In a year of remembering Dr Willy Legg

In a year of remembering

I never met Willy, but we had many conversations on WhatsApp and when he moved into a nursing home, there were bits of interaction when Brian went to visit him.

Last year, as Brian was about to leave for Cape Town to help me recuperate, he visited Willy and part of what transpired was Willy had a premonition and said he'll be gone before Brian returns to Bulawayo.

We were only about three weeks in Muizenberg, near Cape Town, when the news came that he had passed on. There have been snatches of memory and recollections since, many quite interesting and fond too.

I share one such memory below, which was a comment to the blog I wrote in tribute to Willy, a year ago. Unfortunately, the contributor did not leave a name.

The tortoise she birthed

To add to your fund of Willie stories: In amongst all the normal activities of being a clinical student in Harare Hospital, Zimbabwe, occasional remarkable incidents stood out.

One day, someone mentioned in the tea-room that there was an especially unusual case in the maternity unit. It was definitely worth going to see, and it involved a tortoise. Along with Willie Legg, with whom I was then sharing a house, I went to have a look at this 'most unusual case'.

In one of the small side wards holding the recently delivered mothers and their babies, we found a perfectly ordinary young mother in her bed; the adjoining bassinet contained a somewhat dusty but otherwise perfectly ordinary adult tortoise, complete with a few lettuce leaves.

Luckily, Willie spoke perfect Shona, so he asked the mother what her exact story was. She told him she had gone through her pregnancy without any real problems and had an apparently normal delivery in a district clinic. She had been greatly distressed when she was then presented, not with a swaddled baby, but a swaddled tortoise.

According to the established protocol for such things, she was transferred with her new and very obviously 'abnormal' baby to our teaching hospital, as this was a most unusual complication.

It appeared impossible to either of us that anyone could ever accept this story, so we asked the young midwife working on that ward what she thought of the story. She said, and I quote: “No, it could not possibly be true. I have examined the tortoise and noted that its umbilicus is fully healed.” I took this as a valid point, but not a completely satisfactory answer.

Naturally, we were nowhere near the end of the story, as the police were already on the case. It was soon confirmed that the clinic midwife had accepted a significant sum of money to give the newborn baby to a well-off local woman who was infertile.

The tortoise had been substituted for the baby, with the hope that this unsophisticated young mother would just accept this reptile as her unhappy lot. Luckily, this never had to happen, and justice was eventually served.

Blog - Dr William George Wykeham Legg (Willy)