Harry Stanley’s memorial stump, the concrete omphalos, was naked of flowers. For the first time since the killing. Nobody had remembered to remember: fresh bouquets on the anniversary, plastic and cloth florets in a tartan wrap the rest of the year. All gone: a black belt on the ground with nothing to support.
The little estate where I would meet Dr Peter Bruggen belonged to the Crown and was named after the designer of Victoria Park, James Pennethorne: official architect to the Commissioners of Woods and Forests. It was going to be tricky, to find one house among so much warm-red brick, fig trees, private paths with a choice of steps or ramps: a discreet enclave hidden between canal and park. Dr Bruggen was babysitting twin grandchildren. If I did locate the right door, sheltering behind generous plantings, sensible toys and Swedish furniture in picture windows, would I recognize the man? A moment’s chat at the Boas Society on the terrace of the German Hospital, an exchange of emails: was that enough? I was always confusing vice-chancellors with dentists, postmen with poets. Embracing strangers at gallery openings. Leaving spit-prints on the wrong cheek. Better to keep your head down, stay at home.
In the presence of doctors, I was comfortable and uneasy: I had grown up in a medical house with a GP father who never handed out pills if he could avoid it – and then, as often as not, used placebos. Anna did the surgery visits for both of us. I must be registered somewhere. As a workable hypothesis, I chose to avoid places where you could only have bad news confirmed. And would almost certainly pick up something unpleasant on the bus or from the sneezing suppurating mob in the overheated waiting room. Most of the ruffians from the poetry scene of the 1960s and early 1970s had become doctors of some stripe, in the forlorn hope of avoiding destitution by claiming academic tenure.
WORK STARTS IN THIS AREA FOR MONTHS: clancydocwra boasted. A fair summary. Work would start, be left off, status unresolved, for months and months and months. A tribute to the cult of interventionism. Strategic imperatives. City as maze. You can never take the same path twice. Red mesh, blue fence.
We are all Hollow Earthers. Clancydocwra have trenched, four feet down in London clay, as a hint that the surface is tired of its mourning tarmac. Cracks and narrow pits are dug, to locate rusting water-pipes, sleeping bombs, entrances to the underworld: a loud metaphor. Hardbaked mud-holes filling with autumn leaves. The compulsory chasm, shifted across the Thames, is the delight of commentators. Doris Salcedo, a conceptualist of international repute, backed by corporate sponsorship, inflicted a terrible wound on the floor of the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. It symbolized, the explainers said, the gulf in society, haves and have-nots, the obscenely wealthy and ultimately dispossessed.
City Hall plotters (who have lost the plot) and Money Men (juggling debt) are in total agreement: when you are in a hole, keep digging. To confuse critics, your hole can go the other way and climb towards the sky, the latest cloud-reflecting insult. A city of towers is also a city of deep foundations: animal bones, sacred artefacts, plague victims, lost coins, broken clay pipes. Reasons can always be invented for the ravishment of dull and ordinary streets, the felling of trees that might, in the next storm, crash across cars or ambulances. They do not speak of the true motive: the continuing search for the portal to the world beneath, golden lands warmed by a sun that can never be extinguished.
Surgeons – Dr Swann, in particular – were the custodians of a great secret. Just as Christian churches were often built on pagan sites, so I believed our local hospitals disguised points of access to profound reservoirs of memory. Tiled corridors and basements in which lethal X-ray machines were left to brood and leak. Outdated wonder drugs mouldering in disconnected fridges. I taped Dr Bruggen, the history of his medical experiences in Hackney, in the perverse hope that his sane and reasonable narrative would lead me to the clue I was missing. And perhaps to Dr Swann.
Coffee made, comfortable on the sofa, Dr Bruggen began with a brief account of his background. A cat stalked the scene, watchful and contemptuous. Mrs Bruggen had taken the twins into the park. The doctor’s voice, when I played the tape back, to check that it was working, sounded exactly like my own.
I was born in Burnley, a town in Lancashire. My mother was Scottish. My father came from Sri Lanka, he was of Dutch origin. They became general practitioners in Burnley. I went into medicine. I studied in Edinburgh. When I got my first job, I travelled some distance south. I was getting as far away as I could from my family. The job was in Orsett, Essex. House physician. A six-month job.
At the end of that period I looked in the British Medical Journal and spotted something worthwhile in Hackney. I applied. This was July 1958. I qualified in November ’57.
The new job was in the Hackney Hospital. I thought it was in Amhurst Road, but Amhurst Road doesn’t look right on the map. It’s the one out there beyond the Homerton Hospital. Homerton High Street? The phone number was double 5, double 5. The building is still there, but it’s not a hospital any more.
I remember there was a lovely archway you drove through to reach a courtyard. I went for an interview and got the job, houseman. I had no knowledge whatsoever of Hackney prior to this. I lived in the hospital. I was very excited to be in any London hospital – though Hackney wasn’t a smart one. I was very nervous and quiet.
There was a registrar and a consultant. I remember the corridor to the right of the entrance, the operating theatre was off to the right. Upstairs there were two surgical wards, male and female. And these beautiful – relatively beautiful – medical officers’ quarters.
I had a small bedroom and a sitting room. Amazing luxury! I very rarely used the sitting room. There was a doctors’ mess, a dining room. It was big. And very select. A boarding-school atmosphere.
Hackney itself I barely noticed. Life was the hospital. And driving into the West End. And the station, Euston Station, when I went home to see my family.
I was very aware of the Town Hall. It was built in the 1930s. Going down Mare Street, there was a smell from the sweet factory: candyfloss. And that hospice for the terminally ill, St Joseph’s. One of the first and it’s still there. I looked at it and thought: ‘How will anybody be made aware of this place? I’m going to write something about assisted dying.’ I was certainly aware of Mare Street and Hackney Road. That was one of my ways of getting to the West End.
I went to church. I’d been confirmed in the Church of England as a medical student. Religion disappears so wonderfully! I’m a very devout atheist now. I attended a church that I’m still trying to find. My memory is of that narrow bit, by St John’s Church, and then striking off, further to the left. I remember communion on Sunday morning. The church had been painted, it had a dome. I can’t find it. Maybe the whole business was total fantasy. There are so many excuses to wander this area.
My Hackney Hospital experience was of local people and run-of-the-mill surgery, general surgery. Not many knife wounds then. Hackney seemed interesting. I had the socialist conviction that the working classes were good and the middle classes bad. I tended to get keen on certain patients, I would befriend them. There was a young man in for something like arthritic pyarthrosis, massive scars. He insisted it was an accident. Absolutely insisted. He was a Communist. I remember him saying that he believed what Khrushchev had said, denouncing Stalin. He mourned the millions of ordinary Russians Stalin had killed. But he just believed it must have been necessary. I was impressed by that dedication. It didn’t make sense.
I was aware of young girls coming in, sometimes with severe abdominal pain. Was it appendicitis? I remember the registrar giving me a sexual leer, as he conducted a rectal examination. I felt very uncomfortable about this. But like the racism I found in my first hospital in Essex, I didn’t dare to mount a challenge.
A young man came in with a head injury, but the consultant wasn’t interested. Philip, the registrar, told me that head injuries bored him. So Philip pushed for the patient to be transferred to a neurological unit. The surgeon didn’t want to know.
I remember Stead, the consultant, shouting at me once, but on the whole he was good. When he did shout, that was nasty. He was strong and firm and decisive. I was surprised by how difficult some surgery was. Something like appendicitis could take two hours. I was impressed by how hard the surgeons worked and by how good they were.
Surgeons had such status. I called the surgeon ‘sir’. There was a patient of fifty or so, with breast cancer, and this was before the time when information was shared. He had a lump removed and he wanted to know about it. I had to say, ‘Mr Stead the surgeon will see you.’ I was with the consultant when he said to a man, ‘Yes, you do have cancer.’ The prognosis was good. The man was so relieved to be given a straight answer.
I had a sense of the landscape immediately surrounding the hospital. I drove around the area once, but I never walked it. I had a garage for my little car on Homerton High Street. A funny thing happened. The registrar was married, he’d got a house. He had a rather smart car, a tourer. The consultant got a new car, which was a Hillman – not the tourer. He was talking about his new car, as consultants did in those days, as we walked with him, in procession, to the parking place. Suddenly, he noticed the registrar’s tourer: ‘Whose is that?’
I went out with a girl who was a nurse. I don’t even remember her name. There was also another girl you might be interested in. She was called Gill. I think she was a staff nurse. She was beautiful. A proper Hackney girl. Her mother was dead. Her father was a councillor who had once been mayor. This girl had been mayoress of Hackney. I’m talking about 1958. The mayor was Labour, very left wing.
The other interesting person in the hospital was the pharmacist. A person I never met. He slept in the pharmacy. A strange thing to do. I often had to go there. Hospital life involved a lot of drug taking. My drug taking was based around stuff to help me sleep. I took chloral hydrate, which is a liquid. I would help myself. And I would sometimes help myself to amphetamines. It was dangerous, no question. I was certainly dependent on sleeping things.
Years later, 1962 or ’63, I went into psychotherapy. I was then in a psychiatric hospital, near Croydon. My course leader, who was an Indian, confronted me, in a very gentle way, about my own personality. He said, ‘Look, if you’re going to do this, you’ve got to have some therapy yourself. Your personality is getting in the way.’
I went into therapy with someone who used LSD. We used LSD in the hospital. I took LSD in therapy and it was wonderful. One of the things that evolved from that experience was that I stopped taking drugs. I was walking around with a little phial of amphetamines, a phial of codeine. Codeine in case I got diarrhoea. Amphetamines for a boost. Even if I didn’t take it, it was there.
Very many nights I took chloral hydrate to help me sleep. I remember my mother being worried about this. I went into a drug trial and I noticed strange side effects. I was getting everything I needed from the pharmacy in the Hackney Hospital. I was quite obsessed with cleanliness. I washed my face before I went to bed. And I remember – I didn’t wear glasses – washing my face and feeling my hands tingle.
I got in touch with the drug company and I met one of the reps. They used to come around hospitals pushing drugs on us. They were interested in what I had to say. Would I be willing to have a very small drug trial? They gave me things that looked exactly the same. I couldn’t tell what they were. I knew some of them were dummies. Some were sodium amytal. One time I’d got a terrible hangover, so I recognized that. I took two of each and noted its effect. I couldn’t tell the difference. That convinced me that I was into a psychological dependency rather than a physiological one. That helped me to come off.
I started with drugs as a medical student. We bought what we needed from the chemist, nobody seriously challenged us. A little bit of a pause sometimes, then: ‘Oh, a medical student.’
One night in the pharmacy at Hackney, I was getting something for one of the patients and I heard a noise, snort snort. There he was, the pharmacist, lying on top of one of the benches, sound asleep. It was the only time I ever set eyes on the man. It is very strange what goes on in hospitals at night.
Doctors and drugs. Doctors and alcohol. My father drank sherry, whisky and also took drugs. For backache, severe pain. The police hushed it up, he was the police surgeon.
Hospitals ran on alcohol. Beer was given to the men, the patients. They were prescribed Guinness. When Philip the registrar collected the ration, there were always two extras. He and I would have a Guinness.
At Christmas there was a lot of alcohol on the ward. I was on duty and was offered drink. ‘Would you like a glass of sherry or a beer? Or would you prefer a sniff of Dr So-and-so’s breath?’
In Orsett one of the consultants got a package of amphetamines every time he came in, from the sister. Another consultant was always driven to the hospital and collected by his wife. We assumed he had no licence.
None of this was news, my father was a police surgeon. I’d heard the stories. After what he’d seen as a medical student in Aberdeen, a young doctor in London, my father didn’t drink. But Dr Bruggen’s account confirmed my sense of those hospitals on the hill as being lit up, windows burning in the night. The agreement is, when you put yourself in the hands of surgeons or, broken in mind, are committed to a locked ward: the world is an hallucination. Take the curse off reality. Hospitals factor a dark poetic of abuse, institutionalization: chemical reward. Pain creeps over those high walls, through insecure gates, into the city. Down the slope towards the Matchbox Toys Factory, the River Lea and Hackney Marshes.
The territory into which old Swanny had disappeared. Drug Argonaut. Vagrant. Keeper of secrets.
‘Did you ever come across a certain Dr Swann? He was at the German Hospital. And possibly the Mothers’ Hospital in Clapton. He used to stitch up the Kray gang. With bulldog clips, masking tape and a shot of brandy. They called him “The Vet”. The last anyone heard of Swanny was as a kind of caretaker in the bowels of the Children’s Hospital in Hackney Road: after it closed down. He may be there still.’
‘Swann? Sorry. The hospitals are familiar. It must have been after my time.’
In the late 1950s I went to the Mothers’ Hospital in Clapton Road. It was amazing. This was my first experience of real fatigue. My job was sewing up. The deliveries were done by midwives, we were just hanging around. With Caesarean sections, an anaesthetist was brought in. Also assisting at forceps or delayed births would be the registrar.
By far the worst incident seemed at the time to be perfectly straightforward. I was only a bystander. The baby got stuck in some way and we were called down, myself and the registrar. He was putting on forceps. We got an anaesthetist in. It was getting very fraught, we were tense. The registrar said something to the woman in a loud voice. And she said, ‘Don’t shout at me.’ And died. We were in real shock. We didn’t know how to deal with it. The patient was dead. And the baby of course. We didn’t bother about the baby.
The husband was outside. The registrar got in touch with the consultant. Who was called Gladys Dobbs. A high-powered lady, very efficient, very well dressed. She came in very quickly and just took over. I saw the consultants as being the ones who grasp nettles. The terrible thing is that we never had any debriefing, no discussion. We were left in the dark.
The patients in those days knew very little, they were given a bath and an enema. Some consultants gave them an immediate injection of morphine or pethidine. Others said, ‘Don’t.’
Nobody went through it as natural childbirth, without drugs. Mothers were given, on arrival, even if they were too far gone for an enema, an injection.
I remember a black woman. There weren’t very many black women at that time. Not as patients. This woman started to bleed and it didn’t stop. We couldn’t stop it. The registrar did all the right things. She died.
The worst ever thing was the dead baby. Not a stillborn baby, that’s all right. It’s shocking, really shocking. But this one was dead and we had to get it out. There are instruments lik
e pruning shears, used for cutting, so that the shoulders come out. You do manage it. That was the most horrendous thing I ever experienced.
I switched to paediatrics. The interview was at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney Road. But the first job was in Shadwell. The hospital was founded by a tea-planter who had made his fortune in India and who was very concerned about the London poor. He died before it was up and running. At the age of twenty-nine.
The hospital was a lovely environment. The first time I ever had a girl in my room somebody knocked on the door. The nurses’ rooms had outside stairs. All my girlfriends were from inside the medical community.
We were institutionalized. I had my laundry done. There was a maid who kissed me in the morning when she brought in the tea. There was plenty of sex. And drugs.
I met two people who had been ship’s doctors. My job was coming to an end. I applied to be a ship’s doctor. My Joseph Conrad period. Orsett, where I started, is right across the A13 from Stanford-le-Hope, where Conrad lived. We sailed to the Amazon. From Liverpool. Three months.
There was something very vivid about the Shadwell. When a boy died there, it was my first East End funeral. I didn’t go. I saw it from one of the upper floors, a kind of procession: black horses, hearse, mounds of flowers.
Then I moved to the Queen Elizabeth, the Children’s Hospital. From the very top, right above the front door, I saw the last three tower blocks as they were being built. I thought they were so beautiful.
At the Queen Elizabeth the rooms were tiny and I could actually touch both walls at the same time. But we had access to the roof. I can remember, one lovely summer, sitting in deckchairs on the roof. We had some great parties. That’s where I had my first girlfriend who wasn’t a nurse. I had sexual fantasies about other doctors. And I kissed, a single kiss, one of the most senior of the Shadwell doctors. Just before I left. An innocent kiss. Not even a mouth kiss really. I had a conversation with her, twenty years later, on the telephone, about a case.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Page 35