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
‘Your gracious Majesty–’
Sir Lionel Lychfield, FRCP, dean of St Swithin’s Hospital, bowed solemnly and continued to an angle of some eighty degrees from the vertical. His expression – he had put much thought into his expression – was intended to convey at the same time loyalty untainted with flattery, a humility well short of cravenness, courtesy free from affectation and the self-assurance of a freeborn Englishman unmixed with impertinence. The dean felt he looked somewhat like Sir Walter Raleigh throwing his cloak across the puddle. But as he was a short, elfin-eared, quick-tempered man with a pointed bald head, he resembled a surly garden gnome hit in the back by the lawn mower.
‘As dean of St Swithin’s Medical School, Your Majesty, this afternoon it is my cherished honour, my most pleasurable duty, to present Your Majesty with this golden key, so that Your Majesty may most graciously declare this splendid new hospital building – this magnificent achievement of constructional science, consecrated to the highest ideals of humanity – well and truly open.’
The dean bowed a few degrees lower over his outstretched hands, appearing in danger of toppling on to the royal feet.
‘We at St Swithin’s, Your Majesty, take pride in our tradition of uninterrupted devotion to the sick, on this very site in north London, since the end of the sixteenth century. Our original Royal Charter – still to be seen in our Founders’ Hall, which is said to be the work of Inigo Jones – was most graciously presented to the hospital by Your Majesty’s forebear Queen Elizabeth the First. Much, Your Majesty, has been uttered by your loyal subjects in song, in story, in poesy, about our glorious heritage of tradition oh bugger it.’
The cause of the dean’s annoyance was his wife’s voice coming up the stairs. ‘Yes, yes?’ he shouted back. ‘What is it?’
‘You’ve a visitor, Lionel.’
‘What, at this hour? It’s barely seven o’clock and I’m still in the bathroom. Isn’t even a man’s morning toilet sacred?’ He was standing, still bent at the middle, on his pair of clinical-looking scales, wearing only his gold-plated waterproof wristwatch and a large pair of round metal-framed glasses. ‘What sort of visitor?’
‘The hospital chaplain, dear.’
‘Oh my God,’ he muttered, inaccurately if flatteringly.
The dean straightened up. He was a consultant physician, his brain trained to illuminate instantly the most obscure diagnostic corners of the medical wards. He saw at once every possible reason for the call so early on a Thursday summer morning. Someone of national importance had died overnight in the private patients’ floor. Or a patient in his pyjamas was on a twentieth-storey window-ledge and threatening to jump. Or the students had again put the reverend gentleman’s motor-scooter on the chapel roof. Or there was another outburst of sectarian controversy with the reverend Roman Catholic father about the quality of the fish served for the patients’ Friday dinners. Or the chaplain wanted him to read the lesson next Sunday in the hospital chapel. Or he was trying to raise money for a charity. All these conjectures the dean found equally repugnant.
‘When I haven’t even had a bite of breakfast,’ he complained to himself, pulling on a yellow silk Paisley dressing-gown and sticking his feet into a pair of red and purple tartan slippers. ‘If I hadn’t responsibility enough looking after the patients’ bodies. The bloody man might at least get on with his job of looking after the souls without calling in a second opinion.’ He raised his voice. ‘All right, all right, I’m coming.’
He hurried downstairs. He lived against the ancient walls of St Swithin’s itself, in a tall pleasant house of vaguely Georgian style, the middle in a terrace of three. They had been recently built on the site of the hospital’s old septic wards, mercifully made redundant with the discovery of antibiotics over the past forty years, and were let by the hospital to senior members of the consultant staff on the excuse that it would be handy to have them nearby for any unusually elaborate emergency. The dean being financially prudent – he was said by his students to make Scrooge look like a TV giveaway show – the modest rent appealed to him. But he recognized with irritation how the geographical position left him vulnerable to anyone from the hospital inclined to buttonhole him with a grievance.
The stairs led down to a narrow hallway, from which a door opened into the sitting-room, with its bow window, comfortably shabby furniture, shelves of books and the glass case of running cups which the dean had won as a student. The Reverend Osbert Nosworthy was inspecting myopically the dean’s picture of eighteenth-century St Swithin’s, said to be by Canaletto.
‘Good morning, padre,’ the dean began briskly. ‘Splendid weather, is it not? So often July is disappointing. Nothing but rain and hail, ruining the crops and such things. You’re looking very well. Extremely fit indeed. No medical complaints, I hope? And what can I do for you?’
He became aware of something strange about the chaplain, an elderly, paunchy, chinless man with untidy white wisps round the pink dome of his head. He customarily went about God’s business at St Swithin’s in a yellowish clerical collar, a black stock encrusted with the memorials of innumerable soups and a grey herringbone suit which the dean had often thought of incinerating as a sanitary hazard. But now he wore a check shirt, a scarlet and gold MCC tie, and an ancient green Donegal tweed jacket with grey flannels cut in the style of twenty years before, and carried a panama hat.
‘Ah, Sir Lionel,’ the chaplain greeted him jovially. ‘I fear I have disturbed you at your morning ablutions. A thousand pardons.’
‘Not at all. Though of course one is always extraordinarily rushed at this time of the day. I have alas hardly a minute.’
‘I felt I just had to say goodbye to you.’
‘How very kind.’ The dean stuck out his hand. ‘Well…goodbye.’
‘I assure you that I have been trying to catch you at the hospital. For some weeks now. Perhaps months. I don’t think I’ve even had the pleasure of congratulating you on your recent knighthood? But every time I call at your office, it would seem from your secretary that you are either out, or busy in committee or engaged in a consultation.’
‘Really?’ The dean tapped his finger-tips together impatiently. He was still at a loss why the chaplain should suddenly decide to haunt him. The Reverend Nosworthy had been at St Swithin’s since the dean was a medical student himself – looking the same age, and as far as the dean could remember wearing the same grey suit. But the dean could hardly recall exchanging a word with him apart from ‘Merry Christmas’. He had no idea even what a hospital chaplain did. He believed the fellow spent his time cheering up the terminal cases and seeing all the books got back to the hospital library. ‘It was kind of you to call.’ The dean opened the sitting-room door.
But the Reverend Nosworthy seemed disinclined to move. ‘I assure you I should have picked a more convenient hour, but my train is on the early side.’
The dean nodded towards the bow window, the cul-de-sac of Lazar Row outside already brilliant with morning sunlight. ‘You’ve a nice day for it.’
The chaplain suddenly looked miserable. ‘That makes my parting even less sweet sorrow.’
‘Indeed? I should be delighted to be going on holiday myself. This year, I doubt if I shall do better than a snatched day or two in November. With my unending work on the new building. And of course the Queen.’
‘I fear you misunderstand me. I am going for good. Retiring.’
‘My dear padre–’ The dean shook him vigorously by the hand. He felt he could be limitlessly affable, now there was no possibility of ever having to speak to the man again. ‘The hospital won’t seem the same.’
‘I have taken a room in a guest house on the outskirts of Whitstable. Where doubtless I shall spend my remaining days.’
‘You out of one door, the Queen in at another, as it were.’
The chaplain shook his white hair. ‘It’s sad. I had been rather hoping my appointment could have been extended a few weeks, so that I shouldn’t miss so splendid an occasion. But my bishop was quite inflexible. Absolutely so. I even had the impression he thought I had been at St Swithin’s far too long. The bishop is a very new broom, you know. And one accustomed to raising clouds of dust.’
‘I’m sure you’ll find Whitstable perfectly delightful, if a trifle chilly in winter.’ The dean led his visitor firmly towards the front door. He was not anxious to become involved in the arcane complexities of Church politics. ‘You must send me some oysters.’ The chaplain looked blank. ‘From Whitstable. There are oysters everywhere down there, surely? I am very fond of oysters in season, but of course they are too ridiculously expensive to eat in a London restaurant. I expect you can simply pick them up on the beach.’ The dean shook hands again. ‘Look after yourself. Make sure you register with a reliable local National Health doctor.’
The chaplain paused on the front step. ‘I’m sorry that I couldn’t introduce you to my successor. We somehow haven’t overlapped. He’s a much younger man than me – naturally so. A Mr Becket. Thomas Arnold Becket. The bishop certainly seems to think most highly of him.’
The dean made to shut the door. ‘I’m sure the pair of us will get on splendidly.’
The chaplain put on his panama. ‘Bless you, Sir Lionel.’
‘And…er, the same to you. Goodbye.’
The chaplain lumbered down the flight of four stone steps to the pavement. He was shaking his head and mumbling about something. The dean fancied he caught the word ‘Oysters’.
2
‘Old Nosworthy’s apparently been put out to grass.’
The dean descended a few steps from the hallway to the large, bright kitchen at the rear of the house, on a level with a small garden lively with midsummer flowers. The well-shorn lawn ended at a high brick wall which had marked the limits of the hospital for centuries, but now there rose above it a brand new glass and concrete thirty-storey tower, which the dean’s left-hand neighbour, Sir Lancelot Spratt, complained was ruining his roses.
‘Though why the bloody man had to burst in here at day-break to tell me, I can’t understand,’ the dean added.
His wife Josephine, in a green housecoat, looked up from the electric stove. She was younger than him, pleasant, grey-eyed, soft-mouthed, ample bosomed. ‘But surely you knew, Lionel? Samantha and the rest of us at the League of Friends of St Swithin’s got up a collection to buy him an inscribed silver salver. I gave five pounds from the housekeeping.’
‘Five pounds!’ The dean sat on a stool at the pink formica topped table, wrapping the dressing-gown round his skinny thighs. ‘What’s the League of Friends want to keep Nosworthy in silverware for, anyway? I thought you were mostly concerned with seeing the patients drew up their wills properly and got plenty of fresh fruit and that sort of thing.’
‘Lionel, you do seem to grumble so much these mornings. You should know by now that for years the League has taken responsibility for the hospital chapel. And since Samantha Dougal took over as our chairman, a very active responsibility, I might say.’
The dean said nothing. Josephine noticed he always fell silent and then changed the subject whenever she mentioned his sister-in-law. ‘Well, I shan’t be sorry to see the back of old Nosworthy. I can’t imagine how many cases of cross-infection he caused in that suit. Though personally, I don’t see why the hospital needs to spend money employing a chaplain at all. People should really understand by now that modern medicine is a strictly scientific activity. We have surely advanced somewhat since the days of the Black Death.’
‘I’m sure it’s a great inconvenience to you modern scientific doctors, Lionel, that your patients should persist in being the same old human beings.’
The dean grunted. ‘Well it’s my skill at scientific medicine rather than a soapy bedside manner which has won me…or which will win me this autumn, if all goes well…the job of…you know what.’
‘Oh, Lionel!’ Josephine suddenly looked at him admiringly, turning a switch under a boiling saucepan. ‘How wonderful it will be – “Sir Lionel Lychfield, Physician to the Royal Household”.’
‘Of course, that’s one down from your actual physician to the Queen,’ the dean protested modestly. ‘The doctor merely to the Royal Household doubtless has to enter Buckingham Palace by the back door. I assume one starts off by attending grooms and footmen and that sort of thing. But it’s an enormous honour. Which like all honours in this country can of course lead somewhere.’
‘To the front door?’
But the dean’s mind had strayed. He had a vision of himself at twelve-thirty on the following Thursday morning, in exactly a week’s time. He was in exquisitely pressed morning clothes, gardenia in buttonhole, the cushion of purple velvet in his upturned hands bearing a golden key, all round him in the spacious marble-lined main hall of the new St Swithin’s were assembled lords and ladies, medical mandarins from the Ministry of Health, grave-faced academics in gorgeous gowns, the most expensive doctors in the country and persons prominent in the local Rotary. His speech was still not exactly right, he had to confess. He had the words by heart weeks ago, but still needed perfection with the inflexions, the subtle pauses, the delicate emphases.
‘Your eggs, dear.’
‘Thank you, Your gracious Majesty.’
‘Lionel! I do wish you would try to live a little more in the same world as the rest of us.’
The dean opened the morning paper, looking flustered. ‘Talking of Samantha, I see your brother’s got a new novel out.’
Josephine sat on a stool opposite. ‘Yes, he says these days the publishers’ Christmas season starts during the summer heatwaves, like the football.’
The dean read aloud, ‘“In The Brothels of the Mind Auberon Dougal scathingly indicts contemporary attitudes to sex and materialism. He calls messianically for man’s rediscovery of innate human dignity, and a seeking of the salvation which lies in the self. The horizons of Mr Dougal’s philosophy continue to expand, as may be readily perceived through its flatness”.’ The dean looked up. ‘That was a nasty one, wasn’t it?’ He ended reading, ‘“One can already see Mrs Samantha Dougal lending her dutiful if predictable support on television”.’
‘Auberon says the reviewers are all quite childishly jealous of him.’
‘At least they seem to understand what his books are about. I can’t.’
‘Auberon’s an intellectual, dear,’ she told him gently.
‘I’m not, I suppose? No one is, if they use their brains to do anything useful. Auberon always makes me feel like a plumber with bad breath and a smelly blowlamp.’ He looked round as someone came into the room. ‘Ah, Faith, my dear. Slept well? Missing the school bell and cold plunge, no doubt?’
‘Good morning, father and mother. Yes, the first morning home from Horndean Hall is always delightful.’
The dean smiled tenderly, dipping a strip of brown bread and butter into the rich orange yolk of his egg. His seventeen-year-old youngest child was one of the few human beings unfailingly to stir feelings in a man so buttoned up emotionally as himself. His son George had amazed him by finding the wealthiest au pair girl in London and marrying her, turning himself into a jet-propelled executive – particularly as the dean had in the boy’s formative years written him off as half-witted. His elder daughter Muriel, now Professor Oliphant’s house-surgeon at St Swithin’s, had certainly inherited his brains, but his nose and ears as well. But with Faith – although her intelligence perhaps reflected too steeply the reversal to norm from his own brilliance – he felt that the genes of his wife and himself had been well shaken and thrown a double six.
Faith sat at the table. She was slim and fair, with large blue eyes, a small chin, a figure of geometrical neatness and a demure manner – which the dean, for one, found in a person of her age both unusual and heartening. ‘I expect you’re glad to see the last of Miss Clitworth’s establishment?’ he asked her heartily. ‘Horndean Hall always struck me as a place where everything was regularly disinfected, including the girls’ minds. Not that the fees weren’t ruinous. Though I suppose if you can afford to send your children to snob schools,’ he reflected, ‘in this country it’s the height of snobbery sending them to free ones.’ He licked his eggy fingers. ‘It’s strange to think of you as no longer a schoolgirl.’
‘She’s been looking ridiculously mature in that horrible uniform for years,’ Josephine told him.
‘Mind, the way they let you carry on at Horndean Hall would have been thought quite scandalous in my own schooldays. Our only permissiveness was restricted to extra raspberry jam on Saturdays. But of course, then there were only girls and boys, who turned overnight into women and men, with none of this ridiculously self-conscious complication of teenagers–’
‘Please, Lionel. Not your welcoming lecture to the new students again.’
‘Nevertheless, Faith–’ The dean held a strip of dripping bread over his mouth like asparagus. ‘You will have to turn your mind to your vocation in life.’
‘I already have, daddy.’ She had recently taken to addressing the world in a voice of husky solemnity, which lent dramatic quality even to the request for two lumps of sugar. The dean wondered if the girl had trouble with the larynx – a nodule, possibly, on the vocal cords. Perhaps she should be seen by one of his throat colleagues.
‘Really? What?’
‘I want to help people.’
The dean cracked his second egg with a decisive, wristy tap. ‘Very praiseworthy. Though unfortunately the only examinations you have managed to pass are in needlework and cooking, and even the nurses at St Swithin’s need A levels these days. Exactly why you want academic qualifications to put someone comfortably on a bedpan or serve a fruit jelly is beyond me. Heaven knows what Florence Nightingale would have thought. It’s the fashion, I suppose. What was your favourite school subject?’
‘Civic affairs. We learnt from Miss Clitworth all about the world.’
‘H’m. Well, I’ll arrange for you to make yourself useful in St Swithin’s for a bit. To get the smell of the wards, as it were. You can start off by being the Queen.’ Faith looked surprised. ‘I’m holding a rehearsal of the opening ceremony at nine sharp tomorrow morning. You shall be Her Majesty’s stand-in.’ He gulped down his coffee and stood up. ‘The work, the worry of it all! I seem to have hardly a moment for my proper function of treating the sick. I don’t suppose you happened to hear any jokes in Horndean Hall, Faith? Perfectly respectable, but of course funny? No?’
‘Surely there must be dozens of even respectable jokes going round St Swithin’s,’ suggested Josephine.
‘Possibly. But I’m afraid that I am not the sort of man people tell jokes to,’ the dean ended a little pathetically, going upstairs.
In his bedroom he donned bright purple briefs and a pair of green socks, wearing the Walter Raleigh expression supplemented with a smile which was respectfully restrained without being obsequious. ‘But Your gracious Majesty is very kind.’
‘Not at all, Sir Lionel. It was a most amusing little story.’
‘I am deeply grateful for Your Majesty’s approbation.’
‘As you can imagine, over the years these opening ceremonies tend to become just a teeny bit boring.’
‘But I’m sure. I sympathize sincerely with Your Majesty.’
‘And a little bit of fun helps everything along, don’t you agree?’
‘With all my heart, Your Majesty.’
‘I really must tell it to the family when I get home.’
‘That is extremely flattering oh bloody hell, what is it now?’
His wife was calling up the stairs again. ‘You’ve another visitor, Lionel.’
‘But it isn’t eight o’clock yet! A man really can’t concentrate on social niceties before he’s digested his breakfast and opened his bowels. All right, all right, I’m coming.’
He pulled on his dressing-gown, replaced the tartan slippers and hurried downstairs. In the hallway, wearing his usual formal striped trousers and black jacket, was his neighbour Sir Lancelot Spratt.
‘Morning dean,’ the surgeon greeted him affably. ‘Having a long lie in? Looks as though I shall have done a couple of gastrectomies before you’re up and about.’
‘What do you want at this hour?’ the dean asked irritably.
‘Just to remind you about the rugger club annual dinner at Luigo’s Restaurant tonight.’
‘I haven’t forgotten. I’m picking up my houseman at St Swithin’s about seven.
‘And also to remind you to take taxis. You’ve never been to one of these occasions, but they usually end up with the waiters having to barricade themselves in the kitchen. Never do to get breathalized in your nice new Rolls, eh?’ Sir Lancelot jerked his head in the direction of the three garages opposite the houses across the road. ‘I suppose soon you’ll be having the Royal Arms and “By Appointment” on all the doors?’
The dean looked innocent. ‘I don’t understand.’
Sir Lancelot chuckled. ‘Come off it, dean. Everyone knows you’re in the running as quack to the Royal Household. I only hope you get it.’
The dean gave a modest smile. ‘That’s remarkably kind of you, Lancelot.’
‘It’ll be useful if I want some decent tickets for Ascot. By the way, I shan’t be at St Swithin’s for the skylarking next Thursday.’
‘You won’t? The dean looked astounded. ‘Why ever not? As senior surgeon, you’re entitled to be right at the front.’
‘Unfortunately, I shall be floating off the coast of Africa. I am going on a cruise. At six tomorrow morning I fly from Gatwick to pick up the ship at Tenerife. I could not of course ever miss the annual rugger dinner.’
‘But you never told me!’ The dean looked deeply affronted. ‘Well, I hope you enjoy it. I myself certainly wouldn’t risk a trip like that unless I was sure of someone reasonably sensible to talk to,’ he added grudgingly.
Sir Lancelot stroked his beard, grinning. ‘On the contrary, I am taking pains about not talking to anyone. I shall not let on that I am a medical man – the shipping line is certainly in complete ignorance of the fact. For once, I shall be able to relax and behave like a normal human being.’
‘What a ridiculous idea.’ The dean shook his head. ‘You’ll never be able to keep it up.’
‘Why not? It’s perfectly easy once I restrain our regrettable professional tendency to tell people continually that whatever they do in the line of eating, drinking or sex is probably bad for them.’ Sir Lancelot opened the front door. ‘By the way, it isn’t penguins tonight. And I should put on your oldest suit. These affairs aren’t half as rowdy as I remember them, when the evening wasn’t thought complete without a raid on Bart’s or Guy’s. Now I suppose the students run amuck in the pursuit of high principles, rather than football trophies. But with the rugger club you never know.’
‘Josephine!’ called the dean urgently as the door shut. ‘Sir Lancelot’s slighting the Queen. He’s off tonight on a world cruise.’
‘How lucky.’ She reappeared from the kitchen. ‘I’m quite envious. Oh, I know we always have a lovely month every year at Swanage. But I’ve a mild suspicion there may be something interesting beyond.’
‘But my dear! How can I possibly get time off for a world cruise?’
‘Take a sabbatical year.’
‘Let alone afford to pay for it?’
‘Visit a few local hospitals and set it off against your income tax. Exactly as when you go fishing in Scotland. It’s the same principle.’
The dean looked uncomfortable. ‘Mind, if I’d paid for a world cruise and found myself in the same boat as Sir Lancelot Spratt, I’d either demand my money back or chuck myself into the sea, whichever afforded the quicker relief. I must get dressed. And if anyone else comes to the door, you can tell them that the levee is over.’
