Steeped in Blood (4 page)

Following my dream of working in the field of medical research, I applied to the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School. To my great joy, I was accepted, and I obtained an Ernest Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Scholarship based on my matric results.

In February 1967, my mother dropped me at the residence to which I had been accepted, and I set about settling into my studies. My years of hard work were going to start paying off: I was about to climb the first rung of my ladder to success – or so I thought.

‘Men are four:
He who knows, and knows that he knows.
He is wise, follow him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows.
He is asleep, wake him.
He who knows not, and knows that he knows not.
He is a child, teach him.
He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not.
He is a fool, shun him.’

– ARABIAN PROVERB

Residence at Wits University in Johannesburg was awful. First-year students were ‘initiated’, and the hard-drinking louts who headed up the student hierarchy ensured that the treatment of first-years was crude and largely inane.

One evening – which happened to be just before an important class test in zoology – we were taken to meet Phineas, the residence mascot. We were blindfolded and led along the rocky bed of one of
the tributaries of the Braamfontein Spruit. After meeting Phineas at about 1.30 a.m., we were loaded onto a bakkie, soaked to the skin and, still blindfolded, dropped off somewhere on the western side of the city.

I was wet and cold and completely lost. All I could recognise was the Brixton Tower in the distance, so I made my way towards it. Once there, I ran the few kilometres to the university and, when I arrived in my room, found that my bed had been dragged out and soaked with a firehose. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night.

My mother fell ill a month or two later, and, unbeknown to me, was taken to a sanatorium in Sandringham. She had been diagnosed with depression and was receiving electroconvulsive therapy – shock treatment. She was at death’s door: the ‘depression’ had been caused by the fact that she was really ill, having suffered a heart attack, a fact that the doctors had completely missed. The ability of her heart to pump blood had been severely affected. The anaesthetic that was being administered to her at the sanatorium as part of the therapy was causing rapid deterioration. The psychiatric oaf who administered the shock therapy had failed to note all the clinical signs of real and extreme illness, and my mother developed severe pneumonia in the sanatorium, which was also not diagnosed. She was dying.

Meanwhile, I was being subjected to the boorish rituals of initiation, and was not enjoying life in residence. I was struggling to deal with the university work, and my mother’s illness was constantly on my mind. Matters came to a head one day when I forgot to do telephone duty, as I had been to see my mother. I was hauled over the coals by the residence committee chairman, who demanded that I kneel down before him and apologise in front of everybody. Something snapped inside me, and I let him have every four-letter expletive in my vocabulary (a considerable number, as I had attended a church school).

I decided to leave residence and managed to find digs near
the Park Lane Clinic in Johannesburg. It was a dingy little room at the back of a house, and my landlady spoke no English, only French – communication was difficult. After she found out that I liked kippers for breakfast, I had them every day!

The situation was really not conducive to studying. I was miserable, and decided to drop out of university, go home and start again somewhere else when I could find the strength. I went to say goodbye to a friend at varsity and, while looking for him, I bumped into a senior medical student, Beau Loots, who asked me why I was looking so down. I told him. He sat me down for an hour and, rather like Dick Whittington, turned me around. I decided not to leave and found a different flat. I have maintained a friendship with Beau ever since.

My mother, who was still extremely unwell, contacted a friend, who removed her from the sanatorium and had her admitted to Johannesburg General Hospital. Her heart condition and the lung infection were diagnosed and she was placed on appropriate medication. She then developed a persistent cough, and by June or July that year was diagnosed with bronchial carcinoma. Her health deteriorated quickly, and she died in September 1967.

My interest had always been in research and, in particular, cancer research. My mother’s death was a powerful impetus to extend this interest, and my former English teacher, Dr Gevers, also encouraged me to go into research as a career. Gevers wrote a letter to me that had a huge influence on my career, and revealed much about Gevers, the man and the scholar. In this letter, which I still have to this day, he wrote:

By now you will have gone to Johannesburg to register as a medical student. I wish you much luck in your endeavours. Some hold that the first year is the most difficult; others believe it’s the third. In general, no doubt, it must be the first, but in your case there should be no trouble at all, seeing that
you have been a very independent student for some time. If you have not done any shorthand, you should begin to develop a system of your own to keep up with the lecturers. It is believed that very often the top third of a medical group, after having obtained their degrees (M.B., B.Ch.), become research men and/or Biologists, Biophysicists, Biochemists. The middle group develop into specialists, and the lowest third into medical practitioners. As you are an idealist, I take it you may become a research man.

One of the reasons I had wanted to study medicine was that I thought it would allow me to carry out research. Soon, however, I realised that medicine was not the right road to research.

Medicine is a strange set of learnings. The workings of the human body are very complex, and are based on an intimate understanding of the body’s biochemistry. Its delicate balance is affected by any invasive activity, including an operation, a healing wound or medication, which affects the biochemical reactions in the body. Even something as simple as an X-ray has an impact. There is no branch of medicine that does not have an underlying biochemical basis.

Ordinary chemistry is the chemistry of elements, chemical compounds and substances, such as salts. It is about the energy needed to bond chemicals to create other compounds. Biochemistry, on the other hand, is the chemistry of living things – the study of the molecules of life – and deals with the reactions of the body to external events. A person’s skin goes brown in the sun, for example, because the chemical changes that the skin undergoes are a biochemical reaction of the body to the sun’s rays, producing the brown pigment, melanin. Biochemistry controls all aspects of our body, from our breathing to our heartbeat – the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, is a biochemical wonder. If a person is diseased, there is something wrong with his or her biochemistry.

I wanted to understand the biochemical pathways deep within
the cells, and I realised that medicine would give me just a smattering of the knowledge I craved. Medicine would teach me how to follow a recipe, how to cut along a dotted line. I wanted to design the recipe, to establish where to place that dotted line. I needed to grasp the fundamentals; I needed an intimate understanding of chemistry.

I went to see the dean of medicine at the end of the first year, and switched from medicine to second-year chemistry and biochemistry. It was the golden age of biochemistry: James D. Watson and Francis Crick had just received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their groundbreaking work on the DNA molecule, and this exciting subject seemed to me to be the answer to most of the problems confronting medicine at the time. I have not recanted from this view some forty years later.

It was not an easy year for me emotionally, with the shadow of my mother’s death hanging heavily over me. My relationship with my father was also difficult. He was angry with me for dropping medicine, and when he remarried some years later, I didn’t get on with his new wife at all.

Despite all of the family issues, I set about focusing on my studies. I lived in a small flat in Braamfontein that my mother had arranged for me before she died. My tuition fees were paid by the scholarship that I had been granted, and living expenses were covered by the forty rand a month my father gave me. The flat consisted of one room with a small bathroom and an alcove for cooking, which contained a two-ringed hotplate stove. The flat, which was sparsely furnished, was right next to the university in a block called Nelmay Court.

My budget was tight. The rent was twenty-eight rand per month, and electricity cost one or two rand. This left me with ten rand for food, entertainment, books, and so on. I didn’t have much furniture – a fridge was a luxury I could not afford, so I would buy a half-litre of milk and drink it before it went off. I could buy a
kilogram of rump steak for twenty cents and vegetables for five cents, to make myself a princely pot of food for twenty-five cents! An old family friend had given me a pressure cooker, and my hot-plate cooked many a stew, which was always tastier on the second day (it became dubious on the third day in summer, and on the fourth day in winter!).

Eating out was a luxury. A hamburger cost thirty-five cents and a mixed grill around forty cents, but this was over the top. With my home-cooked stew I could feed myself for three days on twenty-five cents! I didn’t go out much, and never caught the bus or went to the movies in my entire university career. I went to my first movie since early childhood only after graduating.

My lifestyle was incredibly frugal, as there was no one to borrow money from if I ran short. It was a difficult time, and I worked during my holidays, mostly to be able to buy books. I studied, worked and lived a humble life. There was no time to cry about life being tough, and I knew no better, so I just got on with it.

Being able to afford the books I needed was one of my greatest challenges. I recall agonising over a book that cost ten rand. It was Morrison and Boyd’s
Organic Chemistry
, and I had to think very carefully before I took the decision to buy it. I was fortunate to become friendly with Harry Fagan, who managed the university bookshop (who, incidentally, had worked in earlier days with Bob Edmonds, the uncle of the girl I subsequently married). Fagan gave me the little bit of help that I needed so badly: he extended credit to me, allowing me to buy the books and pay them off. He was fantastic and never pressurised me.

Another man who had a huge influence on my life was Jack Allen, a senior member of the anatomy department. I came to know him at the end of my first year, when I worked at the Electron Microscope Unit to earn some extra money. Allen was a remarkable man who had completed a vast amount of work on varicose ulcers, a condition arising when varicose veins cause the flesh to
become debilitated and septic. He would come into the room and say ‘Allen’s ops are tops!’, and it was indeed widely accepted that his knowledge of clinical anatomy was unsurpassed.

One particular incident moulded me forever: Allen entered the unit saying that he had to leave shortly to operate on a little girl to remove a glass shard, but that he was going up to the lab just to check his anatomy one more time. Despite all his knowledge and practice, he knew that it was necessary to check one more time. This valuable lesson struck me at the time, and has stayed with me all these years. We have remained friends for over forty years. When carrying out ballistics work, I would always check with Allen on the anatomical implications. I never cease to marvel at his knowledge of anatomy, and his humility in always double-checking to make sure that he is right.

In my second year of university, I had befriended a woman called Sister Faith Hermanson, who had nursed my mother in her last weeks at Johannesburg General Hospital. She told me that all leftover food from the wards is discarded at the end of each day and sent off as pig fodder, and offered to put a plate aside for me each lunch time. Every day I would walk to Ward 22 at the hospital, which was close to the university, collect my plate of food, sit behind the door and eat my lunch, wash the plate and walk back in time for my practical class in the afternoon.

I managed to find employment at a chemical company, McLaughlin and Lazar, towards the end of my third year, and was paid three rand per hour, which translated into twenty-four rand per day – a huge amount of money for me at the time. This helped enormously in paying off my debts.

In my final honours year at Wits, I worked at a shop in Braamfontein called The Bread and Butter from 12.30 p.m. till 2 p.m., serving customers over the counter. I was paid a rand a day for the hour and a half, and I was allowed to eat one item from the menu, usually a long roll, which kept me alive in my honours year!

These times were tough, but there were some good times in between. I had very little – not even a heater or extra blankets – and spent many winter nights bitterly cold. I also did not have much in the line of clothing, and remember being hugely upset when I had saved enough money to buy a set of flannels, only to tear them on a fence the first night I wore them. Those experiences in my life may have built tenacity, but they were hard – really tough times – and I never want to go through that again.