November 1928. We’ve all just emerged from the examination hall. Charlie and I, with thirty others, have just written the final year Medicine paper in gynaecology. He spies me and pushes his way towards me. As I watch his huge frame weave through a haze of pipe and tobacco smoke, I have time to think of our lives together—suburb, kindergarten, school and now medical course. Time and again I had to manage his outbursts of mostly misguided indignation. I had come to see him as a sort of amicable but cranky elephant, myself as his anxious mahout. Six years earlier…