Target for a Lifetime

At Oxford during the '30s, Geoffrey Leonard Cheshire tried to be a wild young man. Racing greyhounds, drinking, and burning up the countryside in a sports car were what mattered. His father was a law professor, but to young Cheshire the law held no charms; the war that was blowing up seemed to promise much more fun.

During World War II Leonard Cheshire was a first-class fighting man. In 1943, after completing a tour of operations in Halifax bombers, he became the youngest group captain (equals U.S. colonel) in the R.A.F. He had himself demoted to wing commander so that he could take over command of the famed 617 Squadron, nicknamed "The Dam-Busters." where he developed a new low-level technique of marking targets. After more than 100 missions, he won Britain's highest decoration, the Victoria Cross.

Assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, Cheshire worked on the problems of dropping the first atom bomb. He watched the bombing of Nagasaki from an observation plane ("I remember thinking that it was dropped a little off target, but of course that didn't matter").

"I Love You!" When the war was over, Hero Cheshire was unsettled about his role in the world. He wrote an article about how he felt, and got a packet of mail from others like himself. Then he called the letter writers together and proposed that they start a cooperative community in which everyone should do what he wanted. It was a dismal failure.

One night in 1948, Cheshire was sitting despondently in a large house in Hampshire, which he had bought for his community project, when a call came through from the local hospital. They had a man there, they said, dying of cancer, with no relatives, who had once been a member of Cheshire's settlement. The hospital needed his bed. Could they bring him over and let him die at Cheshire's?

"I'd hardly been inside a hospital before," recalls Cheshire. "I had to learn how to wash him, how to make his bed, as well as cook and do the housework and the garden. But somehow it worked. Arthur [the patient] thought he was alone in the world and nobody wanted him. Then he found that I wanted him. And it made all the difference to him."

Word got around. Before long, Cheshire's cousin's janitor's wife's bedridden grandmother joined them. "She was as deaf as a post, and I had to shout at her the whole time. She would talk to me about her cat and keep saying, 'I want to go home. I want to go home.' One afternoon she suddenly threw her arms around me and said, 'I love you.' I was a bit surprised, but I hugged her back and shouted, 'I love you.' "

Today Leonard Cheshire, 36, has some 60 patients in three settlements and feels that he has found his life's work. He has taken over a group of houses on an abandoned airfield in Cornwall, some for incurables and others for mild mental cases. His original house is turned over to younger people who are seriously ill and have no one to look after them. Funds for their care are provided by the National Health Service, local authorities, and what Cheshire is able to raise.

A Form of Substitution. Since he began his work, two important things have happened to Leonard Cheshire. Arthur, his first patient, was a Roman Catholic, and when it came time for him to die, Cheshire dug out a Catholic book: One Lord, One Faith, by Vernon Johnson, an Anglican minister's strongly partisan account of his conversion to Roman Catholicism. In the early morning hours after Arthur's death, Cheshire read it through and knew that at last he had found the authority he had been looking for. "After the war," he says, "I'd go to one Church of England priest, then to another. One would say one thing, and another would say another. But they would all say: 'I think this, but that's just my opinion.' And that didn't seem right to me."

Cheshire studied the Anglican answer to the book he had read, but he was not impressed. "The Church of England attitude really was: 'If the Church of Rome is good, why did it have the terrible Popes it had?' But despite its Popes, the Church of Rome has gone on. That seems to argue a certain durability about it." Cheshire became a Roman Catholic in 1948.

The other thing that happened to him was tuberculosis, perhaps contracted from one of his patients. For 22 months he has been in King Edward VII Sanatorium.

Last month Cheshire made a weekend trip to the shrine at Lourdes. The experience moved him deeply and gave him an idea. Working from his hospital bed, he promptly put it into practice. His plan: to organize a series of airborne pilgrimages to Lourdes by friends of invalids, on the invalids' behalf. Last week the first group of 25 spent a weekend at the shrine (cost: about $36 each).

"It's another form of substitution," Leonard Cheshire explains. "People who suffer, but who cannot go to Lourdes, can get their friends to go for them--to intervene for them. It is the same tenet as Christ on the cross. They can carry their friends' suffering for them and bring them back the benefits."

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