Doctor On The Job by Richard Gordon

Author:Richard Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Doctor On The Job
ISBN: 9780755131105
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

12

Just before nine on the following sunny morning, Sir Lancelot Spratt stepped through the automatic glass doors into the lobby of the Bertram Bunn Wing.

‘Thank God for that,’ he muttered. The piped music had stopped. The suggestion of the East was stronger, because the air was hotter. The air conditioning had failed, Sir Lancelot decided. Well, he never liked its deadening year-old sameness, anyway.

His eye fell on the white plastic counter. The two porters and the receptionist were late coming on duty. There seemed fewer people about than usual, just one voluminously black-gowned family sitting on the floor chewing nuts.

‘Lancelot.’ The matron appeared instantly, pink-faced and fiery-eyed at the door of her office.

‘This morning I’m somewhat preoccupied,’ he told her firmly.

‘You’re preoccupied! We’re all preoccupied. Revolution has broken out.’

‘I must see Miss Bristols directly, to inform her that the X-rays are clear. I shall be operating on her breast this afternoon.’

‘You won’t. Not on any part of Miss Bristols. Nor of anyone else. We’re in the grip of anarchy. The porters and people are on strike.’

‘Really?’ murmured Sir Lancelot. ‘A local outbreak of the English disease? It is of course a form of national hysteria, like the mass flagellants of Central Europe in the fourteenth century.’

‘That may well be the case,’ she snapped at him. ‘But my patients haven’t had any breakfast.’

‘My patients in St Swithin’s have had a very good breakfast of sausage and bacon.’

‘Naturally. The blockade is directed only against the hospital’s private patients. The main switchboard is even refusing to put through their phone calls. Some of my stockbroker patients are becoming very distressed. Envy, malice and resentment! Those are the diseases these shirkers are suffering from.’ She shuddered. ‘Little could I have imagined this situation, when I first dedicated myself to nursing. Haven’t you seen the morning papers?’

‘I have only got back to London. I had to go fishing in Berkshire yesterday evening, to avoid attending the nurses’ prizegiving.’

‘Haven’t you even seen the pickets?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Intimidating peaceable people outside our front entrance?’

‘I saw only one of the mortuary porters, Forfar McBridie. He was wearing the kilt, plaid, sporran, bonnet and so on, a skean-dhu stuck in one of his tartan socks and a sprig of white heather in the other. He was assuredly carrying a placard.’

‘What did it say?’

‘“It’s Scotland’s Oil.” They are an enviably single-minded race. But what have the porters gone on strike about?’ Sir Lancelot asked with interest. ‘The only industrial discontent to reach my ears was the lack of a darts board down in their room.’

‘Nothing. They are striking because the dunderheads do absolutely everything my nephew Pip tells them. He’s their shop steward.’

Sir Lancelot paused, stroking his beard. ‘I am a little lost.’

‘He got a job as a porter, when you threw him out of the hospital on Tuesday. It’s all your fault,’ she ended bitterly.

‘Hardly. The dean threw the unfortunate young man out, not I. Quite possibly, I should have passed him. Once I had overcome my reasonable

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