British Birds of Prey

There were two doctors in Northfleet, Dr Crawford and Dr Outred and you swore by whichever one of them you favoured and that very much depended on how much you considered they had done for your family and whether they had ever gone above and beyond the Call of Duty. They were invariably known simply by their surnames. We swore by Outred rather than Crawford because he was renowned for being able to do surgery if needs be and more importantly had saved my life when I was four. He didn’t actually perform surgery upon me but he drove at breakneck speed to Gravesend Hospital to access what he called a Wonder Drug when I had pneumonia. I was busy watching relays of dancing Dutch dolls climb the walls of my bedroom and by the time he returned was not aware enough to know how I felt about the size of the needle he used. According to my mother it was enormous! Needless to say with the aid of the Wonder Drug I quickly recovered and rather generously bore him no grudges about the needle. As for surgery, he had at one stage lanced a nasty throat abscess for my mother whilst bombs rained down on his consulting room in London Road, Northfleet at least that is how she described the occasion and at one time she described it a great deal.

Aunt Mag said that when all was said and done you could quite understand why Nell swore by him. However, she stopped all the swearing once she came to understand that he had been complicit in my father’s death by not realizing that he was suffering from Acute Hepatitis rather than some kind of fairly harmless seasonal influenza. It was my Grandmother and the combined efforts of the Aunts that finally convinced her that the once much revered Outred was undoubtedly responsible for the unexpected and most inconvenient sudden death. Even way back then there were those who were keen on a place to lay blame when faced with life’s slings and arrows. We had not got to the stage, however, where we demanded apologies; we simply seethed with indignation at the injustice of it all. My poor mother seethed a great deal because at the time of the death that by rights should never have happened she was not altogether on speaking terms with my father. This was because she could not forgive him for being a serial philanderer. Later she maintained that it was The War that was responsible for the philandering and the Eighth Army in particular because that was where his fascination for women in uniform began and had it not been for that he would never have looked twice at any of the conductresses on the 480 bus route.

As a child I spent a reasonable amount of time in Outred’s waiting room, most especially once the National Health System was up and running and we no longer had to pay for each visit. Prior to the NHS every consultation had to be paid for and I remember that for an adult this was a costly two shillings and sixpence because it was indignantly discussed frequently. I’m no longer sure what was charged for children. There was general dissatisfaction when a half crown had to be handed over despite no firm diagnosis being made and my mother was most satisfied when she was prescribed a Tonic, preferably a red one in an interesting glass bottle. The red Tonics did her a lot of good, of that she was certain.

Outred did not run an appointments system which was undoubtedly sensible as telephones were largely absent in working class households but he did run two surgeries per day, morning and afternoon. You simply turned up and sat on one of the hard wooden chairs and tried to be quiet if you were a child which was difficult if the wait was a particularly long one. If you were an adult you could speak to those around you if you so wished. There were no toys and books to amuse younger patients as would be usual these days. This would have been a forward thinking initiative had Outred been forward thinking enough to think of it but it was clear he regarded most of his child patients as future delinquents and was disinclined to provide benevolent diversions. Following the incident of the redistribution of pills I was involved in when I was too young to fully comprehend the consequences of what I was doing, he did not trust me one iota and I came to accept that. I can’t say I blame him and fortunately for me the said incident took place after he so valiantly saved my life and had it not done so I wonder about the outcome of that bout of pneumonia. I won’t go into all the unhappy details as the particular tale of woe has been fully documented elsewhere but it would never have happened had I not been left alone in the waiting room whilst my mother discussed something personal with him. As I had at the time an over developed sense of what was fair I simply wanted to make sure everyone got at least some of the brightly coloured pills that had been left for collection by the sick. It seemed grossly unjust to me that some people only got white ones. None of this reasoning went down well with our medical man.

In my defence, and although I don’t want to labour the point, things might not have progressed to the redistribution of medicines had our doctor gone in for providing one or two amusements for child patients. The only diversion he did have was a series of framed prints on the walls of the waiting room. British Birds of Prey! The Glorious Golden Eagle, Falcon in Flight, Common Buzzard Cruising, Descending Sparrowhawk and Hovering Kestrel. By the time I was seven years old I could confidently read the captions beneath each picture and my favourite was Falcon in Flight because the terrain below looked almost like local farmer, That Bastard Beaseley’s pea fields. According to my grandmother Farmer Beasely failed to pay the going rate when he hired pickers in early June and therefore could be viewed with disdain and spoken of with derision using any expletive you chose.

The London Road waiting room could only be described as functional, with a disparate collection of chairs jammed close together against three of the walls. There was a no longer wanted dining table in the middle of the room, highly polished but with only a vase of flowers in the centre and three ash trays around the edges. Mrs Outred was fond of flowers and grew a great many in her garden even in wartime when we all knew she should have switched to onions and carrots and she generally remembered to ring the changes with what was in the vase. Against the fourth wall was a tall, narrow side table and by late afternoon an array of jars and bottles sat on it carefully labelled for patients to collect. It was this table that had proved too enticing for me to ignore as a pre-school warrior for justice. So single minded had I been that I had to drag over an empty chair to climb on – a demanding task but the execution of it exhilarating.

There was no receptionist and as patients arrived they simply seated themselves where they felt comfortable and remembered who was in the queue before them. Mistakes were seldom made. As each consultation ended and the object of it hurried out into London Road with head down, a little brass bell on the wall above the tall, narrow side table tinkled and whoever was next in line headed along the short, dark corridor to the consulting room. If you were unsure of the direction or lost your way you could look on the wall where an arrow and a sign in what had once been gold lettering read – Consulting Room This Way.

The reason for the frequent seeking of medical attention for me once the NHS was well and truly up and running and there was no chance of money changing hands was because I had always been Delicate. I was also Highly Strung. I recall with clarity family and neighbours being advised that it was the doctor himself who had pronounced this which was in point of fact quite incorrect. It was apparently impossible to feed me which was at least partly true and had more to do with the end of strict wartime rationing than fragility of constitution. I had become happily accustomed to a plain fat-free wartime diet which by 1948 had morphed into a great many fried items and stews top heavy with mutton fat which was food that met with my father’s approval but was not entirely to my taste.

Usually sick children attended the morning surgery with their mothers or with their grandmothers if their mother was avant garde enough to still be working shifts at Henleys or Bowaters . Old Nan was definitely not the kind of grandparent who had ever been known to exhibit enough care and concern for a grandchild to accompany them on a doctor’s visit and in any case my own mother liked to be firmly in charge of health matters. She looked down on working women and called them Flighty because they were no better than they ought to have been and their minds were on silk stockings and lipsticks rather than their Poor Little Mites and some of them even Carried On with other women’s husbands down in Crete Hall Road after their shifts ended. It was their poor husbands she felt sorry for because they were likely to be working their fingers to the bone and might have bad backs to boot. And how were they being rewarded? That’s what she would like to know. She thanked the Lord that at least she had never been one known for Carrying On.

As for the late afternoon surgery, that was largely attended by sick adults such as Mary Newberry regularly bent over with abdominal pain that was the bane of her life every month as regular as clockwork and men with the kind of cough that never quite went away despite changing to Players’ Weights. At least half the patients smoked relentlessly to while away the lengthy waits for attention. From time to time a flurry of excitement would be caused when someone was brought in by a relative and clearly more in need of immediate medical help than those who waited patiently on the mismatched chairs. Then when the bell tinkled the person poised to rise from their place might virtuously announce in a voice intended for all to hear, that the sicker one should go ahead without delay on account of their need being greater. They were profusely thanked and the offer invariably taken up.

When this happened all the waiting women would sit up a little straighter and fold their arms and exchange glances one to another signaling disapproval. These pockets of malcontent were never directed towards he or she being rapidly ushered towards medical assistance, but rather they who had so charitably given up their place in the queue. General opinion dictated that the public spirited one should by rights take the turn of the sick newcomer and go to the end of the line. Nothing was actually said until the miscreant themselves headed towards the consulting room when a murmur of discontent would arise. It was all very well to give up your place, it was pointed out, but by rights you should then go right down the queue. When all was said and done there could be no argument. In fact there was no argument because one and all knew what was fair and those who did not perhaps entirely agree simply remained silent, sucked on the end of their Woodbines and stared into the middle distance.

The discontent triggered by this scenario was so predictable that it became uninteresting and I would rapidly turn my attention back to Birds of Prey and wonder if Hovering Kestrel was in fact preferable to Falcon in Flight. Years later my brother who was so drawn to all birds of prey whether or not they were British, said that he always enjoyed his visits to Outred’s waiting room even when suffering severe ear ache and revealed to me that his love affair with the Kestrel that had begun with the stuffed bird in a glass dome in Great Aunt Martha’s Station Road Parlour, was firmly established by the local doctor’s choice of waiting room wall decoration. Later still when I found myself charged with the care of the aggressive bird temporarily housed in the spare bedroom of his Chatham semi-detached, my mind strayed back to those Birds of Prey prints. I took comfort from the fact that had it been The Glorious Golden Eagle rather than Hovering Kestrel that ultimately met with the overall approval of my ever more fanatical sibling this period of guardianship might have been a great deal more challenging. But that of course is another story.