In 1936, at the age of seventeen, I started my life as a medical student at Liverpool University. In the first year we took four subjects: chemistry, physics, botany and zoology. In physics we had to work in pairs and I found myself with Sam (John) Bradshaw, an ex-Saint Francis Xavier school Liverpool boy who had won a rarely given state scholarship to university.

One of my memories of my first year as a medical student was the difficulty we had in getting our electrical experiments to work. At the time we did not know the reason for the problems we had with our galvanometers, but I know now that Professor James Chadwick, the professor of physics, who had worked with Ernest Rutherford and who had discovered the neutron in 1932, had a cyclotron in the basement of the Physics Department and his experiments with it made our galvanometers act independently of our experiments. I particularly enjoyed zoology, studying the anatomy of the frog, the dogfish, the rabbit, the earthworm and the cockroach.

The first operation I saw was with Sam. It was a gastrectomy, the removal of a stomach, at Garston Hospital near Cressington. We had asked the surgeon, Philip Hawe, a friend of my father, if we might attend one of his operations. Hawe made the first large incision in the abdomen and then, without looking up, said, ‘Catch him’ as Sam fainted.

In the second year we studied anatomy and physiology. Professor Wood, the professor of anatomy, told us that we must remember two things. One, that in the tram going home we must not talk about our ‘parts’, being the parts of the body that we were dissecting – an arm, a leg or a thorax. Secondly, we must not take our ‘parts’ home with us. Once a fellow student did take an arm home wrapped in brown paper. As she was jogging along in the tram, she was surprised when the lady opposite to her stood up and then fainted.