Growing Into Medicine Read online

  About the author

  Both Ruth Skrine’s parents were doctors. Ruth’s first career ambition was to be a nurse, but her mother would not hear of it and insisted she train as a doctor. So Ruth spent a long and fulfilling career in medicine, working in general practice, often moving house with her prison governor husband and her daughter, and eventually becoming a specialist in family planning and psychosexual medicine. She was chair of the Institute of Psychosexual Medicine for three years, and led training groups for doctors under its aegis, as well as editing a series of books on the subject and writing one herself, Blocks and Freedoms in Sexual Medicine. Since her retirement she has gained an MA in creative writing and has written poetry, short stories, and a novel in addition to this memoir.

  GROWING INTO

  MEDICINE

  The Life and Loves of a Psychosexual Doctor

  Ruth Skrine

  Book Guild Publishing

  Sussex, England

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

  The Werks

  45 Church Road

  Hove, BN3 2BE

  Copyright © Ruth Skrine 2014

  The right of Ruth Skrine to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Typesetting in Garamond by

  YHT Ltd, London

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  A catalogue record for this book is available from

  The British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 909716 77 3

  ePub ISBN 978 1 910298 37 4

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 910298 38 1

  For my daughter

  HELEN

  The love of my life – second only

  to my husband

  RALPH

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  1. The Early Cast List

  2. My Mother

  3. The Wrack of War

  4. ‘You Can’t Want to Be a Nurse’

  5. Teenage Years

  6. Preparing for Medicine – and Marriage

  7. Hospital and Home

  8. General Practice

  9. Motherhood

  10. The Tug of Domesticity

  11. Freedom to Choose

  12. Family Planning Provision and Training

  13. Body/Mind Doctoring

  14. Body Fantasies

  15. Back to General Practice

  16. Taking the Reins

  17. Surviving

  18. Safe Spaces

  19. And Then There Was Fiction

  20. Mining the Past

  21. The Past in the Present

  Bibliography

  Index

  Author’s Note

  Working in medicine, especially in the sensitive areas of family planning and psychosexual medicine, I had to keep a distance between my private and my professional life. Now that I have been retired for several years such separation is no longer necessary. Reliving my life story in memory has provided an opportunity to put these two sides of myself together and produce a personal record of living and doctoring in the last two thirds of the twentieth century.

  I am grateful to my daughter Helen for agreeing to the publication of this book. Like her father she believes I should do what I want with my own life, despite the fact that her memories of childhood and her view of our marriage are bound to differ in many respects from my own.

  Ever since attending the MA course in creative writing at Bath Spa University in 1999–2000, Sally Bramley, Lucy Maxwell Scott, Ellen Sentinella and I have met to discuss our work. They have visited my house regularly in order to workshop our writing (and share a meal). My thanks go to them for all their support and helpful criticism.

  Lindsay Clarke of Frome Somerset and Sybil Ruth of the Literary Consultancy provided valuable professional advice.

  My most sincere thanks go to my niece Tiki (Alison) Levine of Charlottesville, Virginia, USA for her dedicated reading of early drafts. Her encouragement (‘wow’, ‘really?’ ‘no!’ in the margins), and her honest and helpful critical remarks kept me going through the struggle to turn my memories into a readable story.

  1

  The Early Cast List

  Daisy White came into my life in 1932, when I was three years old. My parents employed her as a second maid. I have been told how shy I was when she arrived. I could also have been told that I peeped round the solid banister at the bottom of the stairs, refusing to say a word to her for three days. But no one could have told me the feel of the well-defined edge to the wooden newel post, still imprinted on my palm. A further echo on my hand is the stone edge of the loggia pillar. I was sitting on the step, pressing my fingers into the reassuring coldness of the corner. My mother stood on the lawn by the tea table, angry and fraught as she prepared for some visitors. When I read that autistic children prefer to carry hard objects with edges, instead of the more usual cuddly toy, I feel a stab of recognition. The most ‘normal’ person can show traces of psychosis.

  At this time my brother Arthur was rising seven and my sister had not yet been born. I wonder what Daisy thought of our household, professional and middle class but not wealthy. My general practitioner father had a few landed patients including one titled family, but at some establishments he was expected to use the servants’ entrance. He worked long hours. Morning surgery ran from 9–10 a.m. but frequently went on till 11, and then again from 6–7 or 8 p.m. with emergency visits afterwards. The queue of patients often overflowed the waiting room and spread into the drive where they perched without complaint on the coping slabs that lay at the top of beautifully built dry stone walls with holes for blue patches of aubretia.

  Daisy never moaned when he was late for supper (most days) or was too tired to eat the plate of food that had been saved for him. ‘I’ll do you some scrambled eggs,’ she would say as she heaved herself out of the chair in the small maids’ sitting room adjacent to the kitchen.

  My father’s practice was scattered, his patients living in market towns, villages and isolated houses and cottages. They admired him for his obstetric skills, as did the local consultants. Most of the babies were born at home or in a small maternity unit in the village of Corsham, three miles from our home in Chippenham, Wiltshire. He attended the delivery of every baby born to patients in his practice. Lying in bed I would hear his car go out and watch the headlights sweep across the ceiling. The house never felt quite safe until the engine had changed its tone at the entrance to the drive and the beam had made the return passage. During the depths of the night, when most babies seemed to be born, I would snuggle deeper into the blankets and the security of home.

  Daisy valued her sleep but must have been woken frequently by his car. Her room was next to the one I shared with my sister Elizabeth, known as Biz. Both rooms overlooked the drive but again I never heard Daisy complain about him. Her first priority was that The Doctor should do his work in as much comfort as possible. However, if we disturbed her with talk or laughter too early or late she banged repeatedly on the wall. When the tomcats started their caterwaul in the spring she would throw her shoes from the window, always singly but in such numbers that several pairs would be waiting to be collected from the drive in the morning.

  Daisy had left school at fifteen and had gone into
service in Bath for a year or two before coming to us. Her mother lived in an isolated cottage outside Wootton Bassett, where the water was collected from the well in a bucket lowered on a long, forked pole. Occasionally, when Daisy had her day off, we visited. I can remember no surprise or shock about the rural poverty. She also accepted the established social order. Certainly I never felt that she resented our position, though recently my sister-in-law Ruth (she became Ruth Hickson soon after I got married and relinquished the name) told me that Daisy had confided to her that as children we had been less trouble than the family in Bath. The children in that household wore frillier clothes so the ironing took longer. She shared my mother’s contempt for women who dressed their girls up like dolls.

  Despite being raised in a safe and loving home I can trace the dilemmas of my life, the struggle for independence of thought and an adequate philosophy of life, back to my parents. The latter was not made easier by my mother’s strident atheism. Both of them, in their different ways, were such strong characters that I can only start to approach my memories of them through Daisy who, although important in her own right, does not evoke such complicated emotional responses – and through animals and places.

  Animals were always an important part of our lives, with one or more dogs, cats and various small animals in cages or on the lawn in runs made by my father. Daisy tolerated them all with equanimity, perhaps because her brother Bert, a farm labourer who lived with their mother for his whole life, always had at least one dog to retrieve the rabbits he shot for the pot.

  Our first dog was a Welsh terrier called Jimmy, who was bad tempered and bit Biz on the head. I can see her standing on a mat inside the back entrance to the house, the blood spreading over her fair hair while we both yelled.

  The mat was set in a special concrete depression, in front of a door leading into the garden from the ‘boothole’. The term is not given in my Chambers dictionary and I don’t know if I should write it as one word or two. We did not question the concept and I assumed it was common parlance. I now realise it suggests some sort of cupboard. In reality it was a decent sized room with a separate toilet. The shoes were kept in a rack and the wellington boots usually lined up tidily. There was also a cupboard that reached to the ceiling where flower vases, dogs’ leads and gloves were stored. By the side, a table was used for shoe cleaning. In the corner a basin had, in addition to the ordinary taps, one with a thin spout that jutted out high above. When they designed the house my parents had chosen it specially so that they could fill flower vases and buckets more easily. For me it provided a cure for hiccups. I would hold my breath until nearly bursting, then twist my head and gulp water from the raised tap before breathing in, an adaptation of the advice to drink from the far side of a cup. Both tricks stretch the diaphragm before swallowing. I remember the panic when I had my first attack away from home. I could not believe the jerks that wrenched my body would ever stop without the help of that tap.

  When he came in from gardening, my father scrubbed his hands at the basin, the palms and backs, each finger separately, then the nails from every possible angle. The procedure lasted at least five minutes. When I became a medical student and entered the operating theatre, I did not have to be shown how to scrub up – I had watched the process there in the boothole. Now that resistant organisms are so common I could make a fortune if I had a video of the routine my father had perfected long before antibiotics were discovered.

  The dog Jimmy was reputed to be a good guardian. My brother Arthur was less than three years old when he wandered out of the garden and down towards the A4, a very busy road. When a neighbour tried to carry him home, Jimmy growled so hard that the only thing she could do was shoo child and dog together back up the hill and into the drive. After Jimmy, I was given a dachshund, named Gerda to chime with her German heritage. She was a placid creature, allowing me to decorate her back with Hewletts antiseptic cream when I was confined to bed with measles. The pleasure of squeezing long white lines, then a wavy pattern across them until the whole tube was used up, is with me still. When Daisy discovered what I had done she removed the worst with paper towels before carrying Gerda into the green bathroom.

  The house had three bathrooms. The green one, between the nursery and the spare room, was used by the children as well as for the weekly wash, when the clothes were boiled in a large, gas-heated cauldron and removed with wooden tongs. The place filled with steam and the pervasive odour of carbolic soap. The blue bathroom near my parents’ bedroom was specifically for their use. We were encouraged to go in while they bathed. My mother would hang her used sanitary towel on one side of a chair back and the clean one on the other. I am more embarrassed by the memory than I was at the time when, as she intended, I accepted menstruation with no sense of shock. However, this did not help me to cope when my own periods started while I was still in the ‘nursery wing’ at Hinton, the house in Somerset that I also loved. My boarding school had been evacuated there and I was the first of my class to be afflicted by ‘the curse’. It took me three days of stained pants before I found the courage to consult the matron. My mother had sent me to boarding school with cotton pads that could be washed, not realising that modern girls used disposable towels.

  The height of excitement in the blue bathroom was when our father submerged the whole of his head. Two or three times a week he soaped the crown and then disappeared under the water, blowing bubbles from his mouth as he did so. When he ran out of breath he shot up like a breaching whale, to much laughter and clapping of small hands.

  The third bathroom was at the end of the corridor beyond the room for the two maids. It was poky, being under the eaves and for their use only. A similar space opposite was used to store suitcases until it was converted into a darkroom for Arthur when he started to develop his own photos. As I grew up, I felt awkward about the social stratification epitomised by these hygienic provisions.

  After the episode with the cream, Daisy encouraged me to help with Gerda’s bath. I knelt by the side, working the shampoo into a delicious, slippery mass of foam while the dog stood still, pleased with all the attention. My enjoyment of such sensory experiences was in sharp contrast to my mother who needed her fingers to be clean and dry. She never let us eat sandwiches on the beach, as any grain of sand between her teeth made her shudder. She preferred the rocks with their pools, taking no pleasure in the messiness of sand, while I revelled in every squish and squelch.

  Bertha, a Dalmatian puppy, arrived during the war and was Biz’s dog. She was very beautiful. As she grew to maturity her developing black spots became more numerous than considered ideal by breeders. They formed an enchanting tick shape on her forehead. Unfortunately she barked whenever the doorbell rang, creating great havoc. My mother’s shouting only encouraged the noise, in the same way that it exacerbated our sisterly screaming.

  Daisy was firm with small children but she was also gentle and full of common sense. No one could have told me about the pleasure when she did my hair. It was long and blonde and always in knots. Her patience was inexhaustible. She would sit in her chair while I stood between her legs. The slow stroke of the brush, the teasing comb that helped her fingers untangle the muddles, produced a particular delicious swooning in my head. It was the most sensuous feeling I experienced for many years, only reproduced later at boarding school when we would tickle each other, slowly and with the lightest touch.

  I must have been about three or four when I would cross my legs and squat down in the middle of the road when we passed a particular tramp on our daily walk. Despite my psychosexual training and experience I am still upset to admit that the warm feelings were associated with daydreams of him beating my dolls. Here was another shadow, like that of the autistic person clutching at hard edges, which I would prefer to deny.

  A third fleeting taste of derangement occurred during the few weeks after my husband died. Although I could work through a whole morning I could not stay in town to shop for more than a few minutes before f
leeing for home. I would have expected these passing hints of autism, sadomasochism and agoraphobia to allow me to empathise more deeply with sufferers. But I find they merely highlight the chasm between my experience and that of others, only serving to deepen the sense of how impossible it is, without an imagination more powerful than mine, to see the world truly from behind someone else’s eyes.

  Daisy knew that my dolls were very important. I pushed them about the garden in a dolls’ pram with a brown hood, raised and lowered by a lever at the side. It was stiff, the joint waiting with malign intent to trap my finger. When forced down it fixed the hood so taut that the folds were smoothed away, leaving the surface tight enough to act as a drum. Or I may be muddling it with the big black pram in which I was left in the garden to sleep, a routine demanded by the protocol of the times, until I was at least two years old. During the psychoanalysis with which I indulged my seventies I remembered the dark space under the hood and the fear of being alone.

  In my old age, when I crave large gulps of silence and aloneness, I am surprised by that fear. Daisy knew how much I needed company. When I was confined to the spare room with recurrent tonsillitis she would find reasons for a chat, arriving to clunk the vacuum cleaner against the feet of the bed, sending a friendly judder through the mattress. Or she would bring me a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice ordered by my mother before she left for work. The ‘bits’ were never strained out: that would have been a waste of good nourishment. I hated their feel against my teeth but forced it down for the sake of Daisy’s visits. On a table by the bed an elephant bell, brought home by my father from India after the First World War, was left for me to ring in an emergency. I never had the courage. Asking for help did not – does not – come easily.

  That gong was rung by Daisy to summon us for meals. At the weekend it would bring my father and brother from the workshop, my mother from the flower border, my younger sister Biz from. . . I don’t know where. Often she would be out across the fields, talking to the farmers she met or to the tramps, solitary men who wandered about with broken shoes and torn carrier bags. Even the resonant elephant bell would not reach that far. But it could reach to our swing, fixed to ‘the’ oak tree.