Against the Tide (10 page)

Because of lack of vocations Beaumont has since been compelled to close. It is no longer the ‘Catholic school for Catholic gentlemen’ for which it was intended; its garish
ornamentation, gilt and gilding, has given way to a computer factory.

W
HEN I left Beaumont in 1934,1 had no money, no home, and nowhere to go. Eileen was seriously ill with tuberculosis and completely
incapacitated. She realised more fully than I did the hopelessness of my position. I had nothing whatever except the clothes that I had on me. There was talk of a job in the bank, or the desperate
last resort of the penniless public school youngster, the army. Luckily for the bank, the army, and above all, myself, none of these desperate remedies was needed.

Father Weld had once asked me to befriend a new boy coming from Ireland, Neville Chance, and help him in any way that I could. He confided in me that while the boy came from Clongowes Wood
College, ‘the ways of Irish public schools are not our ways’, implying that they tended to be somewhat rough and uncouth. It would be up to ‘us’ to help young Chance unlearn
his ways — he hesitated here — and though he naturally did not use the word he clearly meant ‘culchie’ ways. I readily agreed to do whatever I could, but he did not need my
help.

Neville was very good company, and readily settled into school life. It transpired that my friendship with him was to change the whole direction and purpose of my life. Possibly appreciating my
home and financial dilemma, Neville now asked me to spend the summer holidays with his family in Dublin.

Neville’s mother was Lady Eileen Chance, widow of a distinguished Dublin surgeon at the Mater Hospital, Sir Arthur Chance. She had been his second wife. I spent a wonderfully happy summer
in Dublin with Neville and his brothers and sisters and at the end of the summer I returned to Worthing to stay with two elderly ladies, the Misses Stephenson. They had spent much of their lives in
India, where their brother had been a provincial governor. I went with them in their antique Trojan car to the bazaars, tea parties, and Morris dancing in which they were interested. On my arrival
in my new ‘home’, I sat down and wrote a conventional but deeply felt ‘thank you’ letter to Lady Chance for her many kindnesses to me during the holidays. This turned out to
be probably the most important letter I have ever written in my life.

The three unmarried members of the first Chance family, Percy, Arthur and Norman, and their sister Alice, had felt sympathy for me because of my bleak future. Now, in a gesture of great
generosity, they together agreed to finance my education at Trinity College medical school so that I could become a doctor. Lady Chance and her remarkable family agreed that I should live with them
at their home, Nullamore, just outside Dublin, until my qualification as a doctor. It was an extraordinarily selfless decision to take. There was only one difficulty in carrying through their
proposal; since I was literally ‘of no fixed abode’ they did not know where I was. Luckily my ‘thank-you’ letter arrived soon afterwards. Immediately a letter was sent
inviting me to travel to London to meet Percy Chance at the United Services Club where, in the course of lunch, he outlined the proposal.

It was completely unexpected. I had never presumed to aspire to a university education, let alone become a doctor. It was difficult to assimilate the incredible news and all its implications at
once, but I agreed gratefully to return to Dublin to begin a new life, I had passed the School Certificate matriculation examinations with many credits, so I was unafraid of the new challenge on
that point.

The ephemeral, roller-coaster existence of continually appearing and then disappearing people, landmarks, and relationships had dismantled my relatively stable old world, with its constant warm
and loving mother ‘whistling us home’. While very young, I had had to learn to form instantaneous, superficially warm relationships with total strangers, and a succession of friendships
in different families. My own identity as a member of the Browne family merged into all of these sensations and was no more.

Each of those whom I had known and loved had disappeared and left me. I had lost the belief that I could ever again form permanent friendships or lasting relationships. My always limited
capacity to believe in or to trust anyone I only regained much later, and with great difficulty. Yet I had known nothing but support and kindness from everyone. It was the suffering of others and
of my own family which I could not ignore. I had learned to expect that each new encounter must end.

On the loss of our temporary home in Worthing, after the death of Miss Salter in the late 1920s, it was my brother Jody who was to suffer most. Eileen was told that she also had advanced
tuberculosis. I recall the evening on which she returned to the tiny single-room flat in Bayswater where we both lived. She threw herself on the bed and wept bitterly, not for herself I am sure,
but for the rest of us who had been entrusted to her care by my mother. It was now the turn of my sister Kitty to take on that role. She has since told me about her hopeless trek from door to door,
to convents, orphanages, institutions, hospitals for the disabled throughout London, looking for shelter and help for Jody. Finally in great distress she had to decide to have him admitted to a
London workhouse. So was finally smashed Jody’s last vestige of a sheltered life, empty, miserable, purposeless though it had been.

It was then, and in my own experience in hospital still is, the practice for surgeons, in pursuit of experimental material on which to perfect a new surgical procedure, to scour the wards of
non-paying patients for individuals needing such a procedure. Such was to be the fate of my brother in the London workhouse. His cleft palate and hare lip greatly interfered with his speech, adding
to the humiliation and discomfort of his hunched back. He was a pitiable, totally dependent creature. A surgeon decided to operate on his hopelessly inoperable cleft palate and hare lip. Jody died
on his twenty-first birthday, in great distress and pain, following the operation. He had made one friend in that workhouse, a nursing sister. On the day preceding his operation he went out to a
florist and bought her a small bouquet of flowers, in gratitude to her for her kindness to him. He is buried in a pauper’s grave in the heart of London, as our mother was.

In September 1933 I passed the entrance examination to Trinity College medical school and began my course as a medical student. This was to be the first occasion on which, without any malicious
intent, I ignored the dictat of the Archbishop of Dublin. It was forbidden at the time, if one was a Catholic, to attend Trinity College. My attitude stemmed from my experience as a Catholic in
England, where the easy attitude to religion had been noticeable throughout my stay. Catholics there were grateful if they were permitted to live their lives in uninterrupted peace with their
fellowmen, very much as do Protestants behave in Ireland. English Catholicism had none of the hectoring arrogant triumphalist contempt of other religions which I later came to associate with Irish
Catholicism.

A Trinity degree brought its own inbuilt disadvantages. In pursuit of employment I was to find that there were occasions when I was passed over in favour of younger doctors. I know of only one
other Trinity doctor of my year who survived this boycott by the public service of Trinity medical graduates in Ireland, other than by succession to a father’s practice.

Yet bigotry was not confined to the Catholic side. Mainly because he was our professor of surgery and we would later meet him in our examinations, I attended the clinic held by Professor William
Pearson at the Adelaide Hospital. Just before it began he told us that he did not ‘lecture to Jews, niggers, or Papists’, and asked those of us in these categories to get out of his
ward. He would not begin to teach until we did so. There were some African and Jewish students present. Shocked by the bigotry of this declaration we had no choice but to leave.

Religion was to enter into my life once again in the North of England after I had qualified. The Superintendent of the Cheshire Joint Sanatorium where I had been working in a non-permanent
capacity, declined to appoint me to a permanent post because I was a Catholic. This doctor, a Methodist lay preacher and a fine physician, appointed instead a young man with no post-graduate
experience, but a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast and, no doubt, a Protestant. The pleasant irony, which both myself and the young Queen’s doctor enjoyed, was that he was one of
the few Catholics who had studied at Queen’s to become a doctor.

With the Chance family I was to enjoy a modicum of stability in my new home. Sensitive, compassionate, tolerant, and infinitely patient, Lady Chance had nurtured the merger of her two families;
she had watched grow into adulthood her three stepsons and one stepdaughter, as well as her own four sons, and three daughters. She now welcomed myself, a total stranger, into her home, as if I
were one of her own, and I was effortlessly assimilated by them. Any awkwardness that might arise stemmed from the projection of my own intense dislike of any outside intrusion into my own inner
life. How could they uncomplainingly tolerate my intrusion on the privacy of their home life?

It was this realisation of my intrusive presence that conditioned my own inclination to withdraw. One defence was to escape into my own bedroom at Nullamore. There was always plenty of reading
to be done. With the breakup of the family following the death of Lady Chance, I went to live with the two bachelor brothers, Norman and Arthur, who lived in one of Dublin’s elegant historic
Georgian houses, 90 Merrion Square.

The maid, Mary, who cared for us, was a remarkable specimen of early Victorian domestic servant. She was a tall, heavily rouged woman, and wore a white frilly apron, over a full ankle length
black cotton dress, dropping down over her black well polished heavy brogue shoes. She effected a deceptively demure and austere demeanour. As with a Grenadier Guardsman’s Busby, she added
greatly to her stature and presence by a bulky florid red wig, carefully balanced on her head. The clever use of a narrow black velvet ribbon, puckered into the antique shape of a beautifully
white, old-fashioned mop cap sat atop the wig. In spite of her demure appearance, Mary was an obsessional gambler. She bet mainly on horses, and had a wide knowledge of the skills of riding and
racing, with a rich easy flow of betting jargon, reminiscent of a character in a Damon Runyon novel. ‘He started at threes, but by the off, was back down to odds on’, sounded strange
coming from this uniquely Victorian vision.

I later went into residence in Trinity College rooms, where I learned to cater, alas inadequately, for myself. My health was to suffer in consequence. A bottle of milk snatched from the
doorstep, and swallowed running across the front square on my way to a nine o’clock clinic, was no substitute for a ‘full Irish breakfast’.

Student life had not at that time entered the intensely competitive pressures of the present. The short terms, crammed with lectures and clinics, and the long vacations created an exhilarating
pattern of study of man’s body and mind, in health and sickness, interspersed with the limitless permutations of recreations and pleasures to be found in Dublin. There was tennis, sailing,
horse riding, squash, canoeing, skiing, and swimming.

For the public school student leaving the cloistered order of a Jesuit college, university life was a welcome experience of personal liberty. There was virtually no limit to the scale of my
enjoyment. At one time I part-owned a young brown mare, named Araminta, which I hunted with the Bray Harriers. I even rode, unsuccessfully it is true, in the old Calary Point to Point race
meeting.

With Dick Sandys, I helped to form the Trinity College Squash Club, build the squash courts, act as secretary, and play for the team. Reluctantly, and mainly for the companionship, I played
rugby. With George Anderson, whose father was the formidable head of Mountjoy School, I borrowed a donkey and cart and, with a tent, in mid-February, set out to tour the Liffey Basin. I recall a
week later walking home alone through the night, from the bottom of Sallygap Hill, over the Military Road, and down into the dawn, to Rathfarnham village, arriving home to Nullamore, just in time
for breakfast. From there I took an early train into Harcourt Street and Trinity College so that I might finish my last important ‘half’ anatomy examinations.

Very reluctantly, to please a fanatical boxing enthusiast friend Jack Dennehy from Kerry, I might ‘fill in’ on the Trinity boxing team when Jack had an unexpected defection. My
tolerance for such a silly and dangerous sport ended when, to my surprise, at the Jewish Boxing Club in South Circular Road, I knocked out a young Jewish boxer. His mother, present at the contest,
was understandably distressed to see her unconscious son. Filled with remorse, I never boxed again.

Oliver Atkinson, known as ‘George’, became a close friend of mine. In the early thirties, we joined the newly formed ‘An Oige’ organisation. Our first walk together, in
mid-winter, took us from Ballinclea Hostel, a tiny one-roomed cottage, across Table Mountain, down into the Devil’s Glen, and across Glenmalure, to the An Oige Hostel at Laragh. This walk was
important for two reasons. For the first time I learned to value the hypnotic attractions of the Wicklow and Dublin mountains; later I walked, rode on horseback, cycled, travelled by car or donkey
cart over every inch of them, and came to know them as well as my own back garden. For the ill-fated George Atkinson, our long and lovely walk was recalled together when he was struck down, with a
massive infection of the spinal column, by infantile paralysis.

When I visited him at home, he was totally paralysed; his eyes alone signalled his pitiful determination to survive this disaster. He struggled on patiently yet hopelessly, helped by his devoted
mother and sister. At one time, desperately, he tried to replace his now useless arms and back muscles by having himself strapped to a plain crucifix-shaped splint. He was intellectually gifted
beyond the average, and a special dispensation had been needed to admit him into medical school because of his youth. His brilliance and talents were, in time, all squandered on his early
death.