Doctor On The Job (11 page)

‘Brother browncoats! Fellow soldiers, in the van of mankind’s ever-onward march against pestilence, privation and perishing.’

It was two hours later. Pip stood on a bench in the basement, his own brown coat flapping, arms upraised. Beside him on the concrete floor was Faith, holding her open notebook. He stared down at a hundred-odd faces, which stared back at him with a mass expression of mixed interest, scepticism and bafflement.

‘During industrial peace, there’s nothing so becomes a worker as modest stillness and humility,’ Pip went on. ‘But when the blast, “On strike!” blows in our ears, what do we do then?’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply. ‘I’ll tell you. We imitate the action of the tiger. We stiffen the sinews, we summon up the blood. We disguise our normally fair nature with hard-favour’d rage. We lend our eye a terrible aspect.’

He stopped again, to judge the effect. The man in front’s mouth had dropped open.

‘Today, Brothers, I have taken a grave decision. You have all taken a grave decision. I made it on your behalf. And on behalf of the decent, working men and women, confined in their council houses up and down the country, who deserve a fair crack of the whip from the very section of the community expected to serve their most intimate needs. To wit, the doctors. I cannot say where our brave action will lead. Perhaps to the triumph of workers’ natural virtues over capitalists’ natural vice. I set no limits to my ambitions, which of course are also yours. Today St Swithin’s, I say. Tomorrow the world! But I must ask you to be patient for an hour or two, while I explain exactly the issues which have incited you – through me – to choose this agonizingly serious option.’

The audience rose as a man and started filing through the door.

‘Really, they could have been a bit more courteous,’ Pip complained crossly to Faith, watching the last pair of brown-coated shoulders leave. ‘After all, I
am
their democratically elected leader. They might possibly have found the rest of my speech a bit boring, but they could surely have sat through it with a fixed gaze thinking about football and sex and things, like I did often enough during your father’s lectures in St Swithin’s.’

‘Poor Pip.’ She stroked the back of his neck sympathetically, as they sat together on the hard bench. ‘You put such desperately hard work into it since lunch.’

‘I suppose some of that material about the differences in financing the current and capital programmes of the Health Service might have been a little beyond a few of them,’ he admitted. ‘But one can only try.’ He looked up as Harold Sapworth strolled in, without his brown coat. ‘My audience have walked out on me,’ Pip complained.

‘Go on?’ Harold glanced at the wall clock. ‘No wonder. It’s just on three. Tea break.’

‘But surely you can’t take tea breaks when you’re on strike anyway?’ Pip said irritably.

‘They still feel like a cuppa, I suppose. Besides, you sort of get in the habit. I goes on taking tea breaks when I’m lying on the beach on holiday.’

‘Did you deliver the letter safely?’ Faith asked.

‘Easy. I got a forty-five bus. Funny, never been down the Elephant for years. Cousin of mine lives round there, in the New Kent Road. Or rather, he did. He shifted a year or two back to the Isle of Wight.’

‘Did you hand it personally to the Minister?’ Pip demanded severely.

‘Well, not actual. Bloke with a flat hat and brass buttons downstairs said he’d take it up.’

‘I suppose we have cast it into the usual channels, like bread upon the waters,’ Pip reflected.

‘And what do you suppose we shall find after several days?’ Faith asked. ‘Perhaps some extremely uneatable soggy slices?’

He looked at her. ‘You’re sounding a little doubtful.’

‘I am. To be honest, I feel we’ve taken off a jumbo jet without knowing how to land it. You’re not angry, are you, love?’ she added quickly.

Pip said nothing for a moment, just nodding, elbows on knees, slowly rubbing his hands together.

‘On the contrary, I feel rather like that, too. I think I could quite justly compare myself at the moment with Garibaldi, landing in Sicily at the head of his thousand red-shirted heroes. But he knew where to go. I don’t. I can start a strike, that’s obvious. Perhaps any fool can do that. But I’ve not the slightest idea how to run one. It’s much more complicated than simply cutting off the delivery of minced chicken and bunches of flowers to the Bertie Bunn. All sorts of tricky problems must be sorted out. St Swithin’s has obviously got to go on treating emergency cases – that seems traditional with hospital strikers, right across the world. So we’ve got to keep going the hot water, central sterile supply, fire precautions, and so on. Even the canteen. If they couldn’t have their tea break, my members might not be one hundred per cent solidly enthusiastic.’

‘Harold, you must have experienced a dozen strikes,’ Faith suggested, as the porter was pulling on the first brown coat in sight.

‘I’ve been through a few, that’s straight. When I was sweeper in a car plant, we was called out so often I reckon some of the lads began to forget which end you put the engine in. They used to call us the Dagenham Kamikazes. That’s a Jap car, ain’t it?’

‘What’s the first principle in running a strike, then?’ Pip asked him.

‘Discipline,’ Harold replied firmly, doing up the buttons. ‘Keeping the lads in line. Arthur Pince was as useless at that as a bull’s lit. Mind, Arthur was ginger.’

Pip frowned. ‘I thought he was a small dark man?’

‘Ginger beer. Queer,’ Harold explained.

‘I suppose discipline in the ranks depends on the use of my personality,’ Pip decided thoughtfully.

‘Use that if you like, mate. Personally, all the shop stewards what I know prefer a bit of the old –’ He made his boxing motion. ‘The reliable aggro.’

‘1 deplore the use of violence in any context.’

‘Have it your own way,’ Harold told him amiably. ‘But if any of the lads gets less than wildly fanatic, then you’ve got to give them a bit of encouragement, by which I mean the flick knife in the car tyres, or maybe calling with a meat axe to do up their front room.’

‘I think violence is perfectly justified,’ Faith agreed with him. ‘After all, in an army at war, any soldier who fails in his duty is shot on the spot.’

‘Shooting’s too good for some of them cowboys.’ Harold nodded gloomily in the direction of the door. ‘They want a bit of the old electricity where it tickles most.’

‘Harold, I leave you in charge of morale,’ Pip told him. ‘Use whatever means you think best to maintain it, but stop short of murder.’ He looked up in surprise as Forfar McBridie strode in, wearing Highland dress with bagpipes under his arm.

‘I want to ask a straight question,’ McBridie began. ‘What’s the strike got to offer Scotland?’

‘I hadn’t really given that aspect much thought,’ replied Pip, annoyed at the intrusion.

‘Well you’d better,’ the Scotsman told him bluntly. ‘I’m from Clydeside. That’s where the real revolution’s going to spring from. A great red river, rolling down the M6 to London. By the time we’ve finished, we’ll make Culloden look like a pop festival.’ He threw his head back, gazing starrily at the concrete ceiling. ‘God save King Jamie the Eighth! Up from the Clydebank shipyards to Holyrood House. Scotland will be the richest nation in the world, because we control its two most precious fluids – oil and whisky.’

‘As far as I’m concerned, there can be a King Clive in Cardiff and a King Arthur in Tintagel,’ Pip told him shortly. ‘And the Scots pound may be worth so much you can come down whenever you feel like it to buy up the Crown jewels, or spew diced carrots over Piccadilly, like after football matches –’

‘I’ve a mind to slice your nose off,’ declared Forfar McBridie angrily, reaching for his skean-dhu.

‘Harold, administer the disciplinary treatment,’ Pip ordered. ‘Listen, Mr McBridie. This strike is on behalf of decent men and women throughout the country, not just bits of it. Who are
you
?’ he demanded abruptly of a thin, wispy lady who had just ventured through the door, wearing a long fringed dress and a yellowish straw hat which appeared to have been mislaid for some time under other heavy articles.

‘Mr Cripps, is it?’ she asked throatily. ‘They said I should find you here. I saw you in the papers. What are you going to do about the doggies?’

Pip scratched his stiff fair hair. ‘Doggies are nothing to do with us. This strike is directed against doctors, not vets.’

‘Oh, but they
are
to do with you,’ the lady continued earnestly. ‘You’re the man, Mr Cripps, who can do something about our poor doggies. You must stop them smoking.’

‘You are referring, I suppose,’ said Faith, ‘to dogs in experiments, given tobacco smoke to find the cause of cancer?’

‘Exactly, Miss. It’s wicked. Unspeakably wicked. The poor doggies. It’s bad enough, people who encourage children to smoke. But doggies!’

‘I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you,’ Faith continued coolly, ‘that the experiments will probably save thousands of human lives?’

‘I’m not interested in that. It’s cruel to the doggies. It’s not that they even like smoking. Whoever saw a doggie smoke of its own free will? You must put a stop to it, Mr Cripps,’ she instructed Pip firmly. ‘Don’t call off your strike until every doggie in the country has been released by these mad scientists to breathe God’s fresh air. And baboons –’

‘Stop!’ Pip jumped up, hands over ears. ‘I am running, with extreme difficulty, a strike at St Swithin’s for one specific purpose. And everyone seems intent on climbing on the bandwagon for their own selfish reasons. Yet if I lose sight of my purpose – which is simply to stop doctors ratting on their fellow countrymen – I’m lost. That’s exactly how Julius Caesar came to grief. And Napoleon. Trying to fight too many people at once. Harold, deal with this lady. Perhaps you could organize some sort of industrial action at the Battersea Dogs’ Home?’

Harold Sapworth sucked the tip of his thumb. ‘Funny, but I was just going to ask you a favour, too. That cousin what I just mentioned, down in the New Kent Road. It’s not that he wanted to go to the Isle of Wight, actual. He’s doing a bit of bird there. Eight years, with good behaviour. Mind, he was innocent. I know the bloke it was, what carved up the postmistress. But if you could keep up the strike until justice was done –’

‘No, no, no!’ Pip smacked a fist into his palm. ‘I’ve half a mind to call it off, here and now. A strike is a matter of standing up for your principles, not of blackmail.’

‘Can’t see much difference, myself. They has to buy you off in either case. It’s just a matter of fixing the right price. Still, don’t put yourself out. I never cared much for my cousin, anyway. Besides, his old woman’s enjoying having it off with all and sundry. I collected these letters for you upstairs,’ he added, thrusting a pair of envelopes into Pip’s hand.

Pip strode to the far corner of the basement, sat down alone, and opened the first envelope. It said:

Dear Chipps,

I understand from your aunt that you have taken employment as a hospital porter, and are interesting yourself in industrial relations. I congratulate you. It is a subject sadly thin in the attention of first-class academic minds, such as I believe you to possess. You may not feel this compliment either sincere or acceptable after the exchanges of our last meeting. But I assure you that I have always considered you academically sound, if utterly disastrous in practice. Will you kindly be on my ward round at Virtue by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. You will learn something to your eventual advantage.

Yours,

Lancelot Spratt.

‘I wonder what that crafty old hyena’s up to?’ Pip muttered. ‘I suppose I’d better go along. At least, he daren’t make me look a fool any more in front of everybody, including the patient.’

The second envelope contained a telephone message. He read it, jumped up with a shout, and sprang across to Faith and Harold Sapworth, who were arguing with the intruders in the doorway. ‘It’s all right,’ Pip exclaimed. ‘We can go ahead with absolute confidence. We’ve been taken seriously. Look at this – it’s from the BBC. They want me to appear on television.’ He tugged down the lapels of his brown coat. ‘Tonight,’ he said breathlessly, ‘I address the nation.’

‘Good evening. This Thursday we have with us in the studio the man who has turned himself into a national figure overnight. A feat which is usually reserved for footballers and pop singers. And of course kidnapped children. Yesterday, ACHE – the health employees’ union – went on strike against the private patients of St Swithin’s Hospital in London. This afternoon, the whole of this world-famous hospital containing more than one thousand beds was brought to a standstill. What caused you to take this drastic action, Mr Chipps?’

‘Well, Robin, it was simply to force the Government to implement our ban on doctors emigrating.’

‘But that’s nothing to do with the running of the hospital, surely? I mean, the daily portering and cleaning and laundering and so on, which members of ACHE are concerned in?’

‘Oh, nothing to do with it whatever. The strike weapon is the only means we trade unions have of getting our demands promptly and fully met. It is our only weapon for obtaining social justice. Which of course is the same thing.’

‘Come, now, Mr Chipps. You mean that yours is a political strike?’

‘All strikes are political these days, Robin. Now that the Government is so tightly enmeshed in absolutely every national enterprise, whether State-run, commercial or supposedly independent.’

‘But isn’t it hard on the patients, Mr Chipps? Or even dangerous? I mean, I shouldn’t like to be taken to St Swithin’s with some acute and painful illness, and be turned away at the front door.’

‘You wouldn’t, Robin. All emergency cases are being treated as usual.’

The interviewer twitched his bow tie and assumed the expression of amiable inquiry at which Cabinet Ministers had been known to blanch and wonder what exactly he had dug up from their best-forgotten past speeches. ‘And who decides which is an emergency and which isn’t?’

‘ACHE do, Robin.’

‘Don’t the doctors at St Swithin’s object to ACHE taking over their functions?’

‘The doctors in a modern hospital are not in a position to object about anything. They are just beginning to find that out.’

‘Do you honestly think that you yourself are in a position, Mr Chipps, to dictate to the medical profession? With traditions somewhat stronger and a history a good deal longer than those of ACHE?’

‘I honestly think that I am, Robin.’

‘Thank you, Mr Chipps.’

‘Thank you, Robin.’

‘Turn off that rubbish instantly,’ ordered the matron of the Bertram Bunn Wing, who had come into Brenda Bristols’ room shortly after seven o’clock bearing a plate of sandwiches. ‘You might be interested to know that I have cut almost one thousand sandwiches for the patients’ suppers with my own hands.’

‘Lovely,’ said Brenda Bristols, sitting up in bed in her transparent nightie. ‘I’m ravenous. What sort are they?’

‘Ham and pickled onions. The time for anything fancy is past.
What
are you still doing in this patient’s room?’ she demanded of Lord Hopcroft, who was sitting in the armchair in his short nightshirt.

‘I was getting some advice from Miss Bristols on my condition. Your computer downstairs really comes into its own with this present trying situation. It functions as efficiently as ever, strike or no strike. The latest print-out says I’m suffering from pre-eclampsia.’

‘That’s impossible,’ she told him shortly. ‘It’s a disease of pregnancy.’

‘But I explained when you found me in the bathroom, Matron, that I
am
pregnant. And according to the computer this afternoon, I’m almost in labour. It’s certainly a quick worker.’

‘Lord Hopcroft, I should have imagined that
you
enjoyed a sense of humour more remote from that of our medical students.’

‘But I’m not joking,’ he complained. ‘I’m simply pointing out how the computer has made a mistake.’

‘The computer does not make mistakes. That is impossible.’

‘Couldn’t do us a bottle of bubbly too, dear?’ asked Brenda Bristols, doubtfully inspecting the interior of a sandwich. ‘I need a bit of cheering up.’

‘I could not. This strike obliges us all to make sacrifices. You will have to go for once without champagne. I am already late for a vital meeting with Sir Lancelot Spratt in my office.’

‘Do give the lovely man a great big kiss from me.’

‘I shall do nothing of the kind,’ the matron told her icily. ‘Sir Lancelot and myself share a professional relationship with no object but the welfare of our patients.’

‘What about ham sandwiches for me?’ inquired Lord Hopcroft.

‘Meat is forbidden in pre-eclampsia,’ she told him, sweeping out.

Once through the door, the matron glanced at the watch dangling at her left breast. Sir Lancelot would already be there. But she had an important diversion on her way down to the office. She dodged through the nearest door marked ‘Ladies’. Staring into the washbasin mirror, she produced from her uniform pocket a box of make-up and carefully applied it round her eyes. Such brazenness was really unthinkable in uniform. But that night she was to spring her most powerful assault, and everyone said that her eyes were her best feature. She could not allow Sir Lancelot to float about loose with such ravenous predators as Brenda Bristols lying in wait to snap him up. She replaced the make-up box and took out a little gold spray, applying a short burst of scent behind either ear. The girl in the boutique had assured her that it was as irresistible as chopped liver to a hungry mastiff.

She opened the door of her steel and glass cubicle by the front entrance to find Sir Lancelot perched on her desk with feet dangling, glancing idly through his half-moon glasses at an open evening paper.

‘Good evening, Lancelot.’

‘Evening.’

She stood smoothing the front of her blue dress. He went on reading the paper.

‘Lancelot, this is the end of civilization as we knew it,’ she decided to open the conversation.

‘I am aware of trouble in t’ward,’ he returned calmly. ‘But I fancy it will soon evaporate in its own hot air.’

‘This nephew of mine has developed megalomania. Just like Stalin and his doctors’ plot. Did you see Pip on television?’

‘I only watch the cricket.’ Sir Lancelot still did not look up.

‘The way these greedy unions grab everything they can these days is utterly terrifying. I honestly don’t know why the workers are always out after more money. What can they find to spend it on? They get free medicine and free education, subsidized food, housing and transport, free pensions in their old age. They do nothing but dissipate their wages on package tours and bingo. There ought to be a law against it.’

‘Oh, laws won’t do anything,’ he observed. ‘Parliament doesn’t signify, now the country’s run in this peculiar way by the Trades Union Congress, with public opinion forming Her Majesty’s Opposition.’ Sir Lancelot looked up at last, sniffing. ‘Somebody been using ether, Matron? I thought the anaesthetists had given up that smelly stuff years ago. The unions will obviously get away with all they can, like every other individual or organization or nation in history.’ He turned his eyes down to his paper. ‘Anyway, democratic trade unions are self-defeating organisms. First they bankrupt their employers then they establish Communism. Fortunately, the process takes time and even the British people wake up sooner or later. Or at least stir in their sleep.’

‘So you don’t think anything can be done to settle this atrocious strike?’ she asked in a depressed voice.

‘On the contrary, I intend to settle it myself tomorrow morning.’

She looked at him in disbelief, which was swiftly chased off her features by adoration. ‘Oh, Lancelot,’ she exclaimed. ‘But how?’

‘On my ward round.’ He folded the newspaper and put it on the desk. ‘Which I have specifically requested your young man to attend. He is simply exhibiting in virulent form the syndrome I continually observe in my newly qualified students. A sudden rush of importance to the head can produce the most alarming signs and symptoms. He is moreover suffering from an overdose of bigotry, which is the most heady of drugs. Fortunately, a cure is simple. A fierce enough jab in the vitals, and the self-inflation collapses with a loud pop.’

‘Oh, Lancelot,’ she repeated. ‘Every day in every way, I admire you more and more.’

‘What’s Pip’s father think of all this, by the way?’

‘I haven’t heard a word. But he probably approves. He’s a man of violently eccentric ideas himself.’

‘The only idea of Pip’s father which I can remember was retiring to a tiny practice in Somerset and doing as little work as possible for as little money as possible to live on. Hardly anything eccentric in that.’

‘Oh, Lancelot.’ She came close to the desk. ‘I knew from the start of this dreadful business that it called for a man of your calibre to control events. The dean simply dithers.’

‘I agree. When the medical profession is faced with a situation which confronts the owners of steam laundries or sausage factories every week, they run about like hens in a cloudburst. Are you somewhat dehydrated?’ he broke off.

‘I – I don’t think so,’ she replied, puzzled.

‘You’ve rather nasty dark rings under your eyes, that’s all. We medical people did live in such a cosy world before the hospital unions realized their own strength,’ he resumed. ‘As one politician put it, there was a gulf in outlook, sympathy and comprehension between the tight little, warm little inside world of a hospital and the peculiar, unreasonable, ungrateful creatures we observed outside through the windows.’

‘Which politician?’

‘Mr Enoch Powell.’

‘Oh, him,’ she said dismissively.

‘He was one of our few Ministers of Health who did not regard the job primarily as a stepping stone to a better one.’

‘Oh, Lancelot –’ She drew closer. ‘You’re so erudite.’

‘As I explained, it’s simply that since I became a widower I am able to do a great deal of reading in bed.’

She dropped her voice, the crested bosom of her dress against his arm. ‘But isn’t reading in bed a desperately lonely pastime?’

‘One can hardly be lonely with the great Victorian novelists, and their vividly drawn galleries of entertaining characters.’

‘Of course, you’re so right…’ Her thigh pressed his. ‘I read novels, too, when I’m not over-exhausted from my day’s work. Perhaps we…you and I…could both go to sleep with your favourite author?’

‘Trollope.’

‘How dare you,’ she screeched, slapping him so hard she knocked off his glasses.

‘He was a contemporary of Dickens,’ Sir Lancelot told her wearily, picking them up. ‘How’s Miss Bristols? I’ll operate on her tomorrow afternoon, if I can get this strike over. I feel inclined to add a substantial sum to my fee for the free publicity.’

He left the matron standing open-mouthed, pinker than ever.

‘A good try,’ he decided to himself, stepping across the deserted entrance hall. ‘Eye-shadow, perfume, the lot. The poor dear must be getting desperate. Thank Heavens I’ve this peculiar Bristols female to hide behind.’ He stopped, surprised to find himself confronted by Mr Grout. Sir Lancelot had never known anyone from the administrator’s office to be in the hospital after five o’clock, even to visit their own sick relatives. He noticed with interest the junior administrator was accompanied by a slim young woman in a short smart dress and blonde hair arranged in a style he supposed could be named a tonsorial turban.

‘This,’ Mr Grout explained to her, as though indicating some famed national monument, ‘is the surgeon, Sir Lancelot Spratt.’

‘Delighted to meet you, Sir Lancelot,’ she said with a slight accent, offering a slim-fingered hand.

‘Dr Langenbeck is from Hamburg, a doctor of philosophy,’ Mr Grout explained with a look of self-satisfaction which would have befitted his senior. ‘She is studying conditions in British hospitals.’

‘Charmed, madam.’ Sir Lancelot bowed slightly. ‘Have you visited London before?’

‘No, but my father has, often.’

‘Where does he stay?’

‘He didn’t. He was in the Luftwaffe.’

‘You must find Old England quite ridiculously degenerate,’ Sir Lancelot said amiably.

‘Quite the opposite. You are highly efficient. Your strikes are superbly organized and executed. No German worker could get within a kilometre of such successful operations.’

Sir Lancelot inclined himself again. ‘I always accept compliments avidly, particularly when they are well deserved.’

‘I should much like to meet your Mr Chipps. He seems a very intelligent and vigorous young man. In Germany, they would invite him at once to join the board of directors, whether of a manufacturing firm or of a hospital like St Swithin’s.’

‘Unfortunately, in this country the workers and bosses see themselves as two sides in a game of cup-tie football. They combine together only for international contests, which thank God seem to be a thing of the past. If you can be at my ward tomorrow by ten, I’ll see if I can effect an introduction to Mr Chipps. I take it you are in London overnight?’

‘Yes, Charlie is taking me out to dinner.’ Sir Lancelot was for a moment mystified. ‘But not again, please, to that awful canteen,’ she smiled at Mr Grout. ‘Fried fish and peas. Ugh. And that pink sauce like hot floor-polish.’

‘Could you recommend a decent restaurant, Sir Lancelot?’ Mr Grout asked eagerly. ‘I’m not footing the…I mean, it’s official entertainment.’

‘They tell me that the Mirabelle in Curzon Street is very tolerable. I hope you have an instructive visit to our country, Dr Langenbeck.’

‘I’m sure I shall. I have spent much time in preparation, you know. I have read all your great writers who have analysed British politics and the British nation.’

Sir Lancelot nodded slowly. ‘My dear Doctor, there are only two of our commentators who accurately understood the British people, their institutions and their politics. As you can tell from encountering their work any day.’

The blonde frowned. ‘Who? Gibbon and Macaulay?’

‘No. Gilbert and Sullivan. Good night.’