Guardian Nurse

By Joyce Dingwell, ©1970
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Burn West had engaged Frances to look after seven-year-old Jason West in the joint capacity of nurse, governess—and guard. But why should the child need to be guarded? Just what was going on?

GRADE: B+ 

REVIEW:
When Frances Peters first meets her new employer, Burn West (Burn is short for Burnley), she does not think much of him. “The mouth suggested arrogance, she thought, and the eyes were cold. … She found she really disliked this man.” Well, we savvy VNRN readers recognize this as a sure sign that he’ll be playing a starring role on the last page, but we’ll play along for now. Burn runs a very large farm in the Australian outback alongside the Murrumbidgee River in the Mirramunna district, if you are familiar with Australian geography, and having decamped the group there, Burn insists that Frances is never, ever! to leave seven-year-old Jason alone. She is also to ask no questions about Jason, Burn, or anything at all relating to the family she is joining. She valiantly agrees to this ridiculous stipulation, as absurd as it is—do we really think a seven-year-old is never going to discuss his past? (In this magical land, of course, he doesn’t, outside of telling her he has lived in Switzerland and France, which she does not believe.)

Little Jason West has suffered a severe leg fracture, but she is not told how this happened. He is “unfriendly, unco-operative, apparently without any enthusiasm,” when he meets Frances, constantly shouting, “No!” He is scarcely more affectionate with Burn, whom Frances assumes is his father—you know what they say about assuming, but of course she can’t just ask! Jason needs a doctor, and wouldn’t you know it, this turns out to be Dr. Scott Weir, a long-lost sort-of ex-beau of Frances’. They’d been friendly in the nursing home where they’d both worked the previous year—but then he had abruptly transferred to another practice and never said goodbye, so she’d taken her broken heart into community nursing in the city, which was how she’d come to be hired by the Wests.

On the ranch, as Frances and Scott take up where they had left off, Burn is gradually defrosting, and Jason also coming out of his shell—figuratively and literally, as eventually the cast comes off—and he is soon running all over the ranch, or else catching up on his schooling with Frances as teacher. As Frances slowly warms up little Jason’s heart, gradually bits of the mystery are dropped into the plot. We learn that Jason is in danger of being “taken away … by his mother’s side,” Burn tells her, after one of several episodes in which Frances takes her eye off her charge for a few minutes and the pesky little blighter disappears. Frances meets a man coming out of the driveway of the ranch next door and assumes it is the owner, Trev Trent—but then Trev turns up and he’s not that man, so who is he!?! She also sees a young woman in a blue car on multiple occasions, the woman apparently watching them. Jenny, the physical therapist they engage, keeps harping on water therapy for Jason, but when Burn installs a pool, she won’t take Jason into it, or go anywhere near it herself, and it’s Frances who teaches Jason to swim. It turns out that Jenny knows the man whom Frances thought was Trev, but what is their connection? Of course, she can’t possibly do the obvious—discuss these concerns with Burn—though she considers it repeatedly, and rejects repeatedly. Argh!

Of course, in true VNRN fashion, the only way out of this mess is to add a natural disaster—in this case, the routinely foreshadowed flood—and stir. Once all the mysteries and secrets are tidied away with the high water, we can close the book, but here we can let it go with at least a small, pleased smile.

Guardian Nurse is not a book for witty writing—I could shake out nothing for the Best Quotes section—but it is a good story. It unwinds slowly and gently, and most importantly, believably. We don’t like Burn much to start, but he improves in our estimation naturally, and in the end actually is a better person, unlike those books where we are presented with a pig’s ear and told he’s a rose. It’s true that the main folds in the plot are predictable and typical, but nonetheless this book is a pleasant and enjoyable, and worth reading.

One String for Nurse Bow

By Joyce Dingwell, ©1969

The twelve young graduate nurses were waiting eagerly to see what glamorous jobs were to be allotted to them, and none was more eager than Charlotte Bow. And to say that she was appalled at the prospect of being sent to Binkabunkacarrawirrawarrawillapillimundi, in the heart of the Australian Northern Territory, was putting it mildly!

GRADE: C+

REVIEW:
Nurse Charlotte Bow is graduating from a training program with the Farflung Nursing Association, which sends nurses into remote areas for a term. The day the assignments are announced, everyone is so excited to find out where they will be sent! Mostly, it seems, because they are really looking for husbands: “She’s as good as married right now, resented Charlotte,” after a colleague was posted to an assignment as the only woman on an island of 80 men. Poor Charlotte, however, wins the assignment to—here’s the joke of a name—Binkabunkacarrawirrawarrawillapillimundi, way Down Under. “They had all agreed that if they got that draw, they would blow out their dedication lamps there and then,” because it’s “too farflung,” but mostly the problem seems to be that there are not going to be many men, or white men, anyway. The guy on whose farm the hospital is located is called Brother Seb, and another hilarious joke is that Charlotte thinks he is a monk sworn to celibacy, though this is cleared up on page 29.

The third joke we’re subjected to is that every man who meets Charlotte asks her about her strings, an apparent reference to an apparently outdated saying (I’d certainly never heard of it) “a string to your bow”; which means, “If someone has more than one string to their bow, they have more than one ability or thing they can use if the first one they try is not successful,” here “thing” signifying “man.” It turns out that almost every man she meets is another string for her, e.g. Tony the teacher, Dr. Jamie Carley, and prospector Jeff Wright. Not Seb, though, ha ha! “Charlotte scoffed, a string! Brother Seb!” And, we’re told, the feeling is mutual: “He was not even aware of her other than as the matron of his clinic. He did not understand strings for bows.” We’ll see about that!

The book is a fairly mundane plod through the ups and downs of life in the outback, including a typhoid epidemic, an earthquake, an indigenous woman who delivers quadruplets and keeps them—in this backward narrative, native tradition has parents abandoning all but one of multiple births, I’m sorry to report—and delivering a small herd of cattle overland through the bush. None of it is terrifically riveting, and the condescension toward the indigenous people, if not the most egregious I’ve met in a VNRN, is uncomfortable at best (the children are always referred to as “pickaninnies,” for starters), so there’s another donation to the American Indian College Fund.

One thing I did appreciate was Charlotte’s ability to stand up for herself. Though she’s a brand new  nurse, she manages to meet each crisis with relative aplomb and even success. She also expresses outrage at some of Seb’s declarations, such as when Charlotte finds that a native woman has been beaten by her husband. Seb calls the bruise “nothing serious,” and when Charlotte protests, he insists that “a bashing and a thrashing” is indeed off limits, but a “spank-bruise” of the “wifely spank variety” is OK, and Seb, who speaks the native language, tells the husband “it was not good to hit very hard,” and that he should “give it next time where it didn’t show.” Charlotte is spluttering with rage, but in the end, Seb just says that Charlotte herself was not spanked enough and that’s the end of the conversation, leaving Seb with the apparent upper hand. So even if she is right, the story does not come down on her side.

On Charlotte’s less admirable traits is her complete inability to see the obvious. She doesn’t understand when first Dr. Jamie and then Tony say they are no longer wooing Charlotte because there is “one too many, which is a whole lot too many. In fact it closes the subject, doesn’t it?” Dr. Jamie explains. But Charlotte can’t figure out what he means. “Won’t someone please enlighten me?” she asks Tony. “Ask Sebastopol Brown,” Tony says, and she still doesn’t get it. Then, though Seb has asked the friars at the nearby mission if they can perform marriages, Charlotte doesn’t  figure out why Seb, gored by a bull in the bush, is refusing to go to the nearby mission for medical care. “I vowed that the next time [I went to the mission] it was to … it was for … it was …” but no pennies are dropping for the otherwise capable Charlotte. At least, as the only healthcare practitioner for hundreds of kilometers, we know she won’t be quitting her job as a nurse when she and Seb eventually get things sorted. The prose is pleasant enough, but there was nothing for the Best Quotes section, and the lame jokes about the endless name and the strings quickly grew flat, if they ever had any dimension, with repeated pounding. In the end, if not the worst VNRN I’ve read, One String is a one-note story without a lot of life to it.

Nurse Jess

By Joyce Dingwell, ©1959

Margaret South was the most efficient, most dedicated nurse at the Lady Belinda Hospital for Specialized Nursing of Premature Babies. Professor Gink was the most dedicated, most celebrated authority on baby-care in Australia. To Jess they seemed an ideally suited couple, and she began to plot accordingly. And then, far too late it seemed, she discovered that she had fallen in love with the Professor herself.

GRADE: B

REVIEW:

Nurse Jessamine Barlow has such a mouthful of a name that when she gets to her fellowship after graduating from nursing school she is shortened to Jess. She hails from a remote island that is on the brink of transforming into a tourist mecca, and her parents, who run a small hotel, are expanding to meet the boom, though everyone has mixed feelings about it, including the native staff, who have gone on walkabout, what native Australians apparently call a long hiking holiday, with no definite date of return.

At her hospital, Jess is learning all about premature babies and how to care for them, which means hardly ever touching them and feeding them formula and not breastmilk. Some of her patients die quietly offscreen; she comes back to their cribs to find them empty. It’s difficult work, and she naturally feels like a failure, especially compared to her best friend from nursing school who is also on the same fellowship, Margaret South. Early on Jess meets Professor Dr. Gink, whom she mistakes for a parent, and offers him lots of helpful, naïve advice, and is later mortified when she realizes her mistake—though the professor seems charmed by her outgoing, easy manner. Naturally Jess decides that Margaret should marry Professor Gink, even though neither has expressed any interest of that sort in the other, and nor does she bother to enlighten her best friend about her schemes. So it’s a peculiar hook to hang the book on.

Of course, it’s clear to the reader that she likes the doctor and he, her. We can be somewhat relieved that it’s actually only two-thirds of the book in that Jess realizes her own feelings, but still she remains blind to his obvious reciprocal interest. VNRN heroines are not infrequently the dumbest characters in the book, years of medical training notwithstanding, and it’s an irritating gimmick.

Most of the book’s plot follows Jess’s adventures in nursing, including flying to the outback to nurse quintuplets with Professor Gink (we only learn his first name, Bartholomew, five pages from the end) and leading tours of her island’s volcano, which figures prominently in the rescuing of the island from the tourist hordes. We watch Margaret fall for Jess’s friend Barry, who had been pining from unrequited love for Jess until he met Margaret, and dumb Jess can’t see that obvious romance either. That foible again underlined, overall I can’t dislike this essentially charming book, which offers interesting writing and mild humor even if the characters outside the main pair are not deeply drawn. If not especially sophisticated, Nurse Jess is a simple pleasure, much like her title character.

 

Doctor down under

By Anne Vinton, ©1964

When Nurse Kate Norwich arrived in Australia to marry her fiancé Trevor, she found him suffering from amnesia, and the wedding temporarily off, so she took a job as assistant to Doctor Rick Howleigh of the Flying Doctor Service to tide her over. But always she was conscious of Trevor, hundreds of miles away, keeping her to a promise she now wondered if she should ever have given.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Jan was so plain and homely of countenance that she was resigned to never being a bride herself.”

“Apparently she had never heard of the word ‘love’ except as something which appeared in pop songs and rhymed with above.”

“I thought she was terribly courageous; that red hair and a red hat. It takes some doing.”

“I would have thought it pretty expensive to risk turning a pretty little filly like you loose and unlabeled among the herd.”

“Children are always getting infections and babies are insistent about coming into the world. You won’t lack employment.”

“To regret events is to regret life.”

“Nurses were so desirable as wives; their training had not only developed in them a deep and practical sympathy for afflicted souls but made them into warm personalities pre-destined to be good friends and sweet lovers.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Kate Norwich has fallen in love with former patient Trevor Gallyard, but he’s gone off to Australia to start a new life with the plan for Kate to come join him there after he’s gotten established. Right out of the gate there’s trouble in River City, as Kate’s best friend does not like Kate’s beloved, thinking him “a bit wishy-washy”—and Kate herself, after being separated from him for a while, is forgetting his finer points. “Of course when they met again it would be wonderful once more.” Famous last words!

On the day that her ship sails for Australia, she gets a letter from Trevor saying that he doesn’t have the money to support her yet and she should postpone her voyage, “but nowadays the rules were not so rigid and couples managed to be happy sharing both the bread-winning and the running of a home.” (Of course, even today, both spouses might work, but it’s still the woman who’s doing most of the running of the home.) And Kate’s a feisty lass, to boot, so off she sails. The trouble is that she immediately meets Dr. Rick Howleigh, and they are naturally attracted to each other—but after she tells him about Trevor, his friendship cools, much to her disappointment: She finds herself “craving for Rick to look at her again as he used to do, his deep brown eyes speaking compliments which thrilled the woman in her. Now his gaze was cool, polite and impersonal. She could scarcely bear it.” She asks him why he’s changed, and he points out that she can’t eat her Rick and have her Trevor too, but then subverts his own argument by kissing her until she’s so weak-kneed she has to beg off dancing. “‘It was only animal attraction,’ she told herself somewhat desperately, ‘sex rearing its ugly head. Only—’ she turned uneasily in the bunk—‘it wasn’t at all ugly. Why didn’t I struggle, I wonder? I could have—should have struggled, at least.’”

Arriving in Australia, there’s another wrench in the works when she’s met by Trevor’s manipulative but rich aunt, who tells Kate that Trevor’s been in an accident and developed amnesia, and doesn’t remember her at all! Rather than take the next boat home, she decides to accept a job working with Rick in the outback, and stupidly agrees to honor the engagement for six months to give Trevor’s memory time to return. So off she and the good doctor go, driving and camping for days in the heart of Australia to join a crew of eight in the flying health service, delivering medical care by airplane to the European settlers in the far-flung regions.

Before 23 pages have passed, though, Kate realizes “I’m in love with Rick,” and then their plane develops engine trouble and they crash in a remote valley, stranded for days. “There are certain basic desires which, though kept decently sublimated in society, roar with a sense of urgency when man-made rules are even slightly relaxed,” Rick tells her. “If we stay here, like this, in three days it will have happened … we must move heaven and earth, if necessary, to get out of here.” Interestingly, Kate’s not in complete agreement: “The supreme capitulation, the giving and the taking, the act of love between a man and a woman. Was she supposed to be terrified? He would probably find her more than willing three days from now.” However each of them thinks of it, they are rescued with Kate’s virtue intact, and Trevor turns up to act the part of the relieved fiancé, kissing her passionately in front of Rick—and now she’s the cold one who’s forgotten the other. “Trembling with shock and mortification,” Kate “turned to look at this stranger who had dared make that show over her in public.” She decides, however, that “it would be cruel at this stage” to tell Trevor she does not love him—no, better to wait for his memory to be restored or for him to fall for her again before doing the obvious—and right—thing.

She and Rick work on side by side for a while, until Rick decides he’s had enough and resigns his contract. But then Trevor gets his memory back and Kate also leaves to fulfill her promise to marry Trevor, but fortunately Trevor with memory is not as dumb as Trevor without, and he quickly realizes that Kate does not love him, and that Rick really is her man. They end the charade on friendly terms, and Kate decides to stay on in Brisbane to work in the hospital there rather than return to England—but tell Rick she’s free? “What is a nice girl to do? No matter how much she loves somebody she has to wait to be asked.” Fortunately, Rick immediately turns up and in a disappointingly treacly paragraph they close up the book, but at least that part is done quickly.

Overall this is a pleasant story with interesting characters, only slightly weighed down by those contrived, lazy “obstacles” that force the star-crossed lovers apart (an engagement that cannot be broken, an inability to convey the news of its termination). This is one of the more frank VNRNs I’ve read on the topic of sex, which here is portrayed as something that normal, nice girls want to do, even if they shouldn’t—a unique point of view. Early on the book has a sense of humor, which sadly fades as the it progresses, and if not the most sparkling, the writing is good, and no one loves a plot line involving amnesia more than I do (a predilection that comes from years devoted to TV soap operas when I was a teen). This enjoyable book is worth an easy afternoon of armchair travel.   

Wrong Doctor John

By Kate Starr, ©1966

It could have been very confusing to have two members of the staff at the Eye Clinic with the same name—John Hardin; one a doctor, the other a surgeon. But Nurse Emma Brown at least had no difficulty in choosing between them.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“To be really on your toes you needed setbacks.”

“Knowledge is a good thing. It should help you graduate.”

REVIEW:

The premise of this book is that there are two doctors named John Harding, both of whom work at the dilapidated, overrun eye clinic. “Don’t let its squalor deceive you; only on the outside is Eye Clinic an eyesore,” the senior nurse tells a flock of fledgling nurses, which includes our heroine, Emma Brown. For on the inside, the eye clinic offers the best care for eye diseases in Australia. This Emma quickly discovers after she is sent—to her horror—to work at the eye clinic, because the great senior John Harding, looking out the window after a difficult night, sees Emma, also just off her night shift, running across the lawn, her red hair flying, and asks that she be transferred to his clinic. Creepy as that is, off she goes, and upon arrival she cannot even get into the building, it is so full of people. Eventually she elbows her way in and stumbles around for a while, usually directed by the helpful patients who know the confusing maze of hallways a lot better than she does, until she’s put to work sorting patients, who must sit in rows according to who’s next. “Emma, frustrated, feeling that her two and a half years of training, a good part of it most uplifting and impressive, had prepared her for something better than the collecting of tickets, shot Sister Morrow an indignant look.” It’s a humorous scene, in which she is forced to bully the knitters and chatters and the deaf Mr. Al Croker into order. Then she moves on to eye exercises, made more challenging by young Malcolm, an eye clinic veteran who always pretends that his eyes have gotten stuck in the crossed position until Emma pinches him back to normal.

On her first day she meets young John Harding—called Dr. John, compared to the senior Mr. John, a convention you will understand if you’ve read a few Harlequin (i.e. British) VNRNs; senior MDs in the UK are called Mister. Young Dr. John calls her Blackie because of her black stockings—a bit of a joke since her last name is Brown and most people call her Brownie—and she calls him, mostly to herself, wrong Dr. John, because as soon as she meets Mr. (senior) John Harding she is smitten with the great man.

The old clinic is to be abandoned soon because a new modern clinic is being built nearby. Senior/Right Mr. John takes her on a tour of the new facility, interested as he is in this bright, light, lively creature. On the tour, however, she discovers that “something was very wrong” with Mr. Harding. As the book trots along, we hear a lot about Mr. John’s sadness, about “something in the great man that grieved her because it grieved him.” It seems to involve a very beautiful woman named Kristin who hangs around the clinic, lecture halls, anywhere Mr. John might turn up, so she can turn her tear-filled  gaze upon him.

Meanwhile, Emma develops a chummy friendship with Dr. John, who is always teasing her but also on occasion sincere as he earnestly learns all he can from the great doctor, assisting in surgery: “Well—I’ll at least hand something,” he hopes of his first day as surgical assist. The pair skewer each other amusingly, as well as pick each other up, and in the end, they head into the outback as a mobile clinic to treat Maori people without other access to medical care.

You can guess where at least one of these threads is headed, but it really doesn’t matter—this rollicking, enjoyable book has a marvelous sense of humor and some lovely writing; it had me at the first sentence. “It was a postcard sort of morning, a fresh, bright morning that brings wholeness and sanity flooding reassuringly back to a slightly threadbare, rather crazy world.” With writing this good you needn’t worry so much about plotting, though this book’s story moves along nicely. Emma is a feisty gal who, if brought into the eye clinic on a creepy whim, never deserves it, always standing on her own two feet and refusing to be a patsy even to Mr. John. If she does suffer from a clearly foolish crush on Mr. John, she always has Dr. John to ridicule her for it, and we all know how a hopeless crush feels; the characters are so well drawn that we can empathize with their foibles rather than sneer. So in the end, if Dr. John was wrong, this book is absolutely right.

City on the Bay

By John R. Sherwood, ©1964

Cover illustration by Henry Fox

Texan Mike Rayburn left his post in the American city-hospital and flew across the world to Sydney, Australia. To the bridge, the harbor; to the city and world that was newer even somehow than the one he had left behind. On an exchange agreement, he was on loan for six months to the huge research hospital on the outskirts of the sprawling, brawling, exciting city. He was sorry to leave behind his friends and colleagues, and in particular his fiancée, Susan, with whom he had shared so much during his training and the unending strife of a surgeon’s life. But he was glad to carry the battle further afield, to meet new people, learn new methods. In this other city within a city he met the same dedication, the same loves, the same hates and envies. He met other men who were like himself; other men who pretended to be like himself and were not. He met women too, and one in particular who sought his love … and a strange man who sought his friendship.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“A surgeon was just a glorified plumber.”

“I would have liked to be a surgeon. But I suppose that most women just haven’t got the manual strength and skill.”

“Mike Rayburn couldn’t help feeling that the teenager today was a mass-produced product, irrespective of race, creed or language. They had bags of verve though, he had to give them that.”

“ ‘I enjoyed the rock and roll more than I expected,’ she said. ‘It’s a fine catharsis. A bit wearing on the nerves, however.’ ”

REVIEW:

The hero of our story, Mike Rayburn, is not a nurse—he is a doctor from Texas offered a six-month-long fellowship at a research hospital in Sydney, Australia. This means two things: One, he will have to leave his fiancée nurse Susan Carter behind, and two, this book is not a nurse novel.

When Mike breaks the news to Susan that they will be parted for half a year, just when she was expecting to finally get married next month, she is pissed! So he hadn’t asked her to move up the ceremony and come with him, and when he meets beautiful fellow fellow Dr. Linda Purnell, he seems to forget Susan ever existed.

Linda is quickly established as an intelligent and thoughtful doctor heading the dermatology lab. Sophisticated yet guileless, “she could meet most males squarely on their own ground.” Soon she and Mike are great friends, friends who kiss and throw their arms around each other and don’t mention their fiancées waiting for them back home. They go on a lot of dates, and Mike frets that “though he always kissed Linda goodnight before leaving her, their relationship didn’t seem to be getting any further, any more intimate.” Mike is something of a louse.

We follow Mike through various medical adventures, the aforementioned dates with Linda, and his regular but infrequent and unsuccessful struggles with his conscience. Eventually he drops his wallet and a photo of Susan falls out, and that’s that. In a few more rapid-fire pages, the book perfunctorily disposes of all the characters we’ve met to date, including Susan, who writes a very pretty letter of apology to Mike for not having been more supportive. Linda takes a job in Honolulu and never sees Mike again, but sends him a fairly tragic letter saying that she’s seeing a lot of an old friend whom she doesn’t love but who proposes regularly, concluding, “Perhaps one day I will say yes. I am very fond of him and he would make a fine husband. He would want me to give up my hospital work though, and I don’t know whether I am ready to do this yet.” So while Mike walks away with a satisfying career, a loyal fiancée, and a fairly successful fling with a beautiful and intelligent woman, Linda seems destined for a loveless marriage and the forced abandonment of the career she has worked nearly a decade for.

It’s an entertaining book, if poorly copy edited (you know how I just abhor that) and a bit unchivalrous. Linda is by far the most attractive character in the book, inside and out, and her heart is clearly broken by Mike, who does not spend much time feeling bad about his behavior. It’s hard to watch someone win the game when they do not deserve to. I have to wonder who the intended audience is for this story, but if the women characters are as a rule better drawn and more interesting than the men, neither Susan nor Linda deserve the way they are treated by our alleged hero, who is clearly a cavalier and shallow ass. We are not told if Mike mentions his affair with Linda to Susan, but I’m guessing he never gets around to that, either. I might forgive him if he demonstrated any significant remorse or self-awareness of his failures in this situation, but in the end all we’re left with his is sad wish, “If only Western men were allowed more than one wife …” For my part, I’m going to lament that I spent so much time with such a callow ass. 

Surfing Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Too good to be true!” was how Nurse Kara Simmon felt about her temporary assignment away from St. Mark’s. For she was on Surfari with the American Surfing Team as team nurse and as top competitor in the World Championships in Australia. And now this halcyon dream is abruptly shattered as she finds herself pulled by conflicting desires more turbulent and dangerous than the pounding surf … Caught between two men—brothers in name only. Surgeon/surfer Paul Denning, blond, handsome, coolly professional—who seems more interested in her skills than in herself as a woman. And Ross, the professional surfer—wild, headstrong, his animal magnetism undeniable… In conflict between the same, familiar world of nursing and an exciting new world of the professional surfer’s endless summers on the beaches of the world.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Kara had won wolf whistles and applause herself when she walked into the South Sea Lounge with Ross. The spontaneity of that had made her feel good.”

“Let’s make this last dance really Hawaiian! The rest of you make a circle and undulate!”

“You don’t even know me yet. How can you when we haven’t even kissed?”

“She must stop him soon now, she knew. But for a moment still she could thrill to the male warmth pressing against her. Moments like this were few when you were a nurse, she remembered. Too often there was sickness and pain, grief and death. And those things built up tensions inside you.”

“These days everyone has doubts. It’s a symptom of the times.”

“They’re good guys, but they exaggerate like Texans.”

“It would be too much to look like you do and be able to cook like that too.”

“Some of the surfers were taking photos of an odd-looking building on the foreshore of Sydney harbor. It looked like something from science fiction, shaped like huge, streamlined orchestral shells in an intriguing pattern. One of the reporters who joined them at the rail explained that it was an opera house and something of a national joke with Australians. It had been years since the building began and nobody seemed to know when, if ever, it would be completed.”

REVIEW:
To call this a nurse novel is a bit of a stretch. True, Kara Simmon is a registered nurse with a job at St. Marks Hospital in Los Angeles, and theoretically she’s the official nurse to—as well as a member of—a contingent of American surfers, but she doesn’t really do any nursing in this book. Mostly she’s catching a wave. She won the California state women’s surfing title this past summer, which gives her the right to enter a world title competition in Australia. Her surfing mentor, Paul Denning, just happens to be a surgeon at St. Marks. He’s the son of the founder of Denning surfboards, and actually dropped out of his internship twice to pursue surfing, but then decided to return to medicine. He’s the one who coached Kara to her surprising win in California, and the relationship is “an odd sort of intimacy into which sex did not intrude.” It’s not often you meet a VNRN that dares to use the word sex, but maybe that’s because this book was written by a man.

Paul’s younger brother Ross is also entered in the competition, and as the book opens, the American team is on a cruise ship steaming to Australia. Paul has had to remain back in the states practicing medicine, which is lucky for Ross and his enormous ego: “If Paul Denning was with us on this surfari, Paul Denning would win it,” she’s told by one of the other surfers. Ross isn’t likely to win the competition for Kara’s affections, either, the poor conceited sap. He’s convinced Kara is going to tumble for him any second and pursues her relentlessly, much to her annoyance. But when he finally catches up with her one night, he tells her that if she wins this competition, she could make a lot of money and travel the world endorsing Denning surfboards—and she needs his help as a coach to win. She tells him she’s not going to quit nursing, but she agrees to accept his coaching. Only then does he put the moves on her, which she curiously goes along with. I continue to be amazed at the number of women in these novels who kiss men they don’t like.

When the surfing team finally arrives in Australia, Ross takes her out to the beaches and teaches her that she has to maximize her scoring points with each wave. That night, at a beach party, a totally plastered Ross decides to try night surfing, though all the other surfers warn him of the danger. While out in the surf, he is attacked by a shark, which “fastened into his thigh and torn off a long strip of flesh all the way down to his heel.” Ew! Kara applies pressure to the femoral artery until the ambulance arrives, Ross is whisked into surgery, and his life is saved, though his surfing career is over. The never-mentioned upside to this is that he is now spared from ever having to compete directly with his brother in a surfing competition, and so can live on as a champion in his own mind.

The next day, Kara and the rest of the team is back surfing at the beach, the callous dudes. Later she tries to call Paul, but guess what! He’s quit the hospital and is on his way to Australia! He arrives a day later, and Kara quickly persuades him to take Ross’s spot on the team: “Then, and only then, will you really know to which world you belong.” He also takes over Ross’s place as Kara’s coach: “Don’t try any last-minute gimmicks, no matter what Ross tells you,” he advises her. “Surf your own natural style.” During her heat at big competition, she follows his advice—until her last wave, when she hangs five, whatever that means. She knows Paul wouldn’t like that, but thinks Ross would—“Ross was inclined to showboat that way himself.” She wins the heat by just one point, and now she’s in the finals. “She was tempted to try a left break, but memory of the chance she took hanging five drove it from her mind. It was better to stay with her natural style, surfing safely and as well as she could,” just like Paul advised her to do. So what is she doing with her next wave? Why, breaking left, of course. “Don’t ask me why I did that, Paul,” she says as she steps out of the surf onto the beach.

You can predict how this book is going to end in the first chapter. Apart from the shark attack, which takes a long time to unfold, not much happens in this book. It spends a lot of time surfing, but the jargon is so thick that it’s not really enjoyable to a non-surfer: “She set herself and took off, then saw Nerida dropping in on her right. Kara found herself turning instinctively left. She saw the danger at once: a fast right break with a toppling crest rushing toward her along the wall. Flat water ahead! She went into a tight bottom turn. The velocity she had built up steaming across that smooth wall turned her in the beginning of the flaky white—she was steaming back halfway up the face going right now. She was stoking in a glorious long slide ahead of the crest breaking well behind her. Coming out of it at the foot of the wall way right, she flipped out in a backhand turn and rode white water in to the beach.” Whatever that means. Oddly, the book allows Kara to win by following Ross’s advice, not Paul’s, but it’s Paul that she’s in love with and Paul’s lifestyle as a healthcare professional that she is completely devoted to. In the end, I’m just confused by what this book is trying to tell me, both in its message and its surfing descriptions. I wish I’d watched “Gidget” instead.

Overseas Nurse

By Jennifer Ames
(pseud. Maysie Greig), ©1951
Cover illustration by ?Lou Marchetti

At the Sydney airport, Nurse June Ray made her first error: she mistook a handsome stranger for her sponsor, Dr. Jed Lawson. Unaware of her mistake, June spent a romantic day and a half swimming in the dazzling sunlight and dancing under the stars. By the time she met the man with whom she had been corresponding and to whom she owed her last chance at a nursing career, her heart was no longer her own …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTE:
“Being young and pretty takes up a girl’s time – too much time.”

REVIEW:
I suppose that we shouldn’t be too surprised that, as the book opens, Nurse June Ray is fleeing the country, heading for Australia. What I did find unusual is her reason for leaving: She fell asleep on night duty and her elderly patient died. The doctor on the case drummed her out of the hospital, saying, “Negligence is a mild way to express it, Nurse. I believe had you not gone to sleep your patient would be alive at this moment.” Ouch.

When she arrives in Sydney, she’s met by a hunky fella who drives a hot sports car. She keeps looking at his “strong and capable” shoulders. But soon she finds out he’s not Dr. Jed Lawson, the kindly doctor who befriended her brother Clive, cared for him in his final hours after a mysterious car crash, and invited her to Australia. He’s Ken Wyman, manager of the Gumbula sheep ranch, where Clive was working. The ranch is now owned by Shelah Wyman, the slinky widow of Ken’s older brother, Roy. Roy was a “semi-invalid,” wounded during the war, and an impeccable driver who nonetheless crashed his car for no apparent reason, killing himself and Clive and leaving the ranch to his not-so-grieving widow. Shelah keeps talking about selling the ranch, mostly to piss off Ken, but also because living out in the bush is too lonely for her. She’d be all right, she says, if only she were married again. “Roy was scarcely a husband to me for some time before he died,” she says, and is she looking at Ken’s strong and capable shoulders when she speaks?

The day Nurse June arrives at Dr. Lawson’s house, Ken’s grandmother, Mrs. Kensey, has another stroke and requires round-the-clock nursing care. So June is packed off to the ranch, where she and Ken can kiss behind closed doors from time to time while she cares for Mrs. Kensey. When she does have a bit of time off, June helps out Dr. Lawson, who soon makes a play for her, telling her how lonely he is and how he’d like to settle down. Um, gosh, how about those Red Sox?

Back at the ranch, June’s patient is always mumbling about another will that Roy made before his death. She tells June that Shelah creeps around the house at night looking for the will, and she is always trying to get out of bed to find it before Shelah does. She also refuses to drink any beverage that Shelah prepares, because “that’s how she murdered him.” Naturally, everyone assumes the stroke has made her dotty. Well, she is a bit dotty, calling June Claire, because June looks like Mrs. Kensey’s deceased daughter, Ken’s mother. To prove the point, Ken drags her into his room to show June a portrait of his dead mums, and then, in a scene that would keep Freud busy for weeks, kisses her repeatedly, stopping only to say, “You are so like she was.”

One night, in an uncharacteristic gesture of friendliness, Shelah brings June a cup of coffee to help her stay awake all night, along with a nice glass of hot milk for Mrs. Wyman. As June struggles to stay awake—curiously, the coffee seems to have made her more sleepy, not less—she remembers the last time she felt like this, the night her elderly patient died, when the patient’s crabby niece had brought her a cup of tea … June had felt so sorry for the gaunt thing, who had just overheard her aunt tell June she was going to change her will and leave her fortune to June …

The next morning, you may not be surprised to learn, Mrs. Wyman is found dead while June is sawing logs in her chair. Everyone is a pretty good sport about June’s role in the death, saying she’d been overworked and had been up for days with Mrs. Wyman, so they’re all willing to let this go. But at the inquest, June pipes up that she feels she was drugged, and mentions that it was Shelah who brought her the coffee. And then there are the cups they had drunk from, which have vanished, and no one seems to have taken them. Shelah responds by pulling out a letter that June had written to her brother, explaining in great detail what had happened with her first dead patient, and says that June is just trying to find excuses for her bad nursing. There’s no proof, so nothing comes of June’s allegations except that she feels compelled to leave the ranch on the next train for Sydney. And the train actually pulls out of the station with June on it, with no farewell whatsoever from Ken, and never mind that speeding sports car that passes the train just before it reaches the next station.

The ending of this book could be foretold by a ten-year-old, including the hiding place of the new will. But even so, it’s not a complete waste of time. It’s not campy or amusing at all, but the writing is decent enough, and some of the characters are fun to watch, most notably Shelah and Mrs. Wyman. It reads more like a modern-day romance story, with the couple in question kissing in one chapter and quarreling in the next, and a big misunderstanding keeping them apart until the very end. Well, not the very end, as the couple is actually married five pages from the last page, and spends a very satisfying (wink, wink) month-long honeymoon in Fiji, another rarity for a VNRN. The “mystery” aspect of it, though not very suspenseful, gives you something else to think about, and overall this is a fairly decent book.

Nurse Smith, Cook

By Joyce Dingwell, ©1968 

Nurse Fiona Smith was determined to go on looking after her young nephew when he went to Australia to join his father, even though that gentleman had stipulated ‘no females!’ So she pretended to be the new cook instead, hoping that everything would sort itself out in time… 

GRADE: B+ 

BEST QUOTE: 

“‘The bones are not there’—coldly, from Fiona—‘they’re under refrigeration.’ ‘And so,’ submitted Steve, ‘is someone else.’” 

REVIEW: 

I was a little nervous of this book after reading the last vintage Harlequin romance, Silent Heart, which was a smidge too British for easy reading. Don’t get me wrong—I love the British locutions and slang, but the hospital organization was completely different from the American system and so more than a little confusing. But Nurse Smith, Cook is about a Scottish nurse who relocates to an Australian ranch, completely avoiding the hospital and its alien hierarchy, so I had no trouble with it at all. In fact, I found this a thoroughly enjoyable book. 

When the book opens, Fiona Smith is living with her aunt and in Scotland, and the pair are raising Fiona’s nephew, William Manning. Fiona’s older sister Fenella had married an Australian named Steve Manning, who abandoned her and baby William, and she had died in America. William is six years old and a “withdrawn, uncooperative … truculent, ungrateful, unresponsive, quite unpromising, violet-eyed brat.” So naturally we understand her unswerving devotion to the lad. Fiona sees an ad in a newspaper seeking information about Fenella Manning and responds, and soon she has a large check and a one-way plane ticket for William to Australia. She’s forbidden to accompany him, but due to her overwhelming obligation to him, she spends her check on a ticket and goes anyway. When Steve Manning, who is picking up William, asks her if she is the new cook, who the fortuitously has her same last name, she says she is, and off they go.

The trick is, ha ha, she can’t cook: “Of all the things Fiona could not do, and, as with most people, there were many, the top of the list was cooking. … She had been remarkably successful at producing lumpy arrowroot and curdled egg flip, and to this day there was a strange disc on the rec room wall, and when probationers asked curiously: ‘What is that?’ they were informed solemnly that it was Nurse Smith’s first dry toast.” The morning after she arrives at the ranch she is saved from the stove by an outbreak of scarlet fever, a complication of strep throat, among the ranch’s 24 Aboriginal children (William also gets it, in what is a curious coincidence or the shortest incubation period on record; it’s normally one to four days, with spots appearing 12 to 48 hours after onset of sore throat. The rash appears in only one out of ten strep patients, so it’s another medical curiosity that every child on the place comes down with “scarletina”). As Fiona is instructing Steve on the requirements of her patients, he is naturally suspicious: “‘For a cook,’ his voice was dry, ‘you’ve been told a remarkable lot about medicine.’” 

But those darn kids will bounce back, and then it’s off to the kitchen with her. Her first efforts there yield something that “looked like roofing tiles” instead of bread. But when Flora Macdougall, the head nurse of the region’s hospital, who is also Scottish, calls to check on the scarlet fever cases, Fiona begins sobbing about the baking catastrophe, and the matron talks her through the recipe. Two hours later, out it comes, “golden, crispy, sweet, nutty. Twenty beautiful loaves. Fiona stood beside them, actually crying. Never, she thought, never have I felt like this before, not even when Tommie Fenton haemorrhaged after his tonsils through jumping around too much, and the doctor was away, and I had to stitch him up myself.” So between the ranch’s only cookbook and the Matron on the other end of the phone, Fiona begins to whip up edible suppers. Not without mishap, however: As she puts a ruined Yorkshire pudding on the table, someone asks William what it is. “‘A brick, I think,’ William said. ‘The night we were sick they had cricket balls.’” 

In the meantime, Steve has not acknowledged any sort of relationship with William, and neither has she. Fortunately William is so withdrawn that he refers to Fiona only as “Mismif.” But she is not good at camouflage, and Steve knows something is amiss: “Ask if that unlikely story is acceptable, because it’s not, but it’s a good effort and I’ll pass it over for the time being,” he tells her when she tries to explain her unusual concern for William. Her ignorance about cooking and the medical emergencies that keep popping up don’t help her any. Steve gets the mumps, and she is required to tell him, circuitously of course, that he has to go to bed or risk orchitis, swelling of the testicles that can render a man infertile: “You could have complications. … They could ruin your life. … Your wife’s. … Your—your family. If you ever had one. Now—now do you understand?” As the book progresses, it’s clear that she likes him, and he likes her, but she can’t forgive him for running out on her sister and for refusing to acknowledge his relationship to William, and he also seems to be harboring some misconceptions about her that remain mysterious (“Is it too late for white?” he asks her about a dress). You see their dilemma.  

I was a little concerned initially when the Aboriginal house maid’s eyes “rolled” at Fiona’s red quilted dressing gown, and when the ranch hands’ kids are referred to as pickaninnies, or pics for short. But even William is referred to as a pic, so perhaps this term just means child in Australia? Because once we are over these initial bumps in the road, the attitudes are quite enlightened. William latches on to Harold, who is an orphan Aborigine boy living on the ranch, and moves him into his room in the house. She asks Steve, “ ‘Am I to understand then that Harold is now one of the family?’ ‘Any objections?’ ‘Of course not!’ indignantly.” Steve talks of sending Harold as well when the time comes for William to go away to school. “He appears a bright youngster. Possibly will leave William still floundering in the first grade while he makes the top.” Even outsiders refer to William and Harold as “family” without batting an eyelash. 

This book has a sense of humor, and the dialect is fun, too: “He’s out walkabout with name belonga Harold,” “he plurry well is,” “we like the tucker.” The writing style is different than most VNRNs (though I did have to cringe at a sentence early on that contained—and I counted twice—12 commas). But I didn’t get much sense of Australia or the times; apart from the vocabulary and a cameo by a crocodile, it really could have been set anywhere, at any time before the advent of cell phones. And I wasn’t convinced that it really needed all 187 pages. But if it doesn’t have enough to make it an excellent book, it is easily is a pleasant book plurry well worth reading.

Surf Safari Nurse

By Jane Converse 

(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1966 

Hawaii had lured them all: Ron Tercotte, who ran from love and a brilliant medical career to a surfboard in Waikiki. Craig Barclay, aging rou, who was delighted to pick up the tab for an international surfing expedition if it would buy his son, and himself, self-respect. Laurie Davis, a beautiful, principled, and dedicated nurse ... As the aimless days passed, Laurie asked herself why she had ever joined the ranks of beach players. Was the fleeting hope of Ron’s love enough to compensate for the hospital, the patients, the nursing career that had given her life meaning? 

GRADE: A 

BEST QUOTES: 

“You know, Diane, I have a confession to make. I was finding it uncomfortable, sharing a room with someone who was either too rude, too snobbish, or too vapid to have anything to say to me. After hearing you tonight, I'll admit something else. I didn’t know when I was well off.” 

“She would address Diane first only under emergency situations. If she noticed that Diane’s hair was on fire, or if Maana Loa blew itself to bits and hot lava threatened the room, she might casually mention the fact to Diane.”

REVIEW: 

Laurie Davis is a scrub nurse, passing instruments in the OR, and dating Ron, a medical student who in the opening scene is revealed as a surfer of widespread fame, the subject of magazine articles and movies. Ron is ambivalent about medicine, which he finds less thrilling than catching a wave. “Just don’t try to compare excising some character’s gall bladder with a perfect day at Malibu,” he tells her. 

Linc, who is a producer of surfing movies, is leading the eponymous surf safari to Hawaii and Australia for three months to make another film, and is recruiting top-notch surfers for the trip. Ron, of course, is invited, and he drops out of med school to go, to Laurie’s dismay; she and Ron break up over it. She and Linc become friends, however, and he invites her to go on the safari as their nurse. She accepts, and off they go. 

The entourage includes the surfers; Eddy Barclay, Linc’s sycophant go-fer who is the subject of continuous degradation by everyone else except Laurie; and Eddy’s parents, an ex-showgirl and an alcoholic would-be playboy, who are financing the expedition. The plot follows the onshore antics of this group, focusing particularly on the surfers’ mistreatment of Eddy. Near the end, in a hilariously stereotypical crisis, Laurie and Ron’s medical skills are put to use, and this brings Ron back to medicine (as you knew something would, and you might even have guessed it would be a shark).

The book offers a great depiction of the lifestyle of the California surfer circa 1966, from the “woodie” (an old wood-paneled relic of a station wagon that had been preserved in pristine condition) that Ron drives, the descriptions of surfing (“plunging downward and to his left, Ron raced with the curling wave, his bronzed body outlined sharply against a wall of green water and feathery white spray”), the surfing vocabulary “when you’ve gone over the falls backward on a twenty-foot giant at Sunset, or it closes out suddenly and you’re caught in that wild soup, or you get wiped out”), and the general slang (“a ho-dad rockout,” “you look groovy,” “the bit’s worn out, you cats. Cool it,” “I’m stoked out of my mind!”, “looks boss”). 

Great descriptions really let you feel the scene: “The voice was followed into the room by its owner, a still-handsome, fortyish woman whose gleaming black hair had been tortured into an intricate, high-standing coiffure and lacquered into place. She had the svelte figure of a magazine model, and it was enhanced by a Spanish-styled lounging costume that would have done credit to the flashiest of matadors; the slim black trousers were tighter than any Laurie had seen on the younger set downstairs, and the red velvet jacket looked as though the woman hadn’t put it on but had been dipped into it.” There is even some actual medicine in the book, including an emergency splenectomy in which Laurie, distressed by Ron’s dropping out of medical school, is not at her best: “I said I wanted a long right angle clamp. Stat!” the surgeon shouts at her.

This book is worth reading even if you are not an aficionado of the genre. It is lively, humorous, and adroitly shows the reader another time and place. The love story is a little incidental to the main plot, but if the story is interesting and well-written, who cares? This is a great read, and after this, I will be on the lookout for other Jane Converse titles.