Saturday’s Child

By Betty Neels, ©1972 

Abigail was a true ‘Saturday’s child’; she worked very hard for her living. And it looked as if she could expect to go on earning her own living, for no one seemed to be in any great hurry to marry her—least of all Dominic van Wijkelen, who admired her as a nurse but who seemed to have no personal feeling for her at all—except dislike!

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Abigail took off her gloves and unwound her scarf and went to find the kitchen, small and a little old-fashioned, with a gay gingham frill round the mantelshelf above the small electric cooker and a row of pot plants on the windowsill.” 

“There was no doubt at all that pretty clothes did a lot for a girl.”

“Happy times are for remembering.”

REVIEW:
This is the fourth VNRN by Betty Neels that I have read, and all the usual ingredients are here: The plucky 24-year-old orphan, here called Abigail Trent, with few friends and no family, a hard worker who never complains—the book’s title being a reference to an English verse, the book explains: “Saturday’s child has to work for her living, and Abigail was a term used some hundreds of years ago to denote a serving woman.” She thinks herself “not in the least pretty,” failing to understand that her kindness, honesty, and smile (not to mention a new pink dress) render her quite beautiful, indeed. She’s hired to work in Amsterdam caring for an English woman with a gastric ulcer, and there she meets Neels Standard #2, Professor Dominic van Wijkelen, a “giant of a man,” handsome and 40, “arrogant and ill-humored,” always treating our stalwart heroine “with the cold courtesy she had come to believe was the only alternative to his ill-humor.” But she refuses to be overly intimidated by the man and occasionally throws some sass his way, which clearly rocks his world view but makes him take more notice of her as an independent woman not interested in chasing his skirts. 

Next is the Neels Standard Plot: Though he is nearly relentlessly mean to her, occasionally he is kind, and soon—here on page 54—“somewhere behind that forbidding manner must be the man she had fallen in love with.” And though “the professor was as likely to fall in love with her as the moon would turn to cheese” (wensleydale?), he does keep finding work for her that keeps her in Holland and him visiting her (patients) every day. Neels is likely to toss in a dance that he invites her to after which he kisses her and tells her, “You have almost restored my faith in women,” hinting at a broken heart that has kept him bitter and alone. There will be at least one child in the story, here Dominic’s three-year-old niece Nina, who requires expert nursing that he witnesses with extreme gratitude as she works tirelessly—sometimes around the clock—to encourage the lovable muffin back from the brink of death.

In this iteration of the Neels classic, we are lucky to meet two delightful elderly characters, both much beloved by Dominic and who need nursing by Abigail. She brings another elder to the table, a former employee of Abby’s family before her parents died, when they were better off, and to whom she is extremely devoted, planning to support for the duration of her career; Dominic hires the old man to be a gardener and odd-jobs man. These three we can see have wisely assessed the hurdles the relationship between Dominic and Abigail must clear and are working behind the scenes—sometimes literally, as we are not always witnesses to what we can easily believe to be their gentle hands on the wheel—to assist the would-be lovers to an understanding.

Ultimately it becomes harder for me to know what to do with Betty Neels. Though this is, on its own, an excellent book, it shares so many similarities with the three preceding books I have reviewed that it’s hard not to feel like I am getting the same whole cloth I have had before, just with a few different patches sewn on to differentiate it for the sake of the copyright laws. It’s a great book easily worth recommending, but I just wish I wasn’t closing the cover feeling that I’ve read it all before.

The Fifth Day of Christmas

By Betty Neels,  ©1971

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

GRADE: A-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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