Authors: Kate McCann
Like me, Gerry did well academically in school. By the time he came along, the family work ethic was well established, his goals had been set for him and he followed in the high-achieving footsteps of his brother and sisters, competing with them and always determined to do even better. ‘Shy’ and ‘Gerry’ are words that would never occur in the same sentence. All the McCann children are very sociable and self-assured – and McCann confidence is of the kind that would make you a fortune if you could bottle it and sell it. My dad often cheekily remarks that they were born with silver microphones in their mouths.
Gerry was good at sport, too, and being Gerry he was hugely competitive. Middle-distance running was his forte and at seventeen he was the fastest in Scotland in his age group over 800 metres. At Glasgow University he ran with the Hares and Hounds club, whose team strip was a hideous bright yellow. Fine for sports kit, but he was so attached to his running shirt that he insisted on wearing it out socially as well. You could see him coming from a mile away.
To me, the contrasting strands of Gerry’s personality – the confidence and ebullience interwoven with that honesty and openness – combined to produce a very engaging and attractive man. He was a lot of fun on one hand and kind, serious and loving on the other. And yet I kept my distance and tried to play it cool. It was his jack-the-lad image that held me back, I suppose. I was hesitant to plunge into a relationship in which I might end up getting hurt and I guess there was an element of pride to it, too. I didn’t want to be just one of a succession of girlfriends. It all seems a bit silly now, after Gerry’s wonderful qualities have been confirmed to me so many times over the years. I’m not suggesting that his reputation as a ladies’ man was completely without foundation – it wasn’t – but there is no doubt that it was unfairly exaggerated, as these things often are, and that I paid too much attention to gossip. And believe me, I know now how damaging that can be. As things turned out, it took both of us moving to the other side of the world to finally bring us together as a couple.
I was keen to travel, and I knew if that was going be anything more than a pipe dream I needed to do it sooner rather than later. The further my career progressed, the more committed I was likely to become at work and the more difficult it would be to break away. After completing my ‘house jobs’ (as they were known then – basically a doctor’s first year post-qualification), I’d found myself embarking on a career in obstetrics and gynaecology. While that hadn’t been my intention – I’d planned simply to gain the experience I needed for general practice – I really enjoyed O&G. Looking back, I have to admit that the departmental social scene was great, too, and this might well have added to its appeal. But it was an incredibly busy and competitive area, with many apparently dissatisfied and overworked doctors, mostly women, stuck on middle grades, and I wasn’t completely sure it was for me.
Early in 1995, during an oncology posting I’d taken up to enhance my O&G training, I started to apply for jobs in Australia via an organized scheme. I also sent one letter on spec to a hospital in New Zealand at the suggestion of a Kiwi colleague. I was expecting a formal response by post in due course, so I was somewhat taken aback when I was called to the phone one day at work and found myself being offered a job by a neo-natal consultant in Auckland. I said yes.
While I’d been making these applications, at the back of my mind there was always the lurking regret that if I went away, the chances were I’d lose touch with Gerry. We hadn’t talked about our respective plans, and what I didn’t know was that he, too, was seeking to work abroad, in either the US or New Zealand. Later, the unfair, if not entirely serious, story doing the rounds of the Glasgow hospitals grapevine had it that as soon as Gerry found out I was going to Auckland, he decided to chase me across the world and immediately started applying for jobs himself in the Land of the Long White Cloud. Flattering though this version of events may be from my point of view, the truth was that he was already waiting to hear back from several hospitals in both New Zealand and America. What I would like to think, however, is that the news that I would be in Auckland made the decision between the two countries a bit easier for him!
I was the first to leave, in July 1995, and I arrived in New Zealand not knowing a soul. On my first day in my new job a friend of a friend with whom I’d been put in touch rang me to see how I’d got on and asked casually, ‘Want to come for a run tonight?’ in the way that at home we’d say, ‘Fancy a beer after work?’ Although I was sporty, running was not part of my repertoire – that was Gerry’s province. But as this guy was the only person I knew in Auckland, I agreed.
That evening I found myself squelching and puffing across a muddy field. Every step involved trying to yank your foot out of the clinging mire. My new Kiwi mate pointed to a hill up ahead. ‘One Tree Hill?’ he suggested. I nodded confidently. All the way up he was making conversation, asking questions to which I barely had the breath to give one-word answers. Honest to God, I thought I was going to die. When, mercifully, we reached the summit he stretched out his arm to show me the view spread out beneath and around us. From this 182-metre volcanic peak, a famous Auckland landmark, you can see the whole city. ‘Look at that!’ he enthused. ‘And look at those amazing clouds!’ All I could think was, sod the clouds – I’m going to be sick.
But I wasn’t about to be beaten by One Tree Hill. The next evening, I went out to do the run on my own and I did it again and again until I’d conquered it. That’s me. I might not be the most ambitious woman in the world, but what I do have, in abundance, is determination and doggedness. After that I became a bit of a convert and, as well as playing mixed netball in New Zealand, I began to run regularly. Given Gerry’s devotion to the sport, it was probably just as well I enjoyed it too.
I loved my job in the neo-natal unit, and I loved working with babies, but it was something of a baptism of fire. I was classed as a registrar even though I had no neo-natal experience and had junior doctors working under me who did. I was going to be putting big, fancy lines into tiny, twenty-four-week-old babies on my own. ‘Just give us a ring and we’ll come in for the first few, then you’ll be fine,’ the consultant said. And I was. I just needed to get used to the laid-back Kiwi way of doing things. Once I had, I found New Zealanders to be lovely, capable, easygoing people who worked to live rather than the other way round.
Gerry arrived in the country two months after I did but he wasn’t exactly round the corner. His post, in general medicine and cardiology, was in Napier – a flight or over five hours by road from Auckland. But in spite of the distances involved we saw as much of one another as we could. Away from home, and from everyone else we knew, we focused on each other at last and our relationship immediately moved up a notch to the romantic level. In some ways the fact that we’d been friendly for over two years made that transition easier. We already knew quite a lot about each other, after all. Initially, though, adjusting to this new footing was a bit strange and awkward, and we were both very nervous, like teenagers going on their first few dates. Thankfully, that stage soon passed.
After my stint at the neo-natal unit, I took a six-month job in O&G in Wellington (which is about the same distance from Napier as Auckland). We were in New Zealand for a year altogether. It was an amazing time and we were so happy. We both loved the country and our lives there. I think Gerry would seriously have considered staying on for good but, sad as I was to leave, for me it was just too far away from my family and friends, particularly my parents. And now there was no question that wherever we went, it would be as a couple. Having finally found each other, we felt we were the luckiest people on the planet.
So in September 1996 we returned to Glasgow, Gerry to the Western Infirmary and to begin his research for an MD in exercise physiology, while I worked initially at the maternity unit at the Queen Mother’s Hospital before transferring to anaesthetics at the Western Infirmary in 1997. We rented a flat together to start with and then bought our own terraced house very close to Gerry’s brother Johnny and his family. We were married in Liverpool in December 1998 by our good friend Father Paul Seddon. We chose the weekend before Christmas for the wedding: with our friends and extended families scattered all over the place, taking advantage of the holiday period was the best way of making sure as many of them as possible could be there. Added to that, I had always loved Christmastime. It was a wonderful day, and we looked forward eagerly to our future as a married couple and to the children who would make our lives complete.
2
MADELEINE
Gerry and I were keen to start a family as soon as possible, but after a couple of years with no sign of a pregnancy, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be as easy as we’d assumed. Those who have been lucky enough to conceive effortlessly often fail to appreciate how heartbreaking and testing trying fruitlessly for a baby can be: month after month of aching disappointment, punctuated by a mid-cycle urgency to have sex at the crucial time, which removes all the spontaneity, and much of the fun, from making love. Sex becomes a clinical requirement rather than an enjoyable and intimate experience. And as time drags by, you find yourself having to force a joyful smile and congratulate your friends as they become pregnant, apparently without the slightest difficulty.
We were now living in Leicestershire, having taken the decision to move south in 2000 to enable Gerry to take up a training post in cardiology, positions that were very hard to come by. Even then, he had to complete the first part of his rotation in Boston in Lincolnshire, a two-hour, cross-country drive away. By this time I had been promoted to a registrar post in anaesthetics in Glasgow and was working hard towards completing my postgraduate exams or ‘fellowship’. Within six months, I’d been able to transfer to the registrar rotation in Leicester and we had settled in Queniborough, a picture-postcard village with a couple of pubs, a general store and an excellent butcher.
By coincidence my mum’s brother, Brian Kennedy, lived in Rothley, just ten minutes along the road. Now retired, he had been headmaster of a school in Loughborough. I was close to Uncle Brian and Auntie Janet – when I was a child we’d spent every Christmas and Easter with them – and their children, Aileen and James, were like a little sister and brother to me. It was a great bonus to have family nearby. Leicester wasn’t Liverpool or Glasgow, and I found people more reserved than I was used to, but our neighbours, a mix of young professionals and retired people, were all new, too (our mews home was part of the recent conversion of an old country house, so everyone there was new), and that helped.
Shortly after we moved to Queniborough I decided to leave anaesthetics and train for general practice. It wasn’t an easy decision to make – I was happy in anaesthetics, and it meant that my fellowship would be redundant in terms of furthering my career – but just as Gerry was finishing his stint in Boston I was due to begin six months there. I felt that if we both continued to work as hospital specialists, on call at different times and in different places, it would not only be our quality of life that suffered but also our chances of conceiving a child.
With the variety of hospital posts I already had under my belt, all I needed was a six-month position in psychiatry to gain the breadth of experience required for GP training. However, I still wanted to finish my anaesthetics fellowship. It entailed loads of work and everybody told me I was crazy to carry on with it. But I had started it, I wanted to complete it, and I did. Deep down, Gerry understood. We are both ‘finishers’, Gerry and I. Neither of us gives up anything easily.
I did my GP training at a surgery in Melton Mowbray, one of the first specialist GP practices in the country, which was and remains the largest in the UK. It boasts a number of GPs with specialist interests, including cardiology, ophthalmology, dermatology, sports medicine and ENT, as well as a sizeable team of nurses, receptionists and so on, and operates an internal referral system, whereby one GP can refer a patient to the appropriately qualified colleague. This system greatly reduces the number of patients having to be sent to hospital with conditions that can be treated in the surgery by a GP with expertise in the relevant field.
When I’d finished my training I secured a locum post at the surgery. I enjoyed the job, particularly attending and chatting to the old folk, though I found it much harder in many respects than working in a hospital. In general practice you are right at the coalface, with no idea what you are going to be presented with next. Although you have the support of your colleagues, you are working much more independently, making quick decisions on your own all day long about a limitless array of problems without lab tests and X-rays on hand to guide you. Both jobs can be stressful, of course, in their different ways, but I think general practice is especially hard to do well: you need the skill and aptitude to spot the unusual amid the ordinary, not to mention the ability and compassion to deal with emotional and social issues in a very short space of time.
In spite of the big changes in our home and working environments, we had soon made friends, two of the closest being Fiona Webster and her partner David Payne. I had first met Fiona in December 2000 in the staff coffee room at the Leicester General Intensive Care Unit, where we were both anaesthetic registrars. It was the day after I passed my anaesthetics fellowship, so I’d been in an upbeat mood. It didn’t take me long to discover that she was my kind of person. We became such great mates that one of our consultant colleagues rather cheekily used to refer to us as Charlie’s Angels.