Chapter 5. That Boy!

One morning, two clattering, chattering elderly ladies, tumbled over one another into the consulting room. With cries and sighs of relief, they dumped down their bulging shopping bags, and staked out a claim to much of the floor space. Even before they settled themselves into chairs, they began to recommend themselves as excellent trouble free patients. Also they had heard that I was likely to meet their need for a doctor who was above all clean. They were mother-in-law, and daughter-in-law, the two Mrs Cooks.

Seated to left and to right of me, they lobbed and volleyed words over my head, with the anticipation of seeded tennis players, and as they took the phrases from each other's lips, intercepted, rallied and smashed, I was obliged, like a spectator at Wimbledon, to turn my head from side to side, to follow the action.

“Old fashioned” was my first thought, “they are two astounding old fashioned eccentric strange ladies, who may give me much trouble.” Mrs Edith Cook, seventy years old, sturdy and erect, in a substantial wool coat of dark grey, and time out of mind old lady's plain felt hat looked the more formidable. Grey eyes glimmered at me through brown spectacle frames: was that severity or a tight smile? For any expression more committed to light heartedness, it seemed there would be some machinery to adjust. The angle of her mandible, and the hair subjugated by braiding, spoke of feminity battened down and secured by discipline and muscularity.

Mrs Dora Cook, married to Edith's younger son Jim, and without children of her own, was more timid: smaller, rounder, mezzo-soprano to the other's contralto. She was agitated, clamorous, ready to submit, or to fly if snubbed. Through the flat lenses of her plain spectacles she peeped out as if from behind a curtain. She was decidedly hump-backed, the consequence of tuberculosis of the spine, in her adolescence. She had been treated as a long term hospital patient in pre-chemotherapy days, with enclosure in a plaster of P