Settlement Nurse

By Rosamund Hunt
(pseud. Miriam Lynch), ©1966 

Wealthy, attractive Nurse Rebecca Hazlett had no great love for the patients of “The Downs,” the slum area where Dr. Paul Coleman had his office, though being near Paul, despite the fact that he hardly noticed her, seemed to make it all worthwhile. But when she met Paul’s friend, handsome, enigmatic, politician Steve Pryor, she found herself eager to help in his fight to clean up the city—working with the poverty-stricken, going into the depths of the slums, mindless of the underworld dangers that surrounded her. Suddenly she realized her life had taken on a new meaning—but dare she confuse it with love?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“No one was actually rich these days. She might have told him that high taxes and the maintenance of a place like the house of Larchmere Street did not give her parents much leeway.” 

REVIEW:
Wealthy Becky Hazlett is a child, just 21 years old (why must VNRN heroines be so alarmingly young?), fresh out of nursing school, which she had attended in part “because she had wanted to escape from the sort of life her mother had planned for her”—that of an upper-crust society wife—but also because she liked the challenge of it, and the knowledge that she was doing something “most people would find difficult or distasteful.” So, in short, it was most certainly not because she had any burning desire to help people, especially those less fortunate than herself.

Then why is she working in the Downs, the town’s slum, when she “never came into Folger Street without a feeling of distaste”? Well, silly, it’s because she’s in love with Dr. Paul Coleman, who for some unfathomable reason has decided to take up “the most difficult phase of the medical profession in a run-down section of the city where money was scarce and patients put the doctor’s bill at the very end of the list of necessary expenditures.” And why is she in love with Paul? “Because every other young, single, impressionable nurse in the hospital had yearned and speculated, Becky had become interested in him. Because so many other girls wanted him, she knew that she had to have him. It was a form of swimming upstream again.” Well, I guess there are worse reasons.

But needless to say, because otherwise this would be a short book, Paul has no interest in Becky. In classic VNRN fashion, “He never saw her as a person; merely as someone to help ease his heavy burden of duties.” Though  perhaps Becky isn’t being entirely honest with herself; “there was about her face a look of something like aloofness. And too much pride. She had heard herself described, during her training days, as a ‘snob’; and one of her instructors had call her ‘a spoiled brat.’” Perhaps her disdain for the people she works with is not invisible to Paul either.

Then a pal of Paul’s, Steve Pryror, stops by the clinic. He’s running against the forever incumbent for mayor, who has a grifty sort of administration that, according to Steve, helps enforce the poverty that keeps the Downs full, and he wants to change it. He wins the endorsements of Paul and therefore Becky, as well as financial donations from both. But when Steve then publishes an ad in the paper naming them both as financial supporters of his campaign, Becky’s genteel parents are shocked and embarrassed! Furthermore, this puts her in some physical danger from the goons of the Hardcastle administration, but ensuring Becky’s safety is taken up as a personal mission of local ex-con Robbie Hood (self-named, though Paul quips that Robbie “steals from the poor to give to himself”), and Robbie escorts Becky on her work errands, much to her mixed feelings, as she finds Robbie tedious and boring, but recognizes the usefulness of his protection. As her bodyguard, however, he meets her cousin Alicia Coatsworth, who has dropped by the family manse for an extended vacation, and soon Alicia is out on the town with Robbie, wearing clothes borrowed from Becky—and now there’s a photo in the paper of the pair in a seedy nightclub after hours, but the caption misidentifies Alicia as Becky.

Well, this is just too much for her parents, so Becky moves out of the house and into a shabby but clean house in the Downs, where an impoverished widow with two teens is compelled to rent rooms to meet expenses. Becky quickly enjoys being part of a warm, affectionate family so unlike her own, and living in the neighborhood begins to shift some of her condescending attitudes. As she chats up the young daughter, who is keen on becoming a nurse herself, Becky begins to realize her own shallowness and self-absorption. “She could feel no pride in herself as a person. She could see now how false had been her values and motives, how enormous her selfishness.”

Then there is a political rally by Steve after which he is savagely beaten by the current mayor’s thugs—which Becky witnesses along with a slightly deranged old woman who lives in the area. Becky treats Steve on scene, then specials him in the hospital in the evenings until he is out of danger.  Becky and the aged Miss Augusta Shelburne are now star witnesses in the prosecution, and in even more danger. Becky promptly moves Miss Shelburne into the house where she is living so the thugs won’t be able to find her, but unfortunately decides to take this crucial moment to move back home to the safety of her parents’ house, sadly abetted by Paul. “I’ll feel better when you’ve left the Downs behind,” he tells her, though he lives there himself and presumably always will, which will make him quite a hypocrite if and when he marries Becky and she moves in with him.

The rest of the story plays out in an easily predictable plotline, but I did appreciate that Becky is the rare VNRN character who actually grows over the course of the book, and not in an abrupt, unbelievable manner. It is told more than shown—“the change in her did not come overnight, and certainly it did not come easily,” we are told, with examples including her willingness to smile at others on the broken sidewalks—but we still have it nonetheless. My only disappointment with the story was Becky’s step backward when she chucks her independence to run home to Mom and Dad, who had never been particularly supportive of her career, to be “pampered and fretted over” by her parents and their extensive staff. If overall the book has no sparkling prose or even any good quotes to pull out, it’s still perfectly serviceable.

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.

Flight Nurse

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1971 

When beautiful young Pat Romain became a U.S. Air Force nurse, she was fleeing the memory of a disastrous love. But soon her personal hurt was forgotten amid the larger pain of the wounded soldiers she tended. Intense, breath-catching drama was part of Pat’s daily routine on the Med Evac plane shuttling between embattled jungle airfields and hospitals in the Philippines and Hawaii. Another kind of drama raged within her heart as two men—a brilliant doctor and a gallant pilot—competed for her affections. It took a searing confrontation with tragedy, and a desperate crisis aboard a crippled plane, for Pat to discover her full worth as a nurse, and her wisdom as a woman in love.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Well, at least, fellows, we’re plane-wrecked with the prettiest nurse in the whole Air Force!”

REVIEW:
Pat Romain is an Air Force lieutenant and nurse who has enlisted in an 18-month tour shuttling wounded soldiers back from southeast Asia to safer hospitals, and recovered soldiers back into battle, a stint she has chosen in part because of, yes, a broken heart, after her beau “rushed her almost to the altar before he had eloped with the daughter of the physician who headed the Physical Medicine Department. To escape seeing him every day, another woman’s happy husband, she enlisted in the Air Force.” But right away she is being rushed again, this time by Kev Moriarty, medical school dropout and pilot, who is described in glowing terms such as “blithe, brash, irreverent” and “rakish,” all properties any woman would hope for in a serious boyfriend. But two pages after meeting the shallow, wolfish cad, Pat “was falling precipitately in love with him,” for some inexplicable reason, because he is not a likable fellow, we discover, as Pat goes on a date in San Francisco with him and her new roommate and he spouts lines like, “You’ll  miss me when I’m gone.” Actually, no, we won’t.

Not to worry, though, because even though “her heart lurched crazily” when she thinks of him, she proves herself to be as fickle as Kev is, instantly falling for a talented, alarmingly dedicated and possibly unhinged frontline surgeon, Dr. Paul Anders, the stuff of most of the flight nurses’ dreams but who inexplicably takes Pat in his arms and tells her he loves her at the end of a flight in which they both had been extremely busy tending to the wounded soldiers in their care. Now she’s planning her wedding to Paul barely six months into her Air Force service while Kev, whom she runs into now and then, gives her sad-dog eyes. She really doesn’t spend much more time with Paul than she did on their initial flight, because he’s on the front lines and she’s on planes all the time, setting down for literally only 20 minutes at a time in Vietnam before taking off again. They’re all set to tie the knot when the inevitable happens, and Pat is alone again—but she has her good friend Kev to help shore her up. What will happen next?

One of a few nurse novels I’ve read that are set amidst the Vietnam War (see Vietnam Nurse and Vietnam Nurse), Flight Nurse literally only briefly touches down on that conflict, and honestly the book has little to say about the war except fairly regular remarks about wounded soldiers who have vacant looks in their eyes or who “were resigned to never being men again,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. One interesting point about this book is that it never takes back Pat’s first two boyfriends, pretending after the fact that she never loved them. The other is that her roommate, Miriam, is a Black woman, a rarity in VNRNs, though this is really not discussed except when Miriam notes that their new roommate is awfully rude to Miriam: “To her, Patricia, I’m black before I am either a flight nurse or a human being, I’m not sure in which order. I feel sorry for her.” Pat replies she does too, though she’s angry as well—and that’s the end of the subject. 

The book has little in the way of plot or medical interest (except for the time Dr. Anders recommends a rectal tube as a means of decompressing a soldier who is inexplicably eviscerating), and though its admiration for the Air Force is clear, as a civilian I found it occasionally difficult to navigate the military abbreviations and jargon, not to mention literally navigate where Pat was or where she was headed, as she might be visiting several countries in a single day, and I wasn’t immediately aware of where all the bases she lands at are located. So unless you are an especially devoted fan of Vietnam War literature or the Air Force, you’d be better off missing this flight.