by John Hicks
I really want to hear those funny stories.
The solution is so simple. I write down any old number at the bottom of each sum. I know they’ll all be wrong, but at least I’ll be able to go into the story room and hear about the professor. It will be some time before my paper is marked… Why is Miss Rowe calling me out of the story room, so soon? She knows they’re wrong just by looking. If you add two three-digit numbers together, you can’t get a five-digit answer. (What’s a digit?) Wants to know why I’m so stupid. Will it be the ruler again?
Morning prayers and maths lessons. Do those nasty sums quickly and be rewarded with a nice story. Maths and divinity were my weakest subjects. I was conditioned that way.
This fifties-style introduction to academia was perhaps not untypical for many English children. We did not go joyfully to school. I concentrated very hard, but, no matter how I tried, these torments and the threat of them were my daily companions.
Intermediate school was infinitely more pleasurable. The teachers were strict, but seemed to enjoy their vocation. The large Victorian house, with its spacious grounds, oozed character. There was polished oak panelling, and creaking, polished floors. An aroma of beeswax (tempered with boiled cabbage, our daily accompaniment to mince and rice pudding) pervaded high-ceilinged classrooms. Green vistas of mature trees and grass were conducive to daydreaming, because of which, no doubt, I failed to achieve my full academic potential. However, the contemplative pleasures of inner landscapes were forever mine: a priceless acquisition.
A perceptive teacher noticed my deafness, and steps that I didn’t fully appreciate were taken to help me to learn. What self-respecting schoolboy wants to sit at the front of the class? What little boy enjoys having his tonsils removed? Nonetheless I can remember the ice cream soothing my sore throat and my miserable earaches disappeared.
This early hospital visit was, unfortunately, but one of many subsequent brushes with medicine. I was an accident-prone child and even in my veterinary career I have been over-acquainted with hospital interiors.
On one occasion I had the misfortune of holding on to a piece of timber for a builder when the skill-saw he was using kicked back and hit my left hand. I picked my thumb up from the back of the garage some five metres away and draped the rest of my mangled hand in a towel. The index and middle fingers dangled woefully. Viv, dear wife that she is, ran me and a very pale builder for medical treatment.
The upshot is a disabled left hand with a missing thumb.
~
One weekend I was attending a wee Fox Terrier for a young couple and their little boy. A child in the examination room is often a recipe for disaster. The owner can’t concentrate on the message you are trying to impart because half their attention is focused on the child or, if you have their full attention, it is because they have absolved themselves of all responsibility for their offspring. Then it becomes the vet’s job to save him/her/them from assorted needles, scalpel blades and precious equipment as they rampage around the room. All this whilst contemplating a tricky diagnosis and communicating with the owner.
In this case I was pleased to note that I had the full attention, not only of the pleasant young couple, but of their very rapt young son. Throughout the consultation he continually looked from my injured hand and back into my face which he was earnestly, and obviously, trying to read. Such behaviour in an adult would have been unpardonably rude, but all was to be revealed. As the family left, the wife turned to me and apologised for Johnny.
‘He’s not normally like this, but we have had trouble with him picking his nose. He never stops! On the way here we told him that if he carried on like that his finger would drop off.’
I doubt if Johnny ever picked his nose again, but what he thought of me was plain to see!
Chapter Three
Ferry ’Cross the Mersey
Post-war Liverpool was grim. Twenty years after the brutal bombardments, and partially cleared bombsites still blighted the city. Smoke from a million coal fires rained soot on washing. Imposing neo-classical buildings, built with the proceeds of a lucrative slave trade in preceding centuries, were neglected and coated with grime. Thick, choking smog was a frequent visitor and Liverpool was the bronchitis capital of the world. Bent old men hawked on buses, where notices expressly forbade spitting. The pavements were adorned with gobs of glistening mucus and interspersed with dog turds delivered by roaming packs of mongrels. Later, as veterinary students, we were able to examine their euthanised cousins—brought in by the RSPCA to further our education. It was horrifying to see that the lungs of these dogs were frequently—and without exaggeration—black. If they had spent just a few short years on the streets inhaling soot and leaded exhaust fumes, what was happening to our health?
The Mersey was present in the lives of all Liverpudlians; ship foghorns reverberated across the city through many winter nights. An occasional treat was to take the ferry across the Mersey (of Beatles fame) to Wallasey or Birkenhead. For a child such a deviation in routine was decidedly stimulating. The seats may have been sticky but that was the norm for all forms of public transport. My mother ensured that my brother and I went through a full-scale decontamination procedure after each outing. It hadn’t helped that her father was a distinguished Professor of Bacteriology.
Where we embarked at the docks there was always plenty to see: chains clanking, gulls screaming, children with toy windmills whirling in the breeze. The grey waters stank as they slicked between slimy brown shoals. Astern the boat, the muddy slurry muscled by the propellers glinted with petrochemical rainbows. The Mersey was, in effect, an open sewer, and for young children the fun was in verifying that fact. Nearing the relatively cleaner waters on the far side it was not unusual to see brave families frolicking in the floaters. We children lined the rails, avoiding the chewing gum underneath, from where we had a more privileged view of the detritus drifting around the swimmers. ‘Look! There’s one heading straight for him.’
Our family would then enjoy a bracing stroll and quaff the sea air. My father encouraged us to inhale lungfulls of this dubious product of the Irish Sea, with its liberal lacing of industrial pollutants and decaying sea life. At this stage he was a heavy smoker, whereas we children still had functioning olfactory modalities and failed to share his enthusiasm, much to his disappointment. To this day, much as I appreciate pristine environments, the so-called ‘smell of the sea’—rotting seaweed with a hint of autolysing shellfish—holds no appeal for me.
A cleaner seascape was to be enjoyed at Ainsdale Sands. On occasional hot summer days we would drive there through the flat South Lancashire countryside, redolent with cabbage farms and bejewelled with slagheaps. The sands were firm and thousands of like-minded citizens were parked in orderly rows. Out came the canvas windbreaks and deck chairs. Adults snoozed while children disported themselves with buckets and spades. Open-topped charabancs cruised between the rows of cars…
I was never a really naughty child, but with my brother and three cousins, all boys, we were a handful.
… See those grown-ups going for a ride in the open-topped charabancs. How stuffy they look, staring straight ahead. Watch their heads wobble as they hit the bumps!
Between the five of us we were able to dig quite a large trench between a row of cars and across the tracks of a hapless charabanc. Our first attempt was barely adequate, but the joggling heads on the bus encouraged us to redouble our efforts.
The driver was no idiot and at the next pass chose to avoid what was, by now, a highly visible landmark. Unfortunately, his evasive action bore him into soft sand. Wheels spun and he nearly stuck. A fist was waved in our direction and a distorted and angry face mouthed growly words. We had learned our lesson. The next trap had to be less visible! Suitable materials were to hand. We inverted a large cardboard box and buried it just below surface level, and we then covered it with sand.
Victory! Imagine our satisfaction when the occupants of the next busload were forced to clamber off the
bus while the driver, whose body language from our safe distance signified mild apoplexy, did things with mats and spades. For the rest of the afternoon the charabanc was a distant phenomenon charting new sands where, presumably, the natives were less hostile.
Persistence and determination bring their rewards. Subsequent visits to Ainsdale Sands were a distinct anticlimax.
~
As humans we all want to know our place in society and, quite rightly, have an interest in our ancestors. Mine are the usual mixture, but the worthier of them have set standards to which I’ve felt I should aspire. Their example has influenced my life—alas, way out of proportion to the influence of their diluted genes within me.
This need that we have to find out about our antecedents should be an historical, as much as a genetic, quest. The more illustrious of our ancestors usually achieved their status because they were the most ruthless and corrupt members of mediaeval society. If in your genealogical research you happen to strike royal blood, rejoice in your history, but reject your pedigree.
Above all, looking backwards should remind us all that we have been the lucky generation, our lives largely unaffected by the obscenity of war.
Stalked two ME 109s and destroyed one of them. – ‘Jumped’ by the other but not hit. No excitement.
Those last, extraordinary, two words are the last entry in the RAF log book of my uncle. July the seventh, 1942. What is behind their seeming paradox: nonchalance, bravado, understatement, ennui? We shall never know. More probably it was the mere truth from my Uncle John who, before the war and during his precious leaves, pursued a passion for rock-climbing on British crags and mountaineering in the Alps. Excitement is exultation and freedom and my uncle had told my father, on their last leave together, that he got more thrills from climbing, than flying a Spitfire; and he was doing nobody any harm.
From an early age I was made aware that I bore a striking resemblance to my Uncle John. I was proud to carry his name. His mythical figure loomed large in my early childhood precisely because his loss cast a pervading shadow over the lives of my grandparents. There was no closure for them. A much-loved son reported missing. No one saw what happened. Recently a dear friend, who had visited Malta, gave me a copy of Brian Cull’s thoroughly researched book, Spitfires over Malta, in which he quotes from a report by one of John’s fellow pilots: ‘Looking for P/O Hicks ... No sign of him. I found an abandoned dinghy. Hicky’s bought it.’
My grandparents never gave up hope that, by some miracle, their eldest son would one day return. The most precious link they had with him was an ageing Fox Terrier named, for obvious reasons, Raf. Raf had been acquired by John from a Welsh farmer just before the war. Quite a few RAF pilots owned dogs, and Raf was not the first to wait in vain for his master’s return.
When I was a child we would regularly visit Grannie and Gran, and while the grown-ups chattered above us I would enter the floor-level world of Raf. He was a dignified and occasionally crotchety old gentleman, but we had a special understanding. From that early age I have felt an empathy with most dogs and this was certainly a factor in my later career choice.
My father’s side of the family fielded an intriguing mix of other interesting characters. An uncle, Will, was a brilliant chemist and linguist who, between 1907 and 1910 was a lecturer in organic chemistry at Liverpool University. He had completed a PhD in Vienna. His leather-bound thesis Über einen Fall von ‘Desmotropie’ beim Thiobisacetessigester will ever remain beyond my comprehension. During the Great War he was attached to the general staff as an anti-gas expert with the rank of captain. In that capacity he was sent to Russia in 1916, was captured and imprisoned, and eventually married a white Russian, Luba—reputedly the daughter of his jailer.
It pains me to record that I always struggled with chemistry and had to re-sit an organic chemistry paper during my first year at university. Obviously the relevant genes had evaporated before they reached me.
Will’s sister, Kay, gained a medical degree in 1906, one of the few women to do so in those distant years, and became an anaesthetist.
My mother’s side is replete with Methodist missionaries. If religious devotion and blind faith are heritable they, too, have passed me by. My mother’s father was born in India, to a missionary couple. Professor Shrewsbury, Emeritus Professor of Bacteriology in the Medical School of Birmingham University, was a true scholar. He was the author of several books, most notably A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles. It took him much of my mother’s childhood to complete. Not only was he academically brilliant, but he had a distinguished war record and was a competent cricketer.
His sister, by contrast, was a check-out girl at Woolworths in Bury, which in those days was perhaps the most depressed of decaying Lancashire mill towns. She did house-keeping work in her spare time. By preference I avoid acronyms, but my great aunt Elaine could be aptly described by that psychologists’ favourite: LOBNH. ‘Lights on, but nobody home’. She lacked intellect, inquisitiveness, initiative: all the qualities that had made her brother great.
Elaine never married and so her nieces, my mother and her sisters, took turns to look after her. Once a year she came to stay with our family for a few days’ holiday. It didn’t take my brother and me long to realise that something was awry. We laboured long and hard to provide that missing spark in the life of our great aunt.
In those days it was possible to walk into your local ironmongers and buy a bottle of luminous paint. It wasn’t for some time that luminous paint—luminous because of radioactive decay—was withdrawn from general sale. Everyone had luminous watch dials, which was very handy if you woke up in the dark, but my brother and I had more fanciful notions. By the time we had painted our picture it would have set a Geiger counter racing—not that we were to know this at the time. I have wondered if some of my health problems in later life were just retribution for the mischief I am about to reveal.
The picture we selected was of a gruesome archaeological dig on a wild moor. Bleached skulls and skeletons lay scattered against a dismal, peaty background. Grey, smudgy clouds loured overhead. It was a miserable picture to hang on the wall of a guest-room. An inquisitive guest might reasonably have enquired about the dubious taste of their host. But what was grim and bleak by day, now came alive in the dark. My brother and I had bathed every skull, every sad splinter of past human life, in thick luminosity.
We closed the velvet curtains of that large Victorian room and gleefully surveyed our shimmering work, anticipating how Aunt Elaine would interpret this new perspective of resurrection should she be called to her potty in the wee small hours. Alas, that was all the pleasure we obtained for our travail: the pleasure of anticipation. Aunt Elaine was not the sort to notice the greater detail, let alone the minutiae, of her surroundings. Less subtle efforts were required.
Aunt Elaine was fond of reading before she laid her weary head on the pillow. She didn’t notice the ‘dirty dog’ footprints we had placed there courtesy of ‘The Wizard’s Den’, a shop devoted to little Liverpudlian pranksters. But she did notice when her bedside lamp, after behaving normally for a brief warm-up period, flicked off… on… off… on… off… on… This regular rhythm was not attributable to a loose connection, as she suspected. When I removed the circuit-breaker from our Christmas tree lights, all was revealed.
Aunt Elaine eventually became an unwitting but good-humoured connoisseur of false doggy doos, rubber biscuits, whoopee cushions, bending spoons and even stink bombs. She always had a lively stay at our house, and our mother refereed the worst excesses.
Elaine was placid, well-intentioned and kind. There are worse genes to share, but she never passed them on, whereas all her brother’s three daughters to his first marriage completed tertiary courses and a later son, Stephen, is a doctor and research scientist. The next generation, Grandpa’s daughters’ eight children, all obtained tertiary qualifications.
Among those five boys digging bus traps in the sand at Ainsdale there were two futur
e doctors, a dentist, a successful businessman and a vet. For the last mentioned, however, it wasn’t going to be easy.
Chapter Four
It’s Not the Leaving of Liverpool that Grieves Me
Even at a young age I was aware that mine was a polluted and over-crowded corner of the world. Once past Liverpool and its satellites—Runcorn with its acrid pools of alarmingly coloured chemicals, St Helens with its vast graveyard, Birkenhead with its dilapidated shipbuilding industry—real countryside unfolded. My parents regularly escaped at weekends to North Wales. As we drove West, the flat land became hilly, the traffic lightened and the air smelt cleaner. Soon we were in mountainous country and even then I knew, such had been the conditioning by my parents, that I would always seek remote places away from crowds and pollution, and preferably amongst mountains. My Uncle John was not an exception; the Hicks’ family line had had a long love affair with mountains.
At home we had a large selection of books, amongst which were a considerable number devoted to mountaineering. I consumed these avidly, particularly identifying with F.S. Smythe, a mountaineer who ably communicated his passion for the hills. I found that I also shared his fascination with maps.