Chapter Twelve

 

Accidents

 

The A77, the main road from Glasgow to Stranraer, is a hundred miles long. Twenty miles from its final destination – the ferry terminal for Ireland – it passes through Collintrae. To reach our little piece of rural heaven, drivers have had to battle through the towns and villages south of Ayr, none of which even now have, in the twenty-first century, been deemed worthy of bypass by the authorities. So that last fifty miles is a struggle on the best of days. When the weather is bad, or the traffic particularly heavy, there are hundreds of drivers hurtling towards Stranraer, desperate to catch their ferry bookings, unable to overtake on the narrow, winding, two-lane road. Add a local tractorman going about his business, or a caravanner wanting to admire the scenery, and tempers rage. On days like this, misjudge your overtaking, and you end up at best in hospital. Impatience, tiredness, and narrow inadequate roads with blind bends and dips are a sure recipe for carnage.  

As the Collintrae doctor I quickly became used to the call to accidents, sometimes more than one a day. On December 16, 1966 I was called to two accidents. I got to the first one, but I failed to attend the second. My memory isn’t just hazy about the second, it’s non-existent. I’d better explain. 

As you drive south from Collintrae to Stranraer you first climb into the hills above Glen App. You enter the glen, which runs parallel to the coast, about two miles inland, through a narrow pass, with steep hillside rising up to the right, and just as steep a decline down to the left, through pine trees to the valley floor several hundred feet below. It was through this pass that MacAllan’s bread van raced each morning at around six-thirty, with its load of freshly baked delicacies for the ferries.  

On that December morning, it didn’t make it. It wasn’t that the driver was going too fast. A few yards past the summit of the pass, men had been working on the road. They had closed off the right side of the road, so that large vehicles had to drive slowly and carefully past the obstruction, taking care not to catch the grassy verge, beyond which was the drop to the valley floor.  

The baker’s man knew that he had to go slow at that point, but he hadn’t accounted for the black ice on the surface. The temperature was about three degrees below freezing and there had been rain the day before – just enough moisture to form a film of ice on the road, but not enough to notice in the dark before dawn.  

As he edged carefully past the road-up sign, even at that speed the van slid enough to hit the grass with its front near-side wheel. The bus driver behind him saw the accident happen as if in slow motion. The van had started to tip sideways as the verge gave way. As it did so, the driver’s door opened, as if he wanted to jump out, but the tipping was too fast for him. Gravity slammed the door back on to him, and the roll of the van gathered momentum. The bus was close enough for the driver to see the headlights of the van spinning over and over, and to hear the smashing of the trees, as it careered through them. 

I got the message about the crash from the dairyman who lived in the farmhouse at the bottom of the hill. Luckily, I was already dressed so I could leave home immediately. Warned by the policeman about the black ice I gingerly made my way to the scene in my pride and joy, my blue and white Morris Oxford. Even going slowly I felt it slide on the various bends up to the pass. 

I arrived at the scene before the ambulance, just after the fire brigade. Dawn was breaking: the December sun was making an effort to break through the swirls of grey mist. The firemen were at the edge of the road, shining a light down through the mess of broken trees at the wreck. We couldn’t distinguish between broken tree branches and the remains of the bread van. As it had spun down into the valley, it had been ripped into shreds, so that we were looking down at thousands of pieces of splintered wood, from the trees and the bodywork of the van. Scattered down the slope was an avalanche of hundreds of loaves of bread, rolls, cakes, flans and tarts. Below them, lying on the flat grass, was the cab of the van. Beside it was the motionless body of the driver, face down, limbs akimbo. We switched off the engines of the police car, the bus and the fire engine, to try to hear anything that might indicate that the driver was alive. All we could hear was the distant call of a screech owl. 

One of us had to go down the slope, through the gap between the trees, over the jagged stumps and torn branches, to reach him. The firemen helped me into the full fireman’s emergency gear of clothing and boots, tied me into a harness and let me down on a rope from a winch on the back of the fire engine. I made slow progress over the slippery ground, over and sometimes through the mess of broken branches and stumps, down to the valley floor. I was sure that I would be examining a corpse: no one could have survived that fall. As I bent over him, the body turned over, and Frank Wilson looked up at me.  

‘Sorry Doc,’ he said, ‘for getting you out at this time in the morning.’  

Mr Wilson was one of my patients. His family lived in Kilminnel, and he had seen me once or twice for minor ailments. Everyone called hum Lucky Frank because he had some years before won a few pounds on the football pools several weeks in succession. He had certainly been lucky that morning. All he had was a broken left ankle and a few bruises. He had immensely strong arms from years of driving large vans with no power steering. As he tipped over, he had hung on to his steering wheel and braced his spine against the back of his seat. It was only when the cab hit the valley floor and the door burst open, throwing him out, that he had broken his ankle against its metal edge.  

I signalled up to the men at the top, three hundred feet above, to let down a stretcher. By this time the ambulance had arrived, and one of the men came down with it. The three of us were hauled back up to the surface, Lucky Frank on the stretcher, and us beside it, to help steer it away from the wrecked trees. 

This is now where my account gets difficult. My next memory is waking up in a bed, staring at a bare light bulb. As I recall it from forty-five years ago, I tried to close my eyes, but couldn’t. Somehow my eyelids weren’t working. I was lying on my back. My head and face hurt, but I could move my limbs. A hand touched my right arm, and I turned to look at its owner. It was Mairi, sitting beside me, tears streaming down her face. She explained that I had been in an accident, and that I had been unconscious for twelve hours. She was pleased to have me back. She gave me the news that I was shortly to go to theatre to ‘have my eyes fixed’, then a nurse came into the room to wheel me away. 

In the theatre another well-known face bent over me. I was lucky that Professor Jack Mustarde lived in Ayr at the time. He was the most famous plastic surgeon in the west of Scotland, who had trained with Archibald McIndoe in the Second World War, restoring the faces of burnt airmen. He and his registrar, Dr Ghosh, set about stitching what was left of my face together, under local anaesthetic. Jack cheerfully chatted to me throughout, explaining exactly what he and Dr Ghosh were doing, and what had happened to me the day before.  

I’ll draw a veil over my injuries. It’s enough to state that they put over two hundred tiny stitches in my eyelids, forehead and cheeks. I still have the scars to this day but, as Jack said to me, they were designed to look like laughter lines, and my ‘face would grow into them’. He took photographs as he worked, and my ‘before, during and after’ pictures grace one of his textbooks of plastic surgery. I won’t give its title, as they aren’t for the squeamish or even for people with normal sensitivities. 

He told me that as I was preparing to drive home from Glen App a police message had come through from the Bennane Head. A lorry had skidded off the road and hit a man, a Mr Gray, who had just stepped on to the machair from the beach. It was feared that he had serious leg injuries. Could the doctor please attend? 

Perhaps I responded just a little too quickly for the conditions. Perhaps it wasn’t my fault. But on my way down the steep and winding road from Glen App towards Collintrae I turned a corner to face a lorry broadside across the road in front of me. It, too, had met the black ice. I’m told I braked, but the Oxford swept serenely on, straight into the side of the lorry.  

This was before seat belts. I sailed face first over my steering wheel through the windscreen (it was also the days before safety glass), over the bonnet and on to the road. Apparently the lorry driver and his mate rushed to help me as I staggered to my feet, bleeding profusely from my lacerated face. ‘We’ve got to get a doctor,’ one of them said, to which I replied, ‘I am the bloody doctor.’ 

My friends will vouch that I never swear. My father, a teacher, had dinned into me from an early age that people who swear must have no command of the English language. So I look upon my outburst as just being a statement of fact. I was certainly bloody and I was the doctor. Enough said. The ambulance carrying Frank from Glen App arrived a few moments later, and I joined him in the back. Apparently he spent the hour and a half it took to get to Ayr helping the crewman look after me, riven with guilt for having brought me to this state of confusion and injury. I remember nothing of this, of course because, as with any severe head injury, I have a permanent loss of memory for the time immediately before it and for many hours afterwards. 

Donald Gray had been taken off by another ambulance, his left leg broken in three places. 

Neither of us stayed long in hospital. It was close to Christmas, and it was decided that I could leave within a week, once the stitches were out and my concussion had recovered enough. It was a sobering time. I have a big head – a hat size of seven and three quarters. I used to take secret pride in the knowledge that I had an exceptionally large brain. My skull X-rays soon put paid to that. They showed that my unusual head circumference was nothing to do with my brain size. Instead, my skull was at least half as thick again than normal skulls. I wasn’t an egg-head but a bone-head – something that I’m sure my friends had suspected for years. On reflection, though, this wasn’t a bad thing. The extra bone thickness meant that it was better able than most skulls to withstand knocks such as being hit by a hard object, viz. one windscreen, at about thirty miles an hour.  

Donald Gray was out of hospital long before me. He had been put into a plaster of Paris bandage that stretched from one hip to his foot, so that he could not bend his hip, his knee or his ankle. He was meant to stay in this hard casing for several weeks, preferably in hospital where he could be looked after properly. As his official address was ‘Number 1, Bennane Cave, Collintrae,’ the social services felt that he would not be returning to a home that was conducive to a good recovery.  

On the first night, however, he had heaved himself out of his bed, wrapped a dressing gown around the nice new nightshirt so thoughtfully provided by the hospital and, while the nursing staff were attending to some other more needy person (it might even have been me), he walked out of the back door of the hospital onto the street. As the hospital was next to the main road to the south, it wasn’t long before a kindly lorry driver, ferry-bound, picked him up, nightshirt, plaster, hospital slippers and all, to deposit him by his cave. All the lorry drivers knew him. Like the villagers, they too left the odd brown paper parcel by the roadside, next to the cave, and they had all heard of his mishap.  

As for me, the local health board found me a locum doctor, who had just retired from a busy practice in Kilmarnock, to take over my duties for the next month or so. Dr Jimmy Anderson turned out to be the silver lining to the cloud of my accident. He became a good friend, he did a massive job for me in looking after the practice, and he decided at the end of his month to move to the district. He became my regular locum for the odd weekend and week away, and continued to do the job for my eventual successor until he was into his late eighties, becoming a very good friend as he did so. 

As for Mr Gray, he kept on his hip plaster until the following May, around four months after its sell-by day was past. He steadfastly refused to go back to the hospital for its removal, and he waved away any attempts by myself or Jimmy to let us remove it. All through the rest of the winter and well into the spring people who passed by the Bennane were regaled with the sight of Mr Gray waddling about with the huge white, then grey, then black plaster from hip to ankle. We marvelled at how fast he could move with it. Eventually I sat down beside him and suggested that he might let me remove it. This was before we had started to talk. His little grunt gave me hope: I returned to my repaired Morris Oxford and brought out the plaster scissors and knife. 

He kept staring out to sea as I removed the plaster. The leg underneath had healed perfectly. It was strong and healthy, with no sign of any deformity from the three breaks. We threw the plaster on to the fire that burned constantly at the mouth of his cave, and held a silent cremation ceremony around it. Donald looked at me and grunted again. There was even a slight nod of the head that I took for a thank you.

 

Four years later, I was called one spring morning to the Bennane Head. This time a van had failed to take a bend at the summit of the hill. The driver of an approaching car had seen it plunge off the road, through the flimsy barrier, over the cliff edge to the sea two hundred feet below. I got there at the same time as Nurse Flora and the ambulance men, the same crew who had helped on that December morning.  

The four of us stood at the broken barrier and looked over the cliff edge at the boiling sea below. I was experiencing déjà vu. There was the splintered wood, with the bakery colours on it, the hundreds of loaves, rolls and cakes littered all the way down the cliff face and floating on the sea. The cab was deep under the sea, about fifteen feet down. We could see the driver’s body lying face down, spreadeagled inches from the shoreline. He was yards away from the sunken cab, so we assumed that he had been thrown out before the cab had hit the sea. 

This time we were sure we were dealing with a death. Flora and I were lowered down to inspect the body. As we approached, it turned over, and Lucky Frank looked up at me. ‘Hi Doc. It’s me again. We’ll have to stop meeting like this,’ he said. 

His only injury was a broken ankle, the other one this time. He told us that he had fallen out of the cab when it bounced against a rocky projection. As luck would have it, he landed on the only hillock of spongy sea grass and moss. A few feet in any direction away from it were either rocks or sea. His ankle had broken, just as it had last time, when it caught against the door frame on the way out.  

Lucky Frank, Flora and I were hauled up by the ambulance team. Frank and the men had a re-union at the top of the cliff, and they took him off to the hospital to sort out his ankle.  

Even though he had wrecked two vans, the bakery didn’t sack him. They did take him off driving duties, however. They promoted him to store manager, a job in which, as far as I know, he had no more disasters.