding. If you try to stop me—well, like most nurses, I know a few judo tricks.” 

“In my young years I was never a juvenile delinquent. But it’s never too late to start, even at my ripe old age. So how about us having a little snort?”

“Love and money! She sighed to happily and kept smiling to herself. What more could woman ask for?”

“Just to prove that she was a woman of patience and strong will, Gloria did not box his ears as she longed passionately to do.”

REVIEW:
When you find a book with a title like this, you can’t help but get your hopes up. So much potential for rollicking, campy fun! Florence Stonebraker can certainly deliver the goods, too, but it must be confessed that the quality of her work is erratic. So my optimism was guarded. And this turned out to be warranted. 

Sue Whittier has left her job and driven 3,000 miles to La Jolla because the man she dumped seven years ago has leukemia and is at death’s door. He had written to her, begging her to come care for him in his final weeks, so sure! But things are little complicated. First of all, there is a crystal ball in her suitcase under a stack of nylons. Remember nylons? I hope you don’t. Secondly, the first person she runs into is Dave’s half-brother Marv, who is actually the reason why Sue left Dave—right before her wedding “she went down to the beach with another man. And that other man took her in his arms. And her dream of forever and ever love with Dave was forever blasted.” Upon her return, she and Marv immediately get into a rather strange argument in which Marv tells Sue to leave but will not tell her why, and then finally, as she is stomping off, he tells her, “I have never stopped loving you.”

Next she meets the surprise guest, Dave’s wife Gloria. He had picked her up on the rebound during a wild few months “with a crowd who spent their time drinking, smoking marijuana, driving to Vegas to gamble over weekends, swimming in the nude,” but Gloria didn’t last very long either. Now, learning somehow that Dave is about to kick off and has a large fortune to dispose of, Gloria is back at the family mansion and has somehow installed herself as supreme ruler over Dave’s mother and Dave himself. The trick is that she has a six-year-old boy in tow named Bobby, who she claims is Dave’s son. Gloria and Bobby are quite the pair—Gloria is a vicious, scheming vixen out to sabotage Sue, while Bobby is an angry, uncontrollable wrecking ball. “It is not as if he were retarded or anything like that, sweetie,” Gloria explains. “Actually, Bobby is unusually bright for his age. His only problem is that he is inclined to be a psychopathic liar, and that needn’t bother you.” OK! But everyone else in the house is kind to Bobby, who transforms under their supervision into a friendly, gentle boy. Sue even gives him the crystal ball, and he starts talking about seeing his dead parents in it. Um, what?

Meanwhile, Gloria has hired a doctor to care for Dave, but Sue suspects the man is a quack. He is prescribing no end of medications for Dave, and has even given a prescription to Dave’s mother Martha, who had seemed fairly healthy until she had started taking the pills as ordered, but woke up feeling dizzy, strange, unable to speak clearly or even walk without falling. Sue advises Martha to “hold the prescription pills under her tongue until Gloria left the room.” Why she cannot just refuse to take the medication outright is unclear, but once Martha starts dumping the meds in the toilet she is feeling spry and energetic again. Dave keeps taking his medication, and is getting worse and worse.

Marv, meanwhile, is trying to kiss Sue, usually after a loud argument in which he grabs her arms painfully, but she is fighting him off and running, at least for now. He keeps exerting everyone in the house to “play it cool” with Gloria, but is not sharing his long-term plan with anyone, so soon naturally decides without any evidence whatsoever that Marv is in cahoots with Gloria, plotting to inherit Dave’s money.

Suddenly Dave decides he is going to make a new will and locks himself up with Marv, who happens to be a lawyer, to create the thing. Exactly two nights later Dave “simply fell asleep, after taking the pills which Gloria made a nightly rite of putting into the tiny plastic box—and he did not wake up.” The rest of the book plays out pretty much as you know it will, including one character going stark, raving mad—a Florence Stonebraker specialty.

There are a lot of irritating aspects to this book. One is the constant suggestion that there are deep secrets at work here: For example, on her first day, Marv inexplicably tells Sue “I don’t feel free to tell you” why he wants her to leave immediately, though the reason is obvious the minute she walks through the mansion door. Marv, brooding in his room after an argument with Sue, “could not figure in exactly what way this money-greedy woman could hurt Susan,” when the obvious answer is that she can’t. When Bobby starts seeing his parents in the crystal ball, Martha declares, “there’s more to his story than meets the eye. We haven’t enough sense to understand what it is.” Yet the most egregious mystery—did Gloria kill Dave?—is left completely unanswered. Is it fair play for an author to throw out a bone that huge and then walk away from it? I spent some time thinking this question over and concluded that the answer is usually no, though I might accept it from an author so gifted that it actually worked (see A Series of Unfortnate Events by Lemony Snicket). So in this case, no. Even the eponymous crystal ball has no impact on the story. I will always have a deep fondness in my heart for Florence Stonebraker, so her failure in this book makes me doubly let down. If you would prefer to avoid philosophical quandaries and disappointment, you won’t need a crystal ball to tell you that you should probably avoid this book.

Doctor’s Nurse

By Jennifer Ames
(pseud. Maysie Greig), ©1959
Cover illustration by O. Whitlock 

She promised not to marry … that was the condition on which Gail Stewart went with Dr. Grant Raeburn’s research unit to Hong Kong. Gail was as pretty a nurse as you could hope to see and Grant made her promise if she joined his staff not to marry for two years. That seemed easy for Gail loved Grant—and he never even noticed Gail as a woman! But when she met Brett Dyson in Hong Kong—well, things took on a very different hue …

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“All men know whether or not they’re good looking, though they pretend they don’t.” 

REVIEW:
Poor Nurse Gail Stewart is the victim of so many nurse novel tropes! She’s an orphan—her parents died in a war camp in Hong Kong when Gail was six, she herself having been packed off just in the nick of time back to Britain—and she is smitten with her boss, Dr. Grant Raeburn, who is one of those cool, aloof, driven men who has never looked at a woman in his life (is he gay or just autistic?) and is not especially kind to his staff; he is described as a “withdrawn and unsympathetic” “martinet” who “drove his staff hard, almost ruthlessly.” But he’s cute, so that’s OK! 

He is off to Hong Kong to do research for two years and has asked his office team to come along. There’s Dr. Bobby Gordon, the usual foil who is hopelessly in love with Gail and has absolutely no hope of ever being loved in return, and Mildred Harris, a plain spinster who types and is passionately in love with Dr. Raeburn. Gail is asked to come along, but she has to agree to a special rider on her contract: She is not to marry for two years, because apparently if a woman gets married she is no longer able to work. But it’s not a problem for her to make this agreement because “the only man she had ever dreamt of or contemplated marrying was himself.”

So off she goes to Hong Kong with a secret agenda stowed safely in the hidden compartment of her attaché case: She’s going to track down the man who betrayed her parents, who had gotten them locked up in that prison camp where they died, and the rat fink had stolen dad’s lucrative business to boot! “She had to make this man pay,” she decides, though she does not know who he is or even the name of her father’s business, and it was 16 years ago that all this betrayal transpired. But sweet revenge will be hers: She vows, “I’ll kill him with my bare hands!”

So off she goes, delayed by a month because her aunt gets sick, and meets a cute but lazy rich boy on the plane, Brett Dyson. He is going to Hong Kong with the intention of not working for his godfather, Tom Manning, as much as possible, and to marry a rich heiress. He is, in short, the antithesis of everything she believes in, and of course “She disliked him intensely.” But then, bizarrely, her plane crashes in Persia, and she spends a night delivering first aid while Brett very uncharacteristically acts as her capable assistant—and as the sun rises, she passes out and he carries her behind a rock and makes out with her when she wakes up and tells her that he’s falling in love with her because he’s so impressed with her strength and skill and stamina. Naturally he spends the rest of the book trying to bully and dominate her, insisting that she go out on this date or that drive and that she marry him immediately.

She, however, remains committed to Dr. Grant and her work with him, and of course to her plot for revenge! Even though she is “strangely drawn” to Brett and his kisses, she does ask herself lots of questions about whether it’s love or lust (Gail asks herself a LOT of questions). And though Grant tries to express an interest in Gail and takes her out to dinner, she allows herself to be dragged off by Brett, whom they naturally meet in the restaurant, and swoons over his rudeness: “She knew Grant didn’t like it, but for the moment she didn’t care. Her heart was singing; she was strangely, almost unbearably happy. ‘Is this love?’ she wondered,” even though she had just been thinking, after the doctor asks her to call him by his first name, that “intimate friendship seemed natural, love was a beckoning shadow lurking just around every corner.” Her behavior on this first date does cool Grant’s ardor noticeably, and he asks her if her penchant for late-night parties is going to impact her ability to do her job well. “She felt they were no longer friends—almost they were enemies,” and cries herself to sleep, but then goes out with Brett almost every night, even oversleeping one morning and angrily deciding that Grant’s insistence she not marry is unfair. Gail is, in short, an erratic, unstable character.

But—speaking of erratic, unstable characters—out on a deserted island one afternoon with Brett, he presses her yet again to marry him, and when she refuses him, he takes off in the boat and leaves her there. She takes a nap in a cave while waiting for him to return, and when she wakes up, she is trapped by the tide—the waves eventually lapping at her knees while she clings to a cliff—until her screams attract the attention of a fisherman who takes her back to Brett’s godfather’s house, where she is tucked into bed for days, and one gets the impression that Godfather has no intention of letting her leave. But on the third day she’s home alone and heads off for the phone in his office, and while rummaging in his desk for a phone book, she comes across a large pile of passports. What could this be about?

Though she might have been drowned by Brett’s alarming stunt, Gail promptly forgives him—“Why should she hold this against Brett?” Ummm, because he almost killed you when you refused to be bullied by him?—and continues dating him. Now Gail decides she’s going to buckle down and find out what happened to her parents, so she goes around asking everyone at Godfather’s cocktail parties if they knew who killed her parents—it’s kind of a mood-killer, actually—and soon everyone is telling her that she’s in danger and she’s feeling uneasy all the time.

Dr. Grant, meanwhile, apologizes to Gail, telling her that he grew up poor and had to work two jobs to get through medical school, so he doesn’t know how to relax, and asks her for another date. He eventually tells her he’s thinking of leaving Hong Kong because his boss is thwarting all his research efforts, and he thinks his work is being stolen for other governments. Suddenly Gail realizes—and you will be stunned to hear this—that she’s in love with Grant, “something she hadn’t realized. She knew now that deep down within her she had been in love with Grant for a very long time.” Right, since that time it occurred to her on page 8.

Now we have only to clear up the mystery of who is the murderer—and since the list of suspects includes only three people, it doesn’t take long—Gail connecting some extremely tenuous plot points in order to do so, but leaving a larger number of mysteries for us to puzzle over once everything has been “resolved.” If Godfather Tom is already rich, why is he fencing passports? Why does she instantly abandon her life-long plan for revenge, not even pressing charges since he’s done a few nice things in his past, and is suddenly declaring he has been planning to return the company to her anyway—sure he was!—and even forgiving him, which she sees as somehow a prerequisite for her continuing to be friends with Brett—though it’s not clear why she wants to be friends with Brett at all.

Logic and common sense are not widely employed in this book, which left me mostly irritated with heroine Gail for being such a wimpy, gullible victim who all but begs for the bad guys to come bludgeon her over the head. Gail’s adversarial relationship with the secretary Mildred is a cheap, unfortunate side note, as the desperate spinster is too blatantly mean, when her legitimate feelings of jealousy toward the beautiful, popular Gail could have been explored with more interest if the pair had actually been friends. (And there’s a creepy twist at the end when Mildred starts dating Grant’s evil boss and is seen staggering out of a restaurant with him: “What had Dr. Kalavitch given her to drink? And to what purpose?” Even enemies don’t let other women get date raped.) The food and scenery in Hong Kong are beautifully and lovingly depicted, but the few Asian characters in the book are not drawn without prejudice, and Hong Kong is described as a city with a veneer of civility but “there are innumerable rackets; gangsters in high positions—gangsters who would stop at nothing, not even murder.” So it’s another contribution from the White Doctor Foundation from me. I had high hopes for another book by Maysie Greig after her fabulous Doctor’s Wife, but Doctor’s Nurse was a profound disappointment in virtually all respects, and I will approach her next book with a bit less of Nurse Gail’s wide-eyed innocence.

Navy Nurse

By Adelaide Humphries, ©1954

Ensign Dorothy Phillips was beautiful; life was beautiful; her work was wonderful; and everything was right with her world—until the day, her arms laden with bundles for the Chief Nurse’s surprise birthday party, she was almost run down by a carload of brash young Air Corps officers. An impudent apology, yelled by a handsome lieutenant, was the crowning insult. Then the lieutenant appeared unannounced at the party—revealing himself as Lieutenant Keith Cameron Townsend, and the dour Chief Nurse’s nephew, no less! The fact that Dorothy was engaged didn’t mean a thing to Keith. The more she snubbed him, the more persistent he became. It takes a battle at sea—and all the suffering connected with it—for the ensign to realize that love and hate are often akin.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Oh, you know a kiss or so doesn’t mean anything. At least most people don’t think it does in this progressive age.” 

REVIEW:
Author Adelaide Humphries, who has previously given us two A-grade novels (Nurse Landon’s Challenge and The Nurse Knows Best), here has achieved a truly remarkable feat: She has written a novel in which not a single one of the five leading characters is a likable individual. One might wonder why you might want to write a book about spoiled, selfish, inconsiderate people—and a skilled writer might even craft a thought-provoking, Pulitzer Prize–winning epic from such a cast—but alas, here we are just left to grit our teeth and endure through to the end—or just toss the stupid book aside and move on to something better. I advise the latter. 

Let’s start with leading lady Ensign Dorothy Phillips. She is the most gorgeous woman in the entire world, somehow made even more dazzling by her uniform: “Ensign Phillips had features and skin a poster-girl could never have surpassed,” so “when a beautiful girl like Ensign Phillips donned her Navy nurse’s uniform, wolf whistles were the order of the day.” Oh, boy! When the book opens, she is on the sidewalk, carrying purchases for an upcoming party, when a car overflowing with Air Corpsmen whizzes around the corner. She’s pulled back from stepping into the street, knocking her packages askew and somehow keeping her from getting run over though she was never actually in the street, and one of the men in the car leans his whole torso out the window, shouts something unintelligible and waves his arms above his head—it actually seems as if his life was more at risk in this incident than Dorothy’s. These brief seconds leave her “with an impression of laughing black eyes, a flash of white teeth in a tanned, handsome face—and a burning sensation around her heart.” Yes, she’s in love already, and this is why she is overwhelmed with a relentless, obsessive hatred for the young man.

The fellow who had kept her from stepping into the street, Charles Henry Hale, who unfortunately chooses to be called Skid, is the closest we have to a decent human. As a first-class gunner’s mate, he is outranked by Dorothy, a fact that is made much of, and Dorothy’s condescension to even speak to such a lowly creature is treated with great admiration. Don’t worry, though, she is ultimately extraordinarily cruel to the respectful young man, who kindly and humbly helps Dorothy with her packages and carries them back to the launch for her (she is stationed in a hospital ship off the coast of San Diego). He hopefully suggests they have coffee, though noting the invitation is “entirely too brassy,” but Dorothy condescends to accept, after first having berated him for causing her to drop her packages.

During coffee, Dorothy decides that Skid is a “darned nice boy,” and he, of course, falls immediately in love with her and asks to see her again. “Dorothy despised anything that hinted of snobbery,” we are told, so she immediately wades into it, thinking, “An enlisted man couldn’t get seriously involved with a Navy officer. It would lead to all kinds of gossip, and no telling what it might lead to.” The only reason she decides to agree to see him again is that she spots that darned guy who almost fell out of the car that didn’t hit her, and becomes furious that he seems to be laughing at her, so she “deliberately turned her back on him” and gives Skid an overly enthusiastic wave and shouts that she’ll see the poor dope next week!

The party she is helping to plan is a surprise birthday party for Chief Nurse Capt. Nettie Leonard, the quintessential gray-haired spinster martinet, and who should turn up at it but that darned guy again, who is revealed as Capt. Leonard’s nephew, Lt. Keith Cameron Townsend (the two male leads both absurdly have middle names)! Darn the luck, her entire day is ruined! At the party Dorothy’s flirtatious and backstabbing roommate, Micky, flings herself at Keith, scorching her own boyfriend in the process, but Keith manages to grab Dorothy and tell her that he will win her, “no matter what or how long it takes,” because all women find stalkers irresistible! And when Keith crashes her next date with Skid, Dorothy takes her revenge on Keith by telling him that the pair have known each other since childhood and that they are engaged. “She felt good. She was glad she had told that big fib. She would whiten it by explaining later on to Skid, although she didn’t know just what her explanation would be.” This is the same woman who, “besides believing that the best policy was to stick to the truth,  believed that when a person gave his word to someone else he should do his level best to live up to it.” Let’s see how honest Dorothy is going to play this out.

So having gotten herself into one bad situation, she now plans to make it worse: “It looked more and more as though there was nothing she could do except try to make this trumped-up betrothal authentic,” because the honorable thing to do is to marry a man you’ve just met to spite someone else. Dorothy also promises Micky’s boyfriend, Dr. Tommy Simms, that she will keep Keith away from Micky, though this goes completely contrary to her life’s purpose of never speaking to that horrid man again. It doesn’t exactly work, as Keith presses her and Skid into double dating with him and Micky on a regular basis—though, out one evening celebrating their engagement, Dorothy dances with Keith and discovers “one dance had made all the difference in the world,” because Keith kisses her and tells her that he is in love with her—and that “you’ve got a lot to learn, Dorothy. But you will.” So the next scene finds Dorothy admitting to Skid that she does not love him, but that she’ll agree to get married if he wants to. Ugh!!

When word gets out that Dorothy is engaged to Skid, however, the chief nurse becomes unprofessionally hostile and assigns Dorothy to night duty out of spite, and then calls a staff meeting in which “everyone present agreed that it was a mistake for an ensign in the Navy to become engaged to, or even go with, an enlisted man.” Now nothing can possibly save Dorothy from this horrible situation—except a really big sea battle! So off her ship chugs, following the battleships into war—I’m not exactly certain which war we’re supposed to be fighting—and on the eve of the big battle, Skid sends Dorothy a “beautiful” letter in which he tells her that he loves her because “she was so sincere, the kind of girl a fellow would be proud to take home to show off to the home folks.” Clearly this man barely knows her—and her true character is again revealed by her reaction, which is not remorse or shame, but rather “fatality”—and then she hopes that she’ll get a letter from Keith. But when she hears Keith has survived the battle, she’s remembering “his pride, that masculine ego of which he had more than the average share. His pride would demand that he, an officer, must never give up trying to win a girl away from an ordinary enlisted man.” That jerk!

Soon Skid turns up on the medical ship, one of the worst burn cases in a coma for days, his chances of survival a hundred to one, and “it will take plastic surgery to restore that burned face.” Dorothy tells him with tears and kisses to get well, that they’ll be married as soon as he’s better, but “Skid knows Dottie doesn’t love him. He probably knows she feels sorry for him and so is willing to make the best of a bad bargain.” And so he does the decent thing, committing suicide by willpower and dying in his sleep, because “if a fellow wants to die—well, nothing any doctor, or anyone else, can do will help him,” declares Dr. Tommy Simms. “He had the courage to die—because he wanted you to be happy,” adds Micky. Dorothy replies, “It makes me feel almost as though, instead of helping him, I had caused Skid’s death.” Probably her first honest thought—and her last, as without another thought to her likely role in manslaughter, she steps off the ship to “where she belonged—in a certain handsome young lieutenant’s arms.”

There is not one admirable quality in Dorothy, her manic roommate Micky, or the egotistical and domineering Keith, and not much better in the vindictive chief nurse, or even Skid, who is self-sacrificial to the ultimate degree. Dorothy’s stint in the Navy makes it look like a casual weekend gig, and her commitment is definitely wanting; early on she confesses that she’s not sure why she joined the Navy since she has a deep-seated phobia of water, gets seasick easily, can’t remember all the darned rules and regulations, and after six months she still cannot get the hang of military time! But she gets excellent training in the Navy, and she doesn’t have to work very hard—“a navy Nurse’s duties are much lighter nowadays; they’re mostly supervisory.” Interestingly, it is suggested that if she were to marry, she would just resign her post. I’m not sure how that could ever have been a thing, because my impression of the military is that it’s not an optional sort of arrangement. This book, however, is optional for you, and so I recommend that you forego it, and instead try the much more interesting Navy Nurse penned by one of my favorite authors, Rosie M. Banks—it’ll be much smoother sailing.

Nurse Rivers’ Secret

By Anne Durham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Everyone at Ripplegate General Hospital was tremendously excited when the film star Dawn Delaney was admitted as a patient—everyone, that is, except Nurse Nina Rivers, who knew Dawn only too well and dreaded the complications she would inevitably bring with her.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“She’d be a proper corker out of that horrible uniform.” 

“No one looks at a nurse unless she’s doing something to attract attention.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nina Rivers has made a life for herself apart from her family; she comes from a fairly broken home. Her father died when she was very young, and Mother married Alexander Fitchworth, a very nice man who had been a real father to Nina. Of course, he went and died, and Nina became a sort of Cinderella to her temperamental and beautiful stepsister Alexandra, waiting on her hand and foot. Astonishingly, when Mother and Alexandra had decided to move to America, Nina elected to remain in the U.K. to become a nurse, and neither of them has ever forgiven Nina for “abandoning” them and what would have been a life of unappreciated drudgery.

Imagine poor Nina’s surprise when her sister is brought in to her hospital as a pampered private patient—under the name Dawn Delaney, as she is now known, as she is a rising movie star and is making a film in a castle nearby; Dawn had fallen through a rickety balcony when she had been up there outside of working hours with a film mogul who could do things for her career. Nina is immediately sacrificed at Dawn’s altar by none other than Mommie Dearest. Not a hug or word of affection passes from Mommie’s lips after years apart from her first daughter before she is exhorting Nina not to tell anyone of the relationship. “You’ve always said you didn’t care for that sort of life. This is what you prefer, and as soon as Alex has recovered, she will go right out of your life again, and not trouble you,” she says, blaming the victim. “You must come and have tea with us one day,” she adds, finishing the job with a knife to the heart.

But Dawn/Alex is a spoiled brat, always on the call light and sobbing in self-pity, and the only one who can soothe her is Nurse Rivers, who is constantly pressed into duty to pat the limpid hand of her sister. Dawn is also one of those ladies who “always found the men belonging to other girls much more acceptable to her than other men. She didn’t mean any harm; she just couldn’t help it.” Yeah, right. And of course the first man she notices is Dr. Antony Alsford, who is all but engaged to Nina—if only they can settle the thorny issue of whether she will quit working when they get married. “I just want a career of my own,” she tells him repeatedly, but he is having none of it. “He didn’t like his girl-friend to be the one with ideas, the one to want to make plans. He would want a yes-woman, Nina felt.” It’s clear why she wants to marry him and why she is heart-broken when he becomes starry-eyed over the dewy, rose-colored Dawn—and breaks off their engagement with a story about how he is doing her a huge favor by ending it. “I’m standing in your way,” he generously explains. He has no idea how right he is, and unfortunately neither does Nina.

Because there’s nice old Dr. Stephen Cornwell to help her over the rough patches, give her a lift into town and buy her tea and pass over his handkerchief. Though he starts out “much as a kindly uncle,” his charm grows naturally on Nina, and he is clearly in love with her—though she, of course, is the last one to figure this out. She does come to understand something her own feelings early on, however—“a rather special feeling towards Dr. Stephen Cromwell, that had begun deep down in her almost imperceptibly, and was now like a glow of warmth on a cold day, stealing gently yet swiftly all over her. A glow that made her want to be with him all the time.” Unfortunately Dawn, recognizing the attraction between the pair, now decides that, having won Antony for her own, she no longer wants that fickle man and has her heart set on winning poor Dr. Cornwell. “She hadn’t really wanted Antony permanently; she had just wanted to feel that she could take his attention away from another girl, and now she was finished with him.” What a sweet girl!

Now Dawn is making herself sick with longing for the good doctor, and Nina feels she has no choice but to exhort Dr. Cornwell to go along with the charade that he loves her in order to help her recover. “Dawn wanted him, and they must consider her, because she was so ill,” she decides. He flat out refuses, however, proving himself to be a man of principles and character. “She’s behaving like a spoilt child. She wants something. She must have it. It doesn’t matter if it’s some pretty toy or a man’s attention, it’s all one to her. And I, for one, will not pander to it,” he tells her, adding, “I think you’ve let Dawn and her mother make a doormat of you for years, and I’m going to personally stop it.”

But Nina is a clever lass, smart enough to figure out another way to get Dawn off Dr. Cornwell’s leg—even if in enacting her plan she risks losing the doctor for good. Complications and misunderstandings ensue, of course … and in the end we have another fairly typical Harlequin story, sweet and slow, with an admirable, strong heroine—and in this instance, we are lucky to have an attractive love interest as well. Some side characters are well-drawn; Nina’s mother in particular was terrifically horrid in a subtle sort of way. If overall this book is not especially sparkling, it’s still well worth an afternoon.

The Fifth Day of Christmas

By Betty Neels,  ©1971

It hadn’t taken Julia long to fall in love with Ivo van den Werff—but she had better fall out of love equally quickly, she decided, when she met Marcia Jason and realized just how much stronger a claim the other girl had on Ivo’s affection.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“That’s what you’re for—to see that I don’t die in a coma.”

“I, being a man of leisure, am the obvious one to sacrifice on the altar of frostbite and exposure.”

REVIEW:
This is the first book I have read written by romance queen Betty Neels, who published more than 130 romance novels starting in 1969 when she was 60 and chugged along into her 90s (you go, girl!). Ms. Neels worked as a nurse most of her life and served in France during World War II, writing quite a few nurse novels on the way. The problem with her oeuvre is that it largely lies beyond the scope of my “vintage” lens, which I feel limits me to about 1975—certainly not outside the 1970s (and my regular readers well know how painful I have found the quality of books in that decade, which makes me reconsider the wisdom of including the 1970s in my circle for reasons other than timing). So though I was very pleased with this introduction to the prolific Ms. Neels, I also have mixed feelings about whether I should regret or not the fact that I will not be reading many of her books—we’ll let the caliber of her work that we encounter in the future help tip the balance of my regret or relief.

And with that editorial over with, let’s move on to a discussion of this really sweet and delightful book. Julia Pennyfeather is a 22-year-old nurse accompanying a brat of a patient to her home in England just before Christmas, arriving at that remote manor house in the gales of a severe snowstorm that strands her there with only a few members of the staff—and Dr. Ivo van den Werff, who is blown to the door entirely by chance shortly after her own arrival, as he is seeking shelter from the blizzard. She flings open the door to him in the middle of the night, and he chides her for letting in a stranger—but helps care for her patient who has come down with pneumonia. They spend a few days walking in the snow and cooking bread and soup out of the scraps in the cupboards until the roads are cleared, and then Ivo invites her to Holland to care for Marcia Jason, who is living at his fancy family home while that young lady recovers from polio.

Marcia has been “recovering” for about nine months, and Julia—who dislikes the condescending and self-absorbed woman at first site—suspects that the woman is actually much better than she pretends, that her inability to walk is a pretense to allow her to stay on at the house and trap Ivo into a pity-based marriage. So Julia forcefully hauls the young woman up and down stairs—noting that how much help Marcia requires depends on who is watching—and endures comments about how “robust” and “sturdy” she is (Marcia sees her emaciated frame as the height of sophistication). Julia also puts up with a lot of intellectual snobbery, as Marcia is always reading dense tomes by authors we likely have not read (Bacon) much less heard of (Vondel, anyone?) and making snotty comments about what she is convinced is a plebian sensibility, remarking, “You are, I imagine, an impetuous young woman, lacking intellectual powers.” In fact, Julia fabulously turns out to be a quiet brain, and only when she is on a tour of a museum with Ivo, completely flustered by his nearness, does she deliver “quite a dissertation on Rembrandt, rivalling her patient in both length and dullness.” She also often offers thoughtful solutions to actual problems in daily life and in medicine that cause Ivo and me to look at her admiringly. I was also impressed by her limitless ability to bite her tongue when Marcia makes yet another rude remark, instead offering with “a politeness which was quite awe-inspiring” enthusiastic exhortations for Marcia to continue working on her exercises or have another go at the staircase for practice that they both know she doesn’t need: “Why not come into the garden with me tomorrow morning? We needn’t go far and the worst that can happen is for you to fall over, when I shall pick you up again.”

Julia has a young man back at home “who was waiting with the smug certainty of a man with no imagination for her to say Yes.” She’s not going to marry him because he’s an ass, which puts her way ahead of a sadly large number of VNRN heroines, but that gives Ivo something to tease her about from time to time. But since Julia is convinced that Ivo is promised to Marcia—if not definitely, then doomed to be so because of his guilt about her illness—she can only drink him in when he is near and cry in secret.

The humor in this book is constant and reliable, such as when Julia hears a hoarse croak coming from the room of her patient. “She was out of bed, thrusting her feet into slippers as the list of postoperative complications liable to follow an appendicectomy on a diabetic patient unfolded itself in her still tired mind. Carbuncles, gangrene, bronchopneumonia … the croak came again which effectively ruled out the first two.” The characters in the book are delightfully drawn, including Ivo’s lovely father, and the villain Marcia is terrifically awful. Even the love interest, frequently a dull individual with no inspiring qualities in many nurse novels, here has humor, steadiness and appreciation for the gem that Julia is. The book’s only real drawback is that once the party arrives in Holland about halfway through the book, there’s not much to do except watch varieties of the same scenes play out again and again—Ivo and Julia on a pleasant outing, Marcia being nasty, Julia pining for Ivo and planning her departure for England as soon as she can reasonably get away from what she is stubbornly convinced is her impending heartbreak; even if the scenes are well-written and enjoyable, they still become a bit repetitious as the plot spins its wheels for another 80 pages. But even the fact that Ms. Neels can crank out multiple versions of the same scene, all laden with emotion and wit, demonstrates her powers. I look forward to more of her works—it just remains to be seen how far into the 1970s I’m willing to be drawn into, even with as prodigious a talent as Ms. Neels’.

Nurse Atholl Returns

By Jane Arbor, ©1952 

When Lyn Atholl’s fiancé abruptly broke their engagement only a month before the day fixed for their wedding, she felt that the shock had disrupted her whole life. She could not bear the thought of resuming her dearly loved profession of nursing—still less going back to Broadfields Hospital, which she had so recently left in happy expectancy among the good wishes of all her friends. A chance meeting with the famous surgeon, Mr. Warner Belmont, convinced her that she was wrong, and she decided to return to Broadfields. But—would she be able to go through with it?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Lyn thought wryly that to dance with a battleship could not give a girl more confidence than to dance with Tom in a crowd, where it was always the other couples who got out of his way.” 

REVIEW:
Lyn Atholl is leaving her beloved job to get married to a man she hasn’t seen in over a year. And that works out about as well as you expect it will. Turns out her beloved, Capt. Perry Garston, found himself a wife when he was stationed in Austria—and told her as much about Lyn as he told Lyn about Gerda, so you see what a narrow escape Lyn has had. She’s horribly embarrassed about her turn of fortune—much more than anyone in the current age would be, so it’s a little difficult to follow why she’s ready to chuck nursing altogether, not only the hospital she has just left—but soon imperious surgeon Dr. Warner Belmont is wagging a finger in her face, asking her, “Do you mean that your efficiency in your work depends solely upon the smooth running of your personal affairs? Isn’t that taking the importance of the individual and of self-pity too far?” 

Ultimately she decides that he’s right and goes back to Broadfields, but soon she’s “wondering about him as a man—the books he read, the games he played, the people he liked,” but of course that last question is easy: He doesn’t like anyone. Well, except Eve Adler, a petulant, beautiful, very talented singer whom he squires about town. We are frequently reminded that “he needs neither advice nor help, nor companionship nor anything at all from any other human being,” and that “he gets on splendidly with other men and he’s a kind of hero to boys. Yet when it comes to women—to you nurses particularly—he treats you as if he had only to put a penny in the slot to make you tick over like machines. No wonder you resent it.” But Lyn, inexplicably, does not resent it at all, and soon decides “her feeling for the man at her side transcended anything she had ever known before. And she had thought that, after Perry, she would never love again!” Now we only have to wade through 130 more pages of misunderstandings, scenes of Werner being cold and snippy and Lyn being dignified and admirable. Ultimately there’s a train crash and a flu epidemic, and suddenly he’s declaring his undying love for her.

It's not a dull book, though not outstanding, and the plot device of having the heroine fall for an ass who remains one until the final three pages is particularly maddening. Some of the characters are fun to watch—the rotten women especially, it must be confessed—and Lyn is a quiet, competent type, even if she is ready at the drop of a ring to walk away from her profession, though she admits that “all she had learnt in nursing would be wasted” after she marries. Overall you might do worse than to see Nurse Atholl return—even if she’s just going away again at the end.

Nurse at Shadow Manor

By Sharon Heath
(pseud. Norah Mary Bradley), ©1966 

To forget the pain of a tragic romance, Nurse Frances Kimpton journeyed to Shadow Manor to act as companion to its elderly mistress. In that quiet countryside she would try to achieve peace of mind. But the peace she sought turned out to be a will-o’-the-wisp as Frances found when she learned the secret of the manor’s other woman—the young and willful niece of her employer. That secret meant danger and trouble. Frances turned to the attractive Dr. Ralph Grant for help. It was well that she did so. For, together, they were able to thwart a plot that could have ended in murder.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I was expecting a she-dragon in a starched uniform who would glare at me. But this one’s well disguised, apparently!” 

REVIEW:
To have a bad heart fifty years ago seems to have meant to be confined to a virtual prison. Poor Miss Caroline Eldridge, wealthy and only in her 70s, isn’t allowed to do much for herself and spends most of the day knitting, and everyone sneaks their life around behind her back, because “any sudden shock—mental, not physical—could be fatal.” Unfortunately, there’s a very elaborate network of lies and scheming occurring all around her, and it’s up to Nurse Frances Kimpton to protect the poor woman, even as she participates in and even furthers the intrigue.

The story starts implausibly enough when Frances is dragged in off the street to witness a wedding between a pretty, spoiled-looking woman and a weaselly looking man with a thin moustache. She’s en route to her job at an isolated mansion called Shadow Manor to look after Miss Eldridge, a sweet lady who has taken in an ungrateful niece, Eve Garner. You will not be at all surprised to learn that the mystery bride turns out to be none other than Eve, who has left her honeymoon and groom to return to Miss Eldridge’s mansion with nary a word of her recent nuptials. Eve is mean to everyone and seldom home, never saying where she’s going or when she’ll be back, but Miss Eldridge obtains sweet revenge when she decides to rewrite her will, saying that Eve will not get any inheritance until she turns 30 if she marries a man of whom Miss Eldridge does not approve. Fireworks ensue when Eve hears the news!

For her part, Frances, recovering from a heart broken after her fiancé was killed, is clearly over that lad and now has her wily eye on Miss Eldridge’s doctor, Ralph Grant, who is casually friendly. Then Frances happens to be on hand when Eve meets up with her new husband, Leon Josephs, in a whispered but brief sidewalk conversation—super secret! That night, when Frances offers to set out in the dark rainy night to search for the cat, she stumbles and scrapes her hands. She takes the opportunity of her minor mishap to invite herself to Ralph’s cozy cottage to tell him of her suspicions: that she had tripped over a wire slung across the walk put there intentionally to frighten her, and bless his heart, Ralph takes this statement entirely seriously. And now “the memory of this intimate, tranquil time was something she knew she would always treasure,” the little vixen. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if Frances turned out to be a psychotic manufacturing drama to lure in a man she has a yen for? When “no trace of string or wire had been found on or near the drive,” my hopes leapt!

I hate to disappoint you, dear reader, but alas, it was not the case, as author Sharon Heath has chucked that delicious opportunity for something much more implausible: that Leon for some insane reason is out to murder Frances by the most bizarre methods that turn out to be remarkably deadly. For Leon’s next act, he walks brazenly into the house, identifying himself to Miss Eldridge as a window cleaner, and cuts almost through the cord on the sash of a window in Frances’ bedroom. The very next day, Frances opens the window and decides to stick her arm out of it just as the cord breaks and the window comes slamming down! “Which might have been fatal, she thought, had she been leaning out the window!” Leon must be psychic as well as homicidal!

Next Mike Dering, an old boyfriend of Eve’s who had been too poor at the time to propose, turns up, now gainfully employed, and after spending an hour with the young man, Miss Eldrige invites him to stay at the house and tells Frances she hopes Eve will marry him. Ooops! Even if Eve were single she might not have the chance, because the brakes on her car fail and she drives straight into the river, saved by Mike, who happens to be loitering at the bottom of the hill (is Mike psychic too?). Suddenly Eve is a new person, confessing that she’s been changed all along, that she’d “got really fond” of Miss Eldridge, though she’d never bothered to show her anything of the sort. Furthermore, with just one word from Mike, “headstrong, self-willed Eve subsided at once.” Oy.

Frances, seeing another opportunity to flirt with Ralph, tells him he must come to the house that night but that Miss Eldridge must not know it, and Ralph again proves to be either the greatest sport ever or completely daft. After he sneaks into the house; frantic antics unfold! “I just told Miss Eldrige it was a friend of Mike’s who wanted to see him urgently. Miss Eldridge suggested you should have your talk in the morning room, but, if I leave you there and go to fetch Mike, she may take it into her head to come and have a look at this ‘friend.’ Perhaps you’d better come out with me, instead. Only I hope she won’t look out of the drawing room window just as we pass!” How complicated can these shenanigans get!

While they are tiptoeing through the shrubbery, Ralph tells Frances that he is going to hire a private detective to look into Leon’s past. A week later the detective turns up a game-changing fact, but when Frances races to tell Ralph, who is arriving at the manor, he chastens her: “‘I came here to see my patient,’ he reminded her, and she had to admit he was right.” It turns out that Leon was already married, and his wife is as psychic as she is, having determined Leon’s plans for Eve, found him in England, learned he was blackmailing Eve (though nobody knew except Eve), and gotten a job at the garage where Eve was dropping her car for repairs. She’s also an excellent (if nefarious) mechanic! And the pair is lucky too—ultimately Ralph and Frances decide that if they go to the police with this amazing story, the shock (of finding out her healthcare team is bonkers?) would kill Miss Eldridge.

Author Sharon Heath has given us several other gentle, sweet if not stellar books with A Vacation for Nurse Dean and The Sunshine Nurse, but this book is more of an unwitting and dopey comedy. The characters and their motivations are inexplicable: Ralph is not especially attractive, Frances comes across as a loopy dingbat, and why would Leon want to injure, of all people, the nurse? Wouldn’t it be better to off the wealthy matriarch first, and then his second wife to win the fortune, since murdering Eve first would put him out of the running permanently? But it doesn’t pay to examine stupidity closely, so all I can suggest is that you leave Nurse at Shadow Manor on the shelf and move onto something—anything—else.

Nurse Lucie

By Georgia Craig (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1964
Also published as Nurse at Guale Farms

Nurse Lucie Hatcher walked headlong into another world when she arrived at the small Georgia clinic at Guale Farms, eager to work with the skilled Dr. Wesley Warren. Lucie didn’t plan to get involved with the handsome young doctor, nor with the rich owner of the experimental farms, Perry Latham. But she did … with both. Then suddenly, women from Wesley’s and Perry’s lives appeared and disrupted Lucie’s paradise. Could she give Wesley up to the mysterious woman from his past? Could she fight the powerful and jealous Latham family for Perry’s love? Lucie’s paradise soon turned into a nightmare …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re much too pretty to be working at a grim job like this.” 

“A job? My dear girl! That’s a nasty word. Go immediately and wash your mouth out with soap and water.”

“The one end and aim of every woman is marriage and a home of her own.”

“She’s really a looker, isn’t she, now that we’ve got her dried out and all?”

REVIEW:
Lucie Hatcher has left Atlanta to come work in a small rural town, and a good number of the local folks are bewildered as to why she—or he—is willing to “bury herself in a place like Lathamtown. It’s just about the most lonesome place anybody ever heard tell of.” But it’s well paying, and she’s always wanted to experience life in the country, as she’s been a city gal her whole life, and now that she’s arrived in her “silly scrap of a yellow pillbox hat” she’s here to stay, dammit! 

She’s offered a ride from the bus station to the clinic by the pathologically angry schoolteacher Jane Berner, who warns Lucie that she’s to keep her mitts off Gareth Latham, who has just returned home after getting kicked out of college yet again. He’s the stepbrother of Perry Latham, who runs a large experimental farm in nearby Lathamtown and “doesn’t want anything that would bring tourists this way. He doesn’t want Graysville to install drive-in movie theatres, or taverns, or beer-and-wine package stores, or pin-ball machines; anything that might lure the young of Lathamtown astray. He’s not going to allow such devices within easy reach of his people.” Lucie lets this description of an oppressive local dictator pass with little comment or musing about how one person could possibly prevent the development of a whole town, and when she actually meets the tall, very good-looking man with a lean, sun-bronzed face, any further reference to this alarming aspect of Perry’s character drops away and is never mentioned again. As long as he’s cute, who cares if he’s fascist? It’s not long, of course, before he’s kissing her goodnight.

Perry has a stepmother, Belle, and she and Gareth “will never let Perry marry any woman.” When Lucie rightly expresses her incredulity that a grown man, especially a fascist, will be led around by his stepmother, she is told that Belle will “go after the girl. Once Belle gets the idea that Perry is seriously interested in any girl, she’ll sharpen up her knives until they’ll make every scalpel in the clinic seem dull.” Lucie also starts to question, when Jane puts the idea in her head, why “a doctor as young as Dr. Warren is and as skilled would be working in a small rural clinic instead of setting up a fine city practice somewhere or specializing in doing research.” But Dr. Warren is described as a local authority to whom other area doctors regularly consult, so his practice does not seem unsatisfying, if one is interested in primary care for an underserved community—and it’s curious that such a practice, today considered noble, would be scorned.

But Dr. Warren’s practice takes a considerable hit when Leonore Arnold, his fiancée, shows up in a rainstorm. It turns out the woman has gone insane after seeing her mother murdered by home invaders and has been committed to an institution—but has improved enough from her previously catatonic state to learn where Dr. Warren is, escape and find her way 20 miles to his door. Dr. Warren immediately tries to resign because when the town hears that “there’s a mental case here, the story will be built up that she’s a lunatic and her presence here makes everybody unsafe.” Perry insists that he stay, and that Leonore is sure to get well, even if she must never, ever remember that horrible incident again, because “her love will restore her to complete sanity.” Sure it will! Also, remember that since only the clinic personnel know she’s there, the secret won’t get out, “because nurses aren’t allowed to discuss their patients with outsiders.” Lucie, however, immediately lets drop in a packed waiting room that the doctor in charge of the sanitorium has arrived in the clinic to see a patient, and tells Belle that the patient “is no maniac,” just “a girl who is mildly ill mentally.” (And, it must be pointed out, she repeatedly tells anyone who asks about numerous other patients under her care.) So much for keeping a secret. 

Soon patients stop coming to clinic or calling for Dr. Warren’s services, and everyone, including Lucie, is perplexed as to how word got out, interestingly enough. Unfortunately, Leonore herself is one of those classic Peggy Gaddis characters, a beautiful, “bright-eyed, inquisitive child” who has no personality or brain whatsoever, and flings herself at poor Dr. Warren whenever he’s near, pleading, “Please, please, darling, let me stay here with you! I’ll die if I have to be taken away from you!” Not surprisingly, Dr. Warren at one point admits to Lucie that he no longer loves Leonore, but since the nutty shrinking violet is utterly helpless, he is soon declaring his love to her face and insisting they be married immediately. Another thorny issue raised and then perplexingly dropped completely.

Then Belle pops in to threaten Lucie, as promised, that she must not marry Perry, though she has absolutely no weapon to use against Lucie. Perplexingly, Lucie—who is now in love with Perry—tells Belle that she has no interest in Perry but plans to marry Gareth, which sets Belle back on her heels a bit, but then Lucie reverses course and says, “I wouldn’t marry either of the Latham men, even if they were the last men in the world!” Guess who has just come in the door behind her? The only possible way the pair could be reconciled is if Leonore, whose mental illness has mysteriously rendered her unable to walk, takes off into the swamp in her wheelchair and the rest of the gang is somehow unable to find her, and the overwhelming stress of the situation sends Lucie straight into Perry’s arms. The good news is that Leonore is found in a coma suffering from concussion, and the prognosis of her mental illness improves enormously because “a mild concussion might be helpful in restoring her mind. Perhaps when the concussion heals, she may be able to recall the past.” A couple of x-rays—a highly sensitive test for diagnosing mild brain injury (not)—“had been most satisfactory,” whatever that means, and a week later Leonore wakes from her coma!

The overwhelmingly bad medicine in this book is actually comical if you have any actual medical training or ever watched a few episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and it’s hard to understand why Peggy Gaddis, who wrote what feels like thousands of nurse novels, never bothered to learn anything about the subject. Her penchant for raising difficult problems—like a man whose leg is amputated after he is attacked by an alligator and whose wife leaves him because he’s “a cripple,” though Lucie indignantly protests that the young woman is only in shock and will come to her senses and return (she doesn’t)—and then utterly abandoning them unresolved is also infuriating. But overall this is far from the worst Peggy Gaddis novel I’ve met (that would be Dr. Merry’s Husband, which rated a D-), ranking in the top third of the 34 novels of hers I’ve reviewed to date (God help me, I’ve at least that many more to read before I can rid myself of Peggy Gaddis forever). So if you enjoy the occasional novel that you can chuckle at (not with) without suffering overmuch from aggravating writing and characters, this may be a good bet for you.

We can always count on Valentine
for a hideous cover illustration.