Being a medical student is jolly good training for becoming an author. In both occupations you have to sit at a desk for hours on end when you'd rather be out in the pubs, and to live on practically nothing. Though I must admit it was only late in the course that I developed this knack for the studious life. The old uncle had become even stickier with the money after a surprise visit to my new digs one evening, when the landlady answered his question, 'Is this where Mr Grimsdyke lives?' with, 'That's right, sir, bring 'im in and mind 'is poor 'ead on the doorstep.'
I also found that writing a book, like taking out an appendix, looks rather easier from the appearance of the finished product than it is. The snag in writing a book about hospitals is that everyone imagines the atmosphere inside resembles the closing stages of a six-day bicycle race, while the operating theatre is really a relaxed and friendly place, like a well-run garage. Also, the public thinks all surgeons are high-principled and handsome, though most of them are little fat men with old pyjamas under their operating gowns, mainly worried about getting the next hernia done in time to have a decent lunch. My hero, one Clifford Standforth, FRCS, was a brilliant, upright, serious young surgeon, and somehow he didn't seem the sort of chap who'd last half an hour at St Swithin's without getting his leg pulled by everyone down to the first-year students.
After a few weeks, with foolscap on the floor as thick as the snow on a Christmas card, I found myself like any other hermit in pressing need of a decent meal and some conversation, and I invited myself round to Miles' flat for dinner. I thought I could finally pass on Sir Lancelot's remarks about slapping chaps on the back a bit more, but I found the fellow in an even deeper condition of acute melancholia.
'What's up now?' I asked. 'Sir Lancelot still creating about that car park?'
'Barefoot,' Miles replied.
'Oh,' I said.
'He's putting up for the job, too.'
'Unfortunate,' I agreed.
'Everything's against me,' muttered Miles. 'I thought the fellow had settled down for life as Reader in Surgery at West Riding.'
'He's your only serious rival, I suppose?'
'As ever,' agreed Miles bitterly. 'You've never said a word, I suppose, Gaston? Not about the true story?'
I shook my head. 'Not even to Connie.'
'Thank you, Gaston. I appreciate that deeply.'
I felt so unhappy for him I had to help myself to some of his whisky and soda. The Barefoot incident was the only shady part of old Miles' rather sad salad days. Everyone at St Swithin's thought it pretty mysterious at the time, the general rumour being that the poor chap had suffered a nervous breakdown following years of chronic overwork, which was highly gratifying to students like myself who believed in long periods of recuperation between exams.
It all happened just before Miles went up for his finals before either of us had yet run into Connie. Charlie Barefoot was a small, untidy pink chap who resembled a cherub in glasses, and the pair of them had met their first week in St Swithin's, over that beastly dogfish.
'I say, isn't that Hume's _Treatise on Human Nature_ you have there?' asked Miles, waiting for the class to start one morning.
Barefoot nodded. 'I like to keep my mind occupied while I'm hanging about for anything-trains, haircuts, scholarship exams, and so on. But isn't that Darwin's _Origin of Species?'_
Miles said it was. 'I thought it a useful start to one's medical education.'
'But I've been waiting for months to discuss Darwin's views on natural selection!'
'And I've been waiting for months to discuss Hume's views on subjective idealism!'
After that they were great pals.
Medical students in the first year have hardly shaken the schoolroom chalk from their shoulders, but they soon learn to crowd the rear benches of the lecture-room so that unobtrusive exits might be made should the subject start to pall. Miles and Barefoot were always left with the front row to themselves, where they answered all the questions, took notes by the armful, and generally gave the impression intellectually of a pair of young Mozarts. At the end of the first year Miles won the Dean's Prize in Biology, with Charlie Barefoot _proxime accessit._
That got rid of the dogfish, by promotion from the medical kindergarden to the anatomy rooms. They shared the same leg.
'Miles, I've got some capital news,' Barefoot announced, as my cousin arrived one morning. 'There's a vacancy in my digs. Tony Benskin doesn't want to stay any longer. I don't know why, but he got quite shirty the other day, just because I wanted to discuss the popliteal fossa over breakfast. If you were thinking of making a change-'
'I'll give my landlady notice tonight,' Miles replied at once. 'My lodgings are really very difficult for studying in the evenings. Quite apart from the noise of Paddington Station, there are a couple of ladies on my landing who seem to have a tremendous succession of visitors.'
'You'll find it much more agreeable at Muswell Hill. Mrs Capper provides use of the parlour and lets us make cocoa as late as we like in the evening.'
Miles moved his books and bones across London, and from Monday to Friday every night afterwards the pair of them swotted at Mrs Capper's parlour table. On Saturdays they went for a long walk in the country and took supper at Lyons'. In time, Miles won the Gold Medal in Anatomy, with Barefoot again runner-up.
By the time I'd shaken off the blasted dogfish myself, Miles and Barefoot were already at work in the St Swithin's wards. Despite the standing impression of hospital inmates, medical students are let loose on live patients only after a couple of years of cutting up dead ones, and a pretty testing transition it is, too. A good many bright young anatomists I've seen floundering about among the dirty dressings and vomit bowls, and they say all the best surgeons were as hopeless at anatomy as all the best judges were at law. But even Sir Lancelot Spratt agreed it was simply a matter of time before Miles won the University Prize in Surgery, with Barefoot as usual panting a few marks behind.
Then a most unusual dislocation nobbled this pair of academic steeplechasers.
When I started in the hospital myself, I found that once you'd sorted out the odd sounds that come rumbling up a stethoscope the greatest difficulty in a medical ward is not making a diagnosis but making a bed. Hospital sisters regard the students as farmers regard their own unavoidable pests, and insist on all blankets being replaced complete with official hospital corners, which was totally beyond old Miles. He couldn't examine a patient without leaving him like a finisher in a sack-race.
After inspecting a particularly tricky case of splenomegaly one evening, Miles was struggling to tuck back the foot of the bed without repeatedly folding his tie into it, when a voice behind him said softly, 'If you let me do it, perhaps it would be easiest for both of us in the end?'
My cousin found a small, blonde junior nurse smiling at him.
'Awfully decent of you,' he stammered.
'You're working terribly late, aren't you?'
She gave the bed-cover a professional flick.
'Oh, I don't know. I rather like work. You new on the ward?'
'I came down from ENT yesterday. My name's Nurse Crimpole.'
'Mine's Miles Grimsdyke.'
'Of course I knew that.'
'You did?'
'Surely everyone in the hospital has heard of the clever Miles Grimsdyke. Quite unlike the other one.'
She gave him another smile. Miles' stomach felt as though he'd swallowed a nest of glow-worms.
'What would you enumerate as the differential diagnosis of acute nephritis?' asked Charlie Barefoot across Mrs Capper's redplush tablecloth later that evening.
Miles switched his eyes from Mr Capper's Buffalo Group over the fireplace.
'Eh?'
'You all right?' Barefoot looked concerned. 'You haven't touched your cocoa.'
'Yes, I'm fine, thanks. Fit as a flea. Though perhaps I'm overdoing the Saturday tramps a little. Sorry, old man.'