Urine Bottles Decorated With Holly. Buzz Mangrove And The Beast. Anaesthetic Punch. Painless Childbirth, Or Why Grandmothers Should Have Their Mouths Sewn Up.

In September 1962 the reconditioned engine of the Ford Anglia purred out of action in front of College Hall, St Swithin's Hospital Medical School. I ordered Chapman, my father, to carry my trunk up to my room, and went to a nearby inn while he and his wife unpacked my belongings and tidied up the room for my arrival. I left the pub at 3.30, walked back through the courtyard past a lot of rather spotty ex-grammar school boys - absolute oiks the lot of them -strolled up to my room, and dismissed my parents. I cast my eyes around the room — the bed looked too narrow. I tested it for creakiness and made a mental note to tell the porter to bring me a larger and less creaky place to sleep. On the desk - a bakelite version of bird's-eye maple - I noticed something wrapped in greaseproof paper¹. I unwrapped the package. It was a cake from my mother 'How sweet,' I thought, as I threw it into the waste paper basket.

I opened a small suitcase containing my books: Climbing in 1. A piece of paper soaked in lard.

Snowdonia, Nanga Parbat, The Ascent of K2, Cambridge University in the Andes, The Art of Coarse Rugby, and I'll Teach You Drinking. I flicked through a few pages of this volume and came to St Swithin's Hospital. It had three stars by it.

The most important feature of those three years of clinical study was the bar.¹

I learned all of my medicine drinking at it. Unfortunately its ability to teach Surgery and Midwifery was inadequate, and I consequently failed in both subjects/This meant that I had to spend a gruelling six months doing cabaret in a night club and writing for David Frost. This gave me sufficient arrogance to pass them both easily. I should really have learned that lesson months before, when someone whose name I conveniently forget, who had spent his three clinical years playing bridge and poker, passed his finals without ever having examined a patient. All medicine is a gamble, and he was extremely good at it, having stripped at least a dozen students of their grants.

But that's all so much hot air under the bridge. Let us return to the most important aspects of medical training. The bar had been run by a layperson, it was open only between six and seven in the evening, and it ran at a huge loss. Fingers were being dipped into tills, and the occasional large scotches went missing. Stephen Carter, who was Chairman of the Students Union at the time, thought it would be a good idea if his twin brother, Stephen Jenkins, formed what is now

I. This is all fiction including the name 'St Swithin's'. Otherwise the names have been kept the same, only the facts altered; this to fit in with the tradition begun by the doyen of medical writers, Richard Gordon, whose real name is Gordon Ostlere, who, incidentally, actually wrote an extremely good medical textbook, Anaesthetics for Medical Students which contains the only truly funny line in any of the huge tomes that are a medical student's obligatory unfunny reading. The centenary edition of Gray's Anatomy, for instance, clocked up 1604 pages of smirkless facts, Cecil and Loeb's Textbook of Medicine amounts to nearly 2000 titterless pages. Bailey and Love's 1308-page 1975 edition of their curiously titled Short Practice of Surgery is no laugh-a-page pamphlet, although Fig. 1156, representing the rectal impalement of a suitably clad English Country Gentleman on his shooting stick is a quick giggle, closely followed by their Fig. 1157, 'Pepperpot in Rectum'. A radiograph showing a pepperpot in the rectum was later found to be inscribed 'A present from Margate'.

called the Hippocras Society, and we took the whole thing over, running it with voluntary student labour.

Within a year we were beginning to make almost embarrassing profits, and decided that these should be spent to the benefit of the Students Union. However, not everyone in the Students Union drank - some were even Christian Union. We thought that a selected list of people who spent most money at the bar should be the ones to benefit most. Democracy was in progress. We put up a list of some thirty people's signatures, leaving only two blank spaces for those students who would like to visit a Moet et Chandon chateau in Rheims, a day trip costing each member a mere £5 for the flight, the rest of the fare being subsidized by the Hippocras Society. This notice was appropriately pinned up in the bar, and, as expected, the remaining two places were not filled by people from the Christian Union. The plan was working. Count Moet was given the definite impression that his chateau was being visited by thirty-two consultants from Harley Street. We assembled at the bar at 6 o'clock in the morning and had a breakfast of lager, climbed on to a coach containing crates of lager, and left for Brighton Airport.

We all arrived at Rheims with extremely high blood-alcohol levels, and were given champagne by the Count himself. He seemed to be quite pleased that we weren't a load of stuffy consultants. We had a magnificent three-hour lunch in the Orangerie, and tried to keep the bread-throwing to a minimum and throwing-up at least discreet. The Count was enjoying himself, and he ordered Jeroboams of his 1911 Champagne. People on the top table were determined to get the pilot pissed, and they succeeded. He left, thinking of his immediate future of piloting, to rest for a few hours.

We then went on a tour of the cellars. The vast barrels, which probably still have 'St Swithin's for the Cup' written on them, impressed us very quickly. The rest of the tour, being dry, was completed as speedily as possible. Leaving the chateau we went back into the town of Rheims, a quiet place with something called a cathedral in it, which we glanced at from a bar. Outside the bar was a large papier-mache effigy of a Moet et Chandon champagne bottle, which a certain person, whose name I conveniently forget, thought would

look nice on the Hippocras Society's bar top. We arranged things so that he would commit the actual theft while the rest of us drove round the square at high speed in the coach, grabbing it at the last moment. We drove round the square and found Benson (sorry Benson) who hadn't realized that the bottle was chained to the wall of the bar, arguing with a shopkeeper and a gendarme about the tremendous benefit to Moet et Chandon that a trophy like this would bring them in terms of English advertising. The policeman was clearly unimpressed, but Benson, while continuing his line of argument, turned round, threw up, and talked on as though nothing had happened. The natives were completely thrown by his aplomb, and although we didn't get the bottle we were allowed to carry on to the airport.

At Rheims airport, they wouldn't let us leave the coach because the driver had lost his jacket and identity papers, and for some reason thought that a certain person in the coach might be responsible. We waited for Benson to own up, and then were allowed to board the plane. During the flight I remember a different certain person, who is now a consultant paediatrician, hanging from the luggage rack, trouserless, chanting 'Eskimo Nell'. The single air hostess, who was at first a little embarrassed at having to pass under his crutch to reach the front of the plane, must have complained to the pilot. We were all so happy that we filled in the time, (those of us who could stand) by standing at the front of the plane, jumping on the spot, then running down to the other end and doing the same thing in the hope that we could tip the thing up. We nearly succeeded and were told that the police would be waiting for us at Brighton.

The responsible members of the group, that is the Hippocras Society, who were used to drinking, picked people up off the floor and strapped them into their seats before landing. As we landed, we could see that the appropriate reception bay was rather filled by people in dark blue pointed helmets, so, as the plane was taxi-ing in, we all leapt out before it had stopped and ran in through another bay. The police greeted an empty plane, while we rushed through the gate into Customs. A fight nearly broke out with the officials, which we would certainly have won in the short-term.

Someone called Benson wasn't wearing trousers, and no-one would own up to having hidden them. He explained with confidence that shirt-tails was his national dress, pointing to Alistair McMaster who being a very Scottish person also had no trousery substances. The culprit owned up quickly, thinking of the policemen behind us, and we were allowed through on to the coach, with its engine already revving and several Stella lagers already open.

It was an uneventful journey back until we reached St Paul's Cathedral, where one of the Carter-Jenkins twins, either the one who had his hair parted on the left or the one that had it parted on the right (which was Stephen), was pushed out of the coach wearing nothing except a bowler hat. He found an Evening Standard from a nearby stall, and confidently walked through the city, covering his genitals with the newspaper, to the Medical College. Well, it was dark, he was wearing a bowler hat, and it was the Evening Standard, so no-one noticed, and he arrived at the College, fully nude, ten minutes later.

Something in my soul told me that this was Medicine.

To supplement my meagre student grant I decided to do some cabaret. Full of confidence, being ex-Footlights, Tony Hendra and myself went along to the Blue Angel nightclub for an audition. We chose the Blue Angel because it was one of the best nightclub spots for revue and we'd read in The Stage - in an advertisement that sounded like whistling in the dark - how David Frost had recently been retained there for a 'second glorious month'. However, we were accepted at the audition and in two weeks' time found ourselves top of the bill, which meant we didn't start our act until any time from two to two-thirty a.m., meaning that I didn't get back to College until three-thirty, having to get up again at eight-thirty in time for a ward round at nine. I found this routine too gruelling after five more weeks and we left the Blue Angel, to be followed by a promising newcomer called Dave Allen.

We found a more lucrative and conveniently timed engagement at Edmundo Ros's Club though artistically this was less successful, in that the patrons were more interested in the hostesses than two funny guys. My two most immediate

ft was the Evening Standard

recollections of that particular club are of Coca Cola costing the equivalent of two pounds a bottle and a 'hostess' returning after an intimate tete-a-tete to tell her friend, 'Look at this, the bloody fool's gone and given me a diamond ring.' I looked at the poor, fat, sad businessman as he scurried out....

On another occasion at the Blue Angel a drunken guards officer - they formed about fifteen per cent of the clientele -who was annoying us and the rest of the audience by his untimely and incomprehensible interruptions eventually clambered up on to the stage so Tony Hendra took a swing at him and knocked him out cold. We carried on with our act to thunderous applause from the audience.

All this helped to provide me with money to buy mountaineering equipment for brief weekends in the Peak District and holidays in Scotland and, of course a more ample supply of loot for the bar. Later when things were getting a bit tight, I joined the cast of the revue Cambridge Circus when they moved from the Arts Theatre to the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue - but more of that revue later on.

But I wasn't just at St Swithin's Hospital to perform late-night cabarets and West End revues, I also helped to start annual concerts for the Hippocras Society and organize the Christmas 'Ward Shows'. The last was a splendid excuse for avoiding a family Christmas. I could join in with the rest of the lads wandering round the wards, entertaining the moribund with liberal supplies of barrels of beer made portable by the use of hospital trollies. Some of the nursing staff, the huge matron in particular, raised objections to these festive revels in that they were disruptive of hospital routine and in certain cases where beds were trampled on by spectators -deleterious to the well-being of patients, but if I were ill enough to need to be in hospital over Christmas I can think of no better atmosphere in which to peg out: nurses wearing silly hats, urine bottles decorated with holly, mistletoe on the drip stands, general bacchanalia.

Apart from entertainment there was yet another side to medicine.

I was used to dead bodies, but I now had to deal with live human beings. This was another hurdle to overcome, and I

remember on my first day as a 'dresser' we were taught by the houseman how to take blood from patients. He suggested that we should all take blood from each other, and lined us up in pairs, so that you would take 5 ml of blood from your partner, who would then take 5 ml of blood from you. Fortunately he left, and we were on our own. I refused to have my blood taken by the idiot who was my partner, and I'm sure he felt the same about me.

I arrived alone at the ward the next morning at 8.30 to find that I had to take what amounted to about a pint of blood from nine different patients. And so I practised on them. I only missed a few veins, and by the end of the morning was getting quite good at it. And, as everyone knows in a hospital, if you complain you get worse treatment, less attention, and an ice-cold enema.

The next couple of weeks I spent pretending to look like a doctor while looking at people's faeces and staring into their sputum jars. There was one particular patient whom the nurses had finally refused to bath.

His abdominal surgery had been mismanaged at another hospital and he'd been brought into the teaching hospital to be sorted out. His abdomen had been covered with aluminium paste in an attempt to prevent the excoriation of the skin caused by his five substitute arseholes. It was as though his bowels had been doctored by a telephone engineer. Any competent plumber would have done a better job. No-one really knew which hole led where. Marcus Pine and myself, as dressers, were ordered by the Sister to bath him. We put him into a bath which we filled with disinfectant, and were both vaguely nauseated by the unformed turds which slipped out of his orifices. He was pleased by the comfort of the bath and the fact that we hadn't thrown up in his presence. We dried him, carried him back to bed, and he died the next morning.

There was an incident which struck a not-too-distant relative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, His Grace the Mind-Bogglingly Reverend Something - she was called Rachel Fisher (a very attractive female student with large breasts and long flowing dark hair and deep brown eyes that would have put even a minor canon off his muesli) — who was a senior dresser on my ward, and quite unable to finish sentences

properly... (I mean she could finish sentences, obviously, otherwise she'd still be talking... d'you think this is a reasonable place to stop?)... bother, I've forgotten where I was now... anyway (what a terrible word - what does it mean? It means nothing, like 'actually' and ⁴in fact' and 'sort of... it's a... kind of... well, basically it's ah... the product of a hesitant mind)... anyway, Rachel Fisher, who was then a good friend of and is now married to Dr Alan Bailey, remarked (he recalls), 'We had a new student on the ward-round the other day, knew fuck-all about medicine, but he was very funny...'

I remember that ward-round. When asked to describe the physical signs in a patient's abdomen by an impressive consultant surgeon, affectionately referred to as 'the Beast', I offered the product of a hesitant mind and said, 'Well, there were no abdominal signs, in fact.'

The Beast asked, 'What do you mean, "in fact"?'

'I meant as opposed to fiction, sir.'

Which, I suppose, is what Rachel meant....

Ward rounds were designed to instruct the students, make consultants look impressive and frighten the patients. To the patients a consultant was 'the specialist', a direct descendant of Aesculapius, a living god who rarely made contact with mortals. And ward sisters liked it that way. Over in the medical wards, Sister Goderich, who had spent most of her morning chivvying nurses and patients into making her ward impeccable for the professor's ward-round, returned to ask her staff nurse how the ward-round had gone. Staff Nurse said, 'Very well, Sister, but...'

'Nurse, what on earth are those screens still doing round that bed?' yelled Sister. 'Remove them at once, it's time for the patient's lunch...'

Staff Nurse gallantly attempted another 'But...'

Too late, Sister had already charged over and drawn aside the offending curtains revealing an unexpected tableau of His Dignity, the Professor-of-Medicine, washing a youth's hair. This incident could be viewed as contrary to the tender-lov-ing-care-between-medically-and-non-medically-qualified-consenting-adults-only-Act. Questions were asked.

This led to scenes of angry parents confronting the Board

of Governors. I found this whole incident morally repugnant. What did people like that think they were doing? A clear example of abuse of position. By the parents. If I had my way those parents would be put inside and sanctimonious sisters shot. Fortunately the Board of Governors was not composed of closet-dykes and the whole matter was seen in its proper perspective.

John Cleese, who had just finished his finals in Cambridge, getting a rather snooty upper second, wanted somewhere to stay in London while he wrote for BBC Radio such things as Yule Be Surprised, a Christmas show for Dick Emery. I was very friendly with the junior warden, Buzz Mangrove, and had managed to find a pass key to all of the rooms in the hall of residence (on the black market), and I knew that there were several empty ones. I gave John the key and suggested that he should stay in the room normally occupied by a person called Nick Spratt. Now Nick Spratt was a direct but distant descendant of Sir Percival Spratt, the first surgeon to really be a surgeon rather than a barber.

I first met Nick in Cambridge when he was President of the Mountaineering Club and I knew that he was at that time away as the doctor on an expedition in Greenland. He was a very athletic person who always entered the inter-hospitals London to Brighton walk. In his final year at St Swithin's he was doing a locum but decided rather than miss the walk he would run the whole way there and back, returning at.8 o'clock in the morning for his clinic. He arrived at 6.30 in time for a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich after having made the kind of run that would make Roger Bannister look wet. He was the embodiment of the spirit of England - courageous, kind and stupid.¹ He said 'y^uP' when a 'yes' would have done.

On the Greenland expedition Nick had an accident. He was leading the climb up to a peak and while roped up to the rest of the party fell through a thin layer of snow covering a crevasse. The rope stopped his fall about sixty feet down and his only reaction was to call to his second, saying, 'Oh, urn, are you all right?' His second dragged him out of the crevasse

1. Used here in the sense of having concealed wisdom.

and he returned to England rather sooner than he expected to find his room filled with a sleeping John Cleese. But, being a gentleman, he came in and said, 'Oh, urn, yup... er, sorry!' and went out, and slept the rest of the night in the bath.

Buzz Mangrove, a gentleman too, mentioned to me that perhaps Mr Cleese should begin to think of finding alternative accommodation. Buzz at this time was five foot one, and I've no reason to believe that he's grown any bigger now. And apart from being junior warden at the hostel, he was senior registrar to the man called the Beast (vide supra). The Beast was senior surgeon and stood six foot and five inches with no shoes and excluding bright red hair, which meant that Buzz during operations had to stand on a box. The Beast would do anything - he was the last of the heroic surgeons. He would inspire such confidence in his ability that patients would practically plead to have their entire livers taken out by him. I remember one day most particularly when the Beast was operating and he told Buzz that he had a malignant melanoma (an extremely nasty kind of cancer) on his own big toe. He climbed up on to the table and asked Buzz to amputate it. Buzz didn't want to do this, but the Beast insisted he was right. The toe was removed and the report came back from Pathology reading 'Blood blister'.

Buzz also had a problem in that a student who had arrived from Oxford, and was known by everyone as 'TCP', because of his habit of bathing in the stuff, was a fetishist in cleanliness. Bathing in neat TCP four times a day¹ had given him a bright red phenol rash all over his body, and you could smell him four hundred yards away. People in the lift used to remark, 'What's that strange smell?' when they were on Floor 2, even though TCP lived three floors above that. Huge bottles of TCP could be found outside his door, and in the bathroom he even had TCP toothpaste. He was the cleanest man in existence, but not the healthiest.

Unfortunately for him, as a student on his first day in the theatre, he was supposed to be assisting Buzz Mangrove and the Beast. The Beast, having shown off in front of a lot of visiting Greek surgeons, had marched out of the theatre,

i. Definitely not recommended by the makers.

8₉

leaving Buzz to sew up. Poor TCP, who should have been there an hour and a half earlier, wasn't. Not because he'd been late arriving at the operating theatre, but merely because his scrubbing-up procedure was so meticulous that it took him half an hour rather than the recommended five minutes. He was so preoccupied with his fear of germs that he shook a great deal each time he came into the theatre, and so dester-ilized himself on the X-Ray machines, anaesthetic apparatus, and bits of the wall. Each time he was sent off by the theatre sister to scrub up again. The Beast had gone, but before Buzz sewed up the patient he thought he would show TCP what the Beast had done. He opened up the retractors so that TCP could get a good view of the fine surgery that had been performed - a portacaval anastomosis. TCP looked into the gaping abdomen and PLOP! his spectacles fell right into the middle of the wound. Buzz and the rest of the theatre staff had hysterics — while poor TCP, whose spectacles must have been cleaner than anyone else's in the world, was carried out by two porters for psychiatric therapy.

The consultant anaesthetist at St Swithin's was a splendid character called James Grimsdyke. He was the original Grimsdyke in Richard Gordon's 'Doctor' books, and they were contemporary students for a time.

An extremely rich aunt had left him in her will £1000 annually until such time as he qualified. He had sussed out the unintended possibilities of this codicil and spent thirteen years not qualifying. He ran a pack of hounds and a bridge school, never appeared at lectures, and made sure that none of his experiments went well. Unfortunately, World War II caught up with him. In 1939 they'd pass anybody, and because he'd taken the course in anaesthetics more than anyone else in history, he was immediately made consultant anaesthetist in East India Command. He was a great success.

He came back later as consultant anaesthetist at St Swithin's. His carefully studied, but apparently cavalier, approach to life made him a celebrity. Patients loved him because of the confidence he inspired; surgeons loved him because patients under his care didn't bleed. He was adept at keeping a patient's blood pressure at what more timid anaesthetists would think dangerousishly low levels. (He had

condensed Guedel's five stages and two hundred planes of anaesthesia to three: (i) Awake; (2) Asleep; (3) Dead.) James was a stylist, a skilled craftsman and a gentleman physician, and to the students one of the most approachable consultants.

It was my turn to do a month of anaesthetics. Alistair McMaster, a huge but squat Scot, and I were assigned to James to be trained in the art of putting people to sleep. The night before we started was the Rugby Club Dinner, and we all had a very good time in one of the few places from which we weren't banned. I was supposed to be in the theatre with James at eight the next morning. I woke at 8.30, puked, and ran over to the hospital.

Alistair was already there and looking a bit white as he wheeled his patient into the theatre. I apologized for my lateness. James said, 'Don't worry, dear boy, you can do the next one - Alistair'll show you,' and went off to read Autocar in the Surgeons Only. After the operation Alistair came out. I'd been frantically reading Anaesthetics for Medical Students by Gordon Ostlere (see page 80), and asked Alistair what the hell I should do when the next patient came in. He explained. It seemed simple enough. He was looking happier and rather proud at having given his first anaesthetic. I gained some of his confidence and some of James's. The man must trust me,' I thought. Td better not get anything wrong.' And after all, if anything did go wrong, James would be just around the corner.

I injected exactly the right amount of Brietal and Suxeme-thonium, stuffed a tube down the patient's throat, wheeled him proudly into the theatre, and connected him to the gas machine. Halfway through the complicated abdominal operation, my patient started to twitch. The surgeon eyed me suspiciously. I turned up the CO2, having read in the book that this would help clear up hiccoughs. It did. The crisis was over and I was fully in control of the situation. I humbly suggested that the surgeon could continue. Then the patient gave an enormous jack-knife type jerk, and the surgeon politely asked me what the fuck was going on. I left Alistair with the gas machine and went to find James, expecting him to rush out and save the day. I found him reading The West Country Beagling Gazette over a cup of coffee and a

cucumber sandwich. 'The patient seems to be getting a bit light, sir,' I said.

'Deepen him, dear boy, deepen him.'

The logic was inescapable. I went back, turned the valve up another notch, and there were no more complaints from surgeon or patient.

One of James's greatest achievements, both socially and as an anaesthetist, was to formulate a new kind of punch:

Dr J. Grimsdyke, MD, FFARCS

ftK Mv. (t. S0C(OL St Swithin's Hospital

^ London

2_ bof+itS ^D^jJjU \^)Ur^

\ Uottu <4du^c ^ua^

It is a very elegant preparation, an excellent piece of pharmacy. The alcohol is there for obvious reasons - a simple anaesthetic. The honey disguises the strength of the mixture and helps it slip down a treat. The caffeine in the tea makes everyone think they aren't getting drunk, and after two pints of medicine they fall over, go to sleep, and wake up temporarily blind. The efficacy of Elixir Jacobus Grimsdaecii can be verified by several testimonials:

'Better than Dr Collis Browne's' H. Nilsson 'I banged my floor on the head with joy' Tim Brooke-Taylor 'Shgreat... Waagh! Oh, sorry about the flower-bed, old man' Alan Bailey

'For Christ's sake someone help me up' Alan Bailey

'Who turned the lights out?' Alan Bailey

i. Where (A/VA^-^\^^^. is to be revealed in Volume VIII.

CAUTION: There is no known antidote to this preparation. General supportive measures and gastric lavage offer the only hope of recovery.

A month later I was a student in the Ear Nose and Throat Department. One morning I remember the Registrar arriving after the Boat Club Dinner, looking green and fragile. It was one of our jobs to clean out regularly the smelly scabs and unpleasant excretions from patients who had been treated for chronic hay-fever, sinusitis, etc. by having their nasal mucosa burnt out. I had finished probing around with my forceps inside the nostrils of a pleasant old lady and had in my kidney-dish a rather rewarding yield of scaly yellow bits. Next to me the Registrar was attempting to look down a patient's throat. I placed my dish on the table between us and my patient left happily with a note to return four weeks later. Then while looking at the back of a patient's throat through a dental mirror the Registrar glanced sideways and noticed the pus-encrusted scrapings. His patient gagged as though about to vomit, but the Registrar got in first and threw up all over him.

My sexual life at St Swithins consisted of going to bed with women while dreaming about men. (This is hardly even partly true in retrospect. It's just that I definitely do remember, once or twice, thoughts of men's bodies creeping into my mind while in coitus, only that sort of thing just doesn't make for neat sentences.) The first one was the student's traditional friend, a nurse, a sack of flour that you met at a hop and persuaded back to your room for coffee, having put all the chairs in a friend's room so that the only seating accommodation is the bed. She was rather podgy and extremely repellent, but I just wanted to get my end away. She must have been some kind of descendant of Richard Gordon's 'Rigor Mortis' - perhaps her mother was a nurse at St Swithin's in about 1939. She was a real 'lie down, think of hockey and England' type, and after a brief grope that was not enthusiastically received I thought, 'The bar's still open, I'll get rid of her.' She said, 'It's too late now. Matron says we must be in by 10.30.' Was this some kind of devious come-on? I looked her hard in the breasts and thought 'Yuk'. I politely pushed her out of the room, across the square to the

hospital, and over the traditional nurses' hostel entrance, the mortuary gate. Then I ran back to the bar.

The second was an old school friend called Sonia Burrows, whom for the purposes of this book I shall call Sonia Burrows. I tried like hell to get into that one, only to be obstructed by a tampon, anorexia nervosa, and vaginismus.

I was twenty-four, still a virgin in terms of women, and desperate to try the whole thing out. Nothing succeeds like excess, said Ozzie Wilde, and so one day in the refectory I sat down nearest the most attractive female student I could find, and asked her out to dinner. There was some confusion. I didn't realize that she was almost totally deaf, which must have made her a bit of a hazard with a stethoscope in later life.

There was another female student. We had noticed each other across tables filled with lard-sodden meals. She was getting a lot of attention from the lads but of a rather fawning, not-daring-to-ask nature. It was 'Can I carry your books home?' time.... She was drooled over constantly. With very good legs, small but well-formed tits, she was at least as intelligent as Alexis de Tocqueville, Alexander Graham Bell and Alec Plitt put in a box. And so, on an idyllic summer afternoon - it was tea-time in the students' refectory - I sat down at her table. Ignoring her minions I boldly passed her a plate of sandwich-spread sandwiches and asked her if she'd

'go'-

She was intelligent enough to say, 'See you in my room

tonight', with none of this pointless preamble of going out to dinner, sitting in cinemas holding sweaty hands, love letters, and all that timid avoidance of the real issue. We had a bloody good time for a whole year. She was athletic and imaginative. We went right through the card. It wasn't just British Missionary, but doggie, on the floor, on the floor standing, on her desk, in the shower, in the bath, near the bath, at someone else's place while they weren't looking, and in a guard's van through the whole of Birmingham. I liked the experience, but after about nine months or so it began to pall, and I felt I would rather spend more time in the bar drinking with the lads, hoping to be too late back in my room for the, 'Hello, I'm lonesome' telephone call.

'See you in my room tonight'

For a bit of variation one night I tried the wife of a student who'd been foolish enough to get married. She had about three children then, but she was still raring to go. She had large knockers and a very thorough knowledge of what dongs like. Her husband was a friend of Buzz Mangrove and was pissed out of his mind in the bar, but Buzz had noticed her absence, and suspected me. He didn't interrupt but listened outside my door as I came (between her breasts) for the second time... The description of this passage has made me feel so... uh... uhm... ah... ah... excuse me....

After all this frenzied activity I decided that I should do some clinical test on myself, so whenever I went in a taxi-cab, tube, train or bus, I looked at each passer-by and tried to tell myself honestly which ones I would like to go to bed with. And the ratio of boys to girls was something like 7:3, which puts me clearly on the homosexual side of the scale as suggested in the Kinsey report.⁴ I was largely homosexual and worried about it. A trip to New Zealand and America made me a little more broad-minded about myself, and immediately after qualifying I gave up medicine and became a raging poof⁵. But no mincing - a butch one with a pipe.

There are a lot more memories of St Swithin's Hospital, and I'd like to fill up a bit of paper with them. There were several interesting exhibits in the Pathology Museum. One was a live 25 mm shell from an aircraft gun. It had been found by the hospital up the anus of a squadron leader who was in the habit of pushing back his piles with it. He had been rather enthusiastic in his method of treatment one day, lost his grip on the thing, and finished up with the unex-ploded missile in his sigmoid colon. The entire theatre staff wore air-raid helmets for the operation.

I may as well carry on with a few more perineal anecdotes. I remember one gentleman who claimed to have had an accident in his bathroom in that he had the bad luck to sit down

4. Not only the number of this footnote but als o abo ut my rating on the Kinsey scale, >k being exclusively heterosexual; ^l Jj ^J exclusively homosexual and 4 meaning: predominantly homosexual but more than incidentally heterosexual.

5. Medical men are not all scientists, which could be why they overlook the possibility of free individual choice in their weird quest for a 'cause' for homosexuality.

on an upturned cigar-tube. No-one believed him. But it was a damn sight easier to remove than the milk bottle that found its way past the anal sphincter of a middle-aged gentleman from Reading. The problem was overcome rather neatly, a plastic catheter was inserted and guided into the top of the bottle, which was then filled with plaster of paris. The theatre staff went off for tea while it set. The bottle was then turned round, as an obstetrician would turn a breach, and yanked out on the end of the catheter. This patient was unusual in that most people with this kind of complaint come from a prison where things are so bleeding boring that there's really nothing to do except stuff things up your arse.

Moving on to the anterior part of the perineum we come, in males, to the penis. I remember two gentlemen who both arrived at Casualty wearing raincoats. They both refused to tell the hospital porter what was wrong with them, and he explained that if they didn't tell him he couldn't send them to the right department. They refused to speak to anyone but a doctor.... He correctly assumed that it was something sexual, and because the venerologist wasn't around, sent them to Casualty. One of them had, on examination, a curtain ring and the finger-hole of a pair of scissors surrounding the base of his penis. He claimed that his wife had put them there one night when he was drunk because he'd been unfaithful. The brass ring was sawn through relatively easily, but it took three hours and four Gigli saws to cut through the stainless steel scissors.

The other embarrassed gentleman opened his coat to my brother, a house surgeon at the time, to reveal a milk bottle that had somehow slipped over his dong. It was complaining, understandably, by swelling up. The usual remedies - injections of hyaluronadase and applications of cold lard - were tried, but it wouldn't move. So my brother arranged a suture trolley, wrapped a towel round the bottle neck, and hit it with a hammer. The bottle broke, miraculously without leaving a mark.

The 408th anniversay of the abdication of King Charles V of Spain, that is the 16th of January 1964, was a cold, depressing day. The Vietnam war was in full swing, President Kennedy was barely two months dead, and I thought it might be

just as well to go and have a few pints in the Cow and Calf. I met several friends in the bar, and after a lot of pints Benson led us in a few verses of The Farmer's Boy', complete with obscene gestures. He did the best turkey I have ever seen, and a ram that would have rated with the finest, standing on a bar-stool. The landlady complained at the point where he was demonstrating cowpats. He explained to her that she was a whore and that her husband didn't know about the number of men he knew she'd been with, then carried on singing. She fled to find her husband, the landlord. The singing continued. A window was smashed accidentally by someone who felt like throwing a pint glass. When the landlord was brave enough to complain, he was removed from behind the bar and locked in the Ladies. We carried on singing, but the police soon arrived to spoil the day and see the whole of St Swithin's Hospital barred from the Cow and Calf Even members of the Christian Union were refused orange juices and told to get out after that.

The police took us round to the Police Station, where we were questioned as to whether we would like a drink and a game of snooker. We stayed for several of both, and about time too - they'd used our table five times in the last month without even buying a round.

Even as a student member of the medical profession you are in a privileged position. I remember an evening when a grand piano was caused to be thrown out of a fourth floor window in the resident surgeons' quarters. The police arrived and were greeted with a barrage of water bombs, that is rubber finger-stalls (as used in anal examinations) and contraceptives filled with water. It was agreed that all the damage would be paid for, and we all went back to our place for a drink, where we ran around in their helmets making strange mooing noises, while Mclndoe, who had already completed a zumba,¹ was streaking round the college lawn in the snow, nude, lit by the headlamps of the Dean's Morris Minor which happened to be in a tree at the time.

The same week, the Carter-Jenkins twins decided that they

i. A strange ritual in which a male person who has made an error in the verse of a song takes off his clothes in time to a repetitive chant from his colleagues.

₉8

didn't like Peter Redwing because he didn't like their friend Chris Brinton. After a few nights listening to Peter Redwing's pathetic attempts at sex, they rigged up some microphones, recorded his efforts and played back the tape to the lads the next morning. Then they hit on the idea of bringing him out into the open. They very carefully arranged all the furniture and belongings from his room in the middle of the lawn in the snow. Peter arrived back in time to find them still on the lawn arranging his 'room', and say, 'Hey, chaps, what's going on?' Without pausing, they explained that they'd just taken everything out of Chris Brinton's room and put it on the lawn. Peter Redwing thought this was very funny. He leapt on to the bed and pissed all over it, kicked in a few pieces of furniture, including a gramophone, and went back to his surprisingly empty room.

As a medical student at that time you were required to drag out at least twenty babies on your own, and sew up the results of your errors. I went to St Clives Hospital in South London for four weeks, and my fellow student there was called David Sadza. We shared a room. He, through no fault of God's, happened to be black, and I white. The staff nurse in midwifery (I blame God for this) happened to be South African and very white. So David did about four deliveries to my forty. He was quite simply never asked, because blacks could not be trusted. He was not even allowed to do the sewing up after an episiotomy.¹

I became quite good at sewing up vaginas, I suppose because I was thinking of their past and future contents. But I was rather annoyed that, while a new regulation had just come into force, allowing midwives to do episiotomies, so that they were keen to do one whenever they could, they were not allowed to do stitching, so students like G. Chapman were disturbed every half hour to repair their messy work - which meant that I kept missing David Frost's Not So Much A Programme More A Way Of Life.

There was a patient I once examined just before the programme, I thought she was in labour and likely to give birth soon. The South African midwife, who had already accused

I. That is, cutting through the labia and perineal musculature to ease the passage of the probably unwanted infant into a life it didn't ask for.

me of losing the keys to the drug cupboard, said, 'No, she isn't. She's only fourteen and hasn't got any pains.' I informed her that pains, and her age for that matter, were quite irrelevant, and that all the signs, including the contractions, showed that she was definitely in the first stage of labour. The midwife said 'Nonsense' and I went back to watch the programme. Just as Bernard Levin was about to say something very interesting to Harvey Orkin I got bleeped, ran up to the labour ward, and while I was scrubbing up the girl gave birth. The midwives panicked. I gave the girl her child after the formality of tying off the umbilical cord and weighing the placenta. She asked me my name, and, in gratitude, called the placenta 'Graham', though the child had to be called 'Alvar' after its father.

It was the easiest birth I have ever seen, perhaps because she was so young and had none of the fear and worry that is commonly induced by older members of the female sex in order to dramatize their role in life. I have always thought of birth as one of the most natural processes and one not needing the interference of medical science. Most women in the world have their babies behind a bush in a squatting position, in which even a breach delivery can be performed by one person without unnatural interference. For male readers: imagine being nine months constipated having inadvertently swallowed a coconut whole, and then being asked to lie on an operating table, legs apart, with lots of people watching dressed in silly clothes. Would you be able to shit? In my view, maternity wards should consist of carefully arranged shrubberies, with earplugs for each mother so they don't have to hear, 'Ooh, I had a terrible time with my first'; 'Wrong way round is it dear?'; 'Oh poor thing, twenty-five stitches I had the last time'; and 'They've got you on a drip, have they?' Childbirth would be completely painless if grandmothers had their lips sewn up.

And if anyone ever says to you, 'I didn't go through all that agony to bring you into the world for this', either (i) run away; (2) punch them in the teeth; or (3) say, 'Don't give me that, you fucking cow; if you want to go and work in a pit hacking out fucking coal all day, you bloody well can.'

I got fed up with having to sew up so many unnecessary

incisions, and annoyed at the South African staff nurse's attitude towards my friend. One night, after I had just finished sewing up a patient, he was called to a delivery. The South African nurse refused to allow him into the theatre, and I was called. I arrived to find a perfectly natural birth in progress, and was told by the South African nurse that Mr Sadza had refused to do an episiotomy. I said that I agreed with him, there didn't seem to be any need for one, but the harridan kept advancing with a pair of scissors. I said, 'No, this one's all right.' The baby's head had already stretched the vagina and it seemed obvious that it would come out without help or damage to the mother. She insisted that it wouldn't, and again approached the labia with her scissors. I hit her on the jaw with my elbow and she fell to the floor. (I was keeping my hands sterile for the delivery of an intact baby.) The baby was born from an unscathed vagina. This was as much a relief to me as to the mother; the medico-legal complications of a split perineum combined with an assaulted midwife, would not have been pauntly in the least.

CHAPTER FIVE

New Zealand