An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War
Page 37
450 g / 1 lb. dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, etc.)
225 g / 8 oz. sugar
240 mL / ½ pint of warm tea
1 egg
2 tablespoons marmalade
220 g / 8 oz. plain flour
220 g / 8 oz. wheatmeal flour
4 level teaspoons baking powder
Put fruit, sugar, and tea in a bowl and leave to soak overnight.
Next day prepare two 1 lb. baking tins by greasing and flouring them. Turn the oven to 325ºF / 160ºC.
Stir the egg and marmalade into the fruit mixture, then the flour and baking powder, and divide the mixture between the two tins. Bake in the oven for 1½ hours, until well risen. Test by pressing gently with a finger. If cooked, the cake should spring back and have begun to shrink from the sides of the tin. Cool on a wire rack and serve sliced with butter.
These keep well in an airtight tin for up to four weeks, or they would if Aggie Arbuthnot did not have such an acute sense of smell and know when I had just baked them. Still it’s nice to sit down and have a good yarn and a cup of tea with friends, so.
MARMALADE PUDDING
250 g / 9 oz. butter or good-quality margarine
75 g / 2½ oz. fine white sugar
75 g / 2½ oz. brown sugar
150 g / 5 oz. marmalade
225 g / 8 oz. plain flour
½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 eggs
juice and rind from one orange
Preheat the oven to 180ºC / 350ºF and butter an ovenproof dish about 10" × 10".
Cream the butter and sugar and beat in the marmalade. Add the dry ingredients and the eggs followed by half the orange juice and grated rind. (Save a little to glaze the pudding top when cooked). Put the mixture into the buttered dish and smooth the top.
Bake in the oven until top is light brown and pudding has risen. This takes about 40 minutes but keep a careful eye on it.
When the pudding is ready brush the top with the remaining juice mixture and serve with custard or cream.
IRISH COUNTRY CHICKEN BREASTS
4 chicken breasts
30 g / 1 oz. butter
1 cup white bread crumbs
5 tablespoons / 1/3 cup white wine
juice of half a lemon
240 mL /1 cup cream
3 egg yolks
75 g / 2½ oz. grated cheddar cheese
salt and pepper
Salt the chicken breasts and cook them in butter in a skillet or fry pan over a medium heat until just lightly coloured on both sides. This takes about 20 minutes. Put them, arranged side by side, in a greased, ovenproof dish. In the butter remaining in the pan cook the bread crumbs until they are golden but not too brown. Set to one side and deglaze the pan with the white wine and the lemon juice until it has reduced to about half its volume. Leave in the pan until you are ready to use it.
Now beat the cream, egg yolks, cheese, and seasonings. Add the cheese and the deglazing liquid from the pan and pour over the chicken breasts and finish by sprinkling the crumbs over the top.
Bake at 400ºF / 200ºC for about 25 minutes until the top is brown and the egg mixture is firm.
Serve with new potatoes and green peas or beans.
CORNED BEEF CURRY
1 tablespoon vegetable or olive oil
1 onion
2 carrots, chopped small
1 potato or small turnip, cubed
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 piece of fresh ginger, grated (size about 1")
1 red chili, chopped, with seeds removed
½ small green chili, chopped, with seeds removed
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon garam masala
freshly milled black pepper
500 mL vegetable stock
1 400 mL tin chopped tomatoes
½ cup raisins
1 can Fray Bentos corned beef
1 cup pineapple
1 small bunch fresh coriander, chopped (about 2 tablespoonfuls)
½ cup / 4 oz. sour cream
Heat the oil in a large pan. Gently sweat the prepared vegetables in the hot oil for five minutes. Add the garlic, ginger, chilis, and spices, then the stock, tomatoes, and raisins. Cook for about 20 minutes and add the cubed corned beef, pineapple, and chopped fresh coriander. Cook through to heat the corned beef and finish by stirring in the sour cream.
Serve with cooked rice.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is book nine in the series, which started with An Irish Country Doctor, a work set in Ulster in the 1960s. In book six, a Dublin Student Doctor, I began to tell the story of Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, one of the central characters, as a young man while still following his current adventures as an established GP. Two storylines move back and forth over thirty years between the quiet village of Ballybucklebo in the 1960s and the bustle of Dublin in the 1930s. I had hoped in that work to take him from medical school to the end of the Second World War. However, I ran out of space shortly after young Doctor O’Reilly qualified from Trinity College Dublin in 1936.
Fingal O’Reilly, Irish Doctor, the eighth book in the series, once more moved between the ’30s and ’60s. That structure was chosen because readers had taken Ballybucklebo to heart and wanted to follow the goings-on there. They were also adamant that they needed to find out what further befell Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly as a young man. Once again, I was only able to pursue his earlier adventures as a GP for one year after his qualification.
Many, many readers wanted to know about O’Reilly’s first marriage in 1940 to Nurse Deirdre Mawhinney and about his war service on a remarkable British battleship, HMS Warspite. Naturally, the ongoing developments in the Ballybucklebo of the 1960s needed to be followed as well, so here you have An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War, following the time-jumping form of its predecessors. I hope you have enjoyed it.
Like its forebears it needs a little explaining. This note aims to do four things: tell you about my interest in Warspite, thank people for their enormous help in developing that story, apologise for an omission from the tale, and make you all a solemn promise.
So here we go.
I was born in 1941 shortly after Hitler invaded Russia, and Britain and her empire no longer stood alone in the midst of World War II. My father, Doctor James “Jimmy” Taylor, was an Ulsterman and hence not liable for call-up. He had nevertheless, in 1939, volunteered for the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve and was initially stationed in England before my birth. He later served overseas in, among other places, Egypt, which is germane to some of this book. He was demobilised with the rank of Squadron Leader (Medical) in 1946. He had been mentioned in despatches. He maintained an abiding interest in the history of World War II.
We lived in a small house by the Bangor seaside (see etching by Dorothy Tinman in Country Wedding). My father stored his books in my bedroom. It is one of the reasons I am a writer. I devoured them all. It is no accident that my first published fiction was a collection of short stories, Only Wounded: Ulster Stories, to be republished in June 2015. After falling in love with the collected works of W. Somerset Maugham and Anton Chekov’s short stories, how could I not try to emulate the masters?
A Sailor’s Odyssey by Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope was one tome among many that I discovered in my teens. It was in this book that I first read of the admiral’s flagship in the Mediterranean, HMS Warspite. I read the work when I was a member of the naval section of my school’s combined cadet force, a kind of ROTC for schoolboys, and was considering a naval career. Although I can still tie a sheepshank and a bowline and signal with semaphore flags, I confess that since the invention of GPS my skills with a sextant are now rusty. My reading about Warspite served to reawaken my interest in battleships, which had first been stimulated by my father’s hands-on approach for an even younger me.
Royal Naval vessels in the pre- a
nd postwar periods often anchored in Bangor Bay, and opened themselves to the public. It was a proud boast of my father’s that he had, as a youth, explored the mighty battlecruiser HMS Hood. In 1951, I held Dad’s hand when we were taken out in Jimmy Scott’s fishing boat to visit the great ship HMS King George V. She was one of the warships that in May 1941 sank the German Bismarck, which three days earlier had destroyed the Hood. I was born three months later in that very year.
My father, for a souvenir of my visit to KGV, as she was fondly called, bought me a blue triangular pennant with KGV and her crest and motto on it. Until we moved house in the year of my twenty-first birthday, the flag hung proudly on my bedroom wall.
So are seeds sown.
After qualifying as a physician and beginning specialty training, I supplemented my salary by moonlighting for country GPs, one of whom was Doctor Ken Kennedy. He had two charming daughters, Phillippa and Julia, and a son, Kenneth William Kennedy, a famous Irish rugby football international. The son, KW, had been a classmate of mine at both grammar school and medical school.
When I started writing humour columns about Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly (published earlier this year in a collected volume, The Wily O’Reilly), the seeds that had been planted in my boyhood germinated. By chance, like my father and my father’s contemporary and friend Doctor Ken Kennedy, Fingal O’Reilly had seen wartime service. The father had been a surgeon lieutenant on—where else, but on the ship Admiral Cunningham had called “The Grand Old Lady?”—Warspite. Her photograph hung in Doctor Kennedy’s home, as a similar one would come to hang at Number One, Main Street, Ballybucklebo.
Now, if O’Reilly’s story of his time on her was going to be told, it was incumbent upon me to tell it accurately. To that end on matters naval I consulted the following volumes:
A Sailor’s Odyssey by Admiral of the Fleet Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope. As an aside, although it removes a certain amount of authenticity, for more easy understanding of time I have used the convention Lord Hyndhope used in his work. Time is expressed in civilian terms as, for example, six P.M., not eighteen hundred hours. I hope this makes it simpler for those unfamiliar with the twenty-four-hour clock.
Warspite by Iain Ballantyne.
Battleship Sailors by Harry Plevy.
Battleship Warspite by V. E. Tarant.
The Battleship Warspite by Ross Watton, which contains her marine architectural drawings. Her sick bay really was on the main deck and the wardroom on the upper deck aft on the port side.
In addition, I was delighted to be presented with an accurate scale model of the great ship by my longstanding friends Doctors David and Sharon Mortimer. By the courtesy of Doctor Roger Maltby, I was put in touch with Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander Mike Inman, RD, RNR, who read and corrected my naval descriptions. The accuracy is his, the mistakes mine.
While on the subject of accuracy, Fingal wonders, in July 1940, about the location of the Spitfire that his mother and Lady Ballybucklebo’s fund had presented to 602 Squadron. Clearly that specific aircraft is fictional, but 602 (City of Glasgow) Squadron, Royal Auxiliary Air Force, was very real. Under the command of Squadron Leader “Sandy” Johnstone, they were with 13 Group in Scotland at Drem Airfield. In August 1940, 602 moved south to Westhampnett, a field in the tactical area controlled by 11 Group, which bore the brunt of the aerial combat. The City of Glasgow Spitfires fought with distinction throughout the thick of the Battle of Britain.
On matters naval I have, when necessary, referred to some real-life figures by name. It is correct that Captain D. B. Fisher CBE relieved Captain Victor Crutchley VC as Warspite’s commanding officer on April 27, 1940. Her medical branch and many of her other officers and men are all figments of my imagination, with one remarkable exception from another actual ship.
Doctor Patrick Steptoe was in fact a real person and was the medical officer of HMS Hereward in 1940–41. After the war, he became a pioneer in gynaecological laparoscopy. In concert with the late Professor Sir Robert Edwards, Nobel Laureate, he was half of the team that produced the world’s first “test tube” baby in 1978. In 2010, Sir Robert was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work. Regrettably, the honour is not awarded posthumously. Patrick Steptoe died in 1988 and therefore was not eligible for consideration. Patrick taught me laparoscopy in 1969 and I was proud to consider him both valued colleague and dear friend. In 1987–89 I worked with him and Bob Edwards at Bourn Hall Clinic near Cambridge, England. He was a truly great man and my including him here is in tribute to his memory.
I have taken two other liberties. HMS Touareg, nominally one of the Tribal class of twenty-six destroyers, never existed. She too, has been conjured up for dramatic purposes. Her description conforms to that of her real sisters, one of which, HMCS Haida, is still afloat in Hamilton, Ontario, as a naval museum. HMS Vixen, an old 1918 V-and-W-class destroyer, is also a figment of my imagination.
I have striven for geographical accuracy. Describing settings in Ireland was not difficult. I lived there for thirty years and went back from 2007–10. My knowledge of Greenock and the River Clyde and the anchorage Tail of the Bank, and Glasgow area hospitals is also drawn from my own memory. As a very young doctor, I took six months training at a maternity hospital in nearby Paisley. The unit was affiliated with the Royal Alexandra Infirmary.
Scenes set ashore in Alexandria, Egypt, owe a great deal to an old photograph album of my father’s containing pictures he took with a Kodak Brownie during his service in Egypt. Further details were gleaned from A Midshipman’s War: A Young Man in the Mediterranean Naval War 1941–43 by Frank Wade, a fellow Canadian. But for the efforts of our Saltspring librarian, Karen Hudson, I would not have been aware of this invaluable source. She was indefatigable in contacting her friend Lieutenant-Commander Mark Cunningham, RCN. He in turn sought the advice of Sheryl Irwin, librarian at the naval base at Esquimault, British Columbia. Thank you all three.
I hope that explains my interest in Warspite and how, to the best of my ability, the authenticity of that part of the book was established.
I also said I had to make an apology. I have received numerous letters asking for information about O’Reilly’s first marriage and how he came to be widowed. Honestly, this book was supposed to answer both of those questions, but …
But, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, at least so I am told by no lesser authorities than Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (c. 1150), Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Beckett, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Marx. Once more I found myself becoming intrigued with the things O’Reilly and company were getting up to—and ran out of space. Sorry. But—and it’s another big but—I also said I will make you all a solemn promise.
The author’s note is always the last thing written when a novel is finished, and at the end of this paragraph (after proofreading, of course) the manuscript will be going off to my agent. I will be going off on holiday, but the day after I return, I will start work on book ten, as yet untitled, and in it the story of Fingal O’Reilly and Deirdre Mawhinney will be concluded. Honest to God, it will, so it will—and from an Ulsterman there is no more binding oath.
Until then my very best wishes.
PATRICK TAYLOR
Saltspring Island
Canada
August 2013
GLOSSARY
I have in all the previous Irish Country novels provided a glossary to help the reader who is unfamiliar with the vagaries of the Queen’s English as it may be spoken by the majority of people in Ulster. This is a regional dialect akin to English as spoken in Yorkshire or on Tyneside. It is not Ulster-Scots, which is claimed to be a distinct language in its own right. I confess I am not a speaker.
Today in Ulster (but not in 1939–40 and 1966 when this book is set) official signs are written in English, Irish, and Ulster-Scots. The washroom sign would read Toilets, Leithris, and Cludgies.
I hope what follows here will enhance your enjoyment of the work, although, I am afraid, it will not improv
e your command of Ulster-Scots.
acting the lig: Behaving like an idiot.
aluminium: Aluminum.
amadán: Irish. Pronounced “omadawn.” Idiot.
anyroad: Anyway.
arse: Backside. (Impolite.)
at himself/not at himself: He’s feeling well/not feeling well.
away off (and feel your head/and chase yourself): Don’t be stupid.
aye certainly: Of course, or naturally.
back to porridge: Returning from something extraordinary to the humdrum daily round.
bang his/her drum about: Go on at length about a pet subject.
banjaxed: Ruined or smashed.
barmbrack: Speckled bread. (See Mrs. Kinkaid’s recipe, An Irish Country Doctor.)
been here before: Your wisdom is attributable to the fact that you have already lived a full life and have been reincarnated.
beezer: First-rate.
bettered myself: I rose in the world by my own exertions.
biscakes: Biscuits (cookies).
bisticks: Biscuits (cookies).
bit the head off: Gave someone a severe verbal chastisement.
blether/och, blether: Talk, often inconsequential/expression of annoyance or disgust.
bletherskite: One who continually talks trivial rubbish.
blue buggery: Very, very badly.
bollix: Testicles. (Impolite.)
bollixed: Wrecked.
bonnet: Hood of a car.
boot: Trunk of a car.
bottle: Naval. Reprimand.
boys-a-dear or boys-a-boy: Expression of amazement.
brave: Very.
British Legion: Fraternal organisation for ex-servicemen (veterans).
brogue: a) A kind of low-heeled shoe (from the Irish bróg) with decorative perforations on the uppers, originally to allow water to drain out. b) The musical inflection given to English when spoken by an Irish person.
bull in a china shop/at a gate: Thrashing about violently without forethought and causing damage/charging headlong at something.
bully beef: Salted, preserved, and canned beef. Also known as corned beef (the salt came in units called “corns”). That used by the navy was usually produced by Fray Bentos of Uruguay. My mother made a marvellous corned beef curry that my father (RAF) had learned from Indian soldiers in World War II. It is not the recipe given by Kinky here.