Doctor in the Soup by Richard Gordon

Author:Richard Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Stratus

Chapter Fourteen

I drove from Foxglove Lane to Chaucer Way the following fine morning, meditating how humanity, like its activities, had become irksomely complicated since 1662.

The Prayer Book then had simple categories. The quick and the dead. These have been bothersomely extended to the unborn and the dying, who had flexed my moral muscles the previous month. The handicapped, the disabled, the deprived, the geriatric, the transplanted, the comatose formed equally distinct groups demanding sympathy and ethics. Arriving at the surgery I discovered another. The survivors.

‘Mrs Rosie Styles of Inkerman Villas,’ Mrs Jenkins greeted me. ‘The community nurse wants you to call. The lady’s getting on a bit.’

I drove after my morning’s patients to a gently undulating street of terraced Victorian two-up-two-downs across the railway line.

Mrs Rosie Styles was white, wrinkled and wizened, with knobbly arthritic hands. She sat in a red plush armchair, wearing a dingy print dress and clasping a stout stick, amid heavy well-polished furniture, a mantelpiece with a tasselled red cover, framed samplers and an aspidistra.

I examined her fingers and said – the jolly doctor – ‘You must be nearing ninety?’

She stared, outraged.

‘ON SATURDAY WEEK,’ she screeched, ‘I AM ONE HUNDRED!’

‘You don’t look it,’ I added hastily. ‘Not a bit. Well, you’ll have a telegram from the Queen, won’t you, which will be nice. She must be already thinking about it.’

‘IT’S THE DANDELIONS,’ she shouted, having like many wearers of the NHS hearing aid the impression that everyone else in the world lacked one.

I said, ‘Is it?’

She nodded vigorously. ‘DANDELIONS.’

An allergy? I glanced round the neat room. Nothing but a bowl of dried heathers and a vase of pampas grass.

She explained, ‘EAT DANDELION LEAVES FOR LONG LIFE. MY FATHER TOLD ME THAT WHEN HE CAME HOME FROM THE TERRIBLE WAR.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I observed sagely, ‘They must have been difficult to come by, dandelions, in the trenches of France.’

She stared with contempt. ‘DID YOU SAY FRANCE? FRANCE? I JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU YOUNG PEOPLE THESE DAYS. THE TERRIBLE WAR WAS IN SOUTH AFRICA, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT.’

I enquired the other secrets of longevity.

‘STRICT VEGETARIAN DIET ESPECIALLY PRUNES, RENOUNCE THE DEMON DRINK AND THE STINKING WEED, LIVE A CHASTE LIFE AND BED AT TEN.’

I expressed admiration of these principles and warmly wished her many more years yet.

‘I SHOULD HOPE SO.’ She gave an unexpected grin of NHS teeth. ‘I WANT TO KNOW HOW EVERYTHING TURNS OUT IN CROSSROADS JUST LIKE THE REST OF THE COUNTRY, DON’T I?’

The rarae aves of general practice come like magpies in pairs.

The next afternoon I was summoned by the health visitor to Mr Harold Wooljohn of Khartoum Crescent. I drove to a short street of tumbledown cement-faced villas beyond the gas works.

Mr Wooljohn was pale, podgy and ponky, with anaemia. He sat in an untidy two-room, ground-floor flat, wearing corduroy trousers and a bright tartan shirt.

I pulled down his lower eyelid to assess the pallor of its lining, saying cheerfully, ‘You must be nearing ninety?’

He interrupted lighting a roll-up to give me a cagey glance.

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