We moved into a flat at 190, Camberwell Grove, a gracious
Edwardian three storey semi-detached with a basement. The house had a ground and
first floor where the mid 40s owner/ landlady lived. The second floor, reached
by a rather noisy staircase clad in brown linoleum, was all ours - a kitchen, a
living area, quite a large bedroom with an en suite bathroom.
Basic furniture was supplied from various family sources, and
carried up the stairs with family help. Of course we had the loot from our
wedding, unpacked awaiting our return from honeymoon, and were bemused to find
we had ended up with 13 casseroles, very welcome bed and table linen, and
several decorative ashtrays. My parents had given us a rather posh tea trolley
that we used on most days. It had an amusing but somewhat odd habit of rolling
independently across the kitchen, given a slightly sloping floor. Like most
events in our lives at that time we just thought it was funny. These days it
would have been a serious reason to call in a builder.
We realised we had collected rather a lot of books between us, and
had nowhere to store them. They were piled unceremoniously while we sorted the
rest of our meagre belongings. But one Saturday I went to a builder’s yard, and
organised a couple of 10 foot long pieces of pine planking, and a number of
bricks. When they arrived home, with considerable pride we built a simple 60s
bookshelf to take the lot, as well as a stack of records and my old player
(good for 45s, 33s, and older 78s). Later we bought some garish winged bucket
chairs. We were home.
In amongst the muddle, Jan studied for her finals in the coming
June, and I tried to avoid too much study by beginning to work studiously on my
stamp collection. As part of my life long self-analysis, I have realised I am a
collector. I understand that at times of stress, or times when I want to avoid
hard work, I bury myself in an activity. More simply, when Jan was revising three
years of study, I could have been doing the same, preparing myself for my own
finals just under two years hence. My first stamp album was bought by an aunt
and uncle as a gift for a four year old being a frilled, velveted pageboy at
their wedding. This thin red album had very few stamps, and had simply
languished as part of my baggage for many years. Now, I developed a passion for
British stamps, and spent hours organising several new albums around a
miscellany of stamps purchased cheaply from local dealers and others. I became
fascinated by variations, watermarks, franking, and first day covers. It kept
me quiet.
There were times of relaxation and freedom. Above us was a tiny
rooftop flat rented by a couple very much at our age and stage. Bob Stebbings
was an architectural assistant, and his wife Chris a receptionist. They were
young, also newly married, happy go lucky, interested in the world around them,
and very funny. We became great friends. At some stage in my past I had been
allowed to borrow an 8mm camera from Jan’s father, who taught me the skills of
editing and splicing celluloid. I cannot remember how I acquired a camera, but
the four of us began to create a film of us around London doing crazy things.
The first attempt was a picnic in the local park one Saturday. We had no
children, but between us we did have a collection of soft toys, and we filmed a
teddy bears’ picnic with silly interactions. An example was a big blue blow-up
‘teddy’, filmed as the plug was pulled and it slowly deflated. We all fell
about laughing. On a later occasion, we went into the city on the underground
and visited The Tower of London, Horse Guards Parade, and The Embankment, with
Bob parodying guardsmen, emulating silly walks, us sitting on bronze cannons, or
using the glass of shopfronts as mirrors and lifting one leg as if we were
puppets. Over time I edited the film down and came up with an appropriate
title. The Stebbings, who were great smokers, became ‘Stubbings ‘66’. We still
have the reel of silent film (amongst a now large collection of other films and
videotapes of our family history); and every four or five years we replay it, just
to enjoy the silliness, remind ourselves of simple times, and wonder how Chris
and Bob’s lives evolved.
Jan’s exams came and went, and she relaxed in that tense kind of
way we do when waiting for results. Of course she had passed, and gained her
Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry. She glowed, but I suspect her
parents Reg and Bobbie were even more proud; to have a daughter with a
University degree exceeded their expectations given the post war uncertainties
they had survived, and their own educations curtailed by necessity. Jan joined
a kind of elite in their eyes, along with cousin Monica who became an academic
in plant genetics, and her brother Michael who gained his degree and joined a software
engineering firm in the early days of serious computing.
I am not sure how the connections were made, but Jan applied for a
laboratory technician job at King’s and was successful. She began her own
journey of professional work, and I could see her confidence in her own
abilities expand as she gained a varied skill set, became a well liked member
of a team and learned the ever emerging techniques of hospital biochemistry.
The bonus was that Jan was earning a salary working in the hospital at which I
was a medical student. So I became a kept man, supplementing my £96 a quarter
county council grant with moral earnings from my woman. Seriously, it made an
immense difference to our lives, and our sense of security for the future. In
many ways we had come to believe the dire warnings that it was crazy to get
married while we were still students; at time we had lived on next to nothing,
even combining our grants. We breathed more freely.
It dawned on me that I now had to live up to my side of the
bargain, and do sufficient work to complete my own degree. I had to set aside
the stamp collecting me, given my fantasy of making a lot of money selling
special stamps had not come to fruition. I had to begin to study in earnest. But
I found myself frequently falling asleep over textbooks. Clearly it was not for
a lack of interest in my chosen career. But I now know from my later
neurolinguistic training that I am a visual and experiential learner. As I have
noted earlier, I am not good at following a logical plan. Throughout my life I
have continued to be a voracious reader. But textbooks are for dipping into,
not learning verbatim. I had been under the misunderstanding that, to emulate so
many of my close colleagues, I had to read every textbook from cover to cover.
I just have never been able to do that. I learn, and always have learned from
my patients, and the subsequent supervision sessions or post clinical
discussions. And once learned visually and experientially, I rarely forget. In
terms of medicine, I am a collector with a fascination for remembering the work
and names of historical figures and their contributions, minutiae of various
diseases, all along with a clear visual memory of patients and episodes going
back 50 years (even if I struggle to remember their names).
I did not know this in 1965-6, and struggled. I felt dumb, and
thought I was stupid. From time to time I believed I was not worthy to become a
doctor. Looking back, I know I became depressed, and found myself seeking out
odd activities to prove I was not dumb. Again, I cannot quite remember the
detail, but I came across some information about intelligence and, perhaps
during my earliest student time in psychiatry, I was introduced to the work of
Hans Eysenck, some of whose work I devoured (Sense
and Nonsense in Psychology, 1956); Fact
and Fiction in Psychology, 1965), and who had
written a book in 1962 called ‘Know Your Own IQ’. I found a second hand, but
clean, copy in a bookshop and devoured that as well, and seemed to do OK. So I
challenged myself to do the Mensa test. The results proved to me that I was not
dumb; so that was not the problem.
I now know that I was in an episode of depression with loss of
confidence, confusion, irritability and self-blame. How could that be, when I
was newly married to the love of my love, we had a bit of an income, we had
funny friends, and a place to call our own. I guess we could factor in an
episode of glandular fever, from which Jan and I both suffered in recent months.
It is said that can leave you with depressed feelings. Whatever, I did what I
have always done, which is to bury myself in whatever I was doing at the time,
and just get on with it.
And what rescued me on this occasion, probably was the possibility
of doing the pantomime ‘The Tempest’ described in an earlier chapter. I became
so engrossed in the whole process, I forgot about being depressed and my inner
conflict over studying. Well, it was Christmas, and the holidays loomed.
