‘You can still have that operation,’ Heather tells me. ‘It cures the Ménière’s disease but it leaves you deaf in one ear. It’d be worth it, if it weren’t for the risk.’
Ménière’s disease tends to be one-sided. It mostly only affects one ear. The constant noise of Ménière’s disease can make deafness irrelevant, even worthwhile to lose the debilitating nausea, dizziness, migraines and other symptoms associated with the syndrome. The trouble is that the Ménière’s disease sometimes reappears even after the operation – in the other ear.
Peter had assumed that Edith’s operation was unsuccessful because it left her deaf. But it seems that this outcome was probably intentional. Perhaps it was unsuccessful because the Ménière’s did not go away. He remembers that his grandmother was sometimes unwell, confined to bed. She was suffering from ‘neuralgia’, Gladys told her son. That sounds like typical Ménière’s.
‘It sounds like she got it young,’ says Heather. ‘She must have had a severe form or she wouldn’t have had the operation.’
The illnesses that ‘protracted’ her as a pupil-teacher, requiring three weeks or a month’s leave, could well have been Ménière attacks. The doctor’s records cite ‘gastric catarrh’, ‘neuralgia’ and ‘exhaustion’ – vague, imprecise diagnoses that might, or might not, be Ménière’s. I can’t be sure how severe Edith’s symptoms were but I suspect that this unspoken disease must have played a major part in her life, making her achievements all the more remarkable.
Heather loves the outdoors. Since discovering that acupuncture helps control her symptoms, she’s always off on camping adventures with her energetic young family, or biking trips around England. Edith did not have this option and Heather has reservations about Edith’s choice of nature study in later life.
‘Nature’s not your friend,’ she explains. ‘The wind, hiking, cars – they’re all movement. They all trigger attacks. Ménière’s shuts you in your room all alone with the curtains drawn until it’s gone.’
This is not a wonderful scenario for a woman who married a motoring pioneer and embarked on a career studying the great outdoors. Edith went on many travels, by train and by car. She often went camping for a week or two at a time. She went on a great many excursions with the Field Naturalists Club and with Dorothy. I don’t know how often, or how severe, any attacks she may have suffered were, but presumably she learnt the danger signs and was able to live her life around them. Perhaps this was one reason why Edith did not believe that ‘long walks and field work are essential to such study. I am not jesting when I say that a shelf or two across the kitchen window will provide the house mother with a vast field.’ Her own research was often conducted at a close and detailed scale, nature observed in a vase of flowers at the open window, in a museum jar kept by her bedside, or at a bird-feeder outside the dining-room window.
Edith’s close observation of nature did not lead her, as it did her favourite writers, to metaphysical speculation. I can’t imagine her looking outward to infinity, like Richard Jefferies looking at the starry sky and feeling ‘that I was really riding among them: they were not above, nor all around, but I was in the midst of them’.
Much as she admired Jefferies’ writing, I cannot imagine that she would find such a dizzying spectacle of life’s transient insignificance particularly appealing. Edith’s close observation is grounded, solid and specific; it leads her further and further into the intricate workings and delicate mechanisms of life, offering a steadily increasing clarity, precision and certainty that are the greatest beauty of the scientific method. I wonder if she clung to that steadiness, in a life that so regularly spun, literally, out of her control.
‘Here was the centre of the world, the sun swung round us; we rode at night straight away into the space of the stars,’ wrote Jefferies. ‘On a dry summer night, when there was no dew, I used to lie down on my back at full length (looking to the east), on the grass footpath by the orchard, and gaze up into the sky. This is the only way to get at it and feel the stars: while you stand upright, the eye, and through the eye, the mind, is biased by the usual aspect of things: the house there, the trees yonder; it is difficult to forget the mere appearance of rising and setting. Looking straight up like this, from the path to the stars, it was clear and evident that I was really riding among them; they were not above, nor all round, but I was in the midst of them. There was no underneath, no above: everything was on a level with me; the sense of measurement and distance disappeared. As one walks in a wood, with trees all about, so then by day (when the light only hid them) I walked amongst the stars. I had not got then to leave this world to enter space: I was already there.’
Jefferies’ writing takes us beyond ourselves, literally out of our own body and into a different dimension. Perhaps this disembodiment is what is so appealing. It certainly appeals to me. While my colleagues are busy exploring the notion of embodied nature writing, I realise that I have always searched for something entirely different. It is the disembodied nature that attracts me. Almost a loss of self. Like Jefferies, I search for tales of otherness, the non-human, the post-human. Jefferies’ post-apocalyptic After London enthrals me, until the human characters return.
I don’t think I am alone in this. Our love of wilderness is very often coupled with a longing to escape the human condition, to retreat from civilisation, to return to
