Spring and Summer 1954 - Back-packing to Italy

Early in 1954, I developed a small inguinal hernia, which could probably have been left alone for a long time without causing harm. But with visions in my mind of obstruction or strangulation at some inconvenient time and place, I asked a thoracic surgeon at Clare Hall Hospital, Mr Laird, to repair it. He and the others on the staff were solid and competent. I worked under the direction of the medical superintendent, a wise old fox, FAH Simmonds; I lived in, along with a very pleasant Parsee from Bombay, another thoracic surgeon called Mehta, and ate daily with two other registrars who lived out and with whom I hitched rides into London - Alan Buckley and Dick Harvey-Samuel, both alas now dead, though no older than I, both perhaps victims of radiation.

I was attracted to all sorts of exotica, and if it hadn't been for some hard thinking I did while convalescing from the hernia operation, I might have taken up one of these exciting options. I met and discussed going along with a team of young Brits who planned to drive a Sunbeam sports car from Alaska to Terra del Fuego - but decided that they were too erratic and irresponsible for me to take chances with them. Another option that I examined with greater care came, like the Sunbeam sports car enthusiasts, from the “Agony” column of the Times. This was to go as medical officer with a team doing under-water archeology with aqualungs off the island of Rhodes. I doubt if I would have survived the rigorous selection process for this post, but it has always been a tantalizing speculation - “What if?...”

So there remained just a few more odd jobs, locum registrar posts as casualty officer at Poplar Hospital far out in the East End, and finally back to Hillingdon again as a locum casualty officer, before my final tour of Europe in the summer of 1954. I still remained undecided about my future career, my love life was in disarray - neither of the two Australian girls I had taken to plays, restaurants, concerts, had taken me seriously (nor was I really serious about them despite tryimg to pretend to myself that I was).

Ruins of the Foro Romano

Lorelei Rock (cliff) on the Rhine, 1954

I set off with a pack on my back, but with some train tickets in my pocket, to visit the Rhine Valley, Switzerland, Italy, Paris, to crowd into a six week tour as much as I could of the culture and civilization of western Europe before reluctantly and with bad grace, 
turning my back on all this and going home to Adelaide to start an honest medical career.

Castel St'Angelo

Florence

That European tour went very well all the way, full of interest and with several pleasant social encounters. I went along the Rhine by steamer from Bingen to Koblenz, seeing that fortified stretch of the Rhine at its spectacular best. I passed through Luzern, and Innsbruck; then on into Italy, to Rome, Florence and Venice. On the bus between Rome and Florence I fell into conversation with Ira and Ann Zane, Americans, and struck up a friendship with them that lasted until Ira was killed a few years later when the plane he was on crashed into the East River as it was taking off from La Guardia airport. In Florence, I stayed overnight in a cheap pensione where I spread my sleeping bag on a couch beside a long table in the dining room. I slept in the nude then, and woke next morning with a very full bladder, to see a very full table of voluble Italians engaged in animated discussion, or argument. I managed to reach my underpants and get them on before making a run for the gabinetto in the hallway outside the dining room. I had a tiny room to myself for the rest of my week in Florence. In Venice one morning I sipped coffee at an outdoor table of Florian's superb restaurant  on St Mark's Square, reading the International Herald Tribune. A dark-haired young woman with what I took to be an American accent asked me if she could borrow my newspaper to look at the hockey scores. She wasn't American of course, but Canadian, Lorie, from Winnipeg, staying as I was, at the rather scruffy youth hostel. At her suggestion, we left the youth hostel and shared a room and a bed in a cheap pensione, had two happy days sight-seeing, two night of steamy 'making out' (her phrase, new to me) before parting to go on our separate ways, in my case north into Switzerland via the spectacular corkscrew tunnels of the St Gothard Pass to Lugano. In Paris and again on the channel ferry returning to England, I met more Americans, found them pleasant and attractive people, decided after all perhaps they had some claims to being civilized; but they were all poor correspondents, so like others I met then and before and since, no friendship grew out of these meetings.

Venice - The Lagoon

Lorie in Piaza San Marco

The covered bridge in Lucerne, 1954

But all the while as I wandered through art galleries, gazed at spectacular scenery, had desultory conversations with people casually met in youth hostels and while sight-seeing, I was haunted by the thought of how on the one hand I had nothing tangible to show for over four years of experience since graduating from medical school, and on the other I was about to give up all this stimulation and excitement to go back to the most humdrum, mundane existence it was possible to imagine, in the dull, worse-than-provincial atmosphere of Adelaide. I wasn't even sure what I would find when I got there. My mother had sold the beloved house where we had lived in Glenelg, and was now in what sounded a much less attractive place at North Adelaide. And anyway what on earth would I do when I got back to Adelaide? I couldn't imagine going on any longer with the succession of hospital posts - they were beginning to bore me. I would have to go into practice, but although I found the idea not at all daunting, it would mean tying myself down, and I felt this was something I didn't want to do.