Nurse in the Tropics

By Peggy Dern 

(pseud. Erolie Pearl Gaddis Dern), ©1958

Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik

To Martie Howell, a nurse accustomed to routine duty, the assignment to accompany Lisa Long back to her Haitian home and to stay with her during her convalescence from pneumonia seemed like a heaven-sent voyage to enchantment. Nor did the picturesque country, with its brilliant vegetation and its colorful natives, disappoint her. But she was also exposed to Haiti’s darker side—to its voodoo rites and its age-old superstitions. These were frightening when seen at a distance; when used to break up the romance of Lisa and a young doctor, and also to alter the course of the nurse’s life, they inspired hysteria and near-panic.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m a nasty little cat. Why don’t you spank the livin’ daylights out of me?”

“Killing a love like ours calls for a lot of brutality. But then I don’t suppose murder is ever easy.”

“I don’t know who designed the first nursing uniforms, but whoever it was certainly did a fine job! They make a pretty girl beautiful and even a homely girl pretty! Though I don’t believe, now that I think about it, I ever saw a homely nurse!”

“I have to get back to the bananas.”

“I never dreamed there’d be a time when I could laugh and joke with a doctor. I’ve always had a great awe of them.”

“A nurse’s uniform is the most becoming costume any woman can wear.”

“I’m not afraid of evil spirits or any other kind of spirits—except the kind that come out of a bottle and are consumed inwardly.”

“They want to throw a party for us, Martie, to welcome us, but it won’t be a voodoo affair, so don’t be frightened.”

REVIEW:

I can’t help but pick up a book about a nurse in a third-world location with dismay, anticipating the patronizing attitudes I will shortly encounter. Peggy Gaddis has already proved herself a benevolent racist elsewhere, in works including Big City Nurse and The Nurse Was Juliet, so it was just a matter of time before we’d hear about the natives who address the white folk “with childlike affection,” who are “capering” “anxious children afraid of punishment.” “They—well, they’re like children!” Martie exclaims when she travels to a village in the mountains. At the same time, we are told several times that “it’s almost impossible for anyone to understand who has not spent many years here and mingled with the natives.” Curiously, VNRN heroines don’t seem to find similar situations in Paris or Monaco.

We also get to look down on voodoo with all the condescension of those who follow the One True Path of Christianity. An old “witch doctor” who visits a patient in the hospital is forcefully ejected and threatened with jail “because he’s breaking the laws against voodoo and all its weird and nasty practices.” Martie herself finds herself “only a few inches removed from terror of the old man,” an emaciated barefoot waif with “wicked” eyes. It is odd that the white characters, who regard voodoo as a silly superstition, are so regularly struck with complete horror by the two voodoo practitioners in the book.

Martie Howell is accompanying her snotty patient, Lisa Long, back to her home in Haiti. Lisa is far more childlike than any Haitian we meet, and flirts with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, slapping Martie one minute and then, a moment later, flinging herself at her nurse and clinging to her, crying, “Martie, don’t leave me!” Martie responds to Lisa’s tantrums by threatening to “paddle” her and otherwise treating her like a two-year-old: “She’s feeling very sorry for herself because she’s tired and excited,” she tells Lisa’s jilted beau, Dr. Evan Carter, who they encounter on the boat carrying them to Haiti. Lisa and Evan are still in love, but not allowed to marry because the domineering aged family matriarch, Donna Luisa, has decreed that Lisa will marry next-door neighbor Hugh Balcom, so as to unite the two estates. When Martie meets Hugh, she is dismayed to find that he is “spectacularly good-looking,” so it seems pretty clear how things are going to stack up at the end of the book. Indeed, it isn’t long before Hugh and Martie are kissing, but she attempts to squelch the blossoming romance by telling him, “A mere casual kiss is considered no more important nowadays than a cordial hand-shake.” He is understandably cool toward her after that.

Martie soon discovers that Lisa owns the estate, which Donna Luisa is managing on her behalf, and that Lisa will take control of it on her 21st birthday. Luisa has been hiding this fact so as to exert her power over Lisa, as Lisa under the impression that she is living on Donna Luisa’s largesse and “owes” it to Luisa to marry Hugh. Martie informs Luisa that she is going to spill the beans, so Luisa attempts to fire Martie but suffers a stroke before she is able to complete the deed. When Hugh hears of this, he blames Martie for Luisa’s stroke, as does the local medico, Dr. Eaves. Madame Clélie, a local voodoo witch, arrives to nurse Luisa, and Martie decides she will move to the hospital and work with Dr. Eaves until she can leave Haiti. While she is packing, however, she finds a tarantula in her bed, and though she squashes it flat, she is convinced that Madame Clélie is trying to poison her. She is so spooked by the idea that Dr. Eaves agrees with her plan to leave Haiti: “Once this voodoo stuff gets under your skin, you can easily imagine yourself into a nervous breakdown.”

But the boat isn’t due for a few weeks, so she has time to work with Dr. Eaves at his hospital. The next news from the hacienda is that all has been set to rights: Hugh has thrown Madame Clélie out of the house, Lisa has called Dr. Evan to care for Donna Luisa, and Luisa has started to recover and now approves of Evan. So the very same group of people who looked upon Martie with disgust after Luisa’s stroke are now telling her that Luisa’s stroke was “the best thing that could have happened.” Before you know it, Luisa is hosting a dinner party with Martie as the guest of honor, and apologizing to Martie for her atrocious behavior. All we need to do is throw Martie into Hugh’s arms and wade through several nauseating paragraphs—to wit, “She was trembling from head to foot, and in her heart there was music so glorious, so unutterably perfect that she could only listen in awe and ecstasy”—and then we can put the tropics behind us. Though the question of how Martie, who previously couldn’t get out of Haiti fast enough, is going to manage life there is left unanswered.

This book is not worth reading as an interesting story or even as an armchair travelogue. The characters are not particularly attractive; even Martie is disdainful to her patient and the Haitians, overly hysterical about voodoo, and pathetically wide-eyed with Dr. Eaves and Hugh. Really the only interesting person in the book is a talented Haitian surgeon, who is viewed as somewhat tragic, as some white folks (Donna Luisa among them) won’t allow a black man to treat them. But he doesn’t seem too upset by that fact: “ ‘I am of the black people, Mam’selle Martie,’ he said and there was no trace of humility in his voice. Instead there was a pride that bordered on arrogance.” After enduring 160 pages of these ugly Americans, I can’t say I blame him for being glad he is not one of them.  

Town Nurse—Country Nurse

By Marjorie Lewty, ©1970

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

After a disastrous love affair, Kate had felt she never wanted to live in the country again, and firmly turned herself into a town girl. So when her dental surgeon boss suggested that she help out, temporarily, a colleague of his in a small country town, she was determined to stay there no longer than was necessary…

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“You can’t do it. You simply can’t tell anybody, in cold blood, that you don’t love the country.”

“Hugo’s white panther of a car leapt on the miles and devoured them with a kind of satisfied, purring sound that I imagined a panther would make.”

“The kitchen was enormous, about as half as big again as the front room, with a stone floor and great cupboards and a dresser all along one side of the wall. There was a modern electric cooker and a washing machine, but the table where Chloe was shearing neat slices of bread off a huge cottage loaf was the solid white deal kind that needs scrubbing every day. She looked up and smiled. ‘Primitive, aren’t we? John’s going to get the kitchen converted for me one day, when there’s time to get around to it. You know, thermo-plastic tiling on the floor, stainless steel sink, Formica tops—the lot.’ ”

“Mr. Pill was peering at me with his eyes half-closed, as if I were a new shade of emulsion paint that he wasn’t quite sure whether he approved of or not.”

“Any crisis, major or minor, must be an occasion for making tea.”

“ ‘She pushed me—’ He pointed an accusing finger at Rosemary. I was wholly on Rosemary’s side. We girls must stick together, I thought, and besides, she really did look angelic in that little pink dress.”

“How easy it was for a nice man to have an absolutely horrid daughter.”

“I shall be calm and placid, like a vegetable marrow.”

REVIEW:

Kate Moorcroft is actually a dental nurse. She’s not a hygienist, though, and doesn’t do any actual work in anyone’s mouth; she just assists the dentist with his more complicated procedures, so I think this still qualifies her as a nurse, and therefore this book as a VNRN. But it does skate up to the technical line.

The first part gimmick of this book is that Kate despises the country. She was born and raised there, and had intended to marry a farmer, but when her father died, her beloved told her that he didn’t feel he could take on the family farm’s huge mortgage, and he’d mostly wanted to marry her because her father had offered to take him on as a partner. Since wising up to the realities of the deal he’d signed up for, he’d decided he’d really rather go off to Australia, and alone at that. So she’d moved to London and worked hard to floss every hayseed from her teeth. That was three years ago; now she’s dating the wealthy, attractive, and debonair bachelor Hugo Whipple. Things are just starting to heat up with him when her boss sends her off to aid a close friend, Dr. Ben Holland, who has a small practice in—gasp—the country! 

But she grits her teeth and off she goes, to camp at the house where the doctor lives with his sister and her husband. Kate, not being the complete ignoramus that so many VNRN heroines are, quickly realizes—“with a feeling that I’d been punched hard in the middle”—Dr. Holland’s brother in law is a farmer! This is supposed to make her sojourn to the country even more “painfully nostalgic,” but soon she’s over it, and wrestles a lamb trapped in a hedge and a day-old calf about to be kicked by its mother, who is freaking out during a thunder storm. But she’s decided that she’s not going to tell the doctor that she’s from the country, lest she have to go into the story of her sordid past. That’s the second part of the gimmick; Kate has to go around pretending that she doesn’t know that hay shouldn’t be out in a rainstorm or how to operate a kerosene lantern. It’s not going to hold a lot of water, but this book isn’t pretending to be Tolstoy, so it mostly works.

Meanwhile, back at the office, she and the good doctor, who seems less than appreciative of her efforts, spar regularly, as Kate is far too spunky a gal to lie down and take it when he snaps at her. Despite his animosity, she can’t bring herself to actually dislike him: “This Ben Holland had magnetism—loads of it.” Unfortunately for Kate, he has more than just magnetism; he also has a lady friend, Val, a smooth, possessive customer whom Kate dislikes at first sight. “Most unreasonable, but there it is,” Kate admits. “Whatever Ben Holland’s shortcomings, he didn’t deserve a girl like that.”

Eventually it turns out that Ben thinks Kate’s been sent down by her employer to convince him that he should abandon the country and go into practice in the city. Kate, of course, knows of no such plan, and his suspicions are revealed when she demands to know why he’s being such a cold ass, just not in those terms. He’s forgiven after he humbly apologizes: “To be on the receiving end of a smile that packed so many volts was very disturbing,” she says. More than just a potential boyfriend, Kate finds two good girl friends in the country: Ben’s sister, Chloe, and Ben’s new nurse, Celia. These two characters are well-drawn, and their friendships with Kate, if they do move a bit fast, feel real. It’s a really heartwarming—if I dare to use such a schlocky word—aspect of the book, but I mean it. “It’s wonderful to fall in love and it turns your world upside down, but lately I’ve thought that there’s something that’s just as good, though not so spectacular,” says Celia, “just making friends.” I got a little verklempt at this point, but I am known to sob at the long-distance commercials.

So now Kate and Ben can get along on better terms. But Val schemes to get Kate packing back to the city, moving into the farmhouse to take her spot there. It doesn’t work out, however, for anyone: Back in London and out with Hugo, he maneuvers her to his new apartment and propositions her, not for the first time, and she finally realizes that he’s a cad, and that the city-slicker persona she’s put on since leaving the country has misled him. “I’m only playing at being this sort of girl, a dolly girl, out for kicks. I’m really a country type, a cabbage. I need the—other kind of life,” she tells Hugo, and then, when he tries to force a drink on her, she very belatedly realizes “Hugo was much, much older than I’d ever supposed. The lines round his eyes were deeply engraved; there was a slight looseness about his chin.” This spells 
t-h-e  e-n-d for Hugo, but he’s gracious about it and calls her a cab. (Though I’m not certain what he had to be gracious about, and what was his alternative, assaulting her? As if that would have been acceptable under the circumstances?)

Then Kate is called back to Ben’s establishment: Val has up and left, and the house is in a shambles. Kate appears, puts everything and everyone to rights, and she and Ben end up kissing—but then he says that though he finds her attractive, he can’t be with her. Val has witnessed this scene through the window outside, enters the room after Ben has left it, and proceeds to tear Kate a new one and then smack her across the face. But as she rides off in a fury on her horse, she slips on a wet bridge and falls into the river. There’s no one around to save her but Kate, so she shouts at a little girl to go get help and hoves herself into the current, where she’s got one hand on a rapidly loosening willow and the other on the unconscious Val’s chin, to keep it above water. This selfless heroism, of course, is just the thing to bring Ben around, after Kate has been properly rescued and dried off. “Tell me you don’t really want that smooth fellow with the vulgar great car,” he says to her, admits that he loves her, “and he proceeded to demonstrate.” When all is straightened out between them, he chides her for pretending to be a city girl. “What should I have done?” she retorts. “Disappear through the stage and spring back, clad in blue gingham, with a hay-fork in one hand and a pail of buttermilk in the other, crying, ‘Surprise, surprise, here I am, your very own rustic village maiden?’ ” Touché.

This is only the second VNRN I’ve read that’s been written in the first person. (The first, Bush Hospital, also a Harlequin, wasn’t as good as this one). It helps that Kate is a strong character with a sense of humor, guts, and humanity. She also has a rare commodity in a VNRN heroine: intelligence. When a situation is unfolding that any sensible reader could see right through, well, so can Kate. “I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. I’d lived in London for three years,” Kate says when Hugo hints that he could spend the night in her hotel room. (She kicks him out.) But when she doesn’t pick up on something—like the fact that she’s fallen for Dr. Ben—she speaks about it as if she realizes that she should have known: “Even at that point, I didn’t know,” she says, after Ben gets snippy when he runs into her when she’s out with Hugo (the night he propositions her). I don’t mind a touch of blindness when the heroine recognizes that she is. She’s also self-aware: Toward the end, when Ben is watching her cook with an approving smile on his face, she feels an appropriate level of cynicism: “Domestic scene, I thought, with a whiff of self-contempt. Little woman in home setting. Bah!” And so my satisfaction with Kate Moorcroft was complete. This is a playful, amusing, enjoyable book. It has its flaws, no doubt, but these are easily overlooked when you’re hanging out with a great gal like Kate Moorcroft.

Candy Frost, Emergency Nurse

By Ethel Hamill,
pseud. Jean Francis Webb III, ©1952

 

Attractive, red-haired, green-eyed Candy Frost had set an almost impossible task for herself. Her prescription was to work hard at her mountain nursing post … and never to love again. That was surely the antidote to the deep wound left by Bruce three months before, when she had given up her nursing to marry him and he had jilted her in a strange city.

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Frost, dear, was that a dreamy quiver to your mouth, just then?”

 

“I’m just a hard-bitten old maid with a face like a mud fence, so what would I know about romance?”

 

“You look cuter than ever in that silly cap.”

 

“To prove to herself how sensible she was, Candy sat primly on the edge of her chair and chewed each mouthful of whatever it was she was eating the prescribed number of times.”

 

“We’ll have a proper date and I’ll behave like a saint in Levi’s and won’t mention loving you once.”

 

“You’re talking like a half-baked Florence Nightingale. I could set those lines to music.”

 

REVIEW:

Candy (and if this nickname is not unfortunate enough, it’s actually a contraction of her given name, Candida, which is, of course, a genus of yeasts) is not an emergency nurse, really. She is a rural nurse, and as such attends to any health issues at the log-cabin clinic, including emergencies. This means she will, at a moment’s notice, slip out of her nylon dress and into riding breeches, toss her emergency kit over her shoulder, and gallop to the scene on her black mare Rocket, the roads being too undependable for vehicular traffic. She had been working at the clinic for a while when she tumbled for an artist who had set up a studio on the mountain, and had left with him for the big city to marry. But as they had checked in to their hotel, a long-lost flame of Bruce’s crossed the lobby, and when Candy went upstairs to change into her wedding garb, he went out the front door with his ex, leaving her with a dear-Candy letter (and apparently the bill).

 

Now she is returning to her mountain home in disgrace, but en route experiences an emergency of her own when the bus she is riding on goes off the road and rolls into a ditch. Candy is not injured, probably because the handsome young man sitting next to her flings his strong arms around her to protect her from harm. That’s all it takes for Skip Amherst to fall madly in love with Candy. “Something went zzzing! inside you, just as it did with me,” says the romantic poet. But she’s vowed never to love again, so she tells Skip in no uncertain terms that she wants nothing to do with him. “It’s bad manners to turn down a proposal before the fellow makes it,” he answers. “Gives a sort of impression of overconfidence.”

 

Meanwhile, there’s a group of resident terrorists that goes around beating the locals and burning down their houses if they try to interfere with the lucrative moonshine business. They are called—and resist the urge to scream—the Pillow Heads, because they wear pillowcases when they’re out for their nightly jaunts. Who could they be, and how can they be stopped? The upside is that they do give the clinic a lot of business, and reason for Candy to go galloping around the mountain on horseback rescue missions, since the clinic doctor, Blanche Thomas, is apparently unfit for the saddle.

 

When she’s not out and about, Candy takes steps to protect herself from Skip. She has Dr. Blanche write into her contract that she will forfeit a year’s pay if she marries within a year. That will keep her safe! Though why anyone would want to get married less than a year after meeting a new man is a bit of a puzzle to me, and I’m also not certain how a contractual clause against marrying keeps one safe from hot men—you don’t have to buy the cow, after all. Skip is not really convinced, either. “No scrap of paper can keep us apart, Candy, darling,” he tells her. “The only paper that has any real bearing on your future is the wedding license we’re going to take out together.” And he says that she’s overconfident.

 

Skip has been taken in by the Orr family, whose own son, Ad, drowned in a flash flood that he should have known better than to be caught in. The Orrs have also boarded the new schoolmarm, Lulu Mae, who is a tarty thing with an eye for Skip. Soon gossip is going around town that Skip and Lulu Mae are an item, and Candy finds that she is jealous! She spies on Skip at a dance that she has refused to attend with him and sees him kiss Lulu Mae, and then Mrs. Orr reluctantly tells Candy that she heard him talking to Lulu Mae, saying he’d picked her up on the bus, and that “a girl that’s been tagged with a scandal like that ought to be easy to get.” Now she’s jealous and mad! And when Candy’s old beau, Wayne, proposes, she naturally accepts. So much for that contract.

 

Candy and Wayne make plans to meet in town to get married, but Skip gets wind of it and kidnaps Candy, literally carrying her off “with a contemptuous ease which suggested he was hefting a not very valuable sack of feathers” when he catches up with her waiting for the bus to town, and I’m impressed at how this sentence implies the sexiness not only of being physically assaulted, but simultaneously of Candy’s dainty physique. And Skip is only getting warmed up. He tells her, “I ought to take you over my knee and spank you right here and now,” before driving her off to a deserted cabin in the woods. “Do you remember saying I couldn’t make you do what I wanted you to do? Rash remark!” he says. When she says she knows that he is carrying on with Lulu Mae, he denies it, but says, “What of it? You’d still be mine—and only mine. And I wouldn’t kiss you again if you came crawling across this room to me on your knees. And you might do exactly that, you know.” His prediction is close to right—when he storms toward her, looking as if he’s going to beat her, she collapses in tears into his arms, but he “flung her from him” and crashes out of the cabin, guarding the door to keep her from escaping until the bus has gone. Candy “settled down on the hard bench to wait. He was master here.” It’s a monstrous scene in so many ways, rendering Skip completely detestable. But that’s never bothered a VNRN heroine before, and it certainly doesn’t slow Candy’s pulse, either.

 

After this, all the back stories fall into place. There’s a complex scheme that, when brought into the open, explains Skip’s kissing Lulu Mae, the remark Mrs. Orr overheard and relayed to Candy, who the Pillow Heads are, Ad Orr’s untimely death, and the Pillow Heads’ raid on the Orr farm. All this might leave you gasping for air, but Jean Webb has a real flair for plotting, so the entire story seems completely plausible, and it’s also unfolded in such a way as to be not indigestible. Furthermore, his writing is still among the genre’s best. We get tasty morsels like, “The hinged door flattened with a faint pneumanic gasp,” and, “The late moon still swam above them, but her reign was ending.” I am a devoted fan of Mr. Webb’s, who has garnered an A- average in the three other books of his that I have read so far (Aloha Nurse, A Nurse Comes Home, and A Nurse for Galleon Key). Unfortunately, Candy Frost, Emergency Nurse does not meet the standards set by the others: It is short on camp, the hero is utterly despicable, and the heroine is a bit of a moron. Even if Skip had been a stand-up guy, this book doesn’t have much else to recommend it. So while anything Jean Webb writes is worth reading, Candy is not his most delicious.

The Doctors

By Clara Dormandy ©1959

Cover illustration by Edrien King

 

Now, at last, the dream was a reality. They were doctors! Throughout their training, these three young women had been inseparable, but the knowledge of eventual separation had always been with them. For Anne Clive, Fleur’s leaving for her far-off home was a wrench, but the great hurt came with Susie’s surprise engagement to George Wyndham, brilliant surgeon and teacher. Not only did Anne fear that George Wyndham would do little to encourage his wife in her chosen career, but there was the inescapable fact that Anne herself was in love with the handsome Dr. Wyndham!

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You prepare yourself for a party as if—as if you were applying some complicated surgical dressing.”

“He’s not bad for a biochemist.”

 

“You must never be afraid of disagreements even if you feel that you might be wrong. It’s your only chance of finding out.”

 

“Who ever heard of anyone expecting a marriage to be exciting?”

 

“It must be horrible having a self-supporting wife.”

 

“Men clear out the moment they discover that a girl has a mind of her own. They seem to have some sort of vague idea that if a girl has intellect she can have no feelings.”

 

“There are rights which it is difficult to carry through and wrongs which seem easy, but every person must decide for himself which he chooses.”

 

REVIEW:

Both the book’s title and back cover blurb (see above, in italics) lead the reader somewhat astray. While the outside cover leads you to think the story is going to be about three young women (the illustration might even make you think it’s about a male and female doctor), in truth it’s almost all about Anne Clive, who as the book opens has just graduated from medical school with her two roommates, Fleur Tallien and Susie Martin. Fleur, a scholarship student from South Africa, is discouraged by Susie’s brother David’s lack of attention to her and so promptly debarks for her home country, and we hear nothing of her again until the last few pages of the book. Susie shows up at the graduation party her wealthy parents are throwing for her and announces that she is marrying one of her instructors, Dr. George Wyndham, which comes as a complete shock to her two best friends. “He’s not a complete Philistine, you know,” Susie gushes to Anne after the party. “I told him that I liked French painting, so when I went to see him at St. Agnes’s he talked about impressionism and the romantic movement all through two hernia operations and one gastrectomy. And as he was cutting open the specimen after the operation, he suddenly turned to me and asked if I would marry him.” She couldn’t possibly have turned him down after such a romantic proposal.

 

Susie’s engagement, far from broadening her horizons, sharply curtails them. Her family is affronted by her abrupt decision to marry, and she’s dropped by her old medical school friends, who are busy planning their careers as she worries about flower arrangements and bridesmaid’s gowns. Even her good friend Anne is avoiding Susie, partly for throwing away her career and partly for living up to the stereotype: “People talked such a lot about women in medicine—saying that they kept men out of hospital jobs, and how their education was wasted because in the end they got married anyway and settled down to family life. Those who called themselves more ‘broadminded’ admitted that medicine was all right for a certain kind of woman­—the masculine type, the hard and resolute type, or the studious type like Anne, but for such delightful young things as Susie Martin, it was a waste of their own and everybody else’s time.”

 

To give Susie partial credit, she does have a conversation with George, asking him if he will “let” her, or at least give her his “moral support” as she tries to find a job after their honeymoon. But, he tells her, “It would be impossible for you to organize your time according to my time-table.” Susie answers, “Has it never occurred to you that I don’t like ‘organizing’ my time according to anybody’s time-table?” So George trots out the old saw: “I should like to have you all to myself, Susie,” he tells her, as if she were a toy boat or a cookie jar. “I want my wife to remain always the pure happiness and joy of my life. You see, Susie, my great love for you makes me selfish.” This seems to settle the matter; Susie says no more of it and soon has two young children and what appears to be a serious case of post-partum depression.

 

But I’ve skipped ahead: Back to Anne, who lands the plum job as assistant to Dr. Wallis that everyone had expected to go to Susie, so her auspicious career is nicely underway. She decides to go to Vienna on vacation, and while there is introduced to a virtuoso violinist, Kristof Bardy. The man is a cad and a fop—he has named his walking stick Polyder, and “he considered modesty merely the art of letting other people find out for themselves how good he was”—but she enjoys their evening together.

 

Then it’s two years later, and Anne has won a major medical prize for her research on “blue babies.” She still sees Kristof from time to time; when he’s in town for a concert he sends her tickets to his performances and then takes her out to dinner. She asks him why he likes her, when he has so many beautiful women chasing him. “Adulation is boring,” he says, and the next day he is off to Barcelona. In thinking things over, Anne wonders if, of the three friends, “her life had not turned out to be the happiest of the three. There might be something missing—but was it worth all the sacrifice and heart-burning that seemed to accompany it?” Oh, we come to the age-old question: Is a life without love worth living? But don’t you worry about Anne. Because George is now working alongside Anne at the hospital, and late one evening he takes her in his arms and kisses her—and then Anne realizes that her resentment of Susie’s marriage was due to the nauseating fact that she’d been in love with George all the time and just hadn’t realized it!

 

And then it’s four more years under the bridge, and Fleur has married David after all and they have a daughter, and she is in London visiting her old friends. George is so much more “lighthearted” than he ever was, Susie tells Fleur, and this has improved her own happiness, but Fleur realizes that “something had gone out of Susie.” Anne has been offered a two-year research post in a California university, but isn’t sure she wants to take it—she’s still involved with George, who is trying to persuade Anne that he should divorce Susie and marry her, but she won’t have it. She has another date with Kristof, who has a “brilliant” idea: He is about to go to South America for an 18-month tour, so she should go to California and they should get married! “We wouldn’t have to make sacrifices,” he explains. “We would each follow our own particular course right from the beginning. I think it would be a glorious idea, an excellent marriage. Just imagine two people not constantly falling over each other.” Anne rejects this notion, curiously.

 

She goes to see Susie, whom she has ignored since Susie’s marriage, to tell her—and George, now arrived home—that she’s decided to go to California. As Susie is out of the room ringing for tea, Anne tells George, “We would never be able to persuade ourselves that it was the right thing we had done.” After she’s gone, George turns to Susie and suggests that she go back to work—thinking, but not telling her, that this is like Anne’s earlier suggestion to Susie’s bored daughter that she take up stamp collecting so as to have something to keep her mind busy. “I can’t think how I could have gone on living as I have these past several years,” she answers, full of relief and unspoken reproach for George, who kept her out of her profession for so long only to give it back to her after all these unhappy years. “And if there was a note of sadness in his voice, she was too happy to notice it.” He tells her that he came home early to tell her this idea of his—but I can’t help wondering if he’d really come home to tell her of him and Anne, and that Anne’s ending of the relationship put him off that track.

 

At home that night, Anne calls Kristof, and he immediately decides that she has changed her mind about marrying him. “She kept silent, knowing that this silence would affect her future,” and then says yes. “After Anne put down the receiver, she stood as if paralyzed, gazing at the thing. Then very slowly she lifted her shoulders. It was almost a shrug, and something that was almost a smile came into her eyes. Who knows? Perhaps the fates did not intend man to shape his own destiny according to his coolly balanced intellect.”

 

So what are we to make of this? Fleur has the man she always wanted, but she is the most minor character of the three and goes back to Europe after reappearing for a few pages at the end with her beautiful baby. Susie has got her self-respect and her career back, though her husband is a deceitful, condescending ass. Anne, easily the most successful career-wise, has had a lengthy affair with a married man and then decided, almost on a whim, to marry a silly peacock whom she is scarcely going to see for the next two years. I can’t see this working out very well, for some odd reason. But there it is.

 

This book is not at all a conventional VNRN, between the jumps through time, the two or three lead heroines, and the unconventional marriage at the end. If Anne’s motives and ultimate fate are not very clear at the end—has she decided that marriage even to a fool is better than remaining single?—it’s a thoughtful, interesting, and quiet story, and well worth reading.

Emergency Nurse

By Anne Lorraine, ©1955
Cover illustration by Jack Harman

Love and a career, ambition and security, often pull in different directions, and it is not easy for the young to sort out their claims. It was particularly difficult for Nurse Gina Delham, haunted as she was by the thought of her parents’ unhappy marriage. How was she to choose between the different paths set before her?

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Nothing is more infectious than highly strung nerves, you know, and I want you to be a rock to your patients, not a nettle. Let them rest on you, rely upon you—and take good care they never get stung, either by your tongue or your brisk efficiency!”

 

“She’s a woman. Surely you can’t expect her to view mangled bodies with no more emotion than she would inspect a squashed insect? All women are highly strung, emotional is the word you use, I think.”

 

“Bless you, Gina. You’ve given me something to look forward to at last. Life has been pretty ghastly all round. But on Wednesday at seven-thirty life will begin again in all its old glory! We’ll have fun, my sweet—I’ll bring the chariot to the hospital gates, and mind you have shoes that fit well, for you won’t be home by midnight, and we don’t want any glass slippers left on the highway!”

 

REVIEW:

Gina Delham is our eponymous nurse working in the English version of the ED, the Casualty Department, which is headed by the aloof Dr. Simon Brayford. She’s been told by the Matron early on that she’s not a career nurse: “Like most girls, if the offer of marriage came along, and was sufficiently tempting, you would have no more hesitation in throwing over this work than a child offered a cream bun would hesitate to throw away a slice of bread and butter.” Gina wants desperately to be serious about her career, but she’s afraid that the Matron is right. Her heart throbs for Simon Brayford, but it’s a lost cause—or so she thinks—because “nurses are, to him, just so much necessary hospital equipment, about as absorbing as a jar of swabs, and not nearly as useful!”

 

But in spite of her professed admiration for the doctor, she can’t possibly tumble for him because he’s poor and driven and hopelessly devoted to his work, and her parents—you guessed it, killed in a car accident when she was younger—had been driven to hate each other, and the children that bound them together, by the deep poverty they could never escape. So she’s going to marry a rich man, like this here patient, Garrick Peters, who will lift her and her two younger siblings into the good life. Garrick, recovering from a serious car accident and instantly smitten with Gina, seems ready to oblige—a dozen roses with an unsigned card arrive at her door—and Gina is so confident of her future as Mrs. Garrick Peters that she snubs an unprecedented date with Simon. But at his discharge, Garrick is heard telling a woman who turns out to be his fiancée, the duplicitous cad, that he’ll be glad to leave his beautiful blonde nurse behind, saying “The poor kid is making a bit of a nuisance of herself.” Then it’s all over the hospital, her “humiliation, searing, soul-destroying,” that “she had loved him,” she of the frigid, money-grubbing heart.

 

But on the upside, now she’s free to take up an offer by Simon, who despite her disinterest in him, still wants her to be the chief nurse of the new Casualty Department he’s creating at Barneford Hospital. And she’s still free to continue her paradoxical crush on Simon: “If only the doctor would admit that she had some other use than as a competent ‘mate’ on the job!” she sighs. She seems to vacillate wildly in her points of view, one day wishing madly that Simon would notice her, then insisting tearfully that as God as her witness, she’ll never be hungry again! Mostly, to the reader’s growing boredom, the latter. There are, of course, the usual vague hints that Simon does have feelings for Gina, to which she, as a dense VNRN heroine, is completely oblivious.

 

Then, while out on an almost-date with Simon—coffee after an ambulance run—they bump into Garrick, who tells Gina that he loved her all along. Yippee! Except that Simon then tells her that he loves her too, and wants her to stay with him. “She must be strong now. […] No foolish heart must be allowed to persuade her to throw aside all her resolutions.” Simon, citing the growing success of Casualty, hires a young nurse he knew years ago, in a past that he never discusses (though she bites Gina’s head off when she says that with hands like his, he surely must have done some surgery at some point). Betty Newent is the most scatterbrained nurse ever, always dropping trays of pills and going to pieces when an accident victim is brought in—not the most logical choice for an ED nurse, but she and Simon are determined to whip her into a successful nurse, with Gina assisting at the lash. Gina, of course, instantly jumps to the conclusion that this is because Simon and Betty are planning to marry, though Betty seems mostly afraid of Simon and he seems mostly worried about her. With this leap of poor logic, Gina realizes that she herself is in love with Simon, and never did love Garrick. But she still can’t go quietly into that good heartbreak: “Simon represented everything against which she had turned herself, years before. He was everything that her husband must never be—a poor man, offering insecurity and constant striving.” It’s maddening, I tell you!

 

She’s going to soothe her aching heart with a heavy work schedule. “It’s the only way to forget things that have to be forgotten,” a maxim that she shares with both Simon and Betty, though it’s not clear to Gina why, if Simon and Betty are soon to be united in wedded bliss, they should both be so darned mopey. Then Garrick proposes and Gina accepts, even though they have a frank chat about the fact that she doesn’t love him. Simon makes a proposal of his own, that Gina come with him when he leaves Barneford Hospital to start a clinic back where he comes from. She responds by freaking out, yet again: “I’ve been afraid of poverty because of what it can do to people—and if I can’t have my family with me now, do you think I’d consider, for one moment, a job where I still could not have them with me? I want a real life, with security, and freedom, and fun—” So, curiously, when Garrick insists that Gina quit her job after they are married so she can better attend his frivolous and boring cocktail parties where, “hour after hour, the talk was only of frothy trivialities,” she tells Garrick that she will not give up her work.

 

That fight is tabled for the time being, as they are en route to see Gina’s younger brother and sister and gladden their hearts with promises of college and riding lessons. But lo, Alan doesn’t want to go to college and has arranged a position for himself at the local garage, and little Jennifer is working at the horse barns in exchange for riding lessons, so they’re all set, thank you very much. Then, as the final straw, Aunt Katie, who has raised the little Delhams, tells Gina that her parents really did love each other madly, and those fights that Gina overheard were just words of the moment: “They fought like cat and dog at times, but it was all good fun,” Katie tells her—ha, ha. It turns out that Katie, who had been in love with Gina’s father, had fostered the idea in Gina’s mind that her parents didn’t love their children or each other as a sort of nasty revenge. Katie has to tell Gina the truth now because Gina is marrying a man she doesn’t love, and Katie wants Gina to have the kind of love her parents had for each other. Curiously, Gina responds to this shocking revelation by flinging herself into Aunt Katie’s arms and having a good cry. I myself would have, at the very least, slapped Katie silly, but I’m funny about that sort of treachery.

 

So Gina decides she can’t marry Garrick after all. “He offered her fun as another man might offer her eternal devotion, and fun wasn’t enough for her. She wanted so much more from life; she would welcome hard work, idealism, sacrifice—anything which life with a man such as Simon might demand, which life with Simon must demand.” She is so dazed by this realization that she wanders as if senseless through town—which she tends to do after a crisis, such as when she overheard Garrick talking to his then-fiancée—and is run over by a bicyclist. Like any good nurse, she shrugs off the headache that becomes increasingly ferocious over the next few days. When she’s finally felled by the pain and the story of the accident comes out, she’s sent for tests and discovered to have a large clot on her brain, and only the most promising brain surgeon can help her—three guesses as to who this turns out to be!

 

As she’s lying in the hospital, she learns the truth of Simon’s past: He and Betty were engaged once, but she dumped him for his best friend, and then on their honeymoon the pair were in a car accident, and the groom injured and brought to Simon. But the young man died despite Simon’s best efforts, and Simon was obliged to flee the gossip that followed him, suggesting that he had deliberately allowed the man to die. Now he’s just trying to help Betty get back on her feet and get over her dead husband; the two feel only friendship for each other. Gina, seeing her clot as a golden opportunity for the man she loves, refuses to have anyone else do the surgery. Does she die on the table? Does Simon feel he can resume his brilliant career as a brain surgeon? Does Gina agree to marry Simon in the end? What do you think?

 

This book is a bit of a mess, with a lot of dead ends. The identity of the man who sent the roses—you can’t help but suspect that it was Simon, not Garrick as Gina assumed—is never revealed. Simon notes in passing that he has two adopted children who are “parked”—his word—with his sister, and whom he has never mentioned or visited in the months that make up the story. He says he loves these children, and loved their parents, who are now deceased, but this is all we ever find out about them. Several times Gina is accused as being overly demanding, and we are treated to a flashback in which her mother tells her, “You are so greedy, my dear—you make more demands on those you love than they can ever hope to meet.” Later on, a minor nurse character also tells Gina, “You demand so much of people that you scare them away from you.” But we have no evidence of this at all; rather, the opposite is true: Gina has a tendency to be so closed up that she suffers from not knowing what she herself wants, let alone making demands of others. So what’s that supposed to be about?

 

The endless waffling on Gina’s part about whether she should feel hurt that Simon doesn’t love her or pursue Garrick for his money becomes more than a little frustrating. Also, pretty much everyone in the book—Simon, Betty, Gina, Garrick, and even minor characters like the Matron and the hospital librarian—have secret pasts or past secrets that they allude to constantly, and usually tearfully, while refusing to discuss them outright. “Do we have to talk in riddles all the time?” Garrick asks Gina at one point (after she’s learned the truth about her parents’ relationship but is clearly not going to share this with her betrothed, just mawkishly presses their love letters to her cheek). It’s a really excellent question. This book would have been a whole lot shorter than 191 pages if anyone could have just had an honest conversation. And I might have liked it a bit better, and had more respect for Gina. As it happens, the only enjoyable character in the book is Garrick, who regularly drops foppish remarks like, “I’m Garrick Peters, remember? Your very dearest, most precious patient—who fell in love with you when in a state of deep unconsciousness on a marble slab.” But unfortunately, he doesn’t pop up enough to make the book worth the time, and none of the remaining characters are so attractive or interesting that you should spend an afternoon reading about them.

River Nurse

By Joyce Dingwell, ©1963

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

 

‘Helping Hands,’ in its quiet riverside backwater, must be the most unorthodox hospital in Australia, thought Maggie when she arrived there fresh from the clinical efficiency of Southern Cross Hospital. But she soon found that its methods—and its doctor—were none the less effective for all that.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You’ve the main requirements needed of a button seller. You’re young and pretty.”

 

“Twenty-two wants action. It also, and Maggie admitted this rather ashamedly to herself, wants its own cash.”

 

“You have never understood the heart apart from what’s revealed to you through your wretched stethoscope!”

 

REVIEW:

There are plenty of Harlequin nurse novels out there, but I have to say that I generally don’t reach for them (in case you haven’t noticed). They’re long, for starters, and I don’t mean just the page count—I seldom find a VNRN of more than 126 pages (the standard length) that deserves to be. The covers are also generally fair to middling, so they don’t entice, either. But I had enjoyed another of Joyce Dingwell’s books—Nurse Smith, Cook—so I picked up River Nurse with less trepidation than some. And I found it worth the time, almost meriting 192 pages.

 

Maggie Chappy has just graduated from nursing school in Sidney, and she is a rare breed in that she graduated quite at the bottom of her class. (Which reminds me of the joke: What do you call someone who graduates at the bottom of their nursing class? A nurse. Ha! Ha!) Having made it through three years of school, the school matron tells her, “You are no longer a completely feckless, stupid, ignorant girl. My training has seen to that.” Phew! Yet she is now planning to abandon her promising career to move to a backwater town accessible only by river to keep house for her uncle, who raised her (she is yet another orphan nurse) and paid for her nursing school. The rub is that there is a convalescent hospital in that town, run by the sister of the nursing school matron, that needs a nurse. Fortunately for Maggie, when she arrives in Jonathan Town, she finds that her uncle, who has been doing nicely for himself for the past three years, is not interested in having her keep house for him, so off she is packed to the hospital.

 

She arrives on the same day as Dr. Jude Caulder, who has been sent to this godforsaken backwater for a three-month stint before he joins his father at a more prestigious practice in the city. He’s a grumpy Gus about it, and is X-ing off the days on his calendar before he gets to leave. He’s the only doctor in the house, and indeed the only white male in sight who is not a patient, so there’s really no question about who Maggie is going to fall for.

 

It’s a slow, meandering ride through three months of adventures with patients, livestock (Maggie delivers a calf in one sweet scene), administrators who want to close the place down, and even natural and man-made disasters (a flood and a hiking accident, respectively). The plot isn’t really the thing in this book; it’s more the gentle humor, the well-drawn characters, and the pleasant pacing that make this book worth reading. It’s not at all campy, or even really laugh-out-loud funny, but it is amusing. At one point Jude walks into a kitchen overflowing with comestibles for a party and delivers a short lecture on the role of saliva in digestion. Three pages later, it’s tea time, and “the pleasant business of starch-splitting ferments began … bother that man! … the morning tea began.” This kind of simple pleasure pervades the book, even through to the ending, which is a reference to a long-running joke that what the hospital metes out best is tears—meaning sympathy—and sponge cake (Matron Dora is quite the baker). It won’t be the best, or the most memorable nurse novel you’ll read, but it’s definitely worth your time.

Dr. Dorothy’s Choice

By Elizabeth Wesley
(pseud. Elizabeth Adeline McElfresh), ©1962
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

As a doctor at the Still River hospital and as the bride-to-be of Tom Norman, Dee Bailey had exactly what she wanted in life—to cure the sick and to love and be loved. Then both her career and her love were threatened—one by an ambitious doctor, the other by a beautiful, seductive woman. Both had power, money and cunning behind them. Alone, with only her conscience and her love to guide her, Doctor Dee had to make the decision which would determine not only her own future, but the future of the hospital and the entire Still River community as well.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Give my best to his greater omentum. Long may it remain unpunctured.”

“One of these times he’s going to cut out his own gizzard when he tries to knife somebody and pat himself on the back at the same time.”

“A doctor needs to unbend, to let his patients glimpse something besides strict asepsis and medicochirurgical knowledge.”

“I’d like that better if you left out the comma. ‘Always glad to oblige Nola.’ There! Doesn’t that sound better?”

“She had missed last week’s appointment for a shampoo and set at the beauty shop because of an emergency in Surgery—a cross that any nurse, surgeon, or anesthesiologist has to bear, because the patient comes first, no matter what.”

“You know my daughter, Tom. She’s young, beautiful, spoiled rotten. She needs to get married, but God help the man.”

REVIEW:
Dorothy Bailey is the granddaughter of a woman whom Dr. Paul Courtney, now 75 years old, once loved. Though Louise chose to marry another man and died of the flu when she was fairly young, Dr. Paul played the role of uncle to her two sons—one of them named after Paul—and this was Dorothy’s father. Dorothy became a doctor, obviously, “because you are, Dr. Paul,” and now works as an anesthesiologist at the hospital he founded, Still River General Hospital in Indiana. He’s thinking of retiring, and is moved to tears at the realizations of “an old man’s dream” when he offers Dorothy—I just can’t bring myself to call her Dee, as the book does—his job as chief of staff.

But there are a couple of wrinkles in this plan. The first is that some of the boy doctors won’t like it, especially Dr. Rod Howell, who is a coldly ambitious but brilliant surgeon who wants the job for himself. The second hiccup is that Dorothy doesn’t want it, though her reasons aren’t completely clear. “I’m an anesthesiologist! I want to go on being an anesthesiologist. I want to marry you and bear your children,” she tells her fiancé, newspaperman Tom Norman, though I’m not clear what her family planning has to do with it. Tom, to his credit, tells her that she can be a wife, mother, anesthesiologist, and chief of staff, “and you can do a bang-up job at each, separately or at one and the same time.” She responds, “Who ever heard of a woman chief of staff?” So my fear is that Dorothy doesn’t want the job because she is too circumscribed by gender roles, somewhat surprising since she has already done so in spades by becoming a doctor at a time when only 6 percent of medical students were women (this was in the 1960-1 school year; in 2012 it was 49 percent[1]).

But Dorothy can’t bring herself to tell Dr. Paul that she doesn’t want the job, so the bulk of the book is about Dr. Howell’s struggles to win it, by fair means or foul, for himself. He circulates a rumor that a surgery he performed with Dr. Paul was botched by the elder doctor, and that’s why the patient died. A seedy drunk, Jake Smith, is found to be spouting loudly at a nearby burger joint that Dr. Paul killed the patient—though everyone knows that Dr. Howell has paid the man to do so. Then Jake is seeing hanging around the hospital, on the same night that Dr. Paul is found unconscious in the stairwell. Coincidence? We think not!

There’s a lot of to-doing about what happened to Dr. Paul, and confrontations between Dr. Howell and Jake, who attempts to blackmail the bad doctor; Dr. Howell and Dorothy, who has been made acting chief of staff during Dr. Paul’s loss of consciousness (what do they do when he’s asleep, or on vacation?); and Tom Norman and Jake Smith, who protests he never touched Dr. Paul! Then it’s just for Dr. Paul to wake up and tell everyone he just missed a step and fell, Dr. Howell to plead guilty to his mad ambition and be forgiven, and for Dr. Paul to tell Dorothy that he knew all along that she didn’t want to be chief of staff—“You’re in love,” he tells her, again as if her personal relationships somehow make her less fit for the job. She never actually voices her refusal; it’s just assumed that she is turning down the position. Dr. Paul “watched Dr. Dee walk into Tom Norman’s arms as if she never wanted to leave them, and he knew he had done the right thing. He had given Dr. Dee the right to make her decision.” A nice tie-in to the title, but seriously, did she ever not have the right to make her own decision? And did she ever make any decision at all? She is essentially just wafted along by Dr. Paul’s decisions, first to make her chief of staff and then to unmake her.

Unfortunately, Dorothy is not a very vital character, without much starch or spice, and I can’t fathom her lack of interest in becoming chief of staff since she never gives any actual reasons as to why she doesn’t want the job. She’s also brought down by her insecurities about Tom, who is the object of slinky vixen Nola Fenton’s desires. Though Dorothy and Tom seem deeply committed, when Nola lies to Dorothy that Tom kissed her “so hard I’m sure it still shows,” instantly the fountain of anxiety is turned on, and we are treated to paragraphs of Dorothy’s fears: “It isn’t true, Dee Bailey, and you know it! she told herself. So stop tormenting yourself. Don’t give Nola the satisfaction. Don’t let her enter a wedge of doubt between you and Tom—there never has been one; you’ve both been so sure of your love, your trust. But had they? Had Tom?” You see what I mean.

Apart from the disappointing fact that the title character is a bit of a dishrag, the book is fairly straightforward, without much sparkle, but not overly boring, either. It has a bit of humor to it in places, which help you get through it. But in general there’s not enough here to bother reading about Dr. Dorothy’s choices—or lack thereof.

[1] Association of American Medical Colleges, “Total Enrollment by U.S. Medical School and Sex, 2008-2012”. www.aamc.org/download/321526/data/2012factstable26-2.pdf