Read Online Steady Now Doctor by Robert Clifford - Free Book Online

the 1 st XV against Cardiff, the train goes in thirty minutes, our hooker is in the hospital having his appendix out, you are all we’ve got.”
    Andy couldn’t believe it, but it was true.
    At Paddington Station he felt sure that he had seen a very smartly dressed Joneson on an adjacent platform, but there was no time for dallying.
    He scrummed down with two huge prop forwards in the area between the two toilets on the London to Cardiff train to get used to them, then the scrum half came with the ball and they practised timing.
    What surprised Andy was that all these rugby gods were ordinary very nice people, they included three full rugby internationals, two international trial players, six county players and two war-time international caps.
    Cardiff Arms Park in those days was not the magnificent stadium it is today. It doubled as a greyhound racing track and bursts of applause from the crowd were always accompanied by barking by the hundred or so dogs kennelled under the stand.
    The game was far quicker than anything Andy could have imagined, he could barely arrive at each scrum in time. Twice they had to wait for him, but he was more than holding his own against the current Welsh international hooker.
    Although the hospital lost a good game, 23–20, it established Andy as the 1 st XV hooker for the next six years. For the last four he was the team secretary, which meant actually being club secretary, sorting out all the hospital’s seven rugby sides, transport, tours, et cetera.
    For the first time in his life he stayed in a hotel, and for the first time he went abroad to play in France. He played twice for Middlesex County, he was revered as one of the rugby gods by his fellow students, doctors and even consultants, only Andy knew that he wasn’t.
    It meant that it took him a year longer to qualify than he should have done, and that was hurriedly as an Apothecary, after failing his degree finals.
    He would have left the hospital with a great reputation if it had not been for that fateful game against the London Irish in the Twickenham seven-a-sides.
    Andy looked back over his medical student days. By and large he had enjoyed them. He always had two underlying layers of anxiety relating to his studies, with which he was always behind, and the other, that although he wore the mantle of being one of the rugby gods, and was acknowledged as one, he knew he wasn’t.
    To make up for it he took on every possible activity that he could to support the rugby club. He was the club and first team secretary for four years, normally the term for this job was one. This meant that he had to see to the laundering of the team shirts and socks, travel by either bus or train and arrange hotel accommodation for Devon and Cornwall tours. For French tours he had to check ferry tickets, see that everybody had a passport, as well as arranging trains or bus travel to France. In addition he had to make the travel arrangements for the other six teams the hospital turned out every week.
    On one Cornish tour, when a game was eventually stopped by rain, he actually washed all the fifteen muddy shirts in the communal bath when the others had left.
    He volunteered to work behind the bar at the first Rugby Club Ball in his first year. He became a regular fixture there, and as he was good at it, in time he also did the bar for the balls held by the football club, the cricket club, the hockey club and he fixed both bands and bar for the New Year’s Eve Ball. In fact he attended just about every ball held in the six and a half years he was a student, but only from behind the bar. He wanted to be thought of as ‘Good Old Andy’.
    Apart from a couple of trips to the pictures with nurses, he never really got entangled with the opposite sex.
    He was neither bright nor industrious with his medical studies,. He failed his degree MB, BS twice and only with the coaching by friends did he scrape through the diploma of the