Homage to Gaia (55 page)

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 then, those imaginary journeys seemed real. However, not then, nor at any time, have I felt as Philip Larkin wrote in Aubade.

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.

Before 1982 and soon after in 1983, I had no place in my mind for the transcendental part of the New Age, but somehow my perception of the imminence of death put me in that mood for much of 1982. Once or twice a week I would take the one-hour journey along quiet country roads from Coombe Mill, across the northern edge of Dartmoor, through the small towns of Okehampton, Moretonhampstead, and Bovey Tracey to Abbotskerswell, where Jenny lived. That year I also took her son Christopher as an apprentice, and he came to live with us at Coombe Mill for the summer. He was a welcome guest, and his kindness to Helen was unstinted. He was a talented computer maker and user, and converted my crude Basic language Daisyworld programs into pure and fast Assembler. I agreed to pay him and provide, if the work were satisfactory, the strongest of references.
He had no quotable ‘A' levels, but I hoped that a personal reference from an FRS would do as well. He wanted a career with one of the larger computer companies, and as it happened, this worked out extraordinarily well. In September my friend, Leslie Banks, and another senior executive of the British branch of IBM came to visit. They saw the product of Christopher's work running on my computer and were so impressed that they offered him a job on the spot, which put Christopher in on the ground floor of the PC revolution. He rose rapidly in his profession but sadly, a few years later he died in an untimely car crash.

By August 1982 Helen grew aware of my obsession with the attractions of Dartington. She said nothing, but I knew from the way she retired still further into her shell that she was unhappy. We had shared nearly forty years of good and bad and brought up our family as best we could. In recent years, the constraints of MS had put an end to any chance of a warm or loving marriage. I never realized how much Helen and I had missed in our marriage until the experience of the last ten glorious years with Sandy. These have been the happiest of my life. I do believe that for some of us marriage is incomplete unless the partners are in love. Helen needed a great deal from me, but the malign omnipresence of her disease conspired with her natural dislike of the demonstrative. She could not return the warmth needed to make our marriage more than just two people occupying a house. We had been, since the mid-1970s like a pair of friends sharing some common memories, and soon after we moved to Coombe Mill, the growing discomfort of Helen's illness kept her awake and reading for much of the night, and drove us to sleeping in separate rooms. I would get up at 6.00 in the morning, make tea for both of us, and climb into her bed, and we would drink it together. We talked then for an hour or so before rising to start the day. There are worse ways to start a day. For many years, this was a tolerable and often cheerful way of life; but for the strange events of 1982, it could have gone on for years more. My son Andrew once referred to his mother as a gentle tyrant and it well expresses her character. Helen was always cheerful and rarely ever complained about her condition, but as soon as I knew she was unhappy over my visits to Abbotskerswell, I had not the heart to continue them at the frequency that I had been doing, and my meetings with Jenny declined.