Breaking Ranks

EPIGRAPH

Wer spricht von Siegen? Überstehen ist alles.

(Who speaks of victories? To endure is all.)

Rainer Maria Rilke, Requiem

CONTENTS

Epigraph

John Saxby

Reginald Miles

Peter Mahon

Epilogue (Bernard Brown)

About the Author

Also by James McNeish

Copyright

This book is about three men who defied authority, and paid for it. A doctor, a soldier and a judge. Each was at the top of his profession. The title and subtitle of this book suggest a continuity, and, indeed, as I researched and wrote the stories, certain events and incidents I didn’t know about emerged, suggesting a creatively neater approach built around a unified or common theme. But although each life is the stuff of fiction and the three share a common fate, dying prematurely when they had so much to give, more separates their stories than unites them. I have therefore resisted the novelist’s approach and the urge to fictionalise their stories, preferring to let each life stand alone as a story in its own right.

Having said that, I have been conscious when writing this book of a remark some forty years ago by the art critic and teacher, Eric McCormick. He said, ‘Have you ever noticed the anarchic streak in this society?’ I hadn’t. I had never thought about it. He didn’t elaborate. Nor do I recall what triggered McCormick’s remark. It might have been something quite simple, like the well-known episode when Kiwi troops in Libya failed to salute Field Marshal Montgomery, who then complained to Freyberg, who said, ‘I’m sure if you give ’em a wave, sir, they’ll wave back.’ Or the occasion when Joe Heenan, Secretary for Internal Affairs, left his cheese-cutter on a hook at Buckingham Palace after departing from a royal row.

Over the years I have come to realise that there is more than a grain of truth in McCormick’s remark. But this is the first time in my experience that an element of anarchy — the heretical streak in our makeup — has invaded the page unasked, as a kind of back story or mutinous subtext. In this sense the three essays, although quite separate, are not entirely random. All three men defy convention in a way that goes beyond mere dissent. A streak of subversion lingers.

Three lives, then; three provocateurs, innovators and visionaries, who died before their time. Two destroy themselves, and the third — betrayal, it is said, being more dependable than friendship — dies in furious sorrow. Not all three are born New Zealanders. Yet the doctor, who is English and who might be called in the language of fifty years ago a new-New Zealander, is arguably more than that, having transcended definition by being honoured on his deathbed by local tangata whenua and beyond.

Finally, I note that I have changed names in two or three instances at the subject’s request, to protect privacy.

JOHN SAXBY

Sometimes after a good dinner and some wine my wife and I will sit around the table afterwards and talk about absent friends. ‘Who is it we miss most?’ Helen will say. Invariably, almost as inevitable as the next sunrise, one name will come up, that of John Saxby: the only person she claims to have stayed in our house for any length of time who was unobtrusive to the point of near-invisibility. John spent three weeks with us in Wellington in the early nineties. He had designed an outbuilding, a Japanese tea-house, for me to write in and insisted on coming down to help me build it. What I remember about the visit is his gaiety; he was an uncomplicated and benign guest.

He turns up, or is reputed to turn up, in a novel by Brigid Brophy, The King of a Rainy Country, as the young man who is hanging about in the kitchen forever eating cornflakes. I said to John, ‘What do you have for breakfast?’

‘Cornflakes usually,’ he said.

I saw him in action in a professional capacity only once. At the rural institution on the edge of the King Country where he worked in the Waikato, he was holding a discussion session with a group of young patients. I sat in and listened. It was the first time we had met, following an introduction by telephone, and this was a different person altogether from the one who came to stay in 1991. Here was no benign house guest but a masquerading Pierrot, grotesque and impish as one of those gnomes you see as gargoyles, water-spouting from the walls of gothic churches in Italy. John was protean. I knew nothing of his earlier self, or selves: the actor in him, the poet, the translator, the oarsman, the mountaineer, or the innovator and alchemist in the field of mental disorders. Or any of his other selves in a past life. Only a few shards from that brilliant personality were beamed in my direction. At Tokanui Psychiatric Hospital, he was engaged as a psychiatrist, working under Henry Bennett. After Dr Bennett retired as medical superintendent of the hospital in 1984, John succeeded him. And then, nine years later, John died.

Ours was not an intense friendship, although it was intimate and real. We met only intermittently, with long gaps in between. I was often away, sometimes a year at a time. We met perhaps ten or fifteen times in twenty years. Yet such was his gift for friendship that I feel, looking back, that I have been under his spell for a whole lifetime.

In 1994, the year after John died, I was in London having dinner with Derek Robinson, a paediatrician who had known John at Oxford. We were talking about this and that. The members’ dining room at the Royal Society of Medicine in Wimpole Street was busy but pleasantly relaxed. A man sitting alone a couple of tables away sent a note across to Derek. It said, ‘Do we know each other?’

To which Derek answered, ‘Yes.’ When the other man joined us, Derek said to him, ‘We were talking about a mutual acquaintance in New Zealand. This is James McNeish. Did you know John Saxby?’

‘My God,’ said the other man. ‘He used to climb up the stonework into my room. Who didn’t know Saxby!’

The other man turned out to be someone Derek had been wanting to contact for an anniversary gaudy at Oxford, a surgeon named Mann. Charles Mann and Derek Robinson had been undergraduates at New College in 1947, after the war, but hadn’t met again in the forty-seven years since. They were two of perhaps only three or four contemporaries of John Saxby at New College who had taken medicine in the immediate postwar years. So it was that I began to piece together in a haphazard way some of his history.

* * *

John had described his parents to me, his father especially, as somewhat odd. The father was without a trade but had become a businessman. He made widgets. He designed component parts, and bits of machinery and gadgets to wind springs and drill holes or make angles which had no history and no name. In the war the army engaged him on secret work, making gadgets for things by the million.

‘My dear Miles,’ he said to a friend, ‘you cannot imagine how many a million is.’

The friend, Miles Vaughan Williams, was another doctor I met. We met in a rainstorm outside Hertford College, of which Dr Vaughan Williams, a distant cousin of the composer, was a fellow. He used to visit the Saxbys in Abingdon, he said, where the father, Oliver, had his workshop in a rambling house where, I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that John was born. Vaughan Williams described Oliver Saxby as an amateur bloke, ‘quite unlettered’. He told me that when John’s mother became ill and immobile, confined to her bedroom, Oliver designed a travelling chair with a harness, and built a monorail at ceiling height, so she was able to get about the house from room to room independently, under her own steam.

‘Oliver was an absolute wizard,’ Vaughan Williams said. ‘We nabbed him for the Department of Pharmacology here in Oxford. He liked things being broken. Good, he’d say, and rub his hands. Now I can fix it. He liked addressing problems where other people hadn’t been before. You say John was an innovator? He probably got it from the father by osmosis.’

Which may help to explain the significance of our first meeting in New Zealand, the group discussion I attended at Tokanui. The year was 1970 or perhaps earlier, John having arrived from England with his wife and four children in 1966. He had invited me to Tokanui at my request (I was researching a play). The discussion I attended took place in an open ward. The participants were inmates, all voluntary, almost all Pakeha. They exhibited a variety of behavioural and mental disorders, he told me, largely undiagnosed. They sat on chairs in a semi-circle; John squatted in the centre. He wore a rumpled fawn suit, and led a discussion that was lively and at one point became so personal and edgy, with gales of laughter and insults flying — mostly in his direction — that I wanted to hide. John seemed impervious. His ears became pointed, that was all. He parried the insults and became so caught up in the discussion that he was indistinguishable from the rest. An outsider would not have known he wasn’t one of the patients.

What I was witnessing was an experiment in group therapy. In retrospect, it can be seen as a blueprint: the genesis of a socio-psychiatric movement that would spread through New Zealand and see psychotherapy brought into the institutions. Put differently, it was the beginning of a more humanist approach to the treatment of mental illness in New Zealand, helping to rid our asylums of the stigma of cruelty so vividly described in Janet Frame’s autobiographical novel, Owls Do Cry. At Tokanui, John was working alone.

How or why he came from England I have never discovered, except anecdotally. He appears to have been sent down from the British Army or some other august body, in the way one was sent down at the time from the University of Oxford, ‘for unspecified offences’, meaning a contravention of the moral code. As indeed happened to his contemporary and friend, the writer Brigid Brophy, a confessed bisexual, who was thrown out of Oxford for breaking the rules, and with whom he may have been, I suspect, at one time in love. Nor did I discover why — since he wasn’t very good at it and would undoubtedly have shone in another profession like architecture — he chose medicine, unless it was to do with his father.

‘In my Father’s house,’ we read in John’s Gospel, chapter 14, ‘are many mansions.’ Certainly John’s father was many-sided. Before becoming a whiz at widgets, Oliver Baber Saxby had been a magistrate. A decent, charming and liberal human being, by all accounts, he nonetheless believed, according to Miles Vaughan Williams, in the sanctity of corporal punishment.

‘Ra-ther! Young louts, give ’em a good flogging. Ra-rara.’ When flogging was abolished, Oliver resigned from the Bench. ‘I’m not going to have these young thugs coming in and being handed out lollipops and candy. Birching, that’s what’s needed. If we can’t flog ’em, I’m going.’ So he resigned. He took rather the same attitude towards John. They didn’t get on. They had some hard words. You can imagine the rest.

John was an only child and, according to his wife, Felicity, a lonely child, sent away to boarding school in Bedford at the age of eight. He liked science and was good at sketching things and designing houses; he had an inquisitive mind bordering on the exotic, and perhaps, as with the neurologist Oliver Sacks, there was a touch of genius as well. Oliver Sacks is the doctor who emigrated from England to America and wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sacks and Saxby? Both were humane clinicians. That means they preferred patients to laboratories, people to potions, human waywardness to technical certainties. That’s rarer than you think. Both grew up shy with a desire to show off, and were drawn to pursuits involving risk and danger. They are alike in many ways. Oliver Sacks rode motor-bikes, went to Canada to join the air force and became a neurologist by accident; John Saxby climbed mountains and followed a similar roundabout route into medicine. However the similarities are mostly superficial. Oliver the father may have pushed John into doctoring; on the other hand, the son may have grasped at it in subconscious rebellion to a cane-wielding father.

Derek Robinson says, ‘He was an idealist. Medicine appealed to him — even though he wasn’t very good at it — as part of the broader humanities. I mean, he took the Oath seriously. That part of the Oath which talks of warmth and human sympathy and understanding outweighing the surgeon’s knife was pure Saxby. Almost a biblical text for him. Though, funnily enough, he’d have made a good surgeon. John was good on canals and bones, the topography of the human body. But bad on physiology and diseases, like me. We both had difficulty passing exams.

‘I have a mental picture of him in a corridor, leaning back against the wall talking to someone, a patient, and listening. White coat hanging down, his hands pressed in a mitre against his chest, fingers touching, nodding and listening. He was always listening. He wanted to know everything.

‘We did a stint together at Westminster as housemen. Then came Suez, but I’d lost touch with him by then. After Suez the army claimed him.’ If life is a progression of chance, John’s life is a classic example, even if he did grow up conditioned by institutions (school, university, hospital) pointing to a conventional career. What appealed was risk and danger, elements the army would soon supply in abundance.

Derek pictures a young doctor who takes the stories of patients as subjective truths. I see him already a student drawn to trauma among his contemporaries, which may sound implausible until you remember that many of his fellow students at New College in 1946–47 were soldiers in civvies who had just been discharged. Here he was, a tender schoolboy of seventeen; and here were all these warriors in their thirties coming back from the war. The average age in the junior common room in Trinity term at New College that year, we read, according to the three-volume History of Oxford, was twenty-eight. Ex-majors with Military Crosses, wives and moustaches ‘had little in common with seventeen-year-old boys who carried green ration books entitling them to extra bananas’. However, in the case of a listener like John, the interlocutor incarnate, there was a commonality and merging of interests. And the key was milk, not bananas.

‘I liked purveyors of fire and horror stories,’ he told me once. ‘I could draw people out. At New College I earned a brief fame. It was on account of the milk. As a minor, I was allowed a double ration at the buttery. The milk introduced me to a wider circle of friends than I’d otherwise have had. These army chaps, some of them almost old enough to be my father, would come to me for coffee or invite me to coffee because I had the wherewithal to go with it.’

John’s rooms at New College were high up a staircase. He became adept at negotiating the perpendicular walls, climbing up the Victorian gothic pile to get into his rooms late at night after the gates were locked. ‘He showed me how to go up a drainpipe and down the other side,’ a contemporary says. ‘He did it all the time. He was fantastically strong in the shoulders.’ It came from rowing — not in the eights, but in the single sculls. But rock-climbing was the real passion, because of the enhanced risk.

We all take risks, have a hidden wish to show off and be thought well of. A secret urge to assert ourselves and be rewarded? A leap to save a drowning child? It’s generally a spur-of-the-moment thing. But it’s also a matter of temperament: a form of exhibitionism. A desire to shock in the young may be harmless juvenilia, or it may mask other forms of behaviour like a lack of instinct for self-preservation which will recur in adult life and which may not be quite so harmless. Who knows?

In the army John was, as a doctor, automatically made an officer. He would acknowledge the salute of other ranks on the parade ground with a cheery ‘Hello’. A mild enough tic, perhaps, but it infuriated the drill sergeant. A sense of the absurd seems always to have been there.

After graduating he took a house job at the Middlesex in central London. Nurses and staff arriving one day on the early shift were surprised to find a galaxy of figures peering down at them from the façade of the hospital in Wimpole Street. They were gnomes. They wore night-caps. They were cemented on and around the ledges and porticos, decorating the face of the building. They were fishing, their lines depending from little rods into the hospital yard