My second mistake was arriving for the examination in my black jacket and striped trousers. I had learnt in my first year as a medical student that the correct wear for facing examiners was a well-pressed, neatly-darned, threadbare old suit, which invited them to take a kindly attitude of superiority; appearing in a Savile Row outfit was like arriving at the Bankruptcy Court in a Rolls. But this did not occur to me as I made my way through the crowd of candidates in Queen Square.
Before the war the Fellowship was a private affair, in which a few dozen young men were treated to an afternoon's intellectual chat with the examiners and the proceedings were said to be interrupted for tea. Since the National Health Service the examination has been run on mass-production lines, but the traditional politeness of the examiners is steadfastly maintained. They politely made no comment on my Harley Street appearance, beyond smiling a little more heartily than usual in greeting; they brushed aside my ignorance of the precise location of the middle meningeal artery as unimportant among friends; they accepted my inability to identify the pathological specimens in glass jars as understandable between surgical gentlemen. The last examiner politely handed me a pickled brain and said, 'That sir, was removed post-mortem from a man of seventy. What do you find of interest in it?'
After a while I admitted, 'I see only the usual senile changes, sir.'
'They are not unusual, these changes, you mean, sir?'
'Oh, no, sir! After all, the patient was senile.'
'Alas,' he said gently. 'And I shall be seventy-six myself next birthday. Thank you, sir, for reminding me that I am rapidly getting past it all. Good day to you, sir.'
Politely, they thanked me; politely they bowed me out; just as politely they failed me.
Because I had been over-confident this depressed me more deeply than ploughing any of my student examinations. Once more I began opening my _British Medical Journal_ from the back, but I was so dispirited that all I could bring myself to read in the rest of the pages was the obituaries. These are prepared on the first-, second-, or third-class funeral principle, overworked G.P.s succumbing in early life getting small print at the end, consultants larger type well-spaced out, and leaders of the profession whom everyone has thought dead long ago appearing with a photograph taken when they were twenty-four. All that could be said about the majority of dead doctors seemed to be that they were kind to their patients, popular with their colleagues, and liked walking in Ireland; at the most they had a disease named after them. I began to get deeply miserable about the futility of my profession, and wondered if I should have gone into the Church instead.
I found a part-time job helping a doctor in Brixton, and decided that if I gave up smoking I could afford to work for the next Primary Fellowship examination three months later. After a week I began to suspect he was doing abortions on the side, and I thought I'd better leave. My money was running out again, and I saw my Muswell Hill days returning: it was a moment of gathering depression. Then late one evening I had a telephone call from Grimsdyke.
'Where the devil have you got to, old lad?' he said crossly, as I leant on the coin-box in the hall and heard every door on-the landing creak ajar. 'I've been trying to get you all over the place. Have you become a ruddy hermit, or something?'
'I've been working for my Primary.'
'Bit of a perversion this lovely weather, isn't it? I take it that now you've left Park Lane you're not in paid employment? Good. Then perhaps you could help me out. I've got an uncle who practises in the depths of the country-you know, simple rural G.P., beloved by all, full of homespun philosophy and never washes his hands-whose partner's off for his month's holiday. When I qualified I said I'd help him out, but unfortunately I have a pressing professional engagement elsewhere. Would you fill the breach?
'I thought you were a country G.P.'
'On a different sort of level. Can't explain now. How about it?'
I hesitated. I wondered if it was wholly fair to judge Grimsdyke's relations by himself.
'Say you will, old, lad,' he pressed, 'You can take your books and whistle through the work. It's a peaceful as a museum down there, but there's a nice pub next door and a pretty little bit in the post office if you feel like relaxation as well.'
'Tell me-is this uncle of yours married?'
Grimsdyke laughed. 'A widower. One daughter, permanently settled in Australia. How about it?'
I glanced round the dirty, stuffy hall of my lodgings, with the greasy green-baize board that would grow a crop of bills by next Friday morning.
'Well-'
'That's the spirit! I'll send you directions and a map. Can you start on Monday? The old boy's name is Farquharson. He's a funny old stick, but he thinks absolutely the world of me.'
After my first disastrous foray into general practice the prospect of playing the country G.P. for a month was alarming; also, I was a true Londoner who always felt uneasy beyond the friendly grin of the L.P.T.B. bus stops, or in the company of cows, sheep, cart-horses, goats, pigs, and other animals unknown in Leicester Square. But my confidence increased the next Monday afternoon as I drove Haemorrhagic Hilda deeper into the countryside, which wore a look of ripe and gentle peacefulness rarely captured outside brewers' advertisements. The village itself lay far from the main road, at the end of a winding lane in which a herd of cows, responding to the cow-attracting substance with which all cars are seemingly secretly coated by the manufacturers, licked Hilda over at their leisure. My new home consisted of a few houses, a couple of shops, the church, the vicarage, and the Four Horsehoes. In the middle was a triangular green on which a horse stared at me in offended surprise; across the green was Dr Farquharson's house, shaggy with creeper, its brass plate shining like a new penny in the sun, its front garden brilliant with flowers among which bees and wasps buzzed as contentedly as the people lunching off expenses in the Savoy Grill.
As Dr Farquharson was still on his rounds I was shown into the empty consulting-room by his housekeeper. This was a small, dark apartment tucked into the back of the house, containing a dirty sink, an old-fashioned sterilizer heated with a spirit lamp like a coffee machine, and an examination couch covered with white American cloth that looked as uninviting to lie upon naked as a fishmonger's slab. In one corner was a bookcase untidily filled with medical text-books, mostly by Scottish authors and all out of date; in another stood a dusty pile of old copies of the B.M.J. and Lancet. I shook my head sadly. Looking round, I could see no haemoglobinometer, no erythrocyte-sedimentation-rate apparatus, no sphygmomanometer, no microscope, no ophthalmoscope, no centrifuge, no auroscope, no patella hammer, no spatulae, no speculae, no proteinometer, no pipettes…It seemed to me impossible for anyone to practise medicine in the room at all.
Dr Farquharson turned out to be a tall, bony Scot with thick white hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, and big nobbly hands. He was dressed in a pair of patched tweed trousers, a black alpaca jacket, a striped shirt, a wing collar, and a spotted bow tie.
'Afternoon, Gordon,' he said dryly, as though we had parted just an hour ago. 'So you've come to help out an old fogy in the depths of the country, have you? How's that rascal of a nephew of mine?'
'He seems very well, sir.'
'How the Good Lord ever let him qualify I don't know. He hasn't half a brain in his head, and the rest of his cerebral space is filled up with a mixture of laziness and lubricity. Let's have a cup of tea.'
Tea was served under a mulberry tree in the garden by the housekeeper, whom Farquharson introduced as 'Mrs Bloxage, who's painstakingly kept my feet dry and my socks darned since my poor wife succumbed to _phthisis desperata_ eighteen years ago.' We had raspberries and cream, tomato and cress sandwiches, brown bread and honey, buttered toast and home-made strawberry jam, scones and shortbread, and three kinds of cake. 'One of the few advantages for an out-of-date old man like me practising medicine in the back of beyond,' Farquharson continued, helping himself to more cream, 'is that the patients still bring you a little something out of the goodness of their hearts. They're simple souls, and haven't tumbled to it that the doctor's now a Civil Servant, like the Sanitary Engineer. What do you think of these raspberries?'