An Apple a Day. By Philip Gosse. Drawings by Lynton
Lamb. (Cassell. 10s. 6d.)
"MEMORY is a rum thing," writes Dr. Gosse at the beginning of one of his chapters, and he would be the first to admit that he has written a rum book. From the stores of memory he has drawn a series of entertaining reminiscences, accompanied by neat little reflec- tions upon the oddities of human life. Unlike many such records, the book shows a cheerful disregard of chronological sequence. Dr. Gosse begins in the surgery of the general practitioner, jumps from there to the Second World War, then returns to childhood's memories of Audyard ICipling's wedding in 1892 and of floggings at Haikybury ; and throughout the book the reader develops a pleasant expectation of the unexpected. One of the most engaging qualities of Dr. Gosse's rambles is that something always happens. When he went for a holiday to Gibraltar he innocently walked through a gap in a fence and found himself in the upper fortifica- tions; he also found himself under arrest. When he helped at a "Children's Happy Evening," somewhere behind the Edgware Road, by giving boxing lessons, he was lured into a bloody, and ultimately successful, encounter with a young professional boxer. When he visited Achill Island as a medical student, he was hailed as a famous surgeon from London ; his equipment was a penknife, some iodine and a bottle of Owbridge's Lung Tonic, but he operated successfully on a carbuncle on the neck of the eldest son of the King of Juishkea. On the same visit he entered for the one-mile race on the strand of Mullaranny ; he finished first, but the prize went to an Irish boy who was in fact a lap behind. Dr. Gosse is an inveterate collector— of books (including the forgotten verses of Julia A. Moore, the "Tuneful Philomel of Wisconsin "), of inn-signs, of medical men who have played truant. He excels as a collector of incidents, and Mr. Lynton Lamb's sketches (especially that of the two Home- Guardsmen on all-fours) are entirely apposite. The Perfect Hostess will certainly place this book in her best spare room.
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