The Good Boy by John Fiennes

that the nuns had given us children so many sweets and so much afternoon tea that we had been sick. There were raised voices but no real shouting, and my father seemed to just hold my mother’s arms until she stopped complaining … but I was terrified! I had never seen them argue before and asked my sister whether we should go and get the neighbours or the police – someone – to stop them. My sister, a mere eighteen months older than I, airily replied that it was ‘nothing’, that grown-ups argued like that, and that we should just get on with tea and bed. So we did, and in the morning everything was, as she had foretold, back to normal.
    A normal morning meant that Vera’s alarm clock would go off at 6.45 a.m. and I would hear her getting up and then setting out the breakfast things in the kitchen. After having her own breakfast she would start on the day’s work, first of all going to the newsagent next door to collect the morning paper and then making a start on chores such as polishing the floors in the surgery and waiting room, lighting the copper and starting the washing. My mother got up soon after Vera and would wake us children and see that we were dressed and breakfasting at the kitchen table before she arranged and carried a big tray up the hall to my parents’ bedroom and gave my father breakfast in bed. This she did every morning in their twenty years of married life, with an exception being made on Sundays to allow for attendance at Mass. The menu never varied: a bowl of cornflakes with a small silver jug of hot milk; the silver sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers; a plate of bacon and eggs; a rack of toast; butter and marmalade; a pot of tea; the necessary cutlery … and a large white napkin in a silver serviette ring. My father would be sitting up in bed for this ritual and would tuck one corner of the napkin into his pyjama coat before eating. My sister and I would, if allowed by my mother, rush in before he had quite finished his bacon and eggs and beg for a ‘mopper’, a square of toast which he would impale on his fork, swirl around in the egg yolk, and extend to the favoured offspring. I think that this largesse was limited to one mopper per child per breakfast and that once the third child, my baby brother, came on the scene the ritual ended … or my mother would have had to serve my father a larger breakfast. With breakfast finished, my father would then read the paper,
The Age
, before getting up and heading in his black dressing gown (my mother’s was red, making them look more Stendhalian as a couple than they really were) for the bathroom, a shave, and the day’s work.
    My father was a ‘general practitioner’, the traditional sort of family doctor in the suburbs. His surgery was open for consultations between 9 and 10.30, 2 and 3, and 6.30 and 7.30 (making an appointment was unheard of in those days and patients just queued up along the bench in the waiting room or at busy times overflowed into the front garden). After morning surgery my father would usually come into the house and have a cup of morning-tea and then set off in the car on his morning rounds, visiting patients in the local hospital or small nursing-homes and those at home who were too sick or too feeble to come into the surgery. A similar routine of afternoon rounds would follow afternoon surgery (with a short pause for afternoon-tea with the family).
    Sometimes, when the rounds involved a longer-than-usual drive such as a visit to patients ‘out in the country’, my sister and I would be allowed to go with my father. The area where we lived was, in 1940, more or less the outer edge of the city and some patients lived on ‘acreage’ or small farms to the east, in between the urban growth slowly taking place around the stations along the main south-eastern railway line. I don’t think there were any doctors based between our outer suburb and the