Escape to a Better World – Bilbury in the 1970s
Dr Vernon Coleman
The 1970s were a different world as well as a different time. GPs, traditional family doctors, were permanently on call, available 24 hours a day and every day of the year.
`Bilbury Chronicles’ is the first book in my 15 book `The Young Country Doctor’ series and introduces a young doctor who takes his first job as an assistant to a retiring country doctor in a tiny village on the North Devon coast in the West of England.
In due course the young doctor becomes a single-handed GP, responsible for patients who become his friends and neighbours.
Those were the days when people kept warm with log fires, when no one locked their doors, when the village pub was the centre of the community and when people cared for one another.
When the book starts the doctor is single. But he doesn’t stay that way for long. Here is a sample from the first chapter of `Bilbury Chronicles’.
This is escapist literature designed to help take you away from the horrors of a cruel world in which respect, dignity and caring are too often forgotten. `The Young Country Doctor’ books about Bilbury will help feel part of another, gentler world. You’ll meet a host of wonderful characters, read about the daily life of an old-fashioned country doctor and meet a wide variety of patients and their health problems.
CHAPTER ONE
There can be few more beautiful railway journeys than the one between Exeter and Barnstaple. The train moves slowly and stops at a dozen small hamlets on the way but the view from the window is overpoweringly rural: oak and silver birch, hazel nut and walnut trees provide shade and shelter for foxes, badgers and deer; thick, untrimmed hedgerows border lush, dark green meadows; thatched roof cottages sit alongside streams and bridle paths; herons haunt the shallows of the river Taw; dippers and kingfishers decorate the banks, rocks and overhanging branches; and buzzards soar high overhead, unflapping and unflappable.
It was 1971 and an early autumn afternoon when I first travelled on that train and, as it chugged slowly and peacefully along the river valley, through Lapford, past Eggesford and into and out of King’s Nympton, the glorious majesty of the scenery was the last thing on my mind.
You need to feel calm and relaxed to get the best out of this sort of journey. And I was feeling neither calm nor relaxed. I had no time for rich, red soils; plump hilltops crowned with copses or slowly swirling pools of meandering river water. I was on my way to my first job and to say that I felt nervous would be an understatement of grand proportions.
I had finally completed my training as a doctor just five days earlier. My registration certificate, collected by hand from the General Medical Council, lay unfolded and hardly dry in a large, sturdy brown envelope at the bottom of my brand new, black leather ‘doctor’s bag’: a badge of office which had given me confidence and pride when I’d bought it but which now seemed, by its very shiny newness to advertise my inexperience and professional innocence.
I’d got the job as Dr Brownlow’s assistant after a telephone interview that had lasted somewhere between a minute and a minute and a half. My conversation with his receptionist, who had told me which trains to catch, had lasted only slightly longer.
Then, surrounded by the hospital wards and university laboratories where I’d trained, I’d been full of self-assurance. Now, swaying gently from side to side on a train which was steadily lurching its way towards the unknown I felt almost overcome by great, cold draughts of incompetence and ignorance.
As the train took me nearer and nearer to my new job I gradually realised that practising medicine as a senior student in a ward staffed by experienced doctors and briskly efficient, starch fronted nurses was something entirely different to practising medicine out here in the wilderness. The real world was, I began to suspect, something that I might not be quite ready for.
In hospital my patients had mostly lain neatly in rows, dressed in their pyjamas and labelled with diagnoses and recorded symptoms. Advice and help was never more than a few moments away. Out here in the real world my patients were chopping wood, poaching trout, catering for holiday makers, driving trains and herding cattle. I looked around the unfamiliar faces sharing my carriage. Were any of these, I wondered, potential patients of mine? Did they have any idea how much I wanted them to stay well and healthy?
A large, red-faced man wearing a brownish tweed jacket, old-fashioned gaiters and a pair of heavy brown boots suddenly belched, temporarily interrupting his steady snoring to do so. A young woman wearing a dark blue overcoat and a small, blue felt hat looked across at him, sniffed and tutted, and then looked away. She clasped her gloved hands neatly in her lap and stared out of the window. She was in her late twenties or early thirties but her clothes made her look much older.
A young woman in her early twenties loudly shushed the two boys who were travelling with her. I supposed they were her sons. They seemed to find great humour in the sounds emanating from the fat man’s body and had to struggle to contain their amusement. A man in a grey suit buried himself in his morning newspaper. An elderly woman wearing a black dress, black coat, black hat and black shoes glowered around at all of us, as though holding us all responsible for failing to protect her from these social insults, before folding her arms across her chest as though defiantly barricading herself against our world.
The train, slowing down, started to follow a long, gentle curve to the left. Looking out of the window I saw a sign on the platform which told me that we had arrived at the end of the line: Barnstaple. This was it. Grown up reality, responsibility and heaven knows what else lay just a few miles away from here. My mouth felt dry and I could feel a squadron of butterflies becoming airborne in my stomach.
Politely, I waited until the other passengers had left the train and then picked up my black leather ‘doctor’s bag’ and my cheap but capacious blue cardboard suitcase and shuffled along the corridor.
I was clambering down onto the platform when I realised that something had happened a few yards in front of me, halfway between the train door and the exit from the platform. As I got closer to the crowd which had formed I realised that the fat man in the tweed suit, gaiters and heavy brown boots was the centre of attraction. He was lying flat on his back on the platform and even from a distance it was clear to a trained medical mind that all was not well.
‘Excuse me!’ I heard myself saying as I gently squeezed my way through between a tall, thin man in a brown trilby, and the elderly woman dressed all in black. I dropped my suitcase outside the circle but kept a tight hold on my ‘doctor’s bag’. It contained the instruments of my profession and without it I would have felt as vulnerable and as useless as a gunfighter entering the OK Corral without his pistols. ‘I’m a doctor,’ I explained diffidently, hoping that this confession would excuse my behaviour but not attract too much attention.
I had spoken quietly but the response was as immediate and as dramatic as if I’d shouted the words at the top of my voice. These magic words – ‘I’m a doctor’ – would, I was to discover in the fullness of time, part any crowd. The circle widened and I was aware of every eye being trained on me.
Every eye except two that is. The exceptions belonged to the young woman in the blue woollen coat and the blue felt hat who had sat across the aisle from me on the train. She was stooping beside the prostrate fat man in the tweed suit, having unbuttoned her coat to make kneeling easier.
‘Give me a hand!’ she said, without looking up but moving round so that she was behind the man’s head. She nodded towards his feet.
I put down my black bag. ‘Is he all right?’ I asked, hesitantly. ‘Shouldn’t we do a few tests before we move him? He might have damaged his spine.’
‘He’s drunk,’ said the woman in the blue coat firmly. As though anxious to confirm her diagnosis the fat man suddenly sat up. He opened his eyes and looked around him, lifted one hand as though he wanted to make a gesture of some kind and then collapsed flat on his back again with a loud burp. I found myself engulfed in a suffocating cloud of stale beer.
The woman in the blue coat sighed wearily as though none of this was new to her. ‘Let’s get him into a taxi.’
She lifted his head and shoulders and I lifted his feet and together we carried him out to the station forecourt. There were half a dozen taxis queuing there but the woman in the blue coat ignored the first three and headed straight for the fourth in line, a rather battered vehicle of indeterminate make that was heavily pockmarked with rust patches. To my surprise, the drivers who had been overlooked made no protests. The driver of the rust speckled car put down his newspaper, climbed out and opened the back door so that we could push our passenger in.
‘Drunk again?’ enquired the driver, helping us to manhandle the fat man into the taxi.
‘It’s the last Wednesday of the month,’ answered the woman in blue as though this explained everything.
The taxi driver frowned.
‘L.V.A. meeting in Exeter.’
The taxi driver grunted and nodded.
The fat man belched again.
I bent down, picked up one of the fat man’s shoes that had come off as we had pushed him into the car and tried to fit it back onto his foot. Mysteriously, the shoe seemed several sizes too small. I dropped the shoe onto the floor beside the unshod foot, backed out of the car and stood up. The woman in the blue coat and the taxi driver were both standing waiting.
‘His shoe had come off,’ I explained, apologetically.
‘If you’re coming with us you’d better get your luggage,’ said the woman in the blue coat.
I frowned. I didn’t understand.
‘You’re Dr Brownlow’s new assistant aren’t you?’ I nodded. ‘How did you know...?’
‘There can’t be all that many new doctors arriving at Barnstaple station today.’ She walked round to the other side of the taxi, opened the front door and got in.
‘Do you need a hand with your luggage, doctor?’ asked the taxi driver. He handed me a grubby visiting card upon which was printed ‘Peter Marshall-Taxi Driver’. Underneath was printed ‘Funerals and Weddings a Speciality’. There was a Bilbury telephone number. When I’d had a chance to read the card Mr Marshall reached out and took it off me.
‘No, thank you!’ I said. ‘There’s only one case and a bag.’ I suddenly remembered that I’d left them both standing in the middle of the platform. I turned away from the taxi and ran back into the station. Both the suitcase and the black bag were standing exactly where I’d dropped them. I picked them up and carried them over to the taxi. Mr Marshall had opened the boot, which was full of old oil cans, dirty pieces of rope, old newspapers and a large quantity of shrink wrapped toilet rolls stacked neatly in two large cardboard boxes.
‘Delivery for the Duck!’ explained the taxi driver cryptically, pushing the toilet rolls to one side. He had, I noticed for the first time, a very thin moustache on his upper lip. He wore a flat cap that had a greasy mark on the peak where he’d touched it countless times with thumb and forefinger and a badly creased suit that had rather a lot of stains on it. He took my suitcase and carefully laid it down in the centre of the boot. Too late I noticed that much of the boot lining seemed to be soaked with oil. He then placed my black bag on top of the suitcase.
I still felt more than a little uncertain about all this. ‘You are going to Bilbury?’
The taxi driver nodded. ‘That’s where we’re going, doctor. Don’t you worry about a thing.’ He opened the nearside rear door of the taxi for me to get in but the fat man in the tweed suit had collapsed sideways and was now taking up the whole of the rear seat. After trying to push him upright, and failing, Mr Marshall scratched his head and walked to the front of the car. ‘Would you mind sharing the front seat with Mrs Wilson?’ he asked. He opened the front passenger door and in lieu of a smile showed me his gums. He didn’t seem to have any teeth at all. Much later I discovered that he had a set of false teeth but that he only wore them on occasions which he deemed ‘special’.
The woman in the blue coat looked first at him and then at me. I stared at him and then at her. Mrs Wilson could politely be described as having a fulsome figure.
‘I’m Kay Wilson,’ said the woman. She swung her legs sideways, showing an indelicate amount of stocking top and bare white thigh, and clambered out of the taxi again. ‘I’ll sit on your lap,’ she offered. I climbed into the taxi and took her place.
As I have already mentioned Mrs Wilson was not a small woman and her weight was not insubstantial. Fortunately, the springs in the taxi’s seat had long since lost all their resilience and our combined weight meant that the seat sank close enough to the floor for Mrs Wilson to get her head into the car. Once inside she fidgeted about as though trying to get comfortable. Even through her thick woollen coat I could feel the bony structure of her firmly structured supporting undergarments. The air around me was thick with her perfume to which I suspected I was probably allergic.
‘Mrs Wilson is our district nurse,’ explained the taxi driver, turning the ignition key in an attempt to start the taxi’s ancient engine. I realised then that the clothes Mrs Wilson was wearing were her official uniform. I extricated my right hand from between the handbrake and the side of the passenger seat upon which we were sitting and offered it to Mrs Wilson, inspired by a sudden sense of professional courtesy. We were in the act of shaking hands when we were both projected forwards as the engine caught and the car, which was in gear, suddenly jerked forwards. The district nurse was crushed against the car’s worn vinyl dashboard and I, the more fortunate of the two of us, was crushed against the infinitely more pliant district nurse.
‘Maybe we should fasten the seat belt?’ I suggested.
Mrs Wilson, her hat now resting at an unlikely angle, moved her head so that she could look at me and raised an eyebrow doubtfully. Behind us I heard the fat man in the tweed suit cursing noisily. Judging from the pressure on the back of my seat he had rolled forwards onto the floor. I felt a sneeze developing and in an attempt to distract myself from such a potentially hazardous incident I wriggled around so that I could reach the dangling seatbelt clip with my left hand. I then tried to pass the seatbelt clip from my left hand to my right but this wasn’t quite so easy. The main consequence of my struggle was that I pulled Mrs Wilson even closer to me than before. Deep out of reach and trapped in my trouser pocket I could feel my Swiss Army penknife pressing into my leg.
‘Let me help you doctor,’ said Mrs Wilson, taking the seatbelt clip from my left hand and putting it into my right for me. She turned towards me when she’d completed this simple manoeuvre and I noticed that her face was looking distinctly flushed. She put her right arm around my shoulders and pulled herself even closer to me so that I could fasten the safety belt.
‘Got it!’ I announced proudly. This was no mean feat since the taxi was bouncing around like a fairground ride.
Mrs Wilson didn’t seem too interested. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing heavily. My Swiss Army penknife was pressing even harder against my thigh and I could feel my leg going numb.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked the nurse.
Mrs Wilson smiled, nodded and murmured something inaudible. In the back of the car I could hear the fat man in the tweed suit talking to himself.
‘What’s an L.V.A.?’ I asked the taxi driver.
Mr Marshall, hunched over his steering wheel as he urged his ancient taxi onwards past a touring caravan being towed by an underpowered motor car, turned towards me looking puzzled.
‘I heard Mrs Wilson tell you that your other passenger had been to an L.V.A. meeting in Exeter.’
‘Oh!’ said the driver. He swung the steering wheel hard to the left and swerved back in front of the car, just in time to avoid crashing head on into a tractor that was coming towards us. ‘The L.V.A. is the Licensed Victuallers’ Association,’ he explained. ‘Frank is the landlord of the Duck.’
The Duck?’
‘The Duck and Puddle. The pub.’
‘Is that the Duck and Puddle in Bilbury?’
‘That’s the one,’ nodded Mr Marshall. ‘You’ll be staying there, I expect.’ He jerked his head backwards. ‘That’s your new landlord.’
To continue reading the first chapter of `The Young Country Doctor Book 1: Bilbury Chronicles please visit the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com where you will find all 15 books available as paperbacks and eBooks. Or just CLICK HERE
Copyright Vernon Coleman 1992 and 2024
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