Consumption

Consumption’, now known as TB, consumed whole families before the discovery of antibiotics such as penicillin. The Bronte sisters all died of TB or with it, and their brother Branwell only avoided it by dying as the result of his use of alcohol and laudanum before the TB got him. DH Lawrence and George Orwell died of TB, and of course it also affected poor people in poor housing, like my grandparents, who were terrified when my father John developed a persistent cough. They decided to send him to stay with a relative who ran a small shop in a village among the North York moors, where they hoped the fresh air might be good for his lungs. He travelled on the train alone and when he arrived at the start of springtime his aunt asked him if he was supposed to be going to the village school. He told her that the doctor had said he was on no account to do so. In those days of slow communication this wonderful lie was not discovered until the school had closed for the summer holidays.

The huge expanses of heather covering so much of the North Yorkshire Moors shimmered that summer, in my vicarious memory, under endless sunshine, the air having a particular humour composed of the scent of flowering heather and the hum of insects, the calls of curlews and meadow pipits, the atmosphere in late summer visibly tinted by the light reflected by the purple heather. He was mesmerised by this extraordinary landscape, and when he wasn’t overwhelmed by the scale of the rolling moorland he was deep among the heather viewing the lizards and beetles moving like the creatures of a miniature forest. Like everyone else at that time he thought of this as a pristine landscape, and had no notion of how it had been before the sheep destroyed the woodlands, and the fires set by the gamekeepers of the wealthy created huge areas of unbroken heather monoculture. It was utterly beautiful, if your taste was for sweeping panoramas and astonishing colours and skyscapes. Less so if your view of landscape was informed by any elementary understanding of ecology. But these were cruder times. The concept of ecology had not percolated beyond the minds of a handful of academics and our appreciation of the uplands was still moulded by poets who knew nothing of lost ecosystems and saw awesome primal wildness and opportunities for poetical excitement where an ecologist might now see destruction, desolation and lost biodiversity. John loved the openness and the freedom and roamed alone, avoiding the village boys who enjoyed the countryside in very different ways - birds’ nesting, stoning water voles on the village pond and exploding frogs by inflating them, blowing air through straws inserted in their vents. Perhaps such rough boys should not be carelessly despised, in the context of a landscape remodelled in the interests of their sport by an aristocracy that blasted grouse out of the moorland skies for pleasure, and spent much of their endless leisure killing animals for fun.

John wandered in a kind of intoxication over these moors, fascinated by the stars in the night sky and by the fossils he found in moorland quarries. That summer skiving off school profoundly changed him and that single lie affected all of us, not just because it became unthinkable for him to live in a town, but because of the sort of person he became.

He was not a typical farm worker, content to cultivate his cottage garden and spend his evenings in the pub. His time on the moors as a boy had given him some sense of the supernal, and he grew to be a man of a broad range of skills and interests. He seemed content with the work on the farm, though it was hard and often uncomfortably hot or cold or wet and dirty. It was the only way he could support himself and his family in the countryside, but he tried his hand at many other things. He kept bees and made bread, and read poetry. He painted murals on the walls of our homes. In the bathroom – a new luxury when we moved to the fruit farm, replacing both the tin bath on the flagstones in front of the fire and the privy across the yard - he painted a watery mural, a cross-section of land and water, of fish and grass-snakes, dragon flies, frogs and water plants, all the creatures about to pounce on the creatures ahead of them, a food chain paused for his children to consider. Another mural attempted to capture the intense yellow of the dandelion, which he considered the most glorious flower of the English countryside. On winter evenings he would carve blocks of willow into scale models of boats for us to sail on the horse pond. He helped us to make a relief model of the district, cast in plaster of Paris, a complex project in several stages. Sometimes he would try to sculpt a bust of my sister, or attempt painting water-colours or play the flute.

He was a very gentle and I think contented man. His activities were not those of a man of frustrated ambition. The expanse of the moorlands seemed to have given him a sense of endless possibilities that stimulated his enthusiastic temperament; his creativity was just part of his enjoyment of his life, the result of the literal way that his summer on the moors had expanded his horizons. In his late teens he had joined the movement of young people streaming out of the industrial towns to reclaim their right to roam the stolen uplands, the people who defied the owners of the grouse moors and organised the Kinderscout Trespass. They were keen cyclists, ramblers, youth hostellers, trade unionists, socialists, brought up in the Great Depression and destined, if they survived the war, to be among those who celebrated the birth of the Welfare State and the NHS and the idea of a Britain that would be a fit home for returning heroes. They came back from the war to the dawn of a new period of history when ordinary people might have decent and affordable housing, proper healthcare and social security. The revolutionary ideas of the 1930s had left my father believing that art and poetry and music could now be part of the lives of ordinary people like himself, and the expanses of the heather moorlands could be incorporated into the new National Parks, reclaimed from the grouse and the gamekeepers, where whole generations of young people might enjoy some of the inspiration he had felt as a boy on the North York moors. His children, raised in a Herefordshire he also saw as idyllic, would inherit this new world where working people might enjoy the same kinds of fulfilments as had been previously reserved for their employers.

At the end of Shakespeare’s last play, ‘The Tempest’, Miranda is dazzled by the assembled courtiers in the great final scene of reconciliation. She may have been naïve; Aldous Huxley’s ironic choice of the title of his novel ‘Brave New World’ may imply this, but the phrase powerfully evokes the possibility of a better world:

“O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.”

If the world has such beauteous people in it, they are more likely to be simple people like my father, the meek who were supposed eventually to inherit the earth, than The Tempest’s assembled courtiers and sycophants of those who aspire above all to wield power over us. My father’s generation relaxed a little, dropped their guard. Their children might – for a while – have schools with libraries and free school meals. There would be free health care for all. There would be the UN and the International Court of Human Rights, international peace and justice. His generation had defeated fascism, they thought, and being people of admirably simple pleasures they got on with raising their families and enjoying life as best they could, voting now and then, even occasionally getting a Labour government.

Meanwhile the enclosers, the landowners, the industrialists, who were people of anything but simple pleasures, got on with increasing their wealth and power and buying up the media.

The project of the English enclosers started by appropriating the shared lands of the English villagers, our long-lost peasants. This movement, treating Britain as if it was itself a colony, led inexorably to the colonisation of Ireland and went on to the theft of lands across the world, and the enslavement or eradication of their peoples. We are encouraged to think that the industrialisation fuelled by this global appropriation was ‘a good thing’, but it was not a rational development that sought to meet basic human needs with the minimum of damage to the planet. It was a project to support and supply the desires of the enclosers for more wealth and more power and lives of luxury and leisure. Any benefits to the peasantry, to the workers – such as the chance to work in their dark satanic mills or live in the nearby slums – were purely ancillary to the project of the rich and powerful being enabled to live in luxury without doing any work.

And after the war the chance to live in a council house and to afford washing machines and televisions helped to conceal the true nature of the system. Some conservationists complained that our system was built on the wasteful exploitation of finite resources and the pollution of our land and seas by harmful chemicals, but few listened to them, and the heirs of the enclosers continued behind our complacent backs to work for their own increasing power and wealth. The economist Hayek developed the truly chilling theories of free-market economics and Neo-Liberalism that were welcomed by the rich and the powerful and appeared to justify their ambitions, but for years the true intentions were masked by the kinds of cover provided by the rhetoric of one-nation conservatism, the urbanity of Obama and the bumbling of Biden. Reagan seemed to verge on the senile, Thatcher hid behind the persona of a canny housewife while trying to demolish everything that the post-war consensus had achieved for ordinary people, and we all worked to achieve for ourselves the kinds of material success that were a feeble imitation of the conditions enjoyed by the oligarchs, the owners of the media and of the huge corporations. But at last surely it must be time for us to wake from our delusions and realise what is actually happening?

I say this because it seems that the heirs of the enclosers, of the colonialists and the imperialists, finally feel strong enough to break cover. Trump is crude enough to make it quite clear that his version of the American dream is of power, of greed, of disregard for international law, in the making of a society moulded to the desires of the super-rich. The Neo-Liberalism of Reagan and Thatcher, that famously denied the existence of society and attacked those seeking a better life for the ordinary people of countries like Chile, was a little less crudely expressed than that of Trump, but may have paved the way towards a world where genocide and disregard of international law by Trump and Netanyahu are tolerated and even supported by our politicians, and the interests of massive corporations are prioritised over the survival of the planet. Against this kind of evil and stupidity we can easily feel as powerless as the peasants were when facing the enclosers. Our Labour government, heirs of those who announced that brave new world after the war, is led by a ‘human rights lawyer’ who actively supports the genocide of the Palestinians by the Israeli apartheid state while criminalising democratic peaceful protest at home. The most powerful nation on the earth turns out to be still true to the rapacity of the colonialist project, dismantling and disregarding international law, cancelling the judges of the International Criminal Court and contemplating the annexation of Venezuela, Greenland, Canada, Mexico and illegally declaring war on Iran. The UK has probably voluntarily annexed itself.

It is as hard to know how to end this essay as it is to know how this all will end. Not well I fear. Easier not to know, easier not to do anything. In the face of planetary collapse many of those who seek to rule us will eventually and inevitably be judged to have been suicidaly stupid, lacking in any kind of vision of change, as well as simply evil, greedy, cowardly and possibly insane, if there is a future in which that judgement can be made. We can try to have the courage to face the reality of the position in which human arrogance, greed and stupidity has placed us. That would at least be a start on the journey back towards the dream of a brave new world that does not have such people in it. Only when we face the truth can we have any chance of change, and start to look for signs of hope and reasons to be optimistic.

Here in my part of Herefordshire it was said that a turnip wearing a blue rosette would get elected as our MP if it stood as the Conservative candidate, and indeed for many years we had the sort of Tory MP who did little to erode that view of local politics. And yet in 2024 the people of North Herefordshire rallied and went out canvassing for a Green Party candidate who won, ending years of Conservative complacency. Much can be achieved if people organise, as may be illustrated by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in his campaign to be the mayor of New York. His manifesto included affordable housing, free childcare, free buses, affordable food and for the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes. Hardly very radical, and in general intelligent, well thought out and good value for money. But he was opposed by the Democratic establishment, the Republican establishment, the US President and a coalition of enormously wealthy oligarchs. Ninety thousand New Yorkers came out to campaign for Mamdani and he is now the Mayor of New York.

When ordinary people stand together to demand a better world they have huge power. We would all do well to have the courage to recognise the true nature of the forces that threaten not just our simple needs but the very survival of the planet. Only then can we unite to have the conversation about how to live the kinds of simple lives that allow us all to share resources fairly and begin to set the planet on the road to recovery. We may not succeed, but it would be suicidal not to try.

.