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patient in St Swithin’s enjoys one-twentieth of a porter? It’s well below the national peak. Mr Clapper is very proud of that, too. Report to the head porter,’ he continued in a businesslike voice. ‘Who will organize your training in accordance with DHSS Circular HM bracket sixty-eight bracket ninety-six. Which is of course based on the Report of the Advisory Committee on Ancillary Staff Training.’
    ‘Training? For pushing the laundry?’
    ‘If the Ministry say training you need, training you get,’ Mr Grout told him firmly. ‘National Insurance number? Tax coding?’ Pip confessed himself as ignorant of both as of the Zodiacal configuration under which he was born. ‘You’ll have to join ACHE, of course. They operate a closed shop. See Mr Sapworth. He’s due to be down in the pool in exactly two minutes.’
    ‘I haven’t a watch. It’s wonderfully liberating. I wish I’d given them up years ago.’
    ‘Never forget that the patients see more of the porters than of the doctors. As Mr Clapper says, your attitude and efficiency are of great importance to the reputation of St Swithin’s. Sign here, please, for this brown coat.’
    Pip left the office feeling that entering St Swithin’s as a porter was more inspiring than entering it as a student. He decided that with his new status he had better take the service lift. Buttoning up his brown coat, he joined the wide, lumbering conveyance descending with bundles of dirty laundry, a refuse bin trailing blood-spattered bandages, a trolley loaded with drugs, another loaded with congealed dirty dishes, eight brown-coated porters, and two patients, one of whom was dead.
    Pip wedged himself next to the porter in charge of the covered mortuary trolley, a man younger than himself with untidy dark hair, a large stylish moustache and square glasses. ‘You’re one of the students, ain’t you?’ the man asked at once, looking puzzled.
    ‘I was. I got the chop this morning. I’ve just been taken on as one of you.’
    ‘Go on?’ He shook Pip’s hand vigorously. ‘You’re the poor sod what kept getting the stick from Sir Lancelot. I reckon you’re better off for the change. More free and easy, this life. I’m Harold Sapworth. Pleased to meet you.’
    ‘I was told to report to the head porter.’
    ‘You’ll have to take a bus. There ain’t one. Left last Christmas. Got a better job in a hotel. Patients don’t leave tips, see.’ He nodded down at his charge. ‘Especially dead ones.’
    ‘But Mr Grout in the office said –’
    ‘Listen, mate.’ Harold Sapworth grinned. ‘First thing you learn about St Swithin’s, them geezers in the office wouldn’t know they’d been born, if they hadn’t got a belly-button to prove it. Which is what they spends most of their time looking at, if you asks me. Give us a hand with this,’ he invited, pushing out the trolley as the lift reached the basement.
    Pip had never wasted thought on what the hospital porters got up to. They were to him simply anonymous men with complexions either black, hairy or leathery, forever pushing recumbent patients or large unidentifiable bundles on trolleys. It had never occurred to him that they were organized, the troops of a brilliantly generalled army deployed with well-drilled precision. Or were they?
    ‘I was told to see you too, Mr Sapworth,’ Pip said, pulling the front of the trolley along the wide, white-tiled, brightly lit basement corridor. ‘With a view to applying for membership of ACHE.’
    ‘No trouble. You’re in.’ They edged their way against a line of trolleys bringing the patients’ teas from the kitchens. ‘I’m filling the hole for our shop steward. He had a little accident in Piccadilly Circus.’
    ‘I hope it won’t keep him off work long,’ said Pip solicitously.
    ‘Yes, three years.’
    ‘It must have been a nasty one.’
    ‘It was. He was flashing. The accident was letting the coppers see him.’
    ‘But how dreadful,’ Pip commiserated over