Now that the clapping has stopped
Praise is great. We all love to get and give it. The greatest praise of all is to honour those who deserve it with how we live our lives.
In 1970 in Glasgow, I needed to register with a new dentist. I had moved into a flat near the University and, although I was only a few miles from my family home, it might as well have been on the other side of the moon. Glasgow University in those days was called a ‘home’ University. By far the greatest number of Glasgow school kids who went to uni did so in their hometown without ever rippling the surface of their home lives. School simply extended into something with fewer lessons (unless you did Engineering as I did) and more booze, laundry and meals still provided for by Mum at home.
I stumbled across the dentist whilst walking along the soot-blackened sandstone streets of Maryhill Road on a dark, wet winter evening. There, above the line of tenement shops, were a pair of sash windows, glowing with light from the inside, emblazoned with stained glass panels declaring ‘T.T. Macarthur-Baxter, DDS.’
I walked up the dimly lit close stairs, dettol-clean and scrubbed, dark green tiles lining the walls to hip height, banister rail polished to a glossy, smooth snake of wood. Mr MacArthur Baxter’s receptionist took my details and made my appointment. I paid little attention to when she asked if I had met him before, or had been recommended by a current patient. I similarly ignored the same query by the dental nurse who took me through to the surgery the next day.
Have you met Mr MacArthur-Baxter before? - twice asked. And twice slipped by my mind as small talk.
I would like to think that I didn't display any shock, but I suspect that I did, and also that Mr Macarthur-Baxter was familiar with the reaction of new patients. His face was all but gone.
My new dentist’s eyelids were clearly manufactured by tissue from elsewhere, his lips unreconstructed from the two livid scars of what had been, the face a patchwork quilt of skin that had never felt quite at home in its new location. His nose was a faint facsimile, but mainly two holes. His hand, outstretched to shake mine, was missing most of his thumb and forefinger, the stumps slightly shorter than the damaged remaining fingers, whose tips had gone.
I sat in the chair and we talked about my teeth. When we agreed a filling was required, he asked if I wanted pain relief; what was on offer was not the light pain relief of today, but something that would take many hours to fade,, and I had choir practice that evening and needed my lips to move, so I refused.
As his right hand clutching the drill approached my gaping mouth, I saw it was quivering, the faintest but visible shake. ‘Don’t worry, lass.’ said Mr Macarthur-Baxter, seeing my gaze fixated on his hand, ‘once I get some pressure back from your tooth, my hand does what it’s told.’
I had several fillings over the course of the next three years, all with Mr MacArthur-Baxter. I learned that he had early Parkinson’s disease, that he still had pain most of the time. That his young marriage failed when his wife saw the destruction done to the man she had promised to love in sickness and in health; that he trained as a dentist after the war and that he loved his work.
He had volunteered for the RAF in 1942 from a protected position on his father’s farm, having lost friends and family to the war. He joined knowing what horrors lay in wait for those who fall from the sky in a burning plane, and in his turn, he became one of McIndoe’s guinea pigs.
We have recently celebrated VE Day; the celebration of the end of World War 2. For many people, the idea of celebrating something that cost so many lives is abhorrent. I understand that.
The seemingly unalloyed joy on the faces of the people in photos from that day, of course, belies the reality. TT Macarthur-Baxter wouldn't have been in a photo; he was still in hospital having yet more skin grafts.
When people walk into danger to save the people and the values they hold dear, to protect others from harm, to stop evil (or a virus) from spreading, we should celebrate their courage, independent of our outrage that they have to do it at all. Of course we should. Clapping our NHS workers has been wonderful, but it’s time to do. more.
Our only job, if we cannot join the leagues of essential workers, is to help make our bit of the world they gave and still give so much for, somewhere they are proud to live in today. We need to reward them properly, treat them with respect. Most of all, we need to be better people, all of us, for everyone who has fought to get us through this alive.
