Steady Now Doctor (2 page)

Even his parents, who hadn't seen the bout, wondered if they had bred a tiger after all.

But, of course, it didn't last. He was scared of the vicar who taught scripture, so did not put up his hand to be excused, wet his trousers, burst into tears, and from then on he was treated with the usual derision.

It is strange, there was only one other boy from that school that he remembered, apart, of course, from Joneson and Ward, who neither could recall, and that was a boy called Dinga Powell, who he also didn't remember, but his name was inextricably locked in his mind. Dinga Powell's father was a bus conductor, hence the prefix. It was not in any way, as far as he remembered, derisory - he was just called Dinga Powell. When he reminisced with Joneson about Ward he always asked him if he remembered Dinga Powell and he never did. Of course, Joneson was much brighter than Andy, they were never quite in the same form. Joneson was always in 2a, 3a, 4a, 5a and Andy was always in 2c, 3c, 4c, and when it came to the fifth form he wasn't even in 5c, being put in an ambiguous form called remove, but it was from the remove that he had his one triumph - he was good in
WARSHIP WEEK
.

***

The trip to Blackpool was some undertaking. When he said our trip to Blackpool, Andy was going to his grandmother, who lived on the South Shore end, and Joneson was going to an aunt, who lived in Lytham St Anne's. On reflection, perhaps the subtlety of place of destination was the real difference between them.

Andy and Joneson did all the planning. They thought that Ward joined them for one night only, and Joneson's diary record of, “Ward making a dash for Burton-on-Trent today,” confirms this.

They knew he came ill-equipped, as on their first night, where for some reason they pitched their tent on a rubbish dump, Ward had no sleeping bag, and had to share the large hessian one with Andy.

Today this could have all sorts of connotations, but in those days it didn't. That's how things were.

In spite of it being wartime, they had managed to get a route map from the AA. These maps were joined at the top of the page, and had detailed instructions like, turn left at Brown's Tea Shop, right at Smith's Garage, and as you turn up and over each page, the road for you to follow, with all its accompanying details, ran down the middle of the page.

Andy was later than all his friends in acquiring a bicycle. His father was some sort of Structural Engineer, being moved on and up the scale every few years but never quite catching up to the salary scale he was on, so the family was always hard up.

At the beginning of the war the family were evacuated to his grandmother's at Blackpool, but after some months things were so quiet they returned to their home in South London. The day of their return coincided with the first day of the Battle of Britain, and they had a ringside seat watching Spitfires and Hurricanes fighting against overwhelming numbers of German aircraft over Croydon Airport.

But, joy of joys, some stranded New Zealanders, who had been borrowing the house, had left a bicycle behind. Andy immediately claimed it. It was a sit up and beg bicycle, and had no handgrips on the handlebars. This was remedied by his father, always a genius with plastic wood, who moulded some on. In fact, he was probably the only cyclist with plastic wood handlegrips.

Joneson's bicycle was of the dropped handle, racing type, which had the disadvantage that when he became so tired he couldn't lift his head, which was often, he couldn't see where he was going, so Andy, in his upright position, directed operations.

He was not wearing his Boy Scout uniform as he was not on Boy Scout business, but he did wear his Scout trousers which were dark blue, a leather zipped jacket, Scout socks, plus green tabs on his garters to show that he actually belonged to the Scouts.

He had a borrowed frame rucksack which he wore. His tent, sleeping bag and hand axe were carried on the carrier on the back of his bicycle.

On his belt he had a sheath knife with a silver top, beneath which were two circles of coloured glass between the top and the hardwood handle.

His multibladed penknife hung from a ring on the other side of his belt.

Joneson had some sort of lightweight waterproof gear, and all-in-all looked much more streamlined than Andy.

They went up the old Watling Street that Roman Legionnaires must have marched up in their thousands, and who would have envied their bicycles, as they, in their turn, envied the cars and lorries that passed them.

Nowadays it is not easy to pick out the Watling Street on modern maps with all the new motorways that have sprung up, but he still had a feeling that somehow they went through Grantham, as in one ambiguous town they parked their bikes against a grocer's window, to have the daughter of the house, a bushy blonde with prominent teeth of about their age, come out and hysterically admonish them.

They were a bit nonplussed at the violence of her attack. Fortunately Joneson kept his cool.

“You've got a big hole in your stocking,” said Joneson.

“No, I haven't,” said the girl, carefully examining her black woollen cladding.

“Yes, you have,” said Joneson.

“I'd like to see where,” said the girl, now looking worried.

By now they had safe hold of their bicycles.

“Where you put your legs in,” shouted Joneson as they cycled away.

One day, many years later, when Joneson and Andy had one of their periodical bump-ins on the train from Paddington, Joneson said, “You remember that blonde at the grocers?”

“Yes,” said Andy.

“I bet it was Maggie Thatcher.”

“My God, I bet you're right,” said Andy, “but only if the Watling Street goes through Grantham.”

He remembered Lichfield, Atherstone, Newcastle-under-Lyme, then Warrington to Preston, all cobbles, and he believed it was near Preston he said goodbye to Joneson and, in fact, it was some years before they met again, as he changed schools the next term.

The journey took them four days, and he was given a hero's welcome in Blackpool. His mother and father were there, both pleased to see him. His father more than his mother, not that either liked him more than the other, but if anything had gone wrong with his trip his mother would have blamed it on his father.

His bum was the sorest it had ever been, and he was just about muscle-bound. He was taken to a slipper bath in Blackpool Central the next morning. A slipper bath was just an ordinary bath, one of many in a public bath building. Organizing a bath at short notice at home was much more difficult in those days. For the next few days he basked in the glory of his achievement, then some event of national importance took away everybody's attention.

***

His mother and father rowed incessantly. There was nothing so small it could not lead to a heated argument. Several Christmas dinners were spoilt by arguments on how the turkey should be carved, with everybody finishing in tears, and as a finale, his mother locking herself in the coal place.

There are many types of sin. Too many to enumerate. But in his limited experience he felt that nagging was by far the most serious. His mother was an expert. If it had featured as an event in the Olympics, she would have won a gold medal.

An example of her skills was the day his father won some award. She was included in the celebrations, but, of course, not the main event as he was. He was up on the stage, blushing about the nice things that were said about him, received his award to thunderous applause, returned to his seat next to his wife, who whispered in his ear, “Did you know that your suit was shabby?”

Now that was really a class act. She hadn't broken any laws, and perhaps had told the truth, yet in those few quiet words she felled him with one stroke, as surely as one can fell a sapling with an axe.

His father held his own through sarcasm. They were really like two plants in adjacent pots, his father growing more quickly in his than Andy's mother, who tried to keep him down to her size by hacking at his roots.

There must have been times when they communicated. There was rarely a noise from their bedroom, and perhaps this was where they communicated best. It was always a wonder to him how Lettice had been conceived. He learned in later years that it was behind a bush in the dark in some northern park. Surely they couldn't have been arguing then.

His father was a bit of a lad, which was confirmed once when Andy was leading the Peewit Patrol through some local forest. They came to a clearing, and there was his father in his parked car with his secretary. For some reason he didn't seem as pleased to see Andy as Andy was to see him.

That night, when he got home, his father was waiting behind the kitchen door, springing out when he arrived, shoving a half crown into his hand and saying, “Don't tell your mother you saw me.”

“What's going on,” said his mother with her antennae raised.

“I'm just seeing he's all right,” said his father.

Andy couldn't understand any of it. It seemed quite natural to him that his father should take his secretary for a spin, though, for some reason some of his patrol sniggered. Years later his father told him that some of the parents of his patrol cut him dead after this event, but this was probably just his guilty conscience.

This was just about the time Andy was beginning to get religion and thought no evil. His Bible was Baden-Powell's Handbook for Scouts, which clearly outlined what was good and what was bad. Under the heading masturbation it said, “Don't do anything you wouldn't want your sister to know about.”

Now there was a time before Lettice got religion, when she would have been quite interested and probably would have encouraged him, but once she had linked up with her one-eyed love there's no doubt she would have been on Baden-Powell's side.

For Andy, who thought he had found something unique that only he knew about, was now in a position where he always meant to stop doing it but of course never did, but from then on had a guilty conscience every time he did it.

Returning to the parental battle, some aspects of it were a complete enigma to him.

In 1938 at the age of thirty-seven his mother decided that she wanted to be an actress and went off for a year to Drama School in Croydon.

Even today this would be a bit unusual. In those days it was quite incredible, and the fact that his parents must at some stage have had a rational discussion to agree it, was almost unbelievable. Sadly, it was eventually to lead to tragedy.

For a year he was a latch-key schoolboy, living off school dinners, which weren't bad, and having unlimited bread and jam as soon as he got home.

He did not get religion as badly as Lettice, but he got it badly enough. When he was fifteenish he joined the Crusaders which was religion for Secondary School children only.

There were camps (nothing like Scout camps) where older men took you for walks and asked you if you had found the Lord. There were Bible meetings, prayer meetings and on a Sunday Andy went to five different services. He was the complete little prick. He was called by a fellow Christian to come to his sister who was weeping uncontrollably after being jilted by some long-standing boyfriend. Andy knew just what to do. He put his arm round her and said, “Why not turn to the Lord, He succoureth all in need.” Hardly turning, she smacked him right in the eye.

He was even elected to, and gave a sermon in church. But he was getting all muddled up with masturbation, the Scouts, and his parents; so one day in church he prayed that God would guide him in the Vicar's sermon as to what to do.

He got a surprisingly direct reply.

The Vicar got up into the pulpit and quoted a verse from St Matthew, “Go ye then before all nations baptising them in my name,” and he went on to talk about the need for medical missionaries in China.

He had been called.

That afternoon, he went to Crusaders almost in a state of trance. On hearing the circumstances of his calling everybody fell about praying. This went on for weeks.

A man from the China Inland Mission called to see him and said that if he did follow his calling the Mission would help with his fees in medical school.

It was settled; he was going to be a Missionary Doctor. Then one day a boy who had been in the same form at the Grammar School was killed whilst riding his bicycle. He couldn't remember who it was as the only people he remembered from that school were Joneson, Ward and Dinga Powell, and he couldn't remember Ward or Dinga Powell.

The death necessitated a special Crusader Prayer Meeting where they all prayed and wept and also rejoiced, as three days before he was knocked off his bike, whoever it was had accepted the Lord and had been saved.

Suddenly it all didn't seem to make sense to Andy. If he was saved, why did the Lord let him get knocked off his bicycle?

From then on he slowly drifted away from the church. He couldn't have one logic for everyday life and one for religion.

His departure was slow and he changed from wanting to be a Missionary Doctor to just wanting to be an ordinary doctor.

As far as he could remember, both through his Baden-Powell and religious days, he was still a supplier of French letters. He always wanted everyone to think well of him. He was also a bit parsimonious in his deliveries during these two phases, accompanying his distribution with smug phrases like, “I'm only giving you this to save some young girl from an unwanted pregnancy.”

He never tried, “The Lord succoureth” bit as most of his recipients were bigger than him.

He continued being a supplier until gradually people had the nerve and the money to buy their own from the chemists or hairdressers, so from then on he experienced a huge fall in status.

When he had definitely decided to be a doctor his parents sprang one of their surprises.

Somehow in the remove at the grammar school he had managed with two other boys to pass the school certificate, but not well enough to take the higher certificate.

His parents, always short of money but who had come up with funds to start his mother's acting career, now sorted out a place for him as a day-boy at a prestigious medical public school.