Did she not worry I ask about the effects on her children? She tells me about how angry
Did she not worry, I ask, about the effects on her children? She tells me about how angry she was when her son James was sent a Christmas present by his father, a Meccano motor which was ripped open, she presumes by Special Branch, before it was delivered. "That was very hard," says Elizabeth, "because there were drug dealers all over Bristol. When our children, for the first time ever, saw one of the boys who had been living with us tak-en away in an ambulance, they were very upset, and I said, 'That's it.' "So they gave up the hostel and moved to Devon, back to environmental campaigning. Twenty-two years later, they still seem devot-ed to one another.Shortly after their marriage, they moved with her children to Bristol, to run a hostel for ex-heroin addicts.
He had heard of her work through a neighbour, and arrived at Elizabeth's house offering to help. "He came down with a basket of strawberries," she says, "and did lots of useful things like chopping wood." Elizabeth and Bill ended up falling in love, and married in 1973. And in doing so, she met her present husband, Bill Sigmund, who is 20 years her junior. "So two of the most intellectually important people in my life ended their lives," she says (and there are tears in her eyes). "It gave me the feeling that if you can save people's lives, you have got to try."She turned her home into a refuge for a succession of young people, "some of whom were so sweet".
She quickly became involved with her third partner, a potter, and bore him two more daughters in rapid succession, only to see this relationship founder as well. It was then - perhaps not coincidentally - that her interest in another good cause was ignited: again, by a BBC programme, this time on the death of a young heroin addict. "Before she took the overdose, she kept saying, 'If only I had somewhere to go.' And I was on my own with the children, and we had a couple of spare rooms..." It is tempting to speculate as to why she felt compelled to offer to share her home with troubled teenagers: being thown out of her grandmother's home at 16, maybe; or feeling a keen sense of her own adult loneliness? She had also suffered enormous grief when two of her friends had, separately, killed themselves: first the poet Sylvia Plath, whom she met when they were neighbours in the West Country (Plath's novel, The Bell Jar, is dedicated to Elizabeth and her second husband, David Compton); and secondly the television director, James Mossman. But her most zealous campaigning now revolves around sheep-dips. It is, as you might expect, an uphill struggle.BEFORE Mrs Sigmund came to sheep-dips, however, there were some other matters to be sorted out in her life In 1968, her second marriage came to a messy end. She notes, sternly, that Britain has signed but not ratified a convention banning chemical weapons; though the nerve gas plant at Nancekuke was eventually closed in 1976.These days, she still keeps a close eye on stories concerning chemical and biological weapons (including their alleged presence in the former Yugoslavia); she has also provided advice to Army veterans about "Gulf war syndrome", and raised money for Kurdish victims of Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks.
"Those poor people died, having the virus tested out on them. The inhumanity involved is so incredible."Despite such stories, Sigmund feels the campaign against chemical and biological warfare achieved a measure of success. In 1972, President Nixon signed the UN biological weapons convention banning all research and stockpiling - "the only good thing he ever did," says Sigmund - and Britain followed suit. "The fact is that they were infected with brain fever, and two of them died of encephalitis. How those doctors brought themselves to do such a thing, I still can't imagine." She points out that, in 1967, Kyasanur Forest disease was listed at Fort Detrick (the US equivalent of Porton Down) as a potential germ warfare weapon, with a 28 per cent mortality rate. The stated object was to produce remission in the patients by decreasing the number of white corpuscles in their blood (leukaemia increases the number of white blood cells), but Sig-mund was - and is - appalled by the very idea.
The exercise was conducted by a consultant neurologist and a professor of haematology at the hospital, in collaboration with the director of microbiological research at Porton Down, and the establishment's senior scientific officer. After 10 years of persistence, one of the men was awarded a small pension, and a back payment of pounds 2,000; the other became insane and received nothing.Sigmund was also active in campaigning against the biological wea-pons research being carried out at Porton Down. One of the experimen-ts that she brought to light - and which has remained strangely unpublicised, despite her best efforts - involved terminally ill leukaemia and cancer patients at a London teaching hospital, who in 1966 were infected, with their consent, with two rare viruses, Kyasanur Forest disease and Langat virus. They said, 'Our wives don't even know this, you're the first person we've told. We were manufacturing sarin - nerve gas.' " The men told Sigmund that they had been ill since working at Nancekuke, with muscle spasms, loss of consciousness, ex-haustion and deteriorating eyesight.Determined to see justice done - that is, for the Ministry of Defence to admit that a nerve gas leak had caused the men's illness, and to pay them compensation - Sigmund set about ringing everyone she could think of: MPs, lawyers, experts in toxicology, consultant neurologists.