A Family Affair

by Janet Tanner

  She had specialised in sciences and gone on to read organic chemistry, physics and botany at university, sharing most of the course subjects with the engineering students. Then it was medical school for three years – one of only five women in a year’s intake of thirty – after which she had emerged fully qualified to be let loose on an unsuspecting world, as Jack, her father, had proudly put it.

  And he wasn’t so far out, Helen sometimes thought. Though for the first six months in her hospital post the senior medical staff had been there to keep an eye on her, nominally at least, the pressures had been such that she had been expected to do anything and everything from casualty to anaesthetics, from delivering babies to performing operations. ‘The Appendicitis Queen’they had called her, so many angry appendixes had she whipped out. It had been a baptism of fire. She had worked twenty-four-hour duties, snatching an hour’s sleep when she could. There had been no antibiotics to speak of – though M & Bs had become available towards the end of the war, the new wonder drug penicillin was extremely scarce and was to be used only in very special cases, usually serving soldiers or pilots. And all this for the princely sum of ten shillings a week for which she knew she must be grateful – housemen in London were not paid at all for the first six months, their board and lodging their only reward.

  Five years she had worked at the city hospital, two years longer than she had intended. Her carefully mapped out career plan – three years university, three years medical school, three years hospital experience and then a move to general practice had gone awry for reasons she had never explained to her parents, Jack and Grace, when they teased her about it, and even pointed her in the direction of vacancies for assistants that arose from time to time in the villages of South Somerset.

  ‘There’s a lovely little post going over in Dulverton,’ Grace had said to her once. ‘I’m sure you’d stand a good chance of it, being a local girl.’

  But Helen had fobbed her off. She was going to stay in Bristol for a while longer. For the time being she was happy there, she told her mother. The real reason she kept to herself.

  Now, however, she had finally decided the time had come to make a move. And Hillsbridge was ideal. An area she knew and loved, but not quite the backward step she felt going home would be. Far enough from Bristol to put some distance between her and Guy, close enough to have some contact with him if circumstances altered.

  But circumstances weren’t going to alter, Helen thought, and tried to close her mind to the regrets that nagged like an aching tooth. Only she could change the pattern of her life and the best way she could do that was to make a clean break, return to her original career plan and look for a position in general practice. The Hillsbridge vacancy had come up at just the right moment – almost as if it had been meant to be. A fresh start.

  As she stood on Amy and Ralph’s drive looking across the valley that had given the house its name, Helen’s heart lifted again. A fresh start. In every sense of the phrase, that was what she intended it to be.

  Next morning Helen drove over to the big house on South Hill where Dr Hobbs lived and from which he ran his practice. Though she was not due to start work until the following week, she was anxious to begin familiarising herself with her new surroundings and moving in the bits and pieces she had brought with her.

  She parked her Morris Minor on the gravel turnaround at the top of the steep drive and went round to the side door Dr Hobbs had shown her when she had come for her interview. The passageway beyond it had been converted into a waiting room and Helen was surprised to see that it was already quite full. Surgery didn’t begin until nine, and as yet it was barely a quarter to. Presumably these people had all come early with a view to being first in the queue and someone had taken pity on them waiting outside in the chill October air and opened the door for them to come in.

  Eight or ten pairs of eyes trained curiously on her and Helen felt a rosy glow of embarrassment.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said to no-one in particular.

  In the moment’s awkward silence as she picked her way between the two rows of chairs which faced one another across the passageway, her embarrassment grew. Then someone muttered: ‘Morning,’ and she turned her head gratefully to see a wizened little man with a red face and rheumy blue eyes, wearing a tweed sports coat and muffler. She smiled briefly but there was no answering smile, just those rheumy eyes appraising her, summing her up. She turned away again, disconcerted, and hurried to the end of the corridor as fast as she safely could without tripping over feet or shopping bags.

  The two consulting rooms were at the end of the corridor, the small one, which was to be hers, to the left, and the larger one where Dr Hobbs received his patients, straight ahead. Dr Hobbs had shown her the room when she had attended for her interview; at the time it had still been the domain of Dr Stephens, and cluttered to the ceiling with his things. Presumably he would have moved them by now to the new surgery in Tiledown.

  Until his retirement Dr Vezey had run the Tiledown surgery in tandem with the Hillsbridge one, seeing patients in a room in his house there four mornings a week. But with his departure, changes had been made. The practice had taken the lease on a former small shop and converted it into a surgery for which Dr Stephens was to be responsible, leaving the vacancy for an assistant at the Hillsbridge end. The Tiledown surgery would in future be open for five mornings instead of four, with an hour on Saturdays for emergency cases. At her interview, Dr Hobbs had explained the new set-up and the thinking behind it – with a sprawling new estate of council houses going up in Tiledown, there was plenty of opportunity for expanding the practice and Dr Stephens was just the man to do it.

  Helen was less sure on that score. Dr Vezey had been popular with the villagers, a bluff doctor of the old school and very much a local man who could converse with patients in their own language. His accent was unmistakably local and when he talked to the old miners and their families it thickened into a dialect that was practically unintelligible to anyone not born in the valley.

  Paul Stephens, on the other hand, was a Tynesider, quite young and, from what she had seen of him, dour and uncommunicative. Throughout their introductory meeting he had said scarcely two words and she had wondered anxiously if he had his reservations about taking her on. It might be, of course, that he was silent by nature, but if she had found his manner slightly off-putting, then so might his patients. Almost certainly he wouldn’t be the sort to suffer fools – or malingerers – gladly.

  That wasn’t her problem, though. Along with Reuben Hobbs, Paul Stephens was a partner, and as such, her employer. He and Dr Hobbs would make the decisions as to the way the practice was run and all she had to do was go along with them. At least Paul Stephens hadn’t vetoed Reuben Hobbs’decision to take her on, which, given the continuing discrimination against women as medical practitioners, coupled with a north-countryman’s inbred attitude to women in general, he might well have done!

  The door to Dr Hobbs’ room was ajar; Helen knocked on it and looked in.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Helen! I wasn’t expecting to see you!’ He looked up from sorting the post, a dapper man in his middle fifties with a neat pepper-and-salt beard and a pair of gold-rimmed half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose.

  ‘I’m in Hillsbridge now, so I thought I could at least begin sorting myself out.’ Helen still felt vaguely uncomfortable, an intruder in this brand-new world.

  ‘Good idea. I can’t spare any time myself at the moment. Why don’t you go through and have a cup of coffee with Brenda?’

  ‘Oh no – I don’t want to make a nuisance of myself.’ Brenda was Reuben Hobbs’wife, and from what Helen could make out, a very busy lady, not only serving on every imaginable committee but also a magistrate on the local bench. ‘If I could just get my surgery in some sort of order, at least I’d feel I’d made a bit of headway.’

  He looked faintly surprised. ‘Well, yes, by all means. You know where it is, don’t you?
’

  She nodded, feeling more like a fish out of water with every passing second and he looked at her over the top of his spectacles.

  ‘Sorry not to be able to spend more time with you, but I’ve got a busy day ahead. It’ll be good to have you on board, I can tell you. Since Paul’s taken over Purldown I’ve been rushed off m’feet.’

  ‘I could help out if you like.’ Helen offered tentatively.

  ‘No – no. You’re not due in harness’til next week.’ On board – in harness – Reuben was obviously a man who mixed his metaphors! ‘We’ll break you in soon enough.’

  ‘But if you’re having to cope with Paul’s patients as well as your own.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ve coped before and I’ll cope again. There’s life in the old dog yet!’ There was something a little smug in the way he said it and for the first time it occurred to Helen to wonder if Reuben Hobbs might be just a little too fond of himself.

  ‘Right – I’ll be in my room if you need me.’

  She left him and went next door to what had been Paul Stephens’ surgery.

  It was a small room, perhaps only half the size of the surgery she had just left, and uncompromisingly drab. A typical man’s room, Helen decided, with its coarse brown hessian carpet and mustard-coloured walls. Like the carpet, the paintwork was also brown, and the windows were hung with a heavy, striped brocade in a shade of gold which clashed oddly with the mustard walls. The desk was huge and heavy, stained with ink and decorated with white circles where coffee cups had stood year after year, the circles overlapping and entwining to make a haphazard pattern; the small sink, spotlessly clean but streaked beneath the taps with greenish rivulets; above it, a brown-painted cupboard clung to the wall. A tall metal filing cabinet blocked out a good deal of light; Helen decided it would have to be moved. She had a thing about light; dimness depressed her, inhibited her thought patterns. There must be a better place for it, surely!

  For half an hour she pushed and pulled the pieces of furniture around the little room looking for the optimum solution. At last she was satisfied with the result; her desk at right angles to the window to catch the light whilst also allowing her a view across a corner of lawn to a lilac tree which hopefully would erupt into bloom next spring, the patients’chair to one side so that she could swivel to talk to them without the vast expanse of desk between, and the offending filing cabinet tucked into a corner. She peeked out of the door; the hallway was still full of patients. She could hardly weave her way between them to her car and back again laden with her own bits and pieces. Instead she decided to take a look through the files of patients’records and familiarise herself with the names of at least some of those she would be treating.

  The medical records were stored in sturdy brown manilla envelopes, covered with an almost illegible scribble of dates and headings and stuffed with wads of notes. Some of the names leaped out at her as familiar and characteristically local – Latcham, Clements, Brixey, Button – others were strange, exotic even – Polish, she thought. She had heard there had been an influx of Poles into the coal mines when the war had ended; here was proof of it. She pulled one out at random – Okonski, HJ – and was surprised to find it belonged not to a miner but a woman who had previously been called Heather Jean Simmons. Well, of course, it was only to be expected that some of these men would marry local girls.

  She dipped into the records – quite thin by most standards. Heather Okonski was obviously one of the healthier of her new patients. Heather had given birth to a child in February of the previous year, but before that there were no records of any visits, apart from a bout of bronchitis and some treatment for a verruca. And nothing whatever about her childhood, nothing earlier than 1943, when she had apparently been treated for anaemia with doses of iron. Strange. Her curiosity aroused, Helen looked to see if any other members of the Simmons family were registered with her. They were. Gladys and Walter, Caroline and Joseph, David and Jennifer – obviously three generations of the same family. But there was a clue there; Caroline, Joseph, David and Jennifer had a previous address in Bristol – they had moved to Hillsbridge in the war, to escape the bombing, in all likelihood. And the chances were that Heather’s records had been lost in the move, maybe even destroyed by one of the bombing raids. Oh well, it scarcely seemed to matter, since Heather did not appear to suffer much from anything in particular.

  For another half-hour or so Helen browsed through the files. Twice Dr Hobbs popped in to take a pack of notes, not stopping to explain who the patients were or why he was seeing them, and Helen felt vaguely affronted. He might at least have asked her to sit in! The third time it happened she suggested it and after a moment’s perplexed hesitation, Reuben Hobbs agreed.

  Helen followed him into his consulting room – so large and sunny by comparison with her own. An elderly woman, rather overweight, wearing a tweed coat and headscarf, was sitting in the patients’chair, which was stacked around with shopping.

  ‘Mrs Uphill, may I introduce Dr Hall?’ Dr Hobbs smiled at her graciously. ‘Dr Hall will be working with us from next Monday, replacing Dr Stephens here in Hillsbridge. She’ll be looking after you in future – with your permission, of course.’

  ‘Oh!’ Mrs Uphill’s expression was both startled and suspicious.

  ‘So perhaps you wouldn’t mind if she sat in on our consultation today?’

  ‘No – no …’ Mrs Uphill sounded thoroughly disconcerted.

  ‘So – what can we do for you?’

  ‘It’s me bunions, Doctor. They’re giving me gyp.’

  ‘Let’s have a look, shall we?’

  Mrs Uphill somehow managed to remove her stockings without exposing so much as an inch of bare flesh above the knee and stretched out her feet for inspection. Her toes were swollen and deformed, the big toes almost at right angles to her feet.

  ‘This is going to mean an operation,’ Dr Hobbs told her.

  She looked at him in horror.

  ‘An operation? You mean go into hospital?’

  ‘It’s the only thing that will give you any lasting relief.’

  ‘Oh – I don’t want to go into hospital! I hate the places …’

  ‘Worth it, though, surely, if you can walk about without being in pain? I’ll get a letter off today, see when they can fit you in.’

  ‘If you think it’s really necessary, Doctor.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘There’s one other thing, Doctor.’ She glanced furtively at Helen, looked away again quickly. ‘What you said about me having to change doctors. If Dr Stephens isn’t going to be here any more, I’d rather come on your list.’

  For a moment Helen was too stunned to feel the pain of rejection.

  ‘I thought you said I could choose,’ Mrs Uphill said, a little belligerently.

  ‘Well, yes – but …’

  ‘Then I’d rather come with you, Doctor. And I’m sure my Frank would say the same. If it’s all the same with you. I mean, you can’t be too careful when it’s your health you’re talking about.’ She glanced at Helen again, and all her doubts were there in her face. A new doctor. A young doctor. A young woman doctor.

  ‘My list is very full, Mrs Uphill,’ Dr Hobbs said warningly. ‘And Dr Hall is very experienced, up to date with all the latest developments.’

  ‘Just the same, Doctor. If it’s all the same with you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Helen,’ Reuben Hobbs said as Mrs Uphill left the surgery. ‘I did my best.’

  ‘Yes, of course. It’s understandable, I suppose.’ But she didn’t understand. She felt inordinately hurt. In the hospital no-one had given a second thought to her age or sex. They’d simply been grateful that someone was there, treating them.

  ‘I only hope the rest of Paul’s patients don’t feel the same way or there won’t be a great deal of point having you here!’ Reuben Hobbs gave a small tired shake of his head. ‘People round here can be so old-fashioned in their thinking.’

  ‘I hope so too!’ Helen s
aid emphatically. But as she returned to her new surgery she felt totally crushed. Supposing no-one was prepared to give her a chance? What then?

  She flicked through a few more files but her heart was no longer in it. She sat down in the swivel chair, swinging it from side to side, then standing purposefully. Patients waiting in the hall or not, she was going to bring in some of her things. They’d have to get used to the idea she was a part of the practice sooner or later – it might as well be sooner.

  Her hand was practically on the door knob when it opened. Take by surprise she took a step backwards and collided with the newly arranged patients’chair.

  ‘Oh, sorry – I didn’t know there was anyone here!’

  Paul Stephens. He came into the surgery, a tall, well-built man in his middle thirties with hair that was already receding at the temples and a square-jawed face. His eyes flipped past her, taking in the changes she had made to the surgery and frowning slightly.

  ‘What in the world … ?’

  ‘I moved things around,’ Helen said.

  ‘I can see that. What for?’ He looked genuinely puzzled; Helen, already feeling hurt and vulnerable, bristled.

  ‘I thought it was an improvement.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He didn’t say what he was obviously thinking – that there had been nothing wrong with the layout of the surgery before – but his disapproval communicated itself to her anyway.

  ‘I have to do things my way,’ she said defensively. ‘After all, I’m the one who’s going to be working here.’

  ‘Yes, but not until next week.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said sharply. ‘Have I inconvenienced you?’

  ‘Actually – yes. I only had a few patients at Tiledown this morning and I’ve come back to help Reuben out with the surgery here. From the crowds still out there, it looks as if he could do with some assistance.’