A CRUEL END
My maternal grandfather was Robert McDougal. I hardly knew him. He died when I was ten years old. He lived in Milton Street in Edinburgh with my grandmother and two of my mother’s sisters, and although I visited the house many times with my parents he was always in bed, so that my only memories of him are the top of his white-haired head poking out from the bed-clothes, with his face always turned away from us towards the wall, and the strange groaning noise that he made when he wasn’t sleeping. His bed was in a corner of the living room so that we would hear his groaning as a familiar background to our everyday conversations; a constant reminder of the terrible pain he was suffering during the last year of his life. It terrified me and bewildered me – why did no-one do anything about it? Yet no-one talked about it and it was apparently accepted as an unfortunate part of life, like the rattling of a loose window-pane or the creaking of an ill-fitting door. Only later did I become aware that it was not inevitable and that much could and should have been done, but wasn’t.
What I know now about my grandfather came from my mother and my aunts. He was born around 1870 and grew up in Freuchie, near Falkland in Fife. He married a girl, Jessie Reekie, who “came from the Highlands”. They had five children, all daughters, and at some point, the family moved to Edinburgh. He joined the Black Watch and became a Regimental Sergeant-Major. His regiment was sent to South Africa and fought in the Boer War. He was one of the few survivors of the battle of Magersfontein, an action so badly planned and led that the men blamed their commanding officers for the disaster. One of the survivors wrote –
Such was the day for our regiment
Dread the revenge we will take
Dearly we paid for the blunder
A drawing-room General’s mistake
Why weren’t we told of the trenches?
Why weren’t we told of the wire?
Why were we marched up in column?
May Tommy Atkins enquire.
The battle is commemorated in a famous painting by Richard Caton Woodville Jr. entitled
“All That Was Left of Them”. My grandfather was one of this small group who remained defiant to the end. He was captured by the Boers but managed to escape by clinging to the underside of a railway carriage. He was able, eventually, to make his way back home and must have taken great pride in being the only British soldier to successfully escape from captivity during the entire war. At the end of the war he left the Black Watch and got a job as a Ranger in the King’s (now Queen’s) Park in Edinburgh.
He was a large rather rough individual who was too fond of drink. On many a Friday evening, with his pay-packet burning a hole in his pocket, he would go pub-crawling around Abbeyhill and Easter Road with his cronies. My grandmother would mobilise her daughters and send them out to search for him. Each would be given a specific group of pubs to reconnoitre. When one of them discovered which pub he was in, she would call up the others and the gang would enter the pub to confront him in front of his drinking buddies and plead with him to come home before he spent the lot. Shame often drove him home, but not always; life for his family could be difficult.
My grandfather was a heavy smoker. He smoked cigarettes and a pipe. As he got older he preferred his pipe and he was rarely seen without it, sometimes lit and belching acrid smoke and sometimes unlit, sucked as a passive comforter. He would sit in his armchair at the fire listening to the radio and smoking, occasionally spitting out a gob of dottle into the shiny brass spittoon on the floor at his side. My mother remembered that she and her sisters had the job of emptying the spittoon and rinsing it.
It was his smoking that did for him. His tongue, for many years directly in the line of the smoke from the pipe, became cancerous and eventually had to be cut out. This left him unable to speak and for a number of years he was reduced to communicating by grunts and gestures. But the cancer returned and spread to his neck and head. It was terminal. A bed was put up in the living room and he took to it and prepared for the end. His doctor prescribed morphine to alleviate the pain.
Unfortunately, my grandmother, herself unwell, delegated the task of getting the morphine and administering it to the patient, to my aunt Margaret. Margaret was the most nervous and anxious of people. She was borderline anorexic, hypochondriac and valetudinarian, prone to all manner of worries and fears. This may have misled my grandmother into thinking that Margaret was thoughtful and careful, but in reality she was not careful at all, just full of cares. What Margaret knew about morphine, apart from it being a painkiller, was that it was highly addictive. She worried herself sick about this and then decided, without discussing it with anyone else, that she would protect my grandfather from the tortures of drug addiction by denying him his morphine. She would dutifully collect it from the pharmacy, bring it home and then pour it down the drain. And my grandfather, unaware, and incapable of protest anyway, was left to suffer the pain without any sedation at all. Little wonder he was groaning.
It is often necessary, in human interactions, to be “cruel to be kind”. This was the reverse – thoughtless and ill-informed ‘kindness’ leading to immeasureable cruelty.
My maternal grandfather was Robert McDougal. I hardly knew him. He died when I was ten years old. He lived in Milton Street in Edinburgh with my grandmother and two of my mother’s sisters, and although I visited the house many times with my parents he was always in bed, so that my only memories of him are the top of his white-haired head poking out from the bed-clothes, with his face always turned away from us towards the wall, and the strange groaning noise that he made when he wasn’t sleeping. His bed was in a corner of the living room so that we would hear his groaning as a familiar background to our everyday conversations; a constant reminder of the terrible pain he was suffering during the last year of his life. It terrified me and bewildered me – why did no-one do anything about it? Yet no-one talked about it and it was apparently accepted as an unfortunate part of life, like the rattling of a loose window-pane or the creaking of an ill-fitting door. Only later did I become aware that it was not inevitable and that much could and should have been done, but wasn’t.
What I know now about my grandfather came from my mother and my aunts. He was born around 1870 and grew up in Freuchie, near Falkland in Fife. He married a girl, Jessie Reekie, who “came from the Highlands”. They had five children, all daughters, and at some point, the family moved to Edinburgh. He joined the Black Watch and became a Regimental Sergeant-Major. His regiment was sent to South Africa and fought in the Boer War. He was one of the few survivors of the battle of Magersfontein, an action so badly planned and led that the men blamed their commanding officers for the disaster. One of the survivors wrote –
Such was the day for our regiment
Dread the revenge we will take
Dearly we paid for the blunder
A drawing-room General’s mistake
Why weren’t we told of the trenches?
Why weren’t we told of the wire?
Why were we marched up in column?
May Tommy Atkins enquire.
The battle is commemorated in a famous painting by Richard Caton Woodville Jr. entitled
“All That Was Left of Them”. My grandfather was one of this small group who remained defiant to the end. He was captured by the Boers but managed to escape by clinging to the underside of a railway carriage. He was able, eventually, to make his way back home and must have taken great pride in being the only British soldier to successfully escape from captivity during the entire war. At the end of the war he left the Black Watch and got a job as a Ranger in the King’s (now Queen’s) Park in Edinburgh.
He was a large rather rough individual who was too fond of drink. On many a Friday evening, with his pay-packet burning a hole in his pocket, he would go pub-crawling around Abbeyhill and Easter Road with his cronies. My grandmother would mobilise her daughters and send them out to search for him. Each would be given a specific group of pubs to reconnoitre. When one of them discovered which pub he was in, she would call up the others and the gang would enter the pub to confront him in front of his drinking buddies and plead with him to come home before he spent the lot. Shame often drove him home, but not always; life for his family could be difficult.
My grandfather was a heavy smoker. He smoked cigarettes and a pipe. As he got older he preferred his pipe and he was rarely seen without it, sometimes lit and belching acrid smoke and sometimes unlit, sucked as a passive comforter. He would sit in his armchair at the fire listening to the radio and smoking, occasionally spitting out a gob of dottle into the shiny brass spittoon on the floor at his side. My mother remembered that she and her sisters had the job of emptying the spittoon and rinsing it.
It was his smoking that did for him. His tongue, for many years directly in the line of the smoke from the pipe, became cancerous and eventually had to be cut out. This left him unable to speak and for a number of years he was reduced to communicating by grunts and gestures. But the cancer returned and spread to his neck and head. It was terminal. A bed was put up in the living room and he took to it and prepared for the end. His doctor prescribed morphine to alleviate the pain.
Unfortunately, my grandmother, herself unwell, delegated the task of getting the morphine and administering it to the patient, to my aunt Margaret. Margaret was the most nervous and anxious of people. She was borderline anorexic, hypochondriac and valetudinarian, prone to all manner of worries and fears. This may have misled my grandmother into thinking that Margaret was thoughtful and careful, but in reality she was not careful at all, just full of cares. What Margaret knew about morphine, apart from it being a painkiller, was that it was highly addictive. She worried herself sick about this and then decided, without discussing it with anyone else, that she would protect my grandfather from the tortures of drug addiction by denying him his morphine. She would dutifully collect it from the pharmacy, bring it home and then pour it down the drain. And my grandfather, unaware, and incapable of protest anyway, was left to suffer the pain without any sedation at all. Little wonder he was groaning.
It is often necessary, in human interactions, to be “cruel to be kind”. This was the reverse – thoughtless and ill-informed ‘kindness’ leading to immeasureable cruelty.
