Doctor On The Ball

by Richard Gordon

‘You’re the one who must toil for our living, my contribution to society is simply arranging the patients’ flowers, so of course I’ll go wherever you wish, darling,’ she said.

  Her tone was of Joan of Arc asking if they wanted a match.

  Midsummer maddeningly revives the crammed waiting rooms of bleak bronchitic midwinter. The practice provisions itself with prescriptions for its holidays, or seeks safeguards against such renowned perils abroad as diarrhoea, typhoid, malaria, rabies and pregnancy. During a busy evening surgery, Mr Oldfield of the Gas Board sat down and silently stared at me.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked briskly.

  ‘It’s not my trouble, doctor.’

  ‘Then whose?’

  He gazed into the corner beyond my left shoulder. ‘Our son Roger. He’s ten.’

  ‘Well? What?’

  He gazed into the corner beyond my right shoulder.

  The Chestertonian grocer, apron peak buttoned on chest, rubbing his hands and inquiring, ‘What’s the next article?’ from ladies seated on bentwood cane-bottomed chairs amid hempen cornucopias of sugar, salt, rice and split peas, lies extinct under a stratum of supermarkets.

  The Wellsian draper, with pretty jumble of haberdashery, deep secretive drawers of combinations and bloomers, cash in little wooden pots whizzing across the ceiling like driven grouse, has been ploughed into the broad acres of chain-store counters.

  The Dickensian pawnbroker’s brass balls enjoy in memoriam the credit card.

  The ruthless growth of population – and its wages – has dehumanized the petty transactions of everyday life.

  The GP’s surgery is likewise accused of becoming as impersonal as a cashpoint.

  The A J Cronin doctor had time to chat, but fewer patients and even fewer remedies. I can cure with chemicals. I am far more valuable to my patients healing them with a scribbled prescription, than sitting impotently holding their hands and discussing the peculiarities of their relatives.

  But those like Mr Oldfield demand duteous forbearance, to seek some truth unspoken through fear, embarrassment or ignorance.

  I prompted, ‘Fits? Nits? Squits? Be frank,’ I urged. ‘We doctors have heard it all before.’

  ‘It’s Swiss Army penknives.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Roger’s mad keen for one.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that. Wish I had one myself. Full of useful gadgets for taking stones out of chamois’ hooves.’

  ‘But I am concerned he wants to cut my whatsits off. What you doctors call the reproductive genitalia.’

  I inquired, ‘On what grounds do you suspect your little one will creep up on you – possibly when you are trimming your toenails after a bath, or perhaps bending to lift spuds in the garden, or simply leaning to adjust your set – and convert you into an instant countertenor?’

  ‘I read it in a book.’

  ‘Which book?’ I asked shortly.

  He drew a long breath. ‘Though I am in charge of the gas meters of the entire county, I have enjoyed little of further education. It was straight from school to gas-fitting. Gas has been my life. Thus I am always trying to improve myself, doctor. I send for books – trial order, free approval, if not completely satisfied I will return the magnificent volume within ten days and will owe nothing, plus free gifts. After Christmas I learned the World of Art. Now I am into psychology.’

  He fidgeted with his Gas Board tie. He was neat, with big gold-rimmed glasses, fair, balding and shy.

  ‘This Freud, doctor, he says all sons are itching to do it on their fathers, then go and, you know, he naughty with Mum. It’s a complex, isn’t it?’

  ‘Look–’ I clasped my bald head in my hands. ‘This is all in the mind. Obviously, it doesn’t actually happen in families.’

  ‘How do we know, doctor?’ he asked darkly.

  ‘Well, it does rather strike me as the sort of story which might get into the newspapers.’

  ‘Then if it never happens, why did Freud think it all up?’

  ‘Good question. Its symbolism. Imagery. If someone tells his girlfriend, You look so delicious I could eat you, he doesn’t really mean he’d like her fricasseed with chips. If in a moment of irritation with a bus conductor you tell him to stuff his bus, you are not suggesting an interesting anatomical demonstration.’

  He objected, ‘It happened to this Oedipus.’

  I mused, ‘Oedipus! Son of the King of Thebes, who left him on a mountain with a spike through his feet. A fatal case of neonatal hypothermia, but for some passing shepherds. When he grew up, he unknowingly killed Dad after a row about right of way at a crossroads – odd, isn’t it, they were as quarrelsome in traffic even then? He disinfested the neighbourhood of a monster which was making a frightful nuisance of itself, so they gave him the kingdom and the king’s widow as bride. Who was of course Mother. The oracles had been speaking about little else for years. When the couple found out the truth they were so upset she hanged herself and he gouged his eyes out. It was a drama by Sophocles, but Noël Coward would have written it as a rather trying social predicament.’

  Mr Oldfield persisted, ‘If it’s only a play like The Mousetrap, why does Freud so go on about it?’

  ‘Another good question. The infant first loves his dear old mum – the titties, you know. Dad materializes later. Instant rivalry. The lad feels guilty. The Oedipus complex is Freud’s basic family situation, though I fancy the worst that came of it is men marrying women like their mothers.’

  I stopped. The classical had distracted me from the clinical. ‘Buy young Roger a Swiss Army knife by all means,’ I advised, ushering him out. ‘He will doubtless use it for some perfectly wholesome purpose, like carving up the furniture. I assure you there is absolutely no need to go about like the Man in the Iron Mask, testicularily speaking.’

  The next patients were Mr and Mrs Cuthbertson. They sat down and silently stared at me.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ I asked briskly.

  ‘It’s not our trouble, doctor,’ said Mr Cuthbertson.

  ‘Then whose?’

  ‘Our son Cuthbert. He’s twelve.’

  ‘Don’t tell me! You’re scared he’s going to castrate you and get into bed with Mum.’

  ‘Doctor!’ they cried.

  They were globular, well washed, well laundered, dressed with decent drabness. ‘He’s playing truant,’ explained Mr Cuthbertson.

  ‘Dreadfully sorry. I had in mind the Oedipus complex. There’s a lot of it about this time of the year. Lot of truancy, too,’ I consoled them. ‘Who wants to sit in a stuffy room learning algebra with the buttercups out and the swallows aswoop? In which school is he so conspicuous by his absence?’

  ‘Balmoral House.’

  I was puzzled. Truancy – now tarted up as school refusal, the way the physical education supervisor is really the gym mistress – usually occurred in families where the grove of Academe was regarded as less relevant to daily life than the bus shelter. Balmoral House was the boys’ equivalent of St Ursula’s, where the randy Watsons sent their daughter so bubbling with girlish glee for hockey and the pill. The fees were as straws to the entrepreneurial Watsons’ backs. Mr Cuthbertson was an unimportant official in the Churchford Borough Treasurer’s Department. His back had a painfully short breaking point for straws.

  The Cuthbertsons’ lives were ruthlessly pared to the comfortless bone by the fiercest British social ambition. Cuthbert would float out of Balmoral House and find himself among the middle classes as Moses among the bulrushes.

  Their ungrateful pride and joy was delivered daily but regularly made his escape, despite the Colditz point of view permeating the authorities. I inquired how he occupied himself when AWOL. ‘Vandalism? Glue-sniffing? Pushing buttons on panda crossings and grinning infuriatingly at the stopped traffic?’

  ‘Oh, nothing like that, doctor.’ Mrs Cuthbertson looked horrified again.

  ‘He sits on public benches,’ said Mr Cuthbertson.

  ‘Reading,’ added Mrs
Cuthbertson.

  I asked with curiosity, ‘Could I see your alfresco bookworm?’

  She opened the consulting-room door, called ‘Cuthbert!’ and produced a small, pale, tidy child.

  ‘So you’re bored with school?’ I greeted him amiably.

  He replied, ‘Positive.’

  ‘I’m often dreadfully bored with medicine. But we must stick to our allotted jobs or it will be the end of civilization as we know it, which will probably be more fun.’

  He replied, ‘Negative.’

  I asked, ‘Reading anything interesting at the moment?’

  ‘Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. But only because I’m interested in his opinions on Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic.’

  ‘We have a problem,’ I said.

  He said, ‘Positive.’

  An idea struck me, as vividly appropriate as Sir John Millais’ about the boyhood of Raleigh.

  ‘Why not buy one of these home computer things?’ I suggested to the Cuthbertsons. ‘It’ll absorb all young Cuthbert’s mathematical energy, like a punchball if he were the sporty sort. After all, they cost no more than the set of toy trains which I used to buy my own children. Perhaps Balmoral House might contribute?’ I urged. ‘Surely the headmaster must see that he nurtures a budding Euclid?’

  Cuthbert snorted contemptuously. ‘Old Wartnose doesn’t know enough maths to perm his pools.’

  The Cuthbertsons hesitated but agreed, I felt because they suspected that a household without a computer is now regarded by the middle class as the equivalent of one which keeps the coal in the bath.

  I drove to the golf club reflecting on a neat display of pastoral medicine. I had resolved two startlingly different family problems. It is unbelievable the nonsensical situations that between four walls become as steamed up as scraps of stew in a pressure cooker.

  Leaning against the bar was Ollie Scuttle, consultant psychiatrist at the General. Psychiatrists are as well known inside the profession as out of it to vary from tolerable weirdos to outright nutters, but Ollie was so totally unintellectual he could be taken for a surgeon. I recounted the case of Oldfield Rex.

  Ollie groaned. He was a big, gingery, rough-skinned man in a shaggy suit. ‘Freud has much to answer for. Do you realize, before he set up couch, sex was for men an activity as normal as ferreting, racing whippets or playing dominoes. For women, as everyday as doing the washing and pickling onions. What’s it now? A horizontal religion.’

  ‘Mind, Freud did for dreams what Walt Disney did for mice,’ I suggested sportingly.

  Ollie said witheringly, ‘Dreams are only to stop the long night being so boring. Look how tetchy people get, having the telly on the blink for one evening.’

  Ollie did not seem a Freud fan. I confessed, ‘I certainly feel dreadfully guilty whenever I dream of anything sticking out – the garden rake, the contents of the toolbox, my prescribing ballpoint. According to Freud, they all represent my plonker.’

  ‘Yes, and dream of anything caving in, from the Cheddar Gorge to doughnuts, and you’ve really got in mind the gynaecologist’s meal ticket,’ Ollie agreed sombrely. ‘You know why Freud camps out on God’s grave? Because however dishonest, immoral, perverted, overbearing, unloving, selfish, ungrateful and generally impossible we are, it’s the effect of the subconscious. Freud’s made it no more our own fault than catching a dose of flu.’

  Sipping his gin and tonic, Ollie added magisterially, ‘Some men destroy their reputations with a book. Others with a sentence. I quote Freud in 1909: “I dislike the faint mental obfuscation that even a slight drink induces.” What right has such a sobersides to sit in the stalls and criticize the human comedy?’

  ‘Why, Richard–’ came a soft voice.

  It was Dr Quaggy, with his friendly air of a vulture inquiring about the health of its prospective dinner.

  ‘Not had your holiday yet?’ he asked solicitously. ‘Ah, the pains of being Churchford’s favourite GP! You certainly look as though you deserve a really good break.’

  ‘End of the month I’m off trout fishing at Llawrfaennenogstumdwy.’ I clarified, ‘It’s in Wales.’

  ‘How delightful. I often wish I’d taken it up. Such an ideal occupation for retirement.’

  I informed him crisply, ‘Mindless activity is enjoyable only as an alternative to work.’

  ‘Overwork, Richard,’ he corrected me gently. ‘All of us in Churchford admire the way you push yourself to the limits. Pity about Charlie.’

  ‘Charlie who?’ I asked sharply.

  He looked surprised. ‘Charlie Pexham. Didn’t you hear?’

  ‘President of the Medical Society?’

  ‘A coronary. Yesterday. He’s in intensive care. Another GP who never spared himself.’ He patted my arm. ‘I’m sure your holiday will do you the world of good. Take care.’

  He left me with an uneasy sensation. Perhaps young Oedipus felt the same when he first had a word with the oracles?

  ‘Dr Pexham’s had a coronary. He’s in ITU at the General,’ I informed Sandra sombrely when I reached home.

  ‘Oh, dear! But you’re hardly acquainted with him.’

  ‘Never send to know for whom the cardiac arrest bleep sounds,’ I recited gloomily. ‘It bleeps for thee.’

  ‘You really should cut down on your fats.’

  ‘If God had meant men to avoid cholesterol, he would never have given us strawberries and cream and hot buttered crumpets.’

  ‘Right after our holiday, I’m going to dedicate myself to being your dietician.’ It struck Sandra agreeably. ‘I’ll buy a book tomorrow which gives absolutely all the nasty things in food, like salt and calories.’

  I sighed. ‘Modern morality is a battle between self-indulgence and hypochondria. I expect John Donne could have made something of that. I’m ravenous.’

  17

  Mr Warburton, headmaster of Balmoral House, appeared at the following morning’s surgery with a tiny lump on the end of his nose.

  ‘A fatty tumour, no danger whatever,’ I reassured him. ‘What we doctors call a lipoma. People get them all over. You’d be surprised at some of the places.’

  He sat rubbing the nose. He was a lean, untidy man of forty, with lank fair hair, bulging blue eyes and leather on the elbows of his jacket. He asked what to do about it.

  ‘Nothing. It’s hardly noticeable.’

  ‘It is to the boys. You’d think it was a rhino horn. What about plastic surgery?’

  I mentioned NHS waiting lists.

  ‘I can’t possibly afford one of those private clinics you see advertised in the New Statesman,’ he explained resentfully. ‘Unfortunately I don’t run Balmoral House with the commercial acumen of Dotheboys Hall.’ He hesitated. ‘In confidence, doctor – it mustn’t get round that appalling crowd which my boys suffer the misfortune of possessing as parents – I’d sell out tomorrow, if I could. I’ve even a buyer – a college friend with the sense to work for one of those soulless crammers in Kensington, which I believe is so efficient it could get Laurel and Hardy into Oxford and Cambridge. But he can’t raise the cash, no more than I can for my nose.’ He fondled it again. ‘Perhaps I’m too sensitive to be a schoolmaster.’

  ‘But surely you’re also sensitive to the wonderful challenge of education? To teach the young idea how to shoot, and so on?’ I suggested encouragingly.

  The remark nettled him, as though he had caught me throwing paper darts during religious knowledge. ‘Education! What is it? Broadening the outlook. Instilling taste, honesty. Forming character. Identifying truth and beauty. Offering a sense of values. And what do my parents want? Top-grade A-levels, so their children can collect jobs as business executives with full pension rights. What would you expect of people who fit their homes with natural-pine kitchens, holiday on Costas and have the ambition only to own a Mercedes? My job’s the labours of Hercules with someone performing a time and motion study.’

  I suggested, ‘Like my private patients, who become demanding whe
n paying for something others have to suffer for free.’

  He became heated, waving his spindly arms. ‘Compulsory education! Utterly outdated, since the days when children squeaked up two plus two on slates. Who needs the three Rs in a world of TV, word processors and calculators? They seem to get along pretty well without it in Hong Kong. Education should be an activity only for those with a powerful urge to do it, like rock climbing. Had I charge of the country’s…the world’s…education, I should create a select audience for the pageant of life, who could follow the plot without distraction by its gaudy and tawdry scenery. Can’t you do anything at all about my wart?’

  ‘Perhaps the boys will get bored with it?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Take their minds off it,’ I suggested ingeniously. ‘Develop some endearing eccentricity. Say, always having your zip undone.’

  He was unimpressed.

  At the door I mentioned, ‘I believe you’ve a sprouting genius called Cuthbert Cuthbertson?’

  He snorted. ‘Awfully boring boy. Beastly little swot.’ He had a final fiddle with his lump. ‘I’ll have to come to terms with it, I suppose. After all, Cyrano de Bergerac had the same problem.’

  I have often found schoolteachers unbalanced. It is from the strain of always having to behave like adults.

  Three patients later came Mrs Myrtle Oldfield. Unlike Oedipus, Mr Oldfield had married someone entirely different. She was a big, bubbly redhead, former salesperson at Robbins Modes, local arbiter of fashion.

  ‘I really do not know what’s got into my Harry about our Roger,’ she began. ‘Who I’m proud to say is a model child, and whom I have just left happily at the Beowulf Comprehensive.’

  ‘Got his Swiss Army penknife yet?’

  ‘Oo! So you know, do you? Honestly, Harry has such a thing about it, he says he will not place such an implement in innocent hands. Of course you read in the papers about youngsters slicing up old ladies and that, but the way Harry’s creating you’d think Roger was going to murder his parents in their beds. It’s getting on my nerves, doctor, something awful.’

  ‘Harry’s unnecessarily worried about the Oedipus complex.’