Medical student life, 1944-49

Here are a few brief excerpts from a longer account of my medical school years in Adelaide, 1944-49

In February 1944 when I was not yet 17½ years old, I started "first-year medicine" at the University of Adelaide. This was a premedical year - physics, chemistry, botany, zoology. It was intended to weed out the unworthy and to orient to biological science those like me with no prior exposure to these disciplines or their terminology. It was very necessary for me  so I could learn the bewildering technical jargon of the biological sciences. This was new and strange enough to cause me such difficulty that in the term examination in botany with all its exotic terminology, I achieved the lowest mark I have ever recorded, 4%; I was depressed about my prospects of ever being able to understand what was going on, let alone mastering enough to pass an examination. Fortunately, after a year of dissecting dogfish, gazing at strange patterns of cells and tissues through the lens of a microscope, and listening to interminable lectures (many read from textbooks at dictation speed) enough facts and understanding penetrated my brain and I was able to scrape through and move on to the second year, when the real medical course began with anatomy, biochemistry and physiology.

Cloisters in Student Union building, University of Adelaide, c1945

Adelaide University had some competent and famous scholars in the disciplines that made up those first year courses. Our professor of physics, Kerr Grant, a lovable man with a cleft palate, was the survivor of a team that had included William and Lawrence Bragg, father and son, who were Nobel laureates in physics earlier in the century. The department of zoology was headed by Sir Douglas Mawson, a famous Antarctic explorer, who lived near our old home at Brighton; his daughter's PhD dissertation had been on the rectal parasites of penguins, about which she tried vainly to teach us. In the department of botany (later at the Waite Agricultural Research Centre) was Leonard Marsden, who became famous for his discovery of trace element deficiencies in soil that impaired the metabolism of plants, including those vital to the growth of sheep and cattle. All this erudition was wasted on our pragmatic medical student classes.

  

In our second year we were joined by several ex-servicemen, raising the number in our class to an unprecedented 60, including a record number of women, 15. No medical student class ever before in Adelaide had exceeded 45 students nor had more than 3 or 4 women; all the ‘men’ agreed it was a waste of rigorously rationed medical school places, as these frivolous ‘girls’ would marry and drop out of medical practice. In those days we were strident male chauvinists. In fact, 40 years later all but one or two of the women were still active, and a higher proportion than among the men had become distinguished specialists in fields that include neurosurgery, plastic surgery, anesthetics and radiotherapy. The men included three who died young and violently within five years of graduating - by suicide, drug overdose and traffic injury that was as near self-inflicted as semantics permit. We were joined too by several Western Australians; there was then no medical school in that state, so students from the West aspiring to a medical career had to travel to Adelaide or even further to Melbourne or Sydney. My mother rented our former maid's room to one of them, and later when he moved to the University residence of St Mark's, she rented to one of the ex-servicemen.

Anatomy was hard grind but biochemistry, taught without perceptible attention to underlying theories or principles, was worse. We “learnt” about the Krebs Cycle, the basic principle of carbohydrate metabolism, not by rationally grasping and understanding the principles, but by rote learning. Only physiology, under benign guidance, was enjoyable and seemed to have a rational underlying basis of natural laws like the principle of homeostasis that made sense. Our professor of anatomy was an active research worker with little interest or competence in teaching. Our real anatomy teachers were young medical graduates almost all en route towards surgical careers, keen to enhance their understanding before taking the anatomy examination that was part of the primary FRCS they all required. All but one: the exception was Ross Adey, who became an eminent neurophysiologist and medical scientist, illustrious enough to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Ross taught me most of the anatomy that stuck to my brain long enough for me to pass the examinations and proceed on to the clinical years, though it was a close run thing because of the combination of poor comprehension and my distraction from study by extracurricular interests, of which more below.  Many years later Ross Adey and I were expert witnesses in a class action suit against a Californian electric power corporation being sued by people who claimed that low intensity radiation from high voltage power lines caused a cluster of cases of child malignancies. Ross presented the neuropathological evidence, I summarized what was then known about the epidemiological evidence, which was circumstantial and suggestive.

The war ended when I was in my second year. We had a spectacular celebration on VE Day, with an impromptu procession through the streets of Adelaide led by an open touring-car remarkably like one frequently seen in newsreel shots of the commanders of the North African campaign. It contained a uniformed officer who bore an uncanny resemblance to the war hero General Bernard Montgomery. This man was a student, an amateur actor, skillfully made up; he fooled much of the population of Adelaide, some of whom really believed that General  Montgomery was leading our victory celebrations. The second victory celebration when the Japanese were defeated in August 1945 was more subdued. The implications of the fact that the Japanese had capitulated after atomic bombs had destroyed two of their cities, were not lost on some of us. Although we felt profound relief that the war was over and most of us felt vengeful towards the Japanese who were getting their just deserts after the atrocities their soldiers had committed, some of us, myself included, had misgivings about this new weapon, reinforced by Albert Einstein’s words when these appeared in our newspapers. We realized that something terribly important had changed forever in the world we lived in.   

I was becoming increasingly aware of the world I lived in at that time. I avidly read news reports and commentaries in our very parochial local newspapers, and in international magazines from Britain and the USA that were available (weeks after they were published) in our local library. When I was in the third year of the medical course I started subscribing to the New Yorker, which I continued for the next ten years or so, and read its excellent articles on the world’s problems, which broadened my horizons immensely. I became increasingly aware of and sensitive about many of these problems. I still have the issue for August 31, 1946, which was entirely devoted to John Hersey’s account of the survivors of the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.  On the troubled Middle East, I well remember arguing with a classmate about the establishment of Israel; he had served in the Middle East, and was full of admiration for what the Zionists were doing to convert Palestine into a fertile land flowing with milk and honey. Despite my partially Jewish origins, I was deeply concerned about the morality of handing over this land to usurpers who were ejecting by force the families who had lived there for innumerable generations. The bloodshed and oppression of the Palestinians that have followed the formation of Israel in 1947, and the transformation of the Israelis into the international thugs of the Middle East, seem to me now to support the position I argued back in the days just after the end of World War II, when I could see though my classmate could not, that more wars would be caused by the decisions that the new United Nations General Assembly and Security Council were taking in those years I spent getting my clinical training. My Jewish Uncle Lester had a friend, a rabbi I think, who had come back from the Middle East with horrific stories, including one about a massacre he had witnessed, in which a Palestinian family had been brutally slaughtered by the Zionist soldiers (we call them death squads nowadays) who founded the nation-state of Israel. He and Uncle Lester agreed that ultimately no good could come from the violent and brutal founding of a homeland for the Jews in the place where their distant ancestors had lived 2000 years earlier. It would have been better, they agreed, to establish a homeland for the Jews, if there had to be one at all, in Argentina or in the good farming country of Western Victoria.

I actively disliked much of the medical course. It was drudgery and mindless rote learning, taught by pedants. We had no academic clinical departments or professors in those days. The first professor of medicine was appointed the year after I graduated, in time for Peter but not me to benefit from the stimulus he provided. Our clinical teachers were “honoraries,” doctors in private practice who donated a few half-days every week to their charity wards. They varied in quality but hardly any knew how to teach or had the ability to inspire students. Only a few were clinically competent. As I’ve famously said, it took my brain at least five years to recover from the damage inflicted on it by my medical “education.”

One or two of the clinical teachers could guide selected (that is, favourite) students to a level of clinical competence comparable to that achieved by students in good medical schools. Others such as Adelaide's most eminent surgeon, were third rate authoritarian pedants. In my time the University of Adelaide medical school was in a period of decline and stagnation, between a low peak of mediocrity in the 1930s and a higher peak of above-average quality in the late 1950s and subsequently. I spent a great deal of my time in medical school studying entirely non-medical matters - history and English literature in particular. I aspired to be a writer. I was active in writing and helping to edit the university magazine, Phoenix, in which a couple of my short stories appeared. I wrote anonymously (for 3 guineas apiece!) two short stories, now lost without trace, for Men Only, a men's magazine. The loss is inconsequential, those stories are best lost and forgotten, they were awful! I discovered Mary Martin's bookshop, then a small hole-in-the-wall establishment on an upper floor of a building in a lane off Rundle Street, later in its glory days, a grand emporium of books occupying a whole floor in an air-conditioned office building near its original site. Mary Martin was a little brown-skinned woman, Anglo-Indian I think, an arts graduate of the University; the main attraction was Max Harris, Adelaide's enfant terrible of literature, a flamboyant man of letters. He founded the literary magazine, Angry Penguins, which published poems, stories, and literary criticism. Angry Penguins and Max Harris were the targets of a famous literary hoax, when they accepted and published the “posthumous poems” of an entirely imaginary literary genius, Ern Malley, sensuously erotic (for those times) blank verses that were a literary sensation for a few weeks until the hoax was revealed; at the same time the police laid charges of obscenity against the publisher, who was Max Harris. All this happened after I had become a regular fixture at Mary Martin's, drinking coffee, exchanging stimulating conversation with a miscellaneous collection of artists and aspiring artists - most of whom, like me, never got anywhere in the world of arts and letters. There was a film club too, at which we saw the great movies of that and earlier times - the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Max Ophuls, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, John Grierson and of course, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which I saw the week it opened in Adelaide, probably early in 1944, three years after its original release. I became a semi-serious collector of books in those days, and still have some of the books I got from Mary Martin's, along with coffee and conversation, or from Beck's or other bookshops in and around Adelaide. I don’t think I would have survived medical school without those escapes from the grind of incessant study.

There was study too of course, a great deal of it. That was a masochistic period of sitting at my desk within earshot of thousands enjoying themselves. I could hear happy crowds on the beach a few hundred yards away as I sat studying; and in the evenings, the clack of lawn bowls and the conversation of the elderly bowlers on the bowling-green behind our house distracted me.

There's a good photographic record of tennis parties - though more than 60 years later I can't confidently identify all the players!

After the war ended, the air-raid shelter on the far end of the tennis court was done away with. I was thankful that this source of embarrassment, my mother's most ludicrous folly, was gone for good. It left a depression in that corner of the tennis court that took years to elevate to the same level as the rest of the surface, but it was close enough to the base-line so that it seldom came into play. There began then a series of memorable and happy Sunday afternoon tennis parties that punctuated the summer months during the last three years in medical school. These parties were regularly attended by fellow-students and others, including sundry young women, mainly nurses, and a few others who drifted in and out of the group. I went to the movies and occasionally to dances with several of these girls, but all my social encounters were strictly that, totally social, totally non-sexual. Looking back, I wonder whether I was under-sexed or merely naive. Yet comparing notes years later with others who belonged to that social circle, I discovered that they too were wholly innocent in those days. I think we may have been unusual compared to many in that age group at that time.

Of course it was before the Pill, before the era of sexual emancipation. Our tennis parties and other social activities remained platonic at least until we were in our final year, when several began experimenting a little more boldly, and engagements and weddings began to occur. In my case, sexual exploration consisted, when I was past my 21st birthday, of actually feeling a girl's breasts for the first time in my life; and that, for some years, was as far as my sexual life ever got. But we all had a great deal of fun and many very happy times, memorable occasions that are memorable not least because of their innocence and ordinariness.

Our horizons were limited by the shortage of petrol which was still rationed until a couple of years after the war ended. By then my Auntie Doris had come to live with us. She lived in the front room off the veranda, the room that had been our sitting-room; she had cancer and soon became bed-ridden. She had a little car, a Ford Prefect; and by default this became my wheels, providing my means of escape once petrol rationing ended. That was when I was in my final year, and I didn't get the car very often because my mother also used it instead of her own. Now at last I was able to do what young men of spirit aspired to do - take girls out in the car, and sit smooching with them in the back seat, looking down from the hills on the lights of Adelaide on balmy evenings. But I was unadventurous by the standards that seem to have existed at that time according to popular fiction and Hollywood movies about those times.

A beery excursion to the Flinders Ranges north of Adelaide in about 1948

A few times late in our medical student days, some of us went uninvited to parties, and one of those provided me with what may have been the most romantic episode of my life at that time. The party was somebody's 21^st birthday celebration, and it was irretrievably dull. I was talking quietly to a young woman, probably a few years older than I, in a corner. On the spur of the moment, we decided to leave, and drove up into the hills in my car. We left the party about 10.30 pm, and drove to the lookout just below the summit, where we sat talking - reconstructing the universe, talking of books we had read, movies we had seen, our favourite music, things we liked to do. There was no sex, just wonderful stimulating conversation till the small hours near dawn, when I took her home and deposited her safely on her doorstep with just one chaste goodnight kiss. I didn't even know her name, and I never saw her again. What a pity that was! Of all the people I had ever met, this was perhaps my true soul-mate.

In residence - I think during our final student year

A Writers' Workshop

Susan Jennings, seated front middle in this photo, current President of Ottawa Independent Writers, organized and ran a very successful, very productive workshop for writers that ran from last Friday afternoon to yesterday, Sunday. I felt the symptoms of an impending respiratory infection so I left a couple of hours before it was over; I'm glad I did because penetrating rain later in the day would have made the drive unpleasant; moreover, timely medication from my bathroom cabinet may have nipped my symptoms in the bud - I'm feeling much better today.

The workshop took place at the Galilee Centre in Arnprior, an aesthetically more pleasing venue than the Marguerite Centre in Pembroke, which is larger, more institution-like, less cosy, less suitable for thinking beautiful thoughts.  It's less than an hour's drive from Ottawa, which is an added attraction. The drive to Arnprior on a lovely sunny autumn day with the brilliant seasonal colours beginning to inflame the trees, was delightful, and I arrived in time to stroll through the little park on a rise above the confluence of the Ottawa and Madawaska Rivers, where the Ottawa River is about a kilometre wide, and - although there are wild rapids nearby - flat calm and on a windless day, surface like a mirror reflecting the brilliant fall colours that are beginning to appear on both the Ontario and Quebec sides of the river.

The view from my window at the Galilee Centre, looking north over the Ottawa River to the Quebec shore about a kilometre away



The company was excellent.  All but one of us (who left early, also with a respiratory infection) are in the photo above. Most are associated with health care, probably a coincidence, and the majority, like me, are writing or have written memoirs rather than creative fiction. When I was about 12-13 years old I wanted to be a writer, and decided on a medical career partly because several of my role models from that time had escaped from medical careers into writing. I made the sad discovery by the time I was about 16 that I couldn't invent plots or create believable three-dimensional characters, and had a tin ear for dialogue. So creative writing was not a realistic career path. Fortunately by then I had discovered that a medical career held many other fascinations. My colleagues at this weekend's writers' workshop are not hampered by my shortcomings. Listening to their readings of excerpts of their imaginative work I felt humbled by their manifest superiority at creative writing. Several have written stories that are based on fact thinly disguised as fiction.  I admire enormously their ability and imagination that is enough to write believable dialogue into their compositions.  I've tried to do this but failed miserably so far.  Now, inspired by my colleagues at the workshop, I will try again.

As readers of this blog know,  over the past year or so I've been posting abridged excerpts of my memoirs and also some of my traveller's tales, often illustrated with photos.  I feel inspired now to focus more on licking the memoirs into final shape and aiming to publish them as an e-book, as early as I can manage in 2013.  I most warmly welcome comments from any of the several hundred readers of this blog: if you feel impelled to comment, whether to encourage me or to tell me to forget it and take up stamp collecting instead, I will be most happy to hear from you, whether in a public comment or - as most are - a private and personal email direct to me.

Glenelg

Here is another abridged episode from my memoirs

                                                                  7 Olive Street, Glenelg

My mother, Vera Last, as she was in the 1940s

In November 1939 my mother bought a brick bungalow at 7 Olive Street, Glenelg, close to Jetty Road along which the trams went to Victoria Square in the heart of Adelaide. This was a move from country to metropolitan area.  Brighton, just three miles away, was a seaside village outside the city limits as they then were. Our new home was about as far from the beach as we had been in Brighton, but close to a busy main street, many shops, and subtly citified by the knowledge that the city was less than half an hour away by fast electric tram. It was the first place I acknowledge as a real home, for which even after all these years I feel affection.

It faced west. Across the front a garage was built onto the side abutting the dining-room. Behind a small front verandah was the living-room; the other front room was my mother's bedroom with a walk-in clothes closet. There was a maid's room between the dining-room and the kitchen, and we had a live-in maid, a plump young woman called Kathleen, for the first 2 years that we lived there. Along the hall was my bedroom, with access through a window to the back verandah, fully enclosed by mosquito-proof wire mesh netting; I slept out on this verandah for most of the year, going back and forth through the window rather than all the way around through the bathroom or the kitchen. Next to my bedroom along the corridor was the bathroom, and at the far end was Peter's bedroom, which was a glassed-in sunroom. A laundry room at the back opened off the verandah, next to the kitchen. It was a well-designed home ideally suited to our needs; I bless my mother's perspicacity in buying it when real estate values were at rock bottom because of the uncertainties associated with the war. In the back yard there was a small shed for garden tools. Later it housed all manner of odds and ends that were part of boys' hobbies, mostly mine - for example, the mice that I bred for a while.

 John and Peter Last, about 1940

There was a lawn tennis court, though at the time we moved in this was not surrounded, as it needed to be, by netting. Later this lawn tennis court was much used by my medical student friends. When the war news got worse after the Japanese conquest of so many places in Australia's near north, my mother exhibited characteristics that make Jewish mothers a legend: she insisted that we had to have an air-raid shelter; furthermore, that this must be built at the far end of the tennis court, to be as far from the house as possible, and so as not to encroach on any of the precious vegetable garden. Of all my mother's reactions to the stresses and strains of everyday life, this air-raid shelter may have been the most spectacular, at any rate until many years later when my impending marriage threatened to upset the placid world of mother and son that she thought was secure by then.

If my memory of those early years at Glenelg and the unusable lawn tennis court with its air-raid shelter, is slightly sad, my recollection of the fruit and vegetable garden is full of affection for a lost paradise. Like all fruit gardens in South Australia it was incredibly bountiful. We had fresh fruit and fresh vegetables in all seasons. We grew potatoes, lettuce, beans, peas, spinach, carrots, parsnips, asparagus. A lemon tree provided fresh lemons all year long. We had all the stone fruit of that region, apricots, plums, peaches, nectarines. There were strawberries, raspberries. Around the fences along the back of the property and the brushwood fence between the vegetable garden and the tennis court there were grape vines. Over the fence from our next door neighbours’ were the branches of a huge mulberry tree which was the first to bear fruit, starting in late October or early November; from then until late May there was always at least one tree bearing fruit, as well as the grape vines which yielded from late November until March or early April.

We kept chickens for our own eggs, and a fresh-killed old bird that had stopped laying provided roast dinner on many a Sunday. It was my job to chop off the chicken's head, a task I never enjoyed because it was my job also to feed the birds and they were my friends by the time I had to kill them. After I had killed them, they had to be dowsed in boiling water then cleaned and plucked, a job that sometimes was Peter's.

I lived at 7 Olive Street Glenelg from the beginning of 1940 until I left home to go to England in the winter of 1951. These were the years in which I passed through adolescence and became a young man, years of academic success at school, and successful completion of the medical course. They were years of widening social horizons, burgeoning friendships, a few tentative attempts to develop bonds of affection with girls, of trying rather unsuccessfully to come to grips with the adult world. They were also years of emotional, social and psychological disturbance from which I did not fully recover until after I had made a happy and fulfilling marriage.

That house, its tennis court and so far as I could see, all the garden, survived intact when I looked at it during my 1986 visit to South Australia, but it had gone when Wendy and I strolled around to see it again on a later visit to Adelaide in the early 1990s – like many other older homes, it and its garden had been swallowed up in a new development, a settlement for senior citizens.               

 I started at the Anglican boys’ school, St. Peter's College, in February 1939, aided by a small scholarship, without which private school education would have been beyond our reach. “Saints” to all who went there, is just east of the city of Adelaide; it was established early in the colonial era and by the time I started there in 1939 it had become the nearest equivalent in Adelaide to an English public school - though it differed from English public schools in having students who almost all lived at home and commuted daily to classes. Only a small minority of the boys, about 120 out of about 1200, were boarders. The ambience of the school, and some of the teachers whom I encountered there, had a profound and beneficial influence upon my life both in shaping my intellectual development and in molding my values and beliefs, in ways that it is difficult retrospectively to trace, yet these experiences marked me forever.

 Chapel and classrooms, St Peter's College

St Peters College followed the English public school custom of having classes in each subject that were taught by specialists, some of whom were exceptionally able. The best of them were "Crusty" Gillam who taught physics, Bill Pigott (chemistry), "Lags" Symons and "Mate" Sharpe who taught mathematics, and my English teachers, Martin Ketley and especially the senior English teacher, the dignified and delightful "Cammie" Cameron.  Over them all presided an outstanding headmaster, the Reverend Guy Pentreath, who taught in a formal way only Divinity, but whose influence permeated the entire school; moreover, he frequently and informally mingled with the boys, becoming, by the time I was in my last two years there, my mentor and friend in a very real sense. There were many extracurricular activities. The most important for me were the junior and senior literary societies, which among other things introduced me to some of the problems of producing a magazine. I was never an editor of the school magazine, but was on the fringes of the production for much of my time in the senior school - getting acquainted with activities that would later become a prominent part of my life.

Cricket match on the main oval at St Peter's College 

The communal life of the boys at the school was generally relaxed, though there were cliques and some snobbishness. We sorted ourselves easily enough into groups that got along well with each other, in my case a group that included a few whom I had first met at the kindergarten run by the Misses Fleming, as well as others who went on from Saints to the University of Adelaide Medical School, so our lives were intertwined over more than ten years. Some have remained life long friends, although the ties now are tenuous. Some became famous: Don Dunstan was Premier of South Australia for years. Some played a larger part in my life than others. One flamboyant character died young in a traffic crash that was in view of his risk-taking approach to life, entirely predictable.

I have tried to reconstruct the way my intellectual life and my sense of values developed. I think the interaction with others at Saints laid the foundations for skepticism and flexibility of attitudes towards many aspects of life and social organization. Yet this did not happen to all of us; some at least were then and have remained rigid and uncompromising in their view of life. I was fortunate to be among those who responded favorably to the message in the school's traditional Chapel reading of the Lesson, which was from Chapter 13 of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, or Chapter 8 of the Gospel according to St Luke, the parable of the Sower:

...Behold, a sower went forth to sow; and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the wayside and the fowls came and devoured them up; some fell upon stony places where they had not much earth, and forthwith they sprung up because they had no deepness of earth; and when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away; and some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit ...

The aim at Saints was to ensure that as many of us as possible had ears to hear, and were good ground for the seed to spring up and bare fruit. I was lucky, I suppose, to fall in with others like myself. We talked a great deal about our work over lunches that we mostly took with us in brown paper bags or sometimes bought at the school tuck-shop. The balmy South Australian climate made it possible for us to relax in the open air on the lawns by the playing fields to eat our lunches and talk, talk about anything and everything. In the last year at school, when we had more free time to compensate for the heated pace of study, several of us spent those free periods in the library, delving into arcane works of scholarship on biology and astronomy, and there too we talked about anything and everything as we assimilated, digested, sorted, processed, information. It was in some scholarly ways the best year of my life, the year after I had made up my mind that I wanted to study medicine and become a doctor. Before this I had had no clear idea what I wanted to do with my life, and if anything I had some antipathy to medicine because it was my father's calling and I did not identify at all with him. I did well that last year, as I had done in prior years. I came high up on the Honours list, securing a government bursary to pay my tuition fees at the University; and I came third in the state in English Literature, just behind two friends from the radio program, Junior Forum, of which more below.

Football on the main oval at St Peter's College
(about 1942)

Many other things were memorable about Saints. There were intercollegiate sporting events against Prince Alfred College, the Methodist boy's school, especially the "Intercoll" football match - Aussie rules football of course, a fast, open game, often played by these fine athletic schoolboys as well as the older players in the semi-professional league matches. There were the Blue and White dances, at the end of the school year, late in November or early in December, in weather that was hot and balmy, and for boys who were acutely aware of girls, a tremulous occasion - but I was always too shy and insecure with girls to be a romantic success at these Blue and White dances (so called because of the colours of the school blazer, the customary dress for the event).

For me, there was another challenging intercollegiate contest, the Junior Forum, a radio quiz show, in which for some years I and one other boy represented Saints. (The other boy changed often; I was a fixture for some years because of my wide general knowledge and command of language). We were nominated by the junior English master, Martin Ketley, to whom I am eternally grateful for introducing me to this competition, which did so much to bolster my self-esteem. I was just about always able to answer the questions on a wide range of general knowledge, history, geography, literature; just about always able to give articulate answers to the "opinion" questions that made up the last third or so of each half-hour recorded session. 

John and Peter with Rusty in front of our home at 7 Olive Street, Glenelg, about 1941

Much of my insecurity and lack of self-confidence then was due to the fact that I had no father. He had become famous. His war-time exploits - getting torpedoed, becoming the Emperor Haile Selassie's personal physician - were faithfully passed on by his father to the local paper, the Adelaide Advertiser. It wasn't until my last year at Saints that I could bring myself to accept the fact of family breakup, and neither then nor for many years did I lose the sense of guilt that in some mysterious way the marital breakdown was my fault.

                       

The school years were a period of exploration and growing knowledge of the natural world - not necessarily accompanied by very good understanding.  Both at home and away during holidays, there were so many aspects of the world that aroused my interest and curiosity. I was fascinated by small things, like trails of ants on their way to a source of food, or struggling back to their nest with heavy loads of crumbs, dead insects, scraps of vegetable matter. On holidays, such as one that Peter and I had during a term break from school in 1940, at Bon-Bon Station on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, I explored the landscape, remembering what Uncle Lester had told me about the relationship of geology and scenery as I roamed over the red-dusty plains. I recognized laterite, knew how it eroded as the harsh temperature changes, the wind, the occasional torrential rains worked on its soft surface. At night we slept outside on a verandah at Bon-Bon, and lying awake I listened for the creaking and crackling sounds that the rocks made as their outer shell cooled and contracted more rapidly than the still-warm interior. I heard this strange sound that Uncle Lester had told me about; I also heard the lovely night song of willy-wagtails, which when the stars are bright as they were then, have a succession of calls at least as lovely and melodious as those of the nightingales I heard years later around Clare Hall Hospital near St Albans in Hertfordshire.

Looking east from the Adelaide Hills towards the alluvial plains of the River Murray

I was fascinated by big things too. During a summer holiday at Port Lincoln I tried my hand at making maps. The harbour there is interestingly shaped, with a long shallow bay on one side, an island across the entrance, a deep water harbour and channels for shipping ketches clearly marked by buoys. I drew a map, then looked at the real map - which was vastly different in dimensions and configuration from my attempt. I puzzled over how I might get better at this challenging task; but other interests supervened, and I didn't pursue this one. Hills and their many different shapes and textures, from the sand-dunes just beyond the tide line on the beach, the rolling soft contours of the Adelaide Hills that came down to the coast at Marino Rocks, to the jagged peaks of the Flinders Ranges and the flat-topped but higher mountains behind Sydney - why were they all so different? Uncle Lester told me, gave me the insights I sought between geology and scenery.
                                                                                   

The ancient rolling Adelaide Hills

John Last on fossilized coral rocks, Kangaroo Island, 1940

I began accumulating books during my time at Saints, already had quite a collection of Everymans and a few Penguins as well as many other books, by the time I left school. In those days I put the dates of purchase as well as my name on the flyleaf, and a few of the books from that time still survive on my shelves today, despite the attrition of several intercontinental moves. The survivors include some books on history and on natural history, that were not a formal part of the school curriculum but were a necessary part of my explorations of the world I lived in.

For a while, chemistry fascinated me. I had a little laboratory in my bedroom, and used it to carry out many experiments, until one day I made some bromine, a volatile dark-brown liquid with acrid fumes that gave me a severe bronchiolitis. My cousin Owen Bowering who was our family doctor, came to see me as I lay sick in bed, and, looking from my bed to the makeshift bench, retorts, bunsen burner and bottles of reagents across on the other side of the room, gently but firmly insisted that all this must be set up in some place where I didn't also have to sleep nights. I was tiring of chemistry by then anyway, so I had no objection to this edict; but a few remnants of the chemistry set survive even now, relics of that phase of my explorations of the physical world; they repose in my medical bag, having found another incarnation when later I had to test urine as a general practitioner.

The mice came next. We had no biology at school, but some of my friends who already had made up their minds on medical careers were studying genetics as an extracurricular option. I didn't do that, but I did acquire some surplus mice of various colours and varieties, and set about breeding them, albeit without much science. When that phase palled, I was supposed to dispose of the mice by some sort of painless euthanasia, but couldn't bring myself to do this; from then onward until I left home, from time to time one of the mouse-traps that my mother set in the pantry would yield a little black and white striped or albino mouse...

Garpie Last, with some misgivings, passed to me my father's microscope, and I gazed with wild surmise and other feelings like those of Stout Cortez silent upon a peak in Darien, as paramecia darted hither and thither, amebae sluggishly divided, and various other unnamable living objects swam into view in the drops of water I looked at. One day I masturbated and looked at a drop of my semen, saw with satisfaction my own spermatozoa purposelessly but vigorously swimming. By this time I was becoming firmer in my decision to go on from school to university and study medicine. The war was still on and there was a quota, which in my self-deprecatory way, I felt sure would exclude me; but I need never have worried, because when the results of the Leaving Honours examinations were published, there was my name among those in the top twenty in the state, high enough on the honours list to secure a place at the university, and a bursary that covered my tuition fees in full and provided a tiny allowance for books, etc.

Fred Cole's portrait photo of 7 Olive Street, Glenelg

Our next-door neighbour was a fat little old man, Fred Cole, a gifted photographer, retired by the time we came to live there, but still active. He took me under his wing and into his dark room, where I developed negatives and made prints of the pictures I took with my Kodak Baby Brownie. I had a good eye for composition, and a few of the pictures I took in those early days when enlarged and trimmed, were quite good compositions. There is a gum tree, its branches bent and twisted by prevailing winds, still preserved in one of my photo albums; for a while it was framed on my wall.  Before I left home I had moved up from the Baby Brownie to a more suitable camera for taking worth-while pictures, a Voigtlander that went with me to England in 1951.

Social horizons remained confined throughout the years at school, though they slowly expanded. I was (and still am) shy, retiring, did not form friendships easily. For a few years I was a member of a youth group at the Church of England, and went with other youngsters to a few dances and outings such as chop picnics (nowadays they are called barbecues); but when the others paired off, I was always left alone, and so after a while I stopped going to these functions. After the Japanese came into the war, local air-raid precautions became a prominent activity. I joined the ARP as a dispatch rider. On my bike, I would race madly about delivering urgent messages from one self-important middle-aged military reject in charge of an ARP station to another half a mile away. Thankfully, none of our rehearsals needed to be backed up by experience of the real thing. But through these ARP activities I came into contact with other youngsters of my own age and different social backgrounds, different religious persuasions - even, horror of horrors, Roman Catholics, those papists who were from a different world altogether, or so I had been led to believe. Of course they turned out to be exactly like me in values in all respects that mattered. Indeed, I took one of them to a Blue and White dance, and even cuddled up to her in the taxi that brought us safely home at the end of the evening (at about 10.30 pm, because her mother had insisted that she mustn't be late home, and we were doubtful whether we would be able to get a taxi later than this). 

Some of the extended family of Judell descendants, about 1942; Peter Last in front left, Vera Last, cousins David Judell, Trevor Judell, John Last, Janet McRae, second cousin Margo Salom; grown-up aunts, uncles, cousins mostly standing behind the youngsters  

                        Bob Daugherty and John Last


My friendship with Bob Daugherty began some time in those years. He was the son of Manxmen who kept one of the temperance hotels along the sea-front at Glenelg, and for some reason was viewed with reserve by my family. But he and I hit it off from early in our acquaintance, and fell into the habit of traveling to school together on the tram, of stopping off for a milk shake on the way home in the afternoon, hobnobbing with students from other schools - girls' schools as well as boys' - so this too widened my social and cultural horizons. At weekends, I often stopped by the shabby seafront temperance hotel run by Bob Daugherty's parents, and played poker or listened to the radio. But my mother kept me on a fairly short leash, questioning me closely if I was later home than usual from school without good reason, so my partaking of these innocent social encounters over a milk-shake on the way home from school were pretty short-duration activities, lasting in my case no more than half an hour, sometimes to the derision of the others who lingered on until late afternoon.  The struggle between id (surging hormones) and super-ego (my Jewish mother who knew so well how to lay on guilt trips) was no contest; super-ego won every time, but at the expense of a lot of self-esteem and considerable insecurity.

Another family gathering of descendants of Rebecca and Leopold Judell, this one at my mother's Glenelg home. John is 3rd from left standing, Peter on right in front, our mother behind Peter

Those years are crowded with auditory and olfactory memories. They were the years of the Hit Parade, of Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, In the Mood, Artie Shaw's clarinet solos on tunes like Begin the Beguine, Stardust, Frenesi. I can't clearly date the origins of my interest in popular music, but I remember that some time towards the end of the years at St. Peter's College, it was very important to hear the local radio weekly hit parade, called Tops of the Pops, and I as well as almost all of my classmates scornfully rejected the efforts of the music master to arouse our interest in classical music. That interest had been there earlier, just was suppressed for almost a decade from mid-adolescence until early in my sojourn in England when I went with other young Australians in London to the Proms, to Sadler’s Wells, where I saw Don Giovanni soon after arriving in London in 1951, and although I understood nothing of what was going on, I appreciated the glorious music.

The olfactory memories are more complex and difficult to analyze. Sea-smells and sand, close up, while lying spread-eagled, getting a suntan, may be the most powerful. No seaweed I've smelt in the northern hemisphere can evoke the memories associated with the beaches in South Australia. The sub-tropical sun bakes the dry seaweed washed up on the sand as hard as barbed wire eventually, but while it is getting there, it gives off hypnotic odours that evoke memories of carefree days at the seaside from infancy to late adolescence. There's the tang of burning eucalyptus leaves and twigs that we used to grill lamb chops (always chops!) at picnics in National Park near Belair in the Adelaide Hills. Chop picnics were a frequent weekend outing in childhood, often on Saturday from late morning to mid-afternoon. There are auditory memories from those outings too, the echoes that bounced back from the steep hillsides, the warble of magpies, the crazy laughter of kookaburras, the chatter of willy-wagtails. I wonder how many of these typically South Australian birds are left there now. Other odours are reminders of youth; the smell of sweaty male bodies that pervaded the changing-rooms where we stripped to swim (naked) in the school pool, or to put on, then take off our gear for P.T., football and cricket. I hated being forced to play both football and cricket, being no good at either; I can't remember now how it was I managed to evade them so often, perhaps because I was so awful that I was never better than second or third reserve for the lowest level team in my house. Those smells, therefore, are not such happy reminders, but reminders nonetheless of a careless youth gone forever. I would give a lot to smell again the tang of burning eucalyptus.

Many of these sensual memories are complex and multidimensional. If I walk on soft damp grass with moisture oozing out at either side of my footprints, I recall the smell and feel of the playing fields at St. Peter's College on cold winter afternoons when my second-hand footy boots pinched my feet. I was uncomfortably aware of the pressure of the cleats on the soles of my feet, yet fascinated to see the imprints they made on the soft ground, to watch as the indentations slowly filled with water - then would be jolted into awareness of the game going on around me as the ball came in my direction and team-mates shouted at me to intercept (despite the bulk of the opposing team members bearing down on me). After all these years all the sights, sounds, smells of those afternoons are indelibly imprinted somewhere in my brain, three quarters of a century after the imprint of my football cleats has vanished forever. There are many such vivid memories, some of particular episodes, others like football afternoons, more general.

A particular recollection that involved all five senses is of the day I was attacked by magpies as I biked downhill on the way back to Brighton from Marino. It was a sunny spring day; one moment I hadn't a care in the world, the next I was aware simultaneously of a sharp pain in the back of my head, and the flapping wings, raucous squawking of two magpies whose nest I had inadvertently approached too closely. The thing to do, I knew, was to whirl something around my head when magpies attacked; I reached down with one hand to my bike pump, took it from its clips, and began whirling it around my head. But doing that with one hand while trying to steer my bike down a steep and bumpy track with the other proved beyond my powers of coordination; I lost control, the bike tipped me off, I came a terrible cropper, bit my lip, could taste my own blood as it poured out of my mouth; and as I lay on the ground, still feebly whirling the bike pump around my head vainly trying to keep the magpies from attacking my face and eyes, I could even smell them, smell their acrid feathery smell, looked straight at their angry eyes as they pecked at my face. I staggered to my feet, and dragging the bike with me, limped as fast as I could away from there, away far enough from their nest so that they left me to find my painful way home, the bike wheel buckled and scraping on the mudguard, my face bleeding, my legs and hands bruised. Despite this experience, my affection for magpies is undiminished. How delightful it would be too look out and hear a pair of them warbling on the branches of the tree outside my study, instead of the ugly big black crows that are there today!

But I was hard on birds for a few years when I was a boy. With a sling-shot (known for some reason as a shanghai) or an airgun I was a deadly accurate shot; I killed many song-birds and even more birds we regarded as virtually verminous, sparrows and starlings. It was mindless slaughter, killing for its own sake.

My sexual awakening took place during those school years at Glenelg, although my first seminal emission, first orgasm, came before we left Brighton. The flood of new and terrifying yet delightful feelings evoked by those early experiences of sexual arousal were unhappily complicated by terrible guilt, due to my mother's attitudes. From this distance it is impossible and silly to ascribe blame, but she carries a lot of responsibility for making my life miserable and oppressed by needless guilt for the furtive fumbling and sordid dampness of adolescent masturbation. She never discussed sex with me, nor asked anybody else to; there was no frank talk about it by any adult on whom I could lean or in whom I could confide. One of the gaps in my childhood was the complete absence of a male adult confidant. From my mother, and sometimes from others too, there was the subliminal message, in fact often very much out in the open, that anything and everything to do with sex was dirty, disgusting, something nice people just never did. But this didn't stop me from secretly masturbating, or from fantasizing.

My fantasies were based on the sort of innocuous men's magazines that were available in those days, magazines that had cartoons of scantily clad women; on advertisements for women's underwear in the newspapers; but never on real people. Most if not all of the boys among whom I circulated (though I was most often on the fringe, hardly ever right inside the group) learnt a little from each other, much if not all of it faulty or plain wrong. I think guilt about sex in general and masturbation in particular was nearly universal among my circle of friends. It is sad to look back on those far off years and recall how what ought to have been a happy and pleasurable introduction to the facts of life was blackened and made to seem "dirty" so unnecessarily by ignorant or prurient and small-minded adults. I hold this against my mother more than any of the other ways in which she failed me as a mother, because her attitudes made my life a lot less enjoyable than it otherwise might have been. I hope my children will never say as much of me, though I am sure I have failed them in all sorts of ways. To some extent, failure to learn about the facts of life in a straightforward and open way left a permanent mark on me. It certainly impaired very seriously my capability to form emotional relationships with other people, especially with girls of my own age when I was passing through adolescence. So perhaps it was a blessing in disguise, because otherwise I might have bonded to somebody else long before I met and fell in love with Wendy.     

Birthday celebrations

It's celebration enough to be alive still at such an advanced age as 86 years.  It's very pleasing to be able to report that my family found the occasion suitable for a gathering and several meals and other festivities.

David arrived here with Desre, Chris, and Chris's dog Max, in time for a leisurely Saturday lunch, which was memorable among other things for some very tasty pate that David made.  It's very pleasing to me, and to my palate, that David is such an excellent cook.  I don't take after him, so I'm always profoundly grateful for nourishment provided by my family, which in this context means Richard or David.  

Among the perks of being appointed to the Order of Canada is that one or two of the congratulatory letters I received came with gifts.  The CEO of the three 'Science' museums in Ottawa sent me a complimentary family pass to these museums - the Science Museum, the Aeronautics Museum, and the Museum of Agriculture.  Despite residence on Ottawa for more than 40 years, I've never been to the Museum of Agriculture.  We made up for this lapse on Saturday afternoon, with a visit to this museum, which I've driven past on countless occasions - it's on the road that runs through the Central Experimental Farm.  We saw horses, including huge, impressive Clydesdales, donkeys, cows, calves, sheep, goats, pigs, bees, and many of the implements of animal husbandry. I very much like the smells associated with farming.  The evening before I had looked at the delightful movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a lovely, loving tribute to life in modern India, which captures brilliantly the atmosphere, manners and mannerisms of India. The only thing missing from the movie was the smells of India.  Some of these smells were apparent in the spacious animal stalls in the Museum of Agriculture.  

There was time between leaving the museum and getting to Rebecca and Richard's home for dinner, to visit a couple of places where recliners are sold, because I had confessed to the family that I'm thinking of getting myself a recliner. We went on to R&R's where Richard provided as he usually does, a truly superb feast.  Eventually Jonathan drove Chris and me back to my pad.  Chris stayed with me because Rebecca has a new cat that is nervous around dogs. Max is a well-behaved little chap but he does yap from time to time so life was more peaceful at R&R's without him. And this provided a good reason for Chris to stay overnight with me, which delighted me.  It was very good indeed to have some quality time with Chris, for us to talk at leisure about several mutual interests.  I think Chris is an impressive young person who has matured considerably in the past year or so. 

Sunday morning we reconvened for Brunch - pancakes, bacon, sundry other tasty treats - at R&R's; then traveled across town to a store in the far east end that specializes in recliners.  They range in price from a few hundred dollars all the way up to $3000.  I don't think my arthritic spine and swollen ankles are worth $3000 but perhaps they warrant an investment of a few hundred.  I'll look at a few more, perhaps will buy one for a few hundred dollars. 

So finally the birthday weekend celebrations ended, the out-of-town contingent departed for Toronto and Kingston. It was a good weekend.  It would have been a near-pefect weekend if Wendy was still here to help me celebrate but in her absence it was about as good as it ever could be.

No photos to post but here's a sketch of my profile that Chris produced whenI wasn't looking