From Adelaide to London in 1951

Jumping about a little bit in time sequence, here is the abbreviated account of my migration from Adelaide to London in 1951, and what began to happen when I got there

When I returned from the Barossa Valley to Adelaide in the middle of 1951, I decided against doing six months at the Adelaide Children's Hospital. The posts for the second half of the year had been announced, and I had one; but I had a strong desire to get out and away. I knew that my ability to think for myself  had been damaged by the awful medical education inflicted on me. I was uneasy about the calibre of the teachers at the Children's Hospital, suspecting that they were no better than the uninspiring lot at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. I had my name on a list to get a free passage to England as a ship's surgeon, and had written to my father, by this time professor of anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, letting him know I was planning to come to England. I had also discussed jobs in England with the staff in the Postgraduate Medical office in Adelaide. The advice from the postgraduate office included the suggestion that I might like to try medical work in the United States. Nobody from Adelaide had yet gone to the USA for postgraduate experience and the office was keen for someone to test it and report back. But I was cautious, conservative: I didn't want to be the first. I did two more locums at seaside suburbs, including one for my cousin Owen Bowering at Brighton, then in the depth of winter I sailed for London on the Strathnaver, a P&O passenger liner bound for Tilbury, via Columbo, Aden and Port Said. Disturbances in the Persian Gulf at the time were making oil supplies precarious in Aden, so we put in also at Algiers to load the tanks - an unexpected bonus to see this beautiful and fascinating city shortly before it erupted in bloody civil war between the French colonists and the Algerians.

Some of my shipmates on RMS Strathnaver
(I paired off with Jocelyn, on the extreme right)

The ship was loaded with battalions of youngsters like me, mostly from Sydney and Melbourne; one was the aspiring operatic soprano Joan Sutherland, setting off to seek fame and fortune after winning the ABC’s talent quest. She gave a recital in the Mediterranean, and I was very impressed by her voice, but not by her appearance - she was built like a double-decker bus, a huge woman with a huge jaw. Others included that year’s Rhodes scholar from one of the eastern states, notable for the foulest mouth I’ve ever encountered; almost every word he uttered was flanked by the f-word or the c-word or sometimes both. I fell in with the congenial company of others like myself, young professionals - nurses, dentists, pharmacists, girls with office jobs – all of them en route to work and play for a few years in England and on the continent of Europe before returning to settle down to respectable suburban life in Australia. We had a lot of fun, but my shyness left me on the periphery for much of the time, and I made few friends, none that lasted beyond the first few months in London.

Awaiting me in London was a cultural, emotional and social change - a major upheaval - that had a profound effect on the whole future course of my life. I had left Adelaide where my mother reluctantly separated from her first-born, no doubt sensing that I would be finally cutting the apron strings and breaking loose from the almost pathological bond with her, to lead my own independent life.

She had seldom talked about my father to me, and then only in negative ways. I had an unsavory image of him from other directions. Once while I was a house officer at RAH I had given the anesthetic for an operation being conducted by two of his classmates, who in my presence reminisced about his income tax evasion and lucky escape from legal trouble over this, and his scandalous extramarital life. Years before, at Brighton Public School, I had been persecuted by two brothers whose father worked for the income tax authorities, and who taunted me, boasting that their father was planning to send my father to jail for cheating on his income tax. (That man’s oath of secrecy obviously meant nothing to him, but as a small child I didn’t know about oaths of secrecy, and never told my mother how I was being bullied).  On the other hand, his father was immensely proud of all he had done since he left Adelaide, his escape from death when the ship on which he was returning to Australia in 1940 was torpedoed off Iceland, his time in Abyssinia as the Emperor Haile Selassie's personal physician, his appointment as professor of applied anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Now I was to meet this man again, having last seen him when I was 11 years old.

When the ship picked up a pilot off the Devon coast, the mail that came on board at the same time included a letter welcoming me to “the big smoke” and saying he would come to Tilbury to meet me. But he didn’t, though I waited until the last possible moment before getting on the train to London. Finally, on the platform at Liverpool Street Station when the train had unloaded all of us, and most of my shipboard friends had dispersed, he appeared. We recognized each other easily enough, he was an older version of me, and vice versa. I don’t know what I had been expecting him to do, but I had left the problem of finding accommodation in his hands. I soon learnt that accommodation isn’t something he excels at, but I was disconcerted to discover that he had made a booking for me in a small private hotel far away in north London - my shipboard friends were all heading for Earl’s Court or Bayswater. We drove all the way out to Finsbury Park by taxi, going along Fleet Street and the Strand, through Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, past Buckingham Palace and then driving for what felt like hours to reach a musty boarding-house that I discovered later he had chosen because his friends Elsie and Frank Robinson knew somebody who said it was cheap and comfortable. Cheap yes, comfortable no. No shower, for instance. I needed a shower after travelling a long way, all day since dawn, on a hot and sticky day in August. But my father would not wait while I had a bath and changed, we departed as soon as I had deposited my heavy luggage, to go to the Savage Club, his London club where he hobnobbed with the rich and famous. There was a ceremonial dinner that night, the last thing I wanted or needed, but for him I suppose a welcome distraction from the embarrassing task of meeting and getting to know a son whom he had left in early childhood and had seldom if ever thought about since. The Savage Club was interesting, and I met some famous people that night, even a member of the aristocracy who tried to feel me up in the toilet.

My first impressions of my father were mixed, more negative than positive; and my ambivalence persisted throughout all the years that followed. He showed himself to be a pompous, artificial creature, given to contrived eccentricities and pretentious customs such as wearing a monocle and speaking of himself in the third person (“One saw them in Addis” instead of “I saw them in Addis” when I showed him copies of the New Yorker that I subscribed to in those days).

He was at his best when he was with students, the young surgeons in training, especially those living in the residence at the Royal College; with these young men (no women were allowed as residents at the Royal College, and very few women aspired to surgical careers in 1951) he relaxed and behaved fairly naturally, unlike the artificially pretentious air he assumed with most others, especially Australians, for whom he and even more so his wife, seemed to have only contempt. 

I first met his wife Margret about a week after I arrived in London; he arranged to meet me one evening in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and in the semi-darkness, introduced me to her. Soon afterwards I was invited to come to stay with them at their house in Portugal Street, until I had found a job. The house in Portugal Street was always full of visitors, a few of them Australians, including his sister-in-law Edith and her husband Neil Crosby, a physiologist whom I had met in Adelaide some years before; Neil Crosby worked in Perth and was recruiting for the new medical school there. Edith, like Neil and me, had a rich and fruity Australian accent.  Margret on the other hand, had a high-pitched and obviously assumed accent that she presumably thought was English upper class. It was bogus and snobbish, like everything else about this awful creature. Twice I overheard conversations about Ray and Margret among their friends and acquaintances who did not know I was listening; I thus heard the Robinsons devastatingly demolish her pretensions to being an upper-class Englishwoman. Her sister Edith obviously despised her. My own feelings fluctuated between loathing and contempt, the latter evoked by her pathological lies - she never ceased telling self-aggrandizing stories except to make poisonous and destructively critical remarks about people whom she believed her listeners regarded highly. I once had the pleasure of telling her quietly that the person she had just finished maligning in a lengthy diatribe was somebody I had never heard of, whereupon she pettishly said that she had confused me with somebody else who did know this person. I don’t recall her ever saying anything nice about anybody, except the members of the Ethiopian royal family, about whom she demonstrated nauseating sycophancy.

The quality I admired most in my father was his ability to teach with clarity, style and wit. I attended a few of his anatomy lectures, saw how he could draw on the blackboard while talking, learnt more in a few minutes than in my years in medical school, about such details as the nerve supply of the small muscles of the hand. I know now that his teaching over-simplified details and the reality is more complex. Indeed, since his highly successful textbook went into wide circulation it has been necessary for more scholarly anatomists to correct a few of his errors that have become part of what might be called popular medical (or surgical) culture. But this is carping criticism. He was working on the first edition of that textbook in the winter of 1951-52, and in 1953 I was one of several who read the proofs.

His self-centredness was well demonstrated on my 25th birthday, when I went to call on him just after I had started my first house job at Hillingdon Hospital. He knew my birth date well enough I now know, but not a mention of it during an afternoon in his study, listening, as on many other occasions, to an interminable monologue about whatever it was that he happened to be interested in that day. Very soon after I moved into the house at Portugal Street he began the process of attacking my sense of self-worth with relentless and sadistic sarcasm that continued throughout almost all the years I knew him; he often sneered at me, saying "You'll never amount to anything with ideas like yours." This unpleasant behaviour came to an end only in his advanced old age when he was in declining health and became dependent on me. I was reminded of his remark that I'd never amount to anything in the summer of 2012 when I was admitted as an Officer of the Order of Canada, a tangible indicator that I had amounted to something despite his certainty that I would not.   He could be, and often was, very kind and thoughtful to others, strangers or sometimes friends; and he was always very generous to Wendy. But in all the years I have known him since 1951, I don't recall a single generous or affectionate action towards me. Lately I have puzzled unsuccessfully over this odd trait, but have failed to find an explanation that makes psychological sense. From a few things his mother let slip in conversations towards the end of her life, I am aware that his behaviour towards her and towards his sisters was similar. It was rather like a condition psychiatrists describe as one extreme of autism spectrum disorder - a person incapable of emotional commitment to others, a form of Asperger’s syndrome, the neuropsychiatric disorder about which Oliver Sacks among others has written.

Nonetheless, he did help me get my first house job in England, a post at Hillingdon Hospital, Uxbridge, Middlesex, on the western fringe of greater London, not far from Heathrow Airport. I was interviewed, along with three or four other “colonials” like myself, and to my surprise and delight, was offered the job. The delight was due to the friendly and favourable impression the place had made on me at first acquaintance. I have described this already in a previous post on this blog.