Life Before Somerville: Sophia Hartland (Storr, 1969

Life Before Somerville: Dr Sophia Hartland (Storr, 1969, Physiology)

In 1966 Sophia graduated from Cambridge with a degree in French and Russian. She subsequently changed fields completely, took a place at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin to read medicine, but left before taking her final exams to accept a place at the Oxford medical school. This proved to be a turning point and Somerville changed her life permanently. She spent nineteen years in Oxford. She then moved to Nottingham to do her Senior Registrar psychiatric training in Psychotherapy and ended up in Chichester, setting up a new Psychotherapy Service as part of the NHS Mental Health Services. She retired from her consultant post in 2007, qualifying as a group analyst the same year and moved to Lewes. Since then she has been improving her languages, learning the long Wu form of Tai Chi, and enjoying music, the sea, family and friends.

Born in London. To Cambridge for six months with my mother to avoid the buzz bombs. Left asleep in pram in churchyard while my mother bicycled to market. A dress with smocking made me by my mother for ‘being a brave baba when the bombs dropped’. Back in London. In pram, licked chocolate from top of chocolate buns my mother had queued for hours to buy. Walking round the walls of Holland Park, my sister in a pushchair. Stories from my mother of beautiful little Clarence, too beautiful to be allowed out, kept in the house and park behind closed gates, but always managed to get out and have adventures. An attic bedroom with stars painted on the ceiling. Nursery school. Shut in a room standing against the wall with a barking black spaniel when I was naughty. Seaford and staying in a hotel with my grandmother. First visit to the coast. Teddy ran away to sea. Telegram to London. a substitute had to be quickly provided by my mother. Bears scarce in 1948. Sylvie came from under the counter at D. H. Evans.

Unwrapping her in front of the hotel staff. Hampstead. Primary school. Holding a lighted candle and waiting to go on stage for a Nativity play, setting light to the hair of the girl in front. Quickly blown out. My parents discovered the school did not take Jewish girls; promptly removed me. New school. Singing ‘Past three o’clock on a cold frosty morning’ as a solo in the Nativity play in a church. Hearing the slow movement from a Haydn quartet played by a visiting string quartet and falling in love. Being shut in the library to finish the fish pie I had refused to eat at lunch. The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden when I was eight. Cornwall. Night trains to Wadebridge. Terrified the tide would come in so fast we wouldn’t have time to get away. Sitting on window-seat of Grandma’s rented cottage looking at the sea. A new sister. A house of our own in Cornwall. Burying disposable nappies on the beach and pushing the ancient pram across the sand. Cowrie shells in pools on Booby’s Bay. Riding lessons. Being read to after lunch at home or on beach. Told I would probably not pass 11+ in Maths. New school. Reading a 1930s translation of The Odyssey, one sentence at a time round the class. Asked to name the tune played on the piano, then told it was not ‘Oh Polly you might have toyed and kissed’ from The Beggar’s Opera but ‘Golden Slumbers’ (it was both). Putting on the 78 rpm record every morning for Assembly. Singing in the ripieno chorus in the St Matthew Passion in the Festival Hall. Never got over the horse in gym. Hockey – yuk. Trip to Tours to do French course for foreigners. Grass in France is the same as grass in England! Back home, taught myself the Charleston, holding on to the baby grand piano.

New school. Only rule was not smoking in bed. Posh girls with posh boyfriends at Sandhurst. Latin and French W Level, Russian O Level. Tutors in London. Discovering I could read The Barber of Seville in French. Being taught to think. Toasted corned beef sandwiches for lunch from café next door.

Russian lessons for two hours on my own in Highgate with bortsch and Russian gypsy music after the grammar. One or two trips to Count and Countess Kutuzov-Tolstoy outside Dublin to improve my Russian. A few other students. Very cold house, never enough to eat. Trips on bike to Greystones Café to fill up. Wonderful stories of the Count’s background. Films at Greystones cinema, incomprehensible because so much had been cut.

Cambridge. At interview: ‘Can you tell me the difference between poetry and prose, Miss Storr? Do shut the door and come and sit down.’ Smell of chrysanthemums in the market in autumn. Mistakenly given ten times the dose of thyroxine; panic attacks and claustrophobia. Parents separating. Singing the Verdi Requiem in King’s College Chapel and Ely Cathedral. London. Science A Levels at tutors, repeated at City of Westminster Technical College. Mr Gadd (chemistry teacher) and ‘dynamic equilibrium’ – a concept for life. No luck in getting a place in medical school. ‘If you get married and have children, that will be ten years off your working life’. Dublin and Royal College of Surgeons. Rejects from various countries especially Norway and South Africa. Girls at the front of lecture theatre, boys behind them. Known by your seat number, not your name. Bewleys cafés and the smell of roasting coffee. Smell of beer from Guinness breweries. A new friend living in adjoining bedsit. Scrabble over a blue teapot. Apply to Oxford to do the clinical part of the course. Accepted! Write round the women’s colleges just in case they might take me for the preclinical. YES! By Jean Banister at Somerville. Pack up before end-of-year exams in Dublin. Move to graduate block in Little Clarendon Street. Start of a new era.