Medical students arrive for my tuition, fresh-faced and innocent, all eager for the treat. For the most part, they are still of conspicuously middle-class origin, despite the government’s desire to destroy bourgeois science and replace it with the true proletarian variety.
The contact these students have had with the seamy side of life has been either superficial or merely theoretical. They still suppose that most people are reasonable, decent and law-abiding, that they care for their children, etc. By the time they leave me, a week afterwards, their vision of life has darkened. Their eyes are opened to the existence of evil.
Of course, I am relieved in a way that innocence should persist, despite the forces ranged against it. On the other hand, it is slightly alarming that people could go through life in a small country such as ours without any knowledge of so considerable a part of its character. Ignorance, illusion, wilful blindness and wishful thinking have ever been the guiding principles of British government.
How young the medical students look to me now! I sent one off the other day to examine a patient who was no older than himself, but who had had a rather different experience of life from his.
The patient’s father — or should I say inseminator — had disappeared almost as soon as he was born. The mother took another violent drunk to her bosom, and he persecuted the child of her former lover with obsessive malignity, whipping and beating him, and even on one occasion knocking him over with his car. When he reached the age of 14, his mother decided he was de trop and threw him out of her home to fend for himself. Needless to say, the rest of his life had not so far been a triumph; so when he found someone willing to inject him with a would-be fatal dose of heroin, he took the opportunity.
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