In my long life I have seen many changes in our habits and customs. The world, that I entered when at the age of eighteen I became a medical student, was a world that knew nothing of planes, motor-cars, cinemas, radio or telephone. When I was still at school a lecturer came to Canterbury and showed us boys a new machine which reproduced the human voice. It was the first gramophone. The world that I entered was a world that warmed itself with coal fires, lit itself by gas and paraffin lamps, and looked upon a bathroom as a luxury.
On Sundays the muffin man made his rounds ringing his bell, and the people came out of their doors to buy muffins for afternoon tea.
It was a very cheap world. When I entered the medical college attached to St. Thomas's Hospital I took some furnished rooms for which I paid 18 shillings a week. My landlady provided me with a solid breakfast before I went to the hospital and high tea when I came back at half past six, and the two meals cost me about 12 shillings a week.
I had enough money to go to the theatre at least once a week. The pit to which I went was not the thing it is now. There were no queues. The crowd collected at the doors, and when the door opened there was a struggle to get a good place. But that was part of the fun.
Travelling was cheap, too, in those days. When I was twenty I went to Italy for the six weeks of the Easter vacation.
I did my practical work at St. Thomas's Hospital. I was a bad medical student, because my heart was not in it. I wanted, I had always wanted, to be a writer, and in the evening, after my tea, I wrote and read.
I wrote a novel, called "Liza of Lambeth", sent it to a publisher, and it was accepted. It appeared during my last year at the hospital and had something of a success. I felt I could give up medicine and make writing my profession. So three days after passing the final examinations which gave me my medical qualifications, I set out for Spain to learn Spanish and write another book. Looking back now, after these years, and knowing the terrible difficulties of making a living by writing, I realize that I was taking fearful risk. I gave up the medical profession with relief, but I do not regret the five years which I spent at the hospital.
They taught me all I know about human nature. People in pain, people in fear of death, do not try to hide anything from their doctor.
The next ten years were very hard. 1 wrote several novels, a number of plays which publishers returned to me.
Then I had a bit of luck. The manager of the Court Theatre read a playof mine, called "Lady Frederick". It ran for fifteen months.
I had four plays running in London at the same time. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before, and the papers wrote much about it. I may say without immodesty, I was the talk of the town. One of the students at St. Thomas's Hospital asked the eminent surgeon with whom I had worked whether he remembered me.
"Yes, I remember him quite well," he said. "Very sad. Very sad. One of our failures, I'm afraid."
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