GP Obstetrics in ‘the good old days’. Reminiscences of good and bad after half a century.
We talk about the good old days – but they weren’t always good.
Way back in 1972, one of the things which attracted me to coming to work here in Alton was the availability of a local GP maternity unit where I would be able to look after my mothers when they had their babies.
The sell-off of our National Health Service
I have to think they cannot understand
What they have done;
They cannot understand
What made us tick.
Perhaps they lack some vital cog
Like cripples with important bits missing.
I try to see that as their loss
But I can’t.
I am too angry
I am too sad
They do not understand
That they have killed for me a deeply precious thing.
And they have cheaply flogged
Something that was ours
Without our leave
Having promised
Honest injun
That they never would.
But promises they made elsewhere
Have mattered more
Than ones they made to
Coarse proles on streets outside their Club
How could such people understand
What they have done.
The world’s too full of greed,
Too full of hate,
Too full of deceit,
Too full of self-interest,
Too prostrate before the worthless rich
To have destroyed a thing so deeply good
Just because its warmth and wisdom
and the awkward fact of its success
Shamed
Those who denied the world could work this better way.
This balm for the new callousness
This moral for the new amorality
Had to be destroyed
Or they’d be proven wrong
These modern barons,
Pathetically locked in counting up their spoils
So, we must not let them once deny
the fact that it worked
Yes
For half a century it worked
This inspirational dream
Of far far greater men.
And, though they cannot understand what they have done,
That simple truth will live
Must live
To prove that they are wrong
All along
About it all.
JARW 13 March 2012
Generally Speaking 