Cambridge author Larry Amure’s moving memoirs 33 years in the making
Cambridge graduate and retired doctor Bamidele Amure has published his memoirs, and they make for interesting – and occasionally harrowing – reading.
Described by one reviewer as “truly moving”, Beyond the Horizon Might be Better is available in more than 40,000 bookstores worldwide, as well as on Amazon.
Bamidele – known as Larry – has given lectures about it in local churches and at Christ’s College, his alma mater, and also recently gave a 30-minute radio interview to United Christian Broadcasting radio (UCB 2).
“It took me, from start to finish, 33 years to write it,” explains Larry, a retired local GP/ophthalmologist, who grew up in Nigeria and the UK, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from his home in Swavesey.
“But I was waiting for people who might be offended by the contents not to be offended.
“So I then spent three years finishing it off and it came out 16 months ago – it was self-published by Goldcrest Books International.
“And basically it’s just the story of my life, from my early years when things were pretty tough – so tough that I didn’t want to be around…
“Then, when I was 20, my father said, ‘I’ll send you back to the United Kingdom, where you were born’, as a last throw of the dice, and I came back to England and then things improved a lot.
“I did my A-levels at Norwich City College, then I went to Bristol University for my first degree.
“Then I came to Cambridge to do a PhD in neurophysiology, and after that I went to Addenbrooke’s to finish studying medicine.
“Then I went off and trained as an eye surgeon and 136 hours every other week seemed quite a lot to me, so I trained as a general practitioner in the North East.”
After finishing, Larry worked as a GP in an area that covered 80 square miles – including the villages of Over, Swavesey, Longstanton, Willingham and Fen Drayton – for more than 22 years.
“Then the eye clinic at Addenbrooke’s came calling and said, ‘We have a long waiting list, can you help us, please?’,” he recalls.
“So I said yes and did that for 10 years.”
Larry, who is due to do interactive book reading sessions with a Q&A at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August (he previously performed a 30-minute, one-man stand-up comedy routine at the Fringe in 2017), combined working as a GP with being an eye surgeon, retiring 10 years ago.
“I’ve been busy on various committees,” he notes. “I’m the vice-chair of our local parish church council, and I’ve just been approached to be a trustee on another committee.
“I’ve just put my application in, I’ll see what happens there…”
Larry, who also boxed for the University of Cambridge in 1978, obtaining his Blue, recounts his difficult early life in the book, and also his experiences on becoming a doctor – as well as some of the obstacles he had to overcome after he qualified as a doctor, at a time when the UK perhaps wasn’t quite as welcoming as it is now.
He remembers being told at an exam he went for in Edinburgh, for example, that “I wasn’t good enough to treat white people”, but adds: “It’s OK, I don’t hold grudges…
“And other experiences I have had because I’m different, but it’s OK; I’m not one for grudges because I’m a man of faith, which is very important.
“Basically the book was written to give hope to people, which is why I chose that title, because we all know if you aim for the horizon, you’ll never get to it because it shifts.
“But if you never give up, one day you might just come to a position of rest and comfort, so I never gave up and I just persevered.”
Larry concludes: “Everybody has a story to tell, and my favourite poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote: ‘If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility’.
“When you meet somebody for the first time, you have no idea the road they’ve travelled, so I’ve told my children, ‘Don’t judge people because you don’t know what they’ve done before they met you’.”
Beyond the Horizon Might be Better is available now.
