Water
BY BERNARD FERGUSSON HAT I know about fluoridation could conveniently be written on a pin's head and still leave space over for advertising. But there is no doubt that we take the blessing of water much too much for granted in this well- endowed country. Most of us accept it just as it comes out of the tap (Anglice), the spigot (Scottice) or the faucet (American tourists). Fifteen million inhabitants of London and Greater London know water only as the flat, insipid stuff provided by the Metropolitan Water Board. Innocuous and healthy though. it doubtless is, it is as devoid of character as the Cromwell Road. I am presently enjoying five days' leave at home; and the drinking water which comes down off Beneraird Hill is not a negative fluid but a positive delight, whether drunk neat or suitably diluted.
Well-to-do desert Arabs still offer a choice of waters. They are as much connoisseurs as if the contents of the various skins were château-bottled. I have been privileged to drink from some famous wells, notably Jacob's Well near Nablus. where Our Lord spoke with the Samaritan woman. (This. incidentally, is the best authenticated Holy Place in Palestine : for it was known as Jacob's Well long before the time of Christ. as well as ever since.) Many times I have watched the bucket go spinning down into its depths to bring up a gallon of that singularly sweet water, and drunk some of it with my sand- wiches. Unhappily the well at the gate of Bethlehem for whidi David craved so much is no longer to be identified.
I have drunk from both Abana and Pharpar; I have swum in Pharpar, and had many baths, through the kindly medi1 of plumbers' pipes, in the waters of Abana. At neitherwere there medical officers to intervene. There is a Millbank o plex about water. MOs used to have, and perhaps still have.
they a set of toys rather like a child's conjuring set, which e) clli 1 called in reverent tones a `Horiocks Box.' In this day and age. a new quack cult has grown up around some mysterious Box: in pre-war days 'the Box' was the Horrocks Box and none other. Medical officers would return white about the gills front consulting it; there was a divisional manceuvre before the 1,‘ ai. when we were in camp near a large borough in Sussex, and the doctors pronounced the municipal water supply as unlit for human consumption. They chlorinated it until it Ns as almost as solid as the Dead Sea, and twice as undrinkable.
Chesterton's Noah did not care where the water went so long as it did not get into the wine. Neil Munro was more specific: 'It's a fine thing, a drap waiter,' said Para Handy, gasping.
'No' a worse thing you could drink,' said Hurricane Jack. It rots your boots; what'll it no' do on your inside? Wattcr's fine for sailin' on—there's nothing better—but it's no drink for sailors.' • I have' twice been two full days without water, and even now they haunt me to look back on. You lose your judgement: you can think of nothing else; you are haunted by the memories of all the times in your life when you could have had another draught and didn't. I will not write here of what I have seen happen to men deprived of water. The want of it hit Indians and Gurkhas and Burma tribesmen even harder than it hit the British; they are accustomed to drinking more often and more deeply than we do. But I do remember once suffering acutely, at GHQ in Cairo, from what, if 1 had been in the desert as I should have been, would have been called desert sores. The specialist whom I was finally forced to consult told me to abstain from things tinned and from salt; I grew worse and worse until I was uprooted from my office chair and sent into the garrison of Tobruk. There I lived on bully beef and brackish water, and was whole within a week.
All water is potable when boiled, though not necessarily palatable. Men can drink water which even mules refuse. Slimy green water may still save life; and you can drink it when either boiled or exorcised with sterilising tablets. A friend of mine once caught the eye of a Gurkha rifleman taking a pull at his water-bottle; the Gurkha looked immediately guilty, and swallowed a handful of sterilising tablets post hoc: so far as I know, he survived both the water and the surfeit of tablets, though it is horrible to contemplate what must have gone on inside him. It may well be that in his infancy, brought up to sturdy manhood in the hills of Nepal far away from Horrocks Boxes, he had acquired or inherited an immunity far more potent that any tablets might confer. Nobody who has ever seen men sick in hospital from the effects of drinking bad water would ever wholly mock the precautions of the It will do no- harm to repeat that we in this country do not realise how well off we are in the matter of water. I still haye on my conscience one afternoon when, my company having newly arrived in India, we rested under the trees by a village well near Ahmednagar, and helped ourselves freely to water, despite the protests of the villagers that the contents of the well must last them until the monsoon. We could not conceive from our upbringing that water in such a country must be hus- banded. We had not then had to dig for water, and to wait a day until it had bubbled up in the hole.
The right to water is the first liberty of modern man, as it was of Abraham. The feud between the fluoridationists and the anti-fluoridationists leaves me as cold as that between the Bigendians and the Littleendians in Gulliver's Travels, pro- vided always that the process does not make our water taste still more of the tap (or spigot, or faucet). But I have a warm sympathy for the townsfolk of Leuchars in Fife, who are at this moment fighting a losing battle for the right to use the wells which they used in the days of the great Alexander Henderson (their minister in the time of Montrose) and before, in preference to the county supply. Of the rights and wrongs of this, again, I have no knowledge. I merely protest that in these drab days of uniformity, water from the hill still tastes better than water from the county. It was not the Bethlehem RDC supply that David craved. Bencraird shall supply the days of my retirement direct, and not through the chemical censorship of a Horrocks Box.
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