The Mysterious Dr. LeMesurier

Prologue

It was a steal. The cottage was a total basket case, a mid-Victorian wreck which somehow had been overlooked by property developers and virtually abandoned. It would need almost as much spending on it to turn it into a modern, comfortable weekend retreat as it would to buy in the first place, but what turned it into a steal was the fact that with it went fishing rights on the River Test. I have absolutely no idea why the idiot estate agents handling the sale hadn’t put it up for auction in the expectation of a stampede of well-heeled property developers but hey, that wasn’t my problem. A very old lady, recently taken into care, owned the cottage and it was, as the local estate agent put it, ‘unexpectedly on the market’. Personally, I would have thought that it was entirely bloody predictable and God knows how the woman had lived there for so long on her own. I don’t like restoration projects, basically I’m too lazy to renovate them myself and anyway I’d be the first to admit that my DIY skills wouldn’t earn any prizes. If you bring in outside labour restoration projects always go over budget, so as a rule I avoided them like the proverbial plague, but somehow this one seemed to almost be calling to me. I investigated, more carefully it must be said than the estate agent, and discovered the fishing rights. The prospect of days spent fly fishing on one of the premier rivers in the country and, let’s be honest, the prospect of having those rights, periodically rented out, pay for the cottage decided me and I quickly finalised the deal, not bothering to have a survey done. Uncharacteristically I felt a twinge of sympathy for the old woman; how was she to know that she’d engaged a complete muppet of an estate agent. I paid the full asking price, in cash.

The roof leaked in a couple of places but I was surprised to find that, despite first impressions, the rest of the cottage was in a much better state than it actually appeared. The old lady certainly hadn’t wasted any money on cosmetic improvements or even upgrading the sanitary or cooking arrangements, but she had, bless her, ensured that the structure itself remained sound. She had very little in the way of personal possessions and in any case could take few with her to the home. The rest the estate agent removed and I came down for my first weekend away, planning on having a good nose around the property and deciding what improvements to make. Somehow or other it had escaped becoming a listed property, so I had a totally free hand, subject of course to the vagaries of the local planning committee. A recommended local builder had been, unusually, as good as his word and made the necessary repairs to the roof and as the pub just down the road served an excellent lunch and had an extensive wine list the afternoon was a pleasant blur and the evening took care of itself. Come Sunday morning I was up earlier than I usually was (or had planned to be) and decided to have a ferret-around the place. Noticing a loft, I borrowed a set of ladders and a torch from the friendly landlord down the road, and went ferreting.

There were a few things that the house-clearers had missed, virtually nothing of any obvious value except a hard wood mother-of–pearl inlaid trunk, vaguely oriental in appearance, tucked away under a tatty sheet was. Intrigued, I opened it and found some old sepia photos, most appearing to be of an Edwardian or maybe late Victorian family. One particular photo struck me as being a bit unusual and certainly stood out from the others. Mother (dark, petite and seemingly quite some years younger than her husband), Father with a self-satisfied genial air about him, a boy of about ten and a toddler who appeared to be a girl, but it was difficult to tell; they were smiling! Not the usual formal, stiff poses of the period, as were all the others.  Fairly prosperous, by the look of it, there was even a family car and although I knew little of the time that seemed to me to be unusual as well. I had the idea that metalled roads were few and far between at the time I assumed that the photos had been taken. Actually, as I went through the photos, I wasn’t even certain that metalled roads existed in those days, particularly in rural Hampshire. Some of the photos had notes on the back which I glanced at but didn’t bother to read, thinking that it would be amusing on winter weekends to go through them and see if I could piece together a family history. As they had obviously been preserved well enough where they were, I decided to leave them there in the chest and was about to replace them when I noticed that they had been placed on top of something bundled-up in an oiled-cloth. Something else to while away rainy Saturday afternoons, provided I hadn’t over-indulged in the local hostelry.

I drove back up to Smoke on Sunday evening; back up to my modern flat with all mod cons except somebody to share it with and contemplated the week ahead with a certain amount of distaste. Having made what might be described as a large but unfortunately not obscenely, large fortune as a commodities trader, I had then proceeded to give roughly half of it away in a messy divorce settlement. The divorce was to become final the coming week, provided my soon to be ex wife didn’t decide to argue any further over a division of the spoils. Buying the cottage was taking a bit of a chance, legally speaking. The financial side of the divorce had been allegedly settled before the purchase, but my solicitor (Jonno, an old school-friend) had advised waiting until, as he put it, the ink was dry on the decree absolute, before buying any further assets that might become disputed. The cottage was such a steal and it’s true value so well hidden, that I felt it was worth taking the chance before anybody else stumbled across it.

The dreams started on Monday night. Confused affairs; Edwardian families, vintage cars driving at high speed around the M25 chasing an open pearl-inlaid chest that had suddenly acquired four horses legs, something wrapped in oilskin cloth inside the chest. The dreams got stranger and more unlikely as the week progressed. A bearded man, resembling Edward the Seventh wearing a deerstalker hat and little else, driving a vintage car across, what? It looked like a wide-open field; no, it was larger than a field, it was a savannah-like area. Ah yes, the National Geographic satellite channel, a recent programme about the African Savannah but how the hell did that come to feature in one of my dreams? Stranger, the car stopped by a tree-lined, sun-dappled river, where the hell had that come from? The figure produced a fly fishing rod from the back seat of the car and started casting. He got a bite and suddenly flung a spear at the fish. What? This was insane. I put it down to stress or a slight surfeit of Thai food and hoped that come Thursday once the divorce was done and dusted things would improve. Thursday night, after a very brief but necessary court appearance which formally ended my marriage, I dreamt again of the oil-skin wrapped bundle and knew that I would have to drive down to the cottage on Friday evening and discover what the hell was in it if I wanted to get a decent-night’s sleep in the foreseeable future.

The drive down the M3 Motorway was the usual late Friday afternoon/early evening nightmare; how did some of these tossers ever get a driving licence? I felt pretty wound-up by the time I pulled off the small road and onto the grassy-muddy parking area a few metres away from the cottage, so I slung my weekend bag into the hallway, noticing in passing that the junk mail was already rapidly and inevitably accumulating then took myself down to the cheery hostelry. Over a pint or three of the locally brewed bitter, Great Bustard Bitter I seem to remember it was called, the landlord, one Rod Slattery, told me something of the history of the pub and the surrounding village. The pub itself, The Compleat Angler, was named after a book written by one of the early pioneers of Fly Fishing, Sir Izaak Walton. Originally called ‘The Anglers Arms’, Rod and wife Sandra had taken it on six years before when it was just a run-down village pub in the middle of a less than quaint village and turned it into a very up-market bed-and-breakfast place. Following a holiday in New Zealand, where the concept of bed and breakfast is slightly different to this country, they’d decided to convert the three outbuildings that were used to store rusting agricultural machinery into self-contained accommodation. Each building comprised of two double bedrooms, a lounge/dining area and a small kitchen sufficient to prepare breakfast and a simple evening meal. Most guests chose to have the evening meal in the pub.

Rod told me that he thought the old girl had inherited the cottage from her grandfather or possibly her mother, it seemed the family history was a little obscure and that as far as he knew she had no surviving relatives. An uncle had apparently been killed in the First World War as had her father and she herself had never married. A sad story that Rod felt in many ways epitomised the history of a lost generation and I couldn’t disagree with him, particularly as he had just brought me a further pint; the brightest and best males killed and a generation of women left to mourn in single solitude. Although the woman had been a stalwart supporter of local charitable organisations, in her later years she’d become something of a recluse only very occasionally putting in an appearance at The Compleat Angler, displaying strong socialist leanings after a couple of gin and tonics. Apparently whilst deploring the tendency of village properties being sold off as weekend retreats to well-heeled Londoners and so putting them out of reach of local families, she’d approved of the alterations and renovations to the pub, hoping that they’d bring in well-heeled visitors who’d spend some money in the local businesses in nearby Stockbridge. Somehow, I felt that she wouldn’t approve of my purchasing her cottage as a weekend retreat and felt an unexpected pang of remorse at the thought. For some reason I didn’t mention the papers and photos I had found.

I spent Saturday morning, wasted as it turned out, in a mass-market furniture store, the sort of place that deals in kitchens and bathrooms at knockdown prices. Somewhere during the tedious process of looking at cheap, plasterboard prefabricated kitchens and equally naff bathroom suites, the notion came to me that the cottage deserved better. Better I knew from past experience translated into more expensive; vastly more expensive if one went down the handcrafted solid wood traditional ‘Country Cottage’ route but I experienced what I can only describe as a brief vision. Me, retired from London and living in a quiet Hampshire backwater, spending my time fly fishing on the river and virtually living in the Compleat Angler during the winter. For that vision to become fact I would need somewhere to live that was more than a weekend retreat, I would need a comfortable home. Slightly alarmed at these sudden and unlooked for expensive notions, I reckoned that it would be pointless wasting money on either a cheap bathroom or kitchen when I didn’t need to live in the cottage full-time until most of the renovation work had been completed. Short-term the facilities, such as they existed, were adequate and I could probably negotiate a reasonable long-term rate on one of the accommodation units at The Compleat Angler. Thoughtfully, I drove back to the village. This was a notion that needed thinking through carefully and preferably, away from the cottage whose undeveloped charm was beginning to somehow dominate my thoughts.

After a light and virtually non-alcoholic meal at the pub I decided that my afternoon would be spent making a start on sorting out the photos and papers I had seen in the wooden chest. I manhandled it down the borrowed set of ladders and into my ‘camping area’ in what had been a sitting room. Methodically I separated the photos into two piles, those annotated and those not, then turned my attention to the oilskin parcel. The writing on the papers inside the wrapping varied between being extremely legible and virtually illegible, but was nevertheless obviously written by the same person. Fascinated, I opened a modestly priced bottle of Merlot, settled back in the collapsible canvas recliner that I’d brought from a local market I passed on the drive back from the furniture store, and began to read.

I feel I should give a fuller explanation of how this book came to be written than is perhaps customary. Firstly, I should state that I am amazed that it was written at all, enjoying, as I was, a rather comfortable but somewhat busy retirement near to the small Hampshire town of Stockbridge. Nothing was further from my mind than writing a book about myself.

To begin at the beginning. My father was a successful merchant in London and I was brought up in a comfortable world, one that my father would constantly remind me was infinitely more comfortable than the one in which my parents were raised. They were both of immigrant stock and reached maturity in the over- crowded, violent and uncertain world of the East end of the Capital city. My father had somehow obtained a position as a clerk with a ship-broking concern and soon distinguished himself by his diligence and hard work. He quickly realised that the real money to be made in shipping was in the importing of high value, perishable commodities and prevailed upon his employer to allow him to invest some small amounts of money of his own in voyages to the far-flung corners of the empire. These small amounts, after a few years, had grown somewhat larger and by judicious borrowing, my father soon found himself in the position of owning a significant proportion of the cargo carried by the ships that his employer’s company brokered. With the advent of steam ships and the subsequent opening of the Suez Canal, Father realised that this was where the future lay and began to refuse to broker the cargo carried by sailing ships. The business accordingly prospered, so much so that by his late-twenties, the owner offered a junior partnership in the company, his only son having gone to India with his regiment. He was able to leave Whitechapel behind him and acquire a modest property in the Blackheath area. Feeling himself finally in a position to marry, he sought the advice of his mentor and now business partner. As was the custom during those days, marriages were generally arranged and my father would have been regarded as a good prospect by parents of eligible young women. Presumably he thus had something of a choice and most probably against the advice he received, he nevertheless chose wisely. My mother was a quick- witted and, unusually for those times, educated woman from a poor but respectable family. In all probability, she would not have brought much if any money into the marriage and certainly no social advantage, her parents living in Whitechapel, as did my father’s. Nevertheless she proved to be of assistance to her husband in his business and they prospered. I was born some two years after their union and wanted for nothing during my childhood. I regret to say that I was something of an indifferent scholar as a boy, much to my father’s despair. His good fortune sprang not only from his hard work, honesty and intelligence but was also due in no small measure to the fact that he had a firm, legible hand and had somehow acquired a rudimentary but thorough basic education. He was of the opinion that a man made his own good luck and as he put it, the more arrows one had in one’s quiver the easier it was to make progress in the world. Knowledge and the intelligent application of it was, he felt, the key to success and a good classical education taught a man to marshal facts and plan decisive action. I certainly had the classical education, the best that my parents could afford, but I  fell in with a set who had a certain disdain for the merchant class. I am ashamed to say this but I likewise began to feel a certain disdain for my parents. I was careless enough on one occasion to allow this disdain to show. My father’s reaction was in some ways unexpected. To be sure, he gave me a severe dressing-down in no uncertain terms, but what happened next changed the course of my life, although not perhaps in a direction of which he either foresaw or necessarily approved. I like to think that were we able to discuss the matter now, his approval would be forthcoming. Perhaps, one day, we may have that opportunity. Abruptly ceasing to chastise me, he instead seized me by the arm and informed me in a manner that brooked no argument that he wanted to show me something. The subsequent inspections of the poverty-stricken, filthy back streets and alleyways of the East End appalled me. This, my father grimly informed me, was where he and my mother had come from and no son of theirs would return to it whilst he had any influence in the matter. I suddenly understood why my parents and those relatives who had escaped from this dreadful existence never spoke of their origins. For all I knew I had relatives who had remained in this abject poverty, but they never had been, nor subsequently ever were, alluded to. My father expressed his conviction that only a good education and a firm application of effort could save me from descending back to the hellish depths of squalor from which he and my mother had emerged. I found myself in complete agreement with him on the desirability of not returning to the family origins. The conditions in which the people existed were truly appalling, violent, dirty and utterly without any redeeming feature whatsoever, but whereas he seemed content to have escaped and put all this well behind him, I felt strongly that something should be done to improve the condition of this squalid, heaving unwashed mass of humanity. Certainly this was not a feeling that I could have put into words at the time, but inexorably that emotion intensified until it became first a conviction and then a firm resolve to do something; what I could not determine but I knew in the depth of my soul that something should, must, be done. To my parents’ relief and approval, I turned from my disdainful friends and wastrel ways, pursuing instead a more thoughtful course. At this point, I must briefly mention Thaddeus Mitchell, a schoolmaster. Teacher of Latin and Greek, he chanced to make a remark that clarified my thinking and set me on a completely different path to the one I had hitherto followed. Indeed, it was almost as if a darkened room had suddenly become illuminated, such was the effect that the remark had on me. I surprised him one day in a Latin class by my accurate declination of a certain verb, I forget which now, such was the effect on me of his subsequent observation. I well remember, somewhat painfully, his habit of rapping an erring pupil on the knuckles should they fail to answer a question to his satisfaction. Notwithstanding the fact that to study in order to answer questions put in class was seen as something of an aberration amongst my fellows, I had determined to avoid physical punishment if I could whilst maintaining outwardly at least the customary and expected air of diffidence to the whole subject of learning. Following my successful declination, he remarked that I had appeared to have finally understood, not before time in his opinion, the difference between an apparent diffidence and lack of effort and a real diffidence and lack of effort. The former being admirable whilst the latter of course was execrable and must inevitably lead to a decline in the fortunes of the nation in general and individuals in particular. A gentleman, he further remarked, should be seen to go through life making little or no effort whatsoever in whatever endeavours he successfully pursued. Except for a gifted few, he making it clear that in his opinion I was not one of those few, this was an apparent lack of effort and private stern application was necessary. My father, when I recounted this to him, agreed, adding that too many young gentlemen seemed to forget that it was also necessary to engage in some sort of commercial enterprise in order to make their way in the world.

I put down the sheets I had been reading and poured another glass of Merlot. From the number of scorings-out it was obvious that this was a rough draft. Well, fair enough, you had to start somewhere but personally, if I had begun at the beginning I would have said who I was, when and where I was born, and where I went to school. Perhaps Victorian writers did things differently, but I hoped that further into the pile of papers more information would be forthcoming. I also wondered if the book the writer referred to had ever, in fact, been published. I shuffled through the papers and discovered that the first twenty or so pages appeared to be an autobiography of sorts whilst the rest did indeed appear to be the outline of a novel. I read random sentences, even paragraphs, and found myself becoming more and more intrigued by the things I read. If the book had not been published, and I was becoming convinced that these papers were a collection of rough notes rather than an actual draft, then I felt that it should be, but first I needed to undertake some research of my own. I took the papers and photographs back up to London.

I’m going to skip over many of the details of what happened next because they mainly concern me, but I will explain how the book finally came to be published in its present form. I knew of course the name of the old girl from whom I had brought the cottage, Enid Cecile Mason. After some thought, I made copies of all the documents and photos then wrote to the lady, pointing out the coincidence of our surnames and asking if she would be interested in some family papers and old photographs that had been inadvertently been left in her old cottage. She was and a date was set for me to drive to the old folks home to have afternoon tea with her. Afternoon tea, for God’s sake! Very oldie-worldie upper class, not my thing at all. As an afterthought on leaving my flat in Smoke, I took drawings of the planned extension of the cottage and some glossy brochures from a company that specialised in producing traditional, hand-made solid wood country kitchens. I hoped to interest her and even gain her approval for the work I intended to have done on the cottage, which by now I had decided was going to be my full-time home. I probably didn’t, at least at that time, particularly care whether she approved or not, but I reckoned that getting her cooperation in deciphering the mysteries of the manuscript and photos would be much easier if she did approve of what I was planning.

That summer I’d taken a long cool look at the current world economic situation and decided that we were in for a pretty severe downturn. Whilst it’s certainly true that there’s money to be made in downturns, provided you know what you’re doing, the risks are undeniably higher. I resigned from my trading job and began to slowly turn my more speculative investments into cash or in some cases, gold. The flat in Chelsea I put on the market, gut instinct telling me that we were probably near the top of the housing market and when sold the proceeds paid off the mortgages on the two rental properties that I was left with after the divorce. Property is still a good long-term bet, but I maintain not as good as the Stock Market. Still, the rental incomes would augment my other investment income and in the long-term might provide a nice capital sum for my old age. The thought of another marriage or subsequent children didn’t occur to me then. Anyway, enough about me.

Enid, as I’ll now refer to her, became a little weepy on seeing the old photos and was, after some understandable hesitation, able to identify most of the people in them; they’d mainly been taken between the years of 1899 and 1912, as far as we could determine. Although her memory was a little hazy as to exact dates, she was certain that the boy in the photos was her uncle, the man was her grandfather, the woman her grandmother and the toddler her mother, Marie Chantelle. One much older photo was a bit puzzling, until she remembered being told that her grandfather had been married before. It showed a much younger grandfather sitting in a chair besides a bed in which a woman, obviously his wife, was holding a newly born baby whilst laying propped up on pillows. It seemed a reasonable assumption that the babe might be her Uncle Simon, killed in France in 1916. Closer reading of the manuscript revealed references to two previous marriages and subsequent investigation disclosed that her grandfather, Doctor Augustus Pierre LeMesurier, had indeed been married three times. The first wife, Eloise, had died childless. Cecile Marie his second wife had died after giving birth to her Uncle Simon, and the third, her grandmother Enid Jeanette, had died in 1945. As an aside, out for a walk one afternoon, I passed through the nearby village of Goodworth Clatford. I was wearing new walking boots that were killing me so I decided to get the local bus back to the cottage. Waiting in the bus stop, I happened to see a small plaque commemorating the death of several evacuees in 1945, killed by a badly off-course German V2 rocket. A check of local records revealed that one of the victims was indeed the third wife of the late Augustus Pierre LeMesurier, Enid Jeanette LeMesurier.

Anyway, to make a short story of it, Enid agreed that, subject to her final approval of style and content, I should write the book that her grandfather had intended to write, and what follows is the result. I must say neither of us is entirely sure what Augustus would have thought of it, and we feel that most likely he would have written the book as a dry factual account rather than presenting it as a novel. Notwithstanding Enid’s entirely understandable desire to see a book that could have been written by her grandfather, we agreed early on that I should write in a more modern style than he would have done and I have used a more modern idiom. Enid did insist that I write ‘with some decorum’ and I am pleased to say that in her opinion at least, I have succeeded. I have felt free to invent some dialogue but have attempted to write it, at least in terms of content, in as authentic Victorian style as I am able. Even between doctor and patient, some things were alluded to, rather than explicitly stated in those times. Where possible, I have used Augustus’s own words, but any errors regarding the training of Victorian doctors are mine and not his. To preserve the flavour of the narrative, where ‘the last century’ is referred to it should be understood that this means the nineteenth century, Augustus writing his notes around 1910 or 11, so far as it we can tell.

I am indebted to the staff at the Museum of London, the Reverend Robert Wise of the parish of Blackheath for his assistance in tracing Enid’s forbears and drawing up her family tree. Back copies of The Lancet were invaluable in aiding my understanding of the medical profession in general and the history of teaching hospitals in Victorian London in particular. Last, but by no means least, grateful thanks to all the staff of the Imperial College of Clinical Hypnotherapy for taking the time to educate me in the history and application of hypnosis in medical practice.

Charles Mason,

Laburnum Cottage,

Longstock,

Hampshire,

Summer 2010

Foreword by Miss Enid Cecile Crispin

I first met Mr Charles Mason in the early summer of 2009, when he purchased my cottage in Longstock, Hampshire. I had recently moved to a Residential Home just outside of Stockbridge and Charles was kind enough to return some family mementoes that had inadvertently been left behind, in the confusion and sadness of the move. Sadness because one had lived in Laburnum Cottage for most of one’s life and although one was, one must admit, finding it increasingly difficult to cope on one’s own, there was reluctance after some eight decades to live elsewhere and indeed one harboured a secret hope that one would simply fail to wake up some morning. One will also now admit to the hope, after knowing Charles for some time, that we might have been related, Mason being one’s fathers name of course, and Charles being one’s great-grandfather’s name. Of course, Mason is a common enough name, as indeed is Charles, and whilst there remains the tantalising possibility that we indeed share a common ancestor in the time of George the Second, due to incomplete parish records we have not been able to say conclusively one way or the other.

The mementoes comprised of some photographs and papers which one’s Grandfather, Augustus Pierre LeMesurier, had obviously intended to collate and turn into a book. Fortunately for the future of this intended book, Grandfather had, on moving to Longstock and purchasing Laburnum Cottage, acquired a safety deposit box at Lloyd’s Bank in Stockbridge. Over the intervening years this box had become a repository of various family documents but had never been cleared out and so became not only a mine of family information but also contained Grandfather’s certificates and most importantly case histories, those notes made when examining patients. At my insistence, Charles has tried to preserve the style in which Grandfather wrote whilst bringing it up to date to be of more interest to the modern reader. One rather feels that he has succeeded splendidly.