‘An enormous success, isn’t it?’ he greeted his two friends. ‘Meet the strike committee – Harold there, my left-hand man, and Faith my right-hand one. Without her,’ he explained, slipping an arm tenderly round her shoulders, ‘I should never have found this new determination to stand up to the people who’ve been pushing me about for years.’
‘The strike is one hundred per cent solid,’ said Harold Sapworth. ‘At this moment of time, there’s no possibility of a sell out, none whatever. The lads regret the inconvenience to the public, but someone’s got to get hurt. We’re ready at any time to meet with anyone who’s going to talk sense.’
‘Oh, Harold, do try to stop talking like a trade union leader on television,’ Faith told him wearily.
‘Power!’ Pip slapped fist into palm. ‘I have rediscovered the most powerful weapon of the century – organized workers. We are more powerful than any Army,’ he declaimed, arms wide apart, turning to the rest of the room. ‘An Army can only shoot us, thus getting a terribly bad Press all round the world. Moreover, Brothers, willing workers follow their leaders more blindly than any troops the most inspiring of military commanders.’ The audience on the benches went on reading and playing cards, giving Tony and Hugo the impression of having heard it all before. ‘Modern civilization has played into our hands by its very complexity. Even the means of securing such basic necessities of life as light and heat, food and water, have become unbelievably intricate since the days of candles and logs, cabbage-patches and wells. A few strategically placed workers can bring any community to its knees in a matter of days, even hours.’
Pip stopped, chin tipped towards the ceiling.
‘Pip, don’t you think you should have a word with Dr Bonaccord?’ suggested Hugo seriously. ‘It’s his afternoon for behaviour therapy.’
‘On the contrary, I have discovered my normal self. All my life I’ve been inhibited, frustrated, unaggressive. Faith has been my psychiatrist.’ He embraced her again. ‘She rubbed my lamp and the genie came out.’
‘How vulgar,’ murmured Hugo.
‘And this gift for oratory. I never knew I possessed it. It’s quite frightening how I can sway my audiences. I suppose Trotsky would have found the same, if he’d started addressing a nurses’ prizegiving.’
‘It’s wonderful how Pip’s become famous overnight from Land’s End to John o’ Groats,’ said Faith admiringly.
‘He could have achieved that by chucking a bomb at the Queen,’ remarked Tony.
‘Do I detect a certain hostility?’ asked Pip, sounding hurt.
‘You do. We think this strike is bloody cruel. It’s against sick people.’
Pip looked aghast. ‘There’s nothing in the slightest cruel about us. Is there, Faith? We’re only striking against the consultant capitalists. If sick people happen to be involved, it means that our industrial action must be settled all the sooner. A blitzkrieg does far less damage and kills far fewer people than something like the Somme.’
‘Look, Pip –’ Tony had reeled back, hand to forehead. ‘Come up to the bar and have a drink.’
‘A porter?’ Pip grinned, flapping his brown coat with both hands. ‘I won’t embarrass you.’
‘You became a porter for a joke. Right? To get your own back on the dean. Right? Well, the joke’s over.’
‘The dean threw me out.’
‘The dean’s thrown hundreds of students out. But they didn’t take their revenge by wrecking the work and reputation of the hospital.’
‘With which we are getting just the teeniest, weeniest bit fed up, dear boy,’ Hugo told him.
Pip stuck both fists deep into his brown coat pockets. ‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ he admitted solemnly. ‘Am I really damaging the hospital’s reputation?’ They both nodded forcefully. ‘I shouldn’t care for that. After all, I’m part of St Swithin’s, as much as ever.’
‘That’s more the way to talk,’ said Tony warmly. ‘And I’m sure you don’t really want to antagonize old pals like us, who’ve helped you over the years. We’d even have got you through your finals, if only you’d poked the other eye.’
‘That’s true,’ Pip agreed. ‘You two had rather dropped out of my mind, with all the excitement.’
‘So why not say, “It’s been a big giggle, a great gas, but enough’s enough”?’
‘Who put you two up to this?’ Faith asked crisply, snapping shut her notebook. ‘My father, I suppose?’
She stared at Tony so knowingly, he could only reply evasively, ‘We agreed to do it in Pip’s own interest.’
‘You didn’t. My father mentioned to me over coffee this morning something about appealing to your better nature. Knowing my father and his students better than he thinks,’ she continued evenly, ‘I realized that he really meant he was going to bribe you. How much?’
‘Is this true?’ demanded Pip.
‘Of course he didn’t bribe us,’ Tony replied indignantly. ‘He merely agreed to help both of us to practise in Las Vegas.’
‘Where everyone develops tennis-elbow from shaking hands with one-armed bandits,’ Hugo added.
‘You were bribed,’ said Pip severely.
‘Not really,’ Hugo told him languidly. ‘We’re emigrating anyway.’
‘You’re not,’ said Pip. ‘You’ve just given me an absolutely brilliant idea. That’ll be the next plank in my platform. It’s barefaced robbery, newly qualified doctors walking off with an education obtained at the expense of the British taxpayer. I bet even ladies in Tory hats would agree with that. After all, it’s mostly their taxes. Once we stop medical emigration, all our problems will be over. We can reduce doctors’ salaries, finish private practice and at last have the National Health Service adequately financed and fully manned. The doctors will lose their single weapon in the fight. So simple.’
‘How are you going to stop us going?’ Tony asked defiantly.
‘Easy. They manage it in Russia. As we’re an island, there’s no need for minefields. Medically qualified Channel swimmers I think would be a negligible problem.’
‘You are mad,’ he asserted. ‘That’s just not on. This isn’t the Soviet Union. It isn’t even Yugoslavia. It’s Britain. And you can’t interfere with the liberty of the individual.’
‘Oh, individual liberty,’ Pip said impatiently. ‘That’s got a cash value, like everything else. What sort of individual freedom can the workers of Britain afford? Not much. Think of all the places the capitalists can walk into without a second thought – hotels, restaurants, the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, the pavilion at Lord’s, first-class carriages on the trains. I’m amazed the railwaymen’s union haven’t put a stop to that one. The workers are permanently barred from these places, because they haven’t the money in their pockets, that’s all.’
‘We only ask for a fair and just settlement,’ put in Harold Sapworth, who seemed not to be following the conversation.
Pip slapped fist into palm again. ‘Faith, take a letter to the Secretary of State for Social Services, Alexander Fleming House, Elephant and Castle, SE1. Harold can take it across on the bus. I suppose everyone leaves there promptly at five o’clock, the Minister included. Dear Minister…’ Faith flipped open her notebook. ‘Say that in the name of ACHE, no British doctors must be allowed to leave the country from one minute after midnight. If our demand is not met instantly, we shan’t call off the strike.’
‘“…the strike in the Bertram Bunn Wing”,’ Faith supplied, writing in her book.
‘No, the strike paralysing St Swithin’s Hospital itself, from apex to boiler-house, from antenatal clinic to post-mortem room.’
‘But we’re not on strike in St Swithin’s.’
‘We are now.’ He leapt on a bench. ‘Brothers! Forward with the browncoats! Everybody out.’
15
‘Brother browncoats! Fellow soldiers, in the van of mankind’s ever-onward march against pestilence, privation and perishing.’
It was two hours later. Pip stood on a bench
in the basement, his own brown coat flapping, arms upraised. Beside him on the concrete floor was Faith, holding her open notebook. He stared down at a hundred-odd faces, which stared back at him with a mass expression of mixed interest, scepticism and bafflement.
‘During industrial peace, there’s nothing so becomes a worker as modest stillness and humility,’ Pip went on. ‘But when the blast, “On strike!” blows in our ears, what do we do then?’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply. ‘I’ll tell you. We imitate the action of the tiger. We stiffen the sinews, we summon up the blood. We disguise our normally fair nature with hard-favour’d rage. We lend our eye a terrible aspect.’
He stopped again, to judge the effect. The man in front’s mouth had dropped open.
‘Today, Brothers, I have taken a grave decision. You have all taken a grave decision. I made it on your behalf. And on behalf of the decent, working men and women, confined in their council houses up and down the country, who deserve a fair crack of the whip from the very section of the community expected to serve their most intimate needs. To wit, the doctors. I cannot say where our brave action will lead. Perhaps to the triumph of workers’ natural virtues over capitalists’ natural vice. I set no limits to my ambitions, which of course are also yours. Today St Swithin’s, I say. Tomorrow the world! But I must ask you to be patient for an hour or two, while I explain exactly the issues which have incited you – through me – to choose this agonizingly serious option.’
The audience rose as a man and started filing through the door.
‘Really, they could have been a bit more courteous,’ Pip complained crossly to Faith, watching the last pair of brown-coated shoulders leave. ‘After all, I am their democratically elected leader. They might possibly have found the rest of my speech a bit boring, but they could surely have sat through it with a fixed gaze thinking about football and sex and things, like I did often enough during your father’s lectures in St Swithin’s.’
‘Poor Pip.’ She stroked the back of his neck sympathetically, as they sat together on the hard bench. ‘You put such desperately hard work into it since lunch.’
‘I suppose some of that material about the differences in financing the current and capital programmes of the Health Service might have been a little beyond a few of them,’ he admitted. ‘But one can only try.’ He looked up as Harold Sapworth strolled in, without his brown coat. ‘My audience have walked out on me,’ Pip complained.
‘Go on?’ Harold glanced at the wall clock. ‘No wonder. It’s just on three. Tea break.’
‘But surely you can’t take tea breaks when you’re on strike anyway?’ Pip said irritably.
‘They still feel like a cuppa, I suppose. Besides, you sort of get in the habit. I goes on taking tea breaks when I’m lying on the beach on holiday.’
‘Did you deliver the letter safely?’ Faith asked.
‘Easy. I got a forty-five bus. Funny, never been down the Elephant for years. Cousin of mine lives round there, in the New Kent Road. Or rather, he did. He shifted a year or two back to the Isle of Wight.’
‘Did you hand it personally to the Minister?’ Pip demanded severely.
‘Well, not actual. Bloke with a flat hat and brass buttons downstairs said he’d take it up.’
‘I suppose we have cast it into the usual channels, like bread upon the waters,’ Pip reflected.
‘And what do you suppose we shall find after several days?’ Faith asked. ‘Perhaps some extremely uneatable soggy slices?’
He looked at her. ‘You’re sounding a little doubtful.’
‘I am. To be honest, I feel we’ve taken off a jumbo jet without knowing how to land it. You’re not angry, are you, love?’ she added quickly.
Pip said nothing for a moment, just nodding, elbows on knees, slowly rubbing his hands together.
‘On the contrary, I feel rather like that, too. I think I could quite justly compare myself at the moment with Garibaldi, landing in Sicily at the head of his thousand red-shirted heroes. But he knew where to go. I don’t. I can start a strike, that’s obvious. Perhaps any fool can do that. But I’ve not the slightest idea how to run one. It’s much more complicated than simply cutting off the delivery of minced chicken and bunches of flowers to the Bertie Bunn. All sorts of tricky problems must be sorted out. St Swithin’s has obviously got to go on treating emergency cases – that seems traditional with hospital strikers, right across the world. So we’ve got to keep going the hot water, central sterile supply, fire precautions, and so on. Even the canteen. If they couldn’t have their tea break, my members might not be one hundred per cent solidly enthusiastic.’
‘Harold, you must have experienced a dozen strikes,’ Faith suggested, as the porter was pulling on the first brown coat in sight.
‘I’ve been through a few, that’s straight. When I was sweeper in a car plant, we was called out so often I reckon some of the lads began to forget which end you put the engine in. They used to call us the Dagenham Kamikazes. That’s a Jap car, ain’t it?’
‘What’s the first principle in running a strike, then?’ Pip asked him.
‘Discipline,’ Harold replied firmly, doing up the buttons. ‘Keeping the lads in line. Arthur Pince was as useless at that as a bull’s lit. Mind, Arthur was ginger.’
Pip frowned. ‘I thought he was a small dark man?’
‘Ginger beer. Queer,’ Harold explained.
‘I suppose discipline in the ranks depends on the use of my personality,’ Pip decided thoughtfully.
‘Use that if you like, mate. Personally, all the shop stewards what I know prefer a bit of the old –’ He made his boxing motion. ‘The reliable aggro.’
‘1 deplore the use of violence in any context.’
‘Have it your own way,’ Harold told him amiably. ‘But if any of the lads gets less than wildly fanatic, then you’ve got to give them a bit of encouragement, by which I mean the flick knife in the car tyres, or maybe calling with a meat axe to do up their front room.’
‘I think violence is perfectly justified,’ Faith agreed with him. ‘After all, in an army at war, any soldier who fails in his duty is shot on the spot.’
‘Shooting’s too good for some of them cowboys.’ Harold nodded gloomily in the direction of the door. ‘They want a bit of the old electricity where it tickles most.’
‘Harold, I leave you in charge of morale,’ Pip told him. ‘Use whatever means you think best to maintain it, but stop short of murder.’ He looked up in surprise as Forfar McBridie strode in, wearing Highland dress with bagpipes under his arm.
‘I want to ask a straight question,’ McBridie began. ‘What’s the strike got to offer Scotland?’
‘I hadn’t really given that aspect much thought,’ replied Pip, annoyed at the intrusion.
‘Well you’d better,’ the Scotsman told him bluntly. ‘I’m from Clydeside. That’s where the real revolution’s going to spring from. A great red river, rolling down the M6 to London. By the time we’ve finished, we’ll make Culloden look like a pop festival.’ He threw his head back, gazing starrily at the concrete ceiling. ‘God save King Jamie the Eighth! Up from the Clydebank shipyards to Holyrood House. Scotland will be the richest nation in the world, because we control its two most precious fluids – oil and whisky.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, there can be a King Clive in Cardiff and a King Arthur in Tintagel,’ Pip told him shortly. ‘And the Scots pound may be worth so much you can come down whenever you feel like it to buy up the Crown jewels, or spew diced carrots over Piccadilly, like after football matches –’
‘I’ve a mind to slice your nose off,’ declared Forfar McBridie angrily, reaching for his skean-dhu.
‘Harold, administer the disciplinary treatment,’ Pip ordered. ‘Listen, Mr McBridie. This strike is on behalf of decent men and women throughout the country, not just bits of it. Who are you?’ he demanded abruptly of a thin, wispy lady who had just ventured through the door, wearing a long fringed dress and a yellowish straw hat wh
ich appeared to have been mislaid for some time under other heavy articles.
‘Mr Cripps, is it?’ she asked throatily. ‘They said I should find you here. I saw you in the papers. What are you going to do about the doggies?’
Pip scratched his stiff fair hair. ‘Doggies are nothing to do with us. This strike is directed against doctors, not vets.’
‘Oh, but they are to do with you,’ the lady continued earnestly. ‘You’re the man, Mr Cripps, who can do something about our poor doggies. You must stop them smoking.’
‘You are referring, I suppose,’ said Faith, ‘to dogs in experiments, given tobacco smoke to find the cause of cancer?’
‘Exactly, Miss. It’s wicked. Unspeakably wicked. The poor doggies. It’s bad enough, people who encourage children to smoke. But doggies!’
‘I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you,’ Faith continued coolly, ‘that the experiments will probably save thousands of human lives?’
‘I’m not interested in that. It’s cruel to the doggies. It’s not that they even like smoking. Whoever saw a doggie smoke of its own free will? You must put a stop to it, Mr Cripps,’ she instructed Pip firmly. ‘Don’t call off your strike until every doggie in the country has been released by these mad scientists to breathe God’s fresh air. And baboons –’
‘Stop!’ Pip jumped up, hands over ears. ‘I am running, with extreme difficulty, a strike at St Swithin’s for one specific purpose. And everyone seems intent on climbing on the bandwagon for their own selfish reasons. Yet if I lose sight of my purpose – which is simply to stop doctors ratting on their fellow countrymen – I’m lost. That’s exactly how Julius Caesar came to grief. And Napoleon. Trying to fight too many people at once. Harold, deal with this lady. Perhaps you could organize some sort of industrial action at the Battersea Dogs’ Home?’
Harold Sapworth sucked the tip of his thumb. ‘Funny, but I was just going to ask you a favour, too. That cousin what I just mentioned, down in the New Kent Road. It’s not that he wanted to go to the Isle of Wight, actual. He’s doing a bit of bird there. Eight years, with good behaviour. Mind, he was innocent. I know the bloke it was, what carved up the postmistress. But if you could keep up the strike until justice was done –’
Doctor On The Job Page 12
