Well, my mother was certainly unusual in being a woman surgeon, and she was one of the very first women in the Royal College of Surgeons, I think, maybe the third or fourth. A lot of her older sisters had become suffragettes. I mean, they were... they were tough, intelligent women and they wanted all the rights. My mother was not tough in a confrontational way, but she was extremely tough in her stubbornness and fidelity and tenacity, so she wanted to become a doctor. There was one point, I think, at which she had wanted to become a chemist. Many of her brothers were chemists and my mother was fond of chemistry, but when she had set her mind on becoming a doctor, nothing was going to stop her. And she had a, I suppose, in a way, a brilliant academic career in that she took all the prizes at school and at medical school, and... and she obtained staff positions and fellowship of the Royal College when she was... when she was very young. I do not know, however, that she was that comfortable in a male, or perhaps I should say, in masculine society, so the main hospital she worked in was the EGA, the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had been the first woman physician in England. She had... Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had actually... had to go Paris to get her MD. The... but my mother stayed with the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital from her first appointment in probably 1920, maybe earlier, till she was 65 and retired.
She also used to go to the Marie Curie Hospital and told me how she had once seen Marie Curie. And she also told me... I’m being completely irrelevant here, but this is... she told me how some patients with cancers were given tiny gold needles containing radon, and I asked her if she would bring one of them back, or perhaps she just did, bring one of them back. I think the radon had evaporated by then. Radon only has a half-life of three days. But... and, of course, my mother was also at the Royal Free Hospital and that was, to go back to the start, that was when my editor had been a trainee nurse and had heard her talk in September of '33.
