DOCTOR AT SEA полностью

The red lamps were shining on the tops of the high radar masts when we crept close to Dover inside the Goodwins. The lights of Ramsgate and Margate passed off our port side, then we cut across to the Nore, where we were to anchor and await the tide. Someone gave me the morning paper that the pilot had brought aboard. I opened it and read the front page with the careless baffled interest of a holidaymaker inspecting the social column in the village weekly. We had been more or less newsless for three months, but the happenings that used to shake my breakfast table no longer aroused my concern. A paragraph near the foot of the page caught my eye; it was headed 'MAYOR REBUKES DANCERS,' and went on: 'The Mayor of--, Alderman--, yesterday refused an application for an extension to midnight at a cycling club dance. He said he was highly disturbed at complaints of immoral behaviour that had followed the dance last year. "The place for young men and women at midnight," he told the secretary, "is in their own homes asleep."'

I knew I was back in England.

The next morning we steamed into the Thames. The country raised a faint glow of sunshine to welcome us, but the effort was too taxing and the atmosphere soon relapsed into its habitual rain.

We passed the long finger of Southend Pier, which appears a far more dignified structure when seen in reverse, signalled our name, and passed down the channel towards Tilbury. The wet, orderly fields of England on the narrowing banks, with a demure English train jogging through them towards London, had the appearance of a winter's garden after the turbulent unfenced vegetation of the South American coast. Off Tilbury landing-stage we anchored for the Port of London doctor to board us. He was a large, friendly man in a naval battledress and a duffle-coat.

'Have a good voyage, old man?' he asked, running his fingers down the pages of my logbook.

'Pretty good, thanks.'

'Going again?'

'Oh, no. I don't think so, anyway.'

'Back to the N.H.S., eh?'

'That's it. If I can remember any of my medicine.'

He laughed. 'You can still sign your name, can't you? All right, free pratique granted.'

We continued down the River, and I was seized with a spasm of nostalgia by catching sight of an L.P.T.B. bus.

In Gallions Reach the tugs set about us and turned us towards the locks of the Royal Albert Dock.

'Is that all the room we've got?' I asked Easter, as we headed for the narrow entrance. As I always had difficulty parking a car in a busy street I filled with admiration for the mates and tugmasters every time the Lotus came into port.

'There's bags of room,' Easter said. 'They gets them big New Zealand boats through here easy enough. Look at all them bright lads we've got to help us.'

I saw a chilly knot of longshoremen waiting to receive our ropes as we came into the lock: sad, damp Englishmen, their coat collars up to their sodden caps.

'That one there's been on the job for years,' Easter said. 'We calls him Knuckle 'Arry.'

He pointed to a depressed-looking man with a long moustache standing still and holding a rope fender over the end of the jetty.

'That's an odd name. What's his knuckles got to do with it?'

'The knuckle's what he's standing on. Now you wait.'

As the Lotus drew near the stonework the pilot shouted from the bridge: 'Keep her off the knuckle, 'Arry!' The man touched his cap, and solemnly manipulated his fender to save our paint. He then resumed his immobility in the thick rain.

We passed the knuckle, the locks, the entrance to the dock; the tugs dragged us slowly down to our waiting berth; more men in caps and old overcoats secured our ropes to the quay; the ensign came down from the gaff and was rehoisted, in compliance with custom, on the stern jack-staff.

'Lower away gangway!' Hornbeam shouted from the bridge.

The Lotus leant contentedly against the dock and, after three months all but five days, we were home.

There was a wonderful end-of-term spirit abroad. Everyone was packing up and behaving with the recklessness of men for whom there are no longer any consequences.

We were paying-off, the morning after our arrival. Mr. Cozens and his colleagues came aboard and treated us with cordial superiority, and we looked on them with good-humoured contempt. Cozens himself questioned me closely about the exit of Captain Hogg.

'Very good, Doctor,' he said. 'I think you did entirely the correct thing. Our Sunflower is due at Teneriffe in three weeks' time and she will bring him home. We have your successor for next trip-a Dr. Gallyman. Do you know him?'

'I'm sorry, I don't.'

Cozens sighed. 'I'm afraid he is a little on the old side,' he said. 'Retired from practice some years ago. I believe there was some trouble with the medical authorities, too…Still we must hope for the best. It's so difficult getting doctors for these ships just now.'