Chapter 4. Boxed in

The old surgery stood where three roads met. A small traffic island was a vortex around which swirled traffic, men, women and children. Workers, pensioners, idlers, shoppers, pram pushers, and youngsters of all sizes, hurried, limped and skipped across the junction, as they dodged the millrace of cars, buses, vans and lorries, surging from three directions.

The turbulence of dust, fumes, and the debris of the street, left a precipitate in the surgery garden. Old newspapers, cigarette ends, beer cans and paper bags mingled with the fallen leaves of the lime trees planted nearly a century ago when the house was built, at the end of a spacious terrace, modified to meet the requirements of the first medical man to put up his plate in that area.

On fine evenings, drinkers spilled out of the Chained Bull, on the opposite side of the High Road, and some crossed over, pints in hand, to perch on the surgery garden wall: their farewells at closing time (“G'night Bill, G'night Tom, G'night Bill”) then irritated would-be sleepers trying to drop off in the bedroom just above their heads. The old Victorian pub was a gloomy mammoth, convex and fleshy on a wide arc of the curve of the road. Seen from the surgery the cavernous bars intimidated, rather than invited.

Rarely, the publican sent across for medical help: someone stabbed, or dead from a heart attack. Most of the calls were to attend depressed and homesick young domestics or barmaids, come to London from rural Ireland and accommodated in dusty, high ceilinged, narrow bedrooms in the furthest recesses of the pile. I would be led past Cerberus, a discontented Alsation guarding a back entrance, through a gloomy labyrinth, up and down stairs and along corridors, until in a shadowy room, a collapsed adolescent, neglected and scared, lay in soiled sheets wondering how she had ended up so far from home.

From the other direction, traffic flowed downhill past the parish church. There was a sharp left hand curve which concealed the junct