As well as the wide lifts for stretchers, St Swithin's provided for the staff a small creaking cage that usually had a worn notice on the gate saying OUT OF ORDER, which was traditionally forbidden the students. Bingham now used this lift even to descend between adjoining floors; he was particularly careful to summon it when walking along the corridor with a crowd of students, and would wait for them to arrive breathless upstairs. 'Jolly convenient, the old lift,' he said to me one morning. 'Can't understand how we used to manage without it.'

I was not left much time to brood on him, for either the drivers and pedestrians of London were becoming more careless or I was becoming less efficient: the patients in the casualty-room never thinned until supper-time, and I often had to go without my lunch as well.

'I say, old chap,' be began late one evening, as the benches were at last clearing. 'How about buzzing up to the ward and having a quiz round some cases? There's an absolutely top-hole pyelonephrosis and a retroperitoneal abscess side by side-bet you half a dollar you can't spot which is which.'

'No thanks,' I said. 'As a matter of fact, I'm fed up at looking at suffering humanity for a bit. I'm going out for a pint.'

'Forgive me for saying so, old man, but it's hardly the way to get through the Fellowship, is it?'

'I don't care a monkey's damn for the bloody Fellowship at the moment. My feet hurt, I've got a headache, I want my supper, and I'm thirsty.'

'Yes, cas. is a bit of a bind. I'll be glad to get out of it next month and start proper surgery in the wards.'

I looked him in the eye. 'I will remind you that the post of senior house surgeon will go to only one of us.'

He smirked 'Of course, old man. I was sort of forgetting for a minute. Best man win, and all that, eh?'

'Exactly, Bingham.'

Another fortnight went by, and I began to hope that the Hopcroft affair might be forgotten by a busy man carrying the responsibilities of a surgical Chair. Then one afternoon the Professor appeared in casualty. He stood before my desk, looking at me with the same stare of scientific interest and holding in his hand a patient's treatment card.