Read Online Doctor On The Job by Richard Gordon - Free Book Online Page B

his shoulder as they continued towards the mortuary.
    ‘Go on? What’s a bit of bird?’ Harold asked in surprise. ‘My old dad and my brother spend most of the year inside. That’s why I’m always sweating me guts out on overtime, just to keep me poor old mum.’
    ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ Pip asked involuntarily.
    ‘Ashamed? Why? In winter, the nick’s not too cold. In summer, it’s not too hot. That’s all there is to it.’ He added in a more abrasive tone, ‘You’ve got to get rid of all them finicky middle-class attitudes, if you’re going to do a job along with us, mate.’
    ‘I assure you I haven’t any attitudes at all,’ Pip replied hastily. ‘I’ve taken great care to train myself for an open view of life. I’ve read a lot of Freud and Jung. I accept everybody just as they come. Most medical people do. Even Sir Lancelot.’
    ‘That’s correct,’ Harold agreed thoughtfully. ‘I suppose everyone looks exactly the same, seen by the tripes.’
    ‘It’s just that I haven’t met many people in my sheltered life who’ve got fathers in jail.’
    ‘Go on? Well, I sensed you was a good bloke,’ Harold complimented him. ‘The way you took all that chivvying from Sir Lancelot and that lot. If it had been me, I should have toed him in the goolies.’
    They arrived at the post-mortem room, pushing through the double doors into the cool, quiet, tiled interior, its contents lying in neat sheeted rows. ‘I mind your face,’ said the only living occupant to Pip.
    ‘I used to be one of the students.’
    Pip recognized in the same brown coat young Forfar McBridie, a mortuary porter just joined from Glasgow. He was freckled, his brow faintly furrowed like every Scotsman’s newly away from home, through the suspicion that someone was trying to swindle him or, worse still, pull his leg.
    ‘Whose mistake’s this?’ he asked, indicating the trolley.
    ‘One of Sir Lancelot’s,’ Harold told him.
    ‘He won’t have left much inside for us to see,’ the Scotsman grumbled.
    As they returned empty handed to the corridor, Pip said to Harold, ‘I suppose I ought to find the porters’ pool, and wait for orders?’
    ‘Here you are, my old china.’ He threw open the door of a large, low-ceilinged room fogged with tobacco and smelling of feet, its concrete floor covered with benches. It was a scene which recalled to Pip the spectators’ stand of some country cricket ground on a drowsy afternoon. Men with unbuttoned brown coats and unbuttoned shirts lay or sprawled everywhere, lazily smoking, reading newspapers or paperback books, playing cards, drinking tea or cans of beer, sleeping or chatting, listening to the three or four separate programmes emerging from their radios. Peering through the haze, Pip calculated there must have been near a hundred of his new colleagues idling away their working day. He frowned. ‘Are they waiting to be summoned urgently to points all round the hospital?’
    ‘Don’t be daft. You can spend days here – weeks, if you’re sharp enough – without having to shift off your bum. Except for drawing your pay and tea breaks.’
    ‘But Mr Grout in the office said there was a tremendously well-researched system –’
    ‘Now be reasonable,’ Harold told him in a pitying voice. ‘It looked lovely on paper, right? A lot of schemes look lovely on paper. How to win the pools, how to win a war.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘They forget the human element. Get me?’
    Everyone in the room suddenly rose, throwing down their reading matter and hands of cards, striding purposefully for the door. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Pip breathlessly. ‘Some major emergency?’
    ‘Tea break.’
    ‘But a lot of them were already drinking tea,’ Pip pointed out.
    ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Harold explained in the same tone. ‘It’s three o’clock. Tea break. We’re entitled to it. It’s in our contract. Our union fought for it.’
    ‘But supposing you just don’t feel like a cup