The Man on the Clapham Ambulance

Operation Doughnut

2008-10-11T05:08:00.000-07:00

A creature of unwavering habit, the sun ducks down behind the brewery, the cloud-ribboned tapestry of day unravelling in its wake as the dark veil of night descends upon the parish. An owl hoots, a dog barks, and from the belfry of St Benedict’s there rings a low, solitary knell, its mournful tone hanging briefly upon the air until, unheard and unheeded, it dwindles forever without trace into the black silence of infinity.

In the deepening gloom of his ancestral cottage, a young man stirs, glances up at the clock on the mantelpiece and heaves a long, embittered sigh of weary resignation. By a Herculean effort of the will he shakes off the inertia of reluctance and rises slowly from the comfort of his chair, shrugs into a threadbare overcoat and sets off into the night. Tormented by remorse, he treads the familiar path, the faintly glowing embers of hope fading like the memory of a dream and crumbling with every step into the lifeless dust of despair.

He reaches his destination, walks across the yard and enters the messroom, knowing at once he’s been betrayed. Fred ‘Judas’ Ventricle looks up and smirks, and he knows he's finished. His secret is out. The game is up. It's over.

Resigned to his fate, he stands before them, a defendant awaiting sentence, his bowels threatening to loosen as the icy claw of reality grips his innards. But then, when all seems lost and hopeless, he digs deeply into his meagre reserve of youthful resilience and produces from his pocket one last card to play.

“Who wants a doughnut?” As the old brown clock strikes the eleventh hour, he pulls a sugar-dusted ring of jam-filled stodge from the bag and offers them round. The dam bursts and a flood of mercilesss abuse sweeps over him, and as his equanimity drowns beneath a tidal wave of humiliation, he thinks back to the previous night and the scene of that shameful aberration.

“They’re waiting in the canteen. Through here, lads. Down the corridor, turn right, second left, left again, right, left, straight ahead, it’s on your right. You can’t miss it.” The duty sergeant lifted the wooden flap and we crossed over to the other side. Fred seemed to know the way and the sign above the door was clear enough, yet still I felt certain that we’d taken a wrong turning, because I’d been expecting to find half a dozen bleary-eyed coppers sitting about drinking tea, and we appeared instead to have stumbled upon some sort of clandestine assembly of the freemasons deep within the bowels of the Ferris Row police station.

The air was thick with smoke and banter, and the coarse easy laughter of men on overtime flew freely about above the low murmur of anticipation.

“Ah, at last. Come in, gentlemen,” called the Worshipful Master, looking pointedly at his watch and inviting us to take a seat. The room fell silent as fifty faces turned to conduct a brief examination of the new arrivals, delivered a unanimous verdict of indifference, and directed their attention towards Detective Superintendent George Jennings. I looked to Fred for guidance, but he had already made himself at home on a chair to one side, so I sat quietly beside him as the man called Guv proceeded to address his audience in a language I struggled to comprehend.

It was alpha this and bravo that, an ETA at the RVP, the ARV and the SPG, an ASU of the IRA, the TFU from DHQ, the DCC and SOCO. Nonplussed, I turned again to Fred, but he was already asleep, his head against the wall, nostrils quivering, mouth agape, so I just sat there nodding with feigned understanding as I looked around the room.

At the front sat a dozen detectives, and scattered about here and there was an assortment of white-shirted standard-issue coppers, but what drew my attention was the phalanx of stern-featured thugs with low-maintenance haircuts sitting at the back in dark overalls, chewing gum and cradling sub-machine guns and staring unblinkingly ahead as though at something a thousand yards beyond the wall. Blimey, I thought, this is exciting. My first armed incident and we’re going to storm an embassy.

At that early stage in my career, my soul was still tarnished by the original sin of keenness, the quaint enthusiasm of youth untempered by the wisdom of experience, and I was yet to appreciate that the armed incident, far from being a source of excitement, is actually a masterclass in anti-climax and provides nothing of interest to the ambulanceman beyond a most welcome opportunity to sit about doing nothing for a couple of hours. And as long as he is properly equipped with the essential tools of his trade — a half-decent paperback, a flask of tea and a plentiful supply of tobacco — the time will pass pleasantly enough. And unless he is the sort of queer cove who nurses a predilection for patching up gunshot wounds and is yearning for something along the lines of a Sidney Street siege or a Hungerford massacre, he will not be disappointed.

As chance would have it, our destination was in neither Sidney Street nor Hungerford nor, on this occasion, was it an embassy, but a two-storey house in a grim narrow street of early Victorian slums sandwiched between the gas works and the candle factory. According to information received, said Guv, jabbing a wooden ruler at a map on the wall, Mad Dog Maloney and his gang were holed up here, inside number twelve Kandahar Road, with the proceeds of the Catford job and a veritable arsenal of guns, grenades and plastic explosives. We’ll be going in hard and fast, with the advantage of surprise, and the objective is to take them all alive.

“But,” he emphasised with a meaningful pause, the wink implicit, “the safety of my officers is paramount and, well, just use your judgement, lads, reasonable force and all that. I think we all know the score.” Guv raised an eyebrow and a deathly hush fell upon us.

A muted cough broke the silence, then another, followed by the gentle rustling of movement as furtive glances were exchanged, and a ripple of sly complicity swept across the room.

I sat there astounded. Use your judgement? Reasonable force? Know the score? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surely this couldn’t be happening. It had to be a dream. We were going in hard and fast and we were going to shoot the Fenian bastards in their beds. Barely able to contain my joy, and in lieu of punching the air and dancing a jig, I nudged Fred with an elbow. He grunted an oath and continued to snore.

But hang on a minute.

Fred and I wouldn’t be bursting in to confront an armed and dangerous gang of bank-robbing terrorists. We’d be parked up in our van about three streets away drinking tea, well out of harm’s way. We wouldn’t be involved at all. We wouldn’t even get to see anything. In fact, now I thought about it, we really weren’t even on the same side as the coppers, because the official policy of the healthcare professional is one of strict neutrality at all times. And when the history of the Battle of Kandahar Road came to be written, we would be remembered as nothing more than non-partisan non-combatants.

But who was I kidding? We wouldn’t even merit a footnote.

It struck me suddenly that I was nothing but a stretcher-bearer in the presence of battle-hardened troops, a conscientious objector with a red cross on his hat, and I expected at any moment to be approached by a lady policeman bearing a white feather. But as I looked about I noticed something which hadn’t registered before. There were no lady policemen. There was not a single woman present. Not one. And then by one of those curious leaps of association, a mysterious spark within the cerebral whatsname, I found myself thinking of an experience from the dark and distant days of my childhood.

Mother was expecting one of her gentleman callers and wanted me out of the way for a couple of hours, so Fr O’Kneel, the parish priest, had been enlisted to take me off her hands for the afternoon and I had accompanied him to the Clapham Odeon, where we sat in the back row sharing a tub of popcorn and watched a film called Operation Doughnut, an all-action blood-and-gutser about a long-forgotten battle in the Sobang Mountains of Korea in the summer of ’fifty-one.

“So then, lad, what did you think of that, then?” He turned towards me as the credits rolled, his arm draped casually across the back of my seat. “It was brilliant, Father,” I beamed, “really exciting.”

“So tell me now, my boy, why do you think you found it so exciting, eh?” He edged a little closer, his knee pressing against mine. “Um . . .” I began a little uncertainly. “Well now, lad, let me tell you why,” he interrupted, smiling crookedly and trembling slightly, his face curiously shiny, a bead of perspiration clinging to his upper lip. “It’s because there was not a single woman in it. Not one.”

And then he put his hand on my leg and whispered that I had always been his favourite altar boy, that a bright future awaited me in the Church. He could help me, he said, he’d speak to the bishop, and if I came back to his house with him now, he’d introduce me to some of his chums who’d show me a tremendous trick with a jam doughnut. Would you like that, lad?

“Any questions?”

“What channel are we on, Guv?”

“Good point, Skip. Right, listen up, guys. All call signs will use channel seven, talk-through on. Okay then, anything else?” He happened to catch my eye and I watched in horror as my hand rose into the air as though of its own accord.

“What’s it called?” I heard myself asking as a thousand eyes turned upon me.

“How do you mean, son?”

“Well, I mean, has it got a name? This . . . um . . . this operation we’re on. You know, like for instance . . .”

Guv’s face seemed to mutate before my eyes into that of Fr O’Kneel and I found myself surrounded not by dozens of bemused coppers but by a ring of leering, salivating priests. My heart was pounding, my head was spinning, my vision blurred and cloudy. My thoughts turned to chaos and I had no idea where I was or what I was trying to say. So I just blurted out the first thing that came into my head, knowing even before I spoke that it was completely wrong, so terribly, terribly wrong, that it wasn’t what I had meant to say at all.

But I said it anyway.

“Operation Doughnut,” chuckled Fr O’Kneel, throwing back his head. “Mission accomplished.”

The cruel, triumphant laughter crashes over him like a relentless torrent of humiliation, sweeping him away to a dark, terrible place of unending suffering. On and on it goes, louder and louder it grows; on and on and on, like it will never stop, pursuing him through the door as he flees from the rectory, wiping the sticky mess from his lips, spitting and gagging, blinded by tears as he runs into the graveyard and falls vomiting to the ground.

And as he lies there, paralysed by nausea, weeping with shame and remorse, there rings from the belfry a low, solitary knell: a monotonic hymn to the fleeting transience of innocence; the plaintive valediction of a soul consigned to hell. It hangs upon the air for a thousand lifetimes, before dwindling forever without trace into the black silence of infinity.

Forbidden Fruit

2007-11-20T07:13:00.001-08:00

I was sitting at the traffic lights the other day, watching without interest as the world went about its business, my mind wandering idly hither and thither in its customary purposeless fashion, wondering vaguely how it had come to this, when I noticed an elegant woman of a certain age who stood out from the swirling bustle of the multicultural herd like a sunflower in a field of cabbages, and whose attention appeared to be focused exclusively in my direction. Our eyes met and she held my gaze, frowning inquisitively for a second or two before favouring me with the sort of frank, dissolute smile that can leave a man for days afterwards nursing an aching void of hopeless yearning somewhere in the darkest depths of his trousers.

The lights changed, I pulled away, and she was gone; yet there was something hauntingly familiar about her and I was left with a nagging feeling that our paths had crossed before and my brow furrowed deeply with the unaccustomed effort of thought as I struggled to recall the circumstances of our previous acquaintance.

And then, after several minutes engaged upon the more or less unproductive exercise of scratching my head, I turned into Damascus Road and the whole thing came to me in a single moment and I settled comfortably behind a quiet, complacent smile to bask in the warm, roseate glow of fond remembrance and savour with calm, unhurried appreciation every detail of that long-ago brief encounter; but with dispiriting predictability my private happiness proved to be short-lived and it was but a matter of seconds before I was roused rudely from my reverie and dragged back into the harsh glare of workaday reality.

“Driver!” barked Albert Harness, a curious tremor of preoccupation in his voice. “Pull over please. This patient needs some urgent attention.”

With a sigh of profound exasperation and cursing without restraint, I abandoned the agreeable pastime of sweet reminiscence and with seamless professionalism resumed my lowly station as an ambulance driver, whereupon I found myself considering the possibility that the condition of the woman under Albert’s care had taken a dramatic turn for the worse and that there existed a real and present danger of an imminent call to action stations, and it occurred to me that it might be prudent to turn my attention to planning the shortest possible route to the nearest A&E department.

But I liked to think I knew Albert better than that.

“On second thoughts, old son, there’s no need to stop, but would you be so kind as to take the scenic route?”

Leaning across and cocking a curious ear, I heard a series of sounds emanating in a sickening progression from the back of the van like a cross between some tuneless abstract collage of the avant-garde and the third movement of Beelzebub’s Fifth Symphony. There came a brief overture of rustling and whispering and some indeterminate fumbling; a low, muttered suggestion; a sly cackle; a discordant duet of salacious laughter; the sound of dentures landing in a sick-bag; a sigh; a gasp; the name of the Lord invoked repeatedly to the accompaniment of a most peculiar noise which I could not positively identify but which sounded not unlike an asthmatic carthorse slurping treacle through a hosepipe; and then a brief hiatus, followed by a soft adagio, ascending slowly at first before mutating by stages into a grotesque scherzo which combined furious exhortation with a keening, wailing plea for mercy as it grew inexorably in tempo and volume, a wild crescendo galloping out of control towards an explosive climax.

With a shudder of repugnance I slid the door shut, trying to banish a tableau of ghastly images from my mind, to replace them with something fine and gentle and wholesome, to amble calmly and alone once more along the sun-dappled paths of a better, happier world. But it was hopeless. My hands trembled on the wheel and my mind was beset by the torment of furious envy and a crushing feeling of terrible regret that today, but for the whim of cruel Providence, Albert would have been driving and I would have been in the back attending to the clinical governance of Gladys Gummer.

Life, I reflected bitterly, can be so monstrously unjust and there are times when the attrition of constant misfortune leads even the hardiest soul to the brink of despair. I slumped disconsolately in my seat, my head pounding with the physical pain of raging resentment, my imagination tortured almost beyond endurance by an unremitting thumping sound, as of a distant drum, and the familiar rhythmical squeaking of a Falcon Mk III trolley bed.

It’s not the easiest of tasks to steer an ambulance through heavy traffic with one’s hands clamped tightly over one’s ears, but with a strong incentive and a little practice, believe me, it can be mastered. One finds that if one can successfully bring a sense of harmonious coordination to the knees and the elbows, one can in a remarkably short space of time develop a technique of sorts and before one knows it one finds that one can forget entirely the mechanics of forward progress and the humdrum considerations of road safety, allowing one to direct one’s full attention to the contemplation of matters of an altogether more agreeable nature.

In the interests of patient confidentiality and a spirit of quaint, old-fashioned gallantry, we'll call her Mrs X, and though our relationship was of the fleeting, ephemeral variety, it was not without significance in the overall history of my professional development, serving as it did at an early stage in my career as a gentle introduction to the pleasures of partaking of that most strictly forbidden fruit which, as every ambulanceman knows, hangs in tantalizing abundance from the emergency healthcare tree.

It was during the course of an unseasonably warm evening in the springtime of another age that Fred and I were despatched to an address in that quarter of the parish renowned for its broad leafy thoroughfares, its sturdy wrought iron gates and its sweeping gravel drives; a world far removed from the high towers and low hovels of our usual experience and, indeed, a destination so rare for an ambulance crew that even Mr V, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the back streets and alleyways, had to swallow his pride and consult his dog-eared, yellowing copy of Bartholemew’s Pocket Gazetteer to confirm its precise location.

On arrival, as we say in the ambulance game, the front door was opened by a tall, immaculately groomed manservant who studied us with the sort of haughty disdain usually reserved for a caterpillar caught trespassing in a salad, and I was left with a very strong impression that we would have received a less frosty reception had we displayed a greater understanding of accepted protocol and presented ourselves with due propriety at the tradesmen’s entrance.

In the kind of condescending, suspicious tone he might have employed to address a couple of gypsies come to clear out the gutters, he explained that we were to attend the lady of the house, who had been discovered an hour or so previously in a disordered state of mumbling incoherence, a condition possibly related, he ventured to suggest, to the presence of two empty vessels at her bedside; namely a litre-sized green gin bottle and a small brown pot of pharmaceutical provenance that until very recently had been home to a couple of dozen members of the benzodiazepine family.

He had, naturally, made strenuous but, alas, unsuccessful efforts to contact Dr Wilby, the family physician, and thus defeated had found himself faced with little alternative but to resort to calling for the assistance of 'the public service'. His nostrils flared slightly at the phrase and his lower lip curled almost imperceptibly in the manner of one who bears with unflinching stoicism a painful twinge of dyspepsia; and casting a long, lingering look of withering disapproval over the inferior cloth of our uniforms, he sighed with resignation and ushered us inside.

Like a nomadic hunter-gatherer who finds himself unexpectedly in the palace of an emperor, I gazed about in wonder at the unfamiliar splendour of my surroundings, while Fred, apparently having been rendered lame by a sudden bout of sciatica, loitered near a collection of expensive looking porcelain figurines which stood upon a table in the hall. The butler, faced with this rather awkward dilemma, narrowed his eyes and undertook a swift appraisal of the situation, and it took but a glance at Fred’s furtive demeanour for his custodian’s instincts to prevail and he took up a strategic position between his employer’s treasured possessions and the front door, directing me with military precision to a room on the top floor at the back of the house.

And so it was that alone and unsupervised for the very first time in my new career, with the first-aid bag clutched nervously in hand, I found myself climbing a wide staircase into the unknown world of the solo responder. I made my way along a gallery, turned a corner, then another, and walked down a narrow passageway until I came at last to a door marked with the symbol ‘φ’, which, for the benefit of those cruelly deprived of a classical education, is Phi, the twenty-first letter of the Greek alphabet. Intrigued and excited by the implications of this curious hieroglyph, I confess to my shame that I overlooked the most rudimentary considerations of etiquette and opened the door without knocking. I stepped across the threshold and was overcome immediately by a quite extraordinary feeling of inner calm and spiritual contentment, the like of which I had never before experienced.

By the standards of the high-rise slums of the Balmoral Estate the room was undeniably large and yet it seemed much larger still, an illusion created somehow by the exquisite balance and proportions of its dimensions and I felt that, having entered, I wanted never to leave, such was the sense of peace and wellbeing it engendered within me, and as I stood there captivated by the spell of its mathematical perfection and entranced by what lay before me, I became aware of a strange sensation that I can only describe as a rapid surging of some warm inner essence towards the distal regions of the personal extremities which, as any forensic biologist worth his salt will testify, is liable to have a most unpredictable and mitigating effect upon a young man’s subsequent behaviour.

She lay upon a bed as though deceased, quite still, enchantingly serene, her flesh as pale as weathered bone against a gown of blood-red silk, enveloped in a haze of Gordon’s and Chanel that invested my every cell with a hungry, primitive longing as I knelt beside her to conduct what’s known in the ambulance game as a primary survey.

Her eyelids fluttered open and her pupils, like tiny beads of obsidian set upon beds of lapis lazuli, dilated as she met my gaze with the startled recognition of mutual discovery and a smile of invitation played with untamed wickedness about her wanton, bloodless lips. She raised an unsteady hand to my face and drew me closer, her musky fragrance coursing through my blood like wine, her lips brushing my ear as she whispered, slurred but unequivocal, that crudest of womanly exhortations, at which the mask of dispassionate austerity finally cracked and fell from my face and I surrendered gladly to the will of an authority more ancient and compelling even than the Ambulanceman's Code of Professional Conduct.

Then a door opened behind me and my heart skipped a beat.

Albert Harness clambered through from the back of the van and picked up the paperwork in a brisk, businesslike fashion, studiously avoiding my eye.

“Right then, son,” he said, his face a diplomatic compromise between vaunting triumphalism and sheepish embarrassment. “Next stop the King Charles Infirmary, psycho-gerry day centre. We’ve got to drop this one off then pick up a Mr Norbert Nutshagger from the Bowes-Lyon Unit and take him down to the Backwoods County Asylum. Bit of a run, should see us off nicely." He paused then and exhaled a conciliatory sigh.

"Tell you what, son," he said, turning to me suddenly and beaming with his characteristic charm. "I’ll drive if you like.”

The Shoes of the Ambulanceman

2007-08-21T19:26:00.001-07:00

As he goes quietly and without fuss about the day to day business of his chosen profession, the ambulanceman will now and then find himself privy to an observation, perhaps offered by a disinterested bystander confronted by parts of the human anatomy not often seen in the course of his daily routine, or maybe voiced by a relative of a patient who has brought shame and dishonour upon the family name by discharging bodily waste products in prodigious quantity without the least consideration for the convenience of others.

“I couldn’t do your job,” they exclaim with a grimace of distaste, taking a step back and watching with stupefied fascination as we stuff eviscerated organs into gaping abdominal cavities or scoop diarrhoea from between the wobbling, dimpled buttocks of demented geriatrics; and while most of us could in all honesty address the very same remark with envious admiration to, for example, the brain surgeon or the astronaut, the spirit in which it is employed within the hearing of the ambulanceman is in reality more akin to the manner in which it might be directed not to the erudite restorer of neurological function, nor to the fearless explorer of the universe, but to the man who earns his living in the abattoir or the sewer.

What they mean, of course, is not that they are awed by the innate superiority of our physical and intellectual prowess, for in truth to undertake the work of the ambulanceman requires little more natural ability than a keen eye and a steady hand, but that they wouldn’t for a moment give serious consideraton to embarking upon a career of such unpleasant and menial servitude even if the wages were on a par with national average earnings.

The bald truth is that either you have the stomach for it or you do not and the time-honoured method for determining definitively if your digestive system is sufficiently robust to withstand the peculiar demands of our noble profession is to be taken without prior notice at the earliest opportunity to the very lip of the abyss and dangled over the edge by your ankles.

Max Callow, smooth of cheek and clean of limb, presented himself early one morning at the Clapham ambulance station fresh from the Royal Academy of Ambulance Studies in proud possession of a gleaming new stethoscope, unconscionably shiny boots and a pristine green knapsack bulging with bags of salt water and the latest word in plastic tubes. Like most paramedics he would never get to open his bag in anger, though not, as is customary, because the zips were jammed irrevocably by the rust and detritus of neglect but because he reached the eminently sensible conclusion early in his career that the rigours of the ambulance life quite simply were not for him and expressed his decision to quit not through the usual channel of submitting a formal letter of resignation to the Department of Human Commodities but by running screaming from Prince of Wales House and disappearing into the mist without pausing to offer so much as a word of explanation.

We’d been sent on our first call of the shift to a flat on the Balmoral Estate, the elderly occupant of which had not been seen for several weeks and from which there was reported to be emanating a nasty smell, and as that grim conglomeration of dirty grey towers hove into view, my hands started to tremble and my teeth chattered like castanets as the recollection of my own baptism of fire assailed my memory with a harrowing intensity and I had to force myself to clamp my lips tightly together to prevent a mixed kebab and several pints of Wandle’s Most Peculiar from disgorging themselves over the dashboard.

With a stark and terrible clarity, I remembered being propelled by the irrepressible enthusiasm of youthful curiosity, though assisted, I swear to this day, by a firm shove to the small of the back, through a doorway and into a stiflingly hot and gloomy bedroom, whereupon the stench of putrefaction struck me like a well-aimed jab to the oesophagus, bringing me up smartly and stopping me dead in my tracks with the sort of unexpected jolt usually associated with walking into a lamp post.

I gasped with shock and my lungs filled instantly with the noxious gases of corruption, causing me to gag and retch as though drowning beneath a tidal wave of nausea. Blinded by tears and bent double, my head spun with hypoxia and the cold sweat of panic prickled from every pore. Then everything went black as a cloud of bluebottles enveloped my head, crawling over my face, exploring every orifice, the volume and pitch of that fearful buzzing overwhelming my senses, banishing rational thought and driving me in a moment to the very brink of insanity.

Craving only light and air, I turned to find the door locked, and in a mounting frenzy of desperation grabbed the handle, pulling and tugging with what remained of my strength until it came off in my hand and I stumbled backwards, tripped over something bony and fell to the floor. Beside me, wearing striped flannel pyjamas, lay a writhing mass of maggoty flesh surmounted by a bare skull, its empty sockets staring sightlessly into infinity. Unable to breathe, I began fading in and out of consciousness, my limbs heavy and unresponsive as I surrendered finally, gratefully, to the warm and comforting embrace of oblivion.

And then, as I bobbed weakly to the surface of awareness for one last time, I heard the sound of mirthless laughter echoing across a void from far, far away and a gruff voice calling to me as though from somewhere high above.

“Welcome to ambulance work, son,” said Fred Ventricle, standing in the doorway, a roll-up dangling from his lower lip, smug amusement glinting cruelly in those cold, knowing eyes.

Many years and countless prescriptions later, I still have nightmares about my first day on the ambulances, and while I have been advised by my colleagues that chronic barbiturate dependency and those middle-of-the-night moments of waking, sweat-soaked terror are but a small price to pay for a comprehensive education at the hands of one of the great pedagogues of the golden age, in rare moments of introspection I sometimes have my doubts. But then again, I endeavour to console myself — for I am by nature, and despite everything, of an optimistic disposition — were it not for Professor Ventricle’s munificent tutelage, well, who knows where I might be today?

Being something of a stickler for old-fashioned good manners, I steeled myself, gritted my teeth and swallowed last night's dinner for the second time, shuddering with repulsion as I struggled to regain some semblance of composure. The dark edifice of Prince of Wales House loomed over us, silent and forbidding like a sinister monolith, the red crosses of St. George draped here and there providing the only respite from its unremittingly grey facade and lending it somehow the impression of a medieval fortress and serving to engender within me a curious mixture of dark foreboding and patriotic fortitude. I reached for my sword; and then remembered I was an ambulanceman.

A soft drizzle fell from a colourless sky as we hurried past the rubbish bins and up the concrete steps into the entrance, the heady aroma of stale urine and cheap disinfectant serving as an appropriate appetizer for the plat du jour which lay ahead.

On the seventh floor we found a trio of slippered pensioners huddled in squawking conference outside flat forty-eight, the door of which stood ominously ajar, revealing only darkness within. I stood on the threshold and a waft of warm air caressed my face. My nose twitched professionally in the manner of a scent hound and I detected more than a hint of putrescence upon the breeze. Shushing the fretting crones with a universal gesture of impatience, I strained my ears and heard a distinctive humming sound, whereupon a curious transformation occurred within me and things started to get a little odd.

Like an actor whose stage fright disappears the moment he steps from the wings into the spotlight, I felt suddenly calm and strangely detached from the peculiar circumstances of my own existence as I assumed the mantle of a character somehow more familiar to me even than my own, and I seemed at once to mutate physically into someone else. My stance altered, the feet spread, the legs slightly bowed, the shoulders subtly hunched. I felt I had become a little shorter, a little thinner, and though I couldn't have explained how it got there, I reached up without thinking and took a hand-rolled cigarette from behind my ear, muttering foul oaths as I lit it and resisting a very strong urge to spit on the ground.

“Come on, son, let’s take a look,” I said automatically, my voice having acquired a certain coarse quality, the words springing easily to my lips as though from the pages of a well-thumbed script, the line from the familiar scene where the innocent young man is lured unsuspectingly along a dark, malodorous passageway to face a harsh and unexpected scrutiny of his innermost resolution.

The air seemed to thicken as we walked along the corridor, the evil smell overpowering, that furious buzzing increasing in volume with every step and calling to us like the sweet, irresistible music of a siren song, drawing us inexorably onward to the closed door at the end of the hall.

We stopped and stood before it and I sensed a slight hesitation in Max as his knees quivered gently and a cloud of apprehension obscured his once unshakable enthusiasm and dulled the edge of his youthful perspicacity. He glanced at me for guidance, a distinct gleam of uncertainty in those keen eyes, a faintly green pallor beneath the surface of his clear complexion, and I was struck by his uncanny resemblance to someone from many years ago.

I reached across in front of him and turned the handle, my other hand hovering behind him, poised at the small of his back.

“Go on, son,” I said, smiling with the reassuring confidence of long experience, the roll-up dangling from my lower lip. “In you go. I’m right behind you.”

Threatening to Jump

2007-07-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

We were lounging around in the messroom the other day engaged in typically earnest debate, the motion before the house being concerned with the relative merits of the fried and the grilled tomato, when Bert Klaxon, by means of a subtle adjustment of the eyebrows and the merest inclination of the surgical instrument he uses to scrape out his pipe, drew to our attention a man on the television who was bemoaning a national shortage of properly qualified ambulance staff and holding responsible this shameful deficiency for countless recent deaths across the country, and I don’t think we’ve laughed so much since the day Stan Tablets rode into work wearing a cycling helmet.

“They want more paramedics!” we spluttered in outraged disbelief, speculating as to the reaction of our august Chief Officer when he opened his Daily Telegraph to discover that that respected and authoritative organ had chosen to publish leaked details of his latest cost-cutting proposal to employ minimum-wage van drivers in place of seasoned ambulance professionals; and then Stan, a gentleman resolutely of the opinion that actions speak louder than words and surrendering to a primeval urge to express a firmly held view through the medium of mindless violence, strode forward and put a steel-toed size ten through the screen.

And then the phone rang and the voice of Clapham Ambulance Control informed me that someone was threatening to jump from the roof of a tall building.

Threatening to jump. It’s odd, isn’t it, how a simple phrase can take one back in an instant across the barren wasteland of one’s career and bring vividly to mind every minute detail of an experience from the innocent days of one’s youth. All it takes is those few familiar words and one finds oneself suddenly recalling with an almost painful sense of nostalgia hurrying with the quaint eagerness of the ingenue to the scene of some classic medical emergency such as ‘stung by a nettle’, ‘painful left elbow’, ‘stubbed his toe’, ‘woke from a nightmare’, ‘needs to talk to someone’, ‘back pain for seven years’, and so on; and however long one is employed as a lowly pawn in the ambulance game it seems that one is somehow never able entirely to conquer one’s incredulity at the genetic incompetence of the general public nor rid oneself of the insidious feeling that almost every turn of the ambulance wheel is just a senseless waste of time, effort and hard-earned taxpayers’ money.

I sighed and closed my eyes, remembering another age and my very first case of someone who was gripped by the urge to plummet from a great height on to a hard surface. To the best of my knowledge this curious affliction was not covered during the soporific tedium of the two-week training course and to date I have yet to find reference to it, despite countless hours of diligent research, in any of the definitive medical textbooks. Fortunately the seasoned ambulanceman, like the gifted musician, is renowned for nothing so much as his ability to improvise around a given theme, and thankfully back then I was still under the tutelage of the most seasoned of them all, a man widely regarded in his time as the Charlie Parker of the chair and the blanket.

Fred ‘Yardbird’ Ventricle looked casually at his wristwatch, then looked quickly at it again as the horror of a very realistic possibility of being late off duty struck him like a slap in the face. Galvanized from his habitual state of torpor, he bellowed a catalogue of profanity that would have put to shame an inebriated company sergeant major who has barked his shin in the dark against an anvil. He hurled his barely-lit roll-up to the ground and stamped on it with such pathological vehemence that I thought my legs would buckle beneath me.

In the warmth of the spring sunshine a large crowd of afternoon idlers had gathered to watch the show and even the boistrous chanting of the hooligan contingent was silenced for several seconds by this unprecedentedly violent display of furious exasperation by a uniformed public servant. The feckless wastrels cheered with hearty appreciation, then tilted back their heads, jabbed their fingers skywards, and voicing the fervent if unspoken desire of all those assembled, resumed their spirited exhortation.

“Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!”

“Come on, son,” commanded Fred, marching off. “I’ll talk the cunt down.”

Like a pup at the heel of its master I trotted after him through the entrance to Sandringham House and we took the lift to the seventeenth floor where we found officers Harding and Hobbs of the local constabulary loitering in the filthy vestibule discussing the finer points of Clapham Rovers’ defensive strategy for the forthcoming cup tie against Vauxhall Athletic.

“What they wanna fuckin’ do,” opined a youthful and rosy-cheeked PC Hobbs in a rare moment of animation, “is push fuckin’ Biggsy out wide on the fuckin’ left to sort that fuckin’ cunt Richardson, leave fuckin’ Wilson on the fuckin’ right and pull fuckin’ Goody and fuckin’ Reynolds into the fuckin’ middle to take out that fuckin’ lanky — hello, lads. All right, Fred? Son.”

Slouching against the wall and taking neither his hands from his pockets nor the cigarette from between his lips, Constable Harding nodded without interest at the door to the balcony. Resisiting the urge to question the wisdom of playing a back four against a rather lacklustre two-man forward line in such a crucial fixture, we opened the door and saw a fat, greasy-haired teenager in jeans and an army surplus jacket sitting astride the concrete wall about twenty feet away and looking down with an air of agonized indecision at the baying, bloodthirsty multitude in the car park far below.

Fred instructed me to stay back, to look, listen and learn, then strode forward while I stood impotently clutching the first-aid bag, gazing with the wide eyes of the acolyte upon the wise and ancient high priest as he proceeded to address the boy teetering precariously between a life of scorned obesity and the beckoning release of a quick death.

He always had an admirably economical way with words, did Fred Ventricle, and on this occasion he uttered just three: an intransitive verb and a pejorative noun of Anglo-Saxon vulgarity, separated by the pronoun of the second person, which terse combination had the miraculous effect of bringing the tortured youth down to street level without pausing for further procrastination and in about four and a half seconds flat all the hormone-fuelled tribulations of a difficult adolescence were resolved once and for all by the decisive finality of eternal anaesthesia.

I heard a collective gasp, a brief hiatus, then a sort of muffled crunch, followed by loud cheering and tumultuous applause as Fred leaned over and raised both hands to acknowledge the acclamation of the crowd, and it brought to mind an image of the Pope saluting the faithful from the balcony of St. Peter’s, and as tears of awe welled in my eyes I found myself caught suddenly in one of those pivotal moments of self examination that often beset the humble apprentice, torn between a career of plodding mediocrity in the footsteps of greatness and the prospect of a fortnightly trip to the Labour Exchange.

Many years later, having long since abandoned any aspirations to excellence, I was sitting beside Albert Harness as we made our way unhurriedly along the Mafeking Road towards the headquarters of the Clapham Ambulance, not to face the apoplectic wrath of His Eminence concerning some petty transgression of ambulance regulations, but in response to an emergency call from a passing pedestrian who had reported seeing an adult male in ambulance uniform apparently threatening to jump from the roof of that historic building.

It’s well known that in the course of his work the ambulanceman encounters a great many people suffering from a wide and ever-expanding variety of psychological ailments. To name but a few, we deal on a daily basis with such conditions as anxiety, depression, phobias, schizophrenia, panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, personality disorder, dissociative disorder, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, senile dementia, pre-senile dementia, juvenile dementia, gender dysphoria, hypomania, hypermania, nymphomania, pyromania, religious belief and, of course, the psychiatrists' current favourite, paranoid psychosis.

Unable and unwilling to remember such a bewildering array of mental afflictions, or distinguish in any useful way one from another, all ambulancemen simply lump the victims of them neatly together under the collective heading of ‘nutters’, and while the employment of this less than flattering colloquialism might engender a universal perception that your average ambulanceman is lacking in sympathy for loonies, this is not actually the case. Indeed, to the mentalist who has justifiable cause and displays a considered and genuine commitment to take that decisive step into oblivion, we are more than willing to extend the firm hand of advice and encouragement, and when his nerve threatens to fail him at the crucial moment, as in my experience it so often does, to paraphrase the Deputy Commander of Blankets, we will not be found wanting.

Shielding my eyes against the bright afternoon sky, I looked up and saw none other than the Exalted One, the most esteemed and illustrious Chief Officer of the Clapham Ambulance, clutching what looked like a copy of that morning's Telegraph, standing right at the edge of the roof with his toes overhanging in the manner of a high diver and gazing down with an air of agonized indecision at the baying, bloodthirsty multitude in the street far below as that timeless refrain rang out its rapturous entreaty.

“Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump! Jump!”

I pulled on the handbrake and leapt from the cab with the agility of an adolescent antelope, gripped by a sudden and most uncharacteristic enthusiasm for ambulance work, the accumulated cynicism of two decades seeming to fall away in an instant as those three little words of the venerable Ventricle resonated in my mind like a hallowed invocation.

“Come on, Albert,” I urged my astonished crewmate. “I'll talk the cunt down.”

One Under

2007-03-07T05:10:00.000-08:00

I hadn't fully recovered from the shock of being asked to park the ambulance, so I was quite unprepared for another bolt from the blue just ten minutes later, and I’ll admit I was taken aback.

“Would you mind taking the top of the chair?”

It was a question I’d not heard before in all my years on the ambulances and for several moments I was uncertain who had asked it, to what it referred and to whom it was addressed; but the lashes were fluttering, the doe-eyed head was tilted imploringly to one side, and the voice was a passable imitation of a toddler’s, so I reasoned that it could only have been Felicity Philpot enquiring if she could be spared the terrible hardship of carrying the heavy end of the chair and if instead I might shoulder the burden on her behalf. Instinctively the gentleman, I naturally assented with neither question nor hesitation, but in that dark place behind the facade of impeccable politeness a seed of vengeance had been sown and began to germinate silently and unnoticed in the hydroponic incubator of my subconscious.

The way it’s always worked, you see, since before little Ebenezer was even a twinkle in the eye of Jeremiah Vein, is that the driver fetches the chair and the blankets from the van and arranges them in the prescribed fashion, standing behind the patient at the back of the chair, which, when carrying a cumbersome cartload of quivering corpulence down a steep flight of stairs, is without question the more onerous position of the two, the bottom being much lighter and easier to manage and necessitating none of that awkward backbreaking bending and stooping which afflict the man at the top.

Unfortunately the division of labour in this situation is unavoidably inequitable, and if taking the top end of the chair can be likened to shovelling coal relentlessly into a furnace in the unendurable heat of a ship’s engine room, then by comparison manhandling the bottom end is rather like lounging in the shade on the promenade deck sipping iced cocktails while fawning stewards attend to one's every whim. No, it’s not fair, but these things tend to even themselves out over time and there’s nothing to be done about it, and in any case the seasoned ambulanceman will always insist upon the patient walking down the stairs unless there are exceptional circumstances of mitigation such as a verifiably genuine absence of consciousness or a total deficiency in the leg department.

But to be asked to swap ends, well, I’d never heard anything like it.

I know exactly what Stan Tablets would do if you asked him to take the top of the chair. He’d punch you in the face; and rightly so. The trouble is, you can’t do that to girls and they know it.

I blame the training department. When I was schooled in the science of humping Two-Ton Tessie down a few flights, we practised with a real person on a proper staircase. The instructor volunteered the services of the fattest chump in the class — two hundredweight of gormless lard called Alan Bigpants — and then we wedged his hips between the bars of a Rumbold and took turns carrying him up and down the fire escape until we dropped him, which was the signal to break for lunch. Nowadays, of course, the health and safety killjoys insist that only a dummy weighing the same as a bag of groceries may be carried by trainees and only then down two or three wide and shallow carpeted steps, with the inevitable result that many of those graduating from the Ambulance Academy are simply incapable of managing the top end of a carrying chair containing anyone heavier than a bag of spuds and a few tins of beans.

I wrapped the blanket snugly around Mrs. Placenta’s gargantuan carcass and pulled the belt tightly enough to discourage gratuitous respiration as any movement can adversely affect the balance, while Felicity knelt and fiddled with the foot strap in an effort to minimize the risk of getting an unpalatable mouthful of weeping leg ulcers in mid-flight. Satisfied that we were prepared for lift-off, I tilted the chair back and began the short but arduous journey from the back bedroom to the top of the stairs.

It would have been a great deal easier were it not for the several mirrors positioned along the route, which had the curious effect of preventing my crewmate from offering the slightest assistance. Pausing interminably before each one to study her reflection and strike pouting poses prior to making imperceptible adjustments to her hair, Felicity appeared to be quite oblivious to the reason we were there in the first place and had apparently completely forgotten the tricky descent that lay ahead and which I was anticipating with the sort of bowel-loosening dread usually reserved for tackling a desperate solo retreat at night in a blizzard from the north face of the Eiger with a broken arm.

Eventually the top of that perilous slope hove into view and from the summit it looked like an awfully long sheer drop to the ground, and as I gazed over the precipice I became mesmerised and overcome by the dizziness and nausea of pathological trepidation. I employed some emergency relaxation techniques as I waited for Felicity to arrange her hair just so, put on her black leather gloves and execute a curious little dance which involved much gyrating of the hips, a bit of pouting and some vigorous pumping of the the air with both fists while she sang a snatch of some popular melody of the day. I took a deep breath, made a sign of the cross and then we were both more or less ready. Taking care not to smudge her make-up against the patient's knees, Felicity grasped the handles and began to count.

“One . . .”

And as she did so, as if by miraculous providence an idea suddenly popped fully formed into my mind and I couldn’t stop myself laughing aloud with the unrestrained joy of divine revelation.

“ . . . two . . .”

It was so glaringly obvious. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

“ . . . three.”

People pulling those tartan shopping trolleys often stop me in the street and say, “I bet you’ve seen some sights in your time,” and I have to admit that the ambulance game does on occasion provide one with some rather unusual visual stimulation. There is, of course, the occasional corpse of a young child who has been dismembered and set on fire for esoteric theological purposes, and no shortage of old people with no clothes on wallowing in the contents of an overturned commode, and I recall once being granted the dubious privilege of witnessing a certain prominent member of the royal family crawling about blind drunk and stark naked on all fours, demanding to be serviced before vomiting prodigiously over the pristine brogues of a handsome young captain of the Clapham Cavalry, and though the rules of patient confidentiality sadly do not permit me to disclose the identity of this noble aristocrat, I believe I can reveal without giving too much away that she has an older sister who is considered something of a big cheese in the hierarchies of both Church and State.

So, yes, I suppose I’ve seen some sights in my time but right now none is quite so fresh in my mind nor so satisfying to contemplate as that of the expression of self-obsessed indifference on Felicity Philpot’s face turning in a second to one of terrified disbelief as she watched the top of that chair tilt slowly forwards above her, holding a precarious balance at the point of the perpendicular for several nail-biting seconds as her eyes widened and her mouth opened as though to scream.

And then she was gone, swept away by an avalanche of filthy red blankets and finally coming to rest buried beneath a quarter of a ton of pulsating blubber beside the grandfather clock in the hall.

I sat on the top stair waiting for the dust to settle and that irritating moaning sound to stop, surveying the wreckage below with the dispassionate eye of the dedicated healthcare professional, reflecting upon the frail fragility of human anatomy and pondering the seemingly random nature of tradegy until all was still and silent save for the slow and hypnotic tock . . . tock . . . tock of the pendulum marking time as the daylight gradually faded and the darkness settled around me like a shroud.

Women's Problems

2007-02-24T05:32:00.000-08:00

The low sun should have been waiting to greet me as I emerged from the underground railway on to the Mafeking Road, but instead of stepping into the crisp light of an early spring morning I appeared to have blundered haplessly into the third act of Armageddon in full swing and I became immediately engulfed by a thick cloud which stung my eyes and clogged my airways causing me to splutter and choke and stumble blindly around. Frenzied hordes of commuters stampeded chaotically and everywhere was panic and confusion to a soundtrack of wailing sirens and screams of terror. I paused to rub my eyes and collect my thoughts, trying to make sense of all this unseemly commotion when a gust of wind parted the billowing dust for a few moments allowing me to see in the distance that where the ambulance headquarters building had stood yesterday there was now the tail section of an enormous aeroplane protruding from a huge pile of smoking rubble and it brought to mind the image of the handle of a garden fork sticking from a heap of steaming dung on a suburban allotment. And then a shop alarm began ringing at an unbearable volume.

Ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling . . .

I woke with a smile but the cock was crowing and the clock was clanging as the clarion call of the factory bell plucked me from the warmth of Night’s embrace to endure once more the unspeakable inconvenience of having to work for a living. I walked into the ambulance station on that fateful morning and reported to Station Officer Nobby Harris, unaware that I would soon be experiencing perhaps the most excruciatingly poignant moment of my life.

“It’s flippin’ happened, son. They’re flippin’ here,” grunted a singularly bad tempered and unusually foul mouthed Nobby, sitting at his desk and holding aloft a single sheet of paper as though it were a crucial piece of evidence in the never ending case of Harris versus Life in General and bore sole responsibility for this rare display of deep and genuine disgruntlement.

“One’s reported sick with flippin’ . . .” He paused, leaning forward to squint through his thick lenses at the memorandum from headquarters, as if by quoting the words verbatim he could dissociate himself from them and thus from the whole sordid business. But of course even in the typed words of some faceless bureaucrat poor Nobby couldn’t bring himself to speak of such matters.

“Flippin’ women's problems.” He muttered the euphemism like a guilty blasphemy, avoiding my eye, his face contorted with distaste while I dutifully rearranged my own features into a universal gesture of male solidarity and shrugged in sympathy.

“Another one,” he continued, screwing up his face as though in pain and pursing his lips with repugnance, “has declared herself . . you know . . . in the family way.” He squirmed with discomfiture — “flippin’ light duties with immediate effect” — then tutted with profound exasperation, a man so helplessly at odds with the utter madness all around him.

"The rest of them,” his voice was now cracking and barely audible, his lower lip quivering. “The rest are in the flippin’ mess—” He choked on the word, unable to continue, as though quite incapable of accepting the proposition that not only were there females in the messroom of the Clapham ambulance station but female employees. His watery eyes stared sightlessly into an abyss of bewilderment and injustice. He could more easily have come to terms with a flat Earth or the risible notion that as many as five percent of ambulance journeys are actually necessary. Wailing with wretched despair he turned away from me, flapping a hand in a vague gesture of dismissal before slumping forward and burying his head in his hands, his whole body racked by sobs, his tears falling on to the document before him, smudging and obliterating the text with ominous symbolism.

I simply didn't know where to put myself and stood rooted to the spot for several minutes looking helplessly about, completely paralysed by embarrassment at this pitiful display of emotion.

Poor Nobby. I felt a tremendous affection for him, a man from a long-forgotten epoch trying in vain to make sense of events way beyond his terms of reference, struggling just to keep his head above the surface of life, and before I realised what was happening the dark forces of compassion had gathered in sinister conspiracy within me and I felt myself being overcome by an urge to lay a firm hand upon his shoulder and comfort him with a gentle but not unmanly squeeze of reassurance. Somehow, plumbing fathomless depths and drawing on hitherto unexplored reserves of iron resolve, I managed to fight it off and slipped away quickly before I found myself giving him a bit of a cuddle and made my way along the corridor to the messroom.

It was like escaping from the skewed insanity of a Manuel MacNab painting only to pass through a revolving door to find oneself trapped in another even more disturbing depiction of the depraved excesses of the human subconscious, and like the finest examples of the great man’s work the longer I looked at the scene before me the more impossibly incomprehensible it became, until I began to lose my ability to apply a process of rational analysis to the evidence presented by my own senses and in common with many a victim of MacNab’s art I became aware of a sensation of accelerating rapidly downwards, plummeting like a stone into a bottomless pit of fear and uncertainty.

Sitting around in stupefied fascination were the familiar men of the Clapham Ambulance and kneeling at the table engaged in a bout of arm-wrestling with Stan Tablets was a woman I’d never seen before.

And Stan was sweating. His face was purple and quivered with effort, a massive vein throbbed at his temple, his mouth twisted in grotesque contortions as the terror of imminent humiliation shone from his eyes like a desperate plea for clemency and his whole body strained and shook as though his very life were at stake. Like something not quite human that lives in a cave by the sea, he let out a blood-curdling howl of anguish as his knuckles smashed against the wood and a collective gasp of horrified incredulity from the assembled ambulancemen seemed to suck the very air from the room and suddenly my head was spinning and the light was fading and I found myself struggling for breath and had to grasp the back of a chair to prevent myself from falling. And in my semi-conscious state of hypoxic perplexity I could have sworn I heard a baby crying.

I looked over to see something I could not recall having witnessed before in the messroom of the Clapham ambulance station and that was a young woman unbuttoning her uniform shirt and lifting a squawking infant to her bare breast, the nipple of which, with a look of glazed contentment in its eyes, it proceeded to suck greedily. Beside her a plump, dark-haired woman rocked gently backwards and forwards in an armchair clutching a red hot water bottle to her lower abdomen and emitting a loud whimpering sound.

There was a woman with bleached hair and big gold earrings wearing yellow rubber gloves and an apron over her uniform, furiously polishing the kettle with a cloth and declaring aloud as if to enlist support, “I’m not doing nights. I told ‘em. I got kids. I’m not doing nights. I told ‘em. I got kids." And alone in a corner sat a thin, nervous-looking creature with thick blue veins on the backs of her hands and long, dirty fingernails with which she was tearing great clumps from her unkempt grey hair, weeping uncontrollably and between sobs shrieking the word ‘bastard’ over and over again.

Before anyone noticed my presence, I slipped out of the messroom and made my way back along the corridor to Nobby’s office. I entered quietly without knocking and walked towards him. He heard my approach and turned, his face streaked with tears, his eyes red from weeping. He stood shakily and then collapsed against me and I closed my eyes and inhaled the comforting, familiar aroma of Old Holborn and shoe polish as we clung to each other like a pair of shipwrecked sailors hanging on to a flimsy, disintegrating raft adrift on a boundless and hostile ocean, the storm clouds gathering and night rapidly falling with only an ever-diminishing ration of naїve optimism to sustain us through the long and arduous time of darkness ahead.

Equal Opportunities

2007-01-26T00:29:00.000-08:00

Illness and injury, death and disaster, I honestly thought I’d seen it all and that life had little left with which to surprise me and then I gazed one evening through a window of the Clapham College from the upper deck of an omnibus and saw Stan Tablets standing in a classroom amidst a throng of grey-haired matrons, grinning inanely and clutching in the manner of an ape wielding a fountain pen a delicately fluted pink brugmansia and being schooled in the art of flower arranging. And now this.

Sometimes words fail me.

Indeed, I was laid up for several weeks with a severe bout of acute inarticulacy and even now I hardly know where to begin. However, I take very seriously my duties as an observer and chronicler of the contemporary ambulance scene and with what vocabulary I am able to muster I shall endeavour to recount this latest momentous episode that it might serve as a warning to subsequent generations, though I am not unaware that when it comes to absorbing wisdom from the lessons of history, the track record of mankind is not one to which any self-respecting species would be likely to aspire.

Looking back I suppose it all came to a head a month or so ago during the darkest depths of that bleak period of national despondency sometimes referred to as the festive season, when excess and depravity shroud the sane with despair and only the prospect of human extinction offers hope of salvation.

Station Officer Nobby Harris was in the grip of a seemingly permanent apoplectic seizure, had been unable to move or speak for several days and was expected to explode at any moment. Divisional Superintendent Ron Stretcher, quivering and incandescent, was unavailable for comment and not to be approached under any circumstances without the support of the tactical firearms unit. Chairman of the board Lord Hardwood was reportedly huffing and puffing, spitting and spluttering as he stalked the executive corridor up at headquarters threatening to renounce his peerage and retire from public life to pursue a career in cable television, while Knight Commander of Blankets David Bradfield, far beyond rational thought, sat at his desk staring into infinity down the barrel of a loaded revolver, benzodiazepines in one hand, a bottle of Glenmorangie in the other.

Nor were the staunch and steadfast men of the Clapham Ambulance their usual cheery selves. There was no playground atmosphere in the messroom that day and none of the childish leg-pulling accompanied by fits of raucous laughter, nor the relentless and jocular barrage of hurtful personal abuse which has always been such an integral part of ambulance life. No underpants fluttered from the flagpole and no soiled dressing described a lazy arc through the air prior to landing with hilarious consequences upon the nose of a post-prandial snorer, and had a gaggle of hapless tourists wandered innocently through the gates just then and peered curiously through the window, perhaps quite correctly believing themselves to have stumbled upon a building of great historical significance, they might understandably have concluded that they were witnessing an impromptu assembly of men with an axe to grind. But that would have been to understate the dimensions of our grievance. We were ablaze with indignation, impassioned and incensed; furious, inflamed and fuming with rage and resentment.

There were no two ways about it. The men of the Clapham Ambulance were very cross indeed.

The stench of mutiny and rebellion hung heavily upon the air and the imminence of foul language loomed larger by the minute. The tension was palpable, the belligerence malignant, and as voices rose in volume and pitch the mood changed to one of unprecedented ugliness and the subject of conversation turned ominously from impotent protest to direct action; to responsibility and accountability; to half-inch hemp and the gallows tree.

And as our Moscow-trained shop steward Bob Slogan whipped us skilfully into a frenzy of class hatred, we were ready and eager to take to the streets and march as one across the river and upon the faceless grey edifice which houses the Ministry of Public Health, there to mete out our own brand of revolutionary justice to those responsible for this outrageous assault upon our hallowed way of life.

Make no mistake. Our blood was up and the gloves were off.

But the shift was almost over and no ambulanceman likes to be late knocking off, so we just sort of dispersed into the night and went home.

Subscribers to Hansard and keen students of current affairs will by now have deduced that the cause of this bitter unrest, which has shaken our beloved service to the very core of its ancient foundations, was the announcement in Parliament earlier in the week by the Right Honourable Oliver Axminster, QC, MP, Secretary of State for Personal Hygiene, that “henceforth budgetary disbursements to all Public Health Service Trusts . . . including ambulance services (author’s italics) . . . will be dependent upon the achievement of certain performance targets with regard to the recruitment and retention of female staff in roles traditionally undertaken by men”.

It took some days to register, being somewhat difficult at first to grasp, and we struggled through many a long night to make sense of it, wondering if maybe it had been some kind of terrible collective misunderstanding or mass hallucination, but we came in time to appreciate that the minister’s words left no margin for ambiguity and that, unthinkable though it may hitherto have been, the meaning was quite clear, namely that we would soon have women working alongside us on the ambulances.

But this was impossible to comprehend.

Some of us tried to imagine the unimaginable, to conceive of the inconceivable. But of course we couldn’t. It was hopeless. How could we? The human mind quite simply is not equipped for the task.

From the exalted majesty of Lord Hardwood down to poor lowly Hud Edgerton not one of us harboured the slightest illusion that this policy was anything but a sure-fire dead cert guaranteed recipe for total disaster and would surely spell the beginning of the end not only for the Clapham Ambulance but also for the entire structure and fabric of western civilization.

What’ll be next? we scoffed rhetorically with the mirthless laughter of the incredulous. Lady policemen?

But as the sound of that hollow laughter echoed and died upon the air, a curious stillness descended upon the messroom of the Clapham ambulance station as each man found himself suddenly lost in his own personal void of loneliness having to confront the terror screaming silently within him. I watched feeling numb and strangely detached as they stared blankly at nothing, their lips twitching involuntarily in silent prayer, their eyes fearful and uncomprehending like those of a captured soldier held by a cruel and vengeful foreign enemy, who has witnessed sights too ghastly to contemplate and whose consciousness in anticipation of his own terrible fate has simply closed down in a last desperate act of self preservation. There are times when a man can neither fight nor flee, when he must learn to surrender to the inevitable and give himself up to the implacable might which comprises both the immovable object and the irresistible force that is the Ministry of Public Health.

And so it was that we surfaced gradually from this private hell, one by one, each in his own way and in his own time, into the pale dawn of a new era, and as so often in times of trouble and travail it was the gentle wisdom of Albert Harness that eased our passage through the transition and helped us come to terms with this new and alien reality. Neither pleasure nor torment, he began, agony nor ecstacy, ever satisfies its own anticipation, for the ship of Life tends to steer a middle course between the sandy coast and the stormy depths — and here he launched into a lengthy and frankly rather dull monologue employing a plethora of convoluted and contrived nautical analogies to illustrate the simple point that things are rarely as good or as bad as you expect them to be.

True, they can’t lift for toffee. But then again they can probably make a passable cup of tea. Obviously they won't be allowed to drive the ambulances, but then who would read the map? It makes no sense. No, but they could give the messroom a good spring clean now and then. And wash the blankets. And, well, there are probably lots of other things besides if one could just get one's mind right and clear one's head enough to think straight.

Maybe it won’t be so bad after all. Maybe they won't forever be off work having babies. Or maybe they will. Yes. Maybe it's for the best. Why not? Maybe things are looking up. Who knows? Be positive, that's the thing. Do you know, I've a feeling this could be Tim's year.

Clapham Jack

2007-01-23T04:54:00.000-08:00

It’s unclear precisely what we were expected to do when we got there, but Albert and I were sent recently to the rear of Solomon’s where we were introduced by two uniformed officers of the Clapham constabulary to one Colleen Shenanigan, an emergency nurse practitioner from the A&E department of St. Bernard’s hospital, and upon seeing her familiar face in this unfamiliar context, we were struck immediately by one or two glaring discrepancies and began to see her in a whole new light. For a start she was stark naked and her usually keen and vivacious blue eyes bespoke a distinctly uncharacteristic lack of cognitive awareness. Also, and perhaps even more remarkable, her vital organs no longer resided as is customary in the snug cavities of thorax and abdomen, but lay strewn about her on the ground like waste thrown carelessly from a bucket by a butcher’s apprentice.

It was a cold and murky night and a sinister vapour rose from the scattered entrails and hovered eerily upon the still air, and for one ghastly moment I thought I saw a section of large intestine pulsating with life, but as I stared transfixed at the slithery warm offal I realised with an almighty shudder of relief that it was merely a trick of the light, the shadows lending an impression of movement, and that an ambulance journey to A&E would not be the appropriate care pathway for the patient on this occasion.

It has become over the years a generally accepted tenet of modern lore, for she is seldom reluctant to remind us, that the average nurse’s take-home pay is barely sufficient to keep herself clothed and fed, and that items of wanton frivolity such as soap and shoes can be bought and paid for only by the undertaking of some form of additional labour in her spare time, and nowadays there is available to a young woman of sound mind and healthy body a fairly broad spectrum of auxillary occupations from which to choose, depending upon the quality and quantity of certain factors such as personal preference, moral character, general demeanour, vital statistics and so on.

The homely and unimaginative variety of the breed typically will content herself with working additional shifts in the safe familiarity of the hospital ward, from where she may look on with helpless resignation as the years slip rapidly by towards the menopausal bitterness of childless spinsterhood, whereas that rare specimen of adventurous disposition and athletic construction will invariably be found earning her little bit of extra cash sliding up and down a shiny pole and gyrating in a lively and rhythmic fashion upon a table in a gentlemen’s club, clad in nothing but a couple of pieces of string knotted artfully in the general vicinity of the hips.

Your average St. Bernard’s nurse, however, is subject to neither the ebb nor flow of the tide of popular opinion and traditionally has always made ends meet either by stealing prescription medications from the drugs cabinet and selling them on the streets or, more usually, through the simple and timeless expedient of prostitution.

In favour of the original public service one can argue that the hours are flexible, the wages negotiable and mercifully exempt from the onerous deductions of income tax and national insurance contributions, and as a general rule of thumb the lifestyle offers sociability and variety while providing ample opportunity for fresh air and exercise, and for a woman with a natural aptitude for the work it can be a most rewarding and enjoyable occupation.

Unfortunately few things in this life are perfect and set against these undoubtedly convincing recommendations one must of course take into account certain unavoidable occupational hazards. As well as the obvious risks of venereal disease, drug addiction and robbery with violence, and without wishing to deter any enterprising young lady from supplementing her income in such a worthy and necessary field of endeavour, it must never be entirely forgotten that the possibility exists of that chance encounter with one of those peculiar gentlemen who are privy to a special relationship with the creator of the universe, and who are commanded by Him in no uncertain terms by means of a private voice within the cranium to go out on to the streets without delay and cleanse them of the godless whores of Babylon.

Presented with the sight of a close colleague who has encountered the recent misfortune of being strangled then disembowelled — or worse, vice versa — and dumped like an old refrigerator on a piece of waste ground behind a candle factory, the thoughts of any sensitive healthcare professional will be for the wretched victim’s family and her regular customers, whose grief and disappointment respectively will no doubt be considerable, but of course the seasoned ambulanceman prefers to disregard such mawkish sentimentality in favour of indulging in a bit of banter with the boys in blue, exchanging humorous remarks on the topics of strangulation, evisceration and the pitfalls of prostitution in order to establish his credentials as a hardened man of the world, his resilience to horror having been tempered in the white heat of grisly experience, and who will be found neither vomiting behind a bush nor teetering on the brink of hysteria when faced with the freshly gutted corpse of someone he likes and respects and has known on several occasions.

After half an hour or so, having exhausted our extensive repertoire of hilarious anecdotes on the subject of misogynistic mutilation, and with little to offer by way of medical assistance, we took our leave of Clapham’s finest and set off cheerfully into the night because life, as has been well documented elsewhere, goes on, and as we drove away from that scene of uncommon carnage we found ourselves becoming suffused gradually with a rare and tremendous excitement which flowed warmly through artery and vein, invigorating and replenishing each and every grateful cell, then outwards and beyond like a rampant contagion it spread when we arrived at the ambulance station and broke the news that Clapham Jack apparently had come out of retirement and was once again up to his old tricks on our patch, and it was exactly the sort of thing to engender some interest, stir us from lethargy and raise our flagging spirits from the seasonal despondency afflicting each and every one of us.

Students of local history and aficionados of the genre will recall that ‘Clapham Jack’ was the rather predictable soubriquet bestowed by the lower echelons of the printed media upon the anonymous rascal who perpetrated his particular brand of mischief a few years back, and whose exploits were followed with particular interest by the men of the Clapham Ambulance on account of all his victims having been nurses from St. Bernard’s hospital who also pursued part-time careers in the world’s oldest profession, and all of whom were consequently very well acquainted with most of the local ambulancemen in one capacity or another.

At the end of the shift, beset by an almost unbearable tension which threatened to rend his mind asunder, he buttoned his overcoat against the cold and struck out on foot across the common through an ever thickening mist towards the red-light district in the Old Town. Softly, and perhaps unconsciously, he hummed a snatch of Schubert as he walked quickly and confidently along the familiar path, looking neither right nor left, his Old Testament features ploughing a relentless furrow through the fog, his eyes bright and purposeful, moving onward with a determined and single-minded haste, for the hour was getting late and there was much work yet to be done.

He reached the corner of Eddowes Lane and turned smartly into the cobbled alleyway which runs between the high brick wall of Hegel’s handbag factory and the railings of Wandle's brewery, and through the mist he discerned the form of a bare-legged young jezebel in a tiny skirt standing provocatively in the yellow haze of a street light, her hands on her hips, her smooth belly immodestly exposed, her ample chest thrust sinfully forward, and as he approached he recognised her as Molly McMannequin, a staff nurse from Whippet Ward, and his throat became dry and he felt his mouth tighten involuntarily, his fists clenching and unclenching in his pockets as he strode towards her.

She heard his footsteps and turned, inhaling the familiar and distinctive aroma of his tobacco as their eyes met across the misty silence; but there was something different about him today. Something she — it was as though he looked at her with someone else's eyes, the eyes of a stranger, burning and biblical, the eyes of fanaticism, of madness. She tried to force her lips into a smile of appeasement but she knew it was twisted and false. Something was terribly, terribly wrong here and she had a premonition of startling clarity that something very, very bad was about to happen.

She looked down at his hands and tried to run but her legs refused to move. She opened her mouth to scream too late as she felt something go around her neck, tightening, tightening, so tight she felt her eyes would burst, and as the world faded to darkness her last thought was that it was the same necktie he had proudly shown her on the ward only last week when it had been awarded to him by a grateful employer for thirty years' loyal service, and which bore embroidered upon it the royal crest of the Clapham Ambulance.

Friends Reunited

2006-12-03T07:51:00.001-08:00

The lift being out of service, Albert and I returned the heavy bags of equipment to the ambulance and cursing softly trudged up to the eighth floor of Buprenorphine House where we knocked on a door glazed not in the traditional manner but with a combination of rough, unpainted plywood and flimsy hardboard held in place with gaffer tape. After a minute or two it was opened by an emaciated old man with vacant yellow eyes and the complexion of a corpse who gasped desperately for breath with every movement and ushered us inside by means of a silent and economical facial gesture. We followed his frail, limping form slowly along a narrow passageway to a small sitting room where he collapsed into a greasy armchair, took a swig of beer from a can and proceeded to roll a cigarette with trembling fingers stained the colour of autumn leaves.

His face, which looked like nothing so much as yellow parchment stretched over a skull, was curiously familiar and as we waited for him to draw sufficient oxygen from the ambient fug to enable him to speak, I began to search my memory for clues to his identity and I found my thoughts wandering pleasantly along a cool, leafy lane to the gates of my old school and it occurred to me that perhaps he was one of my former teachers now become quite unrecognisable through a long and dedicated regime of substance abuse and physical neglect and the variety of chronic illnesses accompanying such an otherwise enviable lifestyle.

In an ideal world, allowing such a place contained people at all, I imagine individual human lives might follow a process of continuous physical, mental and emotional progression culminating in an absolute zenith of fulfillment a moment or two before death, whereas in reality our personal development treads a rather more haphazard path and thus are we often condemned to spend the greater part of our existence experiencing not the joys of steady improvement but an increasingly miserable state of terminal decline, comforted only by the knowledge that nothing, however disagreeable, can last forever.

I would estimate that I attained the optimum level of my own capabilities and found greatest spiritual satisfaction at around the age of ten, shortly before I was wrenched from the womb-like sanctuary of St. Alan’s primary school, where I had long enjoyed a position of status and respect as both a senior lunch monitor and the undisputed fifty yards hurdles champion, and thrust without the right of appeal into the hostile world of secondary education, since when my achievements have been exclusively of the negative variety, my prospects plummeting with the passing of time and the acceleration of gravity until finally hitting bedrock the day I joined the ambulance service.

During my time in the barbarous jungle that was the Clapham Grammar School I remember there was one boy who stood apart from the others like a thoroughbred hunter in a field of donkeys and I’ve often wondered what became of him. To the universal chagrin of his peers he was blessed with a classically athletic physique and the kind of dark, menacing good looks that will never go out of style, and he carried about him a natural air of swaggering arrogance combined with a romantic penchant for self-destruction that led astray many a respectable daughter of the parish and famously inspired the head girl of St. Margaret’s to develop a taste for Smirnoff and Marlboro and adopt a policy of swearing prodigiously without provocation at the pale and bemused Sisters of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.

How we loved and hated him!

His very name — Rod Woodcock — was imbued in our young minds with the sniggering promise of insatiable virility and the most fanciful rumours concerning his all-conquering exploits abounded and spread swiftly throughout the school like a kind of pandemic disease fuelled by the staunch reverence and unfettered imagination of adolescence.

In those far off days of blissful ingenuousness it was held as an article of our unwavering faith in all things Woodcock that he had sired at least a couple of heirs to his impressive genetic legacy and had not only been with Miss Fisher, the impossibly attractive and hopelessly unattainable English teacher, but also had put the redoubtable Colonel Cathcart in hospital following an altercation in the car park of the Royal Barnacle regarding the proprietary rights to the favours of the deputy headmaster’s wife. And then, according to local legend, as the result of his cruelly brusque termination of their brief liaison, poor Mrs. Cathcart had suffered some sort of nervous collapse and in a maelstrom of menopausal madness and despair had abandoned her husband of twenty-odd years and their four children and left Clapham to work in an orphanage somewhere north of the river, never to be seen or heard from again.

Probably very little of it was true, of course, but the fact that these tales were accorded undisputed credence at the time is an authentic testament to the esteem in which Woodcock was held and certainly the speechless awe with which he was regarded in the changing rooms after sports practice could not have been feigned. Even Jock McGruff, the abrasive former special forces PT instructor whose misfortune it was to be saddled with the task of instructing us in the finer points of rugby union, seemed strangely subdued in Woodcock’s presence and was reported by several boys actually to have given voice to an involuntary whimper upon being confronted unexpectedly by our hero emerging stark naked from a shower stall in a state of bestial tumescence.

At fifteen he had it all, and then one day the police turned up at the school and took him away in handcuffs, thus enshrining his notoriety once and for all, and his name and his legend passed into the annals of Clapham folklore to undergo the due process of being gradually forgotten over the years, as all of us are destined to be notwithstanding the extent of our celebrity nor the magnificence of our earthly achievements.

I was distracted from this nostalgic reverie by a cheerfully tuneful humming sound emanating from the direction of Albert Harness who drew my attention with a nod to the wizened old codger sitting in the chair before us. He had slumped backwards and was no longer breathing, his face pointing towards the ceiling, his mouth hanging stupidly agape. I looked at Albert and we shrugged simultaneously, sharing one of those guilty moments well known to all ambulancemen.

By rights, of course, we should have commenced CPR immediately but all our life-saving equipment was far, far away eight floors below in the car park and between us we had not so much as a pair of scissors or a pen torch; and anyway what would have been the point? He had been barely alive when he let us in and no amount of medical intervention was going to bring him back to life now. He was dead and that was that.

Our first priority now was to decide how best to approach the all-important subject of the paperwork. Fortunately, being blessed with a modicum of foresight, I had about my person a blank patient report form which saved me from having to endure the unthinkable inconvenience of fetching one from the truck. But what to write on it, that was the thing.

In a moment of unthinking foolishness we considered trying to pass it off as a collapse behind locked doors, before realising that that would have necessitated walking down to the vehicle to contact CAC, then humping all our gear up sixteen flights of stairs to await the arrival of the police. A daft notion unworthy of men of our calibre.

No doubt if Stan Tablets had been present he simply would have picked up the corpse, carried it out the front door and thrown it off the balcony, but we were by nature disposed towards adopting a more subtle approach to the problem and inclined to seeking a resolution of the situation offering fewer prospects of a stern interview with the divisional superintendent and a possible written warning.

And then Albert, always the deepest of thinkers, came up with the idea of getting the patient to sign the declaration on the form declining aid and refusing to be taken to hospital. Brilliant. All we needed was a signature to copy and we could be on our way to get some dinner. We began the search for a suitable sample and that nagging feeling returned.

“I’m sure I know him from somewhere,” I said to Albert who was leafing through some documents he’d taken from a drawer. “I think he might have been one of my teachers.” I stared at the stick-thin yellow corpse in the armchair, thoughtfully stroking my chin, my brow furrowed with the effort of frustrated recollection.

“I rather doubt it, old son,” replied Albert, examining what looked like a birth certificate. “According to this he's the same age as you.” I was incredulous. He looked at least twenty-five years my senior.

“His name was Roderick David Woodcock. Ring any bells?”

A Swift One

2006-11-23T03:16:00.000-08:00

I don’t know about you but at the end of a gruelling day spent indulging the preposterous whims of some of the smelliest people known to medical science, my policy is to disinfect in its entirety the exterior of my mortal being using an industrial solution of carbolic acid and a good stiff brush before strolling down the road to forget the unfairness of Life’s bitter incongruity over a glass or two of Wandle's Most Peculiar, after which I generally return home in a state of stupefied beatitude ready to enjoy a few hours’ worth of dreamless oblivion before the alarm clock summons me to gird the loins once more prior to re-entering the vile netherworld that is the dominion of the modern healthcare professional.

Like any conscientious ambulanceman burdened by a sensitive disposition, I’m quite certain I would have been rendered hopelessly insane long ago were it not for the blessed sanctuary of the public house and the spiritually curative properties of strong drink taken in the company of an agreeable congregation.

In fact before I was able even to walk I found myself fascinated by the allure of that dimly-lit house on the corner, deliciously redolent of beer and fags, the bewitching clinking of glasses and the hubbub of adult conversation puntuated by coarse, ribald laughter emanating from within. I lay there most evenings in the second-hand perambulator outside the door of the saloon bar listening intently and inhaling deeply as my mind filled to bursting with a host of colourful characters performing in the multitude of dramas unfolding in my imagination, and I ached all the while with a solitary yearning to grow up and become an actor on that mysterious, forbidden stage; and now, even when on duty — especially when on duty — I find it almost impossible to pass those doors without popping in for a swift one.

Which is precisely the task Albert and I were engaged upon recently when we were approached at the bar by a couple of young lads sporting the type of facial hair that denotes strict teetotalism and having about the eyes that singularly fervent and utterly humourless gleam which generally characterises the single-minded religious fanatic for whom martyrdom is but the price of a one-way ticket to a life of eternal shenanigans with six dozen virgins in paradise, and to that admittedly desirable end the vanquishing of his faith’s godless enemies is understandably the only legitimate earthly ambition to pursue.

So, rather hurriedly making our peace with the Big Feller, and having reconciled ourselves to having our throats ritualistically slit where we stood, we were pleasantly surprised when they asked us instead with strangely formal politeness and in all seriousness if we might be interested in selling them our ambulance.

Now I believe it’s fairly common knowledge that over the years a lot of merchandise has changed hands inside the Princess Margaret, but the ambulanceman unfortunately is limited in his role as a purveyor of quality goods by the meagre and virtually unmarketable nature of the products associated with his chosen profession. True, he might sell a few boxes of surgical gloves to a mechanic with an aversion to grease, and large rolls of blue paper towel have always been popular in the homes of the undiscerning; he might even find a good home on occasion for a cylinder or two of laughing gas, but in the current economic climate there really isn’t a great demand among the general public for such commodities as the oropharyngeal airway or the triangular bandage. On a very lucky day indeed one might find a cash buyer for a low-mileage defibrillator or a good-as-new pulse oximeter, and I distinctly remember Bob Slogan some years ago selling half a dozen Rumbold chairs to a sculptor of his acquaintance, but these are very rare occurrences and certainly cannot be relied upon to provide a regular supplement to the ambulanceman’s paltry wage.

Instead one is obliged to look on, suppressing furious envy, as Percy Stamp does a roaring trade in girocheques and pension books and Sid Skinner shifts half a hundredweight of lamb cutlets before lunchtime, while the poor pathetic health service chump hovers on the sidelines hoping to offload a handful of blanket pins and a box of No. 2 dressings for the price of his next pint.

So when an apparently genuine interest was expressed in exchanging some real money there and then for our beloved old truck, well, we rather forgot our dignity and almost snatched their hands off. Before you could say ‘oculocephalygoric reflex’, we’d removed our personal possessions from the cab, handed over the keys, pocketed the cash, bestowed upon them our very best wishes for their new venture, and ordered a celebratory round of drinks.

Then Albert gave me one of his sly winks before wandering off to the call box and telephoning the police to report the theft of an ambulance.

I really can’t even begin to conceive of the cost to the taxpayer of such an operation but according to Inspector Bent, whose penchant for the recreational syringe has kept him a loyal and valued customer for many a long year, our vehicle was tracked to a shed in Hounslow not by coppers with bloodhounds but by a crack team of specialist technicians utilising a satellite orbiting the Earth, and was in the process of being filled with a curious mixture of products from the seemingly disparate worlds of agriculture and hairdressing when several policemen in overalls burst in shouting and, fortunately for Albert and me, shot dead all those present before anyone had a chance to incriminate us.

It seems after all that those two young scallywags had no intention whatsoever of starting up their own private ambulance firm in competition with the Public Health Service. Not a bit of it. No, it was discovered from documents found in their possession that their plan all along had been to drive the van into the basement car park beneath Ambulance Headquarters and blow the whole building to kingdom come.

Albert dismisses it as just another of Nature’s innumerable little ways of maintaining a state of harmonious equilibrium, but I find it rather unsettling that an overwhelming sense of relief so often is quite indistinguishable from one of crushing disappointment.

Ride-Out

2006-11-09T09:45:00.000-08:00

Like the sacrificial pawn that bursts dramatically into a public house full of Royal Marines smugly proclaiming, ‘Death to the kuffar!’ in a very loud voice, but whose improvised explosive device, so lovingly and meticulously constructed in his lonely bedsit the night before, despite repeated, clearly visible and increasingly desperate attempts, fails to detonate, I was overcome by what I can only describe as a sinking feeling.

An experience equally disagreeable to that of being suspended in fearful anticipation of being stomped imminently to a bloody pulp beneath two dozen angry hobnailed boots is coming into work at twenty minutes to seven on a dreary winter’s morning to discover that one has been scheduled without prior notice to spend the entire shift with neither one’s regular crewmate nor some tolerable alternative, but in the company of Barry Crack, the recently appointed team leader, one of whose official and solemn duties it is to observe, assess and submit a written report on the length, depth and breadth of one's clinical knowledge and skills, identify any notable areas of deficiency and formulate a programme of remedial training to be undertaken prior to re-assessment in a month’s time.

This gratuitous torment is known in Ambulanceland as a ride-out and is a far cry from the gentle Sunday outing of the same name that involves nothing more arduous than pootling around country lanes on a motorcycle accompanied by your local Road Rats.

In theory it takes place twice a year, but the practical reality is that the ride-out is thankfully a much neglected facet of ambulance life and indeed this was to be only my second experience of the ordeal, the first having been endured a year or so after passing out of the training school a thousand lifetimes ago, since when I had managed successfully without noticeable effort to erase from my memory virtually every last vestige of the ambulance stuff which had been so thoroughly drummed into my impressionable young mind back then; and as I stared mournfully at the gleaming new pip sitting proudly on each of Crack’s narrow shoulders, I had to face the simple truth that my incomprehension of all things medical lay somewhere about midway between the profound and the divine.

I looked around the messroom at the sniggering faces behind the diminutive team leader’s back and a wave of something not unlike panic swept over me as the full implications of my predicament became clear. I felt my head swimming and I had to grasp the back of a chair to support myself, my thoughts swirling chaotically as I struggled desperately to find a way out of this purgatory.

For a brief moment I actually gave serious consideration to the time-honoured ruse of simply throwing myself to the floor and feigning some form of vasovagal attack or an episode of autonomic dysfunction or something, but I was restricted by my total ignorance of the symptoms of such conditions, and the ridicule to which I would be subjected when the true nature of my collapse became known was unthinkable.

So, bearing in mind the inherently corrupt nature of all ambulance managers, I turned my attention to wondering if team leader Crack might be amenable to a little financial incentive to ensure the submission of a favourable report on my clinical management, praising the judicious application of my emergency medical skills, finely honed by extensive practical experience and a broad theoretical knowledge of anatomy, physiology, pharmacology and those electro-whatsit things, but a glance at his face revealed only the deep-rooted zeal of the healthcare fundamentalist, unbesmirched by humour or compromise, and I replaced my wallet in my back pocket.

My thoughts moved on from bribery and I was examining the possibilities of blackmail when the phone rang, and with the coarse, mocking laughter of the messroom ringing in my ears, Barry Crack and I duly set off on our first job of the day, to a forty-two-year-old male with a suspected acute aortic aneurysm.

‘Acute’ was easy enough — I’d studied Euclid as a schoolboy and knew it to be the converse of ‘obtuse’ — so I reasoned that what we were up against here must be an aortic aneurysm with an angle of less than ninety degrees, though what the aortic aneurysm itself might be, well, it could be anything. I had the vague notion that an aorta was in some way related to the ignition system of an internal combustion engine, but I was far from certain, and how this might apply to a forty-two-year-old male in need of an ambulance I really couldn’t imagine.

Aneurysm, aneurysm, what on earth was an aneurysm? How was it pronounced and what did it mean? I felt quite certain that I’d never encountered the word before and the more I repeated it the less familiar it became, until it was nothing more than a meaningless humming sound and I found myself chanting it aloud over and over again like a mantra. I looked at the word on the job sheet and began rearranging the letters as though it were an anagrammatical clue in the Telegraph crossword puzzle — Nurse May; emu yarns; any serum — but it didn’t seem to help much.

I looked over at Barry as if enlightenment might somehow present itself for examination upon his humourless features, some nuance of their configuration perhaps revealing at least a hint as to the seriousness of the thing, but his face was a grim mask of concentration and forward vision as he steered the ambulance with practised efficiency through the heavy morning traffic, the sirens wailing and howling without respite and echoing through my head with an unbearable urgency until finally I could take it no longer.

“Barry?” I began in a tone of earnest enquiry, the eager student addressing the wise tutor. “What’s an acute aortic aneurysm when it’s at home?”

He turned to me and stared for what seemed an age with an expression of stunned disbelief, a kind of horrified perplexity, as though I’d informed him in all seriousness and with irrefutable supporting evidence that ninety-five percent of ambulance journeys are a complete waste of time and therefore his whole life’s work was but a meaningless sham, his very raison d'etre nothing more than a senseless waste of public money. His lower jaw dropped and his mouth gaped in the manner of a particularly unintelligent goldfish as the ambulance ploughed into a queue of school children at a bus stop at about forty miles an hour.

Although it could hardly be viewed as a compelling argument nor accorded credence as a valid proposition in a serious theological debate, it’s just this kind of seemingly miraculous incident that can cause me to consider, despite my lifelong and deeply held beliefs, if maybe there is a god after all.

The Big Bang

2006-11-08T04:47:00.000-08:00

I know I’m hardly expressing an original idea when I say that it’s a belief system eminently suited to those committed to a life of physical and intellectual indolence, yet I do genuinely wonder sometimes if maybe each and every occurrence was determined by the immutable laws of Nature at the very moment of the birth of the universe, and that Mankind has been labouring for centuries under the misapprehension that he is able to exert some sort of influence over events.

I can raise this china cup to shoulder height, for instance, and hurl it with great force against the wall of the station yard, telling myself that I am exercising free will. But who can really say with any degree of certainty that it wasn’t always destined to collide with that unforgiving brickwork at that exact moment in time? Like the non-existence of a deity, the non-existence of anything, it’s an unverifiable proposition.

Actually it was Stan’s cup, his favourite of more than twelve years, a present from his dear old mum - God rest her soul - and his reaction when he discovers it smashed into tiny pieces is certainly predetermined, especially when he learns that his treasured vessel was sacrificed quite deliberately in the cause of mere idle philosophical speculation.

The Lost Weekend

2006-11-05T02:40:00.000-08:00

Whatever the quality or the quantity of our excess, however late the hour, however dry the well, eventually we awake to stumble once more into the daylight. Unless, that is, we are absolved as we sleep from the onerous responsibility of Life’s employ, and granted the merciful release of slipping away to mingle with the dust of our ancestors in the land of eternal oblivion. Or condemned by cruel Fate to live on behind the impenetrable veil, alone in the uncharted darkness of a persistent vegetative state, being possessed of all the humanity of a particularly intransigent cauliflower, and for all subjective purposes quite dead.

But I was alive, and I could assert the proposition, albeit silently, with a fair degree of confidence, because in my state of suspension I was becoming gradually aware of a slow drifting sensation in the direction of consciousness, though as the lids of my eyes hesitated to wrench themselves through the painful process of separation, I was as yet unsure of the exact nature of my geographical coordinates, the latitude and the longitude of my precise whereabouts thus far having neglected to present themselves for scrutiny.

Before commanding my reluctant eyes to conduct a visual reconnaissance of the surrounding terrain, or despatching my blind, tentative fingers to reach out and search for snippets of tactile intelligence, I addressed myself to the task of trying to remember the events of the previous day or two, and through the exercise of retracing my steps endeavouring to ascertain my current position. It was hopeless. I couldn't remember a thing. I gave up the struggle and instead allowed my thoughts to wander liberally in a haphazard, free-form sort of way to see where they might lead unprompted, hoping above all else that it would be directly back to the world of insentience, and that I would wake again at some unspecified future date free of the trepidation which gnawed away at my innards.

There came next a vague sensation, like a premonition of the past, a grain of something unforgotten, a stray, unwanted seed of ghastly remembrance germinating and sprouting and spreading its pale tentacles of horror and remorse slowly and unstoppably through the fog of helplessness.

And then gradually I came to in a pool of warm liquid and, if my recovering senses were not mistaken, beneath me lay the familiar rough surface of a railway station platform. My attempts to reveal an explanation of how I came to be there, or where indeed I was, led to the disconcerting discovery that I was also quite ignorant of certain fundamental items of personal information, those simple though important snippets of acquired knowledge generally considered essential to the smooth running of a normal life. Who I was, for example.

Someone was asking me a question, an easy one, possessing as it did only one possible answer, although I harboured the suspicion that it had been asked several times with ever-ascending volume before I became aware that it was indeed I to whom it was addressed. The answer was ‘Yes, I can hear you’, which morsel of intelligence I communicated to my as yet unseen interrogator by means of a vaguely dismissive one-handed arc described randomly through the air accompanied by a low grunt of irritation which, while not obviously one of actual affirmation, or even understanding, by its very existence denoted sufficient confirmation of at least some level of consciousness. The next question, however, had me stumped.

“Can you tell me your name?” said a male voice imbued with neither friendliness nor hostility, but rather with the confident detachment and bored neutrality of a professional and habitual rouser of public sleepers, the voice, almost certainly, of some species of uniformed busybody. A police constable, perhaps. Or, God forbid, an ambulanceman.

Baffled, I struggled to concentrate and find the words, surprised to find myself struck inexplicably inarticulate, and yet aware with a detached, icy clarity that I really ought to know this one.

“Can I tell you . . . ?” And then the correct answer came to me as though in a flash of inspiration.

“No, I can't.” I laughed quietly with a private, smug triumph and became aware of what felt like the steel toe of a size twelve prodding my lower spine quite firmly and the same voice exhorted me to come on now and sit up. Realising that further sleep was for the present no longer a viable proposition, I twisted round and hauled myself with considerable effort to a half-sitting position, whereupon my head began to spin most uncomfortably and I was gripped by a sudden and overwhelming feeling of nausea. I twisted a little further and vomited suddenly and quite prodigiously over the shiniest pair of black boots I’ve ever seen, after which I felt somewhat recovered, though not wholly inclined as yet to receive visitors.

I watched with a kind of numb fascination as the brown viscous mixture of regurgitated kebab, chips and Wandle's Most Peculiar flowed slowly down the leather uppers, seeping in at the tongue and lace holes and finding within, I imagined, the comforting absorption of official black sock. I tried to estimate how long it must have taken someone to get such a reflective sheen on that surface, but I was at a loss even to conceive of any method by which such a result might be attempted, let alone accomplished, or why anyone might feel the inclination to aspire to such an unnatural level of shininess in the first place. Curious to see what secrets of the soul the face of such an obsessive polisher might reveal, I glanced up.

It was, unsurprisingly, a policeman’s face of a deep red hue, curiously phosphorescent, and he was quivering from head to toe with that impotent rage born of humiliation and frustration, and was restrained, I felt certain, from kicking me to death there and then only by the presence of a couple of shadowy figures lurking silently nearby.

To conceal my amusement I turned away and laid back down, shaking with silent mirth, and became suddenly aware of the familiar smell of Bert Klaxon’s pipe accompanied by the unmistakable sound of Stan Tablets, as always enviably uninhibited by any sense of self-consciousness, bellowing with malicious laughter which boomed gloriously like a song of pure joy, an affirmation of Life itself, upon the cold, crisp Monday morning air, and in an instant everything became clear.

“Come on now, son,” said Bert in a measured tone agreeable to reason and sound judgement. “Better get a move on. You’re on duty in ten minutes.”

The Clapham Common By-Election

2006-08-12T15:24:00.000-07:00

In the messroom of the Clapham ambulance station the news of Sir Leslie’s death elicited on the whole a muted response characterised by the regulation courteous murmur of sorrowful regret accompanied by a respectful lowering of the eyes and that standard slow shaking of the head which manages somehow to encapsulate in the smallest of movements the bleak futility of human existence. A message of condolence was duly despatched to the family and a whip-round rashly mooted by one of the junior staff but deemed inappropriate under the circumstances and rejected swiftly by an overwhelming majority vote to unanimous sighs of relief. Stan Tablets and Bert Klaxon, who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were coerced by Ron Stretcher into representing the Brigade at the funeral in full dress uniform and afterwards, quite correctly assuming them to be liveried flunkies of some kind, were commandeered by the widow for the purpose of serving the post requiem sherry and cucumber sandwiches to the assembled mourners in the large drawing room of the Pitt-Tinny residence, and having performed these tasks with resigned good grace and commendably straight-faced solemnity, they returned gratefully to their normal duties as soon as they were able to slip away unnoticed, immediately putting the whole episode, together with the life and times of Sir Leslie, firmly behind them. In fact, of all the ambulancemen, only Albert Harness appeared to take any real interest in the unfortunate demise of our erstwhile chairman, which seemed to invest him with a queer sort of vigour and for several days he could be observed pacing about the station as though galvanised, a curiously messianic gleam in his eye and his hands clasped behind his back in the style of a man who spends an inordinate amount of time in restless cogitation.

And then one day he announced his intention to stand at the forthcoming Clapham Common by-election as an independent candidate for the late honourable member’s empty seat in parliament, and his ruminative peregrinations increased in both duration and intensity.

Of the six hundred and forty-six constituencies currently represented in the lower house, that of Clapham Common is by far the smallest, covering barely a square mile, and certainly the least populated, with an electoral roll of fewer than a hundred voters, each of whom is the proud inheritor and diligent upholder of the ancient tradition of returning at each election a parliamentary representative of established local stock without affiliation to any of the mainstream political parties. To an ambitious man with unimpeachable credentials and few scruples the Clapham Common seat presents itself from time to time as an ideal opportunity to get a foot on the ladder to power, privilege and a first-class ticket on the gravy train, and all that is required of him is a policy or two of sorts, a firm handshake, a memorable catchphrase, good teeth and a full head of hair. Plus, of course, sufficient dexterity in the noble art of largesse to secure the approval and loyalty of the country’s most notoriously fickle electorate.

Albert Harness, unquestionably, was eminently well qualified for the position, though a popular platform of suitably formulated policies was proving elusive, and it was this lack of a marketable manifesto that troubled him as he wandered about the station yard with his chin on his chest and his broad brow beset by a seemingly permanent frown.

As a matter of form, and without great expectations of it yielding much in the way of a bounteous harvest, he issued to the assembled multitude in the messroom a general invitation for suggestions and was rewarded with an abundance of possibilities for his consideration, ranging from the stultifyingly mundane (a ten-year programme of pond maintenance) to the stark raving bonkers (an international airport on the common), between which poles of extremity there lay a large and varied assortment of ideas concerning the perennial issues of grazing and fishing rights and someone, I think it was Frank Trousers, put forward a laudable proposal for a scheme involving the generous distribution of free goats. But all of these suggestions, though not entirely without merit, struck Albert as too parochial and limited in scope and lacking the radical breadth of vision required for the immediate mass popularity that he felt was the key to a successful campaign.

And then Comrade Slogan, our glorious shop steward, came up with the notion of devising and brokering a plan for the geopolitical future of the Middle East that would guarantee permanent peace and prosperity for all parties in the region. He pointed out that this would undoubtedly have the effect of bestowing upon Albert at a stroke the status of a universally respected world statesman with a guaranteed place in history, plus a Nobel prize, an ambassadorship, a knighthood, a peerage and an impressive statue dominating the renamed Harness Square in the city centre. It was, of course, offered purely in jest and added much sycophantic laughter to an already jocular atmosphere, and yet it engendered in Albert a curious transformation. His eyes lit up as if his batteries had been replaced, and a wide grin appeared upon lips which moments before had been tightly drawn, and his whole demeanour altered as though a heavy burden had been removed from his shoulders and sprung shoes placed upon his feet.

He bounded from the room like a startled antelope on amphetamines and returned a minute later with a large and ancient leather-bound atlas of the world which he placed upon the messroom table and opened at the page showing the lands to the west of Mesopotamia. Stroking his chin and furrowing his brow, he studied it intently for a minute or two.

“It’s in the wrong place,” he announced at length, as though stating the glaringly obvious to an audience of simpletons, and jabbed a finger at an area to the south-east of the Mediterranean. “It needs to be moved.”

He flicked thoughtfully through the pages for a while.

“There,” he said, stabbing once again with decisive finality. “That should do nicely.” He went on to explain that the state of Israel covers an area of roughly eight thousand square miles, less than one twelfth the size of the state of Nevada, most of which lies empty, unused and sparsely populated and is bordered not by Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, but is surrounded by the rather more docile inhabitants of Oregon, Idaho and Utah, who, as far as he was aware, were not hostile and implacable enemies bent on the destruction at all costs of the Jewish homeland and all its citizens, but peaceable, slow-talking folk without strong views either way on the matter. That Walt Disney fellow, he suggested, could without difficulty and in no time at all construct an exact replica of Israel in the desert and the population of seven-odd million could be fully settled by Christmas.

The polls have now closed and we await keenly the results of the Clapham Common by-election, wondering if a duly elected member of parliament would be permitted to undertake the representation of his constituents from the confines of a padded cell.

Refrigerating Mrs. Fanshaw

2006-07-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

I was relaxing at home the other evening engrossed in the Miss Islam contest live from Damascus when I found myself taken by surprise and overpowered by a quite irresistible yearning for a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich and I rose automatically from the comfort of the armchair and made my way to the kitchen by the shortest possible route like a man relinquishing free will unto the authority of primitive forces. In a kind of trance I filled the kettle, lit the grill and opened the door of the refrigerator, whereupon the face of Philomena Fanshaw appeared before me as though her severed head were sitting there on the shelf beside the butter and before I realised fully that it was just an illusion, a fabrication of a tortured imagination, for a few moments I thought I’d been up to my old tricks again. I sighed wistfully for happier times and reached for the streaky rashers, and as I pushed the door to, my thoughts became tormented by visions of her sliding away from me and fading forever into the cold darkness, and I fancied I could hear the sound of furious scratching, as of something trapped and trying desperately to escape.

I was working a day shift with Albert Harness and uncharacteristically we had allowed ourselves to become the witless victims of a cruel prank perpetrated by that mischievous imp Stan Tablets in fiendish collaboration with a pipe-smoking rapscallion by the name of Bert Klaxon, both of whom had taken advantage of a moment’s inattention to stitch Albert and me up like a couple of raw kippers fresh from training school, and we ended up having to convey a suspended patient who by rights should have been theirs. Incredible as it may seem, we fell for the old fetching-the-bed-from-the-ambulance routine whereby one returns to the house with the other crew’s trolley instead of one’s own, thus forcing upon them the reluctant custodianship of a malodorous corpse requiring immediate transportation to the hospital mortuary via the nearest A&E department. It’s a low and very old trick but a mere scintilla of inconvenience in the rich and colourful tapestry of ambulance life and we took it in good part, Albert and I, the rueful smiles upon our lips masking the bestial thoughts of implacable vengeance festering in the darkest recesses of our minds.

Philomena Fanshaw had been discovered by her daughter slumped across the dining table with her face in a shepherd’s pie, and though lukewarm to the touch, to an experienced and disinterested ambulanceman she was quite obviously dead and thus technically beyond the bounds of our jurisdiction, having crossed the line into the auspices of the undertaker. We duly informed the distraught woman that, alas, there was really nothing we could do for her mother, whose number quite simply was up, her contract having expired without option of renewal after a very respectable innings, at which metaphorical melange she became unaccountably rather hysterical and begged us, please, to do something, anything, to try and save her dear, sweet mother. Exercising commendable restraint, we explained in calm and professional tones that any efforts to resuscitate the old girl at this stage in the proceedings would be entirely futile and would also necessitate inflicting a gross physical indignity upon her genteel personage, and you wouldn’t want to remember your mother like that, now would you, madam? But she merely elevated her piteous beseeching into the realms of neurotic frenzy and, oh, for God’s sake, all right then, anything for a quiet life, we’ll give it a go if you really insist.

And so amid much sighing, tutting and theatrical glancing ceilingward, we whipped out the defibrillator, ripped away the blouse to expose Mrs. Fanshaw’s pale and surprisingly firm breasts, and with neither hope nor enthusiasm commenced some gentle cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, knowing with utter certainty from the off that such an undertaking would be, as always, a senseless waste of time, effort and hard-earned taxpayers’ money.

Going through the motions without working up too much of a sweat, we arrived in due course at St. Bernard’s whereupon the back doors of the van were wrenched open dramatically by glamorous staff nurse Condoleezza Goolagong and ruggedly handsome senior house officer Dr. Jed Cabbage, both of whom gave our patient a moment’s professional consideration before simultaneously pursing their lips and slowly shaking their heads in a timeless, universal gesture of sorrow and regret; not for the deceased nor for her bereaved family but for the incompetence of ambulancemen who persist in wasting the valuable time of dedicated and expensively-trained medical staff by depositing on their doorstep carcasses without prospect of resurrection. In mitigation we could only shrug and nod in the direction of the daughter. The nurse raised her eyes wearily to the god of mortification, took the elbow of the guilty party and ushered her briskly into the little darkened room set aside for the sole purpose of snivelling, while Doc Cabbage, having signed our paperwork to confirm her death, told us we should deliver the late Mrs. Fanshaw without further ado straight to the mortuary.

Wheeling our cargo into the windowless brick building at the back of the hospital, we found Bill Bones in his customary high spirits, employing his rich baritone with great gusto to sing something about being the monarch of the sea as he sawed gleefully through the skull of the naked young man reclining on the stainless steel post mortem table in the back room. He executed a few steps of a nifty little dance and gave us a friendly wave without missing a beat or dropping a lyric and we set about the routine task of transferring Philomena Fanshaw’s mortal remains to the refrigerator for cold storage to await collection by Messrs Berry and Burnham.

We opened one of the tall doors of the twelve-corpser and slid a galvanised steel tray out on to the rollers of the hydraulic mortuary trolley, and having positioned it at the same height beside our own, we took the body under the arms and by the ankles and humped it across on to the tray with roughly the same degree of reverence one might accord a large sack of potatoes. And then we paused for a bit of a breather.

Unerringly the gentleman, Albert tactfully left me alone with Philomena and wandered off into the PM room, adopting a curiously high-pitched voice and joining in the choruses with Bill - “and we are his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts!” – followed by much raucous laughter. I closed the door, smiling at their schoolboy antics and brushed the back of my hand gently against the peachy softness of her face. And then I noticed something very strange indeed.

At first I thought it was a trick of the light, or the delerium of anticipation, but as I looked closer I could see quite clearly a faint, throbbing pulse at the side of her neck, where the whatsname artery is; and then I saw her bare chest rise and fall, slightly but unmistakably, and deduced that she was breathing. But how could this be? I racked my brain for a solution to this perplexing conundrum and could only conclude that it had been the shock of being thrown roughly on to the cold metal tray that had triggered some mechanical or chemical reaction within her and somehow caused her heart and lungs to start working again. I could not otherwise explain the occurrence of this phenomenon which was quite unprecedented in all my long years on the ambulances. I imagine it was akin to witnessing a miracle and I found myself becoming strangely excited and aglow, with a kind of tingling sensation at the extremities, my heart racing and pounding in my chest.

Panting and perspiring, I gazed down at her face and saw a small flickering of the eyelids, and then they peeled slowly apart and the bright blue eyes of the late Mrs. Philomena Fanshaw were staring keenly and invitingly into my own. She smiled with pleasure as if greeting a dear friend or, my untamed imagination beyond control, a favourite lover, and I felt a warm, slender hand grasp my wrist and squeeze tightly and only the adrenalin of desire prevented me from passing out.

Some while later I judged my composure to have returned sufficiently for me to apply some rational thought to this most singular of situations and try to reach a sensible decision as to what course of action would best serve the interests of all concerned. And while I struggled to manufacture a feasible account of events to explain how a patient in my care had come to be fully conscious on a mortuary tray, there came from behind the door to the other room the incongruous sound of two grown men singing something about a little buttercup in a parody of light operatic sopranos.

There were several factors to be considered, not the least of which was my pension. There would be the inevitable investigation to endure and the endless questions, questions, questions, and an intolerable mountain of paperwork to complete, forms to fill, written statements to prepare. And worst of all, of course, would be the constant merciless ribbing in the messroom. A live one on a tray! I imagined what the likes of Stan Tablets and Bob Slogan would have to say on the subject and my teeth began to chatter uncontrollably.

No, it was quite simply unthinkable and I knew that all along there had only ever been one solution.

I gave the tray a gentle shove, sliding it easily on the rollers into the huge refrigerator in a single smooth movement and as she disappeared into the cold and lonely darkness to join for eternity the company of assorted foul-smelling cadavers, Mrs Fanshaw raised a feeble, imploring hand and held my gaze for what seemed an age with a look of stunned surprise and supplication, like a horrified and incredulous mother held back by burly stormtroopers as she watches her beloved only child being put aboard a cattle train bound for the death camps.

With a shudder of terrible regret I closed the door of the refrigerator and sat at Bill’s battered wooden desk, flicking abstractedly through the pages of the guest book as I waited and waited, interminably waited for the noise to stop, my nerves raw and ragged, shredded and tattered, for there are few sounds more distressing to a discerning and sensitive healthcare professional than that peculiar screeching sound made by fingernails frantically clawing at the other side of a steel door.

Visiting Day

2006-07-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

Miranda turned up a little early dressed from head to toe in what she described as goat couture. From the jaunty Gatsby right down to the soft and sensible ballerina loafers, the jacket and the shirt, the tiny skirt (and everything else besides, I soon discovered) were fashioned from the soft, delicate hide of the finest Anglo Nubian. Even her shoulder bag, to my connoisseur's eye, was unmistakably of shaggy English Bagot. It was, of course, only a dream, but I woke nonetheless in unusually high spirits and was only slightly disappointed when she actually arrived in somewhat more conventional attire, though I’m still unsure of the correct form of dress when paying a visit to one’s uncle who is incarcerated in a lunatic asylum.

It was a glorious morning and we walked the mile or so beneath blue skies in spring sunshine, crossing the common by the pond, admiring the daffodils in the prime of their short lives, and winding our way at the leisurely pace of young lovers through the maze of little back streets in the Old Town until we turned a corner and came suddenly face to face with the towering and forbidding iron gates of the Clapham Lunatic Asylum.

Set into a high wall of austere dark brickwork, one can’t look at those black gates without one’s mind filling with terrible images of poor Victorian wretches being dragged screaming from their hearths and taken to spend the rest of their days in abject misery, forever locked away from their loved ones in dank, rat-infested dungeons. Even today, if one stands in the right place at dead of night, one can sometimes hear the faint sound of hopeless wailing wafting up through the drains, the sounds of torment and utter despair, cries of the unimaginable grief and anguish of the lost, the forlorn, the bereft of hope, like the tortured souls of the damned calling from the very fires of hell itself. Take my word, it’s well worth a listen.

As we passed the main gates I felt Miranda shudder and then stiffen at my side, tightening her grip upon my arm, and we quickened our step as a solitary dark cloud blotted out the sun and an ominous chill seemed suddenly to permeate the air. We made our way hurriedly along the empty street until we came upon an ancient wooden door set into the wall, almost hidden behind the abundant wild buddleia which covers the lower half of the entire perimeter. I knocked four times with the large cast iron ring and waited a full minute before I heard the sound of heavy bolts being drawn on the inside, and then with a deep, foreboding creak the door opened slightly to reveal the striking, unlined features of Sister Joseph. She studied me for a few moments, her face a mask of suspicion and hostility, and then the light of recognition dawned in her pale blue eyes and her lips spread widely in a beatific smile of pleasure and welcome, and I wondered momentarily if she’d mistaken me for the Lord himself come to take her away from all this.

And then she noticed my companion and bristled like a Tasmanian Devil with toothache, emitting a strange hissing sound from the back of her throat, and I thought she was going to strike, but then she took control of herself and her expression began to soften, lapsing by stages into one of strained neutrality before mutating gradually into something cunning and sinister, covetous, proprietorial, and I knew I had to get Miranda away from that awful place immediately, back to the world of flowers and sunshine, but Sister Joseph had already ushered us briskly inside and closed the door behind us, turning an enormous key with a clunking, resolute finality, and sliding the bolts across with a series of harsh metallic cracks which echoed in the darkness like the rattling reports of a firing squad.

Holding a paraffin lantern before her, the tall nun set off without a word at a furious pace, leading us through a labyrinth of narrow, low-ceilinged tunnels which twisted and turned this way and that without apparent reason and appeared to descend gradually until I felt we must be thirty or forty feet beneath ground level, and I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that we were processing directly to some terrible place from which no one ever returns.

Eventually we came to an iron gate and Sister Joseph produced a huge bunch of keys from beneath the folds of her rough brown habit and took us through. She unlocked a barred wooden door and there he was - Sir Leslie Pitt-Tinny, MP, OBE, erstwhile chairman of the Clapham Ambulance, struck dumb and rendered insane by a stupid practical joke which had backfired disastrously and caused the gruesome demise, while under his aegis, of the Queen of England.

He was lying curled in a foetal position on the damp stone floor, a thumb stuck in his mouth, his limbs protruding like thin white sticks from the ragged remnants of his once fine Henry Poole suit, his sparse hair now long and unkempt, a grey beard obscuring most of his face. He looked up vacantly without interest and Miranda rushed over to him.

“Oh, Uncle Leslie,” she gasped, horrified at his condition, kneeling beside him and cradling his sore-covered, lice-ridden head to her breast. “What have they done to you? Oh, Uncle, Uncle!” And then she released him with a moue of faint disgust and came and stood imploringly before me and uttered a variant of those fateful words that one should never say to an ambulanceman without first having addressed the most careful consideration to the full range of their implications.

“Is there nothing that can be done?” she beseeched me, whereupon I stepped smartly forward as though an automaton under the control of unseen forces, taking a yellow bag from my hip pocket, wanting only to please her and do her bidding. Focused on my task, I became vaguely aware of some sort of commotion occurring behind me, but I could not allow myself to be distracted from the important work of the ambulanceman.

When I removed the bag, Sir Leslie was smiling, probably for the first time in several months, his mouth fixed in an expression of gratitude, serene happiness and eternal peace. Almost frenzied with excitement, I turned, filled with pride and a magnificent sense of achievement to share this wonderful moment with the woman who meant so much to me and with whom I now knew with unwavering certainty that I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

A perfect future filled my imagination in an instant: a cottage in the hills, a couple of rough acres, a small mixed herd; Saanen and Alpine, Toggenburg, Golden Guernsey. Together we could have it all and there was absolutely nothing and no one to stand in our way.

Miranda was lying on her back at the feet of the big nun, unmoving, her lean, muscular limbs spread carelessly, her lovely grey eyes filled with blood and bulging grotesquely from their sockets, her full, sensuous lips now drawn in a hideous rictus of terror, her delicate pink tongue horribly swollen and purple, a length of grey hemp, which I'd last seen fastened around the nun’s narrow waist, cutting obscenely into the soft flesh of her pale, slender neck.

I gazed at her lying there, trying to stay calm, trying to control my breathing. Deep breaths now.

In . . . hold it . . . and out. That's it. Just waiting for the sound of the alarm clock.

Come on now, don't panic.

In . . . hold . . . and out.

Keep it together, just wait patiently for the old dull, workaday reality.

Come on now, it's time to wake up.

It's okay. Everything's okay.

In . . . and out. Wake up now.

You know it's not real, it's just another of the dreams.

I'm only dreaming.

In . . . hold it . . . and out.

It's just a terrible dream, just another of the dreams.

In . . . hold it together . . . come on now, wake up.

WAKE UP!

Vein's First Principle

2006-07-03T03:36:00.000-07:00

It will undoubtedly stretch the credulity of the man in the street beyond the normal bounds of its integrity and raise in his mind quite serious and legitimate concerns for the welfare of his family and his neighbours when I reveal that I’ve been acting as a Training Supervisor for the past couple of weeks, teaching a pair of eager young lads fresh from the Academy of Ambulance Studies the finer points of life on the Clapham Ambulance, and it’s proving to be quite an emotional journey of reminiscence for me because it takes me back to my own early days spent under the tutelage of Fred Ventricle and I find myself on a daily basis yearning for the halcyon days of my recklessly squandered youth.

Oh, but how cruelly and inexorably Time rolls on, the cold hand of Death drawing ever closer, and now while I have the opportunity the task befalls me of passing on the acquired knowledge of many years to my own fresh-faced students as they step like a couple of nervous adolescents into the grown up world of the black serge and the silver buttons with their careers stretching out before them to the far distant horizon like a life sentence without hope of parole.

Naturally, I regard it as my foremost duty to spend the greater part of each day trying to persuade them to turn around and go back before it’s too late, before they are irrevocably sucked in and under, but these boys display a stubborn reluctance to listen to the voice of wisdom and seem determined to throw away their young lives senselessly in menial servitude attending to the whims of the drunk, the mad, the smelly and the stupid, and if the thick skulls of youth are really impervious to good sense and reason and they absolutely cannot be deterred from this madness, then I must take them back to basics and start their education from the very beginning to ensure that their voyage through Ambulanceland is as smooth as possible, because I have developed an avuncular fondness for them over the past fortnight and I feel that I owe them at least that small chance of survival.

We in the teaching profession find the days pass more enjoyably if we experiment with a variety of methods for instilling knowledge into the minds of our pupils and I have found that a strong anecdote is often a sound aid to memory and serves well to reinforce an important lesson, and for this particular one, possibly the most important of all, I will employ the tale of the unknown woman who claimed to be Dolly Pickles.

The very first thing you need to learn and must strive never to forget as you take those fledgling steps into the curious world of ambulances, is that you must never believe anything a patient tells you without some form of compelling corroborative evidence from an independent and provenly reliable source. You’ll discover soon enough through bitter experience that failure to heed this simple rule, which is as fundamental a part of ambulance work as the red blanket itself, is to court the most terrible embarrassment and inconvenience and has been known to cause the ambulanceman immeasurable suffering, up to and including the unthinkable hardship of actually missing his dinner.

It would be unfair to give the impression that all patients without exception are either inherently incapable of telling the truth or are setting out at all times deliberately to mislead you, but until you know with absolute certainty that this is not the case, you must assume that it is. This is known as Vein’s First Principle and is as firmly entrenched in the psyche of the seasoned ambulanceman and about as likely to be overlooked by him as putting on his trousers before setting off for work in the morning.

Even the greatest thinkers, it has been said, are entitled to an occasional lapse into absentmindedness, and I recall with red faced shame a day recently when, metaphorically, I reported for duty in my underpants.

It was a grey and overcast Tuesday and it so happened that there had been a bit of a mix-up with the allocation of staff to vehicles, what with sickness and holidays and the usual plethora of unauthorised summertime absences and so forth, and I found myself quite unexpectedly in that rare and enviable position of having no one to work with for the entire shift.

So, with the wary zeal of the erroneously pardoned prisoner, I duly set about the necessary task of plumping the cushions to my own very high standard of conformity and was in the process of psychologically preparing myself for the prospect of eight arduous hours on the messroom sofa when the telephone rang and I was stunned into a state of speechlessness by Clapham Ambulance Control instructing me to take a coach and collect individually a job lot of crazy old women for delivery to the psychiatric day centre in the Bowes-Lyon Unit at St. Bernard’s.

Numb and unable to think, with trembling hand I scrawled the dictated list of names and addresses on a scrap of paper and before lunchtime had somehow managed successfully to round up, transport, unload and herd the cargo into the spartan day room, so I settled down gratefully in the back of the van for a well earned and much needed snooze – out of the strain of the doing, into the peace of the done – and for a while life once again seemed almost tolerable.

But - oh! - how fleeting is that stolen moment of tranquillity; and when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger: stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood; because taking the mad old ducks to the hospital is only half the job, of course, and it seems that no sooner has one closed one's weary eyes to claim the prize of sleep than it’s time to take them all home again. One stands there in the doorway clutching one's dog-eared list and shouts their names in alphabetical order like a headmaster calling the morning register in a school for the senile.

“Mavis Antelope! Minnie Antidote! Doris Artichoke! Nellie Edgerton! Maud Endecott! Myrtle MacNally! Sally O’Mally! Dolly Pickles! Beryl Potts!”

And each in turn will raise an uncertain hand, then stand slowly in frail bewilderment, until eventually you cajole them into trooping out to the ambulance in a ragged line, able to resist the powerful urge to prod their buttocks in a spirit of encouragement with a bayonet only by virtue of not having such an implement to hand, and one by one you return them safely to the welcoming bosoms of their families or the loving warmth of the care homes whence they came, and when this toil is done then you are free to trundle back to the ambulance station at your leisure and enjoy a refreshing cup of tea before quietly slipping off home while Nobby Harris sleeps.

But on that fateful day that simple plan went horribly awry because like an ingenuous ass I ignored Vein’s First Principle of ambulance work.

Our first port of call was Mulberry House, one of the parish's snootier homes, and taking her firmly by one ear, the lobe pinched between thumb and forefinger in the prescribed fashion, I marched Dolly Pickles smartly up the driveway to the front door whereupon I was informed by the staff that Mrs. Pickles had returned already from the day centre by taxi cab, having felt unwell and her request to be taken home early having been granted, and “this woman, whoever she may be, is certainly not our Dolly”. Mildly perplexed but at this stage not overly concerned, I put her back on the ambulance and continued the process of delivering the others, hoping that the problem would somehow resolve itself along the way and her true identity would present itself to me, though how this might be effected was not a subject to which I had devoted much attention at that stage.

When all the others had been returned to their natural habitats, I found myself in profit to the tune of one deranged crone whose name and address were as yet a mystery to me. It was time to stroke the chin and devise a plan of action. Firstly, I demanded repeatedly to see her papers, only to be met with insane laughter and a liberal spraying of saliva. Secondly, while she wept and tried to stem the flow of blood from her nose, I searched her handbag and pockets for clues and was rewarded with half a dozen damp tissues, several loose Fisherman’s Friends, and the lower half of a set of dentures wrapped in a handkerchief. No prescription, no bus pass, no pension book. Finally, I found a telephone box and called the day centre. Marcia the receptionist displayed her usual eagerness to please and checked thoroughly through her records, but could find no discrepancy, all the attenders having been accounted for, but if I would wait, she would get back to me.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rang and Marcia informed me that she had called the home of every patient on her list and all were safe and well, and the only explanation she could offer was that my leftover lunatic had simply wandered in off the street and mingled unnoticed with the crowd before passing herself off as Dolly Pickles and hitching a free ride around the parish.

I considered my options, which were reassuringly few. I could drive the four miles through heavy traffic back to St. Bernard’s and hand her over to the staff in A & E, whose gratitude and opinion of my professional abilities would doubtless be inestimable, or I could simply leave her in the street right here and now and drive around the corner to the ambulance station. I looked at my watch to assist the decision-making process and perceived to my horror a very real and present danger of missing my afternoon tea.

To thwart the slip 'twixt cup and lip, I dunked the chocolate biscuit with great care and precision, then closed my eyes and savoured the exquisite pleasure of the separate flavours as it dissolved upon my tongue, and I reflected with awe upon the life and work of the legendary Ebenezer Vein and how even today, if we heed his immortal words and live our lives by his flawless and infallible Truth, we can be guided safely through the darkness by the unfathomable wisdom of probably the greatest ambulanceman who ever lived.

Somnambulance

2006-06-09T03:59:00.000-07:00

To conceal the true depth of our bitter disgruntlement at being roused from serene slumber and turned out into the midst of our grim surroundings at such an ungodly hour of the day, we adopted the sort of hard-boiled, inscrutable, no-nonsense expressions traditionally favoured by stormtroopers engaged upon the task of ghetto clearance. We hurried dramatically into the supermarket with our trolleybed impressively laden with several bags of life-saving equipment and a selection of machines that go beep, and five minutes later, pumping the patient’s blood through his arteries with our bare hands, and oxygenating every cell in the very marrow of his fibre with no thought for our own personal safety, we marched briskly out again. We lifted the trolley bed with apparent ease, slid it smoothly into the back of the ambulance without dropping it, and shut the back doors smartly to protect the dignity of our patient from the attentions of the inevitable host of gawping onlookers.

I’m prepared to concede that it could have been a trick of my imagination, an aural hallucination, if you like, engendered by conceit, but I fancied I heard from without a muffled round of applause.

In the privacy of the van, far from the madding crowd, our demeanour changed entirely, and all trace of the alert and austere professionalism presented to the public vanished in an instant, as though at the flick of a switch.

Albert glanced up furtively then brought to an immediate conclusion his earnest endeavours in the field of chest compressions. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief, sat down heavily with a weary sigh, as if really this was simply too much for a man of his refined sensibilities, and closed his eyes. At the same time, I released the ventilator bag from my aching fingers and let it fall to the floor with that familiar soft, rubbery thud before staggering to the seat at the back, collapsing gratefully onto it and closing my own eyes in the contented manner of an angler settling down for a long afternoon in the shade.

It was very hot and the last thing any ambulanceman wants to do straight after lunch on a sweltering summer’s day is indulge in the utterly pointless exercise of trying to bring back to life in a crowded public place someone who is very obviously and quite irrevocably dead. If it’s a miracle they want, say the men of the Clapham Ambulance, give the job to Jesus and his crewmate.

What the replete ambulanceman wants to do post-prandially, as everyone knows, is settle in his favourite armchair accompanied by a refreshing cup of strong tea with the agreeable prospect of a couple of hours’ peace and quiet in which to reflect calmly upon the pleasures of his recent repast and wallow in joyful anticipation of his next, before drifting into a lengthy and recuperative state of dreamless unconsciousness.

Sadly, however, due to the insanely impossible demands of a certifiably deluded Minister of Public Health, coupled with the laughably optimistic expectations of a woefully ill-educated populace, the concomitance of what he wants and what he gets now occurs with ever-diminishing frequency, and these days it’s a very resourceful ambulanceman indeed who is able to enjoy with any degree of regularity that once sacrosanct perquisite of his profession, namely the undisturbed afternoon nap, and when a perfect opportunity to grab those coveted forty winks unexpectedly presents itself, well, to pass it up would seem not merely churlish, but would require a far more generous reserve of moral fortitude than that bestowed upon the overwhelming majority of the world’s ambulancemen.

I must say, with the doors closed it was a rare oasis of tranquillity in the back of that ambulance, and the drowsy hum of the passing traffic soothed our sleepy souls like a soft lullaby, or perhaps it was the lazy, soporific buzzing of the flies, but it was so quiet, so peaceful, so warm . . .

I have a vague recollection of hearing a strange, metallic sort of voice talking about analyzing heart rhythms or something, but it drifted through to my consciousness only in a disjointed, meaningless sort of way, as though from far, far away, and then Mother was there on her red bicycle at a church ceremony involving swords and fire and snakes and goats, and Fr. Tab O’Knackle was rapping a candelestick against the wooden rail of the pulpit, calling the congregation to order and pointing an accusing finger directly at me, as Pope Marshmallow XIV danced around the altar, naked but for his pointy pontifical mitre, singing “stand clear, press to shock”, and I became groggily aware that someone was knocking with a kind of diffident determination upon the back doors of the ambulance and that the defibrillator was squawking its usual tiresome exhortations.

“Will 'e be all right?” said a frail voice behind me, blending apology and concern in more or less equal measure. “Only I got 'im a nice bit of 'addock for 'is tea, like.”

I looked around, yawning profoundly, unsure for a moment of who I was, where I was, and why I was there, a condition not uncommon in one of my general disposition, to see a toothless old woman standing at the open back doors, and I looked across with a detached sort of curiosity, following her line of sight, at the gaunt white corpse reclining stiffly on the trolleybed, the pads still attached to its chest, a plastic tube half in and half out of its gaping mouth, a trail of dried, bloody vomit congealed down the side of its face, its vacant eyes staring sightlessly up through a squadron of corpulent bluebottles at something beyond the ceiling, and I assured her that she was not to worry, her husband was in good hands, we were doing everything we possibly could and would be taking him to the hospital very soon and maybe she should phone St. Bernard’s in an hour or two.

And then I looked up at the clock to discover that almost three hours had passed in the blink of an eye. Where does the time go?

With some difficulty I roused a very grumpy Albert who eventually climbed sleepily through to the cab and started the engine. Fighting the almost overwhelming urge simply to lie on the floor, I followed him through and slumped in the seat beside him and then, with both of us yawning and barely able to keep our eyes open, too tired even to speak, in essence virtually comatose, we drove away.

At ten o’clock the next morning, my rest day I might add, I was rudely woken by a slightly bewildered though greatly amused Stan Tablets and Bert Klaxon who had started a day shift some three hours previously and having only just noticed something a little out of the ordinary had decided to call round, most eager to hear the story of how a corpse had come to be left overnight in the back of their ambulance. Oops.

Well, I suppose we’ve all done it at one time or another, haven't we?

Upon the Feast of St. Lucian

2006-05-28T04:04:00.000-07:00

The exquisite, almost perfect serenity of the moment was cruelly shattered by a sudden and frantic knocking at the front door that nearly caused me to jump out of my trousers. I paused and closed my eyes, breathing deeply, waiting for it to stop, the shaft of the axe gripped tightly in both hands above my head, but the insistent racket continued regardless with an apparently unshakable determination bordering on frenzied desperation. I sighed with profound resignation, my anger, tempered by curiosity, swiftly cooling, and went to answer it.

The dark eyes of the young goat tethered across the makeshift altar in front of the fireplace followed my movements with an expression of universal, primitive terror overlaid, I fancied, with a delicate veneer of smug relief. I stroked wistfully the soft white fur on her neck and bid her a fond au revoir.

It was a cold Saturday evening back in January and I had planned my usual private celebration of the feast of St. Lucian of Antioch, but this year Fate apparently had other ideas, and I opened the front door smartly to behold a young woman standing like a statue on the step with one hand poised motionlessly in the air before her as though grasping an invisible knocker. She was dressed informally but expensively and although she looked very familiar, I couldn’t quite place her in the present context. Her face was a mask of primitive terror overlaid, I fancied, with a delicate veneer of smug . . . no, hang on, that was the goat, wasn’t it? Let me think. Oh yes, that’s right, the woman had a pleading, haunted look about her, as though she had travelled far through many a sleepless night, having exhausted along the way even the faintest possibility of redemption; and here she was now on my doorstep, as if finally and absolutely having reached the point of last resort.

“Yes?” I said coldly, no soft touch at the best of times for your average damsel in distress, and at that moment impatiently thinking only of what awaited me before the warm hearth in the drawing room. She placed her hands together, a supplicant at prayer, and bowed her head, looking up at me through long lashes and a windswept fringe like a helpless, orphaned fawn, lost and all alone in a cruel and beastly world, and a tear ran slowly down each cheek and fell softly to the ground. I sniffed, wiping my eyes on the back of my hand and invited her in.

She extended a warm, strong, sensibly manicured hand and introduced herself as Miranda Pitt-Tinny — yes, of course — niece of the famous Sir Leslie, MP, OBE, erstwhile chairman of the Clapham Ambulance, and she explained that she had called to see me upon the recommendation of a certain Mr. Nobby Harris because of my close association with the Clapham Lunatic Asylum, where her uncle had been incarcerated ever since the tragic events of last autumn, and from whom no one had heard a word since that fateful day. She was wondering if I might be able to find out how he was, and what was happening to him, and so forth, maybe even get her in to see him, because the stern-faced nuns there were adamant that he was to receive no visitors without the express written permission of the head psychiatrist, Dr. Aristotle Necropolis, who has answered neither letter nor telephone for several years, though it's rumoured a dim light illuminates his window on occasion.

“But of course,” I replied. “I’ll do everything I posssibly can. First thing tomorrow I'll speak to—”

“What was that noise?” She interrupted me with a well-bred gesture of apology, all her senses becoming suddenly alert as we passed the door of the drawing room, her whole being curiously animated, and all her grave concern for her poor uncle’s plight seeming to fall from her in an instant. She grinned excitedly. “It sounded like — like a sheep! Or even — but no!” She emitted involuntarily a delightful combination of squeal and gasp and covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes sparkling with the unadulterated pleasure of mischievous accusation, the big question hanging unspoken in the air between us.

I laughed a little too readily, a little too loudly, and shrugged, but could not trust myself to speak, so I ushered her hurriedly along the passageway towards the kitchen. I put the kettle on the gas to boil, fiddled with the teapot, found a spoon in a drawer, took some cups from the shelf and when I felt sufficiently composed, turned to face her.

“May I offer you a goat?” I was hopelessly flustered and fumbled a saucer. There seemed to be some quality about her that made a man tongue-tied and clumsy, prone to dropping crockery and blurting out indiscretions concerning goats.

“Oh, rather!" I thought for a moment she was going to ask if I happened to have a brace of Bagots going begging. "No, no,” she continued. “I mean, what? Sorry? What did you —? A goat? Ha ha! I thought—” This flustering business was proving to be contagious and she blushed deliciously, her cheeks the colour of a ripe Crimson Bramley.

“May I take your coat?” Her obvious discomfiture had somehow lent me an air of quick-thinking suavity and manly assurance.

“Oh, I see, I’m sorry, I thought you — ha ha — thank you, yes, that would be — Oh, well, no actually. No, I really can’t stop, I’m afraid. Today’s the feast of St. Lucian, you see, yes, of Antioch, and I have . . . um . . . well, sort of plans. You know how it is.”

“Let’s take this through to the drawing room,” I suggested, picking up the tray. “It’ll be nice and warm in there.”

The Grossminger Conspiracy

2006-05-21T04:06:00.000-07:00

When an ambulanceman in the course of his work, or indeed outside of it, suffers a particularly traumatic experience, it is customary these days for him to be extended via his employer the offer of advice, guidance and consolation from a professional independent counselling service with a view to minimizing the harmful long-term effects that such incidents can have, and ensure as far as is reasonably possible that the poor fellow is in some way able to come to terms with the horror of what he has undergone. If the circumstances are deemed to warrant it, it is now the inalienable human right of all ambulancemen to be offered such assistance, and invariably the unwavering reaction of all ambulancemen, with an amused if slightly belligerent air of affronted masculinity, is to decline such nonsense. Thus are the ways of men.

But something happened to me a while ago which transcended by a wide margin all of my previous horrific experiences put together, and in a moment of weakness I defied all the traditional proprieties by asking Nobby Harris, our much loved and well respected station officer, if he would arrange trauma counselling for me. Astonishingly, he refused point blank and suggested I should see my G.P. who, he said, would direct me towards the care pathway most appropriate to my particular needs. Then he tapped the side of his head slowly three times with a forefinger, and bid me good day with an impatient gesture of dismissal.

Though disappointed and a little bemused, I duly went to see Dr. Medson who asked me in his usual theatrical fashion to take it from the top, maestro, so I told him, with a naive lack of circumspection, a tale of intrigue and deceit, of terror and madness, and of the bizarre goings-on in some of England's top-secret, government-funded institutes of scientific research. He listened with apparent patience, his chin resting on steepled fingers, and then he said he would refer me to a colleague of his, a specialist, but first he must give me an injection.

I have a friend, you see, who works in the notorious Laboratory No. 9. Well, maybe not a friend exactly, not quite, but certainly more than an acquaintance. A kind of close associate, you might say, for want of a better term. We, this person and I, have a sort of informal arrangement, nothing in writing, you understand, whereby I supply hard-to-obtain raw materials, if you know what I mean, and she in return uses her not inconsiderable resources to help me purge myself of the demons which invade and infest my soul during each week spent at the cutting-edge of twentieth century pre-hospital emergency care. Quid pro quo, you know how it is.

Dr. Laura Bunsen – you might remember her, she was in the news a few years back – famously gained a double first in biochemistry at the age of twelve, and a year later a PhD with a thesis so mind-bogglingly esoteric that only a handful of people in the world even knew what its title referred to, let alone understood a word of its content. Born of the Clapham uber intelligentsia, it has been estimated that she is possessed of an IQ which even the likes of Jocky Wilson at the top of his game would have struggled to match with four darts. No dour, hatchet-faced blue-stocking either, she is blessed with an irrepressibly good-humoured disposition and an athletic and delicately contoured physique, upon the shoulders of which sits a fine and noble head which is the most astoundingly adroit and incessantly productive piece of human equipment I have ever encountered, and the prodigiously accomplished Dr. Bunsen, 22, is never happier than when making vigorous use of it.

Perhaps I should explain here for those of you who do not care to read the newspapers, or suffer with short-term whatsname, that Laboratory No. 9 achieved notoriety recently for conducting a series of disastrously ill-judged and fatal procedures on a dozen or so live human subjects in the interests of national security. It is situated within the Longhead Institute of Experimental Biology, formerly the National Centre for Germ Warfare, which concerns itself chiefly with matters utterly beyond the comprehension of regular folk, and, as the tourist pamphlet makes abundantly clear, what goes on behind its barbed-wire perimeter fence is really none of our business.

Obviously I’d like to reveal a lot more about its fascinating research into the whys and wherefores of this and that, and its pioneering work in the field of bacteriological weapons of mass destruction and so forth, but I am bound by honour and discretion, not to mention the Official Secrets Act, and, more importantly, a profound and innate inability to grasp the scientific intricacies of anything more complicated than a basic, friction-levered derailleur system.

The kind doctor, however, has persevered with admirable patience attempting, albeit with limited success, to school me in the fundamentals of particle physics, infra-modal kinetics, theoretical nuclear chemistry, and things like that, to enable me to relate adequately for you the following tale, which I shall endeavour to do right now without further delay, my scientifc ignorance notwithstanding.

"That piece of cloth you gave me," Dr. Bunsen said quite casually one Sunday afternoon a few months ago, and apropos of nothing we'd been discussing. My mind was on other matters at the time, but I knew she was referring to the small fragment I had managed to retrieve from the aftermath of the royal visit, a tiny scrap, barely more than a few fibres, which had somehow escaped the flames, and which I had spirited away in my tobacco tin and presented to my close associate solely in the interests of national security and with absolutely no regard to selfish thoughts of reciprocal favours whatsoever.

"Hmmnnhh?" The week’s accumulated demons were on the verge of exiting the mortal portion of my being, and really, couldn't this wait? "Please, I . . ."

"We-ll," she drawled tantalizingly, ignoring my muttered protestations. "Guess what?" Exercising, exorcising, exhorting, expostulating, explicating, extrapolating, Dr. Bunsen is simply incapable of doing just one thing at a time.

"Nnnhh?"

"It's alive."

"Hmnhaa!" I shot, flabbergasted, bolt upright, and the icy claw of fear gripped my bowels. At least I think that's what it was. I thought back and clearly remembered stepping towards those underpants as they smothered the life from our glorious monarch, and being unable to save her, driven back as I was by the overpowering stench which struck me as forcefully as a cricket bat across the bridge of the nose. But there had been something more, something I had not yet acknowledged even to myself. Like the dog growling through bared teeth, its hackles raised, or the cat hissing with arched back, there had emanated from the undergarment a quite palpable hostility at my approach, a malevolence which, though silent, had as good as screamed at me to get back or suffer the consequences, as if those pants had indeed been alive and sentient. And now this.

"Yes, and not just alive," she continued animatedly, warming to her subject as she washed her hands. "But apparently - what’s the word – cognizant. And growing at a . . . er . . . phenomenal rate. You ought to see it. It's really quite . . . um . . . phenomenal." For all her enormous brainpower, Dr. Bunsen's vocabulary strikes one at times as disconsonantly exiguous.

"Let's go!" I took her hand and we raced outside to the street.

Within an hour we had reached the bleak marshlands of Dungeness and were pulling up with much screeching of tyres outside the guardhouse of the Longhead Institute. Recognizing her sunglasses, headscarf, and white Sunbeam Alpine, old George the gate keeper lifted the pole and waved us through with a perfect blend of cheerfulness and subservience before returning gratefully to his cup of tea, newspaper, and packet of Player’s Navy Cut. Once inside the building, we made our way along labyrinthine corridors and through numerous coded security doors, until we entered the infamous Lab Nine. So this was it. At the far end of the cavernous laboratory was a room within a room made of thickened glass, and it was apparently in there that the thing was being studied. As we approached the door, Dr. Bunsen gasped. In truth, I think she might have reeled.

"Oh, my God!" She stared in disbelief at the room's interior, clutching the doorframe as if to keep herself from falling. “It’s gone!”

“Let’s go!” I took her hand and we raced outside to the car.

We found old George the gate keeper slumped across the table in his hut, the Sunday Pictorial beneath his ashen face, a mug of tea still warm beside him, a filterless cigarette burning away in an ashtray. He was dead, which could mean only one thing: we’d have to raise the pole ourselves.

On a hunch I directed Dr. Bunsen back to town and straight to the Carcinoma Estate, and by the time we arrived and parked the car dusk was swiftly falling. As we approached Leukaemia House, home of the infamous Otto Grossminger, we saw that a large crowd had gathered around it and were chanting for Otto to come down and surrender. Like something from an old Gothic horror film, there were flaming torches in abundance, and the mood was one of righteous outrage mixed with more than a soupcon of trepidation. I half expected to see the local innkeeper bearing in his arms the pale, lifeless body of his young daughter, presenting it to the mob as exhibit 'A'.

High up at the top of the tower block, a massively obese face had appeared at a window, and was looking down at the murderous multitude with fear and puzzlement, an innocent fool surrounded by a baying rabble eager for his blood. And then something flew from the window and fluttered down towards the crowd.

It started with the single scream of a lank-haired young woman in a beige overcoat, and within five seconds a stampeding panic had siezed the crowd as what appeared to be an enormous pair of filthy jockey shorts descended slowly on a spiralling trajectory, appearing to hover on the still evening air, rotating this way and that as if scanning the faces of the terrified crowd below, as though searching for someone in particular. And as I stood unmoving, looking upwards, it was as if our eyes met in a sudden moment of recognition, and the shorts seemed subtly to change course and head directly for me. I turned to run, though I knew it was hopeless, and the last thing I remember is something unfeasibly smelly wrapping itself around my face and then everything went black.

I woke in the Jack Russell Unit, a locked ward in Block X at St. Bernard’s, with a tube in my arm and Laura Bunsen standing over me dressed in a nurse's uniform. I looked at her name badge which read ‘RMN Renata Toggenburg’, but I knew that this was just a ruse, all part of the big cover-up. I looked up and grinned at her, then winked meaningfully, just to let her know that I was no fool, that I knew exactly what was happening, that I too was in on the great charade of the Grossminger conspiracy. She smiled weakly and, fine actor that she is, raised her eyes to the ceiling, and then turned and walked away without a word as if we'd never even met before.

McAtheter's Syndrome

2006-05-16T04:09:00.000-07:00

As if in emulation of a particularly nasty species of viper, Doreen Slugg jabbed a hideously long-nailed finger repeatedly with a sneering malevolence at the red button which hung at the end of the wire that was looped around her bedpost, fantasising with each thrust of the grotesquely ossified claw about venomous fangs biting again and again and again the pretty face of his stupid cat. She could hear quite clearly the buzzer sounding downstairs, and yet Henry did not come, though usually he was up those stairs immediately he was summoned like the timid little lapdog he’d always been. This was most irregular.

Reaching for the heavy walking stick, precursor of the recently installed buzzer arrangement, she began to beat the threadbare patch of carpet beside the bed, imagining with each blow that it was the balding skull of the miserable worm who called himself her husband. Thump, thump, thump, thump, she hit the floor until, in her mind, she’d smashed his head to pieces and splattered his worthless brains around the room. Thump, thump, thump, until her hugely fat arm could raise the stick no more. And still he did not come.

She put her head back and employed as a last resort the piercing contralto which in her younger days could shatter a wine glass across a room, or bring to heel a recalcitrant spouse from a mile away. She screeched his name over and over and over again, until her larynx was raw and her lungs, ragged and exhausted, gasped for oxygen. She listened for his approach, but heard only an eerie, echoing silence.

This was getting serious. Her pillows needed plumping as a matter of some urgency and her morning tea was already seven minutes overdue. Her bag needed emptying, the remote was on the blink, and Trisha was about to start. It just wouldn’t do. By God, he was going to pay for this when eventually he deigned to put in an appearance. His life wouldn’t be worth living. Where was the useless, lanky specimen? Probably out the back, playing with that fucking cat. He seemed more fond of it, spent more time with it, than his own wife. By Christ, she’d make his life a misery when she got hold of him. Did he not have a sympathetic bone in his body? Twelve years now she’d been bed-ridden and the selfish, unfeeling bastard didn’t give a toss about her. But make no mistake, she’d make him regret this for the rest of his stinking life. Well, he’d left her no alternative this time. Reaching across to the telephone, she called for an ambulance.

Professor M.T. McAtheter first identified the condition as far back as 1950 when working at the Coburg Institute for Congenital Diseases of the Mind and Body, which had been founded by the Crown Agents to investigate ways of helping the newly-born heir to the throne lead as normal a life as possible, given the horrific extent of his physical and mental abnormalities.

While conducting an epidemiological study of the numerous genetic defects associated with the royal family and other close-knit, inter-bred communities, McAtheter noticed a peculiarly high incidence of women of low intelligence taking to their beds permanently in middle age for no apparent reason beyond a petulant and stubborn reluctance to do anything else. Such a long-term sedentary existence will, of course, eventually cause genuine and serious medical problems such as obesity and heart failure, but such secondary ailments apparently serve only to vindicate, by the twisted logic of a feeble mind, these patients’ original state of torpor.

This condition, named McAtheter’s syndrome, which is purely psychological in origin, will be well known to all ambulancemen, though it can be easily mis-diagnosed and is often mistaken for motor neurone disease or multiple sclerosis. Almost exclusively it is found in menopausal women of severely limited intellect, though a new temporary strain has been emerging recently which seems to affect mainly younger women of African origin who simply lie on the floor and claim they cannot move. The cause of this is invariably emotional, being an adult version of a toddler’s tantrum, and once the noisy and dramatic arrival of an ambulance has served its purpose of teaching the spouse or children the required lesson, recovery is swift without further treatment. Unknown a few years ago, acute McAtheter’s now accounts for almost four per cent of ambulance journeys.

As it happened it was Albert and I who arrived at Slugg Cottage to find no one answering, just a very friendly and rather attractive young tortoiseshell cat on the doorstep which rubbed its head against our legs and purred in a most endearing fashion. We could make out nothing through the windows, but through the letterbox could be seen quite clearly a pair of grey flannel trousers above a couple of slippered feet which appeared to be suspended in mid-air about six inches above the hall carpet, and distinctly audible was a high-pitched voice beckoning, presumably in vain, someone called Henry.

Looking about and seeing no one, we set our heavy boots to work on the front door until the lock yielded and we made our way inside. What struck us first upon entering the premises was the sight of a thin, bald man of about seventy hanging from the upstairs banister by a length of household electrical flex tied around his neck. He was quite dead and as such of no further interest to the ambulance service. Swinging him aside, we ascended the stairs, following the voice as if drawn, remarked Albert, by the very daughters of Terpsichore, until we came to a bedroom at the back of the house in which we discovered what appeared to be the result of some bizarre scientific experiment which had somehow thrown up a cross between a very pallid hippopotamus and an enormous human female. Whatever it was, it was wallowing on a bed with a ridiculous wig perched upon its head and a large wooden stick in its hand, and it turned towards us when it became aware of our presence, and spoke perfectly comprehensibly with a local accent.

“I can’t walk. Where’s me 'usband?” I cleared my throat and affected an attitude of professional gravitas as I considered the best way to break the news to this woman that her husband of forty-odd years had chosen to take his own life rather than endure another moment in the thrall of such a ghastly creature. I opened my mouth to speak but Albert had already beaten me to it.

“Good morning, madam,” he began, adopting his best funeral director’s voice, and wringing his hands with mock obsequiousness. “I’m very sorry to tell you . . .”

“What? Where is 'e?”

“I’m afraid, madam . . .” Albert paused interminably, creating an air of tension and suspense worthy of the finest actor. The woman appeared genuinely concerned, even frightened, though more, I suspected, for her own welfare than that of poor Henry.

“Tell me what’s 'appened?” She was becoming agitated and waved her stick at us belligerently, but we bravely stood our ground as Albert continued to address her.

“It grieves me, madam, to have to tell you . . .” He stared at her with a penetrating solemnity.

“For God’s sake, what? Tell me!” She was about to snap.

“It’s your husband, madam . . .” Another long, long pause.

“What about 'im? Please!” At last, that word.

“I regret to inform you, madam, that your husband . . . is . . . completely bald.”

At these words the woman gasped as if in shock, and then as the light of understanding dawned she launched into a violent fit of cruel and malicious laughter, beating her stick gleefully against the carpet. Then she began to cough and splutter a bit, and then to choke, struggling for breath and clutching at her ample chest. Her face had turned a remarkably vivid shade of red and I wondered if ‘cerise’ was the right word to describe that particular hue. Albert agreed that ‘cerise’, from the French for a cherry, possibly derived from the old Norman ‘cherise’, about summed it up.

The etymology of Mrs. Slugg’s complexion proved to be a fascinating subject for discussion because it changed colour quite dramatically before our eyes, but after a few minutes we were struggling to keep up because neither Albert nor I could think of the correct word to describe a very pale greyish-blueish sort of a tinge with a subtle hint of yellow. Although he conceded without argument that it was not a valid word for a recognised colour as far as the OED was concerned, being either a noun meaning a dead body or a verb used colloquially in theatrical circles meaning to become helpless with laughter while attempting to perform, Albert suggested that if one were to market a household paint in that colour, with perhaps a kitchen or a bathroom in mind, then the simple appellation of ‘corpse’ would suffice perfectly adequately. I could only concur.

One of the more rewarding aspects of the ambulance game, and there are precious few these days, is the subtle pleasure derived from making life or death decisions on scene without hesitation or advice. For example, you may have to decide if you are going to hump that massively obese patient down the stairs yourselves, or call for the assistance of another crew, or pass the time in pleasant conversation until that backbreaking task falls under the auspices of Messrs. Berry and Burnham. And usually, when you and your crewmate are properly attuned, the whole process will take place without the subject even having to be raised, as if the pair of you aren’t even aware it’s happening. It’s almost uncanny, when you think about it.

Last Will and Testament

2006-05-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

I don’t suppose you’ve ever called unexpectedly at Albert Harness’s house in the Old Town, maybe trying to flog him some dusters, or on the Lord’s business, or, heaven forbid, in connection with Aunt Fanny's will. No, if you're reading this, probably not. But if you had, it almost certainly would have occurred to you at some point during your visit that his is a truly exquisite residence of quite perfect proportion and timeless, understated elegance; and it’s quite likely you would have experienced an acute attack of envy, perhaps accompanied by an uncharitable sense of resentment, and you might have felt an overpowering desire at that point to sit down on the nearest chair, drink a glass of water, take several deep breaths and put your head between your knees for a minute or two; and pretty soon, if not before, you would have taken to wondering, becoming disoriented and possibly on the verge of something resembling panic, what a place like Albert’s must be worth; and if, like the majority of your fellow countrymen, you were well versed in the ubiquitous dinner-party topic of residential property prices, you might have felt able to hazard a guess as to its current market value and, having done so, you would have reeled in astonishment as you asked yourself, dizzy by now and sweating profusely, how on earth a humble ambulanceman could possibly afford such a beautiful house, the likes of which the likes of you could only ever dream of owning; and then quite probably, as the room started spinning and your vision blurred, you would have passed out and fallen to the floor.

Albert, it has to be said, harbours a marked aversion to strangers calling uninvited at his home of an evening, particularly those selling household cleaning products, or peddling religious mumbo-jumbo, or, worst of all, questioning his right to inherit, and he has long displayed an incorrigible tendency to poison them all. Unerringly the gentleman, though, he’ll invite you in, exuding his characteristic smiling charm and offer you some form of liquid refreshment, which you’ll be more than happy to accept, certain you’ll be closing a deal pretty soon, possibly on a set of overpriced tea towels and a six-pack of pan scourers, or, then again, on the very deeds to his immortal soul and a tenth of his income for life, or perhaps on Aunt Margaret's little cottage by the river, the one you've always had your eye on; and no doubt you’ll be feeling rather smug because you think you are about to get the better of him, and you’ll look around at his beautiful house, wondering what it’s worth, and the next thing you'll know will be waking up in a cellar with your hands and feet tightly bound, a filthy rag stuffed in your mouth and a less than charming Albert Harness standing over you with something shiny in his hand.

The fact of the matter is that Albert did not purchase his house at all but was bequeathed it some years ago, so legend has it, by an elderly woman of his acquaintance whom he had come to know closely through his work on the ambulances. His numerous other properties, half a dozen or so of which are scattered around the parish plus a bungalow in Frinton-on-Sea and a chateau with seventy acres in the Dordogne, came into his possession in more or less identical circumstances. I realise this may give the impression that Albert has a way with ladies of a certain vintage and possibly nurses an unusual predilection for girls with papery skin and removable teeth; and while I have no wish to vouchsafe to the general public any glimpses into the darker corners of any of my colleagues’ inner selves, well, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

“As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” preaches the Reverend Harness, who views his many handsome bequests not so much as mere good fortune, nor as the happy outcome of a bit of playful flattery (and who knows what other gruesome ministrations besides?), but rather as a kind of harvest, a gathering-in of a plenteous bounty, the reward of careful husbandry and sensible long-term planning. Or, to put it bluntly, a systematic campaign of forgery and fraud stretching back nigh on thirty years.

He told me once that the idea was born shortly after he started on the ambulances when a regular patient asked if he and his crewmate would be so kind as to witness a signature on a legal document, it being the self-written last will and testament of one Horatio Halliburton, an elderly and one-legged diabetic of the parish for whom the end, sadly, was hoving into view. Unerringly the gentleman, Albert naturally obliged, as did Sid Dressing, who had the pleasure back then of playing the old master to Albert’s young apprentice, and the matter, it seemed, was closed. But a seed had been sown in the rich soil of Albert’s venal mind and I can picture him now as a smooth-cheeked youth, stroking his beardless chin, his eyes narrowing and a smile playing about his lips as the full implications and possibilities of the situation began to shoot up and grow, to prosper and ripen to fruition in the fertile meadow of his iniquitous imagination.

Within a matter of days he had lodged his first will with the Probate Office, that of a Miss Maud Endecott, and he has continued to do so throughout his long and illustrious career as an ambulanceman whenever the right opportunity has presented itself. The elderly spinster, he advises, tends to be most dependable in the generous bestowal of assets because, having no children and usually having outlived her male siblings, there is less likelihood of a disappointed family contesting the will through the courts, though Albert tells me that disgruntled nephews and nieces will occasionally surface with a view to being meddlesome and obstructive. And if you can imagine the impertinence of some people, he's even had one or two calling at his house without an appointment.

If a case should ever reach the unfortunate stage of being brought before a court of law, he will simply explain to the presiding practitioner of jurisprudence, perhaps managing to summon a tear to his eye, that he and the dearly departed had formed a deep and abiding friendship after becoming acquainted through his work for the ambulance service – and here he will pause to allow the assembled parties a few moments to reflect upon the sordid implications of such a relationship – and she, wishing to repay Albert’s fond affection and many hours of close and exclusive attention, bequeathed him her house, her fortune and several thousand shares in the Clapham Dog Biscuit Company. As long as the document has been signed and witnessed correctly, there is little more to be said.

But, warns Albert, your witnesses must be unwavering throughout, as steady as the hand of a neuro surgeon in the face of hostile questioning from highly-paid and artful advocates.

Like all ambulancemen, I have witnessed more than a few signatures in my time and indeed have often played the role of executor and sole beneficiary as well. The fact of it is, for this last will and testament malarkey you need a minimum of three players, and our good friends Stan Tablets and Bert Klaxon have always proved most steadfast in their commitment to the redistribution of wealth, which we in the trade like to think of as just another perk of the ambulance game; a well-deserved gratuity, if you like, from a grateful punter.

Well, you can’t take it with you, can you?

This Sporting Life

2006-05-08T04:16:00.000-07:00

Having no association with any of today's more fashionable diseases and because its lack of mood-enhancing characteristics renders it of no interest to the recreational enthusiast, the man in the street will probably be unfamiliar with the name of Co-beneldopa. No, not a former Derby winner, but a drug used exclusively in the management of Parkinsonism. An apparently dull, workaday sort of pill, lacking the cachet of the more glamorous celebrity medications and certainly harbouring no aspirations to rival the mass appeal of the top illegal substances, you would not really expect it to engender much in the way of passion and excitement on a Saturday afternoon in Clapham High Street and yet, as we shall see, in the right circumstances it has the capacity to surprise with an abundance of sporting possibility.

Until recently I was barely aware of its existence, but fortunately Albert Harness has a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of all things pharmaceutical and once again his inestimable intellect was called upon to save the day and once again, well, we’ll come to that.

Parkinson's disease, though usually associated in the collective consciousness only with quivering, malodorous geriatrics, hence its lowly status languishing in the relegation zone of the charity league's second division, can and does afflict those of more tender years and a few weeks ago we encountered one of the unfortunate few as he floundered helplessly on the pavement like a gormless haddock flapping about in the bottom of a boat, poleaxed by the big P on the day of the Grand National.

As a general rule I allow myself to be guided by an instinctive tendency to avoid whenever possible the company of those who habitually spend their time horizontal on a public thoroughfare, and while I appreciate that theoretically there may be a sound and compelling reason for adopting such a posture, beyond the usual alcoholic over-indulgence, this is about as commonplace as a penalty shoot-out at Royal Ascot. However, Senor Pablo de Noce, for such was his name, displayed a cavalier disregard for the ancient customs of Ambulanceland and turned out to be something of a very rare bird indeed, what with his fully paid-up membership of the Young Parkinsonians and his fondness for lying about in the street without the assistance of strong drink. Most notably, though, he was a punter of a most amiable and sporting disposition and, as such, representative of a species teetering precariously on the cusp of extinction.

Shortly after lunch, Albert and I had been prised from our armchairs to respond to a call from a disgruntled female who had complained of having to step over the recumbent form of a drunken Spaniard who was impeding her progress between the post office and the off licence, and as we approached we naturally assumed that Pablo was just another of the innumerable itinerant Iberian inebriates passing through the parish in the ceaseless quest for oblivion and had decided to take forty winks on the pavement before embarking upon the next leg of his interminable odyssey. But on closer examination that familiar sensation of uncertainty began gnawing away at the old innards.

For a start, he looked a little too well dressed, too well laundered, and we could detect about him none of that ripe, tangy aroma of fermenting compost that usually oozes liberally from the pores of the man whose life’s work it is to drink; and although he was obviously incapable of speech, there was a certain spark of intelligence and awareness about the eyes, which shone far brighter than the glazed and vacant bloodshot yellow orbs of the standard Clapham tramp.

As we pondered these baffling discrepancies, we happened to observe through the window of the nearby bookmaker’s several faces taking an unduly keen interest in our professional ministrations and we heard raised voices and witnessed animated gestures reminiscent of a lively mid-week crowd at Kempton Park or Catford Stadium and sensed with the unerring antennae of the seasoned ambulanceman that here, quite literally beneath our noses, was a potential earner, so Albert ambled into the shop to investigate.

Reputed to sport the largest trousers south of the river, Willie Welch, like all successful bookmakers, is nobody’s fool, and there are only two possibilities, both slender, of ever getting the better of him. You can experience a streak of extremely good luck and then make real the impossible dream of the gambler by stopping while you’re ahead, or you can somehow achieve the enviable but unlikely position of possessing greater insight than Willie concerning some event upon which he is prepared to take a bet. He will, though, to his credit, give you a price on almost anything and as long as the favourite hasn’t romped home, you’ll probably never find him more amenable to an unusual wager than on the afternoon of the National.

Albert emerged a couple of minutes later from the emporium of turf accountancy accompanied by the proprietor himself, closely followed by a small crowd of assorted sportsmen eager for some action and bearing the news that he’d placed a pony for each of us at eleven-to-two on our boy getting to a seat in the ambulance within ten minutes under his own steam. If we could persuade Pablo de Noce to get to his feet and walk in the right direction, climb a couple of steps and just sit down, we stood to win two hundred and seventy-five pounds between us.

Although it failed to register at the time, this constituted an unprecedented and historic moment in the annals of the Public Health Service – a performance target actually worth striving to achieve.

The general consensus within the shop, Albert reported, had been that Pablo, who’d staggered in there about ten minutes earlier requesting a glass of water, had little chance of making it to his feet unaided for several hours, never mind walking twenty feet to the ambulance, on account of him being about as sober as a pickled gherkin and drugged to the eyeballs to boot. The assembled punters and the crafty old bookmaker himself had stood and watched as he'd swallowed some pills shortly before collapsing to the ground, hence the generous odds. Frowning with perplexed trepidation at Albert and wondering what had possessed him, in light of this information, to place such a hopeless dead cert loser of a bet, I visualised our hard-earned cash being swallowed into the fathomless darkness of the back pocket of those unconscionably enormous trousers. By way of reassurance, I received one of Albert’s familiar sly winks and he opened his hand to reveal the packet of medication he’d fished from the pocket of Pablo’s jacket before entering the shop: Co-beneldopa, 50 mg.

The stout bookmaker clarified the simple rules of this strictly amateur contest - no physical assistance, no financial incentives - before handing his stopwatch to an impartial bystander who was to act as umpire and official timekeeper; and raising a grubby handkerchief above his head with ironic solemnity, he brought the totally oblivious Pablo de Noce under starter’s orders. A respectful hush fell over the course as we waited for the off. The flag came down, the race was on, and pandemonium duly ensued.

It seemed that the smart money was on Pablo continuing to play the role of an unmoving carcass for at least the next ten minutes, and the vociferous throng exhorted him in no uncertain terms to stay put. The crowd grew quickly, drawn by the irresistible pull of some impromptu sporting action, like a fight in a school playground. Willie moved among them drumming up business, while Albert and I squatted beside our boy and willed him to recover the use of his limbs, which, unknown to the baying multitude, is just the effect Co-beneldopa will have on the person rendered immobile by Parkinson’s. But would its magic work quickly enough? The tension looked set to become unbearable.

After a couple of minutes, much to the consternation of the crowd, Pablo sat up and made a courageous if unintelligible effort to speak and I tried to engage him in conversation to get him focused and determined and instill in him the will to win. To do this, I adopted Healthcare Professional Tone No. 7: Matey Cajolery, urging and wheedling in that well-practised and inappropriately familiar fashion, as if we’d been at school together, and I saw his mouth twitch slightly in response, though whether with the makings of a smile or a grimace of distaste was hard to say, but I was sure the light of understanding shone in his eyes and I convinced myself that he was on our side and we were going to win.

The minutes seemed to fly by and my emotions swung like a pendulum between the jubilation of imminent victory with each of Pablo’s noble attempts to stand and the crushing despair of certain defeat as he crashed painfully back to the floor. “Crawl, Pablo, crawl!” I screamed at him, still unsure of his grasp, if any, of the English language. He favoured me with a broad, imbecilic grin and rose to a kneeling position, swaying like some rare and delicate Japanese grass caressed by a coastal breeze, smiling stupidly with inflated pride at his achievement, before plummeting headlong once more to the pavement to a huge round of applause and joyful whooping and cheering.

His hands were raw by now, the knees of his trousers ragged and bloody, and I suspected his nose had been broken at least once, but still I urged him to greater efforts, any professional concern for his wellbeing having long since been devoured by the desire to win a few quid. “Come on, Pablo!” I screeched. “Get up! Get up!” And then he was on his feet, decidedly unsteady, but nevertheless standing upright.

“Two minutes!” called the timekeeper and the crowd went wild, pressing in on the tottering, disoriented athlete, shouting into his face, commanding him, begging him to fall. He swayed and staggered off course, his arms windmilling to keep himself balanced. The open back doors of the ambulance beckoned, just ten feet away now, only three steps to climb.

Dazed and confused, he plodded forward, dragging his feet with a great effort, so agonisingly slowly I could hardly bear to watch. He reached out for one of the handrails at the back of the van, missed it, and stumbled sideways. A huge cheer rang out and he seemed bewildered, having lost his bearings. I screamed at him to go right, go right! Whether he understood or not, I don’t know, but he lurched to the right anyway and made another grab for the rail. This time he got hold of it and clung on with both hands.

“One minute!” the timekeeper called out and the volume of the crowd reached an extraordinary new level. Pablo, spurred on by the commotion, attempted to lift one foot on to the first step. He got his right foot on it and hauled himself up by the rail. The seconds were ticking away and somehow he got up to the next step, listing from side to side, but still clinging on. As he got a foot on to the top step, he tried to stand upright and turn to acknowledge the crowd, losing his balance as he did so, but still holding on to the rail.

Then he turned and raised both hands above his head in a victory salute, laughing with a childlike joy, weeping with pride, completely overcome with emotion, as if he’d single-handedly won the World Cup for his country; and then he pitched head first on to the road, smashed his skull open and lay still. At this dramatic spectacle, the crowd went into a frenzy of ecstacy, laughing and cheering, applauding and chanting, dancing and hugging each other. And then the timekeeper blew the whistle and it was all over. We’d lost the bet.

Poor Pablo. He’d tried so hard, given everything he had for us, but like all effort, all endeavour, ultimately it was for nothing. We lifted him on to our stretcher and drove him to the discreet brick building at the back of St. Bernard’s, where Bill Bones rolled up his sleeves and attended to the necessary while Albert and I drank tea and played cards; then we put the yellow bags on a barrow and pushed it round to old Sam Furness, who helped us throw them into the roaring flames of the hospital's ancient incinerator.

We stood outside and watched in silence as the smoke rose from the chimney, a fragile grey plume, torn and twisted, its atoms dispersed upon the blustery spring wind; not destroyed, we told each other, but rearranged like the letters of an anagram and, who knows, given the infinity of Time, maybe one day to be realigned.

But I wouldn't put money on it.

Playing the Goat

2006-05-05T04:20:00.000-07:00

Desdemona Blenkinsop, whose personal particulars I was taking down the other night in the line of duty, turned out to be a former pupil of my old primary school, St. Alan’s in the parish of Clapham, which in itself is unremarkable, one or two of the local children having attended it over the years, but what struck me and set me on the path of reminiscence was the coincidence that she had been born on the very day Miss Chalk put me across her knee in front of the whole class and chastised me for persistently and incorrigibly playing the goat when the script stated perfectly clearly that the part for which I had been engaged was that of a donkey. It’s funny isn’t it, the things an eight-year-old makes a note of in his diary. According to mine, and I’ve kept them all, it happened during a full dress rehearsal in the December of the year that Spartacus Barnett fell from the tower of St. Benedict’s and broke his neck.

I went to visit him last month in the Royal Hospital for Incurable Cripples, though I can’t see how these annual pilgrimages of mine are doing me any good, apart from putting me in rare high spirits for a couple of days afterwards, of course. In fact, to be truthful, for a while now I’ve been considering knocking them on the head entirely; it’s not as if Spartacus knows who I am, or why I'm there, or where he is, or who he is, or anything really. It’s just that somehow when the daffodils are in bloom I am driven by an irresistible compulsion to pick a bucketful of the beastly things and put them in a vase at the foot of his bed.

I landed the role of the donkey despite fierce competition from the likes of such revered luminaries of the drama class as Gervaise Armstrong and Jean-Pierre Braithwaite and felt I owed it to Miss Chalk as a debt of gratitude for her show of faith in my abilities to give it my all, to bring something fresh, perhaps even radical, to what in my opinion has always been a pivotal character in the plot of a timeless classic of the English theatre. After all, without the donkey Mary would never have made it to Bethlehem and who knows what depths of obscurity might have befallen her only son had he been born under some featureless rock out in the desert. Indeed, it’s doubtful we would ever have heard his name.

In my youthful imagination, you see, not only had I become a donkey but I had also somehow assumed the mantle of Protector of the Faith and felt I was bearing the burden of sole responsibility for the very inception and subsequent prosperity of Christendom. Consequently I was quite adamant, with hindsight perhaps too vociferously, that the donkey should be exhibited with far greater prominence and to better dramatic effect than is customary and if it couldn’t take the actual lead, for which cause I argued tirelessly, then at least it should be portrayed as a supporting character of major consequence with a strong and forceful voice delivering a powerful and unequivocal message to mankind. In a word, a goat.

My best friend Spartacus Barnett, I knew, had coveted the role for ages and had, I suspected, been engaging in secret solitary rehearsals at home, having been more or less promised the part already, long before any auditions had taken place. I remember him telling me of his aspirations as we larked about on top of the church tower on that glorious March afternoon a thousand lifetimes ago; how he had his heart absolutely set on the donkey, that it was all he lived for, the only thing he was able to think about; how it was going to be the first step towards an illustrious career on the stage and hopefully the big screen; how one day he would be a rich and famous actor and buy a big house beside the river, drive a Bentley and marry Miss Chalk. Sir Spartacus and Lady Barnett, he chuckled with innocent delight, clasping his hands together, a misty look about the eyes as he gazed into the far distance where a sea of bright yellow daffodils bloomed in the park.

The performance the following Michaelmas term was hailed as one of the finest productions in living memory with Felicity Wilkinson as Mary and Valentine Bottomley as Joseph and featuring Dr. Wolfgang Hardcastle, our hugely popular and always game headmaster who turned in a well-judged comic cameo as the baby Jesus. My interpretation of the donkey having been ruled inappropriate, I had approached Miss Chalk in a last-ditch act of desperation to ask if I might try out for the Holy Spirit as the idea of coming unto Felicity Wilkinson in the night had begun to hold for me a strange and compelling fascination, but the part had been filled already by Geronimo Blenkinsop.

In the end, the part of the donkey was played, in my opinion in a rather stolid and workmanlike fashion, by Tarquin Harrison who had of late become something of a favourite of Miss Chalk’s and who went on to achieve a kind of fame briefly the following spring by disappearing in suspicious circumstances, his hideously bloated corpse eventually washing up in a creek on the southern bank of the wide and bleak estuary on Easter Sunday and funnily enough near the little village of Bethlehem.

And what of Desdemona, the forgotten woman of the first paragraph and unwitting progenitor of the whole sorry tale? Was her role that of mere catalyst, you’ll be asking each other about now, or does she have some greater part to play in all this? Well, Clapham being a small, insular sort of place, you’ll not be surprised to learn that she went on to marry one of the old boys of St. Alan’s; in fact, none other than Geronimo “Holy Ghost” Blenkinsop who sadly left her widowed shortly after the honeymoon when he met with the great misfortune of being struck down and killed very late one foggy night by a hit-and-run driver. There were several low-quality drunken witnesses to the incident but their descriptions of the offending vehicle differed too widely to be of much use to the authorities. The police, who were looking for anything from a pink and white ice cream van to a blue and gold milk float, eventually abandoned the search as hopeless.

The officer in charge of the investigation, my old pal Inspector Bent, gave me an example of the impossibility of the task. Apparently, in all seriousness one short-sighted, half-demented old codger, obviously more than a little the worse for wear, swore blind that Blenkinsop had been run down by an ambulance being driven by a goat.

Pink for Danger

2006-04-19T04:23:00.000-07:00

While it would barely raise an eyebrow these days in any but the most rabidly royalist of circles were I to reveal with frank sincerity that I was once intimate with the late Princess of Wales — ante mortem, I hasten to add — I imagine the assertion that I offered up recently for a 'one under' might challenge the credulity of even the least sceptical reader. But I swear it’s true. Honestly, I really did. On Mother’s grave.

For those who prefer comprehensible English, I responded to a wireless broadcast from Clapham Ambulance Control by volunteering to attend an emergency call which involved a collision between a railway train and a human being. Train versus pedestrian, as we say in prosaic ambulancespeak. This is a fortunately rare but far from unprecedented occurrence, the result of such an encounter invariably being that the fragile human comes off rather worse than the more robust train, which tends to sustain barely a scratch and requires little attention beyond a bit of a hose-down. The patient, as many ambulancemen refer with unconscious irony to a dismembered corpse, requires no treatment.

If you've never seen someone who's been hit by a through train going at full pelt, you might be tempted to conjure up a vision of an unmoving, somewhat pathetic figure lying forlornly between the rails, or perhaps to one side of them, having been shoved there by two hundred tons of heavy engineering travelling at seventy miles an hour, but it isn't quite like that. A train, when roused, can tear the clothes off you in a moment and its ferocious undercarriage can process you rapidly into many pieces before distributing your remains over several hundred yards of the Permanent Way. You might be unrecognisable even as human, let alone identifiable by gender or distinguishing features. Put crudely, you could well be reduced to meaty chunks. Your head, your face, so familiar to all who know and love you, may never be found and some parts of your body inevitably will be overlooked and left for the nourishment of the local rats.

As a stark reminder of the tenuous grip we exert upon our physical existence, the sight of a human body which has been dragged beneath a train is more effective than any textbook, however well illustrated, and you really do need to be there to appreciate it fully. It's a bloody mess, I can tell you, and not my idea of entertainment at all. So you’re thinking there must have been a jolly compelling motive for my apparent eagerness to attend such a hideous bloodbath, and one surely bound up not in altruism or public spiritedness, for that as a general rule is not the way of the ambulanceman, but rather one steeped in shameless and mercenary self-interest. Indeed, astute reader, there was. In fact, for reasons which will soon become clear, I was interested only in recovering a particular item from the pocket of a certain tweed jacket. It all came about as the result of a very stupid mistake, a moment of unthinking madness, one I shall never repeat and I am able to bear the humiliation of public revelation only in the knowledge that my experience might serve as a warning to others in the business and lead them safely away from the path of hasty imprudence which for the ambulanceman often leads directly to the door of the Coroner's Court.

Like most terrible events it began innocuously enough, in this case during the early evening with a call to the Old Queen Mum, a local public house renowned for its inexpensive beer, poor food and a less than discerning clientele, and in which an elderly gentleman had become inebriated to the point of truculence and had been rather unwisely challenging all-comers to a spot of fisticuffs. Most, of course, though no doubt sorely tempted, had no strong desire to take up his offer and simply navigated a sensible course around him on their way to and from the bar, perhaps with a sad little shaking of the head and an amused grin of patronising incredulity. But there's always one isn't there? And it's well known that that's all it takes. So anyway someone eventually gave the old boy a well-deserved smack and down he went with a bloody nose. As he struggled to his feet to rejoin the fray he stumbled across a table and upset a few drinks over their disgruntled owners and a bit of a brawl duly ensued and the police were called and the police summoned the ambulance and driving that ambulance was Stan Tablets and in the seat beside Stan Tablets was none other than your humble servant.

The aged aggressor turned out to be a man who went by the unlikely name of Archibald McTurnip. He was short and wiry of stature and the proud possessor of those traditional souvenirs of an old-fashioned Glaswegian upbringing — borstal-tattooed knuckles, an obsessive fondness for alcohol, a marked propensity for mindless violence, a long scar down one side of his face and a very well developed hatred of all policemen, particularly those of the English variety. He displayed the inevitable excessive belligerence so beloved of the little ‘un and promised on first sight to be quite a handful. However, Stan has a wonderful way with this type of customer and is often able to calm the most aggressive drunk merely by means of a quiet word and a penetrating stare. I don't make a habit of gazing into the eyes of Mr. Tablets or anything but I know there lurks plainly within them a whole world of terrible hardship just waiting for a suitable tenant and in most cases they are an effective antidote to threatening behaviour.

Under Stan's spell Archie quickly became as tractable as a sedated spaniel and he followed us with some ambulatory deficiency but otherwise quite willingly out to the van where we gave him the standard cursory examination. His wounds were negligible and although he was so drunk he could barely stand or speak, in our considered professional opinion he didn't need hospital treatment. One way or another we wanted shot of him as soon as possible because it was time for dinner and a good ambulanceman will never allow the dubious needs of a patient to stand between himself and the pleasures of the table. In huddled conference we reviewed the options.

We could of course simply have taken him to St. Bernard’s, but we’d eaten there the last three nights and fancied a bit of a change. We could have run him home but he lived too far away, across the river somewhere, way off our patch, totally out of the question. So in the end we decided to drop him at the railway station and then dine at Les Sausages which is nearby and serves a palatable and generous portion which falls squarely within the ambulanceman’s modest budget. I attended to all the necessary paperwork and as per the latest wave of Ambulance Regulations gave Archie his personal copy, the pink one, which he stuffed roughly in the inside pocket of his greasy old tweed jacket before scrawling his signature on my copy and taking his leave of us. The last we saw of him he was engaged upon a foolhardy ascent of the precipitous concrete steps which lead to platforms seven and eight, hanging on for dear life to the handrail. We thought no more about him and were pulling up outside the cafe, our conversation having turned to the important and fascinating subject of pie, when we heard the broadcast — one under at the station, platform eight, assistance appreciated.

Before you could say ‘sphygmomanometer’ I had grabbed the microphone and offered up for the job, having reasoned in an instant that a ten-minutes-old pink copy found in the possession of a fresh corpse would present a very poor impression of the ambulance crew to the coroner and would be tantamount to a written testament of our wilful neglect of our patient, a signed confession of a dereliction of our duty of care and incontrovertible proof of our contribution to his untimely and horrific death. Without that vital piece of incriminating evidence about his person he’d be just another drunken old codger who’d fallen over and just happened to land in the path of the Portsmouth Express. Unfortunate, but there it is.

We had to get there quickly before that pink sheet of doom fell under the meddlesome and inquisitive auspices of officialdom and sealed both our fates good and proper, once and for all. Stan drove like a naughty teenager who's nicked a police car and we hurried up the steps with a box of rubber gloves and a roll of rubbish bags, the only pieces of equipment really required for a genuine ‘one under’.

“D'yiz went som?” a voice greeted us as we reached the platform and I could have danced for joy. I laughed with exquisite happiness and spread my arms to embrace my dear, dear friend Archibald McTurnip who responded to my fond advance by taking a swing at me. It missed by a yard and its momentum spun him right round and as he stumbled about in a giddy state of drunken confusion I reached into his jacket and retrieved my pink copy. Easy. Mission accomplished. Thank God and phew and all that, but we still had a job to do.

It might sound strange but the work of collecting the widely-scattered constituent parts of a fellow human being from a railway track and putting them in plastic bags provides a rare and almost perfect opportunity for quiet contemplation. The surreal carnality of the situation stuns all concerned into silence and precludes the usual sick male banter in which the ambulanceman habitually cloaks his fear of death and one is left mostly undisturbed with one’s private thoughts, one’s companions not wishing to intrude upon another’s inner reflections at such a time.

I couldn’t have spoken anyway and my own thoughts, such as they were, were concerned with neither the fleeting transience nor the terrifying fragility of human existence nor with the root societal causes of the unimaginable despair which drives a healthy young person to jump beneath a train. I was aware of an aching sensation in the pit of my stomach, a kind of yearning, not for the enlightenment of understanding nor for a better world for our children, not even for the more fundamental human requirement of some dinner but for that saddest old impossibility of turning back the clock and I was left with nothing but a terrible sensation of existential emptiness.

Perhaps this time I should consider seeking professional help, some form of psychiatric counselling because, seriously, I really am having trouble coming to terms with what I perceive to be my own inadequacy. I mean, fancy giving a pink copy to a drunk in a public place. How could I have been so stupid?

Maundy Thursday

2006-04-13T04:28:00.000-07:00

For a brief and magical interlude it was like watching Shakespeare scratching furiously away at a manuscript; or the light of discovery dawning in the eyes of Archimedes; or Michelangelo applying the final coat to a ceiling; or Stan Tablets throwing an abusive schoolgirl off a balcony. What I mean to say is that it was a far more fulfilling experience than observing mere run-of-the-mill, everyday genius at work, and it inspired not only the standard sort of awe, but also that rare sense of witnessing history in the making, of actually being there, and I felt both humbled and privileged, and more than a little susceptible to the temptations of hyperbole.

It's difficult to convey adequately the sheer joy of knocking off early and shutting up shop for the long Bank Holiday weekend, gratefully casting from the mind all thoughts of the lame ducks and lunatics of the parish, and looking forward to a few precious days of rest in which to commemorate the magnificent achievements of Messrs. Pilate and Iscariot with a few glasses of beer and a plate of roast potatoes. With hindsight, perhaps it was the feeling of calm repose and blissful tranquillity brought on by the impending break, coupled with the drowsiness induced by the generous portions served in the St. Bernard's canteen, or it could have been one of those pills I'd nicked off that patient, but as I sat in the messroom that afternoon, it was as though a divine aura had descended, and all at once I felt myself to be in the presence of something supernatural and miraculous, and was indeed on the verge of telephoning His Holiness with the news when the spell was abruptly broken and normal life allowed to resume.

I was watching Albert Harness in the act of thinking. He lay totally at rest, reclining on the sofa, his eyes closed, their lids flickering almost imperceptibly, his lips moving slightly as though silently articulating the ideas which were forming there and then, before my very eyes, somewhere in the unfathomable depths of that gargantuan mind. I pictured the cogs and wheels of a huge and impossibly complex calculating engine noiselessly turning, digesting, processing, designing, constructing, and I wondered how a brain so massively fertile could be contained in but one fragile human skull. His lips parted slightly as if about to speak, and I awaited the inevitable words of wisdom with bated breath, excited, taut to an excruciating pitch, like a small and rather simple child on Christmas Eve. I knew with the absolute certainty of the unquestioning believer that my life was somehow about to change for ever, and I felt I ought to be making a humble gesture of faith and penance, like washing the feet of a tramp.

And then Albert inhaled sharply and produced from the back of his throat a noise exactly like the protestation of an asthmatic pig upon snaring its testicles on a barbed wire fence, before settling into an unbelievably loud and rhythmical snorting that rattled the cups on the shelf and provoked a swift retaliatory barrage of divers missiles and verbal abuse from the assembled ambulancemen who were trying to take a peaceful snooze after lunch.

I thought of pedestals and idols and feet of clay, and with perhaps greater force than was strictly necessary hurled a No. 3 dressing at his face.

Fool Versus Tree

2006-04-10T04:29:00.000-07:00

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it was Blake who said that a fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees, and if I could degrade that quite remarkable insight into the human condition somewhat by reducing it to a literal observation perhaps I could somehow employ it to account in part for a strange phenomenon which has been occurring around these parts for some little while now, much to the consternation of the local residents, not to mention the poor old hard-done-by men of the Clapham Ambulance. Indeed, if I may be permitted to take the unprecedented liberty of going so far as to paraphrase the great poet by saying that the drunk driver sees not the same tree that the sober one sees, perhaps we'd be making some headway towards enlightenment.

So then, just what is it about trees that the young man of today finds so repugnant? Heavens, when I was a young buck about town, back in another century, I wouldn't have heard a word said against the good old tree. The oak and the ash and the bonny ivy tree - why, we even used quite literally to sing about our feelings for them. The holly and the ivy, and all that. Time was when a man showed a bit of respect for the flora of his native land. Sadly no longer.

No, the trend these days appears to be to drink oneself insensible and then drive one's car, ideally accompanied by a few of one's chums, as fast as possible headlong at the first suitable tree one can find, usually a large one of the chestnut family, and preferably, such are the bewildering demands of fashion, close to the apex of a right hand bend in the road. Presumably, though I'm only guessing here, the purpose of these unwarranted arborial assaults is to try and achieve the hilarious result of knocking the tree down, though I've seen precious little success in that respect so far, despite numerous attempts by the local lads just recently.

Just my luck, I attended one of these cases a couple of weeks back, quite by chance and while off duty. I determined this time to advise the driver, who for some reason had chosen to lie down in the road, of the obvious benefits of selecting something much smaller to start with, a frail and spindly sapling for instance, until he'd got the hang of it, as it were, but my words fell on deaf ears. Some people simply refuse to listen to well-meant and impartial advice, though on this occasion I'm prepared to overlook his ignorance on the grounds that he was quite dead. It'll be scant comfort to his family, I suppose, but at least the trees of the neighbourhood can now rest a little easier of a night.

His seriously injured chums were altogether too vociferous for my taste, and showed very little inclination towards cooperation or even the rudiments of good manners, so I turned my attentions to the poor tree, which had sustained a nasty gash to the bark about a yard above ground level. There was nothing much I could do, and I knew it would heal itself over time, so I slipped away into the night and left them to wait for the emergency services.

The Great Escape

2006-03-19T04:31:00.000-08:00

The hardest part of the operation, he told us matter-of-factly as we sat round the table on the roof like three old pals in the public bar, had been getting all of them out at the same time and without the benefit of his military experience and natural air of bullying authority the plan could never have been pulled off. He'd appreciated from the off that shepherding fifty-odd old ladies, many of whom could barely place one foot in front of the other without snapping a hip or two, up the stairs, on to the roof and through the hole in the fence to freedom was likely to be fraught with difficulty and in the end for the sake of expediency he was obliged to leave some of them behind to take their chances. You never knew, one or two might have made it, but in reality he expected most of them would have been rounded up pretty quickly. A ruddy shame, that, but it couldn't be helped. All in all, though, the smoothness of the whole shebang had exceeded his expectations and though he said it himself it had been a damned fine show. Damned fine! Poisoning the well - actually the staff teapot - had been a doddle, with hindsight a service to mankind, and though he hadn't reckoned on all the guards dying, well, that's what we call collateral damage, lads, and to hell with the lot of 'em. Serves 'em right. Bloody wogs.

John Jackson - 'Black Jack' to the cognoscenti, and not because of the colour of his hair, which in his youth, he informed us, had been quite fair, but that of his soul - wasn't one of those people whom on first acquaintance one feels an overwhelming urge to embrace intimately, buy a few drinks and take home to meet the family. His general construction was reminiscent of the proverbial outside toilet, though one fashioned not from the traditional brick but from a particularly resilient species of granite. On his gnarled features, beneath a scarred and battered bald head, he wore a bellicose expression which announced without ambiguity the ever-present threat of extreme and gratuitous physical violence and though this alarming countenance was etched with deep lines denoting much laughter having occurred thereon over the years one was left with the distinct impression that the only thing likely to amuse this man would be the terrible suffering of a fellow creature. He carried about him an aura of utterly unfeeling callousness and a truly abhorrent arrogance, the sum of which qualities was no doubt of some use to the man whom it behoves to be parachuted behind enemy lines in time of war but which seemed strangely at odds with the ethos of the pale and slender world inhabited by the staff of the modern Public Health Service. He was eighty-seven years old and a few seconds' propinquity was sufficient to induce in me a very strong desire to curl into a ball and rock gently to and fro to the accompaniment of helpless sobbing. Drawing on my last reserves of fortitude, I managed to limit this urge to shuddering at the thought of what he'd been like in his prime, and even Stan Tablets, no delicate flower himself, seemed strangely subdued in his presence. Jackson was more edifice than human being and a serious contender for the title of the Maddest Man I've Ever Met.

We'd been sent to Willow Lodge - 'Clapham's Premier Care Home' - at the behest of a vigilant neighbour who had reported sighting a large elderly gentlemen standing on the roof and 'laughing peculiarly'. Quite why this jovial old boy might require an ambulance was information too sensitive to be imparted to the mere crew, but that's about par for the course these days. Perplexity notwithstanding and nobly setting bitterness to one side, we continued on our journey to find half a dozen or so old women in slippers and nightdresses tottering along the street towards us as fast as their Zimmers would carry them. Reasoning that there was no law against it and having no desire to get involved with such people, we carried on to the address and entered through the open front door to discover that every member of staff we could find was apparently engaged in that time-honoured English pastime of taking a well-earned snooze at the taxpayers' expense. Stan went off in search of someone vaguely compos mentis, no easy task in such a place, and I continued onwards and upwards until I reached a door which gave access to a kind of rooftop garden or terrace.

Built in 1868, Willow Lodge started its life as the four-storeyed, thirty-roomed Clapham Court Hotel, catering mainly for the travelling class of businessman in the days before motor cars ruled the earth and its location, a literal stone's throw from the railway station with its fast and reliable service to the city, proved popular with those journeying up from the south and ensured that it thrived for almost a hundred years. In its heyday the Clapham Court hosted many a gay evening in its modest ballroom where the young of Clapham and its environs danced to the musical arrangements of such local luminaries as Swingin' Johnny Jarvis and his Jumpin' Jazzmen or, when the weather was clement, twirled the night away beneath the potted palms on its rooftop terrace which, before the candle factory was built, had boasted panoramic views of the river and beyond. By the nineteen sixties however, the old hotel was struggling valiantly but ultimately in vain against ever-changing market forces and it finally bid farewell to its last guests in the autumn of 1972 after which it remained empty and unused except by the local children as a sort of impromptu substance abuse club until it was purchased in 1979 by one Rajendra Patel who, with the aid of much timber, plasterboard, and a generous grant from the local authority, converted its thirty rooms into sixty and opened its doors in its present incarnation as a geriatric care home for the physically and mentally dispossessed of the surrounding area.

Mr. Raj Patel named it Willow Lodge after that tree which he felt epitomised the old-fashioned gentility and quintessential Englishness of its prospective residents and while Bonkers and Incontinent Lodge would doubtless have been more accurate Raj was first and foremost a businessman and thus concerned with attracting the cash rather than enhancing the education of the local population. From the start it proved a most profitable addition to the Patel portfolio and remained until the events of the night under scrutiny the flagship of his flourishing financial fleet.

Thoughts of youthful romancin' to the strains of jumpin' jazz men flitted through my mind as I stepped through the door to the terrace and found myself beneath an unseasonably warm and portentous night sky, across which the clouds seemed to be hurrying with an indecent and ominous haste as though in frantic search of a more convivial aspect. The roof garden itself was about fifty feet square and bordered on three sides by a waist-high fence of rails and trellis. There were tables and chairs dotted about here and there and a few desultory shrubs in concrete pots. Perhaps the old ducks were able to derive some vague approximation of pleasure from taking the air up there with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits on a fine afternoon in July but just then I was nurturing an abiding ambition to be far, far away. Something bad was in the offing and it could have been a trick of the wind or solely my imagination but I fancied I could hear a low and mournful sound of the sort usually associated with the terrible suffering of a fellow creature. Directly opposite me there sat an uncommonly large man wearing a dark blazer and grey flannels, puffing contentedly on a pipe and chuckling softly to himself. Beside him I noticed a gap where a section of the fencing had been removed. He turned slowly and looked across at me, and as my legs began to buckle with fright I heard the door open behind me and then the familiar voice of Stan Tablets.

"They're all dead," he said.

"What?" I was only half listening, trying to regain some semblance of composure, my eyes fixed on the creature across the way.

"The staff. Six of 'em. They're all dead." As the meaning of what he was saying finally reached that small part of my brain which is concerned with rational thought, I turned towards him and his brow furrowed quite perceptibly as he caught sight of our new companion. In fact he bristled noticeably and hesitated in a most un-Stan-like fashion as if somehow unsure of how to proceed and then the man spoke in a voice which made Stan's basso profundo sound rather castrato soprano.

"Don't be frightened, lads," he said, and I swear the building trembled. "Come and sit down. I'll tell you a story." Then he turned away and addressed himself to the business of replenishing his pipe. Somehow he seemed marginally less terrifying when those pale eyes were not boring into you, so we crossed the terrace and pulled up chairs beside him. We waited while he got his tobacco burning to his satisfaction and then he began.

"I stayed here once or twice, y'know," he said, gesturing towards the former hotel. "Back in '41, it would've been. I was about twenty-two, I suppose. There was a girl . . . Maisie, her name was. We were going to be married." He closed his eyes, remembering. And then came the life story.

We learned of his itinerant childhood, the crushing poverty and deprivation between the wars, the boxing booths, the bare-knuckle bouts, fighting and thieving all his life; and then the army got its hands on him. Barely able to stick the discipline, he was selected for special operations. He told of his exploits with the Dutch Resistance, how he was engaged in the assassination of collaborators and helping prominent, vulnerable people escape from the Nazi occupation. There was torture and death, dirty tricks and treachery, stuff you wouldn't believe, boys. He couldn't remember how many people he'd killed with his bare hands alone. And when the war ended they gave him a medal and a job with the Ministry as a driver, a bodyguard, a bloody bag-carrier. He searched for Maisie and though he saw her everywhere, he never found her. Maybe she'd been killed in the bombing or given up waiting and married someone else, moved away, had a family. There was nothing to be done so he just carried on, dead inside, for sixty years. And then one day last year the council said they had to knock his house down to make way for the new one-way system and they stuck him in this fuckin' place with these old women and there . . . is it really you, Maisie? All he could think of was getting her out. To live like that! What a waste of time it had all been if that's how it ended. My Maisie rotting in a stinking old people's home, pushed around by a load of fuckin' darkies.

"I had to get her out of there, you see. Couldn't leave her living like that, not with that lot. Had to get her away to safety. But which one was Maisie, that was the question? They all looked the same to me. Couldn't take a chance, had to get them all out. Come on, girls! Quick as you like! Through here! Chop, chop! And the next one! Just like the old days." He laughed insanely and stood, towering over us like some immovable colossus. And then Stan, unable to control his primitive urges a moment longer, sprang at him. There was a brief flurry of movement and then Stan was sitting on the ground eight feet away gasping for breath and scratching his head. Jackson solemnly advised us not to grow old and we assured him that no, no, honestly, we had absolutely no intention of doing any such thing, thank you, and for a moment we thought he was going to make sure of it but he simply turned away without another word, stepped through the hole in the fence and plummeted sixty feet in the darkness. There was a flesh-and-bony, crunchy sort of noise which reminded me of nothing so much as an enormous paratrooper landing in the prescribed manner on a substantial pile of fairly fresh yet brittle corpses and then a few seconds of eerie silence, followed by a familiar wry chuckle, and the sound of size-ten footsteps padding away into the night.

A Small Misunderstanding

2006-03-07T04:32:00.000-08:00

I've gone and put my foot right in it again. Big time, as young Benjamin from across the street would say. First there was Her Majesty, the Queen of England, and now there's Mrs. Mavis Chinstrap of number 17, Cherrytree Avenue, Clapham. Where will it end, I wonder? It simply amazes me how much trouble can be caused by one silly little misunderstanding. If you don't believe me, ask Thomas Becket. Then again, what's done is done, and even he probably would have agreed with my old grandad, who was wont to advise all and sundry that it's no use crying over troubled waters, and sometimes one just has to make the best of a bad penny. Or was it an egg? I'm sure chickens came into it somewhere. Well, I don't suppose it really matters now. If you're wondering what the dickens I'm talking about, please bear with me; I'll get there eventually. In the meantime, let's have some background.

There's an innocent-sounding little question much asked of both policemen and ambulancemen which, although phrased identically and imbued with similar levels of ulterior meaning, is laden in each case with entirely different connotations. The criminal, bang to rights, with commendable optimism and varying degrees of subtlety, will often make the enquiry of the detective sitting across the table from him as to whether a substantial cash donation to Inspector Bent's retirement fund might in any way alleviate the seriousness of the straits in which he now finds himself, and it is customary on such occasions, assuming an understanding to have been reached, for a brown envelope to change hands in the near future at a pre-arranged meeting of said copper and some nefarious emissary of the third party, and charges subsequently to be reduced or dismissed entirely. Such, reassuringly, are the immutable ways of men.

In Ambulanceland, however, where grown men dress in green, the exact same words become a preliminary and tentative enquiry from a concerned relative with regard to the possibility that the Ancient One, not really well enough to endure the arduous journey to the hospital, perhaps could be taken instead directly to the public mortuary, which would save troubling the overworked and under-valued staff in the casualty department, and might be better for all concerned, if you know what I mean. The question in both cases is "Can anything be done?" and it drips with implicit nods, winks, and the imaginary rustle of used notes. And in most cases, yes, something can usually be done.

Ask any ambulanceman in the country, and if he's being truthful he'll tell you, with neither pride nor shame, though strictly off the record, you understand, probably adopting that phlegmatic, seen-it-all manner we tend to acquire after a few years, that he has 'done something' for financial gain, or as a favour to overwrought relatives, or perhaps merely for the pleasure of the act itself. We're all happy to oblige now and then and most of us manage without difficulty to keep the whole business under control and firmly within the bounds of a healthy perspective; but there have been some notable exceptions. One of our erstwhile Directors of Clinical Excellence, the much maligned mass murderer Harold Shipman, was one of those whose baser tendencies eventually got the better of him and he allowed himself to run amok with the morphine syringe among the old ducks of the parish like a country sportsman on amphetamines. Once in General Practice, you see, the temptations were simply too great and he found that his general practice of despatching old ladies on the merest whim became one he just couldn't leave alone. Such a shame he went off the rails; he had all the makings of a truly fine ambulanceman. Oh, well . . . But I'm straying from the subject, no doubt unconsciously trying to delay the inevitable confession of my own stupidity. Dear me, what an unmitigated buffoon I can be!

Anyway, to get to the crux of the biscuit, this is how my terrible blunder came to happen. I was working an overtime shift with Stan Tablets, which is permitted under the terms of my punishment, and we were sent to Cherrytree Avenue for an elderly female, a terminal cancer sufferer, who was unconscious and apparently could be roused by neither crashing cymbals nor repeated acts of physical violence, nor, indeed, by the judicious application of jump leads to the tender terminals east and west of the sternum. Sensing a possible earner, we set off eagerly and arrived at the house to be greeted by a distressed-looking man of early middle age who explained that he just couldn't cope with her any more, it was all too much, she was singularly impossible, doubly incontinent and triply gaga, he was at the end of his tether, and when will euthanasia be legal in England, and really, oh! is there nothing that can be done? With these words, the Mr. Woebegone act stopped rather abruptly and he cast a slyly knowing, we're-all-men-of-the-world look in our direction, and reached into his back pocket. At this, Stan flexed his fingers and cracked his knuckles, and was off up those stairs like a greyhound coming out of trap number four, while I stayed to complete negotiations before following up at a more leisurely pace.

I entered the bedroom expecting to find Mr. Tablets engrossed in the act of wringing the life from a helpless old lady, a sight not exactly unfamiliar to me, so I was somewhat surprised to find said old lady sitting up in bed reading a murder mystery in paperback, very much still breathing and rather taken aback by my unannounced visit, and not a trace of Stan to be seen anywhere. Now, I've often heard it said that assumption is the first recourse of the indolent scholar, or something like that, and that the professional ambulanceman must never assume anything without some form of corroborative evidence. Or is that a policeman? Well, anyway, I just assumed that Stan must suddenly have remembered an urgent appointment with Nature - witness his mad dash up the stairs - and was at that precise moment availing himself of the facilities prior to treating the patient, so I simply carried out the task myself before making my way back down the stairs to see a man about a monkey.

"Oh, there you are," I said, seeing Stan already pocketing the cash. I should have realised at that moment that something was amiss, but it failed to register and we left the house, climbed back into the van and split the money. There was something gnawing away at the back of my mind, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

"Lovely little touch. Can't be bad. So where did you get to then?" I asked, more by way of conversation than any sort of interrogation as I thumbed through the cash.

"Whaddya mean, 'get to'? When?" said Stan, starting the engine.

"Back there, in the house, when you disappeared upstairs." Having counted my share, I stuffed the notes into my breast pocket.

"Talking about? Doing the business, wasn't I? Think I was?" he said, miming a double-hander for the purpose of illustration, complete with sound effects lest there should be any doubt, and then pulled away from the kerb. 'Doing the business' could, I suppose, have several interpretations, depending on the context, but surely Stan had left no room for ambiguity. So if Stan had done the business, then . . . ? A penny was starting to drop and I was starting to sweat.

"But I went upstairs and you weren't there, so I did the business myself. Old girl in the front bedroom. Well, not all that old really, now I think of it. She smiled at me."

"What?" Stan laughed. "She was in the back room, like the geezer said. His old mum." I didn't recall any mention of back rooms or old mums. Oh, dear, I really should pay more attention.

"Was he married, do you suppose?" Our laughter boomed out like thunder across the night sky and probably rattled the windows in drawing rooms over the river. God, what an idiot!

Crime and Punishment

2006-02-25T04:37:00.000-08:00

"Have you tried bleach, madam? Really? Well, what have you tried? Ventolin? Dear me, no, that's no good. If anything it'll exacerbate his condition. He'll probab . . . make it worse, madam. No, no, bleach is the stuff you want. Kills all known germs, you know. Asthma germs, absolutely. Yes, Domestos, Parozone, any brand, but the thicker the better. No, no, don't dilute it. Have you a nebulizer? Well, get him to gargle it. About half a pint should do the trick No, no, he mustn't spit it out. Gargle and swallow, gargle and swallow. That's right. Yes, of course. Okay then? You're welcome. Not at all. Happy to be of service. Good day, madam."

Rolling my eyes heavenward I hung up the phone, shaking my head in utter disbelief that anyone would think I might be stupid enough to be taken in by such a transparently bogus load of old baloney. I glanced across the room and saw Lily Bonemarrow the call-taker watching me over the top of her spectacles, her hand shielding her mouth. I knew the score all right. Getting her pals to phone in pretending to be patients, indeed! A distraught mother whose child was in the throes of an asthma attack? Pull the other one.

"Did you want me to pop out at lunchtime for some sky hooks?" I called across to her. "Or perhaps a tub of elbow grease?" Her only response was to feign puzzlement — rather convincingly actually, to be fair. H'm. Well anyway the thing is I may have been on the Clapham Ambulance since 1987 but up here in Clapham Ambulance Control I was the new boy and as such obviously considered fair game for the old sweats if they wanted to indulge in the harmless whimsy of a bit of leg-pulling. I didn't mind. As long as they didn't seriously expect a man of my experience to fall for their nonsense. To tell the truth I was thoroughly enjoying the refreshing change of being up at CAC. Perhaps I should explain how I came to be here. What happened, you see, was that Ron Stretcher caught me with his . . . would you excuse me for a moment?

"Medical advice. How may I . . . " A high-pitched voice of indeterminate gender spewed forth an incessant stream of gobbledegook, reminding me of nothing so much as the sound of the two-stroke engine on our old East German lawn mower — a kind of ring-a-ding-ding sing-song sort of a racket. I gave Laugh-a-Minute-Lil one of my most withering sardonic smiles as I struggled to catch just one word that I recognised, hoping to identify the language I was listening to, or rather expose it for the hoax it undoubtedly was but it was so well done that my efforts proved futile. I flicked a couple of switches, tapped out some numbers and waited. After a short while I heard the familiar voice of Stan Tablets, roused from the fragile slumber of the shift worker, come on the line with a curt "what?" and without a second's hesitation bellow that concise and timeless oath designed to wound not only every non-English person in the world but also the entire constituency of womanhood before disconnecting the call.

As I was saying, following what I can only describe as a little bit of a misunderstanding involving Ron Stretcher, the Divisional Superintendent, and Shirley, his notoriously coquettish wife, and me, it was decided by no less an authority than the acting chairman himself, Lord Hardwood, that I be moved from emergency ambulance duties for a time "to let things cool down a bit, clear the air and so forth, what?" Consequently I have been sent on what constitutes a three-month punishment posting to the Control Room where I have been assigned to the telephone advice desk which was introduced recently to divert ambulances away from the lowest of the low-born time-wasting lunatics of the borough by bamboozling them with medical jargon and technical terms beyond the limits of their meagre vocabulary and intellectual endurance in the frankly forlorn hope that they'll eventually grow weary of calling us and find some other means of passing their illimitable hours of leisure without spending any money. And this being my first day it appears I'm obliged to undergo the traditional initiation of having my chain yanked for the entire shift. Well I can take it and I must say that it certainly beats a spell on the boat by several furlongs, especially at this time of year. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if this is a punishment then it's . . . look out, here we go again.

"Medical advice line. Good morning. Oh, yes. You caught him doing what? With your sister? And your mother? Together? The beast! Oh, his own mother. Good heavens, madam. No, you're right, he needs to be taught a very sharp lesson indeed and swiftly. Might I suggest a dramatic attention-seeking gesture of the self-harming variety? Something quite theatrical, blood and hysteria is usually best. Yes, I agree, a really convincing suicide attempt would be just the thing in this situation. Preferably a successful one, of course. Where are you? I know it, right by the tube station. That's the spirit. That'll really show the swine. You're welcome. Good luck, madam. Cheerio now."

Sorry about that, they must think I was born yesterday. Yes, it's one of those curiously topsy-turvy twists of the ambulance game that bad behaviour — not that I'm pleading guilty, you understand — rather than being punished is often, in effect, rewarded. In fact, there's a rather cute little aphorism sometimes heard upon the lips of the more cynical inhabitants of Ambulanceland and indeed one shared with the disciples of Herr von Sacher-Masoch which states that punishment is its own reward. Hence the man who accumulates the all-time record number of complaints against him from members of the public could easily find himself removed from all contact with the hoi-polloi by being promoted until his shoulders can barely sustain the weight of all the paraphernalia attached to the epaulettes that come with his new title of, you beat me to it, Head of Complaints. Similarly, the man who . . . sorry, hold on.

"Hello. Yes, that's right, you're through to the Clapham Ambulance telephonic medical advisory service. How may I help? Certainly, sir, that's what we're here for. It's quite all right. Eighty-nine, is she? How splendid. Incontinent? Doubly so? Well, sir, that's a woman's prerogative, of course. Demented? Naturally, you wouldn't want her any other way, now would you, sir? Yes, yes, I quite understand. No, it's no trouble at all I assure you. All you'll really need is a carrier bag and a shoelace or a length of household string. Yes certainly, a belt should suffice admirably. Not on the Service yourself by any chance are you, sir? No, sir, of course you're not." Not many.

Where was I? Oh yes, I was about to relate the tale of the ambulanceman who found himself dismissed a week prematurely from jury service and chose not to report back for work and serve his community with a sense of duty and honour but opted instead to sneak off for a foreign holiday on full pay and who, when this shameful act of despicable malfeasance was discovered, was not sacked in disgrace as you, a taxpayer, might reasonably expect but in fact was spared, soon scaling the ladder of corruption until he reached the dizzy heights of Deputy Commander of Blankets and to this day occasionally graces our television screens as a spokesman for the Brigade on that very subject. Such are the mysterious Masonic ways of the Clapham Ambulance and the road to understanding them is littered with the corpses of bitter madmen. Perhaps some matters, I would venture to suggest, really are best left in the hands of those who aren't fettered by conscience or any sense of — hang on a minute.

"Medical advice. Good morning, how— Oh, hello, you. Fine, yes. You? Good. Has he? The Harrogate Ambulance Mop Fair? Three days! Wonderful. Try and stop me. About six. I shall think about it all afternoon. See you then, then. Bye, Shirley."

No, you'll not hear me complain about working up here at all. The people are absolutely first rate and the air seems almost totally free from the stench of human waste products. If anything it rather reminds me of the operations room in Churchill's secret wartime headquarters or something. There's a huge map table in the middle of the room with little models of ambulances that get shoved around by keen young ladies in starched white blouses who say things like "Charlie One Seven, red at St. Bernard's" and "Charlie One Niner, green orn station" in frightfully plummy tones reminiscent of Joyce Grenfell or Celia Johnson. Actually, there's one in particular who's been— ho-hum, excuse me again.

"Medical advice desk. How may— Please, madam, try to remain calm. Speak slowly. Yes. We spoke earlier, didn't we? Asthma, wasn't it? Sorry? Dead? What! Bleach? But—"

A La Recherche du L'Oeuf D'Or

2006-02-07T04:39:00.000-08:00

Word has winged its way from the wilds of the western wastelands, bringing to my attention the news that the children of today are more stupid than those of thirty years ago, and I have interrupted my winter sojourn in the Vale of Streatham to address myself to the consideration of this worrying revelation and the implications it has for my own research into the dwindling intellect of the contemporary adult, in particular that of the ambulanceman, and more specifically my own. Experiments conducted on a representative sample of children in a secret West Country laboratory have revealed that today's typical fifteen-year-old has a general mental capacity roughly equivalent to that of a twenty-week foetus from 1976, and that while 'O' Level results continue to improve year upon year, this has been achieved only by the simple expedient of allowing the teachers not only to sit the examinations but to mark their own papers, thus lending the appearance of improvement to an actual trend of plummeting degeneration. Only by the inspired stratagem of setting today's youngsters the exact same tests as were used thirty years ago has the truth of the situation been brought to light.

Results prove that the general cognitive foundations of today's children have subsided dramatically beneath their feet, presenting them with great difficulty in grasping such everyday concepts as density, volume, numbers, words, integrity and good manners. They are obese, oafish and clumsy and struggle hopelessly to understand the health and safety implications of an incorrectly fastened shoelace and the dangers inherent in employing an inadequate lighting system on a bicycle. Rather than spend a little time and energy inflating their tyres to the manufacturers' recommended pressures, it seems they prefer to ride around on the rims with dangling, potentially lethal laces, mumbling, when addressed, incomprehensible, monosyllabic farmyard noises rather than conventional words, the fundamentals of grammar and syntax having eluded them entirely and the Cycling Proficiency Test regarded as nothing more than an object of scorn and ridicule.

Many theories have been hurriedly cobbled together and advanced to explain this intellectual and moral decline: lack of fresh air and exercise; the ingestion of huge quantities of chemical food additives; Play Station dependency; the prevailing benefit culture of the schoolgirl mother; the THC content of modern marijuana; the dearth of Jesus in teenage life; the concentration of schools on meeting government targets at the expense of a broader educational curriculum; hip-hop; the scandalous shortage of qualified cycling instructors, and so on. The list is endless and we've heard it all before.

But I think I have now managed to isolate the one crucial development in English culture that has previously been overlooked in the search for the root cause of this national decline in cognitive ability over the last thirty years and that is the widespread introduction to our daily diet in the mid-nineteen seventies of the doner kebab and in particular the poisonous red sauce in which it is customarily drenched.

Some argue that this undoubted correlation is mere random coincidence but as a trained scientist one cannot allow oneself the luxury of believing in such phenomena. God, as Einstein famously said, does not play the harmonica. Or something.

Cast your mind back, if you will, and if you are of sufficient vintage, to the pre-kebab era. When you staggered from the public house at half past eleven on a Friday night in search of sustenance, where did this gastronomical expedition lead you? As you and your denim-clad chums stumbled along the High Street, bouncing from lamp post to passer-by like human pinballs, the chances are high that you would eventually find yourself propelled by an unseen force of Nature through the doors of the Golden Egg; or, if funds were low, tripping over your Green Flash at the sausage wagon outside the railway station where, for a couple of bob, you could take delivery of a Double Dog With, and having smothered it in brown sauce and mustard, would either hang around for a bit of a post-prandial punch-up, depending on the quality and the strength of the company there gathered, or continue your homeward journey where you would complete that morning's Times crossword before retiring to contemplate, say, Heidegger's Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, asking yourself as you drifted off to sleep whether syllogistics is still a feasible model for rational discourse and for the explanatory elaboration of proof or merely an interesting variant on widely accepted but contingent postulates.

What you most emphatically would not have done thirty years ago was arrive home with half a pint of chilli sauce congealing on your chin and plug in your Xbox.

Professional Development

2006-02-06T04:40:00.000-08:00

"See this, son?"

It was a rhetorical Fred Ventricle who spoke many years ago with the earnestly optimistic aspect of a benign schoolmaster addressing a favourite pupil for whom he harbours high hopes of future greatness as he fished from his tunic pocket and held up like a prized specimen to demonstrate for my edification a common or garden plastic carrier bag, well-used but still serviceable, of medium size and pale blue in colour, and bearing the legend Arding and Hobbs Clapham Junction emblazoned across both sides in bright red lettering. Taking quite seriously his new role as my guide and mentor, Professor Ventricle had become markedly didactic in my company and I was feeling increasingly like the greenest of raw pups at the knee of the Master, obliged to hang on his every utterance as I awaited the generous bestowal of his next pearl of arcane wisdom.

"D'y'know, son," the unremitting tutorial continued, "there's more fuckin' people've died in this fuckin' bag than on the fuckin' Titanic." The Mr. Chips analogy, having been driven headlong into an enormous mass of floating ice, descended prow first and came gracefully to rest upon the ocean floor.

I chuckled uncertainly, assuming he was either trying to be funny or had been struck down by a sudden bout of insanity, finally succumbing to the ever-present influence of the madness all around us, as though lunacy were an airborne contagion. Well, indeed, perhaps it is, and the theory has certainly been acquiring new levels of credence recently, but he turned out to be more or less as sane as I was at that time, and was simply being kind enough to take the trouble to introduce the new lad in his charge to one of the tools of our trade, and to another of the time-honoured practices of the ambulanceman's calling.

Back then, when I started on the ambulances, all training was done this way, on the job, and to be an ambulanceman required very little in the way of academic qualification; indeed, not even the crudest fundamentals of literacy were considered essential, as can be witnessed to this day by the memoranda generated by most of the older officers. As for me, I was taken on about two months before Fred's crewmate, George Ailment, was due to retire, and put to work alongside the pair of them, watching and learning and picking up what I could until George went off to spend his last days of freedom tinkering with his collection of electric kettles prior to his admission to the asylum to await the end, whereupon Fred took sole charge of my education and taught me, in his own inimitable style and to the best of his limited knowledge and dubious ability, the ancient and clandestine ways of the Chair and the Blanket. Right to the core I am - and believe me, I know it shows - Ventricle-trained; just as Fred himself was schooled in the craft by Herbert Ligament, who was in turn a product of the legendary Ebenezer Vein, whose seminal volume, The Modern System of Stretchering, continues to this day to inform the essence of ambulance work.

Thus are we able to trace our heritage back like a family tree to its deepest roots, to the very dawn of Ambulance Man, following its many twisted and perverse branches in a great variety of directions, which is why, in the old Clapham Ambulance, no two patients would ever have received the same form of treatment from two different ambulancemen. Now, of course, the loathsome homogenisation of healthcare is denying the poor patient even that small, life-affirming element of sporting chance, and I can't say that it's doing anyone any good.

Back then you learnt the ropes; today you are subjected to a process of continuous professional development, and every newly acquired accomplishment, however irrelevant or insignificant, must be documented and certificated to assist you in the process of career escalation.

Nowadays, in order to be allowed to perform even such an everyday and simple task as securing the binding mechanism of one's rigid-toed occupational foot and ankle protective outerwear, a practice sometimes referred to by the heretical colloquialism 'tying one's bootlaces', one is required to undertake a special course of training, the Health and Safety implications of the exercise having first been analysed in the minutest detail by the Operational Risk Assessment Working Party (Footwear Sub-Committee), and its application tested exhaustively in the field by the Special Ad Hoc Knotted Fastenings Research and Trials Unit, before gaining provisional approval by the Operational Equipment Working Party (Protective Clothing Sub-Committee), whose full report will be submitted to the Executive Uniform Strategy Team for final consideration and referral up to the Public Health Service Ambulance Training and Education Directorate who will eventually devolve responsibility for devising a course of study to the Clapham Ambulance Brigade Training and Professional Career Development Department, the head of which will refer the matter to Nobby Harris who, in reality, will probably just get one of the older lads to show everyone else how it should be done, following which every man, assuming he has pulled the laces to the requisite tension and tied the bow in the prescribed fashion, and signed the forms to say that he has not only done so but has fully understood and appreciated the philosophical implications of the procedure, will be presented with an officially embossed certificate to add proudly to his personal Portfolio of Clinical Achievement and Record of Skills Acquisition.

Back then, when Fred showed me his bag for the first time, we were standing over a sodden, malodorous bed upon which lay, propped up on a couple of squalid pillows, a stinking, wizened, and doubly incontinent crone by the name of Mary O'Dooley who was dribbling a creamy substance quite prodigiously from a gaping, toothless mouth down the front of a filthy nightgown. Fred explained the correct technique for taking a firm grasp of her wrists and wrapping her arms around herself, and instructed me in the correct manner of sitting across her legs to keep her steady while he placed the bag over her head and sealed and secured it with a homemade neck tourniquet, ingeniously fashioned from an old pair of braces. She struggled vigorously for a couple of minutes and then her head fell limply to her chest and she was still. Fred removed the bag and folded it with mock reverence, as if it were an authenticated napkin from the Last Supper, and with a theatrical wink replaced it in the breast pocket of his tunic. I wondered if he ever gave it a bit of a rinse-out, but decided quickly that such idle speculation was best dismissed swiftly from the mind.

"She's gone," he said with patently bogus sympathy when we were back downstairs. "I'm afraid there was nothing we could do." And I watched the deceased's son as he let out a long, articulate sigh, brimming with emotion and quite transparently restrained only by the rigid etiquette of bereavement from punching the air and dancing a jig around the furniture; and then he passed something furtively to Fred which was palmed and trousered with the practised dexterity of a stage magician; a card changed hands - Ventricle Bros. Economy Funeral Services - a few quiet words were exchanged, followed by a snatch of muted, mirthless laughter, and the O'Dooley family was left in peace to ponder both its terrible grief and the problem of how to spend its not inconsiderable inheritance.

Outside, in the privacy of the van, Fred handed me four five-pound notes and as we rolled cigarettes he continued my course of education in the facts of life in Ambulanceland.

The Cruellest Dream

2006-01-27T04:42:00.000-08:00

I woke upon that glorious dawn to realise I'd dreamt it all. The warm sun streamed its rays divine through lace which billowed gently, dancing on a tender breeze that carried soothing song of birds to ease the soul and stir the heart, and grace the mind with noble thought and righteous approbation for every living soul and thing in God's creation. O, Life! O, Joy! O, Jubilation! For all was but a dream. And as awakening dawned, there shone the light of hope, replacing vile, putrescent darkness and horror and despair, and hideous memory bled away, paled by sun and air, and all was peace and only peace was there.

That is to say, it was a lovely day here in Saint Jean Cap Ferrat, and what a relief to find it had all been a nightmare. The whole ambulance thing; just a ghastly dream peopled with freaks and mutants, grotesque characters in a sordid, twisted drama penned as I slept, for reason without fathom, by my subconscious mind. I shuddered at the memory of it, swung my feet to the floor, and padded across a luxuriant carpet towards the land of ablutions.

Washed and dressed, I took the morning post out to the verandah where breakfast awaited beneath a shady canopy, and though the sky was a perfection of azure, and the tour was a sell-out, and the album remained unassailably at number one, still I could not rid myself of the haunting aftertaste of those terrible images, their details popping unbidden with grim clarity into my consciousness, until I abandoned all hope of forgetting them and decided to attempt to expunge them by a process not of ignorance but of confrontation.

I stripped naked and floated in the pool, the deep blue waters of the Mediterranean sparkling in the bay below, the sun beating down upon my bronzed and toned physique, as I addressed the recollection of that frightful dream.

So then, an ambulanceman; what on earth could it mean? I mean, why a lowly ambulanceman? What the dickens did it signify? And those people in the dream, those aberrations, gargoyles to a man. Stan Tablets, was it? And Albert Harness. The names came back to me with a worrying ease. Bert Klaxon, Fred Ventricle, Nobby Harris. Like the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, yet still I felt I knew them. Could it be that . . .

And then my reverie was interrupted by the doorbell. Of course! Nicola and Simone! I'd quite forgotten the time. A ten o'clock appointment. A drive along the coast with the top down, a spot of lunch at Anatole's and then, well, that would be telling. O, Jesu joy of Man's desiring! Nicola and Simone. Such amusing company, so witty and good-natured, so accommodating. So youthful and tender, lissom and inventive, so adventurous and . . . well, so vibrant. Just the girls with whom to spend this perfect day.

And so eager to get started, keeping that slender finger on the bell, its insistent clanging seeming to fill my head, my whole body . . . I tried to swim to the side but seemed to get nowhere . . . like swimming through treacle . . . it was just like when you're . . . when it's just . . . when it's only . . .

Cursing every molecule in the Universe and a few more besides, I fumbled in the darkness of an icy winter's morning for the button on the alarm clock, the hands of which stood at a mocking half past five; and through the freezing gloom and the clouds of my own breath I could squintingly discern, hanging on the wardrobe door, a vertical row of silver buttons attached, I knew, to a tunic of the cheapest, roughest serge that ever was.

The Royal Visit

2005-12-10T04:44:00.000-08:00

While the great majority of the population apparently is content to blunder through life on a diet of pork scratchings and pig ignorance, the more erudite among you will be aware that the Clapham Ambulance Brigade was originally founded under the auspices and protection of the Clapham Charter issued by King George III in 1807 for the purpose, inter alia, of providing some form of immediate medical assistance for his mistress, Princess Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he had installed in a fabulous palace on the common and who was, like most women, subject to fits of violent hysteria and unreasoning displays of quite impossible behaviour in accordance with the phases of the moon. His own brain had decomposed by this time to the extent that he was incapable of identifying even his closest relatives and not one of his courtiers or ministers was possessed of sufficient fortitude to bring to the King's attention the fact that Charlotte was actually his wife of forty-six years and the mother of their fifteen children. Thus was the Clapham Ambulance born into the world: by craven cowardice, out of utter madness, and for no good reason at all.

As this Amentia Carta has never been formally rescinded nor superseded and has now effectively become enshrined in the constitution of English political reality, the Brigade to this day enjoys, or rather endures, a special and theoretically permanent relationship with the House of Hanover, which arrangement renders both sides liable to certain obligations, those of the Royal Family being of a sporadic and mostly ceremonial nature undertaken with obvious reluctance and a thinly-veiled air of contempt.

For our part we are expected now and then to receive the King himself at the ambulance station to allow him to indulge his peculiar penchant for inspecting uniformed men and their equipment and then give him and his legion of twittering flunkies a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich in the newly refurbished messroom. On these mercifully rare occasions we are encouraged by our superiors to polish our boots, wash our hands, brush our hair and generally contrive to give an appearance combining smart professionalism with patriotic subservience. Hud Edgerton and some of the older, less fragrant members of staff will be given a day's Special Leave of Absence, disguised as members of the public and placed just outside the gates with the flag-waving hoi polloi while the rest of us are left to entertain His Majesty as best we can, which historically has always presented us with something of a dilemma.

On the one hand we are sworn to serve the Crown loyally and because of the madness of Farmer George we are in effect the monarch's very own personal ambulance service, and as such will occasionally be called upon if one of the royals has become too inebriated to climb the stairs or crawl to the lavatory. Conversely, like all ambulancemen, we are staunch opponents of any iniquitous system of monarchy and hereditary privilege and would to a man not only advocate the Bolshevik Solution but without a moment's hesitation, given the opportunity and sufficient ammunition, would put them up against a wall and shoot every last one of the sponging in-breds ourselves.

A right royal holocaust unfortunately not being a practicable proposition in the prevailing political climate, we have to content ourselves with making small and impotent gestures of mild protest, passing them off as the puerile practical jokes of obsequious lickspittles as an alternative to the rather more serious consequences of being tried for high treason. Besides, the King has always demonstrated a fondness for the childish prank, being especially renowned for his scatological sense of humour and fondness for breaking wind and we feel that we would be failing in our duty were we not, in one way or another, to oblige him.

Not long ago, with the tedium of a royal visit imminent, Albert Harness gathered us round and proposed an idea which was greeted with cheerful and unanimous approval, tempered only by slight reservations at the prospect of a venture into the malodorous hell upon which the success of the plan was dependent. We girded our loins, donned protective clothing, and with a goodly supply of gas masks set off on our bicycles.

Rather like trying to explain colour to the congenitally sightless, it's not easy to describe a smell, but if you've ever inhaled deeply through the nostrils in the vicinity of a mortician who's in the act of slicing open the stomach of a tramp's rotting corpse, you'd be on the right track. Add to that a hefty dollop of some of the better known household aromas such as human faeces, vomit, the cloying ammonia of stale cats' piss and the altogether singular fragrance of weeping leg ulcers, and you'd still have but a tenuous grasp of the consequences of being within olfactory range of Otto Grossminger, who the observant reader will recall is the foulest-smelling thing in England, bar nothing, and into whose foetid lair our noble quest directed us. Perhaps I shall describe the inside of the Grossminger residence on another occasion, for it certainly warrants some attention, but it will be sufficient for now to say that we burst in and wrapped our stolen prize in many layers of an impermeable plastic membrane before making good our escape, hauling the package with some difficulty back to the ambulance station, gagging, choking and vomiting in the gutter with only the thought of the King's imminent appreciation of our efforts to sustain us along the way.

Now we may be but simple ambulancemen and while we would not consider ourselves to be entirely representative of the population of England as a whole, we are probably about averagely intelligent and knowledgeable, and we'd be the first to admit that whereas we are pretty good on certain subjects, though none springs immediately to mind, there are fairly wide and gaping holes in the fabric of our overall education, the most notable area of deficiency being that of current affairs and politics and that general type of thing. I can assert with a fair degree of confidence that there is not a single one among our number who could name the current Prime Minister, but I would have sworn on Mother's life that the King has always been called George the something-or-other, or possibly Edward. Imagine, then, our collective astonishment, as we stood expectantly and respectfully in a line of gleaming buttons and immaculate creases, when from the huge black Rolls Royce which swept gracefully into the courtyard on that fine autumn afternoon, there stepped not a peculiar-looking cove with jug ears and a beard, dressed up as a sailor, but a miserable-looking little old lady with grey hair and spectacles, wearing a pea-green coat and matching hat. She looked vaguely familiar, a bit like that bloke on the stamps, and I wondered if perhaps I might have lifted her sister from the floor on to a commode a few years ago. Whoever she was, she certainly wasn't the King and she didn't look remotely like the sort of old duck who appreciated a good joke with a strong lavatorial flavour and I became invested with a terrible anxiety that all was about to backfire disastrously.

I glanced over her shoulder and up at the flagpole, where in place of the traditional flag of the Union there fluttered audibly in a rapidly stiffening wind an inordinately enormous pair of grotesquely soiled underpants. A wave of unease spread along the line and the tension became quite palpable and almost too excruciating to bear. As Her so-called Majesty was shepherded slowly along towards me, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, I thought I would pass out and prayed that she wouldn't turn and look up.

"Your Royal Highness," fawned Sir Leslie. "This is Stanley Tablets, another of our long-timers." As Stan curtseyed beside me I took a last opportunity to glance up once more and to my exquisite delight saw that the offending garment had disappeared from sight, presumably torn from its moorings by the fierce north-easterly, and hopefully was half way to the coast by now. Oh, thank God! I let out a sigh of relief and the Queen of England was standing before me.

"And this, Your Highness . . . " I smiled politely and began to extend a hand, but before my name could be spoken there came a fearful noise like a terrific rushing of air through a torn sail accompanied by the most awful smell imaginable as Otto Grossminger's underpants flew closely past me and wrapped themselves around the Queen's head like a massive, putrid jellyfish, completely obscuring the royal countenance and no doubt rendering the act of respiration neither possible nor, given the circumstances, particularly desirable. She clawed frantically at the ghastly thing and began to stagger blindly about.

"Get it orf! Get it orf!" she shrieked hysterically, before falling to the ground and writhing around on the tarmac. All at once I saw an opportunity for an act of heroism that might transform my fortunes as thoughts of a knighthood for the man who saved the Queen's life flashed through my mind. I stepped briskly forward to do my patriotic duty, but fame and honours would have to wait, because I was driven back instantly by the ineffable stench which seemed to invade the throat like a physical object and burn the eyes like tear gas. It was hopeless; one could as easily have walked calmly into a bonfire as within ten feet of those perfidious underpants.

"That was a bit of a turn-up, wasn't it, Guv?" said Albert with characteristic understatement when it was all over, the royal corpse having been removed, the murderous Y-fronts destroyed by SAS flamethrowers. But Sir Leslie didn't answer; he just sat there, unblinking, unhearing, stunned into unthinking vacancy, quivering gently from head to toe, staring silently at nothing as the hapless minnow, confronted by the hungry shark, will gaze numbly into the black, bottomless throat of imminent oblivion.

I May Be Some Time

2005-12-04T04:48:00.000-08:00

As I sit here by the attic window watching the snow falling from the black sky, drifting up against the house, threatening to entomb me alive, I am reminded of childhood winters and my weekly excursions in all weathers to fetch the newspaper for Mother at tea-time on Saturdays in order that she might check her coupon to confirm once again that she'd not won a fortune on the football pools, the same as the previous week and, it would transpire with monotonous predictability, the following one. Small-time gambling was perhaps the least of Mother's vices, of which her constitution seemed to be a muddled conglomeration. "Here you are, child," she'd say, handing me a solitary tanner, and off I'd trudge the half-mile to the paper shop wrapped in coat and scarf, hat and gloves against the bitter cold of a proper winter.

Perhaps it's this unusual weather and the nostalgia it evokes, but recently I find my imagination beset almost constantly by morbid premonitions and I have developed as a result a modest determination to go some way towards making amends for a squandered and lowly existence by endeavouring to terminate it in as creditable a fashion as possible when the time comes; that is, with at least a measure of quiet dignity, perhaps even a dash of aplomb, while avoiding any hint of pathos or comedy; for the manner in which one departs this life is a much neglected element of the overall experience and exerts an often underestimated influence upon a person's commemorated character; for who can say with any honesty that he wishes to be remembered as the fool who slipped on a banana skin and was trampled beneath a carthorse? Or fell from his roof while trying to adjust the television aerial? No, a joke death is the last thing you want.

There exists a piece of film, I have no details, but I saw it once, of an airship coming in to land, and about a dozen or so sailors on the ground grab its ropes and attempt to bring it to heel and, presumably, tether it securely to something or other. I don't know an awful lot about airships, but I'm guessing that this operation was more or less standard procedure at that time, whenever it was. Anyway, what happens is that the ship starts to rise again, whether due to an incompetent pilot or a gust of wind, I couldn't say, but it gradually gains height and the sailors are faced with making a quick decision. The smart ones simply let go of the ropes and just stand around watching, but the more foolish among them continue to hold on and are soon too high to let go without serious injury. And as this airship rises higher and higher into the sky, we see the poor chaps plummeting one by one to their deaths, unable to hang on any longer. It's a grim thing to watch, their lives taken so suddenly, so unexpectedly, and, let's be frank, so stupidly from them. A very silly way indeed to go.

It goes without saying that a romantic expiration followed by a huge and lively funeral at around the age of twenty-five is the absolute ideal and should be everyone's natural ambition, for that is roughly the point at which one begins the slow but inexorable decline towards the demented decrepitude that precedes death, and although this degeneration may not be immediately visible or otherwise detectable without the employment of specialised scientific instruments, it is generally accepted to be taking place beneath one's very nose. Examine the career of any great mathematician, athlete or health service manager and you'll find very little that is worthwhile being produced beyond this age.

Heaven knows it's not easy to get it just right, and precious few have managed to be remembered fondly not necessarily for anything they may have achieved in life but rather for only the perfect nobility of their deaths. The example that springs most readily to mind is that of Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates, who achieved near-sainthood through the selfless sacrifice of his own life in order to give his companions a sporting chance of survival. As it turned out, it was a futile gesture and they all perished anyway but Oates's achievement of combining an heroic death with the coining of one of the all-time great catchphrases should be a salutary lesson to all who aspire to old-fashioned standards of conduct and etiquette.

Clearly, it can be argued that a far more sensible course of action would have been to stay indoors by the fire rather than traipse across the Antarctic on such a pointless and foolhardy mission with an egocentric madman like Scott; but then who would ever have heard his name, let alone still remember it almost a hundred years later? And who among us could reasonably expect our names to be spoken even by our own descendants after such a time?

Dear me, yes, it's really coming down with a vengeance out there now; flakes like tea plates, a swirling, vicious wind and the thermometer showing minus five and falling. Perhaps, unlike Captain Oates, I ought to be sensible and opt to stay in beside the hearth on a night like this. The thing is, I really do need to pop out for some tobacco.

A Sort of Miracle

2005-11-24T04:49:00.000-08:00

As a devout and God-fearing atheist, I'm not readily susceptible to the mumbo-jumbo and hocus-pocus peddled by priests, parsons and other persons of comparably peculiar persuasions, and although I'll admit to a certain fondness for some sleight of hand and a spot of juggling after a good dinner, it should come as no surprise to learn that I do not care to embrace the notion of the literally miraculous occurrence, preferring to regard myself as one of those logical and perspicacious chaps who's not ashamed to admit, when meaning and understanding are not forthcoming, to a dose of good old-fashioned ignorance. We know full well that God and his repertoire of magic tricks were invented to plug the holes in our scientific knowledge of the world, yet still there are times when the rational explanation must be elbowed aside in favour of divine agency to account for the manifestation of certain events transpiring indisputably, yet otherwise inexplicably, within the bounds of one's sensory experience.

I remember I was just dozing off in my favourite armchair, replete with lunch, an empty teacup at my elbow, my mind immersed in contented recollections of a particularly flavoursome gravy, when the hateful sound of the ringing telephone annihilated in an instant the very memory of tranquillity. Bert Klaxon lifted the bakelite from its cradle and took down the details. A fifty-year-old male had suffered a cardiac arrest while playing squash and his opponent, rather sportingly, was in the process of trying to resuscitate him. Tiresome though this type of thing invariably turns out to be, we could see no way around it and were soon out the door and heading towards the Royal Clapham Racquets Club, Stan and Bert in one van, Albert and I in another, lights ablaze and sirens wailing, racing madly to get there in a most outwardly impressive if completely ironical display of eager philanthropy, the idea in reality being to arrive on scene after the other crew without, of course, appearing to have done so deliberately, so that the more onerous burden of work, in particular the transportation of the corpse, would fall to them rather than to us, a piece of harmless chicanery familiar to all ambulancemen and just another of the many trivial diversions we employ to help us through each working day.

Encumbered by seldom-opened bags of weighty equipment, we ambled at the pace prescribed by Health and Safety guidelines up the classical stone steps and into the grand vaulted foyer of the club, where we were welcomed by a uniformed commissionaire who bore an uncanny resemblance to Piero della Francesca's John the Baptist and who directed us by means of a strangely choreographed mime towards the courts. A blond and willowy individual of dubious affiliation beckoned us with great urgency into Court No. 4 where we found the deceased being attended by a heavily-breathing gentleman who knelt over the prone figure and appeared to be interfering with his clothing in a thoroughly inappropriate manner.

"Okay, that's enough of that." Stan shoved him roughly aside and ripped the dead man's shirt apart as though it were made of damp newspaper, and Bert slapped the pads on to his chest in an angry protest at the pointlessness of it all. Stan punched the lifeless sternum with a tremendous right-hander and the familiar sound of breaking ribs echoed throughout the cavernous court. Albert turned on the defibrillator which flickered for a moment or two and then, in one of those embarrassing scenarios well known to all ambulancemen, the machine died, its battery as lifeless as Lazarus.

"Dominus vobiscum," I intoned with solemn gravitas, hands joined, eyes closed, and gave it a hefty wallop. The machine lit up in wondrous resurrection and without fanfare or preamble launched straight into its somewhat jaded routine, the deadpan mid-atlantic lilt grating on our nerves, offending our refined sensibilities.

"Analyzing heart rhythm. Do not touch the patient. Shock advised. Press to shock." Bert hit the button and the corpse jerked violently. "It is safe to touch the patient. Continue CPR." We went through the motions of resuscitation for the ghoulish entertainment of the small crowd of onlookers, knowing our efforts were futile, none of us with our combined service of more than a hundred years having ever seen a dead man brought back to life; but the public expects it and for some unknown reason we are obliged to indulge their fantasies. After a few minutes of this futile and quite exhausting labour, the machine spoke, granting us a brief but welcome respite.

"Analyzing heart rhythm. Do not touch the patient. Shock advised. Press to shock." Once again the button was pressed and the body convulsed in another spasm. And then, as they say, something very strange happened.

We were all peering with dispassionate professionalism at the screen, muttering considered diagnoses, willing the little black line straighter and flatter, each of us glancing slyly at another's wristwatch, silently calculating how much time was left of the shift, would this job see us off, what was for dinner, should we maybe start making a move soon, when the rhythm altered and the shape of a normal healthy heartbeat appeared before us.

"He's got a sinus!" exclaimed Stan with unprecedented zeal and medical vocabulary. "And look! He's breathing!" And sure enough he was; against incalculable odds the dead man was alive again. He coughed and spluttered and began to stir, and within a minute or so had recovered consciousness. He sat up, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and then spoke.

"What happened?" said the voice from the grave. "What's the score? Whose serve is it? Who are these men? What's going on?"

"It's a blimmin' miracle! A blimmin' miracle!" Stan was exultant, dancing about with all the natural rhythm of a moth in a lampshade, repeating the phrase over and over, laughing incredulously until his distinctive basso profundo bulldozed through into my consciousness and I realised that my post-prandial snooze had been brutally terminated.

"It's a blimmin' miracle! A blimmin' miracle! Nobby's made the tea!"

All present there that day, save the always ebullient Mr. Tablets, were dumbstruck, because it was true, it had really happened. Nobby Harris, for the first time in living memory, or indeed recorded history, had made a pot of tea, which is quite possibly a transgression of a natural law by a deliberate volition of the deity, but not one that obliges me to undergo the spiritual upheaval of a comprehensive theological re-evaluation. Thank God.

Carry On, Doctor

2005-11-15T08:08:00.000-08:00

"Now then, Mrs. Artichoke, the ET scan and the phraseology reports indicate cancer of the sarcophagus with well advanced secondary malicious rhizomes in the left and right ulterior catacombs. In order for us to operate safely, it was considered necessary for you to lose a considerable amount of weight, so we've amputated both of your legs just below the hip."

"But, doctor, I'm Mrs. Antelope."

Like everyone whose occupation brings them into close and regular contact with the medical profession and like those thousands upon countless thousands of people who, like the unfortunate Mrs. Antelope, have woken to find they have been parted from their limbs quite unnecessarily, I have little faith in the ability of physicians to diagnose correctly and treat successfully the overwhelming majority of medical conditions, though their skill in congregating in small to medium-sized groups for the purpose of obstructing hospital doorways and corridors is certainly most admirable and rather marvellous to behold, combining as it does the haughtiest arrogance with an absent-mindedly oblivious disregard for the needs of those lesser mortals who wish to make progress in the course of their menial labours. It seems that no matter from which direction you approach a clique of stationary doctors, they manage somehow to ensure that all of their backs are turned ignorantly upon you. A much underestimated and often overlooked accomplishment, it takes many years of sacrifice and dedicated study to acquire such a towering level of self importance.

Indeed, a genetically inherited aptitude for lofty imperiousness is what medical schools have always looked for in potential students and is far and away the chief quality required for a successful career in hospital medicine and most particularly in the field of surgery.

One thinks immediately of the overblown pomposity displayed by Mr. Jean-Claude Glazier, the eminent braggadologist, who would as a matter of honour and reputation aim to reduce to tears of suicidal hysteria through the employment of sarcastic personal abuse at least one member of his firm during the course of every operation and who famously insisted that his surgical clogs be cleaned upon the completion of each day's list by the tongues of those junior house officers who wished to be still employed by him the following morning.

Undoubtedly without that natural air of overbearing superciliousness a hospital doctor has virtually no chance of advancement and might just as well give it all up and join the Red Cross. Or become a general practitioner, most of whom, while probably possessed of even greater qualities of ineptitude, are on a human level generally a more palatable breed entirely.

I must have been something of a sickly child because I remember becoming quite accustomed to frequent visits to the GP, Dr. Medson senior, accompanied by a fretful but fragrantly well dressed Mother. He would be sitting there in his old brown leather chair puffing away on his pipe and after a cursory examination would set me long-winded and complicated arithmetical puzzles to solve while he and Mother left me in peace, retiring behind a door marked 'Strictly Private'.

After twenty minutes or so they would reappear, breathless and flushed with concern, and enquire as to my progress, although the actual results of my mental labours were never disclosed and seemed somehow arbitrary because Dr. Medson would in any case hand me some chocolate, ruffle my hair and pronounce me well enough for now, which always seemed a great relief to Mother, who would walk me home with a spring in her step and a broad, enigmatic smile upon her face, a far-away look in her eye, having made an appointment for me to undergo further tests in a week's time.

As far as I know my mysteriously asymptomatic ailment was never properly diagnosed and I assume it must have healed of its own accord because Dr. Medson eventually discharged me as fully recovered, preferring to concentrate his efforts instead on the son of a very elegant lady named Mme. Honoria De Baucherie, which I'd have thought should have pleased Mother immensely but rather unaccountably caused her instead to weep inconsolably for several weeks.

I suppose the emotional machinations of women and the inordinately high esteem in which society appears to regard the doctor of medicine are among the innumerable subjects which must remain forever beyond the comprehension of the humble ambulanceman.

A Night Out

2005-11-14T08:11:00.000-08:00

Having planned to spend the evening attending a meeting of the Clapham Nihilist Society and then at the last minute dismissing the whole idea as an utterly pointless waste of time, I was returning my coat to the peg in the hall when there came a knock upon the front door. It was young Benjamin from across the street and he was clutching a small package.

"Good evening, sir," he said respectfully. "I do hope I'm not disturbing you but I've brought you a present."

"Come in, Ben, what a pleasant surprise. And what've you got for me in there then?"

It's an incontrovertible fact that all adolescents, in the eyes of decent, civilized people of good manners and taste, are revolting and vile, spotty and repugnant. They'll steal your bicycle, poison your cat and burn down an old people's home without so much as a thought during the course of an average Tuesday evening and then they'll shrug gormlessly when their behaviour is confronted, taunting the authorities, spouting on about their rights and threatening to sue for compensation.

How I envy them!

When I was their age I had no option but to content myself uncomplainingly with an austere recreational programme of sex, drugs and the collected works of Gustav Mahler, though I suppose there's no telling what sort of mischief I might have got up to if Mother had allowed me out of the house.

"It's a sort of herbal tea made with native English mushrooms. My mates and I have been out on the common all afternoon picking them specially." What a charming and thoughtful boy! And such old fashioned chums! Imagine, teenagers picking mushrooms in this day and age. Why, it could almost restore one's faith in humanity.

"I suppose it's a bit late for blackberries, isn't it?" I said, trying to make conversation, but he seemed not to understand and merely looked nonplussed. "Well, anyway, I'd better get the kettle on." I ruffled the young scamp's hair as he unwrapped his parcel, a curiously enigmatic smile forming on his face as I headed for the kitchen.

An hour or so later I found myself striding purposefully along the street feeling most unusually jovial and uncharacteristically sociable, having decided to pay a visit to a public house in search of alcoholic refreshment and some agreeable female company. As I approached the Princess Diana Tavern, renowned for its accommodating and reasonably priced young ladies, I noticed an enormous shaven headed man wearing a dinner jacket positioned in the doorway in the manner of a sentry guarding the entrance to a palace, and beside him a gorilla, dressed identically and striking exactly the same pose, the sight of which set me giggling uncontrollably.

"Look! Look!" I accosted several bemused passers-by, pointing at this hilarious spectacle, almost speechlesss with laughter; it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen. "Look! They've dressed it up in a dinner suit!"

I came round on a trolley in the A & E department at St. Bernard's with two black eyes and a broken nose and what felt like several cracked ribs to find a solitary, sad looking old tramp in a curious kind of cap just standing there watching over me and I was overcome by a warm wave of compassion for him, so I stood and walked over, opening my heart and my tobacco tin.

"Would you like a roll-up? Go on, make a few for later; and here, get yourself something to eat." I took out a shilling and proffered it, but he gave me a very stern and hostile look and replied curtly in the negative and I realised then that he wasn't a tramp at all but a security guard with a beard.

I decided to forgo the seven hour wait to see a doctor and walked back out into the night, pondering the nature of futility and wondering if I might not after all catch the tail end of that meeting.

Strength Through Joy

2005-11-13T05:07:00.000-08:00

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned." She whispered my favourite words and I put my cheek against the grille. It felt like months, years, since I'd heard her voice and felt her warm breath wafting through the mesh into my ear. "It's been two days since my last confession. I acknowledge my sins unto thee and mine iniquity have I not hid. I am guilty of harbouring impure thoughts and I kneel before you now, O Father, to beg your forgiveness and absolution and the blessed mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ."

"Tell me about the impure thoughts." I settled comfortably, adjusting my cassock in readiness.

"Forgive me, Father, but they've been getting worse, much worse, far more . . . graphic. I just can't help myself, you see, but I've been thinking of you, Father." Oh, God! "Terrible, wicked thoughts, Father, involving hideously unspeakable acts of grossly bestial carnality, and sometimes, Father, I just . . . "

"The acts, my child! Tell me about the unspeakable acts!"

Child! She was probably five years my senior and quite plainly vastly more experienced than I in the wicked ways of the outside world. I sighed with exquisite happiness, savouring every moment of her presence, basking in the excruciatingly poignant proximity of her, inhaling her heady musk as she poured her depraved imaginings like a warm viscous liquid slowly through my ear and down, down into the deepest, darkest, secret reaches of my mortal being.

During the afternoon following my epiphany, still reeling somewhat from the shock of it while at the same time revelling in my new sense of liberation, going about my usual priestly business I was delivering leaflets concerning some piece of church nonsense or other, and I called in to leave one at the Clapham Lawn Tennis Club, and as I leaned my bicycle against the pavilion wall, I turned briefly to watch the only game in progress and there she was, running and jumping in the spring sunshine, smashing and volleying, laughing with the sheer joy of movement, her limbs tanned and muscular, her fair hair darkened by sweat, a vision of vitality, like an old Kraft durch Freude poster miraculously brought to life, and as I stood there, unable to take my eyes from her, she represented for me at that moment the very meaning of life, a divine distillation of the essence of human existence and I became suffused with an icy clarity of mind and purpose, the like of which I had never known, and all my senses became heightened to a fabulous and extraordinary new degree.

At that point in my life, relatives notwithstanding, I had lamentably little experience of women, but some of them, I had begun to notice with much surprise and alarm as I went about my parish duties, had the ability to cause in me a sudden, unexpected and highly embarrassing state of arousal without apparent knowledge or intention. Mrs. Tandridge for instance; I couldn't get within six feet of her without feeling my face burning red as I hurriedly pulled my coat together to conceal my shame. I reasoned it must be a purely chemical reaction because she was possessed of no obvious physical charms, built as she was in the style of an East German hammer-thrower with a dark moustache. And Mrs. Donovan who did the flowers; and Miss Drake at the school. It was such a bore at times and so tiresomely, well, adolescent.

But as I stood there watching her playing tennis, feeling the familiar tautening, there was no accompanying sense of guilt nor shame nor awkwardness. I walked towards the court and pressed myself against the fence, my fingers clutching the wire, staring quite blatantly at that synthesis of pure womanhood.

And then I realised that I was stuck. Having failed to adjust my dress correctly, I had succeeded in impaling the galvanized chain link fence and such was the delerium of my excitement that I was held quite fast and helpless, unable to withdraw to cover myself. And then she looked across and our eyes met and I knew that that day was to be my last as a priest in the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Goodbye to All That

2005-11-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

On the morning of that doubly momentous day, I woke at my habitual time of seven o'clock to the usual sound of Fr. Finbar's headboard banging rhythmically against the other side of the wall to an accompaniment of bestial grunting and muffled gasping. I sat up and looked about me and was struck immediately by the notion that something was seriously wrong, that everything was in fact completely askew and that the world had altered in some fundamental way while I'd been sleeping. I looked about the room at the familiar objects: the uncarpeted floor, the table and the chair, the sparse collection of books, the plain wooden cross upon the wall, the jug and bowl I used for washing. It all looked much the same as it had the previous day, and yet it wasn't.

I reasoned that since objects don't simply mutate spontaneously during the hours of darkness, it must be that I was seeing them differently and as I began to apply my mind to the task of finding a solution to this early morning conundrum, I became aware all at once of the preposterous nature of my spartan accommodation. The bareness of it seemed suddenly quite ridiculous; the asceticism that once had denoted piety and humility and seriousness of purpose now appeared merely obsessive, fetishistic and, well, frankly mad. And that absurd cross on the wall; what did it signify? Crucifixion? The pain of Jesus? What? And then it hit me.

Like the man who wakes one day to the realisation that what he'd considered to be a deep and abiding love is in reality nothing but a blind and stupid infatuation, I felt the profound humiliation of one who has made a complete fool of himself. God, what an idiot I'd been! And then I laughed long and loud enough to cause a brief cessation of activity in the adjoining room. There isn't a god any more than there are fairies at the bottom of my garden and to believe in the existence of one is just another symptom of insanity. Religion: a dish served by charlatans for the consumption of the feeble minded.

"If God can do anything, Father," an eight-year-old once asked me, "why doesn't He make my hamster better?" And the answer, once so circuitous and artful, was now so simple and honest: because, Mary, there is no god and Barney is going to die a slow and painful death.

I showered and let my thoughts wander freely around these new circumstances as the warm soapy water cascaded over me, cleansing me, purging me of all that rubbish. I wondered, did anyone really believe? Fr. Finbar? Surely not. Pope Whatsname? Rather doubtful. Bishop O'Herlihy? Categorically no. Was it just the sheep in the congregation then? The flock. Who could say? And who cared? What mattered now was how to turn this situation to my advantage, what to do immediately, and the answer was simple: carry on for now as normal, go through the motions just like all those pederasts under diocesan protection, another seemingly devout priest going about his parochial duties with a fallacious air of goodhearted ingenuousness.

And then, by one of those curious twists of fate which are too bizarre to have been invented, on the very day that I lost Him, I found Her. She who would change everything and who would in time prove to be the unwitting architect of my catastrophic downfall culminating in the abominable degradation of becoming an ambulanceman. But hers is another story.

Unholy Orders

2005-11-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

Following the statistically improbable discovery by a wayward parachutist of Aunt Myrtle's mortal remains at the bottom of the disused well which had lain hidden for years beneath what I'd considered hitherto to be the impenetrable tangle of brambles which formed my back garden, I was ordered by the court to submit myself to a lengthy and rigorous psychiatric evaluation and subsequently informed that I could either undergo an innovative programme of socio-psychological realignment at the recently opened Institute of Experimental Rehabilitation in South Wales or spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement within the walls of the Rampmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Berkshire; the choice, I was told, was entirely mine. After much consideration and ambivalent coin flipping, I opted with grave misgivings for the former.

Some years later, I emerged shakily from a dense haze of chlorpromazine and unspecified neurological interference, my head ringing with liturgical gobbledegook, to discover that for me experimental rehabilitation had included not only my ordination as a priest in the Church of Rome but also an appointment as curate to Fr. Finbar O'Eucharist at the church of St. Benedict in the parish of Clapham. Most worryingly of all, I appeared to be in love with a man called Jesus.

I remembered precious little about my period of theological training, indeed initially assuming it to have been a rather terrible dream, and whether through a process of industrious application combined with a natural aptitude for the subject or a simple administrative error, I really cannot say, but I must somehow have been adjudged to have reached the required standard and passed the necessary examinations because I duly reported to Fr. Finbar, proudly brandishing a seemingly authentic Certificate of Priesthood.

"Father, Father, come in, come in." His welcome was warm enough but contained nonetheless a sinister undertone of sly complicity in some baneful practice silently presumed to be shared by all fellow priests. Restraining my curiosity concerning his dark secret, though having a shrewd idea as to its nature, I threw myself enthusiastically into my new parish duties.

I celebrated mass in English and in Latin; I joined happy couples in various acts of holy matrimony; I committed the dearly departed to the cold earth and the sacramental incinerator, and I baptised their descendants in the name of the father, the son and the good old spiritus sanctus.

Best of all I listened in rapt fascination to the full and frank confessions of the incorrigibly dissolute young housewives of the parish, eyes closed and cassock rustling as I pictured their frequent immoral transgressions of the Lord's sacred word. On His behalf I was authorised to bestow forgiveness upon them and absolve them of their filthy sins, thus providing them with a clean slate upon which to chalk a new catalogue of iniquity for my private pleasure the following week. It was a curious system of self-perpetuating circularity but it seemed to suit all concerned quite admirably, though I could never quite rid myself of the feeling that a loophole was being shamelessly exploited.

As if all this were not sufficient diversion for a young man, at the express behest of Bishop O'Herlihy I was tasked with visiting the homes of the wealthy widows of our flock for the sole and cynical purpose of influencing their last wills and testaments in favour of the Church and found to my delight that many of them preferred to make immediate and generous cash payments in return for my privately administering to their earthly needs for succour and solace.

The horizon, for once in my troubled life, appeared for a short and blissful time to be bright and blue and sunny, but on rare days of relative lucidity I realised that a cloud was looming within; a distant speck for now, I sensed it would grow in darkness and magnitude with the rapid and inexorable progress of a winter nightfall, blotting out the light for many years to come.

How burdened by prescience I proved to be.

The Life of Riley

2005-11-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

He turned the key and dabbed the throttle and a litre and a half of turbo-injected Vauxhall diesel coughed, spluttered and rattled into life. He pressed the sole of a steel-toed Magnum on the brake pedal and slid the transmission lever from park to drive, released the handbrake and accelerated away. He flicked a switch on the dash and the blue lights flashed, he tapped the horn and the siren wailed, and when it reached its peak he tapped it once again and the weeow weeow weeow hit him like a needle in a vein.

He checked himself in the rearview mirror - the hair cut short, gelled into tiny spikes, the thin sculpted line of beard, the immaculate sideburns. He adjusted the Oakleys which had cost him three days' pay and smiled with satisfaction. Image was all and Riley was a work of art, and he had one of the coolest jobs in town, piloting a rapid response car for the ambulance service. He flexed his tanned and tattooed, gym-pumped arms as he gripped the wheel, checking out the shop windows for brief glimpses of his reflected beauty as he sped by, chewing imaginary gum and repeatedly sniffing, his head buzzing with cocaine.

There was about an hour of the shift remaining and this was his first call of the day, to an elderly female on a bus with a hand injury and breathing difficulties. (Actually, she had a slight graze to one finger and was breathing perfectly adequately but her condition had been deemed by the computerised triage system to be immediately life-threatening, a ‘Cat A’, so Riley was despatched in the fast car, his sole purpose to arrive on scene and press a button within the statutory eight minutes in order to justify the salaries of the bean counters and box tickers.) He checked the clock on the screen — just four minutes left to get there. He sniffed hard, inhaling a few stubborn grains of the ORCON powder, and floored the accelerator, reaching sixty miles an hour along the busy High Street, on his way to a patient he would never see.

The day so far, he reflected, had been comfortingly typical. Clock on at seven, shoot the shit with the guys in the messroom, cruise down to Sid's for some eggs on toast and a mug of tea; park up behind Tesco for an hour or two and read the paper, maybe have a doze; nip over to Greco's for a cappuccino and a bit of a flirt with the girls from St. Margaret's; whizz round to see Gaz, grab a gram, hoover a line; pop into St. Bernard's to chat up the HRT babes on reception; a little light shopping, then to the park to find a nice spot out of the way, make a few phone calls, watch the world go by; another line of the white, a cool can of Coke. Sweet.

The low autumn sun reflecting off the wet tarmac shone directly into his eyes as he steered the Astra blindly through the heavy afternoon traffic. Stand on the brakes, hard left into Tyler Road, push it up to fifty, overtake the bus, watch out for the cyclist, oncoming car pulling over, foot down, right into Makepeace Terrace, slide the back round, hit the gas, straighten her up and floor it, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, a right-hander, overcooked it slighly, no problem, step on the gas, sixty-five, seventy, two minutes to go.

As he took the long sweeping right hand bend on the one-way system, he had to swerve left to get round an old codger in a clapped-out Rover doing about two miles an hour in the outside lane. He corrected the steering to get back on course, was blinded suddenly by the sunshine and clipped the back corner of a bus which sent his car sliding over to the left. Both wheels struck the kerb together and collapsed, causing the car to flip over sideways, rolling on to its roof, spinning over and over before it crashed through the window of Hamilton's Department Store, taking with it a young woman and her small daughter who'd been standing there gazing at the display of Christmas toys behind the glass. Neither survived.

Too cool to wear a seat belt, Riley was flung helplessly around inside the car. His head smashed against the door pillar and split open behind his left ear, spurting bright red blood all over the interior, and as the car continued to roll and smashed into the toys, a radio controlled Noddy car (only £14.99) came through the open window and Big Ears’ red pointy hat plunged into Riley's neck, puncturing his carotid artery. He watched in horror, trapped upside down, fully conscious, as his precious lifeblood pump-pump-pumped out of him, and as his vision began to fade and his life slipped away, he could hear in the distance the most beautiful sound of a celestial choir singing his favourite song — weeow weeow weeow weeow weeow weeow weeow weeow . . .

When Albert and I arrived at the scene of the terrible tragedy, we found that the bus driver had already put a small sticking plaster on the woman's finger and the pair of them were laughing about something they'd seen on the telly the previous evening. We joined in the jocular banter for a while and as we were off duty in about fifty minutes, we gallantly offered to run the old duck home.

“Ooh, I don’t know what we’d do without you,” said dear old Mrs. Liversausage, fussing over us and filling our cups from the pot, passing round the chocolate biscuits as we settled back on the sofa to sit out the rest of the shift in comfort.

You know, when you stop and think about it, if you keep your head down and don't rush about taking it too seriously, it's a pretty cushy life in the ambulance game.

Trick or Treat

2005-10-30T08:14:00.000-08:00

I was sitting at home the other evening reading the newspaper, listening to the wireless, peacefully enjoying a pot of tea and a pipe of a particularly fine Cavendish mixture when there came an unexpected knock upon the front door. Reluctantly leaving the comfort of armchair and hearth, I donned my jacket and went to answer it, and found myself confronted by a solitary young woman of slender build and diminutive stature standing on the step with her hands clasped before her as if in supplication. I raised an interrogative eyebrow.

"Trickertree," she said bewilderingly and apropos of nothing of which I was aware, so I waited for her to continue, hoping against reason and experience that something meaningful or faintly interesting, or even vaguely intelligible, might be about to emanate from between those pink twelve-year-old lips. But she just stared up at me with an expression of amused expectancy, her head tilted slightly to one side, an endearingly cheeky twinkle about the eyes, as though she'd told me an amusing anecdote and was waiting only for the penny to drop to signal my inevitable appreciative laughter. Mingled with perplexity I felt a distinct twinge of disappointment at my inadequacy, having no idea how I should react to please her. So I laughed diffidently and shrugged my shoulders apologetically.

"I'm sorry, I . . ." She smiled at my obvious discomfiture, not maliciously but with the gentle exasperation usually reserved for a very dear but somewhat slow-witted old relative, sighing with a most attractive and apparently artless coquetry.

"Trickertreet!" she repeated, bending forward slightly, her small teeth bared in a charming grimace, the change in emphasis possibly conferring upon the otherwise meaningless sound the status of a question and the added consonant lending me the hope that we were at last beginning to make progress towards some sort of an understanding.

I glanced to left and right along the street. It was dark and damp with the kind of thick swirling fog that muffles the sound of a distant cry and through which the streetlights struggle in vain to illuminate more than a few of the deserted cobbles. There was nothing to see and nothing to be heard.

"Perhaps you'd better come in." I turned sideways, ushered her across the threshold and closed the door against the night, fumbling in my trouser pocket for some coins.

Jacob's Garage

2005-10-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

Given that all human activity, indeed all existence, as far as anyone has ever been able to demonstrate convincingly, is devoid of purpose or meaning, it follows logically that every action is neither more nor less momentous than any other, and therefore that a tramp vomiting in the gutter in Clapham High Street, to use a picturesque local example, is ultimately just as important in the grand scheme of things as the construction of the pyramids or the Great War or famine relief or the mating habits of the dung beetle.

All rational people understand this to be self-evidently the case, but historically we have had to suspend that knowledge in order for civilized society to function and prosper, resting as it does upon foundations of political duplicity and religious hypocrisy and driven as it is by the vaunting vanity and arrogance of humanity which inevitably will prove to be its downfall.

Also, it is necessary to set aside a large measure of philosophical enlightenment in order to play a popular and often raucous messroom game called Futile Occupations, in which the players try to think of people whose jobs are fundamentally less important to the functioning of modern society than that of the emergency ambulanceman.

Just off the South Circular Road, to the east of the South Side, lies a veritable maze of back streets, many of which have peculiar names of unknown origin. If you happen to be in the vicinity, have a look at No. 5, Arlby Avenue, and you will see a fairly substantial detached house that was built of an attractive reddish-brown stone sometime around the middle of Victoria's reign. To its left is a large, wisteria-bedecked garage constructed of the same materials, blending in so perfectly that the casual observer would unthinkingly take it for part of the original structure, but this is not in fact the case. The garage was actually built in the summer of 1987; I know because I helped to build it for my tailor and good friend, Jacob Schmutter; it remains to this day the pinnacle of my earthly achievement and I do not expect to surpass it. Indeed, I am quite certain that I never shall.

As I go about the day to day business of ambulancemanship, I will occasionally make a detour to pass Jacob's house and I'll sit and gaze at his beautiful garage, rather to the consternation of my crewmate, and I'll think with considerable pride and a lump in my throat, I built that and it'll still be standing long after I'm gone. It is the nearest thing there will ever be to a monument in my honour.

Never have I passed a person in the street and thought with anything other than a sense of bored indifference, I once took that man to hospital.

The Seventeen Steps

2005-10-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

Of the ephemeral and futile nature of all human endeavour, there are few reminders more poignant than an empty church at a funeral service and the congregation at Mother's consisted of just two. There was the deceased's younger sister, her grief artfully concealed beneath a chic black mantilla and there was me, her only child. We stood there side by side like an orphaned and friendless bride and groom, as a sour-faced clergyman of indeterminate denomination spouted some mumbo-jumbo over a coffin containing the corpse of a person upon whom he'd never set eyes. It was a thoroughly miserable affair, as funerals should be, but mercifully brief and made quite tolerable by the dry, comforting strength of Aunt Myrtle's slender hand, warm with the promise of mutual consolation.

It happened many years ago, but I don't think I shall ever forget the night Mother was taken from me and I'll be haunted always by the memory of her cartwheeling down the stairs, seventeen of them in all, very narrow, quite precipitous and painfully uncarpeted. I've counted them automatically most days of my life as I've climbed and descended, down for breakfast, up to bed. When I was a small boy, I used to see how many I could jump from - I think I managed eight before the fear of shattered ankles got the better of me and I sought solitary pursuits inherently less dangerous and found pleasanter notions with which to exercise my fertile and overly vivid imagination.

She emitted a funny little gasp of surprise followed by a querulous sort of moaning sound as over and over and down she went, helplessly enslaved by gravity yet miraculously defying the constraints of middle age, like a gymnast in the grey Olympics. It was a very brief but quite superb performance, disappointing only in the clumsiness of its conclusion. Not for Mother the crisp and stylish upright standstill, feet together and arms spread widely, chest thrust pertly forward, a saucy smile for the judges. No, she just collapsed in an ungainly heap with a dull thud and lay quite still, like a pile of dirty laundry abandoned in the hallway by a slatternly maidservant. Nil points, I thought stupidly, staring down at the unmoving bundle.

It was so quiet I could hear the clock ticking downstairs in the drawing room and the sound of shallow, urgent breathing coming from the bedroom behind me. I became absorbed by the frequencies and characters of the two distinct rhythms, transfixed, counting, counting, on the verge of hypnosis. Then I came to my senses.

"Mummy!" I shrieked, bounding recklessly down the treacherous staircase.

She had me relatively late in life and was overjoyed when I appeared to be perfectly normal and healthy and not the monstrous freak she presumably thought she'd been expecting. She called me her 'little miracle' and promptly gave up her teaching job and a decent income to devote her time and energy exclusively to my care and early education. We lived happily enough together, just the two of us, in ever-encroaching penury in her four-roomed cottage by the common, sharing a bed from the day I was born until the day I left for university.

I never knew my father and I suspect that Mother met him just the once. Family legend has it that he expired at the very moment of my conception and poor Mother lay trapped beneath his corpulent carcass for almost two days before managing to wriggle free. She used the story of the incident as a kind of cautionary tale, another alarming chapter in the altogether terrifying saga entitled the Facts of Life, a new episode of which she recited to me each Sunday morning from my thirteenth birthday onwards.

She'd lie beside me propped on one elbow while I gazed at the ceiling, rigid with discomposure, as she explained in graphic detail the sordid mechanics of how I came to be. For a long while this weekly experience left me almost permanently unsettled but Mother was always on hand to alleviate my agitation and gradually I became accustomed to it.

I put two fingers to her wrist, searching for a pulse but could feel nothing. I put an ear to her face and felt the faintest whisper of breath against my skin. A tiny stream of bright red blood trickled from the corner of her mouth; her eyelids fluttered weakly, rapidly, like a frantic moth trapped in a jar. She was alive, though barely. All was not lost. I scooped her up easily in my arms and with a weary sigh began once again, slowly, to count the stairs.

Unarmed Man No. 89

2005-09-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

One of the easiest jobs any ambulanceman can hope for in the course of a shift is that of attending an armed incident to hang around just in case someone gets injured. It's very rare that shots are fired and anyway, when the police shoot people they tend to kill them quite decisively, thus presenting the ambulanceman with very little work to do apart from a quick courtesy confirmation, perhaps an application of the Pierrepoint, and a bit of paperwork. Sometimes though, things don't go entirely to plan.

Silverspoon Avenue is in the better part of Clapham and as such is somewhere we rarely go. It's one of those curious facts of life that respectable people simply don't call ambulances - or perhaps that's just the ambulanceman's criterion for defining respectability - and to be sent to an armed incident in this leafy quarter was very unusual indeed. Even more unusual was to be summoned by the firearms unit to attend to a living patient, who turned out in this instance to be a fifteen-year-old boy who'd been gunned down in his own bedroom and miraculously was still breathing.

On examination, as we say in the ambulance game, he was found to have bullet wounds to both shoulders and massive bruising to the central chest area where a third bullet had been deflected by a now disintegrated mobile phone that had been hanging from a string around his neck, and which almost certainly saved his life. In his hand was a green plastic toy gun of some sort. He was fully conscious and lucid and I asked him what had happened.

"Ize messin abow ly wimmee wawpista inni wender doh burstidopin an tree coppaz cum in ginnit aw der ole drop yo weppun an ting inni ly - ize ly waw man woss gonon ly en denday fyud inni."

"I see," I replied, which literally was perfectly true in that my vision was unimpaired, but perhaps misleading in that I was giving the impression of possessing some sort of understanding of what he was saying. Luckily I had an interpreter to hand, a teenage boy who now accompanies crews on calls where people between the ages of ten and twenty are involved and translates their alien gibberish into a comprehensible version of English. An invaluable addition to the workforce, I have to say.

What the youth was trying to tell me was that he'd been larking around with a water pistol and the police burst in and shot him when he pointed it at them. Apparently some passer-by had seen him through the window and mistaken his toy gun for the genuine article and promptly called the police who, unable to restrain themselves, had opened fire; but fate had intervened on the boy's behalf and he'd been quite extraordinarily lucky, if being shot in the comfort of your own home can be considered in any sense fortunate.

I turned to the inspector who was hovering anxiously in the doorway and informed him that the boy's injuries were not life-threatening and that he'd probably make a full recovery. This information had a contrary effect to that which I was expecting and served not to diminish but rather to increase the inspector's perturbation and he began rubbing his chin thoughtfully and asked us if we'd step outside for a moment. He consulted with some of his colleagues in whispers, a nod here and a smile there, some sly laughter, a murmur of concurrence, and then he entered the bedroom and closed the door. After a few seconds the quiet of the genteel suburb was rudely disturbed by the sound of between fifteen and twenty gunshots; I lost count after about twelve. Then the door opened and the inspector, looking much more at ease, asked me with a smug grin if I would care to re-examine the patient and perhaps revise my earlier diagnosis.

I looked closely and at great length and could discern only two notable discrepancies. Firstly, on the pillow where the boy's head had been there was now just a bloody mess of splintered bone and shredded meat with flaps of skin around the edges and a few teeth here and there; and secondly, gone from his hand was the green water pistol and in its place lay what looked like a real gun, big and black, heavy-looking and metallic, with a wisp of blue smoke drifting lazily upwards from its barrel.

Stan's Unspeakable Secret

2005-09-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

I was sitting alone in the messroom the other day leafing idly through the world's dullest periodical, namely the annual Clapham Ambulance Review, when I heard approaching footsteps and quickly slipped it beneath a cushion, affecting an air of drowsiness to lend the impression of having just woken up. The door opened and Stan Tablets entered, looking very serious like an old-time gangster, exuding an air of heavy menace and eyeing me suspiciously. I felt a bead of sweat trickling down beneath my shirt and hoped my face didn't betray my terrible shame.

Feigning a yawn and a stretch, praying I hadn't left a corner poking out, I watched Stan as he scoured the room. My imagination began to run away with me; he must have known there was a copy knocking about somewhere because it had been there that morning. Every autumn when the thing is published Ron Stretcher leaves one on the messroom table where it lies unopened, unread and unmentioned for a few days until someone can be bothered to put it in the bin. Stan peered into the empty bin and then stared right through me.

I should point out here that being caught by the chaps reading any ambulance publication will result, quite rightly, in immediate and total ridicule, but to be found with a copy of the Review is really beyond the pale, a form of social suicide leading to many months of scorn, public humiliation or even total ostracism. Considered almost tantamount to blacklegging, it simply isn't done.

"Where's the Review?" asked Stan, a tremor in his voice that sounded like . . . no, it couldn't have been, not Stan.

"Dunno, why, did you want to read about the new trolley beds?" He took a step towards me and for a second I feared for my life; but he stopped and sighed and I saw that the look in his eyes was not one of anger but of pure, unadulterated fear. I was more than a little intrigued.

When he left to continue his search elsewhere I retrieved the magazine from its hiding place and stuffed it beneath my tunic, determined to smuggle it away to a safe place where I could study it at my leisure and hopefully learn just what it was that had the redoubtable Stan Tablets in such a state of desperation.

At home that evening I spread it out on the kitchen table and went through it page by dreary page, line by lifeless line, reading about financial planning and quarterly fiscal initiatives, training budgets and response targets, vehicle allocations and staff welfare schemes, a message from the chairman and a review of the new passenger restraint strap configurations and, of course, the latest advances in trolley bed technology until my eyelids drooped and my forehead hit the table. But on and on I ploughed undaunted, into the early hours, through the dullest, driest prose imaginable, closely spaced and unrelieved by a solitary illustration until I found it near the bottom of page seventy-seven.

I blinked several times and pinched myself. I stood and walked around for a while but when I came back it was still there in black and white. I laughed hysterically until I cried. I didn't know what to do with myself but I knew that I ought to destroy this terrible, terrible thing. I also knew with certainty that I'd keep it somewhere very, very safe until the day I died. Oh, my word.

What had he been thinking? How could this have happened? Was it a moment of madness? Had he sent it to the wrong address? Was it some sort of practical joke? But who? And why? I just could not come up with a feasible explanation for what was screaming out at me from the page before my very eyes. It was so completely and utterly unthinkable; it quite simply could not be.

And yet there it was as plain as day, under the heading "Poetry Competition"; for his sonnet entitled In Bluebell Wood, this year's fourth prize has been awarded to Mr. Stanley Tablets.

Cold Hearts and Coroners

2005-09-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

Few ambulancemen will deny at least a mild aversion to appearing before the coroner. Often under hostile and aggressive questioning from highly paid and pompous public servants, we are required to explain to the world actions we took and admit to mistakes we may have made that contributed to the untimely death of some long-forgotten patient maybe a year or two previously, and many of us, understandably, will take a few glasses of brandy to steady our nerves before taking the stand to face such an ordeal. I well remember Fred Ventricle many years ago overdosing on Dutch courage and having to be carried into the witness box by four large constables, whereupon he passed out and began snoring so loudly that the light fittings rattled and Sir Meredith Devine could not make himself heard above the stertorous din in his own court. The vision of his frantic near-apoplexy remains one of my most treasured memories.

Many ambulance lifers will endure a whole career without a single appearance at the coroner's court, but for the men of Clapham it seems to have been an almost weekly occurrence to be hauled up before Sir Meredith to justify our unconventional practices in the blinding light of modern medical science. It often felt as though he was conducting a personal vendetta against us and indeed he once recommended that our service either modernise and integrate or be disbanded and it was only the intervention of the King himself that prevented the Clapham Ambulance from passing into the annals of ambulance history or being swallowed like a minnow by the characterless grey whale of the Public Health Servive.

Looking like nobody so much as the effeminate love child of Sir Lancelot Spratt and Professor Jimmy Edwards, and sporting the obligatory bow tie and preposterous handlebar moustache of the crassly faux eccentric, Mary Divine, as he's known in the clubs around Vauxhall Cross, would bang his gavel like a fractious infant and in an unconsciously camp and laughable attempt to imitate a public school bully would screech at witnesses until they cringed before him, though more, I suspect, from the force of his breath than that of his personality. What a querulous old queen he was and how glad we were to see the back of him when he retired. Glad, that is, until we met his successor.

Blessed with the high-cheeked bone structure and willowy physique of a classic English aristocratic beauty, Dr. Phyllida Mortice nevertheless possesses features utterly devoid of humour, sympathy or the merest hint of human kindness, though she dotes on her two Bichons Frises to the extent, so we hear, that she allows them to share her bed, though whether this is an act of benevolence or one of barbarism is probably a matter of personal taste, not to mention dubious legality. She carries about her such an air of disparaging snootiness that even when in the best seats at Covent Garden the impression she projects is that of a duchess slumming it down the bingo at Clapham Junction.

When Dr. Mortice speaks her vowels are so distorted by her expensive education and the indomitable nobility of her haughty genes as to be rendered unintelligible to the man in the street, whom she despises with an undisguised vehemence, as is perfectly natural for one of her kind, and which is undoubtedly reciprocated with equal, albeit unspoken, fervour. I made the mistake once of asking her to speak more clearly, which unthinking solecism unleashed a five minute tirade of furious invective, presumably designed to reduce me to a quivering jelly prior to apologizing profusely and begging her forgiveness. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand what she was saying and only compounded the grievousness of my offence by telling her so directly to her rather red and somewhat breathless face.

“Sorry, love, I didn’t catch a word of that." I shrugged theatrically, turning to the gallery for enlightenment, which earned me a big laugh and seven days in the Wandsworth gaol for contempt. I was appearing as a witness at the investigation into the death of a Mr. Cyril Sprocket and I wonder to this day if my lower class impertinence influenced the verdict of the court.

Sixty-two-year-old Mr. Sprocket was cycling to work at six-thirty one dark morning when he was knocked down and killed by a Bentley being driven by a Lady Ophelia Barrington-Barnett who, coincidentally, was not unknown socially to the coroner herself. Several witnesses attested to having seen Lady Ophelia using a mobile telephone, fixing her make-up in the rear-view mirror, trying to read a map, scolding two children behind her and typing on a portable computer all at the same time as she careered out of control into the unfortunate cyclist. It seemed to be a clear enough case of death by dangerous driving but Dr. Mortice surprised us all by returning a verdict of death by natural causes.

Upon my release I obtained a copy of the transcript in order to try and make some sense of the verdict and hopefully gain an insight into the reasoning of the coroner: "In layman's terms, a woman's brain is wired quite differently from that of a man, in such a fashion in fact that she is able to perform many quite separate actions at the same time in a way that a man could neither comprehend nor hope to emulate. I believe the current, rather vulgar American phrase for this is "multi-tasking". It is therefore the opinion of this court that Lady Ophelia was acting in a perfectly natural and acceptable manner in accordance with the physiology of her gender and that her actions of that morning were in no way contributory to the death of this grubby little chimney sweep."

Unnatural Selection

2005-09-19T08:24:00.000-07:00

There's one in every class in every school and in every department of every branch of every workplace throughout the kingdom of England. Even the Clapham Ambulance, for the first time in living memory, now has one of its own. I refer, of course, to the solitary deer limping at the back of the herd, which the knowing leopard skulking in the long grass has earmarked for lunch. Not that we see many herds of deer grazing these days on the open plain between the North Side and the South Side; and as for leopards, well, we won't mention what goes on in the long grass.

For the wildlife of the sweeping veldt existence is an unending battle for physical survival, a matter of life and death and the human equivalent is different only in its degree of subtlety. It's all part of the same process of disseminating the genes of the fittest, and where the modern welfare state has been instrumental in widening unnaturally the path of human evolution, it has inevitably produced as a by-product of its misbegotten charity a sub-species of vaguely homo sapien origin that is regrettably unable to survive without the oxygen of total assistance beginning several months before the instant of birth and ending some time beyond the point of death.

From the ranks of this anthropological mutation is drawn an ever increasing number of ambulance patients who are linked by the common traits of inadequacy and dependence and the resultant social and financial chaos that dominate their everyday lives, and without whom there would be little need for an ambulance service at all, comprising as they do around ninety-eight percent of our workload.

"What would we do without you?" I am often asked in the course of my work, to which I always reply quite truthfully and without hesitation, "You'd become extinct."

Our forefathers with their huge moustaches would probably rise in protest from their graves if they knew that we have recently taken on our own limping wildebeest, rumoured to be the result of the drunken union of Sir Leslie and a congenitally malformed servant girl of limited mental resource called Nellie Edgerton behind the Masonic Hall on Derby Day in 1986. The product of this sordid liaison was a creature named Hudson, more commonly known as Hud, who is employed mainly in a general floor-sweeping, tea-brewing, boot-polishing, sandwich-fetching type of capacity, but who will sometimes undertake with an endearing eagerness the work of an ambulanceman to cover periods of holiday or staff sickness.

I worked a few shifts with him last week while Stan was in Glasgow on a bare-knuckle break and I have to say it made a refreshing change only for a very short while, conversation being necessarily restricted by Hud's rather skimpy vocabulary and his less than adequate grasp of any concept not directly related to food, drink, brooms, mops or boot polish. But we muddled through and I don't think that more than a few of the patients suffered fatally as a result. Also, by painstakingly deciphering his various snorts and grunts, I was able to piece together some quite interesting information about Hud's circumstances and how he came to be employed by the Clapham Ambulance.

Apparently there were hundreds of applicants for the post, which by law had to be advertised, but every candidate who managed to complete and return an application form was rejected on the grounds that he was over qualified for the position on account of being able to do just that. As Hud Edgerton was the only completely illiterate candidate he was deemed the best man for the job and duly appointed by order of Sir Leslie himself, such blatant nepotism popularly confirming the speculation about his lineage.

Hud also told me about his girlfriend, Christine, and how they're about to move into a new house just as soon as the council has finished extending and refurbishing it, hopefully in time for the birth of their next child. Number five, he tells me.

The Darkest Hour

2005-09-13T08:25:00.000-07:00

I was throttling an old woman the other night, quite calmly and unhurriedly, my thoughts wandering pleasantly in their customary lazy, aimless fashion, when I glanced across the room and was struck by an overwhelming sense of the utter pointlessness of everything. And as I let the lifeless corpse slip from my grasp and slump back on to the damp mattress, the now vacant eyes staring blindly into infinity, the toothless mouth fixed forever in a grateful smile, the familiar wave of black despair washed over me and I had to get out of there into the night, to the cool air, the soft rain; anywhere away from that world informed by the decaying stench of disease and death and soiled incontinence pads.

When the phantom of futility strikes at four in the morning it tends to spread itself with a mercurial malignancy from the particular via the general to the all-encompassing within a matter of seconds and one's entire perception of the universe can swiftly become enveloped in a miasma of barren despondency. A casual thought about the significance of shoe polish, say, or Shakespearean fish imagery, turns out to be the first step on a very steep downhill path to the big black nothing beyond the back of nowhere.

I'm not at my most sympathetic at that time of day and I consider her death to have been entirely her own responsibility. Although inadvertently, and undoubtedly with good intentions, she nevertheless committed the capital offence of offering that most abominable and depressingly useless piece of advice so frequently imparted by the elderly to those of more tender years, the real meaning of which is quite plainly a plea to be transported without delay from this life of misery and pain into the dark void of eternal anaesthesia. Also implicit within those three little words, of course, is an exhortation to commit suicide. She was trying to kill me, m'lud!

"Don't get old," she said and was duly despatched; but the cause of my despair came after that and from a different source entirely.

In the stillness of the night, during that darkest of hours before dawn, hopelessness can be engendered by the most seemingly insignificant of things: a whiff of woodsmoke upon the dying summer's air; the bus stop where we couldn't say goodnight; the shop where I bought my first bicycle; the churchyard where our lips first met; our secret place beneath the railway bridge; so many thousands of haunting memories littering the streets of the past, waiting around every corner to pounce and desolate me with suicidal nostalgia when I'm at my lowest ebb.

But there we were in room twenty-three of Cyril Chamberlain Court, which held for me no slushy remembrance of times past. No, it was simply a silver-framed picture on a sideboard that did it. A photograph of a girl; slim and fair and beautiful, laughing with the unthinking and inextinguishable joy of youth, and around whose once long and lovely, pale and slender neck, seventy years later, my white-knuckled fingers were gripped like a vice.

Paranoia

2005-09-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

Listen, I think I'm on to something. Correction. I know I'm on to something. Something big. Something very big. Something so big, in fact, that they'd do anything to stop it getting out. Anything. So I've got to be careful. Very careful. When the truth is known it'll blow the whole . . . shh . . . I think someone's coming.

Sometime after yesterday's morning medication, they transferred me from Princess Royal, saying I was a cynical and disruptive influence on the tramps and would benefit from the more intensive and specialised therapy available on the Glamis Special Unit, a locked ward deep in the basement beneath the Bowes-Lyon Unit. At least that's what I've been told; really I could be anywhere.

I was roused rudely this morning by an enormous, muscular nurse with tattoos and a shaven head. She thrust a handful of assorted pills and a glass of water at me and told me that things were different here, that there was no namby-pamby group therapy or, she sneered with contempt, 'counselling'. She said the treatment here consisted of two strands. Firstly, chemicals and lots of them. She reeled off a list: chlorpromazine, clozapine, fluphenazine, loxapine, methotrimeprazine, mesoridazine, perphenazine, prochlorperazine and so on until my head began to spin. Secondly - and here she put a forefinger to each temple and made a strange noise - dzzzzzzzzz - accompanied by a slack-jawed, tongue-hanging, eye-rolling pantomime. Then she beamed with delight and left.

I felt the sweat rising all over my head and trickling down the back of my neck, and before swallowing them gratefully in the hope of at least some temporary release from these hellish prospects, I glanced at the pills in my hand. They were of many shapes, sizes and colours, but each bore the legend 'P-Z'. I washed them down and laid back on the bed and after a while I felt myself drifting pleasantly away.

Later, I was visited by a seemingly very cheerful and friendly doctor who introduced himself as "Chandrashekhar Anjekhar, psychiatric registrar". After our consultation, I overheard him talking in the corridor with none other than the eminent professor, Chittaswarap Chatterjee, who not only chairs the National Symposium on the Management of Mental Illness Steering Committee, but also is a close personal friend of the Prime Minister and acts as a special consultant to the Swiss pharmaceutical corporation, Pharma-Zweiff, which, as you know, is the world's largest producer of anti-psychotic medication. They were discussing the government’s latest policy for the future of mental healthcare in England and I heard every word.

Apparently, as advances in chemical psychiatry continue to accelerate exponentially and new forms of psychotic disorders are being discovered and categorised on a daily basis, it is hoped that by the year 2020 at least ninety-seven percent of the population will have been diagnosed with some form of mental illness and will be receiving drug-based treatment.

As I listened, hardly daring to breathe, I learned that in certain isolated regions government targets have been reached already through the employment of a secret long-term experimental programme of inbreeding and substance abuse, most notably in Norfolk, where plans to abolish education completely are beginning to reach fruition. Also, large swathes of Lincolnshire have actually managed to exceed the ninety-seven percent figure without government assistance, and in many of the coastal settlements between Skegness and Cleethorpes this magnificent achievement is not only already plainly evident but is spreading rapidly inland and north towards Humberside.

For reasons I dare not contemplate, and it can’t have been by accident, I appear to have been allowed to stumble upon a huge conspiracy between the government, the health service and the drug manufacturers to subdue and control the whole nation from cradle to grave with a diet of anti-psychotic medication and unless . . . oh my God, there's someone at the door . . .

A Place of Safety

2005-09-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

Following my shameful and unforgivably public display of emotion, I was quite rightly taken by Messrs. Hobbs and Harding of the Clapham Constabulary to the Princess Royal Ward in the Bowes-Lyon Unit under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act (1983), which empowers the police to remove from a public place a person they consider to be suffering from a mental disorder and escort him or her to what is called a place of safety, where he or she can be kept for up to seventy-two hours for the purpose of psychiatric assessment.

The memory of my egregious aberration had left me in such a state of shocked bewilderment, and the enormity of my disgrace weighed so heavily upon me, that I offered no resistance and indeed remained quiet and quiescent throughout the short journey and soon I found myself ensconced in somewhat austere comfort in a small and windowless room that was quite bare save for a bed, a chair and a tin ashtray upon a wooden dresser. I was given a mug of sweet tea and a slice of bread and jam by a beefy nurse with purple hair and pieces of metal stuck in her face who informed me that I'd be seen by the duty psychiatrist at his earliest convenience, and in the meantime I was free to avail myself of the facilities on offer in the communal lounge area.

I gathered my smoking materials and took my tea to the lounge, which turned out to be a very large and very dingy room with a greasy, threadbare carpet, old and decrepit chairs scattered about and a television set bolted to the far wall. In one corner was a severely dented vending machine that dispensed potato crisps and chocolate bars, and beside it a kind of kitchen area with a sink and a fridge and a kettle and the makings of tea and coffee in a cupboard without doors.

Through the fug of Old Holborn and Golden Virginia I surveyed the room and recognized several of my regular patients, familiar tramps from the streets of Clapham. There was old Kevin O'Leary and his girlfriend Mary McGuire; Liam Linehan and Micky Milligan; Derek O'Donoghue and, blow me down, 'Doolally Sally' O'Mally. We'd all been wondering what had become of her. It was like being with old friends and suddenly I felt strangely at ease, at home almost.

No one noticed my arrival, however, because they were all staring as if transfixed at the TV screen, watching some new and apparently quite surreal American game show which I'd never seen before and which involved people standing on the roofs of houses that stood, bizarrely, in a lake, waving their hands and being ferried about on ropes swinging from helicopters. One of the contestants waved a huge flag, the size of a bedsheet, with the word 'diabetic' scrawled on it in red paint, while another played his 'baby needs water' card.

I didn't understand the rules but not wishing to appear either ignorant or aloof I chuckled loudly and after the briefest moment of guilty hesitancy everyone else began laughing too; and as the scene changed to a shot of an old and very fat woman being pushed with grim determination by her equally ancient and obese husband through four feet of filthy water in a wheelchair, her head barely above the surface, the whole audience was convulsed uncontrollably with the insane laughter, not of humour, but of the joyous celebration of overwhelming relief.

We were warm and we were dry; we had a fridge and a kettle and plenty of tobacco. We were here and we were now and we were safe; and there was nowhere on this terrifying planet that we would rather have been.

A Crack in the Dam

2005-08-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

The madman was in the sort of position one instinctively assumes when addressing one's remarks to Allah, but he was pounding the ground rhythmically with both fists simultaneously and wailing a vaguely interrogative sound that sent a shiver down my spine, followed by a blood-curdling racket which I took to be a response to his own question. Waaarrrggghhh!

Usually, like all ambulancemen, we simply would have driven past and left him to it; after all he didn't appear to be suffering from any illness other than some version of one of the numerous locally endemic, nameless psychoses that afflict ninety-eight percent of the local residents, and as far as I could see he'd sustained no injury. But something about his demeanour and the timbre of that terrible lupine howling, which seemed to emanate from the darkest reaches of his very soul, must have hit my own frequency, resonating through me, and it elicited from me a most uncharacteristic sympathy, the suddenness and depth of which caught me quite unprepared, and without thinking I asked a furiously incredulous Stan Tablets to pull over while I went to investigate.

Stan naturally recited a profane litany of personal abuse which addressed fundamental questions concerning both my sanity and my suitability for ambulance work, but he graciously stopped the van beside the kerb and picked up the radio microphone to inform Clapham Ambulance Control that we'd stumbled upon what's known in the ambulance game as a running call.

Now a running call can be the greatest of inconveniences for the ambulance crew if they are, for instance, about to partake of a spot of lunch or, worst of all, returning to station at the end of a long and arduous shift. It can add an hour or more to their working day and make them very cross indeed, resulting in their patient receiving only the very barest 'economy service' in terms of treatment. On the other hand, a running call can be a godsend. En route to that long-distance late job, for example, what could be more fortuitous than to chance upon a small, inebriated man lying in the road just around the corner from St. Bernard's?

This, however, fell into neither category.

As I sauntered towards the wailing figure with my hands in my pockets I became aware of a most peculiarly disorienting sensation that words cannot adequately describe. It was as though I were looking down upon him while at the same time looking up to see myself approaching, as if I were closing in on myself from two directions, the present walking forward to meet the future, and my head grew dizzy and faint and I thought I would pass out. The howling grew ever louder as I came nearer and it drew me inexorably towards it, as though I were becoming a part of the fearful noise, as if it were an integral part of me, my own voice calling out to me; and the words of Albert Harness came suddenly into my head and all at once I knew what was happening to me, for I'd seen it happen to others once or twice. I was teetering precariously above the precipice of compassion.

"Never allow yourself to care," I remembered Albert telling me when I first joined the Clapham Ambulance. "Not even slightly, not even for a moment. It's like a crack in a dam - once it's started, it can never be stopped; it begins with just a few drops forcing their way through and then the pressure builds and builds until eventually the whole thing bursts and the unbearable sadness and futility of all existence sweeps you quickly away into madness and your only possible comfort is the eternal oblivion of death."

Or you can beat the ground, howling.

Perseverance

2005-08-21T08:29:00.000-07:00

If you wander in the grounds of St. Bernard's Hospital, behind the Department of Corrective Medicine, to the west of the Bowes-Lyon Unit and past Block X, keep going and you will find almost obscured by foliage what looks like a very old and small church and which is in fact the oldest of the hospital's buildings, being the site of the chapel constructed in 1112 by the blind monks of the silent Order of St. Bernard under the auspices and patronage of Leon de Beauceron as a gift to Henry I. Since then, of course, the chapel has undergone extensive renovation and, indeed, has been rebuilt several times, latterly by Sir Stephen Sealyham in 1724 to the specifications of the original construction so that the present edifice exactly replicates the original chapel in every detail.

Since 1807 the chapel has been home to the Lowchen Museum and boasts one of the finest collections of pathological specimens in England. It is not open to the public and its contents are maintained and jealously guarded by the present curator, Dr. Clive Clumber, who will occasionally admit selected visitors at his own discretion, though rarely.

The Lowchen Museum is for neither the faint of heart nor the weak of stomach, for here you will see newborn babies pickled in formaldehyde, Siamese twins ripped brutally from the womb, the heads of hanged men silently screaming out at you from the confines of bell jars, severed hands with painted fingernails, skulls complete with bullet holes, a throat obstructed by a pickled onion, the face of a child who watches your every move. Indeed, all manner of anatomical splendours are on display here for those with the time, the inclination and the permission to wander among the rows of shelves and glass cases, and last week I was privileged to do just that.

Perhaps my favourite exhibit is the top of a skull with two parallel indentations running from back to front. Each is roughly a quarter of an inch wide and while one is shallow and fairly short, the other is much longer and goes right through the bone. There is an explanation on a plaque. The skull's owner sought to commit suicide by lying on his back and placing the top of his head against the blade of an industrial circular saw. His first attempt must have given him a frightful shock because he withdrew his head and had to have another go. His second attempt, plainly, was successful.

A Snake on a Stick

2005-08-08T08:31:00.000-07:00

As I entered the messroom last Monday morning, I was dumb- founded by the sight of a blond boy sitting at the table upon which Ted Canvas dismantles and reassembles his clocks in preparation for his retirement next year. The youth was dressed in the regulation uniform of the Clapham Ambulance; that is the black serge tunic with the silver buttons, but with the addition of a black Sam Browne belt and a pair of high leather boots into which, inexplicably, he'd tucked his trousers. With a piece of red cloth he was polishing something shiny and metallic which I assumed at first was a silver-plated Luger, but which turned out to be something he called a laryngoscope.

He turned when he heard me and naturally taking me for his superior, scrambled to his feet, his back ramrod straight, his heels clicking smartly together. I struggled to suppress a grin: he was shorter standing than he'd been sitting.

Instinctively, I checked his uniform for signs of rank and saw only an unfamiliar patch sewn on near the top of his left sleeve: a cartoon representation of what appeared to be a snake or a worm attempting a solo ascent of a chopstick, which, although rather creepy, lacked the authority conferred by the usual stripes or pips. Now that he was standing, as it were, I noticed the vast array of bags and accoutrements dangling from his belt and at once I realized who he was.

We'd been expecting him, or one of his sort, for some time and now he'd finally arrived with his double first in Chair and Blanketry from the Royal Academy of Ambulance Studies, the Clapham Ambulance's first fully-fledged graduate paramedic; the first in what we hoped would be a very short line indeed. He had a cunning, ambitious look about him, resentful and malicious, with vindictive, humourless eyes which oozed a slithery malevolence.

It was plain to anyone that he'd been bullied relentlessly since his very first morning in school and here he was now, poised at last to exact his revenge upon a despised mankind. He shook my hand with a limp, damp grip, reminiscent of something without legs that lives in the earth, and introduced himself as 'paramedic Peter Pouch'. I knew that within a year he would be my boss and with mounting trepidation I looked around the room for the reassurance of the familiar.

Stan Tablets was rocking with silent laughter in the corner, hugging himself as if in considerable pain; Bert Klaxon was puffing contentedly on his pipe, humming a snatch of Schubert, while Albert Harness thoughtfully stroked his beard, examining the intruder in the manner of a shrewd farmer eyeing a plump piglet at a country fair. I'd seen Albert look at patients that way and a sense of calm descended upon me along with the feeling that everything was going to be all right.

In fact that was the last I saw of Peter Pouch and the mystery of his disappearance had been quite forgotten by the end of the week when we gathered for Albert's annual Festival of Ambrosia, which is held on the first Sunday in August in the high-walled garden of his grand Georgian house in the Old Town. We all drank a little too much Gewurtztraminer and sang marching songs around the fire into the early hours, gorging ourselves with abandonded gluttony on our host's delicious and copious fare.

And then, as the flames glowed and the red sparks flew high into the night sky, Albert produced from a clay urn beneath the embers, to hearty applause and appreciative laughter this year's piece de resistance, which consisted of strips of some unnamed exotic meat rolled into cylinders and wound around little bone-like sticks in an arch parody of Aesculapius.

I'd never tasted anything like it; it was exquisite beyond words. Strange, unearthly flavours seemed to rise and swoop upon the palate, weaving into and around one another in a perfect organic synthesis like the notes of a heavenly symphony, building slowly, slowly to a fabulous gustatory crescendo that left one somehow sated and replete yet still yearning for more. It was sinful and degenerate; divine, transcendental; from the kitchen of Satan, food fit for the table of the gods.

"Albert," I gasped, breathless and drained. "This is indescribably delicious What on earth is it?" He looked at me, his eyes shining with sagacious humour, and gave me a sly wink.

"Oh, it's nothing fancy, son. Just a snake on a stick."

Retirement

2005-08-02T08:32:00.000-07:00

I was working a shift with Stan the other day and we had a non-runner in Marshmallow Road, so we decided to pay a call on old Fred Ventricle whose house was just a few doors down. Neither of us had seen Fred for a few years, not since his leaving do back in '96, in fact, which isn't surprising, one of our numerous traditions being that once you're gone, you're more or less forgotten, existing only as a kind of imaginary character in the general lore of anecdote and myth, devoid of form and substance, a wraith living only in the world of the past. Perhaps that sounds unkind, but we are nothing in the Clapham Ambulance if not unsentimental.

And surely there can be no sadder sight than the retired employee who, with nothing better to fill his lonely days, pops in to visit his old workmates. The forced bonhomie soon peters out to be replaced by an embarrassed silence as, out of a sense of well-intentioned but ill-judged respect, current topics become taboo and everyone waits with polite patience for the silly old duffer to get lost so that normal life can be resumed. The rule is very simple. Never go back.

To be perfectly truthful, our main reason for calling on Fred was merely to confirm his passing. He'd been barely alive when he retired and after seventy years on a diet of pork pies and Old Holborn nobody would have expected him to be still breathing.

The house bore the unmistakable Ventricle stamp: barely visible through the jungle of bindweed and buddleia in the front garden was the rusted and decrepit shell of what once had been his pride and joy, a 1968 Hillman Superminx; the paintwork on the house itself had peeled to such an extent that its original colour was anyone's guess and behind the windows' coat of almost impenetrable grime, hung filthy, never-washed net curtains. I dreaded to imagine what lay beyond them. In lieu of a knocker or a bell, we banged on the front door with our fists.

After a minute or so the door opened to reveal an immaculately dressed old gentleman with neatly cropped grey hair and an expression of faint distrust upon a suntanned face. For several seconds we stared in bewilderment at this apparition, which bore a striking resemblance to our old mate; a younger brother, perhaps, recently returned from the colonies, or . . . The suspicious look left the old boy's face and his mouth widened in a dazzlingly-dentured grin.

"Hello, lads, there's a surprise; come on in," he said, and we entered the crazy world of a very much still-breathing Fred Ventricle.

"How's the car going, Fred?" asked Stan, going straight for the jugular, but Fred wasn't biting and remained curiously serene, a faint smile on his lips and the makings of a merry twinkle about the eyes. He ushered us into the drawing room, bade us sit down and left the room to make tea.

I looked about in awed fascination. The room was spotlessly clean and sparsely furnished with what looked like very new and expensive items. Here and there were various sculptures and paintings and I thought I recognised a Kokoschka and a couple of Giacobettis. Was this the Fred Ventricle I knew? I was examining what looked suspiciously like a genuine Maillol, when the door opened and Fred entered, carrying a silver tray.

According to Albert Harness, who knows much about the subject, the life expectancy of a retired ambulanceman is similar to that of a subaltern at Ypres. Most of us, it seems, already declining rapidly through a combination of the physical attrition and mental debilitation that inevitably afflict the lifelong shiftworker, find the change of circumstances too harrowing to endure and tend to die within a year or two, in accordance with government policy. Those of us fortunate enough to cling on grimly to our mortal continuance are usually removed hastily to the Home for Retired Ambulancemen, which, as you probably know, is an annexe of the Clapham Lunatic Asylum. No, the retired ambulanceman's lot is not one of great happiness; unless poverty and madness are your thing, of course. But what was Fred Ventricle's secret?

He poured the tea and told us that he hadn't left the house for more than eight years. He could remember well enough what was out there and would only be disappointed to see how it had changed.

"I get everyfing I need delivered, don't I?" he explained and showed us a machine he said he'd acquired some time ago. "It's called a computer." Stan and I exchanged a meaningful glance; the old codger was evidently completely bonkers. "I can get anyfing I want off the Internet, see. I ain't got no reason to go out, have I?"

"Listen, Fred," I said, adopting the generic, patronising tone of the healthcare professional. "Why don't you come with us, see the doctor, eh? Just for a check-up. What do you say, old mate?" But before he could answer, we were interrupted by the sound of the front door opening.

"That'll be the missus," said Fred with a deranged gleam in his eye; we both knew that Agnes Ventricle had died many years ago; we'd attended her funeral, for heaven's sake.

"Now, Fred," I began, but was silenced by the sight of a beautiful young woman entering the room laden with carrier bags. By the look of her she was from somewhere in the region of Siam and couldn't have been more than seventeen. She smiled at our host with a look of complete adoration. I turned, open-mouthed, to Fred, who winked lewdly.

"Like I said, the Internet. You should try it."

The Boat

2005-07-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

News of an unpopular manager's downfall will always be most welcome in the messroom of the Clapham Ambulance Station, so it was with much merciless laughter and uncharitable rejoicing that we learnt today of Jason Bandages' disgrace and exile. He escaped the ultimate sanction of dismissal due only to his having friends in high places, which also must account for his otherwise bewildering initial appointment; I believe his father was at school with Sir Leslie Pitt-Tinny MP, OBE, who magnanimously spared him the ultimate humiliation of queueing at the Labour Exchange, instead banishing him to the Siberian salt mines of ambulance work, the River Neckinger Rescue Boat, a posting so conducive to madness that its last crew were driven quite berserk by the combined effects of noxious gases, insomnia and home-made alcohol and hanged their captain beneath Southwark bridge before diving headlong overboard to drown in the stinking green mud that characterizes that vile tributary.

And all this because young Jason couldn't control his wandering hands in the (admittedly tantalizing) presence of winsome student nurse Katie Cubicle, the proximity of whose firm young rump proved just too much of a temptation for him to resist, and whose great misfortune it was to have these unwarranted and shameful fumblings witnessed by none other than pipe-smoking Senior Matron Myra Mann-Hayter, a woman renowned for neither the benevolence of her bedside manner nor her tolerance of any male shenanigans involving one of her girls. Within an hour of the consummation of this heinous transgression, copies of her report were speeding by special courier to the heads of St. Bernard's Hospital, the Clapham Ambulance, the Ministry of Public Health and the Bandages household. Thus was Jason's fate sealed, while Matron Myra spent the rest of the afternoon locked in her office consoling and comforting her beautiful young student.

A tour of duty on the River Neckinger Rescue Boat has long been used by the Clapham Ambulance as a punishment posting for its most intractable and incorrigible offenders. In days gone by a minor violation of the dress code, a crooked tie for instance, would have been enough to earn a chap a spell on the boat, but in these more liberal and allegedly enlightened times it would require an infraction of far greater magnitude; persistent violations of patients' human rights, say, or an indiscretion at the Christmas party with Ron Stretcher's missus.

Most of the work of the rescue boat is conducted beneath street level in the network of tunnels and pipes that form the London sewer system and the threat of drowning due to a sudden downpour of rain and the subsequent flooding of these subterranean conduits is ever present. It's a different world down there: dark and dripping, rat-infested and foul-smelling, the bloated corpses of dogs and discarded babies floating with human faeces upon the black, greasy water; the evil and deadly slime can suck you under in seconds, filling your mouth and your lungs, silencing your screams as, panicked and terrified, you suffocate slowly, never to surface again.

And then there are the ambulance boatmen themselves: shifty and sullen, profoundly untrustworthy, disdainful of authority, their wary eyes constantly upon you, waiting silently for your mind to snap as they sharpen their knives endlessly on oiled stones, scraping the glinting blades back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, their unfeeling eyes never leaving you, daring you, willing you, to fall asleep for just a few seconds.

'Honest Ted' Canvas has opened a book and already betting has been brisk on the new captain suffering a similar fate to that of his predecessor within a month of taking command. Alas, it would seem that soft-handed, pen-pushing college boy Jason Bandages has received what is tantamount to a sentence of death and we're having a few drinks tonight in the Princess Margaret if anyone would care to join us.