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on the last day when heavens fall, and justice is done – again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far – ‘All right’.
    From such material Sassall constructed his ideal of responsibility.
    During the war Sassall served in the Navy as a surgeon. ‘That was the happiest time of my life, doing major surgery in the Dodecanese. I was dealing with very real distress and on the whole making a success of it.’ In Rhodes he taught peasants elementary medicine. He saw himself as a life-saver. He had proved his skill to himself and his ability to take decisions. With this proof came the conviction that those who lived simply, those who were dependent upon him, possessed qualities and a secret of living which he lacked. Thus, whilst having authority over them, he could feel he was serving them.
    After the war, he married 1 and chose a remote country practice under the National Health Service, becoming the junior partner of an old doctor who was much liked in the district but who hated the sight of blood and believed that the secret of medicine was faith. This gave the younger man plenty of opportunity to go on working as a life-saver.
    He was always overworked and proud of it. Most of the time he was out on calls – often having to make his way over fields, or walk, carrying his black boxes of instruments and drugs, along forest paths. In the winter he had to dig his way through the snow. Along with his instruments he carried a blow-lamp for thawing out pipes.
    He was scarcely ever in the surgery. He imagined himself as a sort of mobile one-man hospital. He performed appendix and hernia operations on kitchen tables. He delivered babies in caravans. It would almost be true to say that he sought out accidents.
    He had no patience with anything except emergencies or serious illness. When a man continued to complain but had no dangerous symptoms, he reminded himself of the endurance of the Greek peasants and the needs of those in ‘very real distress’, and so recommended more exercise and, if possible, a cold bath before breakfast. He dealt only with crises in which he was the central character: or, to put it another way, in which the patient was simplified by the degree of his physical dependence on the doctor. He was also simplified himself, because the chosen pace of his life made it impossible and unnecessary for him to examine his own motives.
    After a few years he began to change. He was in his mid thirties: at that time of life when, instead of being spontaneously oneself as in one’s twenties, it is necessary, in order to remain honest, to confront oneself and judge from a second position. Furthermore he saw his patients changing. Emergencies always present themselves as faits accomplis . At last, because he was living among the same people all the time, and because he was often called to the same cottage several times for different emergencies, he began to notice how people developed. A girl whom three years before he had treated for measles got married and came to him for her first confinement. A man who had never been ill shot his brains out.
    One day he was called to a couple of old-age pensioners. They had lived in the Forest for thirty years. Nobody had anything very special to say about them. They went every year on the Old Folks’ Annual Outing. They usually went to the pub at about eight every Saturday evening. A long time before, the wife had worked as a maid in the big house of a near-by village. The husband had workedon the railway. The husband said that his wife ‘was bleeding from down below’.
    Sassall talked to her a little and then asked her to undress so that he could examine her. He went into the kitchen to wait until she was ready. There the husband looked at him anxiously and took the clock from the mantelpiece to wind it. At this age if the wife has to go into hospital, it can be the beginning of the end for them both.
    When he went