Читать книгу Forty Years for Labrador - Wilfred T. Grenfell - Страница 8

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In 1883, my father became anxious to give up teaching and to confine himself more exclusively to the work of a clergyman. With this in view he contemplated moving to London, where he had been offered the chaplaincy of the huge London Hospital. I remember his talking it over with me, and then asking if I had any idea what I wanted to do in life. It had never occurred to me to look forward to a profession; except that I knew that the heads of tigers, deer, and all sorts of trophies of the chase which adorned our house came from soldier uncles and others who hunted them in India, and I had always thought that their occupation would suit my taste admirably. It never dawned on me that I would have to earn my bread and butter. I had never seen real poverty in others, for all the fisherfolk in our village seemed to have enough. I hated dress and frills, and envied no one. At school, and on the Riviera, and even in Wales, I had never noticed any want. It is true that a number of dear old ladies from the village came in the winter months to our house once or twice a week to get soup. They used to sit in the back hall, each with a round tin can with a bucket handle. These were filled with hot broth, and the old ladies were given a repast as well before leaving. As a matter of fact, I very seldom actually saw them, for that part of the house was entirely cut off by large double green-baize-covered doors. But I often knew that they must have been there, because our Skye terrier, though fed to overflowing, usually attended these séances, and doubtless, while the old ladies were occupied with lunch, sampled the cans of soup which stood in rows along the floor. He used to come along with dripping whiskers which betrayed his excursion, and the look of a connoisseur in his large round eyes—as if he were certifying that justice had been done once more in the kitchen.

While I was in France the mother of my best chum in school had been passing through Marseilles on her way home from India, and had most kindly taken me on a jolly trip to Arles, Avignon, and other historical places. She was the wife of a famous missionary in India. She spoke eight languages fluently, including Arabic, and was a perfect vade mecum of interesting information.

About the time of my father's question, my friend's mother was staying in Chester with her brother-in-law, the Lord-Lieutenant of Denbighshire. It was decided that, as she was a citizeness of the world, no one could suggest better for what profession my peculiar talents fitted me. The interview I have long ago forgotten, but I recall coming home with a confused idea that tiger-hunting would not support me, and that she thought I ought to become a clergyman, though it had no attraction for me, and I decided against it.

None of our family on either side, as far as I can find out, had ever practised medicine. My own experience of doctors had been rather a chequered one, but at my father's suggestion I gladly went up and discussed the matter with our country family doctor. He was a fine man, and we boys were very fond of him and his family, his daughter being our best girl friend. He had an enormous practice, in which he was eminently successful. The number of horses he kept, and the miles he covered with them, were phenomenal to my mind. He had always a kind word for everyone, and never gave us boys away, though he must have known many of our pranks played in our parents' absence. The only remaining memory of that visit was that the old doctor brought down from one of his shelves a large jar, out of which he produced a pickled human brain. I was thrilled with entirely new emotions. I had never thought of man's body as a machine. That this weird, white, puckered-up mass could be the transmitter of all that made man, that it controlled our physical strength and growth and our responses to life, that it made one into Mad G. and another into me—why, it was absolutely marvellous. It attracted me as has the gramophone, the camera, the automobile, and the aeroplane.

My father saw at once on my return that I had found my real interest, and put before me two alternative plans, one to go to Oxford, where my brother had just entered, or to join him in London and take up work in the London Hospital and University, preparatory to going in for medicine. I chose the latter at once—a decision I have never regretted. I ought to say that business as a career was not suggested. In England, especially in those days, these things were more or less hereditary. My forbears were all fighters or educators, except for an occasional statesman or banker. Probably there is some advantage in this plan.

Most of the subjects for the London matriculation were quite new to me, especially English, but with the fresh incentive and new vision of responsibility I set to work with a will, and soon had mastered the required subjects sufficiently to pass the examination with credit. But I must say here that Professor Huxley's criticisms of English public-school teaching of that period were none too stringent. I wish with all my heart that others had spoken out as bravely, for in those days that wonderful man was held up to our scorn as an atheist and iconoclast. We spent years of life and heaps of money on our education, and came out knowing nothing of the special subjects which fit us for everyday life, except that which we picked up incidentally.

When I followed my father to London, I was not familiar with one word of botany, zoology, physics, physiology, or comparative anatomy, or any natural science whatever. About the universe which I inhabited I knew as little as I did about cuneiform writings. Except for my mathematics and a mere modicum of chemistry, I had nothing on which to base my new work. Students coming from Government free schools, or almost anywhere, had a great advantage over men of my previous education; I did not even know how to study wisely. Again, as Huxley showed, medical education in London was so divided, there being no teaching university, that the curriculum was ridiculously inadequate. There were still being foisted upon the world far too many medical men of the type of Bob Sawyer.

Our hospital was the largest in the British Isles, and in the midst of the poorest population in England, being located in the famous Whitechapel Road, and surrounded by all the purlieus of the East End of the great city. Patients came from Tilbury Docks to Billingsgate Market, and all the river haunts between, from Shadwell, Deptford, Wapping, Poplar, from Petticoat Lane and Ratcliff Highway, made famous by crime and by Charles Dickens. They came from Bethnal Green, where queens and their courts once dwelt, but now the squalid and crowded home of poverty; from Stratford and Bow, and a hundred other slums.

The hospital had some nine hundred beds, which were always so full that the last surgeon admitting to his wards constantly found himself with extra beds poked in between the regulation number through sheer necessity. It afforded an unrivalled field for clinical experience and practical teaching.

Looking back, I am grateful to my alma mater, and have that real affection for her that every loyal son should have. But even that does not conceal from me how poor a teaching establishment it was. Those who had natural genius, and the advantages of previous scientific training, who were sons of medical men or had served apprenticeships to them, possibly did not suffer so much through its inefficiency. But men in my position suffered quite unconsciously a terrible handicap, and it was only the influences for which I had nothing whatever to thank the hospital that saved me from the catastrophes which overtook so many who started with me.

To begin with, there was no supervision of our lives whatever. We were flung into a coarse and evil environment, among men who too often took pride in their shame, just to sink or swim. Not one soul cared which you did. I can still remember numerous cases where it simply meant that men paid quite large sums for the privilege of sending the sons they loved direct to the devil. I recall one lad whom I had known at school. His father lavished money upon him, and sincerely believed that his son was doing him credit and would soon return to share his large practice and bring to it all the many new advances he had learned. The reports of examinations successfully passed he fully accepted; and the non-return of his son at vacation times he put down to professional zeal. It was not till the time came for the boy to get his degree and return that the father discovered that he had lived exactly the life of the prodigal in the parable, and had neither attended college nor attempted a single examination of any kind whatever. It broke the father's heart and he died.

Examinations for degrees were held by the London University or the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, never by the hospital Schools. The former were practically race committees; they did no teaching, but when you had done certain things they allowed you to come up and be examined, and if you got through a written and viva voce examination, you were inflicted on an unsuspecting public licensed to kill—often only too literally so.

It is obvious on the face of it that this could be no proper criterion for so important a decision as to qualifications; special crammers studied the examiners, their questions, and their teachings, and luck had a great deal to do with success. While some men never did themselves justice in examinations, others were exactly the reverse. Thus I can remember one resident accoucheur being 'ploughed,' as we called it, in his special subject, obstetrics—and men to whom you would not trust your cat getting through with flying colours.

First you had to be signed up for attending courses of lectures on certain subjects. This was simply a matter of tipping the beadle, who marked you off. I personally attended only two botany lectures during the whole course. At the first some practical joker had spilled a solution of carbon bisulphide all over the professor's platform, and the smell was so intolerable that the lecture was prorogued. At the second, some wag let loose a couple of pigeons, whereupon everyone started either to capture them or stir them up with pea-shooters. The professor said, 'Gentlemen, if you do not wish to learn, you are at liberty to leave.' The entire class walked out. The insignificant sum of two and sixpence secured me my sign-up for the remainder of the course.

Materia medica was almost identical; and while we had better fortune with physiology, no experiments and no apparatus for verifying its teachings were ever shown us.

Our chemistry professor was a very clever man, but extremely eccentric, and his class was pandemonium. I have seen him so frequently pelted with peas when his head was turned as to force him to leave the amphitheatre in despair.

There was practically no histology taught and little or no pathology. Almost every bit of the microscope which I did was learned on my own instrument at home. Anatomy, however, we were well taught in the dissecting-room, where we could easily obtain all the work we needed. But not till Sir Frederick Treves became our lecturer in anatomy and surgery was it worth while doing more than pay the necessary sum to get signed up.

On the other hand, we had to attend in the dispensary, actually to handle drugs and learn about them—an admirable rule. Personally I went once, fooled around making egg-nog, and arranged with a considerate druggist to do the rest that was necessary. Yet I satisfied the examiners at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and those of the London University at the preliminary examination for Bachelor of Medicine—the only ones which they gave which carried questions in any of these subjects.

In the athletic life of the University, however, I took great interest, and was secretary in succession of the cricket, football, and rowing clubs. I helped remove the latter from the old river Lea to the Thames, to raise the inter-hospital rowing championship and start the united hospitals' rowing club. I found time to row in the inter-hospital race for two years and to play in the football team in the two years in which we won the inter-hospital football cup. A few times I played with the united hospitals' team; but I found that their ways were not mine, as I had been taught to despise alcohol as a beverage and to respect all kinds of womanhood. For three years I played regularly for Richmond—the best of the London clubs at the time—and subsequently for Oxford, being put in the team the only term I was in residence. I also threw the hammer for the hospital in the united hospitals' sports, winning second place for two years. Indeed, athletics in some form occupied every moment of my spare time.

It was in my second year, 1885, that, returning from an out-patient case one night, I turned into a large tent erected in a purlieu of Shadwell, the district to which I happened to have been called. It proved to be an evangelistic meeting of the then famous Moody and Sankey. It was so new to me that, when a tedious prayer-bore began with a long oration, I started to leave. Suddenly the leader, who I learned afterwards was D. L. Moody, called out to the audience, 'Let us sing a hymn while our brother finishes his prayer.' His practicality interested me, and I stayed the service out. When I left, it was with a determination either to make religion a real effort to do as I thought Christ would do in my place as a doctor, or frankly abandon it. That could only have one issue while I still lived with a mother like mine. For she had always been my ideal of unselfish love. Later, I went down to hear the brothers J. E. and C. T. Studd speak at some subsidiary meeting of the Moody campaign. They were natural athletes, and I felt that I could listen to them. I could not have listened to a sensuous-looking man, a man who was not a master of his own body, any more than I could to the precentor who, coming to sing the prayers at college chapel dedication, I saw get drunk on sherry which he abstracted from the banquet table just before the service. Never shall I forget, at the meeting of the Studd brothers, the audience being asked to stand up if they intended to try to follow Christ. It appeared a very sensible question to me, but I was amazed how hard I found it to stand up. At last one boy, out of a hundred or more in sailor rig, from an industrial or reformatory ship on the Thames, suddenly rose. It seemed to me such a wonderfully courageous act—for I knew perfectly what it would mean to him—that I immediately found myself on my feet, and went out feeling that I had crossed the Rubicon, and must do something to prove it.

We were Church of England people, and I always attended service with my mother at an Episcopal church of the evangelical type. At her suggestion I asked the clergyman if I could in any way help. He offered me a class of small boys in his Sunday School, which I accepted with much hesitation. The boys, derived from houses in the neighbourhood, were as smart as any I have known. With every faculty sharpened by the competition of the street, they so tried my patience with their pranks that I often wondered what strange attraction induced them to come at all. The school and church were the property of a society known by the uninviting title of the 'Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews.' It owned a large court, shut off from the road by high gates, around which stood about a dozen houses—with the church facing the gates at one end of a pretty avenue of trees. It was an oasis in the desert of that dismal region.

One instance of a baptism I have never forgotten. I was then living in the court, having hired a separate house under the trees after my father had died and my mother had moved to Hampstead. In such a district the house was a godsend. One Sunday I was strolling in the court when the clergyman came rushing out of the church and called to me in great excitement, 'The Church is full of Jews. They are going to carry off Abraham. Can't you go in and help while I fetch the police?' My friend and I, therefore, rushed in as directed to a narrow alleyway between high box pews which led into the vestry, into which 'Abraham' had been spirited. The door being shut and our backs put to it, it was a very easy matter to hold back the crowd, who probably supposed at first that we were leading the abduction party. There being only room for two to come on at once, 'those behind cried Forward, and those in front, Back,' till after very little blood spilt, we heard the police in the church, whereupon the crowd at once took to flight. I regret to say that we expedited the rear-guard by football, rather than strictly Christian, methods. His friends then charged Abraham with theft, expecting to get him out of his place of refuge and then trap him, as we were told they had a previous convert. We therefore accompanied him personally through the mean streets, both to and fro, spoiling for more fun. But they displayed more discretion than valour, and to the best of my belief he escaped their machinations.

My Sunday-School efforts did not satisfy me. The boys were few, and I failed to see any progress. I joined a young Australian of my class in hospital in holding services on Sunday nights in half a dozen of the underground lodging-houses along the Ratcliff Highway. He was a good musician, so he purchased a fine little portable harmonium, and whatever else the lodgers thought of us, they always liked the music. We used to meet for evening tea at a place in the famous Highway known as The Stranger's Rest, outside of which an open-air service was always held for the sailors wandering up and down the docks. At these a few ladies would sing; and after the meetings a certain number of the sailors were asked to come in and have refreshments. There were always some who had spent their money on drink, or been robbed, or were out of ships, and many of them were very fine men.

A single story will illustrate the good points which some of these men displayed. My hospital chief, Sir Frederick Treves, had operated on a big Norwegian, and the man had left the hospital cured. As a rule such patients do not even know the name of their surgeon. Some three weeks later, however, this man called at Sir Frederick Treves's house late one dark night. Having asked if he were the surgeon who had operated on him and getting a reply in the affirmative, he said he had come to return thanks, that since he left hospital he had been wandering about without a penny to his name, waiting for a ship, but had secured a place on that day. He proceeded to cut out from the upper edge of his trousers a gold Norwegian five-kronen piece which his wife had sewed in there to be his standby in case of absolute need. He had been so hungry that he had been tempted to use it, but now had come to present it as a token of gratitude—upon which he bowed and disappeared.

The underground lodging-house work did me lots of good. It brought me into touch with real poverty—a very graveyard of life I had never surmised. The denizens of those miserable haunts were men from almost every rank of life. They were shipwrecks from the ocean of humanity, drifted up on the last beach. There were large open fireplaces in the dens, over which those who had any food cooked it. Often, while the other doctor or I was holding services, the other would have to sit down on some drunken man to keep him from making the proceedings impossible; but there were always some who gathered around and really enjoyed the singing.

There was always a narrow passage from the front door to the staircase which led down into those huge underground basements. The guardians had a room inside the door, with a ticket window, where they took tuppence or possibly fourpence from the boarders for their night's lodging. At about eleven o'clock a 'chucker-out' would go down and clear out all the 'gentlemen' who had not paid in advance for the night. This was always a very melancholy period of the evening, and in spite of our hardened hearts, we always had a score against us there. That, however, had to be given in person, for there were plenty among our audiences who had taken special courses in imitative calligraphy. I.O.U.'s on odd bits of paper were a menace to our banking accounts till we sorrowfully abandoned that convenient way of helping often a really deserving case.

In those houses, somewhat to my astonishment, we never once received any physical opposition. Some considered us harmless and gullible imbeciles; but the great majority were still able to see that it was an attempt, however poor, to help them. Drink, of course, was the chief cause of the downfall of most; but, as I have already said, there were cases of genuine, undeserved poverty—like our sailor friend overtaken with sickness in a foreign port.

One poor creature, in the last stage of poverty and dirt, proved to be an honours man of Oxford. We looked up his record at the University. He assured us that he intended to begin again a new life, and we agreed to help. We took him to a respectable temperance lodging-house, paid for a bed, a bath, and a supper, and purchased a good second-hand outfit of clothing for him. We were wise enough only to give this to him after we had taken away his own while he was having a bath in the tub. We did not give him a penny of money, fearing his lack of control. Next morning, however, when we went for him, he was gone—no one knew where. We had the neighbouring saloons searched, and soon got track of him. Some 'friend' in the temperance house had given him sixpence. A barman offered him whiskey, his hands trembled so that he could not lift the glass to his mouth, and the barman kindly poured it down his throat. We never saw him again.

My growing experience had shown me that there was a better way to the hearts of my Sunday-School boys than merely talking to them. Like myself, they worshipped the athlete, whether he were a prize-fighter or a big football player. There were no Y.M.C.A.'s or other places for them to get any physical culture, so we arranged to clear our dining-room every Saturday evening, and give boxing lessons and clubs and parallel-bar work—the ceiling was too low for the horizontal. The transformation of the room was easily accomplished. The furniture was very primitive, largely our own construction, and we could throw out through the window every scrap of it except the table, which was soon adapted. We also put up a quoit pitch in our garden.

This is no place to discuss the spiritual influences of 'the noble art of boxing.' Personally I have always believed in its value; and my Sunday-School class soon learned the graces of fair play, how to take defeat and to be generous in victory. They began at once bringing pals whom my exegesis of Scripture would never have lured within my reach. We ourselves began to look forward to Saturday night and Sunday afternoon with an entirely new joy. We all learned to respect and so to love one another more—indeed, lifelong friendships were developed and that irrespective of our hereditary affiliations. The well-meaning clergyman, however, could not see the situation in that light, and, declining all invitations to come and sample an evening's fun instead of condemning it unheard, or I should say unseen, he delivered an ultimatum which I accepted—and resigned from his school.

My Australian friend was at that time wrestling with a real ragged school on the Highway on Sunday afternoons. The poor children there were street waifs and as wild as untamed animals. So, being temporarily out of a Sunday job, I consented to join him.

Our schoolroom this time owed no allegiance to anyone but ourselves. If the boys were allowed in a minute before there was a force to cope with them, the room would be wrecked. Everything movable was stolen instantly opportunity arose. Boys turned out or locked out during session would climb to the windows and triumphantly wave stolen articles. On one occasion, when I had chucked out a specially obstreperous youth, I was met with a shower of mud and stones as I passed through a narrow alley on my return home. The police were always at war with the boys, who annoyed them in similar and many other ways. I remember two scholars whose eyes were blacked and badly beaten by a 'cop' who happened to catch them in our doorway, as they declared, 'only waiting for Sunday School to open.'

With the night work at the lodging-houses, we used to combine a very aggressive total abstinence campaign. The saloon-keepers as a rule looked upon us as harmless cranks, and I have no doubt were grateful for the leaflets we used to distribute to their customers. These served admirably for kindling purposes. At times, however, they got ugly, and once my friend, who was in a saloon talking to a customer, was trapped and whiskey poured into his mouth. On another occasion I noticed that the outer doors were shut and a couple of men backed up against them while I was talking to the bar-tender over the counter, and that a few other customers were closing in to repeat the same experiment on me. However, they greatly overrated their stock of fitness and equally underrated my good training, for the scrimmage went all my way in a very short time.

If I told my football chums (for in those days I was playing hard) of these adventures in a nether world, they invariably wanted to come and co-operate; but I have always felt that reliance on physical strength alone is only like war—an insurance of failure. Only unselfish love can win in the end. At this time also at Saint Andrew's Church, just across the Whitechapel Road from the hospital, the clergyman was a fine athlete and good boxer. He was a brother of Lord Wenlock, and was one night returning from a service in the Highway when he was set upon by footpads and robbed of everything, including the boots off his feet. Meanwhile, Jack the Ripper was also giving our residential section a most unsavoury reputation.

My long vacations at this time were taken on the sea. My brother and I used to hire an old fishing smack called the Oyster, which we rechristened the Roysterer. This we fitted out, provisioned, and in her put to sea with an entirely untrained crew, and without even the convention of caring where we were bound so long as the winds bore us cheerily along. My brother was generally cook—and never was there a better. We believe still that he would have made a mark in the world as a chef, from his ability to satisfy our appetites and cater to our desires out of so ill-supplied a galley. We always took our departure from Anglesea. We carried our fishing gear with us, and thus never wanted for fresh food. We could replenish our bread, milk, butter, and egg supply at the numerous small ports at which we called. The first year the crew consisted of my brother and me—skipper, mate, and cook between us—and an Oxford boating friend as second mate. For a deckhand we had a young East London parson, whom we always knew as 'the Puffin' because he so closely resembled that particular bird when he had his vestments on. We sailed first for Ireland, but the wind coming ahead we ran instead for the Isle of Man. The first night at sea the very tall undergraduate as second mate took the 12 p.m. to 4 a.m. night watch. The tiller handle was low, and when I gave him his course at midnight before turning in myself, he asked me if it would be a breach of nautical etiquette to sit down to steer, as that was the only alternative to directing the ship's course with his ankles. No land was in sight and the wind had died out when I came on deck for my 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. watch. I found the second mate sitting up rubbing his eyes as I emerged from the companion hatch.

'Well, where are we now? How is her head? What's my course?'

'Don't worry about such commonplace details,' he replied. 'I have made an original discovery about these parts that I have never seen mentioned before.'

'What's that?' I asked innocently.

'Well,' he replied, 'when I sat down to steer, the course you gave brought a bright star right over the topmast head and that's what I started to steer by. It's a perfect marvel what a game these heavenly bodies play. I just shut my eyes for a second and when next I opened them the sun was exactly where I had left that star'—and he fled for shelter.

It is a wonder that we ever got anywhere, for we had not so much as a chronometer watch, and in spite of a decrepit sextant even our latitude was often an uncertain quantity. However, we made the port of Douglas, whence we visited quite a part of the historic island. As our parson was called home from there, we wired for and secured another chum to share our labours. Our generally unconventional attire in fashionable summer resorts was at times quite embarrassing. Barelegged, bareheaded, and 'tanned to a chip,' I was carrying my friend's bag along the fashionable pier to see him off on his homeward journey, when a lady stopped me and asked me if I were an Eskimo, offering me a job if I needed one. I suppose the job was in a side-show.

We spent that holiday cruising around the island. It included running ashore off the north point of land and nearly losing the craft; and also in Ramsey Harbour a fracas with the harbour authorities. We had run in that night on top of the full spring tide. Not knowing the harbour, we had tied up to the first bollard and gone incontinently to sleep. We were awakened by the sound of water thundering on top of us, and rushing up found to our dismay that we were lying in the mud, and a large sewer was discharging right on to our decks. Before we had time to get away or clean up, the harbour-master, coming alongside, called on us to pay harbour dues! We stoutly protested that as a pleasure yacht we were not liable and intended to resist to the death any such insult. He was really able to see at once that we were just young fellows out for a holiday, but he had the last word before a crowd of sight-seers who had gathered on the quay above us.

'Pleasure yacht, pleasure yacht, indeed!' he shouted as he rode away. 'I can prove to any man with half an eye that you are nothing but one of them old coal or mud barges.'

The following year the wind suited better the other way. We were practically all young doctors this time, the cook being a very athletic chum in whose rooms were collected as trophies, in almost every branch of athletics, over seventy of what we called silver 'pots.' As a cook he proved a failure except in zeal. It didn't really interest him, especially when the weather was lively. On one occasion I reported to the galley, though I was skipper that year, in search of the rice-pudding for dinner—Dennis, our cook, being temporarily indisposed. Such a sight as met my view! Had I been superstitious I should have fled. A great black column the circumference of the boiler had risen not less than a foot above the top rim, and was wearing the iron cover jauntily on one side as a helmet. It proved to be rice. He had filled the saucepan with dry rice, crowded in a little water, forced the lid on very tight, and left it to its own devices!

We visited Carnarvon, Harlech, and other castles, lost our boat in a breeze of wind off Dynllyn, climbed Snowdon from Pwllheli Harbour, and visited a dozen little out-of-the-world harbours that one would otherwise never see. Fishing and shooting for the pot, bathing and rowing, and every kind of healthy out-of-doors pleasure was indulged in along the road of travel—and all at no cost.

At one little seaport a very small man not over five feet high had married a woman considerably over six. He was an idle, drunken rascal, and I met her one day striding down the street with her intoxicated little spouse wrapped up in her apron, feebly protesting.

One result of these holidays was that I told my London boys about them, using one's experiences as illustrations, till suddenly it struck me that this was shabby Christianity. Why shouldn't these town cagelings share our holidays? Thirteen accompanied me the following summer. We had three tents, an old deserted factory, and an uninhabited gorge by the sea, all to ourselves on the Anglesea coast, among people who spoke only Welsh. Thus we had all the joys of foreign travel at very little cost.

Among the many tricks the boys 'got away with' was one at the big railway junction at Bangor, where we had an hour to wait. They got into the baggage-room and stole a varied assortment of labels, which they industriously pasted over those on a large pile of luggage stacked on the platform. The subsequent tangle of destinations can better be imagined than described. I have never put much value on 'labels' since that day.

Camp rules were simple—no clothing allowed except short blue knickers and grey flannel shirts, no shoes, stockings, or caps except on Sundays. The uniform was provided and was as a rule the amateur production of numerous friends, for our finances were strictly limited. The knickers were not particularly successful, the legs frequently being carried so high up that there was no space into which the body could be inserted. Everyone had to bathe in the sea before he got any breakfast. I can still see ravenous boys staving off the evil hour till as near midday as possible. No one was allowed in the boats who could not swim, an art which they all quickly acquired. There was, of course, a regular fatigue party each day for the household duties. We had no beds, but slept on long burlap bags stuffed with hay. A very favourite pastime was afforded by our big lifeboat, an old one hired from the National Lifeboat Society. The tides flowed very strongly alongshore, east on the flood tide and west on the ebb. Food, fishing-lines, and a skipper for the day being provided, the old boat would go off with the tide in the morning, the boys had a picnic somewhere during the slack-water interim, and came back with the return tide.

When our numbers grew, as they did to thirty the second year, and nearly a hundred in subsequent seasons, thirty or more boys would be packed off daily in that way, and yet we never lost one of them. If they had not had as many lives as cats, it would have been quite another story. The boat had sufficient sails to give the appearance to their unfamiliar eyes of being a sailing vessel, but the real work was done with twelve huge oars, two boys to an oar being the rule. At nights they used to come drifting homeward on the returning tides singing their dirges, like some historic barge of old.

An annual expedition was to the top of Mount Snowdon, the highest in England or Wales. It was attempted by land and water. Half of us tramped overland in forced marches to the beautiful Menai Straits, crossed the suspension bridge, and were given splendid hospitality and good beds on the straw of the large stables at the beautiful country seat of a friend at Trevorth. Here the boat section who came around the island were to meet us, anchoring their craft on the south side of the Straits. Our second year the naval division did not turn up, and some had qualms of conscience that evil might have overtaken them. Nor did they arrive until we by land had conquered the summit, travelling by Bethesda and the famous slate quarries, and returning for the second evening to Trevorth. We then found that they had been stranded on the sands in Red Wharf Bay, so far from the shore that they could neither go forward nor back; had thus spent their first night in a somewhat chilly manner in old bathing-machines by the land-wash, and supped off the superfluous hard biscuit which they had been reserving for the return voyage. They were none the worse, however, our genial host making it up to them in an extra generous provision and a special evening entertainment. One of my smartest boys (a Jew by nationality, for we made no distinctions in election to our class), in recounting his adventures to me next day, said: 'My! Doctor, I did have some fun kidding that waiter in the white choker. He took a liking to me, so I let him pal up. I told him my name was Lord Shaftesbury when I was home, but I asked him not to let it out, and the old bloke promised he wouldn't.' The 'old bloke' happened to be our host, who was always in dress-clothes in the evening, which was the only time we were at his house.

These holidays drew us very closely together; and to make the boys feel it less a charitable affair, everyone was encouraged to save up his railway fare and as much more as possible. By special arrangement with the railway and other friends, and by very simple living, the per capita charges were so much reduced that many of the boys not only paid their own expenses, but even helped their friends. The start was always attended by a crowd of relatives, all helping with the baggage. The father of one of my boys was a costermonger, and had a horse that he had obtained very cheap because it had a disease of the legs. He always kept it in the downstairs portion of his house, which it entered by the front door. It was a great pleasure to him to come and cart our things free to the station. The boys used to load his cart at our house, and I remember one time that they made him haul unconsciously all the way to the big London terminal at Euston half our furniture, including our coal boxes. His son, a most charming boy, made good in life in Australia and bought a nice house in one of the suburbs for his father and mother. I had the pleasure one night of meeting them all there. The father was terribly uneasy, for he said he just could not get accustomed to it. All his old pals were gone, and his present neighbours' tastes and interests made a great gulf between them. I heard later that, as soon as his son left England again, the old man sold the house, and returned to the more congenial associations of a costermonger's life, where I believe he, like his pony, died in harness.

The last two years of my stay in London being occupied with resident work at hospital, I could not find time for such far-off holidays, and at the suggestion of my chief, Sir Frederick Treves, himself a Dorsetshire man, we camped by permission of our friends, the owners, in the grounds of Lulworth Castle, close by the sea.

One of the great attractions of the new camping-ground was the exquisite country and the splendid coast, with chalk cliffs over which almost anyone could fall with impunity. Lulworth Cove, one of the most picturesque in England, was the summer resort of my chief, and he being an expert mariner and swimmer used not only very often to join us at camp, but always gave the boys a fine regatta and picnic at his cottage. Our water polo games were also a great feature here, the water being warm and enabling us easily to play out the games. There are also numerous beautiful castles and country houses all the way between Swanage and Weymouth, and we had such kindness extended to us wherever we went that every day was a dream of joy to the lads. Without any question they acquired new visions and ideals through these experiences.