by Ruth Skrine
I knew what he was talking about and was only too glad I had escaped.
‘The appendix is a great mimic,’ he went on. ‘In a case like this the diagnosis is not too difficult. If it is tucked away behind the caecum it can be the very devil.’
We got home to find a call to the hospital. Here he let me scrub up and put on a gown and mask so that I could hand him instruments as he cut the patient’s hair and cleaned a nasty scalp wound, taking infinite care before putting in the stitches. As he finished, a message arrived to say he was wanted in a house in Sheldon Road. When we got there we found a boy, delirious with a high temperature and a very red, swollen ankle. My father looked serious, sent for an ambulance and rushed back to his workshop to make a splint to support the ankle during the journey.
The first of the sulphonamides, prontosil, had been discovered in 1935 and by the beginning of the war my father was using what he called M&B for infections. Penicillin was not manufactured till 1942 and I don’t know whether it would have been available by injection for the serious infection in the bone, osteomyelitis, that we had just seen.
When I was even younger I went with him into the maternity home in Corsham to look at the babies. But he delivered most of his patients in their own homes. I was about thirteen when he allowed me to watch my first baby being born. The delivery took place in a farm labourer’s cottage across three fields, where I got out to open and shut the gates, glad to be of some real use.
The birth was a joyful experience. For the first time I heard my father’s mantra, ‘Is it a little John or Mary? Ah, it is a Mary,’ as he looked at the genitalia. In the days before ultrasound scans and genetic testing the sex of every baby was unknown until it was born. To a relative he would say, ‘Put the kettle on will you? Mother could do with a cup of tea and so could I.’ If it was a first baby the use of the word ‘Mother’ at that particular moment felt poignant and apt.
The maternity home in Corsham closed eventually and a converted house in Chippenham, called Greenways, was opened in time for my own daughter to be delivered, in 1959, by my father.
The practice of providing medical care to one’s family was not considered unethical or even risky. Certainly, I would have trusted no one more than my father. He worked closely with the matron, a very experienced midwife who, knowing I was a doctor, asked me when I was in labour what pain relief I would like. I was in no state to take decisions, so after a pause she said, ‘A dose of your father’s tipple, I think.’ I did not know or care what it contained. Anything recommended by my father would have worked for me.
I suspect the magic potion he recommended was similar to chlorodyne, a famous medicine patented in the nineteenth century by Dr John Collis Browne. It contained an alcoholic solution of opium (laudanum), tincture of cannabis and chloroform. My father certainly prescribed it freely, often mixed with other agents from the dispensary jars. I have been told that in the 1960s it was available as a recreational drug, often with a special room set aside for its use. At some stage the cannabis was removed and the dose of opiate reduced so that my father complained the remedy became a shadow of its former self. However, when my sister started travelling, and then emigrated to the US in the early sixties it was still reasonably potent, especially for the treatment of diarrhoea. She took a bottle of the tincture with her. She tells me the dose was ten drops. When a favourite cat had a severe tummy upset they added two drops to a dish of cream. My father had provided her precious supply, probably illegally, and she used it so sparingly that when I checked the facts with her recently she said there was still some left in her cupboard – fifty years later.
As I was growing through my early teenage years the opportunity to share medical experiences with my father made me feel special, a need perhaps in all children with siblings. One of the happiest times of my life was one Christmas Day. By family tradition, presents were put on the windowsill in the dining room and opened after breakfast. The parcels were few by today’s standards, one each from our parents, perhaps two or three in brown paper from aunts or grandparents, and a small one from Daisy. On that morning my father asked us to wait before we dived in to rip off the wrappings. From his outside pocket he produced an envelope.
‘This is for you,’ he said, handing it to my mother. She opened it and found a book token.
His hand disappeared again and came out with another envelope for my brother containing a five-pound note. With the third offering in his hand he turned to my younger sister. ‘Here you are Biz, not quite so much for you as you are younger.’
As I watched her pull out a one-pound note my eyes filled with tears. I came next in the pecking order, how could he forget me? I heard his voice.
‘I have no envelope for you, Ruth, I have spent all my money. But perhaps this would do instead.’
I lifted my eyes to see him reach into a pocket inside his suit jacket made by order to carry his stethoscope. The parcel he produced contained a wooden flute.
‘You never told me that was what you were doing in London,’ said my mother, in a hurt voice.
I had been trying to get a note on his flute during the summer holidays and he had encouraged me. Without discussing the matter with anyone he had chosen one for me to have as my own. It was that reticence, as if his feelings for me were too private and important to be shared even with his wife, which still brings a lump to my throat.
His flute has a story of its own. He bought it when he was a medical student and took it with him to India after he had qualified and joined the RAMC. On the way the boat was torpedoed. Over the Tannoy the order came to abandon ship. He disobeyed and went below to collect his flute. By the time he came back on deck another ship had drawn alongside and they were pulling the men from the water. Because he was the ship’s doctor he was wanted aboard in good condition so they put him in a net and threw him, clutching the instrument, from one vessel to the other.
I inherited both that flute and another from him, so that when I wanted to start playing again in my sixties I had three to choose from. To my delight the experts said his original instrument was the one worth repairing and I played it for several years, until I changed to a silver one which was less sensitive to moisture.
At school, singing took precedence. The music teacher was inspirational, insisting with great ferocity that we watch her baton, a habit so ingrained that I bless her every time I play with a conductor. She made me leader of the choir, a job I relished. If she had taught me the flute as well I might have persevered. As it was, once I left school I only picked it up in a desultory way, stopping altogether when my husband winced and my dog howled, waiting to return to it when they had both died.
Making music with others is now one of the great joys of my life. I have few regrets about the way my life has evolved for I have had more than my share of luck. But I am sad not to have reached a higher standard of flute playing when I was young. Those who reached grade seven or eight in their youth seem able to return to an instrument later in life and regain their original standard. As I never rose above grade five or six I cannot hope to improve above that level, which is not good enough to play the first flute part in an orchestra.
During those years, when I was very close to my father, my relationship with my mother remained complicated. I believed that Biz was her favourite. Not only was she the youngest but she was more intelligent and her stories made my mother laugh with delight. I still winced at a sharp word. My mother knew of my sensitivity and tried to curb her tongue. ‘Ruth does feel her feelings so,’ I heard her say once when I should not have been listening.
My poor spelling has haunted me all my life. Children at boarding schools were expected to write home, usually once a week on Sunday. In her reply my mother wrote out my misspelt words at the top of her letter with the faults underlined. I am not dyslexic and during my psychoanalysis I realised the extent of my fury. The suggestion that my failure to learn was an unconscious expression of spite made a lot of sense. My mother had been trying to
help, only wanting her daughter to be able to take her place in the educated world, but I waited for her to be genuinely interested in my news, not critical of the way I reported it. My brother reacted to the same treatment by vowing never to write more than a few words in any letter and I felt particularly honoured recently when his Christmas letter ran to two pages.
In the holidays I mooched around Arthur in the nursery, which he had now been given as his own room, and in the workshop where he continued to make things. We rode out together on our bicycles, often to Hullavington airfield where we lay in the hedge and watched the planes leave and return. It had been opened in 1937 and became the Empire Training School in 1942. At that time seventeen different types of plane are listed as being seen there. No wonder Arthur was so keen to develop his skills in identification!
There was so little traffic on the roads that we were quite safe on our bicycles. Indeed the lanes were so quiet that my mother used to exercise the two dogs by running them behind the car for a mile or two. Gerda the dachshund got tired first and was lifted back into the car, while Bertha with her long Dalmatian legs could keep going much longer.
Daisy continued to cook for us all and run the household. In time, Arthur and I became irritated by her efforts to control us. One day we ran away. Leaving a note, we took our bicycles and went to the caravan. Arthur tells me that on our journey we bought three potatoes but I remember raiding the store cupboard in the van for tins of sardines and baked beans: not a very imaginative or courageous revolt. As the evening drew on and the light faded, I began to regret our bad temper and was relieved when my father arrived. He explained how dependent the family was on Daisy, how impossible it would be for our mother to manage without her and asked us to be more tolerant. Shamefaced we followed him home. When I read my mother’s account of the episode in her diary, of her belief that there was right on both sides, I realise how intensely she wanted to provide us with a happy home. She even considered getting rid of the invaluable Daisy as soon as her own medical work was no longer essential.
In a happier joint venture, Arthur and I visited our grandparents by ourselves. They owned a double skiff. Family holidays during wartime were usually spent in the caravan, parked in their garden, which was large enough to hold a croquet lawn, tennis court and cricket pitch. Our joint expeditions on the river were happy interludes. My mother had been given a punt for her twenty-first birthday so we had a choice of craft. She associated the stretch of water upstream from Pangbourne with her own happy adolescence and was relaxed while we were there. D, dressed in white flannel trousers, emblazoned jacket and neckerchief, with either a Cambridge Trinity College cap or a straw hat called a boater on his head, had taught us how to behave in a boat. One must not drag one’s fingers in the water; always pull in to the side before changing places; never have more than one person standing up at the same time.
Few cabin cruisers spoiled the peace, only the wash from the Salters steamers, plying up and down to Oxford, disturbed the smooth ride. I could scull by the time I was thirteen, feathering my oars with some skill and looking with disdain at people in tub-like rowing boats who chopped at the water in ungainly bites. During our visit we were allowed to take the skiff out by ourselves. Eating our picnic lunch on the move we got to the furthest limit ever reached by a family party, even with two strong men at the oars, going through Goring and Cleeve locks to the islands above. Over supper that night, Mum’s Mum quizzed us on our day. ‘We got to the islands,’ Arthur said, with a straight face. The atmosphere chilled as it was assumed he was referring to the Harts Wood islands, barely half an hour upstream. All through the meal I was bursting to let the truth out, for even my loving grandmother was looking disappointed. Only when we reached the end of the meal did my brother say laconically, ‘Oh, not those islands, the ones above Cleeve.’ Our backs were slapped, Mum’s Mum searched out palms for blisters and D poured a small glass of sherry, not only for Arthur but also for me. I had at last, with Arthur’s help, done something to gain his respect.
When Arthur left school he joined the Fleet Air Arm, a branch of the Royal Navy responsible for its planes. He had hoped to be a pilot but was prevented by his red/green colour blindness. When he and a friend visited me and Biz at school in Somerset, in their naval ratings’ uniform, they caused a stir for we seldom saw men of any kind. We were allowed to walk with them round the grounds, followed by the admiring glances of all the girls we passed.
We were an extremely protected group, never let out of the grounds unless we walked in a crocodile with two senior prefects. The main impact of the war was food rationing. We all had our own tiny pats of butter and jars of jam that we collected from a tray each day. Although the diet was nutritionally adequate we did feel hungry. As I stood in the queue watching the helpings of tart being served out, I tried to judge if I would get one with the extra pastry edge, or even better, a precious corner. Missing out felt like a major deprivation.
I do not remember ever reading a newspaper or discussing the war or politics, our only contact with reality being the red eyes of an occasional girl coming to terms with the loss of a father or brother. Our concerns were which house would win the hockey shield and who would play the part of Viola in the performance of Twelfth Night planned to take place in the sunken garden.
As my School Certificate exam approached, discussions at home about my future became more intense. One day my mother and I were sitting on the seat at the end of the swimming pool, my father standing by her side contemplating the murky water. I took a deep breath. Aiming my remark at his shoulder, not looking at my mother, I said, ‘What I really want. . . is to be a nurse.’
She exploded. ‘You can’t want to be a nurse. If you are going to work with people you must do it properly – as a doctor.’ She leapt to her feet and looked down at me. ‘No daughter of mine is going to be a handmaiden to someone else. That is not why we have gone to so much trouble to give you a good education.’
My father said nothing but I knew that if I gave in and followed my mother’s choice he would be happy. His ideas about equality for women included them training for a profession; nursing did not have the same cachet. My determination to make my own choice seeped away.
In my heart I have often thanked my mother for her intransigence. I have never regretted the decision, even if it was made for the wrong reasons. I was not called into medicine by some longstanding wish to heal the world. I was lucky that the need to please my father and avoid antagonising my mother led me into a profession that offers many choices. A surgeon does not have to be brilliant with people, for his or her patients are asleep much of the time. Pathology is even further removed from interaction with living people. On the other hand, general practice depends as much on the art of communication as on pure science. I enjoyed that field, and my good fortune led me to the niche of family planning and psychosexual medicine that fitted me particularly well. In addition I must admit that a well-paid job is useful, especially if one wants to work part time while raising a family.
The announcement of peace in Europe was expected on 7 May 1945. My mother’s account of that time forms the climax of her diary. She describes feeling drained of emotion, very different from her experience in 1918. Then she joined her father and roistered round the city, revelling with the crowds as the maroons went off and they all celebrated their belief that there would never be another war. But in 1945 she just felt numb, with no sense that civilisation was fundamentally decent. She was acutely aware of the state of Europe with its starvation and physical ruin, and the fact that we still had to fight the Japanese and Arthur would be involved in that battle.
At school someone had smuggled in a wireless and at 8 o’clock, when we were preparing for bed, we heard Churchill say that the next day would be a national holiday to celebrate VE day. Cheering broke out in the stateroom dormitories, five huge connected rooms with 15–20 beds in each. As the noise subsided Miss Williamson, the headmistress, stood in the sunken garden outside, and r
aised her voice in condemnation. She was disgusted by our unruly behaviour and we would not be allowed to take part in the national holiday but would have to work a normal day as a punishment. Even at that moment of national rejoicing we were kept isolated from the wider world. I can only think that she felt threatened by the noise, panicked into a fear that the mass of nubile femininity would become unmanageable. It is only now that I can see how challenging her job must have been, with a diminished staff, families uprooted and a camp of American servicemen nearby. The restrictions I found so irksome were prompted by understandable concerns for our safety.
5
Teenage Years
True to form, my results in the School Certificate (subsequently O levels and then GCSE) were mediocre. I only sat seven exams, a feeble effort compared to many children nowadays with ten or eleven subjects. I obtained six credits and a distinction in geography. My husband teased me about this as I was still muddling the East and West Indies when we got married. To my deep regret I had given up history when we reached Ur of the Caldees for my mother did not think it an important subject. My profound ignorance about the past added to my sense that I was stupid. Reading historical novels I just followed the romance, as I had no milestones around which to build the extra knowledge to be gleaned from such stories.
St Felix School moved back to Southwold in the autumn of 1945. The purpose-built red-brick buildings and well-marked playing fields lacked the private corners in the house and garden at Hinton St George, where I could find small but precious slivers of solitude. But I came to appreciate the romantic, windswept coast and undulating dunes of Suffolk, especially after I saw an unidentified bird flapping over the dykes, disappearing in the dips to emerge a few seconds later. Not long afterwards I spent a weekend at Flatford Mill, immortalised in Constable’s painting, but by then converted into a nature study centre. From my careful notes of the bird’s markings the tutor could identify it as a short-eared owl. Whenever I see a reproduction of The Hay Wain I am reminded that I slept in the room behind that window in Willy Lott’s cottage. It was in there that, when a friend’s hair caught light from a candle, I was able to smother it before the flames had done more than frizzle the ends.