Night Duty at Duke’s

By Bess Norton
(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1960

Nurse Jane Ross had any irresistible charm that few men couldn’t ignore. But in James mind there was only one who really mattered—Geraint Owen the fascinating new doctor who had set all the nurses talking. But there was another manner life: The tall, quiet Dr. Barney Madders, who secretly loved her, with no hope of that love ever being returned. The unpredictable events which fill a hospital taken suddenly, finally turned the course of love, baring some hearts and breaking others … as Jane found out when the truth about Geraint and Barney finally came into the open …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I get sick and tired of saying ‘yes, sir,’ and ‘no, sir,’ and ‘really, sir?’ There are times on days when I yearn to wreck a consultant’s round by saying something quite different. Such as ‘what a load of tripe’ or ‘I couldn’t care less’.”

“And I suppose you don’t even know whether it was a long big boy’s coat or a short, scum-of-the-earth variety?”

REVIEW:
I hope everyone has, at least once in their lives, experienced the electricity sparking when that certain someone’s hand brushes your arm. Nurse Jane Ross is lucky enough to have known it twice—with the same man. Dr. Geraint Owen was Jane’s first love, when she was 19, four long years ago. “I had tied his gown for him, and the first touch of his skin against my knuckles as I did it had shaken me as much as if I had touched an electric wire,” she recalls. The pair had been an item—and a very public one, subject to a lot of talk—and, apparently stung by the gossip, “he had walked out on me, halfway through my final year” in her schooling she explains, and since then “he had made no attempt to get in touch with me.” Until the day she runs smack into him on the ward of Duke’s, the hospital where she now works, and instantly he’s pulling her into the linen closet or onto park benches conveniently shrouded in rhododendrons, and her knees are in a near constant state of jelly.

The problem is that the man is a cad, and is messing around with another nurse, who is only known to us by her last name, Fetterby—as are more than half a dozen other nurses in this book, unfortunately. Jane’s best friend Theo Jacques, a black woman from Jamaica—something of an anomaly in VNRNs—is a hard-working, honest and true friend, but as Jane repeatedly rebuffs Theo’s efforts to put Jane wise to the rumors running around the hospital, the old chums become increasingly strained. “I know what you’re trying to tell me,” Jane huffs, thinking Theo wants to talk about Fetterby. “All right. It isn’t important. It was just one of those things.” It’s clear that Theo has more to tell than that Geraint’s been parking with another woman in his off hours, but Theo just gives Jane a cold stare and turns away.

Jane has another friend, Dr. Barney Madders. “We’d carried on a comfortable brother and sister relationship for three years,” she says, so she’s the only person who is surprised when Barney finally tumbles out, “I love you. I’ve always loved you. I’ve waited, and waited, and waited. I don’t think I can go on very much longer.”

Most of the book involves Jane’s patients, and a nurse who falls into a mine and has to be rescued, and of course there’s the Rugger dance to attend in our finest ball gowns. Throughout we have author Olive Norton, here writing as Bess Norton, penning her usual fine prose, if perhaps not as laugh-out-loud funny as she has been in other books. It’s not the most interesting or captivating book she’s written; as much as I sympathize with Jane’s passion for Geraint, she’s hopelessly blind about him, which becomes a bit frustrating, especially as she becomes increasingly mean to her devoted friends Theo and Barney. But even an “average” book for Olive Norton is better than many authors’ efforts, so you have my blessing to go on night duty at Duke’s.

Emergency Nurse

By Rosamund Hunt, ©1964

Amy Whiting came to Elsalock Island seeking escape. The young nurse had lost the doctor she loved to another woman, and wanted nothing more to do with nursing or with men until her painful emotional wound had healed. But fate had other plans. Her first day on the lovely New England island, Amy was pressed into service when a tragic accident filled the understaffed local hospital with needy patients. Soon Amy had won far more than the professional admiration of two handsome young doctors, and the vengeful jealousy of a stunningly beautiful yet strangely moody fellow nurse. Amy had only her heart to guide her through a maze of personal rivalries and conflicting feelings … the heart she had sworn never to trust again …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Couldn’t do that. Couldn’t pick out one woman in the whole world and make her happy. Think of how many others I’d make miserable if I took myself out of circulation!” 

REVIEW:
Amy Whiting RN has turned up on Elsalock Island, which is located off Cape Cod, vowing never to love again!!! Or nurse again, either, because even just being in a hospital makes her remember Dr. Alec Osborne, a boy she’d loved since high school and followed into medicine with the dream of working alongside him after they were married—except that he’d decided to marry someone else, the rat bastard! Amy needs a serious dose of coping skills. To demonstrate how destroyed she is, “she wore no make-up because she had lost faith in such things. Alec had rejected her for an older, plainer woman, and she was not interested in trying to make herself attractive any longer.” She’s also pretty shallow; did I mention that? 

Anyway, after quitting nursing and life altogether, she’s going to hole up on this remote island in the cottage left to her by an aunt. On the ferry over, she’s taken up by a suave charmer, Peter Pepper, who regales her with humorous stories to such an extent that she hardly notices the two cops who are scrutinizing every male passenger exiting the ferry. “A guy could lose himself up here for a long, long time,” Peter observes. “He could hide out from the world, and his enemies would never be able to find him.” Nope, Amy doesn’t pick up that clue he’s putting down, either. Peter also finds the island attractive because it’s itching to raise money to build a new hospital, and he’s just the man to make all that happen, as long as he gets to put his name on the bank account!

But en route from the ferry stop, the bus she and Peter are riding on tips over, and all the injured folks are hustled off to the local hospital. Amy is not harmed, but she is instantly pressed into duty by mean old Dr. Dan Spencer, who hears Amy’s story and is not exactly impressed. “You decided to quit the profession that you only went into for selfish reasons of your own,” he sums up. “Didn’t it mean anything to you at all, except as a means to your own ends?” At least she has the nerve to answer, “I don’t think it did. It was a job.” Ah. 

But with all these injured folks lying around, she does agree to help out, initially thinking it would be just for one day, but she keeps coming back, because she likes the patients, and besides, Dr. Aaron Moon is “the most impressive-looking man Amy had ever seen.” He’s Indian, of the Chackonee nation, which inhabits one end of the island. He and the charge nurse, Jeanne Halderson, are apparently desperately in love with each other, but for some reason—could it be his Indian heritage?—Jeanne is just nasty and brutish with poor Dr. Moon, so he dates Amy now and then.

Meanwhile, as Amy finds out that more and more folks who can’t really afford it are digging deep into their piggy banks to help the persuasive Mr. Pepper finance the new hospital, she starts to get uneasy. “Don’t get involved in something which isn’t your affair,” she eventually decides, and keeps her suspicions to herself. We’re lucky it’s just one con man, and not a band of international terrorists, that are hiding out on Elsalock Island. You will not be surprised to learn that Mr. Pepper and the money vanish on the same day, and the cops are not so pleased with Amy when they discover she had concerns all along. “Even though this crook was going around collecting money from everyone on the Island. You simply sat back and did nothing when, as you say, you felt that something was ‘wrong’?” Um, yeah, that about sums it up. Interestingly, we’ve met other VNRN heroines who minded their own business and allowed a baddie to get away with a crime (see Jane Arden Space Nurse), but she is not shamed for her stupid behavior the way Amy is. 

So the entire population of the island stops speaking to her, except for the Chackonee people and Dan, but surprisingly, Amy sticks to the job she never wanted in the first place. She even decides that she likes Dan; “there was a certain ease between them, as thought they had known each other for years. There had not been the strain, as there sometimes had been with Alec, of being bright and witty in order to hold his attention.” Because if one man hasn’t worked out, we just have to be informed that the fellow wasn’t all that awesome to start with, that it wasn’t really love that she felt, that it didn’t count for anything.

In the end there’s another disaster, a hurricane this time, and by the end of it, Amy is finally seeing the shining light of Florence’s lamp: “She had found the satisfaction of hard work, of service, of helping and being needed as she never had before in her life. Before, nursing had been to her only the means to an end, something impatiently learned for a selfish purpose. … Words like ‘serve’ had had no part in her life until she had come to the Island, in spite of her glib recitation of the Florence Nightingale oath.” It’s nice that the author bothered to try to give her character some personal growth, but it’s mostly told to us, not shown, unfortunately.

The book ends completely as expected. One big disappointment comes when Amy has just realized that she loves Dan as he is driving her home. He asks her what she’s thinking about, “and, of course, she could not tell him. She could not even turn her head and meet his eyes.” It isn’t until he puts his arm around her and tells her that he has feelings for her that she is able to reach for him. I’ve been realizing lately how passive all these heroines are romantically, how in the end, it is almost always the man who makes the first move. No matter what we’ve been sold throughout the pages about the heroine standing on her own feet and taking ownership of her life, she still can’t extend a hand or face toward a man she loves until his answer is assured. Weak and hypocritical is what it is. The only “plus” in this book is that the Indian community was treated respectably, with honorable, hardworking characters who don’t talk much, of course, but who stand by Amy when Peter runs off with the loot. It’s not much, but with Rosamund Hunt’s Emergency Nurse, we’re not given much, so it’s best to just take that small token and close the book.

The Odds Against Nurse Pat

By Ray Dorien, ©1958

Also published as Red-Head Nurse

Nurse Pat Merriford’s friends said the fire that inflamed her red hair sparked her impulsive personality. For Pat’s impetuous nature gave her a talent for landing herself in difficulties. Luckily, Dr. Kent Willerby had always managed to protect her from being burned. Yet Pat wished that Kent’s protective attitude would change to something more akin to the love she felt for him. Then Janet Westbrow came to work at the hospital. For the sake of loyalty, Pat found herself defending this girl she disliked; one, furthermore, who seemed determined to win Dr. Willerby for herself. To make matters worse, Pat found herself professionally opposed to the doctor she could never stop loving.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Even our best patients think there’s nothing to be done for men except smooth their pillows and hold their hands while they make love to us.”

“I don’t think that is quite the way for a respectable doctor to behave in a telephone booth.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Pat Merriman is the usual impetuous red-haired nurse who is running afoul of the cute but imperious surgeon Kent Willerby at every turn. Then one day, after a bad day in the OR with him, he actually speaks to her, to tell her that “a few words of blame don’t matter. Cheer up.” And with that, “the man she had admired from a distance, almost with a touch of schoolgirl hero worship, was human, approachable. She loved him then, impulsively, foolishly, hopelessly, from that moment.” He’s still quite cool, of course, so I don’t know how “approachable” he actually is, but he does give her the barest of hints that he has feelings for her—a ride home from the farewell party and a kiss on the lips—before he sets off for a year on an expedition to Antarctica, a voyage her brother Tom will coincidentally be making as well. 

A year goes by in a few pages, and Pat is half-heartedly dating Dr. Lee Gauntley and shepherding socialite Janet Westbrown through the first year of nursing school, when Janet quits and goes to South Africa to welcome home the adventurers—and there becomes engaged to Kent. Upon the team’s arrival in England, however, there’s a bizarre and poorly explained accident in which Kent, carrying a heavy case of instruments, fell into Tom, who “hit the bulkhead” and now is paralyzed from the waist down. He’s pretty glum about it, naturally, and it turns out he’d fallen in love with Janet in South Africa—though honestly if you’re going to fall for something you’re better off with the bulkhead than with shallow, materialistic, selfish Janet—but there’s the heart-of-gold physical therapist to tell him off and set him straight, not to mention back on his increasingly sensate feet!

In the end, Lee asks Pat to a weekend house party at his sister’s, and here we spend a lovely few days with good food and company and dogs and charming children, and Pat and Kent reach the understanding you knew they would, but not without a crisis—Janet’s gone missing, and every character in the book is out looking for her, but Janet’s not the kind of gal who is ever short of a man or three, so you know she’ll land safely on her Jimmy Choo’s.

This is a fairly typical VNRN, but the party at the ending is rather sweet, as is the rapprochement between Kent and Pat, even if the kerfuffle about the “missing” Janet is overly manufactured. The writing can be charming, as when newly secure of Kent, “even Pat’s hair seemed to be of a brighter color.” If it’s not the greatest of the nurse novels, odds are you’ll find Nurse Pat a perfectly pleasant afternoon companion.

The Taming of Nurse Conway

By Nora Sanderson, ©1964

Nurse Nicky Conway already hated Dr. Peter Trenton, whom she considered responsible for her mother’s death—so that when he began to interfere with her plans for marrying Geoff Hutchinson, it was altogether too much to bear!

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“From three till six in the morning—that’s the time a night nurse feels like sitting down and writing a last will and testament.” 

“If you keep on flying into rages like this you’ll have a frightfully interesting stroke when you’re older.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nicola Conway is easily one of the most unpleasant heroines I’ve ever met. I’m not alone in this assessment—pretty much every other character in the book chews her out at one point or another, over her irrational obsessive persecution of Dr. Peter Trenton, who was on call the night her mother, in her 40s, had a stroke and died at home with Nicky in attendance, before Dr. Trenton could arrive. It’s been more than a year since the incident, and still Nicky cannot bring herself to forgive the man and move on, or even keep a less-than-overtly-hostile expression on her face when he’s in the room. Her excuse for her hatred is that Dr. Trenton has always readily agreed that if he’d arrived sooner, Nicky’s mother would have survived—but it’s also clear that there’s some secret that exonerates the good doctor, and that the only person in New Zealand (where the book is set) who isn’t aware of this secret is Nicky herself.

Unfortunately, the pair work in the same hospital and run into each other on a daily basis—and Nicky can’t help “giving Dr. Trenton hell—you know you have, in a cruel, clever way so that he can’t hit back at you,” says her former best friend Jane, who eventually—along with all the other nurses—gives Nicky the cold shoulder for her shoddy treatment of the man, who is much beloved by the rest of the staff, the patients, and every member of the community, who all but stop him in the street and ask for his autograph. The only mystery bigger than the one surrounding Mrs. Conway’s death is why Nicky hasn’t been fired for her constant maliciousness: “If I were Dr. Trenton I’d see that you didn’t last one more day on the nursing staff,” says another ex-friend nurse. “You’re just a spoiled, self-opinionated little brat! We’d all be glad to see you go.”

So Nicky says truly horrendous things to poor Dr. Trenton on pretty much every other page, and by mid-book we readers are also wishing she’d get sacked. Even when—as you know would happen—Nicky decides, “I’ve gone and been mad enough to fall head-over-heels in love with Dr. Trenton,” which seems essentially impossible given her unswerving hatred for the man, her behavior barely budges out of the appalling zone.

A large and fairly stupid subplot involves a childhood friend of Nicky’s, Geoff Hutchinson, who has fruitlessly been hounding Nicky to marry him—and who is a victim of an accident at work that blinds him. As the weeks roll by and Geoff’s vision does not recover, Nicky idiotically decides she will marry Geoff and be his full-time nurse, for reasons that are never entirely clear. Dr. Trenton is convinced that Geoff is faking his blindness, and Nicky is equally sure he is not—giving them fodder for many more exasperating arguments—but interestingly, Geoff himself is barely seen at all in much of the book despite his starring role in the impending ruin of Nicky’s life and in all her arguments with Dr. Trenton. The question of whether Geoff is rendered a helpless baby by his blindness is viciously argued on both sides by Nicky—a hypocrisy that the book itself never acknowledges—depending on who she’s talking to: She insists that Geoff is unable to fend for himself when she’s screaming at Dr. Trenton that she must go through with the marriage, and furious that her fellow nurses are “all so determined to thrust him back into the nursery! Losing their sight doesn’t make a child of anyone!”

Equally perplexing is the huge amount of discussion about Nicky donating one of her corneas to Geoff so he would be able to see, and Dr. Trenton’s refusing to allow it—then agreeing, thinking that Geoff would never agree to Nicky’s losing an eye if he is malingering—but never in all of the talk is the surgery ever discussed with Geoff himself, which would quickly put an end to the debate and at least one source of much arguing. (The whole fake-blindness plot is not a new one, either; we’ve met it in New Surgeon at St. Lucien’s, which was also published under the Harlequin imprint though by a different author, Elizabeth Gilzean.)

Throughout this overly long book, we are subjected to a “self-righteous and critical and downright conceited,” “bad-tempered and resentful” heroine (we are told several times that Nicky is a good nurse, but we never see her do any actual nursing, and even the patients think she’s “as polite as a tiger crouching to spring”). She is frequently and rightfully called a child and told to grow up, regularly makes ridiculous decisions and stubbornly clings to them, and nastily attacks a very kind and patient doctor to the point where I think she could be prosecuted for harassment, if not creating a hostile work environment. Her assault on the doctor—and by extension the patients, nursing staff, and even us readers—drags right through to the final pages, when the foolish mystery about Mrs. Conway’s death is cleared up and we learn that if everyone had just been honest from the outset, we could have been spared 189 pages of maddening irritation. It’s impossible to believe that anyone could love Nurse Conway, and at no point is she “tamed” that I can see—rather, I pity the fool who would spend a single minute more with her than they absolutely have to. Do not, dear readers, I implore you, be such a fool—leave this book on the shelf.