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.

The Much-Loved Nurse

By Pauline Ash, ©1967

Nurse Leila possessed a rare quality—the ability to draw people out. Wherever she went, within the hospital or outside it, people found themselves falling in love with her. All except the one person she really cared about. Was there anything she could do to change the way he felt?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“I think you’d be wretched without something of your very own to keep you occupied, but I can’t help feeling, sometimes, that you ought to have a family to raise, instead of just a job.”

“I wish you nurses would just nurse, and not talk to the patients at all!”

“This young man was going to kick against the pricks, every inch of the way.”

“If he could have shrugged, he would have, but he couldn’t because of his injuries.”

REVIEW:

Poor Nurse Leila Richmond. She really likes taking care of patients, which in this case means running errands for them, giving advice about their personal lives, carrying secret messages to the secret people in their lives—and unfortunately, as she’s on the men’s ward, all these patients soon come to feel they’re in love with her. And why wouldn’t they? “She was a golden girl. Golden of skin, golden of hair—and her eyes—they caught the sunlight, and they danced, and it was the happiest, the most beautiful face he had seen for a long time.”

A number of patients are yearning for her tragically: Dudley Marchmont, a wealthy young painter, whose hands were burned in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a child from the fire that burned his apartment building to the ground (an especially gruesome backstory that is barely commented upon); Jeffrey Philbey, a mountaineer with an unhappy marriage who had forced his reluctant wife to come on a climb with him, and in the accident that ensued he’d become a “spinal case”—though it seems likely that he will regain some use of his legs—and his wife was killed, leaving his 7-year-old ward, herself the orphan of his brother, in his disinterested custody; and Marwood Tappender, a travelling businessman with a habit of taking typists to dinner (but nothing more!) when he’s on the road, but he has not told his wife of his hobby, and is being blackmailed by one of the typists. Phew! And did I mention that Marwood’s wife Arabella is the sister of surgeon Kearney Holdstock, “a big man, with massive shoulders and a fine head which he held rather high,” with whom Leila is actually in love?

It’s not hard to see that nothing but serious trouble and hospital gossip is going to come of Leila’s heartfelt desire to help her patients struggling with despair—“You’ve only got to say you need something, and she’ll come galloping to do it for you!” exclaims one patient. Kearney’s feelings for Leila cause him to be sucked in to Leila’s efforts to help her patients, and it isn’t long before he’s in love with her too, but as the hot water rises around Leila’s neck, she’s convinced that the only way out—once she’s solved everyone else’s problems, naturally—is to quit her job and go work at another hospital. The women’s ward, apparently, where she would cause much less collateral damage, has no need for a dedicated nurse.

As she’s running away from the hospital with Kearney in enamored pursuit, her train crashes, which of course leads to the rapprochement of the heroine and her man. This involves her promise to marry him and quit working, even after earlier consideration of quitting her post at the hospital was described as quite a burden to bear: “With the end in sight, St. Mary’s assumed a new atmosphere, an atmosphere she didn’t want to lose. She had  been a part of this great family for long enough to be a little scared and very sad at losing it.” But with a man to be gained, she’ll chuck it all! “No more trying to arrange other people’s lives, my sweet,” says her surgeon, drastically arranging her life for her without a flicker of irony. “You’ll have quite enough on your hands managing your own,” he tells her, implying her life will revolve around him and their future children. She hesitates—and he says, “Leila, if you want to go on carrying the burdens of your patients, you have to make a choice. It’s them or me.” Well, the choice seemed obvious enough to me! While it is true that Leila gets herself excessively involved with her patients and needs to be redirected, she’s clearly a great nurse who turns hopeless patients around, and it does not stand to reason that she shouldn’t be a nurse at all. I felt the loss to the hospital, the patients, and to Leila herself—will she really be happy puttering at home with little to do (until the babies start cranking out) waiting for her surgeon husband, who will be working 60-plus hours a week, to show up?

It turns out I had read this book before but had failed somehow to write the review, and now, remembering nothing of it, I was forced to wade through it again. I can’t really say it was worth a second go-through. There’s a lot of drama in the plot, and as each patient tumbles for Leila she is completely incapable of telling them that she does not love them and that they need to pull themselves together, only compounding her problems. We’re told that Kearney is a good guy—he loves his sister very much, and he agrees to play along with several of Leila’s escapades—but she largely thinks he does not care for her and just enjoys yelling at her, not completely without reason. In the end we have a fiancé 13 years older than our 20-year-old heroine and who has few outward charms to put the reader on his side. The story is entertaining enough, but there’s not enough in this book to love as much as the fellas who all love this nurse.

Doctor Napier’s Nurse

By Pauline Ash, © 1967

Catherine Hewson—Midge to her friends—and her cousin Derry, another Catherine Hewson, were to start their nursing careers on the same day, but at different hospitals, and Derry had suggested, for some purpose of her own, that they change places. But Midge was not at all sure that it was such a good idea …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Did you know there was a disgusting dummy that we pretend is a patient, and practice on it? It has all the lifelike etceteras, and I almost killed it with pneumonia yesterday by leaving it uncovered during a blanket bath.”

“Three other people sharing a secret, and it was a secret no longer.”

REVIEW:

I’ve been a little crabby with VNRNs lately; it seems every book I pick up is another dull rehash of the usual threadbare plotlines (looking at you, New Surgeon at St. Lucien’s, Nell Shannon, R.N., Dr. Holland’s Nurse, Staff Nurse Sally). So it was with great dismay that I realized two pages into Doctor Napier’s Nurse that I had actually read this book before, but had failed to write a review—and remembering little of it now, would have to read it again to be able to tell you something about it. I should have noticed, however, that this book is by Pauline Ash, who also gave us With Love from Dr. Lucien, a lovely book that earned an A- and a fond place for the author in my heart—with that knowledge I would have groaned less loudly, thereby not startling my travelling companions on the subway. In the end this book does not come up to Dr. Lucien, but is definitely not groan-worthy, and possibly even worth a second read.

Here we have the 19-year-old Catherine Hewson, called Midge, and her cousin of same name and age, called Derry. They are also both orphans—they have a surprising amount in common, this pair—and have been raised by formidable aunts Eleanor and Sapphira, who have decided that the young ladies will be packed off to nursing school: Midge to Tapley’s under Eleanor’s friend Dr. Blair Napier, and Derry to St. Augustine’s with Sapphira’s acquaintance Dr. Paul Pinder. Derry is a wily gal with a fondness for the lads that got her booted from her boarding school, and her plan to buck the yoke imposed on the cousins involves switching places with Midge. The  problem with this is that Midge is just not at all the sort of person who would sign up for such an obviously bad idea. But for the sake of the plot, she does, and regrets it mightily on every page that follows.

Both doctor-mentors have been alerted as to the natures of the incoming nursing students, so Dr. Napier is puzzled by Midge, who frequently “forgot she was supposed to be rather dim and frivolous, and settled in to help anyone who required her.” Turns out that despite her upper-class upbringing, “she was liking the life and the work more and more every day,” and soon comes to regret the fact that her little escapade is likely to undo her future career as a nurse. Dr. Napier also happens to be 28, and before long, “Midge faced the fact that she liked Dr. Napier. Liked him more than was sensible for a little P.T.S. nurse who was probably a good ten years his junior.” But because her plot with Derry involves a lot of sneaking out to see Derry so as to deliver mail she would have received and to head off aunts coming to visit, Midge is perennially in hot water with Dr. Napier, who soon insists that he drive her everywhere when she sets foot out of the hospital and is always lurking in his car outside any shop or pub she ventures into, and then glaring at her and crooking his finger at her to pull her in for a ticking off. Frankly, it’s pretty darned creepy.

To her credit, Midge is not impressed with his behavior, either. When he objects that she won’t call him by Blair, his first name—which does suit him, because he is frequently blaring at her—she says, “I can’t. Every time I see you, you’re looking like thunder. You just have to keep picking on me for something. I just can’t please you, can I?” She proceeds to tell him off, shaking with anger. But he can figure out that something is amiss—the girl that Aunt Eleanor told him smokes like a chimney chokes on the one he forces on her, and her work is too good for a young lady who is alleged to have no mind or interest in work or school. “I find it more and more difficult to believe that you are that sort of person at all,” he says. “It’s as if your good aunt is talking about someone else, a stranger. I just can’t understand it!”

She also quickly comes to despise Derry, who, having talked Midge into the stunt in order to further her relationship with a film star she’d pursued in boarding school—a fact that she had not previously revealed to Midge—now shows no inclination to help Midge out with the various entanglements she’s in over it, and in general demonstrates that she is really a horrible person. “Had Derry ever felt anything more deeply than the two words ‘I want’ could conjure up? Had Derry ever felt remorse or compassion for the people she had twisted, in trying to get her own way?” The aunts finally disclose that the way they’d decided to bring Derry to heel is “to get her married off. Someone nice and stolid and long-suffering, with plenty of money and only male relatives.” So the switch turns out to be beneficial in that regard, as Derry’s MD mentor Paul Pinder is 45, and apparently foolish enough to accept the wild Derry—the mystery is why she decides to accept him, and the fact that he is 26 years older than she is means both of the young women’s beaux are not men the reader can be easy with.

Most of the book is one series of near-misses and escapades that can be a bit confusing to follow and eventually just exhausting, given the constant state of high anxiety that Midge is in. Of course everything is sorted in the end, but it does involve a train crash when both Catherines are on board, and most unfortunately, our independent, hard-working, intelligent heroine agrees in the end to give up too much: “From now on, I take the weights. I shoulder the burdens. Right?” Dr. Napier insists. “I take all the responsibility, and make life easy for you. Agreed?” For her part, she foolishly agrees. But the writing is quite good, with bits like, “all of her chins wobbling in her anxiety” to keep us amused, so if the plot gets a bit too much at times, we can feel for our heroine and enjoy the book overall.