My mother had a wicked sense of humour. We had a French lad staying with us one of those summers when I was in Newbridge. He was with us as an exchange student to learn English. His name was Jean Pierre and in fact his English was very good except that he was very fond of using the word ‘completely’ for some strange reason. In a huckster’s shop down in Prosperous there was this elderly frail old lady known as Cis Cribbin. In addition to being very old Cis did not make things any easier for herself by having a lighted cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth from dawn until dusk every day of the week. Her hair, which otherwise should have been white, was now being constantly smoked into a streaky yellow colour. When Jean Pierre first saw this apparition he got a bit of a fright. That evening at supper he was heard to remark: ‘Poor Cis Cribbin. She is completely old and yellow.’ On hearing this mother took a fit of the giggles from which we thought she would never recover. Indeed, whenever she was reminded of the story later she would chortle to herself for ages. Her take on it was that it must be bad enough to be old but to be completely old and completely yellow at the same time was all just too much.
These years were the heydays of Muintir na Tíre, the rural organisation for community improvement founded by Fr John Hayes from Bansha in county Tipperary. My father was a passionate supporter of this movement and founded a Muintir branch in Prosperous at a very early stage of the organisation’s evolution. Today there is a line of maturing lime trees running down the side of the street across from Larry Keogh’s public house in Prosperous that still bears testimony to the work of those early Muintir people.
Muintir na Tíre held an annual conference called rural week. These for the most part took place in boarding schools then emptied for the summer holidays. They were innocent enough kind of gatherings, each evening ending with a kind of freelance meeting called a fireside chat. Here people were encouraged to bring up for debate more or less any subject that occurred to them other than religion or politics which were both statutorily barred. Apart from these there were the usual home-grown concerts and céilí dancing after the more serious stuff during the day. There was no alcohol available on site, something that didn’t bother me in those days. For a young teenager rural weeks were fertile grounds for opportunities to meet the opposite sex and it was at such a venue in Carlow that I first fell in love, with a girl called Phyllis. After that Phyllis used to write to me in Newbridge College on a regular basis, her letters arriving hidden in the pages of the Carlow Nationalist. All letters were screened going in and out of the college. When I wanted to reply to her I had to give my letter to a dayboy or non-boarding pupil who would post it from outside. A lad called Hughie Garret, God bless him, always obliged me in this underground activity. These love-letters from Carlow were very important for sustaining sanity during those otherwise trying times.
Finally then along comes our sixth and final year and I am made one of six prefects who are given minor authoritative roles to play like overseeing the picking up of litter. I share a room with Fergal McAuliffe on the top storey of the new wing. One evening Fergal announces that he thinks he has a vocation to become a Dominican priest. I never then or since actually believed in the concept of ‘vocation’ so this was all a bit odd. I mean if you think that you are cut out for the weird life of priesthood then that’s fine, just get on with it. But what’s all this about a calling from God and where is there any evidence to support such a concept?
Under the direction of the Coot we put on a version of The Pirates of Penzance and then, six months later, the leaving certificate examination is upon us. In this I failed Latin and French but passed all other subjects easily if without any particular distinction. There was no points system for entrance into third-level education in 1961 so the pressure to get great results in your leaving certificate did not really exist and certainly not to the extent that it does today some forty-plus years later. That said however, the leaving certification examination was a defining moment in the lives of everyone who sat it.
I still have a recurring nightmare about the leaving certificate. In the nightmare typically I have failed in Irish or in maths but this failure is not unearthed until after I have graduated as a doctor. Because of this I have in effect failed the leaving certificate examination and should never have been allowed to enter medical school. Therefore in effect I am not a doctor at all and will need to go back and repeat the whole thing again from start to finish.
I know that this recurring nightmare of mine makes no real logical sense but then is that not the very nature of all or at least most dreams? The point here I think is that there are some defining moments in all of our lives that are of such a magnitude as to switch on a recurring sleep thought that stays with individuals for the entirety of their lives and the leaving certificate examination is such a defining moment. It is nice to wake up from a nightmare like that and know it was only a bad dream.
* * *
Now it is the summer of 1961 and all is well. My long years as a boarder in Newbridge College and the leaving certificate are at last well behind me and this, combined with the sunny, warm weather, induces a certain mild and contained euphoria that I can still feel to this day. My father has not yet developed the rheumatoid arthritis that was soon to blight his health in his declining years. In the back of the Irish Times my mother spotted an ad from an elderly gentleman living on the coast road beyond Dalkey. This wealthy old man seeks a young driver to drive him around the continent in return for all expenses paid and a small lump sum. It is a good deal. I have never been outside Ireland before in my short life and this seems a golden opportunity. We agree to meet outside the parade ring at the Curragh race course where the Irish Derby is being run and, after a very brief interview I am hired, just like that. Would that everything in the life to follow were to be so simple.
Within ten days I am walking up the gravelled driveway of a magnificent house overlooking Dublin Bay. This place smells of money. My boss is a frail, thin, old man with a handsome face and thin silver hair. He seems to live alone but that is none of my business. The car is a Zephyr Ford in very good order and we travel down to Dun Laoghaire to take the mail boat across the Irish Sea to Holyhead. There were no drive-on ferries those days. The few cars are loaded on one at a time using a crane and rig. I am free at last. Free of Ireland, free of Ring College, free of the brothers and free of the Dominicans. Free. France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Alpine passes – the Gotthard, the Grimsal and the Furka – all lie ahead. First stop is Paris and the Folies Bergère where I see more naked female flesh than is perhaps good for me. The next day we visit the vineyards of Rheims and the First World War burial grounds of the Somme where my uncle, Richard Curtayne, was killed in action. I cannot find his name and the old man is rushing me.
There are however two not so minor problems. The first is that we are driving a right-hand drive car through countries where we must keep to the right-hand side of the road. I was not a particularly experienced driver at the time so travelling was a bit strained and difficult particularly when it came to passing out other slower road users. The second problem is perhaps more serious.
My boss and travelling companion is not a well man. He suffers from a condition known as tic doloreaux, or trigeminal neuralgia; often, though not always, a painful legacy of shingles or herpes infection. It affects the fifth cranial sensory nerves supplying one or other side of the face. It is more common in women than in men and rare below the age of sixty. Today it is a curable or at least a controllable condition. Then it was not. The pain comes in spasms. This, not unreasonably, made my elderly travelling companion edgy and for most of the time not great company. Talking triggered the painful darts so conversation had to be limited to that which was essential for travel only. I, a mere nineteen-year-old youth, was perhaps not the best at understanding all this and responding appropriately. Maybe the old man should have taken a nice nurse with him to do the driving rather than a gauche young fellow fresh out of school. I’d ha
ve brought along a nice nurse were I he.
However, all was by no means lost. Continental foods like deep-fried breaded veal or scampi were all a revelation and a delight to one who had just spent too many years in a boarding school. The scenery at times was breathtaking, most particularly on the Alpine passes. And the wine, served on draught in my bedroom in Cannes was the best I had had since serving mass in Prosperous ten years previously.
CHAPTER 4
Sing for your Supper
Why the Royal College of Surgeons, I am often asked. I have two answers. One is honest and one is not. The dishonest answer is that I had always looked on the Royal College of Surgeons as a proper medical school in that it is the oldest college of its type in Ireland and one of the very oldest medical schools in the world. Moreover, unlike a medical faculty in a university for example, ‘Surgeons’ only teaches and graduates doctors, dentists, nurses, physiotherapists and pharmacists. Thus it was and indeed remains an institute dedicated to medicine alone.
But while all of that may be true, the real reason why I chose Surgeons on Stephen’s Green was that I had nowhere else to go. It may be hard to believe it now, but in order to gain admittance to either the medical schools of Trinity College or University College Dublin in the early 1960s you had to have at least passed Latin and any one language other than English in your leaving certificate. I had failed Latin and passed only English and Irish and therefore, without further study, was not eligible for admittance to any other medical school in Dublin other than the RCSI.
They had fairly easy entrance exams, which I took and passed. Another thing that I had in my favour on application to the Royal College of Surgeons was that I was Irish and we as applicants for places were in a minority. When you looked up at the preregistration lecture theatre of the class of 1961–62, which in those days was just off the back hall onto York Street, the overall skin colour was brown. Then as now people come from all over the world to study at this medical school and in that first year there were only twelve Irish students in that class of over one hundred and twenty pre-med students. These young people came from some twenty-five different countries. And that was to be the first great lesson that I learned at the College of Surgeons in Dublin: that the world is made up of people of many religions, colours, and cultures each totally unique and all equally deserving of each other’s mutual respect. If there was any prejudice among us, and I can honestly say that I saw no evidence of any in my seven years in the place, but if there was any, those holding it quickly learned to leave it at home and keep it to themselves.
We in Ireland should be very proud of the cosmopolitan nature of this independent school of medicine. Over the past fifty years Surgeons has seeded thousands of doctors all over this globe bringing relief from suffering to millions of disadvantaged people. Nelson Mandela, on receiving an honorary fellowship of the college a few years ago, put it like this:
During the dark ages of apartheid your college provided places for many South Africans who were excluded by racist laws from attending medical schools in their own country. Through these doctors you are making an inestimable contribution to the healthcare needs of our people.
A lot has changed in the layout of the College of Surgeons since my time there and a lot has remained unchanged. Unchanged of course is the great Georgian facade that looks out onto St Stephen’s Green and that still retains the pock marks of .303 rifle fire it had to endure in the immediate aftermath of the Easter uprising of 1916. Forces of the crown were attempting to evict Constance Markievicz from the building. One has to suspect that they were not great marksmen by the way the bullet marks are splattered all over the place. This landmark building was then, as it remains today, largely given over to administrative and ceremonial function. The upstairs of this building contains many impressive rooms but few more so than the oak-panelled banquet hall where eventually I was to receive my graduation documents. This was to be one of the happiest days of my life.
When I first went to Surgeons, York Street was still full of crumbling and deeply depressing tenement buildings with dark and dank interiors and women leaning out of open windows shouting to each other from across the street. Children ran ragged, poor and too numerous on the street outside. The birth control pill was still a few years away and what I was looking at in fact were the final years of the Dublin of Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan, the Strumpet City of James Plunkett. We entered the college from York Street aware of the poverty around us. Then, as now, use of the grand front door up the few steps off Stephen’s Green was frowned upon. But if for example it were raining we would occasionally chance it and run the gauntlet with the hall porter Mr Cooper who was a big man and an ex-prize-fighter. You didn’t mess with Mr Cooper.
On the first day of my pre-registration year, September 1961, I was assigned to seat number 118. Right behind me sat a gentleman who in less than two years’ time was to become one of Ireland’s most notorious killers and a household name. In fact during those first few months in Surgeons I got to know Shan Mohangi quite well. Early in 1963 Shan was tried and convicted for the murder of his then sixteen-year-old girlfriend Hazel Mullen. But of course it was even worse that that. Panicked at the lethal consequences of his attack on her and finding himself with a body on his hands Mohangi tried to dispose of the body by cutting it up into little pieces and burning it in the basement of his apartment flat under the Green Tureen restaurant in Harcourt Street. It was this gruesome aspect of the tragedy that gave the story and Mohangi such notoriety. Murders were rare enough in the Ireland of the time, cutting up bodies to dispose of them was unheard of.
A story is told of the time that a certain gentleman visiting the Green Tureen was making his way downstairs. As he did so he suddenly encountered a coloured gentleman making his way up the stairs against him. The visitor stepped aside to let the coloured man pass, as he seemed to be in a hurry. The visitor could not help but notice that the other was carrying what looked suspiciously like a human head. Such was the fright that the visitor got that he ran out of the building and all the way around to Kevin Street garda station passing Harcourt Street garda station on the way.
The jury returned a verdict of murder at a time when capital punishment was still on the statutes in Ireland and things were looking very grim indeed for my erstwhile friend and classmate from South Africa. He appealed on the grounds that the whole thing had been a terrible mistake and we were introduced to a new way of dying called ‘vagal inhibition’. In evidence, the then state pathologist, Maurice Hickey, said that it was possible to inadvertently kill someone by squeezing him or her, even lightly, about his or her throat. In doing this one may stimulate the vagus nerve and this in turn can cause the heart to stop because the vagus nerve is intimately related to the heart, its sensitivity and rhythm. And thus was born vagal inhibition and Shan’s murder conviction was commuted to that of manslaughter and he was given seven years. He served four of those years here in Ireland and was extradited to South Africa to serve the remainder.
This sad tale has a redeeming end. In time Hazel Mullen’s mother and her brother both forgave Shan Mohangi and believed that he did not intend to kill poor Hazel. And in time too Shan became a successful South African politician where he now sits in parliament. And we back home were very careful how we kissed and cuddled in the back of the Grafton cinema. If vagal inhibition was all it was cracked up to be then one could never be too careful.
That aside, my first year in Surgeons was something of an unmitigated disaster. Along with many of my fellow Irish I found myself in a class of a-level graduates who had already studied and passed exams in advanced physics and chemistry and biology so all the stuff now going on around us was old hat to eighty-five per cent of this class. Consequently the two sisters, Professor Ethna Gaffney and Eibhlin Kenny, lecturing to us flew along at a cracking rate making it very difficult for the uninitiated to keep up or to take proper notes. The consequence of all this was that I failed physics and chemistry in the June exams
that year and failed chemistry again in the autumn exams of the same year. Therefore I could not advance and had to repeat the whole year all because of chemistry. What a bummer.
During that repeat year of 1962–63 I washed test tubes in the biochemistry laboratory of the Richmond Hospital, flew around the place wearing a white coat distributing lab results for all the wards, saw people in pain and others dying and got to know many of the nurses and other staff, with the smell of ether and glycerine and isopropyl alcohol ever in the air. These are the so-called ‘hospital smells’ and I love them all. This place is a courthouse now but then it was a venerable institution and the headquarters of Irish neurosurgery and thoracic surgery. It was here in 1847 that the first Irish surgical operation was carried out under general anaesthesia. Between operations the surgeons would go across the corridor to their lounge and smoke cigarettes or pipes and drink coffee. While so engaged they kept their gloves and gowns on to save themselves the bother of having to over-vigorously scrub up for the next case. These surgeons were gods to my eyes. I badly wanted to be one of them some day. Among them was Professor Colman Byrnes, a pioneer in thoracic surgery who, within a few months, was to succumb to lung cancer himself. A heavy smoker he died of the disease he spent his lifetime trying to cure.
Also during this fallow year I did little or no study because only chemistry stood in the way of my going on to medical school proper and I intended taking grinds in that for the two months leading up to the exam. Around this time I began to take a serious interest in Irish traditional music and singing. Good songs were very difficult to come by just at this stage. Nobody wanted to know about Percy French or Delia Murphy or Mary O’Hara or the tinker lady Margaret Barry, great and all as these people may have been in their day. The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem were on a roll in the US after their debut appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1961 but they remained practically unheard of back in Ireland for a year or two yet. They were about the only source of new folk material on record although the records were very hard to come by. My physics notebook contained some of their songs hurriedly jotted down:
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