'Did you write this?' he asked.

I looked at it. It was directed to the Surgical Registrar, a genial young specialist with whom I had played rugger and drunk beer, and who disliked Bingham almost as much as he did the Fellowship examiners. The card asked for his opinion on a suspected orthopaedic case, but in the stress of casualty I had scribbled only three words

_Please X-ray. Fracture?_

Now I remembered with alarm that the Registrar had the afternoon off to visit the Royal Society of Medicine, and the Professor was taking over his work.

'Yes, sir,' I admitted.

'Have,' he snapped. 'Isn't.'

He turned on his heel and disappeared.

Bingham said eagerly a few days later, 'The Prof. was talking about you this morning, old man.'

'Oh, yes?'

'I'd nipped into the theatre to have a dekko at him doing an adrenalectomy, and he asked if I knew what school you went to. I told him I couldn't say off-hand. Then he made a most surprising remark, old chap-he thought it was probably one of those progressive ones, where the kids learn all about self-expression and bash the teachers over the head with rulers but are never taught to read or write. I suppose you didn't really go to a place like that, did you?'

'As a matter of fact I did. We never learnt to read, write, do arithmetic, play cricket, or swap marbles, but at least we were brought up not to go around kissing the backsides of people we wanted to get jobs from.'

Bingham stiffened. 'I might say that's an extremely offensive remark, old chap.'

'I might say that I meant it to be. Old chap.'

My ambition to be a surgeon now burned low. But it was not extinguished until the week before my casualty job was to end.