Richard Gordon: DOCTOR AT SEA

I wondered what to do. I was being asked to sail in a ship I had never seen, to a place I had never heard of, in the employ of a business I knew nothing about. I looked anxiously through the dark window running with comforting English rain. The wisest course was obviously to go back to Wendy and settle for a fortnight in Sidmouth instead.

'Very well,' I said. 'I accept.'

'Excellent!' said Mr. Cozens, with relief. 'I'm sure you'll find yourself well suited, Doctor. She's a very nice ship indeed. Quite a lady.'

I nodded. 'Where do I go now?'

'There are a few formalities to be gone through I'm afraid, Doctor. Regulations and such things, you understand. First of all, I must supply you with a letter of appointment. If you'll just wait one minute I'll get one of the girls to type it.'

Running away to sea has become more elaborate since the unhedged days when the errant son slipped down to the docks at nightfall, mated up with a bos'n at a wharf-side tavern, and sailed with an Indiaman on the dawn tide. Now there are forms to be filled in, documents to be issued, permits to be warily exchanged for a string of personal data. The next day I was sent down to the Merchant Navy Office, an establishment which was a cross between a railway booking-hall and the charge-room of a police station on a Saturday night. There I poked my letter of appointment nervously through a small window at a clerk, who glanced through it with the unconcealed disgust of a post office employee reading one's private thoughts in a telegram.

'Got your lifeboat ticket?' he asked gloomily, his steel nib arrested in mid-air.

'My what?' I saw for a second the picture of myself shivering on a sinking deck, refused permission to enter the lifeboat because I had not purchased my ticket at the proper counter. 'Where do I buy it?' I asked wildly.

The man looked at me with pity. 'They sends us some mugs these days,' he observed wearily. 'Lifeboat ticket, he repeated, mouthing the words as if addressing a deaf idiot. 'Ministry certificate. Savvy?'

'No,' I admitted. 'I haven't.'

'Got any distinguishing marks?' he asked, giving me a chance to redeem myself 'Or blemishes? Tattoos?'

'No. None at all. As far as I know.'

He nodded and gave me a chit entitling me to a free photograph at a shop across the street. I queued between a tall negro in a jacket that half covered his thighs and a man in a strong-smelling roll-necked sweater who picked his teeth with a safety-pin. When my turn came I had to face the camera holding my number in a wooden frame under my chin, and I felt the next step would be in handcuffs.

Now, sitting in my cabin with _War and Peace,_ my Company's Regulation Cap hanging from a hook above me, I saw that Mr. Cozens was wrong. The _Lotus_ wasn't a nice ship at all. She was a floating warehouse, with some accommodation for humans stuck on top like a watchman's attic. All the cabins were small, and mine was like a railway compartment quarter-filled with large pipes. I wondered where they went to, and later discovered I was situated immediately below the Captain's lavatory.

My appraisal of the Lotus was interrupted by a knock on the jalousie door. It was Easter, the Doctor's steward. He was a little globular man, who felt his position was not that of a mere servant but of a slightly professional gentleman. As an indication of his superiority to his messmates a throat torch and a thermometer poked out of the top pocket of his jacket, and he frequently talked to me about 'We of the medical fraternity.' He was always ready to give advice to his companions on problems of a medical or social nature that they felt disinclined to pour into the ears of the Doctor, and had an annoying habit of counselling them, for the good of their health, to hurl into the sea the bottles of physic just handed to them by their medical attendant.

'Good morning, Doctor,' he said. 'I have a message from Father.'

'Father?'

'The Captain.'

'Oh.'

'He said he wants a bottle of his usual stomach mixture, pronto.'

'His usual stomach mixture?' I took off my spectacles and frowned. 'How do I know what that is? Has he got a prescription, or anything?'

'Dr. Flowerday used to make him up a bottle special.'

'I see.'

The problem grew in importance the more I thought of it.

'The Captain suffers from his stomach quite frequently, does he?'

'Ho, yes sir. Something chronic.'

'Hm.'

'When he has one of his spasms he gets a cob on, worse than usual. Life ain't worth living for all hands. The only stuff what squares up his innards is the special mixture he got from Dr. Flowerday. Makes him bring up the wind, Doctor. Or belch, as we say in the medical profession.'

'Quite. You don't know what's in this medicine, I suppose?'

'Not the foggiest, Doctor.'

'Well, can't you remember? You were with Dr. Flowerday some time, weren't you?'

'Several voyages, Doctor. And he was very satisfied, if I may make so bold.'

It occurred to me that this might be the point to clear up the Flowerday mystery for good.

'Tell me, Easter,' I said sharply, 'what exactly happened to Dr. Flowerday?'

He scratched his nose with a sad gesture.

'If you wouldn't mind, sir,' he replied with dignity, 'I'd rather not talk about it.'

I got up. It was useless sounding Easter on the fate of my predecessor or on his balm for the Captain's gastric disorders.

Down aft there was a cabin with a notice stencilled above the door saying CERTIFIED HOSPITAL. It was a fairly large apartment which smelt like an underground cell that hadn't been used for some time. There were four cots in it, in a couple of tiers. One bulkhead was taken up with a large locker labelled in red POISONS, one door of which was lying adrift of its hinges on the deck.

Inside the locker were half a dozen rows of square, squat bottles containing the supply of medicines for the ship. These-like the Doctor-were prescribed by the Ministry of Transport. Unfortunately the Ministry, in the manner of the elderly, elegant physicians who come monthly out of retirement to grace the meetings of the Royal Society of Medicine, holds trustingly to the old-established remedies and the comely prescriptions of earlier decades. There were drugs in the cupboard that I had seen only in out-of-date books on pharmacology. I picked up a bottle: Amylum. What on earth did one do with amylum? There was a pound of Dover's powder and a drum of castor oil big enough to move the bowels of the earth. At the back I found an empty gin bottle, some Worcester sauce, a tennis racket with broken strings, a dirty pair of black uniform socks, two eggs, a copy of the _Brisbane Telegraph,_ and a notice saying NO FUMARE.

I dropped these through the porthole, taking care with the eggs. Below the shelves of bottles was another compartment. I looked into it. It held a heavy mahogany case labelled INSTRUMENT CHEST, which contained the left component of a pair of obstetrical forceps, a saw, a bottle-opener, and a bunch of tooth-picks; but there were five gross of grey cardboard eyeshades, over seven apiece for all hands.

I saw that prescribing was going to be more difficult than in general practice, where I scribbled a prescription on my pad and the patient took it to the chemist, who deciphered my writing and slickly made up the medicine. We had been obliged to attend a course of lectures on pharmacy and dispensing in medical school, but these were always held on a Saturday morning, when most of the students were already on their way to the rugger field. For this reason there was an informal roster among the class to forge the signatures of their companions on the attendance sheet, before slipping softly away themselves when the lecturer turned to clarify some obscure pharmacological point on the blackboard. As I had attended the greater number of my pharmacy lectures by proxy in this way, I now felt like a new wife in her first kitchen.