Stories and Anecdotes: Written, Remembered, Collected and Compiled

By Jim Wright

This is a collection of stories, anecdotes, and reminiscences written, collected, and compiled over a long professional life.

They amuse or provoke serious thought, aiming to make the reader laugh for a few moments and think for much longer.

Most are in short essay form, some with a discursive introductory beginning leading to a serious or amusing ending, the real thrust of the story.

Most are based on personal experience. The stories about bees are factual and based on a life-long hobby of beekeeping.

The last thoughtfully written section from a lifetime as a doctor is entirely serious, educational, and thought-provoking.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781398468641

Book preview

Acknowledgement

James Edwin Wright AM, MD, FRACS, FACS was a paediatric surgeon in Newcastle, Australia. Now a retired nonagenarian he prefers to be known as Jim.

Throughout his professional and social life he had a memory for a good story, a habit of reminiscing appallingly, never hesitating to inflict listeners with anecdotes from the many travelled years.

A compulsion to write inevitably led to this collection of short stories and even shorter anecdotes.

Many are original from personal experiences recalled from the long years. Those collected and compiled from other sources are acknowledged with origin and author where known.

Jim hopes they create a chuckle or a thought and likes to quote the Australian poet, Andrew Bart, on Paterson:

"…though their merits indeed are but slight,

I shall not repine,

If they give you one moment’s delight

Old comrades of mine."

Dedication

To all who have contributed over many years, wittingly or unwittingly,

to these stories.

Copyright Information ©

Jim Wright 2023

The right of Jim Wright to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398468634 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398468641 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thanks to family members for proof-reading, especially to my late daughter-in-law, Wendy, for detailed checking of an early draft.

To the Secretary of the Sydney University Medical Society for permission to use material from the 1949 editions of the journal.

To Peter Lewis for the cover picture and for permission to use other such artworks.

To Gwen Hamilton for proof-reading an earlier version.

And to all the people, known and unknown, who unwittingly contributed to these stories.

Introduction

What is the difference between an introduction, a foreword, a preface, a preamble, a prologue or a prelude? My authority, the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, gives the following definitions:

Foreword: A word said before something else; hence, a preface.

Preamble: going before…a preliminary statement in speech or writing; a preface, a prologue, introduction.

Preface: The introduction to a literary work usually explaining its subject, purpose, scope and method.

Prologue: Pro one meaning is given as for as opposed to con, against, but in this context the alternative meaning towards the front is more relevant. The logue component means word or speech. So prologue means a word before. I like it because one can marry it with an epilogue or word after.

Prelude: An introductory performance… Thus, usually applying to music.

Introduction: The action or process of leading to something; a preliminary step or stage—1660. …initiation in the knowledge of a subject; elementary instruction—1702 (This is just one of the meanings; others refer to introduction of individuals to one another. It literally translates as leading into.)

These definitions go round in circles; one word defined in terms of another. So, you can take your pick of any of them. I chose the mundane introduction to avoid a previous clanger when I wrote an introduction to a history written by a friend but I called it a foreward. Nobody noticed it and it is there in the published book as permanent testimony to my crass ignorance.

Recently, The Newcastle Herald newspaper had a competition for readers to write and submit short stories based on specific published pictures. The stories the paper printed were very loosely related to the pictures, and in my view most of them were decidedly boring and irrelevant. Though I do not have the imagination or the creativity to write a novel or fictitious story, I really felt that I could do better than most of the entries I read. With the wealth of personal and professional experiences of a nonagenarian, an irrepressible sense of humour and a prodigious memory for humorous trivia, I could surely fashion some into a story.

So I put a few together, but whether readers will find them interesting is quite another matter. Perhaps their appraisal will be the same as my response to the newspaper’s winning stories. Be that as it may, the motivation for writing such stories is purely personal but compelling; an inexplicable compulsion to write and leave judgement to anyone intrepid enough to read them. Banjo Paterson said it better than I can:

Though their merits indeed are but slight

I shall not repine

If they give you one moment’s delight

Old comrades of mine.¹

AB Paterson, Prelude, Selected Poems

The stories are made up, remembered, collected or based on experiences. In early drafts, I transposed some of the personal stories from the first person to the third and changed the profession, perhaps because of an innate reluctance to talk about myself, perhaps to make the story seem fictitious and impersonal or to prevent readers becoming bored with reading about incidents in my own life. Here, I reverted to original personal format so most are told as they really happened but my medical and surgical background is betrayed whether in first or third person.

Where tales involve other people anonymity is preserved by changing names or places to avoid some readers recognising themselves. Some loosely based on actual events and experiences might be embellished in order to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. ²Others are reproductions of other people’s stories which particularly appealed to me and due acknowledgement of their origin is given. It is also noted if the origin or author is unknown or long forgotten.

The book is a miscellaneous collection of short stories and even shorter anecdotes ³gathered, collected or remembered over a lifetime. Some have a moral in the end or a sermon-like message; others end with a punchline which, I hope, provides amusement. A pattern has emerged with a discursive introduction waffling around the given subject leading to the real purpose of the story. Many follow an essay form or revert to it because that is my default style. I have always liked writing essays, in English classes at school and in university exams. Give me an excuse and I’ll write an essay about anything. And this collection is the result!

While many are original, some parts of stories and some stories in rhyme have been retrieved from sources way back in the dim distant past. In some the punch-line is from a story heard long ago with obscure authorship. Such borrowings are acknowledged.

Shorter anecdotes are brief quips and quotes which appealed to my sense of humour and provoked the irresistible urge to share the pleasure or message. Authorship of many of these is unknown or lost.

Some have four-letter Chaucerian naughty words but I refuse to blank them out or use a euphemism for that would spoil the effect, and I insist that used properly, they are good words. Some stories are prefaced with an Australian Broadcasting Corporation type disclaimer such as, The following story has a theme or contains words which might give offence to some people. So if you are a some people, don’t read them. (That, of course, guarantees that those some people will read them more avidly!)

Other stories may offend militant feminists where I have dared to follow the once accepted practice of using the male personal pronoun as generic for both male and female. I refuse to use they or their as singular as is the current practice, and his or hers is far too clumsy. So ladies, if you take umbrage, get over it or don’t read it, for I remain unrepentant.

Why write these stories? Because I have to, despite not having a clue whether anyone will be interested in them. Stories told in the first person are always a little suspect, as eloquently confessed by David Niven in the introduction to his autobiography, The Moon is a Balloon. It is a quote from Professor John KG Galbraith of Harvard University: Books can be broken broadly into two classes: those written to please the reader and those for the greater pleasure of the writer. Subject to numerous and distinguished exceptions, the second class is rightly suspect and especially if the writer himself appears in the story. Well, this book belongs to Niven’s second class; it was written to satisfy the writer’s irresistible urge and the satisfaction of the writer.

Reference is occasionally made to a previous book, Just Walking Up the Hill…which records many more medical anecdotes collected from years of surgical practice experiences in hospitals in NSW, Victoria and America.

Over the years, I have entertained friends, or bored them, by telling many of these anecdotes, raising a smile, a giggle, a laugh or provoking a listener to tell a better one. If the response to the written word is similar I shall be well satisfied. And even more rewarded if any of the tales evoke the kind of humour which a fellow named William Davis espoused: The kind of humour I like is the thing that makes me laugh for five seconds and think for ten minutes.

If you do not entirely share the author’s amusement with these stories, do not be concerned; it is probably not you that is odd. A friend said of a collection of earlier versions, I keep it by my bed and read one story before going to sleep. I know that might be interpreted as a subtle way of saying how boring the stories are; one story soporific enough to put him to sleep rather than inspire continued reading, but I shall remain unrepentant and enjoy a kinder interpretation of his remarks.

While collecting them over many years, I asked the members of associations to which I belonged for contributions. Please tell me about funny incidents in your life’s experience, I asked. And I received the same response from all such requests—none. So it may be that all this volume does is tell of my own peculiar sense of humour, for as the French music composer Francis Poulenc is alleged to have said (in French, of course): I am a melancholy man who likes to laugh…

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A melancholy man who likes to laugh

Jim Wright AM MD FRACS FACS, retired paediatric surgeon

---

¹ This quote so aptly applies to anything I write that I make no apology for using it here after having used it before in a previous book of reminiscences, Just Walking up the Hill…↩︎

² Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado↩︎

³ The Shorter Oxford dictionary defines a story as a historical narrative or anecdote…and one of two definitions of an anecdote is the narrative of an interesting or striking incident or event. So, story or anecdote? You take your pick but I have to plead guilty of a bit of tautology.↩︎

Stories from or About Childhood

The Boy and the Bullet

I looked at my hands, gnarled up with osteoarthritis so characteristic of old age. I felt the fingers of the left hand, numb and insensitive from a stroke. In half a century as a surgeon, that hand had tied thousands of knots with fine sutures but now has difficulty tying shoelaces. As my mind drifted back to an incident in early childhood, I thought how fortunate I was to have any hands. Or eyes.

Childhood years were spent on a farm in primitive circumstances with many hazards for an active inquisitive young boy. My father was not a tidy man, leaving tools where they were last used, never in their own place where they could be found readily. Lots of hazardous rubbish lay around the house, timber with nails sticking up, broken glass. Walking with bare feet, I knew only too well the pain of standing on one of those nails.

2

There was a rifle, a small .22, and I knew at a very early age about shooting; about cartridges and bullets and how a sharp hit on the cap by the rifle firing pin would cause the cartridge to explode and send the bullet flying out the barrel.

One warm Sunday afternoon, the family was sitting in the shade talking to a neighbour who had dropped in for a chat as country people do. He was carrying a .303 rifle, larger than the smaller one familiar to me. Responding to my curiosity, the neighbour gave me a cartridge to look at while he talked to my folks. It was so much larger than the little .22 rounds I was familiar with. As the adults talked, I sat down and thought, If I hit that firing cap with a hammer, I’ll be able to see the bullet fly out of the case. So I wandered off looking for a hammer but it was not where it should have been and I never found it. Looking for something else to do the job, I found a large piece of broken glass, just a little of the rubbish which lay about this untidy farmyard. Holding the cartridge in my left hand, I tapped unsuccessfully on the cap while family and friend were oblivious of the enormous hazard this posed.

As an old man thinking and shuddering about this episode, I was so glad that it didn’t work. I looked at my hands again, at my eyes in a mirror, and thought how lucky I was that the hammer was nowhere to be found.

The Junior Builder’s Labourer

This story contains a word which might give offence to some people, notwithstanding the reality that the word is freely used in movies and television.

So if you are a some people, don’t read it.

Are you the youngest in your family? Being the youngest has its advantages and at times, disadvantages. If you are fortunate enough to have an older sister honing her emerging maternal instincts by doting on you and mothering you, then you are fortunate indeed.

On the other hand, if you happen to be brighter than an older brother who resents any extra parental attention or praise you might attract, you are in for some unpleasant times. Advice gratuitously given by such an older sibling is rarely welcome or helpful and is often resented.

Then there comes a time when older siblings go off to school and you at the end of the line are left at home to entertain yourself. Will you succumb to boredom, or learn to create your own activities? This is a real test for a developing personality. I recall witnessing this very situation involving grandsons. Numbers one and two were off to school, leaving number three at home alone with Mum. I remember thinking, You poor lonely boy, you must be bored stiff.

But no! I watched him playing alone on the lounge room floor with a train set. He connected the tracks, hooked up the engine and carriages and ran them around and around. Eventually tiring of that exercise, he disconnected the tracks and made another route, occupying his attention for another hour or so. Similarly, his realistic little model RAV4 provided more mental stimulation. He was not bored at all; he was creative. I concluded that boredom is not the product of an unemployed active mind, but of a less imaginative one. And as the years went by, I was not surprised to see this little boy display further evidence of outstanding intelligence and sporting skills.

About the same time a senior colleague told a similar story about his youngest of six, also left at home alone with his mother at that receptive and formative preschool age. He was intrigued by the activities of workmen building a house on the erstwhile vacant block next door. He would climb on the fence and watch the mechanical shovels digging the trenches for the foundations, no doubt seeing them in his mind as giant dinosaurs, lumbering along the ground, growling and digging up masses of earth by huge gaping mouthfuls. Then he saw the cement trucks arrive, their revolving silos spewing cement into the trenches. And all the time he watched in awe as the men in hard hats and big boots worked in the hot sun, talked and shouted instructions at each other.

Eventually, the men noted the little bloke sitting there on the fence day after day and invited him down at lunch time to chat and share a sandwich, apple or piece of cake. His mother saw all this happening and was delighted at her boy’s interest in the building of a house and the activities of the workmen. This was obviously long before the days of frenzied fears of child abuse and she was close enough by to keep an eye on things. So she went along with the lad’s request to give him his own lunchbox and packed his lunch to have with the men next door.

So off he’d go to the building site each morning armed with his lunch and eager to watch more intimately as the house grew day by day. He marvelled at the skills of the brickies and the way the walls just rose up so straight and true. The men welcomed their little mascot, talked to him and answered questions. No doubt his education had begun early and was proceeding apace!

He saw the loads of bricks and building materials arriving on huge trucks and marvelled at the strength of the hydraulic loaders as they offloaded heavy pallets of bricks, roofing tiles, toilets and kitchen sinks. He shared the anger of the men when supplies of materials did not appear on time, leaving them helplessly frustrated and temporarily unemployed. Unfortunately this happened with increasing frequency leaving the men idle for longer periods and no doubt expressing their displeasure with colourful language typical of the workplace.

One morning the lad went off to work as usual but came home very shortly afterwards in a very bad mood indeed. He stormed into the kitchen and slammed his lunch box on the table, muttering unintelligibly. Worried, his mother asked: What’s wrong?

With a scowl on his face, he growled, We’re fucked for bricks!

Vive La Difference

About Sex Hormones

It is not often that one can remember the contents of a university lecture over 60 years later, but I recall very clearly the introduction to a physiology class on sex hormones in second year medicine in 1949. It is a wonder that one remembers anything at all of lectures held at 8am, but they were the best attended of all classes because the professor went through the prescribed textbook and told us which sections we could ignore.

It was not the professor I remember here but a very smart physician introducing the subject of sex hormones. No doubt as a means of getting the immediate attention of a lecture room of some 300 sleepy students at 8am, he began with the story of a little girl who went into a lolly shop and asked the shop keeper for a chocolate doll. When it was handed to her, she gave it back immediately, "That’s no good, that’s a girl doll. I want a boy doll."

Embarrassed, the shopkeeper mumbled, There’s not much difference, is there?

No, was the reply, but there’s that much more chocolate!

                       

Chemical formulae of oestrogen, the female sex hormone, and male hormone, testosterone.

The shopkeeper was right, wasn’t he? There really isn’t much difference.

But as a Frenchman once said, Vive la Différence.

(At the time of writing, the subject of sexual harassment and abuse is dominating news bulletins with interminable and irritating repetition. It is also a time of street protests with shouting and waving of banners. Perhaps an appropriate banner at a public rally about sex abuse would be:

BAN

TESTOSTERONE

Maternal Instinct

Or

Vive La Difference II

Feminists would have us believe that anything a man can do, a woman can do better, and they may well be right. But some also like to argue that the difference between boys and girls is the result of nurturing and teaching rather than genetically inherent. I think that the previous stories about sex hormones and the junior builder’s labourer give the lie to that one. And what’s more one’s own life’s experience also denies that claim; little girls are different from little boys from their earliest days.

Nobody can discern the difference better than grandparents, as this personal story illustrates.

My granddaughter of the age referred to in Maurice Chevalier’s song, five or six or seven, had a doll she called Sarah. She loved Sarah. She was also looking forward with joyous anticipation to having a real live doll to play with in the near future, an expected little sister.

It was Grandad’s job to reassemble the cot which had not been used for five years or more, a task which is often a challenge, particularly with only two hands. Though kids love to help, more often than not, that help can well be done without. Not so with this granddaughter. When asked to hold something, she held it; when asked to pass a tool or screw, she did so unerringly.

So, the job done, the wooden cot assembled but lacking bedclothes, Grandad retired to the kitchen for a cup of tea. Returning to the scene of assembly shortly afterwards, he found the job not only completed with all the bedclothes, but there was Sarah tucked in serenely with her mother, rocking and singing her to sleep.

Would a boy do this?

And there’s more. When the real doll arrived, big sister was there for a nurse. The scene brought tears to Grandad’s eyes. The natural maternal instinct stood out unmistakably in every rocking and swaying movement and every loving downward glance to the baby. This was innate; it could not have been taught.

Maurice Chevalier expressed it so well with his signature tune and the song from Gigi by Lerner and Loewe:

Thank Heaven for Little Girls

Each time I see a little girl

Of five or six or seven

I can’t resist a joyous urge

To smile and say

Thank heaven for little girls

For little girls get

Bigger every day

Thank heaven for little girls

They grow up in

The most delightful way.

Those little eyes

So helpless and appealing

Will one day flash

And send you crashing

Through the ceiling

Thank heaven for little girls

Thank heaven for them all

No matter where

No matter who

Without them

What would little boys do

Thank heaven, Thank heaven

Thank heaven for little girls.

This picture needs no caption

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And nor does this

Teenage Music

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

—Noel Coward

Why do teenagers and the public in general listen to such awful music? The music we hear in waiting rooms, in supermarkets, in tourist buses, by telephone when on hold and all day on local ABC and commercial radio. The beat or rhythm is monotonous and what purports to be singing is just loud tuneless yelling.

Surely, if kids were exposed to real or classical music as much as they are to the screaming heebie-jeebies of pop music they would, it they have any ear at all and anything between, embrace it as enthusiastically as they do the rubbish they listen to so interminably. That is not to claim that all classical music is enjoyable. There is some pretty dull stuff on classical record and plenty of it is played on air and in concert halls. Even Sir Thomas Beecham, a great English conductor is on record as saying, There are no rhythmical changes in (Wagner’s) Gotterdammerung…it goes on from half past five till midnight like a damned old cart-horse.

Years ago music called Muzak was played in public places. It was also called elevator music. In contrast to today’s popular varieties it was more like quiet bland unrecognisable tuneless classical music. In fact, Frank Muir, an unforgettable English writer and funny man likened it to a bland diet. It was deliberately dull, boring and uninteresting to provide background avoiding distraction from