agreed. “I’m proper sorry the other doctor isn’t still here, though.”
I found her one of Miss Wildewinde’s overalls and she started on the spot. Her name was Miss Strudwick, and she was as out of place in the surgery as a fan-dancer in church. But she was a willing helper. She had a chronic sinusitus which made her sniff a good deal, and an irritating habit of saying “Aren’t I a silly?” when she’d done something like spilling a carefully-gathered twenty-four-hour specimen over the lino, or sending a patient to a psychiatrist for a post-mortem report and a request to the coroner about the mental condition of his subject. She had no idea of professional sterility or professional secrecy, but she seemed to like the patients and gossiped affably with them all in the waiting-room. After a few days she even began to mellow towards me.
“Mind, all the girls at the Palais thought Dr Grimsdyke was ever so nice,” she confessed one night after surgery, while I was trying to teach her how to sterilize a syringe.
“That’s where you met him, was it?” I always wondered how Grimsdyke had spent his evenings in Hampden Cross. “Now you make sure the sterilizer is on, so, and wait until the water has come to the boil.”
“Oh, yes. There every night he was, almost. He did the mamba something delirious.”
“You first of all dismantle the syringe into its component parts, thus.”
“Mind, he wouldn’t let on he was a doctor to begin with,” she said, giving a giggle. “But of course I ought to have known from the start. He had such lovely soft hands to touch you with.”
“Then you wrap the barrel of the syringe in lint, like this.”
“Don’t you ever go to the Palais, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid I never seem to get the time, Miss Strudwick.”
“Go on – don’t call me Miss Strudwick.” She came a little nearer round the sterilizer. “Everyone calls me Kitten.”
“Er – the plunger is always boiled separately to avoid breakage–”
“You’re one of the shy sort, aren’t you?” She looked up at me. “You couldn’t say that about Dr Grimsdyke, I must say.”
“And the needles of course are sterilized as quickly as possible to avoid blunting–”
“But you’ve got ever such nice kind eyes.”
“Threading them through a square of lint for convenient recovery–”
“Wouldn’t you like to get a bit more friendly, seeing as Fate has brought us together?”
“Er – Miss Strudwick. The – er – temperature of the sterilizer has to be maintained at one hundred degrees Centigrade for two minutes–”
Our conversation was fortunately broken by the telephone calling me out to a confinement, and when I got back I was relieved to find that Miss Strudwick’s emotions had cooled with the sterilizer.
In the next few days it became clear that Grimsdyke must have been a highly popular partner at the local Palais. Girls looking almost the same as Kitten Strudwick appeared hopefully in the waiting-room every morning, and I could have taken my choice of half a dozen receptionists. But finding a locum seemed impossible. I wrote to the Secretary of St Swithin’s Medical School and to a medical employment agency in Holborn, as well as drafting a mildly misleading advertisement for the British Medical Journal . I interviewed one doctor, but he was so old that he seemed likely only to add to the number of my patients; another, with a red face and tweeds, not only arrived drunk but seemed to find nothing unusual in it. There was one excellent young man from India who politely told me that I was too young to be his professional senior, and another excellent young man from Inverness who politely told me that he suffered from schizophrenia. I seemed to have struck the hard core of medical unemployment. Whenever I had been out of work and wanted a locum’s job myself every practice in the country seemed fully manned, but now that I was in the unusual position of employer I couldn’t find any
I found her one of Miss Wildewinde’s overalls and she started on the spot. Her name was Miss Strudwick, and she was as out of place in the surgery as a fan-dancer in church. But she was a willing helper. She had a chronic sinusitus which made her sniff a good deal, and an irritating habit of saying “Aren’t I a silly?” when she’d done something like spilling a carefully-gathered twenty-four-hour specimen over the lino, or sending a patient to a psychiatrist for a post-mortem report and a request to the coroner about the mental condition of his subject. She had no idea of professional sterility or professional secrecy, but she seemed to like the patients and gossiped affably with them all in the waiting-room. After a few days she even began to mellow towards me.
“Mind, all the girls at the Palais thought Dr Grimsdyke was ever so nice,” she confessed one night after surgery, while I was trying to teach her how to sterilize a syringe.
“That’s where you met him, was it?” I always wondered how Grimsdyke had spent his evenings in Hampden Cross. “Now you make sure the sterilizer is on, so, and wait until the water has come to the boil.”
“Oh, yes. There every night he was, almost. He did the mamba something delirious.”
“You first of all dismantle the syringe into its component parts, thus.”
“Mind, he wouldn’t let on he was a doctor to begin with,” she said, giving a giggle. “But of course I ought to have known from the start. He had such lovely soft hands to touch you with.”
“Then you wrap the barrel of the syringe in lint, like this.”
“Don’t you ever go to the Palais, Doctor?”
“I’m afraid I never seem to get the time, Miss Strudwick.”
“Go on – don’t call me Miss Strudwick.” She came a little nearer round the sterilizer. “Everyone calls me Kitten.”
“Er – the plunger is always boiled separately to avoid breakage–”
“You’re one of the shy sort, aren’t you?” She looked up at me. “You couldn’t say that about Dr Grimsdyke, I must say.”
“And the needles of course are sterilized as quickly as possible to avoid blunting–”
“But you’ve got ever such nice kind eyes.”
“Threading them through a square of lint for convenient recovery–”
“Wouldn’t you like to get a bit more friendly, seeing as Fate has brought us together?”
“Er – Miss Strudwick. The – er – temperature of the sterilizer has to be maintained at one hundred degrees Centigrade for two minutes–”
Our conversation was fortunately broken by the telephone calling me out to a confinement, and when I got back I was relieved to find that Miss Strudwick’s emotions had cooled with the sterilizer.
In the next few days it became clear that Grimsdyke must have been a highly popular partner at the local Palais. Girls looking almost the same as Kitten Strudwick appeared hopefully in the waiting-room every morning, and I could have taken my choice of half a dozen receptionists. But finding a locum seemed impossible. I wrote to the Secretary of St Swithin’s Medical School and to a medical employment agency in Holborn, as well as drafting a mildly misleading advertisement for the British Medical Journal . I interviewed one doctor, but he was so old that he seemed likely only to add to the number of my patients; another, with a red face and tweeds, not only arrived drunk but seemed to find nothing unusual in it. There was one excellent young man from India who politely told me that I was too young to be his professional senior, and another excellent young man from Inverness who politely told me that he suffered from schizophrenia. I seemed to have struck the hard core of medical unemployment. Whenever I had been out of work and wanted a locum’s job myself every practice in the country seemed fully manned, but now that I was in the unusual position of employer I couldn’t find any
Similar Books
