Against the Tide

by Noël Browne

  Each of those whom I had known and loved had disappeared and left me. I had lost the belief that I could ever again form permanent friendships or lasting relationships. My always limited capacity to believe in or to trust anyone I only regained much later, and with great difficulty. Yet I had known nothing but support and kindness from everyone. It was the suffering of others and of my own family which I could not ignore. I had learned to expect that each new encounter must end.

  On the loss of our temporary home in Worthing, after the death of Miss Salter in the late 1920s, it was my brother Jody who was to suffer most. Eileen was told that she also had advanced tuberculosis. I recall the evening on which she returned to the tiny single-room flat in Bayswater where we both lived. She threw herself on the bed and wept bitterly, not for herself I am sure, but for the rest of us who had been entrusted to her care by my mother. It was now the turn of my sister Kitty to take on that role. She has since told me about her hopeless trek from door to door, to convents, orphanages, institutions, hospitals for the disabled throughout London, looking for shelter and help for Jody. Finally in great distress she had to decide to have him admitted to a London workhouse. So was finally smashed Jody’s last vestige of a sheltered life, empty, miserable, purposeless though it had been.

  It was then, and in my own experience in hospital still is, the practice for surgeons, in pursuit of experimental material on which to perfect a new surgical procedure, to scour the wards of non-paying patients for individuals needing such a procedure. Such was to be the fate of my brother in the London workhouse. His cleft palate and hare lip greatly interfered with his speech, adding to the humiliation and discomfort of his hunched back. He was a pitiable, totally dependent creature. A surgeon decided to operate on his hopelessly inoperable cleft palate and hare lip. Jody died on his twenty-first birthday, in great distress and pain, following the operation. He had made one friend in that workhouse, a nursing sister. On the day preceding his operation he went out to a florist and bought her a small bouquet of flowers, in gratitude to her for her kindness to him. He is buried in a pauper’s grave in the heart of London, as our mother was.

  In September 1933 I passed the entrance examination to Trinity College medical school and began my course as a medical student. This was to be the first occasion on which, without any malicious intent, I ignored the dictat of the Archbishop of Dublin. It was forbidden at the time, if one was a Catholic, to attend Trinity College. My attitude stemmed from my experience as a Catholic in England, where the easy attitude to religion had been noticeable throughout my stay. Catholics there were grateful if they were permitted to live their lives in uninterrupted peace with their fellowmen, very much as do Protestants behave in Ireland. English Catholicism had none of the hectoring arrogant triumphalist contempt of other religions which I later came to associate with Irish Catholicism.

  A Trinity degree brought its own inbuilt disadvantages. In pursuit of employment I was to find that there were occasions when I was passed over in favour of younger doctors. I know of only one other Trinity doctor of my year who survived this boycott by the public service of Trinity medical graduates in Ireland, other than by succession to a father’s practice.

  Yet bigotry was not confined to the Catholic side. Mainly because he was our professor of surgery and we would later meet him in our examinations, I attended the clinic held by Professor William Pearson at the Adelaide Hospital. Just before it began he told us that he did not ‘lecture to Jews, niggers, or Papists’, and asked those of us in these categories to get out of his ward. He would not begin to teach until we did so. There were some African and Jewish students present. Shocked by the bigotry of this declaration we had no choice but to leave.

  Religion was to enter into my life once again in the North of England after I had qualified. The Superintendent of the Cheshire Joint Sanatorium where I had been working in a non-permanent capacity, declined to appoint me to a permanent post because I was a Catholic. This doctor, a Methodist lay preacher and a fine physician, appointed instead a young man with no post-graduate experience, but a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast and, no doubt, a Protestant. The pleasant irony, which both myself and the young Queen’s doctor enjoyed, was that he was one of the few Catholics who had studied at Queen’s to become a doctor.

  With the Chance family I was to enjoy a modicum of stability in my new home. Sensitive, compassionate, tolerant, and infinitely patient, Lady Chance had nurtured the merger of her two families; she had watched grow into adulthood her three stepsons and one stepdaughter, as well as her own four sons, and three daughters. She now welcomed myself, a total stranger, into her home, as if I were one of her own, and I was effortlessly assimilated by them. Any awkwardness that might arise stemmed from the projection of my own intense dislike of any outside intrusion into my own inner life. How could they uncomplainingly tolerate my intrusion on the privacy of their home life?

  It was this realisation of my intrusive presence that conditioned my own inclination to withdraw. One defence was to escape into my own bedroom at Nullamore. There was always plenty of reading to be done. With the breakup of the family following the death of Lady Chance, I went to live with the two bachelor brothers, Norman and Arthur, who lived in one of Dublin’s elegant historic Georgian houses, 90 Merrion Square.

  The maid, Mary, who cared for us, was a remarkable specimen of early Victorian domestic servant. She was a tall, heavily rouged woman, and wore a white frilly apron, over a full ankle length black cotton dress, dropping down over her black well polished heavy brogue shoes. She effected a deceptively demure and austere demeanour. As with a Grenadier Guardsman’s Busby, she added greatly to her stature and presence by a bulky florid red wig, carefully balanced on her head. The clever use of a narrow black velvet ribbon, puckered into the antique shape of a beautifully white, old-fashioned mop cap sat atop the wig. In spite of her demure appearance, Mary was an obsessional gambler. She bet mainly on horses, and had a wide knowledge of the skills of riding and racing, with a rich easy flow of betting jargon, reminiscent of a character in a Damon Runyon novel. ‘He started at threes, but by the off, was back down to odds on’, sounded strange coming from this uniquely Victorian vision.

  I later went into residence in Trinity College rooms, where I learned to cater, alas inadequately, for myself. My health was to suffer in consequence. A bottle of milk snatched from the doorstep, and swallowed running across the front square on my way to a nine o’clock clinic, was no substitute for a ‘full Irish breakfast’.

  Student life had not at that time entered the intensely competitive pressures of the present. The short terms, crammed with lectures and clinics, and the long vacations created an exhilarating pattern of study of man’s body and mind, in health and sickness, interspersed with the limitless permutations of recreations and pleasures to be found in Dublin. There was tennis, sailing, horse riding, squash, canoeing, skiing, and swimming.

  For the public school student leaving the cloistered order of a Jesuit college, university life was a welcome experience of personal liberty. There was virtually no limit to the scale of my enjoyment. At one time I part-owned a young brown mare, named Araminta, which I hunted with the Bray Harriers. I even rode, unsuccessfully it is true, in the old Calary Point to Point race meeting.

  With Dick Sandys, I helped to form the Trinity College Squash Club, build the squash courts, act as secretary, and play for the team. Reluctantly, and mainly for the companionship, I played rugby. With George Anderson, whose father was the formidable head of Mountjoy School, I borrowed a donkey and cart and, with a tent, in mid-February, set out to tour the Liffey Basin. I recall a week later walking home alone through the night, from the bottom of Sallygap Hill, over the Military Road, and down into the dawn, to Rathfarnham village, arriving home to Nullamore, just in time for breakfast. From there I took an early train into Harcourt Street and Trinity College so that I might finish my last important ‘half’ anatomy examinations.

  Very reluctantly
, to please a fanatical boxing enthusiast friend Jack Dennehy from Kerry, I might ‘fill in’ on the Trinity boxing team when Jack had an unexpected defection. My tolerance for such a silly and dangerous sport ended when, to my surprise, at the Jewish Boxing Club in South Circular Road, I knocked out a young Jewish boxer. His mother, present at the contest, was understandably distressed to see her unconscious son. Filled with remorse, I never boxed again.

  Oliver Atkinson, known as ‘George’, became a close friend of mine. In the early thirties, we joined the newly formed ‘An Oige’ organisation. Our first walk together, in mid-winter, took us from Ballinclea Hostel, a tiny one-roomed cottage, across Table Mountain, down into the Devil’s Glen, and across Glenmalure, to the An Oige Hostel at Laragh. This walk was important for two reasons. For the first time I learned to value the hypnotic attractions of the Wicklow and Dublin mountains; later I walked, rode on horseback, cycled, travelled by car or donkey cart over every inch of them, and came to know them as well as my own back garden. For the ill-fated George Atkinson, our long and lovely walk was recalled together when he was struck down, with a massive infection of the spinal column, by infantile paralysis.

  When I visited him at home, he was totally paralysed; his eyes alone signalled his pitiful determination to survive this disaster. He struggled on patiently yet hopelessly, helped by his devoted mother and sister. At one time, desperately, he tried to replace his now useless arms and back muscles by having himself strapped to a plain crucifix-shaped splint. He was intellectually gifted beyond the average, and a special dispensation had been needed to admit him into medical school because of his youth. His brilliance and talents were, in time, all squandered on his early death.

  Another friend of mine, Pat Martin, was the son of a country rector in Cavan. He liked to claim that the Martins had their origins in ‘good British yeoman stock’. He had joined the British Royal Navy and was a Pay-Master Lieutenant, but had been invalided out and had chosen to do medicine in Trinity.

  Pat had a small car, which greatly facilitated our enjoyment of Dublin’s entertainments. While we were both conscientious about attending lectures and passing examinations, we did not allow work to interfere with our indulgence in the bizarre nightlife available to us under the peculiar licensing laws of the time, the ‘bona fides’. These had originally been related to the exigencies of travel by saddle and horse cars, but a visiting English journalist once wrote of the wild chariot race of cars that now left the city as the pubs closed each night. Circling Dublin was a ring of euphoniously-named places, such as The Golden Ball, The Lamb Doyle’s, The Wren’s Nest, The Igo Inn, The Hole in the Wall, The Stepaside Inn. Entry was gained into a totally darkened establishment simply by whispering the magic word, ‘traveller’. These dimly-lit places were peopled by small private groups, earnestly talking well into the dawn. They were for the most part refugees from unhappy homes or marriages or money worries, or students such as ourselves.

  Pat had much natural charm, and could talk the cross off an ass’s back. He would wheedle a late-night meal for us in some sleazy nighttown cafe by temporarily trading his presentation gold watch or his superb black serge naval overcoat. Sometimes he might cash his cheque from the Indigent Protestant Fund through the good graces of John, the curate, or Davy Byrne himself, in the famous ‘back room’. On one occasion, while we had a fish-and-chip supper in Fenian Street, behind the old Holles Street hospital, I found myself remembering the previous night’s banquet at Nullamore — the gold plate, the gold cutlery, the museum-specimen Waterford glass. My appreciation of the kindness and generosity of the Chance family, which left me free to choose my own path without any sense of indebtedness, has grown and deepened with the years.

  Pat subsequently qualified as a doctor in England, and ended up back in the navy helping to man the guns at a Dieppe beachhead, saving the lives of wounded army and navy personnel during a disastrous Allied commando raid. He was awarded a DSO.

  Although it was becoming apparent that a war was approaching, I was lucky in being able to travel, although in conditions of austerity, through many countries of Europe. Many of these trips were by canoe, the most memorable one taking place in the summer of 1938 when Peter Denham and I travelled down the Danube. We had met by chance during holiday time at the front gate of Trinity and he suggested that I join him. Two years later, struck down by tuberculosis and confined to bed at Midhurst, I read in a travel book by an English canoeist that he was still wondering what had happened to the two young Irish canoeists he had met as they gingerly put their canoe into the water on their thousand-mile passage. Since he could see that neither of us knew very much about canoeing, he wondered if we had survived that ambitious journey.

  The main dangers came where the already powerful flow of water in the river was compressed upwards and narrowed by its passage through the narrow sections of the medieval bridges of south Germany and Austria, creating a torrential rush of water. With water up to and over the spray cover and around our waists, we found that it was best to hold our paddles horizontally while sitting still and await an eventual projectile-like exit through the narrow arches of the bridges. A good sense of balance and a steady nerve was all that we needed. We capsized on one occasion, but with the help of the lifeline, managed to manoeuvre the canoe into the bank, where we dried out our clothes. We lived nearly exclusively on black rye bread and cheese, and the incomparable Bavarian lager. In time we arrived at Vienna, where we rested at a pleasant swimming pool at Klosterneuburg. From there, folding our canvas canoe, we travelled by train to the medieval city of Prague. In Prague I was given attention for a dangerously poisoned foot, and a kindly steuermann gave us shelter and money, while we waited for money from home. Membership of An Oige permitted us to use the many fine youth hostels; more frequently we camped on the bank. We ended that enjoyable journey with a ticket home, otherwise penniless, in the cathedral city of Cologne. I had one small orange, and a bar of chocolate, total sustenance until I reached Dublin.

  My wife carefully kept the address of the Hamburg steuermann of the barge who had been so helpful to us in Prague. At the end of the war, with little hope, she wrote to that address, and offered him and his family whatever help he needed. Gladly we sent food parcels which helped them through the hungry immediate postwar years in Germany.

  On my return from one of these European trips, in 1937, Lady Chance gently took me aside to say that a telegram had arrived in my absence with the sad news that my sister Eileen’s last struggle to live had ended, at the age of twenty-nine. She had died in an Italian sanatorium near Lake Maggiore. As with my parents, she had continued to work on long after she should have accepted defeat and called for medical help. Because of the extent of the disease, no serious attempt could be made to treat it.

  In addition to her medical friends, who continued to visit her faithfully to the end, Eileen had been befriended by an Italian priest who worked in the Italian community church in Soho. He pitied her distress, her tangled family life, and her hopeless condition and arranged for her to be sent out to the sanatorium in Italy with which his Order had links. Yet even in Italy, where they had developed hopeful new techniques, she was beyond help.

  Just before her death the Soho priest enabled Kitty, now aged twenty, to visit her. It was to be a last meeting of pure torment for both of them, for they had always had a very close relationship. Kitty worshipped and loved Eileen deeply, and she never fully recovered from her loss.

  Kitty was a kind and gentle person who loved children. Despite caring for all of us, she put herself through teacher-training college. Emigrating to the USA after the war, she became a teacher in the United Nations School in New York. She did not share Eileen’s keen wit or administrative talent, but she was successful and happy in her chosen profession and enjoyed, for a few years, the deep and loving care of her dear friend of twenty-five years, Lois Coy. Lois nursed Kitty through her long ordeal with Parkinson’s disease, treating her with dedicated concern and self-sacrif
ice. Relentlessly, Kitty became a helpless, dependent cripple; I have never known greater love and dedication than Lois showed her. In 1980 Kitty died, following a fall that resulted in an impacted shoulder fracture that was not recognized in the hospital. In their happy earlier lives together, Lois and Kitty had planned to live out their retirement in the quiet American county town of Harrison on the Ohio river, at Lois’s family home. Instead, because of Kitty’s tragic death, these plans are no more. Lois flew Kitty’s remains for burial in the family grave in the cemetery near their home. In time Lois intends to rejoin her friend, and share their last resting-place together.

  My other surviving sister, Martha, two years older than I, is now retired, and lives in south-west England. She worked with an anti-aircraft battery during the war, and was invalided out after an accident. A deeply religious Catholic, she has always been shocked by my activities.

  This was a period in medical training when we could use the excellent apprenticeship system for medical students. The custom was for a student to live and work in hospital and gain practical experience. On leaving Trinity in 1942, I went to the historic eighteenth-century Dr Steevens’ Hospital, which had associations with the great Dean Swift. We slept in tiny bedrooms under the ancient roof in a place known as the ‘cockloft’. At that time a student served an apprenticeship in all aspects of medicine and pharmacology in the hospital, constantly on call on a rota system to attend at the wards and outpatients department. There were incidents of all kinds day and night, trivial or fatal accidents and sometimes suicides. One of our senior physicians, Dr Winder, was of the generation which still used the original wooden stethoscope, normally stored in a top hat, for diagnosing chest and heart diseases. The stethoscope was about nine inches long and had a flat wooden disc at each end. Understandably, it was a very crude instrument; if the unhappy patient had sounds in his chest which could be heard through that stethoscope, there was not much hope for his survival.