Guardian Nurse

By Joyce Dingwell, ©1970
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Burn West had engaged Frances to look after seven-year-old Jason West in the joint capacity of nurse, governess—and guard. But why should the child need to be guarded? Just what was going on?

GRADE: B+ 

REVIEW:
When Frances Peters first meets her new employer, Burn West (Burn is short for Burnley), she does not think much of him. “The mouth suggested arrogance, she thought, and the eyes were cold. … She found she really disliked this man.” Well, we savvy VNRN readers recognize this as a sure sign that he’ll be playing a starring role on the last page, but we’ll play along for now. Burn runs a very large farm in the Australian outback alongside the Murrumbidgee River in the Mirramunna district, if you are familiar with Australian geography, and having decamped the group there, Burn insists that Frances is never, ever! to leave seven-year-old Jason alone. She is also to ask no questions about Jason, Burn, or anything at all relating to the family she is joining. She valiantly agrees to this ridiculous stipulation, as absurd as it is—do we really think a seven-year-old is never going to discuss his past? (In this magical land, of course, he doesn’t, outside of telling her he has lived in Switzerland and France, which she does not believe.)

Little Jason West has suffered a severe leg fracture, but she is not told how this happened. He is “unfriendly, unco-operative, apparently without any enthusiasm,” when he meets Frances, constantly shouting, “No!” He is scarcely more affectionate with Burn, whom Frances assumes is his father—you know what they say about assuming, but of course she can’t just ask! Jason needs a doctor, and wouldn’t you know it, this turns out to be Dr. Scott Weir, a long-lost sort-of ex-beau of Frances’. They’d been friendly in the nursing home where they’d both worked the previous year—but then he had abruptly transferred to another practice and never said goodbye, so she’d taken her broken heart into community nursing in the city, which was how she’d come to be hired by the Wests.

On the ranch, as Frances and Scott take up where they had left off, Burn is gradually defrosting, and Jason also coming out of his shell—figuratively and literally, as eventually the cast comes off—and he is soon running all over the ranch, or else catching up on his schooling with Frances as teacher. As Frances slowly warms up little Jason’s heart, gradually bits of the mystery are dropped into the plot. We learn that Jason is in danger of being “taken away … by his mother’s side,” Burn tells her, after one of several episodes in which Frances takes her eye off her charge for a few minutes and the pesky little blighter disappears. Frances meets a man coming out of the driveway of the ranch next door and assumes it is the owner, Trev Trent—but then Trev turns up and he’s not that man, so who is he!?! She also sees a young woman in a blue car on multiple occasions, the woman apparently watching them. Jenny, the physical therapist they engage, keeps harping on water therapy for Jason, but when Burn installs a pool, she won’t take Jason into it, or go anywhere near it herself, and it’s Frances who teaches Jason to swim. It turns out that Jenny knows the man whom Frances thought was Trev, but what is their connection? Of course, she can’t possibly do the obvious—discuss these concerns with Burn—though she considers it repeatedly, and rejects repeatedly. Argh!

Of course, in true VNRN fashion, the only way out of this mess is to add a natural disaster—in this case, the routinely foreshadowed flood—and stir. Once all the mysteries and secrets are tidied away with the high water, we can close the book, but here we can let it go with at least a small, pleased smile.

Guardian Nurse is not a book for witty writing—I could shake out nothing for the Best Quotes section—but it is a good story. It unwinds slowly and gently, and most importantly, believably. We don’t like Burn much to start, but he improves in our estimation naturally, and in the end actually is a better person, unlike those books where we are presented with a pig’s ear and told he’s a rose. It’s true that the main folds in the plot are predictable and typical, but nonetheless this book is a pleasant and enjoyable, and worth reading.

Disaster Area Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1965
Cover illustration by Uldis Klavins

The thunder roared and crashed about them—but Nurse Lynn Lawrence felt that the wildness of the storm was rivaled by the frantic racing of her own thoughts. She cast a glance at her fiancé, Greg Avery. Beside him, huddled helplessly, was the pretty Dawn Evans. There was no doubt that Greg was paying a great deal of attention to comforting Dawn—too much, Lynn thought. But there was another in the group of flood-marooned strangers. He was handsome, and smiled at Lynn in a way that sent the heart fluttering. Surely things would right themselves once they got back to civilization. But in a disaster like this, a short time could lead to a broken-hearted eternity.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m not very hot for hardware.”

REVIEW:

I had assumed that Lynn Lawrence would be a public service nurse who manned the battle stations during a disaster, à la Disaster Nurse, but no, Lynn is actually just a nurse who gets caught in a disaster. She and her fiancé Greg Avery are taking a bus to Lynn’s rural home, where Greg is to finally meet her parents—and he is none too happy about it, either—when ferocious rains cause the rivers to flood, stranding Lynn, Greg, four other passengers, the bus driver, and a passing motorist at a nearby farmhouse. Completely surrounded by water, the motley crew tries to make the best of things. Well, not all of them: Greg is whining and crabby at the outset. Actually, Greg’s downfall is not entirely unsuspected, as he’s one of these boyfriends about whom few compliments can be paid even from the opening pages, where he is billed as intense, nervous, skeptical, impatient, and resentful. One can easily see why Lynn wants to marry him.

He’s not the only one who can’t keep it together: Poor little Dawn Evans spends most of her time shrieking or sobbing, and only Greg seems to be able to comfort her. When Dawn is unable to get to her bedroom alone, it’s Greg who accompanies her, while Lynn watches, “an alarm bell ringing in her head.”  When Lynn follows them a few minutes later, she finds Greg holding the weeping Dawn in his arms, puts Dawn to bed with a glass of water and an aspirin, then hauls Greg off by the ear for a few words. He just seems pleased that she’s jealous. “Sometimes you’re so self-sufficient, I wonder what you can see in me,” he tells her. Uh oh.

Hypocrisy soon unfolds in spades when the motorist they’re stranded with, Marshall Davis, starts trotting around after Lynn, grabs her in the hallway and only lets go when Lynn insists—but soon he’s back, kissing her and telling her that he’s in love with her, which is certainly farther than Greg has gotten with Dawn. Though she feels “she was already throwing her pride to the winds where Greg was concerned, almost begging him to concentrate on her, to forget another woman,” at the same time when Marshall corners her again, “this time when he kissed her she was too tired to fight him.”

As this love quadrangle is unfolding, the 7-year-old daughter of the couple who live in the farmhouse, little Diane Wilson, has inconveniently decided this is the time to come down with appendicitis. Lynn attempts to “scatter the infection” with cold packs to the abdomen and the four remaining aspirins in the house (too bad she wasted one on the hysterical Dawn!), but those of us with a nodding acquaintance with modern medicine will not be surprised to learn this doesn’t work. Eventually Lynn, who has been keeping mum for some bizarre reason about the seriousness of Diane’s condition, confesses to Marshall how sick the child actually is, and Marshall sets about building a boat so as to go for help. Needless to say, his desperate voyage is made in the pitch black of night and involves encounters with large floating trees and a ducking or two, but soon a helicopter is landing in the back yard to take the girl off to the hospital. The next day the boats come to rescue them, and back in civilization, Lynn and Greg decide to end their engagement—but not to worry, by the time the day is over, there are two new ones to announce.

This book isn’t terrible, but the double standard Lynn operates under is just perplexing. I was sorry that our heroine, an outstanding surgical nurse (are there any other kind in a VNRN?), didn’t just do the appendectomy herself, like in Wings for Nurse Bennett, but our heroine isn’t that strong. The marooned-on-an-island plot has lots of promise—just ask any of the innumerable books, movies, and TV shows that have done well with it—but Arlene Hale is too pedantic to score any real success with it. The story unfolds automatically, with little suspense or excitement, so there’s really not much to be gained from reading it. With a title as fantastic as Disaster Area Nurse, the disappointment is all the worse.

Disaster Nurse

By Peggy O’More, ©1968

Mina Anne was troubled. She had loved Paul ever since the accident that had brought him to Cutler Hospital. But—one thought turned her days into torment. How could she love a man and still despise his outlook on life? How could she marry a man who so violently disapproved of the job she was doing?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Put two girls and a can opener in the kitchen, and you have a feast.”

 

“For a physician, you are really very uninformed in a certain field of diagnosis.”

 

REVIEW:

Mina Anne Richards is, in addition to one of the more awkwardly named VNRN heroines I’ve met, a public health nurse. She’s concerned about a population of migrant workers who are living without basic plumbing or running water, and now they’re about to be evicted from their squatting grounds, apparently because “the camp was a veritable breeding ground for communicable diseases.” You could say the same about hospitals and elementary schools, but whatever.

 

Mina Anne’s boyfriend, attorney C. Paul Parker, is pressing her to give up her job and marry him, but she’s not completely convinced. Paul is particularly earnest in his proposal because the president of a large company will give Paul’s firm his business but only if Paul marries Mr. Chalder’s daughter—a very peculiar arrangement in a number of ways—and Paul will be off the hook if he’s already married, he explains to Mina Anne. When she objects, he responds, “Once we’re married, I’ll be able to show you where your perspective is out of focus.” Curiously, Mina Anne neither flings a skillet at his head nor shoves him out the door, but continues to consider, no matter how tepidly, his proposal.

 

The book gives us a lot of back-and-forth between Mina Anne and Paul, and even some mildly interesting if dated debates about welfare—one poor family with only one pair of shoes between the two children refuses to accept welfare, and Mina Anne debates whether this is admirable or “false pride.” A casual dinner or two with Dr. Louis Marquand, her boss, and then, at the book’s halfway point, it begins to snow. When Mina Anne and her roommate Joan, trapped indoors for several days by the blizzard, begin to snap at each other, wise medico Mina Anne chalks it up to dehydration: “The department warned us of the possibility.”

 

But then, even worse, the weather warms, and now it’s raining. And raining. The river is rising, and Mina Anne sets out in her galoshes and mackintosh to rescue, well, pretty much everyone: a man with an infected cut on his arm, a farmer and his family, a cattle rancher and his family, the entire migrant camp, a woman having a baby, a family trapped in a grove of trees, Paul’s parents. Just when you think we’re going to have a minute for a sandwich and a nap, someone is tapping on Mina Anne’s shoulder again and she’s off in the chopper with Dr. Louie. Sixty-plus long pages later, it’s finally over, and suddenly Paul has fallen madly for roommate Joan, whose “love would be an ever-burning searchlight on the roiled waters.” Even worse, a marginal character takes Mina Anne in his arms out of nowhere, and she agrees to allow him “to take care of her, not let her take care of him,” if you think you can take it.

 

Peggy O’More Blocklinger, whose work we have seen before under the pen name Jeanne Bowman, is not my favorite author, which should not surprise the regulars. In Disaster Nurse, she manages to do a little better than usual, which is still, clearly, not all that great. Her condescending psychobabble is slightly less prevalent, but we’re regularly treated to bon mots such as, “Premonitions are usually based on logical deductions distorted by emotions,” “Paul’s poverty was restricted vision,” and “This time I am thinking of our state inventory tax, of merchants buying heavily for the Christmas trade and being stuck with merchandise and having to pay taxes on what the weather kept them from selling.”

 

O’More’s main theme about poor migrant workers could hold some interest, but instead of making her points by showing them through her story, she hectors us with long pedantic lectures. When Joan ponders why the migrant families don’t take more pride in their admittedly temporary homes, instead letting them get so run down, Mina Anne climbs up on her soapbox: “I think it is an inner rebellion at their status. They can’t pinpoint the cause; it’s too ephemeral, ever-changing. So they rebel against their fellow man.” Then Joan jumps on the bandwagon: “They believe not: ‘The world owes me a living’ but rather, ‘The world owes me the right to earn a living.’ And when they can’t earn it, they don’t blame an impersonal escalating automation coinciding with population explosion; they blame those who have managed to maintain at least the appearance of economic stability.” Thanks, Professors, for elucidating these contemporary sociopychological tensions. I feel so much better now.

 

I’ve never met a Peggy O’More book I could recommend—unless it was so catastrophically bad that it could be worth a peek, like slowing down when you drive past a car accident (I’m looking at you, Conflict for Nurse Elsa). This book is neither good nor bad enough to bother with, however, so you’re best leaving this disaster to fend for itself.

Kay Manion, M.D.

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1959

For the first time in her life, Kay Manion was running away, driving alone cross-country, fleeing her position as a surgeon in a large California hospital. The young and beautiful doctor could not face the thought that a moment of weakness had endangered a patient’s life—or that the man she loved, Dr. Frank Silvester, was infecting her with his own self-serving attitude toward medicine. But when the floodwaters of a raging river suddenly stranded Kay in the ravaged town of Woodbine, she could run no longer. In the midst of terrible human disaster, she had to prove her worth as a doctor. Forced to choose between a love she could not forget and a new love she could not bring herself to trust, Kay learned how foolish a woman’s fears could be, and how wise her heart.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Since when have pain and illness and death recognized office hours?”

“I’ll bet when he takes my pulse I’ll really register!”

“That was good—‘Good,’ Kay said.”

“She was, first of all, a doctor. First a doctor, then a woman—”

“Her heart plummeted to the toes of her pumps.”

“If you don’t stop talking I am going to pop a thermometer under your tongue.”

“You can’t believe that, Kay. You’re no dewy-eyed teen-ager, you’re a doctor, sweetheart—you know love is strictly biologic.”

“A surgeon pitting his skill against time realizes that time has snatched his patient’s life and is running away with it and he doesn’t dare make one swift, reckless plunge to catch up. If he does, if in his haste the hand holding the scalpel, the fingers tying a ligature, or handling a clamp—as hers had—God—please God—”

“Perhaps she needed to get away from strictly surgery for a while, perhaps that had been a part of her trouble. She had heard it argued that surgery was not for a woman. Pediatrics, definitely. And o.b., internal medicine. But not the long tedious grind that was surgery.”

“Didn’t it give her a turn, sometimes, to open people up? He wan’t right sure that he approved any such shenanigans, looks as though if God had wanted such things done he’d have put a zipper in.”

REVIEW:
Kay Manion, M.D., is fleeing California in her red Jaguar. Like all VNRN heroines who flee home, she’s running from a terrible tragedy: While in surgery, she starts thinking about her miserable love life and misses the call for a clamp from the senior surgeon. An artery spurts for an extra moment or two until she is called back to earth—but “in that infinetismal span of time before the strength she willed came back into her hands, had Harvey Webster’s chance for life been snatched from him?” In the throes of despair, Kay’s “heart and her whole future crumbled and trampled beneath her own foolishness,” she flings her belongings into a bag and heads out of town, before it’s even known whether Mr. Webster is going to pull through. (This is the second VNRN I’ve read where an extra second of hemorrhage convinces the heroine that she’s a murderer; see also Surgical Nurse by Florence K. Palmer.)

Stopping at a gas station in Indiana for directions, the friendly fella there warns her under no circumstances should she stay on Route 50, because there’s a huge flood coming. But when she gets to the intersection where she’s supposed to turn, she’s busy ruminating over that fateful day and biting her lip “until the salty taste of blood was there,” so she just keeps on going. Even as the water gets higher and she has to drive on flooded roads, it never crosses her mind that maybe she ought to turn around. Until she’s crossing this rickety bridge and it collapses under her.

She’s saved by a couple of locals, but now she’s stuck in this backwater, because the bridge was the only way out. But they can always use another doctor, and before long she’s helping with disaster management. She always seems to be seconds away from hysteria, though; Harvey Webster is never far from her thoughts, of course, but even when she’s in the middle of treating patients, she’s still hysterically obsessing: “Kay opened her mouth to ask why hadn’t the Davidsons gotten out while they could, then closed it, the words unspoken. Why didn’t people, herself included, do a lot of things? If she had paid attention to her driving she wouldn’t be here, she would be headed east on 50, far from flood-drowned southern Indiana by now. If she hadn’t followed her foolish heart until even the marrow in her bones was weary, if she hadn’t fallen in love with Frank Silvester the instant their eyes met that day in Dr. Frank’s cubbyhole of an office—she withdrew the needle from Evy’s hip, straightened.” This woman is a nervous breakdown or a malpractice lawsuit, or both, waiting to happen. Fortunately, she can turn it down a notch after page 50, when she finally calls home and finds out that Harvey Webster is going to be all right. The wise old doctor she talks to tells her that she was running not just from Harvey Webster—“It was Frank, too,” she thinks. “And—and her—”

You see, back in California she is engaged to one of those ubiquitous young doctors hoping to set up an office catering to neurotic rich women, apparently not recognizing that his fiancee is, perhaps more than anyone, in need of his services. To develop his clientele, Frank spends a lot of nights out club-hopping and being seen at all the fashionable spots, and poor Kay has been at the verge of exhaustion trying to keep up with him and still get up early for surgery in the morning. But on her midwestern detour she meets steady, dependable Chris Buford, publisher of the local newspaper. For some reason, he falls for her, and now Kay has another reason to anguish endlessly and speak with italics and em dashes: “Chris, I—Oh, Chris, please! I—I don’t know!”

The town is predictably on the verge of going under in the flood, but relentless sandbagging by the townspeople saves it, and there is much rejoicing. The strain, however, is too much for the elderly doctor, who is felled by the hard work: “Pinching the doubt in the bud she found a pulse in the muscular hairy wrist, with an eye on the sweeping second hand of her watch counted … seventy-nine…eighty…eighty-one, and it was a minute. Eighty-one! Oh, God—” Before she completely freaks out, someone ought to remind her that 81 is a normal pulse. So Kay has to stay on to help, and six months later, the old doc is better and hoping she’ll stay permanently. But there’s a rumor going around town about Chris and a beautiful music teacher, who is soon sporting a diamond. Kay flees home to California without finding out the truth of the situation—clearly she hasn’t learned anything at all—and we’ve got 20 more pages, plenty of time to develop a subplot! Back at the hospital, the staff is gossiping that one patient declined surgery, “not if Dr. Manion was to do the operating,” and that she’s a tramp, and now the medical board wants to see her in a closed session. But another surgeon tells her that there is “a master plan behind the whole thing,” an attempt to drive her out of the hospital. Who—who would do such a thing? Oh, God—

Frankly, I’m torn over this book. Kay is a horrible doctor, unable to keep her mind on her work and needing to be talked in off the ledge on every other page. Though she does seem to be a magnet for disaster, the amout of emotional drama she wrings from even ordinary events is seriously psychotic. The camp factor is turned up to eleven, and though it does offer up numerous laugh-out-loud moments, it can feel overdone at times and leave you rolling your eyes at yet another self-absorbed diatribe. I did enjoy the fairly realistic descriptions of surgery and the red Jag—before it drowned, anyway—but this book is a roller coaster of amusement and exasperation. I think it’s worth reading—aloud, preferably, to a group of like-minded friends—but be prepared for a wild ride, on a rickety, collapsing bridge.