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.

Another anniversary

Today is the anniversary of my arrival in Canada as a landed immigrant on November 9 1969. (In mid December I brought the rest of the family over to join me). It's a date that often passes by unnoticed and would have again this year had it not been for a reminder on the radio that it's an anniversary for somebody or something else - I missed the information but heard  the word anniversary, and that reminded me. When Wendy and I decided to come to Ottawa instead of staying on in Edinburgh where we were so happy and I was so professionally well placed, we saw the move as a stepping-stone on our route home to either Australia or New Zealand; we didn't mind which but we did feel quite strongly that we belonged in one or other southern hemisphere country. But when we got to Ottawa, many opportunities opened up for me professionally, Wendy settled in easily, and our kids all did very well in ways that mattered - Jonathan most of all, successfully having complex open heart surgery without which he would not have lived beyond about age 10, paid for in full by the Ontario Health Insurance Program even though the operation was done in Auckland, New Zealand (the best centre in the world at the time). Clearly it was the right decision. As the years passed and success piled on top of success the rightness of our choice - Wendy's as much as mine - became increasingly apparent. By the time the absolutely perfect professional opening materialized for me in Sydney, as professor of public health sciences and editor of the Medical Journal of Australia, it was too late. All of us had put down such deep roots in Canada we simply couldn't uproot and resettle in what by then had become a foreign country. Wendy and I realized then, in 1987, that without either of us noticing we had become Canadians, part of that demographic of 40% or thereabouts of Canadians who had been born in another country.

Wendy and kids on Parliament Hill,
January 1970

Jonathan outside our rented temporary home
331 Island Park Drive, just after returning from open heart surgery in Auckland New Zealand, August 1970

Money talks - Sound and fury signifying nothing

Two obscenities stained yesterday's presidential election in the United States. Over $6 billion was squandered by the two parties on the campaign; and negative "advertising" (hyperbole, obfuscation, innuendo, outright lies) far outweighed objective presentation of facts and political platforms. Romney, the losing Republican, repeatedly shifted his position on key issues, leaving the impression with me at any rate that he was prepared to say anything to his audience to advance his electoral prospects. Obama was at least consistent in his political position. But the status of the two parties in Congress is virtually unchanged so the dysfunctional state of affairs that prevailed before the election is unlikely to change.  The Democrat president has an agenda; the Republican House of Representatives is intransigently opposed to it no matter what that agenda is. A third obscenity is the intransigence of the Republican party.  The great mystery to me is why almost half of all those who voted gave their support to the Republicans.  It seems to be based on inability to separate politics from religion: restricting reproductive freedom for women - indeed, women's position in society - is an integral part of religious faith for a far higher proportion of Americans than people in other advanced, literate societies. This accounts for widespread bizarre beliefs such as the Genesis myth of human origins rather than the scientific facts of evolutionary biology.  The sickness of the body politic in the USA is serious for the whole world however we view the world, and after the USA itself, it is probably more serious and more of a problem for Canada than for any other country. Unless the Republicans show some flexibility, willingness to compromise, and magnanimity, the future looks bleak.  I am profoundly thankful that Wendy and I decided in 1964 that we would rather raise our children in Edinburgh, Scotland, than in Baltimore, USA. That decision shaped the subsequent course of our children's lives as well as Wendy's and mine. Of the several life altering decisions we made, this one was the most important.

Paris

My job at Hillingdon Hospital ended conveniently just before the Easter weekend of 1952, spring-time. What a perfect time to see Paris! I had a week before my next job, pediatrics at the Edgware General Hospital. I flew over to Paris, too short of time, impatient and extravagant to take the train and ferry.

Paris was sparkling, basking in warm sunshine with glorious spring blossom everywhere, girls bouncing along in thin summer dresses in sharp contrast to the dour, grey faces and colourless clothes of the Londoners across the Channel.                                                                             
Paris, Springtime, 1952
            
What a revelation! This was my first encounter with life outside the English-speaking world, and although I spoke some German, I had only a few phrases of French.  Obviously France had recovered more rapidly and completely from wartime austerity than Britain. Nothing was rationed, everything was plentiful and even with the rigorous British currency restrictions I had enough to eat and drink and attend several theatres. Through my father's friend Elsie Robinson I made contact with several young people in my own age group, with whom I went to the Follies Bergerges and the Moulin Rouge. Though I couldn't understand and therefore couldn’t laugh as they did at the jokes the comedians were telling, I could and did appreciate the sight-gags, the spectacular scenery and costumes. The great comedy actress Juliette Greco was starting then, a teenager; she appeared fully clothed on stage whilst all the other girls were bare-breasted - yet somehow she managed to look more naked and far sexier than all the others put together. I’ve never forgotten my first sight of her, wearing a white silk shirt, jodhpurs and knee-high leather boots. She flourished a riding crop with which she was flagellating the naked rump of a fat man at her feet. I gathered that the tableau was a spoof on S&M with Juliette Greco as the dominatrix.  Nobody could ever forget that spectacle, and I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday.

The Winged Victory of Samothrace
in the Louvre, 1952

Mostly I was on my own. In perfect weather I strolled the boulevards, went into the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, gazed at halls of paintings of obscure battles and pyrrhic victories. I lingered along the quais by the Seine, I climbed the Eiffel Tower, all the way to the top up the stairs because they were free but the elevator cost several Francs. I posed beside the gargoyles of Notre Dame and another tourist took my photo. I found Sylvia Beech's famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Company – the first of many visits to that magnificent bookshop that resonated with historical associations with Gertrude Stein, Alice B Toklas and the great expatriate English-speaking writers of the 1920s and 1930s. I made my way up to Montmartre, looked out over Paris from the vantage point of the parapet in front of Sacre Coeur, sipped coffee and bought cheap water colours (that I still have) in Place du Tertre, browsed the book stalls along the Seine, wandered through Montparnasse and the Rive Gauche, where I was staying near the Sorbonne at a pension on Rue de Vieux Colombier. I returned to stay there again next time I passed through Paris a year later. I strolled through the tuilleries. I had then some discomfort looking down from heights, but I overcame this permanently in Paris, standing on the edge of the Arc de Triomph where the parapet is barely up to knee height, atop the towers of Notre Dame, and on other high points all over this beautiful city. I regretted then, as I do now, my lack of French. Yet somehow I managed with English and body language, as I have on many occasions since all over the world. In fact as my comprehension of spoken French slowly improved on subsequent visits to Paris I found that I could understand a great deal, felt sure that if I were to live in Paris for a month or two I would understand almost all of what I heard, and if I lived there for a year or so I would be speaking French.

On my own, I went to hear a performance by the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet and his band, dropped into strip-joints in Place Pigalle, stood near enough to naked girls to see that close up they lost their charm, had pimply, haggard faces and smelt of sweat, cheap perfume and stale tobacco smoke - and of much recently consumed alcohol. For the entire week that I was in Paris I hardly slept, there was so much to see and do.

At the end of my week in Paris as the plane that would take me back to London gathered speed on the runway, I looked out my window and saw the engine nearest me burst into flames. At the same moment there was a loud bang; then everything happened so quickly I can’t reconstruct events. A built-in fire extinguisher must have come on, and drowned the flames in foam that covered my window; the brakes slammed on, and we came to rest nose down in a ditch, propellers buckled, at the end of the runway. That was one of my narrow escapes from untimely death.  I’ll say more about these escapes elsewhere.

It was the first of many visits to Paris, almost always for holidays and sightseeing, later in life for cultural enrichment. On three occasions I went to conferences or meetings in Paris, once to consult with social scientists and others at UNESCO, once to a mind-expanding conference on complexity theory, once for an editorial conference to design a book that several of us were working on.  I haven’t kept count but I think Wendy and I visited Paris 10 or a dozen times for periods ranging from a day or two to a week or more, and several times when I was working for WHO in Geneva I used the superb TGV rail service that whisked me from Cornavin Station in the heart of Geneva to Gare de Lyon in less than 3 hours.  Each time I felt more at home, achieved an easy familiarity with a few districts and several splendid restaurants.  The last time Wendy and I were in Paris in 2007 it was a different kind of experience. It was at the end of a river cruise on the Main, Rhine and Moselle rivers, a tour that began in Prague and ended in Paris, thanks to bus trips at each end. We had several pleasant days, then on what ought to have been the morning of our final day before returning to Canada, Wendy missed her footing on a low curb outside our hotel, fell heavily and fractured her hip. Fortunately the nearest hospital was Hopital Europeen Georges Pompidou, a superb modern facility, considered the best in France, quite possibly the best in the world. So she and I had a few extra days before I flew back to Ottawa ahead of her to prepare our apartment to receive her, while Wendy stayed a few more days with Rebecca to watch over her.   

Bedside Manor

At the end of September 1951, I started my first hospital job in England, as a house officer (resident physician) on the acute medical service at Hillingdon Hospital, Uxbridge, Middlesex, where my chief was Cyril G. Barnes, MD, FRCP, affectionately known as “the Baron” - an excellent general physician and cardiologist; I soon realized that he was better than any of the clinical teachers I'd had in medical school in Adelaide, both as a clinician and as a teacher. The hospital in general and this medical service in particular were closely affiliated with St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London (Paddington). Dr. Barnes, his senior registrar, George Harrison, and the junior registrar, Jack Mickerson, were St Mary’s men. Barnes and Harrison had part-time staff appointments there on Sir George Pickering's service. I met Pickering, a very famous cardiologist and specialist in hypertension and renal disease, a few years later at an IEA conference in Princeton, New Jersey, and from that personal contact came away confirmed in the view acquired at second-hand from Barnes, Harrison and Mickerson, that he was at that time among the two or three top specialists in internal medicine in the UK; I was extraordinarily fortunate to have the opportunity to learn - and I learnt a great deal - from close colleagues of his in a way that came close to learning directly from Pickering himself. I seldom went to St Mary's myself, mainly because I was too busy. But at that stage in my medical career I probably did better staying at Hillingdon and seeing patients with run-of-the-mill acute medical conditions rather than the rare and strange conditions collected in Pickering's wards at St Mary's.

There were some interesting medical highlights: On the night of the American Thanksgiving Day, a young man from the US Airforce Base at Ruislip was brought in comatose, near death, his hands and face twitching strangely. He could give no account of himself. A few minutes later another young air force man was brought in with very severe vomiting and diarrhea, then a few minutes later, a dozen or so others arrived. All became clear then: the first one had been struck down with such severe staphylococcal gastroenteritis that he had catastrophic fluid and electrolyte loss into his own intestines and collapsed unconscious; this also caused the twitching, called tetany; his symptoms and signs resembled those of cholera; (I saw cholera patients with this cluster of signs in Surabaya in Java years later). The food poisoning came from a turkey that had been cooked in the USA, flown over and reheated - a process that left the Staphylococcal enterotoxin intact. This introduction to the epidemiology of food poisoning was a lesson I never forgot. Two other cases that were in adjoining beds at the same time provided another lesson. Both had leptospirosis; one was leptospirosis ictohemorrhagica, rat-bite fever, sewer-worker's disease, the other was the more benign disease, canicola fever; under the microscope, the causal organisms looked almost identical, and the muscle biopsies that I did on both of them also were similar; but the first man died, his liver destroyed by the infection, the second man was hardly even sick, apart from muscle pains and low fever. Hillingdon Hospital is very close to Heathrow Airport and had a small quarantine wing where travelers arriving in the UK with exotic communicable diseases could be assessed. I was off duty on the weekend when a suspected case of bubonic plague led to a few hours of crisis bordering on panic; but I saw a man from Pakistan who arrived at Heathrow when in the early stages of smallpox. He had the relatively mild form of this lethal contagious disease which killed only about 5% of those infected, in contrast to the dangerous variety that killed a third or more of all it infected, but his rash was typical according to George Harrison who had seen many cases in Asia during his war service. I examined the rash closely and felt I would recognize further cases if I should ever see any (I did, during my years at Edinburgh when my colleague Hugh Russell invited me to join him on a visit to the London Hospital for Tropical Diseases where we saw two cases). These experiences with infectious diseases, reinforced by others in the next few years, aroused my interest enough to cause me to consider specializing in infectious diseases. 

Entrance to Bedside Manor, Hillingdon Hospital

Outside the resident's quarters at Hillingdon was a neatly painted signboard with the name of the residence: Bedside Manor. This comfortable modern residence was the best I encountered in all my time in Britain. It had a billiard table, a delightful patio with a lawn where we could play croquet (though few did); a comfortable dining-room and large lounge; and, most wonderful of all, showers rather than the baths that most British accommodation offered in those days. About 12-20 of us lived in Bedside Manor; the numbers fluctuated according to season and on-call duties. About twelve of us were permanent residents, and we came from as many countries and had as many accents - various parts of the British Isles: Glasgow, Dublin, Belfast, Manchester, Cardiff; from New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, Canada. I acquired an ear for detecting differences in regional accents while living in Bedside Manor.  My fellow-Australian was Jim Kalokerinos, a Greek-Australian who among other things was fascinated by the folk-songs of the Hebrides, and was later made an honorary Hebridean in recognition of his painstaking collecting of rare folk songs that he recorded in some instances from the sole living survivor of the era when these songs were known to everybody. Joe Dobson from Christchurch, New Zealand, Sam Axelrod from Johannesburg, Laurie Smith and Peter Butler, two Englishmen from the home counties, Charles Hodes, a Dubliner, Jewish like Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom, Joe Starrett from Glagow, Taffie Rees from Cardiff, Bill Wheeler, a Londoner whom I later visited in a TB sanitorium when his tuberculosis flared up, and who became a life-long friend, were among my mess-mates in Bedside Manor. Somehow the chemistry was just right: we all got along wonderfully well. For me, it provided a broadening, enriching and polishing of character that matured me enormously, adding to my personal stature just as the clinical experience under “The Baron” was enriching my clinical skills.

A corner of the dining room, Bedside Manor 

As in all hospital residency posts, we worked hard, but we played hard too. There were local pubs, occasional movies in Uxbridge, and - most enriching - theatres, prom concerts, Sadler’s Wells opera and ballet. The Royal Opera House  in Covent Garden had taken a direct hit during the Blitz and was not yet repaired in 1951. I went to some of these cultural events with colleagues from the hospital, and to others with a small group of the people whom I had met on the ship coming over from Australia, preserving for a few more months these links with my colonial origins - though over the next few years the ties to Australian friends became progressively more tenuous. Also I discovered the dusty old second-hand bookshops of Charing Cross Road, that had all sorts of fascinating and often dirt-cheap treasures. Penguin Classics were publishing the Greek tragedies then, and I read these voraciously too in 1951-52.  

In December 1951 as a Christmas party at Hillingdon Hospital was winding down I lost my virginity. She was Margaret, Meg, a bubbly red-haired staff nurse from Glasgow, probably a few years older than I and decidedly more worldly wise. She was dating one of the other young doctors at Bedside Manor. But they had a tumultuous noisy quarrel early in the evening, he stormed off and she turned to me as the nearest source of sustenance. Late in the night when everybody was heading for the exit, we were fused together on a sofa in a darkened corner, tongues down each other’s throats, hands exploring sweaty skin under each other’s clothes.  Then she sat up, entwined my fingers with hers, and led me upstairs, asking, “Which is your bedroom?” She had her dress half off before I closed and locked the door and she unbuttoned my shirt and trousers as we fell back on my narrow bed with her asking “Have you got a Durex?” I didn’t. Durex was the brand name of the commonest condoms of the 1950s, that restrained extinct era BP, before the Pill.  In my then virginal state I wasn’t prepared as other virile males would have been. She was undeterred, did a quick mental calculation and decided she’d be safe, her period was due that day or the next. She didn’t need to worry; to her considerable irritation I exploded down the front of her disarrayed underwear before we got near each other. But she demanded satisfaction so my bonus was a tutorial on how to please a hot-blooded young Scotswoman.  This revived my flagging fortunes, and soon I plunged into what she called “The wee hole in ma body.”  She would never let me near her after that one night and not long afterwards she left Hillingdon Hospital.  

I explored as much as I could of the English countryside, and much of Greater London, during those first few months in Britain. Just before I started at Hillingdon, I hitch-hiked up to Scotland, going via the west Midlands, the Manchester by-pass and Carlisle, to Glasgow, and on to Loch Lomond where there was a splendid youth hostel in an old castle. I saw all these spectacular sights in the early autumn, with green leaves giving way to gold, and came back south through the Yorkshire dales in rain-squalls between short spells of watery sunshine with rainbows touching the ground at both ends on the Yorkshire moors. At Barnard Castle there was a roaring fire in the hearth of the old manor-house that was the local youth hostel. In all these places, with the people who gave me lifts, with those I met in the hostels, with people I met in pubs where I stopped for a pint and a sandwich in the middle of the day, I began to overcome my shyness with strangers, learning to exchange ideas about the world as well as about the weather. The rough edges were gradually being worn away. Once I had started at Hillingdon, I continued the same way on my visits to London on the occasions when I was alone - though mostly I went with some of my colleagues from the hospital, or met a group of Australians with whom I shared the delightful process of getting to know London and all it had to offer. My explorations of London covered the City itself - often on my own, because I was like Chiang Yee, the “Silent Traveller” concerned with the art, the architecture and the history. But in Hampstead, Chalk Farm, Kensington, Chelsea, the Bayswater Road, where the Australians lived, the explorations were of pubs and restaurants as well as theatres and cinemas. I had a series of epiphanies, when like Jane Austen’s Emma pierced as though with an arrow, I knew that I was in love with London, and wanted nothing so much as to live there for the rest of my life. I had such moments in Notting Hill Tube station, feeling the blast of air on my face as the train pushed the air in front of it along the aptly named Tube through which it rumbled towards me; as I walked late one night back to Bedside Manor with a frosty full moon outlined against the bare branches of a tree; as I watched a lamp-lighter turn on the gas mantles with a long pole in the lane that runs from the Strand down to the Embankment beside the church of the Knights Templar; as I walked past the liveried footman at the entrance to the Burlington Arcade; as I wandered through the British Museum... and on other occasions too numerous to mention. Such as every morning when I scanned the pages of The Times and the Guardian; and in the evenings as I listened to the 9 o'clock news on the BBC; or as I stood in line to get into the Curzon cinema to see films like la Ronde; and, perhaps most grippingly, at the Last Night of the Proms, when the entire audience stood and belted out “Land of Hope and Glory” while Malcolm Sargent conducted Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance. Yes, I knew at moments like those, that London was where I truly belonged. I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life.

 Piccadilly Circus, 1951 

Piccadilly Circus tube station