Growing Into Medicine (3 page)

To this end I would spend hours standing in cold garages staring into the bowels of car engines. I would nod as my father explained the pistons, spark plugs and distributor. In keeping with his passionate belief that girls were of equal value to boys, he wanted me to understand the workings of all things mechanical. To please him I pretended to listen, fidgeting my cold toes inside lace-up shoes.

As the months and weeks of 1939 passed by, I had little awareness of the gravity of the world situation. Jenny was sent to stay with us for six months. She lived in London with her physician father and
artistic mother (my father’s first cousin) who noticed she was frightened by the talk of bombs and invasions. Everyone agreed that she needed some time in the country.

Within days we had an imaginary riding school and were cantering our ponies to the swing and stabling them in the garage as soon as my parents’ car had gone out. Later she went to Canada with her mother and three siblings. Our friendship had that deep solidity that can survive long periods of separation, the worst of which is her present Alzheimer’s disease.

But rumours of war began to penetrate even my sheltered life. Each day my father would arrive at lunch with the news that someone else had given up hope now. . . Mr Smith at the garage, Mrs Palmer who had a son in the civil service so she should know, Professor Treeby who was retired but spoke and read German fluently. I hardly bothered to listen and somehow my parents managed to hide their anxiety. My mother’s discussion about a possible new car held more interest for us children.

Everyone remembers what he or she was doing on 3 September 1939. As 11 o’clock neared, Daisy was in the kitchen listening to the news on a speaker connected to the radio in the sitting room by an extension wire. Arthur had a small portable wireless and the governess was keeping Biz out of the way. I was sitting in a high-backed chair in the sitting room with my parents. It stood on one side of a handcrafted fireplace, the bricks chosen for their particular terracotta patina, in front of the piano and an enormous standard lamp with a shade painted by a talented aunt. It depicted a deer, starting with its birth and following its life cycle as you walked round the light.

My perch was not particularly comfortable. Although padded, it was not exactly an easy chair. I sat very upright. My father was in his big chair, the one with wooden arms, carved round the edges into a pattern where half moons appeared to have been gouged out, leaving raised, smoothed rectangles separated by narrower indentations. My mother was in her usual place on what she called the chesterfield, a sofa in today’s language, next to the fire.

While the Prime Minister was speaking I did not realise it was a declaration of war. I merely thought, ‘Oh, Mr Chamberlain has given up hope now.’

When he reached the end my father got to his feet and switched off the set. The silence hung curdled in the room before my mother cried out, ‘I’ll have that car. I’ll need it.’

2

My Mother

One day as I was lying on the couch in my analyst’s room I found myself reliving the sense of being shattered into tiny pieces when my mother shouted – that feeling that could be soothed by feeling a sharp edge against my palm.

‘Perhaps,’ said my analyst, ‘it is like a singer who strikes a note so exactly in tune with the inner vibrations of a glass that it shatters.’

I lay still, a feeling of warmth seeping through my body. Could I have had that kind of resonance with her? There were no words then or now to describe the feeling of relief that some part of me might have been in tune with her rather than being for ever discordant and therefore not good enough. It was a turning point in my life.

While introducing the reader to some of the significant others of my early childhood I have deliberately kept my mother in the shadows. She was not the lurking kind. Both in herself, and in my memory, she will overwhelm the others if she is not given some separate space.

Joan Whitelock was born in 1899 to a Birmingham solicitor. Her mother, my grandmother, had intense, twinkling blue eyes and was loved by men of all ages – and by me. She was known as Mum’s Mum to her grandchildren. My mother would have considered any form of address such as
mummy, granny, nanny
both sissy and lower class. For someone who had great sympathy for the communist party during much of her life, my mother had a surprisingly well-developed feel for the nuances of the English class system.

Her hair always fell to her waist. As a child she was expected by her Edwardian mother to wear it loose, which she hated as it got caught in the twigs and branches of her favourite climbing trees. After her death I found some letters from her father addressed to ‘Dear Johnny’. I never knew she had been called Johnny. Perhaps her parents gave out mixed messages about the sort of person she should be. Being a family with strong feelings about the continuation of the name, I suspect they were disappointed when she was not the boy for whom they had to wait another eighteen years. That boy, my much beloved Uncle Miles, did not die until the end of 2011. He grew to appreciate his sister Joan. Not long ago he told me she was a passionate woman. Until that moment I had not attached that adjective to her, using instead words like strong-willed, fervent and fierce.

But yes, she was passionate, she loved and hated passionately and held to her beliefs with unwavering passion, the most strident being her atheism. Always despising hypocrisy, she told me that her hatred crystallised during the First World War. It had been reported that at the beginning the padres were not sent into the trenches but kept behind the lines. She thought this was a cowardly cop-out. Two young men of whom she was fond were killed in the early months and she believed the church, while preaching self-sacrifice, was a sham.

Her hatred reached paranoid heights. White was anathema to her as being the virginal choice of brides who were, in the main, not virgins. She would plant no white flowers in her garden. One of the most important moments of my life was the only time I defied her: over my own wedding. She had bought me a pale blue dress with a little jacket and presumed I would be married in a registry office. Unfortunately I had fallen in love with the only son of a very conventional family.

‘You can’t possibly want to parade through some church in white,’ my mother said. ‘But you must do as you want.’

‘Of course you must want a lovely white wedding with everyone wishing you well,’ my future mother-in-law cooed. ‘But it is your day; you must do what you want.’

I did not care what sort of wedding I had. All I wanted, as usual, was to make everyone happy. That was impossible. Daisy, who by then had lived with us for almost twenty years, was expecting a lovely party at Green Gables and felt personally deprived. In contrast, I had known all my life that my mother would not be at my wedding. I accepted the fact – but her inability to understand my position when the time came was hurtful. In the event I decided that she would forgive me in time, but I did not want to start my marriage by alienating the family of my future husband.

Jenny’s mother offered to host it for me and I walked down the isle of a church in London wearing a long white dress. My father paid for everything and gave me away, dressed in the obligatory morning suit. From the start of the discussions he had managed to support me without wasting energy arguing with my mother. We children believed for many years that she bullied him, but my wedding was just one of the occasions when he cared enough to stand firm and take no notice of her passions. Biz and Jenny were bridesmaids in what now appears to be hideous scarlet satin. During the ceremony my mother took Daisy’s spaniel dog in her car to look for the source of the Thames.

My belief that she would forgive me was mistaken. In the year before she died she was still writing in her diary that she could not understand why I had chosen to be married in that way and that she would never forgive the woman who helped me to such a disgusting show and so much wasted money.

I can now take some pride in the steadfast way she held to her convictions, although my friends are baffled and shocked by the story. If she were alive, my mother would be horrified to see the lavish weddings of the twenty-first century, especially when so many marriages fail despite the money spent. For my part, I envy the choices that are more widely available. No one was upset when my American niece Tiki was married on an isolated island, the only witnesses being the officiating officer and a couple of strangers who happened to be passing.

My mother’s reaction to my wedding was the latest incident in the
long-standing battle about her own. Joan did not want to get married in church but family pressure was so great that she gave in, saying she would do so if she could do everything else her own way. She chose to be married at 8 o’clock in the morning wearing what she always called a tweed coat and skirt. When I found a picture after her death I discovered it was in fact a grey striped affair, rather smart. Miles remembers riding his bicycle, together with his parents on theirs, across the cricket pitch to the church in the village of Whitchurch, near Reading, where they lived. He was six years old at the time and played trains in the aisle during the brief service. Afterwards he was allowed to ride home to the family breakfast in the dickey, the space that opened at the back of my father’s precious two-seater car.

Joan had gone out of her way to accommodate her parents but in so doing she felt she had compromised her beliefs. She was furious when she discovered that her mother had sent pieces of wedding cake in the traditional small silver boxes to their friends and acquaintances. A marriage was a private affair between the two of them and should include no one else. To support this she had only invited her immediate family, whereas my father had a larger contingent. My grandparents found the exclusion of their friends hard to forgive. I fear that for them too my wedding opened old wounds, though my grandmother valiantly stood in for her daughter in the photos.

Despite her disagreement over anything that involved the church, Joan adored her parents, especially her father, known to everyone as D. This was a shortening of the nick-name Diddles, which I believe was given him by my mother’s sister. She was a few years younger than Joan and at one time she rode a child’s scooter round their garden and became known as Scoot or Cooty for the rest of her life. Artistic and a bit fey, she was never able to hold down a job for long. She loved singing and play-acting and I was acutely embarrassed when she wanted me to join her in performing in front of the family and neighbours. I think D found her a trial and perhaps in consequence paid more attention to my mother. He often went abroad
in the winter for the sake of his weak chest and on one occasion Joan joined him in Tenerife. Her memories of this holiday with him gave her intense pleasure, perhaps because at some level she was jealous of her scintillating mother and of their relationship.

I found D a bit forbidding. At six foot five inches, and already developing a stoop when I was a young girl, he had a slow, legal way of talking. It took me a long time to recover from his monosyllabic fury after I made the mistake of copying my Aunt Cooty and called him ‘Diddles’.

For my mother, her father was always the person she consulted about any important decision. After the postman delivered my disappointing higher certificate exam results, my future education was in doubt. Before my mother could voice an opinion, she bundled us all into my father’s car and told him to drive fifty miles to consult with the one person whose opinion she could trust. My father made no complaint. I don’t know if that was because he seldom argued with her or whether he also valued my grandfather’s considered views.

My mother qualified as a doctor from University College Hospital. When she was a senior student my father, Eric Hickson, was the obstetric house officer. Joan was not one of the very first wave of women doctors but the only one in her year, hard to believe now when more than half of medical students in Britain are women. She felt she had to compete against the men at every stage, maintaining that women in medicine always had to be better. Yet her diaries, and some of my memories, suggest that her tough approach was won at some cost. It is clear that she had an instinctive dislike of the messiness that is an integral part of looking after bodies. When they settled in Chippenham she decided to specialise in eyes. Perhaps this choice was more than a matter of convenience, the eyes being a long way away from the dirtier parts of the body.

For many years, until the onset of the NHS in 1948, she worked two mornings a week for no pay at the Bath eye infirmary on Lansdown Hill with the surgeon Mr Colley. She was not herself a surgeon but wanted to keep in touch with proper medicine,
diagnosing and treating those conditions that were amenable to medical rather than surgical interventions and doing much of his follow-up work. Her boss was an active member of the communist party and had a strong influence on her political ideas. Although she never joined any party, at that time she described herself as a socialist.

Meanwhile she made money by testing the eyes of children at school, an important job taken over by nurses many years ago. My mother also saw children privately at home. She had a flair for spotting what Dr Apley, in his book
The Child and his Symptoms
, called ‘the child as the presenting symptom of the mother’, where the child shows the symptoms of the mother’s neurotic worries. A common complaint was headaches and by listening and advising she saved many children from the indignity of wearing unnecessary glasses.

As I think back to this painstaking aspect of her work I am reminded of a man I met many years later in a psychosexual clinic. He was in his late thirties, with the problem of impotence. I could find no physical cause for his difficulty and he needed little encouragement to talk about himself. He sat behind thick glasses and told me how his father had been in the army and as a boy he had attended many different schools. At each one he was bullied anew. As he told me about his anguish at being labelled ‘four eyes’ wherever he went, tears ran from behind the frames and down his face to drop onto his clenched fingers.