Category: Creative Non Fiction

‘This decaying fabric, this unknowable terrain has become my biography, the euphoria then the anguish, layers of memories colliding, splintering and reconfiguring’. 

Laura Grace Ford

St. Mark’s Church sits opposite the start of Roman Road. It was gutted and converted into sheltered housing in the 1980s, after dry rot bloomed and took over its wooden interior. The builders dug up a stash of gold coins as they excavated the foundations in 1848; three bowler hats full, apparently. It was called Roman Road because it formed part of the route between Bath and the Roman settlement of Abona, where the northwest edge of the city meets the Severn Estuary. Roman Road is a place destined to be a cut through on the way to other places. A site for secret stashes of gold to be buried and left behind.

I live just over the other side of the motorway from Easton. When the ghost started haunting me, I avoided walking along Roman Road for a while. Instead, I stuck to the logical paths through the city that guarantee an efficient passage from Place A to Place B. But that’s not how ghosts work when they haunt the city you call home. There’s no escaping them, and they can’t leave, either.

‘I read the past everywhere. It’s like an overlay to the city, two maps, two cities – past and present – and you can always switch your view, walk through the streets a ghost, with you as if you were a spectre.’

The Place of the Bridge, Jennifer Kabat

Bristol has been a port city ever since Abona was established. It’s a city of hills, basins, bridges and gorges built on migration, movement and slavery. Many of the neighbourhoods in Bristol are named after saints. Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, the labyrinthine city of marshland, lagoons, offshoots and dead ends, has his name imprinted over Easton’s streets. Water and earth rub up against each other amongst Venice’s networks of canals, bridges and squares. The footsteps of past, present and future residents overwrite each other along its walkways. All of this creates fissures and in-between spaces where ghosts can appear.

More than twelve rivers and brooks run through Bristol’s valleys to the docks, into the Severn Estuary and out to sea. As in Venice, these waterways circle around Easton and cut it off from the rest of the city. It can sometimes feel like an island. Many of the rivers have been culverted; the River Frome is one of them. It flows from its source in the Gloucestershire countryside, passes through the town I grew up in and then skirts around the edge of Easton, buried under concrete. It’s easy to forget it’s there most of the time but, even though the water is hidden, its influence can still be felt if you pause and linger. A quiet pull, a whisper.

Ghosts need straight lines to move through a place freely. Centuries ago, all over the UK, pathways called corpse roads, lych ways, coffin paths or bier roads wound and weaved their way for miles across the rural landscape. They linked villages to their parent churches and often took the most barren and remote routes. Mourners who couldn’t afford a hearse would carry their dead on foot along these designated paths to be buried. They never took a direct, logical route. Our ancestors believed that if they were straight the spirits of the dead would find their way back to haunt those left behind. They also believed ghosts couldn’t cross water. Corpse roads often cut across streams, rivers and marshland to further ensure the dead didn’t return home.

Many of the straight lines evident in Easton’s streets have been overwritten over the years. This might explain why the ghost that haunts me is stuck on that stretch of pavement next to the park on Roman Road. It’s tangled up in the rows of Victorian terraces interspersed with mid-century cul-de-sacs and tower blocks that make up the urban geography of Easton. It’s stranded on an island. It couldn’t escape even if it wanted to.

The past also teaches us that the living haunt us as well. Processions of sprites, luminescent corpse candles and wraiths were rumoured to travel along corpse roads after dark. But once a year, in April, on St Mark’s Eve, apparitions of the living, those who are destined to die during the next year, make their way from their homes to the closest burial place. In the past, villagers would gather at lych gates at midnight and wise women would watch over the corpse roads and churchyards, to see whose ghostly figure would pass.

~~~~

My steps have scored Roman Road’s paths so often that something of me must also remain for other passers-by to spot in unfocused moments. An occasional flickering glitch barely visible to the naked eye. Flesh and bones are transient, but ghosts remain to reappear again and again. I mostly drive straight through Roman Road nowadays, not leaving a mark. On my way to somewhere else in a rush, navigating the parked delivery vans or stuck behind a mum in an SUV reversing into a too-tight space, dropping her children off for gymnastics.

It’s easy to stop noticing even the most solid of things when you see them every day. In the middle of Roman Road, sandwiched between Anstey Street and Barrett Street, is a large red brick building that dominates the streets around it and houses Hawks gymnasium. I’d rarely notice it when I passed it every day. The building has lived many lives before, of both industry and dissent. Built in 1897, it was first a corset factory, then a laundry, then a storage space for engine parts used by British Aerospace. It was left empty for years until 1987, when it was squatted briefly before being gutted by a fire in 1989.

‘The time is out of joint’

Hamlet, William Shakespeare

I started noticing Hawks gym again after I had children. It has a reputation for being one of the best gymnastics centres in the Southwest; it’s probably the only reason many people from the more affluent areas of Bristol ever venture to Easton. Ava went to gymnastics there when she was six or so, but stopped after a term: ‘It’s too boring Mummy, we repeat the same things again and again.’ I secretly felt proud of her rebellious, independent streak. To be honest, I was also relieved not to have to drag myself out of the house early on a weekend anymore. Every Saturday morning, I’d peel myself out of bed and pile Ava and Joe into the car, both sullen and complaining, before driving over to Easton.

In my memory, every one of those mornings was grey and wind whipped, dragging Joe and Ava through the park opposite Hawks by the arms of their coats, their sulky bunched-up fists wet and cold. Head down, red wine hangover stinging my synapses, horizontal rain bursts slapping my face. Crossing the road, running up the steps, ushering Ava into the fusty, crowded reception. Since then, sometimes when I’m passing, I catch a flash of my back pounding up the steps to the entrance, Ava’s chubby fist in my hand. I am rubbing shoulders with the fainter ghosts of the corset factory and laundry workers pouring out of the double doors at the end of the day. Mothers rushing somewhere they don’t want to be, gymnasts’ feet hitting the mats in the same spot over and over, the clack clack clack of rows of sewing machines.

Hawks gym is clearly visible from the M32 motorway, a swath of Brutalism that sweeps past Easton, elevated on concrete pillars. It provides a constant background roar of traffic; the sound that has lulled my children to sleep since I moved back to the area in 2013. Work began on the motorway in 1966, a safe distance away from the gentle crescents of Angela Carter’s bohemian Clifton. The M32’s construction embodied the promise of a new, more dynamic future for Bristol. It cleaved through the streets of Victorian terraces which housed the city’s workers, rupturing the green parks and cutting Easton off from the rest of the city. The route planned for the motorway intersected with the River Frome just upstream of Easton, so the river was redirected and culverted as it passed Easton’s western edge. The river’s natural course through the city has been altered and forced underground so many times it no longer flows freely. There is a cycle track you can take from Easton to the city centre that follows the motorway, a short corridor of grass, tarmac and graffiti. If you walk along the path and look closely you can catch glimpses of the river stagnating in the dark through metal grilles set in the concrete.

~~~~~

Opposite Hawks gym is a rank of shops. There’s Pak’s Butchers and Star Cash and Carry with its silver bowls of bruised fruit on display outside. Above the cash and carry, a small flat with a grubby closed-eye window remains unchanged since Katie lived there during the long, stifling summer of 1995. We’d both just moved to Bristol and I’d walk there some evenings from my house on Easton Road. We’d smoke a joint with her flatmate, and when we got bored she’d pull her trainers on and we’d run to the pub giggling, Katie still wearing her pyjamas. We’d pool our change on the bar for a pint each; nineteen and fearless. I often think about Katie and her flatmate when I walk along Roman Road. He ended up on smack; I wonder if he got clean.

Two doors down, on the corner opposite St. Mark’s church, is No.12, the new cafe that opened a few years ago. It’s conspicuous in its sophisticated blandness, like it’s been ripped out of a Sunday supplement and pasted over the takeaway that used to be there. Remains of the building’s previous life are still visible if you know what to look for, like a palimpsest. You can see it in a flake of white masonry paint above the new fascia revealing where grey stone used to be. Or in the long, low sill that still runs along the large windows, where a row of people would perch every evening, waiting for their orders of pizza or kebabs. Windows dripping condensation, softening the harsh strip light glitch and buzz inside.

The first time I sat in the courtyard of No. 12, it had already been open for four years. It was a hot, bright Saturday morning in 2018, the summer after I met O. He’d visit most weekends and I’d sometimes meet him off the train at the station opposite St Mark’s church. That day I’d got there early so I was killing time. I sat listening to the coffee machine puffing and screeching inside, nondescript electronica floating through the air. At that moment the café felt flat and calcified; nothing left to be added to its serene occupancy. In direct contrast, the street outside was a constant overwriting of footsteps and noise; the rich busyness and unfolding of an always shifting and building geography. I remember feeling suddenly complicit in the othering of the Easton on the other side of the courtyard’s high whitewashed walls, just by being there doing nothing with my expensive cappuccino. I quickly drained my cup, returned my book to my bag and stepped back out onto Roman Road.

I walked the long way to the train station instead, past the shops and through the summer-humming park. Before the park, unseen behind bricked up ghost doorways, are the backyards of a row of fixed up cottages. Their front doors face onto Albion Road, which runs parallel to Roman Road, like they are politely turning their backs on it. My friend Greg bought the middle cottage for £26,000 in 1999. I rented a room there for a couple of years not long after. A mossy red brick path weaving through tangles of jasmine and green led to the front door. Inside, the rooms were covered in wall hangings and full of cheap furniture, and on weekend mornings empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays left from an after-party the night before. Greg and my close friend Helen, now his wife, lived there until recently with their two boys. They sold the house for £399,000.

~~~~~

‘You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming.’’

For the Sake of a Single Poem, Rainer Rilke

My old bedroom window looks out over the high wall onto Hawks gym, and I always glance up at it when I’m passing, but the blinds are usually down. I remember telling O they were happy times living there when we passed one time and paused by the peeling green park railings to look up at the window, but now I’m not so sure. Too many sleepless nights, whether drug or anxiety induced. Too many people passing through, not enough time spent still.

One scene comes to mind looking up at the window. I am lying on my side in bed propped up on my elbow on a dull, white-skied Sunday afternoon, with last night’s makeup still on. I’m watching a film and passing a joint back and forth with Louie, who is sat leaning against the wall on the other side of the bed. The smoke curling and mugs of hot, milky tea soften the jagged edges of our hangovers. Then the sound of drumming starts drifting up from the street outside. We both get up to look out of the window in time to see a procession passing along Roman Road. A joyful, proud collective heading from the Sikh temple on nearby Colston Road dressed like jewels. The men and boys wearing white kurtas, orange turbans and elaborately patterned coats, the elders at the front carrying blue and orange flags, the younger drummers jostling behind. The procession briefly fills the road and pavements. They are gone in a minute or so, heading in the direction of St Marks Road, leaving nothing behind except the fading sound of drums. I pop my head out of the window to try and follow their route, then I ease the sash window back down and we return to the TV. Louie moves closer, wrapping his arm around me, squeezing my shoulder and settling in next to me.

When I think about living there I also think about the black cat. Sometimes I’d feel a hint of soft fur sweeping across the back of my calves as I ran up the stairs, or I’d catch a glimpse of a black cat’s tail curling around the corner at the bottom of the stairwell as I walked back down. It happened enough times that I started to believe in ghosts. We didn’t have a cat until two or three weeks before I moved out. A stray tortoiseshell cat had turned up out of nowhere one day and would sit motionless for hours on the red brick garden path, staring at the house with intense yellow-green eyes. One day she strode into the kitchen as if she had never belonged anywhere else.

In another scene, I’m lying in bed again, but this time it’s late at night; one of the last nights I spent living in Easton. I’m in bed with the stray cat, who jumped in and curled up next to me a few minutes before, lapping her rough tongue over the back of my still hand.  I’m staring out of the window at the streetlight outside Hawks, half-packed boxes surrounding me.  It is silent and the height of summer. I don’t want to move out of the cottage anymore, but I’ve accidentally made myself homeless. I was meant to be moving to London to live with Louie. Greg had already found a replacement tenant, who was moving into the room in a week’s time. Louie had rung me a couple of days before to announce that he didn’t think me moving in was the best idea anymore.

I decided to take the stray cat with me a week later when I moved into the flat I’d found at the last minute. It had newly painted white walls and pristine polished wooden floors and was on a leafy, quiet street two miles away, on the other side of the M32. It was called a clean slate. When I moved there, the quiet sometimes deafened me, but the cat filled the silence with her warm weight across my feet at night and loud miaows at the door during the day. As I unpacked boxes and filled kitchen cupboards, I made myself a promise that, from then on, I would stop believing in anything that didn’t seem completely solid. The cat disappeared a few weeks later. I was inconsolable, but still couldn’t see the absurdity of the promise I’d made to myself.

~~~

‘Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life struck straight through the streets.’

Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

From the first time he came here in 2017, O seemed like he was sucking the streets dry; collecting the sights, sounds and contours of the city, then storing them away in a private, locked collection. He didn’t want to go for walks through nature reserves and parks on Sundays. Instead, he preferred to traverse the underpasses and back streets, scoring a line past the skatepark under the M32 with its sunken, burst sofas and upturned bins. Sometimes I’d wake on a Sunday morning and he would already be sat on the edge of the bed pulling his socks on: ‘I’m popping out for a quick walk’. We’d walk most Saturday nights as well, me talking, him listening, moving between gigs, friends’ houses, clubs and bars. When I walked with him Bristol felt like a new city. His presence breathed life into the tired streets.

A few months before I last saw O, he messaged me on a Wednesday afternoon to tell me he was coming to Bristol after work and would get the last train home.  It was unusual for him to visit during the week, but he told me he was bored and fancied the trip. All I heard was that he missed me. I rang around for a babysitter and met him in the pub by the station where Katie and I used to go. We sat in the beer garden wrapped in big coats under fairy light garlands and rolled cigarettes in gentle silence and smiles.

After a while we decided to head to Ricardo’s who lived a few streets away. Roman Road was unusually still, bathed in orange light, April sky full of stars. Past No. 12 and Pak’s, past Katie’s grubby closed-eye window, past the bricked-up doorway and closed blinds of Greg and Helen’s. As we walked alongside the park, he stopped in that spot and pulled me close and kissed me out of nowhere. We rarely kissed in public. We kissed for a long time, me marvelling at his solidity, his here-ness, then I pulled back laughing:

‘What are we? Teenagers?’

He laughed as well and pulled me back into him tightly and kissed me again:

‘I just can’t let go’.

We carried on walking, wrapped up in each other, paying no attention to the streets. Later, on the last train home, he messaged me with links to one-bedroom flats in Bristol on Rightmove. All I heard was that he wanted to stay.

~~~~

When O first left, his ghost haunted my house. Over time, it appeared less and less; the frequent apparitions slowly written over by the constant traffic of domesticity. New memories are painted over the old. But all ghosts reveal themselves occasionally; they can never be fully deleted if you know what was there before. Occasionally O’s frame would flicker at the kitchen table in the corner of my vision when I was draining pasta at the sink and a song he loved came on the radio. Or sometimes as I woke and opened my eyes, especially on bright, crisp, winter mornings, a long, freckled back might materialise on the edge of my bed, caught in time pulling on a sock again and again. These ghosts always disappeared when I turned to them, with my mouth full of unanswered questions.

Although the traces were faint and glitchy at home, there was still a ghost’s stain that was vivid, trapped over the other side of the river. Shortly after O left, we entered the first 2020 lockdown. I would sometimes drive through Easton and in my memory the same thing happens each time. I see myself rounding the corner past the church and No.12. There is a white delivery van stopped with its hazard lights on outside Pak’s, the open tailgate door showing skinned carcasses hanging from hooks inside, staring blindly from clouded eyes, the driver nowhere in sight. I stop and drum my fingers on the steering wheel whilst I wait, sometimes for so long I end up turning the engine off. Cars start pulling up behind me, beeping impatiently. Reggae is blaring from somewhere. I see an old man in a long white kurta and topi feeding the pigeons in the park. My eyes, against my will, are pulled to that stretch of pavement and railings that separate the park from the road. That’s where the ghost is, entangled with the street’s tarmac and air. A stratum usually concealed from view. A garland of orange marigolds slung over the railings appears for a second before disappearing. A glitch; a symbol of union and mutual trust marking a sacred spot. Or an offering slung over a portrait of the dead. A point of access shimmering between presence and absence. I wince and turn away and look over towards the gym. Eventually, the butcher in his blood-stained white overalls lumbers into view, pushing a supermarket trolley. He is following the delivery driver, who is on his phone, and slowly starts unloading. When he has finished, the driver jumps back in the van and starts up the engine. As the road clears, I exhale, relieved, and pull away.

~~~~ 

‘Beneath all the cities we don’t recognise are stacked all of the cities we do.’

Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

At the start of the millennium, just before I Iived in the cottage on Albion Road, I lived in Barcelona for a short time. When I arrived, the city was laid out before me unspoiled. No layers of memories, no roots from which to untangle my feet. For most of my time there I walked. Like O, I wanted to suck the streets dry. I walked like a tourist who wants to take the essence of the city home as a souvenir, from the port and beaches next to the old city across to the very top of Montjuic. I walked between cafes and galleries, through secret, crumbling squares. I listened to the echoes of my footsteps in knotted networks of narrow, gothic alleyways that the midday sun never reached. I stopped to watch locals parading dead-eyed, jewel-coloured papier-mache Gegants on sombre, grey Sunday mornings. I walked alone along the wide, crowded thoroughfares that cut through the city, rain showers briefly slicking the pavements before evaporating. I’d inhale Barcelona’s heady, sweat-spiked petrichor deeply, marvelling that I’d never smelt anything quite like it, knowing deep down I never would again. I fell in love with a city.

Then, after a while, I started walking out of loneliness. The people I crossed paths with felt distant and unreachable. As I sunk deeper into depression, the actual bones of the place felt increasingly threatening and the people in it casually cruel. I started resenting the city and everyone in it. One evening I mapped the streets of the barrio around where I lived in looping, unravelling circles for hours. My restless steps echoed the heavy agitation I felt running through my arteries. I couldn’t stop but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was unable to return to my flat, turn the key in the door and admit the affair was over.

After that night I left as soon as I could. 

~~~~

I returned a year later with Louie, a few months after we first met. I felt the urge to revisit and forcibly overwrite my complicated memories with new, simpler ones. We stayed a few streets away from my old flat in a grandiose but down-at-heel pensión filled with huge blooming succulents. We gorged on expensive food and I fucked him noisily day and night. We drank cocktails in bars hidden from the street behind heavy velvet curtains until we stumbled home through the gothic quarter in the early hours. I didn’t tell him, but as we walked I was searching the streets for traces of what I’d felt when I’d inhaled Barcelona’s after-rain smell. But I couldn’t find it. Nor could I fully exorcise my ghosts.

~~~~~

‘Find a way out | Through a memorial garden | A wilderness of roses.’

Savage Messiah, Laura Grace Ford

Not long ago, I found myself walking back along Roman Road on a steely grey February afternoon. Life had shrunk since mine and O’s Saturday night wanders had ended. For the last ten months, I’d stuck to walking the same established paths during our allotted hour a day of outdoor exercise. In the depths of the first lockdown, I’d walk with Joe and Ava up to Stoke Park along the pathway that climbed through the woods behind our house. As we reached the top of the hill, we’d stop and look out over the city spread before us, pointing in wonder at the empty motorway gliding silently past below, high above the roofs of Easton and St Pauls.

When I find myself walking through Easton again, it feels freeing to cut through the city streets on foot once more. As Hawks gym and the peeling green railings of the park come into sight, instead of following the logical, more direct route home, I change direction and walk along Roman Road. I want to know if the ghost is real or is just a by-product of malignant nostalgia left to grow unchecked throughout the lockdowns. I want to see if the garland of marigolds is still there or if it was just refracted light bouncing off my windscreen.

Just before Hawks gym, I reach Paradise Fashions, which has had its shutters down for as long as I can remember. I cross the road and walk slowly along the pavement. A gaunt man in a shiny black Adidas tracksuit sits on the park bench cradling a can of Red Stripe. His gaze is fixed in the direction I am walking from, but he seems to stare straight through me. I don’t see the garland of marigolds as I approach but I can tell as soon as I stop that the ghost is there. I sense it as a swirl of solid, dark energy and hear it as a crystalline snatch of song suspended in a cold April starry sky. A corpse candle halted, flickering mid-air. The ghost still feels brand new, and as gentle and kind as silent smiles in a pub garden, but it also feels raw, and as cruel and shocking as fresh grief. The spectre of an imagined future that failed to materialise. Caught in the city’s in-between spaces, unable to extricate itself from its surroundings. No one else knows it’s there, but it’s now as much a part of Roman Road’s geography as its bricked-up doorways, concrete, grass and air. I hurry away, paying no attention to my surroundings. Past the back of the row of cottages, past Katie’s window, past the rank of shops. A young boy of around ten or eleven comes out of Star Cash and Carry as I pass; I almost bump into him and have to step aside to let him by. He stops to tip a plastic tub of food scraps onto a knotted black bin bag resting on the curbside. His stare makes me feel like an outsider. I follow behind him as he turns and walks back through the shop door.

I decide to return a few weeks later and I swear the man in the Adidas tracksuit is sitting on the park bench again, but the ghost is very faint this time. The marigolds have yet to reappear, although I know they are still there.  The ghost and the marigolds are as solid as chubby fists in my hand, the turn of a key in a lock, a black cat’s tail, a river running under concrete. The marigolds remain there somewhere, buried like a stash of gold coins waiting to be dug up in the future.

My little sister Flora is two and a half. She collects chestnuts and pinecones in a small metal box. She stops on walks to smell the flowers as I lean to keep hold of her hand and the greatest problem she has ever solved: a 16-piece puzzle. She is a toddler, and if my biased opinion is to be trusted, a particularly sweet one at that. She is also the same age I was when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Insidious thing, cancer. I often thought of it as a completely separate entity from my mum. The uninvited third wheel in our mother-daughter relationship. But malignant tumours arise from our own cells, so in that sense, my mother’s cancer was her. I was once told to consider the disease as a Darwinian process; species evolve by mutations and natural selection across entire populations, and so do cancer cells within each individual. Malignancy is the inevitable cost of our existence as multicellular beings. In the case of my mother, she was in her early thirties when the unwanted bill came. She had no genetic predisposition, no family history; the chances of her getting sick were laughably small. But the cancer grew anyway, and with it, an unnamed bulk of guilt and responsibility crawled onto my small back. I have flashes of her skinny figure in a vast double bed taller than myself. I doubt I understood what was happening then, but I know she underwent surgery and chemotherapy early on. The cancer hid for a while, then in 1999, it came again, this time grafting itself onto her right hip. With the benefit of hindsight and many years of biomedical studies, I now know this was the beginning of the end – once the cancer reaches the bone, there is no way to remove it. From then on, my mother’s condition was, plainly, incurable. I have no recollection of being explicitly told this, not then anyway. Any mention of Darwin and oncogenic mutations did not reach me until much later in life. But her first relapse remains brutally etched into my memory.

During the Christmas break of that year and amid a vicious round of chemotherapy, my parents took my sister and me to a ski resort. I was five; my sister was eight. Much of that holiday is a blur – and hard as I try to recall, I do not believe I was aware of the full extent of my mother’s disease. Shortly after we arrived, she fell sick and was rushed to a doctor nearby. When she returned the following night, it dawned on me for the first time in my life: one day, my parents would die, and I would be alone. I rushed to my mother for comfort. She calmed me down and said not to worry and to enjoy the rest of the holiday. But a few days later, on New Year’s Eve, while I was jumping around to songs I didn’t really know, thoughts of my mother’s health came back to haunt me, mingled with a dull feeling I could not quite yet put words on. As the millennium drew to a close, I was joined by a shadow that would stalk me for the rest of my life.

The thought that I’d burdened my mother with my own fears was mortifying; what pain she must have felt, knowing the cancer was killing her even as she consoled me. I never mentioned the incident again. Instead, I quietly carried the shame of what I considered my failure to deal with my mother’s terminal illness without causing a scene. And as the cancer cells continued to slowly but inexorably multiply inside of her, so did my own feelings of guilt. 

For the twelve years that followed, the cancer lived with us like an unwanted family guest we all did our best to ignore. Occasionally, it disappeared for a while before storming back in, each remission shorter than the last. The cycle became so familiar that I fooled myself into thinking it would carry on forever. I went about my life as normally as I could. I went to school, sang in a choir, took violin lessons, and convinced myself that things would get better eventually. Yet, at times, the horrors of my reality burst through that naive ignorance, just as they had in 1999.

When I was around twelve, my mother lost her hair. It had happened before several times, but her most recent chemotherapies had spared her this characteristic side-effect and I had almost forgotten what she looked like bald. I was the only one home when she came from the hairdresser, where she’d said goodbye to the last remaining clumps of hair not yet ravaged by the medication. I assured her she looked great, that her new black chemo hat was sweet and that we’d find a good wig anyway but was unable to mask my reaction upon seeing her. She looked so pale. So ill. All I could see was her cancer. I knew how upset she was at losing her hair again and hated myself for hating her appearance and for the half-second in which I feared the shock had been visible in my eyes.

While writing this piece, I found an email I’d sent that same year to a teen magazine in response to a story about cancer they had recently published. Written in Comic Sans and signed off with a smiley face – my attempt to lighten the mood – the message read:

“My mother has had cancer since I was two years old. I have learnt to live with it, but the older I get, the harder I find it. I am unable to talk about it with my mother, nor my family, nor a psychologist nor my friends. How can I make it easier and help my mother?”

🙂 Emma, 12 (Paris)

I received a very kind email back five days later. The editor suggested I look to artistic outlets as a coping mechanism: “drawing, writing.” As it turns out, I had spent most of my childhood writing. Short poems, mainly, though I ventured into other genres too. At primary school, I’d penned a small pamphlet in which I examined the meaning of words. In suitably morbid fashion, the first one on the list was death. I wonder what my parents made of it. 

When I was fourteen, my mother once asked me to pick up the blood test results for her, too anxious to see what they might show. Unfolding the piece of paper in the laboratory’s drab waiting room, I broke down. I willed the numbers to change, but her illness’s stubborn un-solvability stared back at me from the page. I called my father in tears. After all the pain and the treatments, how could I possibly tell her she was still dying? In the end, it was she who had to comfort me. Here I was, five years old again, unable to cope and unable to make her better. “So it’s not so good, is it?” she said as I opened the front door. “It’s ok, the doctor said the markers might continue going up for a bit.” 

I went on a trip with my conservatoire orchestra a month before her death. In hindsight, I should have known that time was fast running out when cancerous nodules were found in her liver not long before. Still, celebrating Halloween in various bars of Vienna, the cancer seemed far away. And nothing quite takes your mind off impending death like a week of underage drinking and sleep-deprived performances of Verdi’s Requiem. Reality came crashing down the same hour I got back. My father came to pick me up from the coach station on the way to collect my mother up from a therapist appointment. She climbed into the car and burst into tears. “I am not afraid anymore,” she told my dad. It wasn’t until two weeks later, when my father sent me to stay with my grandparents to shield me from the excruciating final moments, that I understood what she had meant. We had finally reached the end. After fourteen years of a life-threatening illness, I still failed to recognise death when it came.

For a long time after her passing, I dreamt about her often and every time the same scenario would play out. I would see her on a Metro platform in Montparnasse, near our flat in Paris, and I would apologise for not realising early enough that she was about to die. My mother was gone, but my guilt remained.

I found solace in biology textbooks in the gaping hole she left behind. I relished learning anything to do with cancer. I sought any mentions of the chemotherapy drugs I had seen my mother endure. Taxol. Taxotere. Any mutations I remembered hearing about. HERC2. BRCA1. “Bones are the most common metastatic site for breast cancer”. “Secondary liver tumours develop in about half of all metastatic breast cancers and often lead to liver failure”. Rather than finding it upsetting, it was like a comforting voice making sense of it all. Here for the first time was a logical justification for my illogical childhood, a coherent explanation of my mother’s illness. 

Biology gave me another, more unexpected source of healing. The same year my mother died, I took an internship at a laboratory researching cancer in Tasmanian Devils. There, I first learnt about malignant tumours in the context of evolutionary theories. The scientist who supervised me called them “biological dead-ends” – once the cancer becomes stronger than its host, it dies with them, just like my mother’s cancer had disappeared with her. In the following months, that same scientist met my dad, who’d wanted to thank her for taking good care of me. They married some years later. And so, in a strange turn of events, after cancer took my mother, it gave me a younger sister, Flora.

It has been eleven years since my childhood fear of losing a parent came to pass. My own thirties are looming large on the horizon. On the other hand, Flora is looking forward to her third-ever Christmas. A few weeks ago, she became inconsolable after breaking a small plate, and as I comforted her, I saw my childhood expectations crumble too. I had always believed it a perfectly reasonable assumption that I should know to deal calmly with my mother’s illness before I had even learnt how to read. All those failures I’d been carrying around since I was Flora’s age, my remorse, my guilt – it was justified. Now, faced with the reality of a toddler’s emotional landscape, I realised for the first time the sad absurdity of it all. 

It took over a decade and the arrival of Flora into my life to reach that basic conclusion. Sometimes in her eyes, I recognise the same carefree innocence I traded as a child for a lifetime of self-reproach. I cannot change how I grew up, nor, as I assured my mother on her deathbed and many times in dreams, would I have wanted to. But as I watch Flora play with her toys and cry over broken crockery, the burden of guilt medical textbooks never quite managed to shift slowly makes way for bittersweet relief. I was a kid who did not know how young she was. I did my best in the worst of scenarios; one day, I will accept that that was enough.

Emma Werner is a creative producer and writer, living in South London. She also holds a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Cambridge. She is originally from Paris, and enjoys writing in both English and French.

I receive a letter from Dad. He’s on the other side of China, moaning about wanting to retire and the university not letting him.

I receive a letter from Dad. He’s on the west coast of America, moaning about his students – how they’re unintelligent but he has to let them pass anyway, quotas or something.

I receive a letter from Dad, and I wonder if it’s going to be his last: he’s coming home.

Living with Dad was a bit like being loaded into a comedy cannon and then fired off to land somewhere, who knows where: in hospital, India, or the wrong school. He had this thing about experience, the necessity to experience life, cram as much as possible into it, and ‘develop the ever-expanding mind,’ as he put it. So, education and travel and risk were important, safety much less so.

Maybe the 1960’s and 1970’s were like that, and boys like me were almost expected to wander around the city with their younger brother and older sister, get involved in things presented to us, experiencing them, and acquiring knowledge, pleasure and hurt. Maybe Dad was just hopelessly neglectful and ignored the risk of us becoming casualties. Maybe, simply because we survived, he was right.

1963. The day we found a dead squirrel, was a hot and dry one. Not half-eaten or diseased, apparently undamaged but definitely dead, it lay on the ground where kid brother, Dan, me, big sister Phoebe, and the dog, squatted down and studied it. We poked it with sticks, turned it over a few times, while we decided what to do. Our speculations revolved around eating it, burying it, burning it, hanging it in a tree as a warning or posting it to one of our enemies. Eventually we thought it best to take it home and show it to Dad. He would know what was best.

He did.

‘The best bit of learning to get from a dead squirrel,’ he declared, ‘is to dissect it.’

‘What does “dissect” mean?’ we chorused.

‘I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘But quick before it starts to smell.’

Mum just sighed and said, ‘Take that ghastly thing outside immediately and wash your hands before you come back in.’

We gathered in the garden, around an upside-down tea chest on which lay the unfortunate squirrel. Beside it were Dad’s dissecting instruments, left over from his first and only year of medical school. Steely, fascinating things, never seen before by us: small, scarily sharp scalpels that we were forbidden to touch, odd-shaped scissors and forceps, large pins, and all held in a neat fabric roll. This little dissecting kit revealed both organisation and hitherto unknown talents in Dad, so we were intrigued, and not a little nervous as we contemplated the motionless squirrel. Something that soon escalated into trepidation, and a frisson of real fear when Dad said we were going to see inside it. Deep inside our little souls we knew a taboo was being broken – the one that states the body must remain sealed and continuous, and that opening it up is a transgressive act.

Dad looked like he knew what he was doing as he fitted a blade to the scalpel and announced his intentions. He was unusually focussed as he pinned the squirrel out on its back, into a square shape, and we stared, horrified, at the tiny clawed paws through which a large pin was placed – surely that would hurt?

We must have looked upset because he said, ‘Not to worry, it won’t hurt the squirrel.’

Dan asked, ‘Is it a little boy or a little girl squirrel?’

‘A boy,’ Dad informed us with aplomb, and we all squirmed.

With the scalpel, he drew a line down the squirrel from neck to tail. A small amount of blood immediately oozed, and he made more cuts along the inside of each slender furry limb. We all recoiled at the sight of such bodily peril and Dan burst into tears and ran off to find Mum – who soon appeared at the back door, saying, ‘Is this really a good idea?’ But Dad was in his element, explaining the layers of skin, and how the ribcage moved. This, he snipped apart and held wide open with the forceps. Then he used his curved scissors to cut the blood vessels attached to the heart, and removed that.

‘Ta da!’ he said with a flourish. ‘The heart. Just like ours, only smaller!’ He laid it on the surface of the tea chest: reddish brown and about the size of a grape. I touched it – it was cold and wet.

By now the smell of extreme butchery was getting to us, especially with the heat of the day, and Phoebe threw in the towel, saying she felt dizzy. I felt ill, but I knew Dad wanted me to stay for the experience, and I was game. It was gruesome and sick and bloody but it was real and I knew I was required to appear tough even though I was only nine. Mum reappeared to complain that her children were being traumatised, but Dad cut her off with a lecture about finishing things: the importance of. He used to talk like that – finishing a sentence with its subject. She stared at him, said nothing and disappeared.

Dad looked at me and I looked at him. We obviously had more to do, so he carried on dissecting the squirrel, next removing the stomach – ‘He can’t eat much, can he, it’s tiny,’ then the large intestine – ‘Squirrel poo in there…see,’ and finally the liver – ‘It regrows, you know, like in space,’ which baffled me.

Eventually, the lesson was over and he said to wash my hands and go inside to call the others; we were all going to bury the squirrel in the garden, next to Jimmy the cat. I was exhausted, with cramping pains in my belly and unable to understand what had just happened. Dad claimed this was normal, useful, and it had been a good test, considering my age.

Mum was summoned to help and we all lined up next to the tiny grave while Dad announced, ‘One day your mother and I will look like this,’ adding something else that sounded important, about life and knowledge.

Mum was furious, I could tell by the way she held her lips so that she couldn’t talk through them.

Much later, when I took my turn at medical school, and they asked us to dissect a rat, I could honestly say that I was experienced at such things.

1970 and Dad was testing us again. This one started at the departure gate in Cincinnati airport where I stood with Dan in one hand and a blue nylon Pan Am branded shoulder bag in the other. The bag was empty except for ten dollars and two passports.

On arrival at JFK, of course we followed everyone else off the plane and onto the chaotic and crowded concourse – only to find ourselves alone. The vast space in the terminal building echoed and howled with noise and Dad’s instructions about connecting flights and where to go seemed to fly up out of my head to bounce off the distant skylights, where they hung, useless and out of reach. We stood around, aching with anxiety, kid brother hopping around like he wanted to pee. Both of us were longing for a familiar face, for someone to say our names, or for Mum or Dad or both or somebody or anybody to appear out of the crowd. But no one did.

We probably should have been met by someone. After all, I was nearly eleven and Dan only six.

I wanted to cry. I was failing the test. Fear grew until it loomed above my head like the slavering demon version of me. I grew certain that there was no hope, that the worst had happened, that no one was coming for us and that we had been abandoned; I realised that it was me, the big brother holding the blue nylon Pan Am branded shoulder bag, who was now, suddenly, in charge. I took kid brother’s hand, knowing I must not lose him.

Dan kept seeing Mum and running up to someone who resembled her. ‘Are you my mummy,’ he’d say, but it was always a stranger. Then he’d whisper to Dennis – the plastic toy dinosaur he always carried with him – ‘Don’t worry, mummy will find us soon.’ Dennis was soon spending more and more time in Dan’s wobbling mouth.

We stood outside for a bit and watched the taxis emptying – maybe someone we knew would climb out of one. They didn’t. Aimless as falling leaves we wandered around the airport looking like under-age nomads in search of fresh pasture, obeying some deep-seated instinct to keep moving, usually from departures to arrivals and back again. Cut adrift and irresolute, our connecting flight long since gone, we regressed into a kind of trance, a rootless endless motion suffused with dread. It grew dark. I wanted to burrow, to dig underneath something where it was dark and safe.

‘I’m hungry!’ said Dan for the ninth time.

I decided I must be hungry too.

McDonald’s stood before us, radiating promise. After a year living in America we were still captured by the spell of its fast food and we knew well the kind of divine pleasures inside.

‘Two chocolate milk-shakes, please,’ I stammered at the till.

The teenager gave me a squint and looked around for the (absent) parents. ‘Whose payin’,’ he demanded, but I had the cash ready and the sight of it convinced him. Soon we were sitting in a booth, happier than we had been for hours. We kept quiet and slurped steadily while Dennis watched us from the Formica table-top with a purple, perpetual snarl. No one was there to say no, so we had another milkshake, blowing bubbles until they ran down our chins and we felt bloated and sick.

‘Give me the bag,’ said Dan.

I was still holding the blue nylon Pan Am branded shoulder bag because it gave me comfort, authority, and a sense that I, and all this, was real. I was reluctant to hand over the talisman but did so; he seemed to know what he was doing. He sat for a minute, holding the bag on his lap and staring into the middle distance as if summoning the djinn the bag probably contained.

‘Let’s ask a policeman,’ he announced at length. ‘I saw one back there.’ And then he looked scared, because it meant leaving the safety of McDonald’s and the milkshakes and returning to the yawning chasm that was the concourse. But in the end we made ourselves leave, because we knew we had to be brave.

The cop stood behind his large belly, surveying his realm and gesturing with his billy club; he seemed to be measuring the noise and chaos as if he was conducting it. He towered above us, black moustache and black uniform, black boots that would crush us to dust if we spoke. We stared up at him in fascination and horror and were unable take our eyes off his gun. He nailed us to the floor with his black eyes.

‘Hiiii boys,’ he said, ‘I seen you two around here already, where ya’ll goin’ to, huh? You guys ok, really?’ We stared up at the monster, ready to be eaten. ‘Where’s mom and pop, huh?’ He waited with a kind look on his face, then squatted down to our level. ‘You guys lost?’ he said.

But we were now examining his moustache – Dad didn’t have one at all – which curved and snaked around his face like a black caterpillar and made us want to touch it to see if it moved.

Men in suits wandered in and out of the icy air-conditioned room, took our passports away and asked me the same questions again and again, but never seemed to like my answers. Uniformed Pan Am women brought us hamburgers and Cokes and showed us where the toilet was. We shivered in our shorts and t-shirts and waited; adults knew what to do, at last, but I held onto the blue nylon Pan Am branded shoulder bag just in case.

After what seemed like days, they decided what to do and we followed someone down corridors and onto a plane. She told us where to sit and gave us our own blanket and a sweet, one each. She smiled at us. ‘You’re going home now,’ she said.

We curled up in our blankets and Dan said, ‘When we grow up to be men, will we have a moustache like his? I want one like his.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘If you want, but you have to want one. Anyway, guess what, we’re on a plane home so we passed the test, ask Dennis if you don’t believe me.’

‘Will Phoebe be there?’

‘Yes, of course, she’s our sister. Stop making me say of course.’

We had survived, so maybe Dad was right in his theories. Maybe the idea was to compress the child until it fit the mould, squeeze until it squeaked and learned the lesson. Like making diamonds. But I didn’t understand that either.

1990. Emotionally unintelligent and unfit for the task I ease myself into an unsuitable marriage, the way you would an old sock – it’s a good fit, but the work involved can make you sweat. Dad would say that with Amy I’m experiencing one of life’s bigger tests, but everyone else just says I’ve lost my sense of humour. Maybe it’s because I see my life as a theory now, a complex maths problem with me as a kind of equation: if I can just input the right values then I can calculate the correct volume of a sphere.

I am collecting my kid brother after his AA meeting; now in his late twenties, Dan has decided which way is up and is evangelical about it. Sometimes we go for a coffee and discuss the experience. Dad would approve. I just love to hear Dan’s old laugh again, there’s a maniac in it, or a djinn.

I too, might be learning – by taking the long view, and enduring. I decide I prefer distance to closeness so Amy and I move to the flatlands, a mute, unwelcoming part of the world; crisscrossed by ditches and canals the landscape seemed to have been darned. The country is so level, so endless and the sky looms and spins you around so vast and just above your head that it makes you want to clutch onto things. Here it is always October, the mists and watery environment enter my mood until a bleak habit of mind develops. It feeds a kind of fundamental disorientation, but it’s actually quite simple – I am no longer a child, in fact I have two of my own.

Being halfway round the world most of the time meant Dad missed the birth of my daughter, and a son. But later, when he holds a baby against his shoulder, supporting the head without me needing to remind him; I see his tenderness, how he is capable of great care, and remember that he cared enough to teach me to read. Dad says I am on the right track with the maths problem approach to life, but that I am living in a wasteland. Dad is often right about his children, or thinks he is because he’s the teacher in the family; but being the Dad doesn’t mean he knows what to do about kid brother’s drinking. No-one does.

Dan gives up on AA, full of nutters and liars he claims, and is back to living in the pub. He drinks a bottle of vodka a day most days, and his decline is unequivocal, untouchable. There is a vengeful quality to his drinking now, as if he knew something all along and wants to tell someone – ‘I told you so, I told you I was doomed.’ When his laugh turns sour and bitter I try, and fail, to give him up as lost.

My parents divorce, as do Amy’s. The events echo through our marriage from a distance, like the sound from the paper cup and string telephone I used to make for Dan and his little friends when he was small. A hurricane in the form of meningitis seizes him when he turns twenty-eight, carrying him away in the space of a week. His death feels like someone has stolen the truth and is a test no one could pass intact, only by a kind of internal withering do I make it into middle age. Phoebe and I, shocked and bruised by loss, sift through memories for a while, but unable to touch the wound, float apart from each other. She wanders as far as California, marries, rarely writes.

Two griefs. One mine and one hers; one here one there, one arid and shrunken and one inflated and sentimentalised by jukeboxes.

Things between Amy and I begin drifting soon enough. Cracks form, silences expand like an invisible gas, all made from the satisfactions and disappointments found in any marriage, but with me are built on a foundation of ambivalence. I try. I try to calculate the right answer to the equation, but the answer never fits. And between us now, nothing fits, or is fake, or a joke.

‘Maybe if you see it all as an experience…’ Dad says, trying to help.

I wake in the night and look at my wife’s face softened and changed by sleep and the room’s shadows, see her younger than the girl I married, look again and see her older, my-mother-like; until finally she is a stranger, as incongruous in my life as a llama grazing in an English field.

In the empty space that somehow occupied decades, I remember one of Amy’s final acts before leaving for good was to take a photo of three men on a sofa: Dad, me, and my teenage son. All shy of cameras, all with the same angry mouth.

I receive a letter from Phoebe. Somehow, she has encountered Amy, and though I try not to, I see them drinking coffee in the Los Angeles sun, comparing notes, sharing experiences of my warped family.

2010. In the end Dad has made it back home. His book is published, the property empire is established, his life-long global trek has ended with the conquering of academia. He finally begins his fable of retirement so no more letters come to me from distant, exotic cities detailing a life one step, many steps, removed from mine.

Now Dad’s brain is being tested by dementia. He stands on the steps of an imposing Victorian building in a February gale, the wind howling down off the moor and blowing wisps of leaf and rain against his flat and empty face. The gloom of a winter twilight barely reveals its brown stone, damp with age and neglect; its brightly lit interior seems both an invitation and a lie.

Dad’s new wife and daughter accompany me. We fail to remark on the magnolia, the steel bed frame, the smell. We do notice the rhododendron garden outside, the way the moor stretches up from the river. And the way Dad’s unnerving, subterranean silence is deepening.

We all smile at Matron, who, as implacable as the stone of her building, calmly takes charge. She anticipates our visits to be infrequent, and painful; his stay to be short.

She’s right. Because whenever I visit Dad and sit with him in the day-room where I read him poetry for an hour or two, the difficult part is the leaving.

‘Dad, you have to stay here.’ He tries to follow me out, but the staff keep him inside and so he stands there at the door, waiting for it to open like a cow at a gate. ‘It can’t be helped, Dad.’ Meaning I can’t. His posture is a mute accusation, meaning why can’t you.

‘Dad, you have to stay here, please.’ He stands like a disciple – silent and patient, waiting for me to release him, his face blank, as inscrutable as a crow. We look through the door’s window at each other, the wire reinforced glass a barrier to everything precious but light.

2020. “… until we’re all at death’s door.” It was a line Dad liked to finish a sentence with, to exclaim at odd intervals or to simply add emphasis. Well, here he is now – at death’s door. Pre-occupied as I am with other losses and terminal illnesses, to find myself in another hospital room at someone’s bedside seems almost routine. It obviously is for the nurses. My step- mother and I have just finished the latest conference with one of the senior ones. Leaning against the wall, with her arms folded and her face in neutral, the nurse’s stance says more to me about Dad’s chances than anything in her words. It must be hard to know what face to wear when every day contains a tragedy.

‘It’s the old man’s blessing, pneumonia,’ is what she does say, not quite casually. She’s probably right.

I’m watching his heart rate on the monitor next to his bed, over 120 a minute – as if you or I were running hard, sprinting after a long race, but he lies motionless under the toxic umbrella of his breath which is too shallow, and far too fast. I wonder how long an old heart can keep going.

Phoebe is here, jet-lagged from a long flight from Los Angeles, but still hoping. I watch as she climbs onto the bed and sits on his hips, pulls open his pyjama top and rubs scented oils into his chest. Intent and furious in the task, she is trying to heal him, cure the illness, make everything all right again. I keep quiet and watch her efforts, knowing them to be fruitless, but appreciating them just the same.

The heart rate monitor goes up a notch, his blood oxygen level goes down a notch. Phoebe climbs off and sits next to him in a chair, her face in her hands. I want to go and squeeze her shoulder or something but am unable to do so; Dad, unconsciously, had taught me the undesirability of touch.

“What is a life for?” he would have asked us as we watched the football on the juddery, black and white TV. I just wanted to know: how do you talk to girls?

I watch Dad’s grizzled face and wonder what he’s going through. He used to say it’s all grist for the mill, it’s all usable as an experience. That’s one way to approach life and I wonder if it’s made him ready to face this, the end of his life.

Phoebe puts a small, water-soaked sponge between his lips and the lips suck hungrily at it. She repeats the act with great tenderness, a few more times, until it seems he’s had enough. And we’ve had enough too, for now; we go outside for a cigarette and to talk for the first time in years, only to discover that, in a vacuum, things have fallen apart.

She says, ‘Do you remember that song Dad used to go on about all the time? That goes …are you experienced?Remember?’

‘Yeah, great song. Jimi Hendrix, Dad’s song, isn’t it.’

We go back up to the ward’s side room where our stepmother is waiting, and Dad is still alive.

David Fisher is a new writer based in Romney Marsh, Kent. He studied English and Creative writing at the Open University. He has had work published in The Guardian newspaper, winning its travel-writing competition and a story is forthcoming in the ‘Between these Shores’ annual. He was long-listed for the VS Pritchett prize and the Fish publishing short memoir prize. He is currently employed as a train driver.

My father and I were both doctors. I use the past tense for my father, Harry Walker, because he died young. For myself, it is because I am no longer a real doctor. I became an epidemiologist and my clinical skills gradually atrophied. I was a child when Harry died and I never had a conversation with him about medicine. Never about anything. Can an adult be said to converse with a five-year-old, a seven-year-old, a ten-year-old?

When I was a young woman, I packed Harry away as images in a photograph album and as a few inherited books and objects. But if I visited a large medical library and walked past a collection of old Medical Directories, I would look up his entry and wish I knew more about his life and work. When I opened a package of my father’s testimonials, a phrase stuck in my mind, that he had ‘the necessary disposition for an anaesthetist’.

Why do people choose medicine as a profession, why are they are drawn to particular specialties, how much do these choices relate to ‘disposition’? These large generalities are all interesting, but this essay looks at the subject at a microscopic and personal level, through the lenses of my own career choice of epidemiology and Harry’s of anaesthesia.

In many ways, epidemiology and anaesthesia could not be more different. Much of epidemiology is desk work. It’s about big-picture thinking, looking at disease patterns at the population level, comparing regions and countries, using statistics to define the factors that cause disease and those which influence its outcome. We have all become acquainted with it during the coronavirus pandemic as, night after night, we look at graphs and listen to discussions about projections and risk factors and the parameters of the latest regression model. Harry, on the other hand, dealt with one patient at a time and in a highly practical manner. His work required him not only to be familiar with every aspect of the machinery and chemicals he used, but also to touch his patients and understand the quirks of their anatomy and physiology, as well as the pathology that forced them into the operating theatre.

But maybe there are some fundamental similarities which explain why a father and daughter might have chosen such apparently different fields. We epidemiologists work in teams, or, these days, Teams. Anaesthetists, too, don’t work in isolation. Although the specialty has expanded its boundaries considerably since Harry’s time, it started as a partnership with surgery and this partnership remains fundamental in the operating theatre. The anaesthetist and the surgeon dance round each other, the patient between them. They share responsibility for the patient’s outcome.

Maybe there is something about not wanting the limelight? The epidemiologists on our television screens are backroom creatures, unused to media interest until now. And, on a surgical ward, each patient ‘belongs’ to a surgeon, not to an anaesthetist, and most anaesthetists appear content with this superficially subordinate position.

And what about the magical properties of our respective specialties? Epidemiologists are oracular now. We predict the future and advise governments. And Harry had the shamanic power to render a person unconscious and powerless.

But they are very different disciplines. I was never interested in anaesthesia. I don’t think I have the right skills or mindset to be an anaesthetist. It is a field which, more than many medical specialties, marries clinical skill with the basic anatomical, physiological and biochemical underpinnings of medicine and which merges both with an interest in pharmacology and in tinkering with bits of kit. Anaesthetists are often inventors, introducing new chemicals or perfecting new connectors or valves.

I lack an interest in technology. I admire people who can make things work, who can build things, are good with their hands like Harry. I enjoy the beauty of my father’s woodworking tools rather than wishing to have a go at carpentry myself. Although I have some manual facility and can draw and sew, I lack the ease with three-dimensional shapes that a real craftsman has. I can read maps and diagrams but I have to think it through with my intellect rather than trust to my gut feelings. It follows that I stick laboriously to a step-by-step leaflet to assemble a piece of furniture whereas my husband could scan instructions then set to with screwdriver and drill, humming with satisfaction as he worked out how pieces fitted together. I used to do what I called ‘inventing’ as a child but it was a species of collecting. I would requisition particularly attractive sweet tins and within them hide an assortment of rubber bands, hair-grips, old coins, pebbles, shells, feathers, broken brooches and doll’s limbs. These assemblages had more resemblance to a seventeenth-century antiquarian’s cabinet of curiosities than to an inventor’s bench.

When I was a child, I took it for granted that not only was my father a doctor, but he was an anaesthetist. When he came home from work his clothes were aromatic with the smell of anaesthetic gases. He kept a brown, ribbed glass bottle of ether in the house because it was good for dissolving the sticky grey crumbs of residual gum left after removing sticking plaster from children’s limbs. I always had skinned elbows and scabbed knees and I got through a lot of Elastoplast. The ether was an important tool in making me presentable for visitors.

At school we asked each other what our fathers ‘did in The War’ and there were hierarchies of glamour from fighter pilot downwards. When a television appeared in our house I became fascinated by Sergeant Bilko, who always had a scheme to make money and managed his gimcrack crew of American soldiers with fast, wisecracking humour, always getting the better of the dim officers who nominally commanded him. I found Sergeant Bilko immensely clever and funny and I wanted him on my side. A sergeant was clearly a prestigious being and I suppose I had heard of people ‘learning a trade’ in the Army so I started to boast that my father had learned how to be a doctor when he was a sergeant in the war. This story must have spread because my mother was cross and made me learn how to spell ‘a n a e s t h e t i s t’ and that my father left the Army as a major.

Harry was a practical man who did most of the house-painting and minor repairs around the house himself and I have memories of playing round his feet while he did something: digging the garden, painting doors in the house, writing letters at his desk. When he was reading or watching television, I used to clamber over him, turning the signet ring round his finger, exploring his pockets, stealing his handkerchief, combing his hair.

Harry’s carpentry tools came to me after my mother died. Then they moved to my first house. Much later, they went into storage until finding their current home in a chest in my hall in my current house.

There’s a Bailey No 4 plane, Made in England stamped on the baseplate in a plain font and Stanley in raised letters on an orange ground on the blade. It is heavy wood and iron. The heft of it is not familiar but I can tell it would fit a larger hand and a stronger arm comfortably. Rust blooms on its base and there are wear scratches and a few streaks of white paint. The wood is thickly varnished a dark brown. The handle and the knob did not have to be as elegantly turned as they are. The worn areas show the wood grain. In the chest there is also a tenon saw and a few chisels, an awl, a punch.

I like the tenon saw especially. I probably misuse it, looked at from a technical, carpentry perspective, but it fits my hand and its weight feels good in my wrist. The wooden handle is polished with skin oils and fixed to the heavily rusted oblong blade with two big bolts. The metal guard on the handle has a curved, finished shape. I could be part of a dragon carving on a sword from the Dark Ages. It’s rusty but it cuts.

Our house had a garage at the bottom of the back garden, with tall folding doors that opened into a back alley behind the houses. Part of the garage was a workshop and this side was almost completely filled with the boat lying propped and wedged on its sawhorses. The floor was cobbled with a gutter running down the centre to a drain. There was a workbench under the side window, black with oil and the window glass was gauzy with oily cobwebs. In the workshop Harry built an Enterprise dinghy from a kit sponsored by The News Chronicle. I used to play on the floor in drifts of sweet sawdust, a radio mumbling in the background, Harry rubbing down the wood with different grades of sandpaper. He painted the hull a shade of blue I had never seen before. Not pale. Not dark. A blue in between. He varnished its other parts: the mast, the rudder, the stern and transom. Several coats. We didn’t talk but I chattered. I missed the boat’s presence when it was finished and launched and left the workshop, with much reversing and re-aligning to move it onto its trailer in the narrow alley.

The testimonials are folded into a brittle, foxed envelope and held together by a rusted paper clip. ‘I have every confidence in him when he undertakes anaesthetics for me’ writes the senior surgeon, a referee for Harry’s consultant post at the start of the NHS in 1948. Another writes ‘Because of his knowledge and skill in the practice of all the most modern types of anaesthetics, there is a great demand for Dr. Walker’s services in this area, where his abilities are now held in high regard by all his colleagues.’

The centrepiece of anaesthetic practice has always been surgical pain relief, assessing the patient’s physical condition prior to surgery and deciding if he has sufficient resilience to withstand the surgeon’s assault, preparing him for surgery, inducing unconsciousness safely, monitoring his bodily responses to the surgeon’s cuts and probings and stitchings, returning him to consciousness and relieving his pain while he heals. It’s a fine balance. Too little anaesthesia and the patient is agonisingly aware of the surgeon’s intrusions; too much and the patient dies.

But it is not solely knowledge and skill that matter. There is something more nebulous and difficult to describe. Along with these technical attributes, a really good anaesthetist also needs a certain type of personality. The referees strain to describe it, using words like interested, conscientious, loyal, pleasant, stimulating, likeable, courteous, agreeable, enthusiastic. ‘He has the necessary disposition for an anaesthetist’. He is ‘in every way a first class man’.

It is curious that personality should be such an important factor in these testimonials because anaesthetists, like psychiatrists and orthopaedic surgeons, are the frequent butt of medical jokes. ‘Gasmen’, they are called. Putting people to sleep is a favourite trope, many jokes riffing on ‘the half-asleep looking after the half-awake’. Status and charisma are other themes, surgeons always asserting their superiority over anaesthetists.

Most likely, what the writers of these testimonials meant is an ability to work flexibly with temperamental surgeons and to manage emergencies in the operating theatre firmly. ‘He didn’t suffer fools gladly’, said one of his colleagues. He (or today, often she) has a complicated relationship with the surgeon. The surgeon is in charge of the surgical procedure, makes the diagnosis, chooses the technique and carries it out in theatre. But the anaesthetist is in charge of the patient. The anaesthetist protects the patient from the harm the surgeon inflicts. If resuscitation becomes necessary during an operation, it is the anaesthetist who takes charge and who directs the surgeon’s actions to preserve the patient.

Some people see the relationship between surgeon and anaesthetist (whatever the sex of either) as akin to the stereotype of a traditional marriage, where the surgeon is a demanding husband and the anaesthetist a competent wife, who is apparently subservient in the background, but quietly in charge. The quality of the relationship is important, not only for the working atmosphere in an operating theatre, but also for the welfare and survival of the patient. Some partnerships last for decades.

Anaesthesia is much more than playing Darby and Joan in the operating theatre. Anaesthetists are entrepreneurs and inventors. They have always had a wider role than sitting at a patient’s head during surgery and today they take the lead in trauma teams, intensive care, emergency pre-hospital care and pain management. I feel that Harry would have relished being part of these territorial takeovers by his specialty. He took anaesthesia seriously.

His copy of The Development of Inhalation Anaesthesia: with Special Reference to the Years 1846-1900 is bound in azure blue fabric-covered boards, sun-faded to grey on the spine and on the top inch of the front cover and with neat gold lettering on the spine in the Oxford University Press manner. Inside the front cover is the bookshop sticker: Donald Ferrier, Medical Bookseller, 8, 9 & 18 Teviot Place, Edinburgh 1, Phone 21551 – 22321. Harry has pencilled above it: 2/47 and 35/-.

When Harry bought the book it was the height of the severe winter weather of 1947 and he was a postgraduate student in an unheated Edinburgh flat, his pregnant wife and undergraduate brother huddling with him in coats and army-surplus blankets. But it was important to buy The Development of Inhalation Anaesthesia as soon as it was published, for thirty-five shillings, the equivalent of about fifty pounds today. It has become a classic, reissued by medical history societies. Buying it at the start of his post-war professional life was an investment in his library, the un-thumbed condition of its shiny mid-century paper suggesting that he put it aside to read in a more leisurely future that never came.

I am surprised at the frontispiece. John Snow (1813-58) is a titan in my own specialist area and I have never seen him in my father’s world. In the photograph John Snow has Darwin-like beetling eyebrows under a receding hairline. His neat mutton-chop whiskers meet his stiff white collar and black, loosely-tied tie. He has a pointed nose, wide mouth and inquisitive, intelligent eyes looking off beyond the photographer’s left shoulder. He leans his right elbow on a small table, arge, practical hands loosely folded in his lap.

In my field John Snow is the man who removed the Broad Street pump. Water was supplied to pumps and houses by a variety of water companies in Victorian London. At the height of the cholera epidemic in Lambeth in 1854 Snow drew a map of cholera cases and showed that their water supply came from one water company. Although it must have been a more complicated process than usually portrayed he is described as persuading the local public health authorities to remove the handle of the suspect pump, thus preventing people drinking the contaminated water, halting the epidemic and saving lives. His mapping and his simple, logical approach to the cause and prevention of cholera means he is claimed as ‘the father of modern epidemiology’ and ‘a pioneer of statistical mapping’. Epidemiological societies are named after him and any respectable School of Public Health has a page on its website devoted to him.

But John Snow was also the first professional anaesthetist. Already interested in the physiology of asphyxia and resuscitation, he read in 1846 of the use in America of ether during surgical operations. Snow developed a mechanical inhaler, testing it on animals and on himself, and this allowed greater control of the anaesthetic process and therefore greater safety for the patient. He became the pre-eminent practitioner in London and personally administered chloroform to Queen Victoria during the births of two of her children. He advocated a scientific understanding of anaesthesia, wrote instructional manuals, and trialled innovations. The Broad Street pump merits only a short footnote in The Development of Inhalation Anaesthesia, whereas Snow’s work on anaesthesia gets a full column in the index.

I like to think of John Snow as a connection between my speciality and Harry’s. To strengthen the connection Snow, like my father and me, came from Yorkshire. Only forty-five when he died, he demonstrates how much can be achieved in a short life when nineteenth-century rationalism, inquisitiveness and respect for education are applied widely instead of being channelled down narrowly-specialised streams.

If Harry had lived long enough to retire, his last decade or so of practice would have overlapped with my first. Harry would have had something to say about the surgeons I worked for in my surgical house job, good surgeons both. In the hospital where I worked as a junior physician my ‘firm’ was in charge of patients on ventilators on the intensive care unit. We called an anaesthetist only rarely and I realise now that we treated the ‘gasmen’ as if they were superior technicians unsuited to managing patients for any period longer than a few hours. Harry would have had something to say about that. He would have lived into the days when anaesthestists were branching out, negotiating turf wars as they expanded their remit beyond the operating theatre. All of it highly practical work, technically competent, physiologically aware, patient-focussed. Very different from my desk work. He would have had something to say about that, too. 

Kate Venables is a PhD student at Goldsmiths College, where she is writing a hybrid memoir-biography which draws on her father’s life. A poem about her father’s books was selected for the 2014 Hippocrates Prize Anthology and her poetry and flash fiction have appeared in The Frogmore Press, Envoi, Ink Sweat & Tears, Brittle Star, Lighthouse, and Flash.

There’s a temporary utopia in town. You can see the lights in the distance, flashing through the gaps in trees, across gardens and slate roofs. You can hear the music and the high pitched screams and the hiss of hydraulics through late summer air. 

August, 2020. There’s a funfair on the Common. It is only a small one: a few socially distanced rides huddling well away from one another. But it is definitely there. Its placement has a defensive quality, tucked away at the bottom of the hill down by the High Road, surrounded by a temporary fence. It stops and starts, struggling for custom. Every time I walk past in the morning and at twilight I see the rides squatting emptily, waiting for punters, surrounded by bored men smoking and chatting. 

In these viral times, in a lull in the pandemic, it is optimistic of them to come here and set up shop. In that sense, you might read it as a positive sign. A little flash of returning normality in the midst of a ‘new normal’ defined largely by weirdness. In another sense of course it presents a strange tangle of interconnecting risks. Danger of death from those poorly maintained rides meeting danger of death from infection carried on machinery and candy floss. 

I want to walk out into that fair and take some pictures. I want to put my mask on and move in close enough to hear the screams. 

A funfair is a portal that connects you to different times. The lights, the repetitive music, the conjuring trick worked by the shooting galleries and the ghost train; they trigger responses deep within you: emotions, memories. They allow you to slip through one reality and into another. The sights and sounds come together to create a spectacle, an illusion which, for some reason, never changes and always, always works. 

Walking around a weirdly empty, Covid-stricken fairground on a bank holiday weekend, I can suddenly see how it all works. I can see the breaks and the joins and the gaps between things. Sitting on their rides, bored workers stared into the distance or dance ironically to the music pumping out of speakers. The music is never updated. It is the same music played at fairs for the past twenty years or more. Rave classics. ‘You’ve got to show me love’, ‘It’s Not Over Yet’, ‘Search for the Hero’. A few scattered families are wandering, wearing masks. Rides whirl and climb into the sky with only a couple of punters aboard. Hand sanitizers squirts are compulsory on embarking and disembarking. 

In the looking glass hall of mirrors here I see reflections and refractions of funfairs past. I remember trips to Blackpool as a child. Every year with my grandparents to see the illuminations. The almost panicked excitement of it. The huge scale of the rides when seen from close to the ground. The sense of being inside another world in the dark rides: ‘River Caves’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Experiencing actual, traumatising terror on the Ghost Train. The definite autumn darkness with weird light at the edges, the rich feel of seaside air, the luminous paint glowing and the smells and screams lingering in the car on the way back. 

The filmmaker Patrick Keiller, who grew up in Blackpool, once suggested that: ‘if Louis Aragon had come to England and someone had taken him to Blackpool, he might have been intrigued, and England wouldn’t have been left off the Surrealist map of the world’. 

Wandering through this tiny funfair in South London, stopping to take pictures and jot down notes, I can see exactly what he meant.

Funfairs are portals, ways back to different times. 

I remember going to Blackpool again later, as an adult (or a young adult, a larger child). The excitement felt almost as intense. It felt almost…better. I was there with someone that I loved at the time, intoxicated, happy just to take a day out from the world and immerse myself in a different, artificial one that has stood somehow on the cold lip of the North Sea for more than a hundred years.

When I was there, I didn’t think about the future at all. I didn’t realise that this was a moment that would have an ending. I didn’t realise that the person I was with would become a stranger one-day. I didn’t realise it would turn all turn into nostalgia. 

Fairgrounds, pleasure beaches, funfairs. Trips away with different people over different years. Grandparents, parents, partners who come and go. Different versions of myself, on different rides, with different people.

And then, finally, just me. Just me, walking around a deserted South London funfair with a camera, in the middle of a pandemic, alone. 

Michael Eades is a writer, researcher and curator based in London. His work has appeared in The Mechanic’s Institute Review, The i, and Reflex Press. Michael also runs the UK’s Being Human festival, an annual multi-city festival of innovative, research driven events. He can be found at @DrMichaelEades and www.michaeleades.net.