Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

119 War and its Aftermath him out, but none of which eventually did. Some later commentators have suggested that it could have been the effects of his malaria, but that was a disease that was comparatively well understood by 1920. The later stages of malaria can involve an infection of the red blood cells, but whether that would account for the other symptoms remains obscure. It could have been a long term effect of exposure tomustard gas or chlorine. Scientific studies are inconclusive but suggest damage to the immune system. 60 In his obituary in the Irish Times it was said straightforwardly that he died ‘as a result of blood poisoning contracted on active service.’ It also says that ‘in the war he served with distinction, and gained the DSO and MC, but was very badly gassed.’ There must have been a psychological element, too. Hex had always had an element of melancholy in his character, sometimes given to disappearing into a world of his own, saying at times that he felt ‘as small as a mouse’, but the damage wrought by the war must have been immense. There had been the loss of his best friend, Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, and it is hard to avoid the impression that treating the killing of Germans as purely a technical exercise had told on him. Parker tells us how it was: The scene is a room in a house in Hertfordshire. A very tall man whose clothes hang loosely about him is talking rapidly and eagerly of rifles and sights, of papier-mache masks, telescopes, the men who sniped from the trenches opposite him. Above his high cheekbones his grey eyes look into the distance. He sees something that you do not; you have seen a look a little like it in the eyes of other men back from the war, but this is the eye of a man who is in a world of his own – a world of a dream? He is back, suddenly, to some tiny detail of a bolt-action. And suddenly, too, he changes the subject. Wild geese, the West of Ireland, Achill Island, the Atlantic – will I come with him to the islands in the west after wild geese, when he is better? He must get better soon. The doctors must soon find out – they have already found out – what is the matter with him; and next year, he means to go to the West of Ireland. He is looking again into the distance; and I who listen have guessed the truth. It was an illness where hope ebbed and flowed. After each operation came the thought that perhaps this time there would be a favourable outcome, and always there was a relapse. In the summer of 1921 Hex thought he was getting better. In December came the eleventh operation, which found an inflamed appendix and gallstones, and even after that there was a twelfth which was deemed a success. In January he was well enough to attend a family wedding in St Albans, and on 22 May The Times reported that ‘Major H. Hesketh-Prichard is progressing favourably, and his condition now gives no occasion for anxiety . ’ But it wasn’t really true. Violet Grimston’s diary records it: All this time Hesketh Prichard had been desperately ill in London in a 60 According to a 1996 report for the Environment Committee of the U.S. Armed Forces’ Epidemiological Board.