Doctor at Sea by Richard Gordon Read Free Book Online Page A

cheese out of my mouth, and I stayed asleep until Easter shook me at four with a cup of tea and a small piece of confectionery known in the Merchant Service as a tabnab. This habit I regarded nervously as the first indication of moral degeneration.
    At five-thirty every evening my bath was run by Boswell, the bath steward. Boswell, like Easter, had seen better days, and the courtly manners he had learned in big P. & O.s and Cunarders had not deserted him. Whatever the temperature, he wore a shining white jacket, a stiff wing collar, and a black bow tie. He would arrive at my cabin door at half-past five precisely, a clean blue-and-white towel folded over his arm, and announce’ Your bath awaits, Doctor’, as if it were an important delegation. He followed me to the officers’ bathroom, which smelled like a seaside cave at low tide, spread the towel over the chair, and mixed the water with his skinny hand. He dipped in a foot-long thermometer with a little metal bucket at the end, anxiously inspecting the temperature, and made a careful adjustment to the taps (later I found the thermometer had not worked for several years). He then poured some fresh hot water from a large shining copper can into a small bowl for the feet, and laid on the white wooden rack across the bath my flannel, a long-handled scrubbing brush, a loofah, and a bar of sea-water soap.
    ‘Would there be anything else you require, sir?’ he asked every evening. I found it difficult to complicate such a simple act as taking a bath any further, and he would bow deeply and retire backwards through the steam. I knew he did so with disappointment, for a bath suggested to him as many variations as soup to a French chef. Every few days he would press me to take a few spoonfuls of mustard in it, or some washing soda, or a tumbler of rosewater.’ Might I recommend a little Sloan’s?’ he asked once.’ I used to put it in regularly for one doctor I looked after in the Cunard. Very good for the joints, I believe.’
    Boswell’s manners were unfortunately not sufficient to overcome the discomforts of the Lotus 's bathroom.’ There were no portholes or ventilators, so water collected on the deckhead as efficiently as in the main condenser in the engine-room, and thence fell thickly in rusty brown drops. The deck was covered with some crumbling material that left potholes to trip the bather and make him catch his head or his shins against sharp projecting pieces of steel. The bath itself was shaped like a coffin, and was furnished with a pair of fearsome taps that gave between them hot and cold sea water and a disproportionate amount of steam. There was an alternative - the fresh-water shower outside Hornbeam’s cabin, but owing to some subtle mechanical fault many feet below in the engine-room this emitted only ice-cold water or superheated steam, and after escaping a third-degree burn I decided to stick to the safe tepid waters under Boswell’s supervision.
    Boswell did not stop at baths: far greater was his pride in the officers’ lavatories. These were not much more efficient than the bath, and in rough weather became alarmingly unreliable. But to Boswell they were a porcelain monument to his own calling. He spent the morning cleaning and polishing them, and on our arrival for inspection would bow low and flush each as we passed with the jaunty pride of the satisfied artist.
    ‘There’s more in lavatories than meets the eye, sir,’ he explained to me one day, with a sigh.’ You’ve got to understand lavatories to do this job.’ I gathered from Easter that as he contentedly did his morning task Boswell dreamed of his retirement in charge of a small underground nest of them at one of the quieter corners of Liverpool.
    My professional duties were not exacting. I saw a couple of patients in the morning, perhaps half a dozen’ at five. The most common trouble was the constipation, doctor. This I first treated with pharmacopoeial doses of the usual