The Summer of Sir Lancelot

gave him a glance of tender concern. Sir Lancelot and the Matron hit it off rather well together. Everyone in the hospital always wondered why.
    ‘Completely, thank you. No late passes for this young lady?‘ Sir Lancelot continued, stirring his cup. ‘No weekend leave? Lights out by ten?‘
    ‘Naturally, I followed your suggestions, Sir Lancelot.‘
    The surgeon nodded. He had decided that the Nurses‘ Home for Euphemia would make a nunnery look like the Establishment of Madame Tellier.
    ‘It‘s all for your own good, my dear,‘ he added in Euphemia‘s direction. ‘You must remember you are at a very impressionable age.‘
    ‘Of course, Uncle.‘
    Though I expect you will want to stand her a treat or two while you are in London, Sir Lancelot?‘ smiled the Matron. ‘By her ward reports, I think she deserves it.‘
    ‘Alas, I have no intention of staying in the Great Wen longer than twenty-four hours. Not while the fish at home are biting like famished alligators. I wouldn‘t have come at all, were it not for a few tedious errands - some solicitors to see about my property in Wales, an agency to visit for a new chauffeur. I had to let Millichap go, you know. The poor fellow was getting very rocky on his pins recently. I also want to buy a new fishing-rod and get an X-ray of my back.‘ He put down his cup. ‘I don‘t suppose anyone happens to know the latest score?‘
    ‘England fifteen for one, Uncle,‘ put in Euphemia quietly. ‘Turnbull, lbw, bowled Duffy, nought, Trevor-Drake eight, the Reverend Chambers six, one extra. I thought you might like to know, so I looked specially at the ward television.‘
    They were simple words, but they buried her past. Sir Lancelot shot an approving glance at the little figure with the mauve dress reaching towards her ankles and the starched cap turning up behind like a dove‘s tail. Now she was cured of her bout of bucolic insanity she was taking interest in the right things of life. After all, she came from damn good stock.
    ‘You and I will take a little stroll round the courtyard in the sunshine, Euphemia,‘ he announced. ‘With Matron‘s permission.‘
    ‘But of course, Sir Lancelot... ‘
    ‘Got anything on the Gold Cup, Matron? I have been given Oystercatcher.‘
    ‘Oh, Sir Lancelot!‘ She fluttered as much as a block of pink granite can flutter. ‘You are a naughty man!‘
    ‘Come, Euphemia.‘
    His niece followed him demurely into the courtyard, where he talked to her for half an hour about the kidney. She listened in respectful but absorbed silence. Like Sherlock Holmes, Euphemia had her methods.
    ‘You are quite clear on the difference between a glomerulus and a tubule?‘ he ended, opening his pocket watch. ‘Excellent. Now I must go and fix myself an X-ray. Good-bye, my dear. We look forward to your company next long weekend leave, now — er — Dr Ewenny has resumed his practice at home.‘
    Sir Lancelot strode across the courtyard where he had reigned for so many years with a flamboyant authority worth an approving nod from the Bourbons, and reached Out Patients in a mood as benign as the weather.
    ‘My dear Sister, don‘t bother yourself,‘ he boomed, as Sister Out Patients came fluttering up. ‘I am here merely for an X-ray, and perfectly able to look after myself. You would be far better occupied attending to that small child, who I fancy is about to vomit into the fire bucket.‘
    He buried himself among the crowd.
    The Out Patients Department at St Swithin‘s hasn‘t much changed since my day, either. It still greets you with an incurable smell of damp raincoats, Dettol, and distant frying fish. It‘s still as busy as the rush-hour at a London terminus, which with its grimy glass roof and iron pillars sprouting weird Victorian decorations it rather resembles.
    But certain touches suggest the patients are no longer assumed to come entirely from the pages of Mayhews London Labour and the London Poor. A small counter in the corner now sells them tea and iced buns. The word PLEASE has appeared on some of the notices. There is an appointments system, so that instead of patients arriving when they felt like it and having to wait halt an hour before seeing the doctor, now they come when they are told and wait an hour instead. But the long wooden benches are still as bare as butchers‘ blocks, and the patients still sit on them furtively reading their case-notes, like their forebears in suffering who were marshalled by uniformed