Barnabas Tales

by Denzil Lawrence

  “Very interesting - the events in Omagh must have upset you particularly badly. I see that it was your home town. Tell me, did you receive any acknowledgement for these letters written from the heart. Did The Times reply, or your MP or the Prime Minister when you sent them copies?”

  “No, none at all.”

  “Dear me. And are you sure that you posted the letters?”

  Judy sniffed, “Certainly, I remember stamping them and putting them in the box by the post office three weeks ago. I gave each envelope a little kiss and saw a lady look at me strangely.”

  “Well, then that cannot be the problem. And did you include all of these details? Did you wonder whether they might be a little too long, containing several pages of autobiographical detail? And also including details of the family pets. Newspapers require short pugnacious missives, and politicians answer letters which ask a question. It is always best to use very short words and sentences. Even then they often ignore them, as I well know.”

  Judy shook her head “I had to tell them about myself so that they could know why it is so important.” She pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed her nose. “At the time the full details seemed essential. I suppose I could try to shorten it but as I’m feeling now I’m not sure that I could write anything at all. I have been so upset.”

  The Professor looked over his glasses and patted her arm. “Try not to cry. It won’t help any poor people in Ireland or Omagh. Would you entrust me with the responsible task of polishing your letter? I could certainly make suggestions. First though, do you really want to send the same letter to The Times and your MP and also to the Prime Minister?”

  She nodded “Yes, definitely. I want them all to work together to start a fund for victims.”

  He frowned, “Very well - I will regard it as a challenge. Rest assured, Mrs O’Donnell, that I will give your communication the same attention which I bestow upon my own epistles.”

  “Oh. thank you, Professor, they told me that you are always writing.” She pecked him on the cheek. Embarrassed, he turned to the desk and laid out the papers while she opened the door into the corridor.

  He rubbed his cheek, looked at his hand and sighed. Then he picked up the pen, pulled the papers towards him, and began to write. A bell rang as the sunlight faded, but he wrote on without noticing.

  Eventually, a burly young man in open-neck shirt and jeans opened the door and came in. He smiled, “There you are, Professor. I’ve been looking for you. Your meal is served and going cold.” He walked over and looked at the writing. “Who is it today? Einstein again? And did you take your tablets? Anyway, come along now.”

  The professor looked up sternly. “Certainly not. Thursdays are Dickens days.” And he drew himself up to a full sixty-three inches.

  In the echoing corridor, scents of bangers and mash mingled gently with disinfectant. The professor straightened his shoulders, and the slippers slapped as he strode to supper.

  ANNUAL TRIBUTE ON 12th MAY- NIGHTINGALE DAY.

  (as celebrated in Muheza Tanzania.)

  Florence Nightingale, the Lady with the Lamp, provided a wonderful example of determination and achievement. She was a practical person, visiting patients by day and also during her night hospital rounds. In 1856 she wrote to Sidney Herbert, her patron, supporter, and also Secretary of State for War, "Dear Mr. Herbert, I received your letter of 6th March yesterday. It is written from Belgrave Square. I write from a Crimean hut. The point of sight is different." She was far nearer to people and to patients, and fought effectively for them.

  The 12th of May is kept for Florence Nightingale in Westminster Abbey, St. Thomas’ Hospital, and also at Hospitali Teule (now St. Augustine’s Hospital) in the small town of Muheza in Tanzania. One year when I was present in Muheza the month of May had been exceedingly hot. A procession of nurses set off in late afternoon from the District Commissioner’s office in town more than a mile from the hospital. They danced towards the hospital, led by the brass section of the Lutheran Church Band. As Dr. Elizabeth Hills, Medical Superintendent, and I waited and watched by the earth road sloping up to the hospital, the stirring brass sounds became stronger and through the fading tropical light a long column of nurses slowly and rhythmically gyrated up towards the hospital gate. Two students with a placard led the smiling staff, while we, children and townsfolk watched from the roadside.

  Inside the hospital courtyard the dancing slowed and stopped. Sylvester Chizazi as Director of the School of Nursing made a welcoming speech, and then the nurses lit candles and performed a long slow conga along the hospital walkway and through each ward in turn.

  I left to check that my wife Bridget, knocked flat by the heat, was recovering in the house where we stayed. The telephone rang (a very recent piece of high technology at that time) with a summons to the final part of the celebrations? The dancers circled in the entrance yard bouncing gaily despite the persisting heat but eventually they stopped and we all sat down. A special display followed and a group of students presented one particularly joyful-sounding dance and song. Apparently this concerned AIDS and, I hope, how to avoid catching it. There followed long speeches in Swahili from the Nursing Director and from the District Medical Officer, after which we drank our sodas and dispersed.

  I suggest that in Hereford we should learn from Muheza and celebrate Florence Nightingale day on May 12th - though our formal activities would doubtless take a slightly less colourful form.

  AN OLD SCHOOL FRIEND. AND THE PM.

  A short Oxford story written 10 years ago. At that time Roger Sutton was a Dean of the Aga Khan Medical School in Karachi, and no longer listed in the British or Canadian Medical Registers. We met again in 2010 at a 50-year reunion in Oxford, and in Vancouver the following year.

  Before Suez, and therefore long, long ago, Roger and I moved from Manchester Grammar School to Oxford.

  1Roger was fair-haired, cheerful, outgoing and outstandingly able. His chemist father managed an ICI factory at Poulton-le-Fylde and Roger commuted to school in Manchester from his comfortable home. We seldom discussed politics in those days. To no-one’s surprise, he won an open scholarship to Magdalen College while I went to Brasenose, also in Oxford University.

  During my first term I joined the Labour Club, the Liberal Society and the Conservative Association. Their cards decorated my floating-voter mantelpiece but I never attended a meeting - my broad-ranging memberships were yet more good intentions to pave the primrose path - since I was busy with other fresh activities in new surroundings.

  One year later several contemporaries including Roger specially joined the Labour Club to be able to hear and to mock a speech by Aneurin Bevan, regarded by many as the evil genius of the far-left. Next day I asked about the speech and heard that the venue had been packed. I found Roger strangely changed and disturbed. Seventeen years of confident Conservative political certainty had been shaken and capsized. Of course after a few days the vessel righted, but I always regretted that I had missed hearing the Welsh Wizard whose eloquent words and spell had floated over Roger.

  Later that year Prime Minister Anthony Eden addressed an audience at the Oxford Union. As a member of the Union I intended to go, but found a long queue waiting outside on a cold, wet, winter night. So I sat in my coat in the Union paper-room intending to let the queue disappear and, interested in some article, forgot about the evening. At last I remembered, walked through the rain, and slipped in at the back, cold and in a wet mackintosh. There was little or no security in those innocent days long ago.

  The hall was full with every seat taken. On a raised platform at the other end, Anthony Eden leant against a lectern while Lady Eden sat on a raised chair adding glamour. (When Clement Attlee had spoken at the Union, his wife had gone to the pictures), and then the Chairman came to the end of a short speech of thanks. I had missed the whole address!

  Then Anthony Eden spoke for a further few minutes while I looked around. I shall never forget the way in which he held that hall-full of
undergraduates in his hand while they soaked up every word and graceful platitude. I had arrived cold and very late, and was perhaps the only person in the building that he had not caught in his net.(except possibly Lady Eden). What on earth was the magic which had affected the rest? They sat there with eyes, ears and mouths open, drinking in each well-turned phrase. No doubt if I had arrived earlier I should have fallen under the same spell, but standing there chilled my vivid memory is of a totally enslaved audience.

  Then came Suez and Eden’s fall. After SuperMac it is hard to think of many who could cast similar spells. Now literary wizards are in fashion, but political oratory seems lost, which is possibly good in some ways but sad in others. And now security is tight everywhere and cynicism about politics is the rule. Is that really OK?

  Roger continued a successful career and moved to Vancouver. I cannot find him in any of the Registers so he may not be alive - his father, like mine, died young of coronary disease. However I hope soon to hear news at a forty-year faculty reunion. Oddly enough one of our old school songs was “Forty Years On”.

  OLD ROOMS (THE MOST ANCIENT CONSULTANT REMINISCES.)

  The quickest way to glaze the eyes of young doctors (and the not-so-young) is for their elders to reminisce about the good old days. Oh Well! Here goes.

  “Rooms” mused the Oldest Consultant absently stirring his sugar-free coffee in Ward Sister’s office. “Ah yes, I remember the accommodation rooms when I was a houseman. The NHS was an optimistic young teenager then.” He ignored the brief looks of panic, quickly followed by expressions of polite disbelief, on the faces of the two youngest doctors.

  “Have I told you about accommodation in those days?” Without waiting he continued “Of course, at teaching hospitals we weren’t expected to sleep much, so the rooms were unimportant. I was the only married houseman, indeed I may have been the first-ever married houseman at St. Mary’s, so perhaps that’s why I was allocated the smallest room - the size of a big cupboard. There was just room for a small bed, a chair, and a wardrobe.” He sighed. “There was no telephone - for that you had to get up if the porter called you, and go out into a cold, shiny, echoing corridor. Our rooms all opened off that corridor. It was eighty yards long, and the more delinquent juniors would amuse themselves throwing bottles along it to smash at the other end, so we used to wear slippers going to the telephone.”

  “St. Mary’s took a very dim view of married resident doctors - the beds were particularly narrow - and cliff-hanging was the term. Mind you, temporary or transient girl-friends were fully acceptable - the real fear was that a wife and family might take root and set up home in one of the rooms.”

  Staff Nurse got up, smiled, and slipped out into the ward.

  “There was a very old-fashioned view of medical women’s place - we had a small residents’ dining room to which you could bring a guest, but only of the same sex. If you wanted your wife to come for supper, for example, you had to request one of the very few lady house doctors to ask her while in return you could invite your friend's boy-friend. But you could however take suppers up to your room. In time I got a dispensation on the grounds that my cupboard of a room was so small that there was not enough room for two people to eat at the same time unless one was actually in bed.”

  “Then one morning smoke filled the hospital. Fire engines arrived and hoses snaked through the hall and up the stairs. Someone said that my room was on fire, which I thought was a joke. However in my little room the cleaner had taken the plug for the electric fire out of its socket to replace with the Hoover plug.”

  “Electricity?” murmured the Senior House Officer.

  The Oldest Consultant looked up sharply “Yes, of course we had electricity then! Where was I? Oh yes - and when she had finished she put the electric fire plug back leaving the switch on, and as she went out she pushed the only chair with my best jacket on it close up to the fire. So shortly the room was well ablaze.”

  “For a week or two after that I slept in the Board Room. I was also called to the House Governor to learn that the hospital was not insured and I would have to claim for my clothes on my own personal household insurance. I was too starry-eyed and innocent to make a fuss. Looking back, I’m surprised they did not try to claim on my home policy for the hospital's damage.”

  “The only other place where we could relax in our monastic lives was the residents’ sitting room. This had been so thoroughly damaged by the leaving party for the previous house - trashed I think you would say today - that the chairs were all broken. There were holes in the walls and the telephone had fallen into several pieces which had to be held together before it would work.”

  At that moment the Houseman’s bleep went off, he peered at the message on the end and said “ITU, sir, urgent.” He and the Senior House Officer sprang to their feet. The Registrar remained seated.

  Leaving they heard - “Yes, those were different days - but not all bad! Food was free and the baths were large and friendly.”

  Later the two young doctors thanked Staff Nurse, but asked her to rescue them more quickly next time. “Poor James – I expect he wishes he also had been on call for ITU today. How frightful to be an ambitious Registrar and dependent on a reference? He could be stuck there for hours smiling and listening to senile anecdotes. I often think the old boy makes it all up. Still - it’s only forty-three minutes until we are off duty - what about a quick cup of tea in the mess and see how the Test Match is going?”

  ONE VERY SINGULAR LIFE

  (Prof Alan Tyson - Fellow of All Souls, CBE, House Physician.)

  Dr. Cecil Symons and I were probably the only physicians anywhere to have had a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford working for us. Dr. Symons was Consultant Physician at the Royal Free Hospital and New End Hospital, Hampstead, and I was his Registrar. Alan Tyson became our Pre-Registration House Physician at New End in 1966.

  It is difficult to peer inside another person’s carapace, and perhaps not something a friend or colleague should even attempt. But Alan was a budding psychoanalyst, so might have spilled beans more readily than most. However I never asked him very penetrating questions so my description is what I thought I saw from outside.

  Alan was nearly rejected for our House Physician job. Dr. Symons rang me and the outgoing house physician from the interview room to see if we thought Alan could fit into our ordinary medical firm. It is certainly not every day a Fellow of All Souls College applies for a pre-registration House Physician appointment. Tim Crow, about to finish his six months (and himself go on to a distinguished career in Psychiatry) and I both thought we could manage. So Alan was appointed.

  Behind him was a career in modern Languages and Music, and at some stage he had been psychoanalysed. This had so impressed Alan that he resolved to become an analyst himself, only to discover that few people take non-medical analysts seriously. So as well as training in psychoanalysis he had become a medical student at UCH among far younger contemporaries. He had qualified, and then needed house appointments to become fully registered. New End Hospital in Hampstead was well within the London circuit.

  Alan was a burly chap, considerably older than I, but he buckled down to the long hours and almost monastic life of a pre-registration doctor. He was very capable, and his great gifts did not present any problems. Part of the work in Hampstead was rescuing patients who had poisoned themselves or had other self-inflicted injuries. Most of these were young upper middle-class girls, and I did notice that Alan seemed more interested in them than in our older depressed or psychotic patients.

  I imagine Alan was in his forties, still single, and presumably fairly well adjusted to living on his own. Due to an interest in old keyboard instruments he owned three antique clavichords. Each was housed in the apartment of a different girl-friend, and I can only imagine that musical evenings were essentially heterosexual – if his interests had been different I imagine the instruments would have been in male musicians' flats or homes. Possibly owning three such instrum
ents with separate guardians was protection against becoming too closely tuned to any one companion.

  Our six months went by without as far as I can remember including problems and Alan moved on. I know that he became a professor of Psychiatry in New York, published books about Beethoven’s letters, and died some years ago. He occasionally appeared on television speaking about music. As far as I am aware he remained single, and I have no idea where his clavichords were later housed. I suppose that the single life permitted more concentration on profession or hobbies than someone with close family ties and responsibilities. Paternal or maternal exhaustion must be less of a problem. And if needed there can be social life in the evening at pub, club, theatre, or in the Senior Common Room.

  Among the privileges and pleasures of hospital work is the wide range of friends and colleagues which it provides. I suppose it is one of my few major distinctions to have taught a Fellow of All Souls a little basic bread-and-butter Hospital Medicine.

  I had put off looking up the Internet until recording my memories – let’s see if it changes anything I wrote?

  Wikipedia tells me that Alan was born in 1926 (so he was 10 years older than I), specialised in studies of Mozart and Beethoven, and was a Fellow of the Royal Academy. He had an interest in the papers and watermarks of music, discovered the true ending of one of Mozart’s pieces, and corrected a miss-attribution of the Second Movement of the Horn Concerto in D. He edited a series of volumes of Beethoven Studies. After I knew him in 1966, he went on to Lecture in Psychopathology at Oxford University for several years.

  The Telegraph Obituary in November 2000 added to this by including his Assistant Editorship of the Standard Edition of the works of Sigmund Freud published in 24 volumes from 1953 to 1974, and his CBE in 1989. It showed that I was wrong about his Professorship in New York – he was visiting Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley. His notes and data are in the Bodleian and his collection of early printed music editions has been divided between the Bodleian and the British Library. There was no mention of clavichords, their guardians, a wife or offspring.