Michael Cecil Heathfield Dodgson MD BS(Univ London) FRCPath
born 26 Oct, 1919, Mayfield, England
died 11 Jan 1988, Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, Sydney, Australia
My father died in January 1988, a day after I knew that I was expecting my third child.
The last thing I said to him, in a phone call to his hospital bed, was that I was pregnant.
He could hardly talk, he had told me a few days before that dying was fine, he did not know why everyone was making such a fuss. But the last conversation, after which he slipped into a coma, he told me "this is awful" and then with all his strength, he told me "I love you.". The only time in my life I ever remembered hearing that from him. The doctor, with his final breath, was giving his daughter what she needed to hear.
My mother graduated from Queen's
University School of Medicine in 1940 and was immediately swept up in
the war effort in England.
She worked hard through her own burst
appendix and bombs dropping around the hospitals in Sheffield and
London and before too long caught the eye of a young medical student
at St Thomas' Hospital, London.
Dr H Patience Uprichard married Dr MCH Dodgson on
January 25th, 1945, and waved him goodbye as he sailed off to Burma
for 2 years with the British Army to finish World War II and mop up afterwards.
Daily letters followed, full of love and promises of a
bright future.
Michael returned, settled down to a career in
Pathology and finally the first child was born in London in 1949, Robert Michael Dodgson.
Since my mother's career was effectively finished at this time, she
decided to do child-bearing properly, giving birth to William John Dodgson 12
months later also in London; me in Bristol 14 months later and then also in Bristol Patrick William Dodgson 12
months after that.
William John died in infancy. and is buried near our Dodgson grandparents in Eastbourne, England.
If you look at Michael's publication list, you see he had a paper published on an idiot brain one month after my birth, which was 13 months after John died.
Did Michael autopsy John's brain and write about it? Very possibly. Michael's relief from pain was always in the lab, always in writing and analyzing.
Meanwhile Michael's career in Pathology was not progressing as fast as he liked,
and we had moved to Manchester which I remember as being gray at all times. My father clearly missed the warm air and blue skies of Asia, and meanwhile the British Government was desperately trying to prop up a dying Empire by paying most of the costs of moving British people to its colonies.
And so, following a trend, one morning Michael woke and announced to Patience that they were
moving to New Zealand and he was flying out in a week. My mother told me that her last words to her father-in-law and mother-in-law were that she did not want to go, this was not her idea.
In June 1957
Patience packed up and moved us to Belfast for 6 months, where we watched Sputnik in the sky. In December 1957 my brothers and I climbed onto the ship named the Southern Cross for a 7-week voyage.
The trip of a lifetime from Liverpool through the Caribbean, across the Panama Canal, through the South Pacific to Wellington, New Zealand! Unfortunately I was only 6. Gosh! In Panama we were sitting under trees at night when the adults were drinking things that made them mellow.
In Fiji I remember eating watermelon. Maybe for the first time.
Tight-rope walking on the ship's rails and a
kidnapping attempt of the Robert in Fiji. Samoa, I remember dancing.
Trying to keep 3 hyperactive children from falling overboard exhausted my mother, and when we arrived in Wellington, my father put her in a hotel room by herself for several days. And she slept a long, long time.
New Zealand was paradise for Patience and all of us. We lived on the top of a hill in a house on the grounds of Cook Hospital, where all food was grown and power generated. Patience did not work for money, and gave birth in 1959 to my youngest brother, a very blond Charles Heathfield Dodgson. My Charlesy.
My father was the only pathologist in Gisborne, and I found out years later, was the only neuropathologist in the entire country of New Zealand.
On Oct 1, 1960, the day the British rulers left both Cyprus and Nigeria, our British family left New Zealand, by boat, and traveled 6 days to Australia, the land of birth of Caroline Tooth Dodgson, my father's grandmother. Michael immediately started work as a hospital
pathologist in a University hospital in Sydney.
Two years after that, Patience was crippled with arthritis. She went from running rapidly
everywhere to being scarcely able to hobble. And she was only 47.
Michael could not handle
his strong companion suddenly becoming needy, and ran off with a young Scottish woman who was his lab technician. After a week, he came back to the house, but was fired from his job, and after that had jobs all around Sydney.
A few years later, the young woman's husband committed suicide and came back to Michael, so he set up house with her 1,500 miles away from Sydney, in Adelaide.
A year after living with my father, she committed suicide, so after that he frequently came back to visit for a week or so or a month or so. Usually right after his latest girlfriend had realized that he might not be the prize she hoped.
Patience never knew when
a taxi would pull up, and he was always welcomed. Except in 1977 when he decided to return to live with my mother permanently so he could access the libraries of Sydney. She told me to tell him that she was too sick to cook for him and care for him, he had to leave, but was always welcome back for visits.
In 1985 Michael was on his way to England to collect his inheritance from his brother Tony, and was staying at Patience's house. Patience knew the symptoms of prostate cancer and called in a local physician to look at Michael and get him admitted to a hospital.
