Growing Into Medicine (4 page)

My mother also held baby clinics and was a strong believer in breast-feeding. She thought that test weighing before and after feeds was useful although it is now thought to add to the mother’s anxiety. For her it was a time-saving device that allowed her to put the baby down at the earliest opportunity. I can imagine her squirming if my tiny lips and fingers played with her nipple instead of getting on with the job of sucking.

Her sense of the right way to behave was very strong. The doctor’s children must behave with decorum. We were never allowed to eat ice cream in public, except on one occasion when an erudite cousin, a professor of economics who looked the part with
an extensive black beard, bought us cornets and encouraged us to follow his lead and lick them with enthusiasm as we walked down the high street.

Clothes were particularly important to my mother. She took immense trouble with her own, fussy about the exact shade of blue, such a favourite colour that it appeared to my child’s eye to carry some sort of moral worth. For work, she invariably wore a ‘suit’, a skirt with a matching jacket, a tradition I emulated for the whole of my professional life. In winter the material was tweed. If it were very cold she put a matching long coat over the top. Once Crimplene and other synthetic materials appeared they made a useful alternative for the summer. She invariably changed into a dress before supper. When she travelled to London for a medical meeting or a day shopping she wore a small hat. She and Mum’s Mum spent hours working on those hats, adding and removing delicate feathers, tiny artificial flowers and wisps of veiling.

I hate hats. When my husband was invited to a garden party as a reward for his time in the prison service, I was obliged to buy one. I considered it small enough and thought the fluff of feathers standing up at the back rather fetching. When I showed it to my mother she made a face. ‘Well, I suppose it will do but of course you will remove that nonsense at the back.’ I was in my fifties at the time but agreed to do so, not admitting that I thought the decoration the only thing that provided any spark of life to my outfit.

The first long dress I ever bought for myself was pale green satin with an off-the-shoulder frill. I have never loved a garment so much, until I went home to show it off. ‘You look just like every other typist,’ my mother said, her class awareness kicking in full blast. I wanted to look like every other typist, only I hoped a bit prettier. She wanted me to look different, elegant and above all tasteful.

The greatest humiliation came when I cycled home from university in Bristol with Jenny and my sister, who was on a tandem with one of her friends. She had borrowed it from the postman in Street where she was at school. I chose to wear three-quarter-length jeans, imagining them to be the most sensible choice, as they would
not catch in the chain. When we arrived at Green Gables my mother threw open the front door, and her arms, to welcome us with her usual enthusiasm.

‘Come in, come in. You must all be tired and thirsty. . .’ she stopped in mid-sentence and her eyes widened as she looked at my legs. ‘What HAVE you got on?’

‘I chose them specially so they wouldn’t get caught in the chain.’

‘How could you?’

The others watched as my face began to burn. ‘I was trying to be sensible. . .’ I had expected praise. Her attack on me in public fractured my world yet again. I struggled on, bending to touch a bare ankle. ‘Look, I don’t need cycle clips.’

‘Go upstairs and change into something decent immediately. Leave them in my room. I will burn them tomorrow.’

I propped my bicycle against the wall and pushed past her towards the stairs watched by three pairs of incredulous eyes. I heard her voice change again behind me.

‘Come in,’ she repeated. ‘Lime juice is waiting for you in the sitting room and then I’m sure you will all want to swim.’

The next morning the bonfire was lit. By the time we came down to breakfast black smoke was billowing across the garden reminding my friends of my disgrace.

Only much later did I understand that such garb was associated in her mind with girls who stood on street corners trying to attract the boys. These were not necessarily prostitutes but ‘those sort of girls’, ones with loose morals who did not know how to behave. After I had been married for several years I was surprised by her reaction when I told her I thought I had fallen in love with someone other than my husband. Her response was to say that it was possible to love more than one man at the same time. She added that one could not help one’s feelings but must take responsibility for ensuing actions.

From someone with strong moral values, at a time when sexual fidelity was held in high regard, I felt her response as warm and generous. I should have remembered that she was a product of the
twenties. She told me once that she and my father had decided they should each try sex with another partner in case it was better. My brother and I believed she probably did have some such experience, but we imagined our father spending a night alone in some dingy hotel. Like all children we did not find it easy to imagine the sexual lives of our parents and cannot envisage him embarking on such a premeditated escapade.

My mother wanted her children to be people who took sensible decisions. The last time I remember her giving me unsolicited advice she was living in a granny flat at the back of my house. I was on my way out and she said it was going to rain and I should take a mackintosh. This time I flared up, saying that, in my mid-fifties, I thought I was old enough to know when I needed a waterproof. I did not take one and it did rain and I got wet – but by then we could laugh about it together.

Today’s reader may find it difficult to imagine the importance of appearance. She longed for us to be dressed properly but also to have the suave, easy manners of the upper classes, those she had met in her adolescence at tennis parties and at Henley. For this she should have chosen a different partner. My father, coming from solid Quaker stock, was kind and endlessly gentle but not bothered by such superficial polish. But despite her attempts to turn us into the sophisticates we could never be, she was often embarrassingly graceless herself. She was a large woman, abrupt and more direct than social nicety demanded. In retrospect I wonder if an awareness of this made her particularly anxious for us to shine.

My mother’s social life centred round the world of medicine and doctors. On principle she never went ‘out to tea’, an activity common among bored middle class women in the 1930s who had servants and seldom worked. But she was always hospitable to doctors. Chippenham had a small cottage hospital, run by GPs with visits from consultants in Bath. Some operations were performed there and, if my father diagnosed a patient with appendicitis or other fairly straightforward emergency, he would call a surgeon out and
give the anaesthetic himself. My mother provided cocoa, coffee or fruit juice, which waited in the sitting room in jugs or thermoses, a pile of sandwiches by the side, ready for them however late they finished.

Visiting consultants ran outpatient sessions at the hospital, a service that spared patients the tedious bus journey into Bath, twelve miles away. Domiciliary visits also provided an opportunity for medical contact. My father invariably accompanied the consultant to the patient’s house and my mother encouraged them to come home for a meal or drink afterwards. She liked to be included in discussions about the case, which provided a way for both of them to keep up to date with changes in medicine. Alas, the general practitioner of today makes very few home visits, and I understand that if a consultant does visit the house the GP seldom accompanies him. Such personal contact and mentoring by the bedside appears to have been lost for ever.

One chore that doctors working in the NHS do not have to face is ‘doing the bills’. This was a family affair that took place twice a year. My mother brought out the low table with drop sides that was usually used for the tea tray. Now it was laden with one heavy drawer after another, carried in from the consulting room. These contained the patients’ notes. As each brown folder was scrutinised for the number of visits and bottles of medicine my mother suggested what the family should be charged. Those patients with money were charged what it was thought they would pay, while those without were asked for a small token fee. The job took several long evenings and at least one weekend. I enjoyed feeling useful as I stuck on the stamps, moistening the backs on a damp sponge that sat in an old tobacco tin.

Every day my father discussed his work with my mother, often over the lunch table in a vocabulary that we children did not understand. Because the practice was run from her own home, and in the early days she often helped out with surgeries and visits, she played a decisive role in the way it was organised. One day, when she was living with me during the last years of her life, she confessed to a
serious mistake. As a result of some misunderstanding, a specimen of urine was thrown out before it had been tested for sugar. The patient, a young boy, died of undiagnosed diabetes, an avoidable death for which they never forgave themselves.

On hearing this story, and especially following my psychoanalysis, I can appreciate how much they supported each other. My previous understanding of their relationship as one of unequal power was flawed. Her quick temper and passionate beliefs added life and sparkle to his placid and dependable nature, on which she depended for her stability.

James Hillman, in his book
The Soul’s Code
, suggests that parents, especially the mother, have become too important, too powerful a myth in our psychological understanding. I never saw my mother as being responsible for the person I became, but my ambivalent feelings towards her, or the figure of her I had built into myself, were uncomfortable and limiting. Although my friends say they can see little change in me since my analysis, I know the effect on my subsequent life has been profound. When they ask why I spent so much time and money the answer is a lame one. ‘Because I now have the confidence to write books,’ I reply. ‘And I can appreciate, understand and feel nothing but love for my difficult mother.’

3

The Wrack of War

The month after war was declared I celebrated my tenth birthday. I had no understanding of its horrors. ‘Wrack’ is too strong a word for its effect on my life, for I continued to be protected and privileged. I was fed, clothed and loved and lost no one dear to me. The adolescent turmoil that was looming might well have been just as powerful during peacetime. However it is possible that the anxiety of those around me, never openly expressed, heightened my tendency to dramatise my feelings.

Until the war started I was educated at home. The role of the governess was well defined. She looked after our clothes, taught us in the mornings and took us for walks in the afternoons. Lunch was eaten round the dining room table with my parents but she always gave us supper in the nursery and then ate her own on a tray in her room. The food was provided for her by the two maids.

My favourite governess was Miss Fox, who taught me to swim in our pool in the garden, an unusual feature in those days and an important part of my childhood. It had been dug a year or two earlier by my parents with the help of the gardener and one other labourer. I liked to believe that my efforts with a sandpit spade helped the success of the project.

The pool was filled at the beginning of summer by two hoses from the house. The process took three days and I watched with growing excitement as the level rose. The system had no pump or filter and went green within a few weeks, despite liberal doses of chlorine disinfectant. Leaves and dead worms accumulated at the
bottom making me unwilling to put my feet down. Once or twice during the season it was emptied and cleaned out. The water drained away into the rough land downhill from the house. On one occasion workmen who were digging up the road at the bottom were mystified by the water that was filling each hole as fast as it was dug. When my father learned of their puzzlement he hurried to replace the bungs in the waste pipe. Later in the war it was valued by the defence services as a source of static water they could use against the fires expected to rage through the town if we were bombed or invaded.

My parents invited many children to swim, although my mother tried to reserve the late afternoons, when she came in hot from work, for her own use. She would proceed with slow breaststrokes, her head and shoulders held high out of the water as she made her stately progress once round the edge. At those times we kept out of the water, fearful of splashing the unprotected plait wound round her head.

When Miss Fox thought I could manage without my rubber ring, a precursor of today’s arm bands, she set me to swim from the deep end, six feet six inches deep, across to the steps at the shallow end, a distance of about twenty feet. After three strokes I sank. For some reason she was standing on the edge fully clothed but did not hesitate to kick off her shoes and plunge in to rescue me. I can see her now, climbing out to toss the dripping hair out of her eyes, laughing as she picked an apple from one of our many trees and took an enthusiastic bite.

Before long I too was swimming a sedate breaststroke though I never managed a satisfactory crawl. I learned to dive and always made myself enter the water head first. Jumping caused too much of a splash and annoyed the adults, while walking down the steps was an ignominious activity reserved for old ladies like my mother (then in her thirties). Until well into middle age I could not admit, even to myself, that I hated diving.

As soon as war was declared the last governess, Miss Taylor, a rather prim person who tried to teach me to sew, left to do more
important war work. To my child’s mind the term always referred to making munitions in a factory, but I cannot imagine her in such a rough and arduous setting. Many clerical jobs needed to be filled by women as the men left to join the forces.

My parents were too old to be called up but younger doctors disappeared in quick succession. Patient loyalty was essential for the livelihood of the doctor and many, forced to leave for active service, feared they would have no practice left when they came home. My mother offered to take over the work of a single-handed doctor in a village three miles outside Chippenham, promising to hold it together so she could hand the business back intact when he returned. She ran surgeries, made home visits and was on call night and day. Not knowing the neighbourhood, and not being mechanically minded, her new car was invaluable, especially as all the signposts had been removed in preparation for the expected invasion.