Just a Little Run Around the World: 5 Years, 3 Packs of Wolves and 53 Pairs of Shoes. Rosie Pope Swale
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about achieving last dreams. Clive and I didn’t believe in the word last. Dreams are founded on reality and facing up to trouble. We just kept on going forward, because it was the only way.
He wrote a poem, ‘I Want to See the World’:
I want to be a sailor, I want to roam the oceans far and wide, I want to see the islands and the far off distant lands, To listen to the music of the drum. I want to ride on camels, and elephants too, And lie on beaches basking in the sun. I want to go to India, and see the famous Tajah, Then visit Everest and its peaks…
Much later, on my world run, I realised that it was Clive who taught me that you never give yourself a break going uphill but only when you are over the top of the mountain. And that the mountains are in the mind.
Clive longed to go to Nepal. He had been born in India and his father had been in the British Army in charge of the Gurkhas. Clive had never gone back because he hadn’t wanted to go as a tourist. Before his illness he had accepted an invitation by the Nepal Trust for us to trek and help them build a hospital in Humla. He still said he’d do anything to go. He also wanted to go to Cuba to make a film about a run, as he had done in the Sahara.
He very nearly made it to Cuba too. He felt better and insisted I go ahead and come back and fetch him after the run, so he could just film it in a few days. He reckoned he’d be OK for a few days away.
This was never going to happen.
Suddenly he got much worse. In January 2002, we were lying in bed together. I had been dozing and Clive pulled the duvet—that’s all he did—and his arm gave a loud crack.
‘I think it’s broken,’ he said. ‘It’s OK if I just lie still.’
The ambulance came. At the hospital they said that the break above the elbow was a classic sign of bone cancer spreading out of control. He was in and out of hospital until April, bravely going to physiotherapy to get back what strength he could. Doing exercises as prescribed by the doctor, with his arm in a sling. I saw it all. I went everywhere with him.
The physiotherapists were astonished he could joke. He used to say, ‘Oh, I have everything going for me. My teeth are going, my hair’s going, my eyes are going…’
On 10 April, his birthday, he ate his cake, or a bit of it. I gave him a little torch you could hold in the palm of your hand. He gave it back, saying, ‘Please keep this for me.’
From soon after his birthday he was in hospital until towards the very end.
Peter Hutchinson of PHD Designs, who make the finest lightweight down clothing on earth, sent Clive a down vest weighing only 250 grams which sat on his fragile bones, giving him so much comfort.
After the arm, his hip broke. Just as they were hoping to get him walking again, the tumours in his spine caused his legs to become paralysed.
He bore it all, as everyone does, and still tried to have a laugh. When his friend Chester visited, asking if there was anything Clive needed, he replied, ‘Yes, I need a fast car.’
Ward 10 Palliative and Cancer Care Ward, in our local Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest, is a place I will never forget, of endless empathy and caring, of a lightness and kindness beyond words. Anne Barnes, a gifted and blessed cancer specialist, always wore not medical gear but bright clothes to cheer her patients up. When Clive and others were transferred to her ward she often dropped dark hints about the latest sexual orgies and parties in Ward 10 at 2am. Of course these didn’t ever happen but the thought brought a smile to her patients’ faces and may have hidden their terrible pain better than the morphine.
The most dedicated nurses I have ever known let me sleep in my sleeping bag for long months, or even on the edge of Clive’s bed, just holding him. One night I awoke and found Clive looking at me. He smiled and said, ‘You had such a good sleep.’ There was a look of pride and love in his eyes I can’t express. The nurses patiently taught me how to do everything for Clive such as cleaning and washing him. It was a privilege for me to do it: I would have done anything for him.
Their policy was to enable patients to come home for the final days if the patient wished for it. I shall never forget how caringly they went about it. They even had a special hospital bed brought to our home, and round-the-clock nursing care.
Clive was so happy to see the honeysuckle he had planted and smiled at the sight of the sparrows, which he always called his ‘feathered hooligans’, feasting on fat balls outside the bedroom window. I had actually been training them up with extra food before he came home so they could put on a gala show. A day later, 12 June 2002, he was gone.
After all the pain and suffering, I awoke beside him feeling that a light had come on. He had been given all his strength and spirit back and was moving on.
When the kind lady doctor had been and the wonderful young Paul Sartori nurse (like our local Macmillan’s nurses) had retired next door after hugging me, I just held Clive close to me all through the night. I didn’t know what else to do. I held him like you might hold onto someone in a desert.
He was off on such a long journey; he might be lonely for a little while. I was on a journey too. Beginning a journey and ending a journey. I was heartbroken, and held him and looked at him all those hours; and then I knew you can only keep hold of beauty by letting it go.
He had won his battle right to the very end. You don’t win a battle because of how it turns out. You win by the way you face it. He was up among the pirates. He was happy.
Even during this desperate fight Clive had never lost his sense of fun. My monument to him shouldn’t be sorrowful, grieving or gloomy. I had to do something for Clive that would be crazy and huge. I could run some marathons for cancer awareness, I thought.
I had been looking at the map of the world on my wall, wondering if I could afford overseas marathons, when something took hold of me by the scuff of the neck; a thought broke through my grief and seized every part of my being.
I would run around the world instead.
Tenby, August 2002
I was born in Davos, Switzerland, where my mother was in a clinic suffering from tuberculosis, while my father was away serving in the British Army. When I was two days old the doctors put an advertisement in the local paper for a foster mother, as my mother couldn’t look after me. There were 45 applicants as I learned many years later. My mother chose the local postman’s wife, who was good to me. To strengthen my lungs, my foster mother took me for long walks, which ended up in the grounds of the TB clinic so my mother could look at me out of her window, because her infection made it impossible for her to have physical contact with me. I have shadowy memories of the faces of my mother and foster mother and the black squirrels eating nuts off my hands. My foster mother always dressed me beautifully and had photos of me taken for my poor mother to have around her bedside later.
I never knew my mother, but I shall always feel such huge love and gratitude to her for having the courage to give birth to me when she was so ill, and also for her greater courage in having to face giving me away. I feel I owe my life to many exceptional, caring and loving people.
When I was two my mother sadly died and my Anglo-Irish grandmother, who was called Carlie, came to collect me to live with her in Country Limerick, Ireland. She gave me a rabbit called Peter, and took me away. She broke the link. My last memory of my foster mother was of a lady with hair in a brown bun crying as she ran beside the train taking me away. From then on Carlie cared for me even though she became crippled with osteoarthritis.
In 1951 when I was five my father, a tall charismatic army officer with kind eyes, married a marvellous Swiss French lady—Marianne. Carlie was bedridden by this time, but my father felt that I was happy with her and it would be unsettling to move me, so we kind of looked after each other. In those long ago days in Ireland,