2.  Arrival In The United Kingdom

None of us had any idea where we were going, when we arrived on terra firma. However, the first transport officer who met us, said that he had instructions from the War Office that we were to proceed to Leeds, where the Royal Army Medical School was located, and we would stay just long enough to sort out our belongings, before proceeding on a week’s disembarkation leave in London. Our accommodation at excellent hotels had all been arranged, he said.

It was August of 1941. There were few tourists in London, and it was long before the myriad of U.S. troops had landed. The English hadn’t started to say, “The American soldiers are over- dressed, over-paid, over-sexed and the worst of it is, that they’re over here”. We very seldom heard that sort of thing said about the Canadians, though as a Captain, I made more than my Lt.-Col. Commanding Officer.

We had a very good time, seeing all the sights. Not only the fine shows, but the museum, the zoo, Madame Toussaud’s, the Parliament Buildings and Palace all had to be seen. There was little sign of war, apart from the black-out, occasional sirens and the barrage-balloons high up in the sky, to discourage enemy bombers from flying low over London. Little did I know that I would soon be suspended in a basket from one of these, before making parachute jumps.

We found the British very friendly and welcoming, and fell in love with London, a love affair that lasts forever, it seems. Some of its early history is pretty sordid, but whose isn’t. We found the underground ”tube” confusing, but studied the map before taking it, and were amazed by the names of some districts, such as “Elephant and Castle”. This, I found, had been “Enfant de Castille”. “Rotten Row” was originally ”Rue du Roi”.

Hearing that Dr. Wilder Penfield was coming to England, I was as excited as he later told me he had been. His fellow neuro surgeon, Dr. Bill Cone, had been selected to head the neurosurgical hospital that Canada had sent to England, while Penfield remained at the Montreal Neurological Hospital, which he had founded in 1934. He had envied Bill Cone, but hadn’t been able to persuade the Army to send him to England. However, he obtained authority from the National Research Council to do so, and was able to see all the people he wanted to.

On the last day of my leave in London, I phoned the number I had received to reach Dr. Penfield, and when the secretary answered, she asked my name. The public phone I was using had been badly beaten by subscribers who had probably tried to get their money back, and the connection was very poor. She heard the “Kerr” and thought I was “Kerr-nel somebody”. On assuring her that I was only a captain, she said, “Oh, you’re Navy”. A Navy captain is, of course, equivalent to a full colonel, and she must have thought that I had to be important to call Dr. Penfield. In any event, she suddenly remembered that he had told her that if I called, she should invite me to have lunch with him at Fortnum and Mason’s restaurant at noon. I told her how happy that would make me.

Few of the readers will ever have had a meal at the luxurious Fortnum and Mason’s, I imagine. In any event, we met there and must have chatted for more than an hour, catching up on the family news and discussing the future of the world!  He was so interested in my experiences so far with the British.

As a Rhodes scholar, he had been in England during the war, before the Americans entered, and had served during his holidays with the Red Cross in France. It was while crossing the channel for his second tour of duty that his shop was torpedoed. He suffered a fractured femur, had a narrow escape when the half of the ship that he was left on, nearly capsized, and eventually convalesced in the home of Sir William Osler. That fine physi cian was able to help him plan his future medical training.

I should explain how I had been, briefly, a member of Wilder Penfield’s family in the summer of 1939. When he was a young student, and his mother was having a busy time, supporting him, he was lucky enough to get a summer job as a companion for the two children of a doctor, whom he considered quite wealthy at the time. He spent the whole summer with them, swimming, sailing and keeping the kids out of mischief, for which he was paid a hundred dollars a month.

So he and Mrs. Penfield thought that they should hire a medical student to do the same for them, since young Wilder was going to spend the summer working in lower Quebec to practise his French, and Ruth Mary was going to France, for the same reason. Mrs. Penfield would therefore be left alone with the two young children, except for weekends when Dr. Penfield always tried to get to Magog Meadows, their fine home on Lake Memphremagog.

When I went to the McGill employment bureau to look for a summer job, the nice lady who looked after us remembered that she had sent me to the University Settlement Camp the year before, and said how lucky I would be if I could get this job. How right she was!!!  I got to know Dr. Penfield so well, playing tennis with him, sailing in the “Astrocyte”, named after the neuroglial cell that he had discovered after working in Spain, and occasionally driving him to Montreal for emergency operations on a Saturday or Sunday night. As we had lunch, he remembered how confident he had been in my driving, being able to snooze as we sped along.

He also remembered other things, such as the time that he was about to leave their home on Montrose Avenue one Sunday night, to catch a train to New York. His daughter and I had just reached the house after spending the day skiing in the Laurentians, and Ruth Mary hurried to give him a farewell kiss, when she started to faint. He held her up and said, “I don’t think you should have skied so far or so fast.”  I told him that he was quite right, since we had covered the Maple Leaf trail from St. Agathe, and just reached Piedmont in time to catch the train, by that time quite full, so we had to stand with our skis.

He also remembered young Jeff’s experience, when I took him horseback riding. His smaller brown horse was usually quite quiet, but that day raced ahead of my big black one, threw Jeff off, fracturing his left wrist. I had made a splint from branches and a piece of shirt, I think, then driven him to Montreal. There we were met at the Montreal General by Fraser Gurd, the chief surgeon. He x-rayed the wrist, found it in good position, and said he wanted to leave it in the splint until the next morning, when Jeff would get an anaesthetic. So all the visitors who came that evening were proudly shown the odd-looking wrist. Incidentally, it was a tragedy that Jeff broke his left wrist, because he was a child prodigy violinist, though he wouldn’t remember that now, probably, and soon stopped practising, after being unable to use his hand for the fingering.

Dr. Penfield always talked to me as though I was his son, and I well remember his counselling me, “You should keep your emotions on ice until you’re thirty. I did!”  This may well have explained, as a psycho-analyst would tell me, if I paid him, why Ruth Mary and I treated each other as brother and sister whenever we had such good times going out together. He also advised me to take my later studies in internal medicine, rather than neurosurgery, unless I was prepared to fail in my treatment of 50% of my cases.

I was tempted, but didn’t ask him about the bravest operation that he had ever done, on his sister, who had a malignant brain tumor. As the best neurosurgeon, all the doctors said he should operate. But on his own sister?  Finally, he carried out a radical dissection, and performed an operation that has now been done thousands of times, a frontal lobotomy. They were surprised that with this amount of brain removed, she still acted so normally. Unfortunately, although she was greatly improved, about two years later, the malignancy won.

We talked so long, I worried that he might be late for something more important, however he was able to tell me about my father’s accident, only a week or so after I had left Canada. He had just bought a new car, with “power glide”, just before the automatic transmission came in. He was a terribly busy general practi tioner and drove fast everywhere. He had tried to beat a large truck to an intersection, and the truck had won. His new car was a “total”, and so was he, very nearly, with fractured skull, spine, etc. Mrs. Penfield had driven my mother to pick him up at the hospital, to take him home. Mother soon learned to drive herself!

We chatted about our fathers, something he seldom did. His mother had been left by her husband, a good doctor who found life too dull where they lived, preferring the “Wild West”. What a difference from Wilder, who was a wonderful father, not only to his own four children, but others, like Ashton!

About the last time that I met Dr. Penfield, he was a  head table guest at a medical meeting. Mrs. Penfield was in the audience, and she asked me to play a little trick on him. I was to approach Dr. Penfield, and she would time him, seeing how many seconds it took him to recognize me. It only took two!

Dr. Penfield died in April, 1976, and I drove Mrs. Penfield to his memorial service, because I had an old convertible, much larger than the Penfield children’s new smaller cars, and it was easier for her to get in and out. She joined Wilder only a couple of years later, ending an era, most will agree.

Fortunately, they leave many grand-children, including two who have inherited Wilder’s love for writing, Wendy Penfield, Young Wilder and Berey’s daughter, and Jefferson Lewis, son of Ruth Mary and Crosby Lewis. His “Something Hidden” should be read by anyone interested in the Penfield story.