on surrounding estates regularly hunted them down. Every year we heard of wildcats being shot or snared. In the 1970s, a local keeper known only as ‘The Blue Charm’ (after a much-favoured salmon fly) told me that in snares and gin traps he killed ‘ten or more wildcats every year’.
As a child and well into my teens I barely questioned this gratuitous killing. It was what was done – the norm, part of the accepted culture of sporting estates the length and breadth of Britain – together with trapping, snaring and shooting of every hooked beak, every weasel, stoat, polecat, pine marten, hedgehog, otter, badger and fox, even herons and gulls; every creature, in fact, that might have the temerity to take a game bird, or its egg or its chick, as well as many innocent species that didn’t. It was killing that those gamekeepers were specifically employed to undertake, their success displayed on macabre gibbets, totems of murder, where the wind- and rain-shrivelled corpses of ‘vermin’ were proudly arrayed. To quote Maxwell again, ‘the estate . . . had long waged war upon the wildcats, and a tree . . . was decorated with their banded tails hanging like monstrous willow catkins from its boughs’. I had seen many such gibbets in the woods around my English home and was drawn to them out of morbid curiosity, astonished by the numbers of birds nailed there: rows of jays, crows, magpies, sparrowhawks, owls, kestrels, merlins, hobbys and buzzards, among the hapless weasels and stoats in their dozens.
The world has moved on significantly since then; protection laws have emerged and most people’s values have shifted towards conservation, although there are still plenty who would put their ‘sport’ before any aspect of nature conservation. Maxwell, I am pleased to record, writing in 1959, makes his own views entirely clear: ‘the wildcats are (now) protected . . . Under this benign regime the number of wildcats has marvelously increased.’ If only that were still the case today.
We all live by the instilled standards of our time. My grandfather certainly did, and I doubt whether he would have questioned the killing of wildcats. But extirpation? That’s another matter, and I would like to think that he would have pulled back, as, interestingly, did the redoubtable John Colquhoun, who firmly advocates trapping against poisoning, whereas Charles St John heartily advocates strychnia as a tool of vermin control.
Illegal poisoning of birds of prey on sporting estates is still a very live issue in nature conservation circles, arguably worse now (2017) than it has been for most of my career. But surprisingly, and to his great credit, Colquhoun decries exterminating ‘vermin’ altogether. In a telling aside he states unequivocally:
Clearing off the vermin by poison has been much in vogue in recent years. But, to say nothing of murdering all the dogs in the neighbourhood, it seems a pity to treat the now rare and interesting rovers of the desert like rats. This . . . may find favour with the man whose only pleasure in Highland sport consists of butchering game. For my own part I would rather trap one fine specimen of . . . the wild-cat or the marten, than shoot one hundred brace of grouse.
For all his killing, I fancy I hear the muffled beat of a conservationist heart, heavily disguised by the cultural mores of his day. In a later essay in Volume II, entitled The Natural History of Sport, he beats a drum familiar and endearing to my ears.
A passing glimpse at the wilder and more interesting British animals is every year becoming less common, since the cultivation of moorlands . . . draining, tree-planting etc. has, in many districts, driven away the aboriginal beasts of prey from haunts where they have prowled for centuries . . . When a schoolboy I remember how often the hen-roosts were plundered by pine-martens or wild-cats, which nightly crept forth from this sanctuary and the superstitious awe with which I listened in the calm twilight of summer to the cry of the tiger-cat to its fellow . . . For years this habitation of wild beasts has been swept away as if it had never been . . . call it improvement if you will . . . as an old sportsman I protest that some of our best fishing rivers have been ruined, our wild sport curtailed and our very climate modified . . . by these same labours of the improver. As the Indians fled before the white settlers, the remnants of our nobler predatory animals have sought refuge among remote Highland wilds, but they will find little sanctuary even there . . . [as] every . . . mountain and rugged moor are sought out and set apart exclusively for grouse and deer. Keepers have been commissioned to destroy the ‘vermin’ by exterminating as many as possible of our rarer and most interesting beasts and birds of prey; so that the eagle, the peregrine, the kite, the marten, the wild-cat . . . are fast receding . . . to make way for such real vermin as droves of pheasants, which afford no better sport than barn door fowls.
Well said, Mr John Colquhoun! Would that his words had been heeded by the sporting fraternity. We might still have some wildcats out there and some unsullied habitat for them. A hundred and thirty-five years after those words were written our task is immeasurably harder.
6
Rheumatic fever
For the first eleven years of her life my mother was a normal healthy child, a non-identical twin with her sister Margaretta. Then it happened. At 12.35 p.m. on Friday, 16 October 1931 the shining white-hulled 14,000-ton Royal Mail Ship Corfu eased away from the passenger boarding berth at London’s Tilbury dock. It was the Peninsular & Orient liner’s maiden voyage, off on the London to Hong Kong run via the Suez Canal, calling at Southampton, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Penang and Singapore. On board were 170 first-class and 211 second-class passengers; among them were the twins, Margaretta and Helen, with their eight-year-old sister, Priscilla, and their parents, bound for Port Said.
It was the girls’ first experience of foreign travel, off to Cairo and on up the Nile to Aswan, where their father was to take up his post as a consultant engineer. During the passage through the Med, Helen developed an angry sore throat. Two weeks later, as they disembarked to travel upriver, she was running a high temperature. Glandular fever, the English ship’s doctor had declared. He was wrong. So began the problems that would direct the course of her whole life.
* * *
Rheumatic fever has nothing to do with rheumatism. It derived its misnomer because some symptoms mirrored rheumatism. Commonplace in Britain during the world wars, it remains widespread in developing countries, especially those without ready recourse to antibiotics. It almost always affects children between the ages of eight and fourteen, eleven being the median norm, girls suffering more than boys. Caused by a bacterial Streptococcus pyogenes infection of the throat, nowadays it is easily treated with penicillin. If allowed to persist, it triggers an auto-immune response, which dramatically shifts the consequences of the disease from a fever to a far more devastating chronic condition. Early diagnosis and treatment are vital if the infection is to be prevented from sliding into full-blown rheumatic heart disease.
The infection causes the body’s immune system to produce antibodies whose function is to attack the Streptococcus bacteria. The sore throat goes away, but in the process those same antibodies are corrupted, unable to detect the difference between the bacterial infection they are supposed to be attacking and other important parts of the body, such as the lining of arteries, heart valves and the heart muscle itself. It is known as ‘antibody cross-reactivity’. Untreated, what appears to be just a nasty sore throat becomes a life-long, life-threatening illness.
The mitral valve is the most commonly affected, developing a thickening of the flaps, known as mitral stenosis, eventually failing altogether. The mitral and the aortic valves sit side by side. If the mitral valve doesn’t close properly the blood flow to the aorta, the main artery to transport blood round the body, reduces, affecting the rhythm of the heartbeat and slowing the whole circulatory system down. But the auto-immune attack doesn’t rest with the mitral valve, it spreads to the aortic valve, causing it to falter too. In severe cases the other two valves, the tricuspid and the pulmonary, also become damaged.
Even that isn’t the end of the story. Patients experience shortage of breath
