I remember the first time I went there. It was a dingy and forbidding-looking den from the outside, and as I pushed through its neglected doors into its little cream and brown painted hall, dust rose from its floorboards. It was gloomy, cold and bare, and lit by the dimmest of gaslights, and I could just make out a jumble of piled up chairs and debris in its shadows.
The collector, a tatty man in a bunched up overcoat and mittens, sat at a card table just inside the door. His trousers were wrapped round his legs and tucked into his socks, and his bike leaned against the wall behind him. His ledger and cashbox sat on the card table together with his Woodbines and matches and a stub of indelible pencil. He was a flabby-faced and rheumy-eyed man with a drinker’s nose, and as I approached him he noisily sniffed its pearly pair of dewdrops out of sight.
I passed him our coppers and card, and as he rolled his woolly entries into his book and onto our card I fastened my eyes on his nose and watched his pearls rising and falling as he breathed. It wasn’t a very jolly business, calling at that place, but the collector’s antics added a little interest.
It was a teetotal benefit society, the Rechabites, founded in 1835 by a frenetic abstainer whose philosophy required those who joined to sign a pledge of lifelong abstinence. But fortunately for Claphams’ men folk and its plethora of pubs - not to mention its dedicated but famously intemperate doctors - the founder’s successors paid scant attention to the maintenance of their creed.
Donald Bullock.
Donald @wheatleypress.com
Edited from The Legend that was Clapham
(www.wheatleypress.com)
I read the Citizen story of Tartaglias’ possible demise with nostalgic regret. I don’t know when they arrived here from their native Italy, but they were well-established and cherished as the very essence of Clapham in the ‘Thirties. They had the hearts of all.
According to the taste-buds of Gloucester and those who struck their national medals, ‘Tartags’ made the best ice-cream there ever was. It won prizes galore with predictable regularity, and Gloucester never knew its match.
A contented and pragmatic clan,‘Tartags’ conjured up their ice-cream in the kitchen of their tall and happily-shabby house, which adjoined the old Recreation ground in Sweetbriar street. Their serving freezer rested just inside their cluttered passage, by their ever-open front door, and a wide shelf above it housed their tumble of wafer-boxes, their wooden box of ‘takings’, and the bottles of fruit syrups which they liberally sprinkled over the ice-cream that came for our ha’pennies.
To hop onto their step and to swing their copper-coloured bell was to pull one of them out, still chewing at their dinner, or carrying the paper they’d been reading, to cram as much ice-cream into their cones as they could. It was a struggle they always won, and followed with a hearty squirt of raspberry sauce. How we’d watch that upturned bottle as it dispensed its magic topping; how we tried to catch their eye, to win a curling smile and a further squirt or two! We always came away from ‘Tartags’ feeling well done-by.
They knew no affectations, the ‘Tartags’. A friendly and relaxed lot, they were part of Clapham, part of us, and folks took them as they found them. When their son Tony was born they celebrated the event by giving a free ice-cream to every child in Clapham – and that meant a great many ice-creams!
Each evening, Eric would stow a churn of their sorcery into his motor-bike’s sidecar and clatter about Clapham and beyond, pummeling its klaxon horn each time he circled to a stop. And out we’d run with our cups and glasses and coppers, to receive a dollop of nectar that sent us to heaven.
Gloucester without ‘Tartags’ in those far-misted days would have been unthinkable, like faggots without peas, or peaches without cream.
And Gloucester without ‘Tartags’ today would be the poorer.
Donald Bullock
Syd, who lived in Union Street with his wife Nell, was a man without hope, and whilst he drew peoples’ sympathy he courted no popularity. Tall and scruffy, loosely and lumpily built and morosely uncouth, Syd had suffered horribly disfiguring wounds in France in the First World War when a shell exploded in his face. They had pulled it roughly together, what was left of it, but its left side had been beyond their skills. The side of his mouth lay exposed, as did a gaping and bloodshot eyeball in its raw and watering socket, and Syd’s hand was never without the red-spotted hanky he constantly used for brushing it dry.
His attempts at speech produced little more than hollow noises, and I shall never forget his hopeless appearance, or his glaring look of resentful anger at the price he’d paid for the country that had meted him his misery and poverty. It was small wonder that he lived for the drink that addled his brain, stoked his face to its angry fire, and drove him to his arrogant belligerence.
He made his living - if living it was - by pushing his shabby, canvas-covered barrel-organ from one cinema queue to another, and winding out his music to its seas of faces. When the queues were fat and long he removed the organ’s side panels to release more sound, and often, after two or three melodies, he’d ungraciously pull some luckless soul from the queue and gruffly set him winding.
“’Ere, stand like this, wind like that. Not too quick, not too slow. Keep it even.” he’d command in his muffled voice, and having set his victim to work he’d barge along the queue glowering and pushing his greasy cap at every face.
If Syd hadn’t been obtuse when the shell took his pride he’d learned to grow the condition since. He was a desperately unhappy man, a tortured soul driven to working the queues to buy the drink that rendered his life just bearable. By publicly winding his machine he was providing more than its addictive melodies for the coppers he received; he was dispensing his hideous appearance. And he knew it, but time had calloused his feelings and he no more heeded their scrutinies than he heard his sailing melodies.
I knew more of Syd than the rest of our group. That his wife Nell, a tiny, bent and suffering woman, fared badly at his hands, and skivvied for her housekeeping shillings ‘til she died, for all of Syd’s earnings, and his pension, went on the drink that brought her his violence.
Great Aunt Nell was my Granny Boden’s sister, which made Syd my great uncle.
But I never let on. Not to anybody. Ever.
Donald Bullock
Then they’d set about making themselves an elver net. They’d turn the osiers into a boat-shaped structure about two feet long and eighteen inches wide, and make the branch its handle. The net’s fabric would be a piece of cheese muslin from Heals, in Barton Street, who advertised it as elver net muslin.
Having made their nets, they’d pull their accessories together. A lantern, a bucket or two, a fair sized bath and a few pillowcases to contain the mountain of elvers they hoped to catch. Whilst many of them would get their bulky trappings to the river on their bikes, others would button-hole a fellow enthusiast with a car, if they could find one. Cars, of course, were luxuries indeed in those days, and the few I ever saw bedecked with elver nets were ancient bangers that clattered noisily up the road chuffing clouds of blue smoke.
The elvers would eventually come swimming upstream in their shoals, close to the banks, and in hopeful preparation the elvermen would choose their spots and their light fires, both to attract their quarries and to keep themselves warm. And there they’d be, wrapped up against the weather and ready and waiting to ply their nets from dusk to dawn in the hope of making their fortune. But when would the elvers be with them?
Nobody knew for sure. They’d certainly come with the spring tides of March and April of course, but some seasons they’d come as early as February, and in others they’d still be about in May. Each season the question came resolved by the keener men, who went to the trouble of casting their nets early and often, so becoming unwilling scouts for the rest. More often than not they’d come home weary and empty-handed, and occasionally they’d net just about enough for a feed, but sooner or later one or more would strike a shoal. Then the word would fly around Clapham, and that night would see an exodus of heavily laden bikes and bangers clattering and spluttering towards the river.
But what part of the long and bending river? That was always the question, for whilst the season lasted a fresh shoal of elvers would come about every ten days, and swim upstream at a speed dependent on river conditions and the weather. Jim Whitfield, the legendary Jolly Waterman’s Charlie’s son, told me that as a rough guide a shoal might travel from, say, the Jolly Waterman, Jim’s riverside home, to the Tar Works in a day, but to complicate matters, part of each shoal would get swept back downstream by the flow, to start again. So elvering was a chancy business, and the elvermen could only guess, then fly off to their chosen spot, hoping they were right. But even the most experienced were often wrong. Sometimes they hadn’t travelled upstream enough, other times they’d gone too far. And since mobile telephones were half a century into the future, they had no way of learning from their luckier peers – even if they’d been prepared to tell them!
The thought that others might be making huge catches whilst they couldn’t find an elver came very galling to most, and the travelling was cumbersome, for very few spots along the river were in convenient reach of the roads, and even those that were presented quite an obstacle course for the fishermen and their vehicles and their cumbersome paraphernalia. It could all be a wearying and flattening business, and often a cold and pitch black one, too, and those who hit the jackpot were reckoned to deserve the money they made.
And there were, sooner or later, always the lucky ones, and those who dropped into a shoal could make very heavy catches. The late lamented Charlie Whitfield, who was widely regarded as the greatest local river authority ever, told me that he sometimes caught fifteen or more pounds at a single dip of his net. The riverside term for a catch of twenty pounds was a score, and he’d caught twenty-five score in three hours. The shoals thinned out about four in the morning, or earlier if fog came, when, Charlie said, ‘they’d drop to the bottom like a stone’.
Elvers, regarded by some as an aphrodisiac, were a popular delicacy in Gloucester, and particularly so in Clapham, and the elvermen easily sold all they caught. It was common to see them being offered live at their captors’ front doors, from towel-topped pails on kitchen chairs. The going rate throughout my childhood was sixpence a pint, usually measured with a pint pot borrowed from their local pub (in return for a feed of elvers, no doubt…).
Others put their buckets or tin baths onto barrows or old ’prams and pushed them round the streets in the middle of the road, and we’d hear them singing out their wares:
“Elvers alive-o, a tanner a pint... Come on; give y’ur old man a treat and liven him up! Fry ’im some of these with a bit o’ bacon...”
Live elvers were transparent and cooked ones white. Our mother didn’t like frying them alive, so she put them in salt water to kill them first. They were tasty alright, but the sight of their tiny, black-eyed corpses piled on the plate in their petrified turmoil always tinged me with a secret sadness, and Dylan Thomas’s musical words would slip to my mind: ‘So many little lives…’
Donald Bullock.
It had changed little by the ‘Thirties. A shanty happening of draughty dens and halls of scarred brick and iron, Johnny’s resembled a Dickensian workhouse with its tiny prison-like windows and its patchwork of rough and sundry floors.
The fruits and sugars were boiled and jarred in the main building, which bordered the road; the vinegars and pickles were brewed in a cavernous den behind, and the jars and bottles that would contain them all were washed in buckets of hot water in a cobbled yard under a corrugated roof.
It was a celebrated firm, Johnnys’, an institution nationally acclaimed, and to its province of women workers the rhythm of its title was a balm. It was an ancient and decrepit place of whitewash and cobwebs and draughts and primitive conditions, where (until they were granted stools, many years later) the women worked standing on concrete floors. They shivered in winter and baked in summer, and a job there meant an early start to their long and arduous days of closely managed grafting.
But there were compensations. Johnnys’ was their spirited haven of shared joys and troubles, the hub of their culture of fellowship; their club. And if their days ran hard there, they did no more than match their lives.
They knew no concept of a welfare state, not even by distant dreams, and with the ongoing unemployment among their menfolk, the Johnnys’ pay-packet was often the only one to enter a home. It was the saving of many a Clapham family, Johnny’s.
Another bonus - for some at least - came incidentally. Every Johnnys’ woman was provided with what was known as their ‘piece’, a square of sacking which they tied around their waists, like an apron, to protect their clothes. After work they’d fold and roll their ‘piece’ and take it home under their arm, and many a pot of jam or pickle, or a cabbage or cauliflower found its way into a rolled-up ‘piece’ for spiriting past the gateman.
But there came the odd mishap. The ample Mrs. Wingate’s fish and chip shop on the Knapp was just round the corner from Johnny’s, and at the end of one lean day our mother gathered up a wad of old newspapers and sent me there with them in the hope that Mrs. Wingate might express her thanks with a bag of chips which might make our supper.
The shop was empty but for a few lumpy Johnny’s women with their rolled-up ‘pieces’. A pot of new and unset jam, secreted in Beryl Gray’s ‘piece’, must have been poorly sealed, for a trail of jam was trickling down her coat. The slow-moving but fast-thinking Mrs. Wingate, behind the counter, saw it too, and lighting up her eyes, she chided Beryl wickedly.
“Aw, look, Ber’, your pot o’ Johnnys’ jam ’ave come undone and spoilt y’ur coat. If I was you I’d take it back an’ get a new pot out of ’em. An’ a new coat, too, whilst you’m at it. Shameful, I calls it. They don’t care ’ow they doos the tops of their jam up these days. I ’ouldn’t ’ave it, Ber’.”...”
And Beryl stood there shuffling and pulling a watery smile onto her face as fast and repeatedly as her shame kept pulling it off.
The women had another popular way of smuggling their pilfered pots of jam out of Johnnys’, and it worked every time, though the part-time gateman, Tom Mahoney, knew all about it.
“I can tell where the buggers stows the jam by the clumsy way they walks a-past me,” he’d say. “But what can a fella do about it, eh? What can a fella do? You answer me that ’un!”
Tom Mahoney, the Knapp butcher, arrived at Johnnys’ at seven each morning to unlock the gates to let the workers in. Any who arrived before three minutes past were allowed in without penalty. Those who followed before five past would lose fifteen minutes’ pay, and any who came later than five past would be sent home until the afternoon start.
A small crowd of unemployed hopefuls always collected at Johnnys’ gates in case a casual job or two arose. And as they waited, they gossiped, for ‘The Gates’ was their garnering post for news of possible work.
“I ’ear they’m after a barmaid at the K.A., Liz. (the K.A. was the locals’ colloquialism for the King’s Arms, at the top of Hare Lane.) ‘T’ain’t no good for me, o’ course, not with the kids, but it might do for you...”
“‘Ere, Lil, Ruby Horsham wants a bit o’ Sat’d’ee ’elp with the ’taters andn veg, like. ’Course, ’er’s busy with her flowers on a Sat’d’ee. ’Er’s bright an’ sharp, mind, but ’er’s ever so nice.” (Ruby Horsham was a prominent Northgate Street florist.)
“An’ they’m after a cleaner at the Lu’e, now as Maisey’s bad.” Then a slow wink. “Say as you knows Wyndham Lewis.”
“They wants another cook at the Spread, Mo., but I can’t fit in with th’ ’ours, not with me job at the Bon. But you could leave your ’Enery ’is bit o’ dinner, couldn’t y’u?”
At ten past seven Mahoney would appear again, to hang one of two signs on the gates. If it read ‘Hands Wanted’ there would be a forward surge and Mahoney would announce his news.
“A morning’s work for three women.” he might call, and after looking them over he’d select three and allow them in. Then, if appropriate, he’d address the waiting men.
“A day’s work for one man, and a morning’s work for another.” And many a man past his best would try to look sprightly enough to be chosen. But more often than not the sign would read ‘No Hands Wanted’ and there’d be a flurry of movement, some hurrying off to look for work elsewhere and others falling into knots to air their hopes or fly their snippets of despair.
I don’t suppose Johnnys’ part-time gateman enjoyed his hiring power. He wasn’t that sort of man. But a critical cynicism reigned amongst the unselected. They held that Mahoney allocated his jobs to those who bought their meat at his butchers’shop.
The Johnny’s Smell.
The spices of the Empire sailed through Johnnys’ gates. And as they mixed and simmered in its silver bowls, the magic of their mingling laced the air, and flew Clapham heady in its scents.
The smell that rose from Johnnys’ was unique. It was sweet and bitter and sour and fresh, and root-rank and stark, and blossom-touched. It was as spry as a mayfly, heavy as fermenting wine, as gentle as whimsy, and as capricious as a fleeting thought. On balmy days it came near tangible, almost a meal, a piquant plot of essences that teased the tongue and watered the throat. It grew us our mid-morning pangs, pulled us to our dinner as the sun slid by, and drew us to our supper as our passage grew its shapes. And when we went to bed we breathed it from our sheets.
It floated its seasoning through Clapham, the Johnny’s smell, and sowed a flavour foreign, yet its own. It hung in our hair, flavoured our furnishings, and hid in the clothes we wore. It was the scent of a lifetime, a chest of sensuous treasure, an aromatic compendium that once tasted, would lie in the blood forever, never to stray or to fade. It was a friend, that smell, and it is with me now.
Donald Bullock.
Sometimes a girl from the neighbouring Knapp - if Fanny Thesp could be called a girl - would slope over and push into the girls’ games. Fanny was a maiden of qualities - of a sort. She seemed a perpetual and childish seventeen, though not a very sweet seventeen, being huge, slow and slothful, and none too refined or respectful. She wore white ankle socks and flat shoes and her discordant nasal speech knew no niceties. She belched publicly for pleasure, always needed a hanky but never had one, and was publicly and joyfully flatulent.
She nursed a compulsion for conversational intrusion and an affinity for personal trivia, and could devastate an objector with a single foul word. She nurtured a love of pavement hopscotch, too, and entered every game she saw as of right.
Her intrusions brought confusions, delays and difficulties, but they were tolerated by those who knew her, and those who didn’t soon found why, for at the first sign of their distaste Fanny would bestow them a basic descriptive noun and up and cuff them. It would be a clumsy swing. Just one. It was enough.
Extracted from The Legend that was Clapham, by Donald Bullock
www.wheatleypress.com
Mercifully, he says, there was then no such thing as television, and he and his peers spent their unshackled and crowded outdoor lives both in the earthy market-town centre and about the hills and vales, rivers, streams and pools of its surrounding countryside.
As he has written elsewhere in his captivating prose: ‘We were an energetic set, and every dawning day came packed with adventure, much of it money-making. We roamed errands about the town, mingled and earned at the cattle and fruit markets, carried parcels at the stations, searched and climbed for birds’-eggs, (a normal boyhood pursuit in those days) and gathered colourful wild flowers by the armful from the roadside verges and meadows.’ (well before the widespread use of weed-killers made them sterile). They picked wild strawberries, blackberries and mushrooms, slept out in tents on Chosen hill to music from their home-made crystal sets, and, in winter, bundled and sold firewood and undertook snow-clearing for their neighbours. They went pike-fishing on the River Leadon, and at Walham and Ashleworth pools, where they often had to break the ice first. And as Christmas approached they gathered and sold holly and mistletoe by day and went carol singing in the evenings.
He and his peers knew every inch of the Nunnies – ‘that adventurous stream of secret worlds, bounded by its willow-draped sage greenery, that slid and babbled between the Cheltenham and Tewkesbury roads and on to the river…’ and, like his peers, he both caught many a redbreast and suffered many a ‘bootful’ in his years of ‘bamping’ there.
What coppers came their way had to be earned, and they spent them frugally. They made their own fishing rods and tackle and became experts at fishing every nook of all the local waters: the Leadon, the Severn and its plethora of streams and riverside pools, and both the Gloucester and Stroud canals. He can still make a professional-looking float in a minute with a pigeon quill and a razor blade…
An ancient and upright bike occasionally came their way, and they used it energetically to broaden their horizons. One pedalled, one sat on the crossbar and the other ran alongside, often to Highnam, Minsterworth or the Lassington or Newent woods, sometimes further, taking it in turns to pedal, sit or run.
After leaving school he worked in The Gloucester Citizen’s photographic department where he spent, he says, the happiest and most interesting few years of his life, until he was forced by family circumstances to leave his haven for a series of better paid but sadly cramping jobs.
He duly became a busy self-employed television engineer, but found time, over the years, to write for many publications, and he remains regularly published today.
Now retired, he is working on the completion of ‘Hovels and Haydust’, his moving, eye-opening, sometimes tragic and often hilarious account of one boy’s childhood in and around a Gloucester long since gone forever. He has never, he says, known boredom, and vigorously recalls his boyhood days as though they were of yesterday.
Perhaps because our stay at The Limes was short, my memories are scant and fleeting. I recall, though, that the lumpy and taciturn Old Toddy lived there with us. A quietly unambitious and avuncular man of many moons, the slow-moving Toddy was an established and steady character who had always stayed with one or another of the Bullock clan, though I never knew why. It was at The Limes that Toddy delivered me my first conscious insight into Nature's wonders. Not that he noticed them himself; he merely set out to bring me the happiness of owning some conkers, and this balmy day he came home with his jacket pockets bulging.
"Here y'are, Donnie." he wheezed. "All you’ll want now is a bit o' string an' a skewer an’ y'ur dad a-playin' conkers with 'ee!" And he tumbled some bruised and spiked and shabby green domes onto the table.
"These ain’t conkers!” I protested. “Conkers are brown and shiny!”
“Steady on, they ain’t out o’ their shells yet.” said Toddy. “You opens 'em like this." And he twisted their spiky shells with his big worn hands and dropped the opened halves into mine. I looked at them. I was seeing newly gathered, mint conkers for the first time, each set in its own finely tailored, soft white cot; and I flew fascinated with their fashioning and finish. Each rounded yet irregular sphere was unique in its polished mahogany skin and each slept in its custom-made satin-cream cradle. I settled to their wonder. What works of art they were, these conkers, in their snug velvet beds. But why the spiky shells to nurse their secret? What force would craft such beauty yet deny its being seen?
And whilst I was lost to their order, I breathed the pungence of their smell. It conjured scenes of rank, sun-shaded grasses and wild garlic, a miasma cocktail of rotting roots and moss and fungi, of acid soil and its life; the scent of the real and deep countryside. What other marvels did Longford hold? What other secrets for the sharing? I had stumbled from the dusty Knapp to a rustic world of wonder, and a casket of treasures shrouded in mystery, and I was lost in wonderment.
Then Toddy pulled my mahogany treasures from their beds and brushed away their spiky shrouds before violating each creation with a skewer and threading it onto a string. I looked up at the old and peaceful face of the man who had brought me a pocketful of miracles, yet was now, from the kindness of his heart, desecrating them.
Why didn't he see the wonder of it all? And marvel at the treasures he had found? How could we all dwell so closely together yet live in such different worlds?
Extracted from the manuscript of Hovels and Haydust, a childhood biography of a Gloucester life, by Donald Bullock.
The Business of Being
Who hasn't brought to mind their earliest of memories?
And asked themselves when life for them began?
When does it start, this business of our being?
For myself, it is as though I was pulled into a life already there. I found myself at rest in a mahogany drawer upon the flagstones of a yard. I had no inkling of a brace of summers spent and knew no curiosity.
There was sunshine and comfort. A leaning lilac brought me shade and I hung in the twilight of sleep and wakefulness. My father's jacket was my bedding, and its flavours hung with that summer's scents. I had come to leather-dust, shaving-soap and newly cut cedar pencils, and they would set my life's seasoning. My father was a cobbler by tradition, a barber-shop lather-boy by necessity and a commercial artist by permanent aspiration.
I was comfortably warm. Gossamer sunbeams were painting my face and I was content to suffer them. I no more cared for opening my eyes than the still air aspired to a breeze. Nature's sounds were reaching me for the first time and I drank at them shamelessly...
The day slid, and I lay musing. Time came dressed as bliss. The earth's whisperings pulled at me, let me go, and teased me again, and feathers played in foliage and sunlight dapples tripped to me for fun. It was a game and I laughed. I had found myself for the first time, and a world of wonder was calling me…
It sang the distant protests of a tethered dog; the under-eaves gossiping of house-martins a-nesting; the idle dronings and busy silences of a sampling honeybee, and the purring of a warm, self-centred cat. And somewhere, far away, thin church bells called their message to the faithful and their melodies to all. If this were living, then life was good, and I snuggled to the sun and lingered along with the day.
And whilst I lay in my natural selfishness, testing my freshly found treasures, my people moved about me, toiling for order in our new and ancient home. Happily wearied and dank browed, they came to me often, carrying a smile, touching my face, and bringing me my simple needs of being.
A copper sun roamed by. Oceans of Severnside gold rolled to our windows and turned them to fire, and our yard grew its shadows and stilled. Shades of my people came kissing and lowing and murmuring of sleep. They floated my drawer and me through gas-lit caverns to a den of homely peace, and there, as I lay measuring the remnants of my day, my sleep won me.
I was my parents' first child. Theirs had been a precarious romance followed by a lonely marriage without the presence or blessing of their kin. Our father’s mother had bitterly opposed their union and forecast its failure with premature satisfaction. They had no money, owned only the clothes they wore, and had no proper job between them.
I had come to their lives in their room over Keelings’. Keelings’ was a corner paper-shop in Gloucester's Clapham, a dense community of need and communal bindings. With my coming they aspired to a home of their own, my people, and found a tiny cottage in the cobbles of nearby Park Street. Time came to move there, and they piled their bits onto a borrowed handcart, settled me in my drawer, put that on the handcart, and carted me there too. And it was there, in the very Bowl of Gloucester, that my yesterdays faded and my dawning slipped to me.
When we were children in the ‘Thirties and ‘Forties we paid our weekly coppers to the Rechabites man at the Sherbourne Mission Hall, and this entitled us to visit – or call – our doctors, whose surgery was at Ladybellegate House in Longsmith street.
It was Dr. Richardson who saw us into the world, but by 1940 his place was taken by Doctor ‘Tommy’ Cormack, whom I remember best.
A product of the Emerald Isle, ‘Tommy’ Cormack was a genial and personable man of great humility and enormous charm. He was unfailingly pleasant and even-tempered, and always seemed to have rather more to do that his time would allow. He was ready to turn out at any hour of the day or night, and his kindnesses went far beyond his calling as a doctor. Many of his patients were painfully poor, and when they had to telephone a hospital or clinic he would often dip into his pocket and press the necessary coppers into their hands. And it wasn’t unknown for him to run an ailing person back home, or to a chemist’s shop for an urgent prescription.
First names were the order of the day and everyone he encountered came quickly captured by his simple and uncomplicated decency. In thinking of him today I see a busy, concerned man, never relaxed, and never still. Even when sitting at his desk he was dynamically charged, and quite likely to spring to his feet when the thought took him.
His was a constantly interrupted life, and his telephone seldom stopped, yet he took it all with equanimity. When he’d seen his last patient and dealt with the knots of people who waylaid him outside his consulting room, he’d genially wish Miss Llewellyn au revoir and fly off to his calls, stuffing his stethoscope and medical bits into his bag as he went, and patting his pockets to ensure that he had his hanky and cigarettes.
He was an intensive chain-smoker, and sometimes, in his surgery, he’d have two or three cigarettes lit and parked at once, yet he managed to give each of his patients his fullest and most competent attention, and we were well-used to his high-speed, genial treatment. When, during a home-call, he felt that his patient needed a specialist, he was likely to dash off and as like as not return with one. They too seemed captivated by his charm and sheer goodness. Indeed, under his driving momentum, many a specialist learned to move and work at a speed hitherto unknown to them, or well-forgotten.
Those ‘in the know’ refrained from calling the good man around his bed time, for at this hour he liked a little peace to check the quality of his Irish whiskey...
* * *
Ladybellegate House was, and is, a large, deep building, and the patients’ waiting room ran its full depth. There were several rows of forms at each end, and they each catered for the patients of two separate doctors. Those of Dr. Cormack sat at the end nearest the main road, whilst those of Dr. Brayshaw occupied the far end.
Half way along the room, in-between the two, was a glass-paned receptionist’s cabin where the ancient and kindly and painfully thin Miss Beatrice Llewellyn sat. Here was another saint in disguise who had the gentle ability to instil calm and confidence into the most agitated of patients. She’d exchange a few brief pleasantries, draw the friendliest of relaxed smiles, look out the patient’s medical card, slide a numbered disc up and off its spike, and hand the card and the disc to the patient. Dr. Cormack’s patients received a brass disc, whilst those of Dr, Brayshaw got an aluminium one.
And there, in our half of the waiting room, we’d sit, anticipating the start of the shuffle. Suddenly an electric bell would briefly ring, and Miss Llewellyn would call:
‘Number One, Dr. Brayshaw, please.’ And a shape would trundle off to his doctor. Then a buzzer would sound, and we’d hear:
‘Number one, Dr. Cormack.’ And off he or she would go, too.
By the time Dr. Cormacks’s buzzer had sounded twice, Dr. Brayshaw’s bell would have rung five times, and so rapidly did press his bell-push as his patient prepared to leave, there were often collisions, outside his door, between incoming and outgoing folk. And in the waiting-room, we patients’ heads would be swinging in unison, as though we were watching an unseen tennis match.
Within an hour, Dr. Brayshaw’s half of the waiting room would be clear, and we’d see the huge bulk of the worthy man struggling from his surgery door amid a plethora of fishing rods and baskets and waders and nets. He’d be off for an hour’s fishing before his house-calls.
Nonetheless, he was a very popular doctor indeed, Dr. Brayshaw. I once asked one of his patients what ensued as he entered his room.
“Oh, he’d ask you what was wrong as soon as you went in, scrawl a prescription as you went to sit down, press his bell-push and wish you goodbye.
‘Mind, if you were ill, he’s spot it and spend time with you, but most of us weren’t, and he knew it.’ he said. It is certainly true that when Dr. Brayshaw died, the papers were full of his patients’ praises. I recall that one affectionate tribute began: ‘Whilst he lacked the conventional bedside manner…’
Meanwhile, Dr. Cormack sat in his surgery taking his patients’ flak, and they loved him for it, too. I’m sure that most of us simply responded to the therapy of seeing him.
I recall the time I was called into his surgery as his previous patient, a gentleman from Galway, was stretching out his goodbyes.
‘I must tell the missus what you’ve said, Doctor.’ he said. ‘What did you say I have in me t’roat?
‘It’s a quinsy, and you must take the tablets and drink a lot of water.’ said the doctor.
‘Can I drink beer instead of water, Sorr?’ asked the afflicted man. The doctor stifled his spontaneous smile.
‘Yes, yes, drink beer if you like.’ he said. The man from Galway smiled.
‘Right. So I’ve got a quinsy and I must drink a lot of beer!’ he said. ‘I’ll go and tell the missus! A lot of beer…. A lot of beer…’
And as he went the doctor turned to me.
‘Hello Donald!’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine, thank you, Doctor!’ I said. He smiled and waited patiently.
‘Oh, I’ve got a sore throat.’ I said.
This time, I was in and out of the doctor’s room in record time, and as I left, I saw the Galway gentleman’s wife looking at him quizzically.
‘Yes, t’at’s what the doctor ordered, Maureen. ‘Drink plenty of beer!’’ he said. ‘Now you wouldn’t want a fellah to ignore his doctor’s orders, would yeh?’