Growing Into Medicine (6 page)

An unexploded bomb in the Circus in Bath, where most of the medical specialists lived, was not removed for two weeks. When at last the people were allowed back to inspect the damage to their property, my parents went over to help their friends try to make their homes habitable.

As I edited her diary for publication I read again of the passion with which my parents followed every twist of the war, and the ups and downs of every battle, of their fatigue and anxiety. I wish I could tell them that I do, at last, value the extraordinary shelter they provided for their children through those agonising years. A few years ago I had typed out the first two chapters of this diary and sent them to an exhibition of wartime memorabilia on show in Bath. One day I went in and recognised the sheets in the hands of a young man engrossed in her words.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, pointing to the pages in his hand. ‘Do you know if there is another copy?’ I could not remember how many I had provided.

He immediately held them out. ‘Do have this – it is the most wonderful story. This woman doctor is driving round Bath on the day after the Blitz. Her descriptions are amazing.’

I waved them away, swelling with pride as I blurted out, ‘That was my mother.’

4

‘You Can’t Want to Be a Nurse’

As I write I am looking at a small flip diary, the back and front covered in leather, the whole held together by a piece of perished elastic. At the top, two screws allow for new pages for each year. This object lived in my father’s pocket all the years I knew him. Each morning he would take it out to see what repeat visits and appointments were booked. Then he added new calls, ticking them all off as he worked his way through the list.

He started to take me with him on his rounds when I was about seven years old. I stayed in the car, making up stories in which I was always the central, heroic character, a practice I only stopped entirely in my forties. As I sat in the car waiting for him to finish his call, I was sometimes frightened by local children, especially when we were in the poorer areas of town and I imagined they were looking at me in a hostile way. Once, when he took me on a visit to Lady Waldegrave, his only titled patient whom he attended for the first five of her confinements, I was so frightened by some geese in the drive that he took me in and left me in their enormous drawing room. After a while I became convinced that he had forgotten me. Tears were streaming down my face when he returned. To cheer me up, Lord Waldegrave rushed from the room and came back dressed in his robes. Throwing the train over his shoulder he boomed, ‘What ho, Iolanthe?’ He and my father began to sing the number about when Britain ruled the waves and the house of Peers ‘made no pretence to intellectual eminence or scholarship sublime’. My father looked so happy that I was soon happy too.

Once I reached my teens he sometimes took me into the house to see a patient. By this time both my parents were hinting that I should train as a doctor. I had no wish to do so for I knew I would have to work hard and take more responsibility than I felt capable of shouldering. What I really wanted was to be a nurse but I did not dare to say so for a long time. I longed to make people comfortable in bed, bring them hot drinks and sympathy, not run the risk of misdiagnosing a life-threatening emergency. However, my father’s patients were tolerant when they heard I might be going to follow in his footsteps.

My memories of a particularly busy Saturday remain with the clarity of a fine engraving. An agitated woman phoned for a visit to her husband who was in pain. She led us up to a cluttered but clean bedroom. I watched as my father sat on the edge of the double bed, his hand on the man’s wrist as he asked for details. Then he took out the metal thermometer case with its screw top from a wallet, which also held his pen and pencil torch. He rinsed off the surgical spirit in the bathroom. After kneeling by the bed to look at, feel and listen to the man’s abdomen, he told me to go back to the car.

Twenty minutes passed before he rejoined me. ‘Thank goodness they had a phone. It has taken ages to make the arrangements.’

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘Acute appendicitis. I couldn’t find a surgeon free to come and do it here so he has to go into Bath. Further for his wife to visit but I can’t help that.’ He turned on the engine and we drove off. ‘This was a fairly classic case but I did a rectal examination anyway. I thought he might be embarrassed if you stayed.’

I knew what he was talking about and was only too glad I had escaped.

‘The appendix is a great mimic,’ he went on. ‘In a case like this the diagnosis is not too difficult. If it is tucked away behind the caecum it can be the very devil.’

We got home to find a call to the hospital. Here he let me scrub up and put on a gown and mask so that I could hand him instruments as he cut the patient’s hair and cleaned a nasty scalp wound,
taking infinite care before putting in the stitches. As he finished, a message arrived to say he was wanted in a house in Sheldon Road. When we got there we found a boy, delirious with a high temperature and a very red, swollen ankle. My father looked serious, sent for an ambulance and rushed back to his workshop to make a splint to support the ankle during the journey.

The first of the sulphonamides, prontosil, had been discovered in 1935 and by the beginning of the war my father was using what he called M&B for infections. Penicillin was not manufactured till 1942 and I don’t know whether it would have been available by injection for the serious infection in the bone, osteomyelitis, that we had just seen.

When I was even younger I went with him into the maternity home in Corsham to look at the babies. But he delivered most of his patients in their own homes. I was about thirteen when he allowed me to watch my first baby being born. The delivery took place in a farm labourer’s cottage across three fields, where I got out to open and shut the gates, glad to be of some real use.

The birth was a joyful experience. For the first time I heard my father’s mantra, ‘Is it a little John or Mary? Ah, it is a Mary,’ as he looked at the genitalia. In the days before ultrasound scans and genetic testing the sex of every baby was unknown until it was born. To a relative he would say, ‘Put the kettle on will you? Mother could do with a cup of tea and so could I.’ If it was a first baby the use of the word ‘Mother’ at that particular moment felt poignant and apt.

The maternity home in Corsham closed eventually and a converted house in Chippenham, called Greenways, was opened in time for my own daughter to be delivered, in 1959, by my father.

The practice of providing medical care to one’s family was not considered unethical or even risky. Certainly, I would have trusted no one more than my father. He worked closely with the matron, a very experienced midwife who, knowing I was a doctor, asked me when I was in labour what pain relief I would like. I was in no state to take decisions, so after a pause she said, ‘A dose of your father’s tipple, I think.’ I did not know or care what it contained. Anything recommended by my father would have worked for me.

I suspect the magic potion he recommended was similar to chlorodyne, a famous medicine patented in the nineteenth century by Dr John Collis Browne. It contained an alcoholic solution of opium (laudanum), tincture of cannabis and chloroform. My father certainly prescribed it freely, often mixed with other agents from the dispensary jars. I have been told that in the 1960s it was available as a recreational drug, often with a special room set aside for its use. At some stage the cannabis was removed and the dose of opiate reduced so that my father complained the remedy became a shadow of its former self. However, when my sister started travelling, and then emigrated to the US in the early sixties it was still reasonably potent, especially for the treatment of diarrhoea. She took a bottle of the tincture with her. She tells me the dose was ten drops. When a favourite cat had a severe tummy upset they added two drops to a dish of cream. My father had provided her precious supply, probably illegally, and she used it so sparingly that when I checked the facts with her recently she said there was still some left in her cupboard – fifty years later.

As I was growing through my early teenage years the opportunity to share medical experiences with my father made me feel special, a need perhaps in all children with siblings. One of the happiest times of my life was one Christmas Day. By family tradition, presents were put on the windowsill in the dining room and opened after breakfast. The parcels were few by today’s standards, one each from our parents, perhaps two or three in brown paper from aunts or grandparents, and a small one from Daisy. On that morning my father asked us to wait before we dived in to rip off the wrappings. From his outside pocket he produced an envelope.

‘This is for you,’ he said, handing it to my mother. She opened it and found a book token.

His hand disappeared again and came out with another envelope for my brother containing a five-pound note. With the third offering in his hand he turned to my younger sister. ‘Here you are Biz, not quite so much for you as you are younger.’

As I watched her pull out a one-pound note my eyes filled with
tears. I came next in the pecking order, how could he forget me? I heard his voice.

‘I have no envelope for you, Ruth, I have spent all my money. But perhaps this would do instead.’

I lifted my eyes to see him reach into a pocket inside his suit jacket made by order to carry his stethoscope. The parcel he produced contained a wooden flute.

‘You never told me that was what you were doing in London,’ said my mother, in a hurt voice.

I had been trying to get a note on his flute during the summer holidays and he had encouraged me. Without discussing the matter with anyone he had chosen one for me to have as my own. It was that reticence, as if his feelings for me were too private and important to be shared even with his wife, which still brings a lump to my throat.

His flute has a story of its own. He bought it when he was a medical student and took it with him to India after he had qualified and joined the RAMC. On the way the boat was torpedoed. Over the Tannoy the order came to abandon ship. He disobeyed and went below to collect his flute. By the time he came back on deck another ship had drawn alongside and they were pulling the men from the water. Because he was the ship’s doctor he was wanted aboard in good condition so they put him in a net and threw him, clutching the instrument, from one vessel to the other.

I inherited both that flute and another from him, so that when I wanted to start playing again in my sixties I had three to choose from. To my delight the experts said his original instrument was the one worth repairing and I played it for several years, until I changed to a silver one which was less sensitive to moisture.

At school, singing took precedence. The music teacher was inspirational, insisting with great ferocity that we watch her baton, a habit so ingrained that I bless her every time I play with a conductor. She made me leader of the choir, a job I relished. If she had taught me the flute as well I might have persevered. As it was, once I left school I only picked it up in a desultory way, stopping altogether
when my husband winced and my dog howled, waiting to return to it when they had both died.

Making music with others is now one of the great joys of my life. I have few regrets about the way my life has evolved for I have had more than my share of luck. But I am sad not to have reached a higher standard of flute playing when I was young. Those who reached grade seven or eight in their youth seem able to return to an instrument later in life and regain their original standard. As I never rose above grade five or six I cannot hope to improve above that level, which is not good enough to play the first flute part in an orchestra.

During those years, when I was very close to my father, my relationship with my mother remained complicated. I believed that Biz was her favourite. Not only was she the youngest but she was more intelligent and her stories made my mother laugh with delight. I still winced at a sharp word. My mother knew of my sensitivity and tried to curb her tongue. ‘Ruth does feel her feelings so,’ I heard her say once when I should not have been listening.

My poor spelling has haunted me all my life. Children at boarding schools were expected to write home, usually once a week on Sunday. In her reply my mother wrote out my misspelt words at the top of her letter with the faults underlined. I am not dyslexic and during my psychoanalysis I realised the extent of my fury. The suggestion that my failure to learn was an unconscious expression of spite made a lot of sense. My mother had been trying to help, only wanting her daughter to be able to take her place in the educated world, but I waited for her to be genuinely interested in my news, not critical of the way I reported it. My brother reacted to the same treatment by vowing never to write more than a few words in any letter and I felt particularly honoured recently when his Christmas letter ran to two pages.

In the holidays I mooched around Arthur in the nursery, which he had now been given as his own room, and in the workshop where he continued to make things. We rode out together on our bicycles, often to Hullavington airfield where we lay in the hedge and watched
the planes leave and return. It had been opened in 1937 and became the Empire Training School in 1942. At that time seventeen different types of plane are listed as being seen there. No wonder Arthur was so keen to develop his skills in identification!

There was so little traffic on the roads that we were quite safe on our bicycles. Indeed the lanes were so quiet that my mother used to exercise the two dogs by running them behind the car for a mile or two. Gerda the dachshund got tired first and was lifted back into the car, while Bertha with her long Dalmatian legs could keep going much longer.

Daisy continued to cook for us all and run the household. In time, Arthur and I became irritated by her efforts to control us. One day we ran away. Leaving a note, we took our bicycles and went to the caravan. Arthur tells me that on our journey we bought three potatoes but I remember raiding the store cupboard in the van for tins of sardines and baked beans: not a very imaginative or courageous revolt. As the evening drew on and the light faded, I began to regret our bad temper and was relieved when my father arrived. He explained how dependent the family was on Daisy, how impossible it would be for our mother to manage without her and asked us to be more tolerant. Shamefaced we followed him home. When I read my mother’s account of the episode in her diary, of her belief that there was right on both sides, I realise how intensely she wanted to provide us with a happy home. She even considered getting rid of the invaluable Daisy as soon as her own medical work was no longer essential.