I was never the sort of girl who wanted to be a nurse and nor, on the evidence of One Pair of Feet, was Monica Dickens. Her account of training as a probationer at ‘Queen Adelaide, Redwood’ (in fact, the King Edward VII in Windsor) was published in 1942 to immediate acclaim. Immediate, but certainly not universal. While literary critics greeted the book with delight, the nursing journals were another matter. One sniffed that Miss Dickens was seemingly not acquainted with the ‘wholesomely-humoured’ women who nursed with ‘balanced minds and intelligence’. The Nursing Times, clearly misreading Dickens’s wry tone, castigated her for choosing a hospital to train in on the basis that the bath water was reputedly always hot. What seemed to annoy them, more than the revelations about the appalling working conditions, the petty discipline and the intricacies of the sluice room, was that Nurse Dickens had dared to be funny about such a deadly serious subject.
It was this iconoclastic spirit which endeared the book to me when I first read it at the age of 13. I had recently been admitted to hospital where I would end up staying for several months and, like the obsessive bookworm I already was, I had drawn up a reading list. Most of the titles on it turned out to be ponderously well-meaning. There was the Sue Barton, Student Nurse series which, for the time it was writ ten (roughly contemporaneous with One Pair of Feet), was probably progressive but in fact struck me as ‘sloppy’. Sue Barton’s on-off relationship with her boyfriend Dr Bill Barry, a handsome surgeon, bored me (I was more into horses), and her determination to find the good in everyone made me want to give her a good hard slap.<
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Subscribe now or Sign inI was never the sort of girl who wanted to be a nurse and nor, on the evidence of One Pair of Feet, was Monica Dickens. Her account of training as a probationer at ‘Queen Adelaide, Redwood’ (in fact, the King Edward VII in Windsor) was published in 1942 to immediate acclaim. Immediate, but certainly not universal. While literary critics greeted the book with delight, the nursing journals were another matter. One sniffed that Miss Dickens was seemingly not acquainted with the ‘wholesomely-humoured’ women who nursed with ‘balanced minds and intelligence’. The Nursing Times, clearly misreading Dickens’s wry tone, castigated her for choosing a hospital to train in on the basis that the bath water was reputedly always hot. What seemed to annoy them, more than the revelations about the appalling working conditions, the petty discipline and the intricacies of the sluice room, was that Nurse Dickens had dared to be funny about such a deadly serious subject.
It was this iconoclastic spirit which endeared the book to me when I first read it at the age of 13. I had recently been admitted to hospital where I would end up staying for several months and, like the obsessive bookworm I already was, I had drawn up a reading list. Most of the titles on it turned out to be ponderously well-meaning. There was the Sue Barton, Student Nurse series which, for the time it was writ ten (roughly contemporaneous with One Pair of Feet), was probably progressive but in fact struck me as ‘sloppy’. Sue Barton’s on-off relationship with her boyfriend Dr Bill Barry, a handsome surgeon, bored me (I was more into horses), and her determination to find the good in everyone made me want to give her a good hard slap. Monica Dickens, on the other hand, burst into my new hospital world determined to find everyone (including herself) slightly ridiculous. Like me, she had formed impressions of nursing via the highly distorting lens of popular culture. In my case this meant those Carry On films in which Hattie Jacques plays a terrifying matron and Barbara Windsor her buxom underling. Monica Dickens’s point of reference was Madeleine Carroll in Vigil in the Night, a 1940 melo drama. Loving the way that Carroll’s nursing cap made it look as though she was wearing ‘a pure white halo’, Dickens imagines herself gliding swiftly about with oxygen cylinders and, if necessary, giving her life for a patient. (It says something about the way we construct narratives from faulty memory that Carroll did not, in fact, appear in the film. Dickens was probably getting her muddled with Carole Lombard.) Both Dickens and I were, inevitably, disappointed by the reality of the nurses we encountered in our new lives. I certainly didn’t spot any pert saucepots who resembled Barbara Windsor. Rather, they were tired-looking women in unflattering nylon uniforms, their ankles puffy from all that standing. Nor did these harassed shift- workers, many of them from overseas, seem remotely bothered about giving the glad eye to any handsome housemen. They were too busy emptying the bedpans. Dickens feels the disappointment even more, dissecting her new colleagues’ failure to live up to her expectations with the sharpness of a scalpel. There is Nurse Richardson who ‘has a healthy crop of black hair on her upper lip’, and Sister Ramsbotham whose false teeth have been known to fly across the ward when she is telling someone off. Even Nurse Jobling, who only appears once, is introduced as ‘wide hipped’. The patients are even more off-putting, including Mrs Davenport who ‘looked like one of those potatoes that people photograph and send to the papers because it bears a curious resemblance to a human face’. It is at this point that you remember that Monica Dickens was the great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens, that past master of the physical grotesque; though nothing, not even Nurse Richardson’s ’tache or Sister Ramsbotham’s teeth, comes close to Sairey Gamp, the drunken and slovenly nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit. I didn’t notice at the time, but Monica Dickens’s harping on about other people’s physical appearance, especially their weight, is relent less and unsettling. A quick delve into her personal history reveals that she had been a noticeably plump child and remained so until her late teens when she ‘came out’ as a débutante. Only after she was put on thyroid medication did the weight fall off. So delighted was Dickens by her new slimmer self that she dipped into what sounds like full-blown anorexia and bulimia for a while, and she certainly remained very slender for the rest of her long life. One can only speculate that these early experiences set her up for a lifetime of hyper-vigilance about her own and other people’s bodies. I don’t think that is the whole story, though. I was – still am – neither thin nor fat, but I remember growing up over half a century after Dickens in a culture that was still obsessed with women’s appearance, especially their figures. My mother and grandmother routinely picked apart everyone they encountered, and I absorbed that harsh critical voice, turning it on myself in an act of self- policing. It makes me sad, but it also makes me wonder too about the damage done to my teenage psyche. I was weighed each morning while in hospital and I remember the thrill of seeing how much weight I was losing. If being ill meant being slender, then it was worth the time spent in this frightening limbo with its piercing shrieks, unspeakable smells and inedible food. There were other, healthier, lessons that I took from One Pair of Feet. Even at 13 I knew I wanted to be a writer, and Monica Dickens was the kind of writer that I wanted to be. I’m not talking here about her choice of genres: as well as three other books of memoir, Dickens wrote excellent novels and hugely popular children’s books. No, what I envied, indeed still envy, was her remarkable economy of style. It is what she leaves out, rather than what she puts in, that makes her effects so bright and brilliant. Take the opening of One Pair of Feet where Dickens is considering the different kinds of war work open to her. A job in the armed forces initially appealed but ‘I didn’t think my hips would stand the cut of the skirt, and I wasn’t too sure about my legs in wool stockings.’ A desk job was out, again because of her hips – ‘sitting is so spreading’. Another possible posting meant relocating to Liverpool, and ‘I’d been there once.’ Likewise, ‘Redwood’ where the fictional St Adelaide’s is situated, had always been a place that one passed through on the way to somewhere else. One only stopped there to buy a paper, or a genuine Redwood pie, or because Aunt Ethel was car-sick, or perhaps to lunch at the Rowan Arms in case there might not be anywhere farther on. Packed into these two sentences is a pin-sharp account of Monica Dickens’s world. It is one that takes civic engagement for granted (hence the stopping to buy a paper), is discerning about food (the Redwood pie is a centuries-old delicacy), accepts that annoying elderly aunts must be accommodated (no one wants Aunt Ethel to throw up over them) and that, finally, assumes a level of material comfort (lunch is taken in a coaching inn rather than out of a Tupperware box in a layby). The use of free indirect speech allows Dickens to convey her origins brilliantly without resorting to masses of exposition or a vocabulary that strains to sound literary or clever. It is a masterclass in economic storytelling. This doesn’t mean, though, that One Pair of Feet doesn’t contain passages of profound emotion. There is the terrible time when ‘Nurse Diggins’ (no one ever manages to get her name right) returns to her quarters after a jolly night out only to be recalled urgently to the ward which is overwhelmed with casualties following an explosion in a factory. Men are brought in dead or dying. Or the time when a young female patient is admitted bleeding heavily, accompanied by her mother who holds in a bowl the foetus that she has just miscarried, following a backstreet abortion. Or the terrifying moment when ‘Maisie’, in shock from her recent road traffic accident, hallucinates that she is covered in her dead fiancé’s blood (he is in fact alive). None of these scenes would land as powerfully were it not for their sharp contrast with Dickens’s previously jaunty tone. Reading One Pair of Feet again has been a revelatory experience. I had forgotten how funny Monica Dickens can be, but also how perceptive at conveying the truths of life, death and that in-between state of serious illness, without sounding either glib or gloomy. Above all, it took me back to that time decades ago when I was a sad, bookish child, marooned in a large teaching hospital many miles from home, who vowed to herself that, when she eventually got out, she would write herself into a new kind of life.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Kathryn Hughes 2026
About the contributor
Kathryn Hughes did indeed end up with the career she was hoping for when she first read One Pair of Feet. She is the author of five books, some of them quite funny.
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