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I heard of a cottage in Iver Heath – all the modern, British-style, conveniences – to be auctioned. With the best legal opinion from a very capable solicitor, who later came ‘unstuck’ by falling into the lawyer's booby trap or ‘occupational neurosis’, my bid of £8000 was successful. By curious chance I overheard a conversation in my Dorset Square Hotel between two well-informed and financially knowledgeable gentlemen who were talking in undisguised tones of mingled amusement and amazement about a fool who had just paid £8000 at auction for a mere workman's cottage. Could folly go further? And what were things coming to when that sort of fool could have £8000 to throw away? This story had an unpleasantly evocative quality. I listened; in fact I would have had to be deaf not to hear. My cottage was not in a particularly desirable neighbourhood either – poor train service and no buses worth talking about. Could that fool possibly be me? It could; it was.
In two particulars it was wrong: I did not have £8000 to throw about from lavish resources, and there was a bus service that I later had a good reason to talk about as one of those buses nearly killed me. Otherwise, I found on joining the conversation, the facts were correct and applied to me – a very close, if not exact fit.
I moved from Dorset Square to the cottage at Iver on the same day that the family looking after my baby moved in from Slough. The cottage was well built and adequate to shelter from rain. The garden included fine apple trees and ample ground for vegetables for the entire household. In conformity with the would-be prestige proper to a successful doctor, but not in conformity with the failure that bitter experience had taught me I was, I acquired a consulting room in a house in Harley Street. After a surprisingly short period I
was amazed to find I had enough patients and such an acute shortage of cash that I had to work from nine to six on week-days, and nine to two on Saturday and Sunday. It was l