Chapter 01 – Red Hat, Red Face
The strident sound of an emergency siren ripped the air apart on a warm summer’s night in July 1969.
Following hard behind the ambulance, my father gripped the steering wheel of the elderly car that he’d had for so long it was almost vintage. His face was ashen, his foot pressed hard down on the accelerator in an attempt to keep up.
‘The doctor says your mother will need an emergency operation – he thinks the intense pain she is suffering is a burst appendix.’
I sat anxiously alongside him in the passenger seat.
‘She’ll be in safe hands.’ I replied trying to sound calm.
I worked at Poole Hospital where my mother was being taken, and knew the surgical team well.
As soon as my mother was admitted to a ward, the surgical registrar came to talk us through the procedure.
‘I will be operating on her myself.’ he said, and threw me a reassuring smile.
For a moment my heart stopped. ‘Widow Twanky operating on my mother?’ I thought with horror.
The registrar was a very competent doctor and surgeon but it was difficult for me to shake off the memories I had of him as a friend, when I had seen him in a social environment and he had exhibited a flair for madness and drama.
In the hospital pantomime seven months earlier, he had played an alarmingly convincing ‘dame’. As co-members of the pantomime committee we shared the embarrassment when a local amateur orchestra who had been invited to play the overture prior to the performance, attempted to take over the whole show amidst squeaky violins and out of tune wind instruments. The ‘overture’ painfully extended to a nail biting forty minutes, causing tension for the performers waiting on stage for the beginning of Scene 1. The audience in the auditorium of the Poole Arts Theatre showed their restlessness with coughs, shuffling and loud audible whisperings of ‘if they don’t hurry up I am going to have to leave for my last bus’.
Only a few weeks previously I had spent a day at Lulworth Cove with three colleagues including the registrar and his girl friend and another young doctor I was going out with at the time. On that occasion ‘Widow Twanky’ was equipped with wetsuit and snorkelling gear and posed for a photo with his flipper slapped firmly across my throat as I lay helpless like a beached whale on the rocks. The sun glinted on his goggles, and he held his harpoon as if poised for the kill. ‘Once a surgeon always a surgeon’ the other doctor had remarked ‘can’t resist the opportunity to cut anything open.’
Still vivid in my mind too was the time ‘Widow Twanky’ held a party at his cottage near the nuclear power station at Winfrith (where he grew magnificent and no doubt highly radioactive mint in the garden). Most of the guests were hospital staff. The introductory game – devised as an ice-breaker – involved two ‘borrowed’ stretchers from the hospital, two drip stands and two empty bags which had previously contained saline fluid and were now filled with ‘scrumpy’ – the strong, lethal rough cider of Dorset. All the guests were then split into two lines. When a whistle was blown, the person at the front of each team ran forward, lay down on a stretcher and had to suck as much cider as possible through the drip line until the whistle was blown again, and the next person took their place.
Whichever team finished their bag of cider first, was the winner. But the combination of sucking air and cider through a tube meant that by the end of the game no-one knew or cared who had won and did not remember too much about the rest of the evening either.
Now, in the cold light of day and the sterilized atmosphere of the hospital, I had to adjust to the fact that Widow Twanky, who filled saline drips with cider as a pastime, was about to operate on my mother in a life or death situation.
After having settled my mother down on the ward, we drove away from the hospital. The air was hot and humid and we were silent, recovering from the shock events of the previous few hours.
My father broke the silence. ‘I have to accompany the Mayor and his party tomorrow when they pay a civic visit to HMS SIRIUS – the Royal Navy frigate that came into the bay this afternoon. Your mother was due to come with me – can you take her place?’
As Mayor’s Secretary, my father had many duties which ranged from writing speeches to making arrangements for official visits. I was more than happy to help him out on this occasion.
‘Of course I will’ I replied reassuringly. After all what hot-blooded woman would say no to spending an evening surrounded by men in uniform on board one of her Majesty’s ships?
Chapter 01 – Red Hat, Red Face