One person was pivotal to my inevitable recoveries through those months and years racked with illness. She would sit by my bedside and we would read together: Peter Rabbit, Fuzzypeg Goes to School, Woman & Home, the newspaper, and my favorite encyclopedias. She took me for walks to see things growing in hedgerows, and look for birds’ nests, and taught me what we could and could not eat from the wild. This was my Australian grandmother, who led a strange existence, living with each of her children and their families in turn. We fought for her to come to us, and I loved her more than anyone else on this Earth.
In 1950, still suffering the aftereffects of those burns, a decision was made. My grandmother’s cousins, Gwen and Walter, had settled in Rhyl in North Wales after a lifetime in Burma and India, places only just emerging from the old British Empire. My lungs still labored. I still struggled for breath. I still coughed up too much mucus and missed too much school. I had already spent time in a sanatorium and I didn’t want to go back there. It had rooms with walls that were pale and shiny, and relentlessly gleaming floors, and there was no escaping the unremitting clean odor of hospital. Food was dispensed by humorless automatons, and the breakfast kippers were so full of bones that the plates were invariably cleared away before I had picked them all out. Every morning and late afternoon, the children were taken to a special room to have their lungs cleared; this involved being bent over a padded beam and being thumped on the back as we did breathing exercises. One of the little girls had a livid scar extending from her shoulder blade around to her front, and I was deeply frightened that I might get one too. I had tantrums when it was suggested that I go back. So, instead, I was sent with my grandmother to Rhyl, where it was hoped that the sea air might bring some life back into my lungs. This was the kind of adventure of which a little girl like me, whose very best friends were her books, could only dream. And to think my grandmother would come with me? The prospect was a joy.
My grandmother, Vera May, was an extraordinary woman. We all remember her as being tiny, thin, and wrinkly. She had white hair and dentures along which she rattled her Mint Imperials. She was formidable, capable, efficient, strict, and overwhelmingly kind. She was my center of gravity, the one I clung to as my parents argued, made up, and fell out around me.
She was born in 1890 on the coast north of Sydney in New South Wales, the descendant of tenant farmers who had pioneered the land in the 1830s. My grandfather, Edmund, a coal miner from old South Wales, had braved the voyage in 1909 when his own lungs had started to deteriorate. He met Vera May just as the Great War was being declared. They fell for each other and married but, as they were looking forward to their first child, they received word that her new mother-in-law was ailing. Left behind in Wales, the old woman feared that the end was nigh—and all she wanted was to have her children around her as she slipped out of this world. She was a powerful, domineering woman and my grandfather felt he had no other choice but to fulfill her wishes. So, in 1916—the year of the Somme Offensive, the year when war was consuming the planet—he put my pregnant grandmother on a boat and together they sailed across the Indian and the Atlantic Oceans to return to his mother’s side.
By some strange mercy, my grandparents made it back from the other side of the world unscathed. But, back home in Wales, my great-grandmother did not die—not as she had promised. In fact, she was still clinging to life, a decrepit old lady, when I myself was born. I remember her like a child does one of their earliest dreams, vague and indistinct. But, although she lived on, my grandfather never took Vera May back to Australia as he had promised. They say the call of home is a strong one, and Wales often calls its sons and daughters back. In any case, she gave birth to her first son there, then another. My mother, and a fourth child, followed swiftly afterward.
Then, in 1931, in one of those cruel twists of fate that happen more frequently than they ought, the lung condition, that my grandfather had left Wales to fight, returned with a vengeance. That was the year that he perished—and my grandmother, with four children to depend on her, had to battle on alone. There was nobody else. Nothing to help her. My grandfather left her no pension. The mine owners claimed that the pneumoconiosis that killed him was not their fault, that it was something bubbling inside him all along—and so my grandmother was faced with feeding and housing and caring for four children, without a penny in the world.
So she took to the only things she knew. She stitched and she sewed, for whoever had the need; she took in washing; she kept rabbits in the back garden for meat, and chickens in a coop for their eggs. She allowed cockerel chicks to grow until they were meaty and then killed them herself; and grew potatoes, carrots, leeks, and cabbages in the patches of land around the family house. In the days before fridges and freezers, she would salt and pickle what they did not eat, preserving as much as possible; no one was allowed to waste anything. The whole family had to go picking mountain wimberries and blackberries along the woodland edge when they were in season, and the stained hands and strained backs were rewarded with plenty in the winter.
Yes, my grandmother knew the natural world. She knew which plants were edible and which ones were poisonous; she knew about mushrooms and toadstools; she knew the taste of young hawthorn leaves, the hedgerow plants and berries that made the whole of the world a natural larder. By grit and hard work, and the depth of that knowledge, she made a life in which none of her children went hungry, and she made sure that all of them were given the gift of grammar school so that they could learn the things she could not teach—an amazing feat by any standards. And when, years later, she was needed again—by a little girl with burns, and lungs as damaged as her husband’s had once been, she was there, by my side in my bedroom, teaching me the wonderful things that she knew.
* * *
—
My grandmother was an itinerant. After her children left home, and having slaved so hard to keep the roof above their heads, she knew that she could keep the house no longer. But her grown-up children were scattered across the country, finding wives and husbands and forging lives of their own. She traveled to be with them, spending months with one, months with another. She told me quietly and secretly that I was her favorite, perhaps because I was her eldest grandchild—and perhaps she saw, in me, a little something of herself. But I clung to her and the love that poured out of her—and our stay together in Rhyl, which was to last two whole years, was the happiest of times.
In Rhyl, we shared a huge bedroom, my grandmother and I. The house was grand and immaculate and filled with treasures of the East: big, beautiful Buddhas, carved ivory, and oriental carpets. Hyacinths grew in glorious array on the back porch and, because her cousins were old colonials with old colonial manners, there were different dishes for breakfast, tea, and dinner—a peculiarity I loved. Walter and Gwen were nervous of admitting a little girl into their grand house, but became delighted at my good manners and careful handling of anything I was given.
Life with these three elderly people was idyllic for me. We played mah-jongg and I spent many happy hours reading National Geographic in the quiet library room.
One day, an animated Vera May whispered for me to come and look at the hedged arch over the path in the rose garden. She lifted me up to see a blackbird’s nest with three pale blue eggs nestling in the interior. I shared my grandmother’s thrill at seeing this marvel of nature.
When she had gone, I went off to see if the Californian poppies had popped their yellow petals out of their bud sheaths, but I could not get the nest out of my mind. And as the minutes ticked by, a new thought started to occur to me. I do not know where it came from—perhaps only that little, unquantifiable corner of a child that will always ask, What if? Whatever it was, a question started hardening. What would happen, I wondered, if I threw my ball at it? And that was exactly what I did. Looking back, I can see it as the futile act of an unfeeling, curious little brat. I watched, with mounting curiosity, as the frantic bird flew off in a cha
otic flurry of wings.
The next morning, I found my grandmother standing over bits of nest strewn across the rose garden. The mother bird had devastated her nest. Shards of shell marked the places where she had tossed her eggs out onto the path. My grandmother, this little woman with the white hair, was stiff with controlled rage—and all her anger directed at me. It was not the killing she objected to. My grandmother killed things when she had to. She had been raised the same as all Australian nineteenth-century boys and girls, to know that so many things in the wild can hurt or kill you—scorpions, snakes, and spiders. It amused everyone that she never failed to check behind the lavatory and under the seat wherever she went—because that is a favorite hiding place of the poisonous redback spider. Her fear of spiders was certainly passed on to my mother, and then to me. But her attitude to wildlife was Victorian and, I suppose, uneducated. Anything that looked ugly, or possibly poisonous, could be eliminated. But birds were different—they fell into another category altogether and must not be harmed.
By now I knew what to expect. I hung my head, unable to look my grandmother in the eye. She had learned how to deal with errant children. After all, she had nurtured three boys and a girl on her own. So consumed was she in providing for them, filling her days and nights with stitching and sewing for everyone in the village, with housework, and foraging for her family, that she could ill afford the misbehavior of unruly children—and, later in her own life, my mother would say to me, “You had all the affection from my mother that I should have had,” as if the vagaries of her childhood had somehow been my fault. Looking back dispassionately, she was probably right. Yes, although she rarely showed it with me, my grandmother could be as hard-nosed as she was ordinarily joyous and kind.
My punishment for that bird was inescapable, though presented in a very clever way. She made me look her in the eye and admit that I had done wrong and deserved what was coming. “Do you want a slap, go without your treat, or do some work?” The slap was immediate but spoiled my dignity. Going without my Saturday Picture Club at the local cinema was out of the question. So, I never chose either and opted for work. I secretly enjoyed it anyway, even though it was intended to make me bored and miserable. My misdemeanor reported, I was handed over to Uncle Walter who, in turn, passed me the familiar nail scissors. “The grasses are waiting.” I followed him out to the back lawn stretching miles and miles to the summer house. It was actually fifty feet long and thirty feet wide but seemed as big as a field to me. Do you remember how the old lawn mowers would scythe through the softer leaves but leave the tough flowering stalks of rye grass still standing?
I had been given this job before and had been surprised and thrilled to find so many tiny, obscure, foreign things between the blades of chopped-off grass. The most productive area for insects, snail shells, animals with too many legs and different tiny colored fragments, which I now know to be minerals, was at the lawn edge. There were plenty of stalky bits to cut, but I could also poke around in the soil with the scissors. I soon realized that the soil was infinitely variable over short distances, and that it was a place rather than just brown stuff. It was home to so many little things with legs. I was made to eat my lunch out on the lawn, which was no punishment either, especially when I found that if I poured my glass of water on the grass and soil, things changed. It changed even more if the drink was hot.
That is what happens, you see, to a child who cannot often go to school, who’s sick and sent away and is not up to doing all the ordinary things the other children do. You are left with your own thoughts and allowed to experiment without anyone knowing. And that, I have always thought, is where it comes from—this fascination, not only with nature, but with the stuff that lies under the surface, the aspects of it that none of us can see. Seven decades later, I’m fascinated still.
CHAPTER 5
Conflict and Resolution
Look out of your window. What do you see?
As I write this, I am sitting in the house I have called home for more than half of my life—my detached sanctuary in a leafy part of Surrey. This is where I live and sleep and do most of my work. Were you to look out of this same window, you would see a garden with lawns, separated by rose- and wisteria-laden trellises, stone urns, a bird bath and sundial, and hedges separating vegetable plots from the little orchard and the more decorative beds. The front of the house is approached by a wide drive bordered by flowering shrubs, trees, and the dreaded Spanish bluebells that I have been trying to eradicate for years. You might be forgiven for thinking that this garden has one single “pollen print” by which it can be identified. But you would be wrong. This garden has a multitude of pollen profiles. Look at any garden, any hedgerow, any grass verge or stretch of a country path. To the untrained eye, the greens and browns, whites, blues, and yellows of nature—and all the various shades in between—merge into one. Nature, we often think, is over there, somewhere beyond the place where we are standing. We categorize it all together. But the truth is much more complicated. As I look through my window, I can tell that, palynologically speaking, one corner of the garden is vastly different from any other.
Indeed, in this very plot, keen students I have tutored in the past have proved that a pollen profile from one side of a flower bed can yield a very different picture from that on the other side, just a couple of yards away. A number of samples taken from the base of the ancient hedge, forming the back boundary of our garden, will be utterly different from those taken from the base of the one which separates the vegetable garden from the lawn leading up to the patio. One sample might be dominated by the pollen of hawthorn, field maple, blackthorn, yew, bramble, hedge parsley, and nettles, while another might show an over-preponderance of grass, privet, lilac, honeysuckle, and Laburnum; one corner might be full of fern spores, oak, and beech, and yet another be dominated by grass with a smattering of daisy, poppy, cornflower, onion, carrot, bean, and many weeds.
The samples attest to the various kinds of planting, areas of neglect and the garden’s diversity. One thing that might strike you as odd is that a set of samples might not be absolutely true to what you see growing in the ground. This is because, unless there are physical barriers, a neighbor’s garden, and even a woodland on the edge of the village might also be represented in the mix. Pollen has, after all, evolved to spread. You also need to keep in mind that there will be many insect-pollinated plants that produce so little pollen that it fails to get into the air. These are particularly important to the forensic investigator because the presence of those “rarer” pollen types on your shoes, trouser legs, or pedals of your car would indicate direct contact with them. Think about a foxglove—aptly named because the flowers can fit on the tips of your fingers. An insect has to crawl deep inside the flower to get the pollen and nectar so, if someone has even a few foxglove pollen grains on them, we can say with some confidence that they have been very near to where a foxglove is growing, possibly treading on the soil at its base, or bumping into it in high summer after pollen has been released from the anthers. The pollen of plants like the foxglove or pansy is most likely to be picked up from contact with the plant, or with the soil where their dead flowers drop. If you tread on that soil, the pollen can get enmeshed into your shoe, and it takes laborious effort to remove it.
What is so wonderful is realizing that pollen and spores provide the telltale story of contact—and much more, as I will reveal later. The pollen transferring to your shoes will not be a complete mishmash. All living things live where they perform well, and different plants might all favor the same kind of habitat, though responding to different aspects of it. This is why you might expect to find bluebells in an oak wood, in a coppice of hazel, or even in a hedge of clipped shrubs along a lane; but you wouldn’t expect to find them in a dense pine woodland, or growing where the ground is very wet, or on heather moorland.
If you are only moderately observant, you will already possess a great deal of ecological information
without realizing it. Where would you expect to find bulrushes? Where would you expect to find docks, nettles, and hogweed, and where would you expect to find honeysuckle or dandelions? They do not occur everywhere, even though many a lawyer has tried to argue in court that this is the case. Plants tend to grow in specific kinds of soil and surroundings, and in communities of others with similar requirements. You cannot grow Rhododendron in chalky soil and many other “calcifuges” (plants that hide from calcium) may be growing with it in a recognizable community. Clematis, on the other hand, is a “calcicole,” or chalk dweller, and will grow with others that either need high calcium or, at least, can tolerate it. Rhododendron pollen on a shoe will thus give an immediate idea of the kind of place the footwear has contacted, and certainly give me information about the soil in which it is growing.
The Nature of Life and Death Page 7
