DOCTOR AT LARGE

of Works. With thanks for your attention. Yrs, George Beecham_

I had lost Razzy a patient, but my personal honour, and probably my professional life, were saved by the politician. I hoped he would become Prime Minister, and since that afternoon I have always read his speeches in the newspapers.

I did not tell Razzy the full story until the day that I was leaving the practice.

'Really?' he said mildly. 'Poor Kitty! I wonder what on earth you did to her psychology, bolting like that. I really must go round and see her soon.'

'And another thing,' I said gazing at the carpet, 'there aren't any Himalayas. As far as I'm concerned, I mean. I wasn't going to let on about it, but-well, you've been so good to me, Razzy, I hadn't the heart not to confess I've worked here under false pretences.'

'But I'm glad, dear boy. Terribly glad. Frightfully uncomfortable it must be, in all that snow and ice. So what other plans have you?'

'I thought I'd stay on in, London for a bit and work for my Fellowship. Thanks to you, I've got a few quid in the bank to pay the rent, and I might be able to make a little by standing-in for doctors at week-ends. You see', I told him solemnly, 'I'm still determined to become a surgeon.'

'And good luck to you, dear boy,' he added indulgently, as though I were a schoolboy saying I wanted to be an engine-driver. 'I've always found surgery fascinating. Completely fascinating. Let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you. Would you like a bonus? The secretary will fix it up-you know I loathe discussing money.'

We shook hands, and I stepped from out of the glossy picture of fashionable medicine for ever.

I now had saved enough to pay off my hundred-pound debt to Wilson, Willowick, and Wellbeloved, and to maintain a modest medical-student standard of living until the Primary Fellowship examination of the Royal College of Surgeons in six weeks' time. I kept my room in Bayswater, took copies of Gray's Anatomy and Starling's Physiology from Lewis's medical lending library, borrowed a box of bones from a friend at St Swithin's, and continued my surgical career.

The Fellowship, like all British post-graduate examinations, is run on the Grand National principle, except that the highest fence is placed immediately in front of the tapes. Before you can enter for the Final exam you have first to pass the Primary in anatomy and physiology, subjects which are learnt in the second year of medical school and forgotten in the fourth. I had now to reopen the pages I had sweated over on coffee-drenched nights five years ago, unpleasantly aware that such traditional aides-memoire for the student as:

_The lingual nerve_ _Took a swerve_ _Around the Hyoglossus-_ _'Well I'm mucked!'_ _Said Wharton's duct,_ _'The blighter's double-crossed us!'_ were inadequate for the Fellowship examiners, who wanted to know the exact seventy-four relations of the lingual nerve and what it did in the monkey, dog, and rabbit as well.

I worked at my books fairly happily, for three months in Razzy's practice had given me the feeling of being a man of the world who could deal with dukes, manage cabinet ministers, and chum along with beautiful women, and could therefore confidently approach such prosaic individuals as the Fellowship examiners. This was my first mistake.

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