Slowing Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

varied wildly from a few minutes to longer than the statutory half hour. She started to forget our names. Her time was surely drawing to a close. Dr Fry got to know this. I didn’t tell him, I was too fond of her to sneak, but somebody did. He had recently acquired an assistant, a gentle and charming Asian girl, and he sent her down to ‘help’ Miss Day. Miss Day was the opposite of co-operative, let alone grateful, and the girl might as well not have been there. She was not allowed to touch the time switches or address the patients. I suspect, perhaps correctly, that Miss Day saw her as a spy.
    One day, after a gap when I revisited Kenya for another newspaper, I came up in the lift to find Miss Day, her plant and radio, gone. Shortly afterwards Dr Fry told me he had insisted , and I don’t suppose it was an easy confrontation, that her time was up.
    Later, Dr Fry announced that in recognition of long and in recent years voluntary service, they were going to give her a champagne party and a new television set. She had indeed told me some time before that her set was very old and she suspected it might be dangerous. In consequence she never switched it on, but now and then, when passing, would pat it as though it were a dog. They gave her a catalogue and Dr Fry said, with mild irritation, she had chosen the most expensive. I felt, but didn’t say, that she was justified in doing this.
    I was very touched to be asked (I half hoped at Miss Day’s request) to her final thrash. It was to be held in a large and fairly new hotel in Marylebone Road shortly after the termination of the West Way and opposite the Western Eye Hospital, a branch of, although separate from, St Mary’s Paddington, and which is later to play an important role in this story. The hotel, its exterior quite impressive in the late-Victorian/Edwardian manner, was, I understood, built as the railways union’s headquarters. Inside it was even more imposing, with huge corridors, an impressive staircase, and a vast lounge with no ceiling but an open prospect right up to the glass dome.
    I was not too surprised to be told that it had been a union building because I had visited another branch in Crewe which, while smaller, was equally grand, with elaborately carved wood and stained-glass windows in the Burne Jonestradition. This conspicious spending is quite explicable, not solely because at the time they were built the railwaymen were considered the aristocrats of the union movement, but also as a case of keeping up with the bosses. This helps explain too why African chiefs, however poor their subjects, are always driven about in huge and expensive cars. There are alas few Gandhis in this world.
    There we all gathered, Dr Fry, his wife, various other medicos and of course Miss Day herself. The corks popped, speeches were made, canapés eaten. The very expensive TV wasn’t handed over then because it had already been delivered to the flat in Victoria. Miss Day responded to the speeches and was both brief (always a blessing) and totally without emotion. I felt that even Dr Fry had been proved, by dismissing her, to have feet of clay. She gave the impression that, champagne or no champagne, TV or no TV, she’d much sooner be up in her eyrie asking people when they last had a bath. It was a slightly downbeat affair all round.
    Quite soon Dr Fry himself retired and a Dr Powles, a very friendly woman, replaced him.
    Not long after that I was crossing Praed Street following a check-up in one department or another en route to a pub, the Fountains Abbey, which conveniently faces the main gates of the hospital, when a cheerful man stopped me. He told me he’d seen me in the psoriasis room in the past. Did I know, there was now a pill which had completely cleared his up? I said I didn’t, but would mention it on my next visit. Dr Powles admitted there was such a pill but was reluctant to prescribe it, as it was very strong and could have serious side effects affecting