Listening for Lions: Chapters 13–14

She glared at us and then in a stern voice said, “In 1914 there was a war going on. While you were children, lolling about in gardens and eating your teas, I, along with other women doctors, was sent to the Balkans to care for the Serbian army...."

I walked through open cesspools to get to my patients. The soldiers we treated were covered with lice, and we had to crowd them two to a bed.

Our teachers pushed us relentlessly. They knew from their own experience that when the time came to qualify for our degree, as women we would find it especially difficult.

When we were faced with our first cadaver, smelling partly of formaldehyde and stinking partly of rot, because it had not been well preserved, we all held our noses and plunged in, covering for the students who were in the lavatory throwing up.

Most of the other students were seeing death for the first time. If it was a patient they had cared for, they blamed themselves. I consoled them, reminding them of all the patients they had helped.

Some of the students joined the choral society and the hardier ones crewed on the rowing eight.

On Sundays I went to services at the nearby foundling hospital, which wasn’t a hospital at all but an orphanage for children of mothers unable to care for their babies. There were nearly five hundred children, all dressed in the hospital’s quaint costumes.

On Sundays I went to services at the nearby foundling hospital, which wasn’t a hospital at all but an orphanage for children of mothers unable to care for their babies. There were nearly five hundred children, all dressed in the hospital’s quaint costumes.

When the mothers left their children, they often left a memento for the child: a lock of the mother’s hair, an earring, or a lace glove. It would be all the child would have to remember his mother.

As I wandered through the aviary, where birds I had seen flying about freely in Tumaini were shut into cages, I had gloomy thoughts about how I was imprisoned in London and in school.

Our meals at school were meager and taken on the run, so I ate every bit of the beef, and afterward a slice of apple tart with a great hunk of Stilton cheese.

Instead, after clearing his throat several times, he said, “I wonder, Miss Pritchard, if you have given any thought to your future.”
“Yes, Mr. Pernick. You know I plan to go back to Tumaini.”
“Very commendable, but I was thinking of your personal future.”

There were intense arguments about the Russian revolution and a political party in Germany called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

Our senior year we all waited to see in which hospital we would do our residencies.

Even the location of the hospital was intimidating, close as it was to the great Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

The male residents snickered, glad not to be a target of Raspton’s satire.

“Well, let us carry on.” He gave Janaki and me a cunning look. “We don’t want to injure your sensibilities, young women, so if there is anything that you find difficult or embarrassing, you will let us know?”

The last patient on the rounds was a man with jaundice.

By our last year the early antagonisms were forgotten. We were all comrades.

In an indifferent voice she said, “We are very pleased.” And then she smiled at me and said, “How proud your father would be.”

We suffered through a terrible storm with rolling seas. We saw flying fish and dolphins follow the ship like obedient puppies. We had singsongs after dinner, and there were masquerade balls and tea dances.

There were charades and games of bridge and backgammon and shuffleboard tournaments and badminton contests.

The cat was the tawny color of a lion, and for a name I gave it the Swahili word for lion, Simba.

If someone dies in a Kikuyu hut, the Kikuyu think it unlucky and burn down the hut. It was like that with Tumaini. There had been deaths, and now everything had moldered away.

After my initial shock I scoured the grasses, determined to find some evidence that Tumaini had existed, but the only proof I found were the crosses that marked my parents’ graves and the graves of Kanoro’s father and the missionary.

I saw that around his neck was a cord and strung onto the cord a small black-and-silver ornament. A part of a stethoscope! That remnant of Tumaini gave me hope.

By afternoon I had a mud-walled house with a thatched roof and a line of people, some of them ill and some who merely said that they were ill so that they might see the red-haired witch doctor.

Wangombe appeared with a small retinue of followers. He was splendid in strings of shells and beads, a cloak of monkey fur, and a headdress of ostrich plumes.

I stood up and greeted him formally, bowing. He did the same, and we faced each other warily, waiting to see who would speak the first word.

Not only patients came, but peddlers arrived at my doorway with eggs and chickens, squash, bananas, and even goats and sheep.