This thread opens up lots of possibilities. Our GP when I was young was Dr Ezzat. His practice was a fairly large but poorly adapted house on the corner of Court Oak Road and Tennal Lane. There were no appointments and you would simply take the next available chair and wait your turn. Good job we were trained to queue from birth! The waiting room must have once been a sitting room or perhaps dining room. The chairs were a random mix of wooden dining chairs, but none of them was particularly comfortable. As the buzzer went (I think it was a buzzer) for the next patient, we would all move along one chair. I can picture the room very clearly even now. There was nothing warm or inviting or interesting about it. When you were called through, you would walk along a short corridor and knock on the door of the consulting room, already slightly high on the whiff of antiseptic. Dr Ezzat was a large, fairly genial Egyptian who knew all of my family and was prone to give advice on a range of things, whether you wanted it or not. My clearest recollection of him is when he treated me for a severe gash to my knee caused by newly pruned and dagger-like privet hedge at my Grand-dads house. I still have the scar, but I did not develop an infection.
My 1960-70s memory of Dr Ezzat.
My blind trust in the UK’s National Health Service was forged during childhood, built on the back of my mother’s frequent inpatient hospital stays and our regular visits to the family doctor. Whenever Mom, me, and my two younger brothers had health issues, she would march us from our home in Capern Grove, left into Welsh House Farm Road, left again at Tennal Road, and right into Tennal Lane. Our destination was number two: the surgery of Dr Ezzat, who practised out of a converted interwar house built somewhere between 1920 and 1935.
Access was gained through a large timber gate, along a short path bordered by shrubs and trees, and up a couple of steps to an imposing Georgian/Art Deco portalled front door. Immediately inside, patients stood on immaculately polished, dark brown linoleum that ran throughout the building. We reported to a receptionist, summoning her attention by pressing a doorbell mounted on a cream-painted timber and obscure-glazed partition wall. A small sliding hatch would snap open; you announced your name and were told to go to the waiting room on the right.
The high-ceilinged, cream gloss-painted room had two heavily curtained windows to the right and another at the far end. There was a boarded-up fireplace to the left, and a centre table piled with ancient magazines, including Reader’s Digest.
Upon entering, you took your place on the first of many mismatching, dark Thonet bentwood dining chairs lining the room. If there were no chairs available, you stood. They creaked as you sat down and shifted your weight on the small, round, hard relief-patterned seats.
A buzzer proclaimed when the doctor was available for the next patient. The person sitting next to the inner door—on the same wall you had entered through—would get up, open the door, and vanish. Everyone else then moved along one seat, like a sombre game of musical chairs.
It could take a few hours waiting your turn in that gloomy, overheated room filled with crying babies and coughing, sneezing people. Finally, your chance arrived to proceed along a passage behind the records-reception room. You would knock on the doctor’s door, await a muffled 'Enter', and step into a bright, white gloss-painted room with a window overlooking the west-facing garden.
The doctor sat at a large, heavy, dark timber desk on the left, beneath a wall-mounted cupboard. You were invited to sit to their left. Dr Ezzat would turn to face you in a dark, padded leather swivel chair that had seen better days. 'Mother, what can we do for you today?' he would ask. This ageing, gentle, kind, and direct Egyptian man listened intently. He inspected chests with a cold stethoscope and checked tongues and throats with a routine 'Say argh'—seemingly his remedy for all ailments.
Exiting past chrome-framed, glazed cabinets housing disturbing-looking medical instruments brought you right back to the entrance. When I grew older, I went to the doctor alone. I trusted him completely and felt safe in his care.
