Growing Into Medicine (7 page)

In a happier joint venture, Arthur and I visited our grandparents by ourselves. They owned a double skiff. Family holidays during wartime were usually spent in the caravan, parked in their garden, which was large enough to hold a croquet lawn, tennis court and cricket pitch. Our joint expeditions on the river were happy interludes. My mother had been given a punt for her twenty-first birthday so we had a choice of craft. She associated the stretch of water upstream from Pangbourne with her own happy adolescence and was relaxed while we were there. D, dressed in white flannel
trousers, emblazoned jacket and neckerchief, with either a Cambridge Trinity College cap or a straw hat called a boater on his head, had taught us how to behave in a boat. One must not drag one’s fingers in the water; always pull in to the side before changing places; never have more than one person standing up at the same time.

Few cabin cruisers spoiled the peace, only the wash from the Salters steamers, plying up and down to Oxford, disturbed the smooth ride. I could scull by the time I was thirteen, feathering my oars with some skill and looking with disdain at people in tub-like rowing boats who chopped at the water in ungainly bites. During our visit we were allowed to take the skiff out by ourselves. Eating our picnic lunch on the move we got to the furthest limit ever reached by a family party, even with two strong men at the oars, going through Goring and Cleeve locks to the islands above. Over supper that night, Mum’s Mum quizzed us on our day. ‘We got to the islands,’ Arthur said, with a straight face. The atmosphere chilled as it was assumed he was referring to the Harts Wood islands, barely half an hour upstream. All through the meal I was bursting to let the truth out, for even my loving grandmother was looking disappointed. Only when we reached the end of the meal did my brother say laconically, ‘Oh, not those islands, the ones above Cleeve.’ Our backs were slapped, Mum’s Mum searched out palms for blisters and D poured a small glass of sherry, not only for Arthur but also for me. I had at last, with Arthur’s help, done something to gain his respect.

When Arthur left school he joined the Fleet Air Arm, a branch of the Royal Navy responsible for its planes. He had hoped to be a pilot but was prevented by his red/green colour blindness. When he and a friend visited me and Biz at school in Somerset, in their naval ratings’ uniform, they caused a stir for we seldom saw men of any kind. We were allowed to walk with them round the grounds, followed by the admiring glances of all the girls we passed.

We were an extremely protected group, never let out of the grounds unless we walked in a crocodile with two senior prefects. The main impact of the war was food rationing. We all had our own tiny
pats of butter and jars of jam that we collected from a tray each day. Although the diet was nutritionally adequate we did feel hungry. As I stood in the queue watching the helpings of tart being served out, I tried to judge if I would get one with the extra pastry edge, or even better, a precious corner. Missing out felt like a major deprivation.

I do not remember ever reading a newspaper or discussing the war or politics, our only contact with reality being the red eyes of an occasional girl coming to terms with the loss of a father or brother. Our concerns were which house would win the hockey shield and who would play the part of Viola in the performance of
Twelfth Night
planned to take place in the sunken garden.

As my School Certificate exam approached, discussions at home about my future became more intense. One day my mother and I were sitting on the seat at the end of the swimming pool, my father standing by her side contemplating the murky water. I took a deep breath. Aiming my remark at his shoulder, not looking at my mother, I said, ‘What I really want. . . is to be a nurse.’

She exploded. ‘You can’t want to be a nurse. If you are going to work with people you must do it properly – as a doctor.’ She leapt to her feet and looked down at me. ‘No daughter of mine is going to be a handmaiden to someone else. That is not why we have gone to so much trouble to give you a good education.’

My father said nothing but I knew that if I gave in and followed my mother’s choice he would be happy. His ideas about equality for women included them training for a profession; nursing did not have the same cachet. My determination to make my own choice seeped away.

In my heart I have often thanked my mother for her intransigence. I have never regretted the decision, even if it was made for the wrong reasons. I was not called into medicine by some longstanding wish to heal the world. I was lucky that the need to please my father and avoid antagonising my mother led me into a profession that offers many choices. A surgeon does not have to be brilliant with people, for his or her patients are asleep much of the time. Pathology is even further removed from interaction with living
people. On the other hand, general practice depends as much on the art of communication as on pure science. I enjoyed that field, and my good fortune led me to the niche of family planning and psychosexual medicine that fitted me particularly well. In addition I must admit that a well-paid job is useful, especially if one wants to work part time while raising a family.

The announcement of peace in Europe was expected on 7 May 1945. My mother’s account of that time forms the climax of her diary. She describes feeling drained of emotion, very different from her experience in 1918. Then she joined her father and roistered round the city, revelling with the crowds as the maroons went off and they all celebrated their belief that there would never be another war. But in 1945 she just felt numb, with no sense that civilisation was fundamentally decent. She was acutely aware of the state of Europe with its starvation and physical ruin, and the fact that we still had to fight the Japanese and Arthur would be involved in that battle.

At school someone had smuggled in a wireless and at 8 o’clock, when we were preparing for bed, we heard Churchill say that the next day would be a national holiday to celebrate VE day. Cheering broke out in the stateroom dormitories, five huge connected rooms with 15–20 beds in each. As the noise subsided Miss Williamson, the headmistress, stood in the sunken garden outside, and raised her voice in condemnation. She was disgusted by our unruly behaviour and we would not be allowed to take part in the national holiday but would have to work a normal day as a punishment. Even at that moment of national rejoicing we were kept isolated from the wider world. I can only think that she felt threatened by the noise, panicked into a fear that the mass of nubile femininity would become unmanageable. It is only now that I can see how challenging her job must have been, with a diminished staff, families uprooted and a camp of American servicemen nearby. The restrictions I found so irksome were prompted by understandable concerns for our safety.

5

Teenage Years

True to form, my results in the School Certificate (subsequently O levels and then GCSE) were mediocre. I only sat seven exams, a feeble effort compared to many children nowadays with ten or eleven subjects. I obtained six credits and a distinction in geography. My husband teased me about this as I was still muddling the East and West Indies when we got married. To my deep regret I had given up history when we reached Ur of the Caldees for my mother did not think it an important subject. My profound ignorance about the past added to my sense that I was stupid. Reading historical novels I just followed the romance, as I had no milestones around which to build the extra knowledge to be gleaned from such stories.

St Felix School moved back to Southwold in the autumn of 1945. The purpose-built red-brick buildings and well-marked playing fields lacked the private corners in the house and garden at Hinton St George, where I could find small but precious slivers of solitude. But I came to appreciate the romantic, windswept coast and undulating dunes of Suffolk, especially after I saw an unidentified bird flapping over the dykes, disappearing in the dips to emerge a few seconds later. Not long afterwards I spent a weekend at Flatford Mill, immortalised in Constable’s painting, but by then converted into a nature study centre. From my careful notes of the bird’s markings the tutor could identify it as a short-eared owl. Whenever I see a reproduction of
The Hay Wain
I am reminded that I slept in the room behind that window in Willy Lott’s cottage. It was in there
that, when a friend’s hair caught light from a candle, I was able to smother it before the flames had done more than frizzle the ends.

Little of what I was taught in school remains in my mind. Just once, I felt a stab of recognition. I was driving across the plains of Alberta. Nodding donkeys dotted the yellow, autumnal landscape, exact replicas of the picture on page twenty-three in my geography book. The isolated excrescences stood as evidence of the oil wells below.

During the Christmas holidays, in the last year before I left school, I went to my first dance, held at Corsham Court. I wore a floor-length blue dress lent by the wife of a local doctor, with my long hair pinned up with kirby grips into curls all over my head. It should have been the most romantic occasion but turned into something of a nightmare. Biz and I were good friends with Richard Awdry and his younger brother Philip. That night Richard was, in my view, the most handsome boy in the room. He was also literate and amusing – but he spent the whole evening dancing with a pretty brunette. I sat behind a pillar discussing the dissection of dogfish with another schoolboy, both of us feeling too plain and nervous to dance: and if I had taken to the floor my hair might have come down. A picture from the local paper shows the guests crowded on a staircase, and there is Richard with his brunette and I a few rows behind, looking anxious.

Before the war such parties, even in much smaller private houses, had been common. My parents had given one in Green Gables. They rolled the carpet back in the nursery, sprinkled powdered chalk on the floorboards and put 78 rpm records on the gramophone. I must have been eight or nine at the time and was allowed to join in with Arthur provided we promised to go to bed promptly at 9 o’clock. The last dance, Sir Roger Decoverley, was moved forward so we could take part before we were banished. I was both proud and furious when I overheard someone say, ‘The little dears, so good of them to go to bed without making a fuss.’

* * *

Back at school after my visit to Corsham Court, my three sixth-form subjects had been dictated by my mother’s decision that I should be a doctor: biology, physics and chemistry. The only one that held the slightest interest for me was biology. We had a good teacher who was married and marginally more interested in the way living things, including human beings, worked. I learned physics by rote, messed up the practical chemistry exam and did not reach the required standard for the place in the second year of the medical course that I had been offered at Bristol University. Luckily they had forgotten to state in their letter that my exemption from the first MB was dependent on my grades. My father created a fuss and they were forced to accept me into the first year. I am ashamed that I only managed to get into university because of an administrative fault.

Before I took up that place I negotiated two important milestones. In two hours during the summer I became an adult. . . or so it felt to me. At that time women with long hair wore it up, the plaits wound into bangs over the ears or round their heads. Only children wore them hanging down. This rigid distinction allowed no opportunity to oscillate between being a child and a grown up. When I insisted that I wanted my plaits cut off my mother eventually agreed, but only if I went to her special hairdresser in London, where he was to put a perm in the remaining hair. I sat in the chair with my mother standing by my side as we watched the long strands fall to the floor. In the mirror, she looked devastated. The man applied lotions and papers and curlers and a disgusting chemical smell filled the room. Once it was washed off and my hair had been dried I watched the head in the mirror turning from side to side, unable to accept that it belonged to me. With no experience of brushing short hair, let alone helping it into any sort of style, it was a tangled wreck by the next morning.

I remained dependent on a perm until my seventies when I found a hairdresser who could cut in such a way that she discovered a hidden wave. What bliss to be able to go out in the rain without the fear of becoming a corkscrew mess. However fashionable such a look might be today, it was an embarrassment in waiting for
me, necessitating ugly waterproof hoods in the pockets of every coat.

My other important experience that year was a trip to France with Arthur. Apart from staying with relatives there had been no previous opportunity for me to travel anywhere without my parents. We put our bicycles on the train to Avignon and rode down the Rhone valley. After a few days we reached the Mediterranean at Sete but could find nowhere to stay for the night. Out of the town we found a flat spot at the edge of a vineyard. We were not equipped for camping but slept on our Macintosh coats. I was terrified by noises in the next field. . . clearly murderers, thieves or at the very least bad-tempered French onion men in flat caps, who floated in my memory from the days before the war. I clung to the long-suffering Arthur until, as daylight finally arrived, we discovered a herd of cows munching along the hedge.

We continued up into the Pyrenees by putting our bikes on the top of buses. I was no good at pedalling my bike uphill. Earlier I had gone to the Wye valley with three school friends, ending the trip on the back of a lorry because I could not keep up. I have never known if this was because I had a particularly heavy bike or whether my heart/lung capacity is not large enough for my body; or perhaps I am just a wimp.

Again, in the mountains we had trouble finding a room. By then there were piles of snow by the roadside and I was terrified of another night in the open. At the fifth hotel I burst into tears. Immediately the end of a corridor was curtained off, mattresses and bedding found and we sat down in front of large bowls of soup. To my shame I discovered then that tears could get me out of all sorts of scrapes, including those embarrassing times much later when I was caught exceeding the speed limit in my car.