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An Irish Country Doctor from bestselling author Patick Taylor is a charming and engrossing tale that will captivate readers from the very first page—and leave them yearning to visit the Irish countryside of days gone by.
Barry Laverty, M.B., can barely find the village of Ballybucklebo on a map when he first sets out to seek gainful employment there, but already he knows that there is nowhere he would rather live than in the emerald hills and dales of Northern Ireland. The proud owner of a spanking-new medical degree and little else in the way of worldly possessions, Barry jumps at the chance to secure a position as an assistant in a small rural practice.
At least until he meets Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly.
The older physician, whose motto is to never let the patients get the upper hand, has his own way of doing things. At first, Barry can't decide if the pugnacious O'Reilly is the biggest charlatan he has ever met, or the best teacher he could ever hope for. Through O'Reilly Barry soon gets to know all of the village's colorful and endearing residents, including:
A malingering Major and his equally hypochondriacal wife;
An unwed servant girl, who refuses to divulge the father of her upcoming baby;
A slightly daft old couple unable to marry for lack of a roof;
And a host of other eccentric characters who make every day an education for the inexperienced young doctor.
Ballybucklebo is long way from Belfast, and Barry is quick to discover that he still has a lot to learn about the quirks and traditions of country life. But with pluck and compassion and only the slightest touch of blarney, he will find out more about life—and love—than he ever imagined back in medical school.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
| ISBN-13: | 9781429920629 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tor Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2007 |
| Series: | Irish Country Series , #1 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 40,295 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Patrick Taylor, M.D., is the author of the Irish Country books, including An Irish Country Village, An Irish Country Christmas, An Irish Country Girl, and An Irish Country Courtship. Taylor was born and raised in Bangor County Down in Northern Ireland. After qualifying as a specialist in 1969, he worked in Canada for thirty-one years. He now lives on Saltspring Island, British Columbia.
You Can't Get There from Here
Barry Laverty — Doctor Barry Laverty — his houseman's year just finished, ink barely dry on his degree, pulled his beat-up Volkswagen Beetle to the side of the road and peered at a map lying on the passenger seat. Six Road Ends was clearly marked. He stared through the car's insect-splattered windscreen. Judging by the maze of narrow country roads that ran one into the other just up ahead, somewhere at the end of one of those blackthorn-hedged byways lay the village of Ballybucklebo. But which road should he take? And, he reminded himself, there was more to that question than simple geography.
Most of his graduating classmates from the medical school of the Queen's University of Belfast had clear plans for their careers. But he hadn't a clue. General practice? Specialize? And if so, which speciality? Barry shrugged. He was twenty-four, single, no responsibilities. He knew he had all the time in the world to think about his medical future, but his immediate prospects might not be bright if he were late for his five o'clock appointment, and though finding a direction for his life might be important, his most pressing need was to earn enough to pay off the loan on the car.
He scowled at the map and retraced the road he had travelled from Belfast, but the Six Road Ends lay near the margin of the paper. No Ballybucklebo in sight. What to do?
He looked up, and as he did he glimpsed himself in the rearview mirror. Blue eyes looked back at him from a clean-shaven oval face. His tie was askew. No matter how carefully he tied the thing, the knot always managed to wander off under one collar tip. He understood the importance of first impressions and did not want to look scruffy. He tugged the tie back into place, then tried to smooth down the cowlick on the crown of his fair hair, but up it popped. He shrugged. It would just have to stay that way. He wasn't going to a beauty contest — it was his medical credentials that would be scrutinized. At least his hair was cut short, not like the style affected by that new musical group, the Beatles.
One last glance at the map confirmed that it would be of no help in finding his destination. Perhaps, he thought, there would be a signpost at the junction. He got out of the vehicle, and the springs creaked. Brunhilde, as he called his car, was protesting about the weight of his worldly goods: two suitcases, one with his meagre wardrobe, the other crammed with medical texts; a doctor's medical bag tucked under the bonnet; and a fly rod, creel, and hip waders lying in the backseat. Not much to show for someone possessing a medical degree, he thought, but with any luck his finances would soon take a turn for the better — if he could just find Ballybucklebo.
He leant against the car door, conscious that his five-foot-eight, slightly built frame barely gave him enough height to peer over Brunhilde's domed roof, and even standing on tiptoe he could see no evidence of a signpost. Perhaps it was hidden behind the hedges.
He walked to the junction and looked around to find a grave deficiency of signposts. Maybe Ballybucklebo's like Brigadoon, he thought, and only appears every hundred years. I'd better start humming "How Are Things in Glocca Morra?" and hope to God one of the little people shows up to give me directions.
He walked back to the car in the warmth of the Ulster afternoon, breathing in the gorse's perfume from the little fields at either side of the road. He heard the liquid notes of a blackbird hiding in the fuchsia that grew wild in the hedgerow, the flowers drooping purple and scarlet in the summer air. Somewhere a cow lowed in basso counterpoint to the blackbird's treble.
Barry savoured the moment. He might be unclear about what his future held, but one thing was certain. Nothing could ever persuade him that there was anywhere, anywhere at all, he would choose to live other than here in Northern Ireland.
No map, no signpost, and no little people, he thought as he approached the car. I'll just have to pick a road and ... He was pleasantly surprised to see a figure mounted on a bicycle crest the low hill and pedal sedately along the road.
"Excuse me." Barry stepped into the path of the oncoming cyclist. "Excuse me." The cyclist wobbled, braked, and stood, one foot on the ground and the other on a pedal. For a moment Barry wondered if his hopes of meeting a leprechaun had been fulfilled. "Good afternoon," he said.
He was addressing a gangly youth, innocent face half hidden under a Paddy hat, but not hidden well enough to disguise a set of buckteeth that Barry decided would be the envy of every hare in the Six Counties. He carried a pitchfork over one shoulder and wore a black worsted waistcoat over a collarless shirt. His tweed trousers were tied at the knees with leather thongs that the locals called "nicky tams."
"Grand day," he remarked.
"It is."
"Och, aye. Grand. Hay's coming along fine, so it is." The youth picked his nose.
"I wonder if you could help me?"
"Aye?" The cyclist lifted his hat and scratched his ginger hair. "Maybe."
"I'm looking for Ballybucklebo."
"Ballybucklebo?" His brow knitted, and the head scratching increased.
"Can you tell me how to get there?"
"Ballybucklebo?" He pursed his lips. "Boys-a-boys, thon's a grand wee place, so it is."
Barry tried not to let his growing exasperation show. "I'm sure it is, but I have to get there by five."
"Five? Today, like?"
"Mmm." Barry bit back the words "No. In the year 2000." He waited.
The youth fumbled in the fob pocket of his waistcoat, produced a pocketwatch, and consulted it, frowning and muttering to himself. He looked at Barry. "Five? You've no much time left."
"I know that. If you could just —"
"Ballybucklebo?"
"Please?"
"Och, aye." He pointed to the road that lay straight ahead. "Take that road."
"That one?"
"Aye. Follow your nose 'til you come to Willy John McCoubrey's red barn."
"Red barn. Right."
"Now you don't turn there."
"Oh."
"Not at all. Keep right on. You'll see a black-and-white cow in a field — unless Willy John has her in the red barn for milking. Now go past her, and take the road to your right." As he spoke, the youth pointed to the left side of the road.
Barry felt a mite confused. "First right past the black-and-white cow?"
"That's her," he said, continuing to point to the left. "From there on, it's only a wee doddle. Mind you, sir ..." He started to mount his rusty machine. Then he delivered the rest of the sentence with the solemnity of a priest giving the Benediction: " ... if I'd been you, I wouldn't have tried to get to Ballybucklebo from here in the first place."
Barry looked sharply at his companion. The youth's face showed not the least suggestion that he had been anything other than serious.
"Thank you," said Barry, stifling his desire to laugh. "Thank you very much. Oh, and by the way, you wouldn't happen to know the doctor there?"
The youth's eyebrows shot upwards. His eyes widened, and he let go a long low whistle before he said, "Himself? Doctor O'Reilly? By God, I do, sir. In soul, I do." With that, he mounted and pedalled furiously away.
Barry climbed into Brunhilde and wondered why his advisor had suddenly taken flight at the mere mention of Doctor O'Reilly. Well, he thought, if Willy John's cow was in the right field, he'd soon find out. His appointment at five was with none other than Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly.
CHAPTER 2He Flies Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease
Dr. F. F. O'Reilly, M.B., B.Ch., B.A.O.
Physician and Surgeon
Hours: Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to noon.
Barry read the lines on a brass plate screwed to the wall beside the green-painted front door of a three-storey house. A glance at his watch told him that by the grace of Willy John McCoubrey's black-and-white cow, he had arrived with five minutes to spare. He tightened his grip on his brand-new, black leather bag, stepped back, and looked around.
On either side of the doorway, bow windows arced from grey, pebble-dashed walls. To his right, through the glass, the furniture of a dining room was clearly visible. So, Barry thought, like many country general practitioners, Doctor O'Reilly must run his practice from his home. And if the man's voice, raised and hectoring, that Barry could hear coming from behind the drawn curtains of the left-hand window was anything to go by, the doctor was in and at his work.
"You're an eejit, Seamus Galvin. A born-again, blethering, bejesusly bollocks of a buck eejit. What are you?"
Barry could not hear the reply. Somewhere inside, a door banged against a wall. He took a step back and glanced over his shoulder at a gravel walkway leading from the front gate, rosebushes flanking the path. He sensed movement and swung back to face a large man — huge in fact — standing, legs astraddle, in the open doorway. The ogre's bent nose was alabaster, the rest of his face puce, presumably, Barry thought, because it must be tiring carrying a smaller man by the collar of his jacket and the seat of his moleskin trousers. As the small man wriggled and made high-pitched squeaks, he waved his left foot, which Barry noticed was quite bare.
The large man swung the smaller one to and fro in ever-increasing excursions, then released his grip. Barry gaped as the little victim's upward flight and keening were both cut short by a rapid descent into the nearest rosebush.
"Buck eejit," the giant roared and hurled a shoe and a sock after the ejectee.
Barry flinched. He held his black bag in front of himself.
"The next time, Seamus Galvin, you dirty little bugger ... The next time you come here after hours on my half day and want me to look at your sore ankle, wash your bloody feet! Do you hear me, Seamus Galvin?"
Barry turned away, ready to beat a retreat, but the path was blocked by the departing Galvin, clutching his footwear, hobbling toward the gate, and muttering, "Yes, Doctor O'Reilly sir. I will, Doctor O'Reilly sir."
Barry thought of the cyclist who had given the directions to Ballybucklebo and who had fled at the mere mention of Doctor O'Reilly. Good Lord, if what Barry had witnessed was an example of the man's bedside manner ...
"And what the hell do you want, standing there, both legs the same length and a face on you like a Lurgan spade?"
Barry swung to face his interrogator.
"Doctor O'Reilly?"
"No. The archangel bloody Gabriel. Can you not read the plate?" He pointed at the wall.
"I'm Laverty."
"Laverty? Well, bugger off. I'm not buying any."
Barry was tempted to take the advice but he held his ground. "I'm Doctor Laverty. I answered your advertisement in the British Medical Journal. I was to have an interview about the assistant's position." I will not let this bully intimidate me, he thought.
"That Laverty. Jesus, man, why on earth didn't you say so?" O'Reilly offered a hand the size of a soup plate. His handshake would have done justice to one of those machines that reduce motorcars to the size of suitcases.
Barry felt his knuckles grind together, but he refused to flinch as he met Doctor O'Reilly's gaze. He was staring into a pair of deep-set brown eyes hidden under bushy eyebrows. He noted the deep laugh lines around the eyes and saw that the pallor had left O'Reilly's nose, a large bent proboscis with a definite list to port. It now had assumed the plum colour of its surrounding cheeks.
The pressure on Barry's hand eased.
"Come in, Laverty." O'Reilly stepped aside and waited for Barry to precede him into a thinly carpeted hall. "Door on your left."
Barry, still wondering about Galvin's ejection, went into the room with the drawn curtains. An open rolltop desk stood against one green wall. Piles of prescription pads, papers, and what looked like patients' records lay in splendid disarray on the desktop. Above, O'Reilly's framed diploma dangled from a rusty nail. Barry stole a quick peep. "Trinity College, Dublin, 1936." In front of the desk were a swivel chair and a plain wooden chair.
"Have a pew." O'Reilly lowered his bulk into the swivel seat.
Barry sat, settled his bag on his lap, and glanced round. An examining table and a set of folding screens jostled with an instrument cabinet against another wall. A dusty sphygmomanometer was fixed to the wall. Above the blood-pressure machine an eye-testing chart hung askew.
Doctor O'Reilly pushed a pair of half-moon spectacles onto his bent nose and peered at Barry. "So you want to be my assistant?"
Barry had thought so, but after the ejection of Seamus Galvin he wasn't so sure.
"Well, I —"
"Course you do," said O'Reilly, pulling a briar from his jacket pocket and holding a lighted match over the bowl. "Golden opportunity for a young man."
Barry noticed that he kept sliding forward on his seat. Try as he might, he had to brace his feet firmly on the carpet and keep shoving his backside upwards.
O'Reilly wagged his index finger. "Practising here in Ballybucklebo. Most satisfying thing in the world. You'll love it. Might even be a partnership in it for you. Course you'll have to do as I tell you for a while until you get to know the ropes."
Barry hitched himself back up his seat and made a quick decision. He might work here if he were offered the job, but he sensed — no, he knew — that if he didn't establish his independence immediately, Doctor O'Reilly would walk all over him.
"Does that mean I'll have to hurl patients into the rosebushes?"
"What?" A hint of pallor returned to the big man's nose. Was that a sign of temper? Barry wondered.
"I said, 'Does that mean —'"
"I heard you the first time, boy. Now listen, have you any experience with country patients?"
"Not ex —"
"Thought not," said O'Reilly, emitting a puff of tobacco smoke like the blast from the funnels of RMS Queen Mary when she blew her boilers. "You'll have a lot to learn."
Barry felt a cramp in his left calf. He shoved himself back up his seat. "I know, but I don't think a physician should chuck patients —"
"Rubbish," said O'Reilly, rising. "You saw me pitch Galvin into the roses. Lesson number one. Never, never, never" — with each "never" he poked at Barry with the stem of his pipe — "never let the customers get the upper hand. If you do, they'll run you ragged."
"Don't you think dumping a man bodily into your garden is a little —?"
"I used to ... until I met Seamus Galvin. If you take the job and get to know that skiver as well as I do ..." O'Reilly shook his head.
Barry stood and massaged the back of his leg. He was going to carry on the debate about Galvin, but O'Reilly began to laugh in great throaty rumbles.
"Leg stiff?"
"Yes. Something's wrong with this chair."
O'Reilly's chuckles grew deeper. "No, there's not. I fixed it."
"Fixed it?"
"Oh, aye. Some of the weary, walking wounded in Ballybucklebo seem to think when they get in here to see me it's my job to listen to their lamentations 'til the cows come home. A country general practitioner, a single-handed country GP, doesn't have that sort of time." He pushed his spectacles further up his nose. "That's why I advertised for an assistant. There's too much bloody work in this place." O'Reilly had stopped laughing. His brown-eyed gaze was fixed on Barry's eyes as he said softly, "Take the job, boy. I need the help."
Barry hesitated. Did he really want to work for this big, coarse man who sat there with a briar stuck in his wide mouth? Barry saw O'Reilly's florid cheeks, the cauliflower ears that must have been acquired in the boxing ring, and a shock of black hair like a badly stooked hayrick, and he decided to play for time. "What have you done to this chair?"
O'Reilly's face broke into a grin that Barry thought could only be described as demonic. "I fixed it. I sawed an inch off the front legs."
"You what?"
"I sawed an inch off the front legs. Not very comfortable, is it?"
Excerpted from An Irish Country Doctor by Patrick Taylor. Copyright © 2007 Patrick Taylor. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Questions for Discussion
* Note that these questions reveal much of the novel's plot; to preserve your reading pleasure, please don't look at these questions until after you've finished reading the book.
1. Just a few pages into An Irish Country Doctor, its main character, Barry Laverty, speaks of his love for and devotion to Northern Ireland. What do we learn about the soul of the country, by the story's end? What makes it such a compelling home for Barry, and for Taylor's other characters?
2. Barry's first encounter with Dr. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly is surprising, to say the least. What is your initial reaction to O'Reilly? Does your opinion of him change along with Barry's as the book progresses?
3. By many standards, Dr. O'Reilly's medical practice is often unorthodox. Is he an effective physician? Is he a moral one? Have you ever known a doctor who resembled him? Would you trust O'Reilly with your own medical care?
4. There are several instances throughout the book in which O'Reilly breaches traditional ethics—in maintaining confidentiality, in telling patients the truth, even in prescribing "tonics"—while caring for his patients. How does Barry react to this? How do those breaches make you feel? Are there ever medical situations like these in which you think the end justifies the means?
5. An Irish Country Doctor portrays two people who each lost their partner long ago, and who have now platonically shared a home and a life for decades. What do you think makes O'Reilly and Kinky such good colleagues in the running of his practice and his day-to-day life? How do they play off one another's temperament? At any point in the story, did you wonder why they had never fallen in love with one another? Why has each remained single for so long?
6. Barry's first meeting with Patricia seems to have a quality about it of" love at first sight," of his being smitten by her beauty and she by his slightly awkward charm. Is there more to their attraction than that? Do you think that "love at first sight" can form the basis of an enduring relationship?
7. In one of Barry's most difficult moments, Patricia says that she wants to prioritize her education and career over a relationship with him. Do you believe her despite Barry's questions about her motives? Are her concerns reasonable, for the decade in which the story takes place?
8. Julie MacAteer's pregnancy brings up a discussion between Barry and O'Reilly on the ethics of abortion. Are you surprised by either of their reactions? How dated do Julie's options appear, compared to our present-day point of view? Do Barry and O'Reilly offer the care and support that she needs?
9. Barry reflects on the difficulty of treating patients whose health has been ravaged by the effects of poverty. Does fighting poverty have a role in health care itself? To what degree do you think this issue is still a factor in health care today?
10. What are the greatest benefits of living in a village like Ballybucklebo? What are the greatest difficulties? How do you feel about the eccentric characters—Maggie, Sonny, Seamus Galvin, Bertie Bishop—with whom Taylor has peopled his story?
11. O'Reilly talks frequently about "not letting the customer get the upper hand." Does this rule seem patronizing, or comical, or is it a question of simple self-defense for him? Do you think that doctors and their patients should be on equal footing, or should doctors wield greater authority? What do you think about the amount of authority that O'Reilly carries in the small world of Ballybucklebo?
12. Barry often compares his big-city hospital experience with the new world of O'Reilly's small-town rural practice. What are the biggest differences between the work of a country GP (general practitioner) and a physician at a city hospital such as The Royal? What could Barry stand to lose by choosing the life that O'Reilly has chosen? What might he gain?
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