There's Fungus on the Mushrooms: or if something can go wrong it will

By Mike Lord

This is the biography of a man who spent almost his entire working life in sub-Saharan Africa and South and East Asia.
Mike Lord was born in London within the sound of Bow Bells, just as the WW2 was about to explode. He was evacuated to the country as a small boy and then was brought up in Berkshire. His family moved to various places, including three years in Singapore from 1948, which involved the Maria Hertzog riots, and a family holiday in Hong Kong, all of which had a curious effect on his later life. Mike now lives and works in Vietnam. His work in Asia included some hot-spots like the Swat valley in Pakistan, and Sri Lanka during the war against the LTTE! Mike’s last project in Vietnam was concerned with Climate Change, but now he has retired and is even busier writing and publishing books!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Lord
• Release date: Feb 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311874160

Mike Lord

Mike had worked in sub-Saharan Africa for over 25 years, and in south and east Asia for another 25 years. He was an expert in the development of livelihoods for disadvantaged farmer families, who often live in remote and mountainous areas.Mike has now retired and has written three historical novels, and has just completed another based on the family of the Emperor Quang Trung, who is still revered all over Vietnam.

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Butterfly Books

There’s Fungus in the Mushrooms, or if something can go wrong it will...

Written by Mike Lord

ISBN 9781311874160

Copyright © Kevin Michael Lord, 2014

Mike Lord has asserted his right to be identified as the Author of this work

Cover photo by Karen Longwell, Ontario.

Also by Mike Lord:

Sinagiri

Serendepia

Quang Trung

The Body in the Laboratory

Chocolates and Cyanide

http://www.lordmaity.com

Living in England during the War.

The first thing that I can remember was Church Square in Leighton Buzzard.

There was a vicarage at one end of the square behind a row of Yew Trees; the church itself was to the right of the vicarage, and in the corner of the square, and there was a gravel lane leading to the church yard. We lived in a row of Georgian houses on the right of the lane and the entrance to the church itself. The houses had stone steps leading up to the first floor and with an entrance to the basement down some steps and under the main steps. The church was called St Michael and All Angels. There was a Post Office opposite our house, and the main road, it might have been called the High Street, was at the other end opposite the vicarage. The row of Georgian houses extended all along the right hand side of the square, and I remember there was a dentist’s surgery in one of them.

I seem to remember that at first we lived on the two top floors in the house nearest to the church itself, but later we moved next door where we occupied the whole house, including the basement. My father was away at war, I believe in Cairo, and my mother was a physiotherapist and she had her treatment rooms on the first floor of the house. The kitchen and dining room were in the basement, and our bedrooms were on the upper two floors again.

Behind the houses were gardens, and for some reason we had combined the gardens of the first two houses, which then to me was enormous with a large central lawn, but years later when I went back the garden was not much bigger than a pocket handkerchief. There was a gate leading into the lane between the first house and the church, and some tall trees, probably elms, at the end of the garden. There was a wooden garage under these trees, but we didn’t have car during those war years, at least I cannot remember one, so the garage became a storeroom for empty wooden boxes.

We had a lawn in the centre of the garden, and flower beds on both sides. Under the trees at the far end was a rockery. My mother had one of those swing seats, with a canopy overhead, and in the spring and summer we would swing and watch the flowers in and around the rockery. The flowers would sway gently in the breeze and my mother and I could imagine fairies embodied in the flowers, but my younger sister, Rosemary, would not believe us and used to grab the flower stem in the hand and glare at the flowers, trying to see the fairies at the bottom of our garden.

When I was old enough I went to school in Linslade, which involved a walk of about one mile and the crossing a footbridge over the main Great Western Railway line to London. The school was called Miss Boars, where we learned copper plate writing and making things out of papier maché. On our way back from school in the afternoon I used to watch train spotters writing down numbers on long lists of the trains as they went through, and although I’m sure this information might have been very useful I could never see the point of it.

We were all very pleased when my father came back from the war. I cannot remember if the war was over or his posting in Cairo had ended.

What else can I remember?

Oh yes, sitting for hours after lunch with a cold and congealing plate of fish poached in milk in front of me, and not allowed to leave the table until I’d eaten most of it. Funnily enough I don’t hate poached fish, probably as years later I learned how to poach fish properly. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, taught me. I never did learn as a boy why my mother never did learn to poach fish with any flavour.

Years later I found out why. Cooking to my mother was a chore. Her elder sister had been I charge of the kitchen when she was a growing young girl. Sunday lunch for us was usually a roast (but not during the war), preceded by a couple of large dry Sherries, after which nobody complained about the roast. To my mother cooking entailed bunging things into a pot or into the oven. But she could make pastry, which was my father’s weakness.

In the kitchen of the basement we had a radio, which was operated by two sets of batteries, the low voltage accumulators, and the high tension solid battery. Every now and then the accumulators had to be recharged, in a nearby shop. It fascinated me how a whole orchestra could fit into that small radio.

My sister and I also used to raid the medicine cupboard. Our target was the ‘Syrup of Figs’ bottle which we both loved, neither of us fully aware of the end effect. We had to arrange a table and a chair in order to open the cupboard, which my mother probably thought was too high for us to reach. We got caught once, and our punishment was to clean the sticky mess we’d left in the medicine cupboard. From time to time we also had to visit the nearby dentist. I sat in the chair whilst he poked and prodded around, and I accidentally bit his finger. The dentist jumped and slapped my face, and I managed to escape the torture. I was quite surprised to find that it was not me who was in trouble, but the dentist who had slapped me.

My mother also had a short wave diathermy machine in her treatment rooms. This was surrounded by a steel mesh cage to stop the short waves escaping. As a young boy I was a bit ‘wheezy’ but a few minutes in the short wave diathermy, with those pads clamped to my chest and back, soon stopped that. I found a much better cure a few years later. Rationing was in full swing in those years, but I do remember some of my mother’s grateful patients bringing her brown paper parcels of eggs or even chickens.

Just after the war my parents brought a pony and trap. In fact it was a governess cart, with big wooden steel rimmed wheels with the wooden spokes painted green and yellow, with a big steel hub, and an extremely docile pony called Queenie, who was never overworked or overexcited until one morning when we encountered the local hunt. She wanted to follow the hunt, governess cart and all, and I managed quickly to jump off the trap and hold her head to calm her down until the hounds passed by. She calmed down after a while and resumed her blinkered plodding around the country lanes, but if she heard the huntsman’s horn she would immediately prick up her ears.

One day we went to the local RAF station to see their sports day. I watched the 100 yards, the shop putting and was most interested in the long jump. At home we did have a sandpit in the garden so the next day we had our own ‘sports day’ using the sand pit to jump into. I found a rake and a hoe which my sister and I used to level the sand. Some friends also participated. I was the ‘raker’, and was particularly proud of my sand levelling ability. My sister had disputed somebody’s jump so she started to ‘chop up’ my beautifully levelled sand with the garden hoe. I wanted to use the rake to stop her, and I swung just as she lunged forward. The rake hit her forehead, and one prong actually penetrated her skull. My mother rushed her off to hospital, and I was sent to my room and had a painful interview with my father when he came back from work.

My sister stayed in hospital for several days. She came back apparently none the worse for wear, and life continued. Before the accident with the rake she had been having fits of some sort, maybe epilepsy, and the surgeons found that the prong of the rake had performed a crude lobotomy to her young skull, and the fits stopped.

We must have gone to several gymkhanas in the summer in those years that Britain was just emerging from the war. I didn’t know much then about petrol rationing, but I’m sure almost everything was rationed. I was allowed ‘pocket money’ of three pence which I used to take to the local shop, together with my ration book, and the shop owner would laboriously cut out one week’s sweet ration.

I know that on sunny days my sister and I would make believe we were ponies cantering around a field, on the lawn behind our house, and would ‘canter’ around holding sticks to beat our own backsides if we refused to jump an imaginary fence.

For my eight birthday my parents decided to buy me my first pony, mainly at my mother’s initiative and nothing to do with the lobotomy. They found a very tiny 9.0hh young grey Welsh mountain pony, which we called Topsy. Nine hands high is very small even for a pony, and Topsy was more like a big dog, and she even behaved like a big dog following us around, even in the house had she been allowed. I had been to riding lessons, but was by no means a competent rider; however my father decided that I should ride Topsy home from the farm where we had bought her, or rather to the riding school in Linslade where we had arranged she would be living. The ride was about three miles, and I probably managed to make the first half a mile with many stops, largely due to my inadequate ability to control a young and headstrong pony. After that my father took out the back seat of the car, and the Topsy was happy to enter, with her head out of one window. I don’t remember how many times a week I went riding but I do know that Topsy taught me how to ride.

One day, I had seen others riding