The Dun Cow Rib Read online

  My sister had been given a shiny red yo-yo for her birthday. That night I crept into her room and stole it. I wrapped it in tissue paper and took it to school the following morning. I wrote ‘from John’ on the paper and left it on Noreen’s desk. The bell rang. She filed in with the other girls and sat down. I glanced across. She opened it, looked up, smiled. There it was again, that pulverising, liquidising smile. I felt sick. My palms went clammy. Nausea washed over me and I felt myself wilting like a frosted bud. If she’d said drink poison, I’d have gladly done it, right then.

  I don’t remember Noreen as exceptionally beautiful. She had long, dark hair braided into two fat, glossy plaits down her back. She was slender and willowy with that fleeting, nymph-like quality some girls possess before the helter-skelter of puberty kicks in. If she had budding breasts, I wasn’t aware of it. Her eyes were as wide and dark as an antelope’s, as wide with innocence as with allure, and her cheeks shone with the softly muted glow of a white peach. Nor do I believe that what had happened to me had solely resulted from her physical appeal, although I’m sure it helped. And it was entirely unintentional, I’m convinced of that. She was just being nice to me, laced perhaps with an intuitive female magnetism of which she was probably not yet fully aware. No, I think I was simply overwhelmed by a chemically induced crush to end all crushes, perhaps as much to do with my own pre-pubescent transmutation as her own.

  But for me, for as long as it lasted – perhaps two or three weeks at most – it burned as an incomprehensible and inextinguishable longing, a flame that seared through all my days and all my nights and which, at its peak, brought me over and over again to the edge of tears. ‘What is the matter with Jay?’ I heard my mother ask. ‘He’s been moping for days.’ I ran and hid in my room. I knew they wouldn’t understand, and anyway, what could I possibly say?

  It was an emotional fixation of such intensity that I would not experience again until I was twenty-one. It was such that never, in all the ensuing decades, and through all the convoluted turmoil of the real mating game, have I for one moment forgotten Noreen Ashby. Nor ever will. She has never made it into the present. She is still there, forever fixed at her Martock school desk with the sun slicing through the high windows, shedding shoals of glitter from her ebony hair, motes dancing in its beams. Peacock butterflies fluttered hopelessly against the glass and from across the road the mellow chime of the church clock hallowed that fateful, rosebud hour. Noreen remains for me an ageless goddess of deliciously unsullied, uncontrived and flawless femininity. Yes – perhaps pure is the right word after all.

  Where are you now, Noreen Ashby? Who are you, sixty years on? On what foreign strand have life’s rough old seas pitched your slender barque? Did you safely steer through fate’s most treacherous rocks? Did your anchors hold? Have you reached the harbour of your dreams? And did you ever comprehend that in the fierce sunlight of that dusty village street your smile had spun a carefree ten-year-old boy into a whirlpool of blinding confusion from which life would never be the same again – that you had inadvertently delivered a clearing blow to the gut?

  Was it pheromones? Perhaps. Although I’m unsure that many girls start pulsating their chemical bio-conductivity as early as eleven. But also I believe I was exceptionally vulnerable because I had never engaged with girls before at any level. Boys’ boarding schools were just that: an unnaturally enforced segregation so that when at last we began to split the pupal case, to emerge blinking from that imposed institutional isolation, most of us would flounder helplessly before the sexual tsunami that would eventually swamp us all.

  I still had no idea what it was about. In an anguished vacuum of ignorance a child loves for the first time without bias, without suspense, regret or hope. It was like a sunrise: pure, transfixing and beguiling. Yet the notion of conjugation, of any physical contact or taking Noreen to bed, even of kissing her mouth to mouth, was unthinkable and would, had I been able to imagine it, have been utterly abhorrent to me. I had not made the connection. Pigeons were pigeons. I was different. It would be a long time before I would chip through the protective shell of innocence to reveal the true animal beneath. And that would be somewhere else altogether.

  16

  Hill Brow

  Another year, another school. My father had finally secured a place for me in a prep school to the north of the Somerset Levels, at Brent Knoll, that spectacular hump that looms out of the flatlands as though God has tipped it out of a pudding basin. Called Hill Brow School, and closed down long ago, it was based at Somerset Court, a modest eighteenth-century country house, which, in a former existence had achieved infamy as one of ‘the hanging judge’, Judge Jeffreys’, courts in the aftermath of the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion.

  My sojourn at Martock village school came to an abrupt end after only three terms, just as I was becoming properly Somersetised. My heart sank. I was adjusting well. I had learned to mimic the farm boys’ hedgerow and haystack patter; Mickey Florey had taught me to make the bully-boys think twice by lashing out with my fists and then a sharp kick to the shins so that I could hold my own in the playground; I’d become used to wearing open-necked shirts, pullovers and old clothes; I’d mastered the trick of wolf whistling through my teeth, and to spit and curse with the best of them, and, once I’d recovered from my bewildering engouement for Noreen Ashby, I really rather liked having girls around all the time. Most of all I loved the unshackled freedom of afternoons, evenings and weekends at home on my own. I loved my pigeons. It had never dawned on me that none of those things were what either of my parents expected of their son.

  As the day neared my spirit plunged and a vacuum of dread engulfed me. I pleaded to stay at Martock. The misery of Hampton Down had never gone away. The prospect of returning to a disciplinarian regime like Bernie’s hollowed me out. I fell asleep struggling to hold off tears. But my father’s reasoning was not just conventional class and educational prejudice, although I’m in no doubt they were visible seasoning within the cocktail. No, the founding motive was a much deeper cause for concern. The spectre of the Dun Cow rib was closing in again. We had all noticed that my mother’s breathlessness had returned, her fingers were blue and her afternoon rests had grown progressively longer. I had watched her toiling upstairs, having to stop twice, chest heaving to get her wind. I had read the pain on my father’s face and her gritty fortitude manifest in the thin line of her blue, pursed lips. Russell Brock and Paul Wood’s notes had proved accurate. Now, looking back, they seem chillingly prescient. By 1955, her aortic valve was leaking badly.

  Our move to Martock had provided my mother with a new doctor in the village’s small rural practice. John Parker, of blessed memory. John Howard Knight Parker, to award him the full recognition he unquestionably deserves, had been an instant hit. Classically handsome in an un-rugged way, more suave country than slick urbane, he wore a ready smile with a habitual chuckle, always with a deeply engaging natural modesty. Years later my mother would tell me that John was ‘the kindest, gentlest, most understanding and the most rigorously honest GP’ she would ever have. ‘He told me that my heart was failing again and that without further intervention I would die – that I had no choice. He also said that I would never find a more skilled or courageous team than Brock and Wood.’ It was John Parker who persuaded her to return to the Brompton sooner rather than later. She dreaded the whole idea but he insisted. ‘Don’t let it get so bad that you have to be wheeled there on a trolley, only to find it’s too late.’ Then he offered to go to London with her.

  What my parents did not know was that in 1945–6, as a young registrar, John Parker had worked under the celebrated surgeon Professor Sir Arthur Rendle Short, FRCS, at Southmead Hospital in Bristol, who in turn was a former colleague, close associate and friend of Russell Brock.

  When Paul Wood was appointed the first director of the newly formed Institute of Cardiology in 1947, he turned his attention to the highly controversial and experimental procedure of cardiac catheterisation – the i
mprobable idea of inserting a fine wire into the femoral artery in the groin and gently pushing it all the way up the body, past the lungs, round and down into the beating heart. Then inserting a catheter tube over it and withdrawing the wire. This delicate procedure, still an essential part of heart diagnosis today, was in its absolute infancy.

  Just as the establishment dinosaurs had argued that the heart could never be opened by surgery, now they argued that the catheter would cause clotting and strokes or that the risk of damaging the arteries was too great. The brilliant and incisive Paul Wood took no notice. Backed by Russell Brock, he was convinced that catheterisation would prove an essential diagnostic tool, hugely helping the surgeon to know what to expect. Wood performed the first one on 6 April 1948. In their chapter on catheterisation in British Cardiology in the 20th Century (2000), medical historians Malcolm Towers and Simon Davies would write: ‘Wood’s integration of careful (patient) history taking, the precise assessment of physical signs at the bedside with the newer knowledge from . . . catheterisation was one of the most exciting developments in the whole of medicine.’

  Only now do I realise how very lucky my mother was to have landed in the hands of Russell Brock and Paul Wood. While heart surgery was still embryonic and experimental when she so badly needed help, their brilliance and their redoubtable collaboration had saved her life in 1953 and prolonged it again in 1957. In an essay on Valvular Disease, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Imperial College Celia Oakley wrote: ‘Paul Wood’s clarity of thought and incisiveness of speech were riveting . . . His teaching further increased understanding of . . . heart disease, obtained through catheterization . . . (and) the foundations of accurate diagnosis had been laid.’

  In the nine years up to 1957 catheter diagnosis technology had been greatly improved, now permitting doctors to take X-rays inside the heart, to take blood and tissue samples, to administer drugs and even perform minor corrective surgery, all without having to break into the chest and open the beating heart. During those early years word had gone out to doctors throughout Britain to identify patients who were unlikely to survive more than six months without heart surgery and to recommend them for experimental catheterisation.

  My mother’s case history was well known to Brock and Wood. The assiduous John Parker had seen their observations in her notes. With characteristic foresight he contacted Paul Wood to see if she was a suitable case for catheterisation. The response was an immediate and enthusiastic ‘Yes, please.’ This made my mother a ‘special patient’ to Parker, who, despite having studied surgery and qualified as an obstetrician, had ultimately opted for general practice in a sleepy Somerset village, far removed from the cutting edge of medical science and its hierarchy of the day.

  Once more we were told nothing. Again my father was chewing his nails to the quick. With typically practical decisiveness he had concluded that having children at home was too much. Mary was banished first, sent away to board at a prep school in Dorset. Our brief, flickering childhood of living at home with our mother was effectively over. I was ten and Mary was twelve.

  * * *

  I entered Hill Brow for the Lent term in 1957, a very small school of only sixty boys. There were no ‘houses’ and we were all lumped together, divided only by forms: juniors, middles and seniors by day and similarly in dormitories at night. Discipline was much gentler but also much more tightly observed than Hampton Down, far less opportunity for challenging the bounds. There were no cold baths and no penal scoring system that had so consistently marked me down. Instead, the school operated an inflexible system of almost permanent supervision by a small team of masters.

  We were never left unmonitored and our every move was managed and recorded, even going to the lavatory, sent there after breakfast, then ticked off on a list, a process I found deeply intrusive and disturbing. My bodily functions had never been regimented before and I found it impossible to perform to a pre-ordained routine. To add to this indignity, the lavatory doors had no locks and the only paper provided was thin and shiny ‘Bronco – medicated with Izal germicide’. The wide gaps above and below the partitions so you could see the next door boy’s feet and trousers I found to be a denial of privacy so distasteful that I declined to perform for nearly three weeks. When at last my alimentary system could contain the pressure no longer, and gripped by excruciating bowel cramps, I crept out of the dormitory at night to an upstairs lavatory we were not supposed to use, where I erupted painfully and with such copiously extruded amplitude that the entire sewage system choked and had to be cleared by a plumber.

  I now see Hill Brow as a happy little school of entirely benevolent intentions only vaguely fulfilled by a small team of largely unqualified, and mostly ex-forces teachers. The headmaster was a Cambridge arts graduate, but he was also the only teacher with university education or any formal credentials. John Matthews, known as ‘Mathey’, was a large, treble-chinned man in his fifties with owl-like horn-rimmed glasses and an air of stately self-importance further endorsed by his maroon Daimler Consort that swept him sedately to and from the front door. If he ever taught me anything memorable, it has long since evaporated, but I do retain the abiding image of him sitting at his study desk in a pale grey double-breasted suit with a filter-tipped Benson & Hedges cigarette permanently attached to his lips, which jiggled up and down as he spoke with a muted chin-wobbling stammer at the beginning of every sentence, cigarette ash cascading down his lapels, and regularly thereafter. That stammer fascinated me, emerging as multiple barely audible Ms, before locating the desired consonant. ‘M-m-m-m-Good morning, John.’ He and his wife, Gerry, a skinny but kindly Scot with a tobacco-induced hoarseness to her Morningside accent, both chain-smoked, as did almost all the teaching staff, including sometimes during lessons.

  Major Rory Newbery, ‘Newbug’, smoked unfiltered Player’s Navy Cut. His fingers and bristly military moustache were permanently stained bright nicotine orange, as visible as henna on a Polynesian tribal warrior. I think he rather revelled in presenting himself as a bumbling English eccentric, which he undoubtedly was, but a fool he was certainly not. As second master he was omnipresent, quietly and unobtrusively helping to hold the school together.

  The master we all respected most was James Serjeant, universally known as ‘Sargie’. He was a tall, stern-faced bachelor in middle age with a prominent brow and dark, swept back hair with a glossy application of Brylcreem. He taught me maths, but probably other subjects too. He was a generous-spirited man of skyscraper principles, reputed to have been in the Military Police during the war, but who was afflicted by regular attacks of apoplexy when boys were rude or disorderly. At heart he was a thoroughly decent, gentle fellow and I don’t believe there was a shred of malice in his heart.

  My favourite was Bill Mayo, or ‘Maybags’, ex-Merchant Navy, tall, red-haired and as obviously Irish as a shamrock. He wore alternating green and brown corduroy jackets, taught geography and Latin, and smoked a pipe with a straight stem. He had travelled widely in his seafaring career and regularly injected personal vignettes of Hong Kong, Peking, Brisbane, New York . . . all of which I loved. He cut a swashbuckling figure as he roared helmetless to and from Brent Knoll village on a noisy 500cc Norton motorbike, pipe protruding from his gritted teeth and red hair streaming in the wind.

  The suitably black-haired matron was Miss Hamilton, who never looked you in the eye when speaking to you. When we angered her, which we achieved often and for sport, she revealed her displeasure by stomping off into her bedroom and slamming the door, a reaction that simply encouraged us to do it more. In a stiffly starched white tunic hauled in with a broad navy blue belt, at surgery after breakfast she dispensed iodine for cuts and grazes, kaolin poultices for boils, calamine lotion for rashes, Californian syrup of figs for constipation and two aspirin for everything else.

  The whole team would nowadays be deemed comically eccentric and their irrepressible tobacco addictions beyond the pale. Yet for all their peccadillos they were thorough
ly worthy people, dedicated to their educational cause with genuine, if unpredictable, professionalism. Without them ever guessing it, their peculiar amalgam of abilities and idiosyncrasies were in themselves a profitable baptism for later life.

  * * *

  In May that year John Parker escorted my mother to London for a consultation with Paul Wood. Her condition was dire, worse than even John Parker had realised. Dr Wood recommended immediate catheterisation. Then the trail goes cool. We know that she remained in the Brompton for five weeks; we know that Dr Wood’s catheter procedure was deemed a great success. What we don’t know is precisely what he did.

  The catheter had crossed my mother’s aortic valve – that much is certain – and we also deduce that it must have temporarily improved the malfunction. We also know that Donald Ross, a brilliant young surgeon from the cardiac unit at Guy’s Hospital, who would go on to achieve fame by performing the world’s second and successful heart transplant in 1968 (the first was by his friend and colleague Christiaan Barnard at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in December 1967, but the recipient only survived for eighteen days), expressed special interest in my mother’s case and came to see her at Russell Brock and Paul Wood’s behest. There was talk of replacing her aortic valve with a plastic ball valve, but Paul Wood dismissed that idea as too risky. She was too weak. Because of the strong possibility of heart failure, he decided not to recommend immediate further surgery. Instead my mother underwent a protracted period of medication under Paul Wood’s personal supervision. His view, confirmed by Russell Brock, remained that she would eventually have to have her aortic valve replaced, but he wanted it to be deferred for as long as possible.