The DOCTOR of Lennox

This memorable pen-portrait was the very first of the Reader’s Digest series titled ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met’

- A. J. Cronin

THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE character I ever met? To my surprise I find myself thinking, not of some famous statesman, soldier or tycoon, but of a simple soul who had no wish to dominate an empire, but set out instead to conquer circumstance—and himself.

I first knew him as a boy, small, insignificant and poor, who hung on to us, so to speak, by the skin of his teeth—barely accepted by the select band of adventurous youths, of which I was one, in my native Scottish town of Levenford.

If he were in any way remarkable, it was through his defects. He was quite comically lame, one leg being so much shorter than the other that he was obliged to wear a boot with a sole six inches thick. To see him run, saving his bad leg, his undersized form tense and limping, the sweat breaking out on his eager face, well ... Chisholm, the minister’s son— acknowledged wit of our band—hit the nail on the head when he dubbed him Dot- and- Carry. It was shortened subsequently to ‘Carry’. “Look out,” someone would shout, “here comes Carry. Let’s get away before he tags on to us.” And off we would dart, to the swimming pool or the woods, with Carry, dotting along, cheerful and unprotesting, in our wake.

That was his quality—a shy, a smiling cheerfulness—and how we mocked it! To us, Carry was an oddity. His clothes, though carefully patched and mended, were terrible. Socially, he was almost beyond the pale. His mother, a gaunt little widow of a drunken loafer, supported herself and her son by scrubbing out sundry shops. Again, Chisholm epitomized the jest with his classic epigram, “Carry’s mother takes in stairs to wash.”