Growing Into Medicine (16 page)

In 1968 Ralph heard he had been promoted from Assistant Governor to Governor class three, and was to be posted back to
Pollington. As far as I know he was the only person in the service to be sent to that isolated spot for a second term. He had to start before our accommodation was ready and wrote to explain that the old hut had been pulled down and a purpose-built detached house allocated to us. Being modern, the rooms were small. The large furniture we had acquired for the three-storey house at Wormwood Scrubs, mainly from my grandparents, would have to be severely pruned. Helen and I were forced to stay on in London for several months and we spent Christmas that year with Helen’s friend Lucy and her hospitable family, who have remained good friends.

I viewed the prospect of returning to Pollington with some trepidation, knowing it would be difficult to find work that would dovetail with my home life. Neither did I look forward to being ‘the governor’s wife’. Dilla filled the role with great aplomb, gracious and friendly at prison functions, acting as a figurehead and often organising the officers’ wives club in the places they served. Ralph was extremely fond of her but in general, having met army wives who talked of ‘my regiment’, he was against what he saw as women who interfered. More importantly, times were changing and such things could be seen as patronising.

I knew I would be no good in such a role. I was still shy at parties, remaining glued to the wall at the mercy of anyone who approached me. The ability to move from one group to another has come to me very late in life, since my analysis, and I still revel in the freedom, enjoying and even looking forward to social functions in a way I never did before.

During that second stay in rural Yorkshire the village school played an important part in our lives. I was slightly ashamed when Helen became something of a teacher’s pet but I am deeply grateful for the attention and support she got from the headmaster and his wife. They helped her to regain confidence after her vertigo. She was able to ride her bike to and from school and quickly made friends. It was a small community with some children from the village and the rest from the staff at the camp.

In addition to a few infant welfare and school clinics that I took
on with no enthusiasm, I got myself appointed to a couple of family planning clinics a week. If I was not home in time to greet Helen from school one of the other wives took her in. This commitment to work as a doctor provided an acceptable excuse for me to refuse to run the wives’ club or even be their chairman. Luckily the wife of the chief officer was happy to take my place.

As the months passed some of the wives came to me with their worries. One knocked on my door in deep distress. I led her into the sitting room. Luckily I was alone in the house as Ralph was at work and Helen at school.

‘My father has just been diagnosed with cancer,’ she said as tears ran down her cheeks.

I said how sorry I was, and wondered what on earth I could do to help and whether I should make the proverbial cup of tea. In fact I just sat and let her talk in her own time.

After a bit she went on, ‘No one in my family has had cancer. What will happen?’

‘What is it you are especially afraid of?’ I asked, sensing that she needed to talk more than listen.

‘I can’t bear him to suffer. You see, ever since I was little we have been very close.’

She went on to tell me about times when her mother had been ill and she and her father had supported each other. ‘Will he come home to die? I don’t know if I could nurse him, I’m not good at that sort of thing. Or will they keep him in hospital? I don’t know what will happen,’ she repeated.

She was comforted by an opportunity to discuss the possible scenarios and the knowledge that he would be given whatever painkillers he needed. I was surprised to find that I did have enough experience to provide at least some answers – but also to realise that the listening skills I was beginning to develop could be of use. It was far more important for her to share her fears than for me to attempt to offer some immediate panacea in a situation where there were no easy answers.

Perhaps a more useful thing I did on the camp was to start a
playgroup. Jo Matthews, a friend and a leading light in the Preschool Playgroup Association (PPA), came to stay for a few days and gave a talk, suggesting that several mothers should take turns to run the group. The PPA considered the involvement of parents most important and I was grateful for all the help I could get, having no specific qualifications for the job.

Ralph was again working three weekends out of four so that I was left to entertain Helen by myself. I remember how my heart sank each Saturday morning when my nine-year-old asked brightly, ‘What are we doing today?’ She presumed I would have a plan. We walked a lot in the flat countryside, made small trips into the neighbouring village of Snaith and sometimes into Goole. Even the names now sound bleak and distant, yet I don’t remember feeling unhappy. I had still not managed to conceive again but the sadness was fading to a distant ache. During much of my early marriage I hankered after my parents’ lifestyle, secretly wondering why I had not married a man like my father with practical hands and a sunny temperament. Now I was changing, embarking belatedly on the process of learning to be myself. I could even feel some gratitude to the mother I had always found so difficult. Her insistence that I enter a profession, especially one where I could earn a reasonable salary in return for part-time work, provided me with flexible options. The knowledge that I could return to a more active medical life when I was ready helped me to tolerate and even to enjoy the confines of domestic life that might irk a professional woman of today.

Although the doctor who had blamed me for Helen’s vertigo prompted much of my commitment to my home, I was also fulfilling a need in myself. Over the years I have found that the line between coping and not coping with the inherent tension between profession and home is very fine. At Hewell Grange, during the first three years of Helen’s life, I was happy with two surgeries a week but over-stretched when I tried three. Later the breaking point was between seven and eight sessions. My hope is that society is developing in such a way that every woman and man can experience the same freedom of choice that was available to me. Then each
individual could discover the pattern best suited to her or his personality and life situation.

Many men in the modern world try to take their share of domestic chores but I still meet women who are carrying a heavy load. My heart goes out to all those who are expected and expect themselves to compete with men without the support of an extended family or the cheap and reliable help that was available in the past.

11

Freedom to Choose

The decision about Helen’s future education, which had loomed in the distance, was thrown into sharp focus when Ralph heard he was to be moved to the prison training college in Wakefield. She was not yet eleven and I had to face the prospect of sending her away to school a year earlier than expected.

Ralph started to board at his prep school, Beaudesert Park in Gloucestershire, at the age of seven. He had been happier there than at home, where he was a solitary and rather lonely little boy. He eagerly awaited the start of each term. I was surprised to hear that copies of a book containing 500 facts were among the boys’ most treasured possessions. They were carried around and used by the boys to test each other’s knowledge. Ralph excelled at competitive regurgitation and believed he acquired more information during his years at that school than at any other time in his life. He was convinced that Helen would enjoy life in a boarding school. I was not so sure. I was not unhappy at St Felix but felt I learned little and had longed for the end of every term. But I was afraid that Helen, as an only child, would suffer from a mother who was too clinging if she remained at home. She would also have had to start at a new school and make new friends every few years. In the event she was pleased to leave home to board at Badminton girls’ school in Bristol.

At the time I was not aware that the most intense period of my life as a mother had come to an end. As this memoir reaches the adolescence of my daughter I have made a deliberate decision to neglect the major part she has played in my life. She has her own
view of her father and of our marriage, and has generously made no complaint about this account of our family from my point of view. Her own journey into medicine, marriage and motherhood belongs to her and is not mine to tell. My love for Helen is the living centre of my being. But the themes that are developing in this story do not need to include the details of her life or those of her family, although I will not be able to stop them creeping in from time to time.

I find it hard to identify my feelings as the beginning of her first term away from home drew near. I did not believe I had been a very successful mother. I was too anxious and, though I don’t like to admit it, easily bored by the unremitting demands of a child. At the same time a fear that my family was falling apart led me to buy a dog. We visited some kennels where a litter of Welsh Border collies waited for new homes. At the front of the cage two male pups scrabbled for our attention while a timid bitch cowered against the back wall. Instinctively I chose her, identifying with her shyness. She was a bad choice, for although charming she grew up to be very nervous, made worse by the fact that she lost an eye due to disease soon after we collected her.

Ralph chose her name. It was not as good as those he chose for the baby guinea pigs and our cats, because Biz is known as Bess in the US, which led to some confusion. But he seldom offered an opinion about domestic details so I never demurred when he did make a rare suggestion. In the same way I was landed with a hideous carpet because he had, in an uncharacteristic moment, agreed to view my choice of floor covering before I bought it. On the way into the shop he saw one with a monstrous green and yellow pattern – and liked it. I acquiesced, too pleased that he had taken an interest to argue.

For the first time we did not live in provided accommodation but bought our own house in Wakefield. It was on a corner with a low wall separating our garden from the pavement. To keep Bess confined we had a fence erected on top. Cadets from the police training college round the corner used to run their truncheons along the struts, exciting Bess to a state of frenzy. She grew up with a fear of
all men walking alone and would chase them, barking and snapping, a constant worry when I let her off the lead.

As a child, I squirmed when my mother said, as she did frequently, ‘We are animal people.’ I could not bear that ‘we’ for I knew she meant all five of us. She used the term frequently about beliefs and behaviours that I did not necessarily share, though I never complained. In contrast I glowed when one of my grandchildren referred to his family as ‘we’, giving the impression that he had a safe base from which he would be able to separate with confidence. In his mouth the word was reassuring, while my mother’s insistence on unity was stifling. Perhaps this was another reason why I felt I had to give Helen as much freedom as possible, however much I might want to keep the family together.

Another quibble with my mother’s assertion that we were animal people is that I have never been as moved by or involved with animals as my sister. Until Biz had her own children she preferred animals to humans. She trained as a zoologist and has run a small herd of cows on her farm in Virginia for most of her married life. She welcomes unusual pets, especially snakes and other reptiles and amphibians. There was often a black snake in her bedroom. Aware of my phobia about things that slither, not helped by the worm Arthur put down my back when I was young, she never insisted that I handle it. Her dining room also contained a small iguana for many years, kept in a cage on a side table. Earlier, when I developed acute back pain during one of her visits, I had shared the green bathroom with her opossum.

I cannot compete with her knowledge and gentleness but fully agree with the belief, which has been passed down the family over at least five generations, that pets add much to a household. Children have a chance to see that even a relatively self-sufficient cat needs regular attention. Animals also offer channels for emotions that we English cannot always express. When my grandsons arrive for a visit, the task of finding and petting the cat eases that awkward moment after the first greetings have been exchanged. Throwing a ball for a dog in the garden, feeding carrots to the rabbit, visiting a
neighbour’s horse are shared occupations that can bind disparate members of a family who may share few other interests. I am not in favour of kicking one’s cat but it is less harmful to shout at him than at one’s spouse. In her increasing dementia my much-beloved cousin Jenny has a Labrador who provides a degree of unquestioning devotion that few human beings could offer so consistently to someone who is seriously confused.

Whether my delayed commitment to animals was an effort to maintain the semblance of a family, or to provide a more interesting home for Helen during the holidays, it is clear that my life had entered a new phase. I was continuing the journey to free myself from the need to react against, or conform to, my parents’ beliefs. The process had started when I defied my mother by marrying a diabetic in church wearing a white dress. The magnitude of that defiance made it both easier and more difficult to take my own decisions, whether they were about pets or work.

With Helen away at school I had more time and energy for my profession. To the bemusement of my parents I did not consider looking for work in general practice, for I had developed an increasing fascination with the challenge of helping people find a contraceptive method they could use effectively. I was discovering that although doctors and nurses must have adequate scientific knowledge, the skill of helping each individual person is closer to an art or craft.

Unfortunately we still do not have a perfect method of contraception, one that is free of side effects and acceptable to everyone. Choices have to be made. Before the 1960s the only methods widely available in the UK were periodic abstinence (the rhythm method); withdrawal of the penis before ejaculation, known as ‘being careful’, ‘pulling out’, ‘stopping at Darlington’, and other synonyms; spermicides; and the barrier methods of condoms and vaginal devices. By the time I did my training we had oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices (IUDs). Hormone containing IUDs and injectable progestogens did not become available till later.