Memories and Adventures Chapter 7 - My Start at Southsea

**Arthur Conan Doyle** (0:00)
Chapter 7 of Memories and Adventures This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librivox.org. Recording by A Fine Voice Memories and Adventures by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Chapter 7 My start at South Sea A strange life Arrival of my brother I buy up a shop Cheap servants Queer patients Dangers of medical practice Income tax choke My marriage Tragedy in my house A new phase What with cleaning up, answering the bell, doing my modest shopping, which was measured in pennies rather than shillings, and perfecting my simple household arrangements. The time did not hang heavily upon my hands.
It is a wonderful thing to have a house of your own for the first time, however humble it may be. I lavished all my care upon the front room to make it possible for patients. The back room was furnished with my trunk and a stool. Inside the trunk was my larder, and the top of it was my dining room table. There was gas laid on, and I rigged a projection from the wall by which I could sling a pan over the gas-jet. In this way I cooked bacon with great ease, and became expert in getting a wonderful lot of slices from a pound. Bread, bacon and tea with an occasional savaloy. What could man ask for more? It is, or was, perfectly easy to live well upon a shilling a day.
I had obtained a fair consignment of drugs on tick from a wholesale house, and these also were arranged round the sides of the back room. From the very beginning a few stray patients of the poorest class, some of them desirous of novelty, some disgruntled with their own doctors, the greater part owing bills and ashamed to face their creditor, came to consult me and consume a bottle of my medicine. I could pay for my food by the drugs I sold. It was as well, for I had no other way of paying for it, and I had sworn not to touch the ten golden pieces which represented my rent. There have been times when I could not buy a postage stamp, and my letters have had to wait, but the ten golden coins still remained intact. It was a busy thoroughfare with a church on one side of my house and a hotel on the other. The days passed pleasantly enough, for it was a lovely warm autumn, and I sat in the window of my consulting room, screened by the rather dingy curtain which I had put up, and watched the passing crowd or read my book, for I had spent parts of my scanty funds on making myself a member of a circulating library. In spite of my sparse food, or more probably on account of it, I was extraordinarily fit and well, so that at night when all hope of patience was gone for that day, I would lock up my house and walk many miles to work off my energy.
With its imperial associations, it is a glorious place. And even now, if I had to live in a town outside London, it is surely to Southsea, the residential quarter of Portsmouth that I would turn.
The history of the past carries on into the history of today. The new torpedo boat flies past the old Victory, the same white ensign flying from each. And the old Elizabethan culverins and sakers can still be seen in the same walk, which brings you to the huge artillery of the forts. There is a great glamour there to anyone with a historic sense, a sense which I drank in with my mother's milk.
It had never entered my head yet that literature might give me a career or anything beyond a little casual pocket money. But already it was a deciding factor in my life, for I could not have held on and must have either starved or given in but for the few pounds which Mr. Hogg sent me, for they enabled all other smaller sums to be spent in nourishment.
I have wondered sometimes as I looked back that I did not contract scurvy. For most of my food was potted, and I had no means of cooking vegetables. However, I felt no grievances at the time, nor any particular perception that my mode of life was unusual, nor indeed any particular anxiety about the future. At that age everything seemed an adventure, and there was always the novel pleasure of the house. Once I had a moment of weakness during which I answered an advertisement which asked for a doctor to attend Cooley's in the tea gardens of the Turai.