.  Jill’s Mother came in her  Riley to meet us. She was thrilled to see her daughter so unexpectedly as she had not approved of losing her favourite one to an eccentric tea planter who worked so far away. We tore down the Great West Road at 70 mph which was nerve racking after the slow pace of traffic in Ceylon!
The weather that September was exceptionally dry and hot and Mother in her summer liberty floral dresses  looked as though she were still in the tropics.She was so delighted to see us both and we got the most  rapturous welcome. Her local GP had heard of my accident and was very friendly with the famous plastic surgeon McIndoe , who had  said he would take me on. However I had been given such precise  instructions on board HMS Gambia from their  surgeon ,that I immediately  made plans to go and visit Mr James a couple of days later.  I was booked in to be operated on  a week hence so we drove down to Corfe Castle for a quiet break and it poured non stop with rain , which was probably  the only wet period during our whole of our 4 months stay.  The operation   took over 9 hours of detailed and finickity work. When I came round next day in my private room (I was on BUPA fortunately ), the pain in my right hand was unbelievable  and was to be acute for about a week  in spite of all the codeine they gave me. I only had one limb which had not been operated  upon, my left foot, and on that I would hop to the bathroom. My two wrists, and my right foot had been used, and were in plaster to provide spare tendons for the graft. The whole of the palm of my hand had been opened up as well as the sides of the three affected fingers. All the stitches were  of fine wire similar to fuse wire, and also each finger had on the end, and on the side, two shirt buttons which were wired into the tendon keeping it in position.
In all later I counted 118 stitches, of which most were actually in my right hand.  Mr James the brilliant surgeon, would come and visit me daily. He had a very distinguished record during the war, having been a principal British liaison officer with Marshal Tito and his guerillas in Yugoslavia, where he had been working behind the German lines helping to organise and arm the growing bands of partisans. Now 10 years later he was the acknowledged specialist on the delicate work of finger and hand grafts, as well as his general orthopaedic work.  A couple of days after my operation as I was hopping to the loo, I looked in at  the next door private room to see  a lady lying flat out on the bed.
“Come in, come in ,” she said. “ Have a glass of whisky”. On saying this, she leant over and poured me half a tumbler full. I was aghast, and she saw it. “ Go on drink it.
I’ve got plenty”, she said pointing to a case in the corner of the room. “You see I have only two hobbies in life, sex and booze. As I cannot enjoy the former being on this traction for my back for a month, and being completely immobilised, I can only enjoy drink. So I have a standing order with the wine merchants round the corner to deliver me a case once a week!”  It turned out that she was a doctor on the staff of a mental hospital and had some accident which had affected her spine. She was in her thirties and  very good fun especially when she would go into all the  intimate details of what she did with the swedish doctor etc. In a way she was a mental case herself,  but at the same time very amusing.
At the end of the day the matron and myself  and one or two others would all join in for a drink and chat. She was a wonderful matron and ruled all her juniors with a rod of iron, and one could not help noticing the little slackness in efficiency when she was off duty.
  Even Mr James himself occasionally would partake in her hospitality! I can honestly say that I have never consumed so much alcohol as I did during the following week. I have never drunk to excess, but do enjoy a tipple. Luckily my stay in hospital was only for 10 days, so the harm was not great and it was a useful painkiller.
One afternoon , I was paid a visit by my school  friend Richard Baker who was part way through his medical internship. Whilst he was in my room, the nurses came to do some routine treatment, and he sat in the corner with my Daily Telegraph and when they left about 20 minutes later I noticed that he had almost finished the crossword.
I was intrigued that he was so adept, and from that day hence I have been an absolute  crossword fanatic and a fan of the Daily  Telegraph , which as soon as I get it, I look at the back page first! A complete time waster, and when one has done it out successfully there is nothing to show except a quiet inner satisfaction and a peace of mind. Mother always used to say  “The Crossword is like a religion in your home”!  
  As I was about to leave the hospital there was great excitement that they had just received another patient with a three finger tendon cut exactly similar to mine. He had been a merchant seaman on board a ship in the Pacific, when the accident happened. He told me that the first mate had temporarily sewed up each finger with a bit of ordinary thread lightly disinfected, and then he had been flown home from Sydney. He was a very game  fellow and later we were together in Physiotherapy.
I came home and spent two weeks with my hand bandaged up, and leg in plaster and we relaxed in the glorious warmth   of an Indian summer. Then it was back to hospital  in early October to have the stitches out. The weather that day had turned absolutely bitter with an icy north wind. Mr James worked steadily on my limbs and took the plaster and stitches off my foot. Then he started on the hand which had lost all its normal thick protective skin , and the stitches had stuck with dried blood that on the ultra tender skin and with all ones nerve endings concentrated there, it was absolute agony. Tears poured down my face, as I tried to control the pain, and the young nurse helping James, said “ Come on , take it like a man!” and James replied to her: “ If you knew what a painful procedure this is, you would never talk like that”.
Finally and most painful was when he cut off the buttons on the ends and side of my fingers and with a pair of pliers pulled the wires through.  I came out of the hospital shielding my poor limb from the bitter wind and hailed a taxi  and asked him to take me to the nearest cinema to recover. He took me to some awful Swedish sex romp picture in Oxford Street, and I just sat semi comatose recovering from the ordeal, just thankful to have my poor raw hand out of the bitter wind.
Three days later I started my physio-therapy. The unit was run by one of those wonderful middle aged women that are the salt of the earth, and who more or less seem to hold the country together with their practical ‘no - nonsense’ approach. She was Miss Sutton in her early fifties, blond haired with a prominent hook nose.  She first fixed an electrode with a saline pad on my upper arm and then she had a prod which came from an electric box of tricks ,from which she could vary as she wanted, the frequency and the amount of current. As she touched the arm in various places, the current would cause a muscle contraction, and encourage its use. She would also pummell the hand to break down the lesions and disperse the huge clot covering the palm. It was all quite painful especially to begin with, but bearable, however once in a while whilst I was distracted or talking,  she would alter the frequency and touch the inside  of my wrist which violently contracted and felt as though it was burning up inside.   I uttered some oath, and felt ashamed of myself for losing my self control. “Its alright, I am not fussed”,  she retorted “ I know all the bad language there is to know. It is  my job to get you right and you can swear as much as you like, but I will make you do what I say”. She was a miracle and over the next three months, she

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Our new Morris Minor 1956 with Adakan driver