Growing Into Medicine

by Ruth Skrine

  No other tree can rival that expanse of indented leaves, that crenellated trunk with its huge branches. My father had screwed two thick eyes into the largest arm that stretched out across an expanse of rough grass. A modern child, familiar with the metal stands of park swings, could not imagine the height of that branch with the swing so far below. Later, it was flanked by a very thick climbing rope, a trapeze and a rope ladder provided for the more athletic Biz.

  I would tie one of my ‘people’, a doll or a teddy bear, to the seat of the swing and push until I could reach no higher. If the person fell off, he or she was chastised – hard, usually physically with my hand or a convenient stick, but verbally as well. ‘You must go into the corner until you are sorry. Can I come out yet? No, you are not sorry enough. But I’m hungry I’ll miss lunch. Naughty girls don’t deserve lunch. You must stay until you are truly, truly sorry.’

  But the swing was also a place of escape, where I could pretend I was running away from home, where I could release those forbidden words, It wasn’t me. . . I didn’t do it. . . I hate you. And a place to drift, to see snow-covered mountains, rivers, strange landscapes beckoning to be explored. . .

  Daisy sometimes had to come to the end of the path leading to the tree, ringing the gong with increasing force, before the sound broke into my reverie. Then dust rose from the bare earth as my feet dragged to bring the rhythmic motion to a stop. When I eased my fingers straight, white indentations remained, relics of sustained pressure.

  Another important member of the household was the gardener. To him was given the unpleasant task of drowning extra kittens within a few hours of their birth. Our female cats had large litters. My parents considered they could find good homes for two by putting notices in the waiting room, but no more. Originally my father would use chloroform to kill them but when it became difficult to obtain the anaesthetic he delegated the job with relief. I learned that one should respect animals and treat them with great kindness, but kill them quickly if they were suffering, or if one could not provide them with a happy and caring home.

  Each morning, while my father was ensconced in the consulting room working his way through morning surgery, the gardener would clean his car. A concrete base in front of one side of the double garage had been built with a slope from each corner towards the drain in the middle. The detailed design was an example of the meticulous care my parents took when they built the family home in two acres of raw field. The house was also intended to be a base for their medical practice. They called it Green Gables for the grey-green colour of the tiles. I don’t know if they were aware of the famous book at that time but at least they did not call either of their daughters Anne.

  One of the other regular jobs performed by the gardener was to clean my father’s shoes. The high polish was an important part of his persona and dear to me. In my analysis I became enormously attached to the scruffy footwear of my analyst. During the five years we met, I only remember one day when they were polished: I felt deeply betrayed. All father figures should stay in character.

  The first gardener I remember was called Slaney. I don’t think even we children called him Mr although his successor Mr Harlow, one of Daisy’s many relatives, was always addressed properly. At various times, members of three generations of her family worked in the house or garden.

  It was Slaney who responded to my screams when my brother Arthur put a worm down my neck, perhaps driven to desperation as I trailed him about, asking questions and wanting to help with whatever he was doing. I must have been about five and had a horror of things that wriggled. I had been given a triangle of ground beside the greenhouse for my garden. Much as I longed to prove myself by growing radishes and cornflowers, the first worm that appeared would send me running to the swing, not to try again for several months.

  Slaney looked for the worm under my blue aertex shirt but could not find it. He carried me in to Daisy who sat me on the kitchen table and discovered it nestling under the band of my skirt. Despite her cuddles and reassurances my screams, which had started in panic, continued for many minutes. I had to make sure that Arthur realised the enormity of what he had done.

  Screaming was an activity Biz and I raised to the level of an art, although this was usually in the presence of my mother rather than Daisy. Anything my mother said raised the pitch and volume. Only my father, wandering into our bedroom to mend the light or embark on a story from his day, could stem the flow. He was not interested in the causes of our ructions, in the rights and wrongs of the case. He would capture us with the news that the floods were out at Christian Malford, three new puppies had been born to Mr Green’s mongrel or his ‘swag’ for the day was half a dozen eggs and a simnel cake. ‘What is simnel?’ I asked, knowing I did not like it but wanting to show I had recovered enough to take part in a conversation. Arthur bears witness to the fact that Biz continued her storms longer than I did. She was not only younger but has always had a more passionate nature.

  Perhaps we screamed with my mother because we saw her mainly in the evenings when we were tired. Or perhaps Daisy’s more placid nature forestalled such tantrums. Certainly her ability to be calm in all situations was useful in a doctor’s household. If the secretary were out she would answer the phone. One gentleman rang asking to speak to the doctor. She told the caller he was out on his rounds.

  ‘Is Mrs Hickson in?’

  ‘I’m afraid she is working at a clinic.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you can tell me, can my wife get up?’

  On another occasion a grateful patient wanted to know if the doctor would like a book for Christmas. ‘Oh, he has plenty of books,’ was her reply. An understandable response in view of the fact that she had to dust them all.

  All memory is story. We are selective in what and how we remember, changing the truth, whatever that may have been, as we relive our experiences. Some of these ‘Daisy stories’ are the product of family folklore. She could be irritating but we loved her and she was a part of us all.

  It seems strange, in view of my ferocious play with my dolls, that during my entire childhood no adult ever raised a hand to me. What punishment I remember was being sent to my bedroom or the threat of a treat removed. Once, Arthur and I turned on the bath taps and got distracted by a pillow fight. The bath overflowed. We emerged covered in feathers to find the water leaking out under the door and making its way down the stairs. The ceiling of the sitting room below had to be replastered. We were told we would not go to the pantomime that year, but when the time came the threat was not upheld.

  So forgiving was the atmosphere that I never consciously felt the discipline to be severe. However Jenny, my second cousin and my best friend for ever and ever, who will play an important part throughout this memoir, was deeply shocked when my mother woke us from sleep one evening to tidy the boothole. The idea of shattering that silence which seeps through a house after the children are asleep, was something her mother would never have considered. We were nine or ten at the time but Jenny, who was always fond of my mother, has remained surprised by that act to this day.

  Four years my senior, my brother Arthur seldom misbehaved unless I led him astray. He must have found it a trial to have such a devoted sister. He spent much of his time in silence, designing and making things. I was not good with my hands, or interested in how things worked. Indeed, I was not interested in things or facts at all – only in the feelings of those around me. One of the excitements of writing in my later years has been to discover that I need a modicum of facts, that it can be fun to track them down. In those early days all I wanted was to make people happy and to make them like me, especially Arthur and my father.

  To this end I would spend hours standing in cold garages staring into the bowels of car engines. I would nod as my father explained the pistons, spark plugs and distributor. In keeping with his passionate belief that girls were of equal value to boys, he wanted me to understand the workings of all things mechanical. To please him I pretended to listen, fidgeting
my cold toes inside lace-up shoes.

  As the months and weeks of 1939 passed by, I had little awareness of the gravity of the world situation. Jenny was sent to stay with us for six months. She lived in London with her physician father and artistic mother (my father’s first cousin) who noticed she was frightened by the talk of bombs and invasions. Everyone agreed that she needed some time in the country.

  Within days we had an imaginary riding school and were cantering our ponies to the swing and stabling them in the garage as soon as my parents’ car had gone out. Later she went to Canada with her mother and three siblings. Our friendship had that deep solidity that can survive long periods of separation, the worst of which is her present Alzheimer’s disease.

  But rumours of war began to penetrate even my sheltered life. Each day my father would arrive at lunch with the news that someone else had given up hope now. . . Mr Smith at the garage, Mrs Palmer who had a son in the civil service so she should know, Professor Treeby who was retired but spoke and read German fluently. I hardly bothered to listen and somehow my parents managed to hide their anxiety. My mother’s discussion about a possible new car held more interest for us children.

  Everyone remembers what he or she was doing on 3 September 1939. As 11 o’clock neared, Daisy was in the kitchen listening to the news on a speaker connected to the radio in the sitting room by an extension wire. Arthur had a small portable wireless and the governess was keeping Biz out of the way. I was sitting in a high-backed chair in the sitting room with my parents. It stood on one side of a handcrafted fireplace, the bricks chosen for their particular terracotta patina, in front of the piano and an enormous standard lamp with a shade painted by a talented aunt. It depicted a deer, starting with its birth and following its life cycle as you walked round the light.

  My perch was not particularly comfortable. Although padded, it was not exactly an easy chair. I sat very upright. My father was in his big chair, the one with wooden arms, carved round the edges into a pattern where half moons appeared to have been gouged out, leaving raised, smoothed rectangles separated by narrower indentations. My mother was in her usual place on what she called the chesterfield, a sofa in today’s language, next to the fire.

  While the Prime Minister was speaking I did not realise it was a declaration of war. I merely thought, ‘Oh, Mr Chamberlain has given up hope now.’

  When he reached the end my father got to his feet and switched off the set. The silence hung curdled in the room before my mother cried out, ‘I’ll have that car. I’ll need it.’

  2

  My Mother

  One day as I was lying on the couch in my analyst’s room I found myself reliving the sense of being shattered into tiny pieces when my mother shouted – that feeling that could be soothed by feeling a sharp edge against my palm.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said my analyst, ‘it is like a singer who strikes a note so exactly in tune with the inner vibrations of a glass that it shatters.’

  I lay still, a feeling of warmth seeping through my body. Could I have had that kind of resonance with her? There were no words then or now to describe the feeling of relief that some part of me might have been in tune with her rather than being for ever discordant and therefore not good enough. It was a turning point in my life.

  While introducing the reader to some of the significant others of my early childhood I have deliberately kept my mother in the shadows. She was not the lurking kind. Both in herself, and in my memory, she will overwhelm the others if she is not given some separate space.

  Joan Whitelock was born in 1899 to a Birmingham solicitor. Her mother, my grandmother, had intense, twinkling blue eyes and was loved by men of all ages – and by me. She was known as Mum’s Mum to her grandchildren. My mother would have considered any form of address such as mummy, granny, nanny both sissy and lower class. For someone who had great sympathy for the communist party during much of her life, my mother had a surprisingly well-developed feel for the nuances of the English class system.

  Her hair always fell to her waist. As a child she was expected by her Edwardian mother to wear it loose, which she hated as it got caught in the twigs and branches of her favourite climbing trees. After her death I found some letters from her father addressed to ‘Dear Johnny’. I never knew she had been called Johnny. Perhaps her parents gave out mixed messages about the sort of person she should be. Being a family with strong feelings about the continuation of the name, I suspect they were disappointed when she was not the boy for whom they had to wait another eighteen years. That boy, my much beloved Uncle Miles, did not die until the end of 2011. He grew to appreciate his sister Joan. Not long ago he told me she was a passionate woman. Until that moment I had not attached that adjective to her, using instead words like strong-willed, fervent and fierce.

  But yes, she was passionate, she loved and hated passionately and held to her beliefs with unwavering passion, the most strident being her atheism. Always despising hypocrisy, she told me that her hatred crystallised during the First World War. It had been reported that at the beginning the padres were not sent into the trenches but kept behind the lines. She thought this was a cowardly cop-out. Two young men of whom she was fond were killed in the early months and she believed the church, while preaching self-sacrifice, was a sham.

  Her hatred reached paranoid heights. White was anathema to her as being the virginal choice of brides who were, in the main, not virgins. She would plant no white flowers in her garden. One of the most important moments of my life was the only time I defied her: over my own wedding. She had bought me a pale blue dress with a little jacket and presumed I would be married in a registry office. Unfortunately I had fallen in love with the only son of a very conventional family.

  ‘You can’t possibly want to parade through some church in white,’ my mother said. ‘But you must do as you want.’

  ‘Of course you must want a lovely white wedding with everyone wishing you well,’ my future mother-in-law cooed. ‘But it is your day; you must do what you want.’

  I did not care what sort of wedding I had. All I wanted, as usual, was to make everyone happy. That was impossible. Daisy, who by then had lived with us for almost twenty years, was expecting a lovely party at Green Gables and felt personally deprived. In contrast, I had known all my life that my mother would not be at my wedding. I accepted the fact – but her inability to understand my position when the time came was hurtful. In the event I decided that she would forgive me in time, but I did not want to start my marriage by alienating the family of my future husband.

  Jenny’s mother offered to host it for me and I walked down the isle of a church in London wearing a long white dress. My father paid for everything and gave me away, dressed in the obligatory morning suit. From the start of the discussions he had managed to support me without wasting energy arguing with my mother. We children believed for many years that she bullied him, but my wedding was just one of the occasions when he cared enough to stand firm and take no notice of her passions. Biz and Jenny were bridesmaids in what now appears to be hideous scarlet satin. During the ceremony my mother took Daisy’s spaniel dog in her car to look for the source of the Thames.

  My belief that she would forgive me was mistaken. In the year before she died she was still writing in her diary that she could not understand why I had chosen to be married in that way and that she would never forgive the woman who helped me to such a disgusting show and so much wasted money.

  I can now take some pride in the steadfast way she held to her convictions, although my friends are baffled and shocked by the story. If she were alive, my mother would be horrified to see the lavish weddings of the twenty-first century, especially when so many marriages fail despite the money spent. For my part, I envy the choices that are more widely available. No one was upset when my American niece Tiki was married on an isolated island, the only witnesses being the officiating officer and a couple of strangers who happened to be passing.

  My mother’s reaction to my
wedding was the latest incident in the long-standing battle about her own. Joan did not want to get married in church but family pressure was so great that she gave in, saying she would do so if she could do everything else her own way. She chose to be married at 8 o’clock in the morning wearing what she always called a tweed coat and skirt. When I found a picture after her death I discovered it was in fact a grey striped affair, rather smart. Miles remembers riding his bicycle, together with his parents on theirs, across the cricket pitch to the church in the village of Whitchurch, near Reading, where they lived. He was six years old at the time and played trains in the aisle during the brief service. Afterwards he was allowed to ride home to the family breakfast in the dickey, the space that opened at the back of my father’s precious two-seater car.

  Joan had gone out of her way to accommodate her parents but in so doing she felt she had compromised her beliefs. She was furious when she discovered that her mother had sent pieces of wedding cake in the traditional small silver boxes to their friends and acquaintances. A marriage was a private affair between the two of them and should include no one else. To support this she had only invited her immediate family, whereas my father had a larger contingent. My grandparents found the exclusion of their friends hard to forgive. I fear that for them too my wedding opened old wounds, though my grandmother valiantly stood in for her daughter in the photos.

  Despite her disagreement over anything that involved the church, Joan adored her parents, especially her father, known to everyone as D. This was a shortening of the nick-name Diddles, which I believe was given him by my mother’s sister. She was a few years younger than Joan and at one time she rode a child’s scooter round their garden and became known as Scoot or Cooty for the rest of her life. Artistic and a bit fey, she was never able to hold down a job for long. She loved singing and play-acting and I was acutely embarrassed when she wanted me to join her in performing in front of the family and neighbours. I think D found her a trial and perhaps in consequence paid more attention to my mother. He often went abroad in the winter for the sake of his weak chest and on one occasion Joan joined him in Tenerife. Her memories of this holiday with him gave her intense pleasure, perhaps because at some level she was jealous of her scintillating mother and of their relationship.