Nov 2021 – The Bohemian Waxwing

The Kingdom of Fife

Early in 1981, while working in the Coronary Care Unit of the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, I was interviewed for the two-year medical registrar post at Milesmark Hospital in Dunfermline. The interview was held at Lynebank Hospital, an institution for patients with ‘mental handicap’, as it was then called. It was also the site of various administrative offices for the West Fife region. I was keen to get a job that would allow me to stay in Edinburgh while I studied for the MRCP*. In the candidates’ holding pen I came across the medallist from my year who had graduated MB ChB with honours. We were not close friends. From this discovery I assumed that my chances of being appointed were now poor to nil. He emerged from his session with the interview committee looking his usual confident self.

The committee were seated at a long table, their backs to three windows that looked out onto the grounds of the hospital. The candidate sat facing them. Hoping to impress my interlocutors, I had listed, at the end of my CV, the number of lumbar punctures I had performed as a house officer in neurology and the equally numerous temporary pacemakers I had inserted in my current post. When his turn came to question me, Dr Desmond Noel Scott Malone (formerly of the Royal Canadian Air Force) flicked through the pages of my application and alighted upon all this information. “What are the memoirs of Malcolm Muggeridge all about then?” he asked, in a stinging tone. Muggeridge had recently published a lengthy, over-detailed and self-regarding autobiography.

At this delicate point of potential humiliation, one of the resident patients chose to wander past outside and look into the interview room. He paused at each window in turn to pull a face and stick out his tongue at the occupants. I was the only one in the room who could see him. “Well?” asked Dr Malone, growing impatient. Distracted, I made some stumbling excuse about trying to quantify my experience for the panel and assumed the interview was now definitely a goner. At this point I did not know that Doctors Lawson, Malone and Fraser put a bit more weight on what one might call social skills than pure academic brilliance. To my astonishment and delight, they called me back in after their deliberations to offer me the job. Apart from any other benefits, it meant I had secured gainful employment for the next two years.

The advantage of the commute between Edinburgh and Dunfermline was that you were travelling against the heavier traffic. In the morning, most of it was moving south across the Forth Bridge from Fife into Edinburgh while you made your way north on the quieter carriageway. The reverse applied on the way home. On mornings when a haar** affected Edinburgh, one often emerged from the advection fog into beautiful sunshine halfway across the bridge.

Two additional middle-graders, a senior house officer and another registrar, rotated through Milesmark from Edinburgh posts, creating a one-in-three resident on-call rota. It soon dawned on me that with annual and study leave to be taken by each one of us, huge blocks of one-in-two on-call lay ahead. During these times, every second night and every second weekend had to be spent in the hospital. At one point, I did three continuous months of one-in-two, only getting home to Edinburgh for a weekend off once a fortnight. Not being a natural swot, I found this level of commitment combined with studying quite testing.

Inevitably, life shrank down to the hospital and its immediate environs. Socialising was largely restricted to our fellow inmates, much to the detriment of relationships with friends and family at home. It did, however, breed an intense camaraderie. Should a staff night out occur, we would simply stay over in the hospital residence. I remember the entire junior staff establishment turning out for a cardiac arrest in the early hours after the off-duty cohort had returned from a night of curling at the Green Hotel in Kinross. It was a successful resuscitation despite that.

The medical experience on offer was excellent and represented the best possible preparation for the clinical parts of the ‘Membership’ exam. We saw a full range of general admissions, including coronary care and poisonings, and we triaged patients who would go on to regional specialist units in Edinburgh. The outpatient clinics were immensely varied.

Having already cracked temporary pacemakers, I was soon a dab hand at gastric washouts. Unfortunately, the local surgical service was not on-site. The surgeons were based at the old Dunfermline and West Fife Hospital in the town. We medical registrars were expected to go there on request to offer physicianly advice. Conversely, when I performed my first-ever suprapubic catheter insertion, I had to follow instructions over the phone from a consultant surgeon who was scrubbed-up in theatre at the time. After I passed the MRCP, I ran into him when I was at the West Fife on a consultation. “I understand that congratulations are in order, Allan,” he offered, lugubriously. Pleased that he’d noticed, I thanked him. “Well, now you’ll find out everybody’s got one,” he said.

We ventilated major poisoning cases without the luxury of an attending anaesthetist. Our equipment was a cape ventilator with huge knobs on it that looked like something Dan Dare might use. The patient got whatever minute-volume you set on it whether they liked it or not. A nurse who had taken a massive barbiturate overdose required longer term respiratory support and a change of endotracheal tube was called for. My consultant confirmed with me that I was happy to go ahead with this, then went home. When I extubated her she went into laryngeal spasm and I couldn’t re-intubate her. Having ascertained that we had some suxamethonium, I administered it for the only time in my career – and to my colossal relief the vocal cords parted like magic. It was less ‘see one, do one, teach one’ than ‘do one’.

The last job of a weekend on-call was to record the week’s poisonings. In those pre-computer times, this involved yellow punch cards with holes running around the periphery. Each case was recorded on one of these cards. The holes corresponded to various data such as age and sex, the substance taken and any treatment given. Using a hand punch, you cut a V-shaped notch into the relevant hole. Later, to sort the data for publication, you made a neat bundle of all the cards, then pushed a knitting needle through the hole relating to the parameter you wanted to select. If you shook the cards, any positives with the notched-out holes would then fall off the needle onto the desk. We had many poisoning admissions every week, but I always put the hated card-punching chore off until the very last moment on Sunday night.

The registrars’ on-call accommodation was a ‘cottage’ next to the car park. The previous incumbent had been an Indian doctor. His family were feeling the Scottish cold terribly and he had stuffed the gaps around the windows with cotton wool to try to keep the heat in – a sight that somehow added to the gloom of the place. Overnight, a telephonist was on duty at reception. One of them, an attractive lady with a cockney accent, had a side-line in making charming alarm calls to various other local workers – policemen and the like. She was always cheerfully apologetic when she called you in the middle of the night. “I’m sorry love, cardiac arrest, Ward 2,” she would coo gently. You then had to leap out of bed and run across the car park hoping the house officer had started resuscitation.

In-house entertainment was confined to table tennis and a TV, but while on-call there was rarely much time for sitting about. The news events I remember during my incumbency at Milesmark were Ian Botham’s Ashes series, the Falklands War and an NHS pay dispute. Regarding the latter, the management asked if the medical staff on-call would mind delivering the meals to the wards in the morning if they, the managers, cooked them. We all agreed that this seemed a humane thing to do. After a torrid night of alarums and excursions on the wards, I got called out of a deep sleep about 7am to do my duty as delivery man. Feeling tired and grumpy and with little sense of solidarity, I trudged off to get the small electric vehicle that towed the meal trolleys. It was then I discovered that the porters had hidden it in the farthest corner of the grounds. I finally found it and got it hitched up to the trolleys outside the kitchens. On the way back to the wards, I had to drive past the picket line which consisted of many people I knew and liked. They pelted me with empty fag packets and the like, while shouting “scab!” and “blackleg!” at me. What a laugh.

One other significant event was meteorological. The winter of 1981-82 was incredibly cold. It set in before Christmas with heavy snow and by early January temperatures were below zero all day. Occasional slight thaws had resulted in meltwater freezing onto the stone walls like glass and icicles hung from the gutters of the buildings. I had taken to sleeping in my old-fashioned heavy, cotton-striped, pyjamas, which I wore over a T-shirt. I was still cold.

In the early hours of 10^th January 1982, I received one of the charming estuarine-accentuated phone calls. I threw my white coat on over my pyjamas, stuck my bare feet in my shoes and set off running across the car park which was very icy. We soldiered away for an hour or so attempting to retrieve a patient from the jaws of death. Afterwards, I went over the learning points with the house officer then wrote up my account in the notes. Wrapping myself tightly in my white coat and feeling very tired I set off on the return journey to the cottage. It was a dazzling moonlit night. The car park had been cleared, but the surrounding grass had about six inches of lying snow. The light sparkled on a crust of large ice crystals that had formed on top of the snow over the days since it had fallen. How pretty, I thought, and experimented with breaking through the crust to the powdery stuff beneath. How lovely the Moon and stars look tonight, I mused. Quite suddenly I became aware of a numbness in my nose and ears and had the distinct feeling that icy fingers were reaching through my clothes into the flesh beneath. I began to wonder how cold it actually was – and hurried on to the cottage and its relative warmth. The indoor temperature induced a dull pain in the tip of my nose, ears, fingers and toes.

In the morning I switched on the radio as usual to listen to the news. I learned that the lowest ever UK temperature of -27.2°C had been recorded overnight in Braemar. They added that the lowest temperature ever recorded in the Scottish Lowlands had occurred in Dunfermline where it had reached -26°C. If I’d stayed out much longer, I might have developed proper frostbite, an interesting and possibly unique hazard of hospital medical practice.

*Membership of the Royal College of Physicians, a postgraduate qualification for those wishing to practice general medicine.

** Sea or advection fog caused by the cooling of warm, saturated air.

Guns

In the 1960s, children’s TV featured huge numbers of cowboy shows. Shows like The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Laramie, Bronco and Gunsmoke. I loved them all. It didn’t occur to me that the clothes, hairstyles (and even skin colour) might be inauthentic and anachronistic. To be a cowboy you had to be white; clean-shaven; wear a modern Stetson rather than a bowler; slick back your hair teddy boy-style and carry a six-gun.

I really wanted one of those black Colt Peacemakers in a leather holster with bullets on the belt. The holster would be tied to my leg of course to allow a quick draw. Instead I had to make do with a silvered cap gun in a black plastic holster ridiculously adorned with red plastic ‘jewels’. Still, it was exciting to go to McKechnie’s Toy Shop on a Saturday morning and buy rolls of percussion caps in their little round white containers. You broke open the gun and placed the roll of caps on the spindle, feeding the end up under the hammer. With the gun closed, each time you pulled the trigger, fresh caps were pushed up ready for detonation. It was so tempting to keep blasting away as the singed paper strip scrolled out of the top of the gun. In no time they were all used up – but what a great smell. Those toy guns were played with until they fell apart.

Real guns were an order of magnitude more exciting but my parents were agin firearms. Bill, our farm mechanic, had a twelve bore shotgun with a magnificent leather cartridge belt, but the first proper gun I remember firing was a .22 rifle owned by my dad’s cousin ‘Uncle’ Robbie. He lived on a farm near Ballantrae which we visited. He had a large collection of guns – and walking sticks. He’d known Harry Lauder and owned one of his famous corkscrew hazel sticks that the entertainer had used onstage. Another stick was a strange-looking thing apparently made out of crystal – and he had an African cudgel of primitive appearance and gory provenance relating to the Mau Mau Uprising.

He took us out in a canvas-topped Land Rover with his German Shorthaired Pointer, Blitzen, running behind. Uncle Robbie pulled up in the middle of a field and surveyed the distant landscape. He solemnly informed me a .22 could kill at over a mile and therefore we had to check for any sheep in the line of fire. He chose a telegraph pole for our target and I remember the sharp crack when I pulled the trigger. There was little perceptible recoil, from which I assumed the gun lacked power. We then drove over to inspect the telegraph pole and found the bullet had torn a four-inch long furrow through the timber on one side. I was impressed and a bit shocked by the extent of the damage. Most other family members had shotguns rather than rifles. My mother’s brother Roy kept a gun in the bedroom and used it to shoot rabbits in the policy field in front of the house. The drawer of the bedside cabinet contained 12 bore cartridges.

An early game of stone, shotgun, catapult…

My father had no desire to shoot or fish, stating that the countryside was to be ‘enjoyed not destroyed’. Preoccupied with his business and public life, he took little to do with the day-to-day activities of his three sons. There was never any question of me getting a shotgun or a rifle and my mother consistently refused to allow me the fallback option of an air gun. Aged about 13, I had been doing casual work on the farm and getting little pretend pay packets for my efforts. Once I had generated enough cash I took matters into my own hands.

Wardrop’s Glaisnock Street sports shop was a cornucopia of delights. Guns, rods, fishing tackle and knives filled the interior. I particularly liked the fishing flies in their display cases. I had noticed a .177 air pistol in the window. This was not a proper target pistol but a replica of a modern .45 Colt automatic with a very short, unrifled, barrel that tilted up for loading. It was manufactured by Diana and it looked great. You cocked it by pulling the slide at the back to compress the spring.

One day, before going home for lunch, I gave my savings to my pal Bert. While I was at home enjoying Mum’s usual three-course feast, he went into Wardrop’s shop and asked to buy the pistol. He was clearly under age – and small for his age – but the shopkeeper simply asked a random stranger in the shop to buy it for him. By the time I returned to school in the afternoon some third year boys were using the gun for target practice in the crowded playground. They were very complimentary about the gun, acting like they were big experts. I was relieved to retrieve it from them and smuggle it home in my school bag.

I hid the gun in the log shed. My excitement dissipated later when I discovered the pistol lacked any significant power and was wildly inaccurate. After a few days of covert operations – and no avian casualties – my conscience was troubling me; so I confessed to my mother. She was writing letters at her desk in the lounge when I entered with the gun hidden behind my back. Her pleasure at seeing me lasted until I revealed the pistol. Furious, she confiscated it. Later, to punish me further, she let my younger brother use it. I remained contrite in the hope of a reprieve.

Eventually I got it back and after a few weeks of avoiding the subject she relented and said she would let me have a proper air rifle – provided I only shot starlings and sparrows, which were considered pests on the farm. My mother entrusted Bill the mechanic with the job of accompanying me to town to select a rifle, as he seemed to have the necessary expertise. Bill had three daughters who didn’t share his interest in field sports. In the absence of a son of his own he would take me fishing and shooting. He was a very large, robust cockney who boxed when he was in the army and had driven a variety of extremely powerful motor bikes in his youth. I spent many hours in the garage listening to him philosophise about politics and religion from a very different perspective than my Presbyterian parents. Later he would repair my cars when I crashed them.

The main air rifle manufacturers at the time were BSA, Diana and Webley. All the other boys I knew who had air rifles seemed to own a BSA or a Diana. Dianas had rather disappointing pale wooden stocks. The Webleys had beautiful walnut stocks and looked much more like a serious weapon. There were two gun shops in town. In the end we selected a .22 Webley Falcon from the smaller of the two in Townhead Street. Astonishingly, in order to demonstrate its potential, the shop owner let Bill fire the gun over the counter into a wooden door at the back of the shop. The lead pellet buried itself in the wood. We were both impressed. At home, after a brief lecture about safety, I tried it for myself and discovered the gun could propel a pellet clean through an old-fashioned heavy tin can.

Loading that type of air rifle involved breaking the gun by pulling the barrel downwards. The barrel acted as a lever compressing the spring inside the cylinder. For a young boy this required quite an effort, especially when the spring was new and resilient. A lead slug (we never called them pellets) was then placed in the chamber and the gun closed ready to fire. Firing an air rifle isn’t silent but there is no ‘bang’ – just the noise of the spring being released and the air escaping from the muzzle with the projectile. If you looked down the barrel you could see the spiral rifling which imparts spin to the slug making it fly true. Guns have an alluring smell of metal and oil. If you put a few drops of oil in the barrel a puff of ‘smoke’ could be generated when you fired.

The rifle had open sights with a ‘V’ notch for the rear sight and a vertical post at the end of the barrel for the foresight. I felt sure I was aiming it properly but I kept missing despite adjustments to the alignment. Bill confirmed that the sights were out. There seemed to be a manufacturing fault with the rear one. He clamped the gun in a vice in the workshop and set up a cardboard target on the wall. After a few test firings he filed a deeper ‘V’ in the rear sight and after that the gun did shoot accurately.

Releasing the gun from the vice, Bill reloaded it and, with a devilish smirk, turned towards one of his two apprentices. ‘Right, Eddie, dance!’ he said, pointing the rifle at Eddie’s feet. “Aw, come on Bill,’ said the lad, uncertain how much danger he was in. Then Bill fired – and Eddie yelled. I have no idea whether it was intentional or not but the slug went right through Eddie’s heavy work boots just behind the steel toe cap intended to protect him from ‘accidents’. Bill put the gun down and Eddie’s boot was removed. There was a lot of swearing. The slug was still inside the boot and a small chunk of flesh had been knocked off his little toe. I decided to leave the garage staff to sort this out and went off to look for things to kill.

A few days later I saw what I thought was a starling some distance away perched in the top of an old ash tree and took aim. The bird dropped to the ground, but when I retrieved it I saw to my horror it was a male blackbird. Blackbirds were not vermin and definitely contravened the agreement with my mother. Knowing that Bill tied his own fishing flies and that he used blackbird feathers for some of them I hurried round to his workshop to get rid of the evidence. Unfortunately my mother saw me from a rear window, gun in my left hand, dead blackbird dangling from my right. I protested it had been an accident caused by mistaken identity but the rifle was impounded as soon as I returned to the house.

After another lengthy ban the gun was finally returned to me with the reiterated condition that I restrict my shooting activities to vermin – or old milk bottles in the glass dump. A mini slaughter then ensued. I gave my victims to the farm cats – who were grateful. I kept slugs in my blazer pocket so I could go off shooting as soon as I got home from school but eventually I sickened of this work. The death of my victims ceased to be enjoyable to me in any way and I stopped shooting at living targets. Paradoxically, in later life, I would become a keen ornithologist. My murderous urges as a youngster disturb me now. I must have discussed this with Bill because I remember him claiming Sir Peter Scott shot geese on the Solway as a young man. However this seemed to be more of a point about hypocrisy than adolescent morality.

My Latin teacher for the first two years of secondary school was the great Ivy McCaig. He had been an athlete in his youth, playing wing three-quarter for Glasgow University and the legend was that he’d once chased an offending boy a mile up the nearby Woodroad Park until the lad was forced to climb a tree to escape. He was now in the twilight of his career and no longer terribly interested in schoolboys. We were made to write the Latin in ink and our translation beneath in pencil. He considered me dilatory and claimed my attitude was, ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’ [Matthew 6:34]. He would approach the desk where I sat with my friend saying, ‘We’ll just see how much Stevenson and McDonald have done.’ He belted us regularly for a variety of minor offences including lack of industry and always preceded this with a formal intimation to the female members of the class that retribution was imminent. Fortunately in his declining years he couldn’t really ‘draw the belt’* any more.

Our main school building was Victorian but some language classes took place in prefabricated ‘huts’ supported on brick piers. It was near one of these that the third year boys had tested my air pistol. Immediately below the huts was a steep embankment leading to some flat ground where a modern housing estate had been built. One day, during a Latin lesson there was the the noise of something striking one of the windows on the embankment side – hard. Mr McCaig and some of us boys went over to investigate. A small hole was found in the glass with a starburst of cracks around it. Then there was another impact – and another. It dawned on us that we were being shot at from the rear of one of the houses below.

Mr McCaig sprang into action. ‘Get down girls!’ he yelled as he crouched below window sill level. We boys, convinced we were in no particular danger, continued to stare out of the window trying to see where the shots were coming from. Our teacher didn’t seem to care much about our safety. Then a distorted air gun slug was discovered on the floor. Ivy pounced on it. ‘That’s evidence! Give that to me!’ he cried and crept out of the room on all fours. The police were called and two teenage boys from the housing scheme were arrested. The incident made the local paper.

Over time air guns start to lose their power. Either the spring becomes fatigued or the seals on the piston start to leak – or both. This reduces the velocity of the projectile. The first sign of this is being able to see the slug as a tiny dot flying away from you when you fired in the air. You could also detect an increasing delay between pulling the trigger and the noise of the slug hitting its target. Fairground guns are always wrecked, their sights are way out and the little coloured darts struggle to reach the target a few feet away. Of course this is exactly what is intended.

With time I used the gun less and less. My first university flatmate was an old school friend. His father was a miner and trade unionist who bred canaries in the traditional manner. Local cats were prowling around his outdoor aviary, disturbing the birds, and he wanted to get rid of them. I agreed to let him borrow the .22 and that was the last I saw of the rifle.

In the early 1980s our ‘double upper’ flat in India Street was burgled. The police said the robbers’ technique was to gain access to a stair then ring all the doorbells to ensure everyone was out. They would then target a top flat, pick up a doormat to muffle the blows, and lie on their backs to kick on the bottom of the door. This used the door itself as a lever against the lock and the door jamb would splinter. The thieves took a number of seemingly low-value items from us: shoes, clothes, a replica Bauhaus chess set – and my useless old air pistol. Without an inventory it is very difficult to know when something isn’t there any more and it took several days for me to realise it was gone. For no good reason I replaced it with another similar pistol. In the interim the build quality had deteriorated further and the gun was now even less effective. The manufacturer was no longer Diana but a firm called ‘Sportsmarketing’. After we moved house I did occasionally use it for target shooting in the garden but I hid it away once we had children.

After a child fatality in Glasgow the Scottish Executive decided that all air guns must either be licensed or handed in to the police by the end of December 2016. By then I had forgotten I even had a gun. Being a law-abiding sort I decided to turn it over. Accordingly, with just hours to spare, I took the pistol to St Leonards Police Station. There was a clear (possibly bullet-proof) screen over the counter with a receptacle similar to a bank night safe. The gun was placed in this box which was then tilted back onto the counter side for safe removal of the gun. Before I handed it over the female officer behind the desk asked me, ‘Is the magazine clean?’ I didn’t know what she meant. ‘Is there any ammunition in the gun?’ she said wearily. I said there wasn’t, lowered the gun into the box and it was gone.

Shooting clays with a 12 gauge over-and-under Beretta

* If a teacher could ‘draw the belt’ this meant he or she had the technique to make it really hurt.

Wartime

I was born in 1954, the year World War II rationing ended. I have vague memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and my parents’ distress, but that is all I have experienced in terms of the threat of war. Of course, much later, we had the Falklands War and the various Middle East conflicts, but there was never any question of my British generation being subjected to a general call-up or even having to do National Service. By contrast, as young Americans, my friends Al and Ken had to endure the Russian roulette of the Vietnam War draft. In the end, by good fortune, neither of them were called up. Thanks to Harold Wilson’s refusal to put ‘boots on the ground,’ the worst our British Cold War generation had to contend with was the constant background threat of nuclear war. We read Bomb Culture, but we didn’t have to fight. We did have to endure black and white TV dramas depicting what was in store for us should we survive the initial nuclear exchange. A visit to the decommissioned ‘secret bunker’ in Fife is an unsettling reminder of those far-off times before the Wall came down and Vladimir Putin got very rich.

A regular topic of conversation among us old hippies is how glad we are that we have never had to fight in a war. A friend has a recurring nightmare that he is standing in the front rank of some unspecified army, in the rain, holding a spear. He asks his neighbour what they are doing there and is told that ‘the battle’ is about to start – at which point he wakes up, terrified. While cold steel does seem a genuinely remote possibility, at my now advanced age, 1954 seems terribly close to the largest and most extreme conflict in human history.

Farming was a reserved occupation; one that excused you military service on the basis that your job was essential to the war effort. As a result my family largely escaped doing any actual fighting. Had it been otherwise, I might not be sitting here writing this. Almost all my contemporaries had fathers who served. My mother’s parents were the only grandparents we knew as children. Granny and Grandad were born in the 1890s and married shortly after the end of World War One. Even as non-combatants their experience of that war must have been appalling. Granny frequently told me, ‘You never opened the paper without reading that someone you knew had been killed.’

She herself lost ‘a lad’ she was very fond of. He tried to write to her from a field hospital after he had been wounded. Distressingly, the handwriting trails off mid-sentence and the letter was sent on to my grandmother posthumously. He was an only son and Granny felt very sorry for his parents. She invited them to post war family events – even after she married my grandfather. The elderly couple appear in some of our family photographs – and the letter from their son is still among Mum’s papers.

Even though as a family we were relatively unaffected by the armed conflict in the First World War, ‘Spanish Flu’ (an H1N1 avian virus), arrived with American troops and eventually killed far more people than the war itself. Some estimates are of 500 million infected and 50 million deaths. The virus spread in the trenches and barracks and penetrated every corner of the globe with the returning troops. In fact, there was nothing Spanish about it. The belligerent countries suppressed the dreadful death rate for reasons of national morale, while neutral Spain reported it and became eponymously associated with the disease.

In 1919 flu nearly killed my grandfather who at one point wasn’t expected to survive the night. The fragility of existence in the face of war and disease would have been a basic fact of life for my grandparents in the pre-antibiotic era. Still, the Twenties must have brought some kind of relief. My mother was born in June 1925 and my uncle on ‘Black Tuesday’, the night of the Wall Street Crash of 29th October 1929. The subsequent depression plunged the world into financial extremis and fomented the rise of extreme fascist and communist movements.

I did my surgical house officer job on the orthopaedic wards of the Royal Infirmary. In 1979 I admitted a patient who had broken his hip. It transpired he was from a travelling family and enjoyed being outdoors. He was tanned and sported a neat white goatee beard. He said he had spent the first two years of his life strapped to his mother’s back, sharing all her conversations, and travelling through ‘every town in Britain’. He liked to take a bottle of wine and drink it ‘in God’s good air’. The previous day, whilst walking up the Mound, carrying his bottle, he had fallen and been unable to rise. He asked many passers-by for help but no one would stop, so he had to lie there all night. The next morning a secretary in the Bank of Scotland building sat down at her desk and noticed that the man she had seen lying on the pavement the day before was still there. She called the police and finally he made it to the ward.

I was shocked that no one had been prepared to help him. Presumably they thought he was simply drunk. Having completed the history, I needed to examine him and mark up his broken leg for theatre. I pulled back the bedsheets and was confronted with a heavily scarred and deformed left leg – the opposite side from the broken one. I asked him what on earth had happened. He said, ‘In 1936 doctor a few of us thought democracy was in danger in Spain and so we went over there to fight.’ He had been a member of the International Brigade. I cannot now recall which battle he was wounded in, but he said they wanted to amputate his leg afterwards. He wouldn’t allow it and eventually he recovered and made it home to Scotland.

Having completed the formalities, I told him he would have his broken hip pinned later that day. At that moment a young woman appeared in the open Nightingale ward carrying a baby. She rushed down to the man’s bed, upset, but delighted to see him. At first I thought she must be a relative but it turned out she was the warden of his sheltered housing. She was very fond of him and had reported him missing when he failed to return from his day out.

My mother was 14 when the second war broke out in 1939. The farm was on very flat land near the Firth of Forth at Grangemouth, just north of the Wall of Antoninus Pius. Mum remembered hearing the declaration of war on the radio in the kitchen. Barely a month later, in October, she and Grandad were outside thatching stacks when the Germans attacked warships at anchor in the Firth of Forth. This turned out to be the first German raid of the war – although at the time my mother and grandfather assumed it was an exercise.

Falsely reported in Britain as an attack on the Forth Bridge, the Luftwaffe’s target was actually HMS Hood. A radar failure at Cockburnspath had allowed the bombers to reach the firth undetected. Notably, it was the first occasion Spitfires were used in combat. 602 Squadron (City of Glasgow) based at Drem, and 603 Squadron (City of Edinburgh) based at Turnhouse were scrambled. Said by British sources to be a failure, the Luftwaffe actually hit several ships; 24 men were killed and 44 injured. The Germans lost two bombers, one shot down off the coast at Port Seton and another at Crail in Fife. A further plane crashed in Holland on the way back, killing all the crew. Fortunately the Hood had been moved into dock and was undamaged. Later she would blow up at the Battle of the Denmark Strait when a 15 inch shell fired by the Bismarck hit her magazines. She sank in three minutes and of the 1418 men on board only three survived.

As the war progressed, German bombers would repeatedly attack installations on the Forth or pass overhead on their way to bomb Clydebank. There was an air raid shelter in the garden of the farm and mum said that during attacks they could hear spent anti-aircraft shell fragments hitting the metal hay shed roof. A Polish fighter squadron was based at the neighbouring Grangemouth Airfield and planes would take off low over the farm steading during sorties.

Prisoners of war were held at various places in the Lothians such as Mortonhall Camp and Donaldson’s school. They were put to work on local farms to help the war effort. Some Italian prisoners were sent to my grandparents’ farm. They seemed pleased to be out of the fighting and enjoyed the work. They were nice to the children and even made them toys. At that time the war in North Africa was going badly for the Allies. Granny said the prisoners would tell them in broken English, ‘You see. Rommel do it! Rommel do it!’ which annoyed her greatly. She gave the prisoners their lunchtime sandwiches wrapped in pages from The Scottish Farmer because they contained no war news. As the tide turned under Montgomery she switched to pages from the Scotsman.

Over on the other side of the country, in Ayrshire, my farmer father had yet to meet my mother. During the Second War he was a Special Constable, checking on the blackout in the local town. His cap, uniform and truncheon hung in the hall cupboard and intrigued us as children. We found his gas mask in the attic.

My first flat in Edinburgh was on the second floor of a tenement in Marchmont Road, on the southern margin of the Meadows. I moved there in 1974. The common stair had a rear door leading to the ‘back green’ an area for drying clothes and for some half-hearted gardening. It had the usual unkempt appearance with self-seeded elders, sycamores and long grass. The various properties’ grounds were separated by stone walls. Close to our building there was a large gap in one of the walls associated with an extensive, indistinct, grassy hollow. On the ground floor lived the elderly Mrs Bowie-Deans. She had stayed in her flat throughout the war. One day, on an impulse, I asked her what the odd excavation was in the back green. She told me that it was a bomb crater. German bombers that had lost their way to the target or had to turn back for some other reason would drop their bombs on any urban area they could identify in the blackout. Mrs B-D said the bomb had blown out all the windows at the back of the building.

Later I moved to a flat in a New Town tenement. One of my neighbours was a lecturer in architecture at the at Edinburgh College of Art. He came from a Viennese Jewish family. His father got most of his relatives out of Austria in the 1930s before failing to return from his final trip. Those that remained in the country, including Bob’s father, were lost in the camps. Bob ended up in a displaced children’s refugee camp in the south of England along with future members of the Amadeus Quartet. He remained friends with them for the rest of his life. At the end of the war he was old enough to do national service with the sappers of the Royal Engineers, stationed in the north of Scotland. One day a notice went up asking any German speakers to report to the adjutant’s office. By that time Bob had anglicised his name. ‘How good is your German, Farnborough?’ he was asked. ‘Pretty good sir, I’m Austrian,’ he said.

Bob was sent to Sweden where he discovered his task was to interview the last commandant of Auschwitz, who had been captured trying to escape to South America. It turned out this man had only been in charge of the camp for a couple of weeks and was a pathetic specimen unworthy of Bob’s hatred. The previous commandant had successfully evaded the Allied forces. Later Bob was sent back to Vienna, his home city, as part of the British Army of occupation. He didn’t find any of his family. Vienna is, famously, the city of the film The Third Man. I told Bob his story was amazing. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘All of us who survived have stories like that. Everyone else is dead.’

My boss when I was a medical house officer at the Northern General Hospital was the neurologist Ernest Jellinek. He was another Austrian refugee of part-Jewish origin. His mother’s family estate included a chapel where Hitler had been christened. In the 1930s it was clear things were getting very serious and his family fled Austria for Britain. On the outbreak of war he was interned on the Isle of Man – which he found tolerable and even interesting because of the brilliant people he was locked up with. Later he was offered the chance of release if he was prepared to join up. At first he did labouring jobs, but graduated to a tank regiment and described his reconnaissance missions in northern France as being a ‘moving target’. He was wounded twice, the second time badly, losing an eye and ending up in a brain injury unit back in England. He said that was what sparked his interest in neurology. You can hear him talk about this and the rest of his fascinating life on the Edinburgh College of Physicians website.

https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage/ernest-jellinek

Many years later I attended a conference in Vienna. A colleague who is a keen student of military history asked if I wanted to see the ‘flak towers’. I had never heard of them. These are massive concrete anti-aircraft towers which also served as bomb shelters for as many as 30,000 civilians. The walls are 3.5 metres thick. They were constructed in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna from 1940 onwards and were virtually indestructible.

Understandably they are not publicised as a tourist attraction and coming across them in the parks around central Vienna is a stunning experience. During the early part of the war Allied bombers could not reach Vienna but after the invasion of Italy the city was heavily bombed. By that time fuel for the ammunition lifts was running out and the flak batteries on the platforms could no longer be supplied. For a while German defenders held out in the towers which were impervious to the Russian artillery. If you are ever in Vienna I recommend you seek them out.

https://www.hamburg.com/architecture/11748556/st-pauli-bunker/

Working as a doctor has given me access to many veterans’ stories which they often volunteered unasked. A colleague examined a nonagenarian Spitfire pilot who was shot down over northern France. He was picked up by the resistance and smuggled through the south into Spain. After 18 months he made it back to Britain and rejoined the RAF. After the war he found the field in France where he had crashed and picked up a piece of his plane which he kept on the mantelpiece.

Many Polish servicemen stayed on after the war rather than return to a communist régime. A Polish hairdresser I met was warned by a hand-delivered letter from his mother not to return. All it contained was a newspaper cutting describing how Polish ex-servicemen with combat skills were being sent to gulags. He never saw his family again. I also met a German prisoner of war who had been held in a camp at Gosford in East Lothian. He decided to stay on in Scotland after the war ended. He said he liked it there and he had married ‘a beautiful girl from Aberlady’. I suspect his home had also been sealed off behind the Iron Curtain. My own school friends included a smattering of Polish and Eastern European surnames, the sons and daughters of WWII world War servicemen.

My parents’ generation are all but gone now, and with them the chance to hear their first-hand experiences. If they seem lucky to us it is only, as my neighbour said, the fact of their survival that allows us to contemplate their remarkable stories. It is not just the anecdotes that are going, something of the reality of war is fading to be replaced by a thoughtless disregard for what they went through. Worse still, revisionists are waiting to reinterpret history in the light of current prejudices and fashionable tropes.

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