On New Year’s morning 1982 a hazy sun shone from a milky sky and the air temperature was close to –5° C. It seemed a good day to move a load of logs from the pile near the barn. For small jobs like this, I used a small farm tractor made by the Japanese firm, Iseki. I think they had built it for use in rice fields and it was unusual in having a 4-wheel drive. As I drove near the barn, the tractor suddenly slipped on a patch of ice and moved, crab-like, sideways. It fell over the edge of the track and out onto a steep down-going slope of grass and rocks. It turned over once, then again, and stopped precariously on the slope. I was pinned beneath the tractor by the steering-wheel. There was no roll-bar on this tiny tractor. I turned off the engine and with what seemed a vast effort, dragged myself from underneath the steering wheel. Later I found that the force transmitted through my abdomen to the ground bent the wheel itself. I had a feeling that something was wrong, and felt shocked, but I could still walk around and move without pain. I walked over to where Helen was sitting in her golf-cart. I asked if she could see anything wrong with me, anything out of place. ‘Is my back all right?’ I asked. ‘What have you done?’ she said, and I explained what had happened with the tractor. In her usual calm and unexcited way she commented, ‘Your jacket is torn right through.’
I decided to telephone our GP and ask his advice, but I had reckoned without the British bank holiday on which days everything stops, even to a large extent the National Health Service. This is especially true of Christmas or New Year’s Day. When I called, I reached a sleepy young doctor I did not know. I explained what had happened and told him that all seemed well but I felt odd and somewhat shocked. He dismissed me, saying, ‘You probably have a few bruises. Come and see me tomorrow if you have any further trouble.’ Later that day, my thigh began to ache, enough to require relief from painkillers. I felt shivery and nauseous. A local schoolmaster who was visiting at the time said, foolishly, ‘Ah, you have delayed shock.’ Like an idiot, and perhaps because I was still dazed, I took his amateur diagnosis as correct. Certainly, the pain passed away in a few hours. Next day I felt well enough to carry on without bothering my GP again. I now know that the accident had so damaged my left kidney that it never functioned again. There is a wonderful redundancy in our body parts and, unless we are contemplating some extreme trial, like crossing the Sahara with a minimum water supply, we do not need two kidneys. One will do, as many people living now who have donated one will know, and it seems to be true even of the brain. There are many carrying on useful lives, even holding down demanding professional jobs, with a third of a brain or less. The loss of a kidney did not seem to bother me, but looking back, I realize that during the next few months I was less active.
The next mishap occurred in early April. I was then a member of the governing council of the Marine Biological Association (MBA), and I was attending the Annual General Meeting at their wonderful old building at Plymouth, part of a fort called the Citadel that stands overlooking the sea at the east end of the green that is the Hoe. The Director of the MBA, Sir Eric Denton, invited me to dinner at his home in St Germans, a few miles west of Plymouth, and after the afternoon session, I walked back to my hotel, the Duke of Cornwall, changed, and at 6 pm drove across the Tamar Bridge from Plymouth into Cornwall and St Germans. Eric and Nancy Denton lived in a beautiful old house, set back from the village road, and immersed in the shrubbery of their well-kept garden. The Dentons had that wonderful capacity to make their guests feel wanted and at home, and we met in their sitting room—a large and gracious room made comfortable by two vast settees placed on either side of the fireplace. It was so comfortable that I felt as if I were sitting tucked up with my friends in a giant feather bed. Dinner was the best that Devon could provide, which means plenty of cream, and I remember having a second helping of Nancy’s trifle, which was very rich indeed. Normally I eat sparsely, but on special occasions such as this, I have always felt that one should enjoy treats and break the rules. It was a marvellous evening and we talked of everything, from cabbages to kings, until about 10.30, when we departed and I drove back to Plymouth and to the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in a warm and pleasant mood. I parked in the side street outside the hotel and began to walk back the few yards to the front entrance. As I climbed the first steps, my angina hit me extra hard. I felt in my pocket for trinitrin tablets and then realized that they were in my bedroom. To my dismay, the lift was out of action, and, as I slowly climbed the two floors to my bedroom, the pain grew worse and had a crushing intensity, something I had read about but never before felt. I began to fear that my coronary artery was now completely blocked, but somehow I reached my room, took a trinitrin tablet, and lay on the bed thinking ‘If it doesn’t ease in sixty seconds, I’ll telephone for help.’ I waited, and it went away. I was relieved, thinking that however bad, it was still an angina, not a blockage. I undressed and slept the night through.
I joined the other MBA Council Members for breakfast. It was difficult to believe as I chatted with them, my fears of the night before. After breakfast as I climbed the stairs to my room—the lift still did not work—the angina came back as it had the night before. This time the pain appeared after no more than a few steps, it seemed, but the blessed drug trinitrin worked its usual magic, and my mind turned to the morning ahead: the final stage of the MBA meeting. I remember sitting in the large dining room on the top floor of the MBA laboratory, with its fine view of Plymouth harbour, Drake’s Island and beyond it the sea approaches to Plymouth. The Oxford physiologist, JZ Young, our President, effortlessly guided the meeting through its course. He was a great story-teller and extemporizer and he kept the meeting moving on, like some amiable dog herding us sheep, with instructive barks and little nudges, in his chosen direction. I was to wish for these powers when a few years later I took over as President. He, Sir Eric Denton, and Sir John Gray were essential figures of the Plymouth laboratories of those days, and represented the strength and excellence of science in England.
I drove home through the greening lanes of spring in Devon, through Tavistock and up over the quiet hills near the extinct volcano of Brentor to Lifton and to Coombe Mill. As I drove I thought about my heart; something bad had happened to my coronary arteries. I decided, as before, that the only thing to do was diet and exercise, and on Monday following the meeting I went into Launceston and bought a bicycle; maybe the exercise of cycling along the less hilly roads around Coombe Mill was what I needed. I also started a strict, almost fat-free diet that would continue for the rest of 1982. Working alone means that long periods of inactivity due to illness bring a proportionate fall in income, the luxury of sick leave available to those in employment is not available to those of us who live by our wits. The very idea of sitting around and doing nothing was, in any event, to me repellent. It was like the concept of retirement—a sure path to disintegration and death. My personal guidance came from that simple phrase, ‘Business as usual’.
Later in the month, I made the first of my trips that year to the United States to see my customers, Hewlett Packard and NOAA, and I visited Lynn Margulis at her lab in Boston. On the day before leaving for America, I gave a lecture at Dartington Hall, which is about sixty miles from Coombe Mill and on the other side of Devon. This was to fulfil a promise made somewhat reluctantly, in the previous year. I say reluctantly, because it grew ever more apparent that Gaia as science did not benefit from association with Gaia as an emblem of the New Age. I recognize the value of Gaia as a unifying symbol, but knew that scientists would never accept Gaia as a valid theory if they saw it as an alternative science like astrology. Even so, the Dartington meeting was a good one and the start of two key friendships for me. In the audience were Jonathon Porritt who, to me, is our most distinguished environmentalist, and Jenny Powys-Libbe a warm-hearted and pleasant woman attached to Dartington. Whatever—if any—scientific credibility I lost through mixing with the greener side of Gaia, these two friendships more than made up for it. I respect and admire Jonathon for his clear, incisive
voice on Green affairs. He stands far above what is, to me, a confused and babbling community of Green politicians and philosophers. That we disagreed over many things—in particular the dangers of nuclear reactors as power sources—did not matter; we learnt so much from each other. Jenny Powys-Libbe was powerful in a very different way: she gave me comfort during one of the more trying years of my life. She had written, inviting me to the meeting and had offered to put me up for the night after the meeting so that I could then travel directly to Heathrow and to my flight to Philadelphia.
As soon as I was back from the United States, I began walking and cycling the small roads around Coombe Mill, at least once each day. Sometimes the walk was a mere two-miles round trip—along our own road and then up to the nearby farm of Emsworthy—and it included a modest but steep climb of about a hundred feet. On better days, I would walk the four or five miles round the road and back to Coombe Mill that involved a climb of about 300 feet. My average walking speed for the whole walk was about four miles per hour and always, of course, during these walks I was popping trinitrin pills, one about every half mile or so. Several times during May and June I fainted, waking up a few minutes later to find myself lying on the road. In our part of Devon, there was almost no traffic other than the farmers’ tractors and their Land Rovers, and because of this, never did anyone see me slumped unconscious on the road. My surgeon, Mr Keates, told me much later that these faints were a consequence of global ischaemia; in other words, the failure of the blood supply to the greater part of the muscle of my heart. However, the exercise regime seemed to work, and gradually I lost weight, and grew fitter in the sense that I could perform more without tiredness. The angina became like an old friend and would come on even when resting, although never when lying down.
I did not entirely believe in my own course of treatment, and therefore I visited my friends and physicians, the doctors Alan Edwards and Ian Barker, at their practice ‘The Holsworthy Doctors’. Holsworthy is one of the last remaining small market towns of England—most of the others have been urbanized in one way or another. In Holsworthy Market Square, farmers and their wives still shop in their dungarees and wellies. Here, banks, building societies, and estate agents do not dominate. The quality of the six or so physicians who make up the Holsworthy Doctors is as genuine as the town itself, and one of them revealed it by the reply he gave when I asked his views on the Health Service: ‘The practice of medicine is hard enough’, he said, ‘without the worry about whether my patients can afford it.’ Alan Edwards was concerned about my condition and arranged for me to see the consultant cardiologist at Plymouth, Dr Marshall, and I saw him at Plymouth one morning in July. He quizzed me about the symptoms and then asked his technician to take a resting electrocardiogram—ECG. Then he came through to me afterwards and told me not to worry, my electrocardiogram was quite normal, but to come back if my condition worsened. I complained a little and said surely my condition was worse than that, but he replied with, ‘Oh no, there are people much worse off than you coming to see me. You have nothing to worry about,’ and dismissed me. To be fair on Dr Marshall, I must have seemed an oddity—a fit, vigorous man for his early sixties, with a good complexion and colour and one who walked quickly along the corridor and into his consulting room. Not the picture expected of somebody with a left main coronary insufficiency, if not occlusion. Alan Edwards confirmed the next week that Dr Marshall had written to say that my problem was a mild one.
Whatever these physicians said, my body told me, and I half understood, that death was close, and it put me in a strange frame of mind. One part carried on business as usual; the other sought comfort and knowledge about how to prepare for dying. In this second area, Jenny satisfied my needs and gave of herself generously, but it must have been miserable for Helen. She could see that I was far from well and she would sometimes say, when I returned from my walks looking quite grey, ‘Jim, you’ll kill yourself if you keep doing that.’ She needed me badly, for she was now approaching the immobile state of multiple sclerosis, and grew ever more dependent on me for comfort, and for strength to cope with her advancing disease. I remember telling Alan Edwards, our physician, who was concerned about us, ‘We are three cripples who make up about one whole person, and that is how we run Coombe Mill.’ The third person was my son John, disabled at birth by brain damage caused by anoxia. He was physically able and could function as the hands and arms of Helen, but he was epileptic and suffered in other ways. John and Helen would work and talk together during the day; Helen always in her electric vehicle. They did this winter and summer, gardening and doing the many small jobs that needed doing outside at Coombe Mill. I sustained the cash flow needed to keep it all going, and served in other ways, the hardest of these was acting as surrogate physician for Helen. At intervals, she would pass into a crisis that required some remedy immediately, and once this happened at a weekend when our physicians familiar with her problems were not available. They had earlier given her the drug ACTH: she became oedematous and incoherent, and when I called the doctor on duty, I found that he was one that neither of us knew, and I was unable to persuade him to make a house call. I knew enough to suspect that the nature of Helen’s distress came from an electrolyte imbalance. She was taking diuretic pills as well as the ACTH injections, and it seemed possible that her troubles were iatrogenic. After some agonized thought and reading, I concluded that lack of potassium seemed a likely explanation of the incoherence and oedema. Cautiously, I gave her some potassium citrate dissolved in orange juice to drink. I say cautiously, because had I misdiagnosed and her condition been attributable to an excess of potassium, this would have been a most unwise thing to do. But the effects were near magical, and within a few minutes, she was no longer mumbling meaningless phrases like a drunkard. She became her old self again, and within an hour, she was able to get up from her chair and go to bed. Physicians rarely ever treat their own families. I now knew why. The option to try a remedy that could worsen rather than improve the condition of a loved one is too hard a decision to have to take personally, but this was to be my lot on occasions like this throughout the next six years before she died in 1989. Multiple sclerosis can be the most terrible of diseases, and not merely for the sufferer.
As spring spread into summer, Jenny became my guide and comforter, and she was representative of some who used Dartington in those days. For them it had become a legendary place where new thoughts and radical ideas flourished. It is an ancient manor house in hundreds of acres of its own land, rich in woodland, and watered by the river Dart. It is a place of eclecticism, where poets and politicians, scientists and composers and artists and intellectuals meet, and these were the golden years of the New Age. It was a chaotic time, almost entirely free of constraint, and by my own Gaian arguments, was unstable and could not last long. The New Age existed in a wholly unpredictable landscape fashioned from the self-similarity of its own ideas; it was the human social equivalent of chaotic mathematics. Their interest in me and in Gaia came from a misunderstanding of its rigour. They saw Gaia as the great Earth mother, embodiment of eastern religions, and comforter of feminists. They did not see the other side of Gaia, where she resembles her sister goddess, Kali, the stern grim figure who drank the blood of humans from a scull. Gaia stands above all for firm constraint—something the New Age never understood—but even so, these also were golden days for me. I seemed to live suspended a few inches above the ground, and I joined in enthusiastically with the entertainment of Dartington’s New Age menu. What appealed especially was transpersonal psychology, with its imaginative games, rather like an intellectual version of dungeons and dragons. On the dark side were Jenny’s own death workshops, where noviciates were led across an imaginary meadow dappled with spring flowers and sunshine, and led on to a green wood wherein dwelt their death. The object of the exercise was to meet and talk sensibly with the personification of one’s personal death. For anyone fit and well, this must seem an absurd and extravagant nonsense, but for me the
n, those imaginary journeys seemed real. However, not then, nor at any time, have I felt as Philip Larkin wrote in Aubade.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there;
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
I suspect a part of me is still immature, still needing to grow, and death therefore seems part of the life’s adventure. When it approaches and there is no escape, perhaps I will feel as he did, but Larkin’s certainty is not yet for me, although I love his verse. Even at the height of the New Age Dartington was more famed for its concerts and exhibitions. Now under the Chairmanship of John Lane and with Satish Kumar’s inspiration of the Schumacher College, it has become an alternative university as well as a distinguished centre for music and the arts.
Homage to Gaia Page 46