Under the Microscope

by Dave Spikey

  Andy came good and turned out to be a top bloke. He entered the RAF as an apprentice armourer, I think, and over the years rose up through the ranks to become a Squadron Leader or something equally impressive.

  The downside of having family in the forces is that you hardly ever see them. Joy and Andy were constantly on the move as his career progressed and in addition to various postings all over the UK, they spent huge chunks of time on bases abroad. I would guess that since she married in the seventies, I’ve only seen her a couple of dozen times, tops. She has lived in Cumbria and Anglesey in recent years, but we still don’t see much of each other. She comes to some family celebrations, most recently Mum’s eightieth birthday party, and when we get together, it’s immediately like old times, like she’s never been away.

  Never Lie at Interviews

  I’D JUST STARTED the sixth form at school. I was studying Maths, Physics, Biology and Chemistry and I had a vague idea that I’d like to go to university to study medicine. A vague idea was as far as it got – because my dad had an accident at work and as a result I had to leave school and get a job.

  As you know, my dad was a painter and decorator (self-employed, no job too small), and he was painting the hands on the Town Hall clock in Bolton when he slipped and fell off. Well, it was half past six so he had nothing to hold on to – quarter past, he’d have stood a chance – and the doctors said he was lucky to walk away with two broken ankles. This meant that he was going to be off work for at least six months. We’d just moved house and my parents had taken on a big mortgage, but now there was no money coming in, so it was obvious that I’d have to get a job.

  My dad had noticed, while he was at the hospital, a sign in the Department of Pathology advertising a job vacancy for a Junior Medical Laboratory Technician – six O levels required, including Maths, Physics, Biology and Chemistry. He suggested that it might be an idea to apply because, once he was fully recovered, I could return to my studies and the medical laboratory experience might prove valuable if I pursued the medical career.

  And so it was that I presented myself for interview at Bolton Royal Infirmary in September 1968. The interviewing panel was daunting and comprised Mr Parker the Chief Scientist, some bloke from Personnel and Consultant Pathologist Dr Manning.

  Dr Manning was a very grand, old-school-type consultant pathologist. Immaculately turned out, right down to the flower in his buttonhole. Think James Robertson Justice in the Carry On films. He was also very shrewd and a great judge of character, which is why, when I told the lie in the interview, he knew immediately. Rather than challenging me on it directly, he played me like a fisherman plays a salmon, allowing me just enough line to keep running, but he was in fact slowly, inexorably and painfully reeling me in.

  The interview had actually gone pretty well and we were up to the easy bit at the end where they try to find out what makes you tick. Hobbies, interests, sports, that sort of thing. I made the mistake of lying to impress when Dr Manning asked me about my hobbies. It went something like this …

  Dr Manning: So, David, what do you do in your spare time? Do you have any hobbies?

  Me: Stamp collecting.

  Dr Manning: Philately?

  Me: Probably.

  Dr Manning: I’m a great philatelist myself.

  Me: (Smiling on the outside, but on the inside thinking, ‘Oh shit.’) Really?

  Dr Manning: Yes. I specialize in United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. Which country do you specialize in?

  Me: China.

  Dr Manning: China! That’s unusual.

  Me: (Ohmigod.) Is it?

  Dr Manning: Why China?

  Me: (He knows I’m lying.) Because my uncle lives there and he sends me them.

  Dr Manning: Whereabouts in China?

  Me: (Eyes pleading: ‘Please let me off.’) Er ... (Why didn’t I do Geography?)

  (Mr Parker and the bloke from Personnel are now exchanging knowing smiles, then Mr Parker leans slightly back in his chair out of Dr Manning’s eyeline and mouths something to me. I think I know what he’s saying.)

  Me: Saigon.

  Dr Manning: That’s in Vietnam.

  Me: (Sweating now.) Is it? Shanghai, then? Yes, that’s it definitely, Shanghai. I’m always getting them confused.

  Dr Manning: What does he do in Shanghai, your uncle?

  Me: (Oh, please be merciful.) He’s an engineer.

  Dr Manning: What sort of engineer?

  Me: A marine engineer.

  Dr Manning: A marine engineer in Shanghai?!

  Me: Alright! I don’t collect stamps!

  I got the job!

  Howzat?

  I MET MY FRIEND Sean, who would become a mate for life, at the interview; he was in after me. When I came out, he nervously asked me how the interview had gone, and I said, ‘Brilliant.’ Then, because I thought there was only one job going, I helpfully suggested that if he wanted to impress the panel, he should say that he was a stamp collector.

  Despite falling for this, he got a job as well. It turned out that they needed seven junior laboratory technicians at the time, so it wasn’t such a big deal getting the post as I’d thought.

  The following Monday, four of the seven started in the Department of Pathology at Bolton General Hospital and the other three – Sean, myself and a bonny girl called Yvonne – started at Bolton Royal Infirmary. We were allocated departments and my first rotation (we would eventually work in all the departments) was in Bacteriology, which sounded pretty exciting, but turned out to be a nightmare.

  I don’t mean a proper nightmare; not a crazy man in a black hooded cloak chasing you with two machetes and your legs can’t run and it feels like you’re wading through treacle, and now you’ve no pants or underwear on and you’re trying to pull your shirt down to cover your balls, and then suddenly, for no reason, all your teeth fall out! And now you’re hitting him, but he’s laughing because you aren’t hardly touching him because your arms seem to be made out of jelly!

  Not that sort of nightmare – but almost as bad because I found that one of my main duties was as assistant in the animal house, with responsibility for all the laboratory mice and guinea pigs. This was an aspect of the job that I had never considered; I’d never dreamed that even in 1968 hospitals still used animal testing. I love animals, always have, and so, as it turned out, this was possibly one of the worst jobs in the world for me.

  After being allocated my four white lab coats, pens, pencils and a chinagraph marker (common name: ‘grease pencil’) required for writing on glass laboratory apparatus and microscope slides, I was given the usual fools’ errand handed out to naive, gullible and wet-behind-the-ears kids fresh out of school. And so it was that I waited patiently in a queue outside the pharmacy department for eighteen inches of fallopian tubing. When I looked down the queue, I saw both Sean and Yvonne on similar missions; Sean asked the pharmacist if he could have a ‘long stand’ and she left him waiting there for an hour and a half, while Yvonne politely asked for a bucket of steam. Oh, how we laughed.

  Sean was on the receiving end of one of the best impromptu practical jokes ever when he needed to sharpen his chinagraph pencil. He asked where he might find a suitable pencil sharpener and was told to go through a set of double doors. He barged through – to discover himself in the mortuary, where Dr Manning was straddling a dead body, wielding a Black and Decker saw in the process of sawing off a cadaver’s skull to examine the brain.3 Dr M knocked off the electric saw and glowered at Sean, who stammered, ‘Have you got a pencil sharpener, please?’

  So, on that first morning, after my fruitless and humiliating mission to obtain fallopian tubing, I was given a guided tour of Bacteriology. First stop: the animal house. I was incredibly apprehensive as we made our way across to the unit from the main lab block.

  Unfortunately, my darkest fears proved well founded because as we entered the main door and turned onto the corridor, some object whizzed passed me at head height and I ducked instinctively and then
heard a weird sort of ‘splat’ noise. I turned slowly to see the current incumbent of my post wielding a cricket bat, upon which was a large patch of white and red. As I stared in disbelief and some horror, a splatted mouse slowly slid off the bat.

  ‘Watch out!’ the batsman shouted, and I turned just in time to see another technician drop a white mouse into the nozzle of a CO2 fire extinguisher and then aim it towards his colleague before pulling the trigger. The mouse flew past at something approaching Mach1, before the batsman played a haymaker of a stroke and missed the poor thing (there might have been a slight edge) and the mouse hit the suspiciously stained brickwork behind him.

  ‘’Owzat!’ the bowler screamed at me, obviously confusing me for an umpire. I just stared, open-mouthed, shocked beyond belief.

  John, who was showing me round, explained that every week we received mice that were surplus to requirements. We never knew exactly how many tests would be requested and so how many mice we might need. We had a standing order for a certain number – and any surplus mice had to be disposed of. For the last six months, these two technicians had implemented different ways to expedite this … but now I was in charge.

  Mice were used in testing for Gonadotrophins.4 Mr Parker and/or Dr Greenwood, a big genial forensic pathologist, injected the mice every morning, Monday to Thursday, in the scruff of the neck with differing concentrates prepared from the patient’s urine. It was my job to catch and identify each mouse from a batch of four (not easy, as most white mice look pretty much alike) and present it to the injector in a ‘spreadeagled’ manner by pinching it by the neck while simultaneously pulling down on the base of its tail.

  On Friday, the mice were killed and dissected and the uterus and ovaries removed and weighed. I had to kill the mice and I had to do it effectively and quickly, which wasn’t a perfect science. I had to drop one patient’s batch of four mice into a jam jar and then gas them, via a tube fitted into the cap and connected to the bench gas supply. It was disgusting watching them trying to escape the deadly fumes by attempting to climb the inside of the glass jars, before they quickly succumbed to the gas. Mr Parker and Dr Greenwood worked at incredible speed and keeping them supplied with dead mice in the correct patient order was a very stressful job for a seventeen-year-old who hated every second of the process.

  Sometimes, in the rush, I failed to administer the right amount of gas, and the mice would start to come round during dissection. When they did this, two things would happen: Dr Greenwood, who as it turns out was terrified of mice, would go berserk and run off to his office; and Mr Parker would go ape-shit because he now had to finish off all the dissections by himself, and so I would get it in the neck (be on the receiving end of his wrath, I mean, not the concentrated piss).

  Early on in my animal genocide career, I asked the Chief Medical Laboratory Technician (CMLT) if I could be excused these duties on moral and ethical grounds. He got hold of me by the throat on the main corridor, in front of staff and patients, and explained to me that this would not be possible and if I ever mentioned it again or refused to do it, I would be sacked on the spot, and I couldn’t let that happen; we needed the money.

  So, I used my initiative. Within about four weeks, I had a hidden colony of mice that had been deemed surplus to requirements. I told my bosses and my fellow technicians – who were in the early stages of planning a laboratory-mouse-based Wimbledon tournament – that I was gassing them humanely every week, when actually I was putting them in a large cardboard box hidden in the guinea pig room.

  One day, I looked in the box and realized a major flaw in an already heavily flawed plan – and that was that, mice being mice and doing what mice do, I now had twice as many mice than I started out with. Inevitably, something would have to be done.

  After much soul-searching, I realized there was nothing else for it but to dispose of them. The logistics of this posed an enormous problem. If I tried to gas them four at a time as per Friday’s process, it would take me hours because I reckoned that I had about 150 mice in the box by now. I formulated a plan. The plan was this: I’d get a Winchester bottle (2.5 litres) of chloroform and a roll of thick cotton wool, which I would soak with the chloroform and deposit in the cardboard box. Next, I’d close the air holes up. The mice would simply fall asleep and never wake up. Simple and humane, I thought, and so it turned out, as within fifteen minutes all the little things were well and truly dead.

  Next problem = disposal, and here I had another plan. Part of my duties was to take certain items of laboratory waste (let’s leave it there!) to the hospital incinerator – and so I thought cremation of the poor mice was the obvious solution. I carefully carried the box, the cardboard coffin, down through the hospital grounds to the incinerator and pulled aside the heavy door to reveal the furnace inside. I said my goodbyes, which took about ten minutes (I had given them names), and then slid the box into the blazing inferno. As the flames engulfed the box, I bent my head in silent prayer.

  It was then that the box exploded. Idiot that I am, I hadn’t figured out that chloroform and its fumes – being highly inflammable, especially when concentrated in a confined space – might react in this fashion. The incinerator spewed forth a huge flame of exploding gas and I just had time to put my hands up to protect my face before it hit. I staggered, dazed and confused, back to the lab with my hands badly burned, my eyebrows missing and my ‘Paul McCartney’ fringe smouldering.

  I spent the next two hours in Casualty, and the hour after that with Dr Manning, trying to explain exactly what had happened. I lied again, of course. He didn’t believe me again, of course, although I might say that my ‘chloroform and chlorine disinfectant bottles being easily confused’ was a fair excuse in such a short space of time. I said that I had mistakenly cleaned the sluice and sinks down with chloroform and put the rags and paper towels used in the process in the bag for incineration. Alright, so the nurse in Casualty freaked when she found half a mouse in my hair … but I feigned ignorance about that.

  And just when you think that it can’t get any worse … you have to kill half a dozen guinea pigs. We used guinea pigs in a test for TB. Dr Greenwood would inject a tissue biopsy concentrate into a guinea pig’s groin and then, after a period of a few weeks, the animal would be killed and dissected to examine for signs of TB growth at the site of injection. I only had to do it the one time (thankfully), but I had to kill a batch of the little fellas.

  The thing about guinea pigs is that they’ve got more about them than mice. They’re bigger, obviously, and cleverer and prettier in my opinion, with their own character traits … and so you sort of get more attached.

  At the time, the prescribed ‘humane’ method of execution of a guinea pig was by breaking its neck. This could be facilitated either by hitting it with a metal pole or by our laboratory’s preferred method: hitting the poor creature really hard on the edge of the bench. Just writing it again and picturing it after all these years brings home how absolutely barbaric this is.

  On the day, it took me three hours to kill six guinea pigs. I say ‘three hours to kill’, but if I can break that down: it took me five minutes to kill them, and the remaining time to psyche myself up into actually doing it.

  It was obviously very important not to get the guinea pigs mixed up, which would result in misdiagnosing patients. We had a Home Office book to fill in with all patient and guinea pig details. The guinea pigs would be accurately described, for example, ‘Abyssinian, predominantly white with black patch on right eye and rear right leg,’ or ‘Golden with white patch on head,’ and I labelled large pieces of paper headed with the patients’ names in the same manner, ready to accept the body.

  I must have picked up that first guinea pig ten times, ready to do the deed – only to panic and return it to its cage. You have to understand that in order to break the poor thing’s neck, you had to cradle it on its back within your two hands and press its two little paws down with your thumbs, so that just the head and neck protruded above you
r hands; so it’s lying there looking up at you, staring into your eyes with a quizzical look that seems to say, ‘What?’

  After two hours and five threatening phone calls from my boss, I knew I had to get it over and done with. The deed passed in a blur as I picked up each beautiful guinea pig and quickly smashed its head and neck against the bench edge. Once I’d done all six and placed them on their allotted paper, I turned away, shaking in disgust, totally traumatized.

  After a couple of minutes, I composed myself and turned to look at the pieces of paper – and discovered that four of the guinea pigs had gone! I searched frantically for them and found each one in turn, wandering dazedly around the benches, shaking their little heads and going, ‘What the f**k was that all about?’

  I realized immediately what had happened. In my panicky state, I simply hadn’t hit them hard enough; it’s understandable, I suppose, when you do something half-heartedly. I grabbed them and hit them again, poor things, and finished the job. All dead.

  I’ll probably go to hell for that. I probably deserve to.

  Blood, Spit and Tears

  THE ANIMAL HOUSE management formed only part of my duties in Bacteriology (‘Bugs’ as it is known in the trade – and why, by the way, would anyone want to work in a place called ‘Bugs’?). I also did a lot of work in the main lab, where we would receive all sort of human biological matter (and, believe me, I was really not attracted to a job in which much of the day’s work involved taking the lid off yet another pot to discover yet another lump of poo). The lab would then try to identify firstly which, if any, bacteria were present in said sample, and secondly which antibiotics worked best to prevent that particular bacteria’s growth. I saw a car sticker once, which said, ‘Microbiologists Do It With Culture and Sensitivity’, and I laughed out loud because culture to a microbiologist is a Wallace and Gromit T-shirt.