Doctor On The Job

by Richard Gordon

  ‘That’s your last word?’

  ‘Indubitably.’

  ‘So the strike will go on,’ Sir Lancelot observed gloomily. ‘Perhaps for years. Some do, even when the pickets have completely forgotten what it was all about.’

  ‘I am past caring. Civilization is over. Chaos reigns. The Creator has announced Fiat nox and switched off. I’m going for my tea.’ The dean slipped into a lift just as the doors closed.

  Sir Lancelot gave a heavy sigh. The dean was an obstinate fool, and the opinions of obstinate fools were more trouble to eradicate than greenfly in roses. He took another lift down to the sub-basement car park. He knew that he could blackmail the dean with threats of spiking his pet projects on hospital committees, or revealing his behaviour after the last rugger club dinner. But that took time, and settling the strike was urgent. He crossed thoughtfully to the Rolls in his reserved parking space. He disliked putting to use his influential patients, but the simple coincidence of his professional visit that afternoon was too tempting to be overlooked.

  Sir Lancelot drove up the winding concrete slope, stacked on either side with plastic bags of smelly rubbish, the local refuse collectors having ‘blacked’ it. Strange, those emotional words, he ruminated. ‘Black’ or ‘red’ or ‘strike’ itself stirred deep emotions in rugged breasts. So did ‘lock-out’ or ‘victimization’ or ‘boss’, or in a different sense ‘workers’. He could have agreed with Pip that politics was really simple practical psychology. And industrial disputes were founded not upon money, which could only buy things, but upon power, which was pride. Meanwhile, he reflected as he drove westwards, it was useful to play the worm in so many powerful men’s confidences.

  Sir Lancelot drew up his Rolls at the kerb. A policeman saluted. Nodding acknowledgement, clutching his square black leather instrument case, he made for the front door. A lurking young man immediately stepped forward with, ‘Excuse me – but you would be Sir Lancelot Spratt the surgeon, I believe?’

  ‘Well, I don’t look like the Leader of the Opposition, do I?’ he returned testily.

  ‘Is there any particular significance in your visit?’ his interceptor asked eagerly. ‘I represent the Daily—’

  ‘My dear young man, mine is purely a routine call which is never reported in the Press. The appearance of medical persons on the doorsteps of great men can have effects which are widespread and often devastating. Currencies crumble, stock exchanges collapse, armies march. I have an arrangement to prevent such catastrophes occurring regularly once a month. You should have checked with your editor.’

  The front door had already opened, in the hands of a tail-coated butler. Inside was a lean, youngish Civil Servant, dressed with the same formality of the surgeon.

  ‘Good afternoon, Sir Lancelot.’ The surgeon had got to know the official well over the past few years. ‘I’m afraid Mr Nelson is still in committee. He’ll be with you as soon as possible.’

  Sir Lancelot nodded. ‘I assume he’s been keeping well?’

  ‘As fit as a flea. Or should I say some other insect?’ The Civil Servant smiled, being one of the few in the secret. ‘Mrs Nelson is in the garden tatting. She wondered if you’d care to join her for a cup of tea and a cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t smoke, and I would not intrude upon a lady’s afternoon’s peace. I’ll go straight upstairs.’

  Sir Lancelot stepped into the narrow automatic lift. Mr and Mrs Herbert Nelson lived in a cramped flat above the official rooms which filled most of the old, oft-renovated building. In the bedroom, Sir Lancelot removed his jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, and opened the leather case on a chair. His eye travelled round the now familiar personal items in the room – the group photograph of Mr Nelson in his youthful football team, his framed life-saving certificate and coloured commendation from Sunday school, two texts in pokerwork Wine Maketh Merry: But Money Answereth All Things Ecclesiastes X 19 and There Are More Ways to Kill A Cat Than Choking It With Cream. He noticed again the small shelf of well-thumbed books, Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare, The Golden Treasury, The Plain Man’s Guide to Wine, Teach Yourself Economics. He genuinely was the simple man he liked to see depicted in the newspapers, Sir Lancelot decided indulgently. The surgeon was inspecting a small ceramic article of baffling use inscribed Clovelly, with a year indicating purchase on the Nelsons’ honeymoon, when the bedroom door opened and his patient hurried in.

  ‘Afternoon, Sir Lancelot. I was at a very long and very tough confrontation with the people from the Autoworkers Union. About the National Bubble.’

  ‘The little plastic car which threatened to make our streets resemble rivers floating with ping-pong balls?’

  ‘That’s the snag. No one wants to buy it. We’re thinking of giving ’em away – first to deserving persons, old age pensioners, unmarried mothers and that. Then to anyone prepared to drive ’em off. Trouble is, the Autoworkers’ executive aren’t content with our ban on the import of foreign cars. They want Parliament to pass a law making all foreigners buy British ones. I explained that quite frankly for technical reasons it wouldn’t work.’ He started taking down his trousers. ‘How do these political slogans appeal to you, Sir Lancelot? Inflation Means More Money. Employment Doesn’t Mean Work. Social Security Secures Socialism. Quite frankly?’

  ‘Not enormously.’

  ‘I rather agree. Mrs Nelson thought of them last Sunday morning, while she was beating the Yorkshire. To cheer the country up at a stroke, you know, in place of strife.’ He removed his trousers and Y-fronts, and draped them on the edge of his dressing-table. Mr Herbert Nelson was short and slight, with bright pink cheeks and bright blue eyes, scanty fair hair and a soft, finely wrinkled skin. He was always smiling. ‘I’m in a bit of a hurry, I’m afraid,’ he apologized. ‘In five minutes I’m meeting some gnomes of Zurich, then I’ve got to join the cocktail circuit with some faceless bureaucrats of Brussels.’

  ‘We need not be long.’

  ‘I hope not. But if it’s there, you’ll catch it, won’t you?’ he asked anxiously.

  In reply, Sir Lancelot snapped together a long, slim pair of surgical forceps in front of his own nose.

  ‘It’s most reassuring, your performing these regular examinations.’ Mr Nelson lay on the bed. ‘I could swear on the Bible there was one there, sometimes. Particularly in midsummer. And when the pollen count is high, naturally. I can even hear a buzz, quite distinctly. I turned to the Chancellor yesterday and asked if he could hear a buzz, too. I was most relieved when he couldn’t, though quite frankly it seemed to fill the entire room. I suppose having a bee in one’s bonnet is quite normal, but having a bee in one’s –’

  ‘Lie on your left side,’ commanded Sir Lancelot. He took from his case a long, narrow glittering tube with a handle at one end. ‘Easy now.’

  ‘Oh, I’m perfectly used to it. I find it not unpleasant, in fact. Can you see the bee?’

  ‘Not for the moment.’

  ‘It never stings, you know. Just buzzes about.’

  ‘By the way,’ remarked Sir Lancelot, choosing his moment. ‘You know of the trouble at St Swithin’s?’

  ‘Yes, I heard you were having some little local difficulties with your social contract. What is it? People who’ve never had it so good wanting it rather better? Jobs for all, the sack for nobody, a fatter pay packet every Christmas? It’s the same everywhere, you know. Even among ordinary, decent working-class people. The doctrine of full employment only works without trouble among the Saints. Sure you can’t see the bee?’

  ‘I’m still looking,’ said Sir Lancelot, applying his eye. ‘I wondered if you might consider personal intervention? After all, we do an enormous export trade in the private part of St Swithin’s. I’m sure the hospital deserves the Queen’s Award for Industry, though perhaps the insignia on the door would look a little discouraging to arriving patients.’

  ‘You want me to have a gritty confrontation with this Mr Crisps, or whoever he is? Make him feel the smack of firm Governm
ent?’ continued Mr Nelson, half into his pillow. ‘Get him to call off the strike at a stroke?’

  ‘He’s a very impressionable young man. From my own experience of him as a medical student, a little skilful bullying will bring him to heel.’

  ‘Very well,’ Mr Nelson agreed. ‘I’ll see him tonight, then. Nine o’clock? Then they’ll have the film clips in good time for The News At Ten. No bee?’

  ‘You’re absolutely bee-free, take it from me,’ said Sir Lancelot, withdrawing his instrument.

  ‘Well, that’s certainly a great relief. It always is, every time you stick your little scope in and look. Yet on occasions I could imagine I’d a whole hive up there. When we were at one of those Oriental embassies last week they offered me a ceremonial gift of honey. Mrs Nelson had to laugh. Their Ambassador wondered why, and got a bit shirty.’

  He reached for his trousers. ‘Excuse me. The wind of change. Tell me, Sir Lancelot. Do you think that I am perhaps a shade abnormal, imagining that I have bees buzzing about up there? I mean, a man in my position. Not that I should ever have any intention of resigning, of course.’

  ‘Bizarre delusions involving animal or insect life are not unusual in great men,’ Sir Lancelot reassured him, washing his hands in the adjoining small bathroom. ‘Sir Winston Churchill sometimes had the feeling of being followed by a large black dog.’

  ‘There’s no known remedy, I suppose?’ Mr Nelson pulled the trousers on.

  ‘It is a condition admittedly resistant to treatment,’ Sir Lancelot admitted. ‘I had a similar case, much more severe than yours, who got himself into the most peculiar contortions by insisting on feeling for his bee with his fingertip. I exhorted him to pull his finger out. In the end, I was obliged to administer a general anaesthetic and assure him afterwards that I had performed a successful apisectomy – as I suppose the surgical removal of bees should be correctly termed.’

  ‘That effected a permanent cure?’

  ‘Alas, no. I shortly discovered the patient in exactly the same contorted position. He explained that having been put to such trouble ridding himself of the insect, he was keeping the route blocked in case it tried to get back. I shall tell young Chipps to present himself at nine sharp.’

  The interview with Pip that evening was not the brightest bloom in Mr Nelson’s convoluted garland of successful negotiations. As the pair sat down in the official reception room, the tail-coated butler placed at Pip’s elbow a silver tray bearing a covered silver dish and a bottle of brown ale.

  ‘Beer and sandwiches,’ explained Mr Nelson in the armchair opposite. ‘They’re a traditional offering for these sort of late night, last minute, strike-averting talks. The employers’ side get whisky, but it’s the same principle.’

  ‘I’m not very hungry or thirsty at the moment, I’m afraid,’ said Pip, who refused to be dutifully impressed with his surroundings.

  ‘Mrs Nelson can wrap them up, and you can enjoy them later,’ he said kindly. ‘Well, lad. What’s the trouble? Trying to fight the Three Day Week War all over again?’

  ‘I only want justice.’

  ‘That’s right, lad,’ he agreed encouragingly. ‘So do we all. By gum, we do. The lifeblood of democracy, that is.’

  ‘I represent the reasonable aspirations of the down-trodden proletariat.’

  ‘Have a fag.’

  ‘Don’t smoke, thanks.’

  ‘Neither do I. Except cigars. And these days it doesn’t do to go round in public with a big fat cigar in your face. Not like the times of Sir Winston Churchill. Always with his cigar, and his top hat, and his big black dog,’ he continued fondly. ‘Ah, you missed something during the war, lad. Mind, it was terrible with the bombs and that, and people being killed. I fought all the way through it you know,’ he added with a note of defiant pride. ‘As an Air Raid Warden. Bit of medical trouble kept me out of the Army. But the great spirit in the country! The Dunkirk spirit, the Alamein spirit, the spirit that cheerfully accepted shortages, rationing, the blackout, sing-songs down the shelters…’ He hummed a few bars of We’ll Meet Again. ‘We were one big happy family in those days, lad. It was our finest hour. I call for us all, lad, to relive that hour now, whatever the sacrifice, whatever the inconvenience. Well, that’s settled then,’ he said, holding out his hand and rising.

  ‘What’s settled?’

  ‘The strike, lad. You’ll call it off in the national interest.’

  ‘I certainly won’t,’ Pip said resentfully. ‘Not after all the work I’ve put into it. I’ve hardly had a wink of sleep since last Tuesday.’

  ‘You young lads don’t need a lot of sleep, not like we old codgers,’ continued Mr Nelson in a kindly voice, giving the impression of being about to nod off in his chair. ‘I remember when I was your age, lad. Not sleeping more than an hour a night for months on end. Sweating in the factory seven days a week, just to make a few bob to keep my poor old mum. By gum, we northerners were tough in those days. I went to work barefoot. Nothing to eat all day but bread and marge. They’re not like that back in Barnet any more, I’ll wager. I’ve been through it all, lad. I know how ordinary working folk feel. It’s time to put our shoulders to the wheel with the broadest backs bearing the greatest burden. So call off your strike, lad. Let our first job be getting Britain back to work.’

  ‘No,’ said Pip.

  ‘You got a mother still this side of Heaven, lad? Old age pension, I suppose? Senior Citizens, they call them these days. To me, they were just Gran and Pop.’ He wiped an eye delicately from a convenient box of tissues at his elbow. ‘They’re the folk who suffer from a selfish minority grabbing wage rises. The old, the sick – the sick, you know all about the sick, lad – the handicapped, the underprivileged, the homeless, the poor, and so on.’

  ‘But those are exactly the people I’m trying to benefit,’ Pip objected. ‘Improving their care by keeping their doctors in the country, and stopping medical energies being lavished on a few privileged patients.’

  ‘Well, lad, I’ve got some ambassador bloke to see, so I’ll have to send you on your way.’ Mr Nelson glanced at his watch, seeing that the three minutes allowed for the interview had expired. ‘Let’s keep the lines and the options open. Any time you change your mind, give us a phone call. I’m always available. Servant of the People. Sure you don’t want your beer and sandwiches? Know your way out? Don’t hear a buzzing noise, do you?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Ah, it must have escaped this afternoon. We’ll keep in touch,’ he said with crushing finality.

  On the doorstep, Pip was met with television cameras, clicking lenses, jabbing microphones.

  ‘The strike goes on,’ he announced, wrapping his coat tightly round him. ‘I call upon our brother trade unionists in the entire country to back one hundred per cent the struggle of the workers in the Health Service.’

  ‘You’re demanding a general strike?’ asked a man with a microphone.

  ‘Am I?’ Pip scratched his head. ‘Yes, I suppose I must be. Definitely.’

  Another man asked, ‘But supposing the trade union movement as a whole doesn’t respond?’

  ‘That’s a very good question.’ Pip stood on the doorstep, nodding thoughtfully until the solution came to him. ‘ACHE will simply stop even emergencies being treated in any hospital.’

  ‘But, Mr Chipps,’ cried someone else. ‘Isn’t that the mentality of the hijacker?’

  Pip gave a smile. ‘Exactly. And hijackers are the only practical politicians today who know exactly what they want and almost always get it. It isn’t their fault that they threaten to blow aeroplanes and so on to little bits. It’s the fault of modern civilization. Life has grown quite ridiculously complicated. Hasn’t that occurred to you? Anyone can get their own way, if they know precisely where to seek it. It takes such a very small spanner to jam the works, and anyone who rocks the boat has his hand on the tiller,’ he ended a little confusedly. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, my strike committee are waiting in the Mini.’
r />   19

  Just before ten o’clock the following morning, a Saturday of brilliant June sunshine which beguiled the nation’s darkest hour since the war, the matron of the Bertram Bunn Wing sat at the desk in her hot, un-air-conditioned steel-and-glass office, looking gloomily at the front page of a tabloid newspaper.

  ALL OUT – OR THE MORGUE,

  said the big headline.

  The front page was filled with the photograph of a wild-eyed Pip, giving a double clenched-fist salute on the doorstep the previous evening. The story in heavy type said:

  Supermilitant shop steward Pip called for a general strike yesterday to support ACHE’s action against private patients and dodging doctors. And a grim alternative – ACHE will black even emergency cases.

  TUC chiefs – gathered for gala opening of Yorkshire’s multi-million pound working men’s club with draught champagne and double-shift striptease – declared the strike call needed ‘Serious consideration’. A Government spokesman described the situation as ‘Extremely delicate, if not rather desperate’. The £ plummeted overnight AND England lost the Test Match in two days AND the weather forecast says WET and STORMY! So cheer up! BRITAIN CAN BLOODY WELL TAKE IT!

  ‘Grinning and bearing,’ sighed the matron to herself. ‘The great British virtue. Or the great British stupidity?’

  Emotions as warm and entangled as a plate of spaghetti lay within her breast as she continued staring at the page. She could not entirely suppress a feeling of pride that her nephew was sunning himself in the spotlights of fame. After all, none of the family had ever before got their picture in the papers, apart from Pip’s mother with the vicar in the Wiveliscombe Bugle. But Pip was thoroughly frightening. He was like some fondly indulged, playfully destructive puppy who had developed rabies. He really deserved putting down, she decided, if in some unhurtful way. The matron frowned, searching her mind for the fate of other turbulent pests. She supposed they ended up immured in the House of Lords, and Pip was perhaps a little young for that.