Sheburn

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.

The largest famine in human history was a timetable of a government improving on nature, and every line of it was announced as progress. 1958, January: Mao issues eight rules for farming. Two of them come from the Soviet biologist Lysenko, who taught that plants of one species do not compete, so seedlings can be sown ten times closer. Nobody in the room has farmed. 1958, spring: The Four Pests campaign. Every sparrow in China is drummed out of the sky, close to two billion birds, and the insects that fed their chicks are left alone with the wheat. 1958, spring: Deep ploughing is ordered. A metre down, in places three. A thousand years of topsoil is buried under subsoil that will not grow a weed. 1958, summer: Close planting. Seedlings packed so tight the lower leaves rot in the dark, and the fields are ventilated with electric fans and lit at night with lamps. 1958, August: Half a billion peasants are moved into communes. The private plot, the family pig and the family goat are taken into common ownership, and the pigs start dying first. 1958, autumn: Backyard furnaces. Ninety million peasants are pulled off the fields at harvest to melt their pots and tools into worthless iron, and the forests come down to fire them. 1958, winter: With the real harvest rotting unpicked in the fields, the provinces report the biggest crop in history to Beijing, 375 million tonnes, nearly double the truth. 1959: The grain quota is set on the fiction. The state takes its share of a harvest that does not exist, and ships 4 million tonnes abroad to pay for machinery. 1959, summer: The locusts arrive, then the borers, on fields with no sparrows. The counties that lost the most birds lose the most grain. 1959, July: Marshal Peng Dehuai tells Mao the countryside is starving. He is purged, and every official in China learns what honesty costs. 1960: The pig herd has halved. The oxen are eaten. In Anhui and Sichuan whole villages have nobody left strong enough to bury the dead. 1960: Beijing quietly buys a quarter of a million sparrows from Moscow, in crates, in hard currency. 1962, January: Liu Shaoqi stands up in front of seven thousand officials and calls the disaster three parts nature and seven parts man. 1962: The private plots are handed back. The family pig returns. The famine ends within the year. Three years of ploughing, planting, slaughtering and drumming against nature, and the dead run from fifteen million at the lowest count to forty-five million at the highest, in a country at peace, with a generation behind them never born. Every animal on that timeline was removed as a cost. The sparrow, the pig, the goat, the ox. The grain was the plan, and the grain was never enough. The famine ended on the day a family was allowed to keep a pig again.

The pioneer cemeteries of Iowa stand two and three feet above the fields around them, with a fence round each one, and the step up from the corn to the graves is the topsoil that has left the state since the men in the graves broke the prairie. Iowa was the finest soil on the continent. Ten thousand years of tallgrass prairie, with roots fifteen feet deep, had built a black loam over a foot thick across the whole state, so rich the settlers of the 1850s said you could not kill it. They ploughed it in a generation. The grass went under, the corn went in, and every spring since then the bare field has met the Iowa rain with nothing holding it, and the soil has gone down the gullies into the creeks and the creeks into the Mississippi, which has carried it to Louisiana, where it is the Gulf's problem. The cemeteries were the one piece of each township never ploughed. The prairie grass survived inside the fence, the roots held, and the ground inside stayed where it was while the ground outside went south. So the graveyards rose, or seem to have, as the fields fell around them, and a man can stand at the fence and measure with his eye what a century and a half of corn has cost: half the topsoil of Iowa, by the state's own estimate, more than a foot in places, from the most fertile soil in the world, to grow a crop that is mostly fed to pigs or turned into fuel. The fields are still losing it at ten tonnes an acre a year in the worst years, five times faster than it forms, and the farmer makes up the difference out of a bag. For ten thousand years the bison grazed that grass and the roots held the state together. The men who ploughed it are the only part of Iowa still standing at the height they knew.