DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE

by Richard Gordon

  As I had to take all my meals out I saw little of the other lodgers except when they passed on the stairs and said 'Excuse me' in bad English. In the room next to mine was a stout young blonde, but she lived very quietly and never disturbed anyone. One morning she was found strangled in Hyde Park, and after that I thought I ought to move again.

  For the following twelve months I lived in a succession of boarding-houses. They were all the same. They had a curly hat-stand in the hall, a red stair-carpet worn grey in the middle, and a suspicious landlady. By the time I reached the end of the anatomy course I was tired of the smell of floor-polish, damp umbrellas, and frying; when I was offered a share in a flat in Bayswater I was so delighted I packed up and moved without even waiting to work out the week's rent.

  The share was awarded to me through the good offices of Tony Benskin, who lived there with four other students. There was John Bottle, the man who liked dancing and dogs; Mike Kelly, now Captain of the first fifteen; and a youth known about the hospital as Moronic Maurice, who had surprised the teaching staff and himself by finally passing his qualifying exams, and had gone off to practise the art, to the publicly expressed horror of the Dean, as house-surgeon to a small hospital in the country.

  These four were really sub-tenants. The flat was leased by a final-year student, a pleasant fellow called Archie Broome, who had lived there during most of his time at St. Swithin's and took his friends as lodgers to help out with the rent.

  'We're pretty free and easy there,' he explained to me in the King George. 'I hope you're not terribly particular about the time you have your meals or go to bed and that sort of thing?'

  As I had found unpunctuality for meals was taken by landladies as a personal outrage and sitting up to midnight regarded as sinful, I told my prospective landlord warmly I didn't give a damn for such formalities.

  'That's good,' Archie said. 'We usually kick in together for the groceries and beer and so forth, if that's all right with you. Here's the key, and you can move in when you like.'

  I shifted the following afternoon. The flat was in a large, old, grimy block just by the Park, up a dark flight of stairs. I dropped my suitcases on the landing outside the door and fumbled for the key. While I was doing so the door opened.

  Standing in the hallway was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. She was a tall blonde with a figure like a model in a dress-shop window. She wore slacks and a sweater, which sharply defined her slight curves. Taking her cigarette out with a long graceful hand, she said with great friendliness, 'Hello, Richard. Come on in and make yourself at home.'

  'I'm afraid…' I began. 'I mean, I was looking for a fellow called Broome, you know…'

  'That's right,' she said. She had a slight, attractive, and unplaceable accent. 'The boys are all at the hospital at.the moment, but just come in anyway. Would you like a cup of tea? My name's Vera.'

  'How do you do,' I said politely. I picked up my cases and entered hesitantly. After conditioning myself to living with four coarse men being greeted by a delicate girl was puzzling.

  'This is the sitting-room,' Vera continued. 'How about the tea?'

  'No thanks. Very kind of you, but I've had some.'

  'That's good, because I've got to go and change anyway. If you do want anything the kitchen's through there. Just look round as you please.'

  The girl slipped through a door leading off the hall, leaving me in the centre of the sitting-room feeling like a participant in the opening scene of a bedroom farce. I had learnt since being at St. Swithin's that the best way to treat anything unusual was to ignore it, so I directed attention towards my new home.

  The furniture in the sitting-room had an original touch which reflected the profession of the occupants. Like Axel Munthe's room in the Hфtel de l'Avenir, there were books everywhere. A row of them stood along the mantelpiece, from which the names of distinguished consultants could stare at the students in gold lettering from red and black bindings, rebuking their loose activities like a row of church elders. In the window an uneven line of thick volumes ran along the ledge like battlements. There were books on the floor, dropped carelessly behind chairs or lost between pieces of furniture and the wall. They were scattered over the table like litter on a beach, mixed up with jam-pots, pieces of bread, tobacco, newspapers, and beer bottles. There was Price's famous Medicine, four inches thick, with two thousand pages that told you about everything from measles to leprosy, from sore throat to heart failure (it was also useful for propping open windows in summer and supporting a reading lamp); there were books on diabetes, appendicitis, bacteria, and bones; books full of photographs of skin diseases, rashes, or broken limbs; heavy dull books on pathology from Scotland, with no more than a bare picture or two of a growth or an ulcer to interrupt their closely-packed print; books on obstetrics with line drawings of nonchalant babies being recovered from disquieting predicaments; and scattered among them all like their young were the thin little brown volumes of the Students Aid series-an invaluable collection of synopses that students fall back on, like compressed emergency rations, when faced with imminent defeat by the examiners. All this knowledge-all this work, experience and advice from so many experts-all the medical instruction in the world was concentrated into a few square feet. It was ours for the taking, if only we had ever sat down and started reading.

  A microscope stood in the corner, conveniently tilted to take the eye, with an open wooden box of glass slides beside it. The articulated bones of a hand lay on the table, mixed up with everything else. From the top of a cupboard in one corner a skull grinned down and provided a stand for a green hat with white cord round it that Benskin was sometimes moved to wear.

  As well as this academic litter the room contained pieces of sports kit-rugger boots, woollen socks, a couple of cricket bats, and a dart-board on a splintered plywood backing. The occupants' leisure activities were also represented by a collection of signs, notices, and minor pieces of civic decoration that had from time to time been immorally carried off as trophies. It was a bad habit of St. Swithin's rugby team when playing away from home to pick up souvenirs of their visit before leaving, and in the course of seasons these had grown to a sizeable collection. There was a thirty-miles-limit sign in the corner and an orange beacon next to the skull on the cupboard. From a hook in the wall hung a policeman's helmet with the badge of the Cornwall Constabulary that had been carried off in a burst of vandalism at the end of a successful tour of the West Country. Below it a framed notice declared that the passing of betting slips was illegal, and on the opposite wall a board announcing the opening and closing times of the park. I discovered a little later that the bathroom door bore a metal notice saying 'Nurses Only,' and inside, at the appropriate place, was a small printed request not to use the adjacent apparatus while the train was standing at a station.

  My inspection was interrupted by the reappearance of Vera. She was in her stockinged feet and wore only a skirt and a brassiere which she was holding on with her hands.

  'Richard, please do my bra up for me,' she asked. 'This damn fastener's gone wrong.'

  She turned her slender shoulders.

  'Thanks so much,' she said casually. She strolled back into her room and shut the door. I shrugged my shoulders and decided the only thing was to wait until the male members of the household arrived and guardedly discover Vera's precise function.

  Vera, it turned out, was Archie's mistress. She was an Austrian girl, with an ensnaring personality and the ability to conduct herself towards her four sub-tenants with such graceful, impartial sisterliness that none of us would have thought of making advances towards her more than we could have contemplated committing incest. Besides, she did all the cooking and most of the little feminine odd jobs about the flat. This was appreciated as highly as her decorative qualities, for our own abilities in the kitchen did not go beyond baked beans and we were able to mend socks only by running a surgical purse-string suture round the hole and pulling it tight. Floor-scrubbing,
fire-making, and the coarser domestic tasks were done by the men on a rough rota; but it was Vera who thought of buying a new shade for the lamp, ordering the coal, or telling one of us it was time to change his collar or have his hair cut.

  Vera unfortunately had a bad habit of periodically upsetting the smooth running of the place by having sudden fierce quarrels with Archie which always ended by her packing up and leaving. Where she went to in these absences none of us knew. She had no relatives and no money, and Archie was so horrified at his own suspicion of how she maintained herself while she was away that he never dared to ask her outright. The flat would become untidy and unscrubbed. The boiler would go out for lack of coal, and the five of us would nightly sit down to a progressively repellent supper of orange-coloured beans. In a week or so she would reappear, as beautiful, as graceful, as sisterly as ever, throw herself into an orgy of reconciliation with Archie, and continue her household duties as if nothing had happened.

  I floated contentedly into the drift of life in the flat. My companions treated the time-table of domestic life with contempt. They took meals when they were hungry, and if they felt like it sat up all night. Archie lived with Vera in a bed-sitting-room, and as they were an uninhibited couple this afforded them sufficient privacy. His guests had the run of the rest of the place. We all shared the bathroom and, as we had to put shillings in the geyser, quite often the bath water as well. It was in connection with the bathroom that Vera became her most sisterly. She would walk in and start cleaning her teeth unruffled by a hairy male in the bath attempting to retain his modesty with the loofah. Although we were all far too gentlemanly knowingly to intrude while she was in the bath herself she was never worried by anyone bursting in. 'After all,' she would say flatteringly, 'you are all doctors.'

  I felt I was living the true liberal life and developing my intellect, which were excuses for not settling down to the more concrete problems set by my text-books. The thought of the anatomy exam nevertheless hung over me uncomfortably, like the prospect of the eventual bill to a guest enjoying himself at a good hotel. One evening we discovered with a shock that the contest was only a month away, which gave Benskin and myself no alternative than cramming. We opened our text-books and drew a deep breath of knowledge, which we hoped we could hold until the examination was over. It was the worst time we could have chosen to start work. Mike Kelly had decided to learn the clarinet. Archie's landlord was trying to raise the rent, and Vera had disappeared again. On this occasion she never returned, and by the time the exam was held I was as miserable as her lover.

  5

  When I heard I had passed the anatomy examination I felt like a man who had received an unexpected legacy. I had cut down my work preparing for the test by refusing to study at all topics that had been asked in the past few papers, in the belief that examiners, like lightning, never strike twice in the same place. I scraped into the pass list in company with Tony Benskin, John Bottle, Sprogget, Evans, and Harris. Grimsdyke also succeeded, and confessed himself amazed how near he must have come on previous occasions to the disaster of getting through.

  I was elated: now I was released from the dull tyranny of the study of the dead in the dissecting room to the investigation of the dying in the hospital wards. I could start to perform like a real doctor; I could buy myself a stethoscope.

  I strolled into a surgical instrument-maker's in Devonshire Street to select one, like a boy buying his first pipe. With the grave and critical air of a consultant cardiologist, I chose an impressive instrument with thick rubber tubes, a chest-piece as big as a jam-pot cover, and a few gadgets I could twiddle while delivering my professional opinions.

  The choice was an important one, because in hospital a stethoscope is as undisputable a sign of seniority as long trousers in a prep. school. It was not thought good taste to exhibit the instrument too blatantly, but a discreet length of tubing poking out of the coat, like a well-set pocket handkerchief, explained to your colleagues you had quitted the anatomy rooms for ever. With a bit of luck you might even be taken by the public for a real doctor. To the layman the stethoscope is the doctor's magic wand; if he sees a man with one round his neck he assumes he is a physician as readily as he takes a fellow in a clerical collar for a parson. These are a pair of conditioned reflexes that have from time to time been used for extracting small sums of money from well-meaning citizens by sufficiently respectable-looking confidence tricksters.

  The next morning I walked proudly through the gates of St. Swithin's itself instead of going into the narrow door of the medical school. My first call was the student's lobby, to find which consultant I was appointed to.

  Teaching of the clinical subjects-medicine, surgery, gynaecology, and midwifery-is carried on by a watered-down continuation of the old apprenticeship system. The year is divided into three-monthly terms, each of which the student spends attached to a different consultant. The doctor is the Chief, who usually takes on six or seven pupils known collectively as his firm, and dignified in the physician's wards with the title of medical clerks.

  Each of the clerks is given four or five beds to look after. He is obliged to examine the patients admitted to them, write their notes, and scrape up an account of the case on the consultant's weekly list. Teaching is done at the bedside either by the Chief himself, his junior consultant, the registrar, or the houseman, and the students are expected to educate themselves in the intervals by nosing round the ward for instructive signs and symptoms and doing the unending medical odd jobs.

  I began clinical work on a medical firm under the instruction of Dr. Malcolm Maxworth, M.D., F.R.C.P. Dr. Maxworth was one of the hospital's oldest physicians and had charge of male and female wards-Patience and Virtue. As he appeared only once a week the new students had to start by attending a small class given by the houseman on examination of the patient. We had at the time no more idea of the correct method for this than water-divining, and a Boy Scout with a first-aid certificate would have been more use in the wards than any of us.

  The wards of St. Swithin's, which were contained in two large red-brick blocks, were dull, hostile galleries made up of a succession of irritating corners in which the nurses dusters flapped for ever in defiance. They were repeatedly being redecorated in an attempt to give them an air of modernity and cheerfulness, but the original design of the corridor-like rooms made fresh paint as ineffective as make-up on a crone. There was always a plan on foot to pull them down and rebuild, but the execution of this seemed to meet with baffling postponements. Meanwhile the staff took pride that they trod the same boards in the exercise of their art as their professional forebears, and the nurses spent a great deal of time they should have given to the patients sweeping the floors.

  I walked across the court and up the dark stone stairs to Virtue ward. Tony Benskin, Grimsdyke, and Evans were already standing outside the heavy glass doors, dangling their stethoscopes and trying not to appear a little in awe of their surroundings, like Oxford freshmen or new prisoners at Dartmoor. We greeted each other in low, church tones.

  The houseman came jumping down the stairs three at a time. We stiffened ourselves, like sentries coming to attention. He shot straight past and through the ward door, without appearing to notice us. A moment later his head popped out again.

  'Are you relatives waiting to see someone?' he asked. He caught sight of our proud stethoscopes. 'Oh, you're the new clerks, I suppose. Damn it! I'm far too busy to show you anything.'

  He scratched his curly head. He was a pleasant-looking fellow, about three years older than ourselves.

  'Look,' he went on cheerfully. 'Get a sheet of instructions from Sister Virtue and see how you get on examining a few patients. I've got a lumbar puncture and a couple of aspirations to do, but I'll give you a hand when I can.'

  He disappeared again. The small glow of self-importance over our promotion was dimmed. Glancing nervously at one another we went through the doors into the ward.

  The houseman had already disappeared b
ehind some screens round a bed at the far end. One or two nurses were busy attending to the patients. The four of us stood by the door for ten minutes. No one took the slightest notice.

  From a small door on one side of the ward the Sister appeared. She immediately bore down on our quartet.

  'Get out!' she hissed savagely.

  I had never seen a sister close to before. This unexpected proximity had the effect of being in a rowing-boat under the bows of the _Queen' Mary._

  Sister Virtue was a fine body of a woman. She was about six feet tall, her figure was as burly as a policeman's, and she advanced on her adversaries with two belligerent breasts. Even her broad bottom as she passed looked as formidable as the stern of a battleship. Her dress was speckless blue and her apron as crisp as a piece of paper. She had a face like the side of a quarry and wore a fine grey moustache.

  My immediate impulse was to turn and run screaming down the stairs. Indeed, all of us jumped back anxiously, as if afraid she might bite. But we stood our ground.

  'We're the new clerks,' I mumbled in a dry voice.

  She looked at us as if we were four unpleasant objects some patient had just brought up.

  'I won't have any nonsense here,' she said abruptly. 'None at all.'

  We nodded our heads briskly, indicating that nonsense of any sort was not contemplated.

  'You're not to come in the ward after twelve o'clock, in the afternoons, or after six in the evening. Understand?'

  Her eyes cauterized each of us in turn.

  'And you're not to interfere with the nurses.'

  Grimsdyke raised an eyebrow.