At the age of 60, when I was looking forward to a comfortable and fruitful retirement, the ugly truth was thrust in my face. I was left bereft and bewildered. I found out that for years I had been betrayed in every way a woman could be. We had never really had cross words or even disagreements – we were not close enough for that. I had had plenty to engage my attention while he gallivanted off on his various hobbies and, as I later found, conquests. Again, how sad. I politely asked him to leave, and after some equally polite resistance, he complied. That was that.
We divorced about seven or eight years after parting and, in the meantime, I had to earn my living. We were not rich at all; he had frittered away nearly everything we had on sheer hedonism. I was left in this huge house on my own with my two cats. But, that meant that I was never lonely and, in fact, I hardly noticed that he had gone. One welcome difference was not having to wash his shirts and cook his dinner every day. I certainly was not going to waste money on lawyers, and I carried out the divorce proceedings myself with a little advice from my solicitor niece. The whole thing cost a couple of hundred pounds; I even asked him to reimburse me for that and he complied. That was such a painful time, but certainly not as bad as the very worst thing that happened to me. How did I survive that physical and mental agony?
The first disaster in my world was the sickening news that my beloved grandmother had been killed in a car crash. I just could not take it in and, for the first time in my life, I felt alone and frightened, shaken, and disorientated. Worse was to come within the year. My child was a spark of joy, certainly the sunshine in my life, and my reason for being. I lived for her – my blue-eyed, golden-haired daughter, Siân. For the first nine months, she was remarkably well and robust, and she was, of course, an exquisite child, as is everyone’s. We were very close and I used to nurse her in a Welsh shawl, wrapped around my body, singing to her, with her slung next to my bosom. We both loved it. I still have the shawl.
They say that bad things come in threes, and they certainly did then. One morning, Siân was very fractious and we were both shocked when, at the minimal rebuke, she burst into violent floods of heart-rending tears. When I took her to the doctor, he dismissed me as being a neurotic first-time mother. Even when it was obvious that something was really wrong, I was still treated as a nuisance. Not long afterwards, her back was covered with a mass of tiny purple smudges, which I now know to be caused by bleeding under the skin. These were purpura. There was no Internet to consult and we only had the GP for advice. This time he took me seriously, and Siân was urgently referred to a consultant paediatrician. I cannot bear to dwell on the details of the months that followed but she was eventually diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma – essentially a blood cancer. The local consultants did not have the level of expertise to deal with this in such a young child and St Thomas’ Hospital in London became our second home for the next few months. Eventually, they realised a misdiagnosis and it turned out to be a very rare autoimmune disease called Letterer-Siwe disease. The next ten months were sheer and utter hell. Every time I went to her cot, I half expected her to be dead. She had too few red blood cells and I was able to give her my blood – anyone can have my blood because I am a universal donor (O rhesus negative). The horrendous medical and surgical interventions went on and on, and I realise now that the doctors just did not know what to do.
My only regret now is that she did not die more quickly. If she had, she would not have suffered so much, because suffer she certainly did. Even after all these years, I weep over her grave and think of her every day. What might she have been? Would I have had grandchildren? Would she have been more like me or her father? I never had any more children and do not know whether I would have been a good mother anyway. I always expect everyone to do their best, to excel at what they try. I know I am critical and would have probably been an unconventional mother. Perhaps Siân would have disliked me as much as I disliked my own mother – but I know I would always have put her first. I delighted in her existence. I desperately tried to protect her, but she ceased to be Siân on that cold, January day. I stared in numb disbelief. I felt an electric shock and then the draining away of my insides. Not everything that left me ever came back. There is still an overwhelming void that nothing will fill or satisfy.
When the nurses gently led me away, I realised that the worst thing that could ever happen to me had happened. No disaster or misfortune would ever have the same impact, or ever hurt me as much. Since that day, I have been magically protected from being hurt by anyone. Nothing and no one would ever be as important to me as Siân. I am grateful that I had a daughter.
Being so protected can give one an air of arrogance. For the most part, I genuinely do not care what people think of me, and it has led to my being outspoken and direct. Nor am I afraid of anything or anyone. Perhaps that is why I have been able to cope with so many hideous and shocking sights and events during the course of my forensic career. I know too that my great concern for badly treated and neglected children and animals must, somehow, be linked to my daughter, her suffering, and her death. I know that some consider me to be fairly hard, but actually I am as soft as a marshmallow under the brittle exterior. Those who really know me are never frightened, but I know I can stop an undesirable in their tracks with one of my looks.
After I lost Siân, I was very thin and continued to suffer with my breathing. One day, in the medical school where I was working, standing over a bottle of urine collected from a ward, the professor commented on my cough.
‘Oh, I have always had that.’
‘Well, I think you need to have it investigated.’
And investigate they did.
In those days, they put you on a table that could rock in all sorts of directions, put a tube down your nose, poured a radiopaque liquid into your lungs, swirled you around on the table until the lung was coated, and then took multiple X-rays. I remember watching the screen in fascination even though I felt I was drowning. The only way to get the white stuff out was to be turned over and thumped on the back until it was all coughed out. This procedure was called a bronchogram and has thankfully been replaced by the CT scan. No child or sick adult will have to experience this ever again. It was like being tortured by a group of white-coated aliens from a spaceship.
The diagnosis was swift. My right lung had completely collapsed into an abscess and my left one wasn’t too good either. Within the month I was a patient at the same hospital where my daughter had died, in a ward right opposite Big Ben. Who would ever believe that, after a short time, one was not even aware of the bell booming out so regularly. Most of my right lung was removed and these were the days when anaesthesia and pain relief were not particularly good. My memory of that time is acute; I was sucked down into a maelstrom of pain and misery, and the only escape was morphine. The euphoric sensation of being lifted up, up, and away from agony was truly magical. At first, I resisted because the needles hurt so much but, as soon as I asked for relief, it was refused. Obviously pain relief had to be weighed against the possibility of creating addiction. I can well understand how the next fix of a strong opiate can be the raison d’être for those subsumed by wretchedness and despair. It would be so easy to succumb when the reward for the prick of a needle is bliss and elation.
It took a long time, but I recovered and went back to work. My psyche and thin little body had taken too many beatings. But I am strong and robust mentally – if only I had the physical strength to match.
12.
POISONS
I may not have been able to go school as consistently as my classmates, but until I passed the 11+ and ended up in that forbidding grammar school – that place at the top of the steep hill – I loved it, with the wonderful and kindly headmaster, Mr Davies, and ‘Shorty’ Jones, our 11+ year teacher. What utterly gifted people they were. Mr Jones brought the best out in all of us and yet managed never to show favouritism, nor make a child feel marginalised. I had not realised it myself, but over 60 years later, at a
reunion lunch, an old classmate told me that everyone knew I was the headmaster’s favourite. She rolled her eyes and laughed when she told us all how he would always turn to me for answers, or ask me to set the class straight when we were floundering over some simple concept. I was full of facts imbibed from my encyclopaedias and they were my favourite reading. After all, they were full of stories as well as being instructive and a great source of information and wisdom. My long hours spent in bed, when others were out enjoying games and adventuring, gave me the reward of knowledge, even if it were eclectic in the extreme.
My special friend was Jeannie Bruton and, when I was well enough, we would set off together looking for adventures. It was not far to the open hillsides outside the village where sheep and mountain ponies roamed free. We would be gone all afternoon, sustained by Marmite or jam sandwiches … if the ponies didn’t get them first. They really were thugs at times, eager for more interesting tastes than the hillside turf offered. Jeannie and I were true companions. We picked bluebells and made scent in washed-out sauce bottles, ignoring the lingering sauce smell in the fermenting mush. We knew where to get frogspawn so that we could follow the progress of the tiny black commas in the jelly as they took form, and eventually hatched into tadpoles. By leaving bits of raw meat in the water, we even managed to get exquisite little froglets sometimes. We caught a slow-worm and kept it in a big jar on our hall windowsill, although my mother eventually freed it from its glass prison and I bawled in fury that she had had the temerity to do such a thing without consultation. My dearest wish, which was eventually granted, was to have a penknife so that Jeannie and I could dig up pignuts. Conopodium majus is in the carrot family and it produces a tasty little tuber deep in the soil. We knew an area of grassland at the edge of a path where we could unearth these from a depth of only about four inches, which is fairly shallow for this plant. Anyone would think that we had unearthed treasure when we eventually got a few of these. We would wipe off the soil, scrape the outside a bit with our penknife, spit on them, rub the outsides on the hems of our dresses, and then eat them straight away, even though they were sometimes a little gritty. They have a lovely, delicate taste and we always felt the digging was worth it.
Later, we would trek up the hillsides and pick wimberries. We loved them and came home with blue mouths, fingers, knees, and rear ends. Along with everyone else, we picked blackberries from September onwards, and my knowledge of their leaves, picked up as a child, would later help me to tell the police how long a body had been in its grave. Simple childhood memories of being close to wildlife helped in a lot of my later casework too.
The big outdoors offers many treats that are quite safe to eat; the young leaves of hawthorn have a lovely taste and their berries later in the season have an interesting flavour and texture – although too many can be harmful. The berries of the elder bush have little taste, but they give stewed apple a lovely colour when cooked with it. Local people called them gypsies’ currants because, apparently, they were used as a substitute in cake-making. Most people know about the sloe or blackthorn, and I try to collect the tannin-rich, little plum-like fruit every year to make sloe gin, which is always delicious. If you try to eat a fresh sloe, your mouth dries up as the tannins in the fruit combine with the proteins in your saliva. It is a horrible sensation and you feel as though your tongue will never taste anything again. Freezing or heating the fruit, or soaking it in alcohol, destroys the cellular structure of the fruit and the tannins are released and lose their effectiveness. They certainly disappear in my sloe gin and, although I never manage to get the same flavour every year, it is always marvellous. Jeannie and I knew where and when to look for little treats and I am so sad that so many children today are too fixated by electronic games and texting to have adventures.
As mentioned, there are many wild plants that are safe to eat, but there are also many to be avoided at all costs. Plants and animals have evolved together over millions of years and, because no animal can produce its own food and must rely on plants at some level in the food web, if some defence against predation had not evolved, plants would have been chewed and sucked out of existence. Some plant defences are exquisite and they show us how nature works towards balance. Protection can be mechanical, chemical, or a combination of both, and some involve mutualistic relationships with an animal.
The young leaves of the stinging nettle make good, nutritious soup – but to protect itself from too much predation, a combined mechanical and chemical defence has evolved. Specialised hairs on the leaves are intricately modified to inject a mixture of formic acid, histamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin into whatever touches it. This mixture causes a painful and burning rash, and there are records of dogs being poisoned due to running through extensive stands of nettle. Other plants, like wild parsnip and the giant hogweed, can cause a blistering rash if touched in sunlight. The books and papers written about harmful plants are legion, and everyone should have at least a basic knowledge of them.
Defences like this help to maximise a plant’s survival in a competitive world. The thorns produced by many in the rose family are long, sharp daggers, and a hedge of hawthorn or firethorn acts like a wall of barbed wire; the thorns certainly deter foraging animals. Some Acacia species have thorns which become hollowed out by ants. The ant produces formic acid, which makes a sting long-lasting and painful, and it will protect the tree from browsing animals such as giraffe, as well as insect pests. There are many examples of such elegant symbioses in the woodlands, savannahs, and jungles of the world.
The number of plants with physical defences like these, however, pales when compared to those which have evolved chemical defences in their ongoing quest to survive and spread. The array of chemical compounds produced in the plant kingdom is bewildering, and many of them appear to be for protection – defences against chewing insects and other animals, shields against parasites from entering their bodies, and some for which, as yet, a function has not been clarified. Plants, fungi, and bacteria are the astonishing factories of organic compounds on this planet. They can sustain the rest of the living world by providing food, but they also make compounds which cause discomfort, and even death. Vegans and vegetarians (non-human and human) are testament to plants’ ability to sustain other living things, but there are plenty of examples of them being harmful or even deadly.
Throughout history, crimes have been committed using poison. It is held to be the preferred murder weapon of the female. We only have to think of the rumours and scandals surrounding Lucrezia Borgia, the illegitimate daughter of Pope Alexander VI and born in 1480; and Livia, wife of the first Emperor of Rome, Augustus, who is supposed to have poisoned his figs in AD 14.
What is a poison? Does it differ from a toxin or a venom? All of these can be harmful to a person’s well-being and can sometimes kill. Poison is a general word which covers any chemical that alters the normal body function. Inorganic substances like the element arsenic, or the compound potassium cyanide, can both be deadly poisons, but the ones delivered by animals such as snakes, scorpions, and spiders are termed ‘venoms’ and they have a very complex chemistry. Most plant, bacterial, and fungal poisons are termed ‘toxins’. Ironically, both venoms and toxins can be beneficial if taken in the right dose and will only harm if the concentration is too high. An example of this is the cardiac glycoside, digitalin, originally extracted from a species of foxglove (Digitalis). The genus produces a range of related, deadly cardiac and steroidal glycosides; in appropriate doses, digitalin (digoxin) can regulate heartbeat but in a large, unregulated dose, it results either in a lethal slowing down or speeding up of the heart, confusion, nausea, and even hallucination. It is easy to see how the humble foxglove could have been used to murder a victim in years gone by when medicine was relatively primitive, and before toxicology came into being. A victim might simply have been diagnosed with some kind of heart failure. Even the pretty pink and white flowered shrub oleander, seen all over the Mediterranean, has similar compounds and
can cause cardiac arrest if even one leaf is eaten.
The toxins in foxglove and oleander can be found in any part of the plant but, in others, it may be concentrated in specific parts, or produced at certain times of the year. The red, fleshy part of the yew ‘berry’ is not at all poisonous, but the black seed in the middle is deadly. The leaf stalk of rhubarb is delicious when cooked, but the leaf itself is full of oxalic acid, which is highly toxic. My mother used to boil the leaves in her old saucepans to get them gleaming.
Many plant toxins seem to have evolved as a defence against animals, especially the hordes and swarms of insects that crawl and skim around our planet. It is certainly one of the roles taken by terpenes. Urushiol, the truly terrible oil that caused the running sores on my legs after my brush with poison ivy when I visited the Body Farm, is a terpene, and it is present in poison oak too. The terpenoid toxin, thujone, is thought to be the mind-altering substance in the tissues of grand wormwood, an essential ingredient of absinthe, a much indulged-in drink by Parisians during La Belle Époque. Even though it can cause blindness and madness, it was certainly a favourite of van Gogh, Gauguin, James Joyce, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Oscar Wilde, Proust, Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Byron, Ernest Hemingway and, most spectacularly of all, Salvador Dalí. It makes one wonder if thujone played a part in the sheer inventiveness and expressiveness in these artists; certainly some of the ideas and images produced by them seem quite mad to the rest of us. The output of some artists, whether visual, written, or musical, often seems to be beyond the realms of normality to me anyway. Many of us must harbour deep secret visions and thoughts that are suppressed by our rational selves. Throughout history, the creative intelligentsia have probably indulged in plant toxins to free their inner selves, and by doing so, give the abstemious, ordinary mortals among us a glimpse of their inner beings. Terpenes can be life-enhancing in other ways too. We are all familiar with Eucalyptus oil, camphor, turpentine, ginger, cinnamon, and the ubiquitous cannabinoids which are toxins implicated in earlier dementia and schizophrenia. Even so, Cannabis is eagerly sought by many, and some of the more creative have admitted succumbing to its lure.
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