Homage to Gaia (62 page)

We attended the daily meetings and outings by Lindisfarne and went to the nearby towns of Gubbio and Assisi. Then, through that enhanced sexuality that is the by-product of romantic love, we spent the rest of the time in bed. Our friends were wise indeed, and left us to ourselves for the evenings. We would buy a picnic meal of fruit and bread and cheese and wine and retire to bed early to eat and then to explore our bodies and all the pleasures that they could offer. So it went on for a whole week, and by the end of it, our bonding was complete. We travelled back in the plane to London in a fearful anticipation of the separation to come, and I shall never forget the wrench of it at Heathrow as we parted: it felt like surgery without an anaesthetic. I took a taxi to Windsor Castle, where there was a meeting at St George's House on the church and the environment. I remember sitting in the pews of St George's Chapel, entranced by the heavenly singing of the choir—the state of love is a wonderful amplifier of the senses and the emotions. Next day, there were discussions among bishops, civil servants, theologians, and politicians on the role of the church in environmental affairs. At the coffee break, Professor Sam Berry introduced me to the Duke of Edinburgh, and we talked briefly about Gaia. Sunday lunch marked the end of the discussions and was a good meal of English food in St George's House.

One day in June I drove to Westbury station, met Sandy there, and took her to Bowerchalke and the countryside of the Chalke Valley and Cranborne Chase. We endured yet another agonized parting at Tisbury station, and then I drove on to Poole to see my old friend and long-time colleague, Brian Foulger. Brian and his wife Barbara both come from the English countryside, and represent the people I most admire. I have seen their family—Rebecca, Thomas, and Stephanie—grow from childhood to young adults, and in a way that any parent would envy. They are our closest of friends, and indeed Brian and Barbara were witnesses at our marriage in 1991.

After eating with the Foulger family in their spacious detached house in Netherbury, Brian and I went for a walk along the beach promenade. It was a four-mile walk at about four miles an hour, finishing with a modest cliff climb to Brian's car. Ordinarily we
would have discussed science and our work the next day at the Ministry of Defence laboratory which Brian now ran, and I had founded in 1966. This time I had to tell him about Sandy, and it says much about Brian that he was warmly supportive of my enthusiastic babble which went on for most of the walk.

The summer went on like this, and Sandy and I came together in London hotels during my trips away from Devon. I tried to compensate by extra care for Helen at Coombe Mill. I still had no notion that her months were few and that she would soon die: instead, I saw her as a tough, cheerful fighter who would survive for many years. Sandy and I decided, now that we were committed, to find a place of our own where we could come together. We both found distasteful the anonymous, inappropriate, and expensive venue of hotels. I knew that I would never leave Helen while she was so much in need of me. She had a room at Coombe Mill purposely built as an office, from which she managed the affairs of our company, Brazzos Ltd., and she dealt with the enquiries about Gaia from scientists, theologians, and others all over the world; indeed, like me, her interest in Gaia gave her something rewarding to live for. The only thing we did not share was knowledge of the domain that Sandy and I occupied. Helen's physical health and capacity to walk deteriorated during 1988, but Margaret Sargent, who came from the village to help us, and Christine, were always there when we needed help. A friend in the village, Frances Edwards, who had been a hospital sister and who still worked at a clinic, began to provide support well beyond the expectations of friendship and I am truly indebted to her for her unstinted help during the last months of Helen's life. I really do not know how I would have managed without her.

During the greater part of my time at Coombe Mill in the second half of that year, the nights were made hideous by the need to treat Helen's bedsores and deal with her failing physical functions. So many things tortured the body of this woman who was the mother of my children, and who, for many years in the past, had been a loving wife. Surely, there are few diseases more cruel or distressing than multiple sclerosis, both for the sufferer and for the family. My brief stays away with Sandy in 1988 gave me the strength to cope with it. Significantly, those angry at my behaviour rarely came when she was ill. It is as in wartime: the most bloodthirsty and tribal of the combatants are the middle-aged and elderly civilians, living in safe havens far from the battlefields. Soldiers often see the enemy as men like themselves.

Helen spoke these words while we had tea in bed on Wednesday 3 November 1988:

I knew that the wishes, expressed by family members and by our physicians, to move Helen to a nursing home were wrong, that come what may she ought to be able to live here at her beloved Coombe Mill. One of the great cruelties of modern societies is the wish to put old people away in places that are neat and hygienic and where they will be well looked after by professionals. This is, to my mind, an imprisonment because as one grows older, the sense of well-being depends on the familiar, comfortable things that one has known and has grown to love and to live with. I think it is far better to die in discomfort in one's own home than be ‘cared for' in a perfect clinical environment. In any event, there were always John and Margaret at home, and Frances in the village in case of emergencies, and I would be there at least half the time.

Then, one evening in January, when I returned to Coombe Mill, Helen was in her downstairs room in her new adjustable bed, but in great distress. She was breathing with rapid sighing respiration, was feverish, and it looked to me as if she had pneumonia. I called our physician, Alan Edwards, who came immediately, examined her, and
called for admission to the Plymouth Derriford Hospital. An ambulance came soon afterwards and we travelled in it to the hospital. The paramedic on the ambulance gave her oxygen, and she was much improved and even annoyed to be in hospital. They gave her antibiotics and slowly, over the weeks, she seemed to improve. Then there was a telephone call from the hospital to tell me that she was gravely ill and would I return at once to see her. I flew back from London to Plymouth Airport, which is conveniently almost opposite the hospital, and there I saw the physician in charge. He told me that they could do no more for Helen and that she would almost certainly die within a few days.

When I saw her she seemed so normal that it was hard for me to believe the physician's words, and I went back to speak with him. But he confirmed them and showed me an X-ray of her lungs. I still could not believe that she was dying, and asked if it wouldn't be better to have her transferred home, because even if she were to die she would be a lot happier there. His response was that she was so ill he doubted whether she would survive the transport back. I think I should have insisted on her return home; some hospitals are grim places to die in. But in four days, she did, although unconscious and therefore not uncomfortable. All of my children were there, around the bedside and, with the best of intentions, Christine called Sandy to come to Plymouth, although not to the hospital, because she saw me as so distressed as to need the comfort that only Sandy could give. Helen died at about 5 pm in the afternoon of 4 February. After this, my mind was in that kind of turmoil seen in chemistry when a reaction in a flask has started and the heat generated makes it go faster and faster, until the whole thing boils vigorously and sometimes bursts forth from the flask. Grief, relief, sadness, and guilt were all reacting together in my mind.

Next morning the cloudy grey skies of English winter matched our sadness, but the task of arranging the funeral, and dealing with the paperwork that comes after any death, gave us no time to concentrate on grieving. There is something therapeutic about the routine of recording and recognizing death. Sandy and I went first to the registrar's office, and then to an undertaker who had served when my mother died in 1981 in Plymouth. He was unusual: he had previously worked as a physicist, but said he preferred and found much more fulfilling the life of undertaking. He was amazingly good at his job, and knew exactly how to handle me and to keep a balance between a
proper concern and the practical details. He was entirely free of sentimentality, something that I dreaded. I told him of Helen's wish for burial at Coombe Mill, and he was well informed and helpful about this unusual request. The Reverend Alan Brownridge, the Vicar of St Giles on the Heath, was wonderfully comforting and helpful to me although we were not his regular parishioners. It was a full day and I did not return to Coombe Mill until late in the afternoon.

The days before the funeral I stayed at Coombe Mill with Jane, my daughter, to keep me company. Helen's grave is at a high spot, where she often used to sit and look over the house and the land. There is a memorial seat nearby for both her and for David Orchard, Sandy's husband, who died of cancer at Coombe Mill a year later. Margaret and John tend the grave. From then on, Sandy and I were together. We flitted between St Mark's Road and Coombe Mill. In March, we felt a great need for a break away and took a week's holiday in the sunshine of Lanzarote. It did much to clear the miasma of bad grief that still seemed to linger over Helen's death. It must be rare to fall deeply in love and establish a new firm bond when both former partners are dying, yet we did rise, phoenix like, from those ashes and today eleven years later we are still flying. Love has been a great teacher, and has revealed the world of literature and music that previously I had been too busy to enter. We confirmed our commitment by marriage in February 1991 and, as a wholly unexpected consequence, I found myself a part of an American family. Sandy's sister Phyllis and her husband Tom live in the suburbs of St Louis, as does her brother Harley and his wife Vernell. During the five years I lived and worked in the United States I was no more than a resident alien and, although I paid my taxes, I never felt a part of the nation. But when I became Tom Hollman's brother-in-law, things changed. No more for me the long and lonely isolation of hotel rooms; together Sandy and I share the warmth of a good American family and we seem in our hearts, although not legally, to hold dual citizenship and be part of both our great nations. We applaud the good things we encounter on our visits and are concerned about the less than good.

Illness had made the 1980s a time of painful self-absorption, whose bounds were limited as if by the straitjacket of an insect's pupa. The 1990s set me free to soar like a dragonfly and I saw for the first time the political world, somewhere scientists rarely go. As an Englishman I always, even as a young socialist, regarded the aristocracy as part of the native scene and a favourite humorist, Osbert Lancaster, used to
captivate me with his sketches of the fictional Lord and Lady Little-hampton. I have no idea why I found their world—one that PG Wodehouse occupied—so funny, but I did. The aristocracy was then, and even more now, like a species of endangered, brightly plumaged birds. I shall be sorry to see them go from the House of Lords, and cannot believe that either an elected or an appointed second chamber will be as fair and as representative as is our jury of hereditary peers. Biodiversity is a natural state and a better one than the featureless monoculture of egalitarianism.

I first met Henry Bentinck, the Earl of Portland, in 1991 when I was spending a few weeks at Schumacher College near Totnes in Devon. I was holding forth on Gaia. Henry had chosen to listen to what I had to say, and he quizzed me afterwards, wanting to know how such a view affected our vision of the future. He wanted to know if I had any practical suggestions about how to live with the Earth. It did not take me long to discover that he was someone I could talk to for, in spite of our different backgrounds, we shared in common a serious interest in Green affairs, and soon we became close friends. Henry was one of those rare men who had the courage to admit his mistakes and turn error to advantage, and this requires integrity not mere obstinate consistency. He thought it right on humanitarian grounds to be a conscientious objector at the start of the last world war, but saw the error of this choice when he came to understand that the Second World War was quite different from the First. He gave up his conscientious objection when he saw that our own hard-won civilization was in danger.

In the same way, the enthusiasm we shared for humanism, with its exclusive belief in human rights, changed in the 1960s when we realized that there was more to life on Earth than the welfare of people. Human rights were not enough. We knew that if our grandchildren were to inherit an Earth worth living on, the relentless growth of population, and the unending exploitation of the natural world, must cease. I think the fact that he was soon due to take his place among his peers concentrated his mind. He was much concerned about his maiden speech and sought my advice on the science of it. He wanted it to mark a change in the attitude of the second chamber—a change towards a better understanding of the environment. He delivered a radical speech that was refreshingly free of party political dogma. Before he gave it, only one other British politician had spoken clearly and seriously on global environmental affairs, and
that was Margaret Thatcher. In her speeches to the Royal Society and to the United Nations Assembly, she was the first to warn of the dangers of global change that loomed in the next century. She predicted that the environment would eventually usurp the political agenda. John Prescott's splendid speech at the Kyoto conference, nearly ten years later, confirmed her prediction, and our record in environmental affairs. We have been fortunate to have some of the world's best environmental politicians and it is good to know that Henry was among them. We will always remember the way that he brought life into mere history. On one occasion, Henry told us of his aunt who lived in the Netherlands and who had had the Kaiser to tea one afternoon in 1918, when he was obliged to flee Germany. From his personal tales we began to see why England has such a struggle coming to terms with Europe.