DOCTOR IN CLOVER

Barefoot nodded. 'I like to keep my mind occupied while I'm hanging about for anything-trains, haircuts, scholarship exams, and so on. But isn't that Darwin's _Origin of Species?'_

Miles said it was. 'I thought it a useful start to one's medical education.'

'But I've been waiting for months to discuss Darwin's views on natural selection!'

'And I've been waiting for months to discuss Hume's views on subjective idealism!'

After that they were great pals.

Medical students in the first year have hardly shaken the schoolroom chalk from their shoulders, but they soon learn to crowd the rear benches of the lecture-room so that unobtrusive exits might be made should the subject start to pall. Miles and Barefoot were always left with the front row to themselves, where they answered all the questions, took notes by the armful, and generally gave the impression intellectually of a pair of young Mozarts. At the end of the first year Miles won the Dean's Prize in Biology, with Charlie Barefoot _proxime accessit._

That got rid of the dogfish, by promotion from the medical kindergarden to the anatomy rooms. They shared the same leg.

'Miles, I've got some capital news,' Barefoot announced, as my cousin arrived one morning. 'There's a vacancy in my digs. Tony Benskin doesn't want to stay any longer. I don't know why, but he got quite shirty the other day, just because I wanted to discuss the popliteal fossa over breakfast. If you were thinking of making a change-'

'I'll give my landlady notice tonight,' Miles replied at once. 'My lodgings are really very difficult for studying in the evenings. Quite apart from the noise of Paddington Station, there are a couple of ladies on my landing who seem to have a tremendous succession of visitors.'

'You'll find it much more agreeable at Muswell Hill. Mrs Capper provides use of the parlour and lets us make cocoa as late as we like in the evening.'

Miles moved his books and bones across London, and from Monday to Friday every night afterwards the pair of them swotted at Mrs Capper's parlour table. On Saturdays they went for a long walk in the country and took supper at Lyons'. In time, Miles won the Gold Medal in Anatomy, with Barefoot again runner-up.

By the time I'd shaken off the blasted dogfish myself, Miles and Barefoot were already at work in the St Swithin's wards. Despite the standing impression of hospital inmates, medical students are let loose on live patients only after a couple of years of cutting up dead ones, and a pretty testing transition it is, too. A good many bright young anatomists I've seen floundering about among the dirty dressings and vomit bowls, and they say all the best surgeons were as hopeless at anatomy as all the best judges were at law. But even Sir Lancelot Spratt agreed it was simply a matter of time before Miles won the University Prize in Surgery, with Barefoot as usual panting a few marks behind.

Then a most unusual dislocation nobbled this pair of academic steeplechasers.

When I started in the hospital myself, I found that once you'd sorted out the odd sounds that come rumbling up a stethoscope the greatest difficulty in a medical ward is not making a diagnosis but making a bed. Hospital sisters regard the students as farmers regard their own unavoidable pests, and insist on all blankets being replaced complete with official hospital corners, which was totally beyond old Miles. He couldn't examine a patient without leaving him like a finisher in a sack-race.

After inspecting a particularly tricky case of splenomegaly one evening, Miles was struggling to tuck back the foot of the bed without repeatedly folding his tie into it, when a voice behind him said softly, 'If you let me do it, perhaps it would be easiest for both of us in the end?'

My cousin found a small, blonde junior nurse smiling at him.

'Awfully decent of you,' he stammered.

'You're working terribly late, aren't you?'

She gave the bed-cover a professional flick.

'Oh, I don't know. I rather like work. You new on the ward?'

'I came down from ENT yesterday. My name's Nurse Crimpole.'

'Mine's Miles Grimsdyke.'

'Of course I knew that.'

'You did?'

'Surely everyone in the hospital has heard of the clever Miles Grimsdyke. Quite unlike the other one.'

She gave him another smile. Miles' stomach felt as though he'd swallowed a nest of glow-worms.

'What would you enumerate as the differential diagnosis of acute nephritis?' asked Charlie Barefoot across Mrs Capper's redplush tablecloth later that evening.

Miles switched his eyes from Mr Capper's Buffalo Group over the fireplace.

'Eh?'

'You all right?' Barefoot looked concerned. 'You haven't touched your cocoa.'

'Yes, I'm fine, thanks. Fit as a flea. Though perhaps I'm overdoing the Saturday tramps a little. Sorry, old man.'

'It wasn't important. Anything interesting happen in the ward this evening?'

'No. Nothing worth mentioning at all,' said Miles.

13

The next Saturday Miles told Barefoot he was visiting his aunt in Sydenham, and took Nurse Crimpole to the pictures.