A large map of England hung on the wall of the surgery waiting room; Cornwall was yellow, Devon red, Hampshire cream, and you couldn’t tell the difference between Cumberland and Westmoreland because they were so far away at the top. There was an oblong mahogany table with nothing on it but a plantless plant pot and some tattered magazines. On the mantelpiece a gilt clock ticked loudly under a glass dome, and above this hung a framed diploma certifying in a very spidery handwriting something that nobody ever bothered to stand on a chair and read. Fifteen chairs, in fact, were ranged against the four walls, and when they were all occupied the assembly, with the big table in the middle, looked like some fantastic board meeting. You had time to notice all these things while waiting for your turn. And at intervals the inner glass-paneled door would open, a patient would emerge and the next one rise eagerly; and then you would hear two distinctive good-evenings: the one that meant “You’re calmer now, you can go away easier in mind; things aren’t quite so bad, are they?” — and the other that meant “You’re worried, I know. Please tell me all about it; I’m here to help you.” And when, on summer nights, the sunlight slanted in, you could watch the yellow bars climb up from the Isle of Wight to Birmingham — never higher because of the roof across the street; and after they had gone away altogether Susan would come in with a lighted taper for the gas. It burned green and pale, with a hissing sound. And then the inner door opening again … “Good evening” — “Good evening …” Oh, little doctor, please be kind to me when it comes my turn …

So, as a child, one watched and prayed while the Cathedral bells chimed the quarters; and the prayer was answered. He was kind, none ever kinder. Once, when he had pulled out a loose tooth not quite painlessly, he promised a child a real steam engine with real steam. It was absurd, since it would cost far more than the fee, and no one expected anything to come of it — no one except the child, who believed and waited in vain. But a story came from the man who kept the town’s toy shop — that David had been there to buy the steam engine, but that Jessica interfered and wouldn’t let him spend the money. One could hardly blame her.

The trouble with genius (because I think, in some ways there was a touch of that quality in the little doctor) is that it is essentially alone. The most you know is that it is there; you cannot really come to terms with it; it is something that gives and cannot take. There were times when David sat by the bedside of old and dying people, and something passed between them in a finger touch; but you could no more describe it or analyze it than you can trap the wisp of memory that strays from a forgotten dream. And it came again in his jokes with children. Most of these look rather silly on paper, but here is one which was remembered because it shocked Jessica so much. There were mice in the kitchen of the house and she had sent for Tom Riddle, who was Calderbury’s vermin catcher and insect exterminator — a friendly little fellow with a drooping moustache and a squeaky voice. It so happened that he arrived in the midst of a children’s party and announced himself as “the mice man.” This seemed to amuse David enormously and he began a sort of game with the children to find how many other kinds of men would rhyme with “mice man” — “rice man, ice man, nice man,” and so on. Whereupon Teddy Farrell suggested “Christ man” (he was the seven-year-old son of the Arch-deacon and had probably caught the phrase from one of his father’s sermons), and David, laughing like a child himself, began to make a jingle of it: —