The relation of road to estate to village doesn’t change. Nineteenth-century maps present the same village green, two pubs (King’s Arms and Cricketers), parish church. But Harefield Park changes dramatically; once mansion, stables, coach house were surrounded by woods, farms. There were lakes, streams, mature trees (oak, horse chestnut, a great cedar of Lebanon). Then, decade by decade, trees were felled, parkland was lost to hospital, nurses’ home, occupational therapy, laundry, record office. The Mediparc is a J.G. Ballard version of the pastoral. Information brokering, fibre-optic transactions, in place of the acres of enclosed, seigneurial countryside. The more apparently opened up an estate, the fewer its freedoms. Security operatives and surveillance cameras replace bailiffs, gamekeepers and man-traps.
Accounts by local historians speak of Harefield as blessed, one of the earth’s bright places. It might be the situation, looking west over the valley of the Colne, but the PR is justified. (We spoke of the name Hare-Field. Of Foucault’s ships of fools, hippie narrow boats on the Grand Union Canal. Of how sailors could never use the word ‘hare’. It was considered an unlucky thing. An ancient prohibition, unexplained, that came with the craft. Hares and boats didn’t mix. Hare was a burrower, a chthonic spirit. Boxer, dancer, trickster. Hare was a companion of witches. His foot was a specific against sorcery. The term ‘hare’ is hidden in ‘heart’. Hare is heart, a lunar spirit. Mad in March. Mad with good heart.)
Harefield holds firm to a particular narrative. The back story has not been deleted, but entrusted to one of their own — Mary Shepherd, former senior thoracic surgical registrar at Harefield and Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. Shepherd’s Heart of Harefield (The Story of a Hospital) is an insider’s legend: anecdotal, properly sourced and attributed, humane. Copies of the book, approved history, can be purchased on site.
The Harefield tourist pauses to flick through the illustrations, checking monochrome prints against present reality. This publication, while looking like a National Trust calendar, performs a useful service: it tells patients what they can expect, it grounds them in the privilege of place. The journey to Harefield, knowing that some trauma, insults to the immune system, devastation to body chakras, lies ahead, is a time of stress. Shepherd’s narrative prepares future victims, guiding them through the levels of anaesthesia. The expedition to the house on the hill is made in fearful expectation, dread of the consultant’s verdict. The trees of the long avenue become obstacles around which mental anchors are cast, slowing the car, postponing this awful moment.
Harefield Park is mapped with pain. Fifty thousand wounded Australians were treated during the First World War. Many are buried in the village church. The soldiers, walking out, visiting pubs, making friends with local children, left a print on the territory. Convalescence is the slow release of pain-memories, the shifting of horror from sand and hot rock to damp English greenery.
Therapeutic rituals are initiated, to reassert normality, life before war, home life. Cricket, always. Cricket on a rough meadow. Photographs of cricket. A nurse, in full uniform, hands spread wide, is behind the wicket. The batsman, in military cap, heavy serge jacket, keeps his eye on the ball. Playing in the Aussie spirit that marries technical correctness with bloody-minded determination, he does his best to move his front foot into line. But it’s not possible. He doesn’t have a front foot, or leg. It’s been amputated, just below the knee. The man in the bush hat, fielding dangerously close in, at — ouch! — short-leg, is watching the bowler, not the batsman. His right arm is in a sling. No worries, mate, they’ll stuff any eleven Englishmen. By lunchtime on the third day.
Harefield doctors liked their cricket and weren’t too bothered about cars. Cricket was part of the ethos. The Welshman Dr Kenneth Stokes, Medical Director between 1940 and 1959, was quite happy to share his house and his car, a ‘plucky little bus’, with the Matron, Beatrice Shaw. He relaid the cricket square that the Aussies marked out in the First War and he built a pavilion. Matches were arranged, the team travelling by van, against the Uxbridge Electricity Works and the Chalfonts Epileptic Colony.
After the days of Stokes, Harefield was seen as less of a village, more of a suburb, ‘an extension of London’. Sir Thomas Holmes Sellors spoke of the difficulties of a hospital ‘built without the city walls’. Nurses, willing to banish themselves to the countryside, were scarce. Relatives and friends of patients found the journey to Harefield long and difficult. Cars were important. Nurses drove to Ruislip to visit cinemas and restaurants. The sense of Harefield as a private estate, protected by the river valley, cushioned by golf courses (Moor Park, Sandy Lodge, Northwood, Haste Hill) and other Mediparcs (Mount Vernon and the Radium Institute Hospital), was threatened. Everything was changed by the coming of the motorway.
The M25 was a blue-grey pulmonary artery; oxygen and nutrients carried to the cells (cars, units of housing). The liberties of the old park were terminated. The wild cats, a free-ranging tribe with about seventy members, were rationalised: inoculated, neutered, hunted. The last cat was shot in 1986.
Now the work force is migratory. ‘Everybody has a car.’ Cars surround the buildings. Twenty-five acres of the north park have to be sold. The cricket-loving Dr Stokes, who doted on his ‘decrepit and bird spattered’ Ruby Austin 7, didn’t indulge in serious commutes. On 9 July 1959, he took a run down to the village. Sitting in his tin box, he suffered a heart attack and died at the wheel.
Recovering heart patients, where it was appropriate, were encouraged to walk, a few steps across the ward, a tottering excursion to the corridor, before the release into the grounds: until they were clocking up fifteen or twenty miles a week (the winter distance of one of our orbital walks).
We are superstitious about major surgery. The place where it happens, this Aztec ripping of a heart from the cavity of the chest, fills us with dread. I wouldn’t say as much to Renchi but the fear clings: they’ll keep us, they won’t let us out. We’ll have to pay, in flesh, for our casual tourism, this unsanctioned stroll around the Tenochtitlán of the Colne Valley.
On a 1542 map, made for the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the city of Tenochtitlán is symbolised by an eagle, wings spread, perched on a cactus. The omen guided the Aztecs to the site of their capital. One of the Harefield photographs I take of Renchi has him standing in front of a building with a one-armed clock. On the roof is an eagle with spread wings. The coach house. The clock never moves, it’s a painting.
The eagle was a significant symbol for the first occupant of The Mansion, Sir George Cooke. The ‘Eagle Room’ was the most important room in the house. If the hare is a lunar creature, the eagle is the sun. In alchemy the eagle is the liberated spirit released from the prima materia. Zeus commands an eagle to devour a portion of the liver of Prometheus, the fire thief. Each night the liver renews itself, so that the torment can recommence on the following day. The outline of the myth is well known but we forget the reason for the withdrawal from humanity of the gift of fire: Prometheus tricked the gods when he divided a sacrificed ox. He arranged flesh, entrails, edible matter to one side and left the bones on the other, under a coat of succulent white fat. Prometheus, chained, suffers his punishment for an eternity, until Hercules slays the eagle and sets him free.