If symptoms

persist.. .

THE STAFF of Air France chose the precise moment of my arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport last week to go on strike. I make no claim for a causal con- nection — but still the coincidence was impressive, and might have powerfully affected someone of less scientific tem- perament than mine. Instead of brooding upon it, however, I took the opportunity afforded by my longer than foreseen wait for a return flight to these benighted shores to read Le Monde.

It was with a certain balefully patriotic satisfaction that I read in that serious, not to say solemn, publication that the back-to-front-baseball-cap and mugging `culture' (as the promiscuously charitable anthropologists would no doubt call it) now dominates the slums of France. The difference between France and England, of course, is that while only a third of France is a slum, two thirds (at least) of England is.

Back in the hospital after a short break, I discovered that nothing had changed in my absence, at least not for the better. My first patient, aged 25, had false teeth: not dental decay (fluoride in the water supply having abolished all that), but the violence of her lover. And he had just broken her jaw because the eggs she had cooked for him were not to his complete satisfaction. But she was afraid to leave him because he had threatened to break her mother's legs if she did so.

`Prison's nothing to him,' she said. `Besides — I know it sounds silly to you, doctor — I love him.'

As for his more serious offences against her, they were so unspeakably awful that I cannot record them here.

My next patient had been prevented by his stepfather from attending school between the ages of 6 and 15. He had been continually beaten by him, ostensi- bly for such reasons as failing to tie his shoelaces in the prescribed fashion, but really to satisfy this latterday Murd- stone's desire to beat a fellow human being with utter impunity.

And then there was a girl aged 18, imprisoned, beaten, tortured and repeat- edly raped by her 19-year-old boyfriend. I knew her story to be true because I had previously attended the boyfriend's mother and sister, whom he had also beaten savagely. The police have been called to his home more than once, but no charges have been laid: his victims have refused to testify in court against him because flesh is thicker than law, which in any case provides no more pro- tection against violence of this kind than holy water against bullets.

I left the ward with a deep loathing of humanity. Or perhaps it was disgust at my own impotence (and everyone else's, apparently) in the face of this evil. At any rate, that afternoon I was in no mood for prisoners' complaints.

`Doctor,' said the first of them, 'you'll have to give me something to control my temper.'

`Why?' I asked.

`I keep losing it. Last week I poured a saucepan of curry over one of the screws.'

`Was it hot?'

`You mean spicy?'

'No, I meant temperature.'

`No, not very. You know what prison food's like — or perhaps you don't.' 'As a matter of fact I do.'

'Oh do you?' he said, raising an eye- brow. 'Well, anyway, it was only a vegan curry.'

Theodore Dalrymple