The Good Boy by John Fiennes Page A

then country town of Dandenong: Springvale was serviced by the doctors from Dandenong, and Clayton by my father and his colleagues. Dad had patients living on small farms at Clayton that now form part of the Monash University campus. My sister and I were supposed to wait quietly in the car while my father went into the patient’s house, and for the most part I think we did. We had strict instructions not to open the doors nor get out of the car. To while away the time we often played at ‘driving’ the car (which sometimes became an aeroplane and we the pilots, sometimes a train engine and we the crew) and sometimes people would come out from the house being visited and would be nice to the doctor’s children, chatting to us with the window wound down.
    My abiding memory of these visits is of the respect and even affection shown for my father by these people. I think that the experience underlined for me the message we were always given at home, to
think of others
and it probably kindled in me the ambition to do things when I grew up that would, like my father’s work, help others. Of course, as a child I was probably also attracted by the prospect of being praised for my actions: the phrases ‘what a good boy’ and ‘what a little gentleman’ and ‘just like his father’ were music to my ears. The fact that both parents were trained members of what are now termed caring professions (medicine and nursing) perhaps inevitably oriented me more towards being helpful than towards being financially successful, towards idealism rather than towards realism. Money matters were never discussed in front of us as children and I had no idea that our comfortable lifestyle depended on the amount of money my father’s work brought in.
    On one of these country visits my sister and I were sitting in the car while Dad went into the house to his patient. Growing a bit bored we opened the car door … precisely why I do not recall and, as if for our disobedience, we were invaded by a large, smelly, noisy white billygoat which had somehow broken free of the long leash attached to the farm gatepost. My sister and I could not get the animal to retreat and were more scared of it than of the expected scolding for having opened the door. When Dad eventually emerged from the farmhouse after seeing his patient he had to summon help to prise the animal out of the car.
    We could accompany Dad on his rounds only before we started school, of course, and only in daylight. He was often called out at night and we would not know of this until next day, if at all. My father was fairly deaf in his right ear and so my mother persuaded him that he should normally sleep on his left side. As a result, he did not hear the bedside phone ring in the dead of night and my mother, who slept on the phone-table side of the bed, would answer the phone, filter the calls, and virtually decide whether or not to wake my father. I don’t suppose she was really able to save him from many midnight call-outs, but they both enjoyed telling this little story of their teamwork when the question of out-of-hours calls came up with their friends (and it often seemed to, as many of their friends were also doctors and nurses).
    Working from home was in those days the norm for most doctors, only a small number having their surgery or rooms at a large hospital or in Collins Street, where most of Melbourne’s specialists were established. I think my mother was never really keen on having ‘the public’, i.e. the patients, sauntering up the garden path at virtually any time of day or night, even though they did veer off to the side of the house where a surgery and waiting room adjoining the house had been built shortly after I was born. The system did mean, however, that we children saw much more of our father than would otherwise have been the case; we had all our meals together including lunch and afternoon-tea, and we were on