Across the Wide Zambezi: A Doctor's Life in Africa (15 page)

He more or less took over the obstetrics
and gynaecology. He was not backward at coming forward. The GDMOs were allowed
to do a certain amount: I did hernias, for example, as well as caesars. Now
Andy had never done a hernia, which was not surprising for a gynaecologist in
European practice, and asked me to show him one. It must have been half way
through the first one I showed him that he practically took it over. (In my
teaching method, which I had scarcely evolved, I allowed the pupil to take the
knife at the second operation.) Thereafter he pinched hernias from under my
nose, as they arrived at the operating theatre if I wasn't quick enough off the
mark, to the great amusement of everybody but me.

But in return, he taught me much
himself, and by the hands-on method too. And the most important thing he taught
me was the subtotal hysterectomy, as will appear later.

And then came Harry Bowen, who was half
way to becoming a surgeon. He had a round face, glasses and a fringe and looked
about sixteen. He was as keen as a schoolboy about life in general and surgery
in particular.

One morning, Sean and I came out of the
operating theatre to help out with the last of the outpatients. Harry had been
in this sweat-shop, not the most popular place in the hospital, since he
finished his ward round.

'Where have you chaps been?'

'In theatre.'

His face fell, like the little boy who
missed out on the party.

'It's all right, Harry. It's your turn
on the speedboats tomorrow.'

Harry overlapped the Crookes, and made
his debut in polite Kitwe society at a folk-singing party - of the rather more
serious kind than a come-all-ye.

He turned up late. Indeed, the first we
knew was when an old African gentleman arrived at the house on a bicycle with a
note addressed to the host requesting the writer (Harry) to be rescued from a
ditch. He had given the man a dollar ('Was that enough, chaps?'), where a less
trusting soul would have requested cash on delivery by the note. Harry was no
fool, but that was his way.

When he had recovered from his
experience and been given a beer, Harry looked around him with his owl-like
gaze: if ever an owl looked bright and eager for fun, that is. Perhaps he had
not been forewarned, but he took it in (or something like it) fast enough.

'Folk-singing? I love folk-singing.'

He was standing on the rug before the
fire place - an Afghan rug, the expensive pride and joy of the lady of the
house. He put down his pint of beer beside him on this article, perhaps with a
view to conducting a chorus, which never in point of fact materialised, and
began:

'Cats on the rooftops. Cats on the
tiles -'

gently waving his hands like Sir Malcolm
Sargent. I may say he was a keen rugby player, and that is how he learned most
of his 'folk songs'.

The bearded faces drooped painfully over
the guitars which, needless to say, remained silent: faces and guitars. Even
when Harry kicked over his beer on the Afghan carpet. The lady of the house
simply left the room and her husband followed solicitously after her.

Presently he reappeared alone, tapped
Harry on the shoulder - 'A word, Harry!' - 'Certainly, Ivor,' from the ever
eager Harry. Ivor led him to the door, opened it, thrust Harry outside, and
closed it after him.

An hour later, when Andy went outside
for a breath of fresh air, he found Harry standing in the middle of the lawn
with tears and moonlight streaming down his face. When he discovered what was
going on, with all the passion for justice of his race, Andy led a meek Harry
back into the house; and now it was Andy's turn to have a word with Ivor.

A very ugly scene followed, in which the
lady of the house, who had recovered from her own tears, took a conspicuous
part, with language which made us wonder where she had spent her impressionable
years. Her performance was only stimulated by the persistence of Harry (who had
shed his meekness by now) in calling her 'sunshine'.

'Don't effing call me
"sunshine"!'

At this stage no one was in a mood for
folk-singing, and the party broke up by general unspoken agreement - or general
spoken disagreement.

I took Harry on an afternoon trip to
Ndola zoo. A zoo in Africa has always struck me as rather amusing - at least it
does not matter if the animals escape. On the way we saw what appeared to be a
strip of metal, half bent upward, at the side of the road. We were almost upon
it when I realised.

'That's a snake!'

'Christ! Look at it!' shouted Harry,
with an excitement it did my jaded nerves good to hear. 'Get a photograph,
Warren!'

There was no time. The snake, all six foot
of it, snapped like a whip and shot off into the veld. I thought it was a black
mamba and said so.

'A BLACK MAMBA!!!' shouted Harry, his
eyes popping out as he strained in vain to get a view through the rear window.

It was certainly more impressive than
anything we saw at the zoo, except perhaps an elderly crocodile, at which a
group of black children had to be restrained by a keeper from throwing stones.
Zoo or no zoo, they knew all about crocodiles: the keeper must have been told
off specially to protect the unfortunate old fellow.

Then we saw the fish eagle with his
white head, brown wings and trousered legs - caged in Africa, dear God! Another
keeper was coming up from the dam, carrying a large barbel he had caught there.
'I'm going to give this to the fish eagle,' he grinned.

He opened the cage and flung the fish
into the water trough, where it twisted about, then settled motionless. The
fish eagle appeared not to notice, staring off at nowhere with its mad,
unseeing eye.

Then it became restless. It moved up and
down on the branch, on its claws and trousered legs, stooping and flapping its
large wings, like a big hungry dog.

Then it pounced. It grabbed the fish
with both claws and got itself and prey back onto the branch again. With the
fish under its foot, it stared once more into space.

Then it proceeded to tear up the
writhing fish with its eagle beak.

'Cor, look at that!' shouted Harry. 'The
fish eagle thinks its Christmas!'

I got him away at last, feeling sick at
the whole Creation for a time, while Harry babbled on beside me about the
bloody eagle.

But, of course, Harry was right. Who
knows what fish or fish eagles feel? How can you argue with nature?

Later I was sharing house with another
man when Harry drew up at our front door at 11pm. One goes to bed early in the
tropics (10 pm being usual) and rises early. Billy and I were already tucked up
when we heard the crunch of Harry's car on the gravel.

I rose and opened the door for him
before he reached it. He stepped out of his car. Billy stood behind me. Harry
had just come from the mine club. He looked at our night attire.

'Don't tell me you chaps are in bed
already! What's the matter with you? You're not old men! The night is yet
young!'

I forget whether he wanted us to come
out to play or whether he wanted to come in to play. What I do remember is that
when he stepped out of his car, he had a full pint of beer in his hand in one
of the club glasses.

I introduced Harry to the flying doctor
business. I don't know whether he kept it up thereafter. His mental swings were
as sudden as Toad of Toad Hall's, as I discovered on the way home.

On the return flight from the Anglican
mission, where he had met the usual priest, brothers and nuns, gone round the
bare wards, etc seen the wretched cases, and been given a cup of tea in the
common room, he fell strangely silent. Normally, even the noise of the
aeroplane would not have been enough to repress Harry for an hour together.

As we left the plane and walked to the
shed of the tiny airport, it all burst out.

'Wonderful people! Wonderful people,
Warren! There they are, doing the Lord's work, out in the bush, looking after
those poor savages, while we're revelling in the fleshpots of Kitwe!'

He paused and looked me full in the
face, his eyes round with earnestness.

'I've made up my mind, Warren. I was
thinking about it all the way back. I'm going straight from now on!'

As I was not aware of any wide
deviations from the strait and narrow on Harry's part in the past, I said
nothing.

We walked on. He glanced at his watch.
'Christ, Warren! Six o' clock already! The club bar'll be open. Come on! We're
losing valuable drinking time!'

I also took him to a games evening at
the Catholic hall: roulette, pontoon, crown and anchor, etc, all in aid of
church funds. We bought chips at the door. We did not have much money on us: as
I remember, we restricted ourselves to dollar ones (kwacha). Harry soon lost
all his money.

I was reluctant to lend him any. I had
limited myself to ten dollars, and meant to keep to it.

Harry sat disconsolately on the edge of
the roulette table. Then an astonishing thing happened. After the wheel had
stopped and the croupier was going to work, I saw Harry's hand come out as if
by itself. He was looking away at nowhere the meanwhile. The hand picked up a
dollar chip and was about to slip it into Harry's pocket.

The croupier, a hardened Rhodesian type,
rested his rake.

'Excuse me, sir! Would you mind
replacing that chip, please?'

Harry seemed to jerk out of a trance,
glanced at his hand as if he had accidentally cut himself and meekly replaced
the chip without a word.

Then he saw a girl he knew - a white
nurse or teacher. There were unattached white females on the Copperbelt, but
they were greatly outnumbered by the male ditto. I lost sight of him.

She could have been a wholesome
influence on him, but it didn't happen. I don't know if she leant him any
money. At any rate, it could not have accounted for what I saw next.

When I saw him again, he had undergone a
terrible change. Fangs were protruding over his lower lip. Fur was sprouting
from his cuffs, and, in his two-inch nails, he was clutching fistfuls of chips
- not dollar ones, but ten-dollar ones. His pockets were stuffed with more of
the same. He staggered from table to table, his face flushed and his eyes
glazed with booze and greed. He seemed not to hear or see me when I asked him
what was going on.

But it all came to nothing. When at
midnight Father Bunloaf brought the proceedings to a close with a short prayer,
he had lost everything.

Harry came out actually as a locum - for
about three months. Then he went back to UK as a surgical registrar. He meant
to return to Kitwe the following year. I asked him if he ever took a holiday.

'What do you call this?' he answered,
bending over his snooker cue in the club at 4.30 in the afternoon. Certainly,
company work was the lightest a doctor could get in Africa (except private
practice). Samreboi was busy enough, but that was an exception.

A year later he came out again, as
ebullient as ever. One morning, we noticed the appearance of more than one
little black boy in the clinic bearing the Christian name of 'Bowen'.

Of course, this is a compliment to the
doctor, commonly when the doctor has delivered him - which would only be in
complicated and therefore memorable cases anyway; otherwise it would have been
a midwife.

But Harry came in for a good deal of
ribbing on this matter. He looked superior about it.

'Nothing to do with me, chaps, what they
choose to call their offspring. I expect the president comes in for a lot of
the same sort of thing.'

Julie came out for a short tour at the
beginning of 1971. She was a lithe, gipsy-looking girl from Australia. I called
her a 'socialist missionary'. A hundred years before she might have been a
Christian missionary - or she might have been a George Eliot, more likely the
latter. She had enough 'moral earnestness' about her to satisfy F R Leavis.

Like the girl in the Nun's Story, she
was not very happy to find herself assigned to the management hospital, which
was mostly white. I don't know what she expected. The whole company service
seemed to her old-fashioned: geared to curative medicine with little attempt at
preventive medicine, which was mostly left to the government. 'They don't even
have an under-fives clinic,' complained Julie, which was a fairly new idea
then. Perhaps she had a word with somebody, because soon afterwards they
instituted them in the mine clinics, which were situated in the townships. She
also thought the management hospital hopelessly uneconomic, which it certainly
was. They should have opened it up as a private hospital to the public, who
would have welcomed it and made it pay. I don't think Julie was thinking quite
in this 'capitalistic' direction, however. This was a suggestion I made, but it
was never taken up.

You will see that Julie's orientation
was towards public health. She was a fine clinician, but not enthusiatic about
surgery or obstetrics ('hated them, in fact'). The chief medical officer, a
hopeless old sexist, suggested that as an unmarried woman doctor she should
concentrate on child medicine. Julie was far from being a rampant feminist: she
was a very balanced person; but she reacted: 'Why the hell should I do that,
Warren? I suppose he thinks I'm a frustrated old maid, or something.'