If symptoms

persist.. .

I WAS ON my way to my rounds at a prison last week when I noticed a Nean- derthal youth by the side of the road, thumbing a lift. I stopped to pick him up, for, in the words of Terence, I am a man, and nothing human is alien to me.

The prison was in the countryside, and the youth with a prognathous jaw and ovine gaze was in a village with a pretty name and an ugly housing estate on its outskirts. As he climbed into the car, I noticed that his right hand was ban- daged. Ever the compassionate doctor, I enquired what was wrong.

'I was in a fight,' he said.

'Where?' I asked. 'In a pub?'

'Outside a pub. I was pretty impressed with myself: I was drunk, but I still won, like.'

'What was it all about?'

'He gave my girlfriend the eye, like.' 'And what happened to him?'

'I knocked his fucking teeth out.'

He laughed at the happy recollection. The English working class has never been very keen on teeth anyway, because they only give you trouble in the end and, in the words of my grandmother as she tried to persuade my mother to dose me once a week with castor-oil, it is bet- ter to have a good clear-out.

What must one expect on the inside, if this is what society is like on the out? I confess I was surprised: my first patient at the prison was an applied mathemati- cian who spoke five languages fluently. Unfortunately, he had (according to the police, though stoutly denied by him) a penchant for tying small children to chairs and whipping them thoroughly. The jury believed the police rather than my patient. In all other respects, howev- er, he was not merely normal, but better than normal.

Then came a world-travelling evange- list who raised the capital for his chain of brothels by stirring his audiences into frenzies of repentance and consequent financial self-sacrifice. Having served five years of his 'bird', he had come to realise what a frightful bounder he had been all along, and now prayed every day that God would forgive him — and grant him parole.

He had wonderful stories to tell of sex and religious ecstasy, and I began to wonder whether the 'in' might not be a rather more interesting place to be than the 'out', rather as hell is more interest- ing than heaven. My next patient, an archetypal whiner, convinced me other- wise.

He had committed armed robbery, and his co-accused had grassed on him. As a result, his co-accused received a much shorter sentence than he, which he considered unjust because his co-accused had fired the gun while he had only taken the money.

`They're more interested in money than life, if you ask me,' he said.

'Life in this country's cheap, that's what it is, cheap.'

`To the contrary,' I said. 'When I was in Central America, people would come up to me in the bar and ask if I wanted someone killed for $20. I visited a Peru- vian gaol where it cost $4 to put out a contract. So you see, life in this country is not cheap, but expensive.'

His jaw hung open.

`Yeah, well,' he said. 'I've never been overseas.'

Theodore Dalrymple