I hope this is not over the top! But these are things I just have to share. I met David when I was young and so I always felt like a junior whenever we met.
I knew David from when I was a boy, probably when I was 12-13 yrs (early 1970s). He was our family vet . My father got me interested in orchids, through visits to Kent, and at some stage I got a camera (a Zenith, with extension tubes and hand-held meter!) and arranged to meet David. He started telling me where to find orchids in Sussex, giving me photographic tips; and afterwards I would report back (with my slides, that he would duly load into the cassette of his projector and go through them carefully). But mostly he talked and I listened (I can remember later on when he was just developing the ideas for his book on berries, when he laid all his notes out on the study floor: it was so exciting just to be with him. I wanted to write books too!). I was in awe of him, his knowledge and his exuberance: I still was when I last saw him, just before my retirement. How could anyone keep up with him……? I always felt so naïve when I was with him, but I just wanted to hear more!
When I decided to quit my engineering degree and study botany instead, I am sure that my interactions with David must have played a part. I wanted to be more like him – or Attenborough, or Bellamy - than to be designing where metal rods should go in concrete columns making up a car park!
Every holiday during my studies I would meet up with him (as soon as I get inside our front door, my mum would say “are you going to see Mr Lang? When are you going to ring him?”) and be enthralled about his trips, the characters he knew and met, and his future plans. He was always interested in me and my developing career: I would report on the plants I had found in Wales and he tried to help me out with the marsh orchid complexes I had been seeing there – and going through my photos of them, one by one on the projector, as he also did after my expeditions to Iceland. While doing my PhD in Canada, he had me comparing their Spiranthes romanzoffiana with his observations in Ardnamurchan and I would moan to him about how North Americans lumped all their small green/white orchids into one genus. These visits to him continued when I came back from my PhD in Canada and then on my infrequent visits to Lewes after I emigrated to Australia. I loved to hear his stories about his Himalayan trips, his imitations of the Indian officials that he had to deal with, the people with broken limbs that he had to fix as the group’s “doctor”. When I started publishing my own (academic) books, his tales of interactions with his publishers became all the more real (it was such a thrill to deliver a copy of my book of the weeds of Western Australia to David, though he was in hospital coming to terms with hysteria - and he had to tell me in GREAT detail what the illness was all about, as David would). He would always treat me as if I was as knowledgeable as him, when in fact even late into my career I always felt ignorant in his presence. I never felt uncomfortable, but I was still overawed by being with him: not just about natural history, or the details of particular species in his rock garden, or how his varieties of strawberries were doing this year, but music as well (he always wanted to tell me what his choir was doing: I had married an alto and he wanted to tell me everything in great detail, even though my knowledge was miniscule). I would just nod, listen, eat his cake (there was also a cake if he knew you were coming!) or drink a mouthful of the pint of Harveys I was drinking with him in the Royal Oak and try not to appear stupid.
Despite our shared interests, I never once went into the field with him! What a missed opportunity! I don’t know why: probably because I was always passing through, or perhaps because I was scared of showing my ignorance over what we would see.
David really influenced my outlook on life and I am so pleased to have known him. I will miss his annual reports on his activities (which usually reached us in September with our Christmas card – we think he was under the impression that mail still went by sea!). And there will be no new book to hear about, no upcoming expedition.
Roger Cousens
