Free Doctor On The Ball by Richard Gordon Page A

drinks.
    As Sandra was visiting Mother, I suggested enlivening Jilly’s day off from the General. Lovely! They’d asked Mrs Henderson, who would adore to tell Jilly about her terribly interesting gallbladder.
    Jilly drove me in her Metro. The Watsons had a Rolls, Volvo and Suzuki, televisions and videos, microwaves and computers, players and recorders, the compact electronics with which the successful inhabitants of Churchford embellish their homes, as those of Amazonia once with the shrunken heads of their enemies.
    ‘I’ve gone back to work,’ Pam Watson imparted at once. She was pretty like Gwen, except the melons were Honeydew.
    ‘I’ve started with Pangloss Enterprises in Mayfair,’ she continued eagerly. ‘You know, they do absolutely everything. I’m reception hostess.’
    I congratulated her, sipping my Glenlivet by the double-glazing overlooking the lily pond and garden statuary.
    ‘Did you know I was Bill’s secretary when he started in business?’ She simpered. ‘He used to say I was a woman in a million. Yes, it’s quite a challenge. But now Gwen’s young brothers are both at boarding school, I mustn’t be just another bored suburban housewife, must I?’
    I nodded towards Gwen, prim in white blouse and check skirt, distributing the Twiglets. ‘She’s ever so happy these days,’ said Pam, ‘now she’s getting it regularly.’
    ‘Pardon?’
    ‘Hockey,’ she explained. ‘Keeps her wonderfully fit, she wouldn’t even look at a drink, not like some of those dreadful teenagers in the lovely homes round here, you wouldn’t believe. Gwen would never overdo it because she knows that Mummy wouldn’t like it, but it’s terrifying the influences going against parents’ wishes in our hard-nosed society.’
    I had a word with Gwen under the pretence of requiring Twiglets. ‘You’ve said nothing?’ I murmured.
    ‘No, but I’m going to soon,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not something you can just bring up, like saying you want to go on a diet. Can I fetch you another drink? Daddy expected you’d finish the bottle, but there’s lots to go.’
    I discussed the Watson ethics trap with Jilly driving home. As she was my colleague as well as my daughter, the Oath was switched off.
    Jilly asked, ‘Who do you think would outrage Pam Watson more, secretly seeking the pill? Her husband or her daughter?’
    ‘Her daughter,’ I answered readily. ‘Some parents demand from their children an obedience and devotion which they know would be utterly impossible to demand from their spouses.’
    ‘Who are big enough to walk out.’
    ‘It’s parental insecurity,’ I decided. ‘Perhaps they realize they’re not really worthy of such burning love? You know, it always amazes me how few parents try to make friends of their children.’
    ‘Or sometimes of their spouses,’ sighed Jilly.
    I continued warmly, ‘Those excitable, indeed hysterical, self-assured, self-satisfied moralizing pressure groups give us doctors the blame for inciting the young to have sex all over the shop, never the credit for keeping an unfortunate third party out of these conflicts – the unborn baby.’
    ‘Oh, it’s doctors’ own fault. Pretending we’re more than mere cutters and purgers.’ Jilly has the surgical mentality.
    I repeated what the family had heard often enough. ‘Medicine became mixed with morals once the public transferred its faith from the man in the surplice to the man in the white coat.’
    We were passing St Alphege’s parish church, Kentish ragstone amid yew-shaded acres embedded with tombstones, to emphasize the value of virtue when the prospect of Heaven was as real as that of next summer’s holidays.
    I observed sombrely, ‘Which would never have happened had Freud been a rabbi, Darwin a bishop and Bertrand Russell a doctor.’
    ‘Come off it, Daddy,’ said Jilly.

8
    Sandra had found her St Swithin’s uniform in a trunk at her mother’s. On Monday morning she donned it in our bedroom. A