Family meal nearly killed me, says Charlotte Gordon Cumming

[okarol]

Family meal nearly killed me, says Charlotte Gordon Cumming

Susan Swarbrick

17 Jan 2011

One summer day she sat down with her family for a lunch of wild mushrooms.

But a simple mistake was to cost her dear.

Charlotte Gordon Cumming tells the full story of her poisoning and her recovery for the first time.

Charlotte Gordon Cumming can remember with pinprick clarity the moment she realised she might die. There was nothing verbalised. No dramatic speech or grand gesture. Lying quietly on a hospital trolley as pain coursed through her body, the singer-songwriter watched as her doctors, huddled around a computer in a curtained cubicle just a few feet away, turned slowly in unison to look at her, before silently returning their collective gaze to the words displayed ominously on the screen: Cortinarius speciosissimus – deadly poisonous mushroom.

The previous day had begun with no inkling of how fate was going to turn her world upside down. It was a crisp August morning at Altyre, the Cumming family estate near Forres in Moray. Gordon Cumming, her novelist husband Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, and their son Finlay, now eight, were spending time with her brother Sir Alastair, his wife Lady Louisa and their three children.

It should have been a treat: a woodland crop of wild ceps, or Boletus edulis, handpicked on the 13,000-acre estate. The nut-brown fungi were collected in a basket then fried with butter and parsley for lunch. But a crucial mistake had been made. They were not ceps but the similar looking Cortinarius speciosissimus, a species of mushroom which goes by the sinister moniker of deadly webcap.

When recounting the story two years on, Gordon Cumming, 53, is careful not to apportion any blame. “They were picked for lunch on the Saturday,” she begins deliberately. “We all sat down to eat at Altyre. The children refused them, thank God. Alastair and Nick ate quite a large amount, Louelly [Lady Louisa] and I had literally only mouthfuls. I had broken my ankle the previous day and was in a lot of pain. I had been playing football with the children and put my foot into a rabbit hole. I think that’s what stopped me eating any more than I did. Sadly the boys [her husband and brother] had a huge amount.

“Within 16 hours I was in trouble. Being of slight build, the poison just ravaged me. After a certain amount of time I said: ‘I can’t deal with this on my own, I need help.’ I knew it was more than a tummy bug or food poisoning as we had first thought. I was taken to A&E [at Dr Gray’s Hospital] in Elgin and we took the mushrooms with us because, by then, we had an inkling it might be something to do with that.

“I was extremely ill and they put me on a drip as the doctor looked up the mushrooms on the computer. I was lying on this bench and they [the medical staff] were about four feet away in a cubicle on the computer. I remember all of a sudden they turned at once and looked at me, then looked back at the computer screen. I knew in that moment it was potentially fatal.”

By then her husband, brother and sister-in-law had also taken seriously ill and, like Gordon Cumming, were experiencing violent sickness and diarrhoea. As their conditions collectively deteriorated Dr Gray’s Hospital called Aberdeen Royal Infirmary for advice. “The hospital in Aberdeen said: ‘Just get them all here as quickly as possible,’” Gordon Cumming recalls. “We went by road, screaming sirens, and were so ill by that point that we were throwing up every 20 minutes.”

As the lethal toxins attacked their bodies, their renal systems went into failure and all four were prepped for emergency kidney dialysis. Within hours, news of the family’s plight was making headlines around the world as each began a precarious fight for life.

Often when people talk about battling through their darkest hour there are marked gaps in their memories. Those moments of respite when the body and brain shut out the pain and they remember only blackness. Surprisingly, given how ill she was, Gordon Cumming has vivid memories of that time. “It’s pretty crystal clear,” she says. Sitting opposite me in a Glasgow hotel, she pauses, looking down at her hands folded neatly in her lap. It’s the first time she has spoken publicly about the events of that August day in 2008 and it’s clearly affecting her.

“There was a moment I had when I was allowed out of bed for the first time,” she continues. “I walked around the hospital [in Aberdeen] and came across an old piano under a stairwell. I sat at it and was consumed by emotion. I put my hands on the keys and burst into tears. It was a defining moment. I knew I had to fight to get better because if I didn’t I wouldn’t sit at a piano again, never mind write a song. I went back upstairs to the ward and told myself: ‘I have to fight now.’

“That’s what I have been doing every day since. It is like a fight for me.” She pauses again, before switching track. “We do need transplants. All four of us. I’m not on the [organ donor] waiting list but my brother and Nick are [as their kidney damage is more severe]. We all have people who have offered us live kidneys. In 2011 I’m praying we will all, hopefully, be in a position where we can have transplants.”

Her own damaged kidneys won’t be removed; instead, a piggyback surgical technique will be used to attach a donor organ. “They attach them to your old kidney, nothing comes out. There is a guy in Aberdeen who had seven kidneys,” she says. In the meantime Gordon Cumming requires dialysis for five hours three times a week, without which her kidneys would fail and she would die.

Yet for all she has endured – and continues to endure – she is free of any sense of victimhood. Rather, Gordon Cumming has channelled the rawness of her experiences of the past two years into an album, The Brave Songs, to accompany her husband’s latest novel, The Brave. It’s a bold record filled with spine-tingling melodies and powerful, provocative tracks such as the potently titled Body Bags and Psychotic. Gordon Cumming’s voice has a mesmerising, haunting quality that lends added poignancy to her emotive lyrics.

Working on the album, she says, has inspired her journey of recovery. “The warrior came out in me,” she says. “I had this enormous sense of physical and emotional exhaustion, but when I got to the studio I had to rise up and do the work. What was extraordinary was that the music healed me. I didn’t feel sick at all in the studio. When I was working I never for one moment thought I was ill.

“It reminded me of when I worked with a boy with Tourette’s. Before we would start he had all the tics, shouts and wording, but the moment we started on the piano it was all gone. He would sing like an angel.”

She collaborated on The Brave Songs with Paul Buchanan, the frontman of The Blue Nile, someone she has long admired and respected. “He’s a fantastic guy to work with, very chilled but a craftsman, a real musician,” she says. “I’ve worked with some wonderful people in my life but to work with Paul was a gift. We clicked – and I think that shows in the music because the diversity we came up with on the four songs we wrote together is wonderful.

“Paul just went to the piano, I sat next to him and we worked like that for three days. I have revered The Blue Nile for many years so it was an honour to work with him. Immediately we were very relaxed and I knew it would work, although the first day I was slightly in awe.”

The content of the album, she admits, turned out differently than perhaps it would have had she and her family not suffered the poisoning. “I haven’t held back,” she says. “I didn’t want to cut any corners and some of the lyrics on what I call my ‘war songs’ are great. They are like classic protest songs. People have remarked and said: ‘You are quite brave to write songs like that.’ The track Psychotic is definitely a stab at President [George W] Bush. I was angry about the Iraq war and Nick’s book enabled me to voice an opinion through the songs.”

Gordon Cumming is a skilled raconteur whose conversations are peppered with flashes of endearing eccentricity. Dressed in a green twin set, maroon cords and brown snow boots, she apologies for wearing sunglasses indoors, dry eyes being one of many side effects of renal failure. Perusing the menu for afternoon tea brings its own challenges as she is on a special renal diet (“Things with high potassium and high phosphate I have to be extremely careful with,” she explains).

Yet while her poisoning has shaped and altered her life irrevocably, Gordon Cumming is determined that the events of August 2008 won’t define her.

She has never been one to shy away from the road less travelled. A rebellious teenager, at 18 she ran away from boarding school in Italy and made her way to London. There she turned her hand to poetry until a record producer friend convinced her to try writing lyrics for songs.

Gordon Cumming soon found she was a natural and, while working in a series of part-time jobs – including selling oriental carpets – to help pay the bills, she devoted every spare moment to pursuing her newly discovered vocation. She spent time in New York, performing in the clubs of Manhattan, and later co-wrote Soul Sound, a hit for the Sugababes which was nominated for Best European Single at the MTV Awards 2001. Gordon Cumming released her own album Mindwalking, a fusion of Celtic melodies and African rhythms in 2006.

She met novelist Evans in 1997 and the couple married seven years later – the second marriage for both. They have a son, Finlay, in whom Gordon Cumming recognises glimmers of her own maverick streak. “He is like me in that way and drives Nick bonkers sometimes,” she says, chuckling. “Finlay can wind Nick up beautifully. He thinks we are the un-coolest parents in school, which miffs Nick a little – and makes me roar with laughter.

“He is a strong character, an Aquarian like me, so he does have that slightly doolally, feet-off-the-ground personality. I’m not sure how his creative talents will come out but he’s obsessed with sport at the moment – and I was too as a child. We go out and play cricket or rugby with Finlay whenever we feel well enough.”

It was on a sporting theme that she and Evans, 60, were brought together. “We met on a tennis court in Notting Hill. Was it love at first sight? No, I arrived in a bad mood and had to play in a men’s three as their fourth hadn’t turned up,” says Gordon Cumming. “I did play quite good tennis and could keep up with the men. I was partnered with Nick. All I can remember is slamming the ball back and forward. I was invited back and that’s when I took a bit more notice [of him]. I remember giving Nick some of the Scottish music I had written and I think he fell in love with that as much as me. There was a couple of songs he would just play and play. We just connected.”

Gordon Cumming’s Scottish roots remain a hugely important grounding force. Although these days based in “a medieval monks’ dwelling” in Devon, she grew up on the Altyre Estate, her family’s ancestral home near Forres, Moray. Passed down through the generations since the 12th century, the estate’s current laird is her elder brother Sir Alastair, who is also the chief of Clan Cumming. The family owned Gordonstoun in Aberdeen before it became a school.

When we meet in Glasgow, Gordon Cumming is fresh off the train from Inverness. “Spending the past week in Scotland, I feel so bound to it. I think about moving back here all the time,” she admits. “I was talking to my brother only a couple of days ago about perhaps building something contemporary, an eco house at Altyre that I could use. It would be part of the estate but somewhere I could write and work. Altyre is a jewel in a crown, it’s the most beautiful little estate and when I’m there – even though I almost died there – it fills me with power somehow.”

Get Gordon Cumming started on genealogy and she could talk for hours. “My family – the Comyns – came over with William the First and made their home in the highlands in the 1100s,” she says, her face lighting up. “They have had lands there ever since. The Comyn clan ran Scotland between 1300 and 1400s. One of my ancestors, John Comyn – the Red Comyn – was killed by Robert the Bruce in 1306. The name changed from Comyn to Cumming in pre-Victorian times.

“As I started to get a bit better from my poisoning I wanted to do some family history for my website and went to the archives in Edinburgh. I found a family tree which dated back to 567AD and made reference to the White Comyn, who was a bishop, an ecclesiastical man, who looked after part of the Western Isles. I’m so embroiled in my clan now. They were a raucous, wild and scary bunch but absolutely fascinating.”

Inevitably the conversation comes back to her health. “I have good days and bad days. It’s come to a plateau. I don’t feel well but I feel good enough. I have reason to get up in the morning,” she says.

“It’s difficult because I have dialysis three days a week so life has to be really planned, there’s no spontaneity, which is a word I would have leaped upon before. The poison was literally: stop. It’s not for wimps – but I’m learning from it.”

Gordon Cumming smiles as she reflects on the side effects of the early drugs she took to manage her condition. “When I was on steroids I looked Tibetan with a moon face and a body like J.Lo,” she says. “I was happy as a skylark walking down the corridors of the hospital in Aberdeen in my NHS pyjamas and a bum like J.Lo. It was amazing the affect but, at the same time, I was extremely ill. There were all other kinds of strange side effects too that I won’t go into.”

Which is why, in the summer of 2009 – almost a year after the poisoning – Gordon Cumming decided to undertake radical measures. “I felt I was dying on all the NHS drugs and I wanted to detox off them,” she says. “I found these people in California and flew out there to see them for three weeks to detox and go homeopathic. It worked, I came off all my drugs. I think it’s what people call a rebirth here: where you detox the body, mind and spiritual being. It’s a three-part whammy.

“I started again. That was late summer 2009 and I have stayed off the NHS drugs since. I now work with people in London you would probably call alternative healers. I do a lot of complementary medicine and some people tell me I look better now than before I was poisoned. I feel better, clean inside. Even though I’m on dialysis, I feel cleaner.”

Her objective now is to concentrate on using her music to heal. Gordon Cumming plans to revisit an album she started writing in 1996 while living in a crofter’s cottage in the Borders (“It includes two songs I wrote about Mary, Queen of Scots, which are big, powerful landscape songs and I want to go back to them and release them”) and has been commissioned by Mercedes-Benz to provide music for their forthcoming iPad app.

She smiles softly. “I hope to see better health in 2011 for all of us – my brother, Nick, Louelly and myself. I think if I can continue to do my songwriting – and it can take care of me – then I’m going to have a long, happy and healthy life. Getting ill, surviving and sitting here today is a bloody miracle. I just smile most days.”

The Brave Songs by Charlotte Gordon Cumming is out now on Metamorphosis Records. Visit www.thebravesongs.com and www.charlottegordoncumming.com.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/life-style/real-lives/family-meal-nearly-killed-me-says-charlotte-gordon-cumming-1.1080354