For some years, our home was in a suburb of Benghazi. Our near neighbour was a Sicilian doctor who lived much of his life on the edge. He was a government doctor who also treated private patients. Amongst them was the Queen of Libya. He was living with a beautiful Belgian lady who had just left her husband. He augmented his income by embalming expatriates whose mortal remains had to go home for burial and by attempting to beat the roulette wheels in the casino. He liked to hunt and kept the badly cured skin of a cheetah which he had shot in the desert. He had a pet gazelle in his back garden and was upset when it was bitten by a scorpion.
He often needed rescuing from himself, sometimes by me. He was good enough to reciprocate. His influence was invaluable, for example, when our daughter had bitten off the end of a mercury thermometer and we thought she had swallowed it.
I asked no questions when he appeared at our door and instructed me to dash to the pharmacy in town and collect some saline drips. I did as he asked under the impression that one of his patients had turned up at his house in need of urgent attention.
I met him sometime later and asked him if his patient had recovered. He explained that the supplies I had collected from the pharmacy were not for a patient but for the Belgian lady. He and she had had a fierce difference of opinion. She had become very angry indeed and locked herself in the bathroom. To persuade her to come out he decided to frighten her by firing his pistol. He reasoned that if he shot downwards into the wooden bathroom door the bullet would embed itself therein, but the noise of the shot would persuade her to stop arguing and come out. He fired into the door, but the bullet penetrated it and ricocheted around the bathroom. She had been sitting on the water closet which was shattered by the bullet, depositing her on the broken shards. She was deeply shocked.
On another occasion, he turned up at our door looking somewhat worse for wear. He asked me to drive him to the hospital with great care as he thought he had broken a shoulder blade. He was in too much pain to explain in detail, but he and his lady had been out in the desert in a government Landrover ambulance in which he had topped a sand dune at speed and rolled down the steep side. He had landed heavily but the Belgian lady had only minor injuries. I left him at the hospital entrance.
He had indeed broken a shoulder blade and one of his colleagues fixed the pieces together with a wire and encased his chest in plaster of Paris. There was a piece of the wire sticking out of the plaster so that it could be removed later, leaving the plaster cast in place.
The full story emerged soon enough. He and his Belgian lady were in a government Landrover ambulance but not on official business. They were hunting gazelles. They had spotted a herd and given chase, topped a dune at speed and rolled down the other side. He was accused by the government of using the ambulance for private purposes but offered the implausible, but apparently acceptable, excuse that he had received a report of a typhus outbreak and had gone to investigate.
He held a party in his house when he decided to have the wire removed from his shoulder blade, to which he invited June and me and several doctors. They gleefully insisted that I removed the wire using a pair of pliers from the garage tool kit.
DON'T KILL ME NOW 