IF YOU LIKED THIS…
No Time for Romance by Lucilla Andrews
After reading the scenes in Atonement where the casualties from Dunkirk arrive at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, you might like to read the source that Ian McEwan relied on for their authenticity
Lucilla Andrews’ 1977 memoir about her nursing career during the Second World War became famous — even notorious — in 2006 when Ian McEwan was alleged to have plagiarised significant passages for his novel Atonement (2002). In what became a heated debate, Andrews and the merits of her book were largely ignored. She had died only weeks before the story broke and so was unable to speak for herself. But while the extent of McEwan’s borrowings and the adequacy of his acknowledgements were mulled over, No Time for Romance was curiously absent from the arguments.
The book’s title cannot have helped. It sounded perilously close to some kind of chick-lit —a genre that serious writers and their readers dismiss. And indeed, that title is a conscious reference to one of the most scoffed-at subgenres of light reading for women: the hospital romance. Lucilla Andrews made a substantial career out of writing about romantic relationships between nurses and doctors, with titles like The Quiet Wards (1956) and A Hospital Summer (1958). But the war did not stop or prevent such relationships. No Time for Romance focuses on the particular demands that wartime conditions imposed on medical staff, but it also makes plain that snatched and often tragically brief relationships were part of the story.
The thick of things
It was not love there was no time for, but writing. In 1940, at the age of 20, Andrews put aside her literary ambitions in order to join the Red Cross and ‘do her bit’ for the war effort in London. What became clear to her was that the more she learned and the more she absorbed the disciplines of the profession, the better equipped she would be to deal with the heightened tensions of wartime nursing. She applied for and was admitted to fulltime training in the nursing school established by the legendary Florence Nightingale at St Thomas’ Hospital. The hospital’s location on the South Bank, close to Parliament and the East End, made it highly vulnerable to German attack.
From the beginning she was in the thick of things, but despite the exhausting hours and the emotional onslaught of her work, she kept a journal throughout the war. Perhaps the habit of meticulous observation was ingrained by the regular log-book records she had to compile as part of her duties. Her accounts of the Dunkirk casualties are packed with detail:
The square was covered in stretchers, rows and rows of stretchers, loaded with men lying so still that at first we thought they were all dead. They were all covered with grey blankets and their faces were… greying-black and sort of slimy, but caked. (Ch. 4)
Later, she realises that the slime comes from the oil coating the sea they have all been rescued from. But military casualties were not her only patients:
Every wartime midwife and obstetrician I met agreed that nothing so swiftly induced a baby as the sound of a falling bomb… . Overhead a plane dived. The sticky black-haired object under my right hand jerked forward and grew bigger, and I thought I heard Mrs N scream, but was not sure, owing to the guns’ thunderous answer. (Ch. 5)
Professional respect
Later, she would quarry her journals in many of over 30 novels she wrote before publishing her memoir in 1977. Just as her nursing skills shaped her fiction, so her experience as a novelist helped to shape her memoir. Though her fictional writing is often both vivid and moving, her command of narrative form is shaky. But her novels are interesting, in the way that B-list fiction often expresses the characteristics of the age in which it was written more clearly than super-subtle literary art. If you want to know what everyday sexism was like in the 1950s, you could hardly do better than read The Print Petticoat (1954) — the title refers to the uniform of a highly-regarded teaching hospital.
Still, the nurses hold their own, and though there is no doubt about their rank within the medical hierarchies, their expertise, their professional ethics and the respect of their peers form the backbone of Andrews’ work. The fact that she was regularly recommended by the Nursing Times (the profession’s most widely read journal) suggests that nurses themselves have been pleased with how she represents them, and that her novels were not merely romantic fantasies. It is a curious feature of much light fiction aimed at women that it sets out to inform and educate its readers. The hospital romance is also one of the few genres to pay much attention to people — women or men — at their work.
It is not a genre that a serious novelist seems likely to turn to in search of historical evidence. Yet a writer of McEwan’s calibre is unlikely to have drawn from a light-weight or sentimental source. Measured by strictly literary criteria, No Time for Romance is a better-crafted book than most of Andrews’ fiction. Indeed, some passages are so good that it has proved hard to tell where her craft ends and Ian McEwan’s begins. Her descriptions of the Blitz recall The Night Watch, Sarah Water’s 2006 novel set in 1940s London:
The men worked carefully, in case a sudden sound… brought down a wall or roof on those undiscovered and still buried alive. The silence accentuated the sounds; the steady clink of rubble being moved by hand, the chorus of smoke-induced coughs, the slow footsteps on pavements and the wooden planks laid across some of the craters. (Ch. 6)
Questions of genre?
Why is it that nursing has not been well-represented in literary fiction, despite its birth-to-death drama and the symbolic and metaphoric potential it offers? The pre-Nightingale harridans Sarah Gamp and her partner Betsy Prig in Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) added extra terrors to the Victorian sickroom, while Catherine Barkley, the nurse in A Farewell to Arms (1929) is too much of a fantasy figure to survive: Hemingway had her die in childbirth.
What is also worth considering is the popularity of hospital soaps. What is the affinity between television and this genre? Why do relatively few films cover the same ground, even though hospitals surely offer as much possibility for tension and drama as any crime thriller. In literature, crime writing was once considered too popular to be worth critical attention. Now it is respectable enough for the A-level syllabus. Even so, who pays any attention to the tropes of Casualty or Call the Midwife?
Historical novels rely on historical sources. Books feed on books. Sometimes it can prove rewarding to discover what nourishes an act of imagination.