We were visiting my parents for tea a while ago, when I heard my husband, Anthony, laughing immoderately from another room. I found him looking through a file of souvenirs from when I was small. It consisted of a mixture of highly questionable artwork, programmes of concerts I’d played in, appalling poetry, and all the other creative output a doting parent might collect, to encapsulate those fleeting childhood years.
The thing that was making Anthony laugh was a letter I’d written to Father Christmas when I was five. (Why a little girl from a nice Jewish family was writing to Father Christmas at all can be blamed on my Christian primary school. My education has also left me with an enduring love of Christmas carols and the words of the Lord’s Prayer carved into my brain.)
The list, which was written in 1979, included a request for a “Cindy doll” (sic) along with “all the clothes and all the furniture” to accompany her. I never would have asked my parents for such an immoderate gift, but given that Santa had magical powers, I felt it was definitely worth a punt. The paper the letter is written on is blackened with soot because it had been sent up our chimney (that being the only way to communicate with Santa Claus, obviously) and my parents had secretly retrieved it from the garden.
But the source of Anthony’s amusement was the printed heading on the paper. Emblazoned across the top were the words: “ANUSOL: soothes painful piles and anal irritation.”
My father practised as a GP, and practically everything in our home seemed to have the name of a drug company on it: paper, pens, calendars, mugs, all given away by “drug reps” as part of the pharmaceutical industry’s marketing strategy.
My parents have kept all the toys we had as children, so now when our own kids go to visit they get to play with them. One example is a “Viewmaster” — a plastic picture viewer that shows a three-dimensional image when you look through it. You press down a lever on the side and, with a click, a disc turns to reveal the next image along.
It was a popular toy in the 1970s, and my friends had versions showing stills from movies and pictures from fairy tales. Ours, on the other hand, is branded with the word “Mucodyne” — a drug used to treat bronchial problems — and it came with a disc of pictures showing a variety of lung diseases. It’s hard to imagine the conversation in the planning meeting where they decided to produce this. After all, it’s hardly going to appeal to children… and I’d like to think that it wasn’t intended to be the GP’s first source of research when treating lung conditions. If I were sitting in a consulting room with a hacking cough and the doctor started peering into a Viewmaster in order to work out what was wrong with me, it wouldn’t fill me with confidence.
When I was small, though, having this stuff round the house was so completely normal that I never questioned it. My parents’ entire social circle consisted of Jewish doctors and their wives. (They were of a generation where very few of the women had careers of their own.) My grandpa, also a GP, had a practice in Sunderland which my father then joined — and two of my brothers were to enter the profession in due course.
The medical profession is one that tends to leak out of the surgery and the hospital and into all aspects of life. Conversations round our dinner table routinely focused on medical conditions, discussed in eye-watering detail. I had syringes to play with in the bath (the needles removed, obviously), and it never occurred to me that these were not a completely standard bathtime toy.
I think that we have a tendency to take our childhood experiences and form them into a mental landscape of what is “normal”. Everything that happens subsequently is seen as a diversion from that norm — not necessarily a bad diversion, but a diversion nonetheless.
For me, therefore, the default career is to be a doctor. I always assumed that’s what I would become, too (though there was no pressure put on me to do so). As it turned out, I showed no aptitude for science, I’m squeamish and I have no fine motor skills — so it became clear that it wasn’t the ideal choice. To this day, though, I see the world of work as divided into “doctors” and “not doctors”.
Meanwhile, when I look back at the “Anusol” Christmas list, I see that most of the requests on it were made in vain. I didn’t get a Sindy doll till I was older — still less any of the associated accessories. It’s possible that Santa Claus knew Chanukah was really my festival, so he didn’t take my letter sufficiently seriously; or perhaps he was just put off by my choice of writing paper.
@susanreuben
