In 1957 I joined Drs. Rupert Barrington and Peter Dagger immediately after the death of Ben Sunderland, who had practised from Haverhill since 1918.

So what was it like in Thurlow then? We had a village surgery "next to The Cock", in the stables of Lavender Cottage. You climbed an outside wooden staircase to enter a waiting room, and beyond was a large consulting room with couch, chairs, desk and glass-fronted "dispensary cupboards". It was open three times a week and was run very efficiently by Viv Cook (Atherton "that was"). Viv had started to work for Dr. Ben in her early teens and cycled to and from Haverhill. Later the estate, wanting the house, moved us to the village hall and built a "secure" drugs cupboard in the corner. As they said, we were losing personal accommodation and gaining a loo. Viv stayed with us and only gave up because of illness shortly before she died.

We had a superb old school district nurse in Nurse Buck. In our country area there were two other memorable nurses ­ Nurse Kaye in Kedington and Nurse Charles in Birdbrook. Their midwifery was an education and I often wondered who was more scared of Nurse Buck, the young mums or myself.

In the early days we dispensed our own medicines, not so many tablets then and patients didn't have much faith in them. We used stock mixtures or made up individually prescribed medicines ourselves. Linctuses and brown bottles for cough, white bottles for indigestion, gentian infusions and red or yellow syrups for tonics ­ very popular. The best tonics were prescribed with a small quantity of gin and seemed to work rather better than vitamins for debility after illness!

At first telephones were few, cars were not generally owned, and Cambridge and Newmarket seemed a long way to go. Haverhill on Fridays ­ market day ­ was the usual trip. We had surgeries in Haverhill twice on Saturday and Sunday morning until 1958. I was told by an elderly lady in the village that she had never been further than Haverhill because she said she "never had cause to go".