One Pair of Feet

I have posted previously on Monica Dicken’s writing. I read One Pair of Feet on my flight over to Perth. It is a five hour flight and taking the flight, after having worked all day, all I wanted was something light to read. Monica Dickens was the perfect prescription.

One Pair of Feet is about her time as a nurse at the Queen Adelaide hospital during WW2. It is a lot of fun. Dickens’ was a brilliant character writer – they really come alive. My favourite description is of Siddons, a Gastric patient on one of Dickens’s wards.

“He was short and stocky, with hair like a carpet brush, and all the hospital dressing-gowns were too long for him. He flip-flapped about in a pair of carpet slippers, pouncing on any job that was going and looking after the other patients like a mother. The men called him ‘Auntie’. He would do anything for anybody, but he kept them in order. He had been there so long that he regarded the ward as his own, and was determined to see that it was properly conducted”.

Well worth hunting out a copy!