A Dublin Student Doctor (5 page)

What a terrible rent it would tear in the fabric of Ballybucklebo if anything happened to Donal Donnelly. Betting man, greyhound race fixer, poacher, pipe major of the Ballybucklebo Highlanders. Everybody in the village loved the little bucktoothed man. Well, maybe Councillor Bertie Bishop didn’t, but everybody else did.

Fingal put down his fork. At least if surgery did become necessary, Mister Charles Greer, M.D., F.R.C.S., was the man for the job. Big Charlie, with shoulders like an ox and fingers like sausages, did not look like someone who could work with the delicacy his specialty demanded. But he could. After he’d qualified in 1936 he’d studied here at the Royal under Mister Purce and Mister Calvert, two of Ireland’s pioneering neurosurgeons.

Fingal remembered Charlie as a student, a young man with a finely honed sense of irreverence and a shock of ginger hair to rival Donal Donnelly’s ruddy thatch. Charlie’s was greying now.

Fingal had met him in October ’31 on the day they’d started their basic science studies and their lectures in French, English, logic, psychology, and Latin. The School of Physic at Trinity College Dublin, as the medical school founded in 1711 was known, demanded that fledgling doctors gain a Bachelor of Arts degree after three years of study.

As students, Fingal and Charlie had had something else in common. Rugby football. After a series of trial games, they’d been picked to play for the Trinity College first fifteen in the Irish Senior League. Fingal had hoped selection would be the first step to playing for his country, and that his four-year layoff while at sea hadn’t made him too rusty.

And there was more to Charlie Greer than rugby football. It had seemed incongruous then that a man who enthusiastically thumped into opposing players during matches and boxed for fun, also regularly attended the university debating society, loved the works of Mozart, and sang in a choir. Even now, he was a member of the Belfast Philharmonic Choir.

O’Reilly picked up his fork and managed to swallow a soggy brussels sprout.

Charlie had attended Methodist College Belfast along with a short, green-eyed fellow student with prematurely thinning hair. The man played the bagpipes, the penny whistle, and raced yachts called “Waverleys” out of Ballyholme Yacht Club. Whenever Fingal and Charlie were getting themselves into mischief, the third man in the triumvirate was always Donald Cromie, who preferred simply to go by his surname. He was happy to explain why if anyone asked. He’d been born on September 6, 1914, the second day of the First Battle of the Marne. His father’s only brother, Donald, had been killed that day. Cromie disliked feeling like a walking war memorial.

Today, Donald Cromie was a senior surgeon here at the Royal and two years ago had been knighted for his services to handicapped children.

The potatoes had the consistency of damp sawdust, but he’d eaten worse in his digs in Dublin, a damp, cramped bedsit on Westland Row. The three friends had surmounted the hurdles together: exams, lectures, and practical sessions. And they’d frequented Dublin’s pubs, cinemas, and dance halls whenever time allowed. Charlie had once described those years as a time of pleasant relaxation punctuated by moments of intense panic.

Yet despite the panic, all three had passed and moved ahead. In October ’33 in the beginning of third year, their little group had been joined by a man who had already spent seven years officially studying medicine. Robert Saint John, pronounced “Sinjin,” Beresford was one of a number of students referred to as “chronics.” These men, either by accident or design, kept failing examinations and in doing so had to repeat the courses they’d failed. They were said to be doing “the long course.” Robert, Bob to his friends, was doing the very long course.

He was twenty-seven, stocky, and fair-haired. Piercing blue eyes looked out over a sharp nose and sardonic smile. A rich aunt had left him an allowance of two hundred pounds a year, which, as her will said, was to be “provided as long as he remained a student of medicine.” It was a very handsome sum when a secretary might make fifty pounds and a lawyer two hundred and fifty a year. Bob had a flat in the upper-class Merrion Square and drove a 1929 Morris Minor.

The lads had taken to Bob and tried to encourage him to pass the next exam so the group of four could stay together. Perhaps a practical joke had persuaded him.

The four of them had been sitting in Bob’s flat after class. Bob had a habit of inviting his friends for afternoon tea. Charlie Greer perched on one arm of a chair and, clutching a teacup that looked too frail for his big paw, said, “This afternoon you all heard our prof of physiology, Doctor Pringle, say, ‘the human animal seldom if ever looks up unless its attention is attracted by movement or sound.’”

“So?” Fingal had asked.

When Charlie suggested a way to test the hypothesis, Fingal and Cromie laughed, but it must have hit Bob’s funny bone. It took him a good minute to stop chuckling and say, “Let’s do it.” And they had—during the final applied anatomy class before the short holiday.

The learnèd professor had been right. For forty-five minutes not a soul in that lecture theatre had noticed anything unusual. They’d been too busy scribbling notes. Then a metallic jangling came from overhead.

The lecturer, Mister Chance, and all forty-one male medical students stared up. The women in the class had their own anatomy sessions. Every eye fixed on Gladys. The fully articulated human skeleton was usually stored in the rafters dangling from a pulley. Today she was resplendent in black brassiere, red knickers, suspender belt, and silk stockings. As the racket of the alarm clock lodged in her pelvis died away, the laughter started, first with a few titters building to a chorus of guffaws.

Mister Chance, widely regarded as a good skin, had not taken reprisals. “Gentlemen, as there are only ten minutes of class time remaining and your attention has been, shall we say, compromised, I suggest we bring today’s class to a close. Good afternoon, and good luck.” He swept from the theatre, his long, black academic robe billowing and making him look like an untidy crow.

Fingal made his way from the back row down wooden stairs worn concave by the countless boots and shoes of students like himself. A man waited halfway down. He was as tall as O’Reilly’s six foot two, but in contrast to Fingal’s nearly twelve stone would have been described by the locals as being as skinny as a wren’s shin. He had a prodigious Adam’s apple.

His voice was high and rasping. “I didn’t find that schoolboy humour amusing in the least, O’Reilly. I know it was you and your infantile friends. You’ve been nothing but trouble since first year.”

Fingal smiled. He wasn’t going to let Ronald Hercules Fitzpatrick irritate him. Not on a sunny March afternoon at the end of term. Fingal shook his head, making his black, badly trimmed thatch flop over one dark brown eye. “Och sure, Hercules, life’s too short to go round looking po-faced all the time.”

“I should prefer not to be called ‘Hercules’—” He was nudged aside by Charlie Greer. “Come on, Fingal,” he said. “We’re off to the pub. I’ll let you buy me that first pint.”

“Very decent of you,” Fingal said with a grin. Now term was over he could even have found it in himself to invite Fitzpatrick to join them, but the man was a teetotaler, a Pioneer who had taken the pledge at thirteen. “Enjoy your week off.”

“I shall study.” He turned and left. “I want to be ready for next term. We’ll be working in a hospital and sitting our BAs and Intermediate Two examinations in June.”

“Indeed we will,” said Fingal, “but all work and no play makes Hercules—I mean Ronald—a rather dull fourth-year medical student.”

Passing the Intermediate Part II would mark the beginning of their study of real medicine. Examining patients, diagnosing illnesses, and learning how to treat them would become progressively more intense. And that was what Fingal had wanted to do since he was thirteen.

He and Charlie took the last few steps two at a time. Bob and Cromie were waiting at the door to the amphitheatre and together they walked two by two in the bright sunshine, Cromie and Bob leading. The sky was the eggshell blue of early spring as they crossed Trinity’s forty-seven acres, an oasis in the midst of the bustling city.

Fingal felt a crisp breeze tainted with industrial fumes. The Provost’s House was to their right. It had been built in 1759, thirty years before the rising of the United Irishmen and at the same time as the establishment of Guinness’s Brewery.

On Nassau Street, outside the grounds, they were faced with a throng of pedestrians and traffic. “Come on,” yelled Cromie, judging things nicely and nipping across the thoroughfare, Bob at his side.

Fingal and Charlie followed, dodging a fleet of bell-tinkling bicycles, a Morris Cowley motorcar, a laden Guinness dray, its iron-tyred wheels grumbling over the cobblestones, and a double-decker electric tram on its way to the suburb of Terenure. The air was noisome with exhaust fumes. Overhead, flocks of feral pigeons wheeled.

Charlie stopped, held up by a man pulling a barrow full of turnips. He was a tugger, a man who eked out an existence pulling goods in a rickety homemade two-wheeled cart. Two barefooted urchins had to jink like a pair of snipe to avoid colliding with him.

“Bob’s heading to Davy Byrnes,” said Fingal.

He preceeded Charlie into the long narrow room. The walls were of dark oak and a low hum of conversation rose among smells of stout and tobacco. Cromie had grabbed a table and Bob Beresford was halfway down the long, curved, wooden bar, ordering. The four of them knew each other’s preferences. Bob looked smart today in a double-breasted grey suit and dove-grey spats over highly polished black shoes. He could afford to.

Fingal’s scuffed boots clumped on the plank floor as he went to help Bob. “Come on,” said Fingal, picking up two pints, “let’s get these over to the table.”

“Just in time,” said Charlie, taking a pint. “My tongue’s hanging out.”

When everybody was seated, Bob lifted his whiskey.
“Sláinte.”

“Sláinte mHaith,”
came the reply.

The stout was smooth and bitter. Fingal sank one-third of the glass’s contents in a single swallow. “Lord Jasus,” he said, “but that hits the very spot.” He wiped froth from his upper lip. “I’m not one bit sorry to see the end of applied anatomy.”

Bob laughed, a deep rumbling for such a small man. “You’re not sorry? I’ve sat through it three times.” He grinned. “But this afternoon with Gladys? That was the berries. You three?” He shook his head.

“You don’t have to repeat the courses again, you know.” Fingal, who was conscious of his own limited budget, was not envious of Bob’s money, but that anyone given the chance to study medicine should choose to squander the opportunity was beyond comprehension. “You could try to pass.”

“Actually, I have been thinking that. Since I’ve drifted down into your year and met you lads the
craic
’s been ninety.”

“Then why not pass your Intermediate II and stay with us?” Cromie asked.

“Wellll.” Bob frowned. “There is the small matter—”

“Of your allowance?” Charlie asked.

“It does come in handy.”

“But you’d make more as a doctor,” Cromie said.

“I know,” Bob said, “but,” he wrinkled his nose as if inhaling a bad smell, “one would have to work.”

Fingal was sure it was only by an effort of will that Robert Saint John Beresford avoided shuddering. “Come on, Bob,” Fingal said. “We’ve twenty-seven months more to go, lectures, outpatient clinics, working on the wards, delivering babies.” And how Fingal was looking forward to it all.

Bob smiled. “It would be grand sticking with you fellows and we’d still have two more exams to pass after Intermediate before we’ll be finished. Lots of opportunity for me to fail one, stay a student for years more.” He managed to look embarrassed. “You see, I really don’t like responsibility. Life is such fun without it.”

Bob offered Charlie a Sweet Afton cigarette. He refused on the grounds that he was trying to quit. He didn’t want to ruin his wind for the rugby.

Fingal pulled out a pipe and lit it. He looked at his friends’ glasses. It would soon be his shout and three shillings was all he could budget for this afternoon. He was relieved when he heard Bob call, “Same again please, Diarmud.”

The barman said, “Right, sir.”

Fingal looked at Bob. “And we’re not asking you to stick with us just so you can pay the bills, Beresford. We enjoy your company.”

Bob smiled. “I know that. We all know you’re often short a bob or two, Fingal. You’re the only one of us paying his own way through medical school, but you always pay your shout with us—”

I’d not have it any other way, Fingal thought.

“But term’s over. I had a bit of luck on the horses at Leopardstown, so today’s my treat—for you all.”

“Bloody marvellous,” said Cromie.

“Daddy Warbucks strikes again,” Charlie said, and lifted his glass.

“And which one of you bowsies is Little Orphan Annie?” Bob wanted to know.

“Look, you lot,” said Fingal, “I know your tongues are hanging out for another jar and we are grateful to you, Bob, but we’ve business to discuss too. Come autumn with our Intermediate and BAs behind us we’ll be spending a lot of time working in teaching hospitals. I’ve asked around and heard that the system usually calls for us to pair off and work pretty closely together.”

“Jasus, you and Hercules Fitzpatrick, Fingal. I can just see it.” Bob grimaced.

Charlie laughed so hard he nearly spilled his pint.

“Exactly,” Fingal said. “What a prospect, but how about us four in two pairs?”

“That makes sense,” Bob said. “Bloody good sense.”

“Another reason for you to pass the exams in June,” Fingal said. “You’d be doing us a favour.”

“Lord,” said Bob, sipping his whiskey, “you, O’Reilly, will be having me Doctor Beresford before I know it.”

That’s right, Fingal thought, but held his peace. “Before we do anything we have to choose a teaching hospital. We can go to any one of ten in Dublin.”

“Och,” said Charlie, “the tyranny of choice. We’re enchained by our freedom to pick.”