About the Author
Richard Gordon, real name Dr. Gordon Stanley Ostlere, was born in England on 15 September 1921. He is best-known for his hilarious ‘Doctor’ books. Himself a qualified doctor, he worked as an anaesthetist at the famous St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (where he was also a medical student) and later as a ship’s surgeon, before leaving medical practice in 1952 to take up writing full time. Many of his books are based on his own true experiences in the medical profession and are all told with the wry wit and candid humour that have become his hallmark.
In all, there are eighteen titles in the Doctor Series, with further comic writings in another seven volumes, including ‘Great Medical Disasters’ and ‘Great Medical Mysteries’, plus more serious works concerning the lives of medical practitioners.
He has also published several technical books under his own name, mainly concerned with anaesthetics for both students and patients. Additionally, he has written on gardening, fishing and cricket and was also a regular contributor to Punch magazine. His ‘Private Lives’ series, taking in Dr. Crippen, Jack the Ripper and Florence Nightingale, has been widely acclaimed.
The enormous success of Doctor in the House, first published in the 1950’s, startled its author. It was written whilst he was a surgeon aboard a cargo ship, prior to a spell as an academic anaesthetist at Oxford. His only previous literary experience had been confined to work as an assistant editor of the British Medical Journal. There was, perhaps, a foretaste of things to come whilst working on the Journal as the then editor, finding Gordon somewhat jokey, put him in charge of the obituaries!
The film of Doctor in the House uniquely recovered its production costs whilst still showing at the cinema in London’s West End where it had been premiered. This endeared him to the powerful Rank Organisation who made eight films altogether of his works, which were followed by a then record-breaking TV series, and further stage productions.
Richard Gordon’s books have been translated into twenty languages.
He married a doctor and they had four children, two of whom became house surgeons. He now lives in London.
1
‘You may be surprised to hear,’ I announced to my cousin, Mr Miles Grimsdyke, FRCS, ‘that I’ve decided to do the decent thing and settle down in general practice.’
‘Do I attribute this decision to a severer sense of professional duty or to a severer hangover than usual?’
‘Neither. But all my chums from St Swithin’s seem to be installing wives and families and washing machines, and it seems high time I did the same. Take my old friend Simon Sparrow, for instance. Why, in the days of our youth we got chucked out of pubs together, and now his idea of whooping it up on a Saturday night is taking the lawn-mower to pieces. Believe me, I’m going to become dear old Dr Grimsdyke, the chap who’s brought half the district into the world and pushed the other half out of it, beloved by all until it’s time to collect old-age pension and chiming clock from grateful patients.’
‘I suppose you realize, Gaston, how difficult it is these days to get into general practice?’
‘Of course. Quite as bad as getting into the Test Matches. But not for fellows like me who know the ropes. You’ve heard of Palethorpe and Wedderburn, the medical employment agents?’
Miles frowned. ‘The people in Drury Lane? I have never had recourse to them myself.’
‘I happen to know old Palethorpe personally. We met last summer, on an occasion when I was able to offer him valuable professional advice.’
I didn’t mention to my cousin we’d run into each other at Sandown Park races, where I put Palethorpe on such a good thing he’d kept my medical career close at heart ever since. Unfortunately, Miles has no sense of humour. It’s the tragedy of modern life that so many people – dictators, tax collectors, tennis champions, teddy boys, and so on – seem to have no sense of humour, either.
‘If you really intend to settle down,’ my cousin continued, ‘I might say I am delighted that you have chosen this particular moment to do so. In fact, I will confess that is exactly why I invited you for lunch today. More greens? One should keep up one’s vitamin C this time of the year.’
‘Enough is enough, thank you.’
It was one of those beastly days in midwinter when dusk chases dawn briskly across the London roof-tops, and fog was hazing even the chilly halls of the Parthenon Club where we sat. The Parthenon in St James’s struck me as about as comfortable for lunching in as the main booking-hall at Euston Station, but Miles was one of the newest members and as proud of the place as if it were the House of Lords. I supposed it fitted into his self-portrait of the up-and-coming young surgeon. He was a small, bristly chap, generally regarded as embodying the brains of the family, who had just reached that delicate stage in a surgical career when your car is large enough to excite the confidence of your patients but not the envy of your colleagues.
‘And how exactly are you earning your living at this moment?’ Miles went on.
‘I have many irons in the fire,’ I told him. ‘Though I must confess the fire isn’t too hot. There’s my medical articles for the popular press, to start with.’
Miles frowned again. ‘I can’t say I’ve noticed any.’
‘They’re all signed “By A Harley Street Specialist”. Of course, it would be gross professional misconduct to put my own name.’
‘You certainly show a remarkable ingenuity for practising without actually doing any medicine.’
‘Which just proves what I’ve always held – medicine’s a jolly good general education. It teaches you the working of everything from human nature to sewage farms. Not to mention all those little bits of Latin and Greek which are so useful in the crosswords.’
‘But you must realize, Gaston, the time has come to put this free-and-easy existence behind you for good. You’re not a mountebank of an undergraduate any more. You must now maintain the dignity of a qualified practitioner.
‘Oh, I agree with you. Being a medical student is really the worst possible training for becoming a doctor.’
Miles dropped his voice below the hushed whisper permissible for conversation in the Parthenon.
‘I am now going to tell you something in the strictest confidence.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Mr Sharper at St Swithin’s is to become Professor of Surgery at Calgary University.’
‘Really? I hope he enjoys crawling about in the snow potting all those bears.’
‘That isn’t the point. There will therefore be an unexpected vacancy on the surgical consultant staff. I shall in due course be applying for it. As Mr Sharper’s own senior registrar, I do not flatter myself in believing my chances are excellent.’ He helped himself to another boiled potato. ‘Though as you know, considerations other than the strictly surgical sometimes weigh strongly with the selection committee.’
I nodded. ‘I remember one chap was turned down because he wore knickerbockers and arrived for the interview on a motor-bike.’
‘Quite so. To be perfectly frank, Gaston, it might embarrass me if you simply continued to flit about the medical scene–’
‘My dear old lad!’ I hadn’t realized this worried him sufficiently to stand me a lunch. ‘I may be a poor risk for a five-bob loan, but you can always rely on me to help a kinsman. A couple of weeks to say farewell to the haunts of my misspent youth, and I’ll have made myself scarce from London for good.’
Miles still looked doubtful.
‘I hope the permanency of your new position is more durable than some of your others.’
‘They were mere flirtations with work. This is the real thing. And everyone will say, “See how that steady chap Miles has put even old Gaston Grimsdyke on his feet.”’
‘If that is indeed so, I’m much indebted to you. We may not always have seen eye to eye, Gaston–’
‘Oh, come. Every family has its little misunderstandings.’
‘But I assure you I have always acted entirely for your own good. And what precisely is this position you have in mind?’
‘GP up north,’ I explained.
I had been in Palethorpe’s office that morning, when he’d greeted me with the news:
‘I have exactly the right opening for you, Dr Grimsdyke. General practice in the Midlands – the backbone of England, you know. Assistant wanted, with a view, as we say. Start end of January. Dr Wattle of Porterhampton. A very fine man.’
‘It doesn’t matter what the doctor’s like,’ I told him. ‘How about his wife?’
Palethorpe chuckled. ‘How I wish our other clients were half as perspicacious! Fortunately, Mrs Wattle accompanied the doctor when he called, and I can assure you that she is a highly respectable and motherly middle-aged lady.’
‘Nubile daughters?’
‘It is their sorrow to be a childless couple, alas. I believe that is why they particularly asked me to find some decent, honest, upright, well-mannered, single young practitioner to share their home with them.’
‘I can only hope you come as a nice surprise,’ muttered my cousin when I told him.
‘At last I feel set for a peaceful and prosperous career,’ I went on, enlarging on my prospects a little. ‘Who knows what the future holds? The dear old Wattles might take me to their bosoms. They might look upon me as a son to enlighten their declining years. They might send for their solicitors and start altering their wills. There should be plenty of lolly about in Porterhampton, too. They make turbines or something equally expensive up there.’
‘My dear Gaston! You know, you really must grow out of this habit of counting your chickens before the hen’s even ovulated.’
‘What’s wrong with a little imagination?’ I protested. ‘Lord Lister and Alexander Fleming wouldn’t have got far without it. Anyway, at the moment roots are fairly sprouting from my feet like spring carrots.’
2
Until then Porterhampton was just another entry in my football pools, but a fortnight later I found myself driving past the Town Hall on a morning as crisp as an icicle, and pretty solemn I felt about it, too.
While lunching with Miles, I’d been putting an optimistic face on a pretty desperate situation, which is another of the useful things you learn from studying medicine. I didn’t really like the prospect of being a respectable provincial doctor. In fact I didn’t really like the prospect of being a doctor at all.
I was a médecin malgré lui. I’d taken up the profession because nobody in the family ever had the originality to think of anything else, and anyway all my uncles and cousins seemed to have a pleasant time of it, with large cars and everyone listening to their opinions at cocktail parties. But with medicine and marriage, the earlier you go in for either the riskier the project becomes. Quite a different chap emerges at the end of the course from the apple-cheeked lad with big ideas who went in. It’s great fun at first, of course, being casualty houseman in a clean white coat with all the nurses saying ‘Good morning, doctor,’ even if the job does consist mostly of inspecting unpleasant things brought along in little white enamel bowls. It’s a bit of a shock finding afterwards that you’ve got to make a living at it, though I suspect a good many housemen feel the same and keep pretty quiet. The public doesn’t much care for entrusting their lives to doctors who don’t love their profession, even though they entrust them every day to bus drivers and no one expects a bus driver to love his bus.
But as I couldn’t go exploring like Dr Livingstone, become a Prime Minister of France like Dr Clemenceau, or play cricket like Dr W G Grace, I had to find a steady job like everyone else. And what of these Wattles? I wondered, as I drove past the Porterhampton fish market. They might at that moment be hopping about like a small boy waiting for the postman on his birthday. Or they might be plotting to kick me about like a medical tweeny. Fortunately for my low psychological state, I was soon reassured over my conditions of work.
I found the Wattles’ house somewhere on the far outskirts, in a road of roomy Victorian villas apparently reserved for prosperous turbine-makers. As I drew up in the 1930 Bentley, the motherly Mrs Wattle herself appeared at the gate.
‘Dear Dr Grimsdyke!’ she greeted me. ‘We’re so delighted you’ve decided to bury yourself in our rather sleepy little town.’
‘Charming place, I’m sure.’
‘Mr Palethorpe spoke so highly of you, you know. I’m awfully glad he persuaded you to come. But you must be tired after your long drive. I’ll show you to your room, and there’s a nice lunch ready as soon as my husband gets in from his rounds.’
I slipped off my overcoat.
‘Dear, dear! No buttons on your shirt, Doctor! You must let me have it tonight. And any socks and things that need darning, just leave them on the kitchen table.’
My room ran a bit to chintz and water-colours of St Ives, but seemed very cosy. There was a bookcase full of detective stories, a desk, and a large double bed already airing with a hot-water bottle like an old-fashioned ginger-beer jar. Going downstairs after tidying up, I found roast beef and Yorkshire on the table, with apple pie and Stilton waiting on the sideboard.
‘I’m sure you’d care for a bottle of beer today,’ cooed Mrs Wattle. ‘Mr Palethorpe said you took the occasional glass.’
I’d met Dr Wattle himself only for a brief interview in London, and he was a little pink, perspiring chap with a bald head, resembling a freshly-boiled egg.
‘Delighted to see you, my dear doctor.’ He shook hands warmly. ‘We may call you Gaston, may we? I hope you’ll be very happy with us. Is that your car outside? Very dashing of you to drive an old open tourer. But do take my wife’s Morris when it’s raining, won’t you? Would you care for an advance of salary? We’ll sort out your duties later. If you ever want time off for anything, don’t hesitate to ask.’
‘Your chair’s over here, Gaston. Sure you’re not in a draught?’
‘I hope you’ll find my wife’s cooking to your taste.’
‘The roast beef’s not overdone?’
‘Anything special you fancy to eat, do please let us know.’
‘Horseradish?’ asked Mrs Wattle.
Later we had crumpets for tea and finnan haddock for supper, and in the evening we all three sat round the fire making light conversation.
‘Mr Palethorpe revealed you had quite a roguish wit,’ said Mrs Wattle, playfully shaking her finger.
So I told them the story about the bishop and the parrot, though of course altering the anatomical details a bit.
‘How pleasant to hear a young voice in the house,’ murmured her husband.
‘We’ve so missed company in the evenings!’
‘Ever since the dog died,’ agreed Dr Wattle.
After years of living on tins of baked beans and packets of potato crisps, and mending my own socks by pulling a purse string suture round the hiatus, it did my physiology no end of good to have regular meals and all the buttons on my shirts. There wasn’t even much work to do, old Wattle himself handling all the posher patients and leaving me with a succession of kids in the usual epidemic of mumps. After surgery and supper we all three gathered for the evening in the sitting-room. Sometimes we watched the telly. Sometimes we played three-handed whist. Sometimes they asked me to tell the story of the bishop and the parrot all over again. I was glad to see the Wattles had quite a sense of humour.
But even the Prodigal Son, once they’d used up all the fatted calf, must have hankered to waste just a bit more of his substance on riotous living. As the local amenities ran largely to municipal parks and museums, and so on, and as I couldn’t go to any of the pubs because I was a respectable GP, or to any of the pictures because I’d seen them all months ago in the West End, I longed for one final glimpse of the lively lights of London.
‘Dr Wattle,’ I announced one morning, when I’d been enjoying three square meals a day for several weeks. ‘I wonder whether you’d mind if I popped down to Town this Saturday? I’ve just remembered I’ve got some laundry to collect.’
‘My dear boy! Go whenever and wherever you wish.’
‘That’s jolly civil of you. Awfully annoying, and all that, but I’d better make the trip.’
The following Saturday evening found me once again in the genial glow of Piccadilly Circus, breathing the carcinogenic hydrocarbons and watching the neon sunrise as the lights came on.
I don’t think there’s any sensation to compare with arriving in London after a spell of exile, even if it’s only your summer holidays. I felt I’d never seen anything so beautiful as the submarine glow of the misty street-lamps, heard anything as cheerful as the nightly torrent ebbing towards the suburbs, nor smelt any perfume so sweet as the reek of a London Transport omnibus. But I couldn’t waste time admiring the scenery, and went to a telephone box, looked through my little black book, then rang up Petunia Bancroft.
Petunia was a little brunette and an actress. I’ve had a weakness for the stage ever since I was a medical student and nearly eloped with a young woman who was sawn in two twice nightly by a Palladium conjurer, until I discovered that she was in fact a pair of young women, and I’d picked the half with the shocking varicose veins. Petunia had been a chum of mine for many years, though unfortunately her ideas of entertainment rather exceeded her theatrical standing – usually she just walked on the stage and announced dinner was ready, but after the show she knocked back champagne like the great leading ladies when the stuff was five bob a bottle. Also, she had a rather hysterical personality, and was likely to throw the dessert about and bite the head waiter. But after a month in Porterhampton, Petunia seemed just what I needed.
‘Darling, I’d love to meet you’, she agreed. ‘Don’t come to the show, it’s lousy and closing any minute, anyway. See you at the stage door after ten.’
The London streets were as deserted as Porterhampton on a Sunday afternoon by the time I took Petunia home to Balham – like most glamorous hotsies these days, she lived quietly with Mum and did the washing-up before catching the bus to the theatre. We’d had a pleasant little evening, what with supper and a night-club, and even if it did demolish Dr Wattle’s advance of salary I was feeling like a sailor after ninety days at sea.
‘Lovely time, darling,’ said Petunia at the garden gate. ‘When are you coming to live in London again?’
‘One day, perhaps. When I retire.’
‘When you retire! But darling, I won’t ever recognize you then.’
‘I’ll have a chiming clock under my arm,’ I told her. ‘Night-night.’
The next morning I made my way back to the provinces for good, having wrapped all the Sunday newspapers in a large brown-paper parcel which I labelled THE EVERCLEEN LAUNDRY WASHES WHITER.
This little jaunt of mine was a mistake.
One taste of Metropolitan delights had ruined my appetite for Porterhampton for good. I’d tried really hard to fool myself I could merge with the local landscape. Now I realized I couldn’t be comfortable anywhere in the world outside Harrods’ free delivery area. I faced endless evenings watching the television and talking to the Wattles, and that night the prospect of both made me feel rather sickly over supper. But I had to stay in the place until the St Swithin’s committee had shaken my cousin by the hand and told him where to hang his umbrella, and anyway the dear old couple were so terribly decent I’d never have forgiven myself for hurting their feelings over it.
‘Dr Wattle,’ I began, when we were alone after the meal. ‘I don’t know if I’ve told you before, but I’ve decided to work for a higher medical degree. I hope you’ll not think me rude if I go to my room in the evenings and open the books?’
He laid a hand on my arm.
‘I am delighted, dear boy. Delighted that – unlike so many young men these days, inside and out of our profession – you should take a serious view of your work.’
There was a catch in his voice.
‘We are all mortal, Gaston,’ he went on. ‘In another few years I may no longer be here–’
‘Oh, come, come! The prime of life–’
‘And I should like you to be well qualified when you eventually take over this practice. My wife and I have become very attached to you these few short weeks. As you know, we have no children of our own. As a young man I suffered a severe attack of mumps–’
‘Jolly hard luck,’ I sympathized.
The mump virus, of course, can wreck your endocrine glands if you’re unlucky enough to get the full-blown complications.
‘If all goes well,’ he ended, ‘I hope you will inherit more from me than merely my work. I will detain you no longer from your studies.
The rest of the week I sat in my room reading detective stories, and pretty beastly I felt about it, too.
Then one morning Mrs Wattle stopped me outside the surgery door.
‘Gaston, my husband and I had a little chat about you last night.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘We fear that you must find it rather dull in Porterhampton.’
‘Not at all,’ I replied, wondering if some revelling turbine-maker had spotted me in that night-club. ‘There’s always something happening,’ I told her. ‘The Assizes last week, the anti-litter campaign this.’
‘I mean socially. Why, you never met any young people at all.’
It hadn’t occurred to me that in Porterhampton there were any.
‘So next Saturday evening I’ve arranged a little party for you. I do hope you can spare the time from your studies?’
Naturally, I said I should be delighted, though spending the rest of the week steeling myself for the sort of celebration to make a curate’s birthday look like a night out in Tangier. When Saturday came I put on my best suit and waited for the guests among the claret cup and sandwiches, determined to make the evening a success for the dear old couple’s sake. I would be heartily chummy all round, and ask the local lads intelligent questions about how you made turbines.
‘Here’s the first arrival,’ announced Mrs Wattle. ‘Miss Carmichael.’
She introduced a short girl in a pink dress.
‘And here come Miss Symes and Miss Patcham.’
I shook hands politely.
‘With Miss Hodder and Miss Atkinson walking up the drive. That’s everyone,’ she explained. ‘Gaston, do tell us your terribly amusing story about the clergyman and the parrot.’
It struck me as an odd gathering. But old Wattle handed out the drinks while I sat on the sofa and entertained the girls, and after a bit I quite warmed to it. I told them the other one about the old lady and the bus driver, and a few more that I hadn’t picked up from the boys at St Swithin’s, and they all laughed very prettily and asked me what it was like being a doctor. I was quite sorry when eventually midnight struck, and everyone seemed to think it time to close down.
‘I’m sure Gaston would drop you at your homes in his remarkable car,’ suggested Mrs Wattle.
With a good deal of giggling, I discarded girls at various respectable front doors in the district, until I was finally left with only one in the seat beside me.
‘I’m afraid I live right on the other side of the town, Gaston.’
‘The farther it is, the more I’m delighted,’ I replied politely.
She was the Miss Atkinson, a little blonde who’d given the parrot story an encore.
‘Quite an enchanting evening,’ I murmured.
‘But you were so terribly amusing! I always thought medicos such stodgy old things, even the young ones.’
I gave a little laugh.
‘We doctors are only human, you know.’
‘I’m so glad,’ she said.
After leaving her at another respectable door, I hurried home for some sleep. Nothing takes it out of you quite so much as telling a lot of funny stories.
