Dr Samways Writes to the Editor

In April of last year, during the first lockdown, I spent a few days staring into my screen at a painting by Stanley Spencer of a WW1 army dressing station in Macedonia.[1] I was working on a poem. I’d written that the surgeon was “equipped with ether and antiseptics, scalpels, catgut, gauze…” The reference to ether bothered me. I liked it for its sound and rhythm, but worried that chloroform might be more historically accurate.

I did what I often do when I’m struggling with a medical question, or with something relating to statistics or animal husbandry or spreadsheet software or how to cook fish or the migration of birds. I emailed my brother Tom.   

From the fishing village just up the coast from Boulogne to which, with his Irish passport, he has retired from surgery, though not from the pursuit of science, he responded within a few hours. What he sent was unexpectedly detailed – a series of letters, published in the BMJ from September 1918 to June 1923, debating the rival claims and relative dangers of these two anaesthetics.

The most persuasive among the correspondents was a Dr Samways. I was vaguely aware that Tom was writing a book about Samways, but this was my first close encounter with the engaging figure he had been moved to pluck from obscurity. [2]

My concern was quickly settled. Both substances were used during this period and each had its champions. Ether was cruder with more harmful side effects but chloroform more likely to be lethal if carelessly administered. Ether could stay in my poem, though Samways favoured chloroform:

Mishaps occur with the sharp scalpels of surgeons, which blunt ones would have avoided. Why not use blunt ones? Because, though they escape mishaps, they bruise the tissues, cause after-troubles not less tragic though less spectacular, and embarrass the surgeon. Chloroform, too, is a sharp-edged knife, but, personally, I have found it, in every way, a more convenient and more controllable anaesthetic…  (page 150)

For much of his professional life, Samways ran a general practice in Mentone on the French Riviera, but in 1914 he had left France for Exeter in the South of England to work in one of the new War Hospitals. Here, among other things, he served as an anaesthetist. His attitude to the chloroform-ether debate is characteristic. Use whichever is best for the patient – best during surgery but also in the longer term when the surgeon has moved on – and train the practitioner to use it properly.

His letters on many subjects, written to the medical journals over a period of 40 years, draw on available evidence as well as personal experience, employ metaphors and analogies not as rhetorical flourishes but to clarify arguments, and are consistently concerned with humane patient care.

Samways was a generalist of the best kind. He turned his hand, and his mind, to many things, but always wanting to learn for himself and to improve how things were done. Writing about ambulances during these war years, he complains that “many… are a mechanical disgrace, with half the body overhanging behind low back wheels, thus providing a maximum of discomfort for the unfortunate occupants” (p 183). In treating deep entry wounds, where it’s necessary to clean the wound and drain infection outwards from the furthest inner point, he designs his own elongated instrument to make this possible. Never off-duty, on leave in London he observes soldiers with their arms in splints, too many of them set in the wrong position for the best long-term outcome.  

He expresses concern for the psychological wellbeing of patients, as well as their physical comfort. Accustomed to the way oxygen is administered in France, he is shocked to see that, in England, “a terrifying cylinder, recalling a trench mortar, is brought to the bedside, and, after much struggling with cocks, ice-cold oxygen is supplied to [the patient’s] lungs. The oxygen should first be passed into rubber bags in another room, and left to warm to a reasonable temperature before it is taken to the bedside” (page 151).

His career as a general practitioner in a provincial resort in France was, itself, a pragmatic exercise in making the best of what life made available. When he earned an MD at Guy’s Hospital for his research into rheumatic heart disease, and particularly mitral stenosis, his future as a specialist seemed assured. But his progress was derailed by a diagnosis of tuberculosis, probably as a result of time spent in the post-mortem room studying diseased hearts.

Following a common practice for sufferers who could afford it, Samways boarded a slow steam ship for a voyage around the world. He reported later that the best part was being ashore in Western Australia. Having experienced the discomfort over many months of cold damp air, he decided that the warm dry climate of southern France would do him more good. He acquired an additional MD from the University of Paris and opened his practice in Mentone.

It’s possible that his experiences at sea informed his later attitude to the fresh air fetish:

Is it not time more discrimination were shown by the medical and nursing professions in the advocacy and employment of fresh air?... Some friends of mine were lately present at a concert given to the patients at the Brompton Hospital. So great was the draught that music put down on the piano was actually blown off, while two assistants were required to hold in place any piece of music which was being played. (p. 143)

As early as 1898, Samways foresaw the possibility of a surgical cure for mitral stenosis. In the 1920s, long after he had given up any prospect of becoming a cardiologist, he was writing letters to the BMJ from France, correcting more eminent correspondents on the mechanism of the heart. But the kind of mechanical intervention he envisaged would not be achieved during his own lifetime.

In his many disputes, Samways seems to be in the right more often than not. But it’s typical of Tom that he is reluctant to blame historical figures for their misconceptions. In an eye-opening chapter on the persistence into the twentieth century of routine bloodletting, he argues that “there is no harm in being aware of just how wrong doctors can be in the hope their present-day counterparts, and I include myself, will be more reflective.”

An alert critical mind, a restless search for knowledge and an openness to the possibility that things could be done better are qualities shared by the subject of this book and its author.

Dr Samways Talks to the Editor is available direct from Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Until the end of September applying the code PROMO25 gains a 25% reduction on individual purchases.

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[1] Stanley Spencer: Travoys arriving with wounded at a dressing station at Smol, Macedonia, September 1916, painted in 1919, Imperial War Museum 

[2] Tom Treasure: Dr Samways Writes to the Editor: the Life and Times of an Exceptional Physician, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021

Tested to destruction

‘I have a higher IQ than Stephen Hawking. I have a higher IQ than Einstein.’  So said one of the boys competing in Channel 4’s Child Genius, which is run in association with Mensa, ‘the high IQ society’.   

Full disclosure: I have a lower IQ than either Hawking or Einstein. I know, because I was tested by an educational psychologist when I was 12 along with my three younger siblings – my mother probably negotiated a cut rate for the four of us.

Even fuller disclosure: I have a lower IQ than most of my siblings. You might think this explains why I believe IQs are a lot of hokum, and you may be right, though I’m inclined to attribute it to less subjective factors. I can’t remember what I thought about all this when I was 12, but since then I’ve interacted with a lot of people, and the idea that they could all be placed on a single scale and assigned a number that would tell me anything useful about them has come to seem increasingly absurd. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t plenty of people a lot cleverer than me in lots of different ways. But I do think the different ways are as important as the cleverness, which can reveal itself suddenly in unexpected moments, or slowly over time.

IQ testing was once integral to British education policy. It came to light decades ago that Cyril Burt, the psychologist behind the tripartite system of secondary education established by the 1944 act, had falsified his research. In The Mismeasure of Man, published in 1981, the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould raised the lid on the whole murky history of IQ testing, exposing the statistical fallacies, cultural assumptions and circular arguments on which the construct depends.

And yet as recently as 1994, a couple of American academics, Herrnstein and Murray, were willing to argue in The Bell Curve that IQ is real, measurable and resistant to change over generations – and that, by the way, the average IQ of African Americans was 15 points below that of white folks and likely to remain so.

At least Child Genius has a healthy ethnic mix. It is also essentially a game show, with ‘sudden death’ rounds that defy the most basic principles of educational testing, and therefore not to be taken seriously. It might be one of the more cruel examples of reality TV, exploiting children for our entertainment and turning their remarkable abilities into circus acts. But better that the concept of IQ should find its natural home here, alongside Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, than influencing public policy.   

A no to independence is also a kind of yes

I’m traveling in California so it’s on National Public Radio’s financial program Marketplace that I first catch wind of the swing towards Scottish independence. Marketplace covers it as a currency story: the British pound takes a dive in the wake of new polling news.

There are pragmatic concerns here that I suppose might interest me. But my first response is an emotional one. I’m not ready for Scottish independence. A Santa Barbara friend, with no ancestral connections to the British Isles, tells me she’s all for it. She’s rooting for the Scots and is delighted to see them standing up to the Brits, the bankers and big business. What’s my problem? I’ve got Irish roots, haven’t I? Why aren’t I cheering on my fellow Celts?

Well maybe that’s one reason why. I was born in England with an English father but never quite think of myself as English. My mother was Irish and my upbringing – our upbringing, I have to say since there were nine of us – had a distinctly Irish flavour. I spent twenty years of my adult life in Wales. My brother Wilfrid worked as a GP in Edinburgh for twenty years, where I visited him regularly, and in Shetland for a couple more. I have an instinctive preference for joining these pieces together than for splitting them apart. The same impulse will contribute to my vote against leaving the EU when it comes to that.

And I’m acutely aware, by the way, that Scotland's departure would increase the proportion of anti-Europeans among the rest of us.   

When my American wife Leni and I were in Inverness recently we asked people what they thought about independence and got some interesting answers:

It’ll force us to grow up and stop blaming everything on the English.... For me, it's like wanting to be your own boss instead of working for someone else.... Who hates the Scottish? No one. Who hates the English? Everyone.

They were the pros. The antis just came straight out with it:

It’d be madness.... Complete lunacy.

Incidentally, our tiny sample revealed an even bigger gender gap than the opinion polls do. All our yeses were men, all our nos were women. Listening to our no-voters I had the distinct impression that some heads would be knocked together if it was up to them.

The nice lady at the Culloden visitor centre was way too canny to express an opinion. Given that this is a place of bitter memories – the site of the final defeat of the Jacobites, leading to the brutal destruction of the highland way of life by the ‘Butcher’ Duke of Cumberland – and a place of pilgrimage for Americans seeking their Scottish roots, I admired her tact and was inclined to put her down as a no, though I would have had to count her as undecided if I’d been conducting a poll.

Considering the length of the campaign, the number of undecideds has apparently remained stubbornly high. For some, like the lady at Culloden, don’t know might translate as not telling. For others perhaps it reflects that heart-versus-head thing commentators have been talking about – indulging a wild yes impulse for as long as possible, maybe, before settling down to the practicalities of no.

There I go with the kind of patronising assumption guaranteed to irritate a nationalist. What would be wild or impulsive about voting for independence?  More important, it concedes too much in handing over all sense of imaginative possibility to the yes-voters, just as the Better Together campaign has done in emphasising fear – fear of change, fear of uncertainty – over hope.  

The yes campaign has not made the mistake of dwelling on the past – ancient grudges have not featured. But it’s hard to ignore the more recent grudge that must fuel the urge to go it alone – the feeling that since the 80s the British political establishment has engaged in a process of neo-liberal economic restructuring that Scotland never signed up to. Half the population of Britain south of the border could raise their hands and say we never signed up to it either. Understandably, Scottish nationalists don’t see this as Scotland’s problem. And I can certainly see the appeal to disaffected Scots of wiping the smug smile off Cameron’s face and giving him a bloody nose on their way out the door. 

Paradoxically the very features that have enabled the Scots to protect themselves from some of the ravages of this right-wing project, including the creeping privatisation of the NHS – Scotland’s historic identity as a country, its tradition of separate institutions, and its 15-year-old parliament – have provided the platform, unique in mainland Britain, for its departure. Other disgruntled regions and disregarded minorities don't have the same option.  

So my heart and my head are united on this issue. My heart says I don’t want Scotland to leave the family. My head says my political interests, and the interests of those I care about, will suffer if it does.

I strongly suspect that Wilfrid, who loved Scotland’s more rugged landscape, taught himself the bagpipes and took to wearing the kilt at family celebrations, would have voted yes. If something in Scotland claimed his soul, his political calculations also saw the benefits of living and working north of the border – years ago he told me, with a baleful shake of the head, that the NHS in England and Wales was finished.  

But I would have argued with him about how to vote. On the one hand, independence is no guarantee of a socialist future – a Scotland having to clamour on its own behalf for international investment might find itself settling for something less idealistic. It's possible that independence would result in a shift to the right on both sides of the border. On the other hand, walking out on the UK’s problems is, in its own way, a failure of imagination. Austerity will not serve as a permanent excuse to screw the poor and reduce taxes on the rich. We won’t be ruled by Cameron and Osborne forever. And we have more chance together than alone of ending their temporary ascendancy. 

Running deeper than the ebb and flow of politics, there are surely bonds of culture and history and shared interests that unite us across our geographic borders.

My father and Mrs T

In the fractious debating society that was my childhood, my father would sometimes grow eloquent on the evils of socialism. By his own account, he had fallen for left wing ideals in his youth, but had come to see the error of his ways. Education paid for by the state, healthcare free at the point of delivery with government-issue orange juice thrown in, a generous family allowance to be collected every week from the post office – we benefited from all these provisions, and I never heard him utter a word against them. But socialism he was definitely against.  

This might sound like a paradox but it made more sense back then. For one thing, there was a lot more socialism around. When my father complained about socialism he wasn’t thinking about health and education. He wasn’t thinking about pensions either, or the Gas Board or British Rail.

  

He'd grown up in harder times. He pursued education as long as scholarships would allow, but at 16 he was apprenticed to his father’s trade and became a carpenter and joiner. During the postwar housing boom, he worked as a foreman for a house-building firm. After a couple of years, he asked for a pay rise. When the boss refused, they got into an argument and he was fired on the spot. Living in a company house and with a wife and seven children to support, he decided to go into a partnership with a friend who had £1,000 to invest, and embarked on a precarious business as a speculative builder.  We might have been children of the welfare state, but he was a self-made man.

What he was really talking about when he talked about socialism was stroppy workers holding the country to ransom, and people thinking the world owed them a living, and union leaders with the power to bring down governments lording it over the rest of us with their beer and sandwiches at number 10. When Margaret Thatcher was elected Conservative leader in 1975, he and my mother finally joined the party they’d been voting for all those years, and from then on their faith never wavered.

I heard about Thatcher’s death from a homeless man sitting outside Holborn tube station. He held a scrappy cardboard sign that said: RIP Thatcher. Dingdong the witch is dead. I had no idea this old song was about to go viral. The homeless man looked about 28, too young to remember Thatcher in office, a generation too young to have rioted against the poll tax, bought his own council house, lost his job in a Yorkshire coal pit or bought shares in a newly privatised utility company. I was surprised he cared one way or the other.  

Next day I learnt from the front page of the Daily Mail that he was part of a movement: “30 years of left wing loathing for Lady T explode in sick celebrations of her death”. Violence had, apparently, “erupted at ‘death parties’ across the country”. More young people with eerily long memories. Even so, it struck me as an odd choice for a conservative paper to relegate to the inner pages all its pictures of their heroine with her children, and with the Queen, and with victorious troops in the Falklands, so that it could lead with THE FLAMES OF HATRED. But I suppose the Mail knows how to keep its readers happy.

American TV took a more upbeat view. From a quick sampling of CNN and MSNBC I gathered that Thatcher’s greatest achievement was working with Reagan to bring the Soviet Union to its knees, though no one asked how the two leaders had brought this about, and that without Thatcher Britain would have turned into Greece, though no one explained why it might not just as easily have become Sweden. Mysteriously, Thatcher was also credited with being Britain’s first working class prime minister. I wondered what her father, Alderman Roberts, whom she revered for his business acumen, would have made of that.

For a more nuanced view, I turned to the Guardian. They had Philip Hensher on hand to imagine an alternative history in which Thatcher lost the Tory leadership election, leading to a present in which “Perhaps we would be waiting six months for a mobile telephone, and paying the bills to the post office… I don’t believe it would be a very advanced telephone, either.” Scary stuff. On another page, Ian McEwan was explaining that “There was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her… She exerted a glacial hold over the (male) nation’s masochistic imagination”. This put my father’s enthusiasm in a whole new light, though it didn’t explain why, to the day she died, my mother kept a commemoration Thatcher plate on display among her very best china.

Personally, I won’t be worshipping at the Lady’s shrine, but I won’t be dancing on her grave either. I’ll admit it’s hard to forget the particular air of vindictiveness that she brought to the task of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich, a job her successors have attended to with greater tact and more polished smiles. But although she seemed to make it all happen by sheer willpower and self-belief, there have clearly been larger forces at work in our increasing subjugation to unregulated markets. 

Thinking about those debates of my childhood, I recognise now that what allowed me to fulfil my parents’ aspirations for me was neither pure socialism nor untrammelled capitalism, but a mixed economy, with scope for individual enterprise, support for those who needed it such as mothers with children, and the opportunity for anyone from any background to achieve their potential. The educational doorway I stepped through, which was opened by Atlee’s Labour government in 1946, has been squeezed shut in successive stages by New Labour and the ruling coalition. You can’t pin that one on Thatcher. And she didn’t bring down the Soviet Union either, and she didn’t invent global capitalism, and she wasn’t actually a witch.

Redefining marriage? What's so new about that?

The US Supreme Court is currently debating whether to uphold or overturn the 1996 Defence of Marriage Act, an attempt by Congress to obstruct the spread of same-sex marriage across individual states. On this issue American politicians are still divided largely on party lines. 

Here in Britain the Conservatives have seen the benefits of indulging popular support for same-sex marriage, an inexpensive way of shedding their image as the nasty party while continuing to grind the faces of the poor. Opposition is left to backbench traditionalists and church leaders, most vocally the Catholics and of course, standing precariously on their established status, the Anglicans.

In Britain, the state got into the business of regulating marriage in 1753, while leaving the Church of England largely in control. Oddly, the legislation established some kind of exemption for Jews and Quakers, though not for Catholics, who had to continue being married by clergymen whose status they didn’t recognise. 

In 1836 the Church lost its monopoly, when parliament introduced civil marriage. Now, like any other religious organisation, the Anglicans can refuse to preside over a wedding ceremony, but have no power beyond that to decide who may or may not marry. On the question of same-sex marriage, they’re entitled to their opinion but it really isn’t up to them.

I’ve got some tangled history with this subject. I was raised Catholic but at 16, prompted by a wildly rebellious urge, joined the local Anglican choir. I learnt to sight-read hymns in four-part harmony and acquired the knack (an Anglican peculiarity) of reading the words of a psalm from one book and the music from another. For this I will always be grateful. I also discovered to my surprise that the vicar thought highly of historical figures I’d been taught to think of as villains, such as Thomas Cranmer. Not many years later, no longer considering myself a Catholic, I got married in an Anglican Church.

After I was divorced (a humane solution beneficial to both parties) I went out for a while with a nice Catholic girl, until she told me she’d have to break it off because I was a married man. Young and naïve as I was, and something of a literalist, I consulted a Catholic priest. After some questioning he told me that my marriage needed no annulment being null from day one, since, while still technically a Catholic, I had neglected to seek the permission of a Catholic bishop, permission that would have been granted on condition that my fiancée and I undergo a course of training on the significance of marriage.

(The vicar who married us had, in fact, delivered his own, very Anglican, version of marriage preparation. I remember a meeting in the vicarage during which he blushed and stammered, said ‘You’re clearly both intelligent people’ and handed us a pamphlet which instructed us that sex was ‘very, very pleasant’.)

I immediately told the nice Catholic girl that it was OK, I wasn’t married after all. I saw to my dismay that she wasn’t as thrilled with this news as I had been. I would later be told often enough that ‘It isn’t you, it’s me,’ but would never again be dumped with the line, ‘It isn’t me, it’s the Pope.’  

By the time I was ready to get married again (to Leni Wildflower) I’d lost interest in organised religion, but Leni had spiritual inclinations and was quite keen to be married in the eyes of some god or other. So I approached a friend who happened to be an Anglican priest of a fairly liberal kind. He turned us down because of that first marriage, which he told me remained sound as far as the Church of England was concerned whatever the Catholics might think.

So Leni asked a rabbi, a professional colleague in California, who said, ‘I don’t do mixed marriages’. Since the rabbi was female this hair-raising response could not be blamed on a strict adherence to orthodoxy.

In the end we settled for a California Methodist who allowed us to stamp on wine glasses to cries of mazel tov, and to say whatever we wanted about God, Vishnu or the cosmos.  

Early collaborations

I drifted through Grammar School in one of the lower streams. I worked out later that it wasn’t only the boys who were streamed – in some subjects it was the teachers as well. In particular, there was a dynamic English department of which I was barely conscious. Meanwhile our English teachers were the backwoodsmen. They were less than enthusiastic but I liked them. Worse things can happen at school than benign neglect.

For a couple of years we had Alf (as I’ll call him here), a non-specialist who, having overseen the decline of his own subject, was kept occupied overseeing us. Our weekly homework was usually a list of three or four essay titles, dictated out of his head into our exercise books: The Worst Holiday, My Hobby, Loneliness – that kind of thing. The last on the list was always the same: Anything else you can think of. His comments on my work were laconic. 15/20 Good. 14/20 Quite good. 16/20 Good if original. For an essay on Crowds, I cut out and glued a picture from the Gloucestershire Echo of people waiting on the platform to see the Queen pass through the local station. I pointed out the danger that the people at the back might push forward in their excitement, throwing the people at the front under the Royal train. Alf wrote: 14/20 Not very likely.

It was probably my father who’d given me that thought. Health and safety was one of his things. But he was good at stories too. Under the generous rubric of Anything else you can think of, he helped me with a few tales of adventure – first person narratives, often set, I realise now, in the pre-War world of my father’s imagination, in which a couple of pals might set off on their bicycles into the countryside in pursuit of a burglar, to be congratulated by the local constable once the burglar was safely behind bars. I did all the writing, but he was happy to feed me plot ideas while he got on with other jobs.

The story I remember most clearly involved a local convict, whose escape is reported in the local paper. Our first-person hero and his friend do some research and decide to stake out the home of the convict’s aged mother. The convict catches our hero snooping around the house and takes him hostage at gunpoint, while the police, summoned by the friend, gather outside with loud hailers. There seems no way out of this impasse. Then the aged mother turns on the radio, and the newsreader reports that an escaped convict has captured the son of local builder Wilfrid Treasure.

‘You’re never Wilf Treasure’s son!’ the convict says. ‘Best boss I ever ‘ad, ‘e was. I was working on ‘is site, diggin’ the footin’s when they came to arrest me. Insisted on paying me out in full, your dad did, before ‘e’d let them take me away. ‘Ere, Ma, put the kettle on. I’m giving myself up.’

That’s the way I remember it, including the forest of apostrophes. I’ve no idea what Alf made of this crudely embedded commercial  for the family business. He gave me 15/20 and wrote: Implausible, but quite well written.

A new year revelation

As new year’s eve approaches I am moved to reflect on new years past. One I remember particularly I spent with my brother Patrick, sadly no longer living. I was 16. He had just finished his first term as a dental student at Guy’s Hospital. I’d hitched to London to visit him – 100 miles up the A40. It was a journey I was familiar with for other reasons – a girl I knew in Clapham – but that would be a different story. And unlike those other trips, which ended with me slipping back into the house in the small hours of a Sunday morning (unmissed, thanks to the random comings and goings of large-scale family life), this new year’s visit was probably made with the knowledge and consent of the parental authorities.

As midnight approached, Patrick and I were making our way down Charing Cross Road towards Trafalgar Square. Patrick had learned to play the trumpet but liked experimenting with other instruments. His favourite at that time was a baritone horn (an upright brass instrument like a small tuba) which he’d found in a junk shop. It was battered and tarnished and leaky around the valves, but he could knock a decent tune out of it. As we wove our way down the street, Patrick was blowing air into the horn to warm it up and working the keys with his fingers. Was he wearing fingerless mittens as I picture him? Quite possibly.

Suddenly we were confronted by a drunk, a wreck of a man, his bloated drinker’s face sallow under the streetlights. He pointed an uncertain finger at the horn and said, ‘Bet I could get a better sound out of that thing than you.’ He wasn’t quite steady on his feet, and it had been a struggle for him to get that sentence out, so Patrick must have reckoned he was safe. Since he was holding the instrument, he went first. A small crowd gathered. I fancy he played Auld lang syne, but I might have imagined that detail, or imported it from another memory. When he’d finished there was applause and some raucous cheers, and Patrick handed the horn over.

Cradling the instrument, which looked smaller in his arms, the drunk reached deep into the pocket of his rumpled mac. I thought it was a handkerchief he was after – he could have used one. What he pulled out was a mouthpiece. That’s when I began to think we might be in trouble. He removed the mouthpiece from the horn, passed it to Patrick and fixed his own in place. He played Abide with me and gave that thing the kiss of life. The crowd where we stood fell silent. I’d never imagined such a sound could come out of such a ruin – the horn or the man.   

Looking for a plot

So the new novel is in the hands of my agent, and I’m itching to break ground on a new one. But about what, and set where, and in what form? There’s something odd about this searching for a subject – a period of vague preoccupation. It feels faintly undignified. ‘Nothing to do?’ my father would ask. ‘Come to me. I’ll give you a job.’

I’m descended from doers and makers – carpenters on my father’s side, tailors on my mother’s. I was brought up to respect the dignity of labour. Shoulders were to be kept to the wheel, noses to the grindstone. ‘Make way for the working man,’ my father would say, coming through the kitchen with his tools and his saw-horse. He was never happier than when he had a job on. He saw university education, out of the reach of a pre-war working class boy, as the route for his children to professional lives – in medicine, preferably, or the law. But book-learning in itself had an uncertain value. And paying attention to dreams (see Marx, Hitler and Madame de Pompadour) like other forms of introspection would have come under the heading of ‘worrying about yourself’, which was not to be encouraged.

My mother, who was sometimes visited in dreams by saints or by the dead, and had been known to act on their promptings, would have had more sympathy.  

Depending on such irrational sources of guidance is, of course, ridiculous. Except that the rational sources are no more reliable. A female writer friend tells me that people (not in the business) are constantly urging her ‘do a Fifty Shades of Grey’. But the random success of mummy porn, like the random success of boy wizards, teenage vampires,  and Vatican conspiracies, is not useful data. You can only create what you’re inspired to create and hope someone buys it when it’s finished.  

My father earned his living as a spec builder – putting up one house at a time, or small developments of two or three houses – always dependent on a prompt sale to pay down debts. Alongside the stresses and the frustrations, no doubt compounded by the pressure to provide for nine children, he regularly experienced the pleasure of a day’s work done for its own sake rather than for an hourly wage. Once a house was near completion, buying another site meant having somewhere to move the shed, the scaffolding and the cement mixer, and offered the prospect of future profit. But it also expressed a creative impulse. He too was always looking for his next plot. 

Playing the saw

Leni is in search of gefilte fish for Passover. I suggest an outing to Golders Green – a good excuse to see an unfamiliar bit of London. She asks if it’s on a tube line, and the words of a song come into my head:

Finchley Central 
is two and sixpence 
to Golders Green on the Northern Line. 
On the platform
by the kiosk 
there you said you’d be mine…

I only know this song because my older brother Patrick (who died too young) used to sing it. Where does it come from? YouTube directs me to The New Vaudeville Band. These 70s musicians playing their banjos and trombones with 20s-style slicked down hair and moustaches remind me of Patrick playing the saw, and I recognize the influence.

To play the saw, you need a tradition panel saw and a well-rosined violin bow. Grip the handle of the saw between the knees, sharp edge towards you, with the blade rising vertically, the tip held in your left hand (or your right, if you’re lefthanded). Applying the downward pressure, bend the saw into an S-curve – so that the blade, as it rises, curves to the left and then back to the vertical. Think of the saw as a cello and start bowing. To change the note, increase or decrease the bend in the saw. It requires the same kind of touch as it takes to get a note by rubbing a wet finger round the rim of a wine glass, or to get a harmonic out of violin string.

To play the saw in public, Patrick wore a dinner jacket and a lofty expression. And in case anyone’s wondering, the song Finchley Central does include instructions to change at Camden Town.