| Description | Supplementary recording by Dr. Stella Henriques. No date given. Available in two parts MS 3620/3/16/1 and MS 3620/3/16/2
Transcript of recording:
This is Stella Henriques speaking.
H I have thought of a few things to tell you that will interest you about the goings on at Marischal and after, when one is more of less trying to start a career. To begin with though in Marischal College in 1918, you see we knew each other right through for the next two years, the medicals but you remember also that there were Arts, Science, Agriculture, Commerce, all sorts of other people there, all doing the same first year stuff, we were all in together. Right, 1918 we were a smallish number of men because they were mostly disabled men back from France or somewhere and a very large class of women. The next entries in the spring of 1919, were still a large entry of women, and I think a number of men now demobbed from the War. 1919 Autumn was I think an enormous entry; so large that they had to cut the classes in halves, so that in the morning the poor lecturer had to lecture and then had to do the same lecture all over again in the afternoon. We were told which one we attended and I was re attending the chemistry class which I hadn't had my sign up for it, in the year before and so I was with all this crowd and the first year medical students. Our chemistry Professor was Professor Finley, he had taken Professor Soddy's place, who had gone to Oxford and whereas I never understood what Professor Soddy was talking about, this man was absolutely marvellous, as far as my poor brain was concerned I really knew what he was talking about. Other people very superiorly said Oh this is chemistry for babies, well this made me ashamed to acknowledge it but the class was dreadful. It was an enormous class, filled and with an awful lot of these young men who had returned from the army. Whether it was just a relaxation of stress, strain or discipline, they were the most unruly disciplined, undisciplined I should say, crowd you ever came across. They behaved disgracefully, so much so that poor Professor Trailer, I remember, being told that he had lost his temper, all he said was Gentlemen, I will not call you gentlemen, you are parasites living on government gratuities, and that's about what they felt like. They were really very dreadful, they were noisy, they were rude, they disrupted the classes, they were really very naughty, and one, when the Professor was there, this is Professor Finley, they behaved fairly well, but if he happened to be away, they was a Dr. Gray, whom used to take his place, and I have no doubt that he was a most worthy and splendid person, but he did not command the respect that the Professor did. He was a deputy and they played him up terribly, they really were dreadful and one afternoon, the poor man was in such a, well he in despair he turned, or told the ringleader to clear out of the room. You never saw anything like it. They first of all he came down the steps from the back of the lecture room, trailed down and in front of the thing you see where the counter was to go right through to the door of the room and to go out. Behind them straggled three four five six and it became a flood of men all traipsing out after in, in support. I sat still, I was shocked and sitting beside me was Betty Mitchell, she was the daughter of a doctor in the town, and she had two elder sisters, Peggy and Dorothy, and I think Dorothy was in her third year, and perhaps Peggy in her final year. I knew them by sight but that was all, Betty was a very sweet friend, she was in her first year. As all these men went out, I noticed that one of the men in my digs; I had two men lodging in a room across where I was in my digs, James Leslie, he went out with these men. His stable mate you might say, went to the morning class, William Chalmers. William Chalmers was a agriculture and commerce, and Leslie was agriculture and art. And I saw James go out with the rest. A few, half a dozen of the girls, who thought it was very sporting you see, went out with the men. The men received them with grateful pats on the back and cheers and so forth, and I sat still with the rest of the women. The majority of the women stayed….Betty half rose in her seat and she said I can't stand this, I will have to go and I pulled her down. I said you move and I'll never speak to you again. So there we were. The class went on for about ten minutes and then poor Dr. Gray dismissed us and the poor wretched men who had the courage to stay behind, poor wretches, pushed us in front to meet this, as we opened the door, howling and jeering mob. Of course we just, they couldn't do anything to us women, and we walked straight through them and looked neither to right nor left. What they did to the unfortunate men I don't know, they probably debagged them and did all they could. Anyhow, the point is that a day or two later, James Leslie and I came face to face in the passage outside our digs and he said to me 'I was surprised that you didn't come down and join those others, the other day", I said " I was surprised to see you there, I was ashamed for you", and he said "Oh I don't know", I said "You know, you know as well as I do, you would never have done this if it had been the Professor and why do it to his Deputy, I said the poor man was unable to answer back, is that clever to bait a man whose helpless. I was very ashamed of you and he looked ashamed. He mumbled something about well yes I know I shouldn't have gone but when I saw all the others you see I felt I couldn't stay. I said "Coward" and marched off very furiously. And a day or two later, Betty came to me and she said "Peggy and Dorothy have asked me to thank you for making me stay, they say they would have been so ashamed of me, if I had gone out. So there you are. Poor Professor Trailer I may tell you died two years later, and it was commonly thought that it was those dreadful classes that killed him. Well he was an old gentleman, he had been my father's Professor, poor old Charlie Niven, who did the Physics, bless his heart, I don't know how he got on with them I am sure, but I know he was oldish because he had been, so Dad told me, an aspirant for the hand of my Aunt Amelia, and she had been married ...how many years, so there you are. There was another thing that struck us too, it took a while to strike, but the preponderance of men over women became more and more noticeable as the entrants came in and the women became fewer and fewer into various students, I don't know how many, and these men were, once the men were back you see, nobody wanted the women, the women who qualified. It was men they wanted. But before that, just for the social life of the town, college, the university, we used to have very happy class dances, botany dance, physics, zoology, chemistry and even up to the pathology that was our third year, we had class dances, and they were very happy occasions, our men were more of them, and we really had quite a choice of partners although we never learnt the sort that had to have a partner to take you there or bring you home or that sort of thing, we went off to those dances perfectly happy. I can't think where we had most, we generally went to Kennaway's for the dances, but there was somewhere else but I can't remember where, where you had a buffet supper and all the rest of it. We were perfectly alright, but by the time we had got to our fourth year, we then discovered you see, that we were the surplus women, we were told, it must have been the government, informed us that there were two million surplus women and who would never marry because there were no men to marry them and that was that. And said they cheerfully, from the Government I suppose, you must work to justify your existence, that is a phrase that we really learnt 'and what was more, we in Aberdeen weren't the only one, we women, because I had a friend who was a student at Goldsmith's college in London and in later years, she is dead now, but it must be say the last eight or ten years, that she and I were talking about this in front of her sister in law who was quite a generation younger than us, and I said this had to work to justify your existence, and she was shocked. She had no idea that such a thing could be said, and , she looked towards my friend who was sitting there, and she said "Is that so?" and she said "Yes, that's exactly how they spoke to us". We had got to find a job for ourselves and work. And so it was that when we were capped, we knew that we were in for trouble to find jobs. At the time of the capping, I think I told you that Dad and I were capped together, he said he was blowed if he was going to have the same degree as mine, and he swotted up Greek, and he took an examination in Greek and he didn't have to do a clinical test because he came under what they called the old regulations, and he had to write a thesis. He wrote a thesis on diphtheria and so it came about the day we were capped, we weren't capped actually together, first of all the MD's got their capping, this was all in the same ceremony, and then we went up and got our MB's, but I know the Professor, what was his name, Sir George Adam Smith, shook me by the hand and said He had never done such a thing before, as cap a father and daughter at the same time, so there we were. Well the point was that Dad he came up for the capping, and I remember thinking Chris Care who'd been again one of my friends, she lived up in, no they were living in Aberdeen by that time,'' her father had retired, he'd been Rector of Elgin Academy, and that Dad said to me "You know I feel sorry for that child, she such a long way from anywhere, now I will invite her to come home and stay with us for two or three months if she likes, so that she can go and do interviews, it will be closer to London for her. And he proposed this, and they accepted it, and eventually Chris came down and went to and fro to various interviews. She never got a thing, they were all hospital jobs she was trying for you see, and there were no hospital jobs open to women. Once there was a man, he got it and that was flat. Well, I am talking about our dances, it finally came that obviously the men had got there own partners, and they didn't want any extra females I mean we couldn't go and have fun and all dance together. Times had changed, we used to do lancers, and eightsomes, foxtrot came in, two step, one steps and all sorts, waltzes, all kinds, we did them all. But they'd got their own partners and they began to feel a draught in that when they were getting up a dance, there wasn't so much money about because we weren't joining in on this, we said "What's the point if we don't get the chance to dance, why should we come" and they approached Jean Ritchie who was the ringleader of our little gang, there were six of us, Jean Ritchie, Teeny Lane, Chris Care, Gertie Angus, and Beston Barr, who was really half a year behind us, she came with the spring entry, no. autumn entry of 1918 and myself. So Jean was approached by the young men organising a class dance of some description, I don't know what, and they wanted her to bring us along to swell the numbers, and to fork up for the tickets. So Jean pointed out that we were the extras and that we didn't see much hope of getting dances. Oh said they; you come and we guarantee dances for you, so we were taken in. We forked up our money, we went and as we thought we got no dances. The men not only sort of didn't dance among themselves with the women, but they clung to one partner cheek to cheek, the whole of the night, and they wouldn't swap partners, let alone look round to see what we were doing. So in the end we went up to the ladies room which was upstairs in Kennaways and sat on the floor. Somebody found a pack of very grubby cards and we played rummy until it was time to go home. After that Jean spoke her mind to the gentleman who had approached her, and we had no more to do with it. Didn't worry us really, you've got to face up to these things and that's happened. So ,and Chris came down as I say to Gillingham, and she went hunting for things. Dad said to me, at the time of the capping, just after it when we were going down home, he said now come down soon, because I have taken two rooms for you in Canterbury Street, and I thought this was very strange. I always thought I was going to be with him, and he doesn't want me now, I wonder what I'm to do. Well I couldn't do anything, and I didn't know for a long time after I was told what had happened, you see, when Lloyd George, this is going back a bit, Lloyd George dealt, got the panel going for the working man, it did not include his wife and family, so that the working man still had to fork up the usual doctor's fees for his dependants. Well there had always been club doctors in the past, where they would, a family would pay perhaps sixpence a week or something like that, to a doctor, or rather to his collector and get treatment but this was, it was, but also the doctor did private work and the club was a side line. It wasn't, it was alright, it was done but in this case, the friendly societies got going and in Gillingham there was the Victor Medical Benefits Society, it was a properly constituted society. It had a dispenser, he provided drugs, and it provided two doctors, and the doctors were salaried, I notice only on the radio the other day, that the BMA still sets its basics against the salaried doctor. Well the salary doctor is completely on the pale, I don't know what happens to him now, but in those days, you were beyond the pale, no medical man in the town would speak to you. You were absolutely and utterly ostracised, and Dad knew this, Vie, what happened was that he had been assistant to a doctor at Stroud, on the other side of the Rochester bridge, for a number of years he was very well liked, and well known and he thought he would start up on his own. He came over to Gillingham, and he took a house and he put a plate up, and he rented the house of course, but no money and there we settled but I can't think that we were there more than four or five months when in this medical society, the doctor, yes, it was divided into two, one doctor was in the upper part of the town, living in the house provided by the committee and the other doctor was in the lower. The Doctor in the lower part went and the committee members came to Dad and asked him to take on the job. They offered it to him, he didn't seek it and he knew what it entailed. It meant the social ostracism, that he would have no friends amongst his peers as it were, or anything and he didn't know what to do and he went up to London and he saw a number of his own friends who were consultants and he put it to them. He said " What am I to do?" And they talked it over and they said Take it, its sure money which is something in medicine in those days. You lived on whether your patients paid you or not and hoped for the best, but they said it is sure money and you have got your wife, your old grandpa and the two children. And they said take it. He said what am I to do for consultants, for hospital. He said nobody will speak to me, I know that. There is no one I can ask for help or anything. They said we shall help you, let us know and we will come down, and they did bless their hearts. We had some very fine consultants who cheerfully gave up an afternoon to come down and see Dad's patients, and the point was they were all paid for it mind your it was a 3 guineas consultation in the patient's house and Dad would collect together half a dozen cases that really did need seeing by a consultant and the consultant would come down and Dad would take him round and he would see the patients, if necessary he got them into hospital in London, he never bothered about the hospital in Rochester, because nobody spoke to us anyhow and they did this. I remember Dad drumming it into me the fee for the consultant is 3 guineas. Its got to be ready on the mantelpiece, ready to give to the consultant. If by any chance the patient hasn't got the money, or isn't ready, then you must pay it, but whatever happens your consultant must be paid. I had that drummed into me. Anyhow that was from the British working man's point of view, he was told how dared he presume to think of taking me on. Silly idiots I would have worked for nothing for him, but they can't understand that. What they do understand is that having got a hold on any kind of an educated man they had got to get their money's worth out of him and that's the solid truth. Right, at the same time the British Medical Association writes you when you have qualified, ah now you are qualified, you must join your trades union or words to that effect. Send, we'll let you have the BMJ half price, or free was it for half a year, I don't know which, it was quite a bait and also that you must apply, but the application mustn't go to London it went to the local BMA committee or your town or area. So I applied and sent it in and the next I knew I got a letter from the secretary whom I didn't know at all, I think he belonged to Tunbridge Wells or somewhere, I don't know and, saying that they wanted to know was I acting as an assistant with my father, was I on the job at the club. And I wrote back and said, No I was living in the house as his daughter, well that was something. Then a bit later on ....... Not long after all this happened a notice came to all the doctors in the town, telling them that the local council had decided to ask for people, someone to come and do part time school medical inspections the Doctor Muir, the medical officer of health had found that he could not really get round to it all, so we were asked to apply and at the same time, to say how much we should require for incassion. The work consisted of two half days a week, two afternoons I would be at the schools, and the following week would be one afternoon and one morning, the afternoon again at schools, the morning giver anaesthetics, gas, for the school dentist. I didn't apply because I felt I was too new in the place, and one of the more established doctors would want it, and Dad of course had no time at all to do anything extra. However a few days after the letter had gone round, or the notices, I was approached by the proprietor or manager, I don't know which he was, might have been both, of the only good bookshop we had in the town, I dint know him personally, I just knew him to say good morning to him and that sort of thing, but nothing else. However he approached me, and he said, Have you had that letter from the council about the part time schools. I said Yes, he said 'Have you applied, I said No, I said I thought I was too new in the place for anything like that, they wouldn't want me. `Oh he said I wish you would apply, some of us feel that it would be very nice for the girls to be examined by a woman, so of course I toddled home and I told Dad all about it, and he got out the papers, and looked at them, and he said Oh it would be very good for you, it was such good practice. You'd get to know children, and their mothers and so on, and they might like you, you might even get a little work out of this, but he said, it would be very good experience. I said well that's alright, I said how much have I got to ask for each session. Well there we were stumped. We had no idea how much to ask, there was no one we could ask, because nobody would speak to us, and we just had no notion what to say, we had no idea what was the custom or anything. And Dad said well you know I have heard, that they are going to take the money off Dr. Muir because he asked for this assistance. And he said it would be very dreadful poor man. Look let's say a pound, a pound a time then. So I said right, so I wrote and I said I was applying for the job and I want a pound a session, and later on of course we were all summoned, those who had applied, and we sat in a waiting room together to be interviewed. The only person I did know was the one woman doctor who had appeared in the town the same time as myself, but she had come as the wife of a doctor, who had come to take up a partnership. She, I understood, she was London trained, she called on me once, she decided that I was quite negligible and that in any case she was going to make up a better class practise, and she wouldn't have to bother about me. But she nodded to me. I sat there listening and I discovered to my horror that the correct and proper fee for one session, a session was one and a half guineas. Well I did not know, of course, but there. I went in for the interview as we all did, one after another, I was a bit nervous because, well I had never been interviewed before, but Dad's parting words to me were 'Don't be afraid of them, remember they can't eat you.` Well that was very comforting, and they were very nice to me. I didn't know a soul there until I discovered that the Chairman was my friend Mr. Chapel who had told me to apply. So it was rather nice to see somebody I knew and then I don't know what they asked me now. I went and some days later I had a letter saying that I was appointed to this thing at a pound a time, so I thought alright. I started work, working at the schools in the afternoon, two afternoons a week, and in the morning one morning I would do this dental clinic and I learnt a tremendous lot from the school dentist about giving gases. I really became quite good at it and they had the most primitive of apparatus to do gases. You couldn't have had anything more primitive but I learnt to do them and I really did them quite well. Anyhow, no sooner than this had been settled, then I got another letter from the BMA secretary. He must have been tired of it, and he said was it true that I had got this job and if it were true had I really said I would do it for a pound a time, and didn't I know that a guinea and a half was the proper fee to have asked. Well I really felt I had enough and I wrote back and I said, Oh yes and the thing I was to do was to approach the council and tell them that I must have this guinea and a half. Well I thought of all the, how could I, so I wrote them and I said Yes I had this job and yes it was a pound a time, that I had not known about the guinea and a half but I could not possibly go back on my word to the council and it would have to be so. And I added that I felt in view of the fact, and that it was obvious that whatever I did was not going to be acceptable to them, and I was obviously not a fit and proper person to associate with such gentlemen, I would withdraw my application to join the BMA. So that was that. However I was attending my dentist at the time, who was a qualified medical man as well as dentist, though he never practised as a doctor, and he had known me since I was a schoolgirl. He was interested in knowing how I was getting on, and I told him, and he said you made a mistake. I said what did I do, he said you lost your tempera I said yes I did, he said well you must write and acknowledge the facto he said it is no good losing your temper, you only make matters worse. He said but they will respect you. You see think of the unfortunate secretary, he has to write these letters, he don't know who you are from Adam, so you do it right. Write and say, well yes your still not applying for your membership of the BMA, but you regret having said more than you should have said, or words to that effect. So I did, and that was the finish as far as I was concerned. Meanwhile, I had been in practise well over a year, oh yes the British working man now decided they'd have a go at me and they, the committee that Dad worked for, told him that I was a rival practitioner living in their house, which of course was true as far as living in the house was concerned, so I had got to get out. So out I went, I found a funny little place, jammed in between a fried fish shop and garage but I managed for many a year I think in that place, and then I managed, my patients came, I did more and more work, I slept there. In the end I had a housekeeper and we got on and finally I moved to a rented house at the lower end of the town, next door to a pickle factory actually, but you never smelt the pickles in the house, they were very particular and I was perfectly happy there. Meanwhile I had come across, oh yes bless my soul, Louis Park. Louis Park graduated when I did in Aberdeen, and she poor soul had not been able to get a job at all, the only bit of employment she'd had was to look after a handicap child, nothing else. And she had come down to stay with an uncle who was a retired doctor living outside Maidstone. Now, not only that, but Maidstone did have some connection with me in that I was living in the days when you took out tonsils on the kitchen table and the surgeon who did that, was the Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon from Maidstone, from the hospital there, Mr. Gibb, and he was very willing to come over to Gillingham and take out those tonsils, and I gave the nitrous oxide, and gassed the people and he whipped out their tonsils in double quick time. He was very adept, he never guillotined people, there were no tags left behind, he had invented a very interesting scalpel, all for his own invention. Actually the blade was alright, but the handle when it, just not far from where it joined the blade, he had bent it, so that the blade was at an angle and he could scoop it round the tonsils and whip them out in no time. He was frightfully good at it. Well Louis Park, she came over to see me and we foregathered and she was staying with this uncle as I say, and one day Mr. Gibb, the surgeon, wrote to me and he said he was having, the BMA people were having their meeting at his hospital in Maidstone and he was going to demonstrate his technique and talk about it and so on and I was invited to come to this, and Louis must have come on the strength of her uncle's invitation probably and we went and sat together. Well of course nobody spoke to us, that was alright and Mr. Gibb demonstrated his do and he talked about it and then when he finished all these men went off to have a tour of the hospital but Louis and I sat on. And the secretary, I never could remember his name, it was, I always thought it was a bird name, either Sparrow or Starling, it might have been one or the other, I don't know. Anyhow he was gathering his papers together, and you know how it is, they pass round the paper for people to sign their names to say who has been there. However Louis and I had not written on this and he approached us and he said "I do not think I had you ladies your autographs. So Louis took the paper and she explained who she was and all about her and that was alright and then he handed it to me. I signed it and I said, you and I have had some correspondence and he said oh have we, he said what name and I told him. He stood stock still, his jaw almost dropped. He took my hand, he shook it warmly, he said I'm so glad to meet you, this has been a dreadful time for both of us, I cannot tell how awful it has been to write these letters and if I were a private person, I could tell you more. So that was that, that was the end of that story. The other thing was also, that I had decided that after a whole year, yes a whole year I never had an evening off. I worked every day, all day as it were, I was an all that sort of thing, and I said to Dad, I want an evening off. I'll take Wednesday evening, and then I can go out with you. He had Wednesday evenings off, he said you cant. Every Doctor in the town is out on a Wednesday, somebody must be there for emergencies and so I had to wait, I had Thursday's off, and really I did all those emergencies. I dealt with heart attacks, there were quite a few heart attacks, and, by the way, the thing you used for heart attacks in those days, was Hoffman's Anodine. If you look it up in Sutherland's Dispensing made easy, or in one of the old dispensing books, you will find it has about 20 ingredients but it works, mind you it works. What I used to do was inject about half a teaspoonful into the patient and make them drink the other half. Most extraordinary but it brought them round, it was frightfully good. Anyhow I had heart attacks to deal with, I had a strangulated hernia one night and I certainly had one appendix. The appendix was rather interesting because I must have been eating with Dad even though I had moved house as it were, at the time, I was only a few doors from him, the first place that I went to, and it was a lunch time. There was a knock at our front door, I went to it to open it, found a strange man standing here and he asked me if I was who I was, and I said yes and he said my names Langford and I have come over from Rochester, I'm the, you looked after that old appendix lady for me. He said I am taking out her appendix tomorrow over at the nursing home, you come over and help me. So I said well thank you very much, and I went over and I did assist him. It was wonderful to be spoken to by another medical. He introduced me to the anaesthetist and he was civil to and at the end of the whole do, he handed me three guineas. I said I never thought of getting any money. He said My girl when I was a youngster I devilled for other people and they never gave me a penny and I made up my mind if ever anybody devilled for me they should have their share. You take it. I discovered afterwards that he had been a Registrar at the Royal Free and of course understood working with women, so that was how it was. We had our one and only contact with the local medical people. I also, what else did I do, oh yes I developed this Wednesday evening surgery, not only to any, what you call it, emergencies, I always said to the patients after I dealt with them, who is your Doctor and let them know tomorrow morning and that, of course nobody ever said thank you for anything but I did say that having Wednesday evening on duty and it was our early closing day, that my panel became augmented by all the shop assistants, the girls, and I did quite a lot of what you might call preventative medicine. Because they worked in most draughty conditions very often with chilblains and what have you, so I saw to it that they got anti catarrh vaccine at the beginning of the winter to tied them over and we used to give them, heaven knows why, calcium and parathyroid tablets for the chilblains and circulation through the winter too. So it was all very interesting, I enjoyed it. The thing about the schools were, and its a very funny, because after, when, after I had come back from Persia and settled in England in 1947, I got a job with the West Riding in Yorkshire again school clinics and things like that, and I found that nothing had changed about the attitude of the school teachers towards the school medical inspections. They loathed them, they loathed them when I started on them, they still loathed them. You see they upset their precious routine and they did not like it, but just as a matter of how they looked at it, some of them were decent to me. This is when I was starting doing this and considered me a necessary evil and so they did everything they could to make it easy for them and for me. They gave me a room, they helped me with the getting of the parents along and everything else and so that I was able to get on with it, but there was one lady who disliked me intensely and she made it very clear and I was not given any place of my own to examine the children. I had to examine them in her office, I had to do it at the corner of her desk. She chatted to the parents and all the rest of it. You can imagine how difficult it was. In those days, they used to send for about 30, 25 30 children for an afternoon, an awful lot and, but the 'thing was that you, the parents could and did refuse to have the children examined. So that I could always count on about 5 refusals which certainly brought the numbers down, but it was really very very difficult, with all these interruptions and she wanted to get things out of the drawer, near where I was sitting, and I had to sit back, honestly it was very difficult. Nurse who had to test eyes out in the corridor in the back, it was in the cloakroom. Children passed too and fro between the testing card and the person who was being tested and nurse was frantic. I spoke to Dr. Muir about it, I tried to tell him it was very difficult but as she would never have dared behave like that to him, he didn't believe me. He thought I was being awkward and he just passed over. So I just carried on the best way I could until one day, he said something to nurse on her own in the office I suppose, and he said something derogatory about me and my clinic or something. And nurse let fly, and she said you should count yourself lucky that you get any kind of inspection done at that school at all. And she told him exactly what was going on. He was quite shocked of course, he said why hadn't I said. She said that I had tried and he hadn't believed me, so that was that. However he did a thing which came, how useful it proved to me 20 odd years later. He didn't fight with the lady, he wrote to her and said that as it appeared difficult for her to provide me with a suitable place in which to examine the children, he would like the children sent up to the office up in the town, for them to be examined. That he thought was the only way to ease matters. My dear of course she did not want 20 or 30 kids trailing up in the street, with one of her teachers if not more, in attendance and to get them home again and so on, so in the end I had a peaceful time. The one time that I did blot my copy book with her was the day when I was delivering a lady. I did all the midwifery, I don't know what the song and dance is about, we examined, we delivered all our women at home. I did it not only did I do it but, I later on as I carried on working, they rebooked me as Dad said, that was a great comfort. It meant they liked me to be rebooked. But I delivered those women quite cheerfully and nobody worried about it except the older midwives, or maternity nurses. Once one walked out of the house as I walked in, left me alone with this woman in labour. Her mother scouring the town for someone to help me and her brother aged about 10 bringing up cans of hot water and shoving them outside the bedroom door, what a picnic. Never mind, I did it but the point was I used to pray that all my .... cases would come off at night so that it didn't interfere with the day and they always did except one day. When I found myself with an afternoon session and a lady in labour just about the time the thing should take place. So of course I couldn't leave her and I sent a hasty note off to the nurse, the school nurse and I told her what had happened. I said .do tell the mothers what has happened and to ask them to do what they think fit. If they care to wait believe me I shall come as soon as ever this is over but if they don't want to wait well and good, I will still examine the children and tell the headmistress so. So eventually I arrived, I suppose about half an hour before school closed and I was greeted by this very irate head you see. She had waiting on, would never get done and goodness knows what. The mothers had been and gone and oh dear oh dear. Well I said nothing I just gone on with the job. I said I was very sorry I couldn't leave my patient and that was that, and I said to nurse afterwards what did happend. What did the mothers say. Well she said what would they say, the moment I told them what it was, they said immediately. , Good gracious me of course the poor wretch, she cannot leave the woman we'll go home. Tell her nurse not to worry, we'll leave the children, the children can be examined and we'll go home. If there is anything wrong you can let us know, and she then looked at the headmistress who was still raving at her you see and she said I thought to myself well you poor thing what do you know, anyhow. Because of course in those days, all these teachers especially the heads were unmarried because if you married you lost your job in those days, they didn't have married school teachers,. what would they do now I wonder? Never mind, so there it was and I carried on, presented with a job of anti natal clinic and infant, yes infant welfare clinic as well to add to my afternoon sessions but now I got a guinea and a half for them. Dr. Muir said to me, no nonsense about a pound, I said alright, so I was alright with that, and that's what I did. Later on, much much later on, oh yes, a woman doctor came and put up her plate in Rochester, my headmistress of my old school met me and said you've got a hated rival,. I said where, and she said in Rochester. Oh I said, I must go and see her and so one Thursday evening off I trotted. I must have been at some sort of a do because I had got a pot of jam I remember and I went over to Rochester and I clambered up the stairs to this souls waiting, consulting room and she was sitting there alone and I walked in and I said, my name is Stella Henriques, I've come over from Gillingham to wish you luck and put down that pot of jam and gave it to her. She was very surprised, I hadn't realised that the local BMA people had warned her specially to have nothing whatever to do with me. It must have rather shaken her when the outcast came to wish her luck. We made good friends, she came over to tea with me and something like ten years later after I was in Persia, she came out to Persia also and worked in the mission with us and so we were all very good friends indeed. That's the finish of that.
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