by Tom Smith
Medical school was like that. On our first day as students we didn’t take part in the jollies and parties offered to the students from other faculties. Instead, we were introduced to the fearsome Ernie Jones, the cadaver man. Under his guidance we trooped up to the dissection room, were allocated our bodies and, on the sound of a bell, we had to unwrap them and start to dissect the upper limb. We lost five young gannets on the rocks that first day, while the rest of us sailed on into the sky of our medical education.
By the time we were starting morbid pathology, two years later, we were hardened to most sights and smells in the hospital wards and operating theatre. But I hadn’t been prepared completely for my first post mortem.
My digs were on the south side of Birmingham in those days, and I travelled into the city centre, to the General Hospital, by bus along the busy Bristol Road. Unhappily for me, as it turned out, on the morning that I and the small group of students (the ‘S’s in the alphabet) were to start our pathology training, the road was busier than usual. The bus ground to a halt a mile from the city centre, stuck in a jam. I had to get off it and run all the way to the General.
I arrived around ten minutes late, rushing into the mortuary hot, dishevelled and all apologies to the Professor. He was unusually cheery, I thought, all smiles. He didn’t mind my being late at all, he said. I could have the last cadaver in the room. It was only then that I noticed that the rest of the students were standing by their tables, waiting to begin. On each table was a white sheet, under which rose the outline of a body. There were seven of us in all, and each of my six colleagues was standing beside a white mound that looked of fairly normal size. Mine, white mound number seven, was different. It was huge. Underneath it was obviously a very fat person, with an enormous abdomen.
I grimaced, and realised why the chief had smiled. He had kept the biggest body for the last student to arrive, as a punishment for his laziness.
We were instructed for a few minutes on the rudiments of performing a post mortem, then told to begin. I thought I caught a suppressed laugh or two as we removed our white sheets, and supposed that the Prof had let them in on his little wheeze. I didn’t know the half of it.
A post-mortem examination begins by plunging a sharp knife into the upper chest, and drawing it down in one vertical slash towards the pelvis. We all did that. My memory of what happened after I did that to body number seven is very clear to this day. I don’t mean, however, my visual memory or my auditory memory. I can’t really recall the faces of all the people in that room, or what exactly they said to me at the time. But imprinted on my olfactory memory since then is the smell.
My man hadn’t been fat at all. He had been in a canal for three weeks, and was full of gas. His body behaved almost exactly like one of those party balloons that you blow up and let fly around the room. Not that it flew round the room, but that it blew off the noxious agents that had been forming inside it during those weeks, in a concentrated stream. From being an enormous mound he was now a shrivelled, very thin, wizened little man, bathed in the most horrendous smell
I staggered to the door, to find myself the only one in the room. Prof had warned the other students, and they had departed the instant before I had made my incision. They were out in the corridor, waiting for the fans to clean the atmosphere before they could start again. I was never, never, late for pathology again.
The body from the beach wasn’t quite as bad. The salt in the sea slows down the corrupting process, so that bodies taken from it are better preserved than those from industrial canals. Our mistake had been to leave him at room temperature for around ten hours before examining him – by which time he had probably been out of the sea for fifteen hours. That’s time enough to accelerate the rotting process.
Sergeant Duff managed to come back into the room to help me finish taking off the rest of the clothes. We took them off carefully, making sure we weren’t stung by the remnants of the jelly fish . The dead man was wearing a coat, a suit, a thick white shirt, plain blue tie, expensive underwear, socks and high-quality brown boots that had amazingly survived their long immersion in the water exceptionally well. There was absolutely no mark of identification on any of them. Someone, presumably the man himself, had removed the makers’ labels from all of them. There were no papers, wallets, handkerchiefs, combs, pocket knives – nothing by which we could identify him. The only objects found on him were collections of sharp stones in each coat and jacket pocket.
I propped up my copies of Glaister and Polson beside him, under the light of one of the hurricane lamps, and read as I worked, ‘How to examine the body’. Sergeant Duff must have thought I was doing the equivalent of painting by numbers, but I needed to get this right. All the layers of clothing had preserved the rest of his body from the crabs and other creatures that had made such a good job of eating his face. He was a muscular man, with a moderate layer of fat on him. Much of the fat had turned into a substance called adipocere, a thick, greasy substance that Glaister calls suet-like. He also writes that it ‘is inflammable and burns with a faint yellow flame: when distilled it yields a dense oily vapour’. He continues, ‘it has a mouldy odour’.
Sergeant Duff and I already knew about the odour. We weren’t going to test its inflammability, so we moved the sputtering hurricane lamp a little further away and continued with our morbid task. According to the two textbooks, that amount of adipocere meant that he had been in the sea for between one and two months. Apparently he had never had a surgical operation or a wound – there were no marks or scars on his torso or limbs. I prized open his clenched fists, to find some strands of weed and pieces of stick still inside them. They were not from the sea, but perhaps from a river bank. His nails were scratched and edged with dirt that had survived the sea because the fingers had been tightly buried inside his fists.
I guessed from his skin, and the black body hairs going grey, that he was around fifty years old. I also guessed that he had committed suicide: many suicides want to obliterate themselves, to leave no trace of themselves in the world that they wish so much to leave. Removing all traces of identity is one aspect of this sad desire. The stones he had put there to weigh himself down but, perhaps, once in the water he had changed his mind. Were the twigs and grasses in his hands the sign of a final vain fight for life?
As for the eyes, the explanation was there in Glaister’s pages, but it wasn’t written by Glaister. It was a note in the margin, written by Dr Rose, just opposite the part about adipocere. He had obviously had a similar job in the past. It read: ‘NB: the eyes are preserved in the sea – probably too slippery and solid for the crabs and the fish to get a hold’. I was grateful to Dr Rose, and as I hadn’t seen this noted elsewhere, I’d like to call it ‘Rose’s Sign’. You read it here first.
I had a last duty to do. The Fiscal had asked me to take a small sample of lung. It meant making an incision in the chest wall and removing a piece of the lung from underneath. The younger policemen, who had gingerly re-entered the room, decided at this point that the night air outside was better to breathe. Sergeant Duff, interested now, held the specimen bottle for me.
It was a simple test. Salt water is denser than tap water. If you drown in the sea, a bit of your lung will sink in a glass of tap water. If you drown in a fresh-water river, it will float. This lung floated. I could give the Fiscal an assurance that however the body got into the sea, it had arrived there from a river, around a month to two months before. I made the required report for a Scottish doctor reporting a cause of death – ‘I swear on soul and conscience that I have examined this man and find that he has died of suicidal drowning. I do not believe that any other person was involved in this death’. I thanked the police for their help and went home, for a large whisky and a long hot bath.
Next morning, I saw Donald again. He was still on his seat, looking out to sea. I said ‘Good morning’, he gave one of his little grunts, and we looked at
the sea together for a few moments before I drove off.
I didn’t think I would hear more about the body on the shore, but he was identified a few weeks later. A real pathologist had performed a full Fiscal’s autopsy. He confirmed that he had drowned in fresh water. Examination of scrapings from the soil under the fingernails and the plants in his hands had defined the area of entry into the water as near a bridge in the Upper Clyde. A man local to that area had been missing for a month, after finding his wife with someone else.
Believe it or not, it was the job of the police to launder the dead man’s clothes and offer them to the not-so-grieving widow. After all, they were his possessions, and they rightly belonged to his next of kin. Although they ‘brushed up well’, not surprisingly she refused them. So they were disposed of in a bin. A few days later on my usual coastal drive to Girvan I passed Donald, who was wearing a very fine pair of leather boots.
Though words were not for Donald Gray, I did once manage to get a dozen from him. Our second child, Alasdair, had arrived when Catriona was two years old. After that, to give Mairi a rest from time to time, I would take Catriona along with me in the car when going on short visits to patients I knew. They loved to see ‘the wee lass’ and made a fuss of her. She was a friendly girl, who smiled at everyone, including Donald when we stopped to greet him on the road or by the Bennane. Whenever I was accompanied by Catriona, a flicker of warmth appeared on Donald’s face that I had never seen before when I had greeted him alone.
From time to time, however, Catriona would have a recurrent illness that, thankfully, eventually passed. There was a period when she was around three years old when she had a long stay in bed and even a few days in hospital. The word got around the village that ‘the Doctor’s wee lassie wasn’t well’. For a few days she was not in the car. When next I was driving past the Bennane, I saw Donald in the distance, waiting by the side of the road. As I drove up, he waved me down, the first time he had ever done so. I stopped beside him and leaned across the passenger seat to wind down the window next to him.
He stuck his weather-ravaged face through the space. He looked anxious and was obviously trying to speak – it was almost as if he had forgotten how to do so. Then the words came out in a torrent.
‘I hear the wee lassie’s ill,’ he said, almost in tears. ‘It’s no serious, is it? She’ll be all right, won’t she?’
Almost instantly, I could feel the tears flowing down my own cheeks. That this man could be so concerned about my daughter that he had spoken for the first time in many years moved me greatly. It took me some time to compose myself before reassuring him and thanking him profusely for his concern.
From then on we managed to have the odd conversation. Donald died a few years later, still in his cave. Everyone from the villages around came to the funeral, but the day after, the council bricked up the entrance to the cave, so that no one could follow the old tradition. I thought then it was a shame, and still think so. I’m sure there is another Donald somewhere who could have filled his shoes.
Chapter Eleven
Willie’s hair
Willie had long hair. You’d think that wasn’t so outrageous. But Willie lived in Collintrae.
The three Fs – fishing, farming, and forestry – have sustained the men and women of Collintrae for a thousand years or more. It wasn’t that the modern age had passed them by. They prized education and learning: but they remained where they were. They didn’t see the need to leave for the city when they had so much in and around Collintrae.
They were natural conservatives in those years before the rise of the Scottish Nationalists and the Scottish Parliament, though almost to a man they voted Labour, with a sprinkling of old Scottish Liberal. They followed their callings, father to son, mother to daughter, without a thought of seeking change.
Willie had followed his father and grandfather, and all the McIlwraiths before him, into the family boat. No rebel he. Yet he had long hair. It wasn’t even a fashion of the time. Sure, there had been longhaired teenagers a generation before him, but in his day the Beatles wore their hair in the Mod style, like an Eton crop. The long hair of the flower power people was yet to come. Only a cissie would have grown his hair as long as Willie did. But it would be a brave man who would call Willie a cissie. For a start he was a big guy. Years on the fishing boats had given him a formidable set of muscles and a weather-beaten look. So anyone tempted to snigger about his blond, curly, shoulder-length locks did it behind his back. Only his dad, Jim, the skipper, dared take him to task.
‘That hair of yours needs a damn good clip. If you dinna get it done yerself, I’ll get Alec McClung tae dae it’, Jim would say, though with tolerant affection, rather than anger.
Alec McClung was no fisherman. He was a shepherd, and the thought of his shearing clippers didn’t go down well. There are no niceties about sheep shearing. Alec could shear a sheep every three minutes and keep it up for ten hours a day. Efficient, but not pretty. So Willie kept well away from him.
That decision saved his life. And I was a witness to it. I had taken on the mantle of local family doctor seriously. Now we call ourselves general practitioners, but I prefer the older name. It sits more comfortably with what I did – look after families. That means learning a bit about what my patients do for a living, just as much as helping them when they are ill. So during my time in practice, I’ve tried my hand at sheep dipping and shearing, lopping trees, and driving tractors.
I tried to think that it was just part of the job, then, when I eventually joined the herring boats for a night at the nets. I’m sick on the Arran ferry, and that’s only an hour’s trip on a ship a lot bigger than a fifty-foot inshore fishing boat. Herring congregate over the ‘banks’ about fifteen miles off the Collintrae shore. Look at it on the map, and you’ll see that it’s slap bang where the Atlantic rollers run in to the mainland. There’s no protection for three thousand miles: due west is northern Labrador, and nothing to stop the swell. I reckon the herring choose that spot out of spite. A few miles to the south and you are in the lee of the Antrim coast, and few miles to the north, the Mull of Kintyre, the 100-mile long spit of land that runs down the west coast of Scotland, protects you. But the herring banks? They’re in the gap.
Herring are creatures of habit. They only appear for a few weeks a year, gathering in their millions at that forsaken spot to spawn. They don’t choose the summer, either. Which is why I found myself going out to the fishing grounds on a bitter February night, sailing from the harbour on the good ship Annabel at around midnight. There were six of us on board: the five regular crew of four McIlwraiths and a McCrindle, and me. Jim settled himself into the wheelhouse and the others invited me to the for’ard cabin. It was snug enough. Willie was brewing a cup of tea and Bud, his uncle, was frying a heap of bacon and eggs. I lasted around half a minute. The boat wasn’t yet out of the harbour, and I was feeling sick. The smell of the bacon didn’t help.
I staggered out on deck and decided to spend the rest of the trip there, watching the lights of home recede and the stars dance around with the pitching, tossing and yawing. Jim lashed me to the mast with strong rope, like Jason on the Argo, about to face the sirens of Scylla and Charybdis. He wasn’t going to return to Collintrae minus the doctor.
We eventually reached the fishing grounds in about two hours of battling against what I thought must be a storm, but was cheerfully told was a force five – really only a breeze. Then the crew got to work. We were ring netting. That means that two boats work together. They start side by side, aiming to pay out a long strip of net. The anchor boat stays put, and the ‘ringer’ sails round in a huge circle, eventually returning to her partner. Each boat now has one end of the net, and it needs to be pulled in, hopefully full of herring. The fish swim at a certain depth below the surface, and the net is designed to work at just that depth.
What happens next is crucial. When the second boat bac
ks alongside, its crew (apart from the man in the wheelhouse) jump across to the anchor boat, with their end of the net, and they pull in the fish from that one boat.
On a calm night, that jump needs finesse: it isn’t easy. When a two-metre swell is added into the equation, your timing and your jump have to be just right. There is only a second or two to make it with each wave, when the boat decks are at the same level. Willie, the youngest and nimblest, had gone on the Carrick Rose, our ringer, with Bud and Roddy McCrindle, a man of around thirty five. They had to make the jump back to the Annabel. I watched them, still tied as I was to the mast. The first to jump was Bud. The older man stood on the edge of the deck, waited till the two decks were level, and just stepped aboard the Annabel, as easily as stepping off a pavement. Roddy was a bit less sure of himself. He waited for a second wave to try the transfer. The boats rolled apart, then came together, the bumpers of old tyres hanging on the boat sides squashing together as they did so. He was a fraction late: the Annabel’s deck lurched away as he strode across, and he had to jump, just a little bit, to be safe. He landed safely and grinned back at Willie, who was waiting his turn.
Carrick Rose and Annabel swung apart again as a roller came between them. Willie was waiting for the trough, when they would swing back together. At the crucial moment he stepped off the Rose. Ocean swells aren’t predictable. As he did so, a cross wind caught the side of the Annabel. I felt the jolt myself as the mast juddered against my spine. Instead of stepping on to the deck, Willie stepped straight into the water.
It happened so quickly that we were all stunned for a second. The boats rolled together, and Willie was under us. Aghast, I could only think he had been crushed between the hulls. The boats swung apart as the next wave came between us, and the water rose to meet the horrified faces of the men peering over the side. Both the boat and the sea around it were floodlit from powerful lights on the front of the wheelhouse, so we could see almost as clearly as in daylight.
