The Naked Island | Page 4

the shape of a medical orderly, emerged from behind a turf guide and summoned us, one by one, to be weighed and measured. Next, in to the doctors for an examination.
Doctors were a tribe for whom I had never had much time. The one before whom I now stood filled me with no confidence at all. He had the outward appearances of a publican and the delicate hands of a navvy. He confirmed my worst fears about the profession in general and himself in particular by thrusting an inquisitive finger against what is euphemistically termed one's lower abdomen and saying, "Cough."
If that, I thought to myself, is where he imagines I get a sore throat, no wonder he had to join the Armyl I stood silent and contemptuous.
Irritably he looked up from the inquisitive finger and my lower abdomen. "I said Cough, " he told me. I nodded. "Well then," he ordered, very abruptly indeed, "Cough!" With no great conviction, I coughed.
"Uh-huh," he said, and removed the finger and averted the gaze and wrote something down on a form which I tried very hard to read but with no success at all.
"Now," he said in a businesslike manner, "some questions." I prepared myself for questioning.
"What diseases have you had?" This, I thought, at least displayed a pleasantly paternal interest in my past, so, even though it appeared quite irrelevant to the business of killing Germans, I answered him briskly, saying, "Measles and whooping cough."
He looked most disappointed. "No chicken pox?" he queried. I denied the chicken pox.
"No mumps?" I denied the mumps. I also denied broken limbs, missing teeth and interesting scars. The doctor became quite pa tently bored and attempted a different gambit.
"Do you throw fits?" he asked hopefully. I denied that I threw fits.
"Mother or father throw fits?" he persisted. I said, "No " His face clouded with despondency but he pressed on: "Any insanity in the family at all?" he demanded desperately "grandparents or any thing?" Again I said no: whereupon quite disgruntledhe wrote down on the form that I didn't throw fits, that my mother and father didn't throw fits and that my grandparents were sane. Meantime I stood by, still quite naked, and listened to the other naked recruits also being interrogated about the state of their grandparents* sanity. I suddenly had a terrible desire to assure thfa doctor who looked like a publican that actually both my parents had the D.T.s and that my great-grandmother had been as mad as a cut snake. These reveries were, however, completely disrupted by a curt order to bend over. All around the room at that moment recruits were bending over and very unsightly it was, too.
"Whyr I asked.
"Because," said the publican, with quite unwarranted impatience, "I want to see if you've got piles."
"I haven't." I told him firmly and remained vertical.
"Bend over," he bellowed. "You can't expect me to take your word for it got to see for myself."
"You didn't want to see my grandparents," I argued.
"I am not," he hissed, "examining your grandparents for piles, Now bend over."
"You asked me," I pointed out, "whether my grandparents were cracked. I said, No. You didn't say, Show me your uncracked grandparents! Now, you ask, have I got piles and I say, 'No,' and you say, Bend over. It doesn't make sense."
With a look of undisguised hostility, he straightened up in his chair.
"All right," he capitulated, "you have not got piles. Now, for God's sake," and he said the words very slowly and with not much good will, "go away. Go next door," and, dismissing me, he pointed to the far room. So off I marched in naked dignity, whilst behind me the publican sat writing furiously all over my medical form.

The next room turned out to be occupied by an orderly, by one of my fellow recruits a huge, amiable and incredibly sun-tanned Life Saver who rejoiced in the nickname of Tarzan and finally by a most impressive array of bottles. There were milk bottles, ink bottles, oyster bottles, beer bottles bottles of every description.
Pressing an ink bottle into my hand, the orderly said, "Fill this," and, at the same time, passed Tarzan a milk bottle. I gazed curiously at my bottle Swan's Blue Black, I noticed.
"What with?" I demanded, at which the orderly looked quite incredulous and Tarzan flung me, over his vast brown shoulder (a brown made all the more striking by the white gleam of his buttocks), a patronizing grin. The orderly explained what with, and simultaneously Tarzan proudly produced his milk botdeful, so that I could even see what with. This was a facet of Army life for which I was wholly unprepared. In fact so far all the facets were facets for which I had been wholly unprepared.
"Can't be done,' I said.
"Why not?"