A Wander in Vetland

by John Hicks

  The medically minded will have noted that Kereopa’s unrestrained eating habits exposed him to considerable risks. There was, as we have mentioned, a typhoid epidemic in Opotiki at the time, and cannibalism exposes its participants to extreme risk from hepatitis and many other diseases, although Maori generally mitigated this by cooking. However, even cooking will not destroy prions. These are the agents responsible for Scrapie in sheep and “Mad Cow Disease” (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, BSE) in cattle. BSE was caused by adding Scrapie infected sheep meat to cattle rations. Likewise, prions and cannibalism have been linked in humans. The South Foré people of New Guinea unwittingly infected themselves with Kuru, a prion disease, by eating the brains of their dead relatives. Kuru caused emaciation and contracted face muscles and was known by the South Foré as “laughing sickness”. Kereopa would have been unaware of this particular disease. It would be another century before its cause was unravelled.

  Kereopa committed a horrendous crime, but as to the details, how much is truth, how much polemic? There is no doubt that political mileage was to be gained for the new settlers from maximising the horror of the event. No doubt, too, that the colonial forces with their Maori allies (there being Maori fighting on both sides) took no prisoners, gave no quarter and looted, killed, burnt villages and destroyed crops until this final, vicious, guerrilla stage of the Maori Wars ended in 1872.

  On the other hand, omission of the details from modern history books smacks of political correctness. Some well respected general histories of New Zealand cover the whole episode in less than one sentence: “Kereopa Te Rau…was involved in the killing of the missionary Carl Volkner…” or, from The Oxford History of New Zealand (1992): “Yet, for all this, it was the murder of the missionary Carl Sylvius Volkner at Opotiki and Te Kooti’s massacre of thirty-three settlers and thirty-seven kupapa (‘friendly’) Maori at Poverty Bay in 1868 that left the most enduring memories.” This is scant treatment of such a dramatic episode in New Zealand history in an otherwise detailed, lengthy and densely printed book.

  Should we rake up such ghosts from the past? I believe we should, providing we can read about them without provoking any sense of racial outrage. We need to acknowledge that we are all products of our upbringing. Human nature in the raw can lead us to plumb depths we all must acknowledge, the better to avoid them. European history is also frighteningly replete with secular and religious savagery, and the fate of Viv’s saintly antecedent pales into insignificance beside the persecution experienced by my mother’s ancestors.

  Chapter Two

  The Roots of Prejudice

  God seems to have forgotten all I have done for him. Louis XIV

  The influence of history has a long reach. Kereopa’s crime played no part in Viv’s formative years, but the calamitous persecution of my ancestors in France – several centuries before Kereopa was born – certainly influenced mine, and today there are millions around the world who could claim common cause with me.

  The French kings in the sixteenth century, according to Nancy Mitford, were regarded – indeed, regarded themselves – as “Viceroys of the Almighty”. France was a Roman Catholic theocracy and Roman Catholicism was compulsory. This fusion of church and state existed before the reign of Louis XIV the “Sun King” (1643 – 1715), although his glittering decadence exemplified some of the worst aspects of absolute power. When he worshipped God in his chapel, his courtiers – with their backs to the altar – worshipped Louis XIV.

  There were bound to be dissidents unable to tolerate life as the subjects of the licentious and unjust monarchs who claimed divine authority over them. A Protestant reformation swept through France in the early fifteenth century. Their religion was based on a belief in salvation through individual faith and the right of individuals to interpret the scriptures for themselves without the need for intercession by the state, or even a church hierarchy. The government would not tolerate such freedom of thought and a general edict, which encouraged the extermination of Protestants (later to be known as Huguenots), was issued in 1536.

  Despite this, or because of it, French Protestantism continued to grow, but there was increasing conflict with the authorities. In 1562, twelve hundred Huguenots were slain at Vassey. This ignited the French Wars of Religion which devastated France for the next thirty-five years. The worst atrocity was the St Bartholomew Massacre of 1572, instigated on the orders of Charles ІХ. Over three bloody days, more than eight thousand Huguenots were murdered in Paris alone. Accounts of atrocities often resort to clichés about “rivers of blood”. Many of the victims had their throats slashed by Swiss mercenaries, or the king’s guards and his “noble” allies, the Duke of Guise and his followers. The human body has around five litres (just over a gallon) of blood in circulation. The jolting reality of thousands of gallons splashing onto cobbled streets, spraying onto walls and soaking into furnishings deserve more than a cliché. The massacres spread throughout the country.

  How easy it is to overlook the suffering, the stench, the flies, in the dry pages of history books. The river Rhone was choked with corpses from the massacre in Lyons and the citizens of Arles were unable to drink its water for three months. In the valley of the Loire, wolves came down from the hills to feast on the decaying bodies.

  When the news reached Rome, Pope Gregory ХІІІ was jubilant. He made several moves that were unlikely to endear him, or his office, to any remaining Protestants. He oversaw a procession of thanksgiving in Rome, and thanked God in prayer for having “granted the Catholic people a glorious triumph over a perfidious race”. The artist Vasari was commissioned to paint scenes of the triumph of “The Most Christian King” over the Huguenots in one of the Vatican apartments. A commemorative medal was struck, featuring corpses of the slain on the “tails” side. For Protestants, this behaviour by the head of the Roman Catholic Church – believed by its adherents to be God’s infallible representative on earth – should explain why there would never be reconciliation between the two faiths.

  The persecution ended in 1598 when Henry ІV, himself a Huguenot, signed the Edict of Nantes. At last Huguenots were permitted to practice their faith, but only in twenty specified “free” cities. However, when Henry ІV was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic in 1610, the persecution resumed. The free cities gradually fell to the forces of Cardinal Richelieu, and “Sun King” Louis ХІV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Huguenots were tortured, burnt at the stake or, if they were able-bodied, condemned to a miserable and short life as galley slaves. The number of galleys in the French navy was increased from six to forty. Each employed two hundred slaves, and Huguenots found themselves rowing alongside criminals and Turks captured in the Barbary wars. Huguenot churches and houses were destroyed. Huguenot children were forcibly removed from their parents and educated by Roman Catholic monks or nuns. Mixed marriages were forbidden and the children of existing ones declared illegitimate. When Protestants became ill they were taken to state hospitals so that their last moments could be supervised by a priest. In the wealthy towns of southern France, where Protestantism thrived, a policy named Dragonnades was imposed – regiments of ill-disciplined dragoons were compulsorily billeted in Protestant households where they had licence to create havoc. Under Louvois, Louis XIV’s war minister, rape and plunder went unpunished. The soldiers were encouraged to mistreat their unfortunate hosts in every way possible. Murder and torture became commonplace.

  The net was tightened: emigration was declared illegal. Nevertheless, by various estimates between two hundred and fifty thousand, and four hundred thousand Huguenots fled to other European countries, South Africa and North America. An equal number were killed in France itself. Many of these were affluent trades’ people, artisans and skilled workers, which France could ill-afford to lose. The persecution of the Huguenots, aside from being morally repugnant, had become economically disastrous. An Edict of Toleration in 1787 partially restored the rights of French Huguenots, and their church was fully legalised in 1802.
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  It was a rather late move. By then forty thousand Huguenots had settled in Britain, where their skills were welcomed. Among them were my mother’s ancestors, the Dorée’s, who came to London. They were originally silk-weavers. One of their descendants, George Dorée, supplied the velvet for Edward VІІ’s coronation robes in 1901. It is no surprise that the Huguenots brought with them a contempt for papacy, and anything connected with the Church of Rome. My own mother, bless her, inherited a full complement of this baggage. Most of her family members that I knew, as a child, could be described as rabidly anti-Catholic. Her animosity was not personal, but directed towards the institution itself.

  It was also from her French ancestors, I assume, that Mum derived her Latin temperament, and a tendency to scandalous exaggeration: the latter an idiosyncrasy for which a child is not equipped to compensate, and can only do so retrospectively, with the wisdom of age. But children love drama and eccentricity, and Mum’s hyperbole was couched in such wonderfully colourful language – how could we resist? Small wonder that my brother and I sometimes held confused perspectives. How were we to know that many of her pronouncements on topics, such as burning the Pope, were outrageous rhetoric? – especially when a guiding principle of her life has been to treat all she meets with kindness. In spite of her diatribes against their faith, some of her best friends were Catholics! When, as a youngster, I met them I was surprised that their teeth had not been worn down from “chewing the walls” of their local church – an occupation which, my mother had mistakenly led me to believe, occupied “all their waking hours”. Later I was to learn that this strange expression was a linguistic anomaly – one of many family eccentricities – a term of derision applying to anyone of overly religious persuasion.

  It would be a mistake to assume that Protestants would have been models of tolerance had the boot been on the other foot. Burning at the stake was not solely an atrocity inflicted by Roman Catholics on Protestants. Conflicting protestant sects – Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Deists, Unitarianists – denounced each other for perceived heresy and contrived punishments every bit as shocking as those of the Roman Catholic Inquisition, although never on the same scale. They burnt and hanged each other, and some designed even more bizarre fates for those who dared to believe differently.

  The Anabaptists practised adult baptism by total immersion in water. It seems innocuous enough to us, but sixteenth century Lutherans in the state of Zurich thought otherwise. They inflicted prolonged total immersion in water – death by drowning – on any Anabaptists they managed to entrap.

  Our ancestors were an intolerant lot.

  ~

  It was my mother’s fate to marry a Liverpudlian. He was, as you might expect, not a Roman Catholic, but she was now destined to live in Liverpool, the most Catholic of British cities. During my childhood, the first Roman Catholic cathedral to be built on English soil since the Reformation, was erected in Liverpool. It is an unconventional and strikingly modern concrete-and-glass structure, with a cylindrical tower soaring over its conical base. The Mersey Tunnel, connecting Liverpool with the Wirral peninsula on the other side of the Mersey is, to Liverpudlians, an iconic landmark. In their inimitable way, they soon dubbed their new cathedral the “Mersey Funnel”.

  Our house in Liverpool was solidly Victorian: semi-detached and four-storied. There was a polished mahogany banister from the top floor, and my brother and I could sit astride it and slide down its considerable length, much to the envy of visiting children who came from modern, less characterful homes; but there was also a damp and spooky cellar that an imaginative child could only dread. After I discovered the vivid horror stories of Edgar Allan Poe, my visits to the cellar to bring up the buckets of coal requested by my parents, became personal struggles – the terror of which I failed to impart to them. “Don’t be so damn silly!” was their pragmatic response, and I knew the truth of their words. But I was like a moth to a flame; I found it hard to resist any author of the macabre. WW Jacobs, Bram Stoker and Dennis Wheatley frizzled the flight path of my tender soul. We all thrive on a bit of fear; bouts of terror add piquancy to life.

  Beyond the high and sooty brick wall of our back garden rose a large neo-gothic structure, its sandstone masonry blackened by pollution. Its steep slate roof climbed forever, towards the leaden skies. This was the local Catholic church.

  With an elastic catapult it was possible to skim pebbles up this roof, much as one skips flat pebbles across a calm pond. The angles were more challenging but, if you if got it right, those stones would bounce with alluring pitch variation (and I am referring to tonal quality here) nearly to the apex of the roof and then, losing all impetus, roll lazily down – gathering pace as they thudded into the gutter. Marbles were the best, but youthful penury precluded their frequent use.

  The amazing thing about all this was that our mother turned a blind eye to our delinquency. Yes! Our mother! Our mother who, in accordance with the standards of the day, was strict about any deviation from impeccable behaviour. Little did we realise that we, like her, were mere pawns in an ancient game – exacting vengeance for the St Bartholomew Massacre and all the other atrocities inflicted on innocent Protestants over previous centuries. And so, with this outlet for the devil in us, we periodically plied that roof with pebbles. If the pinging resonance of the hard stones on those slates was obvious to us, what acoustic embellishment did it provide for those at worship within? We were soon to find out.

  The priest came knocking on our door. My mother dealt with him courteously, and he was permitted to have a word in private with my brother and me. This was, perhaps, my first encounter with a representative of the Catholic faith. He was a gentle young man. He appealed to our better natures and encouraged us to desist from interrupting his services. We were impressed. We desisted.

  ~

  Beneath my mother’s English veneer, her Latin temperament flared. This, magnified by her Gallic gift for hyperbole, spared us any perception of the mundane. She fiercely loved the birds in her garden. No winter passed without food for the blue tits, blackbirds, thrushes or anything else that survived the depredations of the cats besieging our small oasis of green. Meg, our Fox Terrier cross, was programmed to keep the coast clear of cats, many of which were encouraged by the priest’s housekeeper’s habit of laying out regular fish left-overs on the seminary steps – next to the church. The whole neighbourhood, my mother insisted, was “snowing with millions of stray cats”. And “that trollop” who was “living with the priest” provided set up an orgy of feasting for them every Friday evening.

  Meg picked up on these vibes and would become frantic if she saw any cats in her territory. She responded to “cats”, as any normal dog responds to the word “walk”; but we could induce her to even greater hysteria with a cry of “coggers’ moggies”. Frantically she’d lurch for the back door, her legs a blur of useless energy scrabbling for purchase on the slippery tiles. Suddenly she would gain traction, find voice, and shoot outside as a cork from a bottle. She wailed like a banshee round the garden, her screams reaching a crescendo as she locked on to her quarry. In her long life she contrived never to catch a single cat. They had plenty of warning, and she wasn’t stupid. If they stood their ground and didn’t run, she pretended she couldn’t see them.

  “Cogger” is a Liverpudlian term for Roman Catholic. In the main, Liverpudlians are a tolerant lot, and I don’t believe that the word is used derogatively. In Liverpool’s polluted past I can only surmise it was the closest approximation its citizens could make to the correct pronunciation through their phlegm-clogged nasal passages.

  Honesty compels me to continue with my story, though as a vet of some longstanding, it is with the utmost reluctance that I proceed from this point …

  My brother and I were enlisted in the war against cats. Armed with those same catapults that propelled missiles up the church roof, we were encouraged to repel the cats that audaciously paraded in our garden, and which even had the cheek to sit ne
xt to the bird feeders waiting to trap a feathered snack or plaything.

  From our third or fourth floor windows we had a wonderful range of fire. A pebble sizzling into the vegetation beside an unsuspecting cat merely arouses its curiosity. It assumes there is another mouse rustling about for it to torture. You can take three or four pots at a naïve cat: one that has not been caught out before. And then, a strike! A thud, a yowl, a frantic scramble, and over the wall she goes! Cats have good memories and we kept our garden relatively clear in this manner.

  The moral of this tale is that our attitude to animals, as to people of other religious persuasions, is a learned response. We can be conditioned to persecute without remorse and we are inconsistent in our application of moral standards. Rats are rewarding pets, yet I would have no fear of retribution from outraged rat owners if I had just described a teenage rat-hunting expedition; but this catapult confession has the potential to expose me to the vitriol of every cat owning member of the public. Many would regard my behaviour as “beyond the pale”. The point is that I was programmed to be a dog lover and a cat hater. Seeds of prejudice, sown early, readily take root.