It’s unusual to come across a travel book that includes very
little travelling in it.Bedpans and Bobby Socks describes what happens when a group of
British nurses leave the austerity of post war Britain to work as nurses in the
United States. They buy an old car, a 1949 Ford V8, and set off on trips to
Niagara from their base in Cleveland. Once they get a taste for the road, they
decide to travel to the west coast and back, paying their way with stints by
working at hospitals along the route. Six of them plan to travel, in two
cars but – at the last minute – one decides to get married, so the remaining
five cram into one car and set off.
Their route takes them to Chicago, Denver, Salt Lake City and
San Francisco via a massive detour into Canada and along the Alaska Highway.
Then it’s a side journey to New Orleans, a trip to Mexico, and eventually back
to Cleveland via St Louis.
That’s an impressive road trip by any standards. Anyone who’s
hired a roomy Avis car and followed a Rand McNally route across the States will
know that, after a few weeks of Interstates and Highways, you’ve seen enough
for one year. What must it have been like for five girls squashed into a beaten
up car with a tendency to break down?
We find out very little about the road itself. Yellowstone is
dismissed in a sentence, An ice field in the Canadian Rockies creaks and sighs
like a door that needed oiling. Arizona is a ‘straight desert road’, Texas
‘nothing but gravel and sand’. Louisiana does rather better, with four
sentences. So what actually happens? The girls make friends along the way, with
flurries of romance, and they get jobs. Most of it is pretty trivial stuff.
But therein lies the book’s attraction. If you’ve had enough of
‘hilarious’ adventures, where every minor scrape and incident is magnified into
high drama, as though the author were a worthy successor to Eric Newby, then
this understated book is well worth a look. It makes easy bedtime reading, and
it really is good fun.
