My mother was an intensely shy woman who could hardly bear social occasions and would retreat into silence, or her own thoughts, when forced into them. But there was another side to her character, and she could become expansive, exuberant, a ham, a performer, when she was at ease, with her students. Many years later, when I took my first book to an editor at Faber’s, she said, ‘You know, we’ve met before.’
‘I don’t think I remember’, I said, embarrassed. ‘I can never recognize faces.’
‘You wouldn’t’, she rejoined. ‘It was many years ago, when I was a student of your mother’s. She was lecturing on breast-feeding that day, and after a few minutes she suddenly broke off, saying, ‘There’s nothing too difficult or embarrassing about breastfeeding.’ She bent down and retrieved a small baby which had been sleeping, concealed behind her desk, and, unwrapping the infant, breastfed it before the class. It was in September 1933, and you were the infant.’
I, too, have my mother’s shyness, her dread of social occasions, as well as her flamboyance, her exuberance in front of an audience, in equal measure.
There was another level, a deeper level, in her, a realm of total absorption in her work. Her concentration when she was operating was absolute (though she might break the almost religious silence at times by telling a joke or giving a recipe to one of her assistants). She had an intense feeling for structure, the way things were put together – whether they were human bodies, or plants, or scientific instruments or machines. She still had the microscope, an old Zeiss, she had had as a student, and kept it polished and oiled and in perfect shape. She still enjoyed sectioning specimens, hardening them, fixing them, staining them with different dyes – the whole intricate panoply of techniques used to make sectioned tissues stable and richly visible. She introduced me to some of the wonders of histology with these slides, and I came to recognize – in the brilliant stains of hemotoxylin and eosin, or blackly shadowed with osmium – a variety of cells both healthy and malignant. I could appreciate the abstract beauty of these slides without worrying too much about the disease or surgery that had brought them into being. I loved, too, the odorous gums and liquids used to make them; the smells of clove oil, cedarwood oil, Canada balsam, xylene are still associated, in my mind, with the memory of my mother, intently bending over her microscope, totally absorbed.
Though both my parents were highly sensitive to the sufferings of their patients – more so, I sometimes thought, than to those of their children – their orientations, their perspectives, were fundamentally different. My father’s quiet hours were all spent with books, in the library, surrounded by biblical commentaries or occasionally his favorite First World War poets. Human beings, human behavior, human myths and societies, human language and religions occupied his entire attention – he had little interest in the nonhuman, in ‘nature’, as my mother had. I think my father was drawn to medicine because its practice was central in human society, and that he saw himself in an essentially social and ritual role. I think my mother, though, was drawn to medicine because for her it was part of natural history and biology. She could not look at human anatomy or physiology without thinking of parallels and precursors in other primates, other vertebrates. This did not compromise her concern and feeling for the individual – but placed it, always, in a wider context, that of biology and science in general.
Her love of structure extended in all directions. Our old grandfather clock, with its intricate dials and inner machinery, was very delicate, needing constant care. My mother undertook this entirely herself, becoming a sort of horologist in the process. Similarly with other things in the house, even the plumbing. There was nothing she liked more than mending a leaky faucet or a toilet, and the services of outside plumbers were usually not needed.
But her best hours, her happiest hours, were spent in the garden, and here her sense of structure and function, her esthetic feeling, and her tenderness came together – plants, after all, were living creatures, much more wonderful, but also more needy, than clocks or cisterns. When, years later, I came across the phrase ‘a feeling for the organism’ – often used by the geneticist Barbara McClintock – I realized that this defined my mother exactly, and that this feeling for the organism underlay everything from her green thumb in the garden to the delicacy and success of her operations.
My mother loved the garden, the large plane trees that edged Exeter Road, the lilacs that filled it with their scent in May, and the climbing roses that trellised its brick walls. She gardened whenever she could, and was especially attached to the fruit trees she had planted – a quince tree, a pear tree, two crab apples, and a walnut. She was particularly fond of ferns as well, and the ‘flower’ beds were almost entirely filled with them.
The conservatory, at the far end of the drawing room, was one of my favorite places, the place where, before the war, my mother had kept her most tender plants. It somehow escaped being shattered during the war, and when my own botanical interests blossomed, I shared it with her. I have tender memories of a tree fern, a woolly Cibotium, I tried to grow there in 1946, and a cycad, a Zamia, with stiff cardboard leaves.
Once, when my nephew Jonathan was a few months old, I picked up a packet of X-rays marked ‘J. Sacks’ that had been left in the lounge. I started to leaf through them curiously, then perplexedly, then with horror – for Jonathan was a nice-looking little baby, and no one would have guessed, without the X-rays, that he was hideously deformed. His pelvis, his little legs – they scarcely looked human.
I went to my mother with the X-rays, shaking my head. ‘Poor Jonathan…’ I started.
My mother looked puzzled. ‘Jonathan?’ she said. ‘Jonathan is fine.’
‘But the X-rays’, I said, ‘I’ve been looking at his X-rays.’
My mother looked blank, then burst into a roar of laughter, and laughed until the tears ran down her face. ‘J’ did not stand for Jonathan, she finally said, but for another member of the household, Jezebel. Jezebel, our new boxer, had had some blood in her urine, and my mother had taken her to hospital to have a kidney X-ray. What I had taken for grotesquely deformed human anatomy was, in fact, perfectly normal canine anatomy. How could I have made such an absurd mistake? The least knowledge, the least common sense, would have made it all clear to me – my mother, a professor of anatomy, shook her head in disbelief.
My mother’s practice had moved, sometime in the 1930s, from general surgery to gynecology and obstetrics. There was nothing she loved more than a challenging delivery – an arm presentation, a breech – brought off successfully. But she would occasionally bring back malformed fetuses to the house – anencephalic ones with protruding eyes at the top of their brainless, flattened heads, or spina bifida ones in which the whole spinal cord and brainstem were exposed. Some of these had been still-born, others she and the matron had quietly drowned at birth (‘like a kitten’, she once said), feeling that if they lived, no conscious or mental life would ever be possible for them. Eager that I should learn about anatomy and medicine, she dissected several of these for me, and then insisted, though I was only eleven, that I dissect them myself. She never perceived, I think, how distressed I became, and probably imagined that I was as enthusiastic here as she was. Though I had taken to dissecting naturally, by myself, with earthworms and frogs and with my octopus, the dissection of these human fetuses filled me with revulsion. My mother often told me how she had worried about the growth of my own skull as an infant, fearing that the fontanelles had closed too early, and that I would be, in consequence, a microcephalic idiot. Thus I saw in these fetuses what (in imagination) I, too, could have been, and this made it more difficult to distance myself, and heightened my horror.