When I was 6 I was taken in to the old hospital to have my tonsils out. Daddy was a GP in Armadale and Mummy was a Pelican. Her bridesmaid was a matron at the hospital, so she came to see me after they took my tonsils and adenoids out (I think that was it). I was sick ‘cos I swallowed too much blood, but Auntie Bep encouraged me and then I had lots of ice cream. But what I remember most was the smell of the chloroform – smothering! Later I helped Auntie Bep wrap the parcels for children at Christmas time. Her room had enormous high windows and a window seat.

I was born in the Simpson Maternity Hospital.

My father was George C. Malloch. He was a Lieutenant Dr. in the Navy in his early twenties and must have been not very long home from the Navy and the Arctic Convoys – I’ve just acquired his Arctic Cross recently. He died eventually in the RIE in 1996, thinking not much of all the machines attached to him and of the doctors talking across him, now the patient. My mother was Eileen Littlewood; she died at the age of 102. Her bridesmaid was Bep (Elizabeth) Robertson Munro. I got to feed her a little at Liberton Hospital a couple of weeks before she died in 2010. She didn’t think much of Liberton, saying, “It’s not a proper hospital!”

You can imagine how very highly the three of them thought of the RIE. As do I, now celebrating the world-famous life of that great hospital.