Nurse in London

By Jane Converse 
(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1970
Cover illustration by Bob Abbett 

“I want you, Luv,” said Lee Watson. He was the star of The Tree of Life, the top rock group in England and America, and he lay in a hospital bed, victim of a crippling motorcycle accident. In pain and despair he had clung to Nurse Holly Brooks. Now, he was going back to London to resume his career. “I love you, Holly,” he told her. “Come with me.” And Holly came because he needed her … stepping, unaware, into a frenzied, psychedelic landscape where The Tree of Life flourished, and she was a stranger.

GRADE: C 

REVIEW:
Lee Watson is the creative genius behind The Tree of Life, a rock group that “the young patients on our floor rate up along with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones,” except that this music is “country baroque. Banjo meets harpsichord.” Whatever that is. He and his band have come to the U.S. on tour, and while out for a ride one day on his donorcycle, Lee missed the curves of Topanga Canyon and went over the edge, resulting in injuries that insisted on the amputation of both legs. Though “he hasn’t lost his talent,” the accident set him back on his heels, if you don’t mind the metaphor, and he’s become reliant on Nurse Holly Brooks for his emotional as well as physical recovery. 

Interestingly, we meet here an orthopedic doctor who is concerned that his patient will become addicted to opioids (a rare species in this day and age) and who works with Holly to wean Lee off the morphine he’s been getting. “I am not so certain, not certain, at all, that our young man is unfamiliar with analgesic drugs,” he tells Holly. “We cannot risk addiction.” His solution is to administer an IV placebo, but guess what?

Lee is a volatile individual who one minute is screaming in Italics, “There isn’t going to be any tomorrow! It’s over! Can’t you stop playing your idiotic games and see that it’s all over?” and the next minute he’s going on “like a gushing fountain” about a proposal that his group give a free concert in a London park. He’s a bit manic, if you ask me, but no one else seems to have noticed. In the first scene between Lee and Holly, he tells her—hot on the heels of him rejecting the pills and begging for “a shot”—that he loves her and wants her to come back to London with him. His orthopod agrees: “To prevent him from becoming addicted to a narcotic, to keep his morale high enough so that he does not refuse to follow the routine of his exercises; this appears to be within your power,” he tells her. “Your presence at this time could mean the difference between recovery and total collapse.” But no pressure, luv. And, of course, contrary to all teachings about addiction; only the addict is responsible for their addiction. On Holly’s side, she feels “the flattery of being singled out by the exceptionally attractive idol of thousands of girls,” and has a “breathless sensation” over being invited. So off she goes, and her attitude about being able to save Lee does not bode well for either of them.

Dr. Glenn Raymond is the doctor who is taking over in England, and he quickly turns mean when Lee shouts for her in the middle of a press conference, “C’mon over and give us a kiss, pet. Give these ink-stained vultures something to write about.” Nonetheless, as Dr. Raymond continues to be “blunt, unsympathetic,” “smug and unpleasant,” Holly decides that she is falling in love with “this dictatorial, waspish man,” because nothing turns a woman on more than a man who is an asshole. Dr. Raymond suspects that Lee is on drugs, given his “mercurial” “manic-depressive” presentation. Furthermore, Lee won’t let anyone see his arms, and Glenn and Holly decide that Lee is “hooked on morphine,” provided to him by one of the groupies. They discuss getting him into drug rehab, but Holly thinks Lee will not cooperate. She wants to wait until after the big concert: “You can’t imagine what it means to him … a chance to prove that he isn’t a useless, unwanted cripple.”

The doctor stomps off, and Holly paradoxically decides that “whatever was done to save Lee had to be done quickly, and it had to be done, Holly decided, by herself alone.” She’s worried that it would be “an unforgiveable breach of ethics” because she would be “proceeding contrary to his orders,” but “all heroic acts were acts of defiance, were they not?” Lee’s monstrous egotism has apparently rubbed off on her. So she gets into a fistfight with the groupie who is dropping off the drugs. Lee’s manager stops the fight and throws out the groupie, and then a hellish night in which Lee suffers withdrawal ensues.

The next morning she summons Dr. Raymond. If Lee is not cured of his addiction that night, Holly recovers from her “arrogant conceit.” Dr. Raymond arranges to have Lee moved to rehab, but before he can accomplish this, Lee flies the coop. They tried to make him go to rehab, but he said no, no, no! He’s got to finish preparing for his big concert, see, and after that’s over, he’ll go, pinkie promise! Dr. Raymond comes over to yell at Holly some more, but after he’s done, and after he’s learned that Holly is not engaged to Lee, he warms up considerably and tells her that he’s in love with her. After some smooching, they decide to get married, because their one date and his subsequent horrible behavior have told her she needs to spend the rest of her life with him.

The concert goes off, and during the last number, Lee wheels himself offstage before the music has concluded. Holly has an ominous feeling and rushes after Lee, only to find that he’s shot himself dead in his dressing room. It’s soon revealed that Lee has left his entire substantial fortune to Holly, and Dr. Raymond trots out his Mr. Hyde personality again, accusing her of having pretended love for Lee to engaged and win his fortune. She dashes off to the airport, but it’s taking her so long to get a ticket that Lee’s manager, Bart, catches up with her. “You’re as bad as Lee, thinking you can run away from yourself!” he says, adding that Dr. Raymond had immediately realized, after hanging up on Holly, that he’d made a huge mistake, and had been trying to track her down ever since.

With a bit of time for backstory before the doctor catches up with them, Bart tells Holly that when he made his will, Lee had had to ask what Holly’s last name was, and mentions that Lee had been married twice before, the first time to an honest woman who’d had a son with him, and who had “kept hoping Lee would come around to see the boy someday. Fall in love with ’er again, if she didn’t annoy him.” Holly tells Bart that it’s was she and his Los Angeles doctor who had made an addict of Lee, but Bart shrugs that off, telling her that Lee had been high on speed at the time of his accident, and that his addiction was inevitable. By now the doc has found a parking spot and rushed into Heathrow to give her a kiss. Immediately she starts to plan “spending the rest of your life in a foreign land. Yet wouldn’t she be willing to live anywhere, for the remainder of her days, if she could be at Glenn’s side?” The terrible problem of her estate she decides to entrust to Bart to manage for her, never mind about helping out Lee’s good-hearted first wife or son, and they head off to get a wedding license and struggle with the burden of being millionaires. Poor kids.

Author Adele Maritano can crank out plenty of great sentences, but here she hasn’t given us anything for the Best Quotes section, and she’s lousy with plots, which is a tragedy for her and for us. Here she writes of addiction as if the attitude that the addict is helpless in the face of drugs is a new one; of course, in 1970 it may well have been, so we can’t blame her for that. But it’s tiresome to the more modern sensibility, especially when a professional like Holly is not with the program and falls into all the typical traps about her responsibility for Lee’s addiction or sobriety. It’s also dated in how it treats the musical genius of Lee; we are told that his brilliance endows him with “the superiority that permitted him to behave like a tyrant and get away with it.” Again, it’s not easy to swallow that perspective 50 years on or watch him abuse people who revere him. Here we have another of Maritano’s many mediocre works that offer little beyond a flashback to another time, which of itself is not really enough reason to pick up this book. There are other, better VNRNs that will take you to London (see An American Nurse in London, not to mention many of the Britain-based Harlequin nurse novels), so I advise you to turn in your ticket and catch a different flight.

An American Nurse in London

By Diane Frazer
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1968

The huge jet liner was London bound. And Elaine Gibbs had left thoughts of hospital routine far behind. But when the stewardess asked her to assist a sick passenger, she couldn’t refuse. Then, she discovered that her patient was none other than Tommy Taylor, the rock-and-roll idol. At the airport, Elaine helped Tommy avoid reporters—including the handsome young journalist who was her seatmate. And so, unwittingly, she embarked on a wild adventure that changed her entire life. 

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Hospitals. They give you a pill to put you to sleep, and then they wake you up in the middle of the night with a blinding light in your face.” 

“She hadn’t forgotten her own days of student nursing, when you combined classwork and exams with floor duty and wondered how much longer you’d be able to stay alive.”

“Pity I’ve a wife. Healthy one, too.”

“One felt almost anything could happen when the sun shone.”

“Luck was the last ingredient for a happy life. Work and industry and giving in a relationship was what made it grow and blossom.”

“Lionel always notices legs. I’m grateful for that. I’d loathe living with a man who noticed bosoms. That always seems so common to me.”

“Behind every delightful man there’s a wise and gracious woman.”

REVIEW:.
I’m writing this review on a jet to the US from London, and I have to say that what struck me most about this book was the ease of travel and immigration when it was penned 54 years ago—no passenger locator forms, no COVID-19 tests, no vaccination certifications or multiple COVID tests to schedule upon arrival—just show up, fall in love, and stay forever in a foreign country forever. Times have changed, indeed. 

Elaine Gibbs is a nurse on vacation, and so barely acts as one during this book, apart from diagnosing fellow passenger, rock star Tommy Taylor, with chicken pox. She goes above and beyond, however, when she helps him scurry off the plane to escape the press and the crush of screaming female fans, whisking him off to her friend Erica McLean’s flat at 14 Grafton Terrace in the Bayswater district of London, which is apparently a real address. (I wonder if its current occupants know of its prominent place in literary history?) The spots on Tommy’s face, we are told, would be “just great for my image,” and that’s all the sarcastic explanation we are given as to why Elaine must escort the man out the plane’s back door, a “service exit for airplane personnel,” through passport inspection and customs, and off to Erica’s—an address no one has bothered to give to Tommy’s manager, Bernard Moss, who is accompanying him on the flight, so he’s left worrying and waiting for Tommy to reappear.

Another problem is that Elaine’s seat mate on the plane, Tony Crenshaw, is a very attractive and interesting young journalist. Dashing off without explanation, Elaine is vastly disappointed not to have been able to share a cab and perhaps something more with the young man, who is left to cab it alone into town. As for Elaine, once she lands in London, she makes the most of her vacation with a very thorough tour of the city, and we are led to Trafalgar Square, Lincoln’s Inn Fileds, Temple Church, the Cheshire Cheese pub at 145 Fetter Lane—an old haunt of of Samuel Johnson’s—and Windsor and Buckingham Castles.

In a shocking incident of insight and coincidence, Tony is lunching at Twining’s at the same time as Erica, who is a literary editor, and she inadvertently leaves behind a manuscript with her name and address on it. This simple clue leads psychic Tony to decide that this must be where Elaine and Tommy are. He knocks on the door the following day, only to be turned away by Erica. But Tony’s brief visit makes fellow reporter Liam Cobb suspicious—my God, these British reporters must all have ESP—and he tails Tony as he’s tailing Elaine, Erica and Tommy on a driving tour of the countryside. Tony, spotting Liam, punctures Liam’s gas tank  to get back to town first to turn in the story that Tommy is alive and well. Elaine, deeply crushed that Tony had learned of her whereabouts and not contacted her, is unconvinced when Tony turns up to offer a dozen roses and a box of Fortunum & Mason’s chocolates in apology. She stomps off in the rain to see Picadilly Circus (I was there yesterday, and if it’s not as horrific as Times Square, it’s certainly not a pleasant jaunt) and then to Buckingham Palace, and he trails along behind for almost an hour after she refuses to speak to him, but “he couldn’t stay out of the office all day,” so making no further effort to speak to her apart from his intial rebuffed attempt, he stomps back to work, “thwarted and seething.”

Tommy, meanwhile, is whisked back to a more suitable hotel by his manager. He and Erica, during their time together, had found themselves remarkably compatible, able to quote the same Alexander Pope poems and discuss artists with insight and intelligence—but Erica just cannot accept that Tommy is a rock and roll singer—“one of those dreadful people,” Erica insists, after two weeks of the contrary. She finally agrees, reluctantly, to attend his concert, and discovers that it’s not rock that he plays at all! Rather, he opens his show with a flamenco paso doble in Spanish, “an elegant pop number,” and when it’s over, Erica is a changed woman. “That isn’t popular singing!” she exclaims, finally won over, the shallow fool. For his part, Tony continues to shadow Elaine, and finally runs into her on the street and discovers that she’s pinned one of the roses he’d given her to her lapel, so that relationship is saved, too, without them speaking a word.

This book is somewhat problematic. Tony and Elaine, who have barely spoken for most of the book—the intrepid reporter who stops at nothing including criminal vandalism to obtain a story can’t make more than a trivial effort to speak to a reluctant woman—end on the brink of becoming engaged, too much too fast. And after all the reconciliations, Elaine makes a slip that Tommy had had chicken pox, and that’s Tony’s lead story for the early edition, so he’s apparently learned nothing at all from his journalistic misadventures. Even more curious is Erica’s debate about men vs. career; she’d dumped a man who’d wanted her to give up her career running a literary agency to marry him. “Roger had wanted her to be what she wasn’t. He’d wanted her to be just a woman, nothing else.” Working at the agency “had remade her, made a woman of her. No, she had never regretted it; it was her life. Or so she’d thought. That it was enough.” Because now, having met Tommy, she’s having doubts. Grrrr!

There are hints here of what makes author Dorothy Fletcher, here writing as Diane Frazer, a great writer, but this is not one of her best books. It’s not a terrible book on its own, rather the difficulty is knowing that author Fletcher can do so much better. The amusing wit is not as prevalent, and the absurd leaps of plot are just not acceptable from a writer as smart as she is. It’s not exactly a fair yardstick—for an author like Jeanne Bowman or Arlene Hale, two dandelions on my Worst Authors list, this book would be a home run—but this is the curse of being good at what you do, that a B grade is a disappointment.

Young Doctor Kirkdene

By Elizabeth Hoy, ©1955

 

Doctor Kirkdene had made it quite plain that as a rising young medic he considered domestic entanglements and distractions as hindrances. But Nurse Lindy couldn’t help hoping that in spite of all his theorizing he would eventually come to love her!

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You mean, you actually make beds, wash patients, do dreadful terrifying dressings, watch gory operations without fainting?”

 

“Career women ought to marry docile men—otherwise they are heading for disaster.”

 

REVIEW:

Nurse Anne Linden—Lindy throughout this book—is hopelessly in love with Dr. Kirkdene, who has no first name and is just known as Kirk. But the man, gorgeous and self-confident, is a shameless cad: “His conquests were legion; hearts fell before him like nine-pins.” But one night Lindy, off in a back room for a sanctioned nap while on night duty (and how I wish such a humane break were more widespread), is followed by the flirtatious Kirk. No sooner has he planted a wet one on her when the door flings open and the night supervisor catches them in the clinch. As if that isn’t bad enough, word gets out that Kirk has left his post in the ED, and when an emergency came in, the nurse there was unable to find him and the patient survived only through her quick thinking.

 

With the two of them about to be tossed not just out on the street but to the metaphoric wolves, Kirk does what any enterprising, ambitious young man would do in similar circumstances: He lies, telling the head of the hospital that he had just proposed to Lindy when they were discovered. This makes everything all right and saves them both—but now they have to pretend they’re engaged.

 

And pretend they do, through an extensive 192 pages. Lindy is angry at the sham, secretly wishing it were real, watching Kirk with alternating fury at his coldly shameless ambition to nail a post at a new pediatrics ward and reverential awe at his complete and selfless devotion to his patients, to the point that he risks his career to help them. There are a few side plots, but this is essentially the book in a nutshell. It may seem simple—in truth, it is—but Elizabeth Hoy is enough of a storyteller to make this little story worth reading.

 

After Elizabeth Hoy’s outstanding Nurse Tennant, I went shopping for more of her books. Young Doctor Kirkdene does not live up to its superlative sister, but it’s certainly better than the other title I found, Doctor Garth. The writing is easy and charming, with occasional pretty phrases like, “Sensibly she reminded herself of these things, while her singing heart went its own wild way.” And few VNRN writers can make you feel so acutely the wretchedness of a young woman pining over an unrequited love—she pulls me back to miseries I haven’t experienced since high school. It must be admitted that the length of this book does get a bit tedious, and I found myself wishing the miserable pair could just have one honest conversation and put a quick end to it—indeed, the end, when that finally does occur, was a bit of a letdown. But all things considered, this is a rarity among VNRNs, a novel that actually hurts, and so I happily suggest you make an appointment at your earliest convenience with Young Doctor Kirkdene.

Student Nurse

By Renee Shann, ©1941

Cover illustration by Victor Kalin

 

When lovely young Shirley Davidson ran away from her tyrannical father, fate (and the kindness of Matron Anna Marsden) fulfilled her lifelong dream—she became a student nurse. Then, as if she weren’t already bursting with happiness, she fell in love. But there were complications (and heartbreak) ahead. For handsome Dr. Gerald Trent, though irresistibly drawn to Shirley, was already engage to Anna Marsden. And Shirley would rather die than do anything to hurt the woman she worshiped, who had given her her first chance for a decent life.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“I’ve an idea that the only sensible thing is to be crazy.”

 

“One needs to have one’s heart in one’s job, otherwise it’s impossible to make a real success of it.”

 

“Luckily one’s best beloved never saw one at the hairdresser’s. At least, not if one had any sense.”

 

“In all lives there are times when one has just to sit tight and wait until one feels better.”

 

REVIEW:

Anna Marsden is the 35-year-old matron of the Gresham Nursing Home, one of London’s most prestigious hospitals. She’s had this job for two years—won it after a lengthy battle within the hospital board, in which trustee Howard Bleston prevailed—and feels a great deal of dedication to her job and to Howard for awarding it to her. Her fiance, though, Dr. Gerald Trent, hates her job and wants her to chuck it and marry him. She knows that “she needed some form of self-expression other than running a house and ordering meals and being decorative at her husband’s dinner table. She too wanted a career and the knowledge that she was doing something useful in the world. Gerald had said lightly and a little reproachfully that looking after him was something useful.” Why she continues to see him is a bit of a mystery.

 

He’s to leave for a prestigious fellowship in New York, and has asked her to quit her job and come with him as his bride. She’s all set to do it when Howard’s wife, the horrible Hilary Bleston, arrives to recover, again, from drug addiction, which will take at least three months. Given her loyalty to the husband, Anna feels she must see the wife through this crisis, and tells Dr. Trent that she can’t go with him. His ardor noticeably cools.

 

Enter Shirley Davidson, at 17 about half Dr. Trent’s age. She has arrived at the hospital by jumping into Anna’s car at a traffic light and urging her to drive on, because she’s running away from a life of crime forced upon her by her ogre of a father. Anna takes Shirley in and gives her a job as a nursing student, and Shirley is hopelessly star-struck with her devotion to Anna for her kindness. But upon clapping eyes on Dr. Gerald Trent, she’s hopelessly star-struck with her infatuation with the man. Since his engagement to Anna is a secret—and Gerald helpfully never mentions it to Shirley—she gratefully accepts his dates and kisses. It’s just a matter of time, however, before she finds out that Gerald belongs to Anna, and then she calls it off in an utter panic. It’s just a matter of more time, then, until Anna finds out that Shirley is in love with Gerald. Shirley quits the hospital and disappears into London’s  seedy underbelly so as to clear the field for Anna, but that great lady decides—after some indecision that leaves the reader a little nervous for a second—that she’s through with Gerald.

 

Everything ends well for everyone, of course, and in a wholly predictable way, but that’s not always a bad thing, especially not here, because the writing is very fine. The characters and their motivations and anguish are drawn quite beautifully, in a way that is particularly unique to VNRNs from the 1940s, as this one is. If Shirley’s character is given to flightiness and exaggeration of emotion, she is, after all, only 17, and can reasonably be expected to be both. Hilary Bleston, a nasty shrew, is fun to watch, especially as she overhears her friends gossiping about her at the beauty shop. Student Nurse is a slow book, perhaps overly so at 223 pages, and this really is its biggest flaw, but it’s not a fatal one. As long as you’re not in a hurry, this book will be a pleasant diversion.

Bush Hospital

By Gladys Fullbrook, ©1968
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

When Ann Royce joined the Voluntary Service Overseas and went to work as a nurse in a bush hospital in Tanzania, she left an unhappy love affair behind her. Was it that previous humiliating experience of love in England that threw her so quickly into the arms of Jeremy when, at the same time, she was so attracted to David? In the hot sun of East Africa, she gradually discovered the answer.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I had been his ‘steady’ for more than five years; and during that time he had never looked at another girl, though plenty had looked at his handsome face and athletic figure. I was quite certain of this because that sort of thing always gets around, and sooner or later some kind friend will feel that she really ought to tell—for one’s own good, of course.”

“Women and children patients … seem to be tougher than the men, and I’m not surprised as they do most of the work.”

“Fate may intend me to be a career woman. A Sister Tutor, or even a matron of a teaching hospital. I considered this dazzling prospect for a moment, then sighed; for I had to admit that it did not attract me in the slightest. All I wanted was to be a happy, loving wife and mother.”

“I could imagine just how Mother felt, but I did wish she would leave me to manage or mismanage my own affairs, for after all that is what we all have to do in the end.”

“We spent a gay half-hour at the hotel, where, incidentally, very moderate drinking was indulged in, for we all had the new breathalyser tests in mind.”

“ ‘Well,’ I thought, rising jerkily to my feet, ‘the mini-skirt has its uses!’, and after one swift glance round the room, I followed David over the windowsill, and outside.”

REVIEW:
I work with a surgeon who possesses something of an unchaste mind, and he has asked me several times if I own a copy of Head Nurse (I do). So when I found this book, I had to bring it to him as a worthy companion to that title. Indeed, under its cover I did actually find it to be slightly more prurient than most VNRNs I’ve read. But in the world of VNRNs, that’s not really saying much.

Ann Royce is a nurse in England, who, having just completed years of training to be a nurse, is now ready to chuck it all and become a housewife for her long-time beau, Mike. After five years, however, he’s rather belatedly getting cold feet. She shows him, and signs up with the Voluntary Service Overseas Organization for a year working in, yes, a bush hospital in Tanzania. She steps off the plane in Dar-Es-Salaam, where mission church “padre” and former surgeon David Ottershaw is waiting for her, showing the effects of the heat: “He was wearing a sort of wide-brimmed felt hat, and I noticed with distaste that it was stained with sweat round the inner edge. His khaki shirt was limp with the same dark stain. Without thinking I moved a little away from him, and suddenly he smiled … ‘Yes, wind’s in the wrong direction,’ he remarked casually.” You just know they’re meant to be together.

The hospital is staffed by Nurse Ruth Harris, and there’s schoolteacher Wendy Ellison, and a few native nurses-in-training, but beyond that this book is as thinly populated as the African wilds. David drops in from time to time and brings Jeremy Dunne, who is working in agriculture nearby for the VSO, to meet Ann. Before too many more pages, she and Jeremy are an item, although from the outset there are clues that Jeremy is not exactly a steady type: “You take your job very seriously, don’t you, Ann?” he asks her, and seems surprised when she answers, “Of course, don’t you?” Nonetheless, when Jeremy proposes and then kisses her for the first time, she accepts, though she seems more enthusiastic about the kissing than marrying Jeremy: “But did I want to marry? Well, of course, doesn’t every woman?”

But after announcing their engagement, Ann realizes she’s in love with David. What to do, what to do? Naturally, she decides to go ahead and marry Jeremy, until he starts dancing with Wendy and cools toward Ann. Eventually she decides she has to break up with Jeremy because “David was the man that I loved truly and for all time … In the depths of my heart I had known for some time; in fact, ever since that magic moment after the operation that David had performed on the man with the smashed leg.” Now all she has to do is pine after David, who has expressed no interest in her and seems increasingly remote.

Her year in Tanzania over, she returns to her parents’ house in England and gets a job in a nearby hospital. But it’s still David, David, David. A friend finally asks her, “Have you told him?” She is all agog, and the friend says, “I suppose nice girls don’t do such things. But believe me, my dear, they most certainly do.” We’ve got another 40 pages to go, so now we struggle through the waffling, the self doubt, “have you got the nerve to force the issue?” Jesus, just text the man and get it over with. But nice girls don’t do such things, and unlimited texting hasn’t been invented yet, so it’s letters to Ruth and from Ruth informing Ann that David is on holiday in a nearby town, then phone calls to Ruth that get cut off by the operator, abortive bus trips to track down a D. Ottershaw, spotting David in a green Austin mini, more letters and phone calls to Ruth that go astray. After 30 pages of this, the man himself calls her out of the blue in a rather anticlimactic conclusion to the ordeal.

Though the romantic aspects of this book are fairly typical, this book is unique in that it acknowledges physical attraction as a stand-alone phenomenon, separate from love. Ann herself is not immune, and recalls “my own passionate response to Jeremy’s love-making.” She eventually decides that her relationship with Jeremy was based on hormones and not much else: “In spite of the strong physical attraction which he had for me I knew, and now he knew, that it was just not enough.” The story itself is more serious than some VNRNs, which I think is typical of the Harlequin imprint. It’s not overtly racist and the descriptions of the African country give you a better impression of the setting than most VNRNs set in Africa. This is the only VNRN I’ve encountered that is presented in the first person, and that did make me wonder why the third person is the It is well-written and has a cute ending, but it doesn’t have a lot of excitement or camp or fun. Since this is first and foremost why I read these books, though there is nothing really wrong with it, I just can’t give Bush Hospital high marks.

Wayneston Hospital

By Elizabeth Kellier (pseud. Elizabeth Kelly),
©1963
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Wayneston was a very small village hospital, having only one resident doctor, the young Chief of Staff, Ian Collington-King. And when Susan Brent came to work there as a staff nurse, the enigmatic doctor immediately roused her curiosity. Susan’s puzzlement grew after she confided her feelings to her fiancé, handsome Brian Draycott. For Brian was sure a scandal was attached to Dr. King’s name, and for his own purposes Brian was anxious to uncover it. Why had the brilliant young surgeon chosen to hide away in Wayneston? What had Brian to gain by discovering Dr. King’s secret? And why did Susan find herself in the storm center of an emotional battle between two men in her life?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTE:
“Am I interrupting one of those important female confabs?”

REVIEW:
When the story opens, Susan Brent has just graduated from nursing school, not an uncommon affliction for heroines of vintage nurse romance novels. (It seems that once you graduate from school, the only next logical step for a gal is to get married.) Susan has left her home in London and moved to a small town in Dorset to work at the hospital and to be near her fiancé, Brian Draycott. Brian is a partner in his uncle’s development firm, and he is in charge of buying real estate so the firm can put ticky tacky houses on it. He’s hoping to buy a lot of land that’s coming up for sale soon for himself and build a house on it, and then he and Susan will get married. In the meantime, they’ll go to dinner at his stuffy parents’ house and to the movies a lot. And after they’re married, “you’ll be able to quit work altogether,” as she’s told several times in the book’s first few pages, which she receives with nary a peep.

She first meets Ian Collington-King, the limping doctor who today would be called a hospitalist, at the local pub, almost colliding with him, and it was only his “quick action … that prevented her from being thrown off balance,” as he seizes her elbow. His companion, Mr. Treverly, who runs a house in the country nearby for retired gardeners, “did not appear to like Brian. But why not? she wondered.” Such are the mysteries of vintage nurse romance novels.

But there are more! At work Dr. King, as he is mercifully called, is mum about his private life. “Nobody seems any wiser about him now than on the day he arrived eighteen months ago. In some ways, he’s a real mystery,” another nurse tells Susan. He lets it slip to Susan that he was in Rhodesia when he was in the army, and naturally she tells Brian this. Brian thinks he has heard the name before, and with Susan’s tip he soon remembers that a Major Collington-King was “cashiered” (I had to look this up, it means dishonorably discharged) from the army for embezzling money from the mess funds to support “a particularly expensive wife” and spent six months in prison for it.

In person, however, Dr. King is a kind, benign gentleman. Susan feels “surprisingly at ease” with him, and when he gives her a lift back to town, she admires how he handles the idiosyncrasies of his battered old automobile, and she feels like she did as a child in her father’s car, “so wonderfully safe.” This is in sharp contrast to Brian’s shiny new Sunbeam, a powerful racecar that he drives too fast for Susan’s liking. We are given a tour of Dr. King’s superior surgical skills, and the de rigueur enthusiastic appraisal of his hands: Susan thinks he is “a more than efficient surgeon. His slim, long-fingered hands moved with an instinctive skill, almost as if they had no need to be controlled by his brain. … She once more admiringly acknowledged his expert adroitness.”

Brian’s godfather, Mr. Chadwick, is a crotchety unmarried wealthy old man with a blood disease that brings him to the hospital on a regular basis. Who is he going to leave his money to? Brian despises the old man’s relatives who hang around like flies but then uses Susan to get him onto the floor to see Mr. Chadwick after visiting hours are over. Susan resents this, but does it anyway.

Brian begins to suspect that Dr. King is trying to get Mr. Chadwick’s money and seems to become a little unhinged in his obsession with the idea. Even after they have a heated discussion about it in which he snarls at her for her “touching faith in [Dr. King’s] integrity,” she runs to tell Brian of an outing Mr. Chadwick took on his own one afternoon, arranged by Dr. King, and then about a letter that Mr. Chadwick asks her to mail for him to his lawyers. Brian becomes furious with each news bulletin and snaps at her, “I notice you’re quick enough to jump to the defense of Collington-King again.”

In the book’s climax, Brian makes a scene at a local dance, accusing Dr. King of assisting his godfather of buying the lot of land he wanted out from under him and donating it to Mr. Treverly’s charity, and then drives Susan home too fast and gets into an accident. But since she’s unconscious for most of it, the accident is not really exciting or interesting; it’s just over in three sentences.

This is a fairly plodding, quiet story. Not much really happens, and then it ends. It’s not hard to start mentally ticking off the boxes as we pass the obligatory milestones in the plot: Steadying hand on the elbow? Check. Deft surgeon’s fingers? Check. Warm smile and blushing cheeks? Check. It’s not badly written, but our heroine, Susan Brent, has a mere fraction of the starch of her nurse’s cap, and I do tire of hearing about her “well-shaped head” or her outfits replete with “tiny pearl earrings that set off the small ears and the fine shape of her head.” Her eventual rapprochement with—this should not be much of a spoiler—Dr. King isn’t much of a reward, since their previous relationship has been completely pedestrian apart from him twinkling his blue eyes at her. The cover is really the best thing about this book, so after you’ve admired that for a minute or so, just put it aside and be done with it.