Our doctor was always Dr Outred of De Warren House on the London Road. My mother maintained he was definitely the best doctor in the area, much better than Dr Crawford on The Hill and that was because he was a surgeon as well as being an ordinary run-of-the-mill doctor and that signalled being Extra Special! That’s not to say that we were in the habit of consulting him all that frequently because back in those days it cost half a crown a visit and that meant the benefits of each possible consultation had to be weighed carefully in advance. Not something to be rushed into. So when my mother had some kind of abscess in her throat during the winter of 1942 she put up with it for several days before consulting Dr Outred who apparently swiftly lanced it giving her a story to dine out on for several years to come, had she been in the habit of dining out which of course she was not. The lancing, she informed anyone who would listen, was on account of him being a Surgeon and possessed of a certain amount of skill with several varieties of blade. Subsequent to the drama of the lancing she felt so much better that her overall faith in him increased mightily.
He then had the foresight to add to his overall mystique by saving my life when I was four years old and suffering from Pneumonia. I should explain that it was not even Ordinary Pneumonia either, but the Double variety and although I have never been entirely clear about what separates the Ordinary from the Double, the dramatic event itself I actually remember with reasonable clarity. I had been put to bed in my pink and cosy winceyette nightgown well wrapped in blankets with the added precaution of a roaring fire in my bedroom. Feeling decidedly unwell I idly observed the giant sized wooden Dutch Dolls that entered the room carrying a trestle table which they set up at the bottom of my bed before calmly and methodically consuming the contents of a wicker hamper. I watched in fascination as they munched their way through a number of pink iced cakes decorated with cherries, aware that had I been feeling just a little better I might well have been envious. My mother hovered over me with hot lemon juice laced with honey and at some stage my condition was deemed to be such that Old Mr Bassant from next door went to call for the doctor to come which perhaps meant crossing the road to Simms’ shop to use the telephone. By the time he arrived I was sitting on the curtain rail above my own bed, alongside a number of hunched and ugly shiny bronze goblin-like creatures that I remember thinking looked about the size of those strange individuals who lived inside the wireless in the kitchen, those that read the news and told jokes that made the grown-ups laugh. Perhaps they were indeed from the wireless because it was feasible now I had become much smaller that I would soon be going to live with them on the shelf in the corner of the kitchen next to the scullery door. I hoped I would be able to still see my mother from inside the wireless. It was possible that the front panel also contained a window big enough for those inside to observe what was going on in the parallel world of full-size humankind. I certainly hoped so.
And while these jumbled thoughts occupied me I calmly witnessed Special Dr Outred who was also a Surgeon peeling the layers of clothing from me and looking disapprovingly at the banked up fire before striding to the window beneath me and to my mother’s horror opening it wide. Even the goblin people muttered to each other when that happened. Then I was given a most Magical injection of what was described to the neighbours the following day as a Wonder Drug. My life had been saved and I then recovered in a most remarkable manner.
All in all during those wartime years my mother felt she had a lot to thank Dr Outred for although later when he killed my father she naturally enough changed her mind and never felt quite the same about him again. To be completely fair it was Old Nan who first decided that he had been responsible for my father’s death by Pissing About instead of sending him Over the Orspital where apparently they would have Sorted Him in No Time. All this was of course in the future and should not concern us at the moment because for the purposes of this particular narrative, Dr Outred still maintains his elevated position which was close to the Blessed Saints themselves.
In those days a number of family doctors did their own dispensing and ours was one of them. Patients were not handed their medicines at the time of consultation and were required to return for them later when they would be ready on the table in the general waiting room in rows of boxes and bottles labelled with names. This meant that typically the table hosted an interesting range of potions and multi-coloured pills awaiting collection by a steady stream of the sick or their envoys. It was a reasonably seamless system.
One particular visit to the surgery at De Warren House, London Road, stands out very well indeed because my mother for some reason wanted to speak to Dr Outred without me by her side and so she left me in the waiting room with a Beano comic to occupy me. Many years later I came to understand that this consultation had something to do with my father recently being briefly Home On Leave and some kind of nasty infection that had passed from him to her. Strangely, on that chilly winter evening we were the only patients and when the Beano comic’s attraction began to pall I turned my attention to the eye-catching array of medications awaiting collection. There were pills of every hue in some of the little glass bottles as well as the standard and exceedingly dull white ones and also tall bottles of red, blue and green tonics and cough mixtures. As I studied them it began to seem very unfair to me that some specifically selected people who were undoubtedly Special like the doctor himself, were given a whole bottle of red pills or blue ones whilst other lesser mortals were destined to merely receive the white ones. Some years later when Papa’s Ice Cream Parlour Over-the-Town began to make a range of flavours once more, I likened this particular situation to being doled out vanilla ice cream when others were lucky enough to receive chocolate or strawberry because we all knew that vanilla was definitely not a real flavour at all but just another way of saying Plain. However that comparison was yet to come as at the time of my mother’s tearful consultation Papa was still simply serving cups of tea and broken biscuits and I don’t think I had experienced the joys of ice cream of any variety but that’s probably beside the point.
That early winter evening in 1944 no matter which way I looked at it, I felt that a grave injustice was being done to some of Dr Outred’s faithful followers so I decided with all the wisdom of a four year old, that it was up to me to bring some balance to the situation. With the waiting room still eerily empty I began a redistribution of the pills by first emptying all the containers and then methodically refilling them so that each recipient would now get at least one or two of the nicely coloured ones. Quite an effort was involved but by the time I had finished and turned my attention to the more complex problem of the bottled liquids, not one of the Northfleet sick that evening would suffer the indignity of having to swallow Vanilla Pills. Relishing my new role as a Junior Warrior for Justice I was in no doubt that they would be quite delighted although in the furthest recesses of my mind there began a slight uncertainty with regard to how the doctor himself might view the matter.
Almost as soon as that misgiving occurred to me I was left in no doubt as to his position on the matter and even after all these years I cannot forget the look of disbelief and fury on his face. I knew he was itching to take to me physically because his hands, at the level of my shoulders, clenched and unclenched as he hissed at me. He said that I was a totally irresponsible and ill-disciplined child and that my wayward behaviour would result in a lot of extra work for him. My mother, horrified and increasingly tearful, repeatedly apologised for me. That behaviour wasn’t like me, apparently because usually I was as Good as Gold. He looked as if he did not believe her and said something about me needing Much Firmer Guidance and she assured him she was going to Give Me What For when I got home. I rather imagined he seemed just a little placated when she said that.
She talked about the What For I was going to get all the way back along London Road and down Springhead Road which didn’t make the walk home very pleasant, especially when she promised it would be the Hiding of my Life. I tried in vain to broach the issue of Natural Justice when it came to those who were unfairly doled out Vanilla Pills but she just didn’t seem to be interested.
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