LOOKING BACK ON EIGHTY YEARS

In my long life I have seen many changes in our habits and customs.

The world I entered when at the age of eight­een I became a medical student was a world that knew nothing of planes, motor-cars, movies, radio or telephone. When I was still at school a lecturer came to Canterbury¹ and showed us boys a new machine which reproduced the human voice. It was the first gramophone. The world I entered was a world that warmed itself with coal fires, lit itself by gas and paraffin lamps, and looked upon a bath­room as a luxury out of the reach.²

On Sundays the muffin man made his rounds ringing his melancholy bell and people came out of their door to buy muffins and crumpets³ for after­noon tea.

It was a very cheap world. When I entered St Thomas's Hospital I took a couple of furnished rooms for which I paid 18s a week.⁴ My landlady provided me with a solid breakfast before I went to the hospital and high tea⁵ when I came back at half-past six, and the two meals cost me about 12s a week. I was able to live very comfortably, pay my fees⁶, buy my necessary instruments, and clothe myself.

I had enough money to go to the theatre at least once a week. The pit, to which I went, was not the orderly tiling it is now. There were no queues. The crowd collected at the doors, and when they were opened there was a struggle, with a lot of pushing and elbowing and shouting to get a good place. But that was part of the fun.

Travelling was cheap, too, in those days. When I was twenty I went to Italy by myself⁷ for the six weeks of the Easter vacation.⁸ I went to Pisa⁹ and spent a wonderful month in Florence¹⁰; then I went to Venice¹¹ and Milan¹² and so back to London.

I spent five years at St Thomas's Hospital. I was an unsatisfactory medical student, for my heart was not in it. I wanted, I had always wanted, to be a writer, and in the evening, after my tea, I wrote and read.

I wrote a novel, called Liza of Lambeth,¹³ sent it to a publisher, and it was accepted. It appeared during my last year at the hospital and had some­thing of a success. It was of course an accident, but naturally I did not know that. I felt I could afford to chuck¹⁴ medicine and make writing my profes­sion; so three days after passing the final examina­tions which gave me my medical qualifications, I set out for Spain to learn Spanish and write an­other book. Looking back now, after these years, and knowing as I do the terrible difficulties of making a living by writing,¹⁵ I realise that I was taking a fearful risk. It never occurred to me. I abandoned the medical profession with relief, but I do not regret the five years I spent at the hospital, far from it.¹⁶

They taught me pretty well¹⁷ all I know about human nature, for in a hospital you see it in the raw.¹⁸ People in pain, people in fear of death, do not try to hide anything from their doctor, and if they do he can generally guess what they are hid­ing.

The next ten years were very hard. I did not follow up my first success with another. I wrote several novels, only one of which had any merit, and I wrote a number of plays which managers more or less promptly returned to me.

Then I had a bit of luck.¹⁹ The manager of the Court Theatre, Sloane Square,²⁰ put on a play that failed. He read a play of mine, called Lady Freder­ick,²¹ and thought he did not much like it, thought it might just run²² for the six weeks, It ran for fif­teen months.

I had four plays running in London at the same time.

Nothing of the kind had ever happened before, and the papers made a great to-do²³ about it. If I may say it without immodesty, I was the talk of the town.²⁴ One of the students at St Thomas's Hospital asked the eminent surgeon with whom I had worked as a "dresser"²⁵ whether he remembered me.

"Yes, I remember him quite well," he said. "Very sad. Very sad. One of our failures I'm afraid."

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1018