Doctor On The Job

by Richard Gordon

  Mr Grout left Mr Clapper staring pleasantly at his rows of buttons, wondering who to summon next.

  ‘The duties appertaining to the hospital porters,’ said Mr Grout, sitting behind his cheap desk and screwing up his eyes while Pip in turn stood respectfully opposite, ‘are one, the movement of patients, two the movement of meals, three the movement of drugs and laundry Oh, and bodies. And of course cleaning. We have a porters’ pool.’

  He opened his eyes to stare at Pip. ‘It’s in the basement. A highly efficient system evolved by Mr Clapper, after extensive time-and-motion studies. There must always be a porter or two standing by for emergencies, but Mr Clapper has so arranged the work-schedules that none of you remain idle for more than a minimum period of time. Mr Clapper is very proud of it. Did you know that each patient in St Swithin’s enjoys one-twentieth of a porter? It’s well below the national peak. Mr Clapper is very proud of that, too. Report to the head porter,’ he continued in a businesslike voice. ‘Who will organize your training in accordance with DHSS Circular HM bracket sixty-eight bracket ninety-six. Which is of course based on the Report of the Advisory Committee on Ancillary Staff Training.’

  ‘Training? For pushing the laundry?’

  ‘If the Ministry say training you need, training you get,’ Mr Grout told him firmly. ‘National Insurance number? Tax coding?’ Pip confessed himself as ignorant of both as of the Zodiacal configuration under which he was born. ‘You’ll have to join ACHE, of course. They operate a closed shop. See Mr Sapworth. He’s due to be down in the pool in exactly two minutes.’

  ‘I haven’t a watch. It’s wonderfully liberating. I wish I’d given them up years ago.’

  ‘Never forget that the patients see more of the porters than of the doctors. As Mr Clapper says, your attitude and efficiency are of great importance to the reputation of St Swithin’s. Sign here, please, for this brown coat.’

  Pip left the office feeling that entering St Swithin’s as a porter was more inspiring than entering it as a student. He decided that with his new status he had better take the service lift. Buttoning up his brown coat, he joined the wide, lumbering conveyance descending with bundles of dirty laundry, a refuse bin trailing blood-spattered bandages, a trolley loaded with drugs, another loaded with congealed dirty dishes, eight brown-coated porters, and two patients, one of whom was dead.

  Pip wedged himself next to the porter in charge of the covered mortuary trolley, a man younger than himself with untidy dark hair, a large stylish moustache and square glasses. ‘You’re one of the students, ain’t you?’ the man asked at once, looking puzzled.

  ‘I was. I got the chop this morning. I’ve just been taken on as one of you.’

  ‘Go on?’ He shook Pip’s hand vigorously. ‘You’re the poor sod what kept getting the stick from Sir Lancelot. I reckon you’re better off for the change. More free and easy, this life. I’m Harold Sapworth. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘I was told to report to the head porter.’

  ‘You’ll have to take a bus. There ain’t one. Left last Christmas. Got a better job in a hotel. Patients don’t leave tips, see.’ He nodded down at his charge. ‘Especially dead ones.’

  ‘But Mr Grout in the office said –’

  ‘Listen, mate.’ Harold Sapworth grinned. ‘First thing you learn about St Swithin’s, them geezers in the office wouldn’t know they’d been born, if they hadn’t got a belly-button to prove it. Which is what they spends most of their time looking at, if you asks me. Give us a hand with this,’ he invited, pushing out the trolley as the lift reached the basement.

  Pip had never wasted thought on what the hospital porters got up to. They were to him simply anonymous men with complexions either black, hairy or leathery, forever pushing recumbent patients or large unidentifiable bundles on trolleys. It had never occurred to him that they were organized, the troops of a brilliantly generalled army deployed with well-drilled precision. Or were they?

  ‘I was told to see you too, Mr Sapworth,’ Pip said, pulling the front of the trolley along the wide, white-tiled, brightly lit basement corridor. ‘With a view to applying for membership of ACHE.’

  ‘No trouble. You’re in.’ They edged their way against a line of trolleys bringing the patients’ teas from the kitchens. ‘I’m filling the hole for our shop steward. He had a little accident in Piccadilly Circus.’

  ‘I hope it won’t keep him off work long,’ said Pip solicitously.

  ‘Yes, three years.’

  ‘It must have been a nasty one.’

  ‘It was. He was flashing. The accident was letting the coppers see him.’

  ‘But how dreadful,’ Pip commiserated over his shoulder as they continued towards the mortuary.

  ‘Go on? What’s a bit of bird?’ Harold asked in surprise. ‘My old dad and my brother spend most of the year inside. That’s why I’m always sweating me guts out on overtime, just to keep me poor old mum.’

  ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ Pip asked involuntarily.

  ‘Ashamed? Why? In winter, the nick’s not too cold. In summer, it’s not too hot. That’s all there is to it.’ He added in a more abrasive tone, ‘You’ve got to get rid of all them finicky middle-class attitudes, if you’re going to do a job along with us, mate.’

  ‘I assure you I haven’t any attitudes at all,’ Pip replied hastily. ‘I’ve taken great care to train myself for an open view of life. I’ve read a lot of Freud and Jung. I accept everybody just as they come. Most medical people do. Even Sir Lancelot.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Harold agreed thoughtfully. ‘I suppose everyone looks exactly the same, seen by the tripes.’

  ‘It’s just that I haven’t met many people in my sheltered life who’ve got fathers in jail.’

  ‘Go on? Well, I sensed you was a good bloke,’ Harold complimented him. ‘The way you took all that chivvying from Sir Lancelot and that lot. If it had been me, I should have toed him in the goolies.’

  They arrived at the post-mortem room, pushing through the double doors into the cool, quiet, tiled interior, its contents lying in neat sheeted rows. ‘I mind your face,’ said the only living occupant to Pip.

  ‘I used to be one of the students.’

  Pip recognized in the same brown coat young Forfar McBridie, a mortuary porter just joined from Glasgow. He was freckled, his brow faintly furrowed like every Scotsman’s newly away from home, through the suspicion that someone was trying to swindle him or, worse still, pull his leg.

  ‘Whose mistake’s this?’ he asked, indicating the trolley.

  ‘One of Sir Lancelot’s,’ Harold told him.

  ‘He won’t have left much inside for us to see,’ the Scotsman grumbled.

  As they returned empty handed to the corridor, Pip said to Harold, ‘I suppose I ought to find the porters’ pool, and wait for orders?’

  ‘Here you are, my old china.’ He threw open the door of a large, low-ceilinged room fogged with tobacco and smelling of feet, its concrete floor covered with benches. It was a scene which recalled to Pip the spectators’ stand of some country cricket ground on a drowsy afternoon. Men with unbuttoned brown coats and unbuttoned shirts lay or sprawled everywhere, lazily smoking, reading newspapers or paperback books, playing cards, drinking tea or cans of beer, sleeping or chatting, listening to the three or four separate programmes emerging from their radios. Peering through the haze, Pip calculated there must have been near a hundred of his new colleagues idling away their working day. He frowned. ‘Are they waiting to be summoned urgently to points all round the hospital?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. You can spend days here – weeks, if you’re sharp enough – without having to shift off your bum. Except for drawing your pay and tea breaks.’

  ‘But Mr Grout in the office said there was a tremendously well-researched system –’

  ‘Now be reasonable,’ Harold told him in a pitying voice. ‘It looked lovely on paper, right? A lot of schemes look lovely on paper. How to win the pools, how to win a war.’ He tapped
his forehead. ‘They forget the human element. Get me?’

  Everyone in the room suddenly rose, throwing down their reading matter and hands of cards, striding purposefully for the door. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Pip breathlessly. ‘Some major emergency?’

  ‘Tea break.’

  ‘But a lot of them were already drinking tea,’ Pip pointed out.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Harold explained in the same tone. ‘It’s three o’clock. Tea break. We’re entitled to it. It’s in our contract. Our union fought for it.’

  ‘But supposing you just don’t feel like a cup of tea? I mean, it’s a little early. I generally have mine at four.’

  ‘That makes no difference. You’ve still got to take your tea break. If you don’t, it’s a sign of workers’ weakness. What happens when the workers show weakness about anything?’ he added warningly. ‘Even the shop temperature, one degree too high or too low. Provision of soap and towels and all that lot. Though most of these sods here would only nick them,’ he remarked contemptuously as they followed the others towards the ancillary staff canteen on the far side of the building. ‘A worker’s weakness is a bosses’ opening. Get me? It’s like the old boxing match.’ Harold gave a little twirl of his fists. ‘Drop your guard, and you’re floored. KO’d, finished. We’re exploited bad enough, mate, as it is.’

  ‘Do you know, Harold – may I call you Harold?’ Pip said in an admiring voice. ‘I’ve learned more about practical industrial relations from you in five minutes than I should have learned otherwise in a lifetime. And more than a lot of people in British business ever will learn, I suspect.’

  ‘Go on?’ said Harold, looking surprised at himself.

  ‘It’s practical mass psychiatry, that’s all.’

  ‘Listen –’ Harold briefly sucked the tip of his thumb. ‘I got a bright idea. You’re an educated bloke. And sharp with it. How about getting elected as our shop steward?’

  ‘But I’ve hardly joined the union,’ Pip protested. ‘Who’d vote for me? Nobody even knows who I am.’

  ‘Details, details,’ Harold dismissed them. ‘I was left in charge when Arthur Pince had his little engagement elsewhere. So I can call a branch meeting whenever I likes. Nobody attends, see? Nobody ever does. Who wants to be dragged out a night from his hearth and home and telly? Anyway, everyone always does what I says. Them Herberts,’ he nodded towards their brown-coated colleagues, ‘is so thick between the ears they’d thank you for doing their thinking for them. Even if it was deciding whether to go out on the booze at night or have a bit of tail off of the wife. You’re on?’ Pip nodded quickly. Harold shook hands again. ‘No need to fix nothing more. Instant democracy, that’s my speciality.’

  7

  Even without a watch, at eight o’clock promptly the following morning, the Wednesday, Pip Chipps arrived at the ancillary staff entrance at the rear of St Swithin’s and punched the clock outside the gatekeeper’s lodge. It was another cloudless day, threatening to be hotter than the last. Pip did not relish idling its hours away down in the smoky porters’ pool. He wondered as he descended to the basement if he could somehow discover some work to perform. But there was no one to give him orders, nor even to indicate where he should seek them. He settled down with his feet up on a bench, reading Jung’s The Undiscovered Self. Pip found interesting Jung’s notion of the Socialist State taking the place of the old religions, and slavery to it a form of worship. Jung’s alternative conception of socialism as a mass regression to irresponsible childhood under all-powerful parents, he marked in the margin. He wondered what such a practical socialist as Harold Sapworth would have to comment.

  Pip continued his studies while his fellow-porters leisurely leafed through their copies of the Sun, Mirror or Morning Star, until the electric clock on the wall, which had apparently the single function of indicating the tea breaks, pointed to a few minutes after ten. He slipped the book into the pocket of his brown coat and quit the room. The administrators should have just arrived at their first-floor office.

  ‘Yes?’ Mr Grout looked up crossly as Pip’s figure appeared in his doorway. ‘What’s the idea, barging in like that?’

  Pip was taken aback. ‘You didn’t seem to mind when I walked in yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday was different. Then you were one of the students. Now you’re one of the porters. I can’t have hospital porters tramping in and out of my office just as they feel inclined, can I? We’re worked off our feet as it is.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Grout,’ he apologized meekly. ‘It wasn’t you I meant to disturb. I really came to see Mr Clapper.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ Mr Grout stared in outrage. ‘Off your head? You, a hospital porter, demanding an audience with Mr Clapper? I’ve never heard of such an undisciplined, indeed insolent suggestion. Mr Clapper has far more important matters on his mind. Even porters must have enough savvy to realize that.’

  Pip’s normally unaggressive, easygoing, self-effacing nature turned him back to the door. Then he paused. It was not as a humble porter that he sought to enter the presence of Mr Clapper. He was himself a shining new cog in the hospital’s complicated administrative machine. ‘Mr Grout,’ he announced modestly, ‘I’ve just been appointed shop steward of ACHE for the whole of St Swithin’s.’

  ‘Oh, that’s quite different,’ Mr Grout told him briskly. ‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place? That was quick work, wasn’t it? I suppose they wanted someone who could understand a document more complicated than a pools coupon, and was likely to keep out of jail for a bit. As shop steward, you have the right of access to Mr Clapper whenever you wish.’ He picked up a red telephone on his desk and said in a humble voice, ‘Mr Clapper, the shop steward would like a word with you, if it’s convenient.’

  ‘Of course it isn’t convenient,’ Pip heard Mr Clapper’s voice clearly through the closed door between the offices. ‘Can’t you get rid of the fellow? Oh, well, perhaps I’d better give him some flannel. Send him in.’

  Pip was greeted by Mr Clapper’s pussycat smile. ‘About the dartboard, is it? The one you’re after in the porters’ room down in the basement. A union official like yourself, Mr – ?’

  ‘Chipps.’

  ‘Will appreciate that these requests can’t simply be pushed through any old how. They’d short circuit the administrative machinery. And dartboards are extraordinarily difficult. They don’t fit into any category of hospital equipment. They are not surgical instruments. They are not furnishings. Though inspecting the necessaries for a game of darts, you might think they resembled both.’

  Hands clasped across jacket button, glasses tilted ceilingwards, Mr Clapper continued speculatively, ‘Dartboards are not fit and proper objects of official funds. Dear me, no. The British Treasury would never sanction the purchase of a dartboard. I am confident of that. Fortunately, the administrative machine is most adaptable – to those of us who know the right levers. I am hopeful of results under the heading of staff welfare. Or possibly nursery facilities. Or even religious ministration, which with a little ingenuity can be invoked to justify any peculiar expenditure. Rest assured, Chipps, I am pursuing the matter energetically. I write letters on the subject regularly, at least once a month.’

  ‘It wasn’t about the dartboard,’ Pip said shyly. He drew a sheaf of closely written papers from his brown coat pocket. ‘I stayed up all last night, working out a scheme for a more efficient use of the portering service in St Swithin’s –’

  ‘You worked out a scheme?’ Mr Clapper rocked back in his well-padded chair, looking like a pussycat who had suffered the indignity of getting its nose caught in a mousetrap.

  ‘Yes,’ Pip nodded, spreading out his papers on Mr Clapper’s impeccable blotter. ‘I’ve found how to achieve the same amount of work in the hospital with half the number of porters. Each patient could easily get along with only one-fortieth of a porter of his own instead of a twentieth.’

  ‘My dear young man.’ Mr Clapper found himself presented with a se
lection of emotions, and settled for pained indulgence. ‘You don’t even begin to understand the research, the effort, the administrative experience, the time, the intelligence which goes into such work studies. It is obviously far beyond someone of your limited capacities and restricted education, if I may say so.’

  ‘But it’s all so easy,’ Pip protested. ‘You start off by sacking all the porters in the pool. Say, a hundred. You create instead a small flying squad of experienced porters, with no duties but to rush anywhere they’re suddenly needed in the hospital. I sat all night going over the head porter’s records, until he left last year –’

  ‘Left? Nobody told me. He can’t possibly have left.’

  ‘And found that emergency calls for porters averaged ten point seven-five per day, less than one every two hours, you understand. Each job needed an average of five men and lasted an average of twenty minutes, so that five porters in the vast pool downstairs are, by simple arithmetic, kept in idleness for all but three of each twenty-four hours, while the remainder are kept in an idleness which is absolute.’

  Pip waited patiently for comment. But it seemed Mr Clapper was in no mood for statistics. ‘Will you kindly leave?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘You’re not interested?’ Pip asked in surprise.

  ‘Your function in the hospital is to represent the members of ACHE, not to teach me my job.’

  ‘I was only trying to help –’

  ‘This is a hospital, Chipps. You may not understand, but it is a place where ignorant meddling can be dangerous or even fatal.’

  ‘But won’t you even read it?’ Pip asked plaintively.

  ‘You can if you like leave your outpourings with Mr Grout.’ Mr Clapper made a gesture as though flicking water from his fingertips. ‘I would also remind you that even shop stewards are not above dismissal for meddling in activities beyond their abilities. Good morning.’

  Pip was at first mystified more than offended. He left the administration office and took the service lift, which contained half a dozen other porters, the remains of several wards’ breakfasts, a superior-looking girl with the library trolley, a man smoking a pipe selling newspapers, and a nurse with a woman at the extremity of pregnancy groaning in a wheelchair. He felt sudden resentment at such highhanded rejection of a scheme, worked out so painstakingly in Faith’s cubicle until they both dropped exhausted to sleep, which could save St Swithin’s and the National Health Service so many thousands of pounds. There was a more liberal mentality in the wards, he reflected. The humblest student daring to question a diagnosis or line of treatment was encouraged rather than squashed. Even Sir Lancelot Spratt, Pip recalled, would grunt and declare generously, ‘Well, a pup often smells a rabbit quicker than an old dog.’ And at that moment, to Pip’s alarm Sir Lancelot himself stepped impatiently into the waiting lift.