[originaltext]M: Well, you’ve asked a rather strange person a pretty standard q

M: Well, you’ve asked a rather strange person a pretty standard question. I happened to be doing language for my A level at school, and I decided that I didn’t think there was a great deal of future in the study of languages, so I decided that I’d change over to some scientific subject that I felt might be useful. And after a great deal of difficulty, got accepted at a medical school, found it very difficult to get going, but eventually succeeded and perfectly happy.
W: So you mean eventually you went into...er...medical school or university without any A levels
in scientific subjects.
M: That’s right. The first morning the lecturer wrote up some chemical formula on the board, which was the first chemistry lecture I bad ever been to. As far as I was concerned, she might have been putting it up in Egyptian hieroglyphics. It didn’t mean a thing. So that was a long time ago.
W: So you had a lot of...sort of...personal individual work to do to catch up with everyone else then.
M: Yes, it was very hard, but the university I was at, which was Sheffield, had a kind of special class for what you might call "lame ducks" such as myself. And there was a retired watchmaker. There was a dentist. There were a couple of nurses—people who had come to do medicine in later life having taken up other things. So I think they looked after themselves well and most of us in the end managed to get through.
W: And you eventually qualified?
M: Yes, when I qualified in Sheffield way back in 1960, I was then actually so interested in the general aspects of medicine that I joined a special practice at the University of Manchester that was teaching medical students, and being involved very closely with the academic side of medical practice, and from then on went on to student health service work back in my former University of Sheffield and then came down here to reading twelve years ago.