FINDING

W.H. HUDSON
The Writer Who Came
to Britain to Save the Birds

CO NO R MAR K J A ME S ON

PELAGIC PUBLISHING
 Contents

Preface ix
Acknowledgements xii

Part 1: Late Victorians 1

1 Smelling England 3
2 Salvations 16
3 The Bird Society 29
4 Branching Out 56
5 Saving London’s Birds 75
6 Further Afoot 91

Part 2: Twentieth Century 111

7 Early Edwardians 113
8 Modernists 150
9 Later Edwardians 178
10 Wider Horizons 199
11 Shadows of War 220
12 Lamps Going Out 236
13 Picking up the Pieces 267
14 Swansongs 279

A last word 295

Postscript 297
Notes 298
W.H. Hudson’s books and pamphlets 329
Bibliography 331
Index 335
 PA R T 1

LATE VICTORIANS
 CHAPTER 1

Smelling England
‘The land of my desire’1

W
illiam Henry Hudson first set foot in England early on a bright,
chill morning in May 1874, after spending the whole of April
crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Argentina. ‘I’m not coming
with you to London,’ he announced to his fellow passengers, as they stepped
gratefully and unsteadily off the ship. ‘I want to go into the countryside
and find English birds.’2
He checked into a hotel near the railway station, and explored
Southampton. Hudson was immediately struck by an aroma that pervaded
the streets, unlike anything he had known before. He enquired of passers-by
what the smell might be. They must have given him funny looks, being
unaware of anything unusual. It is our first hint of Hudson as a possessor
of acute sensory abilities, but it is also a measure of the freshness of his
impressions of his new home, and their impact on him. It was only later
that he was able to identify the source – breweries.3
The following day, Hudson turned his attention to his first main
ambition: meeting the local birds. So he hired a pony and trap, with a
boy on the reins and an American from the ship who couldn’t be shaken
off, and they headed first to nearby Netley Common. The poor boy was
wedged between Hudson and the American, with Hudson nudging him
and pointing, wanting to know what bird that was, and what bird was
singing this note, and that song. On the other side the American, a
student of agriculture, was pestering the poor boy with questions about
farming.
‘What grass is that?’
‘The grass what horses eat!’ the exasperated boy yelled back, over
the clatter of hooves and metal wheels. Sadly for Hudson, the boy was
no bird-guide either. He could name for his client only two species: the
skylark and ‘dobbin-dishwater’. Hudson believed that they were in fact
looking at a robin and not a grey wagtail, which derives this old name from
its habit of frequenting river edges alongside washerwomen and children.
4  Finding W.H. Hudson

Hudson’s friend and first biographer Morley Roberts described how at

the end of his reminiscence Hudson issued ‘a terrific cackle of laughter’. It
seems Hudson had a peculiarly high-pitched laugh for a man of his imposing
stature, like a green woodpecker that he no doubt heard but the identity of
which he could only guess at on that introductory sortie into the English
countryside. It’s got so I can’t hear a green woodpecker (or yaffle, as they
used to be known) without thinking of him. The far-carrying sound haunts
me, but in a good way. It’s possible to reconstruct vignettes of Hudson’s life
such as this one from some of the more detailed of his anecdotes that are
related in letters and articles, in which he recalls snatches of conversations
and interactions with local people, usually in rural settings.
Hudson would always be vague about his early days, and years, in
England, but luckily, two years before he died, Morley Roberts had the idea
of interviewing him and transcribing his responses. For whatever reason,
Hudson broke with habit and consented – providing, from memory, nearly
50 years after the event, the above picture of his first day in England, that
precious and defining moment.
Hudson wasn’t asked about – or wouldn’t talk about – the month-long
voyage that had preceded this escapade. I  longed to know what his sea
crossing had been like, but found that in all his books he makes few
references to being on that ship. I did find this one, written shortly after he
left behind an unhappy few days in the Peak District and returned to the
pastoral south. The quote encapsulates the attachment Hudson developed
to the southern counties of England: ‘Never since I had known England,
from that morning in early May when I saw the sun rise behind the white
cliffs and green downs of Wight and the Hampshire shore, had it seemed
so surpassingly lovely – so like a dream of some heavenly country.’
I later realised that there was something that would bring Hudson’s
voyage – and those first formative days here – vividly to life: a cache of letters
that he had written while on the ship, and in his first days at Southampton.
These were discovered long after Hudson died, a precious time capsule.
After those first few heady days among Hampshire’s leafy lanes and
wild birds, Hudson took a seat for his first ever railway journey, bound for
London, 80 miles to the north-east, where fortunes might be sought.

Lurid London
I’ve tried to imagine the young immigrant’s inner turmoil, his excitement
and trepidation as the train approached the great city, as he emerged from
Waterloo Station clutching a suitcase, among a throng of other passengers,
 Smelling England  5

his 6-foot 3-inch frame head-and-shoulders above most in this bubbling

river of bonnets and hats. I wonder if he was prepared for the scale of the
place, the smoky air, the grime. In the winter just passed, a cattle show in
the city had been enveloped in a smog so thick and noxious that it left the
livestock gasping for breath, many of them collapsing and dying.
This was all in marked contrast to the fresh, green, budding countryside
he had just passed through in the train as he craned to see every bird,
perhaps scribbling notes as he went, thinking about his ancestral origins.
Hudson’s paternal grandfather was said to be a Devon man. I can picture
him turning over in his mind and sharing with fellow passengers the dream
he was following, to become a professional ornithologist, if not a poet, in
whatever form that might take.
He had for some years been corresponding with scientists at the
Zoological Society of London, as well as the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, and had established some credentials as their bird man in
Argentina. He provided specimens of birds and descriptions that were
advancing the sparse knowledge of the avifauna of that region, including
two species new to science, and which would in time come to bear his name.
But is there a living to be made in this? a fellow passenger might have
asked him, voicing a question no doubt echoing in his own thoughts.
Hudson might have smiled thinly and raised his eyebrows in a gesture of
hope and effortful optimism. Perhaps he articulated the one basic reason

Hudson’s canastero, one of two species new to science that Hudson discovered.
Image courtesy of Nick Brooks.
6  Finding W.H. Hudson

for seeking kindred minds so far from his Pampas home: ‘Not in all the
years of my life in the Pampas did I ever have the happiness to meet with
anyone to share my interest in the wild bird life of the country I  was
born in.’4
Perhaps he was having early notions of challenging the trade in bird
plumage that was beginning to decimate the birds he had known and
loved. He might have described some of the appalling cruelty he had
witnessed – young birds left to starve in the nest as adult birds were netted
and clubbed in their breeding colonies. His beloved hummingbirds too:
tiny, miraculous fliers, killed and embalmed, to be turned into adornments
for dresses and hats, or jaded trophies, mounted behind glass.

Hudson later recalled his first impressions of London, the vast, mushroom-
ing city, already the largest in the world:

I put up at a city hotel, and on the following day went

out to explore, and walked at random, never enquiring
my way of any person, and not knowing whether I was
going east or west. After rambling about for some three
or four hours, I came to a vast wooded place where few
persons were about. It was a wet, cold morning in early
May, after a night of incessant rain; but when I reached
this unknown place the sun came out and made the
air warm and fragrant and the grass and trees sparkle
with innumerable raindrops. Never grass and trees in
their early spring foliage looked so vividly green, while
above the sky was clear and blue as if I had left London
leagues behind.
As I advanced further into this wooded space the
dull sounds of traffic became fainter, while ahead the
continuous noise of many cawing rooks became louder
and louder. I was soon under the rookery listening
to and watching the birds as they wrangled with one
another, and passed in and out among the trees or
soared above their tops. How intensely black they
looked amidst the fresh brilliant green of the sunlit
foliage!5

Besides visiting London Zoo, which had opened to the public 20 years
earlier, and the Crystal Palace, setting for the Great Exhibition, showcasing
 Smelling England  7

technological and scientific achievements, he would have admired the

scale of the recently completed Houses of Parliament and the Natural
History Museum under construction.
Buenos Aires was also rapidly growing at this time, but Hudson would
never have seen anything on this scale.6 London had almost 5 million
inhabitants, many of them – like him – recently arrived. The population
had multiplied fivefold since 1800, and almost 2 million more people
would live there by the end of the century. In weeks to come, he would
peer through pea-souper fogs, hold his finely tuned nose at the stink of the
filthy River Thames. He called it ‘lurid London’, and wrote of the ‘rank
steam of slums’.7 But it was here that the country boy from a far-off land
would have to stay.
For now, Hudson had a career to discuss, and an appointment with
the top man at the Zoological Society of London at Hanover Square, an
individual and an address that would come to figure prominently in his
story, and the campaign to save the birds.

Creative tensions with Dr Sclater

One person more than any other held the key to Hudson’s future in
Britain: Dr Philip Lutley Sclater, one of the era’s pre-eminent figures
in natural history. Posterity records him as having identified the six
main zoogeographic regions of the world, including the Neotropics,
from which Hudson had come, and the Palearctic, in which he now
found himself. The two had corresponded for several years, as Hudson
supplied bird-skins and notes on bird habits and habitats to Sclater at
the Zoological Society, where he had risen to occupy the top position of
secretary. Hudson’s long-distance correspondence had been published in
the society’s journal.
Hudson could now pursue his publishing project with Sclater to
produce the definitive textbook on Argentine birds. He had already
provided much of the new material and first-hand knowledge of these
species, and descriptive powers to bring them to life on the page. Sclater
was the empiricist, the scientific mind. One way or another, despite
Hudson’s need of favour from his main contact in scientific circles and
the imbalance of power between them, they were unable to get along well:
‘All the antagonism of poet to pedant, and of outdoor to indoor naturalist,
pervaded Hudson’s work with Sclater.’8
But although Hudson didn’t warm to his collaborator, and it wasn’t in
his nature to suffer fools gladly, he had to grin and bear it. The two-volume
8  Finding W.H. Hudson

Argentine Ornithology would take the best part of 20 years to produce. And
it would not have taken Hudson long to realise that this wasn’t going to
put food on his table any time soon.
Morley Roberts recalled Hudson’s lukewarm view of his collaborator.
‘Judging from his description this eminent professor lacked charm,9 to say
the least of it, but balanced the lack by a keen regard for royalties somewhat
repugnant to a much poorer collaborator.’10 That they didn’t become best
friends is perhaps less surprising than that they could collaborate at all,
and over so long a period. Sclater was in no hurry – he didn’t need to be.
And of course he was very busy, and a man of considerable standing. His
father owned the Hoddington Estate in Hampshire, and his elder brother
was a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP).
It is a pity in a way that they didn’t meet at Hoddington soon after
Hudson stepped off the Ebro at Southampton, to bring into focus the
contrast in backgrounds and status of the two men. In fact they met at
the Zoological Society’s offices in Hanover Square, where Sclater also
lived, in a plush apartment that came with the job. The irony was not
lost on Hudson that ‘two men who have not one thought or taste in
common should be associated together in writing a big book’. And as for
what they did have in common? ‘We are both big ugly men, and there all
resemblance ends.’11
If working with Sclater was tedious, there was the consolation of free
tickets to the zoological gardens. ‘They look at us with a strange friendli-
ness in them as it they knew what we, after thousands of years of thinking,
have only just found out’, wrote Hudson after meeting a lemur at London
Zoo.12 He remained preoccupied with evolution, and had issues with some
of the assumptions in the theory. It would lead to issues with another, even
more eminent, figure in natural history. In fact, it already had.

Issues with Darwin

For reasons best known to himself, Hudson liked to let his friends and
colleagues believe that he had arrived in England in 1869, five years before
he actually did. This error continued to be repeated for several decades
after his death, which suggests that the letters he had been sending to
Dr Sclater in the years leading up to his emigration from Argentina in
1874 were not generally known about. I assumed these letters must have
been long lost, and not kept by the Zoological Society of London.13 Then
I  discovered that someone had been well ahead of me, not here in the
UK, but in America. The bundle of letters to Dr Sclater had been sought
 Smelling England  9

out and transcribed by a Scottish journalist called David R. Dewar, and

published by Cornell University Press in 1951.
I was intrigued as to why writers on Hudson had for so many years
never thought to enquire of the Society about any such correspondence, as
some letters were published in their journal and sight of them would have
set the record straight on his arrival date in Britain, and also opened up the
question – the mystery – of why Hudson wanted people to believe he spent
those five years, 1869 to 1874, in Britain rather than in Argentina. My
mind raced. Did he need an alibi for some reason? Or did traumatic events
happen in the period before he left that he needed to erase? What’s also
curious is that if Hudson liked to let people believe he was younger than
he was, adding five years to his time in England hardly helped with that.
I was able to buy a copy of this small bound volume of seven hitherto
unpublished Hudson letters, together with five that were printed in
the society’s ‘Proceedings’, which had been overlooked by Hudson’s
biographers for decades. Perhaps this speaks to the fact that these Hudson
scribes were less interested in him as a naturalist than in other aspects of
his life and personality. This is curious, as Hudson defined himself first and
foremost as a field naturalist. Saving the birds was his mission; writing was
a means to that end.
The 1951 volume is dedicated ‘To Lovers of W.H. Hudson everywhere’,
while recognising that this constituency may already be diminished in
number – citing a recent article in the New York Times that reported ‘the
general public has forgotten Hudson, but, with his friend Joseph Conrad,
he will come back into favor’. They were right about Conrad, at least. The
letters reveal that Hudson dared to find fault with Charles Darwin and –
worse still – aired his criticisms in public. While broadly accepting the
principle of natural selection, Hudson found errors about South American
woodpeckers in Darwin’s book,14 and he wasn’t shy about pointing them out.
Darwin had travelled in South America, first arriving in 1832. In
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, first published in
1859, he had described the behaviour of the campo woodpecker, a species
that Hudson knew well from his days in La Plata. Darwin used this as an
example of a species adapting to a new environment, one that he said was
almost treeless, saying that now the species never climbed trees. Hudson
dared to state in the pages of ZSL’s Proceedings, in 1870:

so great a deviation from the truth in this instance

might give opponents of his book a reason for
considering other statements in it erroneous or
10  Finding W.H. Hudson

exaggerated … The perusal of the passage I have

quoted from, to one acquainted with the bird referred
to, and its habitat, might induce him to believe that
the author purposely wrested the truths of Nature to
prove his theory.15

Ouch. Not surprisingly, Hudson’s accusation prompted a lengthy response

from Darwin, which was also published in the Proceedings, in which he
said: ‘I should be loath to think that there are many naturalists who,
without any evidence, would accuse a fellow worker of telling a deliberate
falsehood to prove his theory.’16
In the 1872 sixth edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin adjusted
the wording, recognising that it was wrong to say this woodpecker species
never climbed trees, although it might, in a treeless situation, be able to
live without them, and nest in earth banks where suitable. Like the green
woodpecker in Eurasia, it was adept at foraging on the ground. In any
event, this tells us something about Hudson’s lack of airs and graces, and
his forthrightness of views and approach.
Hudson’s public criticism of Darwin may not have helped his aspirations
to move in academic and scientific circles, but it doesn’t seem to have
done him any harm in the eyes and esteem of Alfred Russel Wallace, who
became a later ally.
Like many people with his background, Hudson was brought up
reading the family Bible. This was a form of recreation, as well as no doubt
being encouraged – if not required – by his parents. But they were also
liberal-minded. There is no more sense that they forced him to attend
church than they thought formal schooling necessary for their six children
growing up on the edge of the Pampas. But one way or another Hudson
was sufficiently God-fearing – or God-believing – to have his world rocked
when an older brother returned from a trip to a big city brandishing a copy
of Darwin’s theory, first published in 1859 when Hudson was 18 years old:

The idea of a beneficent Being who designed it all –

did not come to me from reading, nor from teachers,
since I had none, but was thrust upon me by nature
itself. In spite, however, of its having come in that
sharp way, I, like many another, succeeded in putting
the painful question from me and keeping to the old
traditions. The noise of the battle of Evolution, which
had been going on for years, hardly reached me; it was
 Smelling England  11

but a faintly heard murmur, as of storms immeasurably

far away ‘on alien shores’. This could not last.
One day an elder brother, on his return from travel
in distant lands, put a copy of the famous Origin of
Species in my hands and advised me to read it. When
I had done so, he asked me what I thought of it. ‘It’s
false!’ I exclaimed in a passion, and he laughed, little
knowing how important a matter this was to me, and
told me I should have the book if I liked. I took it
without thanks and read it again and thought a good
deal about it, and was nevertheless able to resist its
teachings for years, solely because I could not endure to
part with a philosophy of life, if I may be so describe it,
which could not logically be held, if Darwin was right,
and without which life would not be worth having.17

So it is clear where Hudson stood. He was briefly in denial. After

that, and perhaps reluctant to throw his lot in completely with the
new theory, he became a Darwin challenger: ‘Humanity angry at the
intolerable insult implied in the Darwinian notion. But we have now so

Sparkling violetear hummingbird (photographed in Ecuador).

Image courtesy of Nick Brooks.
12  Finding W.H. Hudson

far outgrown that feeling that it is no longer an offence for the zoologist
to tell us not only that we are related to the lemur … but even such a
creature as the bat!’18
As far as courting favour with influential figures was concerned, Hudson
had made a shaky start. He may have burned his boats with Darwin, and
was walking a bit of a tightrope with Sclater, but he wasn’t finished yet.

John Gould and the indoor naturalists

Perhaps it was Dr Sclater who suggested Hudson should try his luck with
the businessman artist John Gould in his search for paid employment. Some
people, if not Hudson, might have been a little starstruck on meeting Gould,
another of the big names in ornithology. He was by common consensus a
difficult man. Edward Lear called him harsh, unfeeling and violent, and it
was Lear, along with Gould’s wife, who did much of the painting.19 I have
prints of ‘Gould’ toucans hanging on my walls, but I hadn’t realised that he
had little time for creating the actual artwork himself. He might be better
described as an art director, shrewd and hard-nosed in business, ambitious
and enterprising. Hudson’s visit to him was perhaps inevitably ill-starred.
Morley Roberts recorded that Hudson had found his dealings with Gould
so unpalatable that he didn’t like to be reminded of them. But recall them
he did, years later:

I shall never forget the first sight I had of the late

Mr Gould’s collection of humming-birds, shown to
me by the naturalist himself, who evidently took
considerable pride in the work of his hands. I had just
left tropical nature behind me across the Atlantic,
and the unexpected meeting with a transcript of it
in a dusty room in Bedford Square gave me a distinct
shock. Those pellets of dead feathers, which had long
ceased to sparkle and shine, stuck with wires – not
invisible – over blossoming cloth and tinsel bushes,
how melancholy they made me feel.20

I can picture Gould standing proudly beside his trophies, jaded and
moth-eaten on their wire nooses, dangling pathetically in the musty room.
There were thousands of them. Five thousand, in fact. Perhaps Hudson’s
mind flashed back to his South American childhood, and these often
tiny, delicate birds glinting, iridescent, buzzing and darting, forward, back,
 Smelling England  13

sideways, in the warm sunlight, amid vivid blooms dripping with sweet
nectar.
Gould also tried to import hummingbirds alive, believing that he could
simulate, perhaps in a greenhouse, the conditions they needed to survive.
They lived for a time on his ship bound for Britain, ‘until they arrived
within the influence of the climate of Europe. Off the western coast of
Ireland symptoms of drooping unmistakeably exhibited themselves.’ Un-
surprisingly, ‘they never fully rallied’. One of the birds made it alive to his
house in London, but then died within two days.21
Gould was evidently suffering from some physical affliction that
added to his bad humour, and perhaps amplified his moans and groans.
Hudson was unsympathetic, and thought Gould had ‘as little real
illness as he had manners’. He thought of him as a ‘necrologist’ and
an ‘embalmer of nature’,22 what John Ruskin called ‘the skin-and-bone
man, the layer up of mouldering skins and empty eggshells’. Morley
Roberts, meanwhile, thought Gould a ‘pretentious and unscientific
ornithologist’.23
If they discussed the global trade in dead birds and their plumage for
the fashion industry, Gould might have told him that he wasn’t keen
on any legislation that would restrict imports; that might make it more
difficult for people like him to source specimens. Maybe Gould scorned
Hudson’s knowledge of British birds, which in these early days was
rudimentary. Roberts recalled how Hudson satirised his meeting with
Gould in a published sketch, although the title of the magazine in which
it was published eluded him. ‘That Gould should regard Hudson as some
astounding intruder who dared to believe he knew anything of birds, and
should be intensely rude between groans, was a joke that did not pass
unavenged’, he wrote.24
Hudson’s experience with Gould was probably a turning point for
him, such was his dismay, and the creeping realisation that the world of
these great scientists, artists and ornithologists might not be what he had
imagined.25 His ambition of becoming if not a professional scientist then
at least an ornithologist scraping a living – ‘my one dream’,26 he called it –
was rapidly fading. His face, his accent, his dress, his lack of education …
who was he kidding?
I can picture Hudson making his way through the streets of London,
the beggars and street urchins of the East End, the crowded, filthy streets
and, despite his own parlous state, being kind to children who were
begging, in the guise of selling matches. Then I see him sitting on a bed in
a comfortless, dreary, spartan boarding house, an alien lost in a vast, smoky,
14  Finding W.H. Hudson

noisy city, in which he had no other reason to be living but pursuing life
as a naturalist, a dream in danger of fading fast. Things were about to get
even worse.

Down and out

After the whirlwind of his early explorations, meetings and occasional
excursions, there is something of a blank canvas on which to paint
Hudson’s early years in London. Morley Roberts wrote of ‘the irritation
he always felt if anything recalled to him his time of bitterest poverty and
stress. It is indeed due to this that I, or others, know so little.’27
We do know that Hudson spent a lot of time in the British Museum
library, reading voraciously, especially on the natural history of his new
homeland, and scouring The Times and other newspapers to keep abreast
of current affairs. It was on his 1875 library readers ticket that he described
himself as a field naturalist, the self-identification he would stick to
throughout his life.28
But for now, he was broke, with no obvious way to monetise the
knowledge and expertise he had. He would have to seek alternative
employment. Somehow or other he ended up at the office door of a man
called Chester Waters, who was trying to make money by offering an
ancestry research service mainly to visiting Americans who were keen to
trace their family histories in the British Isles. It’s possible Hudson first
went there to investigate some of his own heritage, to find out more about
his Irish paternal grandmother and his parents’ claimed link to the Pilgrim
Fathers, who left Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, among the earliest
European colonists of North America.
Hudson was hired, and this might have looked like a pretty good job
on paper, but it was to be short-lived and ill-starred. His employer was
heavily in debt, and one of Hudson’s main tasks was to use his imposing
physique to keep angry debt-collectors at bay. Sometimes he couldn’t
get out of the office – lest these bailiffs got in – or get back in himself.
There seems to have been a system of fetching lunch into the building
using pulleys from an upstairs window. Waters’s wife and daughter had
abandoned him.29
Imprisoned in this office, Hudson daydreamed of world travel. ‘A
beautiful dream all this, like that of the poor little pale-faced quill-driver
at his desk, summing up columns of figures, who falls to thinking what his
life would be with ten thousand a year.’30
 Smelling England  15

He soon became one of these debt seekers himself, as he was owed his
wages. ‘It is no use asking for money. I haven’t any,’ 31 his feckless employer
would plead. Following one particularly heated row with Waters, Hudson
threw a batch of paperwork in his astonished face. His dalliance with
office drudgery and deception had been short-lived. He retired ‘penniless
and defeated’,32 in Roberts’ assessment.
One day, as he wandered in London, Hudson revisited the park with
the hundreds of elms, and the rookery that had so impressed him on his
first days there. He was shocked to find nothing but logs and sawdust, and
men sawing the tree trunks that remained, creating space for new buildings
and industry, and infrastructure for the growing network of overground
and underground railways. It was a sight he would never forget, and which
later served to drive his passion for saving nature.
So began the ‘wilderness period’ for Hudson, and at times things
seemed desperate. He had no income, or fixed abode, and what funds he
had brought with him were dwindling. To save money he took to sleeping
in the shrubbery in Hyde Park – ‘kipping down’,33 as he once called it.
This was perhaps less of a hardship than it sounds – at least on warmer,
drier nights – as he was a man well used to lying with his head on a saddle,
under the Pampas sky.
He was consoled by the proximity to nature this gave him. He shared
his bread rolls with the birds, near where he slept. He loved London’s
sparrows, a familiar companion to him in almost every place he visited,
despite the soot and grime. In an urban environment still dominated by
horse transport, the humble sparrow was still very much at home. He
scribbled notes and poems on scraps of paper:

I from such worlds removed to this sad world

Of London we inhabit now together,
O Sparrow, often in my loneliness,
No other friend remaining, turn to thee…34

If the tuneless chirping of sparrows kept his spirits up through some dark
times, the voice of a woman who gave him what he thought would be
temporary shelter, signalled salvation.