A Dr. Bannerjee worked on my arm. This was long before microsurgery. He put it back where it should have been, sutured the meat back into place, and hoped the blood vessels and nerves would find each other and reconnect. Miraculously they did. Apart from some puckering, the ear has worked perfectly well ever since.
A Mr. Laing, a dental surgeon roused from his bed, worked on my mouth. All five of the top row front teeth had been smashed out and even the roots were in bits. He plucked out every last fragment and sewed the gums closed, leaving tendrils of thread hanging down like something from a horror movie. But the big problem was my left hand. It was pulp.
It just happened that two years earlier, one of the finest orthopedic surgeons in England, after a long and prestigious career in the London teaching hospitals, had retired to his native Norfolk and settled in a village a few miles away. He had met Matron and suggested that, although he was fully retired, if she ever had a really bad one, she could call him. That night, she did. I believe he was called Mr. North. He, too, left his bed and came to the emergency ward.
He would have been perfectly entitled, I was told afterward, to amputate at the wrist. Another surgeon told me later, after seeing the X-rays, that he would have done so. That would have been the unchallengeable decision—a clean, thirty-minute removal of what was left of my hand. The alternative was risky. The trauma was so bad that the young driver could easily die on the slab rather than take a six-hour operation. But he took the risk.
Through the night, the anesthetist constantly checked the life signs, and the surgeon plucked out the tiny fragments and chips of bone and rebuilt the knuckles and metacarpals. He finished around sunrise. His patient was still breathing. Then he took a cup of tea and drove home.
It was three days later that I finally drifted out of a coma. My head was a large ball of bandages, my mouth a gaping hole with no front teeth. My left hand was a globe of plaster of Paris hung up in the air. My haggard father and mother were sitting beside the bed, where they had been for two days. Matron was standing on the other side.
The big worry was that brain damage might have reduced me to a vegetable. But it seems I answered a few simple questions logically, then drifted away for another two days.
Fit young people have amazing powers of recuperation. I was out of commission for about three weeks. My black eyes subsided, the bone fragment in the side of my head resealed itself, and hair began to grow on it. The stitches came out of the gums and the ear reattached. Only the left hand was still a globe of plaster. Finally, Mr. North came back and the plaster was removed.
My hand was still there, uninfected, moving slowly when bidden. Eventually, under the scars, the grip would return, but never quite strong enough to hold a golf club again. But a lot better than a stump. Mr. Laing came back to assure me that a dental plate would give me a better smile than the one before. Dr. Bannerjee was too shy to return to be thanked for his amazing work on my ear. Mr. North would accept nothing from my father save a redecoration of the nurses’ hostel, which was accomplished. I remain grateful to them all, though as I was then twenty-one, I doubt any can still be alive.
While I lay in convalescence, I was moved from intensive care to the general ward and found myself next to a middle-aged man recovering from a minor operation, and we got talking as side-by-side patients do, and something very strange took place.
He told me he was a tailor and very diffidently mentioned that he “used to read palms.” I had no confidence in that sort of thing, but was intrigued by the phrase “used to.” He explained that he had stopped after a nerve-jolting experience. He had agreed to do his fortune-telling hocus-pocus at a village fete.
One of his visitors was a local pillar of the community: wealthy, happily married, healthy, worry-free. Yet in his palm was the unmistakable forecast of his imminent death. He (the narrator beside me) was so horrified, he invented a “fortune” for the man, who left his tent in high good humor.
But the palmist was sufficiently distressed by what he had seen that he went to the vicar and told him. The priest was both horrified and offended, excoriating the palmist and ordering him never to do anything like that again. Two days later, the local notable went to the gun room of his large manor house, took a 12-bore shotgun, and blew his head off. The palmist beside me said he had never told a fortune since.
Of course, it was like a red rag to a bull. I pestered him until he relented. He wanted my left hand, but that was still swathed in bandages. So he studied the less adequate right hand instead. Then he told me what he saw.
I am still unconvinced about this sort of thing. A journalist ought to be a natural skeptic anyway. But I can only report what he said.
He started with my background: birth, family, father’s occupation, schooling, the languages, the travels so far, the flying, the lust to see the world, in fact the lot. But I convinced myself he could have learned all this from the staff by cunning questioning. Then he embarked on the future from 1960 onward.
He told me about successes and dangers, triumphs and failures, advances and reverses, wars and horrors, material success and wealth, marriages and sons. And more or less when and how and where I would leave this planet.
And so far, over fifty-five years he has been almost completely accurate. Not unnaturally I am quite curious about the next and last ten years.
Two years later, I took the final exam. I believe I came second in England for that year. I know little of the chap who came first, save that he was from the north of England and
chose to remain with his provincial newspaper. I had other ideas.
I had just turned twenty-three; it was autumn 1961. I was heading for London and for Fleet Street, the capital of British journalism, and I still intended to become a foreign correspondent and see the world.
FLEET STREET
I had not the haziest idea which newspaper I wished to join when I took that train down from King’s Lynn to London in October 1961. I toyed with the idea of the Daily Express because my father had taken it when I was a boy, but I had no inside contacts and no introductions, so I just started at the top end of Fleet Street, near the Law Courts, and began walking. I entered and applied for a job at every press organ I came to.
That was when I discovered Fleet Street was a fortress. It did not seem to want any extra reporters, and certainly not this one. Walking up to the front desk and asking to see the editor was entirely the wrong tactic. The very idea of penetrating the front hall without a confirmed appointment was out of the question.
There were forms to fill out, but pretty clearly they were going to be “binned” as soon as I disappeared out the front door and back onto the street. I had reached the great black-and-chrome edifice of the Daily Express by the lunch hour. There was not much point in going on until the editorial staff returned from their liquid lunches. Journalism then had a reputation for heavy smoking and heavy drinking. I repaired for a sandwich and a pint of ale to the Cheshire Cheese pub. It was standing room only.
When the crowd thinned out a bit, I took a stool at the bar and thought things over. I was still on the staff of the Eastern Daily Press; I still had my tiny flat. I had my return ticket in my pocket. Then the old luck held.
He was sitting down at the bar in the now almost-empty room, middle-aged, clutching his pint mug, puffing away and staring at me but with a kindly expression.
“You’re looking down in the dumps, lad,” he said.
I shrugged. “Trying to get a job,” I said.
“Any inside contacts?”