A Seaside Practise

by Tom Smith

  I grew up in those two summers as a psychiatric nursing assistant. They, more than all the psychiatric teaching at medical school, prepared me best for Collintrae and how to manage my little Tuinal-deprived band of men and women. But I wasn’t truly prepared for my first real crisis, which came in the shape of Donald Gray.

  Chapter Ten

  Donald Gray

  Today Donald Gray would have been described as homeless, although he had a home that was perfectly acceptable to him. It had a magnificent view, a bountiful source of pure drinking water and plenty of other water in which to wash, on the few occasions he saw a need for it. It had adequate facilities for his sanitary needs, and was perfectly insulated against the weather.

  It was a cave.

  The main road to Glasgow snakes its way north of Collintrae, between the shoreline to the west and the ancient raised beaches to the east. The first three miles are straight, built on the ‘machair’ land, the grassy flat area that lies between the coast and the richer, less salty farmland beyond. Then the road hits the Bennane Head, a granite hill over which it must pass to return to the machair again and the route that takes the traveller up the winding west coast, forty miles to Ayr and thirty more miles to Glasgow.

  In the past, the Bennane was a real obstacle to travellers. It isolated Collintrae and the villages beyond it from the north, so that for centuries travellers to Stranraer and Ireland had to take the road miles inland. Until the road over the Bennane was built, around 1890, the only way Collintrae folk could go north was either by boat or into Kilminnel and around the hills, a long detour in the times when the only vehicles were horse-drawn.

  So the Bennane was a place few people visited. Even in the twentieth century, people had not settled on the cliff top. The few farms there were back from the edge, spreading into the hills beyond, and entry to them was from the inland road, not from the snake-like cliff pass. Yet for many centuries, people had lived at the Bennane, but in the caves below it, carved out of the rock by the pounding of the sea.

  The nature of the caves meant that those who lived in them had to be special. So special, in fact that they were often possessed of, for want of a more medical word, an unusual state of mind. For example, back in the fifteenth century, in the time of King James the Fourth, there was the Bean family. The head of the family was Sauney, who was reputed to have several wives and many children, and who eschewed all civilised behaviour. The mildest of their aberrations was that they wore no clothes, something that anyone who has sampled South Ayrshire’s winters (or, for that matter, all four seasons) can hardly believe. Worse were their eating habits.

  Sauney and his family were cannibals. People who had tried to take the cliff paths between Girvan and Collintrae had a habit of vanishing on the way. For a while, their friends and families thought that they had fallen off the treacherous cliff tracks by accident, until the ‘accidents’ became too frequent. When the militia eventually went to investigate, they found the naked Bean family well-fed, with choice legs and arms hanging up, presumably an early form of the curing process we use for ham, in the recesses of the cave. The salt sea air was perfect as a preservative and, it was rumoured, added a certain piquancy to the meat.

  Sauney was forced to watch his wife and children beheaded in Edinburgh before being exposed to the ‘Maiden’. I won’t describe it in detail as this is supposed to be a light-hearted look at Scottish life. It is enough to state that it had to do with a long curved, razor-sharp blade and two heavy weights each attached to a leg. His quarters were then distributed to various townships and hung, rather appropriately, in gibbets for the citizens to ponder over.

  Sauney’s cave has never been lived in since that time, although today’s visitors to it (they have to climb down a steep cliff path to get to it) are still finding small bones in the sand that forms its floor, or in crevices in its walls. Fragments of sheep bones, craftily broken to just the right shape and size, look remarkably like, say, the wrist bones of a long-dead ancestor, horribly slain by a Scottish monster. There is no scarcity of dead sheep around Collintrae, nor of locals who like keeping up the tradition of satisfying the romantic notions of their American cousins.

  But Sauney isn’t the main subject of this story. About a hundred yards south of his cave is another, with a high-vaulted, cathedral-like ceiling of pure granite. Its opening is just above the high-water mark, so that it never floods, and the sand and shingle floor gently slopes upwards fifty feet or more into the rock. About twenty feet in, there is a shelf on the north side of the cave, just wide enough for a man to sleep comfortably on, and high enough for the rats not to bother to visit. To the south edge of the cave opening, a fresh-water spring emerges from the shingle margin of the machair and the beach. It keeps running all year round, never drying up in the summer or freezing in the winter. Just in front of the cave is a large rock that hides its mouth from anyone on the sea beyond: it offers security and a natural break from the prevailing south-westerly winds.

  It sounds like perfection for the sort of person who wants to get away from it all. Donald Gray was just such a man, the latest in a long line who had seen its perfection. The villagers would tell of a succession of recluses who had lived in the cave, going far back into their great-grandparents’ time and probably long before then. They would say that when one died, the next would always turn up within days, as if there were a grapevine for just this sort of loner.

  Anyway, in my time in Collintrae, the cave occupant was Donald. With his long straggly black hair and beard going grey, his gaunt face, his ragged clothes put on in multiple layers in the winter, only a few of which he would shed in the summer, and his Wellington boots that were never taken off, even when sleeping, he cut a strange, but not particularly fearsome figure. The children of the village all knew him, and were never frightened of him or rude to him. Their parents had taught them to treat Donald with respect: they always said ‘Good morning’ to him as they passed by. They knew that he would never return the greeting, but would never have thought of ignoring him. He was as much part of the village community as they were. He had his nickname, as had all his predecessors. If you visit his cave mouth now, you will see it on a metal plaque to his memory, erected by the people of Collintrae, who held him in great affection. I prefer not to use it, however: he deserves a proper name in this book.

  I can’t say that Donald was a man of few words, because he wasn’t. He was a man of no words at all. When I arrived on the scene he had been in the Bennane cave for thirty years, and no one had heard him speak a word in all that time. His routine was simple. Every day he rose at dawn and every evening, at dusk, he retired to his mattress on the shelf. They were long days in the summer, and very short ones in the winter. Throughout the year he tended to a tiny vegetable garden on the machair beside the cave, grown from tubers, seeds and plants that were miraculously left just beside his cave mouth every spring. He foraged south to Collintrae on Tuesdays and north to the small fishing village of Carletonfoot on Fridays. In each village, each week, he would find ‘leavings’ in the top of the bins. They were small offerings of wholesome food that the villagers had left specially for him, well wrapped in brown paper, so that he could carry them home to his cave.

  Donald would never beg, or ask anyone for a favour, but he knew which dustbins were plentiful, and which weren’t. He never thanked anyone, but he would offer a gruff smile from time to time to those he knew had helped him.

  That smile was a real effort for him. Donald had once had a promising career ahead of him somewhere in the city, but a devastating illness had deprived him of his desire to communicate any further with the rest of his kind. He was great with seagulls, with seals, with otters and even rats, but not with humans. I suspected that he had schizophrenia, but he had never been near a doctor in his adult life, having suddenly walked out of his parents’ home, never to see them again, at the age of twenty. So I never knew why he had turned
his back on the rest of us.

  One of my responsibilities was to look after patients from the practice who were in the cottage hospital in Girvan. This took me almost every day on the road that passed only a few yards from the front of the cave. Often he would be sitting on a rock with his back to the road, looking due west, out to sea. It wasn’t a bad occupation. In front of him were the rocks of the shore. Beyond them were eleven miles of grey-blue sea with gannets and gulls wheeling high above it. Interrupting the skyline was the great rock of Ailsa Craig, the remnant of a volcano that was once higher than Everest. Twenty miles beyond Ailsa Craig the horizon was shaped by the long low hills of Kintyre, and to the north the majestic peaks of Arran. On a clear day Rathlin Island stood out in the south-west, marking the start of Ireland. I imagine he never grew tired of that view.

  I stopped one day, to see if I could light a spark of interest in him. I clambered over the grassy hummocks, walked over a few yards of shingle, and sat down on a rock about ten feet away from him, facing the sea, not looking directly at him.

  ‘Morning, Mr Gray. Nice view’, I said. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard a very mild grunt. He didn’t move his head or give any other indication that he knew I was there. ‘I know you don’t want to talk, and probably don’t want me near you, but just in case you ever need me, I’m Dr Smith. You may know my car. I pass most days around this time.’

  I thought I heard another grunt, but wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to press myself on him, so I stood up and left. He didn’t turn round. I walked to my car, and drove off.

  Over the next few months I made a point of stopping whenever I saw him walking along the roadside. I would wind down the window, smile, and say hello, say a little about the weather, and say that I hoped he was well. I didn’t intend to invade his private spot again, on the rock just above the high-water mark. But he never answered, though he did look at me for a second or two before resuming his trudge to or from his cave.

  I eventually did intrude on his space around a year after we had first met on the shore. It was a beautiful June morning, the sea flat calm after a fairly severe storm the evening before. It had been one of those storms that the local farmers loved, because it tossed on the shore many tons of seaweed that they could harvest for fertilising their potato fields. Ayrshire tatties are famous for their taste, and just the right amount of seaweed in the ground is one of the reasons for it. The shore line just north of Collintrae is a good harvesting ground, flat and firm so that the tractors can be driven from the road right down to the beach. It is easy pickings, and gratefully received as one of the perks of living near the sea.

  That morning, though, it wasn’t just seaweed that had landed on the beach. I was first alerted by a phone call, around eight o’clock. ‘Is that the Admiralty Officer for the Collintrae region?’ said the mature male voice on the other end.

  ‘I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number,’ I replied, then replaced the receiver.

  The phone rang again, seconds later. ‘Excuse me, but you are the Collintrae doctor, aren’t you?’ It was the same voice.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said, mystified.

  ‘Then you are the Admiralty Officer. This is the South Ayrshire police, Sergeant Duff speaking. We have a body you need to examine for us. It’s on the beach just below the Bennane Head. Must have been washed up by last night’s storm.’

  ‘Why me?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you have an on-call pathologist?’

  ‘That’s you,’ said Sergeant Duff. ‘As I said, you are the Admiralty Officer – it’s part of the local GP job. Any body on a beach and you have to make the first examination. Only when you have certified death can we move the body. I don’t think you’ll find it difficult, Doctor.’

  I thanked him for the call and drove the three miles to the Bennane, ruminating as I did that the job was throwing up surprises. There had been no Admiralty Officers in Birmingham. When I got there, I found that Sergeant Duff was right: it certainly wasn’t difficult to certify death.

  There were two police cars on the machair between the road and the sea, and a large black unmarked van ominously parked beside them. Three policemen were standing by, obviously waiting for me. James Brodie, one of the local farmers, was sitting on the machair grass, beside his tractor. The trailer behind it was half-full of seaweed. He had had a good morning, until he had caught sight of the object of our enquiries. Only twenty yards away sat Donald on his stone, staring, as he always did when he sat there, steadfastly out to sea.

  The senior policeman introduced himself as Sergeant Duff. Mr Brodie had found the body as he was shifting a particularly bulky pile of seaweed from the shingle. As he had turned over the edge of it with his ‘graip’ (the Ayrshire word for a large fork) he found two clear blue eyes looking up at him. Not surprisingly he had been sick on the spot. For the eyes were the only flesh remaining on the face. The rest of the skin had been eaten away to the bone, so that the eyes were staring out of lidless sockets in a clean-picked skull. The only flesh to be seen on the head was over the back of the scalp and around the ears.

  By the time I had arrived, the policemen had cleared all the seaweed from the body, that was now lying face up, arms stretched out along his sides, one leg lying with an ankle crossed over the other. If it hadn’t been for the lack of a face he might have been having a quiet siesta on the beach.

  Beside one shoulder was a neat little pile of steaming half-digested breakfast, belonging to one of the policemen. Its producer was leaning against a rock a few yards away, apparently ridding himself of the rest of his morning coffee and toast. Another policeman, stronger of stomach, was busy taking photographs of the scene from different angles. Beautiful beach notwithstanding, these snaps weren’t going into a family album.

  I turned to Sergeant Duff. ‘Well, he’s dead,’ I said, a little unnecessarily, I admit. ‘What do we do next with the body? We obviously have to take it somewhere to examine him, and I doubt if the hospital mortuary would be happy to take him.’

  ‘We’ll put him in the south cemetery house in Girvan. We can do the post-mortem there,’ he said.

  ‘How do you mean ‘‘we’’?’ I asked him. ‘Can’t we get a man from Ayr?’

  ‘It’s up to you, Doc,’ Sergeant Duff replied. ‘The Procurator Fiscal only wants an external examination for the moment, but we may have to take a piece of lung.’ I blanched. I had the usual student experience of PM examinations, but they weren’t my strong point. However, I couldn’t let myself down in front of the men in blue. I bent over the body to make sure I hadn’t missed any vital clue before he was moved. There were small black sea-lice jumping all over him, desperate to get back into the safety of the waves. There was seaweed in every fold of his heavy grey tweed overcoat. A red jelly fish had become entangled in its belt, so that there were strands of stinging tentacles wrapped round his waist. The backs of his hands, which were tightly clenched, were as bony as his face. The rest of him was covered with the coat and thick tweed trousers. I was astonished by how well his clothing had survived the sea and the creatures that lived in it. Obviously it wasn’t nearly as much to their taste as his skin and flesh.

  I wondered about his eyes, too. Why were they spared, when they would have been the first meal for any crow that came upon a body left on land?

  I stood up and turned to go, and as I did so, caught sight of Donald, sitting there, motionless as ever. I made my way clumsily over the twenty yards of slippery boulders and seaweed towards him and stood beside him, looking, as he was, out to sea.

  ‘Morning, Mr Gray,’ I said, quietly. ‘You all right?’

  I thought I heard one of his quiet grunts, but wasn’t sure. I looked at his face: it carried his usual deadpan expression. If he had been affected by the body lying in his little piece of the world, he didn’t show it.

  ‘If you need me, let me know,’ I said, and turned away, up to the machair
and the road.

  Sergeant Duff organised for me to meet him and two of his officers at six o’clock that evening, after dark, in the cemetery, where we would conduct our Fiscal’s examination. I got on with my daily rounds and surgeries then, at around five, I took out my books. I was the new boy on the block, and I had to perform. As a Birmingham student, my bible on bodies was Polson’s Essentials of Forensic Medicine and as Polson had been very much a Birmingham man, there was not too much, unsurprisingly, on bodies found in the sea. Happily, though, one of the books left by the late Dr Rose had been the Glasgow tome, by Glaister, and this had much more that was relevant to my current predicament.

  So it was that at six that evening, I and four policemen, the extra one being the Fiscal’s man, entered the gloomy shed in the old Girvan cemetery to perform the external examination. There was no electricity or heating, so we made do by the light and heat of three hurricane lamps as we began to divest the man of his clothes. Maybe I should have warned the policemen beforehand about post-mortem examinations of persons who had been dead a little while. But I didn’t, which perhaps explains how, shortly after, I found myself in the shed alone, with four stalwart policemen outside, in various states of asphyxia. My mind went back to my first post mortem attendance, as a third-year student. We were ‘hands-on’ students in Birmingham. That meant that our introduction into a subject was undertaken in the same way that young gannets learn to fly. They are just nudged off the edge of their cliff ledge by their parents. They free-fall a hundred feet or so, and just before they hit the water or rocks below, somehow they turn on their flying skills. From then on they can free-wheel about the sky wherever they like. Presumably, millions of years of evolution ensured that the slow learning gene for gannet flight has been lost on the way.