The memorial service was full of military men, many tennis players, and friends of Claire and her parents. There were also a half dozen or so men in dark business suits, but none of them seemed to have a name. Just before the service began, Prime Minister Macmillan slipped into a pew in the back of St. Margaret’s. Claire asked me to read the twenty-third psalm, which I did.
As I walked out after the service, I saw Mark Thakeham, who had left the church and was waiting just outside.
“Hello, Fiona. I know you cared about him. My condolences.”
“Mark, thank you for coming to the service. It’s thoughtful of you.”
“I saw in The Times obit that he was awarded a VC. For ‘defending the realm,’ without any more detail.”
“Yes. Maybe some of the people here today know what happened to John, but I don’t.”
The brief obit in The Times had also said that it was “rumored” in Whitehall that John had been one of the senior officers of the secretive Special Boat Section. It said he was survived by his parents and by his sister, Claire Fitzwilliam Kershaw, who had been the 1960 and 1961 Wimbledon ladies’ champion – and that his “frequent companion” had been the 1962 Wimbledon ladies’ champion, Miss Fiona Hodgkin, of Paget, Bermuda. The newspapers didn’t know we had been engaged.
“Are you going to stay in London?” Mark asked.
“No. Claire asked me to stay here and transfer from Smith to University College. She wants me in London. I’ve thought about it, but I’ve decided to go back to Smith. I’ve already been away from my classes for a week and a day. I need to get back to Smith. I leave tomorrow for the States. But I’ve promised Claire I’ll come back to help when she has her baby.”
Then I asked him, “How is medical school?”
“I go on rounds and, after a resident presents a patient, I’m occasionally asked for my diagnosis. I give it and everyone chuckles. Then the consultant gives the correct diagnosis. So it’s going as expected, I suppose. You’re taking organic, I recall?”
“Yes, and, as you said, it’s rough. But it is interesting. I hope I haven’t gotten too far behind.”
“I never had the opportunity to congratulate you on Wimbledon.”
“Well, now it seems like a very long time ago, but I guess it actually was only last summer.”
We stood looking at one another for a few moments. Finally, he reached out, and we shook hands. His hand lingered on mine for just a second longer than would be customary.
“Well, again, my condolences to you. Keep in touch.”
“Certainly,” I said. “I will do so.” And we parted.
PART FIVE –
JOHNS HOPKINS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
1968
JOHNS HOPKINS SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
At Smith, I never got around to having a boyfriend. I worked hard at chemistry, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t leave me with much free time. Just before I left Bermuda for my senior year at Smith, Mother sat me down. “Fiona. The time has come when you need to be open to meeting new people. You have a life to lead. You need to find a boy you like.”
She didn’t say what I knew she was thinking, which was that I needed to forget John Fitzwilliam. The problem was that I didn’t want to forget John.
I promised Mother I would try to find a boyfriend, and I did make an effort. I went out with two or three boys, but nothing was serious. I even let one boy sleep with me, but that was a mistake. He had slept with other girls before me, but he hadn’t learned anything from his other girls. When we were in bed together, and I suggested to him how to go about pleasing a girl – specifically, me – he was offended.
I knew exactly how it should be done; John had taught me.
So not having a boyfriend was my fault; I just wasn’t interested.
I was in the spring of my second year at Johns Hopkins medical school when an intense, young pediatrician on the faculty lectured to my class on childhood vaccines. He was thin and wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses. I went up to the front after the lecture to ask him some question – I can’t recall what it was – and we talked for two or three minutes.
I thanked him and was leaving the lecture hall when he called me back: “Doctor?” he said. This was a purely courtesy title; I was two years away from my M.D.
I turned back to him. “Yes, Doctor?”
“Do you have a chemistry background?”
“I majored in chemistry in college.” Maybe whatever question I had asked reflected some knowledge of chemistry.
“I need a lab assistant. To assay an antibody. It’s part of a research grant I have, but I haven’t had time to do it myself. There’s a stipend. But not much. Do you want the position?”
That was easy. The medical students who got the few lab assistant positions were stars who had been marked by the faculty for Great Things. But I had gotten this offer by merely asking a question after a lecture.
The antibody turned out to be for chickenpox. My first afternoon in his lab, I asked him, “How do I get a sample of the antibody?”
“Did you have chickenpox?”
“Yes, when I was five or six.”
“Stick a needle in your arm. You’ll find plenty of the antibody. Your immune system never forgets chickenpox.”
A month later, I was working at my bench in his lab, and he stopped as he passed by. I expected him to ask how my work was progressing, but he didn’t.
Instead, he said simply, “Will you go out with me this Saturday night?”
I said yes.
That August, just after my summer rotation, and just before my fall rotation at Hopkins began, the lease on the flat in Charles Village that I shared with three other women medical students was about to expire, and so he and I spent a Saturday morning packing up my belongings to move me to his flat.
He said I might as well move in since I spent most nights there anyway.
While we were packing, he found the photograph of me just after I had won Wimbledon, in its cheap plastic frame. I had never mentioned this part of my life to him. As far as I knew, he’d never held a tennis racket.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a tennis match I won. A long time ago.”
“You look awful.”
“Thanks.”
He and I worked together, sitting side by side at the lab bench. His bench skills were far better than mine, and he took the time to show me how to conduct delicate assays without contaminating the samples.
Then he taught me how to prepare a scientific paper on my findings. I sat at my typewriter drafting the paper, revising it, revising it again, and again. Late at night, over our usual dinner of take out Chinese food, I reworked the text and tables of data until, at last, I submitted it for publication.
In early 1968, my paper finally appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine: ‘Humoral immune response to ∞ herpesvirus 3. Hodgkin FA. From the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.’
For a medical student, life doesn’t get any better than that.
A week or so after our paper came out, I was walking down the main hallway of the hospital when the imperious Dean of the medical school passed me going in the other direction. I had never spoken to him, and I assumed he had no idea who I was. The Dean generally did not acknowledge the existence of individual medical students.
But he stopped. “Miss Hodgkin?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“An interesting piece of work.”
He didn’t need to tell me that he meant the paper that had just been in The New England Journal. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“I asked my secretary to check on your marks. She tells me you’re near the top of the third year class.”
“Yes.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Your plans?” This was medical school code for what specialty I planned to go into.
“My father is a pediatrician, and I hope to be a pediatrician as well.”
By pure luck, the Dean was a pedia
trician himself. But how could he possibly treat children without frightening them? He certainly frightened me.
“Good. An interesting piece of work. Keep it up – ” He paused for an instant and then said, “Doctor Hodgkin.”
Purely a courtesy title. He turned and continued walking down the hall.
One evening during my pediatrics rotation, I came into my boyfriend’s lab. I had spent the day being trained in how to care for ill children, and now I had hours of lab work in front of me.
I sat down beside him at our bench. He had made lemonade for himself, and he poured some for me into a glass beaker. We routinely ignored all the signs that warned against taking food or drink into the biomedical laboratories; we barely had time to eat as it was. He no longer saw patients but supported himself (and me, for that matter) entirely with research grants.
“Don’t you miss treating children?” I asked.
He shrugged. “My clinical skills aren’t strong.”
I was included in his circle of research friends at Hopkins. Probably most of them had never heard of Wimbledon; that wasn’t part of their lives. I never mentioned it. Our friends and colleagues assumed that my boyfriend and I would eventually marry and spend our careers at Hopkins. This was a compliment to me, because it implied that I had what it took for a career of research at Hopkins.
My boyfriend would be at Johns Hopkins permanently; he was a research star.
Late in the spring of my third year, my boyfriend took me out to a fancy dinner at a new restaurant in Baltimore, Tio Pepe. This was out of character for him, and I should have known something was up. In the middle of dinner, he asked me to marry him. He had even bought an expensive engagement ring for me. I told him that I was only 25 and wasn’t ready to get married yet, or to make any commitment, which I intended as a gentle way of saying, “No.”
I thought to myself guiltily that I had been plenty ready to be married when I had been only 19, and that the difference between then and now wasn’t my age, but that I had been in love with John. I wasn’t in love now. My boyfriend was disappointed and hurt, and so after dinner, even though I was tired, I took him by the hand, led him back to the flat, took off my clothes, and did my best to make it up to him.
Nearly two decades later, I was making dinner for my daughters, and I happened to turn on the television to catch the evening news. I was startled to see on the news a lecture room at Hopkins that I knew well from my medical student days. He was standing in the front of the room, just as he had the day he lectured to my class on vaccines. But now the lecture room was full of reporters, not medical students. He was still thin, but his hair was gray. He was just as intense as ever. He wore stained khaki trousers and a ragged sweater.
Earlier that day, the Karolinska Institute had awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on childhood vaccines.
I hadn’t seen him since I had taken my M.D. in 1969. We hadn’t spoken since the late Saturday afternoon in July 1968 when I had talked with him by telephone from Claire’s kitchen in Belgravia. When I returned to Baltimore, he already had left for 10 days to give a seminar at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. We had planned to make that trip together. I let myself into the flat and packed my medical textbooks, Rachel’s old sweater, the framed photo of me after my final with Claire, and my other things.
As I was leaving, I locked the door and pushed my keys to the flat and to our lab through his mail slot.
I was going to chuck my career at Hopkins to become a pediatrician on Point Finger Road in Bermuda.
A reporter asked, “How did you start this research?”
He blinked his eyes for a moment. “I began this work with a colleague, Fiona Hodgkin, who was a medical student here at Johns Hopkins at the time.” He stopped to think. “We used her blood as a starting point. She had chickenpox as a child. She published a paper about the antibody in her blood. In ‘68, I think. In retrospect, an important paper. Doctor Hodgkin deserves part of the credit for this prize they’ve given me.”
Later, I read in the newspaper that he had never married.
JULY 1968
LONDON, ENGLAND
After I finished my third year at Hopkins, Father helped arrange a general surgery rotation for me over the summer in London at his hospital, Guy’s. Claire picked me up at Heathrow. Her parents had retired to the country, and Claire, Richard, and their children had taken over the house in Belgravia. I was going to stay with them.
Claire had reluctantly given up her Alfa Romeo roadster for a Jaguar sedan that could hold her children. When I opened the passenger door, I had to brush the Animal Cracker crumbs off the seat before I could sit down.
Claire looked at the crumbs ruefully. “I dole out Animal Crackers to young Fiona to keep her occupied when we drive to the country. Richard says we have to leave off calling her ‘young Fiona,’ or else the double name will stick, and she’ll be burdened with it for the rest of her life.”
I laughed. I was young Fiona’s Godmother.
“So,” Claire asked, “how’s your love life?” She had met my boyfriend on a trip to the States and made no secret to me that she didn’t care for him.
“He’s asked me to marry him.”
“Oh, no! What did you say?”
“I told him I wasn’t ready to make any commitment.”
“Good! Fiona, he’s not right for you. Has he ever been to Bermuda?”
“No,” I admitted. Not only that, I thought, he’d never expressed the slightest interest in visiting Bermuda.
“And I don’t think you should spend your time holed up in a laboratory.”
This wasn’t the first time Claire had said all this to me. Even though I knew the answer, I asked anyway: “Why shouldn’t I do research? It’s important.”
“You need to be around people more. I want you to promise that this summer you’ll be open to meeting new people. It’s time. I’ll find you someone else who’s better for you.” She left unsaid an important part of what she meant, which was that she would find someone English for me – not American. Claire and my Mother hadn’t spoken to one another about me, at least as far as I knew, but they both said exactly the same things.
“I promise I’ll be open to meeting people.”
“Fiona,” Claire said when we pulled up in front of the house in Belgravia. “You have a choice. We have a guest room on the third floor, or John’s flat on the ground level is empty. The two boys are on the third floor, and they’ve been known to make a great deal of noise. You’re welcome to stay in the flat if you like.”
I thought for a moment. “I’d prefer the guest room, Claire. The boys won’t bother me.”
My first day at Guy’s, I scrubbed and walked into an operating room to observe one of the senior consultants operate.
The consultant looked up when I came in. He wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses with a strip of white adhesive tape holding them to the bridge of his nose. “Well, a new face,” he said.
The members of the surgical team chuckled. This was a small joke; with my surgical mask and cap, my eyes were the only part of my face visible.
The consultant asked, “Who are you?”
“Fiona Hodgkin.”
The consultant went about his work on the patient and after a moment said, “There was a girl with that name some years ago who won the singles at Wimbledon.”
“That’s me.”
“You’ve had quite a change in vocation, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Where are you training?”
“Hopkins. I start my fourth year in September.”
At the name ‘Hopkins,’ he looked up at me. “You’re English. Why train in the States?” He looked back down at his patient.
He thought I was English because I speak with an English accent. “I’m actually Bermudian. Both my grandmother and mother trained at Hopkins.”
“A family of medical women, I see.” He said this not entirely with approval.
“So why are you here at Guy’s?”
“My father did his internship here just before the war. He arranged for me to take my surgery rotation here.”
“What’s your father’s name?”
“Thomas Hodgkin.”
This got him to look up again from the patient. “Quite a famous medical name.”
“My father is descended from the younger brother of the famous Thomas Hodgkin.”
“Is your family Quaker, then?” The famous Hodgkin had been a Quaker.
“No, my parents are Church of England.” “Well, Miss Hodgkin, where did the famous Thomas Hodgkin train?”
“At St. Thomas’s and Guy’s medical school.”
“Correct. And what is the second thing for which Hodgkin is famous?” The consultant was making another small joke. Hodgkin is best known for characterizing Hodgkin’s disease, a lymphoma, in 1832.
“In 1822, he advocated the use of the stethoscope here at Guy’s.”
“Correct. For some reason we were reluctant to take up that handy device. Can’t imagine why.” Then he stepped away from the patient and asked, “Miss Hodgkin, are you scrubbed?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
The consultant glanced almost imperceptibly at the senior anaesthetist, who checked the patient’s vital signs and nodded to the consultant. The patient was stable as a rock, and a few extra minutes on the operating table for the training of a medical student would make no difference.
The consultant said to me, “Miss Hodgkin, have the heirs of William Stewart Halsted at Hopkins taught you to suture?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Then come over here, and we’ll see if you can suture as well as you can hit a tennis ball.”
Then I knew that, even though I was a woman, I had been accepted.
Mark Thakeham was a Senior House Officer at a different hospital, but he heard I was in London through the medical grapevine. His schedule as an SHO was hectic and exhausting. Wimbledon was on, and Mark called the Club and got two seats in the players’ box one afternoon during the first week. It was the first ‘open’ Wimbledon – that is, it was open to professional players. He rang me at Guy’s and asked me to come with him.
The Tennis Player from Bermuda Page 26
