The Dun Cow Rib Page 8
The world has moved on significantly since then; protection laws have emerged and most people’s values have shifted towards conservation, although there are still plenty who would put their ‘sport’ before any aspect of nature conservation. Maxwell, I am pleased to record, writing in 1959, makes his own views entirely clear: ‘the wildcats are (now) protected . . . Under this benign regime the number of wildcats has marvelously increased.’ If only that were still the case today.
We all live by the instilled standards of our time. My grandfather certainly did, and I doubt whether he would have questioned the killing of wildcats. But extirpation? That’s another matter, and I would like to think that he would have pulled back, as, interestingly, did the redoubtable John Colquhoun, who firmly advocates trapping against poisoning, whereas Charles St John heartily advocates strychnia as a tool of vermin control.
Illegal poisoning of birds of prey on sporting estates is still a very live issue in nature conservation circles, arguably worse now (2017) than it has been for most of my career. But surprisingly, and to his great credit, Colquhoun decries exterminating ‘vermin’ altogether. In a telling aside he states unequivocally:
Clearing off the vermin by poison has been much in vogue in recent years. But, to say nothing of murdering all the dogs in the neighbourhood, it seems a pity to treat the now rare and interesting rovers of the desert like rats. This . . . may find favour with the man whose only pleasure in Highland sport consists of butchering game. For my own part I would rather trap one fine specimen of . . . the wild-cat or the marten, than shoot one hundred brace of grouse.
For all his killing, I fancy I hear the muffled beat of a conservationist heart, heavily disguised by the cultural mores of his day. In a later essay in Volume II, entitled The Natural History of Sport, he beats a drum familiar and endearing to my ears.
A passing glimpse at the wilder and more interesting British animals is every year becoming less common, since the cultivation of moorlands . . . draining, tree-planting etc. has, in many districts, driven away the aboriginal beasts of prey from haunts where they have prowled for centuries . . . When a schoolboy I remember how often the hen-roosts were plundered by pine-martens or wild-cats, which nightly crept forth from this sanctuary and the superstitious awe with which I listened in the calm twilight of summer to the cry of the tiger-cat to its fellow . . . For years this habitation of wild beasts has been swept away as if it had never been . . . call it improvement if you will . . . as an old sportsman I protest that some of our best fishing rivers have been ruined, our wild sport curtailed and our very climate modified . . . by these same labours of the improver. As the Indians fled before the white settlers, the remnants of our nobler predatory animals have sought refuge among remote Highland wilds, but they will find little sanctuary even there . . . [as] every . . . mountain and rugged moor are sought out and set apart exclusively for grouse and deer. Keepers have been commissioned to destroy the ‘vermin’ by exterminating as many as possible of our rarer and most interesting beasts and birds of prey; so that the eagle, the peregrine, the kite, the marten, the wild-cat . . . are fast receding . . . to make way for such real vermin as droves of pheasants, which afford no better sport than barn door fowls.
Well said, Mr John Colquhoun! Would that his words had been heeded by the sporting fraternity. We might still have some wildcats out there and some unsullied habitat for them. A hundred and thirty-five years after those words were written our task is immeasurably harder.
6
Rheumatic fever
For the first eleven years of her life my mother was a normal healthy child, a non-identical twin with her sister Margaretta. Then it happened. At 12.35 p.m. on Friday, 16 October 1931 the shining white-hulled 14,000-ton Royal Mail Ship Corfu eased away from the passenger boarding berth at London’s Tilbury dock. It was the Peninsular & Orient liner’s maiden voyage, off on the London to Hong Kong run via the Suez Canal, calling at Southampton, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Penang and Singapore. On board were 170 first-class and 211 second-class passengers; among them were the twins, Margaretta and Helen, with their eight-year-old sister, Priscilla, and their parents, bound for Port Said.
It was the girls’ first experience of foreign travel, off to Cairo and on up the Nile to Aswan, where their father was to take up his post as a consultant engineer. During the passage through the Med, Helen developed an angry sore throat. Two weeks later, as they disembarked to travel upriver, she was running a high temperature. Glandular fever, the English ship’s doctor had declared. He was wrong. So began the problems that would direct the course of her whole life.
* * *
Rheumatic fever has nothing to do with rheumatism. It derived its misnomer because some symptoms mirrored rheumatism. Commonplace in Britain during the world wars, it remains widespread in developing countries, especially those without ready recourse to antibiotics. It almost always affects children between the ages of eight and fourteen, eleven being the median norm, girls suffering more than boys. Caused by a bacterial Streptococcus pyogenes infection of the throat, nowadays it is easily treated with penicillin. If allowed to persist, it triggers an auto-immune response, which dramatically shifts the consequences of the disease from a fever to a far more devastating chronic condition. Early diagnosis and treatment are vital if the infection is to be prevented from sliding into full-blown rheumatic heart disease.
The infection causes the body’s immune system to produce antibodies whose function is to attack the Streptococcus bacteria. The sore throat goes away, but in the process those same antibodies are corrupted, unable to detect the difference between the bacterial infection they are supposed to be attacking and other important parts of the body, such as the lining of arteries, heart valves and the heart muscle itself. It is known as ‘antibody cross-reactivity’. Untreated, what appears to be just a nasty sore throat becomes a life-long, life-threatening illness.
The mitral valve is the most commonly affected, developing a thickening of the flaps, known as mitral stenosis, eventually failing altogether. The mitral and the aortic valves sit side by side. If the mitral valve doesn’t close properly the blood flow to the aorta, the main artery to transport blood round the body, reduces, affecting the rhythm of the heartbeat and slowing the whole circulatory system down. But the auto-immune attack doesn’t rest with the mitral valve, it spreads to the aortic valve, causing it to falter too. In severe cases the other two valves, the tricuspid and the pulmonary, also become damaged.
Even that isn’t the end of the story. Patients experience shortage of breath and energy and develop a heart murmur – the Carey Coombs murmur – caused by the blood regurgitating back and forwards between leaking valves. The heart is forced to work harder, dilating its muscle tissue, causing an overall increase in the size of the whole organ. The risk of severe strokes from clots passing to the lungs greatly increases.
Rheumatic heart disease is not just a horror that afflicts young children. The corrupted antibodies go on gnawing away at the heart valves and muscles for decades, gradually affecting its victims more and more, taking between ten and twenty years to reveal itself as a serious, chronic and ultimately life-threatening disability.
* * *
Helen was taken to hospital in Cairo too late. The chance to kill off the infection had been missed. Antibody cross-reactivity had set in and she was irrevocably doomed to a life profoundly complicated by heart disease. Yet, true to form, those complications would not properly emerge for a further ten years, by which time she would be an attractive young woman just married to a tall and dashing Englishman.
Initially at a French convent in Zamalek, the affluent district of Cairo, genteel and cultured nuns had schooled her and her sisters. She was a bright, cheerful child, always smiling with a ready, rippling laugh and an irrepressible desire to please, secure and happy in their lush Gezira island-in-the-Nile home among flowering jacaranda, banana and golden mohr trees, and scented datura, whose white bell flowers swayed in the h
ot afternoon winds. But there was another side to her education.
On regular walks to Giza along the glittering Nile, egged on by her much more precocious twin Margaretta, hand in hand they explored the dim and aromatic alleyways of that ancient crowded city, always listening, watching and learning. Their pale peach skin, bobbed hair curling in just below their ears and held back with matching satin bows on kirby grips, their identical gingham dresses, waistbands with bows at the back, brown sandals buckled over white ankle socks, and their nursery-taught, delicately mannered British coyness – ‘Be sure to say Please and Thank You to everyone you meet’ – hovered over them as their guardian angel. It was an ancient Arab world that had changed little since Ptolemy wrote the Almagest. On these daring expeditions they made unlikely friends with the fierce-looking thobe- and kibba-robed Bani Rasheed tribesmen tending their donkeys and camels on the desert edge of that vast city.
The Bedouin were filthy and stank like goats. Fearsome curved khanja daggers were thrust through their braided robe belts. But the twins loved the haughty indifference in their hooded eyes and written deep into the creases on their hot-wind and sand-leathered eagle-beaked faces which stared out from beneath kufiya turbans. These rough-hewn men of the desert in their flowing disdah, thobe and kibba robes fascinated my mother. Over the following years she would spend hundreds of hours in their company, sitting quietly, observing and absorbing their always volatile and often violent exchanges, yet never feeling frightened or threatened. She would never forget those sharply etched nomads and their camel trains vibrating through the heat haze, slowly emerging or disappearing into the burning sands.
Those romantic images were not the only unforgettable influences from Egypt and the Bedouin. The tribesmen taught the girls to spit and belly laugh and to swear in Arabic. ‘Imshi y’ Allah! Yla’an haramak! Ibn himar!’ – an unladylike skill my mother retained all her life. Throughout my childhood she muttered curses at those who offended her, knowing full well that the chances of anyone in England understanding ‘Clear off! Son of a donkey!’ were always likely to be slim. In extreme cases she would resort to ‘Ornak sharmoota!’ – ‘Your mother is a whore’ – followed by some far more lurid instruction beneath her breath. Proudly she wore the zigzag scar of what must have been a vicious camel bite on her upper arm.
My mother was a Romantic as much by instinct as by inclination. Later in life, in hushed reverence she relived her precious memories of the Sphinx of Giza, Luxor, the Aswan High Dam and the Nag Hammadi Barrage, Lake Nasser and Wadi Halfa, of lateen-sailed feluccas on the Nile, of water buffaloes along the banks tended by little Egyptian girls with gold earrings and long cotton djellabahs. During the Suez crisis in 1956 she wept bitterly when Gamal Nasser’s resistance fighters dynamited the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French creator of the canal, and tipped it into the water. But the images most dear to her were the frankincense, cinnamon and cardamom-scented souks and the long, roped camel caravans carrying cargoes of dates and myrrh resin, undulating rhythmically through the desert like a convoy of ships rising and falling on the tide.
The remaining ten years growing up were spent almost exclusively overseas in Egypt, then Persia and on to Turkey when her father moved to Karabük as consultant to the new steel works British engineers were building on the dusty plain surrounded by the foothills of the Kolu Daglari mountains. Helen and her sisters enjoyed a carefree childhood laced with the exciting advantages of being raised at each posting in the rarified exclusivity of the secure and vibrant 1930s British ex-pat community.
Small crinkly-edged black-and-white photographs from the albums of her late teens reveal smiling and laughing gangs of young men and women at picnics and chukar partridge shoots in the hills, setting out on impromptu horseback expeditions, and at barbecues and tennis parties at the large British encampment.
That she was thought to be a ‘delicate’ child did nothing to dampen her enthusiasm for life. She was bright, vivacious, unsnobbish and fun, always with confident opinions wrought of high principles, a natural linguist who loved music, ballet, opera, theatre, literature and, above all, people. Always with a ready smile, as much flashing in her blue-green eyes – the blue-green of blackbird eggs marbled with dove grey – as spreading across her high-boned cheeks. By eighteen she had grown to be shapely and attractive – a striking young woman – always spiced by her unassailable Romanticism and a quick, intuitive intellect, ever locating the best in people and endlessly redeeming their muddles, and by her characteristic silvery laugh. That cheerful positivity was an indomitable trait that would deliver great fortitude in the testing years ahead. At Karabük she became very attached to one of those young engineers. One man in particular, very tall, strong-featured with a centre parting and a wide moustache, appears with telling regularity in her photographs.
Her childhood had been full of adventure. She had been well; her health marred only by the occasional lack of energy. The rheumatic fever had been largely overlooked. She had apparently recovered fully and showed no outward signs of disability. The family had ceased to worry.
As a child Helen would have had no idea of the true gravity of her condition and, besides, by nineteen she was in love and engaged to marry the tall man in the photographs, John Christopher, the man who would become my father. He was twenty-six and well made. Six foot six, lanky and leggy, with a powerful upper frame. He had rowed for his university college, was an accomplished horseman and an excellent shot. He makes a comical figure in the photos, with his horizontal handlebar moustache and a trilby hat at a jaunty angle, a spotted silk cravat, hacking jacket, breeches and long riding boots, the embodiment of an extrovert character straight out of P.G. Wodehouse, always with a strong-jawed throwaway charm.
My father was quite definitely not a Romantic or a linguist. He was a hard-shelled pragmatist and an empiricist, a man with excellent hand and eye coordination who could make almost anything he turned his mind to, while the Arts, including music and literature – the whole creative canon – remained an impenetrable mystery to him. He was a man of rigid principles dictated by custom and instilled tradition, ever diligent with sound judgement, and never shying from hard work. I remember him only ever dressed formally, with a neat but unadventurous style, almost always in a tweed or worsted suit with a plain shirt and tie. He never possessed a pullover or a cardigan, condemning those who wore them as ‘sloppy’.
The instincts that ruled his character were in unequivocal monochrome, black or white, with a resounding sinkhole between the two. There was right and there was wrong, good and bad, honourable and dishonourable: Nelson was good, Napoleon bad, degrees veering only to extremes. Churchill embodied everything noble, Hitler everything evil, no nonsense, no debate. He harboured immutable war prejudices against all Germans, while freely acknowledging their engineering expertise. For the same reasons he admired Holland – anything to do with water or the sea he would announce, ‘Bring in the Dutch!’ The French he dismissed as frivolous and unreliable, the Italians devious and untrustworthy, and the Spanish and Greeks ‘bone idle’. Americans were loud, extravagant, vulgar and late. And yet, to his endearing credit, when events proved him wrong, he would laugh at himself and declare openly, ‘Well, well, blow me down! I would never have guessed it.’ Convention permanently hovered over my father’s facial expressions, often revealed in an undecided conflict between form and a mischievous sense of fun that made him good company, his humour inclined toward irreverent and ribald.
Those carefree days in Turkey came to an abrupt end in 1939. The outbreak of war meant a chaotic dash back to England on what the London Times described as the ‘last safe boat out of Istanbul’. Thunderous war clouds brooded over the whole of Europe, but at least the young couple had each other and their own future looked bright.
As a qualified civil engineer – a wartime ‘reserved occupation’ – my father was barred from enlisting, despite his pleading with all three armed forces. Instead he was seconded to Lord Nuffield’s disastro
usly unproductive Spitfire engine factory at Castle Bromwich. Out of touch with the reality of war, Nuffield knew how to make motor cars – his was the Morris empire – but Britain needed aero engines far faster than he had ever made cars. My father often spoke of the extreme frustration among the young engineers that Nuffield had refused to adopt modern assembly line procedures. In 1940 Winston Churchill personally intervened. Nuffield was summarily sacked and replaced by the far more bullish Lord Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production. My father was rapidly promoted and tasked with building munitions factories in the Black Country. He remained very proud of his contribution to the war effort for the rest of his life.
War changed everything; weddings were famously austere. The amateur photographs show my mother in a corduroy suit with peplum shoulders, her dark hair long and waved to her collar, tumbling down from the fashionable 1940s heart-shaped coiffure above. My father, hair slicked down from his habitual centre parting and neatly trimmed moustache, stands tall in baggy cavalry twills and a tweed sports jacket with leather patched elbows and cuffs. They were married on 7 March 1942 in Westbury-on-Trym parish church on the outskirts of Bristol, where my mother’s parents had settled. She is clutching a bunch of daffodils.