The long way round
Her Journey
Eight eras and a dozen addresses, in the order they happened. The outline is here; the story is in the book.
Era one · 1940s
Childhood in India
A fatherless girl in a house full of aunts, and then a series of railway colonies stretching north across a country in the middle of Partition.
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Bangalore Mysore State · South India
Born into a Syrian Christian family from Kerala and raised in a headmistress’s bungalow, with jasmine on the trellis, chickens in the kitchen, and a grandmother at the centre of everything.
Ammama with her first grandchild. -
Ajmer Rajasthan · North India
A promotion brought a transfer, a three-day journey by steam train, and the coldest winters Grace had known. It also brought the morning a six-year-old ran for the neighbours and saved a life.
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Abu Road Rajasthan
A guava tree perfect for reading in, and Independence Day marked in the maidan under a blazing sun. That same year she lost the person she loved most.
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Ratlam Madhya Pradesh
Piano practice every evening, the church organ on Sundays, and a mother who set schoolwork years beyond her class.
Railway colonies were the backdrop of her whole childhood.
Era two · 1950s
Education
Always the youngest in the room, and usually the only one who had been taught at a dining table.
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Barnes High School Deolali · Maharashtra
A year taught at home placed her three classes ahead. She arrived at ten into a class of thirteen-year-olds, on a hill of 250 acres, known first by the colour of her sash, and completed high school at thirteen.
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Sophia College for Women Bombay
Two years too young for medical school, she filled them reading, knitting, and raising a duckling that accompanied her in a shoebox.
Era three · 1958–1966
Medicine begins
Five years at the best medical school in the country, six months of service owed, and then a one-way flight west.
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Christian Medical College Vellore · Tamil Nadu
Thousands applied. A hundred were called for three days of tests. Fifty were chosen: twenty-five women, twenty-five men. Grace was the youngest of them, and left with a gold medal in medicine.
Christian Medical College, Vellore. -
Nadiad Gujarat
Her scholarship carried an obligation: six months at a small mission hospital, where three young doctors ran everything between them.
Era four · 1966–1967
New York
Twenty-four years old, fifteen dollars in her pocket, the legal limit, and a Bible too large to fit in the case.
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Mt. Sinai Hospital, Queens New York · from 1 January 1966
Six in the morning to six at night, on call every other night, with a notebook in her coat pocket because memory is not good enough where lives are concerned. At the end of the year she was offered a fellowship.
The fledgling doctor.
Era five · 1967–1990s
Britain
The longest era, and the hardest: the years medicine was taken away, and the years she took it back.
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Bricket Wood Hertfordshire
A medical room with an examination table, two chairs and a bottle of olive oil. Conventional medicine was not permitted. What she was told there, and what she was finally asked to give up, is the hardest chapter in the book.
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The Castle, Hertfordshire Marriage and three children
Three children, five pounds a week to run the household, and dozens of nappies washed by hand each day. Seven years in which a qualified doctor did not practise.
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St Thomas’ Hospital London · the way back
A part-time registrar post she had no experience for, two mainline trains and the Underground each way, and three children delivered to school before she started. It was the door back in.
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Royal Surrey County Hospital Guildford · consultant
Consultant cytopathologist, offered the post minutes after the panel finished. She went on to found a regional training school, write three textbooks, and lecture on four continents.
With Phillip, a fellow pathologist, whom she met at St Thomas’.
Era six · Gascony
France, the first time
Bought on a diverted holiday route, restored over years, and given up for a job at Harvard.
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Larroque Mas d’Auvignon, Gers · south-west France
An L-shaped stone house with three wine vats in the barn, two acres, cracked panes and no bathroom. Twenty-six thousand pounds. They agreed on the spot.
Larroque, before and during the years of work.
Era seven · America
Harvard, and after
Two invitations to Boston, one for each of them, and a second vocation found in the desert.
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Massachusetts General Hospital Boston · Associate Professor, Harvard
She took the post at Massachusetts General; he took Brigham and Women’s. They bought a house sitting in a railway station, four days into the visit, before either had a contract.
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Sedona Arizona · retirement, and painting
Early retirement to the beautiful red rock area of Arizona: javelinas in the yard, a mountain lion at the window. And at a local art show, quite by accident, the beginning of a second vocation.
Arizona, and the years that followed the laboratory.
Era eight · now
Full circle
Back to France, and then back to the town where the whole English half of the story started.
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L’Hopiteau, Boussais Deux-Sèvres · western France
A cottage on a crossroads with an attic that became a studio. Ten years of figs traded for vegetables, until a neighbour said four words over the fence that meant they had been accepted.
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Guildford Surrey · where the memoir was begun
A ground-floor apartment five minutes’ walk from her daughter. It was here, on a walk through the park, that Grace realised her children knew nothing about her childhood, and began to write.
A Kaleidoscope of Memories
This is only the route
The places are here. What happened in them is in the book.
The last words of the memoirAfter an extraordinary lifetime of travel, medicine, art and adventure across three continents, we had truly come full circle.