GUINEA PIGS 1962

It’s 1962, I am 14. We go to school on Saturday morning (this seems unbelievable even as I type it), so I have to make a 20 minute bus ride to Stratford upon Avon and back for 3 hours of lessons. But this does have the advantage that I then have had a free trip to Stratford and can mooch around the shops and go to the library in the afternoon.

Every fortnight I go to the library to change my library books. Stratford library actually adjoins Shakespeare’s Birthplace – a very heavily restored half timbered building for which there is no documentary evidence it actually is the Birthplace, and which looks nothing like the building before it was restored. Indeed, an activist once attempted to sue the Birthplace Trust under the Trades’ Description Act, but very fortunately for the Stratford tourist industry the evidence was never heard as the application was disallowed on the basis that the Birthplace Trust was not a ‘trade’. Phew – close one! Anyway, it was a very prestigious and sensitive position, and the library was I think a totally mock-Tudor half timbered building which was probably a ‘Carnegie Library’. There was a small fiction library on the ground floor, and a wide staircase to the left of the entrance lobby led to a reference library on the first floor – which was three different rooms on different levels in a quite interesting manner, with I seem to remember open roof trusses. There was a newspaper room with stands for reading the day’s newspapers, a general reference room, and a local studies room. There was a resident clientele of regulars.

After changing my books (I was an avid Science Fiction reader in those days – Assimov; Bradbury; anthologies – ‘The Nine Million names of God’, and Flying Saucers - Desmond Leslie; George Admaski; and Patrick Moore as ‘Cedric Allingham’), I would explore the Local History library, researching the village where I lived. In retrospect it seems rather odd that a small provincial library should have had such a large collection of such books – perhaps one of the librarians was an enthusiast too?

One day I entered, and coming down the stairs towards me was an horrific sight. A 40? year old man whose face was half bright flaming red, with ‘drops’ of flesh dangling and swinging off it, and only one eye, no hair. We are evolutionarily designed to find physical deformity disgusting and frightening and to reject sufferers, and this was about as bad as it could get. He strode past me and out onto he street. I had never seen him before and never saw him again, but the image has stayed with me for the whole of my life. And the guilt, of course, he shouldn’t have roused such feelings, but children would have been seriously frightened. I assume the library staff had requested he leave, and not come back.

It was only after I read ‘The Guinea Pig Club’ (Edward Bishop 1963) that I came to the conclusion he was a wartime fighter pilot who had been frightfully burnt when shot down, and had got sick of hiding himself – “I got this for you, so the least you can do is look at it”. But, dreadful as it is to say it, it was too much – it was unacceptable to walk the streets deliberately flouting it, and no doubt he was told so. I suspect he had removed his prosthetic face mask. The ‘Guinea Pig Club’ is described in Wikipedia as: ‘established in 1941, was a social club and mutual support network for British and allied aircrew injured during World War II. Its membership was made up of patients of Archibald McIndoe in Ward III at Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, Sussex, who had undergone experimental reconstructive plastic surgery, including facial reconstruction, generally after receiving burns injuries in aircraft. The club remained active after the end of the war, and its annual reunion meetings continued until 2007. At the end of the war there were 650 members - the last member died in 2023’.

And then 30 years later in 1993, at Kensington Planning Department, we got an application for a minor modification to a mews property, which I happened to see. I didn’t normally have anything to do with applications, I can’t remember why I read this one. It was an application in person, not employing an architect; blue fountain pen ink; handwritten. After describing the proposal the applicant had written “I am a member of the Guinea Pig Club”. It was fifty years after the war, I was pretty sure I was the only person in the Department who understood the reference; all Officers dealing with it were young, under thirty, and the Councillors who decided it mostly local forty year old business men with no interest in wartime history. It was a totally pointless point to make – people had forgotten long ago. In fact, it read as somewhat odd – ‘Why is he mentioning his Club? It’s nothing to do with it?’.

In atonement for my 1962 revulsion I was tempted to write to the applicant gently explaining this and apologising – but it really wasn’t my place to, and it might have got me into trouble, so I didn’t; but it did make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t know if the application was granted.

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