Junior Pro

By Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton), ©1959

Before Lindsay Wood took up at nursing, she had been warned that it was hard work. What she hadn’t heard much about was the difficulty of steering one’s personal course. She did find someone to whom she felt she could turn for advice--but he was the resident medical officer, far out of the sphere of a lowly probationer. And she couldn’t quite understand his attitude, sometimes helpful, sometimes very much the reverse. How she coped with all her perplexities is told in a lively story with an authentic hospital atmosphere.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“I wished, while I was about it, that Sister Tutor had taught us a little less about finding our way around the buildings, and a little more about finding it round human situations. It seemed to me that nurses needed a good deal of practice in dealing with people, and I knew I didn’t have it.”

“I could eat you, darling, only I haven’t time.”

“It’s a good sign to be a little scared. Bad nurses never worry—they don’t know how.”

REVIEW:
How lucky for me that after coming out of the first F-grade nurse novel I’ve ever read (if you must be reminded: Jolie Benoit, R.N.), I pick up such an incredible gem as Junior Pro. This book has all the hallmarks of a true great: Lots of girlfriends, witty writing that sparkles on every page, a feisty heroine, and—a rare treat—one of the best endings I’ve ever encountered. Told in the first person, the sixth such VNRN I’ve read (but the third by Olive Norton; it seems to be a favorite trick of hers), here we meet Lindsay Wood, who is just entering her first year of training to be a nurse, making her what they call in this English hospital a “junior pro.” On the eve that the “lambs” are finishing their didactic months and being sent to the wards, though, there’s a ball. Like most VNRN hospital balls, this one is momentous, here because only one man asks her to dance. “When we did get on the floor we found ourselves in the middle of a Paul Jones [a dance in which you change partners], and I lost him after about four strides. He was just tall enough to be comfortable to dance with, and I was annoyed. Nobody came to claim me, and I went back behind my pillar.” He turns up later, though, apologetic, and takes her for a drive. When he finds out she is just a brand-new student, instead of mussing her lipstick, he starts the car. “Home, Madam?” he asks, and she replies, “Home, James,” and when they arrive at the nurses’ home, “he bent his head and kissed my hand very gently, and gave it back to me as though it were something extremely fragile and very precious, instead of just thing I used to hold a tennis racquet with.”

Like many people in their first days on a new job, Lindsay lands on the wards with a splat: There is almost nothing she does right, to such an extent that her first moment of triumph is remembering to take the stairs instead of using the elevator, which is forbidden to first-years. The worst of her crimes, though, is when her chauffeur turns up on the ward dressed as the R.M.O.—that’s resident medical officer, or chief of medicine in the UK. “Good morning, James,” she says without thinking, and it turns out that it is a most serious taboo to speak to a senior medical officer when you’re only a nursing student, made even more scandalous by the fact that Dr. Findon’s first name is indeed James. But he seems to forgive her, because when it turns out that she has scored top marks in several subjects and just barely loses out on a prize given to the top student, he gives her one: a silver pin shaped like Aladdin’s—or Florence Nightingale’s—lamp, engraved “Findon prize—Nurse L. Wood.”

Over the ensuing pages we follow not exactly the most original plot line, but still a very enjoyable one as Lindsay flounders less as the days pass, tangles with Dr. Findon, goes home to visit her family on their farm in Wales, and wallows heavily in a mistake of a relationship with Dr. Jack Beresford, an incorrigible flirt who has claimed the heart of her best friend Catherine, complicating matters. But she really does like kissing Jack! Which makes her agree when he vaguely suggests that they marry, though she comes to her senses a few pages later, thinking it would be better to have Catherine than Jack—but then, dang it, he kisses her again, and she loses her head once more. And again, the next morning, when Jack comes around to plan the wedding, she insists—as she has done throughout the book—that she is going to finish her training and get her nursing degree, which will take three more years. Hearing this news, Jack “sulked.” When Catherine pins Lindsay down later on, Lindsay insists it’s over: “He made it clear, then, that he wouldn’t hear of my finishing my training before I settled down. That changed the whole thing. Because nothing and nobody is going to stop me from getting State Registered. If he isn’t satisfied with that, then it’s no go. And he isn’t.” You go, girl!

Lindsay is a heroine we can adore because she is not perfect, but she honestly works very hard and she has a good heart. She is forced to give up her beloved Findon prize pin when a misunderstanding causes her to be suspected of stealing a brooch that a patient has given her, and when months later the nursing matron says she has earned it back, Lindsay disagrees: “James still doesn’t think I come up to some standard of his own,” she decides to herself. “So I can’t wear his badge because it would burn a resentful hole in my apron. I know whether I’m ready to have it or not, better than anyone. And I’m not.” Toward the end there is the usual catastrophe when the hospital’s old smokestack falls in a storm, landing on an ambulance, and Lindsay, who is on the admitting desk in the ED with Dr. Findon, crawls through the broken window in the ambulance door and gives the trapped patient inside a hypodermic of morphine, talked through the procedure by Dr. Findon—and later she asks to be marked off for having given an injection, the spunky lass! When she is on night duty, she uses the quiet hours to study her butt off, because she is deeply passionate about medicine, much more so than surgery: “The way I saw it, medicine was so much more complicated and important than merely tailoring people’s insides neatly. Medicine took skill, and brains, and patience, and selflessness.” 

The writing here is not so much laugh-out-loud funny but just constantly and quietly sparkling: “I thought our off-duty time was a mad scheme to let us relax,” Lindsay says to a chum who wants to use her time to study; “I spend my life in here, mopping up Sister Badger’s casualties. Better women then you have wept upon this manly bosom, I can assure you,” Jack tells Lindsay after he finds her crying in the linen closet on a particularly bad day; “I expected to pass out, and I didn’t. There was too much competition,” Lindsay says of her first day in the OR, in which the surgeon faints; “Thanks for mopping the fevered brow,” Lindsay says to a friend when she’s recovering from the chimney crash. The ending is a true, rare prize in VNRN literature, in which Dr. Findon tells Lindsay that one of her most attractive qualities for him is her dedication to nursing. He gives her a Gloria Steinem–worthy speech about her rights to be “a person in your own right,” and agrees to wait for her to finish her three years of training before they marry (though in retrospect it’s not clear why they can’t marry while she’s a student). I dropped bona fide tears at multiple points through this book, the ending most of all. This book is not to be missed; if Lindsay Wood is only a junior pro, author Olive Norton is a pro of the most senior sort, and if her many other nurse heroines are even half as perfect as Lindsay, I look forward to meeting them.

A Nurse for Dr. Sterling

By Ruth MacLeod, ©1962

Young and idealistic Janet Raleigh, fresh out of an exclusive school, found herself bored by the shallow pleasures of high society. Seeking something to fill her life and give it meaning, she chose nursing as her career. To her amazement she found that her wealth and background created an unexpected barrier. The doctor she loved doubted her sincerity and patronized her; her supervisor questioned her conduct and humiliated her; and then came the brutal attack that put her very life in danger.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“I hurt so! Kiss me and make it well!”

“Please, nurse … I’m going to die! Give me just one kiss to take with me—”

“Janet, you don’t want to be a nurse! You’ll have to do awful things! As a nurse you’d have to make hundreds of beds, and bathe all sorts of dirty people, empty bedpans and emesis basis, and listen to people whine about their aches and pains!”

REVIEW:
Imagine my horror when, arriving at the house we’d rented for a long weekend of walking in the apple orchard and reading on the couch, I discovered I had left my nurse novels at home! What to do, what to do? Well, thankfully this is the era of the e-book, and I was actually able to find a handful of actual nurse e-novels out there, including—imagine my surprise!—The Nurse Novel Megapack of four novels, including three I hadn’t read yet (actually, I knocked off two of them over the weekend, so now I’ve just one left). Coming soon, a blog page listing other nurse e-books, should you happen to find yourself in a similar horrifying predicament, dear reader!

Anyway, A Nurse for Dr. Sterling is a curious choice for a curated selection of nurse novels, because it in my opinion crosses over the line of true VNRN just a smidge. The problem here is that most of the  book is told from the point of view of Dr. David Sterling; nurse Janet Raleigh anchors only about a third of it, despite what the back-cover blurb suggests (and in this case, the blurb errs on a number of points, so beware!). When we meet him, Dr. Sterling is fleeing a malpractice suit he’d lost—he had not diagnosed a terminal brain cancer in a man who had demonstrated few vague symptoms, so though it wasn’t really his fault, most of his patients had left him and he’d fled town and the blot on his reputation to come to Las Lomas, California, an actual town on Monterey Bay.

He’s been hired by his old acquaintance Dr. Graham Burns, who had dumped his excellent, dependable, strong, smart wife Mildred, who had supported him during his up-and-coming years, for a young vixen half his age. Mildred’s gone on without him and is now superintendent of nurses, while Coralee is making passes at David from about the first minute they meet. David is determined not to wreck the marriage of his old friend and his second chance, but Coralee is a very determined young lady!

What’s interesting about her as a character, however, is that she has an awful voice, and we are reminded of this repeatedly, “a tone that had neither resonance nor depth. If he had heard her first on the telephone, David thought, he’d have pictured her as a dull, drab, dishwater blonde, probably chewing gum.” Mildred, on the other hand, “wasn’t a beautiful woman, but her personality made looks unimportant,” while Coralee seems to be the opposite. “I think she’s beautiful,” David admits of Coralee, “and would be even more so if her voice matched. As a person, however, I wouldn’t stack her up against Mildred at all.” It’s an unusual take in a VNRN, that personality outweighs looks; where will this come out in the end?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we learn about Janet Raleigh, a nursing student who has left her privileged background because “I want to do something important, she thought; not just to keep occupied, but to make my life count for something.” Under the withering eye of Nurse Daisy Andrews, a 40-year-old spinster battle axe who does not deserve her name (or the nickname Dizzy, which the girls have given her, tee hee!), however, Janet is losing her resolve, as Nurse Andrews bawls Janet out in front of the doctors on numerous occasions (but winning her the sympathy and interest of one Dr. David Sterling, so it isn’t all bad!). One day poor Janet is given the difficult task of bathing the most difficult patient on the ward, 19-year-old Archie Crane, who is not recovering from his burst appendix eight weeks ago. He refuses to cooperate with the sponge bath until Janet kisses him, which she does only after he has wrapped himself around her and refused to let go.

The bastard tells another nurse of his exploits, and Janet is bawled out yet again by Nurse Andrews. She’s ready to quit, until wise Mildred asks Janet to write down all the reasons she wanted to become a nurse and why now she wants to quit—and when one page is full of scribbling and the other has only Nurse Andrews’ name on it, Janet is ready to get with the program. Mildred sends her on her way with some kindly advice: As a student nurse, even if her superior is unfair, “in respect for her professional knowledge and standing, you follow her orders meticulously, listen carefully to all she says, refraining from comment or retort if you don’t agree. You accept her criticism gracefully, knowing it’s for your own benefit eventually.” Initially I was a little bothered that the bully was going to triumph, but I should have trusted Mildred—two weeks later, she demotes Nurse Andrews from head nurse to assist in the OR. (Of course, we astute VNRN readers see the writing on the wall with this move!)

On the lam from Coralee, David asks Janet to go out with him, and she agrees. “Janet was an easy girl to be with, David reflected. She didn’t make demands, and was at ease in any social situation. It’s her poise that makes her so darned attractive, he thought, watching her.” Soon the pair are seeing each other almost every night, but that doesn’t stop Coralee, who literally chases David around the golf course when every shot she hits lands 10 feet from David’s ball. The woman could have out-whacked Louise Suggs (a neglected golf giant who beat Sam Snead on a par-three course in 1961, correctly arguing that what they lacked in driving distance, women could make up in the short game). When he turns down her forty-ninth pass in the sand trap of the 14^th hole, Coralee almost slugs David in the head with her niblick, but Graham saves her from becoming a murderess by dropping with what appears to be a heart attack. Dr. David Sterling knows better, however, and diagnoses a cardiac tumor, and never mind how ridiculously rare those are, because he’s already correctly diagnosed masher Archie Crane with a liver abscess. 

In the interim, David cannot commit to Janet, so she foolishly accepts a date with Archie, and her date with Archie goes horribly awry when he proves that his behavior in the hospital was, far from an aberration, just the tip of the iceberg when he drives her to Rocky Dell Park and assaults her, eventually pushing her off a cliff after he’d thrown her to the ground and she’d bashed him on the head with a rock. Knocked unconscious, she comes to only to find he’s fled the scene, leaving her to flag down a passing car to get home. She’s two hours late for curfew at the nurse’s dorm, and there’s Nurse Andrews, all full of slut-shaming. To the high credit of all her friends, everyone who hears the story wants Janet to call the police, but she resists—and then it turns out she’s suffering a subdural hematoma and needs immediate brain surgery! The surgeons, of whom David of course is one, are scrubbed and boring holes in Janet’s skull when Graham drops of another attack, and David steps up and completes the surgery. Does he get any thanks? Well, Janet’s grateful, but Nurse Andrews is livid because David is not a brain surgeon! In revenge, she’s ready to testify on behalf of Archie Crane in the assault trial, pulling out what she calls David’s affair with Coralee—what this has to do with the assault is beyond me—as it’s her opinion that Janet asked to be attacked at the park after her scandalous behavoir, being attacked at the hospital. But she’ll withhold her testimony if Janet agrees to resign—that’s one hell of a grudge!

But before Andrews has the chance to crush the pair like little bugs, Graham finally agrees to exploratory cardiac surgery if David will do it, as it seems he can do anything except the dishes. Andrews is assisting in the surgery, and—you guessed it—hands David the wrong drug when Graham’s blood pressure tanks. David manages to pull Graham away from the Grim Reaper with open-heart massage, and Andrews flies out of the OR and commits suicide in the scrub room, injecting her own heart with the same incorrect drug she’d handed David, one of the more spectacular VNRN flame-outs I’ve ever witnessed. So everyone’s reputation is saved, and now it’s just for David to come to his senses and propose to Janet. Also for Graham to come out of surgery to find that Coralee has left him and that Mildred, bless her, will take the louse back. So happy endings for all.

This book has strong women characters in Mildred and Janet, women whose character is more important than their looks; Coralee, who wins big in the latter department, is the loser in the end. I did appreciate her dramatic presence, though, as I did Nurse Andrews. I also found some wisdom in the book, in the advise that Mildred gives Janet about accepting criticism, and also in passages in which it’s suggested that Archie is faking his illness: “I believe it’s a mistake,” David says, “to ascribe illness to neurosis before every physical source is thoroughly checked,” which is a maxim still very true today and of which I’ve needed to remind myself on occasion. But while it has a lot to recommend it, I just didn’t love this book—my beef with it being that it’s mostly about David Sterling, and the writing, though it had some interesting ideas, just didn’t sparkle enough to make an A-grade book. It’s worth a read, though, so if you have the chance to spend the afternoon with David Sterling’s nurse, take it.

Jane Arden Surgery Nurse

Book 4 of 7

By Kathleen Harris, ©1958

All the women who knew Dr. Tony Gray agreed that he was too attractive for his own good—yet none of them could help falling under his spell. When Jane Arden met Tony, first as his head surgical nurse, then as his latest romantic interest, she felt his belief that marriage didn’t mix with medicine made him “safe” for a girl who had an understanding with another man. And then, abruptly, she found herself up against the most difficult question a girl ever faces …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Most of them, especially if they happen to be young and pretty, only take up nursing because they think it will pay off—in good wages, extra bonuses from grateful patients, eventually a husband!”

“So you’re a doctor! Small wonder that so many girls take to nursing.”

“Most girls, as you claim, are smart enough to make the most of their appearance. But some still are not as smart as their grandmothers. … Your grandmother was too smart ever to do things better than a man.”

“[Nurses are] big husky individuals who look down on everyone disapprovingly as though he was covered with germs. As a rule, they are quite unattractive, too.”

“‘Age of the Ultimate Weapon,’ she reminded herself, as one commentator had called it. An age so hurried there was little time for people to be kind to one another, a frightening age, with satellites being sent into outer space and talk of people going to the moon, weapons being created whose power was unthinkable.”

“You must be happy in your new job, watching the doc cut people up.”

“Men should realize that it often takes a woman to help them reach the top.”

“Perhaps she put too much of herself into her work. Perhaps there was not enough left over for a real life, aside from her chosen career, a home of her own, her own man, her own children. Every girl wanted these things more than anything else.”

REVIEW:

Jane Arden, who should be called vagabond nurse, has moved to New York for this book, after stints in Ohio, Florida, and Tennessee in the first three. Again she’s moved into her sister’s apartment, as she did in Florida for Jane Arden Registered Nurse, Roberta also possessing a serious case of wanderlust, as having herself moved from Miami to New York, she’s now set off for Europe and left her empty apartment to Jane. We learn early that heartthrob Dr. Tony Gray is not going to be a problem because “Jane was immune to men,” but we know better! Early on she catches Dr. Tony’s eye because they work in the same OR, and agree to be friends because neither of them wants to get married—Tony because he’s concentrating on his training, Jane allegedly because two years later she is still in mourning her childhood sweetheart, whom she had agreed to marry in JARN despite the fact that he’d turned out to be a complete ass before conveniently dying in a plane crash, but I suspect that in fact it’s because she does not have a heart. You will not be surprised to learn that on her first date with Tony—which of course she accepts because they’re just friends and will never be anything else—Jane shows her true colors when, at a party thrown for her by Roberta’s friends, “Jane couldn’t help a certain coolness from creeping into her voice. She was disappointed in Tony. She had wanted to accept him as a friend. But his actions this evening made this practically impossible.” His big crime? Roberta’s married friend Carol Gaylord flirted with him. The nerve! When he asks her what’s wrong, she lies, “You must be imagining things.” Did I mention that I am not particularly fond of Jane?

In JARN Jane had met young millionaire Nicky Powers, who had inexplicably fallen in love with her, but in book three, he’d packed off to Europe to study art. He’d promised to beg Jane to marry him when he comes home, which he has not yet done in this series. Jane has nothing other than sisterly feelings toward Nicky, yet when she learns that Roberta has met up with Nicky in Paris, she again demonstrates jealous possessiveness of a man she says she doesn’t want. Now, suddenly, “Jane still did not know how she felt toward Nicky,” her jealousy apparently changing her feelings, especially now that a previously smitten man’s ardor for her may be cooling.

When Jane comes down with the flu, Tony shows up at her apartment to take care of her. Though she is still angry with him, she lets him in, because “what could she do? A nurse always obeyed the doctor.” So now they are dating again, and Jane continues her self-delusion that she isn’t jealous of Carol, and also perpetrates an ongoing stream of obvious lies to Tony about her feelings about his friendship with Carol: “It doesn’t matter, Tony. It’s none of my business,” she tells him, while all along she’s thinking he’s “pretty dumb for being taken in.” Eventually they are kissing with an “exhilaration that had taken her on a trip to the moon.” But when Tony is appointed the new chief of surgery and is too busy for dates, here she goes again, “wishing that Nicky would come back from Paris. Maybe she would discover that she did love Nicky. Jane was tempted to urge Nicky not to stay away much longer. She knew if she wrote that she needed him, Nicky would not delay his return.” If she doesn’t actually love any of her boyfriends, she certainly does love to jerk them around.

Turning back to her other puppet, when Tony asks if he can come to her apartment one evening, she goes all out with the standard VNRN fare—salad, steak, cherry pie—and throws in candles and flowers to boot, for a man she repeatedly states she is not interested in. Her ploy works, and Tony tells her, “I’m crazy about you. Please say I don’t have to fight it any more.” Interestingly, she interprets this as some sort of proposal: “They would have to make plans, now that they were in love.” He comes over for dinner a lot, though he never mentions love or marriage, and Jane is outraged when he tells her he’s moving out of his slum apartment and taking a six-month lease on a nicer place a few minutes from the hospital. “Jane felt her heart tighten. Plans like these certainly did not include her. What she wanted to say—to cry out—was, ‘What about us, Tony?’” As if a six-month lease equals a breakup. Honestly, this woman and logic have never even shaken hands. Naturally, she just lies some more: “It sounds pretty grand,” she tells him. But she won’t go there to see Tony, because even though “some girls would think nothing of going to a man’s apartment,” nice girls like Jane, who invite men to their own apartments several times a week, have bizarre double standards.

As much as she wants to put that collar on Tony, she’s doesn’t know how she feels. “Was she in love? she asked herself. She must be. She was almost deliriously happy when she was with Tony. Tony needed her; he had come to depend on her. And it was good to be needed. David had never needed her. He had been so self-sufficient.” And her waffling continues when she decides that “she hoped that when the time came to renew her contract as a surgical nurse, she would be quitting, to be married.” Which she had ardently insisted when she was engaged to her first fiancé that she would never do—though you will be completely astonished to learn that she had never actually mentioned it to the man. And yet she still doesn’t know what she’s going to say when Nicky comes home and proposes. It was all I could do not to hurl this book across the room.

Roberta returns to New York—catching Jane and Tony in the clinch—and Jane can only say “I guess” when Roberta asks if she loves him. To clarify, she explains, “Tony has an allergy when it comes to marriage,” so it seems that “love” to Jane just means “husband.” Roberta decides she is going to help Jane get Tony to propose, and before long Tony is angrily dragging Jane out of the hospital to demand to know why Jane has not told him about “this fellow.” Jane cannot stop with the lies. “What fellow?” she asks. “Are there more than one?” Tony roars, and you know there would be, if Jane could find them. It comes out that Roberta has shown Tony a cable saying that Nicky is coming home and Jane should make arrangements for the wedding. Rather than tell Tony the truth—that’s so not Jane’s way—she snaps that there’s no relationship between her and Tony because “during the very first talk we had, you informed me that you had no intention of becoming involved with anyone.” He reminds her that she said the same thing, and she stomps home. Roberta is pleased with her work: “The best way to get to the bottom of anything is to give the other person a severe jolt—and the fact that Tony took it so much to heart is a good sign.” The only shock here is that Jane then tells Roberta that she can’t marry Nicky. Roberta only gently chides Jane for keeping him dangling for so long, and then mentions that she herself is going to marry Nicky “since you don’t want him. Naturally, being a gentleman, he had to wait until you turned him down before he could ask me to marry him.” So it seems Roberta’s “jolt” was delivered to two people, not just one. These Arden women are cold-blooded killers. Roberta’s wedding goes off in two paragraphs, and Jane makes it clear that though Nicky’s aunt and uncle cable their congratulations, “Jane had been their first choice.” What a self-centered bitch Jane has turned out to be!

Tony hears about the wedding and calls Jane to tell her for the first time that he loves her, but Jane is going to jerk the hook around a bit and asks him if Carol is keeping him from being lonely. “Didn’t I just tell you I love you? What else do you want me to say?” he asks her. Jane, of course, “could have told him, but she didn’t.” Tony, however, is not too dumb to read between in the lines, but too dumb to run screaming from the horror show that is Jane Arden, and he actually proposes. Jane “caught hold of a chair to keep from toppling over.” Then she makes snarky remarks about waiting six years until Tony has become a successful surgeon. “Jane still thought it a good idea not to let this handsome young man be too sure of her,” so she refuses to answer him, saying they will talk about it when she gets home from her sister’s wedding. “She knew she was going to have a good cry as soon as she hung up. But this time her tears would be tears of happiness—all was well with Jane Arden’s world once more.” Unbelievable. I’m going to cry, too, but only because I’m going to have to read three more books about Jane Arden.