One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens

If you read Monica and think Charles, you’re right - she’s his great-granddaughter.

Fascinating war-time details and social commentary.

It’s the start of the Second World War and women have gone from being surplus to being urgently needed everywhere at once. ‘One had got to be something; that was obvious,’ Monica begins. Certain that she’ll never get her hips into a military uniform, she decides to join the trenches of the Queen Adelaide Hospital and become a nurse.

One Pair of Feet is based on Monica’s year of training. A year of never-ending toil, but also of sneaky cigarettes in the bathroom, night-time escapes to go dancing, secret swigs of grog with the cheekier patients, and remarkable grit in the face of exhaustion.

Written in a casual, gossipy style, One Pair of Feet is an enjoyable trip into the past. Monica’s voice is young and slightly saucy, and often very funny.

“Escape. So many nurses marry the first men who ask them, because they have had neither the time nor the opportunity to meet anyone else or to realise that life holds other alternatives besides hospital and marriage. They are thrilled to escape from a monotony which they know only too well into something of which they know nothing and therefore expect a great deal.” p.220

One Pair of Feet reads like a journal: a year of encounters with patients and doctors and formidable matrons, and I found this wearying towards the end. I much preferred her later book My Turn to Make the Tea, which is based on her newspaper days and has a stronger story shape. That said, the war-time details and social commentary in One Pair of Feet are fascinating, and Monica has a charming voice.

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My Turn to Make the Tea by Monica Dickens