15. Eat
From 'Passages' by Jean de Lier
Harry had attended autopsies though he never performed one. It is interesting that the word used is ‘performed’ since the ones he saw certainly had something of a Thespian air, a slightly stagey effect. Without the needs of the patient having to be taken into account, it derives of course more nearly than therapeutic cutting, from the old “Anatomy” as performed in Padua (first) and portrayed by Vesalius and later by Rembrandt (The Anatomy Dr Tulp). But even therapeutic operations are still performed in a ‘theatre’, there are theatre nurses etc and at least one old operating theatre with raked seats is still preserved at Guy’s hospital, in London. Harry had seen two or three autopsies (post-mortems or PM’s) by the great Prof. Keith Simpson who more or less invented forensic science (in England anyway) and wrote fat books on murders. No murder was involved but he put on a great performance for the students nevertheless. And as Harry passed the PM Room on his way to work he always thought that the most macabre thing was not the bodies inside but the fact that the milkman left two pints of milk outside every day. Of course he knew with his head that they were for the orderlies who were also entitled to their tea break - but nevertheless with his heart they were just two pints for the dead.
In the first year of medical school they had to dissect bodies and it was hard at first. They had one corpse (called a stiff) between six students - grey and pickled in formaldehyde. Only the wedding ring, which they had been unable to remove (or missed) was really disturbing as it somehow 'humanised' the lump of inanimate matter that was only vaguely in the shape of an old woman. By the time they had done a bit of work on it (her) the resemblance was slight indeed. But the smell, acrid and pungent pervaded their clothes and any whiff of formalin to this day is a memento of that time. On day one an instructor told them jocularly not to worry, by the end of the course they would be having their sandwiches up there. Jokes, especially macabre ones are the stuff of medicine, jokes are abreaction to stress. It is part of the induction into the toughness that people who deal with the sick have to undergo.
They even discussed that remark - why should they, even if they physically could, have sandwiches in so disgusting a place, a large room smelling of formalin with perhaps ten tables each with a corpse and six students round it, when they could perfectly well wash up, and go down five flights, and sit in the quadrangle, tree-shaded and leafy, and watch the pretty nurses go by, bustling to their duties on the wards, or back to the nurses’ home. That was also where the sandwich bar was located, for obviously good reasons.
They had to get the body and the dissections finished before the end of the summer term of that first year to get the sign up - and probably to stand a chance of passing the anatomy exam anyway. They all took regular turns at reading, listening and dissecting but like most random groups some were faster at dissection than others. It soon became apparent that Amanda and Harry were the fastest by far with the scalpel. In the last fortnight before the exam those two were voted ‘prosectors’ to the group. In the last week they spent three whole days there continuously in order to get it done, each stage checked and confirmed by the ‘demonstrator’. While Amanda and Harry had their hands in the body, others read instructions from the manual, pointing out the fifth minor branch of the trigeminal nerve or a twist in an artery; others were from time to time dispatched to buy sandwiches for all. They ate with their hands except Amanda and Harry, who, dissecting, were fed the sandwiches by relatively clean handed fellows. No one wore rubber gloves in those days.
They were not alone, and in retrospect it was perfectly hygienic (sterile) though not gastronomic. Nor were the sandwiches any worse than usual - floppy flavourless white bread like blotting paper, steamed rather than baked in an oven, with a smear of margarine and a razor-thin slice of ham and pungent English mustard on it; or the same with cheese but no pickle. Nothing green, no trace of limp lettuce enlivened the pink centre in those days nor tomato. It would probably have fallen out anyway. No doubt it nourished their glycaemia.
It needed a serious French boarding house, full board and lodging, to produce the maximum blend of disgusting food and total pretension. Harry had been sent there before Medical School, to learn French on what would now be called a gap year. It also saved call up for National Service. He particularly remembered one lunch, the main meal of the day, which started with a small polenta cake, more like a soft dry biscuit which was meant to help with the potato soup. Then there was a pale yellow to mustard coloured dish, hopefully entitled ‘cannelloni’ but without discernable flavour and a texture of toothpaste: smooth, amorphous, without structure but maybe ever so slightly gritty, as if some ingredient had not been properly washed. This was served with French bread, bought from the boulangerie, and certainly the highlight of the meal. A ‘salad’ was served consisting of three thin slices of pickled beetroot, and a little grated carrot. And they finished with rice pudding, grey, lumpy, watery just vaguely on the sweet side of neutral.
They had missed out the Semolina, but otherwise that lunch had all the easily available forms of carbohydrate, and no green vegetables, and no animal protein. Maybe there was some cheese in the cannelloni but not much. Harry later learned of an English business man, released after several years in an Iranian jail saying that anyone who had endured a British Public School and the British Army for National Service could endure a Persian Jail. A cheap French boarding house with a mean landlady after the second world war must have run it close.
Philosophically, the worst meal has to be a meal you eat without real necessity. There is the ‘rubber chicken circuit’ that politicians have to put up with in America, and maybe in England too, for fund raising. “Thank you, Mr Chairman, for arranging a delicious meal and such delightful company” Ugh. but a person must eat; hunger and familiarity do strange things. Prisoners of war, or in concentration camps do not comment on anything except quantity of nourishment. Those appalling sandwiches up there on the fifth floor do not count as meals; they were eaten. They were not in a way even the worst meals of Harry’s student days – the student café ran a line of disgusting dishes that made post-war English school food seem to have been tasty.
A starving man might be given almost anything and, less than starving, some things are too disgusting. But disgust itself is cultural and Belloc has a wonderful ‘Cautionary Tale’ on the subject of what other nations (and animals) eat. Malays (I think) eat huge caterpillars roasted on a spit, which might just be worth a try (like prawns?); but they also eat the same beasts raw and live which Harry could not. But many fine upright English people find oysters (live) hard to swallow, and increasing numbers seem to object to delicacies such as tongue, kidney, or brain. But then few western Europeans can eat an eyeball, which I am told is an Arab delicacy. The Americans are even more squeamish.
Harry also remembered an undergraduate meal cooked for him, a great and heroic effort made by a totally inept and inexperienced young girl. She was trying to do a meal for six in his honour and had perhaps never done so before. He wept for her, so perhaps she succeeded in what she really intended, but the meal, as a meal, was a disaster. She had bought a melon for a first course and did notice, when she got it home, that it was unripe. So she thought to leave it in the evening sun just long enough to warm up to a disgusting tepidity but certainly not long enough to ripen any more. They started with hard, unripe, unsweet warm melon. She tried to cook a goulasch from a recipe (never having eaten one) and she produced a thin pink gruel, hardly even a stock, in which floated some par-boiled strips of tough leatherette beef, a few shreds of tomato skin and an old potato together with probably half a teaspoon of paprika. And having got through that she finished with a concoction like a dry Cornish pasty in a rock hard pastry, containing a few bits of soggy apple and a raisin. This was supposed to be an apple strudel. Harry thought at the time that if she had merely gone to the supermarket and bought an ‘oven ready’ chicken, perhaps managed to remove the plastic and shoved it into the oven, they should all have had a much better meal.
No matter, the acidulated wine and warm beer lubricated their young enthusiasms. She had tried valiantly and failed, as a cook, but she had some other qualities which encouraged Harry take her to more than one restaurant to dine. To that extent, perhaps, she succeeded.
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