A Dublin Student Doctor Read Free Page A

Monto, filthy, squalid, vermin-plagued, but with indomitable inhabitants. O’Connell Street and, halfway up it, Nelson’s Pillar beside the General Post Office, from the steps of which Pádraig Pearse had read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic at Eastertide 1916. Its façade and Ionic columns were still pockmarked with British bullets from the siege during the Rising.
    O’Reilly was distracted by a sudden movement ahead and leant forward to see the bushy tail of a badger scurrying for cover and its home.
    Dublin had become O’Reilly’s home in 1925 when his father, young for the job at forty-five, had been appointed professor of classics and English literature at Trinity. O’Reilly had been born and brought up in Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland, still part of the United Kingdom, but for eleven years had lived in the Irish Free State. Sometimes he thought he was neither fish, fowl, nor good red meat. He’d loved Ulster all his life, particularly Strangford Lough, where he and his older brother Lars had spent their winter Saturdays wildfowling. But he loved Dublin too.
    The ambulance slowed then halted to give a large lorry right of way. O’Reilly turned and slid back a window between the cab and the rear of the vehicle. “Everything all right, Kitty?”
    The lighting was dim and he had difficulty making out her features.
    Kitty said, “Everything’s fine. Donal’s sleeping.”
    If the middle meningeal artery had burst, Donal would be deeply unconscious, not asleep, but surely a nurse with Kitty’s experience—
    “It’s all right, Fingal. I’ve no trouble waking him up and there’s no change in any vital signs.”
    O’Reilly exhaled. He hadn’t realised he’d been holding his breath, and damn it, he should have known better than to doubt. “Grand,” he said. “We’ll be there soon.” He closed the window as the ambulance began to move. Donal was going to be all right. Of course he was. O’Reilly looked out the windscreen to see the ambulance taking the left-hand fork of a Y junction.
    Ireland was full of strange road confluences, the Six Road Ends in County Down, the Five Road Ends at Beal na mBláth in County Cork where Kinky had grown up on a farm, and Michael Collins, head of the armed forces of the Irish Free State, had been assassinated in August 1922.
    O’Reilly had come to a crossroads in his own life in ’27. If he hadn’t made his choice about which road to follow, he’d not have Charlie Greer and the others as friends, nor Kitty. Nor would he have been a rural GP, a life he loved, if he’d meekly caved in when Father had decreed over breakfast in the family house on Lansdowne Road in Dublin that no son of his was going to be a physician. The ambulance lurched over a pothole and a goose walked over his grave as he shuddered and remembered that day, September 17, 1927.

2
    It Is a Wise Father that Knows His Own Child
    “So, Fingal,” his older brother Lars said, refusing another slice of toast, “you’re convinced Sir Malcolm Campbell can beat Major Henry Seagrave for a new land speed record?”
    “Seagrave did 203 miles per hour,” Fingal said, digging out the yolk from a soft-boiled egg, “but Campbell’s tenacious. I admire that.”
    “I think,” said Father, “you are forgetting that fragments of miles per hour can be critical. The major’s actual speed was 203.841.”
    Fingal shook his head and looked across the table. Father was a professor at Trinity, a breed who tended to be inward-looking, but he had always been interested in the world around him and a stickler for accuracy. He was a tall, slightly built man with a neatly trimmed black moustache. His high forehead was scored with three horizontal lines, his nose aquiline. He wore a three-piece pinstripe suit, wing collar, and Old Harrovian tie.
    Father looked at his watch. “Fascinating as speed may be, boys, I have to be in the college in fifty-three minutes, and, Fingal, I should like to have a word