The dentist’s surgery was upstairs in a Victorian-era Newmarket shopfront just down from the old Flemington post office. You climbed the steps into darkness and came out in a dim hallway with name-plated doors on both sides all the way to other end, which seemed a couple of buildings away. The dentist owned two of the doors; the second being the grey waiting room where you sat on 1950s steel and leather chairs, and you either picked up a Women’s Weekly, or stared out the long narrow window at a vertical cross-section of slate roof and a terracotta chimney and blue sky. When the muffled noise of the drill through the adjoining wall fell silent, you could hear the dentist and the ug-ug-ik reply of the patient, and behind that the soft murmur of a radio. It was November. I was about six. I sat on the chair and read the comics in the magazine while I waited.
When I was called in, the dentist and the nurse were statues as if someone had switched them off. The radio was louder, but not because I had just come into the room. One of them had turned it up. It was saying something about President Kennedy being shot.
I was born two days later, in the naval hospital in Portsmouth, Virginia. My father was a medical intern there.
ReplyDeleteIt was one those ‘everyone knows where they were’ moments probably assisted in our case by the shared surname. In fact despite being a world away, one of my schoolyard nicknames was ‘President’.
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