Doctor On The Job

by Richard Gordon

  She opened the newspaper. The emotions behind the severely cut bosom of her uniform instantly straightened themselves out. The page facing her was filled with a photograph of Sir Lancelot Spratt’s patient – her top half, smiling winsomely from her bath upstairs in the Bertram Bunn Wing, while daintily sponging the nape of her neck.

  BLACKLEG BRENDA!

  it said beneath. The caption went on:

  Actress Brenda Bristols, strikebound since Tuesday night in St Swithin’s Hospital private wing, serves meals and cleans floors and aids the nurses – and nobody objects! Said Brenda, tubbing after a hard day’s work. ‘All the hospitalized sheikhs want to take their money out of Britain because of the crisis. But they can’t. The private patients’ telephones are on strike!’

  ‘Serves meals! Cleans floors!’ muttered the matron. ‘She doesn’t do a hand’s turn, except when there’s a photographer about. That woman’s clothes come on and off quicker than the television commercials, and probably just as often.’

  She continued glaring at the photograph. She found inconceivable the attention, the courtesy, the interest which Sir Lancelot lavished on such a mammary monstrosity. Particularly as the matron had discovered from Tony Havens’ case notes that Brenda Bristols’ real name was Elaine Fishwick and that she had been a Wimpy Bar waitress in Slough and divorced three times. The sort of woman to console Sir Lancelot in his widowhood, she reflected, should be entirely different. Serious minded, intelligent, energetic, reliable, with much conversation in common by way of interesting operations, symptoms, and diseased organs.

  The matron sat back, drumming her delicate fingertips slowly against the edge of her desk. She had not played her cards right the previous evening, she had to admit. Worse still, she had wrongly accused Sir Lancelot of revoking. But the game was not over. Brenda Bristols would be excluded from the play, once this ridiculous strike of Pip’s was over, if it did not end up in Civil War II.

  There was a knock.

  She pushed the newspaper into a desk drawer. ‘Come in.’

  Lord Hopcroft appeared, fully dressed. ‘Good morning, Matron. I was just leaving.’

  She pursed her lips. ‘I don’t remember giving permission for your discharge?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. The computer discharged me.’

  ‘I see. Well, I hope your stay was comfortable. As comfortable as possible under these unruly circumstances.’

  ‘I have not a word of criticism, Matron. Everyone was absolutely marvellous.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, the frost fading slightly.

  ‘I’ve come to collect them.’

  ‘Collect what?’

  ‘The twins.’

  The matron frowned. ‘Are they your relatives?’

  ‘Most definitely. I had them late last night. Two girls, according to the computer.’

  ‘But there must be some mistake –’

  ‘Not a bit. The computer cannot make mistakes. You told me as much yourself, repeatedly. Well, where have you got them?’ he asked, smiling round the room. ‘I just can’t wait to bring them home. My butler will be terribly thrilled. He is rather on the effeminate side.’

  ‘Lord Hopcroft,’ she addressed him severely. ‘You were perhaps diagnosed by the computer as having delusions you’d given birth to twin girls.’

  ‘I’m not having delusions,’ he returned firmly. ‘The computer may be having delusions, but that’s no affair of mine. I’m in quite a tizzy deciding what to call them. One must be so careful not labelling girls with trendy names. They do so date. A friend of my former wife christened her little one “Twiggy”, which I’m sure may be something of a mistake. What shall I feed them on, Matron? Putting the babies to the breast would seem to present certain technical difficulties.’

  ‘I always advise my mothers to attempt breastfeeding, at the very least. It’s so much more satisfying.’

  ‘One could but try, I suppose,’ he mused.

  ‘If there isn’t enough natural milk, then you will find any of the proprietary artificial feeds perfectly satisfactory.’

  ‘How often should one give them?’

  ‘I recommend feeding on demand. That is so much more natural than giving your baby meals at fixed intervals. Its little stomach may not be at all ready. Weaning of course, particularly in the case of twins – What am I telling you all this for?’ she broke off crossly. ‘Of course you haven’t had twin babies. You haven’t had even one.’

  ‘But the computer print-out gave their weights, their blood-groups, their genetic details –’

  The matron silenced him with a firm tap of her pencil on the desk. ‘We shall forward your twins to your home address.’

  ‘Like buying things at Fortnum and Mason’s,’ he agreed amiably. ‘Yes, having them delivered would certainly be more convenient. I hope my chauffeur is still waiting. He will be needing a shave rather badly by now, poor fellow. Again, Matron, thank you. I had such an easy and painless confinement. I shall certainly make a point of bearing the rest of my family in your hospital. And it was quite an excitement to meet Brenda Bristols in the flesh.’

  ‘You think so?’ The ice reformed.

  ‘She is coming to convalesce at a little shack I own near St Tropez, once Sir Lancelot has nipped that lump from her breast. A ridiculously small one for an operation, it seemed to me. But I suppose all things are relative. Oh, just one final matter,’ he remembered. ‘The computer tells me to obtain my maternity grant. Where do I apply for that?’

  ‘I should try the administrators’ office in the main St Swithin’s building,’ she told him bleakly. ‘Unless they are all on strike.’

  As Lord Hopcroft left, a second visitor pushed hastily into the office past him. He was slight, slim and sandy-haired, drooping-moustached, bright-eyed and fresh complexioned. He wore a crumpled brown suit of Donegal tweed, and carried a shapeless tweed hat with fishing flies round the brim.

  ‘Florence –’

  She jerked upright in her chair. ‘Horace –’

  ‘What is Pip up to?’ he asked at once.

  ‘I don’t know. Trying to take over Downing Street as he’s already taken over St Swithin’s, it seems.’

  ‘And Buckingham Palace into the bargain. I can’t understand it. He always used to shy away from responsibility. He even refused to become Secretary of his mother’s Poetry Circle.’

  Dr Horace Chipps sat down, staring at his brown-booted feet.

  ‘You saw his antics on television these last two nights?’ asked the matron.

  ‘Yes. That’s why I decided I must come up to London. I wanted to look at a new trout rod in Farlow’s, anyway,’ he added. ‘It’s dreadfully worrying about Pip. Is he suffering from mania? Ought he to be shut away somewhere? I know he wanted to be a psychiatrist, an ambition I always suspect to be a symptom of incipient mental disease. But what’s he doing as a porter, anyway? Why isn’t he pursuing his medical studies?’

  ‘I’m afraid his medical studies have raced out of sight. He was expelled after failing his exams.’

  ‘That happened to me dozens of times,’ Dr Chipps dismissed the incident. ‘I simply turned up again at the start of the next session as if nothing had happened. Nobody said anything. They always feel dreadfully foolish expelling a St Swithin’s man – who the hospital naturally recognize as the best all-round top-quality students in London.’

  ‘It’s simply that Pip has got into the hands of the wrong people.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Faith Lychfield.’

  ‘The dean’s daughter?’ he asked in amazement. ‘But I met her on their holidays in Somerset. She’s a sweet and charming little girl who couldn’t say boo to a gosling.’

  ‘Young people do peculiar and most unexpected things these days. The sons and daughters of even highly respectable families frequently become hippies, drop-outs, drug addicts, alcoholics, sex maniacs and so on.’ The matron added with a hard look, ‘Personally, I put the blame on the parents.’

  ‘I suppos
e you’re suggesting that I brought up Pip wrongly?’ he said, returning her glare. ‘Well, I didn’t. I taught him cricket at ten and fly-fishing at fourteen. How to deliver lambs at fifteen and how to classify butterflies at sixteen. At seventeen how to train gundogs, and at eighteen how to drink scrumpy without being sick.’ Dr Chipps stood up. ‘I’d better have a word with my son, I suppose,’ he decided. ‘Before they start calling out the Army and Navy, if we’ve got much of either left. Where can I find him?’

  ‘His usual haunt is the porters’ room in St Swithin’s basement.’

  ‘I shall never find my way about my own hospital, now it’s been so extravagantly rebuilt,’ he complained sadly.

  ‘Just follow the picket lines, and you’ll get right to the spot,’ she advised him crisply.

  The front of St Swithin’s struck Dr Horace Chipps as resembling a film unit on location rather than a hospital forecourt. There were cameras, lights, cables and large vans everywhere. Bright-shirted men strode decisively about, pointing in all directions. Girls in jeans and enormous glasses hurried after them attentively with notebooks and stopwatches. Men dangling with cameras or festooned with microphones lolled comfortably in the warm sunshine. He noticed, looking equally lost, the pinkish, smartly dressed man who had left the matron’s office as he had entered it.

  They caught each other’s eye. ‘Excuse me,’ said the stranger to Dr Chipps. ‘I’m looking for the administrators’ office. I’ve just been discharged from hospital.’

  ‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ the doctor asked kindly.

  ‘Not at all. I have given birth to twins.’

  Dr Chipps blinked. Not only St Swithin’s but medicine had been startlingly modernized since his own student days. He looked round. A young man in Highland dress was holding up a placard saying, HOME RULE FOR CLYDESIDE. Nearer stood a brown-coated youth, gloomily bearing aloft the message FAIR CURES FOR ALL. ‘Certainly, Guv’nor, first floor,’ he replied politely, when Lord Hopcroft asked for directions.

  ‘And what’s your opinion of the dispute?’

  ‘Of the what?’

  ‘The strike.’

  ‘Oh, that. Ain’t thought, really.’

  ‘But surely,’ suggested Lord Hopcroft gently, ‘you understand why you’re on strike?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m on strike because we was called out.’

  ‘But do you know why you were called out?’

  ‘The shop steward called us out.’

  ‘Exactly. But for what reasons did your shop steward decide this?’

  ‘Look, Guv, I ain’t a bleedin’ professor.’

  Lord Hopcroft reached the first floor offices. They were deserted, except for a young man in a bright T-shirt and jeans, visible through a far door shovelling papers into a brief-case. ‘Are you on strike, too?’ Lord Hopcroft asked, approaching.

  The young man looked up. ‘Not on Saturday. We never do anything on Saturdays. I’m clearing up. I’ve been fired. Just because I blew a few quid of hospital funds on some German bird in a classy restaurant. It’s damn unfair. I’d call a strike over it, if there wasn’t one on already.’

  ‘What job are you going to do instead?’ Lord Hopcroft asked sympathetically.

  ‘Not another hospital,’ Mr Grout said feelingly. ‘Not where you can’t even wear decent gear, and have to be on your dignity all day. I’m going to try hotels. Hotels are just the same as hospitals, anyway. Except that fewer people die in them.’

  Lord Hopcroft snapped his fingers. ‘By God! I think you’ve given me the answer, young man. My company owns a couple of modern hotels in central London doing atrociously badly at the moment. But they’ve got an efficient and – I flatter myself – most contented staff. The cooking and cellar are all that the most fastidious capitalist or caliph might desire. I could easily knock a few suites into rooms for the doctors to do whatever they do in them. After all, an operating theatre seems to me only a rather elaborate bathroom. I’ll get one of the top couturiers to design the nurses’ uniforms,’ he continued enthusiastically. ‘Nosegays and things, get rid of this dreadful butch Florence Nightingale image. There will never be any industrial trouble, because the domestic staff will be accepted as having an interest in their pockets rather than their patients. Why should it be otherwise? We are surely past the days when monks and nuns toiled to bring the sick their possets and so on? A great pity, in a way,’ he reflected. ‘They were a splendid source of cheap labour. Henry the Eighth has much to answer for.’

  ‘You need a licence,’ Mr Grout pointed out gloomily. ‘Under the Public Health Act, 1936, Sections one hundred and eighty-seven to one-nine-five.’

  ‘What precisely was the job you lost?’

  ‘Junior administrator. As a matter of fact, all this trouble’s due to me.’ He nodded towards the crowded forecourt. ‘I was the one who gave Chipps his job as a porter. Only last Tuesday.’

  ‘You obviously have a flair for picking the coming man,’ Lord Hopcroft complimented him. ‘I may well have room for you in my new scheme. Would you care to join me for lunch in one of my hotels? Then you can come along and help me smash up our office computer. I have reason to suspect they can be unreliable instruments.’

  20

  ‘Do you mind slipping out of the mortuary entrance under cover of this hearse, Dad?’ Pip was conducting Dr Chipps from the rear of St Swithin’s, the same time as Lord Hopcroft was leaving the front door with Mr Grout. ‘I’ll get mobbed if I show my face at the main entrance.’

  ‘In the old St Swithin’s building,’ his father reflected fondly, ‘the mortuary was the only route into the Nurses’ Home after midnight. I’m sure it was splendid training for the girls in the realities of their chosen profession, once you’d pushed them over the gate.’

  ‘Where should we go for this drink?’

  ‘I wonder if the Cock and Feathers still stands?’ his father suggested. Pip frowned, trying to remember. ‘It was a favourite among the students in my day. It should be just along this alley, as I recall. Though of course I haven’t been back to London more than a couple of times since I qualified.’

  ‘It was good of you to come and see me today, Dad.’

  ‘I thought I’d look you up,’ he explained casually. ‘It’s interesting to see you in your natural habitat. There’s the pub.’

  ‘Seems to be one I’ve overlooked,’ Pip confessed.

  ‘It hasn’t changed a bit. Though I’m afraid that little red-headed barmaid will have changed considerably.’

  They pushed through the narrow doorway of a small, grimy pub, seemingly too insignificant for the baleful notice of the planners who had savagely redesigned the area. The sign overhead was faded, the single window giving into the public bar was unwashed, the interior was dim, empty, sawdust-floored and smelling strongly of beer in all stages of decomposition.

  ‘Morning, Horace,’ said a fat man in shirtsleeves and braces behind the bar. ‘Your usual?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You haven’t been in for some time.’

  ‘No. I’ve been living in Somerset.’

  ‘Nice down there?’ The man started drawing a pint.

  ‘Very nice.’

  ‘It must be getting on for…what? Twenty years?’

  ‘Nearer thirty, Sam.’

  ‘Time flies, dunnit?’

  ‘It certainly does.’

  ‘Seems like yesterday. Same for your friend?’

  ‘He’s my son.’

  ‘Don’t say? Yes, time does fly,’ the publican observed reflectively.

  Dr Chipps took his son to a bench and a rough table in one corner. ‘Do you see, Pip? Once you’ve been a student at St Swithin’s, that’s not something you can wipe out of your life like some holiday you once enjoyed. The hospital isn’t just some modern technical school, turning out doctors who are simply garage mechanics for human beings. Though admittedly, that’s what the place now looks like,’ he conceded. ‘The buildings may be brand-new, but as an institution St Swithin’s has
been going strong over four hundred years. And a bit of that history sticks to all of us.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have been more appreciative of my hospital if it hadn’t thrown me out,’ Pip objected mildly.

  ‘Some of the most zealous of St Swithin’s enthusiasts are its failed students. They look back on it as a sunny forcing-ground before they found success in other fields.’

  ‘Well, I’ve found success in another field.’

  ‘Only by trying to destroy St Swithin’s and everything it stands for,’ his father pointed out.

  Pip sipped his pint. ‘It’s exactly that I’m proud of.’

  ‘That’s only your opinion,’ his father told him forbearingly.

  ‘I’m unshakeably convinced it’s the right one.’

  ‘What could you tell jesting Pilate? That the truth is only a point of view. Though I suppose black and white are the same thing to a blind man, and in my experience of humanity most people are pretty wall-eyed. That’s why they’re so easily pushed about by strongly minded and noisy activists. Like you.’

  ‘May I tell you what, in my eyes, St Swithin’s stands for? Starkly clearly?’

  ‘I think I’ve gathered that already from the papers. Private practice and doctors’ emigration. Both of which you are determined to stop. By allowing coronaries and appendices and haemorrhages and so on to die through lack of treatment.’

  ‘I was a little carried away by my own words at that particular point,’ Pip admitted shamefacedly.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone took you too seriously,’ his father told him easily. ‘The country’s pretty used to trade union braggarts who enjoy making the public’s flesh creep on television.’

  ‘Dad, you’ve only diagnosed the symptoms of my argument against St Swithin’s. Not the condition that’s causing me to form them. I really object to something more fundamental. To doctors setting themselves up as something special, as people way above their fellow workers in the National Health Service.’