THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE CORRIDOR

Some things do change, and some don't, even though they ought to. Like the hours that junior doctors work - after three shifts end-on, you no longer believe your eyes, or know whether you're asleep or awake. The old type of hospitals, with all their disadvantages, are disappearing - slowly - to be replaced by the new kind, which have a different set of disadvantages, that we're finding out about - slowly - but many of the primitive practices have stayed exactly the same.

Why? Is it because we senior doctors get too far away from what we used to be and what we used to do? We shake our heads over the youth of today, and their lack of stamina, guts, staying-power - and have forgotten the serpentine abyss of sleep from which worried nurses dragged us screaming to perform with unruly hands and closing eyes a procedure we had only ever read about on the morning of the physiology exam three years before. What are patients to us today? Subjects for papers, filled spaces in an appointments book, no longer puzzles dropped from the skies into hospital beds for us to solve. We leave the messy stuff to be done by housemen and registrars, people who have no reputation to lose if things go wrong, as they sometimes do.

What can go wrong for us? We sit on committees, we congratulate each other, we award each other grants that would pay to let all the junior doctors in the country spend eight hours a day in bed, sometimes we stab each other in the back. We inspect new hospitals, we inspect old hospitals, we inspect old hospitals that are on their way to becoming new hospitals. But we leave our past behind us, as far as we can, like a piece of paper you've dropped in the street, and you pretend it belonged to somebody else.

And maybe it does. Maybe our past doesn't belong to us any more, seeing what our present is, and what our future's likely to be. You're not satisfied with what I'm saying? You're not happy, because I promised you a ghost story? What is a ghost? Isn't it a piece of the past that won't go away? Well, then. Listen.

Last month, I went to inspect a hospital that was being demolished. They'd already started building the new one on the same site, having snipped off one corner for the hypermarket and another for the starter homes, to provide the money for real oak panelling in the office of the Trust's director. The reduction in size meant that some of the wards would be facing a brick wall and most of the rest would look out over the car-park or the waste-bins, instead of the scrubby little birch-trees and under-nourished oaks that had been struggling in the very poor soil for the last hundred years. But that's progress.

Yes, I'm a cynic, and that's why I asked the mid-rank administrator (the one wearing last year's style in double-breasted suits, and driving a Hyundai instead of a Toyota) to show me round what was left of the old buildings. Of course, I was really there to see the new ones, but I'd seen that design before (you can only tell which hospital you're working in nowadays by looking at the impressive and expensive headed notepaper), and I'd made all the old criticisms before, and no one was going to listen to me, for all the usual reasons, so I thought I'd be mischievous and make one of the bureaucrats realise what it was they were losing.

There's something melancholy and fascinating about looking at buildings in the process of demolition. It's like looking at a corpse in the process of dissection: all their secrets are revealed, every coat of paint they ever had, every layer of wallpaper, every alteration of roof-level and floor-level, every addition and subtraction.

There wasn't that much left of the old hospital. It had been designed in the Florence Nightingale style as a series of separate pavilions ("pavilioned in splendour" was the phrase that always occurred to me when I heard the term), to reduce the risk of cross-infection, but then they had joined them together with long corridors to keep people dry, and as the twentieth century wore on, and less Spartan attitudes prevailed, the corridors had been given glass windows to keep out the cold and the wind and the rain.

I asked to have a look at the last two remaining pavilions, and the corridor that joined them - "for old time's sake" - wondering, as I said it, whether that phrase was to be found in the Hyundai-driver's Psionic Organiser Thesaurus. We looked together at the bare wards, with their flaking paint, and the marks of hospital radio sockets showing where each bed had stood. Then we walked along the corridor to the second pavilion, but it was locked. It didn't matter, I said - it would have been the same as the first. And I gave a little lecture on the merits of the pavilion style of hospital construction, the small communities, the humanisation and so on, all of which seemed to me to be superior to the economies of scale new hospitals could achieve (but rarely did).

The administrator listened politely, and didn't even try to hurry me up. Perhaps he was avoiding a particularly unpleasant and tedious meeting by talking to me. When I had finished (it was quite late and dark by now, being the end of November), he apologised for the smell and the mess in the corridor where I had been lecturing him (it was going to be demolished for heaven's sake!) and explained that the workmen on the new site seemed to like the atmosphere there and used it as a shelter during their workbreaks, which was why the electricity had been left on, and in view of the rubble on the floor, he thought it might be wise if he turned on the lights so we didn't trip over anything on our way back to the first pavilion which was the only one to which he had a key.

The lights were neon. They pinged, flickered, stuttered, and came on. Then some of them went off again. Those that stayed on made a high whining sound, like insects in the tropics, or the devices you use to trap and kill them. Only the one at our end of the corridor leapt straight into life without hesitation and kept burning steadily.

Carefully we negotiated the discarded paint-cans, the multi-lesioned saw-horses covered in cigarette-burns and dirty plastic coffee-cups, and got back to the open door. My guide turned off the lights, and plunged the whirring corridor into silence. But not darkness. One light, at the far end, burned steadily and silently. My guide twitched his padded shoulders in annoyance, apologised to me, "You can never trust the wiring in these old buildings", switched on the lights again, scurried back past the workmen's detritus and turned off the switch at the far end. It had no effect on the renegade neon tube, which continued to illuminate his increasingly irritated face. Taking pity on him, I flicked the switch at my end, to give him safe passage.

The light was still on when I got into my car to drive away. I saw it very clearly in my rear-view mirror. Maybe it was because I was concentrating on it so much that I came to take the wrong way out. I took the old drive, which led past a little stand of trees and came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a clay morass where the petite footings of the bijou starter homes were just being dug.

Why had I turned that way out of the car-park? I knew, after all, which way I had driven into the place. But the way I took had seemed - familiar. How could that be? As I got out of the car (a nice solid Rover, thank you very much) to check the muddiness of the road-side before doing a three-point turn, I saw a large wooden sign lying in the bushes. Not far away were the sawn-through wooden posts to which it had once been attached. The lettering was large and bright and easy to read. "Rookwood Hospital" it said, and I knew why I had tried to take the old road through the wood. I had been here before.

I had been here, in fact, as a junior doctor, some thirty years before it became the "Linmead Centre for Excellence in Medical Care" as the new signs at the new entrance proudly proclaimed it to be. Admittedly, I had spent some six months of my life here, but with all the changes I found it explicable and forgiveable that I should not have recognised it.

But now that I knew where I really was, and found myself in touch with my past again, I turned the car round (the verges were firm), parked facing towards the insistent and distant little light, and began to examine my memories.

It had been around Christmas, I thought. A rather Puritan hospital, not strong on decorations or festivities. Towards the end of a very long but relatively quiet shift, I found myself all alone on the ward. Nurse - oh, what was her name? Skipton? Stockton? Sheldon? - let's say Sheldon - all the nurses had to wear black stockings in those days, with seams, but it was only Nurse Sheldon's arrow straight seams that gave such an unambiguous message about where they were leading. Nurse Sheldon wasn't there. It was quiet. It was Christmas. And Dr McFarlane, with the curly red hair and the bright blue eyes and the sexy Scottish voice was in the next ward. I heard she married him and they went to the States where he left her for a millionairess whose in-growing toe-nails he had treated. He must have been crazy - unless Nurse Sheldon had taken to wearing seamless tights. In stockings she was irresistible. I heard she married the divorce lawyer who got her a superb property settlement. She could have had anybody - especially me. That was why I was letting her skip away quite improperly to see my arch-rival - because I was absolutely and unreservedly in love with her. You do funny things when you're young.

All on my own, half-asleep, half-awake, I wandered out of the stuffy ward into the linking corridor for some relatively fresh air. And that was how I noticed that one of the lights was moving. In those days, the lights weren't neon. They were substantial metal shades, green enamel above, white enamel below, slung quite low from the ceiling on heavy cables, with bare bulbs in them. And one of these lamps was swinging. Quite slowly. Not violently. I remember being reminded of the way they said Galileo discovered the properties of the pendulum, and I used my own pulse to time the periodicity of the swing. It was very regular, whatever was causing it.

My first thought was that it must be the wind. But as far as I could tell, the windows were all shut. And if the door in the distance had been open - even only a crack - the draught would surely have made the light swing along the line of the corridor, not at right angles to it. I began to pay more attention to my pulse for its own sake, wondering what illness I might be developing when I saw lights moving.

At that moment, I sensed a warmth near my hands. Then there was a cough behind me. Harry, the porter, whose wife's shrewishness kept him at work in his seventieth year ("It's the night-shifts I like - I hardly have to see her at all, and she can't nag me for going out!") was offering me a steaming mug of tea. Not one of your modern mugs, with POISON or WORLD'S MOST MODEST NEURO-SURGEON, or a picture of Bart Simpson stencilled on it, but the old-fashioned kind of white enamel mug with a thin blue rim, that kept your tea nice and warm if you left it on the radiator.

As I drank it, Harry followed my glance. "Don't you worry about her," he said, "she's not worth it. Her and Dr Mcfarlane are well-suited to each other. There now, I can't say worse than that, can I?"

"It wasn't Nurse Sheldon I was worried about, Harry, " I half-lied, " it was the light. Do you see how that one's moving, while all the others are staying still?"

"Oh yes," said Harry. "Of course. That's where Mr Bigsby's bed was."

"In the corridor?"

"No, no - just the other side of the door. He could see the light, though. That was the point."

"What point, Harry?" I didn't yet feel I was entirely clear of having a compromised optic nerve.

"Well, in order to understand it, I'll have to tell you about Mr Bigsby. You never knew him?"

"How long ago was he here?"

"Ooh - must be - what? - thirty years?"

"Harry - I'm only just twenty-five."

"Well, you wouldn't have known him, then, would you, sir? So you'll just have to be patient, while I tell you about him."

He coughed and had a sip of his own tea. There was a silent pause. I was aware of the patients in the ward behind us, asleep and hopefully continuing to breathe, while the light at the end of the corridor swung slowly to and fro without any reason.

"He was a bank manager, was Mr Bigsby. Of course, he must have been something before that, like a clerk, or something, I mean, you're not born a bank manager, but where he was concerned, you couldn't imagine he'd ever been anything else or looked any different. As a bank manager, he thought it was his duty to be involved in charities, and in the old days this was a charity hospital."

"The old days, Harry? The good old days?"

"All days, when old, are good - that's what they say, isn't it, sir? Well, I don't altogether believe it."

You don't get porters like Harry nowadays, not ones who can quote Byron without knowing it.

"Yes, a charity hospital. Perhaps that's why they're a bit miserable about Christmas. But you could always tell they meant well. Especially Mr Bigsby. It was as if, with his work being taking money in, he had to spend his free time giving money away. He certainly seemed to enjoy it. Do anything for the hospital, he would. And what did we do for him? Killed his two kids. Well, not exactly. One had diphtheria, one had polio. Nothing much we could do for them. Not in the old days. Turned his wife's mind, it did. They were lovely little fellas, too. But Mr Bigsby - he just seemed to take it, and keep on smiling. He used to do conjuring tricks, you know. They were his speciality. Ping-pong balls out of the ear. Sovereigns down the nose. And sometimes, if it was your nose it'd come out of, you got to keep the sovereign. Oh, he was popular, was Mr Bigsby, especially at Christmas, when he'd go round all the wards and do tricks. Card tricks, too, and really simple things like Find the Lady and Which Shell is the Pea Under? He used to do those at the summer fetes, to raise money. It wasn't really gambling, you see, not if it was charity, so nobody minded. I never saw anybody win on those."

"So how did Mr Bigsby end up in here as a patient?" I asked.

"Paralysis. Stroke? Brain tumour? I never knew, I never asked. It wasn't my business to find out. But it was my business to call on him every day for five minutes and have a chat. Not that he could answer me, though. Speech gone, too, you see. By rights, I suppose, they should have sent him home for his wife to look after - I mean, we needed the bed. But everyone knew the state she was in, and everyone knew how much Mr Bigsby had done for the hospital, so we just kept him in here. And then, one day, I was passing by, and his wife came up to me - she came to see him on her good days - her eyes were all stary, and her hair had that wispy, grey, mad look - and she said to me, "He can still do his tricks, you know." Well, I just nodded - you know the way you do with that kind of people - and off she went. But then I saw that Mr Bigsby had the old Pea and Shell game out on his bed-table, so I thought I'd play it with him. His face had a kind of fixed grin, but his eyes moved, and I could see a glint in them. Well, he was paralysed, so I had to move the shells round myself, but I could see his eyes following me and laughing, and they had every reason to laugh, because I couldn't win. No, sir, I could not win. However slowly and carefully I moved those shells, the pea was always under a different one from the one where I thought it was. Eventually, I tried not moving them at all. And I still lost. I'd put the pea under one shell, and when I lifted it up again, it'd be gone. Of course, he couldn't do all his old tricks. No ping-pong balls out of the ears. But there were times I found a sovereign in the pocket of my old brown overall, when I didn't have one myself to put there."

"And how did he die?"

"Oh, very peacefully. One day, I was playing the shell game with him, and I thought his grin was a bit more fixed than usual, and less of a glint in his eye. And that was it. He was dead."

"But what about the light?"

"Well, sir, part of it was that he didn't like lying awake in the pitch dark. But he didn't want to disturb other people. So he found a way, all of his own. His bed was right at this end of the ward, so quite a bit of light reached it."

"But how did he - ?"

"Ah, sir, if you and I knew that - ! What wouldn't we do! But sometimes, you see, he used the light to call attention to things - not just himself - if someone else on the ward was taken poorly. After all, he couldn't shout or ring a bell. But he always did his best for others."

I had been watching Harry's lined and weathered face change expression while he told his story, but as he spoke about the light, I turned back to look in that direction, and saw beyond the light itself a shadowy figure that seemed to be wreathed in mist.

Only when the scent of tobacco reached me, did I realise that it was Nurse Sheldon enjoying a post whatever it was cigarette. You could get away with that kind of thing in those days, before there were smoke alarms and sprinkler systems, provided you opened a window to disperse the evidence. And that was what she proceeded to do. She opened a window (I heard the rasp of the metal catch on the metal frame), tossed the cigarette end out of it, and swept away through the distant door, back to the ward where Dr Mcfarlane was presumably still waiting for her.

Behind her, the lights in the corridor went crazy. The wind took them and flung them about. Shadows reminiscent of every shade of contorted evil, grotesque, misshapen, distorted, leapt, gambolled and cavorted in a kind of obscene rock and roll. The shock of the change from the orderly pathway of light was such that I began to worry again about my mental and physical state after being on call for so long. But then, as the shadows fluttered like autumn leaves in the wind, I noticed that one lamp had resisted the invitation to join in that Bacchanalian dance. Beyond the turmoil and the darkness and the shadows of confusion, the last light in the corridor shone on motionless, serene, and untroubled.

It had grown cold in the car. The windows were misting over. I started the engine, turned the heater to full, and drove away.

Mike Rogers 12.00 p.m.- 1 a.m. 3-4 xii 94

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