Wars never get easier. Since Georgia, I have had flashbacks of an elderly woman crying her eyes out after being driven from her village by Russian bombs. When I was younger I used to bring real black dogs home with me, but not so much nowadays. My three-stage prescription for recovery from war journalism is as follows. First, get extremely drunk. Get very, very drunk and you can delete or corrupt entire files of short-term memory. Second, find your woman and make love. A close correspondent friend says he has to do this with his wife the second he arrives back home from an assignment, before he’s even sat down for a cup of tea. Finally, there is what I call the Horse Cure. The best way to administer this medicine is to own a farm. If you do not possess one, build a shed or a tree house. But in general a Horse Cure’s vital ingredients include hard labour, the outdoors and the company of animals rather than people.
My father, Brian Hartley, invented the Horse Cure in 1955 for a friend of his called Laurie Hobson. They had served together in the Aden Protectorates for years. The work of a colonial officer among warring tribes was tough. Laurie was a fine Arabist, but vulnerable. The stress — perhaps a form of what the newspapers today call PTSD — got to him and he threatened to throw himself off a roof. My father coaxed him down, but soon afterwards my parents married, Dad retired and they settled on a cattle ranch in west Kilimanjaro, Tanganyika.
While still building the first huts of the farmstead a string of telegrams arrived, saying Laurie had suffered a relapse in Aden. Uninvited, his colleagues sent him to the ranch.
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