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ANOTHER CURE

When Farmer N.... moved from Charmouth to Powerstock before the last war he brought with him his ability to charm the red-water disease in cattle. Such was the faith of the neighbours he had left that they would ride horseback to Powerstock with the name of the stricken animal so that he could cure it.

Red-water, technically Haemoglobinuria or Bovine Piroplasmosis occurs mainly in the south and southwest of the country, parts of Scotland and most of Ireland.

Simply, the animal - cattle, deer and goats are subject to it -is bitten by the common tick. The result is that the red corpuscles in the blood stream ‘break down’ and enter the urinary system, hence red-water.

The animal is now bleeding to death and in severe cases will die within thirty-six hours. Modern treatment ensures that every animal seen to have the disease has a good chance of recovering if the symptoms are spotted in time. This treatment did not appear till the mid-thirties when Bayers in Germany were doing work on tick-borne diseases in Africa. Until then there were only two courses open to the livestock farmer. To breed all stock on the infected farm and so produce an immunity or, and sometimes as well, rely on the power of a local person to charm the affected animal.

My sister, when she was about nineteen, was hailed across the valley one summer evening by an elderly neighbour but she chose to ignore the call.

I met him some years later when we sheltered under a tree during a summer storm and he recalled the incident.

“I was going to pass on the red-water charm to her,” he said. “I can only pass it on to persons of the opposite sex.” What a lost opportunity by a naturally suspicious young woman.

Another neighbour’s father had the charm and was able to stop bleeding in humans as well as animals. “If you showed him the bleeding,” my neighbour said, “Father would go away and I believe he read something out of the Bible but I never saw or heard him do it.”

Just after the war a Ministry of Agriculture Veterinary Officer drove into a farmyard in West Dorset and was surprised to see a cow reversing out of the kitchen door of the farmhouse. Asked the reason for this the farmer, somewhat embarrassed, said that the cow had red-water.

“But why was the cow in the house?” was the next question.

The reply was equally as surprising. “Well, the man who generally charms our cattle is ill in bed so we took the cow to the telephone.”

Not long ago, in a book on Witchcraft I came across the following: - “... One charm to staunch blood, widespread in English, French and German illustrates this dualism...” A fifteenth century English version reads: “When our Lord Jesus Christ was on the cross, then Longius came with his spear and pierced him in the side. Blood and water came out of the wound. Longius wiped his eyes and saw a man through the Holy virtue that God showed there. I conjure thee, blood, that thou come not out of this Christian man.

The plea is sealed by the repetition of “In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. Amen.” Substitute ‘this animal’ for ‘this Christian man’ and it could well be the charm used by my late neighbour and by Farmer N.... all those years ago.