Going to the Dentist
I was never afraid of going to the dentist. The dentist was a friend. In those last years of World War II when I was too young to go to school but too old to stay by my mother’s side in our bakery at Box Hill, I used to wander around all the shops in the city. We were a city, a proper city, but it was in reality still a village, just two blocks of shops that huddled around the crossroads where Station Street intersected with White Horse Road.
The corner overlooking the intersection was occupied by Tait’s Corner Store, and above it was the surgery of “Marshall G. Tweedie, Dentist”.
Mr. Tweedie was a very upright, clean living, Christian man. He was known for his leadership in many of the professional and business circles in our community. He would never have been one of my father’s circle of drinking and gambling friends.
Mr. Tweedie was extremely tall and very thin. His long bony fingers seemed to have been made for poking into people’s mouths. He was President of the Box Hill Horticultural Society, President of The Ratepayers Defence League and President of the Box Hill Rose Society. The annual horticultural displays in the Box Hill Town Hall brought crowds of visitors to our city. The Town Hall was a maze of colour with banks of ferns, gum tips, rhododendrons and azaleas with large plots of pansies and phlox. People could wander through the displays and over the artificial bridge over the small lake that always was at the centre of the hall and of the display.
His home in Churchill Street showed his love for roses he had scores of bush roses, climbing roses, standard roses and dwarf roses. Long rows of standard roses stood to attention alongside his front path and down the car drive. He always had a fresh rose in the lapel of his dentist’s coat. He walked to and from work each day and lifted his hat to every lady he passed.
Thirty years later, I attended the funeral of Dr. W.A. Kemp and saw there my friend Mr. Marshall G. Tweedie. He stood at the back of the crowd that overflowed the church, alone, staring to one side. Nobody spoke to him. I felt sorry for him as he stood alone. I walked over to my old friend of earlier days as he stood there on that hot day with a scarf around his tall, thin neck. He remembered instantly and smiled and greeted me with warmth. Then I noticed that half of his long thin neck was gone and that the other side of his face was an open cancer. His features were gone and the cancer was black from radium burns. I never saw him after that. I read his obituary. He was one of nature’s gentlemen.
His surgery overlooked the main junction of Box Hill, and on one side was the War Memorial to the soldiers of World War I with a marble model of a soldier with bowed head and his rifle upturned to the ground. At the base there were always wreaths of half dead flowers not for the World War I soldiers, but for the boys of Box Hill who even at that moment were fighting the Japanese in Borneo and New Guinea or who were in the prisoner of war camps at Changi or on the Burma Railroad.
We were a patriotic town and many of our young men in those late war years were overseas and many mothers were anxious and hopeful. The Town Hall flew the British and Australian flags and now they added the American flag.
I used to think that the soldier in uniform was our own bread carter, Eric Vial, who was missing in action somewhere on the Kokoda Trail.
From Mr. Marshall G. Tweedie’s window I could look straight across at the memorial where the marble soldier guarded our town.
Many people feared the dentist, but I liked Mr. Tweedie. Sometimes I would go up to his waiting room in those days before I commenced school, just to read his magazines. I was always welcome. He had the most beautiful pictures in copies of “National Geographic” and “London Illustrated” and wonderful advertisements in the back of “Popular Mechanics”. I loved to read those advertisements with their pictures of American boys who could go to colleges where all the students wore military uniforms and were trained as officers.
On Mr. Marshall G. Tweedie’s wall hung a framed verse:
“If you have the toothache,
Things are not so bad,
Some folk have no teeth;
That’s far more sad!Do not be downhearted,
Yield not to care,
Count your many blessings
Everyone has a share!”
In Mr. Tweedie’s surgery there was a remarkable drill that stood in the corner with its arms outreached above the dentist’s reclining chair. That drill looked like it had been made from spare bicycle parts to a plan from one of the “Popular Mechanics” magazines.
The long arm had five joints. At the thick end there was a motor which drove long cords which ran round little sets of wheels at each joint. Each arm was smaller than the previous one, and at the end was a drill shaped like a fountain pen with a wheel on one end where the cord ran round, driving the cutting bit on the other.
There were no injections in those days. I never had an injection or a pain killer until I was an adult. Mr. Tweedie just drilled away, grinding into the tooth remorselessly, stopping every now and then to wait for the tooth to cool down, and for the patient to take a swig from the glass of pink water and to empty out the bits and the blood.
If a tooth needed to be extracted, he just pulled and twisted until it fell with a plunk on his white marble plate. There was then usually some more bits and some more blood to be swilled out. I once had a back tooth that was one of my first teeth and should have come out by itself but it was jammed between the new coming teeth, so Dr. Kemp was called in. The situation was serious.
Dr. Kemp sat at the end of Mr. Tweedie’s reclining chair and chatted away as he opened his leather gladstone bag and got out his equipment. First of all a wire gauze mask, like a tea strainer which covered my nose and mouth, then a couple of layers of gauze and cotton wool, then a few drops of some sweet smelling liquid that sometimes splashed through the gauze and tasted very bitter.
Then Dr. Kemp would ask me my name which was very strange because he knew me very well and had presided over my birth and had known me ever since. Then he would ask me my address as if he wanted to make sure that this young boy in the dentist’s chair having his tooth out was really the person who should be there. Then he asked me if I could count from ten backwards. Of course I could and started counting: “ten, nine, eight …., seven …., five …., six …., seven ….” then no more.
I woke in another room with a swollen jaw but no pain. The world was a little unsteady. Dr. Kemp had left on his rounds.
Mr Tweedie came in and peered into my mouth again.
Whenever he brought his face down close I could see in the blue pupils of his eyes my own face reflected and I could see the long black hairs up his nostrils.
He told me not to take the cotton wool rolls out of my mouth until night time. I did not even know I had cotton wool rolls in my mouth.After a few more minutes I could go. I slowly went down the wooden stairs but this time hanging onto the wooden hand railings on the both sides and out the glass door with its gold lettering proclaiming to the world “Marshall G. Tweedie, Dentist”. I walked rather slowly up Devon Street, opposite the cow paddock, to No. 55 Birdwood Street, Box Hill, a great city which was once a village, where the adults were kind and the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
