An Appetite for Wonder Page 10

  Under the influence of an evangelical agricultural author called F. Newman Turner, and also perhaps of his eccentric friend from Marlborough and Oxford days, Hugh Corley, my father was an early convert to organic farming, long before it became fashionable or patronized by princes. He never used inorganic fertilizers or weedkillers. His organic farming mentors also disapproved of combine harvesters, and our farm was too small to justify one anyway, so in the early days we harvested with an old binder. It clattered noisily across the field behind the little grey tractor, scissoring the wheat or barley in front and spitting out neatly tied sheaves behind (I marvelled at the clever mechanism for tying the knots). And then the real work began, because the sheaves had to be stooked. An army of us walked behind the binder picking up sheaves two at a time and stacking them against each other to make little wigwams (stooks), six sheaves to a stook. It was hard work, leaving our forearms scratched and grazed and sometimes bleeding, but it was satisfying and we slept well that night. My mother would bring jugs of draught cider (scrumpy) out to the fields for the stookers, and a warm feeling of good fellowship suffused the Hardyesque scene.

  The purpose of stooking was to dry the crop, after which the sheaves were carted and tossed up onto a rick. As a boy, I was not strong enough with a pitchfork to toss a sheaf right to the top of a high rick, but I tried hard and I envied my father’s strong arms and horny hands, the equal of any of his employees. Weeks later, a threshing machine would be hired and parked next to the rick. The sheaves were fed in by hand, the grain threshed out and the straw baled. The farm workers all joined in with goodwill, regardless of what their real jobs might have been – cowman or pigman or general handyman or whatever. Later we moved with the times and hired a neighbour’s combine.

  In an earlier chapter I said I was a secret reader who used to escape to my bedroom with a book instead of rushing around outside in all weathers in true Dawkins tradition. Secret reader I may have been, but I can’t honestly pretend that my reading in the school holidays had much to do with philosophy or the meaning of life or other such deep questions. It was pretty standard juvenile fiction: Billy Bunter, Just William, Biggles, Bulldog Drummond, Percy F. Westerman, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Treasure Island. For some reason my family disapproved of Enid Blyton and discouraged me from reading her. My Uncle Colyear gave me the Arthur Ransome books in succession, but I never really got on with them. I think I found them too girly, which was silly of me. Richmal Crompton’s William has, I still think, genuine literary merit, with irony that can appeal to an adult as well as a child. And even the Billy Bunter books, though so formulaically written they might almost have been composed by computer, have pretensions to literary allusion in such phrases as: ‘Like Moses of old, he looked this way and that, and saw no man’ or ‘Like a podgy Peri at the gates of Paradise’. Bulldog Drummond plumbs depths of jingoistic and racist bigotry which unmistakably label its era but passed over my naive young head. My maternal grandparents had a copy of Gone with the Wind, which I reread avidly on more than one summer holiday, never really noticing the paternalistic racism until I was older.

  Family life at Over Norton was about as happy as family life gets. My parents were a united couple who celebrated their seventieth wedding anniversary together shortly before my father died in December 2010 aged 95. We were not a particularly rich family, but we weren’t poor either. We had no central heating and no television, although the latter was from choice more than poverty. The family car was the dirty old Land Rover I mentioned or a cream van, neither of them luxurious but they did the job. Sarah’s and my schools were expensive, and my parents surely had to skimp in other areas of life to send us there. Our childhood holidays were not in posh hotels on the Côte d’Azur but in army surplus tents in Wales, pelted with rain. On those camping trips we washed in an ex-Burma-Forest-Department canvas bath, warmed by the camp fire on which we also cooked our meals. Sarah and I, in our tent, heard our father sitting in his bath with his feet outside it, meditatively ruminating to himself, ‘Well, I’ve never had me bath in me boots before.’

  For three of my most formative years in my early teens I had the equivalent of an elder brother. Our great friends from Africa, Dick and Margaret Kettlewell, had stayed on in Nyasaland. Dick had at an unusually young age become Director of Agriculture, and distinguished himself in the job so resoundingly that he later became Minister of Lands and Mines in the provisional government on the way to full independence. When their son Michael, a playmate of mine in our very early days, turned thirteen he started as a boarder at Sherborne School in England; and, as with my father a generation before, the question arose of where he should go in the school holidays. I was delighted when he came to us. The age gap was only just over a year, and we did everything together: swimming in the freezing cold stream in the valley; indoor pursuits like chemistry sets, Meccano,39 ping-pong, canasta, badminton, miniature snooker, various childish concoctions and recipes for making beetroot wine, or detergents, or vitamin pills. With Sarah, we had a junior farming enterprise called The Gaffers. My father gave us a litter of piglets, which we called The Barrels. We fed them daily and were wholly responsible for looking after them. Mike and I have remained lifelong friends. Indeed, he is now my brother-in-law and the grandfather of most of my young relations.

  There is a downside to having an elder brother in your formative years, however. It can mean that whenever you do anything, he actually does the operation and you pass him the instruments (since Mike later became a distinguished surgeon, the metaphor is not unsuitable). My Uncle Bill had a lifelong reputation for being ‘no good with his hands’, whereas my father had the opposite reputation, and it was probably for the same reason. The younger brother is apt to be the apprentice, never the master craftsman. The elder brother tends to be the decision-maker, the younger brother the follower, and early habits stick. Unlike my Uncle Bill, I didn’t cultivate a reputation for being no good with my hands. Nevertheless I was – and now am – no good. Mike did everything, with me as superfluous assistant, and my father probably looked forward to my imminent exposure to the famous workshops of Oundle, which should set me belatedly in the footsteps of Major Campbell. But those workshops, as we shall see, proved to be a disappointment.

  I was probably a disappointment as a naturalist, too, despite the rare privilege of spending a day with the young David Attenborough, when we were both guests of my Uncle Bill and Aunt Diana. Already famous but not yet a household name, he had been their guest on a filming expedition up-country in Sierra Leone, and they remained friends. When Bill and Diana moved to England and I happened to be staying with them, David brought his son Robert to visit, and had us children wading all day through ditches and ponds with fishing nets and jam jars on strings. I’ve forgotten what we were seeking – newts or tadpoles or dragonfly larvae, I expect – but the day itself was never to be forgotten. Even that experience with the world’s most charismatic zoologist, however, wasn’t enough to turn me into the child naturalist that both my parents had been. Oundle beckoned.

  THE SPIRE BY THE NENE

  By the boys, for the boys. The boys know best.

  Leave it to them to pick the rotters out

  With that rough justice decent schoolboys know.

  John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells

  I GOT the English public school experience too late – thank goodness – for the real cruelties of the John Betjeman era. But it was quite tough enough. There were ludicrous rules, invented ‘by the boys for the boys’. The number of buttons you were allowed to undo on your jacket was strictly laid down according to seniority, and strictly enforced. Below a certain seniority level, you had to carry your books with a straight arm. Why? The masters must have known this sort of thing was going on, yet they did nothing to stop it.

  The fagging system was still going strong, although happily it no longer is. (Note to American readers: this doesn’t mean what you think. In British English, a ‘faggot’ is not a homosexual but a bundle of sticks o
r a rather nasty meatball. And ‘fag’ means cigarette or boring task or – as in this case – schoolboy slave.) Each house prefect at Oundle chose one of the new boys as his personal slave or fag. I was chosen by the deputy Head of House, known as Jitters because he had a tremor. He was kind to me, but I still had to do his every bidding. I had to clean his shoes, polish the brasses of his Cadet Corps uniform and make toast for him at teatime every day on a paraffin pressure stove in his study. I had to be ready to run errands for him at any time.

  Not that fags were totally immune to sexual importuning. On four separate occasions I had to fend off nocturnal visits to my bed from senior boys much larger and stronger than I was. I suspect that they were driven by neither homosexuality nor paedophilia in the normal sense of the outside world, but by the simple fact that there were no girls. Pre-pubescent boys can be pretty in a girlish sort of way, and I was. There was also folklore, rife throughout the school, of boys having ‘crushes’ on other boys with girlish appeal. Once again, I was the victim of many such rumours, whose only real damage was the – considerable – time they wasted in idle gossip.

  Many things about Oundle were intimidating after Chafyn Grove. In the Great Hall for morning prayers on my first day, new boys were yet to be assigned places and we had to find empty chairs where we could. I found one and timidly asked the big boy next to it whether it was taken: ‘Not as far as I can observe’ was his icily polite reply, and I felt crushed very small. After the treble chorus and foot-pumped harmonium of Chafyn Grove, Oundle’s deep bellowing of ‘New every morning is the love’, accompanied by the massive, thundering organ, was alarming. The stooping headmaster in his black MA gown, Gus Stainforth, was formidable in a different way from Gallows. In nasal tones he exhorted us to ‘break the back of the term’s work’ by the third week: I wasn’t sure how you set about breaking the back of anything, let alone a term’s work.

  My form master in 4B1, Snappy Priestman, was a gentle man, cultivated, kind and civilized except when he (very occasionally) lost his temper. Even then, there was something oddly gentlemanly about the way he did it. In one of his lessons he caught a boy misbehaving. After a lull when nothing happened, he began to give us verbal warning of his escalating internal fury, speaking quite calmly as an objective observer of his own internal state.

  Oh dear. I can’t hold it. I’m going to lose my temper. Get down below your desks. I’m warning you. It’s coming. Get down below your desks.

  As his voice rose in a steady crescendo he was becoming increasingly red in the face, and he finally picked up everything within reach – chalk, inkpots, books, wood-backed blackboard erasers – and hurled them, with the utmost ferocity, towards the miscreant. Next day he was charm itself, apologizing briefly but graciously to the same boy. He was a kind gentleman provoked beyond endurance – as who would not be in his profession? Who would not be in mine, for that matter?

  Snappy had us reading Shakespeare and assisted my first appreciation of that sublime genius. We did Henry IV (both parts) and Henry V, and he himself played the dying Henry IV, chiding Hal for having taken the crown prematurely: ‘Oh my son. God put it in thy mind to take it hence, that thou mightst win the more thy father’s love, pleading so wisely in excuse of it.’ He asked for a volunteer who could do Welsh (Williams) and Irish (Rumary: ‘Oh, Rumary, you are a treasure.’) Snappy read us Kipling, putting on a creditable Scottish accent for the hymn of the Chief Engineer, M’Andrew (that really is Kipling’s spelling). The hauntingly rhythmical opening verse of ‘The Long Trail’ put me sadly in mind of the ricks of Over Norton and the ‘all is safely gathered in’ satisfaction of early autumn (please read it aloud to get the Kipling rhythm).

  There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,

  And the ricks stand grey to the sun,

  Singing: ‘Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,

  And your English summer’s done.’

  And, right on cue for the mellow fruitfulness, Mr Priestman read us Keats.

  Our mathematics master that same year, Frout, was prone to dizzy fits. Once, before he arrived in the classroom, I seem to remember that we set all the lights swinging from the ceiling. Then when he came in we swayed in unison with them. I don’t recall what happened next. Maybe remorse has blocked out the memory. Or maybe it is a false memory based on a schoolboy folk legend about what others had earlier done to him. Either way, I now see it as yet another example of the lamentable cruelty of children – a recurring theme of my schoolday recollections.

  We didn’t always get it our own way. One time the 4B1 physics master, Bufty, was ill and the class was taken instead by the senior science master, Bunjy. Having ascertained that we had reached Boyle’s Law in our curriculum, he proceeded to teach us, labelling us with numbers in place of our names, which he had no time to learn. Small, stooping, old, and more short-sighted than anybody I have ever encountered before or since, he was, we thought, easy meat for ragging. He seemed scarcely to notice our insolence. We were wrong. Hypermyopic he may have been, but he noticed. At the end of the lesson, Bunjy quietly announced that he was keeping us all in detention that very afternoon. Crestfallen, we returned in the afternoon and were instructed to write on a clean page in our notebooks: ‘Extra Lesson for Form 4B1. Object of the Lesson: To teach 4B1 good manners and Boyle’s Law’. I am confident that this is not a false memory and I, for one, have never forgotten Boyle’s Law.

  One of our masters – the only one we were allowed to call by his nickname – was prone to fall in love with the prettier boys. He never, as far as we knew, went any further than to put an arm around them in class and make suggestive remarks, but nowadays that would probably be enough to land him in terrible trouble with the police – and tabloid-inflamed vigilantes.

  Like most schools of its type, Oundle was divided into houses. Each boy lived in, and dined in, one of eleven houses, and his house commanded his loyalty in all competitive fields of endeavour. Mine was Laundimer. I don’t know what the others were like inside because we were discouraged from visiting other houses, but I suspect that they were all much the same. Interestingly, however, our minds tended to see each house as having a ‘personality’, and we unconsciously grafted that personality onto individual boys in the house concerned. These house ‘personalities’ were so nebulous that I cannot find it in me to attempt a description of any one of them. It was just something one ‘felt’, subjectively. I suspect that this observation represents, in a somewhat more innocent form than many prevalent in the wider world, that ‘tribal’ human impulse that lies behind much that is more sinister, such as racial prejudice and sectarian bigotry. I’m talking about the human tendency to identify individuals with a group to which they belong, rather than seeing them as individuals in their own right. Experimental psychologists have shown that this happens even when individuals are allocated to groups at random in the first place and labelled with badges as arbitrary as T-shirts of different colours.

  As a particular illustration of the effect – actually rather an agreeable one in this case – there was a single boy of African ancestry at Oundle when I was there. It is my impression that he suffered no racial prejudice whatsoever at that time, possibly because, being the only black boy, he was not identified with a racial group within the school. But he was identified with the house to which he belonged. Along with his contemporaries at Laxton House, we saw him not as noticeably black at all but as ‘one of the Laxton crowd’, with a similar personality to others in Laxton. In hindsight, I doubt that there was any identifiable personality trait that could reasonably be associated with Laxton or any other house. My observation relates not at all to the reality of life at Oundle but to a general characteristic of human psychology, the tendency to see individuals as badged with a group label.

  My reason for choosing Laundimer as my house was a rumour, which proved ill-founded, that it was one of the few houses that lacked the tradition of an initiation ceremony (what American colle
ge students call ‘hazing’). As it turned out, we did have to stand on the table and sing a song. In my piping treble I sang one of my father’s songs:

  Oh the sun was shining, shining brightly

  Shining as it never shone before – shone before.

  Oh the sun was shining so brightly,

  When we left the baby on the shore.

  Yes we left the baby on the shore.

  It’s a thing that we’ve never done before – done before.

  When you see the mother, tell her gently

  That we left the baby on the shore.

  Singing this was an ordeal, but not as bad, in the event, as I had feared.

  I didn’t see much individual bullying at Oundle, but there was a kind of formalized bullying which afflicted every new boy for one week in his first term or two, at least in Laundimer, and I think much the same happened in the other houses. This was the dread week when he was ‘bell boy’. In your week as bell boy you were responsible for everything, and you were to blame if anything went wrong – which it usually did. You had to light the fire and make sure it didn’t go out. On Saturday during your week of ordeal as all-purpose scapegoat, you had to go round all the studies taking orders for Sunday newspapers, and collecting money for them. Then, on Sunday morning, you had to get up very early, walk to the far end of the town to buy the newspapers, then carry them back and distribute them to all the studies. Your most publicly noticeable function was to ring the bell at exactly the right time to signal each of many deadlines throughout the day: getting up time, mealtimes, bedtime and so on. That meant you had to have a very accurate watch. By the end of my week as bell boy, I had got the hang of it, but the first day was a disaster. For some reason, I hadn’t grasped that the five-minute warning bell had to be rung exactly five minutes before the breakfast gong. Many of the senior boys were in the habit of getting out of bed five minutes to the dot before the gong rang, and five minutes is not long to wash and dress so the timing was crucial. On my first day as bell boy I rang the five-minute bell, then strolled across to belabour the gong about half a minute later. Consternation was rife, and angry ridicule ensued.