Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  That summer we received an invitation for the Millennium Year meeting of the Fiennes tribe at the family HQ, Broughton Castle near Banbury, in which the family boss has lived since 1377. This clan coming-together involved 200 of us from all over the world and all descended from Frederick Fiennes, the 16th Lord Saye and Sele. James, the 1st Lord, fought at Agincourt and was Treasurer of England. You can catch up with the rest of them in the family tree on page 360.

  At least sixteen of us at the castle that lovely summer’s day were the progeny of my mother who, at eighty-eight, was the oldest person present. Our host, Nat, had been a pageboy at her wedding. Ginny and I had a great time meeting my sisters’ families, including my American nephews and nieces. The castle is surrounded by a wide moat complete with drawbridge and portcullis, and Ginny provided Nat with iridescent Cayuga ducks from our farm that swam around in the Broughton moat weed, out of reach of foxes. My cousin Joseph Fiennes was at the meeting. He was no stranger at the castle, having recently starred with Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, which was filmed there. His brother, Ralph, was unfortunately away in America.

  The very first Fiennes who came to England that we know about was Eustache Fiennes, who came from a village called Fiennes in northern France which is now an industrial suburb of Boulogne. According to the historically accurate picture diary that is the Bayeux Tapestry, Eustache arrived at Hastings in 1066 and, commanding the Norman Army, he personally cut off the English King Harold’s head with his axe and was given various castles as a reward. One was Herstmonceux just a few miles from Hastings, but subsequent Fienneses sold it. Today, only Broughton, which is open to the public for most of the year, remains. Oliver Cromwell plotted against the Royalists using Broughton as his local base, since most of the Fiennes family were fervent Parliamentarians. Cromwell’s war jacket is still on show in the castle.

  Before we left Broughton my sisters and I agreed that we should meet up in Lodsworth as our mother was moving, after forty years in the village, including twenty as president of the football club, to a retirement home in nearby Petworth. She was becoming increasingly forgetful and a little lame, so she had decided to make the move whilst she was still physically able. She wanted us all to decide which items of furniture each of us would like, since in her new one-room home there would be no space for most of it. We all sat around the kitchen table and one by one – starting with Sue, the eldest – listed our choice, little knowing that within three years only two of the five of us would still be alive.

  Ginny had for years only been able to go on holiday or on expeditions with me by hiring an Animal Aunt, a sort of experienced animal-babysitter, from a company in Sussex. She had often been sent one particular girl, Pippa Wood, who was excellent with the animals. Eventually Pippa, who was self-employed, agreed to work at Greenlands whenever needed, enabling us to enjoy holidays again with old friends like the Gaults and the Bowrings without Ginny constantly worrying about the farm. That summer, unable to race competitively, I had time on my hands and almost learned to relax. We went for long walks with the Black Dogs, Pingo and Thule, great-grandchildren of the original Black Dog Ginny had brought to England a quarter of a century before. We expanded the farm by thirty-five wilderness acres, bought from our neighbour, mostly a place of wild flowers, jack snipe and a tumbling stream. A good place for picnics and bird spotting, with plenty of shelter for the cattle in winter.

  Five months after my Arctic accident, Donald Sammut amputated the remaining bits of dead finger on my left hand and folded the previously semi-damaged skin neatly over the newly gaping stumps. He described the operation in simple terms:

  Ran’s Do-It-Yourself amputations had rather forced the issue, since the resulting raw surface had opened up the core of the amputated bone to the elements and we no longer had the protection of the mummified dead finger tips. The results of his ‘surgery’ included the middle finger bone being particularly exposed, protruding free well beyond the skin cover. Nevertheless this did not much compromise the eventual surgery, and I operated on 14 July, removing any residual dead tissue and providing skin cover to the tips. This skin cover consisted of islands of skin dissected virtually free on a stalk of nerve and artery advanced to cover the tip of each digit: this permits one to preserve maximum length (and crucial tendon insertions which preserve maximum power) while providing good quality, sensate skin similar to pulp.

  So Donald grafted on extra patches cut from the sole of my left hand. He is a superb surgeon and anything I have been able to do since then which involves intricate finger movement is thanks to his meticulous skill.

  I spent a post-operative week in hospital doing nothing in between visits by Ginny, various good friends and my cousin Rosalie Fiennes, who gave me a book which appeared from its cover, to be the Works of Shakespeare but which was in reality the first book about the as yet unknown boy wizard, Harry Potter.

  ‘You may think it is a children’s book,’ Rosalie told me, ‘but don’t be embarrassed. Nobody will know it’s not Shakespeare. I have read it and, believe me, it’s brilliant.’

  I whiled away the hours with the book and have been a Potter fan ever since.

  Back at Greenlands again with time on my hands – one of them gloved after the operation – I was sorting through some long overdue filing when I came upon a box of documents I had forgotten all about. The papers had come a long way. In 1995 when I was working as a lecturer for an Abercrombie and Kent cruise ship, I had found myself in Antarctica and, because that year was unseasonably warm with lots of loose ice the ship was able to visit a scientists’ hut on the coast not previously reachable by cruise ships. Our German skipper asked the chief lecturer, Dr John Reynolds, Europe’s top polar geologist, to check out the hut’s safety before allowing his shipload of mostly American tourists ashore and John asked me to join him.

  We beached the inflatable boat close by the hut. The last scientists to have worked there, some thirty years before, had left everything in place – food, equipment, six bunk beds and a great many books, including notes on the very first studies of what later turned out to be the ozone hole. Many of the scientists’ notebooks were damp and stuck together, so John decided they should go back to Britain, and when I flew back to London from Chile I handed them over to Dr John Heap, Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute. Two of the notebooks, unlike the rest, were not on Her Majesty’s Stationery and, since John Heap did not want them, I took them home and soon forgot about them.

  I now found that the pages of one of the books had, over years of damp summer atmospheres presumably, become largely glued into a pulped mess. The other was in better condition and appeared to be a rambling diary written in biro. I could only access forty-five mostly separated and disjointed pages, but the little that I could read was fascinating.

  I called Ed Victor, my literary agent, who agreed to approach a publisher, and I phoned Paul Cook, chief paper conservation expert at the Greenwich Maritime Museum, who gave me detailed advice on, and materials for, un-sticking the pages. Using Gore-Tex slips and an iron, I eventually managed to separate and render legible some 60 per cent of the diary, which turned out to be that of a fifty-five-year-old Canadian welfare worker named Derek Jacobs who, during the 1970s, had learned of his family’s massacre at the hands of Nazis in 1945.

  Determined to locate his mother’s murderer, a policeman escorting the Wallern Death March during the last week of the war, Jacobs joined the Secret Hunters, an organisation dedicated to tracking down perpetrators of war-time atrocities. The diary showed that he had eventually traced the man he believed to be his mother’s killer to Bermuda where the former Nazi had chartered a yacht to sail to Antarctica in secret quest for a reputed seam of gold. Jacobs had joined the yacht as crew.

  When my application to inspect the records of the 1945 Death Marches drew no response, I asked a German friend, Mike Kobold, to trick his way into the archives at the Zentrale Stelle zur Verfolgung von Nazi Verbrechen and photocopy 400 pages of the re
levant documents. I also tracked down Prince Yurka Galitzine, the man who had originally set up the Secret Hunters, and I went to visit him at his Mayfair address.

  I spent the next eight months checking out most of the events described in Jacobs’ diary and travelling the Sudetenland Death March route in Czechoslovakia and East Germany with Mike before settling down to start writing. I intended to produce the full story of Jacobs’ life and the horrors experienced by his parents. But at that stage, Mike and I had failed to track down the whereabouts of Michael Weingärtner, the man Jacobs held responsible for his mother’s death.

  Travelling in Mike’s lethally fast Audi on autobahns with no speed limit gave me a taste of Formula One, so when the Top Gear TV programme asked me to have a go on their Surrey race track, I jumped at it. They had an instructor named Stig who taught me the rudiments required and my best time, although bettered by Kate Moss, was several seconds ahead of the socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, which was a great relief for my ego.

  At the weekends I took time off to show Ginny’s best cattle at agricultural shows. I came home from a show one night, well past midnight, and found Ginny sitting in the kitchen with a man. They were both drinking whisky and both were literally covered in blood – recent blood that was still shiny in the lamplight. The scene resembled that of two killers having a drink after committing a murder, but I soon recognised Donald, our local vet of many years, who Ginny had called in to deal with a difficult birth and prolapse. They had just spent an hour together in rain and darkness trying to force the bloody intestines of the mother cow back through her vulva.

  Each of Ginny’s hundred or so Aberdeen Angus cows had a name and, that year for the first time, I got to know most of them by sight. Ginny specialised in selling her own brand of bulls and, because few fences can keep randy bulls away from cows on heat, she kept all her bulls at a farm several miles away from Greenlands. Sadly bovine tuberculosis, which is endemic in the south-west, struck in the autumn of 2000 and all Ginny’s bulls had to be shot by the Ministry. I remember the night before it happened, I came home from a lecture to find no supper but a note from Ginny saying, ‘Not sure when I’ll be back. Have joined the blockade. Love you, Gin.’ I turned on the television news and learned that there was a national fuel crisis, sparked off by the sudden hike in petrol prices to £0.81 per litre at the pump, and groups of truckers, taxi drivers and farmers, including Ginny, were blockading oil terminals. There were pictures of police breaking up demonstrations. Ginny eventually called me on her mobile, not to explain what she was up to nor with whom, but to announce that she’d left me a rice dish in the Aga.

  Only five months later, in February 2001, the foot and mouth epidemic was officially confirmed. I shuddered at the thought of how Ginny would react to the prospect of each and every one of her cattle and sheep being shot. If the virus reached anywhere on Exmoor, it would spread like wildfire across the largely unfenced moorlands of the National Park over which red deer and sheep wandered at will for many miles. For months we exercised maximum movement control on and off our farm. We avoided calling in the vet in case he brought us the dreaded bug on his van tyres or his clothing. All our gates were kept closed at all times and buckets full of disinfectant with a hand spray were left by our cattle grid for use by essential visitors like the postman. Every farmer in the area did likewise and prayed hard.

  After the tax investigation and tuberculosis, Ginny needed this foot and mouth threat like a sore foot. She did not look at all well over those long summer months as the virus crept closer and closer to Greenlands, eventually stopping, God knows why, approximately twelve miles away.

  Ever since the end of the Transglobe Expedition some twenty years before, Charlie Burton, Oliver Shepard, Ginny and I had met from time to time to chat about all those special years we had spent together. We thought of big, tough Charlie as immortal, but in October 2001 he suffered some form of heart attack whilst crossing a road, and then a few months later he died at home one morning, and Oliver rang to tell us. The three of us joined many more members of the Transglobe team and several hundred others for his memorial service at the Royal Geographical Society. I was lucky to have shared so many trials and tribulations over so many years with such a brave and solid man with a huge spirit and sense of humour.

  Ginny and I had always slept with one leg or one arm entwined. When we had an argument by day, increasingly rare as the years fled by, this physical contact – which had become virtually subconscious like puffing up a pillow last thing – stopped any bad feeling spilling over into the next day. It also led to the likelihood of being struck when the other party was having a bad dream. One morning that June, just before dawn, Ginny went rigid and I woke with a shock.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked. ‘Are you okay?’

  Ginny stared down at me. ‘Celia,’ she said, ‘your sister. You must go and see her. Now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I think she’s got much worse.’

  My middle sister, Celia, living in Augusta, Georgia, had for a year or so been receiving chemotherapy for stomach cancer. That month reports from her husband Bob indicated that things were not too good, but there was no suggestion that she was dying. However, Ginny had never had such psychic intimations of bad news before, so I caught a flight the very next day, rented a car in Charlotte, North Carolina, and arrived at Celia’s home at 6.00 p.m. Bob greeted me at their door with a worried look. He and Celia had gone for a quiet walk together the previous day, but on return she had fallen into a deep sleep, her breathing had rapidly become shallow and she was no longer reacting to normal stimuli.

  She opened her eyes when I greeted her and seemed to smile. Her fingers lifted momentarily from the quilt and Bob said he was sure that she knew I was there. But I never heard her speak again. We stayed in relays with her through that night. Bob and her son, my nephew Tony, were both doctors and one of her two daughters, Deirdre, was a nurse. They looked after her beautifully and held a bedside communion service, until at 9.00 a.m. the following morning, with her family all about her, she died peacefully – a lovely person, an active and committed Christian and a perfect sister.

  When the following week I drove to see my mother, I found her much quieter than usual. We went out to lunch, as we often did, at the Angel Hotel in Midhurst where, as a teenager over forty years before, I had done the washing up for pocket money. For the first time my mother did not recognise members of the hotel staff she had known for many years. She asked why my fingers were bandaged, a question I had answered her in full many times since the accident. She asked me about Celia, and I stressed that I had been with her as she died peacefully. But my mother did not seem able to take in at all that one of her children was dead.

  That summer, back in the village hall of her beloved Lodsworth, my remaining two sisters and I arranged a party for her ninetieth birthday with fifty of her best and oldest friends, plus many of her grandchildren. After various toasts were offered and speeches laughed at, my mother spontaneously stood up and, with a lovely smile, thanked everyone there for all the happiness and fun they had given her down the long years. I loved her dearly and knew no mother could ever have been more loving or caring. She had brought up four young children, for much of the time in a foreign land, with no husband and a domineering mother-in-law. Thanks to her I had never felt any parental void as a child, no need for a father figure, for her shoulder was always there to cry on. I wondered on her ninetieth birthday, perhaps for the first time in nearly sixty years, on whose shoulder she had been able to cry since my father’s untimely death.

  My father, although I never missed him, has always been one of the three people I have in different ways wished to emulate. I was brought up with stories of his bravery. My other two heroes were Wilfred Thesiger and Wally Herbert. That summer I learned that the former, whom I considered the greatest British desert traveller of all time, was living out his old age in a rest home in Surrey. I had met him, only once, to interview
him about one of his travel books thirty years before. He was a craggy, imposing figure, even then, with the face of a hawk. I decided it was time I paid him another visit. I found him resting in a deep armchair in a small room that seemed to imprison him. But he was cheerful.

  ‘I’ve won at last,’ he said with his sun-leathered features creasing into a smile. ‘I’ve escaped from the mixed wing. No more old ladies blocking up the stairways.’

  He levered his long frame out of his chair with two sticks and suggested we venture to the local pub for some lunch. He spurned the offer of a lift in my car and we walked down the road for twenty minutes, resting occasionally as he leaned heavily on my shoulder. The pub turned out to be a sandwich bar. His mind, like my mother’s, wandered now that he was ninety-two years old, but I listened spellbound to his stories of the great deserts of Oman, Saudi and the Yemen, and especially of his wanderings, some twenty years before I was there, in the wilds of Dhofar. I had met and worked with perhaps a dozen Dhofaris who clearly remembered Thesiger. They had called him by his Arab nickname of Mubarreq bin Miriam, and all remembered him with great respect. After two hours of yarning he began to doze off, so we walked slowly back to the rest home and I left him alone in his room. He had no family any more, but an unrivalled wealth of memories of people and places, of incredible journeys he had dared and endured, and the inner pride in knowing that he had never given up.

  A year later I was lecturing in Kenya when Ginny phoned me to say the Prince of Wales had asked me to represent him at Thesiger’s memorial service in Eton’s magnificent college chapel, as he would be abroad. If I could taste just a mere fraction of the wonders Thesiger experienced, I would die happy, but I never will, for Thesiger was born just in time to be the last of the Marco Polos, a stranger in strange lands marvelling at weird, often savage, rituals in the harsh badlands of Danakil, among the nomad raiders of the Empty Quarter or the biblical marsh-men of the pre-Saddam Hussein Euphrates marshes. Thesiger’s powerfully written and photographed books ensure that neither these people as they used to be nor he who travelled then among them will be forgotten.