Against the Tide by Noël Browne Page A

confined to the Catholic side. Mainly because he was our professor of surgery and we would later meet him in our examinations, I attended the clinic held by Professor William
Pearson at the Adelaide Hospital. Just before it began he told us that he did not ‘lecture to Jews, niggers, or Papists’, and asked those of us in these categories to get out of his
ward. He would not begin to teach until we did so. There were some African and Jewish students present. Shocked by the bigotry of this declaration we had no choice but to leave.
    Religion was to enter into my life once again in the North of England after I had qualified. The Superintendent of the Cheshire Joint Sanatorium where I had been working in a non-permanent
capacity, declined to appoint me to a permanent post because I was a Catholic. This doctor, a Methodist lay preacher and a fine physician, appointed instead a young man with no post-graduate
experience, but a graduate of Queen’s University, Belfast and, no doubt, a Protestant. The pleasant irony, which both myself and the young Queen’s doctor enjoyed, was that he was one of
the few Catholics who had studied at Queen’s to become a doctor.
    With the Chance family I was to enjoy a modicum of stability in my new home. Sensitive, compassionate, tolerant, and infinitely patient, Lady Chance had nurtured the merger of her two families;
she had watched grow into adulthood her three stepsons and one stepdaughter, as well as her own four sons, and three daughters. She now welcomed myself, a total stranger, into her home, as if I
were one of her own, and I was effortlessly assimilated by them. Any awkwardness that might arise stemmed from the projection of my own intense dislike of any outside intrusion into my own inner
life. How could they uncomplainingly tolerate my intrusion on the privacy of their home life?
    It was this realisation of my intrusive presence that conditioned my own inclination to withdraw. One defence was to escape into my own bedroom at Nullamore. There was always plenty of reading
to be done. With the breakup of the family following the death of Lady Chance, I went to live with the two bachelor brothers, Norman and Arthur, who lived in one of Dublin’s elegant historic
Georgian houses, 90 Merrion Square.
    The maid, Mary, who cared for us, was a remarkable specimen of early Victorian domestic servant. She was a tall, heavily rouged woman, and wore a white frilly apron, over a full ankle length
black cotton dress, dropping down over her black well polished heavy brogue shoes. She effected a deceptively demure and austere demeanour. As with a Grenadier Guardsman’s Busby, she added
greatly to her stature and presence by a bulky florid red wig, carefully balanced on her head. The clever use of a narrow black velvet ribbon, puckered into the antique shape of a beautifully
white, old-fashioned mop cap sat atop the wig. In spite of her demure appearance, Mary was an obsessional gambler. She bet mainly on horses, and had a wide knowledge of the skills of riding and
racing, with a rich easy flow of betting jargon, reminiscent of a character in a Damon Runyon novel. ‘He started at threes, but by the off, was back down to odds on’, sounded strange
coming from this uniquely Victorian vision.
    I later went into residence in Trinity College rooms, where I learned to cater, alas inadequately, for myself. My health was to suffer in consequence. A bottle of milk snatched from the
doorstep, and swallowed running across the front square on my way to a nine o’clock clinic, was no substitute for a ‘full Irish breakfast’.
    Student life had not at that time entered the intensely competitive pressures of the present. The short terms, crammed with lectures and clinics, and the long vacations created an exhilarating
pattern of study of man’s body and mind, in health and sickness, interspersed with the limitless permutations of recreations and pleasures to be found in Dublin. There was