Dibs

You’ve always wondered whom to blame for nurse romances. Well, we’ve got the culprit right here: Lucilla Matthew Andrews Crichton, who using several different bylines including Lucilla Andrews, Joanna Marcus and Diana Gordon wrote 35 novels such as Quiet Wards, The Young Doctors Downstairs, Hospital Summer, Flowers From the Doctor, Healing Time, Nurse Errant, Ring O’ Roses, The Weekend in the Garden, Edinburgh Excursion and The Crystal Gull. But she died last week, and thus you aren’t allowed to say anything bad about her. She was a military nurse herself and joined the British Red Cross at the outbreak of WWII. She wrote much about nursing in London during the Blitz — Ian McEwan drew on Andrews’ work in his Booker-shortlisted novel Atonement. According to the Guardian, her doctor-husband was a drug addict and Matthews had to support their daughter: “She had torn up and burnt her first novel on the night before her wedding – ‘it was dull pompous rubbish and I knew it’ – but she was determined to establish herself,” so she tried again. “The first version of The Print Petticoat, based on her experiences as a wartime nurse, had been rejected by six publishers, one of whom suggested that it was too harrowing a reminder of the grim years of the second world war. She rewrote the book with a lighter touch and introduced a romantic love affair, and it was published in 1954. It was the year her husband died… She wrote vividly about nursing the injured from the Battle of Britain, delivering babies while bombs fell… When her nurses home was hit by a V2 bomb in 1945, she grabbed two things from her room: her eyelash curlers and her file of notes for the books she wanted to write.” Andrews “was fond of both whisky and cigarettes (having been encouraged to take up smoking by her doctor husband) and was famed for her elegance and enthusiasm for hats.”