Richard Gordon: DOCTOR AT SEA

I stood in the rain on the quayside reading a large sheet of printed instructions for resuscitating the apparently drowned. This was the only information of any sort available to passers-by. The wharf was deserted. The cranes huddled together in a row, a few railway trucks crouched between their legs; the warehouses were shut, locked, and abandoned even by the cats; the Lotus, lit with a few dim lights, looked as uninviting as a shut pub.

I was a young doctor with a bad diploma passing through the difficult stage of professional adolescence when you discover the medical schools teach as little about medicine as the public schools do about life. My knowledge of seafaring was based only on _Treasure Island_ pictures in the windows of Cook's, and a walking-on part I had been allowed to play in a students' production of _The Middle Watch._ I was nevertheless a recognized sailor. I had in my pocket a new seaman's identity card with my fingerprints on it, a document that made me the professional descendant of Drake and Cabot, subject to and protected by a batch of Parliamentary Acts, the target of missionaries' good intentions and girls' bad ones, and entitled, if I felt like it and there was enough room, to doss down in the Sailors' Home.

The first problem presented by nautical life was how to get aboard the ship. A slippery gangway reached up from the wharf to the Lotus's afterdeck, but there was no one to welcome me at the top. After a few damp minutes I climbed the gangway nervously and looked around me. I was on a dirty iron deck littered with pieces of timber, scraps of rope, and coils of wire, like the junk room in a ship chandler's. A heavy wooden door led into the upper works, and as the rain was coming down my neck persistently I opened it and stepped inside.

Hostile darkness surrounded me; I smelt the faint bitter-almonds tang of cyanide. Uneasy tales of the sea blew through my mind, like a sudden cold draught in an old house. It occurred to me that the Lotus, like the _Marie Celeste,_ had been freshly abandoned by her terrified crew, or was manned with lost souls from the _Flying Dutchman._ I shivered.

A light, an oil lantern, sprung into mid air in front of me. A voice behind it snapped:

''Op it!'

I jumped back, hitting the door with my head.

'Get the 'ell out of it, Charlie,' the voice continued, coming nearer.

'I-I'm a member of the crew,' I managed to say.

The light advanced on me. Behind it two eyes stared with concentrated suspicion.

'The new doctor,' I explained humbly.

The voice at once took on a friendly inflection.

'Sorry Doc! I thought you was trying to pinch something.'

'No…I just came aboard. There didn't seem to be anyone about. I hope it was all right?'

'Sure, it's all right. Liberty Hall, this hooker. Make yourself at home. Spit on the deck and call the cat a bastard.'

'Thank you.'

'Glad you've come, Doc,' he continued affably. 'I've got a bit of a cold like.' He sneezed to add point to the remark. 'Could you give us something for it?'

'Yes, certainly…But wouldn't a bit later do? I'm extremely wet. I'd like to find my cabin and so forth.'

'Sure, Doc. Follow me. I'll take you to see the Mate.'

He walked off, the lamp swinging high in his hand. I stepped timidly behind him, along narrow alleyways, round sharp corners, up unidentifiable ladders.

'Sorry there ain't many lights,' he apologized over his shoulder. 'But the engineers has got the jennies stripped to-night.'

'Oh, really?'

That sounded more alarming than ever.

He came to a cabin door and opened it.

'The new Doctor,' he announced, as if he had just materialized me out of a hat.

There were three men in the cabin-the Mate, Archer the Second, and Trail the Third. Hornbeam was sitting in the only chair with his reefer unbuttoned and his stockinged feet on the washbasin. It was a small cabin, designed like a crossword puzzle, and the visitors had to adapt themselves to the interlocking pieces. Archer, who was a tall, pale man with an expression like a curate just beginning to have doubts, had wedged himself between the bunk and the bookcase above it with his legs dangling on to the deck, like a human question mark. Trail, squatting between the locker and the desk, was a fat youth going through a florid attack of _acne vulgaris._

'Talk of the devil!' Hornbeam said immediately.

'We wondered when you were going to turn up,' Archer said. 'Have a bottle of beer.'

'Move over, Second, and let the Doctor park his fanny,' Hornbeam said. He introduced himself and the others. 'Give us another bottle, Third. Do you mind drinking out of a tooth-glass?'

'No, not at all.'

The welcome was cordial enough, but it disturbed me. It is a habit among seafarers to accept every newcomer on terms of intimacy, but I was a fairly new doctor and stood on my professional dignity like a girl with her first pair of high heels.

'I hope I'm not butting in,' I said stiffly.

'Not a bit of it! Throw your coat on the hook there. We were only having a quick peg.'

I climbed up on the bunk next to Archer without enthusiasm. It seemed as comfortable as trying to drink on a bus in the rush hour.

'You just passed out of medical school?' Archer asked.

'Certainly not! I've been in practice for…some years.'

'Oh, sorry. Been to sea before?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'You'll soon pick up the routine. I hope you're hot stuff on the diseases sailors get.'

This brought a roar of laughter from the other two.

'We doctors have to be "hot stuff" on very many things,' I said.

I gave a superior smile. Since I qualified I had fed on professional respect and I found the conversation irritating.

'By George, we find some queer doctors at sea,' Trail said, handing me a glass of beer. 'Don't we, Mr. Hornbeam? Usually they're getting away from their wives or the police, or both sometimes. Or else it's drink. That's the commonest. Sometimes it's drugs, though.'

'I drink very little.'

Trail took no notice. 'I remember old Doc Parsons I sailed with when I was doing my time,' he went on cheerfully. 'He was a real scream. As tight as a tick from morning to night. We reckoned he got through a couple of bottles of gin a day, easy. Started before breakfast, every morning. Said the world was so bloody awful he couldn't face it at the best of times, but especially with his last night's hangover. Then one day in the Red Sea the Mate ripped his arm open, and old Parsons said he'd operate. Laugh! The lot of us went down to the hospital to watch. I was doubled up. He'd been at the bottle extra strong and he was as blind as a bat. Kept dropping the knife on the deck and falling over the table. In the end the Mate clocked him one and got the Chief Steward to do it.'

Archer leant forward.

'Do you remember old Doc Hamilton in the Mariesta?' he asked.

The other two began to laugh again.

'He was a real queer 'un,' he explained to me. 'Started on the grog before we sailed-had to be carried up the gangway. By the time we reached Gib. the Old Man stopped his tap-no more booze, you understand. So he went down to the dispensary and drank all the surgical spirit. When he finished that he scrounged meths from the engineers. They tumbled to it, of course, and wouldn't let him have any more. In the end he drank the acid from the wireless batteries.'

'The police came for him when we got home,' Hornbeam added. 'I don't know what it was for. Something about abortions, I think.'

'I remember we buried an old doctor off Teneriffe,' Archer said thoughtfully. 'He hanged himself. He did it with his belt,' he continued in my direction.

I began to understand that the medical professional was not held in the highest esteem at sea.

'I assure you I shall not commit any of those things,' I said.