Doctor in the House (3 page)

I shook my head.

‘No thanks. I don’t drink much, you know. Hardly at all, in fact. Only if I’ve been out for a long walk or something and I’m thirsty.’

I saw Grimsdyke wince.

‘Of course, one must remember…’ he began. ‘You will find that in a little while at St Swithin’s you will learn enough bad habits to make life bearable. However, there is time enough for that. Padre,’ he called. ‘The other half for me, if you please.’

‘Could you tell me…?’ I began, feeling I had better collect all the information I could from my companion while he was talkative.

‘Yes?’

‘Why – why do you fail your examinations on purpose?’

Grimsdyke looked inscrutable.

‘That is a little secret of my own,’ he said darkly. ‘Maybe I’ll let you into it one day, old boy.’

I learnt about Grimsdyke’s little secret earlier than he expected. It was common knowledge in the medical school and seeped down into the first-year students within a few weeks of their arrival.

Grimsdyke’s reluctance to pass examinations was wholly the fault of his grandmother, a well-to-do old lady who had passed the long-drawn-out twilight of her life in Bournemouth. As she had nothing else to occupy her she developed a wide selection of complaints, which were soothed away, all in good time, by the expensive attentions of her charming physicians. Her regard for the medical profession mounted with each indisposition, and was tempered only with the regret that she had not a single medical gentleman in her own family. The only person who could have rectified the omission was young Grimsdyke, and she conceived the idea while he was still at school of enticing him into the profession by offering to pay his expenses for the course. Unfortunately, the grandmother shortly afterwards developed a malady beyond the abilities of her doctors and was carried away; but her will contained a clause bequeathing a thousand a year to the young man during the time that he was a medical student.

Grimsdyke did not immediately realize the full significance of this, and had begun his first year’s study at St Swithin’s before it dawned on him that he had an excellent opportunity to spend the rest of his life in London on a comfortable allowance without the tedium of doing any work. He therefore took great pains always to fail his examinations. He came to the hospital once or twice a week, paid his fees promptly, and behaved himself, which was sufficient for St Swithin’s. He had a flat in Knightsbridge, an old two-seater car (known as The Ulcer, because it was always breaking down), a large number of friends, and plenty of spare time. ‘I sometimes think,’ he would admit to his cronies, ‘I have discovered the secret of graceful living.’

About the time that I joined the medical school Grimsdyke’s spacious days became limited. He had fallen in love with a girl and proposed to her, but she was a shrewd young woman and not only discovered the secret of his existence but refused to accept him unless he altered it.

‘An embryo doctor, yes,’ Grimsdyke would explain sadly, ‘but a chronic hanger-on in a medical school, no. I was obliged to go out and buy some books. The power of women, my dear old boy. It is for them that men climb mountains, fight wars, go to work, and such unpleasant things.’

She must have had the personality of a Barbary slave-master, for he thenceforward applied himself to his studies as enthusiastically as anyone else in the hospital.

As there were no classes arranged for the day of the Dean’s lecture I had the afternoon to myself. I slipped off quietly from the King George shortly after a bunch of senior students burst in and started a noisy drinking session with Grimsdyke. The lighthearted way which my new companions slipped down pints of beer alarmed me. I drank very little, for I had recently left school and was under the impression that more than two glasses of beer ruined your rugger and led to equally serious moral degeneration.

‘So you are going in for – um – medicine?’ my housemaster had said to me during my final term.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘A very – er – esteemed profession, Gordon, as you should know. Unfortunately, I find the means of entry to it seems to have a bad influence on boys of even the highest character. No doubt the effect of dealing daily with the – um – fundamental things in life, as it were, is some excuse. Yet I must warn you to exercise continual restraint.’

‘Oh yes, sir. I will, of course, sir.’

‘I expect you will soon become as bad as the rest,’ he sighed. His small opinion of medical students sprang largely from the days when he had been reading theology at Cambridge and, on his attempt to break up a noisy party of medicals in the adjoining rooms late one night, he had been forcibly administered an enema of Guinness’ stout.

I had lunch alone at the ABC and went down to a medical bookshop in Bloomsbury to buy some text-books. I had to get a copy of Gray’s
Anatomy
, the medical student’s bible, as unquestionable authority on anatomy as Hansard on a parliamentary debate. When I saw the book my heart sank under its weight. I flicked over the two thousand foolscap pages of detailed anatomical description split up by beautiful bold drawings of yellow nerves, bright red arteries, and blue veins twining their way between dissected brown muscles that opened like the petals of an unfolding flower. I wondered how anyone could ever come to learn all the tiny facts packed between its covers as thickly as the grains in a sack of wheat. I also bought a set of volumes giving directions for dissection of the body, a thick tome on physiology full of graphs and pictures of vivisected rabbits, and a book of Sir William Osler’s addresses to medical students.

‘Is there anything else, sir?’ the assistant asked politely.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A skeleton. Do you happen to have a skeleton?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re out of skeletons at the moment. The demand on them is particularly heavy at this time of the year.’

I spent the rest of the afternoon hunting a skeleton for use in the evenings with the anatomical text-books. I found one in a shop off Wigmore Street and took it back to my digs. Most landladies had become accustomed to a skull to be dusted on the mantelpiece and a jumble of dried bones in the corner, but students moving into lodgings that had previously sheltered such inoffensive young men as law or divinity pupils were sometimes turned out on the grounds that their equipment precipitated in the good lady a daily attack of the creeps.

For the first two years of their course medical students are not allowed within striking distance of a living patient. They learn the fundamentals of their art harmlessly on dead ones. The morning after the Dean’s lecture the new class was ordered to gather in the anatomical dissecting room to begin the term’s work.

The dissecting room was a high, narrow apartment on the ground floor of the medical school that exhaled a strong smell of phenol and formaldehyde. A row of tall frosted glass windows filled one wall, and the fluorescent lights that hung in strips from the ceiling gave the students themselves a dead, cyanotic look. The wall opposite the windows supported a length of blackboard covered with drawings of anatomical details in coloured chalks. In one corner was a stand of pickled specimens, like the bottles on a grocer’s shelves, and in the other a pair of assembled skeletons grinned at each other, suspended from gallows like the minatory remains of highwaymen. Down the room were a dozen high, narrow, glass-topped tables in two rows. And on the tables, in different stages of separation, were six or seven dissected men and women.

I looked at the bodies for the first time curiously. They were more like mummies than recently dead humans. All were the corpses of old people, and the preserving process to which they had been subjected had wrinkled them beyond that of ageing. Four untouched subjects lay naked and ready for the new class, but at the other tables the senior students were already at work. Some of the groups had advanced so far that the part they were dissecting was unidentifiable to an unknowing onlooker like myself; and here and there a withered, contracted hand stuck out in silent supplication from a tight group of busy dissectors.

We stood nervously just inside the door waiting for instructions from the Professor of Anatomy. Each of us wore a newly starched white coat and carried a little canvas roll containing a pair of forceps, a freshly sharpened scalpel, and a small wire probe stuck into a pen-handle. The others, to impress their superiority on the newcomers, disregarded us completely.

The Professor had the reputation of an academic Captain Bligh. He was one of the country’s most learned anatomists, and his views on the evolution of the hyoid bone in the throat were quoted to medical students in dissecting rooms from San Francisco to Sydney. His learned distinction was unappreciated by his students, however, all of whom were terrified of him.

He had several little unnerving peculiarities. For some reason the sight of a student walking into the medical school with his hands in his pockets enraged him. His private room was next to the main entrance, so it was convenient for him to shoot out and seize by the shoulders any man he saw through the window sauntering into the building in this way. He would shake him and abuse him thoroughly for some minutes before stepping back into his room to watch for the next one. This habit was thought unpleasant by the students, but nothing could be done about it because the Professor, who controlled the examinations, held the power of justice at all levels in the anatomy school.

The Professor appeared suddenly in the dissecting room through his private entrance. The hum of conversation at the tables immediately ceased and was replaced by serious, silent, activity.

He stood for some moments looking at his new class narrowly. The sight apparently did not please him, He grunted, and drawing a sheet of paper from the pocket of his white coat called a roll of our names in a voice rough with disgust. He was a tall thin man, shaped like a bullet. His bald head rose to a pointed crown and his body sloped outwards gently to his tiny feet far below. He wore a mangy ginger beard.

He put the list of names back in his pocket.

‘Now listen to me, you fellows,’ he began sternly. ‘You’ve got to
work
in this department, d’you understand? I’m not going to put up with any slacking for a moment. Anatomy’s tough – you can’t learn it unless you put your backs into it. Any laziness here, and…’ He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Out! See?’

We nodded nervously, like a squad of recruits listening to their first drill sergeant.

‘And I don’t want to see any of you men slopping round with your hands in your pockets. It’s all right for errand boys and pimps, but you’re supposed to be medical students. The attitude is not only unanatomical but gives you osteoarthritis of the shoulder girdle in your middle age. No wonder you all grow up into a hunchbacked crowd of deformities! I know I’m ugly, but I can stand up straight, which is more than some of you people. Do you follow me?’

We assented briskly.

‘Right. Well, get on with some work. The list of parts for dissection is up on the board at the end there.’

With a final glare he disappeared through his door.

I had been allotted a leg for my first term’s work. We dissected in pairs, two men to each part. My partner was a student called Benskin – a large, sandy-haired man who wore under his white coat a green check shirt and a red tie with little yellow dogs on it.

‘What ho,’ said Benskin.

‘Good morning,’ I replied politely.

‘Are you conversant with the mysteries of anatomical dissection?’ he asked.

‘No. Not at all.’

‘Nor I.’

We looked at each other silently for a few seconds.

‘Perhaps we had better read the instructions in the dissecting manual,’ I suggested.

We sat down on a pair of high wooden stools and propped the book against the dead thigh on the table in front of us. After turning over several preliminary pages we reached a drawing of a plump leg with bold red lines over it.

‘That seems to be our skin incision,’ I said, pointing to one of the lines. ‘Will you start, or shall I?’

Benskin waved a large hand generously.

‘Go ahead,’ he said.

I drew a breath, and lightly touched the greasy rough skin. With my new scalpel I made a long sweeping incision.

‘I think I’ve cut the wrong thing,’ I said, glancing at the book.

‘It doesn’t look quite like the picture,’ Benskin admitted. ‘Perhaps we ought to raise some help.’

There were a pair of demonstrators in the dissecting room – young doctors passing grey years in the anatomy department for small wages in the hope of being appointed to the surgical staff of St Swithin’s in middle age. They flitted from one group of students to another like bees in a herbaceous border, pollinating each pair with knowledge. Both of them were far away from our table.

At that moment I caught sight of Grimsdyke, in a shining starched coat, strolling between the dissectors like an Englishman in a Suez bazaar. He waved languidly to me.

‘How are you progressing?’ he asked, crossing to our table. ‘Good God, is that as far as you’ve got?’

‘It’s very difficult,’ I explained. ‘You see, we don’t quite know how to start. Could you give us a bit of a hand?’

‘But certainly, my dear old boy,’ Grimsdyke said, picking up a scalpel. ‘I have now dissected four legs and consider I have something of a flair for the knife. This is the gluteus maximus muscle.’

Grimsdyke slit his way rapidly through the muscles and in half an hour did our work for the week.

The routine of lectures and dissection passed the time agreeably. After a few weeks I began to distinguish more sharply the personalities of my fellow students, as an eye gradually sees the objects in a darkened room. My dissecting partner, Tony Benskin, was a cheery young man whose mental horizon was bounded by rugby football and beer drinking and clouded over only with a chronic scarcity of cash. Dissecting the fellow to our leg was the ginger-haired youth I had noticed at the Dean’s lecture reading Darwin. He turned out to be a quiet and disturbingly brilliant Welshman called Evans, who started the course under the impetus of a senior scholarship. Evans dissected away conscientiously and efficiently from the start – which was fortunate, as his own companion rarely put in an appearance in the anatomy room at all. He was a handsome fellow named John Bottle, whose interests in life were ballroom dancing and the dogs. He spent most of his afternoons in the palais and his evenings at Harringay or the White City. The middle-aged man with the notebook I soon discovered to be an ex-bank clerk called Sprogget, who was left a little money after twenty years’ looking at a ledger and immediately fulfilled an almost forgotten ambition of taking up medicine. Sprogget was unfortunate in being partnered by the most objectionable student in the class – a man named Harris, whom Grimsdyke named immediately the Keen Student. Harris knew everything. His greased black hair, parted precisely in the middle, and his thick-rimmed spectacles popped frequently between a pair of dissectors.

‘You know, old man,’ he would volunteer, ‘you’re not doing that bit according to the book. You ought to have exposed the nerve before you cut away the tendons. Hope you don’t mind my mentioning it, but I thought it might save you a bit of trouble with the Prof later. I say, you’ve made a mess of the brachial artery, haven’t you?’

He was incorrigible. He sat at the front of the lectures and asked grave questions to which he already knew the answers. He ate a lunch of sandwiches in the locker room of the anatomy department, reading a text-book; and his conversation was limited strictly to anatomy. He regarded the barracking to which he was inevitably subjected as another instance of persecution of the intellectuals.

Grimsdyke was a useful acquaintance, for his four years’ start put him on familiar terms with the senior students. One afternoon shortly after my arrival he hailed me as I was walking out of the medical school doorway.

‘I say, old lad,’ he called. ‘Come and meet Mike Kelly. He’s secretary of the rugger club.’

There was a broad young man with a red face standing beside him. He wore an old tweed jacket with leather on the elbows and a brilliant yellow pullover.

‘How do you do,’ I said respectfully. Kelly was not only rugby secretary but two years senior to myself.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Kelly, crushing my hand. ‘You play a bit, do you?’

‘A bit. Threequarter.’

‘Jolly good. The hospital’s going to be short of good threes in a year or so. First fifteen at school, I take it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which school?’

I told him.

‘Oh,’ said Kelly with disappointment. ‘Well, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t turn out a decent player once in a while. We’ll give you a run with the extra B fifteen on Saturday and see how you make out. Grimsdyke here’s the captain. He’ll fix you up.’

‘The extra B is a bit of a joke,’ Grimsdyke said as Kelly strode off. ‘Actually, we are more of a social side than anything. Our boast is that we can take on any team at any game. Last summer we played a dance band at cricket, and I’ve arranged a shove-ha’penny match with the police for next month. I’ll meet you here at lunchtime on Saturday and give you and that fat chap – what’s his name…?’

‘Benskin.’

‘Benskin, that’s right. I’ll give you both a lift to the ground in my car. Don’t worry about shirts and things.’

The St Swithin’s ground was in a North London suburb, and the extra B was the only one of the half-dozen teams run by the hospital that was playing at home that weekend. The game was not brilliant and St Swithin’s ended up with a narrow win.