Christmas is coming, and I still have not retired.
From a shop long remembered behind Edinburgh Castle, I ordered a case of selected single malts – Auchentoshan, Inchgower, Dalwhinnie, Tullibardine, Ladyburn, Craigellachie, Rosebank, Bunnahabhain. Lovely names. Lovely whisky.
It arrived at breakfast-time.
‘You mustn’t drink too much over Christmas,’ Sandra uttered the routine warning.
‘As every medical student knows, alcohol dilates the coronary arteries.’
‘I can’t understand why you tipple so. The whole family for Christmas dinner should be stimulating enough. Everyone knows what a scream my brother George is.’
‘I’ll tell you why.’ I screwed up my eyes. ‘I quote the Victorian novelist Marcus Clarke – “Pleasing images flock to my brain, the fields break into flower, the birds into song, the sea gleams sapphire, the warm heaven laughs. Great God! what man could withstand a temptation like this?” Mind, he was writing about an alcoholic parson on an Australian convict settlement.’
Sandra silently cleared away breakfast, unmoved by English literature.
It was a bleak Monday morning. The young Bellwethers, married last autumn, arrived at the surgery with a dead cat.
They unwrapped it from the
Guardian
on my consulting desk, cold and stiff. It appeared a sad case of feline hypothermia.
‘Spent the night in our deep-freeze,’ Herbert Bellwether informed me solemnly.
The tragedy flashed upon my mind like the apocalypse. The couple delving for the oven-ready chips, tabby inflamed by the unleashed tang of fish fingers, the lid carelessly slammed, piteous miaows unheard, supper eaten and telly watched, fruitless puss-pusses throughout their little home, with the breakfast bacon stark revelation.
‘Rotten luck,’ I sympathized. ‘Though the end was probably painless.’
‘I mean, the body spent the night in our deep-freeze.’
I was puzzled. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off calling at the vet’s? Though it rather looks as if nothing can be done at this stage.’
‘This cat is a doctor’s problem cat,’ he insisted quietly.
I started. Rabies! It was raging chronically among cross-Channel cats. From Boulogne to Bordeaux people were frothing at the mouth and shying at their bottles of Perrier. I recalled posters at the ports more intimidating than the Customs men, and coastal magistrates regretful at an inability to have pet smugglers put down.
‘Who’s it bitten?’ I demanded anxiously.
‘Can’t you see, doctor?’ Julie Bellwether pointed tearfully. ‘She’s been shot in the neck.’
‘How extraordinary. It’s nice of you to let me have a look, but I’d suggest you display the corpse to the RSPCA. They must be hot stuff on feline murder.’
‘It happened at the General Hospital,’ Herbert added.
I became lost in a blizzard of bewilderment.
The Bellwethers had been my patients since childhood. Herbert wore a beard and an anorak and ran a garden centre. Julie had straight hair and big round glasses and helped at a nursery school. They were an ideally suited gentle couple, who believed the world would be a better place if it renounced nuclear weapons and ate compost-grown veg.
I inquired, ‘Some disturbed patient ran amok with an automatic? I do hope he did not similarly shoot his psychiatrist?’
‘On Sunday afternoon they had a cat shootout,’ Herbert explained.
‘I don’t think I follow?’
‘You know we live right against the hospital? Well, a man appeared beyond our back garden fence with a rifle and started firing at cats. He got six, including Samantha.’
I mentioned, ‘Do you think we might have the cat wrapped up again? Thank you so much.’
‘She was in such lovely condition,’ said Julie anguishedly. ‘I cry every time I see her unopened tins of cat food.’
‘But surely someone must have noticed a man spending his Sunday afternoon going round shooting cats?’
‘They certainly did, doctor!’ Herbert said indignantly. ‘There was a really nasty scene when the porters and cooks at the General twigged what was going on. They loved those cats, doctor, as we loved our Samantha.’
He described vividly domestic staff attacking the mass murderer with brooms, stretcher poles, frying pans and choppers, forcing him to flee in his van leaving his prey scattered round the consultants’ car park. The corpses had been cherished for months in the hospital kitchens, lavished with scraps and saucers of creamy milk, bedded down cosily among the central-heating pipes. It was hardly less horrible than a man going round to shoot the geriatric patients.
‘But why pepper a pack of pussies?’ I asked. ‘For coat collars? Chinese restaurant delicacies? Was he a nostalgic tiger hunter? Had he a thing about cats, like Napoleon?’
‘Search me.’ Herbert shrugged. ‘That’s why we hoped you’d help us, doctor. Nothing can bring our Samantha back, but she might prevent other cats suffering the same end.’
I agreed reluctantly, ‘Oh, all right. I’ll phone Mr Applebee, the administrator at the General, about the fiendish carnage. Meanwhile, would you please ensure that the cat is unnoticed as you pass through the waiting room? Or I shall have to have the place fumigated, at great expense.’
I had not met Applebee since our involvement with the bodyscanner in question. It took two days to reach him – such remoteness is a common hazard with persons in administration, to display their overwork and give them a chance to guess what the devil you are after. The delay stoked my indignation, until I felt towards the incident much as Milton towards the Late Massacre in Piedmont, and started with the conversational equivalent of
Avenge
,
O Lord! They slaughter’d Saints
.
‘Shooting cats is part of official National Health Service policy,’ he countered stiffly.
‘Simpleton that I am,’ I apologized. ‘Some
Dummkopf
might similarly have phoned the
Führerbunker
inquiring why the Nazis gassed people.’
‘Really, Dr Gordon, you’re not being helpful or even sympathetic towards the exhausting difficulties we face administering the NHS,’ he returned severely. ‘Cats are a major problem. Worse than fiddled meat invoices, the disappearing floor-polish mountain and typewriters going like giveaway ballpoints. Don’t you realize, the General hosts a colony of fifty feral cats? So does every one of the five thousand hospitals in the country. This equals a quarter of a million untamed cats eating their heads off at the expense of the Health Service, which as everyone knows is tighter for cash than the Church of England. And further, Dr Gordon, let me tell you the cats are using my heating ducts as a vast litter tray, the engineers are complaining the basement is alive with cat fleas, they are threatening to strike and bring the hospital to a total halt any minute, all because the sentimental domestic staff lavish tender loving care on vermin which are now learning to jump through the windows after the patients’ dinners. I’ve had terrible scenes in the wards, people screaming and waving their scratches, two patients are already suing me and the marksman’s boss becomes perfectly abusive on the telephone about experts being insulted and assaulted by ignorant kitchen-hands, who are refusing to work while they organize stretcher parties to bring in survivors wounded in action.’
He paused.
‘I appreciate you have an ecology problem,’ I conceded. ‘But surely you could find a less sensational means of curbing your annoyance than occurred to the late A Capone on St Valentine’s Day?’
‘Cats are a health hazard,’ he replied firmly. ‘My duty is to summon the pest-control people, and if a .22 rifle is their most effective instrument, who am I to disagree? Do you expect mc to tell surgeons to use fingers instead of scalpels? Listen, when the Great Exhibition opened in London in 1851, sparrows got into the brand-new glittering Crystal Palace, twittering everywhere and doing things on the top hats and furbelows. Queen Victoria was not amused at all. But she knew the man for the job – the ancient Duke of Wellington, who advised at once, “Sparrowhawks, ma’am.” It was as great a success as the Battle of Waterloo. This country must be ruthlessly businesslike, or it goes under. Satisfied?’
‘Why not put in ferrets?’ I suggested, but he had rung off.
The Bellwethers were back the following week. Bits of
Guardian
now stuck to the cat’s fur, like thermal underwear to the lost body of an Arctic hero.
‘It’s happening in hospitals all over,’ said Herbert sombrely, handing me some cuttings. I felt a duty towards the Health Service of holding a glimmer of reason to the misty-eyed dissidents, but he interrupted determinedly, ‘And I’m going to stop it, doctor.’
‘Isn’t there some pressure group for promoting the welfare of poor, helpless cats?’ inquired Julie meekly.
‘Undoubtedly. There is for promoting the welfare of everything else in the country from smokers to beer-drinkers.’ I thought. ‘PUSSY! That’s it. Always in the newspapers. Why not phone them and state your case? No knowing where it will end – questions in Parliament, Court of Human Rights, the Esther Rantzen show.’
They thanked me heart-warmingly, wrapped up the cat and left.
There were only three shopping days to Christmas. The Bellwethers reappeared.
‘Very sensible of you, transferring the cat to a black bin-liner,’ I congratulated them. It was frosty-furred and fossil-hard, and rattled on the consulting desk. ‘How did you get on with PUSSY?’
‘It was a bit funny,’ Herbert reported awkwardly. ‘The lady said, “Why don’t you walk round King’s Cross yourself, dearie, and chat up some of the girls?”
‘PUSSY’s not for cats,’ Julie explained. ‘It’s for something else.’
I apologized, ‘With so many people so busy living up to their acronyms, a slight muddle is excusable.’ I remembered, ‘CAT! The Cat Action Trust. Ring up the lady in charge of that. Good thing the gaffe wasn’t made vice versa.’
They thanked me sincerely, shrouded Samantha and left. They returned the following morning. I implored them forcefully not to let the cat out of the bag. It was getting like the pheasant which Rollo Basingstoke sent us, which lay forgotten under the dog food for three years.
Julie began excitedly, ‘The CAT people were terribly interested. They said the Ministry gunfire was utterly deplorable.’
‘They’d a much better idea,’ Herbert added enthusiastically. ‘Trap the cats, neuter them, and put them back again.’
‘You see, that doesn’t create a cat vacuum,’ Julie pointed out.
‘To be filled by a new wave of cats,’ Herbert amplified.
‘So the neutered cats live there happily, until they disappear by natural wastage,’ Julie ended with satisfaction.
I charitably promised to pass the survival plan to Applebee. I took the chance of mentioning that Samantha was possibly due for decent interment, the smell causing curiosity, even alarm, in the waiting room, and could not be doing their dairy ice cream and frozen peas much good.
Herbert gave a dark look. ‘We are keeping her above ground, doctor, because we are planning direct action.’
I wished them a Merry Christmas.
I caught Applebee on Christmas Eve. Over the telephone, I urged in the spirit of the season the CAT alternative.
‘After all,’ I emphasized, ‘it’s better to be castrated than catsmeat.’
‘How the hell are we going to neuter a quarter of a million cats?’ he objected. ‘Do you realize, there are more than a million feral cats in the country, the population of Birmingham? Why, the sterilizers would be more overworked than the NHS junior doctors. And perhaps you would tell me how I’m to catch the cats? Particularly as they may not much care for the operation.’
I demurred.
‘Would you?’ he asked.
‘Why not dig pitfalls, baiting them with mice? They work splendidly for elephants.’
But he found it no more amusing than Queen Victoria the sparrows. I decided he was the voice of humourless, heartless officialdom, and hoped the cat would vanish from my life after Christmas as Marley’s ghost from Scrooge’s.
I was in paper hat carving the turkey for my extended family in the middle of Christmas Day when the doorbell rang. I cursed. On the mat was Applebee, distraught. He was holding hands with Julie. She was holding hands with Herbert. Applebee was also holding the cat, gift-wrapped in holly paper. I was confused.
Applebee cried, ‘We’re stuck!’
Julie giggled. ‘With Superglue.’
Herbert chuckled. ‘Mr Applebee opened his front door thinking he was getting a nice present, and now we’re all firm friends. Including Samantha.’
I asked Applebee shortly, ‘What do you expect me to do about it?’
‘Dissolve us,’ he demanded hysterically. ‘Surely you’ve some sort of antidote? You must always be getting teenagers with noses stuck into plastic bags inhaling the stuff? All my wife’s relatives are getting famished. How can anyone carve a turkey attached to a dead cat?’
I grabbed the cat and pulled. I found I was adhered, too. Sandra opened the dining-room door, curious about the spectre at the feast. I politely introduced her. She shook hands with Herbert, and became stuck. My son Andy and daughter Jilly emerged, puzzled. Also George, Bill and Augustus (their uncles), Sal, Mary and Janet (aunts) and Hilda (widowed same). ‘Keep clear!’ I yelled.
Instantly assuming the cat was emitting a highly infectious plague, they clapped hands over their mouths and cowered behind the Christmas tree. Andy bravely pulled at the cat, and got stuck. Uncle George rang the fire brigade. We sat on the floor, awaiting the arrival of the appliances. I remarked to Applebee, ‘Why, I’ve solved your cat problem! Simply present each patient with a complimentary cat to take home from hospital.’
Applebee scowled. The man had no sense of humour even on Christmas Day.
In the New Year we held a party. My daughter had become Miss Gordon.
Jilly had passed her Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons, who display supreme professional snobbery by shedding the title ‘doctor’. She conceded that Daddy was right. Surgery was a masculine career, like conducting orchestras and bookmaking. She was refocusing on gynaecology. As Bertie’s registrar job was shortly vacant at the General, Jilly suggested it would be smart to invite the Taverills, and to make sure also to ask their son Peter, who was already halfway up the golden gynaecological ladder in London as senior registrar at the Royal Women’s.
Over my Laphroaig I informed Bertie of that morning’s patient Ms Clew, who, being liberated, wished to give birth under water.
‘How tiresome.’ He spiked the olive from his martini with the same elegant, neat gesture that he used when inserting a stitch into a lady’s intimate parts. ‘I’m utterly exasperated by women who read smart articles in the Sunday papers and demand to give birth in peculiar positions. What did you tell her?’
‘That it was fine for mermaids.’
Ms Clew was a big comprehensive schoolmistress, seven months gone in a macramé smock. I did not enlighten Bertie with her response to my suggestion that she invoked his expert care at the General.
‘No thank
you
,’ she had complained, red spots on pale cheeks. ‘I’ve already had two there, and they treat the mothers as suffering from a disease called pregnancy, when childbirth should be an experience of astonishing beauty and sensuality, as that lady said on television. They put you in the stranded beetle position and fire everyone off with drugs every morning like a barrage of guns. All this high technology! Why can’t I enjoy natural childbirth in my own home?’
An upset patient means a bad doctor.
‘My dear Ms Clew,’ I had said soothingly. ‘Giving birth is not just another wifely domestic duty like cooking the Sunday roast. Believe me, Ms Clew, doctors entertain the same caring feelings towards labouring mothers as lifeboat men to shipwrecked mariners, and will similarly spare no effort to bring them safely through the harrowing experience, but obviously the lifesavers must use the most efficient lifeboat, the latest safety gadgets, and expect the floundering sailors to obey the megaphoned instructions for their own good. See?’
Slightly mollified, she muttered something about male obstetricians feeling threatened at losing the birthing process. She informed me, ‘Well, I’m taking my case to Re-Birth, in Islington. They’re very concerned about the sexual exploitation of women in labour.’
I am not impressed with the women’s liberation movement. A lifetime in medicine develops a sensitive nose for the whiff of bullshit in the winds of change.
Bertie Taverill was a handsome man with bristly grey hair and expensive suits. He was inclined like many consultants to be unthinkingly condescending towards us poor bloody GPs, though careful to keep on our right side, as we supplied the raw material for his rich tapestry of life.
‘I should hate to perform a delivery under water,’ he remarked. ‘A newborn baby’s a slippery little thing, I might lose it like the soap in the bath. How nice to see Jilly looking so happy.’
‘If you’re not happy as a young hospital doctor, you never will be.’
‘My Peter seems to be seeing a lot of her.’
I looked blank.
‘Oh, he’s always taking her out to theatres and dinner in London. Well, you can’t expect children to tell Mummy and Daddy everything when they’ve got an FRCS. Eh, eh?’
He laughed heartily and dug me in the ribs hard (with the tips of two fingers, you could tell he was a gynaecologist).
I bore the news to Sandra under the pretence of offering nuts. Her eyes glowed over her Tio Pepe. Young Taverill, across the room chatting to Dr Lonelyhearts, was good-looking, well off and clever, and having a gynaecologist as your daughter’s boyfriend is somehow reassuring, like letting a racing driver borrow the family car.
I mentioned Peter to Jilly over the washing-up.
‘Oh, yes, I have been out with him once or twice. I thought it useful, talking to someone at my own level about the career prospects in gynae,’ she explained over the sink. ‘Did you know he’s already invented a new method of laparoscopic sterilization? He’s dreadfully brainy and frighteningly hard-working, it’s a wonder he manages to be so terribly nice and have such delightfully civilized manners and be so well dressed, he has a remarkable knowledge of books and music and is an absolutely fascinating conversationalist and is terribly sophisticated in restaurants and drives a Lotus.’
‘This is only a professional relationship?’ I hazarded.
‘Oh, definitely. I’m keeping in with the Taverill family only to further my career, which of course comes first.’
‘Admirable,’ I agreed heartily. ‘Well, mine’s over. I’m retiring.’
‘No! But you’ll be bored, like some resting old Shakespearean actor.’
‘So your mother said,’ I told her wearily. ‘Luckily, I’ve hit on an agreeable retirement activity. Literature!’
‘You mean, you’re actually going to write that book you keep talking about, on twenty-five years in general practice?’
‘Even if I publish it at my own expense, by what they call “vanity presses”. Though Dr Lonelyhearts once told me,’ I reflected, ‘that all presses were vanity presses – he knew a lot of authors.’
The idea was sharpened by discovering in my shelves an ancient copy of
Dr
Bradley Remembers
, by (Dr) Francis Brett Young, a novel I had read as an impressionable student. Its hero was a family doctor pre-NHS – at first, even pre-L1 G – shabby in traditional frock coat and wing collar, practising in a grotty Midland town with gas-lit consulting room and oilskin-covered couch, wrapping beautifully his self-dispensed medicines with dabs of scarlet wax, recalling his professional life on his retirement eve at seventy-three, beloved by his old patients and scorned by his new colleagues, his wife dead in childbirth, his son not only dying from morphine addiction but failing his finals as well, and arthritis in both hips. A blub a page, I now adjudged, rereading it in bed. The night after the party I reached the final paragraph. Dr Bradley is called to his last case.
The rain drummed fiercely on the top of his opened umbrella. The little girl nestled close to his side and clung to his left arm as she had been bidden. They passed, that odd pair, across the rain-slashed oblong of light that the window cast.
You can almost see the credit titles rolling up, I thought contemptuously, turning out the bedside light. I could surely do better than such unrealistic sentimental rubbish!
I decided next morning I must break to my partners the sad news of my retirement. At the surgery front door I encountered Elaine Spondeck.
‘What a splendid idea!’ she responded. ‘Did you know, Richard, I’ve thought of suggesting it for months? You so obviously hate plodding along with the burden of the practice. Indeed, the three of us had long discussions how we could tactfully suggest that such self-sacrifice was deeply appreciated, but unnecessary. Why, now we can take in some bright, up-to-date, dead keen young doctor who’ll do most of the work for us all.’
I withdrew to my consulting room with mixed feelings.
‘Mrs Jenkins,’ I announced solemnly as she followed with the letters. ‘I am going to retire.’
‘Oh, good!’ she exclaimed. ‘You know, I’m absolutely dying to spend my life at home tending my garden and husband, but obviously I couldn’t while still needing to tend you. I mean, all the patients know how delightfully vague you are about things like sick notes and repeat prescriptions and cremation certificates. When are you leaving, exactly? Resigning end of month, then taking due holiday? I’ll type my own resignation right after morning surgery.’
I sat staring across my consulting desk, torn between feeling that I should have vanished long ago to universal acclaim or should stay until senility to teach them a lesson.
I was interrupted by my first patient, Moira Days, twenty-six, pale and pretty, who wished to distribute all her organs.
‘I saw it in the paper, doctor, how someone gave his heart and his kidneys, and his liver, I rather fancy. It is my wish to bestow the same upon humanity, and I wondered if any others were transferable.’
I mentioned corneas, though adding encouragingly, ‘At the end of your own long life, Moira, perhaps we’ll assemble an entire human-being construction kit. You never know, with these ambitious surgeons. But why the sudden generosity?’
‘Well, I’ve nothing in life which means anything but my little Tracey.’
She was a clean, solemn, fair child of six, sitting beside mother quietly reading Snoopy.
‘And I’d like to feel I’d done some good, passing through this world. Who knows? My kidneys might live after me in some man doing great deeds, like a Member of Parliament. Or maybe end up in a real saint like a bishop.’
‘How’s things at home?’ I asked.
She could smile as she said, ‘My husband’s gone away again, six years this time, robbery with violence; still, it spares me getting knocked about for a bit, doesn’t it? My old dad’s no better in that home with his stroke, and you know about my mum in the bin, my brother’s into hard drugs now, heroin and that, and my sister’s still on the game, though she pretends she’s a hostess and attracts rich Arabs. Well, it could be worse. We could all be dead.’
I was constantly amazed at Moira. She was left in perfectly good shape by the mills of fate, which would have rolled me flat as tinplate.
‘If only half my patients kept as sunny with one-hundredth of your troubles,’ I congratulated her.
‘I always remember what Dad told me from some radio show back in the war – “It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.”’
‘By the way, I’m retiring at the end of January.’
‘No! You mustn’t.’ She added shyly, ‘You’re the only doctor I want to look after me.’
‘All doctors have the same training, you know,’ I pointed out.
‘You’re the only one I really trust.’
‘I assure you that my three partners are extremely trustworthy,’ I rebuked her mildly.
‘But it’s you who’s kept me off the drink.’ Now her face clouded. ‘I’m always remembering the terrible time I had.’ She shuddered. ‘It’s horrible, just the thought of slipping back.’
I gently pooh-poohed my importance in her eyes, but I was deeply stirred. Perhaps I should stay after all? But it would be such a dreadful disappointment to Mrs Jenkins.