Kit Cavendish—Private Nurse

By Margaret Malcolm ©1965 

Kit had always taken care to keep her work as a private nurse quite separate from her private life—but she was unable to prevent this happening when she took a job in the Baylis household. And as things turned out, she was quite right to be apprehensive about it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Whether we liked it or not, there’s only one world for everybody to share, and the sooner we realized that we had no right to expect a bigger or better share than other people, the more we would enjoy what we had got.” 

“You know, with a face like yours, anyone would imagine you had a sweet, sympathetic nature. Always ready to lay a soothing hand on a fevered brow—metaphorically in this place, of course. But how wrong one would be!”

REVIEW:
Kit Cavendish, who has been working as a private nurse for the past year, has just been hired to care for a wealthy gentleman recovering from a broken leg sustained when he fell while having a heart attack—so he has two ailments to recover from. As it happens, this man lives just outside Kit’s hometown, which she left six years ago for her training. She no longer has any family in the area to bring her back before now, but she accepted the job because she thought it might be fun to go back and see her former haunts. 

It isn’t. It turns out there’s a big new factory in town—owned by her patient, Ralph Baylis—and as a result, “Where there had been fields and farms and perhaps a few isolated houses there were now rows and rows and rows of small, ugly houses, each exactly like its neighbor,” built to house the new workforce. Then there’s a young man from her past, Victor Wrinch, who is now an accountant for the factory. Years ago he’d had some unrealistic ideas about his relationship with Kit, who was too nice for too long about it, until the day she found “she had had to be almost brutal” to clue him in to her disinterest in him romantically. But when she arrives in town by train, Victor is the one waiting to meet her at the station, telling her that he and Ruth Baylis, her patient’s wife, had decided on Kit for the job: “Someone intelligent who could keep him occupied with other interests so that he doesn’t have time to worry” about the factory. Or the fact that Ruth Baylis—incidentally 20 years Ralph’s junior and his former secretary—has stepped into the role of running the business while Ralph is home doing nothing at all out of fear that he might have another coronary. Unfortunately, you can see the trouble coming a mile away, because how could a woman possibly run a company well? “When a woman thinks she’s as clever as a man—or cleverer—she always goes too far, simply to convince other people. And she doesn’t care what methods she uses either.” Another option for this story line—and a more interesting one at that—would have been that Ruth actually was good at running the company, but Ruth starts out mean and lying, so we know something shady is afoot.

Then who should show up but Jason Heathfield! (If I’m going to snark about the Baylis’ age difference, I should also mention with raised brow that he’s 14 years older than Kit.) He is the cardiologist on the case, and had abruptly ditched Kit four years ago for no apparent reason; of course, “she could never marry any other man” after that. So now she has Jason’s slightly warm—or is it just slightly less cold?—demeanor to negotiate on top of the family drama, which includes not just the mystery of what Mrs. Baylis and Victor are doing at the factory, but Ralph’s son Noel (from a previous marriage) to fend off and Ruth’s niece Sue, an overworked and underappreciated Cinderella. Noel likes to play around with life and women, and while Ralph is hoping Noel will come to work at the factory, Ruth just wants to keep her current position as boss and uses Kit as a vehicle to tarnish Noel’s reputation with his father. Sue, of course, is in love with Noel but doesn’t stand a chance, due to her shy demeanor and Kit’s outstanding and forthright personality.

Then one day, out for a walk, Kit meets Jason just as she is setting out a huge picnic, and she asks him to join her. In the course of general conversation, he says something vague and obscure and covers her hand with his—“She knew beyond doubt that what he had said was much more than a mere generalization. He had expressed a personal hope—and one which concerned not just other people, but themselves.” She’s a bit of a mind reader, and she needs to be, because that’s the end of that conversation, except he promises never to let her go without a fight again! Until Kit is abruptly sacked by Mrs. Baylis, and Jason says not a word as she packs up and heads back to her old hospital job in London. “She realized you’d got too strong a character to be got round, so she’d made up her mind you’d got to go”—Victor tells Kit, explaining that Ruth wanted to keep Ralph an invalid and out of the office so she could keep the top job, while Kit wanted exactly the opposite, as she knows it is best for Ralph to be healthy and occupied.

In the end Jason comes around and explains why he’s been such a curmudgeon, but it’s hard to start liking a fellow on page 184 when he’s been an aloof ass for the previous 183. Some of how the tangles are tied up make for sweet endings, particularly the way Ralph Baylis wins yet simultaneously makes peace with his unhappy, frustrated wife. I wish Ruth Baylis hadn’t been such a shrew, as it is easy to dismiss the real problem of there being few real outlets for intelligent gifted women in the 1960s when the woman in question is a scheming harpy. But overall this book is a good read with interesting characters and plot developments—if only the book’s hero had been included in either category.  

NOTE: This author should not be confused with the pen name Margaret Malcolm, under which author Edith Lyman Kuether wrote the novel Headless Beings, her only book.

Send for Nurse Alison

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1965
Original title: Only Time Will Tell

Alison Gray wanted so much to forget the unhappiness of her last weeks at St. Hilda’s Hospital that it seemed providential when Merlin Bleckworth asked her to come as industrial nurse in his father’s factory. But was Merlin only interested in her professional ability?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Too much agreement is as bad as too much argument.” 

“Life’s not too bad. It’s a great deal what we make it, and the unexpected turning up—like your theoretical thunderstorm—can often be a challenge and quite interesting. It depends how we tackle things.”

REVIEW:
Alison Gray was training to be a nurse when she fell hard for the young cad Dr. Graham Hoyland, who never returned her affections and ended up marrying the daughter of a rich patient. From her tragically broken heart Alison recovered, throwing herself into her studies so that now, a year later, she’s graduated with top honors and is able to work alongside Graham in the ED with nary a flutter to her healed heart. Nonetheless, when the hospital matron out of the blue tells her, “I feel it is important for you to get away for a time,” suggesting Alison take a job in a hospital far away and giving her no reason why this is “the best course for her to take,” Alison curiously is suddenly certain that this is what she should do so that “she need never again have to come into contact with Graham Hoyland or his wife-to-be.” That afternoon she tells her friend Lisa she’s resigning, with no plan for what she’ll do next, only “the strangest feeling everything in my life is being arranged for me.” How convenient!

So she and Lisa head off for a three-week vacation—can you imagine such a thing?—when Alison leaves her job, and when that’s over, as she’s driving out for an interview for a  job she doesn’t want, she sees a small boy fall off a cliff—he and his brother are hunting for gull’s eggs, yum yum—and rushes to his aid. Another car, “a big, opulent estate car,” pulls up, and handsome young Merlin Bleckworth bounds out, assists with the rescue, and helps drive the young victim to the hospital. From there it’s only natural that he should take Alison to dinner, learn she is a nurse, and offer her a job caring for the workers at his family’s industrial manufacturing business.

They drive to his house that night, where Alison is welcomed as one of the family—subjected to frank, heart-to-heart conversations with the housekeeper, his sister, and his mother, all of whom hint to varying degrees that Alison should stay and marry Merlin. When she doesn’t run screaming from the building, they pop her in the old nurse’s suite—the last nurse they had, now leaving to get married, lived in the house—and the next day driver her out to the factory. There she immediately aids with a young worker who has crushed his foot to a jelly, doses an anxious man with a toxic medication no longer in use, diagnoses him with too much stress from living with his in-laws who won’t let him work in their garden, and suggests to Merlin’s father Joseph, the owner of the firm, that he build housing for his factory workers. Then she flies everyone back to the family manor in her invisible jet.

This all having taken half the book to cover, now pretty much nothing else happens. We meet a new character, Dr. Ian Meltham, whom Alison immediately identifies as “a philanderer.” He incessantly pesters Alison for a date, though she never once agrees, except for the time they meet by accident in a department store, where Alison’s ability to say “no” departs her, and she is coerced into having tea with him—and the ensuing scandal requires pages of maneuvering to recover from! Merlin’s would-be girlfriend, the “tall, extremely slender, elegant girl with jet black hair and slanting green eyes,” falls for Dr. Meltham halfway through the book and is therefore completely wasted as one of those evil, scheming gold diggers out for our heroine’s man—though she does show up at the house to ask Alison in a “deadly quiet tone” if she is in love with Dr. Meltham, and Alison randomly decides the woman is on the verge of a “hysterical attack” and diagnoses her with bipolar disorder and calmly talks her out of what we are told is mania, but the description reads more as if she’s just upset and under a lot of pressure from her family to marry Merlin.

Truthfully from this scene on it seems that Alison is the one who has lost her mind, as, realizing she is in love with Merlin, “she would make no plans, no special moves, to draw him towards her,” so she plans to move out of the area that very afternoon without telling anyone because she decides she’s not going to be dumped again, a sentiment that has not haunted her one bit through the year after Graham picked someone else and all the time she’s been at Merlin’s home. Of course there’s an accident that rights everything again, but all through the book runs the theme of trust, and after this very bizarre stunt of Alison’s, It’s hard to believe anyone would ever trust her, again much less propose marriage to keep her from sneaking off. I, on the other hand, having been disappointed and blindsided by the wild leap of her otherwise sturdy character, was not sorry to see the back cover close on Nurse Alison.

Community Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1967 

When Leah Larkin, R.N., left the large city where she had worked as an office nurse, she felt that she was following her lucky star. For the handsome Cal Havelin, a visitor to her city, had stolen her heart and taken it back with him to his peaceful home town. And Leah was certain that in the quiet valley her dreams would be fulfilled. Once settled there she would make her mark as a community nurse—and win Cal’s love. But Leah was soon to discover that reality never follows the smooth path of a dream.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I’d like for you to meet Dad. He’ll like you. Even if he’s past seventy now, he still appreciates a pretty girl.” 

“It’s indecent for a woman to look so lovely so early in the day.”

REVIEW:
Leah Larkin, RN, is fed up with city life! “Here patients were just patients. She barely saw them long enough to do more than administer to their needs and say goodbye,” she thinks as she packs her bags. I’m not sure if she’s expecting to sit down to high tea with every patient who walks through her door, but she seems to have some unrealistic expectations about becoming besties with them all. Based on these dissatisfactions, she’s decided to set sail for Green Hills, a small town hours away—which, not coincidentally, is where Cal Havelin lives. Cal is a man she had dated for a few months, but then one day he’d done the ’60s version of ghosting her: “It had been two months since he had kissed her good night with his usual lighthearted smile and told her he would phone again soon.” She’d never heard from him again.

But “Cal had become too important, too necessary and too vital to her,” so she’s pointed her car down the highway—and, upon arriving in Green Hills, into the path of a young boy on a bicycle. But it does mean she quickly scores an introduction to local medico Dr. Rod Goodman, who shows up to care for the squashed lad. She asks for a job as a nurse in town, but it seems they’ve already got one, with little interest in the services of another one, especially one who’d run over little Bobby Walker on her first day in town. Asked to vouch for her character, Cal shows up to claim her, tells her she’s beautiful, touches her face, and kisses her a couple times, “lightly, like a brother.” Instead of listening to the warning sirens, Leah rushes back to her motel room, “took a brisk bath and changed clothes to be ready for him.” Guess what? The phone doesn’t ring, and the door remains silent. Finally she picks up the paper and spots a photo of Cal with Deloris Wentley, “her arm linked possessively through Cal’s.” Oh.

Leah learns that Dr. Rod’s brother’s wife, Michele, lives with Rod, but all the nurses he hires to care for her quit before too long. Gossip is that Rod is a masher, but Leah goes out to dinner with him anyway, all the while pining for Cal. “Oh, Cal, where are you? Why do you let this happen?” she cries as she applies her makeup for her date. During dinner, Rod talks about the town’s underfunded hospital and points out that the Havelins are the richest folks in the area. As he drops her off, he says he’d like to see her again, and she answers, “So you can persuade me to ask Cal for money for your precious hospital?” Leah has seen the 22-bed hospital—little Bobby is lying there in a coma—which has only a couple aides and one nurse, who has told Leah that they are understaffed and underpaid, so it’s bizarre that Leah would take this high-minded attitude.

Cal shows up eventually and offers her a cabin his father owns and doesn’t use any longer. “Now come here and show your gratitude,” he commands, and she obligingly kisses him a lot. He invites her to his father’s retirement party, where Cal’s father Sam tells Leah that Deloris is bad news, that she is pushing Cal to make big changes at the plant. “She wants him to be a big duck on the pond. Ambition! It’s the root of all evil,” he declares, and it’s certainly an odd sentiment for a self-made man. Except it’s not Cal’s ambition that’s the problem. “Deloris has put him up to this,” Sam snarls. “Deloris and her high-minded ideas!” Why her ideas are so appalling is unclear, particularly as we’re told, “She was not a woman to be overlooked. There was a brain in her head, a drive to her will.” OK, that was a rhetorical question.

Outside of parties and dates, there’s not much for Leah to do, since no one wants to hire her. Fortunately, everywhere she goes, people get injured or sick, so she ends up nursing a man who’d had a stroke and a boy who catches a fishhook in the face, and therefore has lots of opportunities to see Rod. And it pays off—well, not financially, but Rod does tell her he loves her. She goes out on dates with him—and kisses him too—because “he was one of the most appealing men she’d ever known.” But “it was Cal she loved. Rod had been merely a substitute. That had to be it!”

The book has so many threads it’s like a Four Seasons bedsheet. One evening Rod and Leah are out together when Michele walks in with a date of her own. Rod inexplicably tries to drag Michele out of the place, her date beats him up, and Rod doesn’t fight back, saying that he “deserves” to be beaten up, but won’t say why. Rod asks Cal for money for the hospital, saying, “If there was a major disaster in this town, or some kind of emergency at your plant involving a good many of your employees, we couldn’t begin to take care of them.” Will these people ever learn? You never say quiet when you’re working at the hospital, and you never say disaster when you’re a character in a VNRN. Then the employees at the hospital start acting squirrely; one of them tells Leah, “You can tell Cal Havelin from me that he’d better get smart and start keepin’ his eyes open. He’s heading for trouble, big trouble. You mark my words, miss!” Little Bobby Walker, who’d come out of his coma and been discharged, relapses and has to go for brain surgery. Sam Havelin has a heart attack—did I mention Leah seems to be a jinx?

There’s lots more, including the inevitable d******* at the plant, a dramatic rescue from the flames, an alcoholic exposed, changes of heart, and a “long, low foreign sports model with bucket seats of flaming red leather.” And lots of kissing! In the end, this book feels more than a little frenetic, and it’s hard to forgive Leah and Cal’s hypocrisy, not to mention the villainization of Deloris because she wants to do more with her life than just play golf at the country club. Author Arlene Hale wrote about a hundred novels, and as I am fond of lamenting, many of them nurse novels—I’ve read 23 of them, 75% earning C grades or less, with another 11 waiting on my shelves, and probably at least as many out there in the world to be tracked down. My work is not all glitter and glamor—but especially not when I’ve got one of Arlene Hale’s books in my hands.

Jill Nolan, Surgical Nurse

Book 2 of 4

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1962

Cover illustration by Mort Engel

As a skilled, disciplined surgical nurse, Jill Nolan was well prepared to assist at critical operations. But, as a woman in love, could she forget that the man fighting for his life on the operating table was Tom Ratcliff, her attractive, wealthy fiancé?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“We can use a change of male scenery around this place.”

REVIEW:

Jill Nolan is one of those fickle professionals who, having worked for years to put themselves through nursing school, is now ready to chuck it all when Tom Ratcliff slips that band of gold onto her finger. Early on in the book, her contented dream is to “be Mrs. Thomas Ratcliff, not Nurse Jill Ratcliff, with all the responsibilities that went with her new name.” What those responsibilities might be, why they’re more important than her responsibilities as a nurse, and why the author missed this awful dangling modifier, escape me.

Jill’s engagement comes as a bit of a surprise because at the close of Jill Nolan, R.N., she was smooching Dr. Al Harper on her way out the door of a relationship with fiancé Vince Merrill, while having “warm glowy” thoughts about another character altogether, and Tom Ratcliffe was not even a named character in that book (though the married Carl Ratliffe, who is not a character in this book, is). So how did she give three men in the first book the slip? Is there another Jill Nolan book hiding out there that my searches have not turned up? The head-scratching that we closed the first book of the series continues in the start of this, which is not a good omen.

Enter Dr. Donald Jonathan Gifford, a brilliant surgeon who has his pick of two top posts but chooses to take up at Bradburn Memorial Hospital in Seymour, Kentucky, where Jill and the scant roster of her fellow nurses and doctors overwork themselves. Now, after she’s decided that she likes Giff—and “the knowledge brought a warm, small glow deep inside”—she’s starting to feel a bit of “reluctance” at the idea of quitting her job, which pops up during a drive she takes with the doctor. Before long she’s chafing at the bit on every other page, quietly stewing over Tom’s resentment that her job takes up a lot of her time—and his hypocrisy when he runs off to fix some problem at work and leaves her cooling her heels, or when he’s upset that she doesn’t share his devotion to his chemical plant despite the fact that he can’t condone her devotion to nursing—and it gets downright tiresome. “Tom felt that, if nursing were such a challenging and satisfying profession, let it be a challenge and a satisfaction to someone else, as, after they were married, it would have to be.” “I don’t want to share you,” he tells her. “With you I’m second.” Then there’s the wavering, when after a long day at the hospital, she “obediently” makes a tour of the plastics factory with Tom even though she’s dog tired. “It was her duty, she had told herself sternly, many times before, for she would not be marrying just Tom Ratcliff. Whether she liked it or not, she would be marrying Ratcliff Plastics, Incorporated.” But the more time she spends with Giff, the more she begins to think that she might not feel for Tom “a love deep enough to compensate for giving up nursing to marry him […] the kind of love that she would need if she were to be happy with only Tom and not the nursing career she had dreamed of since childhood.”

All this back-and-forth between the two men is sandwiched between two crises at the plastics factory. Chapter One opens with a big fire at the plastics plant, and a number of men are wounded, including Tom. One of Jill’s many moments of panic comes when she is obliged to assist during the operation on his depressed skull fracture and hemorrhaging middle temporal artery. He pulls through, of course, thanks to Giff, but now we’re all in a dither about the fire: “If that fire had been set—! For heaven’s sake, who could hate Tom so much?” But it’s all a lot of, if you will, smoke and mirrors: After pages of hysterical italics, it turns out that the fire was set by the flip of a careless cigarette. However, we’ll be meeting the italics again: An oil tanker crashes at the plant and an unnamed worker is pinned. After 150 pages of complaining about Tom’s oppression, she’s freaking out: “Oh, God, please, not Tom, again!” If it is him, she decides, she’s not going to tell him that she doesn’t love him anymore! But he’s not hurt, and when Dr. Gifford goes crawling under the truck to get the trapped man, Tom forbids Jill from going in with Giff. From one extreme to the other: “Jill jerked free. ‘Don’t try to stop me!’ oh! Tom Ratcliff! How could I ever have thought I loved you?” She helps Giff patch up the severed subclavian artery, and now he’s the lucky recipient of her hysteria: “Giff, oh, Giff darling, be careful!” Bleah.

The writing in this book is pretty perfunctory. Ms. McElfresh likes to explain in great detail each surgery that Jill witnesses. While this could be interesting, if you don’t understand all the anatomy and surgical equipment, it passes over the reader’s head. In addition, she is unfortunately enamored with the idea of using medical jargon as descriptors in her writing, so we are treated to far too many gems such as, “a lancet of apprehension,” “half-anesthetized by a fresh burst of terror,” “Dr. Bradford’s terse nod ligated the swift-burgeoning fear.” The hysteria that populates this book reminded me somewhat of Marie Warren, Night Nurse, but without that book’s camp or very peculiar charms. This is the second book in the series, and it’s never a good sign when you’re not looking forward to hearing about Jill’s further adventures.

Roxanne, Company Nurse

By Zillah K. Macdonald with Josie Johnson, ©1957
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

When pretty young Roxanne McRae gave up a glamorous post in a large New York hospital to become Assistant Nurse at the Hudson Sugar Refinery—a job with broad responsibility for the welfare of a big company—she did not realized she would be plunged into—
Danger—the hazards of a huge plant where safety measures are few and injuries many and terrible …
Romance—with Anthony Polk, young general manager—handsome, charming, and sometimes infuriating …
Intrigue—when the accident rate at the plant rises suddenly, Roxanne decides to play detective and finds herself caught in a mysterious and frightening situation …

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:
“Putting on a cast was surely indicated. And that meant teamwork of the finest kind with the attending surgeon.”

“Men patients always thought they were dying.”

“These new-in-America patients are just children. They can’t wait to rip the bandages off and show the wound, and every dirty finger in the neighborhood starts pawing over it. The idea of asepsis is nil. Never been taught.”

REVIEW:
Roxanne, Company Nurse purports to be something of a mystery. The mystery is what the authors were thinking, or if they were thinking at all, when they penned this throwaway. At the book’s opening, Roxanne McCrae is a float nurse at St. Agatha’s hospital in upstate New York, and has just gotten stuck working her third weekend in a row. But then a new patient who works at the nearby sugar refinery is brought in. He’s left his watch on a windowsill at the plant, and asks Roxanne to go and get it for him. So off she trots to retrieve it, and in short order she’s been offered a job there and is working the day shift—no weekends!

Almost at once, as we are alerted by the back cover blurb (above), Roxanne is plunged into a frightening situation … she’s in a basement room of the factory when the lights go out. She hears a swishing sound, and a voice cries, “Let me out!” She panics, flails around, and then, when the lights come back on, runs into Anthony Polk, the company owner’s son. He shows her the way out, and that’s the end of that.

Except it’s not: The book keeps wondering about this scene: what was the swishing sound, who cried out, who turned out the lights and why? Eventually we learn it was a parrot who was speaking, but whose parrot? Then, when we discover (I am sorry to say) several talking parrots, which one is the guilty parrot? Why was it there? Did it drop the cigarette butt that Roxanne found on the cellar floor? Around and around, until you’d just like to bash that bloody parrot’s head in for involving you in this endless navel-gazing.

Would that were the only mystery in play here. Why is the accident rate going up at the plant? Why do most accidents happen at 11 a.m., when Anthony Polk makes his tour of the plant? Why are all the workers thinking they’ll lose their jobs if they come to the infirmary with their bleeding gashes? What does the factory reporter know? Why does the injured worker with the lost watch think something is wrong at the factory? Why is there a rumor going around the plant about “trouble in the Medical Division,” and why is the ten-year-old boy who hangs around the plant referring to her as the “bandit nurse”? (I wanted to know what a fourth grader is doing at a sugar factory, but that is one mystery the book left unscathed.) Even though I just finished reading this book, I can honestly say I don’t know the answer to a single one of these questions.

Roxanne is rather annoying. Early on she spends a chapter worrying that she’s lost the friendship of Mary, the nurse she works with at the infirmary, though I could see no reason whatsoever why Mary would be angry with her, unless all the obsessing was getting on her nerves as much as it was on mine. Roxanne is infuriatingly insecure, endlessly fretting about her abilities. “She herself had a sense of inefficiency and failure. What would she do if Mary and Dr. Nealley decided she had not the brains for the job?” When she’s the only medical staff on duty, she has “a curiously helpless feeling. She was quite alone. The idea that a doctor was not within call worried her.” She’s called to handle an accident on the factory floor, and “for an instant Roxanne’s knees went weak.” She is a far cry from the typical nurse heroine, who is a spunky, confident woman who will do the appendectomy herself if the doctor doesn’t pull himself together, stat!

Another of Roxanne’s irritating habits is that she endlessly poses a paragraph’s worth of never-to-be-answered questions: “Did he really know? Or was he just being kind? Had he guessed her secret?” “What did he mean? Was he just another who did not like Anthony Polk? Did they, too, resent his impulsiveness? And suffer from it? And then she remembered the call from the foreman. What was his name?” If it’s not question marks we’re being inundated with, it’s exclamation points: “Her job was here! Grandmother could drive! She must take that chance!” I expect the plethora of punctuation is meant to engender some sort of emotion in the reader, but all it induced in me was exasperation.

Then there’s her final mystery: What is up with her abrupt, inexplicable, baseless obsession with Anthony Polk, who apart from popping up in the dark room, has had little contact with her at all? Particularly since, at the beginning of the book, she finds him irritating? “If they could just sit beside Grandmother’s fire once more, she might be able to warn him. She might even try to win his affection. She was ashamed to have to own up, even to herself, that she wanted to. Nothing else in life now seemed to matter.” Seriously?

In the end, we discover that someone is trying to drive Anthony out of the factory, and the climactic scene plays a bit like that in The Nurse. Except the bad guy in this case has no gun, and when he tells Roxanne to hand over the incriminating evidence or he’ll have her fired, she actually considers giving it to him (never mind that if she exposes the plot, he’s the one who will be fired, if he doesn’t actually do time): “Her knees went weak. She reflected that his criticism might even prevent her from getting an executive position in any nursing field. He had it in his power, perhaps, to ruin her career! Temptation assailed her. Why should she jeopardize her career to right a wrong that was past, over, and done with?” She’s about to surrender when she realizes that his plot has jeopardized the health of the factory workers, and that the fundamental job of a nurse is to preserve health! So she drops the evidence into a locked drawer, and the bad guy turns and leaves. Wow, my knees are as weak as Roxanne’s after that frightening situation. How about you?

I desperately wanted to like this book, based entirely upon Harry Bennett’s fabulous cover illustration and the fact that it was originally titled Roxanne, Industrial Nurse, which rated pretty high on my camp-o-meter. But there is really nothing to appreciate inside this overlong, annoying book. Just enjoy the cover and move on to something else.

The Nurse

By Lucy Agnes Hancock, ©1945
Cover illustration by D. Rickard

Also published as The Nurse at Whittle’s

The life of a nurse is not an easy one, but Susan Trent enjoyed every minute of her work, even those times of tragedy when unavoidable accidents brought disaster, bloodshed and suffering. She found it absorbing because she shared in those difficulties and problems of all those whose lives and health she guarded. But Susan had not expected to be involved so deeply that the problems of others would affect her own secure existence. Nor that the sinister and deadly happenings in the busy shops and factories would culminate in her own quiet office.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Almost she wished she were a girl with a past—an intriguing past.”

“Life held many far more important things than mere marriage—or did it?”

“I haven’t eaten a little girl in years. Reformed, you know.”

“How a few pleasant words of commendation brightened one’s day! Too bad more people didn’t go in for that sort of philanthropy.”

“Once she had asked Dr. Marshall why professional men were notoriously such poor penmen and he had laughed and told her it was necessary to impress the public just as using long unpronounceable medical terms did.”

“You know what men are. They don’t know what real pain is; that is, most of them don’t. If they had to suffer as we women do they’d be less ornery.”

“It was queer that it so often rained just at twelve and at five when most people were quitting work.”

REVIEW:
The cover of this book is certainly a tough act to follow. Though it is a bit of a spoiler—you’ll get to the penultimate chapter before the heat-packing thugs make an entrance—I’m hard-pressed to think of many better. I know Ms. Hancock to be capable of very fine work (see Graduate Nurse), and while The Nurse is a pretty good book, it’s just not quite that good.

Written in 1954, this book is set more than ten years earlier. The United States has not yet entered World War II, and the men are always debating enlisting in the Army versus waiting to be drafted. (Even our heroine, Susan Trent, discusses enlisting, as “nurses will be needed, you know.”) In the meantime, Susan lives in the family home in the eastern town of Ashton, working at the Whittle Tool and Implement Plant with Dr. Joel Marshall and supporting her family: widowed mother; middle sister Barbara, age 19; and baby brother Dick, age 17, who is reluctantly studying to be a lawyer as his father was. Susan’s salary keeps the family afloat and allows Barbara the luxuries that have turned her into a spoiled brat who hangs out with the wrong crowd. Susan, almost to compensate for her younger sister, “seldom had dates—she wasn’t the type.”

So while sis is partying—and even vomiting in the bathroom at 3 a.m. after a hard night of drinking—Susan has only Dr. Marshall in her life, with whom she has shared nothing but the most professional of relationships, until architect Alan MacDowell comes into her life. He’s working on a plan for housing for the factory workers, but Dr. Marshall doesn’t approve. Could it be that the doctor is a bit jealous? Well, of course he is, and he asks Susan out on a date—the first time he’s ever noticed her—shortly after she starts seeing Alan. She can’t go, as she has a date with Alan that night, but she thinks about how much she cares for him. “He was such a grand person!” Then Susan hears that the doctor is married to a woman who has been in a psychiatric asylum for the last 15 years. So the doctor moves to the back burner—and Alan also has qualities that make him unattractive to Susan, such as his infatuation with the beautiful and charming Barbara when he spends an evening at the Trent home.

Of course, everything sorts out in the end, down to the wayward sister, but overall the plotting is pretty weak. Some things (a worker with an apparent gunshot wound to the shoulder, a man of Austrian descent suspected of bombing the factory, the identity of the person who has been writing threatening letters to Dr. Marshall for years) are never explained, and the wrap-up explanation of why the two gunmen come after Susan and Dr. Marshall is so strange and loose that I still don’t get it. But the plot is not really important; as with Graduate Nurse, the heart of the book is the heroine’s daily life, and this is what makes the story worth reading. Susan visits numerous patients, handles emergencies in the plant, frets about her sister, cooks eggs and bacon with her brother, soothes her nervous mother. It’s an old-fashioned, sweet and simple life, even quaintly socialistic, in which the emphasis is on the community over the individual, where men who take shortcuts on the job wind up with injuries and a guilty conscience for thinking they knew better and trying to buck the system. Here a secretary is a far better person than a socialite, and ambitions of working as a machinist or joining the army are held in higher esteem than going to college.

I find a number of parallels between this book and Ms. Hancock’s real life. As with Graduate Nurse, this story touches sympathetically on psychiatric patients; Ms. Hancock’s oldest sister lived in an institution for most of her life, so perhaps there is a connection there. Ms. Hancock also held various positions at International Harvester throughout most of her career, as she didn’t start publishing books until she was in her late 50s, and this informs the book’s setting in the tool factory. And of her seven siblings, only two married (the oldest of her three brothers); Ms. Hancock lived with three of her sisters all her life, so their home must necessarily have been the center of their lives. The fondness and devotion Ms. Hancock shows for family life—Susan’s eventual fiancé even agrees to move into their house with them—makes me think that her home must have been very happy indeed.