Timeslide; it’s 1973 – I’m with my parents, in the back of my father’s mustard-yellow Mk III Ford Cortina GXL with black vinyl roof and Rostyle wheels [reality: he had a brown Mk III GL with normal wheels]. It’s 1973, yet I’m sitting in the back seat with my children, aged five and two, so more like 1998. But it’s today – all at the same time. My parents are out shopping. They return, put the bags in the boot; my mother’s in the front passenger seat and shows me the Sunday Times that she’s just bought. There’s a whole supplement, she tells me, carrying a most remarkable story… She pulls it out and hands it back to me past the headrest.
I look at it. It's really weird. The supplement isn’t typeset – it’s handwritten, in the style of a cartoonist. I’m thinking Gerald Scarfe, Ralph Steadman or Marc Boxer – somewhere between the three. There’s a story here – a report – about the Sally, the wife of famous British philosopher, Bernard, and Africus – an elk. The story is set in an Oxbridge college, a new one – a post-war campus, though with its modern buildings set around a grassy square like a traditional Oxbridge quad.
Sally is Bernard’s wife, she is 11 years his junior. He left his first wife for a phenomenally beautiful undergraduate student in the Swinging Sixties, a time when such practices weren’t frowned on. Now she’s in her mid-50s, still a beauty, but dying of an incurable wasting disease. Africus the elk, a living exhibit owned by the college, is also dying of an incurable wasting disease. Neither could be diagnosed; "of unknown aetiology", the specialists said.
Now here’s the thing.
As both Sally and Africus reached a point in their mysterious disease, they both began to display an incredible trait – telepathy. People around the woman, and the elk, started reporting intrusive thoughts – sad thoughts, reflections on death and existence, strange memories, anomalous sensations of taste. Dwelling on these strange thoughts, it became clear to those in their near presence that they were picking up the sensations of awareness from another being. As this was a university, curiosities were piqued.
News spread, crowds began to gather around the small pasture within the quadrangle upon which Africus lived. He still had his magnificent antlers, but you could see the contours of his ribs on his flank. Though he was not old, he moved with a wobbly gait. There was not long to go… Yet people standing around the enclosure all experienced his thoughts – his experiences. Above all, what it was like to be a dying elk.
At this time, Sally would go for short walks around the quadrangle; clutching a walking stick, she could not go far. But seeing Africus became a daily ritual for her. Yet as she’d approach the beast, people going the other way would look at her, say things to her, replying to what could only be her thoughts. Not saying anything to anyone, she felt she was the centre of human attention; people whom she looked at felt it, felt her disapproval at the way they were dressed, their behaviour. She always had the tendency to be critical of others.
Before long, it was clear that something strange was going on. Was it Africus, or was it Sally? Or both of them – word got round. Journalists latched onto the story. They too noted that the claimed telepathy was real; one claimed that standing in the right spot, he could pick up thoughts from both Sally and Africus.
The Sunday Times dedicated an entire sixteen-page section to this, with specialist doctors and vets giving their opinions about the nature of the disease, neurosurgeons coming up with different explanations for the phenomenon. The newspaper’s proprietor himself took the decision to publish a hand-written account of the story of Sally and Africus. It took many days, working around the clock, for the cartoonist to prepare this unprecedented work of art. He too had been there to experience it for himself and knew that this was real. Never since the times of monks hand-writing illuminated bibles had such an artistic enterprise been undertaken.
Sally and her husband became media fixtures, appearing on all channels. Yet the telepathy that all those around Sally experienced didn’t work via TV. In the studio, however, it did; wheelchair-bound, Sally would read minds in the audience, and audience members would tell Sally what she was thinking. One experiment that amazed everyone was when she'd sing a song to herself - nothing obvious - no Rule Britannia - rather obscure pop tunes from the mid '60s or a nursery rhyme. Everyone in the audience felt it, some began to join in, aloud.
Sadly, it was clear that neither Sally nor Africus had long left to live. For both of them, the very act of moving became increasingly painful; the elk just sat upon one patch of grass, and ate the feed his keepers offered him with difficulty. Their decline was visible week by week - then day by day. Sally became bed-ridden, she steadfastly refused being moved to a hospital, thinking to her carers that she'd like to die in her own room. As they approached their end, the radius within which their thoughts were being encountered extended; as far as three miles away, people were reporting the experience of what it felt like to be an elk tasting freshly-cut hay, or supping Sally’s milky tea and Digestive biscuits. Bernard kept a scrupulous log of her meal-times and what she managed to swallow; people sensed her thoughts with an accuracy that could not be written off as coincidence or conjecture.
The Sunday Times supplement was published when Sally and Africus were still alive – both died, at exactly the same time, on the very next Tuesday. With their deaths, the phenomenon ceased, but ever since then, scientists have been at loggerheads about this well-documented case. Was it real? Or make-believe, or a dream?
This time two years ago:
S7 update, around what's now Węzeł Zamienie
This time three years ago:
Marchin' again
This time seven years ago:
The autumn sublime in Jeziorki
This time nine years ago:
Enduring Ealing - Victorian and Edwardian klimats
This time ten years ago:
Krokowa, Poland's former northern borderlands
This time 15 years ago:
Aerial photograph of Central London
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