Farmer completely nailed it - but didn't get the needle

His name was Edward Fraser, or “Eddie Fry” as he was known locally. “Fry” being the family by-name; strangely enough a fact that I didn’t discover until long after my grandmother died. With many a Highland by-name, the wish to avoid offence proscribes its use within the earshot of the family that it applies to. Maybe this was why “Fry” was kept from me for as long as it was.

He was a kindly and slightly gruff figure. “Eat it up, boy!” he’d say as I pushed my herring around my plate (all those horrible bones…) and in his tweed jacket and flannels he was a kenspeckle figure as he went about in his grey Humber Hawk calling on his patients.

His daughter, my cousin Helen, tells me that he often came home at the end of the day with a few eggs or a bit of salmon or whisky in a lemonade bottle that it was never terribly wise to enquire too closely about.

The oldest local people remember him yet; and it gives me personal pleasure that those memories are fond – for that is surely the best epitaph to have in the Highlands.

But all this is a mere throat-clearing to what I really want to tell of – what he had in his surgery in Tain’s Scotsburn Road. Opposite his desk, and on the right of the door by which you entered his consulting room, stood a glass sided display case containing various shiny surgical implements.

Tweezers, what looked like pairs of pliers, a kind of hammer, silver bits and bobs that were meant to do, I don’t know what – clearly the tools of his profession – and also, on the second top shelf, one thing that invariably made me shudder and turn away in utter horror.

It was an instrument of torture that the Flemish artist Hieronymus Bosch might well have depicted in one of his nightmarish pictures; it was the hypodermic syringe from hell.

It was huge, with the squirting syringe part of it the look and size of a mechanic’s grease gun, and the needle (arghh! — nearly a foot long!!) and with a point that looked none too sharp, so that Uncle Edward would have to take a run with it if he was to get it into you.

If the amount he intended to inject you with didn’t cause you to explode, then the needle alone would surely finish you off.

If I was sick in bed and Uncle Edward called, I was highly apprehensive when he reached into that big old brown leather bag of his. One never knew — perhaps he had brought “it” with him…

“Are you for a dram, Edward?” Oh those most blessed words of my dear father. The answer was always yes and the bag was closed again.

Although the sore throat was dreadful (and I had so many of them when I was a boy) I would live another day.

Many years later, when I was working for a drilling company based in Aberdeen, I became friendly with a doctor living in the village of Monymusk. One evening (over a dram – what is it about doctors?) he told me an interesting tale.

A patient of his had been working away in his steading when he had managed to do what they call the rake trick – you know, when you inadvertently step onto a garden rake lying on the ground and the handle flies up and whacks you in the face. It is the very stuff of cartoons and I have certainly done it myself.

The trouble was, my friend told me, that the gentleman hadn’t done this with a rake, but rather with something he had been making with bits of timber — and whatever he had stood on, whatever he had done, had resulted in a heavy piece of wood smacking him hard — and (sit down before you read this) actually knocking a three-inch nail well into his head.

“I am awful sorry to bother you, doctor, I can see you have a busy clinic,” the man apologised. “I would have taken a plier to it myself, but what with it being at the back of the head, I couldn’t see it right in the bathroom mirror…”

My friend examined him with growing concern: he could see that the nail had penetrated the skull and, knowing that any attempt to remove the nail there and then (let alone with “a plier”) could have resulted in a fatal haemorrhage, he explained that this was clearly an urgent hospital case and that he was calling the ambulance right away.

“You sit down here,” my friend mopped his brow. “You mustn’t move – and what we’ll do to save time is x-ray your head while we wait for the ambulance to arrive. First I’ll have to give you a small injection…” and he took out a sterilised hypodermic and squeezed it until a small jet of liquid squirted out of the end of the needle.

“Fair enough, doctor” and then the patient looked at the hypodermic – and passed clean out.

As my friend said (as I refilled his glass) the patient had driven in from his farm, had patiently queued up in the waiting room, with a three-inch nail deep in his head – and then had fainted at the sight of a needle. Extraordinary.

As for Uncle Edward’s lethal instrument, in later years I discovered that it was merely an ear syringe, for getting all that wax out of the lugs of dirty wee boys like me.

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