New Arrivals « Musings

8Mar/10Off

New Arrivals

As soon as someone on TV looks as if they’re about to be inoculated, I shudder and avert my gaze. I cannot bear it. So you will understand how I felt when I was asked to film a chap’s leg being amputated.

It was my own fault. We were comfortable in our first house and I was happily running a publications department in Surrey. But also I was beginning to feel that I really should be doing something more vitally useful for my fellow humans. A friend told me that a public relations person was badly needed in the Christian Medical College and Hospital in Ludhiana, Punjab. Bravely, my wife agreed that we should take it on. So, on March 11th, 1961 we boarded the SS Circassia for India and ultimately the college and hospital. Most obligingly, our eighteen-month-old son agreed to accompany us.

The sea voyage over, we had the rail journey to do. Bombay to Ludhiana. Thirty-six hours is a longish journey and a family’s luggage for a couple of years means a whole lot of luggage. Knowing that for the final hundred miles or so we would be sleeping we asked the Guard to wake us one hour before our 5am arrival at Ludhiana. He must have been greatly surprised when the train drew in to Ludhiana two hours early. Thus, it was only 3am when I woke to his very excited voice.

‘We are coming Ludhiana, sir, we are coming Ludhiana!’

Of course, we had done no packing or preparation of any sort. It was pandemonium. And, quite apart from that, a very small boy does not take kindly to being woken from his sleep amid the essentially noisy cramming of cases and cries of ‘Where’s my -? and ‘Have you got the -?’

We staggered out on to the platform and eventually stood, surrounded by 29 crates containing things like refrigerator, photographic and sound recording equipment and huge metal trunks. Naturally, our host was not there to meet us. Five minutes of thought and discussion ended with Barbara and small boy getting a horse-drawn taxi to the college while I protected the pile of all our worldly goods and waited for a college official of some sort to be awakened. I wondered if he or she would arrive in pyjamas and dressing gown. To my disappointment (it would have made a good story better) he, the Professor of Medicine, whilst full of apologies and stifling a yawn, did not.

The general idea was that I would create and edit an international news sheet, make films and slide presentations for overseas use, conduct visitors on a tour of the establishment and generally encourage voluntary donations by providing all fundraisers round the world with up-to-date information and pictures.

But, very sensibly, the Professor of Orthopaedics pounced on the idea of using my services to perform a useful teaching function. With movie film he could show his MBBS students how to amputate legs and things without them getting in his way in the theatre. So came the phone call, the trepidation and the job itself. Gowned and hooded, I was relieved to find that if you kept your eye firmly planted in the viewfinder and did not look at the real thing it didn’t hurt a bit. Shortly after that I was asked to film a hermaphrodite having things ‘tidied up’, as the Professor of Gynaecology gently put it. With my newly-adopted viewfinder technique to protect me, I managed it without fainting.

Looking back at the whole experience of working in a teaching hospital it is crammed with surprises like this. Beside the job of setting up the PR department I had to learn the technique of hosting tour groups from church-related organisations abroad. My initiation was quite charming. The group was all-American and they were on a fact-finding visit for their church. I met them as they arrived at the college. Their leader, a substantial lady with a parasol, swept through the group as though swimming through sharks and waved her parasol cheerily at me.

‘Sir, I don’t know your name,’ she said, gripping my hand, ‘but I know you’re an American and that’s just fine!’

Electricity failures were frequent in those days. Whenever it happened we would hear cries of 'Bijli bund! Bijli bund!' (Electricity's off!) echoing round the compound. Sunday church services, and the pipe organ in particular, were among the victims. It was a venerable instrument but capable of gorgeous sounds. It was, however, fully dependent upon a steady flow of the right stuff. If that failed during a hymn or Psalm, the effect was little short of comic. At one service I attended it happened just after the announcement of the first hymn. This sparked off the following verses; I made full use of the intriguing and poetic names of organ parts.