Skippy

During my few months at RAF Wegberg, I spent a lot of it doing theatre lists. The surgeons were a mixture of army, RAF, and civilian locums. ENT, general surgery, urology and gynaecology was the case mix, and nothing too major was encountered. What did I care anyway. I was being paid handsomely for every hour I was there.

I did meet a pilot who had ejected from his aircraft over the mediterranean. The ejector seat had worked so effectively that it had given him crush fractures of two of his lumbar vertebrae. He came to my operating theatre for something completely unrelated.

I was shacked up in a nearby barracks with all the other civilian locums. They were a mixed bunch of mixed professions and mixed nationalities, a bit like the NHS in fact. There was Rex the heavy drinking cardiologist, M the delightful Greek general surgeon, and H the ENT surgeon from Egypt, who suffered from terrible nasal sinuses.

In the north-western German springtime, far away from home, we all formed a band of happy campers. My wife was back in London with our first child at nursery, and our second one on the way. I bought my first ever mobile phone to stay in touch with her.

A short walk away was the NAAFI, a sort of shop cum bar where one might purchase the necessities of daily living  and a few beers in the evening. Charisma and charm it had not but the only time I ever have seen a woodpecker headbanging away was as I wended my way there one evening.

Less than a mile away was the much larger Army base called Rheindahlen, but a visit  there necessitated being perused by two soldiers with big ugly guns: one on exiting Wegberg, and one on entering Rheindahlen. It was hard to forget that one was living on military soil.

With a bike lent to me by a brigadier’s wife, I often sallied forth to sample the wares of the adjacent base. The NAAFI there was like a department store, and there was even an American PX shop from which I purchased some jelly beans, a big Maglite torch, and a Leatherman multi-tool, the latter two remain with me today.

[Get back to the title please -Ed]

My anaesthesia technician was a 6 foot 7 squaddie by the name of Skippy. Although he was not a person to be met at the wrong end of a bayonet, he possessed the gentility of a teddy-bear. Within the army, he was a battlefield medic, skilled in providing advanced first aid to injured confreres.

I asked him why he was called Skippy. He laughed and shrugged as he explained yet again. He had a broad Suffolk accent, and when he signed up to the Forces, his colleagues thought he must be an Australian, and thus named him ‘Skippy’, after the famous bush kangaroo: