If symptoms

persist.. .

I READ a book not long ago which maintained that the essential difference between Man and the animals was that Man had a concept of the future, which allowed him to foresee and plan ahead. I can only remark that the author of this book must have confined his observa- tions to a very restricted social circle indeed.

Last week I arrived on the ward to find a young woman in bed with tears and smudged make-up running down her pale cheeks. Her hair was dyed blonde, with dark roots, and by means of the hairdresser's art it had been induced to stick out of the side of her head in strag- gly and crinkly strands, like a feather from a hat. Her jaw was broken.

I surmised at a glance that her story was dismal, and so it proved. Aged 17, she was the unmarried mother of two children by the man who had just broken her jaw. She had left him, she said, a few months before, when she decided to move from one area of the city to anoth- er and he had refused to follow her. He had punched her in the face while on a visit to what she called 'the babby'.

She said she didn't know what to do, for she lived in terror of him. I suggest- ed, naively as it transpired, that she take out an injunction against him.

`I've already got one of those,' she said. 'But it's no use.'

She had called the police three times when her ex-boyfriend broke the terms of the injunction, but the police had done nothing. I was exasperated by this inactivity of the police: nowadays they seem to do nothing even when a crime is committed in front of their noses. Then again, perhaps the leniency of the courts is to blame for the police's inertia.

`And how many times has your ex- boyfriend broken the injunction against him?' I asked.

`About seventy,' she said.

`And how does he get in?' I asked. `He pushes the door when I open it.' `Why do you open it to him?'

`I don't know it's him.'

`But you must suspect by now that it might be him. Don't you ask?'

`No.'

`Don't you have a chain on your front door?'

`Yes.'

`Don't you use it?'

`Why not?' `I forget.'

I began to see the method in the police's inertia. If they charged the swine, she would eventually refuse to tes- tify against him. At the age of 17, with two children, she needed him even as he smashed her in the face. He would never be called to account for his actions.

In the next bed was a 15-year-old girl with abdominal pain. She too was crying. I looked into her vacant, ruminant eyes and I knew she was pregnant. So it turned out to be.

Of course, her boyfriend had deserted her. She'd known him for ages (three months) and had become pregnant deliberately because he'd threatened to leave her. As far as she was concerned, life without Jason wasn't worth living.

I had a book with me, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials by Telford Taylor, and asked her to read the title. She could progress no further than the first syllable of the second word.

`What are your interests?' I asked.

`I don't have none,' she replied, after a long pause for thought.

`And how do you see your future?' I asked.

She shook her head.

`I haven't thought about it.'

Theodore Dalrymple