One Of The Most Significant Places In My Life
After leaving Enfield, I took a nostalgic ride on a 121 bus to Southgate to get the Piccadilly line back to Central London. I pased this anonymous block of modern flats at the top of Windmill Hill.
One Of The Most Significant Places In My Life
So why is it significant. On the site there used to be a nursing home, which is where I was delivered by my parent’s GP; Dr. Egerton White.
The Place Where The Bottom Fell Out Of A Drawer
Whenever I go to Oakwood station, just seeing the parking in front of the station reminds me of a very funny story.
The Place Where The Bottom Fell Out Of A Drawer
Our next door neighbour, a rather pompous Mancunian, who thought the world revolved around him, just after the Second World War, had a Rover, very much like the one you see in the James Herriott programs on television. My doctor, the wonderfully named Egerton White had one too, as doctors in those days always did. just like they had three-piece suits, a good size corporation and a pocket watch on a gold chain.
Our neighbour, had a garage that was basically a store for his junk. in the middle of the back wall, was an old chest of drawers with large round knobs. He also had the habit of going in a bit close, so that he could shut the garage doors. My father, who was a bit of a comedian, once joked that. his junk wasn’t worth nicking.
One evening, he wanted to get an evening paper. The easiest place to get one, for our neighbour was Oakwood station, where he just parked outside, left the engine running and walked inside the station to get one of the Star, News or Standard.
The Entrance To Oakwood Station
The picture shows where the papers were sold, from the bench just inside the entrance.
Anyway, he duly backed the Rover out of the garage and proceeded to drive to the station. He always sat high in the car, to emphasise his own importance and was surprised to see people waving and pointing to the front of his car. He just waved back, as my father used to say, when he related the tail, in the style of the King.
When he returned to the car after buying the paper, he realised the reason for all the attention on the trip to the station. He had gone into the garage just a little bit too far, the night before and the bumpers of the Rover had hooked themselves under the knobs on one of the drawers. They were so firmly locked, that when he backed out to get the paper, the car extracted the drawer from the chest and it had stayed balanced there, all the way to the station.
He then took a fateful decision. He decided that as the drawer had stayed there on the journey to the station, it would stay there on the way back.
It did stay there, but as he moved off, the bottom decided to part company from the rest of the drawer and thirty years of accumulated odds and ends, were deposited all over the forecourt of the station.
My Allergies and Me
I seem to be getting no relief from the hay fever at all this summer. Just as it seems the pollen level gets to a low level for a day, it then rises back up again. I had lunch with a friend yesterday and he never suffers, but he is this year. It’s a story that I’ve heard so many times in the last few months from others. No-one seems to have any idea about it either.
I don’t get any luck with it either. On Friday I was to see a consultant about it, but for administrative reasons the appointment was put back for a few days. Any sane person, would think that the Devil has it in for them, if they had suffered the last three years I have. To make matters worse, the sale of my house in Suffolk, seems to be moving slowly and Ipswich lost by seven goals to one last night. But I’m still here, which is more than can be said for my wife and youngest son.
I also had a good lunch yesterday with friends, essentially to celebrate my birthday on Tuesday. Even Ipswich contrived to lose six two that night.
I know it’s only a small thing, but I slept well last night and got up feeling fresh. So I thought, it might be a good idea to go to perhaps Brighton or Southend and get a bit of sea air. But after checking the pollen levels, I decided against it as levels were moderate in all the places I checked. And the excellent Met Office web site, says that it’ll be Tuesday before the levels get better.
So I think I’ll go and see my therapist today. I’m not sure where I’ll explore, but because it is so easy and fairly close, I think I might go to Bruce Castle Museum this afternoon.
What I will do is reflect on my life and especially this dreaded hay fever.
I will start with my ancestors. I’m certain that it’s my father’s line that has the really bad genes and has brought me the allergies. From what I know now, I’m certain that he was a coeliac like me. He certainly had more wind than the Outer Hebrides. He was always choked up with catarrh and ate menthol catarrh tablets like others eat sweets. He was also a heavy pipe smoker and that couldn’t have helped. His father had died young of pneumonia and my father had told me, that my grandfather was a heavy drinker and smoker, who suffered from asthma. My father told me graphic stories about how he would pick him up in a terrible state from places like Wood Green Conservative Club. One of the strange things about my father’s family, is that there is very few women, who have ever given birth. Could this be the coeliac gene, which doesn’t help women carrying a viable foetus to full term.
Unfortunately, I don’t have my school records, but it would make interesting reading, as I can remember taking endless time off because I just wasn’t up to it. I seemed to be coughing all the time and spent many nights with my head over a jug of Friar’s Balsam. At one time I supposedly got a case of scarlet fever. How I ever got to a Grammar School I don’t know! Luckily, we had television and I had my Meccano to amuse myself with. And that is what I did, when I was at home. Most weekends I would be off to my father’s print works, where I did useful things. To say, I was an indoor child would not be an understatement. And we worry about kids spending too much time on their computers.
So what was it that made me so ill? Unfortunately, my medical records are incomplete and start in 1970. If only they were on a central database, that I could access!
My GP, one Dr. Egerton White, thought I was allergic to eggs, and so I was rationed to one a week. Did it help? Not at all. My father thought it might be the paint in our house, which he thought contained lead and I can remember him stripping it all off and using modern lead-free paints. It could also have been his smoking or the coal fires we had in those days, but I didn’t really improve much. I suppose it might have got better, when my parents bought a house in Felixstowe, but we only went for the odd weekends. But at least I used to walk a lot by the sea.
I think in some ways, I just grew out of the worst times and what finally killed it in some ways was going to Liverpool, where I spent the next three years at the University on top of a hill with the wind in the west.
So perhaps it was just hay fever of a particularly persistent form, as from what I can remember, I don’t feel much different now. The only difference, is that now I’m on a strict gluten-free diet after having been diagnosed as a coeliac ten years ago. That cured a lot of my problems, like chronic dandruff.
All of my levels like B12 are spot on, so it’s not as if I lack anything.
Since C died, I’ve started to get a few problems, like tight shins, difficulty in breathing and spots on my chest, back and legs. I scratch them a lot, when I’m alone.
I have been told on good authority by an academic I respect, that widows can suffer high cortisol levels and the Internet indicates there may be a link.
So has all the stress I’ve suffered in the previous three years, brought the hay fever back?
I sometimes think, that my mind learned how to control it and the stroke knocked out that knowledge, but that is just a feeling not based on any fact. I have been told by a serious doctor, that stroke patients sometimes have pain return from previous injuries. He did find problems in my neck, which are improving through physiotherapy.
Dr. Egerton White
I am fairly unique amongst people these days in that I was delivered by my GP; Dr. Egerton White.
He was your classic GP of the time in North London. He had the Rover 90 or 110, the corporation, waistcoat and watch-chain, the kindly face and warm hands, and everything else that went with the job.
But why did he come all of the way from Winchmore Hill to my parent’s home in Cockfosters?
It was a drive of about five or six kilometres and all of my friends and neighbours used doctors who were much closer. My father always said that it was because his was one of the first houses built in the area and there weren’t any doctors. He may also have been a client of my father’s printing business. But then that wouldn’t add up, as the house was built in 1936 and I don’t think my father was working there at the time.
It has always been a puzzle.
I can still see Dr. White’s face in my mind, as he came many times to see me at home. I should say, that I also went to see him and his partner, Dr. Curley, at Winchmore Hill just as many times too. It was an unusual face in that it was round and covered in dark pigmented spots.
Only now, do I know what the problem is with my health. I am a coeliac, which means I’m allergic to the gluten found in wheat, barley and rye. But in those far off days of the late 1940s and early 1950s, no-one knew how to diagnose my problem. He thought I may have had an egg allergy, but try as he could, he missed the diagnosis. Incidentally, go through my medical notes and you’ll see all sorts of symptoms that now I put down to being a coeliac.
Note that I don’t use coeliac disease. I suffer from a diet-controlled non-illness.
One incident stands out. At about seven, I caught scarlet fever. Or did I?
I had all the symptoms and was placed in isolation at home. But according to Dr. White, I was the only case in London. So was it some weird manifestation of my allergy. I don’t know and I suppose I could find out if I had a test for the antibodies. But does it really matter? No! In the grand scheme of things.
About seven years ago, I bought a new car. The salesman had the same skin colour with the pigmented spots as Dr. White. And the salesman was black or of mixed-race!
So does this partly explain the reason how the good Dr. Egerton White came to be my family’s doctor in North London?
The Anonymous Widower 