Nurse Caril’s New Post

By Caroline Trench, ©1959

Doctor Justin Garthorpe was reputedly a tyrant, and while Penelope worked for him, sparks were bound to fly. And she had to cope with family worries as well as an exacting job. Here’s the story of how she succeeded.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Nursing was the most worthwhile life in the world and she loved it all, from the work that could sometimes be so satisfying and sometimes so hard, to the friendly companionship of the other nurses.”

“Justin never thinks of the decorative value of nurses when he engages them, although I’ve told him it would make all the difference to the patients. Not to mention the doctors!”

“How encouragingly human you look! The starch and stiffness have all evaporated into thin air!”

“He thinks of me as someone who helps him in his work, not as a woman.”

“You’ve made me absolutely agog with curiosity. How do you look agog, by the way? But I clamp my lips together and nobly forebear to ask more.”

REVIEW:

Penelope Caril is a London-based nurse who suddenly learns that older sister Alison and her husband Bill have been killed in a car crash, leaving her guardian of nephew Sandy, age 7, and niece Grace, age 17. This means she can no longer work the alternating shifts of her hospital because she’ll need a steady schedule for the children, so she relocates to the coast to take a position in a small children’s hospital founded by Dr. Justin Garthorpe. He’s got a reputation as a strict martinet but a genius with children and their illnesses, and during Penny’s interview with him, she finds him “infuriating,” three separate times but nonetheless thinks “she didn’t know whether Justin Garthorpe infuriated her or interested her. But, whatever her feelings were, she knew she wanted to work for him.”

Not that you will be surprised to hear this, but soon she is in love with him. They seem to have a close friendship, and he involves her in his toughest cases, but he is also at the same time somewhat aloof—“what had brought the brusqueness to his voice, the lines between his eyes and the streak of gray to his hair? What was the mystery of his life—and would she ever know it?” Of course she will, and it’s revealed by a shrew who calls herself mother of one of their patients: Justin’s own daughter had come down with appendicitis and the diagnosis had come too late, he had operated and she had died, and his wife had died shortly thereafter of suicide. The scandal!

But Justin’s friend Simon has a slightly different take, and explains that Justin had been working through an epidemic at the time on four hours’ sleep a night, living at the hospital, and that little Barbie had been seen by another doctor who’d blown the diagnosis. By the time Justin had finally gotten home, Barbie was too ill to be saved. And the wife had left Justin and died of an overdose of sleeping pills. Justin, of course, doesn’t see it that way, and is so haunted by Barbie’s death that he can never love again.

So Penny sets out to find the whole truth, and drags Justin off to meet an old friend of his wife’s, who tells the real story—that Adele had been on the brink of coming back to Justin to try to start over, but had been troubled by severe anxiety which necessitated the fatal sleeping pills, and her death was an accident!

Exonerated by the truth, Justin is free to tell Penny that he’ll never marry again, but that he expects she’ll be happy with any of the several beaux floating around Honeysuckle Cottage, where she lives with the children …

It’s a slight, pleasant enough story, with a few interesting characters (Penny and Justin, unfortunately, not being among them), but no surprises of plot to make it particularly unusual—apart from the nurse’s dorm fire that Justin extinguishes with his hands, blistering them so badly he nearly faints from the pain, but strangely the next day he is driving around the countryside and gripping Penny’s wrist, “the hardness of his grasp almost bruising her flesh,” but apparently with no discomfort whatsoever. Rather, the story seems to be a goodly number of the usual conventions strung together—surly misunderstood teen made right by love, crabby doctor made right by love, perennial bachelor and ugly nurse and crippled fiancé made right by love. Still, if there isn’t much to it, what there is is enjoyable, and you certainly could do a lot worse.

Nurse Judy

By Elizabeth Wesley (pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1958

As Nurse Judy Byron worked under the white lights of the operating room, she remembered the words of a wise teacher: “A good surgical nurse is as important to a surgeon as a steady hand, a keen eye.” Now, watching the skilled hands of Doctor Peter Clay as they coaxed life back into  a still heart or pieced together a shattered skull, the words had a fine, true ring. She was an essential tool in the surgeon’s miraculous work. But Judy Byron the woman could not escape the tensions growing around her, the distrust and hostility between the two chief surgeons, Doctors Murdoch and Clay. As a nurse she should never take sides, but watching Dr. Clay’s steady hands so often clenched in anger as he worked to save Murdoch’s patients, she found she cared very much. As her love grew, Judy Byron knew she must become more than just a surgical tool to Peter Clay.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Doc’s great on acquainting his patients with what’s going to happen to them. Makes a patient feel better, he says, to be familiar with hospital routine. Well, now, he sure should have told me there’d be a hazel-eyed angel to hold my hand and—”

REVIEW:

Judy Byron is a nurse at Whittingill Memorial, where she cares for surgical patients. The chief surgeon, named Dr. Montgomery Mason Murdoch, of course, has been carrying on with Karen Whittingill, great-granddaughter of the hospital’s founder and owner of the Whittingill chemical plant. And whenever you see the words “chemical plant” in a nurse novel, you know what’s coming. In fact, this book has a good number of the usual tropes, but it’s as if they are isolated gum drops thrown into a melted frappe of a novel, as a good number of them go nowhere despite taking up considerable space in these pages. There’s the crabby patient of Dr. Murdoch’s, rich Mrs. Ravensby, who keeps ringing the fricking call light for no reason at all and demands a lot of Nembutal. She’s becoming increasingly put out with her doctor, and a number of times Judy involves the nursing supervisor out of some never-named “concern” for Mrs. R, but at the end of the book she’s suddenly discharged and her story, whatever it might have been, is left bafflingly open-ended.

There’s “Staph” with a ph Murdoch, who never washes his hands before surgery so all his patients flirt unnecessarily not just with him but with death by sepsis after their trips to the OR. “Lister would turn over in his grave, at the way he scrubs up,” says another nurse. But the chief of staff seems completely unable to stop it, again for no reason that we’re given, except possibly because of Karen Whittingill’s intervention on her longtime boyfriend-but-not-fiance’s part.

The explosions at the chemical plant (you knew they would happen) is combined with a general sense of unease: “Things are pretty bad out there, Judy. It’s the morale, I think,” explains Judy’s longtime beau, newspaperman Hi Lambert, and I feel like I run into a brick wall every time I see his name on the page. “Something very definitely was out of kilter in both Whittingill Manufactory and the hospital,” we’re told. A sense of unease so great that everyone in town is talking about it, but the only explanation the book gives us, after suggesting that something sinister is behind the several chemical burn incidents, is that one of the employees is a drug addict—hardly enough for all the number of times “tiny prickle that is apprehension cake-walked along her spine,” the “throttled” doubts, the “nibbling small worry,” and don’t even get me started on all the issues Judy has going on under her sternum.

There’s the night someone sneaks up behind Judy when she is on duty alone on the night shift and knocks her out with ether—though nothing else seems amiss apart from Judy herself, who wakens insisting that she needs to finish getting ice water for Mrs. Ravensby, because she is one dedicated nurse! But after an hour’s worth of kerfuffle, during which hunky Dr. Peter Clay comforts her in his rumbling warm voice and steadies her with his firm, fine surgeon’s hands, it’s back to normal with not even a security guard or a motive for the attack—as every little pill in the drug cabinet is accounted for.

Orderly Andy Dexter continues to remain employed despite the fact that he seems to be the source of every patient-privacy-revealing story that Hi prints in the paper, and Judy’s increasing displeasure with Hi who “had no business sneaking around Dr. Tim’s back to get his story!” demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of basic journalism despite the fact that she’s been dating this man for many years.

Only a few of these  mysteries come to a head when a man at the plant is clubbed on the head and suffers third-degree chemical burns, an attack witnessed by a young woman who promptly vanishes. The victim dies despite Dr. Clay’s magical hands, and now everyone in town is on high alert except Judy’s ward, where one night she stumbles across a big guy riffling through the drug cabinet. Instead of calling security, Judy decides to confront the man, who in classic evil-villain monologue confesses to the attacks on the dead man and Judy herself, and having taken the keys to the drug cabinet out of her pocket and rather than immediately avail himself of an excellent opportunity to clean it out, instead somehow had a copy of the key made (at the nearby 24-hour hardware store?), slipped the key back into her pocket and waited for a super-busy night a week later to come back for the goods. Then he decides to strangle Judy, who is rescued by the rare ambulatory patient wielding a potted gloxinia, and I kid you not.

Now the really shocking part comes out!! The man turns out to have been the single patient of Dr. Murdoch’s not felled by sepsis who was rewarded for his survival by getting so much narcotics from the illustrious Dr. MMM that he became addicted. Dr. M, instead of taking the obvious way out with his prescription pad, instead steals drugs in some unspecified way from the hospital and sells them at exorbitant prices to the hapless former patient. This is actually the first time I have come across this problem in a VNRN, a problem that has legitimately become a really frightening issue for the country and a seldom acknowledged, seriously shameful blot on the medical profession that started the whole crisis, with much less repercussions than those faced by Dr. MMM. So buried deep in this hapless two-day-old fruit salad of a novel is an actual meaty issue—quickly whisked off the table by the overzealous waiter of an author who wants to turn and burn us, jumping essentially from mid confession to months down the road, spending exactly one page showing us who Judy has eventually married, someone she has heretofore never even kissed (which actually could include her boyfriend Hi).

In wanting to be all things, this book ends up being essentially nothing, completely missing a real chance at providing us with something substantial. Judy has deeper relationships with her flower garden than she does with either of the men she is ostensibly interested in. All the repetitive hackneyed phrases are old, well, not exactly friends, because we can’t actually admire this trite, overused language, but they’re certainly familiar to longtime readers of Adeline McElfresh, here writing as Elizabeth Wesley, who loves a cliché in language as much as she loves one in plot. There’s nothing overtly bad in this book except a blatantly obvious lack of effort, which begs the question of why we the reader should bother with it when the author has not.

The Romantic Doctor Rydon

By Anne Durham, ©1967

All sorts of rumours were flooding the hospital about the new R.M.O., the handsome, romantic Doctor Michael Rydon—and Nurse Leanda Kenny was determined that she for one was not going to follow the crowd and fall for him like all the rest! And anyway, she was as good as engaged to James Martle, wasn’t she…?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“Leanda thought how lucky she was to have such a pleasant Sister to work with. Bridget had a Tartar, for her sins, and Nell Jones lived a life of terror.”

REVIEW:

When a book is based on a terrible premise, it’s hard to really make something good out of it, but this one partly succeeds. The problem here is that our heroine, Leanda Kenny, is dating an absolute ass of a man, Dr. James Martle, who insists that she wear gray tweed and not that smart yellow dress with the birds and bees on it, and to change her hair from her stylish bangs into something more matronly. “Why did he feel he had to be educating her, shaping her to his ways, all the time? Why couldn’t he accept her as she was?” Why, while we’re at it, does she continue her relationship with the oppressive fuddy duddy, even if he is “solid and consistent,” even if “he’ll be good to me”? Indeed, we’ll spend about 180 pages wondering why? why? why? when on page after page he proves to be a self-absorbed, inconsiderate bore who against his better judgment finally gives her a peck and a cold cuddle when he tells her, “I’ve planned to announce our engagement” on her birthday, six months from now, without even bothering to ask if that’s OK with her, when he decides who her bridesmaid will be and that she should give up not just her career to become “that sort of senseless creature which she abhorred, the social wife,” but also her friends when they are married, when he is shocked that to be frank and open as she is is “a luxury hardly permitted in our family.” So many reasons to run pell mell from this man, and yet there she goes again, agreeing to another soul-crushing oppression.

On the other hand, and you knew there was one, is Michael Rydon, “the best-looking young man Leanda had ever seen,” a young medico new to the hospital over whom all the nurses and indeed quite a few of the patients are in uproar. With the reputation of a bounder and a cad, Dr. Rydon arrives with a car wreck hot on his heels, in which the beautiful Phyllida Blane and her young niece Rachel Varney are injured. Phyllida immediately alerts everyone that Dr. Rydon is her intended, but that’s just fine with Leanda, because she absolutely despises Dr. Rydon! He’s always laughing down at her as she flushes, and “the thought of having to work near him made her pulses race and her heart bang miserably fast,” because she hates him so much!

There’s the usual misunderstanding about the actual state of Dr. Rydon’s relationship with Phyllida, which even a toddler could see through, but by which Leanda is wholly taken in. The gradual awakening of her true feelings for Dr. Rydon, despite her fierce resolve to have nothing to do with him because of his loose reputation, and the fact that the hospital grapevine is placing bets that she will end up with him, although why they’ve singled her out for that especial privilege is a mystery. Her resulting resolve is to go through with the very bad idea to marry James. His near disaster in a car wreck of his own brings her illusions crashing down with it, and the final reconciliation as she is eventually allowed to see him, or what bits of him are showing in between all the bandages and plaster, is sweet even if it is not completely  unforeseen.

The plot, painful as it is to wade through, should result in a more distasteful book than this one. If Leanda is so hell-bent on her own emotional suicide, we could at least be given a reason why, a plausible psychology that makes her susceptible to it—and we actually have the bones of one, in the fact that she is an orphan from an early age, raised in foster homes, but this is never fleshed out. But as exceptionally hackneyed as this story is, without much humor or sparkling writing to bolster it, it is still a pleasant read, though I am hard-pressed to say exactly why; I just couldn’t bring myself to give it a C+ rather than a B-. Perhaps it’s because in between the irritating scenes with Dr. Martle there are some enjoyable moments with patients and friends, and Leanda’s tumultuous feelings for Dr. Rydon are sympathetically drawn. So if the framework is rotten, there’s enough pretty wallpaper to make this a pleasant room, one worth spending an afternoon with. 

The Marriage of Doctor Royle

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1967

Doctor Bart Royle’s mother would have liked to see him married to her nurse, Janice Loveday, but two people stood in the way—Ned, who needed Janice, and Pippa, who wanted Bart.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“That was one good thing about Nurse Wilson, nobody would ever have married her!”

REVIEW:

A more superlative nurse than Janice Loveday, who without questions merits her surname, never silently walked the VNRN wards in her spotless white oxfords; she is a “delightful girl who, apart from her beauty of face and form, had that rare quality, a beauty of character which was displayed in everything she did or said.” But she has taken on a hopeless loser of a man, Ned Thaneton, who is the son of a wealthy man and a louche gambler. Time and again Janice has tried to make him heel to the straight and narrow path, but the lazy cad doesn’t feel he should have to work for a living and so inevitably drifts back to the casino. As the book opens, Janice is finally starting to tire of his insistence that she be available at his whim to go out with him, irritated that he completely misses the point that if he does not work for a living, she goes, and at a job that requires the mental sharpness that follows eight hours in the sack. Her solution is not to tell not-friend Ned to take a long walk off a short pier, but instead to get a new job: “If I found a post either miles away, so that Ned couldn’t ask me to keep these hours and so on I had free, it would be better. Or if I took a post private nursing locally,” she says. Though it’s not clear why a new job will make Ned say no when she can’t herself. Well! It just so happens that Dr. Bart Royle has just such a post, caring for his most beloved mother, former nurse Norma Mattingly Royle, who has what is described as a relentlessly advancing “sclerosing arthritis.”

In Janice moves, and before long she is the daughter Norma never knew, her own having died of polio in childhood, and a pillar of strength for the entire household. The fly in the linament, because we must have one, is Pippa Chambers, a beautiful young wealthy lass who has her heart set not on Bart but his name, as she is nouveau riche and wants an entrée into an upper crust society that no amount of Daddy’s money can buy. Pippa is not pleased by Bart’s well-known devotion to his mother and plots to pack the old bag off to a nursing home as soon as Bart carries her over his threshold. And, when she claps eyes on the lovely Janice, Pippa is not pleased with the new nurse, either, as she fears Bart will be seduced by her beauty, strength and character. She sets out through various lame schemes that all quickly come to naught to turn Bart against Janice, but in the end her big chance comes when Ned turns up and begs Janice for £250 lest the thug he owes smash him to a jelly. Janice, finally seeing a  chance to be rid of Ned forever, tells him to get lost. No, wait, that’s not what happens at all—Janice, the perennial doormat, promises to find the money somehow! But if she gives him the money, he has to go to Canada and work on the farm of this nurse she knows there, who surely would be delighted to take on a lazy gambling addict like Ned!

Wandering the house in a daze after her meeting with Ned, Janice bumps into Pippa and immediately tells her arch enemy the whole story. Helpful Pippa whips out her checkbook and offers to gift Ned the money if Janice will quit her post and go work for the World Health Organization in Africa somewhere, far away from Bart. Janice’s next ricochet lands her in Norma’s room, and that intelligent woman, seeing Janice’s shock—for the proposed separation from Bart makes Janice suddenly realize “how blind she had been! She knew now and for ever that she was in love with him!”—is easily able to get the story, as well as Pippa’s heartless proposal, out of Janice. In three seconds Norma has hatched a convoluted plot that involves converting her own large estate into a nursing home where she will continue to live, establishing her son as chief medical officer with the caveat that he be married, arranging a meeting between Pippa and Janice in which Janice politely declines Pippa’s offer and Pippa unpolitely expresses her displeasure with Janice and Norma just as Bart is walking through the door, and arranging a gourmet dinner between herself, Bart, and Janice for that evening (I pitied the cook) during which Janice is wearing the Mattingly estate diamond and sapphire earrings that almost make Janice’s blue, blue eyes pale in comparison. That Norma is one wicked smart woman!

This book started out from Bart’s point of view, Janice nowhere in sight, which made me fear it wouldn’t quite qualify as a nurse novel, but we do work our way around to Janice in the end. Janice would be too good to be true except for her absurd devotion to Ned, but apart from this bit of overperfection in Janice, the characters in this book are vivid, completely endearing—even Pippa, although she undergoes a character transformation at the end that is as disappointing as it is implausible—and thoroughly enjoyable to pal around with. Except, actually, Bart, who is fairly bland, even if he does have “firm sensitive lips.” If the story line isn’t novel or especially exciting, it is still a pleasant book and one worth reading.

Frightened Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1976

When Nurse Gwen Powell arrived at Tampa airport she caught sight of Dr. Reece Ramsey, who’d hired her for her new post. He left his car, smiling warmly, hands outstretched in greeting. A wild, sudden thought leaped unbidden into Gwen’s mind: some day she was going to marry this man! It wasn’t long before they arrived at the palatial home of the Nordykes. Introductions to the family members took place quickly. And then Gwen met her patient, the elderly Henry Nordyke. But—almost from the first—strange, freakish problems occurred in Henry’s case … accidents … overdoses of medicine … and Gwen became uneasy. Then there was a night of terror as Gwen, thoroughly alarmed by still another incident, rushed to the room of her patient. Her hand shook uncontrollably as she turned the knob. She knew then that someone was trying to kill Henry Nordyke.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Gwen knew she shouldn’t be eavesdropping like this, but the conversation was too fascinating to pass by.”

“I had no idea when I came down here from Chicago I was going to get into a nest of intrigue!”

REVIEW:

This book would have been better named Mildly Perturbed Nurse, so bland is it that fright is much too strong an emotion to be experienced by any character in it, much less anyone reading it. Gwen Powell is a Chicago-based nurse whose fiancé Ted had been killed in a car crash six months ago. She’s still  heartbroken, not surprisingly, and so decides she needs to leave town to recover. She’s accorded that opportunity when Reece Ramsey, an old friend of her fiancé’s, invites her to Florida to serve as a private nurse to business magnate Henry Nordyke, who has suffered a stroke at age 75. He’s a stubborn, cantankerous old goat, so naturally in no time flat Gwen has him eating out of her hand as she rubs his fuzzy ears.

The other members of the house and family prove to be more troublesome. There’s son Kevin, who is a painter: “ ‘I’m an artist,’ he shouted. ‘Do you hear, an artist! Not a bookkeeper or office manager, not a seller of foods!’” He even defaces canvas from time to time to prove it, resides in the garret and mopes constantly about the fact that dad won’t pay for him to go live in Paris, though no fewer than four major characters in the book point out that Kevin could just get a job and earn the money himself—indeed it’s acknowledged that he has gotten apparently significant sums from his father in the past. “I’ve advanced you money from time to time, over and above the trust fund that was set up for you. What do you do with it all?” asks Dad. “That’s my business,” Kevin snaps, and that’s the end of that.

Daughter Carol has married boozer frat boy Howard Dane, who has another crazy scheme to make money that involves investing large sums that he doesn’t have, and the pair drop by almost daily to harangue Henry into giving them some. Crazy aunt Flora, Henry’s sister, is a joint owner of Henry’s business, but seems to have a tenuous grip on reality—yet still is given the responsibility of caring for Henry when Gwen has evenings and Sundays off. Lyle Thelman, Henry’s business partner, feels Henry’s business is about to go under but could be saved by a merger that Henry refuses to agree to, so Lyle waylays Gwen on the beach several times to urge her to use her influence on Henry. She declines and he tries bribery instead, which is equally unsuccessful.

Now this is the frightening part! Or might be if the plot and writer were much, much better. Gwen comes home from a bad date with Kevin in which he forcibly kisses her and calls her a “moody little witch” when she fights him off, to find that Henry is barely breathing because somehow he’s taken an extra sleeping pill! A determined night of pouring coffee into him and chafing his wrists and he’s back to normal, but who could have tried to kill Henry? And what kind of drug is nearly fatal with a second dose? The mild intrigue masquerading as a mystery continues when Gwen goes to check on Henry one night to discover the window has been left wide open. “Had someone slipped in here while he slept and opened it? Had someone wanted him to lie sleeping in a draft?” There must be a homicidal maniac on the loose! Next, Henry wheels his chair out onto the patio one night in a driving rainstorm and is locked out; who was he meeting out there? “None of your business,” he snaps, a common refrain among these Nordykes, but somehow he survives this deadly encounter with the weather, likely due to the hot bath and medicinal cup of tea that Gwen treats him with.

Then a car follows her and Kevin on their next date—of course there is one, despite his deplorable behavior on the last one, because “she could not help but find him attractive” and soon is “returning his kiss and enjoying it.” And Gwen sees a man on the lawn watching the house, though of course the police are not called. Then! The golf cart brakes fail while Gwen and Henry are out for a ride, but Gwen turns off the motor and the golf cart, hurtling down the sidewalk at a breakneck 10 mph, dwindles to a stop. “There was something very strange going on here and had been ever since she’d come. She wasn’t sure she was up to much more of this!” Her anxiety takes hold of her in the middle of the night and she rushes to check on Henry. “He was all right!” Nonetheless, “she couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was coming to a head, that they were just marking time until zero hour. When something horrible was going to happen!” Are you scared? Maybe someone will leave a banana peel on the top stair!!!

Eventually one of her midnight checks on Henry uncovers a man in Henry’s bedroom who has a heavy object in his hand “and then it came crashing down on her head”!! Next thing we know, she’s waking up to learn that the evil schemer behind all the shenanigans was Howard Dean—who’d not been at the house the night of Henry’s overdose or of the ruthless open window incident, and the patio episode is never explained. His brush with death averted, Henry undergoes a complete personality change and gives the lazy bum Kevin $30,000 to go to Paris, money well spent to get the lout out of the house. He also accepts the merger deal as well as his daughter back into the house, as she’s divorcing Howard, but given the fact that Howard’s now in jail, it’s not clear why she can’t remain in her own home. Gwen finally succumbs to the smooth moves of Reece Ramsey and seems poised to embark on a relationship with him, though it’s not clear why she suddenly prefers Reece to Kevin—but then, it was never clear why she preferred Kevin in the first place, so  maybe I shouldn’t be too demanding.

This dull book has little to recommend it: The writing is ordinary, the characters insipid and dislikeable, and the plot is boring—an even worse crime than usual since author Ms. Hale is apparently attempting to give us a thriller. I have never enjoyed Ms. Hale’s books, giving the 17 books of hers that I’ve read an average grade of C+ (unfortunately for me she’s written at least another 20! Insert chagrined emoji here), and I continue to be amazed that she was able to get so many of her works published. A sad commentary on the VNRN market, and on my future reading list.

Wrong Doctor John

By Kate Starr, ©1966

It could have been very confusing to have two members of the staff at the Eye Clinic with the same name—John Hardin; one a doctor, the other a surgeon. But Nurse Emma Brown at least had no difficulty in choosing between them.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“To be really on your toes you needed setbacks.”

“Knowledge is a good thing. It should help you graduate.”

REVIEW:

The premise of this book is that there are two doctors named John Harding, both of whom work at the dilapidated, overrun eye clinic. “Don’t let its squalor deceive you; only on the outside is Eye Clinic an eyesore,” the senior nurse tells a flock of fledgling nurses, which includes our heroine, Emma Brown. For on the inside, the eye clinic offers the best care for eye diseases in Australia. This Emma quickly discovers after she is sent—to her horror—to work at the eye clinic, because the great senior John Harding, looking out the window after a difficult night, sees Emma, also just off her night shift, running across the lawn, her red hair flying, and asks that she be transferred to his clinic. Creepy as that is, off she goes, and upon arrival she cannot even get into the building, it is so full of people. Eventually she elbows her way in and stumbles around for a while, usually directed by the helpful patients who know the confusing maze of hallways a lot better than she does, until she’s put to work sorting patients, who must sit in rows according to who’s next. “Emma, frustrated, feeling that her two and a half years of training, a good part of it most uplifting and impressive, had prepared her for something better than the collecting of tickets, shot Sister Morrow an indignant look.” It’s a humorous scene, in which she is forced to bully the knitters and chatters and the deaf Mr. Al Croker into order. Then she moves on to eye exercises, made more challenging by young Malcolm, an eye clinic veteran who always pretends that his eyes have gotten stuck in the crossed position until Emma pinches him back to normal.

On her first day she meets young John Harding—called Dr. John, compared to the senior Mr. John, a convention you will understand if you’ve read a few Harlequin (i.e. British) VNRNs; senior MDs in the UK are called Mister. Young Dr. John calls her Blackie because of her black stockings—a bit of a joke since her last name is Brown and most people call her Brownie—and she calls him, mostly to herself, wrong Dr. John, because as soon as she meets Mr. (senior) John Harding she is smitten with the great man.

The old clinic is to be abandoned soon because a new modern clinic is being built nearby. Senior/Right Mr. John takes her on a tour of the new facility, interested as he is in this bright, light, lively creature. On the tour, however, she discovers that “something was very wrong” with Mr. Harding. As the book trots along, we hear a lot about Mr. John’s sadness, about “something in the great man that grieved her because it grieved him.” It seems to involve a very beautiful woman named Kristin who hangs around the clinic, lecture halls, anywhere Mr. John might turn up, so she can turn her tear-filled  gaze upon him.

Meanwhile, Emma develops a chummy friendship with Dr. John, who is always teasing her but also on occasion sincere as he earnestly learns all he can from the great doctor, assisting in surgery: “Well—I’ll at least hand something,” he hopes of his first day as surgical assist. The pair skewer each other amusingly, as well as pick each other up, and in the end, they head into the outback as a mobile clinic to treat Maori people without other access to medical care.

You can guess where at least one of these threads is headed, but it really doesn’t matter—this rollicking, enjoyable book has a marvelous sense of humor and some lovely writing; it had me at the first sentence. “It was a postcard sort of morning, a fresh, bright morning that brings wholeness and sanity flooding reassuringly back to a slightly threadbare, rather crazy world.” With writing this good you needn’t worry so much about plotting, though this book’s story moves along nicely. Emma is a feisty gal who, if brought into the eye clinic on a creepy whim, never deserves it, always standing on her own two feet and refusing to be a patsy even to Mr. John. If she does suffer from a clearly foolish crush on Mr. John, she always has Dr. John to ridicule her for it, and we all know how a hopeless crush feels; the characters are so well drawn that we can empathize with their foibles rather than sneer. So in the end, if Dr. John was wrong, this book is absolutely right.

Nurse in Spain

By Diana Douglas, pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter, ©1975

Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Lovely young Fran Kelly had accepted a transfer to the American Army base at Coronado, hoping for an easy tour of duty and a  much-needed rest. Almost at once Spain began to work its magic. Perhaps it was the presence of handsome Dr. Des Walton which made the country seem so wonderful. Or was it Mario Vallejo, the landed aristocrat and famous matador who showed her the most fascinating places in town? But Des kept brooding over some secret in his past, and Mario was involved in activities Army intelligence frowned upon.  Confused by rumors of terror and violence, how could Fran choose between the two men? If her heart betrayed her, Fran would face a danger that could destroy her only chance for happiness ...

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“He should remember that he is a guest of Spain, not we of America.”

“They do not matter. They are tourists from the north who come here. German, Scandinavian, Dutch. Their own developers build for profit the concrete warrens they vacation in, and our government allows this because of the deutsche marks, the kroner, the guilders they spend here. Other than money, they bring nothing to Spain except the permissiveness of their own decaying society! They do not even bother to learn enough of our language to ask for their needs.”

REVIEW:

Lt. Frances Kelly is a surgical nurse who has just transferred to the US Army base in Coronado because “Spain was full of interesting places and people and things,” and besides, she’d been worked so hard in New Mexico she was about ready to drop. She is fluent in Spanish, and it goes without saying that she is a top-notch nurse. She has an excellent surgeon, Dr. Des Walton, to work with. He’s an emotionally wounded guy, scarred from Vietnam, where he had done an emergency splenectomy and nephrectomy on a good friend—only to find later that the patient had congenital absent kidney and so died in less than a week after his only kidney was removed. As Fran arrives, Des had just walked out of a similar operation, unable to go on, and gotten drunk. Fortunately the base commander, Major Bill Ryan, another surgeon, is forgiving, understanding Walton’s actions as the result of a neurosis, and doesn’t court-martial him; instead he pairs Fran with Des in the OR, thinking, “Des Walton was a man who needed a calm and reassuring girl just like her.”

Eventually, as you know it will, another identical case lands on Walton’s OR table with no other surgeons available. Walton is about to lose it when Fran calmly and reassuringly suggests that Walton make a midline incision and manually palpate for the good kidney before removing the bad one. It’s such a crazy idea, it just might work! Walton follows her suggestion and then, reassured of the second kidney, is able to complete the surgery. “It was you who gave me back my confidence,” Des tells her afterward. Another life saved! Now if only all war-related PTSD was so easily cured …

In the interim, Frances has gone to a bullfight and witnessed the most brilliant performance ever, by matador Mario Vallejo. She’d called, “Good luck!” to him before the match, shockingly—“norteamericanos do not usually do this,” she is told—and he’d sent her his cape to display during the fight. Major Joe Crane, a self-absorbed possessive ass she’s attended the fight with, tells her, ”You don’t know these people like I do. Vallejo wasn’t paying you any compliment when he gave you that thing. When they give any foreign woman a gift like that it’s because they want her. There’s no way they’d marry outside their own kind.” To her credit, Fran replies, “Really? So I’m flattered that he wants to go to bed with me! Thank you for explaining that, Joe.”

You will not be amazed to learn that Frances meets Matador Mario again in town, and he takes her to lunch, and out shopping, and to see flamenco danced for realz, by “a big woman. Even in her dress with its flashing skirt she looked far too heavy for a dancer. And she was no beauty now, though she might have been thirty years ago. Her features had grown too heavy, and the dark shadow of one of the faint moustaches Fran had noticed and disliked on older Spanish women at the corrida showed quite plainly on her upper lip.” But boy, can she dance! She is such an artist that people on the street, hearing the music inside the bar, which has been locked for this private performance, pound on the door, begging to be let in to watch. Matador Mario is a hero in Coronado, and Fran’s day with him is magical.  “It was like traveling around with one of the great American film stars at the height of his career. It was a thrill being with someone like that. It was just about the greatest thrill of her young life.” At the end of the day, when they are kissing passionately, “it occurred to Frances that she was in the process of being seduced by an expert. But that didn’t seem to matter …”

She keeps seeing him, much to the great consternation of Major Joe, who warns her to keep away from Matador Mario because “the name of the game is subversion!” Gasp! It seems that our matador muy suave is involved in a plot to overthrow the government and install a new king of Spain. Frances calls Mario to ask him about this and discovers that his home has been seized by the Guardia  Civil police force and that they are looking for Mario. Instantly she jumps into her car and speeds into town, warned only casually by the base guard to “watch it in town tonight. There’s rioting in town [with] Guardia Civil everywhere with submachine guns.” But have a good time, honey!

Indeed, arriving in town she finds several friends of Mario’s, including the flamenco dancer, have been shot dead. She avoids arrest by playing the dumb tourist, and finds Mario at the bullring with his pals. They jump into her car and flee the city, Mario curiously telling his chums, “If she should try to betray us, shoot her.” As the men are climbing out of the car to flee into the mountains on foot, Mario chooses this moment to propose: “Come to France with me, Fran. We will be married there in a little chapel we have on  Vallejo land. You will be the Countess Frances Vallejo y Carlos. And one day a distant relative of ours will rule all Spain.” Between the gunplay and the idea of being on the lam, she’s not exactly won over and decides, “That’s not for me.” She tells him she doesn’t really love him after all: “Fascination isn’t love. I’d never met anyone like you before. It was like meeting a famous star back home and being flattered and kissed because you admired him. And I did admire you. You were like a storybook lover. But that isn’t really love either, Mario.” So as he dashes into the mountains, Des Walton shows up, and she holds his hand—and tells him a half-truth about her day’s adventure. And that’s where the book ends.

This is actually one of the better Richard Wilkes-Hunter (aka Diana Douglas) books I’ve read. We know it’s him from the usual gratuitous reference to her “firm young body” in the shower, and only male VNRN writers overtly mention sex, as in, “I’m not accusing you of sleeping around with the guy,” or in the discussion of Spanish women as mistresses or whores. But apart from denigrating remarks about Spanish women, which reflects a sexism demonstrated equally toward American woman (as when Frances is told by Mario, “Politics in Spain were not for women”), I really didn’t find anything terribly racist in this book, unlike Flight Nurse, which has a lot of similarities to this book, like the matador who is an accomplished lover working to overthrow the Spanish government. Neither book allows the heroine to pair up with the Spaniard, but at least here Frances takes Mario seriously as a boyfriend, even if in the end he is disqualified. The story moves along well and Frances has no obvious foibles—she hates the domineering Joe Crane and makes it plain to him that she does, she takes risks, she speaks her mind, she’s a great nurse. There’s nothing really special about it, apart from the unusual ending (all of which I have not revealed here), but it is a worthwhile bit of armchair travel.