Alan Rayner

A Tribute to My Father, Ronald William Rayner, 20/8/1914 - 26/10/2002
  For the Occasion of His Funeral Service, 6/11/2002

And so, at last, I have to join with my sister, Joy, to pay tribute to a remarkable man and a remarkable life. Remarkable in so many ways, and yet not easy, not painless, not free from contradiction or intransigence, and not always being allowed or allowing himself to flower to full potential.

Remarkable in his dogged survival against the odds. He had his first stroke in 1958, aged 43, which paralysed his left side and saw him flown back to Britain from Kenya for emergency treatment. Another stroke a couple of years later left him with double vision. In 1967, almost exactly 35 years ago to the day, he had a severe heart attack, leading to his early retirement from his work as a plant pathologist at the Commonwealth Mycological Institute in Kew, London. None of the other cardiac patients admitted to St Richards Hospital in the same week survived. Two years ago he fell out of bed, lying immobile for days until his wife managed to summon help, only to pass away herself a few days later. For many years, he has warded off prostate cancer, succumbing only in these last few months.

Remarkable in the incisiveness and inventiveness of his scientific mind. I have met many supposedly great scientists, Nobel Prize Winners, Fellows of the Royal Society and the like, but none, for me, have outshone him. But he wasn’t so good at arrogant self-promotion, and his illnesses, combined with his extreme perfectionism, caution and vulnerability, impeded his advancement.

Remarkable in his passion for natural history, above all the study of larger fungi. A passion whose slow-burning fuse he lit in me, not through compulsion but quiet, persistent inspiration. My most idyllic times with him were when, as a teenager, I used to go out searching for and identifying birds, plants and fungi with him, he using his extensive knowledge and analytical powers, I my naïve intuition. Together, we seemed to do quite well, adding over twenty species of Russula to the British list in a few years.

Remarkable in his personal adventurousness and courage, notwithstanding his scientific caution. Born of a 72-year-old father who he lost when seven years old, and a mother who he lost as a teenager he nonetheless got himself to Kings College, Cambridge and toured Europe on a motorcycle he typically bought and then sold for 5. He became conversant in 14 languages and tried to pioneer Esperanto as a way of bringing people together. He studied in Trinidad before moving to Kenya to work on coffee diseases. He went on safari, mended his broken down car surrounded by lions, suffered altitude sickness trying to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and, with my mother, received a Queen’s Award for Gallantry for saving an African boy from drowning in shark-infested waters near Mombasa. He ate all manner of fungi, much surer in his infallible identification skills than I have ever been in mine.

Remarkable, perhaps most of all, in his enduring love for my mother, his wife, Mervyn, in a marriage that followed three broken engagements and a wartime voyage by my mother on a TNT-loaded ship pursued by submarines from England to South Africa. A marriage that lasted almost sixty years until my mother’s death, 2 years ago, leaving him desolate but still determined to ‘take care of himself’. A partnership of his pure, detached reason with her equally pure, feeling intuition. A partnership not without its frailities, stormy tensions and volcanic outbursts, not to mention troublesome progeny, but strong both in spite of and because of all that. A partnership that found its haven in a common passion for the sea, in whose view they spent their life’s evening. A partnership now to be re-united.

A few weeks ago I wrote a poem, ostensibly about human evolution, but which seems now to be all about my father and mother. No doubt my father would have regarded it with that wry, small, comprehending/uncomprehending smile he reserved for some of his offsprings’ stranger creative efforts, before pointing out its shortcomings.

Here it is:

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My Hope: To help develop a more empathic, more fulfilling way of thinking/feeling about relationships amongst ourselves, other organisms and our living space, which acknowledges the fact that the boundaries we inhabit are not absolute and fixed but rather inform dynamic, interactive domains that allow a rich variety of patterns to emerge and transform our lives

A D M Rayner