‘Stop!’ cried the matron, jumping from her gilt chair.
‘Sorry, Auntie Florrie.’ Pip blinked at her. ‘Have I said something rude?’
‘Get off this stage at once. You have already insulted me personally once today. I will not now have everything I’ve worked for subjected to insults derived from warped class-consciousness.’
‘Sit down,’ shouted several voices from the audience.
‘Shut up,’ the matron snapped back. She turned to Pip. She was pink and quivering, like the chef’s famous salmon mousse on its way to one of her patients. ‘Fortunately, your perverse opinions are of monumental inconsequence. I advise you to get out of this hall at once and continue from a soapbox at the nearest street corner.’
‘And that’s your last word, Auntie?’
‘Emphatically. I shall not address another to you as long as I live.’
Pip turned back to the microphone. ‘Comrades against suffering. I now relinquish the floor to the dean. Thank you for listening to the single, simple point I called this meeting to make. Who are the paid-up members of ACHE?’ A few hands were raised, Harold Sapworth’s with an empty bottle. ‘Brothers, the Bertram Bunn is blacked. As far as the private patients are concerned, from now we’re on strike.’
For the second time that day, Pip excited a burst of clapping from an admiring female, this time the dean’s daughter.
Just before nine on the following sunny morning, Sir Lancelot Spratt stepped through the automatic glass doors into the lobby of the Bertram Bunn Wing.
‘Thank God for that,’ he muttered. The piped music had stopped. The suggestion of the East was stronger, because the air was hotter. The air conditioning had failed, Sir Lancelot decided. Well, he never liked its deadening year-old sameness, anyway.
His eye fell on the white plastic counter. The two porters and the receptionist were late coming on duty. There seemed fewer people about than usual, just one voluminously black-gowned family sitting on the floor chewing nuts.
‘Lancelot.’ The matron appeared instantly, pink-faced and fiery-eyed at the door of her office.
‘This morning I’m somewhat preoccupied,’ he told her firmly.
‘
You
’re preoccupied! We’re all preoccupied. Revolution has broken out.’
‘I must see Miss Bristols directly, to inform her that the X-rays are clear. I shall be operating on her breast this afternoon.’
‘You won’t. Not on any part of Miss Bristols. Nor of anyone else. We’re in the grip of anarchy. The porters and people are on strike.’
‘Really?’ murmured Sir Lancelot. ‘A local outbreak of the English disease? It is of course a form of national hysteria, like the mass flagellants of Central Europe in the fourteenth century.’
‘That may well be the case,’ she snapped at him. ‘But my patients haven’t had any breakfast.’
‘My patients in St Swithin’s have had a very good breakfast of sausage and bacon.’
‘Naturally. The blockade is directed only against the hospital’s private patients. The main switchboard is even refusing to put through their phone calls. Some of my stockbroker patients are becoming very distressed. Envy, malice and resentment!
Those
are the diseases these shirkers are suffering from.’ She shuddered. ‘Little could I have imagined this situation, when I first dedicated myself to nursing. Haven’t you seen the morning papers?’
‘I have only got back to London. I had to go fishing in Berkshire yesterday evening, to avoid attending the nurses’ prizegiving.’
‘Haven’t you even seen the pickets?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Intimidating peaceable people outside our front entrance?’
‘I saw only one of the mortuary porters, Forfar McBridie. He was wearing the kilt, plaid, sporran, bonnet and so on, a skean-dhu stuck in one of his tartan socks and a sprig of white heather in the other. He was assuredly carrying a placard.’
‘What did it say?’
‘“It’s Scotland’s Oil.” They are an enviably single-minded race. But what have the porters gone on strike about?’ Sir Lancelot asked with interest. ‘The only industrial discontent to reach my ears was the lack of a darts board down in their room.’
‘Nothing. They are striking because the dunderheads do absolutely everything my nephew Pip tells them. He’s their shop steward.’
Sir Lancelot paused, stroking his beard. ‘I am a little lost.’
‘He got a job as a porter, when you threw him out of the hospital on Tuesday. It’s all your fault,’ she ended bitterly.
‘Hardly. The dean threw the unfortunate young man out, not I. Quite possibly, I should have passed him. Once I had overcome my reasonable irritation at his commencing the examination of his first patient by attempting to eviscerate the eye-socket.’
‘Then you must get the dean to reinstate him at once.’
‘I can hardly intervene in the internal affairs of the medical school. There the dean reigns supreme. Wouldn’t there be more point in your talking to Pip as a Dutch Auntie? Tell him to call his little strike off again.’
‘I refuse to utter another word to Pip in this world.’
‘In which case, I can’t see more chance of resolving the situation than between a couple of chimpanzees fighting over a bunch of bananas.’
‘You are not being in the slightest helpful,’ she told him, slamming the door.
Sir Lancelot shrugged his broad shoulders and continued across the patterned mosaic floor of the lobby. He was unwarmed by the matron’s red-hot indignation. He suspected it was all some prank hatched in the residents’ bar. He reached the lift as the doors slid open. The dean stepped out, walking straight past him.
‘I say, Dean –’
‘The dean stopped. He stared at Sir Lancelot without recognition, blinking behind his large round glasses.
‘Dean! It’s Lancelot. Wake up.’
The dean jumped, as Sir Lancelot gave a sharp pinch to his biceps. ‘Ah, yes. Good morning.’
‘The matron would appear to be having trouble with her industrial relations.’
‘The apocalypse is upon us. As from yesterday evening.’
‘Isn’t everyone making heavy weather of a sportive little breeze?’ Sir Lancelot asked a little irritably. ‘It’s only another manifestation of that harebrained Chipps’ twisted sense of humour.’
The dean shuddered. ‘You are talking of my son-in-law.’
Sir Lancelot stared. ‘I never heard that Faith was even contemplating marriage.’
‘Neither did I. But apparently she and this medical Mad Hatter are joined in what they call an “open marriage”. I’ve no idea what that means. It sounds like some sort of public conveyance.’
‘They might have invited me,’ Sir Lancelot grumbled. ‘I’ve known Faith since the day she was delivered, up in the old maternity ward.’
The dean gave a laugh sounding like interference on the radio. ‘How delightfully old-fashioned you are. There was no ceremony. Not so much as going to the post office and buying a dog licence. Apparently you become married these days by saying so. You “shack up” together. I don’t know what that means, either. It sounds like something you do in the garden. Mind, I suppose it saves all that fuss with clergymen and organists, and the considerable expense to which the bride’s father is, to my mind, quite unreasonably committed by some obscure tradition. With my elder daughter, the florists’ bills alone –‘
‘This too is only some juvenile foolishness,’ Sir Lancelot comforted him brusquely. ‘Marriage these days is simply another amusement which has come within the economic grasp of the young, like holidays abroad and fast motor cars. It is old fogeys like us, who after so many years upon earth, come to take both marriage and death rather seriously.’
‘They flaunt it,’ the dean objected. ‘In my face. If I had a mistress I’d keep pretty quiet about her, believe you me. I think Faith should see a psychiatrist. I’ve been looking everywhere for Dr Bonaccord.’
‘But the nuptial knot is loose. It may vanish once the rush of blood is past. Like an absorbable ligature.’
The dean shook his head gloomily. ‘I shall emigrate. To a leprosy practice, like Dr Schweitzer. I shall spend the fag-end of my life sitting in some steamy jungle contemplating the wrongs which the world has done me.’
‘In the meantime, hadn’t you better do something to see the private patients get some breakfast?’
‘I suppose someone had better galvanize that pompous bungler Clapper. I doubt if he has even noticed that the whole hospital is falling about our ears.’
The dean maligned the hospital administrator. A few minutes later he found Mr Clapper with Mr Grout in his spacious first-floor office in St Swithin’s, eyeing the front pages of the morning papers spread all over his desk, and wearing the expression of a cat who is not certain whether the noise it hears is mice or a large dog.
‘We have had quite a “Press” as the expression goes, Sir Lionel,’ he told the dean. ‘We’re on all the front pages.’
‘If only I hadn’t asked that colitic gossip writer,’ the dean said bitterly. ‘The story got round Fleet Street in a flash. It’s like having one’s family quarrels paraded to titillate the whole country over its breakfast.’
‘One big, efficient and above all happy family,’ remarked Mr Clapper, sitting back with his hands folded across his stomach. ‘That is the administrator’s duty, to create it from his hospital staff. Don’t I always say so, Mr Grout?’
‘Yes, Mr Clapper,’ said the junior administrator, respectfully at his side.
‘No easy task, I grant you. A hospital employs people of vastly differing skills, intelligence, training, education, traditions, ethics, outlooks and even tastes in canteen nourishment. Odd, how doctors don’t eat curry. It is a task demanding the utmost skill and tact, to avoid conflict between one group and another. One must expect occasionally some disruption.
‘Yes, but how are you going to settle it?’ demanded the dean.
‘We are putting our minds to it. Aren’t we, Mr Grout?’
‘Yes, Mr Clapper.’
‘Meanwhile, the newspapers make us look a bunch of fools.’ The dean threw a lordly glance at one of the tabloids, its headline announcing,
MATRON BRENDA!
The front page was mostly filled with a photograph of Brenda Bristols in her plungy nightdress, leaning over a goggle-eyed Lord Hopcroft as she handed him a glass of water in bed. The story beneath read:
Brenda Bristols and other pampered patients in St Swithin’s Hospital private wing will wake to a rude shock this morning. Their domestic staff are on strike. No one will serve their gourmet meals, sweep their expensive rooms or even push them into the operating theatre. It’s going to be do-it-yourself treatment day. Patients well enough are learning to tend their sicker companions. ‘I’m going to love it,’ says Brenda, in for minor surgery. ‘I always intended to be a nurse.’
The dean snorted. ‘This frivolous woman is turning the whole thing into a publicity stunt. Sir Lancelot really ought to control his patients better. She could at least have worn a dressing-gown.’
‘It’s really most irregular,’ complained Mr Clapper. ‘All this is covered by Circular HM bracket fifty-six bracket fifty-eight, Information to Press about Condition of Patients.’
Below was a picture of Pip and Faith, looking self-conscious outside the St Swithin’s main door.
Firebrand union leader “Pip” Chipps and girlfriend Faith on the picket line
, the dean read with an expressionless face.
Pip is a former medical student, Faith the daughter of St Swithin’s medical school Dean Sir Lionel Lychfield. ‘It’s against natural justice, having one ward for the rich, another for the poor,’ Pip said. Faith added, ‘Daddy always encouraged me to have an independent mind.’
‘The British Press is incurably irresponsible,’ he complained. ‘There’s not a word about the hospital’s side of the case.’
‘I shall hold a press conference,’ Mr Clapper decided. ‘That is a procedure allowed for under official regulations – Ministry Circulars RHB bracket fifty-two bracket eighteen and HNC bracket fifty-two seventeen, as I remember. We will sit behind large cards with our names and functions – Mr Clapper, Senior Hospital Administrator, that sort of thing. We are authorized to provide reasonable refreshment, I think coffee and biscuits rather than whisky, Mr Grout. We can hold it in the Founders’ Hall, we might as well get full use from the flowers provided for last night. We shall be quoted in the papers, we shall be heard on the radio, we shall be seen on the telly.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘My wife and daughters will be very pleased.’
‘I’ve put five girls to answer all Press inquiries on the telephone, Mr Clapper,’ said Mr Grout, as his superior nodded approval. ‘Though the papers seem mainly interested in knowing when the most famous pair in the country are going to be reshaped.’
‘Pair of what?’ asked Mr Clapper.
‘It’s something to do with Brenda Bristols,’ Mr Grout explained tactfully. ‘The newspapers do rather concentrate on people’s looks.’
‘Appearances are false,’ pronounced Mr Clapper.
‘Brenda Bristols’ aren’t,’ said Mr Grout.
‘You may leave the dean and myself in conference, Mr Grout,’ said Mr Clapper severely.
‘It won’t be the slightest use meeting the Press,’ the dean told Mr Clapper as his office door closed. ‘Reporters don’t like being told they’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick, no more than we doctors do. We’ll just have to stand shoulder to shoulder in the pillory, putting on a bold face for them to throw rotten eggs at. We’ll have to hope that the public will forget this stupid incident in a day or two, just as they forget absolutely everything else they read in the newspapers, once they’ve gone to wrap chips or been put to some other use.’
‘Why, there’s a photograph of me,’ exclaimed Mr Clapper, opening the pages. ‘It was the one taken at the last Hospital Administrators
v
. Prison Governors golf match. My wife and daughters will be most interested.’ He produced a large pair of scissors and started carefully cutting it out. ‘You think the strike will be over in a few days, then?’ he asked, not looking up.
‘If I play my cards right. I am going to be extremely crafty.’ The dean tapped his nose with his forefinger. ‘I can be crafty when necessary. I have to be, in order to keep one jump ahead of my perfidious students. This fellow Chipps has an Achilles’ heel in which sits a Trojan Horse. My daughter Faith.’
‘Of course, Sir Lionel. One word from you, she’ll mend her ways and send this Chipps packing.’
‘One must be realistic,’ the dean admitted. ‘Daughters do not show a proper respect for their fathers’ wishes any more. But I shall appeal to her intelligence and her sense of reason, of fairness, of rectitude. These are qualities which she enjoys richly. After all, she
is
my daughter.’
The desk telephone buzzed. ‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Clapper. ‘Hello? You have a German doctor? What German doctor? Oh, of philosophy. Send the Kraut to Mr Grout. I’m far too busy.’
‘As Faith is undoubtedly somewhere about the hospital with her inamorato,’ the dean continued eagerly as Mr Clapper replaced the telephone, ‘I shall tackle her forthwith. I’m sure I can make her see the light. Otherwise, I shall simply have to throw the poor child to Dr Bonaccord.’
He left the office with a resolute step.