A Seaside Practise

by Tom Smith

  We were pleased to find a heap of straw just inside the door, and gently laid Jack on it. As we left him he started snoring loudly, so we tiptoed out, content with our night’s work, and shut the door behind us.

  Waking up the next morning, I wasn’t quite so sure we had done the correct thing. Was it really acceptable to have left him in such a state? I decided to drive back to the farm before surgery started, to make sure he had survived the night. I drove up to the farmhouse door, and when I got out of the car, was immediately aware of a commotion going on behind the house, in the yard. I walked round the corner to see Jean with a hose, turned full on, and directed straight at a dejected, forlorn and naked Jack, who was standing over the sunken drain in the middle of the yard, with the water cascading off him.

  The redoubtable Jean saw me, and stopped the hose for a moment. She turned to me and gave me full voice, if anything louder than her diatribe the previous evening.

  ‘Why did ye pit ma husband in the pigpen?’ she blasted. ‘That wisnae the hayshed. Look at him – and his claes. I’ll hae to dump them.’

  I looked at a pile of what seemed to be rags lying in a corner of the yard. Examined more closely there was a brown suit, a shirt, and long johns. For some unfathomable reason, Mrs. Hunter had allowed her spouse to put his boots back on. She had obviously had to remove them to take off his long johns.

  I walked over to the door of the shed where we had left him. There was the pig, a huge pink pregnant beast, lying in the heap of straw. Beside her was the Jack-shaped depression where we had laid him the night before. The sow was snoring: it became quickly clear to me that the snores we had heard the previous night had come from her, and not a human throat. Why hadn’t we smelt her? Our sense of smell, of course, wanes after a few moments when assailed by strong odours. We had smelt the midden first and the cows second. By the time we had come to the pig, our noses were tired – and rightly so.

  I turned to Jack and Jean. I had to work very hard not to smile at our mistake, as Jean was very definitely not amused.

  ‘Whit am ah goin’ tae dae wi’ these claes?’ she asked, reasonably. I suggested the dry cleaners in Girvan. They had made a good job of cleaning my clothes: perhaps they could do the same for her.

  Jean walked over to the heap, and picked up the jacket.

  ‘Dae ye think that they’ll tak’ claes like this?’ she asked. ‘I dinna think sae.’

  She wasn’t wrong. The straw hadn’t been exactly clean. And in staggering around in the pen, Jack had fallen over the animal. His clothes were not just stained but torn. They were irretrievable.

  Then I saw something very odd. Jean actually winked at me and a suspicion of a grin flitted across her face.

  ‘I want ye tae come inside for a minute,’ she said. ‘Follow me. And you,’ she said, talking to Jack, ‘ye’d better get in and hae a hot bath.’

  The three of us walked into the house, Jack up to the bathroom, Jean and I into the front room, where we sat down in armchairs either side of the fireplace. I was a bit fearful of her, half expecting her to give me a bill for his suit.

  She listened to the bathroom door shutting, and then she leaned across at me and beamed.

  ‘Thanks, Doctor, for giving me the biggest laugh of my life,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t believe it when I saw Jack this morning. I’ve wanted to put that suit away for years, it’s well past time he had a new one. You and Constable Tait helped a lot last night, and I’m grateful. Maybe he’ll stop drinking for a while, and stop making an ass of himself. He’s done it before after a shock like this.’

  And after a shock like this Jack did alter, but in a direction no one expected. I’ve got two theories about that. Aesculapius, the founder of medicine centuries before Hippocrates, swore by the benefits of dropping agitated and depressed patients into pits full of snakes to shock them back into health. Waking up hung over and with no memory of the night before, sprawled across a heavily pregnant pig, could have had the same effect. On the other hand, standing naked in a yard before breakfast being hosed down with cold water could be compared with ECT.

  Whatever the cause, Jack eschewed alcohol from that day onwards. Sadly, his personality wasn’t strong enough for him to avoid replacing it with another addiction. He adopted religion instead. Jack didn’t do his addictions by halves, and it wasn’t long before he was a regular on the lay preacher circuit, thundering on street corners and in his old haunts against the evils of alcohol.

  The second in my portfolio of memorable Stinchar Valley drunks was Patrick Flannigan. Patrick was brought into Willie’s house, which doubled as his home and the police station, by a local lorry driver in the early hours of a Sunday morning. He had been picked up staggering about the road north of Collintrae, where it ran by the beach. He was shivering, which was not surprising, because he was soaked to the skin, and he was rambling on about being shown the right road to Belfast.

  The driver found the answer to that question a tad difficult because to get to the Belfast road meant first driving to Stranraer thirty miles to the south, taking the ferry across the Irish Channel to Larne, then picking it up from there. This was clearly a problem for Willie the polis to sort out.

  Willie didn’t see it as part of his job to unravel a drunken man’s confusion: his sole interest was to make sure that he wasn’t ill before he banged Patrick up for the night as drunk and disorderly. Drunk he certainly was. Disorderly was another matter. He was a mess, right enough, and needed warming up and dry clothing, but he seemed harmless and no threat to anyone. Unless he had been at the wheel of a car. So how had he come to be wandering the road over here?

  Patrick was co-operative and truthful. He had driven in his black Ford Anglia from Belfast to Larne, where his brother worked and lived on the ferry. It was his brother’s night off, but he was holding a party in the bar on the boat, and Patrick had been the guest of honour. During the party, the boat made one of its round trips between Larne and Stranraer, time enough for Patrick to enjoy a few drinks. He then disembarked at Larne, got into his car, and drove off back to Belfast.

  At this point in the tale, Patrick had frowned. He must have taken a wrong turning, he said, because the road back to Belfast seemed unfamiliar, but he reckoned that if he kept the sea on his left hand side, he was bound to hit the town. After all, Larne and Belfast were on the same stretch of the east coast of Ulster, and the coast road was bound to lead to the city. Unfortunately, after a few miles he seemed to have missed a bend, and the next thing he knew he was in the sea, and climbing out of his car on to the road. That’s where he was when he had been picked up.

  It was then that Willie decided to phone me, utterly bemused by Patrick. The man was not only drunk, but if his story was correct he was also the first person to swim the fifty miles across the Irish Channel fully clothed, four sheets to the wind, in the hours of darkness. There was an alternative of course: he could be an absconder from a psychiatric hospital.

  Willie was an old-fashioned and kindly policeman. Annie, his wife, hunted out some of Willie’s old clothes for Patrick to wear, and gave him some strong coffee. Willie and I then drove out to the spot where the driver had found him. There were marks of tyres tearing across the machair, leading straight to the sea. It was still too dark to see anything clearly, so Willie said he’d return to the spot in the morning, and sort things out. Patrick remained in the hospitality suite in the police station – the only cell – and we had to figure out what had happened.

  It became clear the next day. One of the crew of the ferry was based in Stranraer, and drove each day to the ship in his black Ford Anglia, which he parked on the dockside. He left his keys in it: nobody stole cars in those days. It appeared that the party had gone on longer than Patrick had thought. He had made three crossings, not two. The third had, of course, ended in Stranraer, which he had mistaken for Larne. His less than coherent brain had spotted the
Anglia, the same colour and model as his own, and drawn the wrong conclusion. For the first few miles the road north along the Scottish west coast looks similar to the road south along the Ulster east coast. Sober, nobody would have confused the two, but drunk anything’s possible.

  That morning Willie found the black Anglia where he expected it, in the sea. That evening a sober and extremely penitent Patrick delivered his car, keys and all, to the crew member whose car he had taken. It was a fair exchange. He pleaded guilty to driving under the influence and was banned for a year. The man whose car he had inadvertently stolen pleaded successfully with the justice of the peace to let Patrick off the more serious charge of car theft, adding that he now had a better vehicle, thanks to Patrick’s generosity.

  Cars were also the problem that brought notable Stinchar Valley drunk number three into my care. Steven Williamson was a self-made man, a farmer who had worked hard in his youth, spending time building up the best beef and dairy herds in the district. What he didn’t know about the relative merits of Aberdeen Angus and Galloways, Ayrshires and Holsteins wasn’t worth knowing. The farming establishment, recognising his pre-eminence in such matters, invited him on this national board and that international committee, and paid for him to visit places all over the world, from East Africa to South America, to oversee the proper management of their exported British cattle blood lines.

  Less well known was that he had a similar encyclopaedic grasp of the merits of the Scottish glens, names such as Glenmorangie, Glenfiddich, Glenlivet and Glengoyne often appearing on his shopping list. He was not at all averse to sampling their end-products generously and at any time of day. His wife Isabel kept this secret until the day that she and Steven celebrated a recent success at the Perth bull sales by buying new cars.

  On the way home from Perth, they stopped off in Glasgow to trade in their Rover for a top-of-the-line Fiat for the family and an Alpha-Romeo runabout for Isabel. Italian cars were all the rage then, and where fashion went, the Williamsons were never far behind. Isabel drove home ahead, with Steven following, although Steven’s car dropped out of Isabel’s rear-view mirror when they were about halfway home. Which is why Isabel had already parked her pride and joy and had a pot of tea on the kitchen table when Steven roared up the drive. Their house was on a hill, and it took a little acceleration to push the car up the last steep slope and around the corner into the yard beside the kitchen window.

  Far be it from me to criticise either Steven’s reaction time on the day, or Isabel’s wisdom in parking her Alpha under the kitchen window, where she could admire it while enjoying a refreshing cup of Lipton’s best. Whoever was at fault, the result was that Steven turned the corner too fast, braked too slowly and the two new cars were written off in a fraction of a second. The back end of an Alpha-Romeo sports car does not react well to being hit at around twenty miles an hour by the front end of a Fiat Estate. Ditto for the front end of a Fiat Estate and the forehead of the driver as it bounces off the steering wheel.

  Luckily, it was only the cars that were written off. Steven got away with a large bruise on his forehead and a distinctly wounded pride. As the accident had occurred on his own driveway, there was no need for the police to be involved, but I was called, to make sure that he wasn’t seriously hurt.

  The examination didn’t reveal any physical injury, but I was struck, when examining his eyes, that the whites were a bit more yellow than they should have been. I presumed that this was an effect of the room lighting, and asked him to come to the kitchen window to see him in daylight. They were still yellow.

  I wasn’t happy with this, and asked him to go through into the bedroom to let me look at him more thoroughly. The after-examination discussion with the Williamsons was straightforward. Steven was to come to the surgery the following day for blood tests to check on his liver. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he might have a touch of jaundice, and that had to be followed up.

  A few days later, Isabel arrived at the surgery on her own. For the first time she revealed the extent of Steven’s drinking. He kept swearing that he would stop, but he hid bottles in the fields, in hay lofts, under machinery, anywhere he thought she wouldn’t find them. He was now feeling sick most days, and was too weak to get up out of bed for more than a few hours in the afternoons. Could I possibly give him a fright, to stop him before it was too late? I didn’t need to put on an act to give him a fright, I said to her. His liver function tests were enough to frighten anyone. They showed severe alcoholic liver damage. If he didn’t stop drinking alcohol, he would soon be in liver failure. In those days, years before dedicated liver disease teams and transplants, that meant a fairly rapid death. I would be happy, I said, to come to see him at home and read the Riot Act to him.

  ‘I’m not sure he would listen to you alone,’ she said. ‘He thinks you’re just a wee boy. Could you get someone special, with a medical reputation, to see him? He respects real authority.’

  I could understand that. Mr Williamson thought of himself as an authority, and wanted an equal as his physician, not a youngster like myself who was obviously just out of medical school. I wasn’t sure who that might be in our region. It would have been easy in Birmingham: there, I could have named three or four consultant physicians with just the right air of superiority and medical gravitas to impress him. There wasn’t such a medical hierarchy in Ayrshire. All the consultants who served our district, who were based mainly in Ayr, were brilliant physicians but straightforward, down-to-earth men and women with no hint of pomposity. I would have to cast my net further afield, probably as far as Glasgow for someone to fit Isabel’s needs.

  I phoned Arthur Thomson, my colleague from Darley and a Glasgow graduate, to ask for it. He came up with the name of Dr Jonas Hall, a famous gastroenterologist who had deeply impressed him as a student, not so much for his knowledge of diseases and their cures, but for his collection of Rolls-Royces that he had managed to acquire in the course of his private practice.

  Dr Hall was obviously the man for the Williamsons.

  I spoke to his secretary on the phone. The doctor was slightly indisposed today, she told me, but he would be delighted to make a ‘private’ home visit. The fee would be high because the round trip would be more than a hundred miles, but that could be an advantage, she suggested, if the patient needed to be impressed.

  What a wise secretary, I thought, and agreed to put the proposal to Isabel. She jumped at it.

  ‘Just the thing, doctor,’ she said. ‘I’ll break the news to Steven that he is being seen privately by the most prestigious liver doctor in the West of Scotland. He will be pleased.’

  I wasn’t sure that this was the way I had described Dr Hall, but I let it go at that.

  When he arrived three days later, it was certainly with a flourish. I had been in the house only a minute or so when his Roller glided up the steep driveway to the front door. There was no corner to negotiate and no danger of colliding with the Williamson’s replacement car. A chauffeur with peaked cap and smart grey suit got out and with appropriate grace and dignity opened the rear driver’s side door.

  Out stepped the great doctor. His eminence could be seen at a glance. Most of it was round his middle. There was the grey morning suit like the men wear at Ascot on Ladies’ Day, and the shoes with spats. A picture of James Robertson Justice as the terrifying professor in ‘Doctor in the House’ flashed into my mind.

  ‘Dr Smith? So good to meet you. Thank you for asking me to see this most interesting patient,’ he said. In a second flash, Uriah Heap replaced James Robertson Justice. I was in for a show, not a consultation.

  We turned to enter the house. I took a closer look at my colleague as we walked along the hall towards the bedroom, where Mr Williamson was waiting ready to be quizzed and examined. He was certainly in ruddy health, to judge by the rose-red cheeks and, for that matter, nose. The bulging waistcoat and triple chin suggested a gou
rmet lifestyle and a certain lack of exercise. He was a bit clumsy, too. Was that a slight stumble as he walked up the steps? Did his words sound a little slurred? I dismissed these thoughts as scurrilous, and walked forward to introduce him to our hosts.

  Our patient, in preparation for the visit, had abstained from hard liquor for a day, a feat that had cleared his head and his vision for the first time in months. He responded to Dr Hall’s questions and to his probing examination in a sober and even subdued manner. He lay back on the pillows at the end, and waited for the verdict.

  Dr Hall brought out a sheet of paper from his document case. He showed it to our patient and asked him to note very carefully the figures on it. He then brought out a book with a marker at a page near the end and asked Mr Williamson to compare them. I was curious, and looked over Dr Hall’s shoulder at the two pages. On the paper were the liver function results, in the book were similar figures presented as examples of liver failure. They were close to identical.

  ‘If you don’t stop drinking,’ warned Dr Hall in his most severe tone, ‘you are heading very fast for cirrhosis and an early death. I want to see you in Glasgow in two months’ time, in my rooms, and I want these results to be far better by then.’

  At that the great man rose to go. I thought that as he turned round he had lost his balance very slightly, but he was quick to correct it. As he walked back to his car, he swayed, just a little. He refused any refreshment and was soon on his chauffeur-driven way back to Glasgow.

  The next day I returned to the Williamson house. Steven was sitting up. He still hadn’t had a drink, and seemed keen to take this change seriously.

  ‘Don’t worry, Doc,’ he said. ‘I’m on the wagon. I’ll do what I’m told.’

  ‘So those figures shocked you,’ I said. ‘I thought they might. That was the idea.’