A Seaside Practise

by Tom Smith

  Five pairs of eyes desperately searched the churning surface of the water. Suddenly, just beside the hull of the Annabel appeared what looked like the head of a large floor mop. Bud grabbed it in his huge right hand. As the boats began to move together, he heaved with all his might.

  The mop came up in his hand like a cork from a bottle. Willie was underneath it, attached to it by his scalp. His feet were a fraction of an inch above the deck edge as the boats crashed together again, and he was lying on the deck. He hadn’t even had long enough under water to take a breath. There wasn’t a drop of ocean inside him, and his only complaint was that his scalp hurt.

  He was taken to the cabin. I was unlashed from the mast and helped across the deck to tend to him. Naturally he was soaked to the skin, but a warm blanket and hot sweet tea soon revived him. His only physical injury was a sore head, perhaps made a little worse by his embarrassment at missing his step. We sailed back to Collintrae with a full catch of herring, and a good story to tell. Strangely, the village found more to laugh about in my being lashed to the mast than Willie’s hair. He still wears what is left of it over his shoulders, more than forty years on.

  You would think that after such an experience I’d never set foot on a fishing boat again, but my duties as a doctor forced me back on the Annabel twice more in the following year.

  Ailsa Craig sits twelve miles off the coast from Girvan and Collintrae. It’s the remains of an ancient volcano, standing out of the water like the stub of a pencil, a thousand feet high and a mile across. The sea around it is deep and full of fish, so it supports hundreds of thousands of sea birds and a thriving colony of seals. In my time, it was also the home of the lighthouse keeper and his wife, and the small gang of men who from Monday to Friday hacked the granite from the cliffs to make curling stones.

  Today, the keeper and his wife have gone, replaced by an automatic light. The granite gang has gone too, replaced by a boat that arrives twice a year to blast the rock, collect it in huge lumps, and take it to the factory on the mainland to shape into the stones. The makeshift railway that carried the stones around the south face to the lighthouse and jetty on the east side has rusted almost away. When I see it now, I’m sad but realistic that it had to give way to modern practices. I still have vivid memories of my time there.

  My first call came one winter evening at nine o’clock. We had just finished a late dinner with friends. It was the keeper of the light. I didn’t know him, as he was a Girvan patient, but his wife, Ethel, was listed as one of mine.

  ‘Evening doc,’ he said. ‘Sorry to bother you, but Ethel has really bad stomach ache, and we need some advice. Could you help?’

  We talked for several minutes about her pains, her sickness, her headache, and her bowels, until it became obvious that I couldn’t make a diagnosis over the phone or rule out a serious condition needing surgery, such as appendicitis or a perforated ulcer. But how could anyone get out to Ailsa Craig, in the dark, with a storm approaching?

  I asked the keeper about the Girvan Lifeboat. It had already been called out to an emergency in the Irish Sea – and it didn’t have a doctor on board. The only answer was for me to come in a fishing boat, if one was in the harbour.

  My luck was out. There was one in the harbour – the Annabel. I phoned Jim, and he sleepily agreed to go. He rounded up Willie and Bud, and prepared the boat for sailing. I took an anti-sickness pill, drove down to the harbour, and stepped gingerly and none too surely into the boat.

  We took two hours to get to the Craig. There was no need to lash me to the mast – I stood alongside Jim in the Wheelhouse all the way, staring at the light on the island to keep the nausea at bay. At twelve-thirty Willie, surefooted now, stepped off on to the jetty, then helped me ashore. We walked carefully over the slippery line of cobbles that led up to the house a few yards away, torches in hand. It was strangely quiet, the windows unlit. Willie rapped on the door. It took a minute or two for it to open.

  The keeper was standing in his pyjamas, peering out at us.

  ‘Oh Doctor, it’s you’, he said. I had the fleeting feeling that this was probably the most unnecessary statement in the history of medicine. Who else could it have been but me?

  ‘Do you mind if you don’t come in?’ he asked us. ‘Ethel felt a lot better an hour ago. She passed a lot of wind, all of a sudden, and felt better. She’s now sound asleep, and I don’t want to waken her. If you come in she’ll just wake up and lose the benefit of the sleep.’

  Dear reader, what do you think I did? Did I turn away and simply go back to the boat, leaving the lady in peace, but chuntering away about unreasonable patients under my breath? Or did I march in, regardless, and get my revenge, angry about the waste of time?

  My first action was to count to ten, forwards, then backwards. I told myself that it was a reasonable call-out and also a reasonable request from the man. But I still had to go in – in the case of both appendicitis and a perforated ulcer, there’s a time in which the pain goes away for a few hours, and the patient feels better. If the doctor misses that diagnosis, it’s curtains for the patient. So I persuaded myself that I had to check. I explained this to the keeper, and walked into the cottage. Mrs Keeper was sound asleep, looking the picture of health. I woke her up, gently, and explained that I had come to check that she didn’t need an emergency admission. I walked over to the sink, and turned on the tap to wash and warm up my hands. The first lesson in clinical medicine was never to put a cold hand on a suspect abdomen. It not only upsets the patient, it also causes the stomach muscles to contract, which makes feeling for any abnormality much more difficult.

  The colour of the water wasn’t reassuring. It was light brown, and smelt ‘off’. I stared at it for a second or two, then asked how long it had been that colour, and if they had been drinking it. About a week, they said, and they had been boiling it before using it for cooking. They collected drinking water from a spring not far away, and used that for their tea.

  Hands warmer, but not necessarily cleaner, I turned to examine my patient. Her abdomen was soft, though a little tender, and the bowel sounds were normal. If she were to be developing peritonitis the abdomen would be silent, and she would object fairly strongly to my putting more than the slightest pressure on it. She didn’t.

  I judged that all she needed was clean water to drink, and was able to give her a supply from the Annabel’s store. I took a sample from the offending tap for analysis, and asked the keeper to have a good look at the tank, on the hill above the house, when it was daylight. Before I reached the door, his wife was already sleeping.

  By this time it was two in the morning. The wind had risen, and Willie and I walked back down the cobbles to the jetty, where the sea had covered the smooth granite flagstones with a film of weed and salt water. The cobbles of the road had offered some grip for the soles of my boots, but the surface of the jetty was like ice. Halfway down it my foot slipped. I would have been in the water if it hadn’t been for young Willie’s strength and fast reactions. In the dark, yards away from the lights of the boat, and with only torchlight to find me, I would have been impossible to find – especially as I have short hair. As it was I went tail upwards into a heap of seaweed. Willie caught me as I slid towards the edge, held me for a moment, then heaved me up. We walked the last few yards arm in arm to the safety of Annabel. We took three hours to struggle back to Collintrae, against the wind and tides, and I fell into my bed at five-thirty.

  The next day all was explained. In the surgery at nine sharp (in those days the doctor couldn’t take a day off after a night up), I had a phone call from the keeper. The cover of the water tank had shifted, leaving a hole large enough for a rat to fall into it. Drinking eau de dead rat isn’t consistent with a healthy gut even if it is boiled. The lighthouse supply vessel, thankfully, was arriving that day, and with the help of the crew he was going to put things right. In the meantime it was bringing
a large supply of fresh water to tide them over. I looked at the sample on my desk, added a note about the rat to the form that was to accompany it, and put it into the box for the lab.

  In the end, therefore, the visit was worth it, at least for the patient. We had made the diagnosis, found the source of the problem, and dealt with it. For me it wasn’t so profitable. The slip on the jetty had driven seawater and weed, together with several sea creatures, under the surface of my oilskins on to my normal clothes underneath. Foolishly I hadn’t changed on my way to the harbour. I had simply put on a spare set of Jim’s oilskins over my best suit and shirt, with the sad result that my only tidy suit was ruined, as was the shirt. Talking to a colleague about it a few days later, he suggested I claim for a replacement from the Health Board. After all, wasn’t a call out to the Craig in the middle of the night beyond the usual duties for a family doctor? Surely there was a fund that would supply some recompense?

  I wrote to the Health Board in Kilmarnock. Two weeks later I had a reply, with a postal order for ten shillings and sixpence. This was not a fee for the ruination of my suit. That, the letter stressed, was my responsibility. However, the Board could pay a fee for an out-of-practice emergency call. The rules were that the fee could not exceed ten shillings and sixpence, regardless of the distance or the time taken away from the practice. In fact, there was doubt that there was provision in my contract for me to leave my practice for such a time without employing a locum to cover me. They were looking into whether they should dock my pay for the appropriate time I was absent from Collintrae. I would hear from the Board later on this point. There’s nothing like recognition for a hard day’s work…

  I had one more affair with Annabel. Three of the quarrymen who hacked out the curling stones on the Craig came from Collintrae. From Monday to Friday they lived in cabins on the island, working themselves to the limit. They were strong and tough, and at weekends they played hard, too. Pat O’Leary was in our famous village football team, a full-back feared by every forward who dared to pass him. Gordon Black and Michael Hagan were low-handicap golfers whose overdeveloped shoulder and back muscles helped them to hit their drives three hundred yards or more – though not always in the right direction.

  The three had been great pals, as well as workmates, for more than ten years. The Annabel and the Carrick Rose were contracted, on alternate weeks, to take them and their provisions to and from the Craig on Monday mornings and Friday evenings throughout the year. They looked on it as the perfect job – with the boys during the week on the rock, and every weekend with the wife and family. Their absence during the week, they said, made their marriages better. I’m fairly sure that their long-suffering wives agreed.

  But no job is perfect. Which is why I found myself back on the Annabel one Wednesday afternoon, sailing for the Craig. The message we had from the lads’ radio to the Annabel (there was no landline phone at the quarry) was that there had been an accident and that Michael’s right leg was trapped under a granite slab. Pat had said that they had applied first aid and Michael seemed to be ‘OK’, but it looked as if he might lose his leg.

  At first thought this seemed to be a helicopter case, but there was no landing place near the quarry and the winds and sea were making flying conditions very difficult, if not impossible. The Prestwick helicopter base would keep trying to get there, but could the Annabel make it, too, as the boat could get closer inshore and maybe arrive sooner?

  Obviously we had to go. The Annabel had been fishing just offshore, so Jim took her into harbour, I climbed aboard (old clothes under oilskins) and we set off. Luckily, tides and winds were on our side, and we made the crossing in less than an hour. Long-haired Willie grinned at me as he helped me lever myself from the boat to the rocks under the cliff, with tens of thousands of gannets whirling above and around us, like a blizzard of huge snowflakes.

  It wasn’t the time to stop and admire them. About fifty yards away were the two men huddled around Michael, who was lying calmly, waiting for us. I marvelled at his courage, as the rock that had rolled over his knee had crushed it beyond repair. Gordon and Pat had made him comfortable, and one of them had saved his life by applying a tourniquet to the thigh just above the knee. There had been plenty of blood, but there was no bleeding now. The leg was hanging on by a thin flap of skin, and all I had to do was to cut it to ease him away, minus leg, on to a makeshift stretcher.

  That was exactly the moment that we heard the helicopter. We brought Michael down to the water’s edge, as far as possible from the cliff above us, and watched as a man stepped out of the machine, carrying a stretcher of his own.

  It took only a minute or two for Michael to be carried away to hospital, leaving Willie and I to go home, and Pat and Gordon to carry on working. I was willing to take them back to Collintrae with us, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

  Six months later, Michael won the area amateur golf championship. I was there to watch his last round. He was brilliant. His drives were rifle straight. He outdrove all his competitors by yards, and hit almost every fairway in ‘regulation’. (Golfers know what that means.) His handicap had become ‘plus’ – four strokes better than before his amputation.

  Celebrating with him in the clubhouse, I congratulated him on his amazing recovery from such a calamity.

  ‘It’s my new leg,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a wee key at the side of my knee that locks the joint into place whenever I want to. It makes it rigid, so that it can’t bend or sway. That means I swing round a stiff right leg – I can swing the club down and into the ball in exactly the right path every time.’

  Obviously, Michael couldn’t go back to the Craig. The golfing success, though, opened up a new career for him. He became a golf assistant, and within a few years was club professional to a well-known course somewhere in Britain. I won’t name it, because I don’t know if he has told his members or competitors about his ‘wee advantage’. And I don’t know if it is legal to use it. Perhaps someone from the R & A Rules Committee might know…

  Chapter Twelve

  Accidents

  The A77, the main road from Glasgow to Stranraer, is a hundred miles long. Twenty miles from its final destination – the ferry terminal for Ireland – it passes through Collintrae. To reach our little piece of rural heaven, drivers have had to battle through the towns and villages south of Ayr, none of which even now have, in the twenty-first century, been deemed worthy of bypass by the authorities. So that last fifty miles is a struggle on the best of days. When the weather is bad, or the traffic particularly heavy, there are hundreds of drivers hurtling towards Stranraer, desperate to catch their ferry bookings, unable to overtake on the narrow, winding, two-lane road. Add a local tractorman going about his business, or a caravanner wanting to admire the scenery, and tempers rage. On days like this, misjudge your overtaking, and you end up at best in hospital. Impatience, tiredness, and narrow inadequate roads with blind bends and dips are a sure recipe for carnage.

  As the Collintrae doctor I quickly became used to the call to accidents, sometimes more than one a day. On December 16, 1966 I was called to two accidents. I got to the first one, but I failed to attend the second. My memory isn’t just hazy about the second, it’s non-existent. I’d better explain.

  As you drive south from Collintrae to Stranraer you first climb into the hills above Glen App. You enter the glen, which runs parallel to the coast, about two miles inland, through a narrow pass, with steep hillside rising up to the right, and just as steep a decline down to the left, through pine trees to the valley floor several hundred feet below. It was through this pass that MacAllan’s bread van raced each morning at around six-thirty, with its load of freshly baked delicacies for the ferries.

  On that December morning, it didn’t make it. It wasn’t that the driver was going too fast. A few yards past the summit of the pass, men had been working on the road. They had closed off the right side of the road, so
that large vehicles had to drive slowly and carefully past the obstruction, taking care not to catch the grassy verge, beyond which was the drop to the valley floor.

  The baker’s man knew that he had to go slow at that point, but he hadn’t accounted for the black ice on the surface. The temperature was about three degrees below freezing and there had been rain the day before – just enough moisture to form a film of ice on the road, but not enough to notice in the dark before dawn.

  As he edged carefully past the road-up sign, even at that speed the van slid enough to hit the grass with its front near-side wheel. The bus driver behind him saw the accident happen as if in slow motion. The van had started to tip sideways as the verge gave way. As it did so, the driver’s door opened, as if he wanted to jump out, but the tipping was too fast for him. Gravity slammed the door back on to him, and the roll of the van gathered momentum. The bus was close enough for the driver to see the headlights of the van spinning over and over, and to hear the smashing of the trees, as it careered through them.

  I got the message about the crash from the dairyman who lived in the farmhouse at the bottom of the hill. Luckily, I was already dressed so I could leave home immediately. Warned by the policeman about the black ice I gingerly made my way to the scene in my pride and joy, my blue and white Morris Oxford. Even going slowly I felt it slide on the various bends up to the pass.

  I arrived at the scene before the ambulance, just after the fire brigade. Dawn was breaking: the December sun was making an effort to break through the swirls of grey mist. The firemen were at the edge of the road, shining a light down through the mess of broken trees at the wreck. We couldn’t distinguish between broken tree branches and the remains of the bread van. As it had spun down into the valley, it had been ripped into shreds, so that we were looking down at thousands of pieces of splintered wood, from the trees and the bodywork of the van. Scattered down the slope was an avalanche of hundreds of loaves of bread, rolls, cakes, flans and tarts. Below them, lying on the flat grass, was the cab of the van. Beside it was the motionless body of the driver, face down, limbs akimbo. We switched off the engines of the police car, the bus and the fire engine, to try to hear anything that might indicate that the driver was alive. All we could hear was the distant call of a screech owl.