A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong

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СКАЧАТЬ is generally very clear. Most of the time we don’t have involvement with the family, because you can’t afford to be influenced by their emotion and their situation. So most of our work is in clinical isolation. And you go the full 110% on everything you do, whether it’s for the police, the courts, the family or whoever, it doesn’t matter. But when the family element comes in, then you do end up, I think, going that extra little bit that you possibly shouldn’t. But you can’t not.

      In a place like that you were probably working very long hours with little sleep – how on earth do you look after yourself?

      If you’re the only anthro on the team and you haven’t looked after yourself and they need an anthro, then you shut that team down. So there’s a huge responsibility to look after yourself – to make sure that if you cut yourself you deal with it properly; if you get a tummy upset you deal with it properly, you drink enough water.

      We also have a buddy system where you take responsibility for somebody else, who equally takes responsibility for you. If you start to see erratic behaviour, then you can pull them aside and say, ‘We need to talk.’ You’ll do that for them, and they’ll do that for you.

      Also, part of the role of the senior officer in charge is welfare. We didn’t have that in the early stages of Kosovo, so we did work far, far too many hours. It became clear that people were going to burn out quickly, and the senior officer said, ‘No, today we’re doing nothing. We’re going to sleep late and eat well. You can read a book, phone home, do whatever you like, but we’re not working today.’ That becomes very important, but you can’t do that in all circumstances – it depends on the nature of the deployment. If you’re going in somewhere that’s particularly dangerous you may have a very tight time schedule, and then you don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘We’re not working today.’

       What keeps you going?

      It’s the detective in all of us, isn’t it? Our mystery is: who was this person? And when you solve that, it’s a huge adrenaline rush. You think, ‘Yup, someone’s got their husband back. Someone’s got their wife, their daughter … I’ve made a difference.’ Even if it’s not going to make a difference to the courts, it’ll make a difference to somebody. And that’s grand …

      Working in a big team in Kosovo was a bit like Big Brother. You take a bunch of people that wouldn’t normally choose each other; you throw them into a really difficult situation; you throw stresses at them – lack of sleep, lack of food – you make them work together. And yep, there are times when you will shout at somebody, lose your temper, but you know you’ve got to live with them again, so you get over it. It can be quite an experience! But the camaraderie you develop is hugely strong. And these are the people you can talk to, because, when nobody else will understand, they do.

      The police brought some counsellors to Kosovo. And I mean, bless their hearts, they tried! But they never understood why we couldn’t take them seriously. Because they’d never worked with us, they didn’t know what we were doing.

      So is this where the buddy thing came in – they suddenly realised you needed someone who knew the situation?

      Yeah, absolutely. You’ll sit down at night with a beer, and you’ll just talk. But to have a counsellor come in and say, ‘Tell me how you feel,’ you think: for goodness’ sake, I’ve been here for 12 weeks – how the hell d’you think I feel? It can be counterproductive if you haven’t got the right counsellors.

       In buddying each other, can you admit weakness?

      Oh, absolutely. We had an officer out with us one time … We had been exhuming bodies in a field. It was miles from anywhere, so we couldn’t take the bodies back to the mortuary; we had to do the post-mortems on a sheet laid out in the field. This was a group of women and children that had been massacred, and they were really in a dreadful state. We’d just exhumed the body of a little girl and she was still wearing her sleep suit and her little red wellies. One of the officers made a mistake – the little girl was about the same age as one of his own, and he put his daughter’s face in his own mind on to this. I was working with the pathologist, and I looked up and thought: why’s there a row of policemen looking at me? Then I saw that behind them was this officer who was falling apart: it was the men’s way of giving him his moment of privacy and time to get over it.

      So I took my gloves off, took my suit down and tied it round my waist, went over and gave him a huge hug. He broke apart, and he could then talk to me afterwards. We sat and we drank beer together that evening, and by the following morning he said, ‘Och, I shouldn’t have done that. I’ll never do it again, because it’s not my daughter.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not,’ you know? So you’ve just got to look out for it …

      Going back to the beginning when you first did anatomy, how difficult did you find it? Were you ever squeamish apart from the rats?

      When I was at school I had a Saturday job in a butcher’s shop, so from the age of 13 I’d dealt with cold, red meat. I’ve never been squeamish about carcasses, or cutting up meat. It’s natural. And to dissect a human body, to be able to look underneath the skin, is the most fascinating thing. It’s a real privilege to be able to see what we’re like inside. There’s nothing ghoulish about it. We’re all fascinated by bodies.

      You were the first in your family to go to university, but how much support did your mum and dad give you over the years?

      My mother was enormously proud. She had a scrapbook, bless her, of everything I’d ever done. My father is proud too, but he can never tell you. He’s an ex-regimental sergeant major, classic Scotsman, and he finds demonstration of affection really difficult. But I know how much he cares.

      How easy is it to take off your white coat, go home and be a mum at the end of the day?

      Oh, easy. It’s just the other side of the coin. There’s only one occasion where I made a mistake, and I made a really big mistake. I have three daughters: 23, 12 and 10. I’d just come back from Iraq and had done a radio programme. I hadn’t heard the final piece, but my husband had recorded it for me, and I went to listen. Grace, my middle child, said, ‘Can I listen too, Mum?’ I did a quick think, and said, ‘That’s fine.’ I knew it was aiming for a middle-ground audience, so you’re careful about what you say. But I’d forgotten that the interviewer had asked me, ‘How do you reconcile the situations you can find yourself in and being a mum?’ And I’d said, ‘I believe I’m getting close to the point where I’m irresponsible, because my children need to know that their mother’s coming home.’ I looked at Grace, and her eyes were filling with tears, and she said, ‘What d’you mean you might not come home, Mum?’ I said, ‘Well, I might miss the plane …’ You could see what she was thinking: she wasn’t fooled.

      When I did the second tour in Iraq, she was the one who suffered. I phoned every night, but she suffered, and I thought: I cannot put her through that. So I turn things down. I won’t go back to Iraq.

       What about your husband? How supportive is he?

      We’ve known each other since our teens, so we’ve been together a very long time. We went to university together, and he studied anatomy as well, but he learnt pretty quickly that if you want a decent income you don’t become an academic! So he went into business.

      But he understands what I do, and he’s got a very good way of dealing with me. When I get home after being away he’ll not question me at all. Three or four days later I’ll start to tell him stories, and then he’ll wheedle СКАЧАТЬ