A Nurse’s Tale
Set in 1935-1948, and 2018-19, A Nurse’s Tale showcases the real-life Nigerian Princess Adenrele (Ade) Ademola, a maternity nurse at Guy’s and Queen Charlotte hospitals during WWII. Her diaries pass to her great-great-niece, Yemi, a graphic artist tasked with a project to research one hundred Nigerian women of influence, of whom her great-great-aunt is one. At a UK NHS conference, she meets Dr. Mike, whose grandfather turns out to be the biracial child of Ade’s Caucasian nursing friend, Violet. The three musketeers, as they call themselves, Ade, Violet and Elvina, work closely as maternity nurses during the war and are the best of friends, but when Violet becomes pregnant with a Black pilot’s child, her family disowns her. After she dies in childbirth, they refuse to recognise the child. Dr. Mike is eager to discover anything about his white great-grandmother, Violet, and his Black great-grandfather, Lester, in honour of his now-deceased grandfather, the abandoned biracial orphan.
There are parts of this story that I enjoyed; Elvina’s feisty personality matched with her Jamaican patois is very endearing. Unfortunately, the novel suffers from unedited errors, sentence repetition, whole paragraph repetition, and phrases like ‘furthering (further) dampening’. September 1939 to December 1942 is spoken of as two years; Yemi’s great-great-aunt (her grandmother’s aunt) seems interchangeable with her great-aunt, including in the publisher blurb; Mike’s great-grandmother is once his great-aunt, and his grandfather is sometimes his great-grandfather. This jolted me out of the story more than once. Ade’s story feels rather dry when told in diary form and didn’t leave me with a lasting image of the times, although the feel is more personal after 1943 as war fatigue creeps in. For me, Mike and Yemi’s romance felt one-dimensional, but I could easily relate to Ade’s and Elvina’s pining for warmer climes, colour, and spicy food, whilst stuck in drizzly England during the war years.
