The Vasectomy Doctor (2 page)

Then slowly the gunman drops his rifle away from my face and directs it onto my lower abdomen. Now I have the impression that perhaps he does not intend to kill me. This is an impression that I may have to review in a few minutes' time but just at this very moment I feel a fraction safer than I did seconds before. Now I try to push him away from me but somehow the instrument trolley comes between us and goes crashing to the floor. There are vasectomy instruments all over the place. Two vasectomy forceps, a haemostat, a scalpel handle with a number fifteen carbon steel surgical blade attached, a five cc syringe loaded with two per cent Xylocaine, surgical swabs and a galley pot filled with Hibitane. All these things are now scattered across the floor.

Before I try to take him on again he pulls the trigger and the room is filled by a loud bang. He brings the bolt backwards and the empty shell flies out. He shoves the bolt forward again and locks it down. I felt nothing at all but there is blood running down the front of my right trouser leg. I have been hit, but exactly where I cannot say. Had it not been for all the blood and the loud crack of the rifle I would not have known that I had been shot. I say to my attacker: ‘You've shot me, you bastard' and then I fall to the ground. He is over me still pointing the gun directly at my face. Now of course I know that the gun is loaded and this whole thing has taken on a more deathly dimension than ever.

Suddenly I get up off the floor and am amazed to find that I have two good legs under me. So why did I fall? I do not know but it hardly matters. What matters now is that I have both legs under me and I had better start using them to good effect. I make a bolt for the door and am away up the corridor. As I reach the empty waiting-room there is a second bang as the gunman fires at me again. Since I felt nothing as the first bullet entered the top of my leg I could not know now if he has hit me again or not with his second shot. Being shot is a painless business. I hear myself roaring. I do not want to roar like this but it seems to me that my body has gone into autopilot and is doing things of its own accord. Outside a patient is coming in to see me. I grab her by the wrist and try to pull her along with me and tell her what's going on and that there is a gunman in there with deadly intent. She falls to the ground and I stop to help her and the gunman is outside the surgery and barely ten feet away from us.

Next an extraordinary thing happens. The man who nearly had a vasectomy, his trousers by now safely back on, walks up to the gunman and offers him a cigarette. The gunman accepts the cigarette and lights up. The man who nearly had a vasectomy is only trying to calm the situation down and to this day I am grateful to this man who I never met since. Now, for the second time I get the incorrect impression that the worst of the attack is over. It is not. With the cigarette sticking out of the corner of his mouth the gunman slides the bolt of his rifle forwards and backwards once again. I can see the empty shell arch its way to the ground glittering in the summer sunlight as it makes its way. Again the gunman lifts the rifle to his shoulder and fires right at my head. I know he has fired straight at my head because once again I am treated to a view directly down the barrel of his rifle. The tip of a branch of a leylandii bush parts company with the hedge one inch away from my left ear. It is time to get going again.

As I run up the short driveway towards the street there is another bang. This is his fourth shot at me and the third time that he has missed. I take a sharp left and left again. Now I am running diagonally across an empty space at the back of St Ann's where I once lived. He is after me and still shooting at me. I take a leaf out of the snipe's flying manual and start running in a zigzag fashion making myself a difficult moving target for a rifleman. Soon I am out onto the main street of Clane and running in front of St Ann's and around to the back of the house were I find my colleague Xavier
Flanagan loading his golf clubs into the back of his car. Xavier wants
to know what's wrong with me because I look dreadful. When I tell him that I've been shot he finds it difficult to believe. But then he sees all the blood down my right trouser leg and has to agree with my self-diagnosis. At this stage I am absolutely knackered and need to sit down. Xavier props me up on a garden chair on the raised patio at the back of his house and the thought occurs to me that the gunman could round the corner at any second and there I'd be cocked up on a chair, a grand target for even a mediocre shot like old meaty fingers.

What has happened in the meantime is that my attacker, unbeknownst to me of course, has taken himself into a field across from my surgery and threatened to shoot himself and anyone else who comes near him. About forty-five minutes after I have been shot Xavier lays me out in his car to drive me up to Clane Hospital. As we are passing the field where my attacker is I can see him out in the middle of the field sitting on the grass with the rifle across his knees surrounded by cattle. By this stage an enormous crowd has gathered and are viewing proceedings from whatever vantage point they can find. The army arrives complete with tear-gas canisters and the whole place takes on the appearance of a small battlefield.

The x-rays at the hospital show that the bullet has lodged in my right hip joint and I will need surgery to get it out. All things considered my kind colleagues advise that I go to a bigger hospital to have the job done and I agree. I may have founded Clane Hospital but that does not mean that I was unaware of its limitations at the time. At midnight I was put to sleep in St James' Hospital in Dublin and three hours later orthopaedic surgeon Garry Fenelon dislocates my hip joint and, with considerable difficulty, manages to get the bullet out. It now sits in a plastic envelope on the dresser at home here in the kitchen. I recover quickly. In four days' time I am back in Clane Hospital for a few days respite before getting the stitches taken out. While there my friends Dick and Geraldine Warner send me in a pint of Guinness covered with cellophane. Seldom has a pint tasted so good. Another old friend of mine, Paddy McKenzie, sends me in a vintage Châteaux Margot; that also is a memorable experience.

* * *

My surgeon advised that on no account was I to go to Scotland for grouse shooting that year. In Scotland the grouse-shooting season opens on 12 August, the so-called ‘Glorious Twelfth', and that was just one month after having my right hip dislocated to extract the bullet. But I felt fine and decided to ignore the good doctor's advice
and go to Angus anyway for our annual two days of walked-up grouse
shooting on the heather-clad mountains over Balintore Castle. I'd been going there for years and I was damned if I was going to let recent happenings interrupt such a fine tradition.

Grouse are a fast flying bird slightly smaller that a hen pheasant and are native to the upland areas of Scotland and Ireland. Their staple diet is shoots of young heather, and to help them survive in good numbers it is necessary to burn off the heather in large patches to encourage new growth. But they also need older heather to provide them with shelter against the winds and the rains. We have very few native Irish grouse now in Ireland because nobody manages the moors where they might otherwise flourish. In Scotland on the other hand grouse-shooting is looked upon as a significant industry
and all grouse moors are accordingly carefully keepered and managed.

If you know about these things one glance at an upland grouse moor in Scotland will tell you to which estate it belongs. Each keeper has his own way of burning off heather in a pattern that is unique to him alone. Thus all these low, smooth mountains are tattooed with the heather burn marks characteristic of that shooting estate.

The guns are arranged in a straight line across the moor and the dog-handlers follow some twenty yards behind. Every now and then the guns come onto a covey of grouse hidden in the long heather. A covey is a family or clutch of birds containing two adult parents and anything up to twelve mature offspring. They might all take to the air in one great flurry of activity or, more usually, they may get up in smaller groups of two and three. Once a bird has been shot down a whistle is blown and the line of guns stops moving forward. The dog-handlers unleash their retrievers and they go forward to try and retrieve the shot grouse. This sometimes can take ten or even fifteen minutes to achieve because at that time of year with all the heather pollen blowing around the place scent is poor and dead birds hard to pick up. But the code of practice whereby every shot bird must be picked up is not one lightly dismissed and it is a matter of honour that nothing gets left for a fox unless it is absolutely unavoidable.

I can sit on the dry heather while waiting for all birds to be picked up, take a breather and talk to my neighbouring gun or to a Scottish dog-handler or bird carrier. But if I wish I might just want to be left to my thoughts and be allowed to take in the spectacular
views that upland grouse moors always and unfailingly afford. While
so musing this may be a time to take stock and wonder exactly why I was shot one month ago and if there was any way of ensuring that this will not happen again and was I not incredibly lucky to have escaped with my life and what a great life it is too. Reflective moments like this are important.

CHAPTER 2

The postman came on foot. He had a limp, something to do with having been kicked by a cow. He didn't have a bicycle and of course he didn't have a car, only doctors and priests drove cars in those days. He walked. We called him Joe the Post; his full name was Joe Devine. He did more than just bring the post up to the house from Healy's post office down in Prosperous each day. He was also our eyes and ears, our lifeline to the outside world be
yond the tall beech trees, the limes and sycamores and avenue's end.
Television was yet to be invented and we had no radio, no phone, no transport other than Judy the pony and her trap. And no electricity. The Post would know who was dead and who was dying. More cheerfully, he would know who was born and who was getting married, who was making hay or who was cutting turf. This wasn't idle gossip either I'd have you know. These snippets of information were vital if you had hay down or were wondering where you might buy some decent firing come the autumn. He could forecast the weather for you as well.

‘What's the weather going to be like this afternoon, Joe?' my father would want to know. Joe the Post would then make a careful survey of the summer skies and with a freshly sucked finger held aloft he would check the wind's direction and speed, for this was a serious business requiring skill and consideration.

‘I'd say you would get the odd light shower this afternoon, Boss.'

That afternoon there would be an odd light shower. In this way Joe the Post was a walking almanac, a meteorologist, a newsman and reporter, a soothsayer and a wise man. He also brought around letters and parcels in an old canvas bag with a leather strap round his shoulders.

The Second World War is coming to an end. Dreadful, cruel, inhuman and hideous things have happened and are still happening. But I am oblivious to them all. It is 1945 and I have just passed my third birthday. The ration books are out and Joe the Post tells us that there is a big pile of turf up in the Phoenix Park. When the Post leaves it is my job to distribute the letters around the house. I can't read of course but Janie Ennis in the kitchen tells me that these are for the study and these for the schoolroom upstairs. First port of call then is the study where my parents, Stephen Rynne and Alice Curtayne, are seated across from each other at a large part
ner's desk. The room is a cube, eighteen feet long, eighteen feet wide
and eighteen feet high. Each has a Remington Rand typewriter in front of them and the place is alive with the clack-clack of keys on paper and the ring of the little bell three letters before the end of the line prompting the writer to return the carriage and start a new line. My father uses two fingers only while my mother flies along in a properly trained manner. The room smells of Sweet Afton smoke and buddleia. My father reading aloud the last paragraph he has written occasionally disturbs the clack-clack of the typewriters. This you might think was a rather eccentric way of writing but then eccentricity and my father were no strangers.

The next lot are to be taken upstairs to the schoolroom. Here the governess, Kathleen McGowan, from Grange, county Sligo, holds sway. She is teaching my older siblings, Bridget, Catherine and Davoc, the rudiments of reading, writing and mathematics. I am excluded from this institute of higher education on the basis of my tender years and am relegated to the role of office boy bringing the post around the house. But my turn will come.

There was a lot of religion around at the time and our house – Downings House, just outside Prosperous in county Kildare – was no different from any others in this respect. Grace before and after meals and bedtime prayers were standard fare. A picture of Madonna and Child hung in the big hall downstairs and others of Dante, St Paul, and The Last Supper hung upstairs in the landing. There was never a Sacred Heart for some reason. I expect that my parents thought it in bad taste. Even at three years of age I at least had a sense about the devil and angels, heaven and hell, sin and sanctifying grace.

I was sleeping one night upstairs with Miss McGowan. (‘Miss McGowan, the head of the town, one leg up and one leg down' we used to sing at her.) I must have told a lie or something that day because I remember the devil was under my bed and he came out and bit me in the right elbow. The devil then spirits himself across the nursery floor and goes down the wash hand basin. I lie closer to Miss McGowan. I am three years old and it's one of my very first memories – the devil biting me in the elbow. God help us.

The winter of early 1947 has to go down in the annals as one of the worst winters in Ireland for a few hundred years. The
Monthly Weather Bulletin
of March 1997 describes it like this: