Flesh Wounds

by Richard Glover

Margaret told me her husband, my cousin, was a little unwell but ‘tickled pink’ to hear from me. Her email ended:

  Do hope to hear back from you. I know that Colin would like to know what happened to his Auntie. I never met her but know that Bertha was very distressed that they lost touch.

  While looking into my mother’s background, I also grew more curious about my own origins – the ‘procedure’ that apparently led to my existence and the gynaecologist who had performed it. My mother, when describing my miraculous conception, had always been keen to mention the name of the doctor: ‘It was Professor Malcolm Coppleson,’ she’d tell anyone who’d listen. He was, she’d make it clear, a society gynaecologist of some prestige. Could he still be alive? If I really were the first artificial insemination baby in the country, he might remember me.

  I hunted around and found a phone number: right name, right sort of suburb for a retired medical man. After a couple of attempts, I found him at home, now aged in his nineties. His voice was firm and cultivated. I explained how my mother had always claimed I was created through artificial insemination, organised by him. Professor Coppleson listened and then asked the date of my birth. He seemed to be treading carefully. ‘Memory is a strange thing; you have to travel back through it,’ he said. ‘I’d like to think about it, to see if I can be useful.’ I paused to give him a chance to say something, perhaps to either confirm or laugh-off my mother’s story. Nothing.

  ‘So I should ring you next week?’

  ‘Yes, why don’t you do that.’

  I made a note in my diary.

  Meanwhile, I composed a reply to my cousin’s wife, wondering how frank to be. Should I spell out what I knew? Or try to tread softly, teasing out more details without saying too much? Oh, bugger it, I’ll be frank. Here’s what I wrote:

  When I first came to the UK – about thirty-five years ago, when I was nineteen – my mother wouldn’t give me the names of my relatives. I think she had reinvented herself in Australia as posher than she really was (!) and that was why she didn’t want me to make contact. It’s a great thrill, though, to finally have a sense that there is this other side to my family.

  The next morning I logged on and there was a friendly reply, revealing a flurry of relatives. Margaret and Colin had two sons, both with children of their own. Molly, the other sister, had given birth to two girls, one of whom was still alive.

  Of course, my main questions were about my mother. Did she really leave school at fourteen? Was the family really banned from the wedding? Did they come anyway, as I’d been told, standing outside in the rain, throwing confetti? I wrote back hoping to start a conversation with Margaret’s husband, my cousin.

  I again rang Professor Coppleson, who’d now had time to reach into his memory. He recalled my mother, describing her as one of his favourite patients, but said he was uncertain whether he’d helped her with artificial insemination. All he could do, at this distance, was confirm that the treatment was in use at the time.

  ‘I remember it all vividly, the wife there with her legs up, waiting, and then, in this little curtained-off area, the husband, the poor bastard, had to produce some sperm. I have a strong memory of the scene, but I don’t remember if we tried it with your parents.’

  At Professor Coppleson’s suggestion, I rang one of his younger colleagues, Professor Robert Lyneham, an expert in infertility. The fifties were before Lyneham’s time, but he was happy to guess at the method. It wouldn’t have been the turkey-baster of popular legend, he said, more likely a syringe and a cannula. They probably performed the procedure twice, on Day 13 and Day 15 of the mother’s cycle. The attempt at impregnation would not have occurred at the hospital, but in the gynaecologist’s rooms – ‘a private arrangement’. Assuming no complications other than an unwillingness to sleep with the father, the chances of becoming pregnant would be reasonably high.

  Later, after checking the academic literature, Professor Lyneham sent me links to various articles. As early as the 1930s – according to a piece in a 1934 copy of Scientific American – one hundred and fifty babies a year were being born in the United States using artificial insemination, with either donor sperm or that of the husband. The practice, it seemed, went back a whole lot further than I’d imagined. The celebrated Scottish surgeon John Hunter was the first to claim success – impregnating a linen draper with her husband’s sperm back in the 1780s.

  My mother’s claim of a virgin birth still looked possible, but not her claim that I was the first child in Australia to be produced by this method.

  It was then I flicked open a more recent article by the American medical historian Kara Swanson, published in the Chicago-Kent Law Review. Swanson was not at all convinced by the Scientific American article, and its picture of early, widespread use of artificial insemination. According to Swanson, the week after Scientific American published its story in the mid-1930s, the New York Academy of Medicine tried to talk things down. It issued a statement declaring that artificial insemination was potentially dangerous, not very effective and certainly not mainstream medical practice. Even in the forties, artificial insemination, whether by husband or donor, remained a ‘clandestine practice’.

  To quote Professor Swanson:

  The way doctors practiced artificial insemination, the strictures placed on patients, and patient access to the treatment were all shaped by fear of social opprobrium . . . the majority of doctors who practiced artificial insemination worked without any public admission of their participation in assisted conception, keeping their involvement quiet even as they urged secrecy on their patients.

  By the 1940s the two variations of artificial insemination were often referred to as ‘artificial insemination by husband’ – or AIH – and ‘artificial insemination by donor’ – AID. The latter was highly controversial – ‘adultery in a test tube’, in the words of one Canadian judge – and even when it was the husband’s sperm not everyone was happy. Again quoting Kara Swanson, it remained ‘socially questionable and subject to religious condemnation’.

  When the husband’s sperm was used, the usual reason was to overcome fertility problems – either due to the ‘barrenness’ of the woman or a husband whose sperm was ‘not vigorous’. The procedure, in the phrase of the time, would give the sperm ‘a three-inch boost on a six-inch journey’. What about its use for women simply unwilling to copulate? Here the literature is silent. Perhaps the problem was simply too embarrassing to mention. I emailed Professor Swanson and asked her about my mother’s situation.

  She kindly replied a few days later:

  By the 1950s, psychoanalysis was ascendant in the United States, and many doctors would have considered female frigidity to be a pathology that probably rendered a woman unfit for motherhood. On the other hand, providing a woman with a baby could also be a treatment for her disorder. I cannot comment on the extent to which such views would have prevailed in Australia at that time – in fact, I have not encountered any discussion of the practice of artificial insemination in Australia in the period that I have investigated.

  The circumstances of my birth, while perhaps not unique, are still considered by experts like Swanson to be pretty bloody weird.

  And maybe, just maybe, I was the first Australian case in this limited category: artificial insemination employed as a response to the mother’s unwillingness to have sex. I rang Robert Lyneham to tell him what I’d discovered. He replied: ‘I think a woman in those days would have to be quite brave to ask for it to be done.’

  I imagined my father’s humiliation, stuck in that tiny, curtained-off room. I thought about my mother, having to explain her situation. Maybe they did want me, to go through so much. Maybe I was a love child after all.

  Top of the social pile . . . my mother and father during their early years in Papua New Guinea.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I was hoping to hear more from Colin, my newly discovered English cousin. While waiting I decided to assemble as much as I could of both my mother’s a
nd father’s stories.

  Father first: He was born on December 7, 1923, in Blackburn, a cotton town in the north of England. The address on his birth certificate was 38 Lynthorpe Road, Blackburn. He was educated at the Blackburn Cathedral School. His father was a foreman on the railways. My father first found work as an office helper at the Blackburn Times, a local weekly newspaper. He joined the Royal Navy in August 1942 and was seconded to the Free French Naval Forces as ‘a liaison officer in sub-chasers’. At age twenty, he was promoted to sub-lieutenant, and then lieutenant by the end of the war. At some point he was selected to work on the Pacific Post, the newspaper of the British Pacific Fleet, published during the war’s final months, becoming the paper’s sports editor.

  When the title ceased publication, he was appointed a press liaison officer with the navy’s South East Asia Command, a role that took him to Hiroshima not long after the detonation of the nuclear bomb. In a box of his papers, I found a description of Hiroshima that he had written for his old newspaper in Blackburn, under the headline ‘Blackburn Man Sees Hiroshima’:

  My guide opened his face in a wide grin and spoke excitedly. His frost-bitten hand pointed out over the side of the balcony and he suddenly raised his hands skywards. I nodded my head to signify that I understood. It was not hard to gather what he was trying to tell me for we stood on the top floor of one of the half-dozen buildings that are the remains of atom-smashed Hiroshima.

  Nestled with the clipping were three photos Ted took while in Hiroshima, marked on the back in his handwriting: ‘Hiroshima, Japan, Feb 1946’ – about six months after the bombing. The most dramatic shows just two buildings standing in an otherwise flattened plain. Among his papers were also two tiny metal Buddhas, wrapped in a cotton handkerchief. He told me he’d picked these up from the floor of a temple in Hiroshima and, later in life, suggested all his medical problems had been caused by the radiation they emitted. I never believed that claim, preferring to blame the countless whisky bottles, but nonetheless found myself pushing them to one side of my desk, using the end of a pen, so as to protect myself from any atomic radiation they might still be emitting.

  He married my mother in late 1946, the scene captured in a clipping he’d kept from the local paper. The newspaper’s photo showed him in uniform, my mother looking glamorous, her arm through his. The shot was close-cropped, just the two of them, so it was hard to know if, out of frame, there were the weeping relatives my aunt had described, throwing confetti in the rain.

  As for my mother, the available facts were limited. Her birth certificate listed her as born on December 11, 1924 and gave her name as Alice Sudall. Her father’s occupation was ‘cotton mill engineer’. The address on her birth certificate was 46 Charles Street in Clayton-le-Moors, a town near the cotton industry hub of Accrington in Lancashire. This was about six kilometres from my father’s family home.

  Using Google’s Street View I could bring up images of both addresses. I couldn’t quite pick the exact houses, but the two streets looked almost identical. In class terms, my parents were closely matched, even in a country so conscious of tiny distinctions that George Orwell could famously describe himself as ‘lower-upper-middle-class’.

  I found my father’s passport, showing the couple’s arrival in Australia in 1946. In his box of papers, there were mentions of work as a sub-editor on Sydney newspapers – the Sydney Morning Herald and the Daily Telegraph – and then, in 1948, he was given the job of editing the South Pacific Post, a start-up English-language newspaper in Papua New Guinea, working under a managing director. He was twenty-five years old.

  At the time, Papua New Guinea was a territory of Australia, with an Administrator running things from Port Moresby, assisted by Native Advisory Councils. When my parents arrived, there were – to use the wording of the time – around 10,500 ‘Europeans’, 2500 ‘Asians’ (a reference, largely, to the Chinese community) and about 1.5 million ‘Natives’. The country’s geography – chains of mountains as high as Europe’s Alps, separated by deep enclosed valleys – created isolated, and sometimes warring, groups. In the 1950s around 850 languages were spoken. There were few roads outside the main centres and the coastal strip; transport into the Highlands was dependent on small planes operating from alarming makeshift runways. It was still common for expats, my father included, to have ‘first contact’ experiences, in which they would come across a village which had managed to avoid any interaction with Europeans. The 1954 Handbook of Papua and New Guinea, a copy of which I found among my father’s things, marks large parts of the Highlands as ‘unexplored’.

  The relationship between whites and locals was patriarchal. From the Handbook:

  It can be said that these people, by and large, are likeable folk, developing a remarkable degree of intelligence when given reasonable opportunity; and that, other things being equal, a happy relationship can be established between Western Europeans and the primitive aborigines of Papua and New Guinea.

  In the early 1950s, Port Moresby, the capital, had a limited phone service, only a few sealed roads and an exclusive club, the Papua Club, where European businessmen and public servants would meet. The Handbook of 1954 lists by name much of the European population, including Glover EP, Editor, of Kermadec Street.

  The bus service in Moresby, according to historian Ian Stuart, was segregated. A section of the local beach was reserved as a ‘European Swimming Beach’, and part of the wage of any ‘Native’ had to be paid in the form of food rations. Papuans were employed in local shops but did not wait on European customers – they were there to fetch and carry under instruction. In 1956, the first milk bar opened: Papuans were served from one side of the counter and given paper cups while Europeans sat on the other, sipping from glasses.

  It would have been a struggle to establish a newspaper. Newsprint was still rationed, printing machinery was difficult to source and the power supply was unreliable. Ships called about once every six weeks and a lone DC-3 aeroplane made a weekly trip between Papua New Guinea and Australia. Not only did my father have to find equipment under these constraints, he also had to hire staff. I remember him late in life telling me how he wandered down to the shoreline in Moresby and approached local men fishing off the rocks, offering them paid work as linotype operators – handling the hot, noisy machines which cast molten lead into lines of raised type. He smiled ruefully at the memory and considered whether their lives would have been happier had they refused his insistent offers.

  It took months to produce the first edition, after which the paper limped through its initial two years, battling bankruptcy. The original managing director left, and my father became editor-cum-manager. A little later, Steve Stephens – the man who years later came to my rescue – was hired from Sydney to join the staff, adding a fiery tone to the paper’s news columns. One historian of the period described him as ‘an aggressive and outspoken reporter’. A decade on, the staff had grown to thirty-five Europeans and forty-five locals. Solvency had been achieved.

  Years later, when Steve Stephens looked after me, he’d tell stories about those early years, describing the long hours working in the newspaper printing plant, a blazing-hot tin shed on the edge of Port Moresby. On one occasion, driven mad by the heat and noise, he had a furious row with my father, jumped into his car, drove the few miles to his house, ran up the front steps into his bedroom, opened the cupboard door, got his gun, loaded the thing and drove back to the printing room.

  ‘It was only when I was walking through the door with the intention of shooting him that I thought, “Better not.”’

  Steve told me this story in the spirit of ‘If I hadn’t calmed down, you wouldn’t have been born, so you owe me one there.’

  An article from Time magazine, dated July 6, 1959, discovered among my father’s papers, gives a good idea of the difficulties confronting the newspaper:

  Few more improbable newspaper locales could be conceived than New Guinea, 312,329 square miles of steaming, often impenetrable jun
gle and snow-capped mountains, populated by some 2,400,000 natives – 90 per cent illiterate – and some 34,000 émigré whites. Yet for nine years the Post has successfully managed to give a voice to an area where news once travelled largely by bush telegraph.

  It went on to describe the Post’s ‘termite-honeycombed headquarters’, saying they’d been flooded eight times during monsoons. What’s more, ‘Twice the composing room has been invaded by serpents – a ten-foot python, a rare and venomous taipan – which were pelted to death by ingots of type metal.’

  The author, Time’s Australian correspondent, described the paper as toughly critical of the island’s Australian administration and noted the way the Post demanded justice for ‘coloured readers’. He quoted my father: ‘Nobody ever got hurt by free speech except bad politicians and complacent bureaucrats.’

  I let the phrase roll around my head, admiring both its sentiments and its rhythm, feeling a surge of pride across the decades. The Time article is a tiny window on my father; it had been sitting in its box under my house for years without me knowing it was there. He’d kept six copies.

  The piece also mentioned an unusual feature of the newspaper’s success – some of the sales were to English-speaking expats, but others were to locals who used the paper to make roll-your-own cigarettes. This, six years on, led to a listing in the 1965 edition of the Guinness Book of Records under the heading ‘Most Smoked Newspaper’: ‘New Guinea’s South Pacific Post, which circulates only 5200 copies over about 183,500 square miles, is probably the most sought after newspaper for smoking and sells for 6d. per lb. for this purpose.’

  Many journalists boast about their inflammatory prose, but my father’s editorials were regularly proved combustible.

  As I sat going through all this memorabilia, I felt a mix of delight and then misery for how it all played out. How could a life begin with such hope and intelligence and achievement and then end as it did? Whose fault was that? His? My mother’s? That bastard Phillipps’?