An Appetite for Wonder Read online

  Apart from beekeeping with Mr Thomas, I suppose my other mildly constructive spare-time occupation at Oundle was playing music. I spent many hours in the Music School, but even there I have to confess to massive wasting of opportunities. From my earliest childhood, musical instruments of any kind would draw me like a magnet, and I had to be dragged away from shops that had violins or trumpets or oboes in the window. Even today, if a string quartet or a jazz band has been engaged to play at a garden party or a wedding, I will neglect my social duties and hover around the musicians, watching their fingers and talking to them during the intervals about their instruments. I don’t have perfect pitch like my first wife Marian, and my harmonic sense is poor, unlike that of my present wife Lalla, who can effortlessly improvise harmonious descants to any melody. But I do have a natural melodic ability, meaning that I can play a tune about as easily as I can sing it or whistle it. I’m sorry to say that one of my pastimes in the Music School was illicitly to pick up instruments that didn’t belong to me and teach myself to play tunes on them. On one occasion I was caught playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ on a rather expensive trombone belonging to a senior boy, and got into trouble because the trombone was later found to be damaged. I genuinely believe I didn’t do the damage, but I was blamed (not by the owner himself, who was rather nice about it).

  My facile melodic gift turned out to be a curse rather than a blessing, at least in a child as lazy as I was. Playing by ear was so easy for me that I neglected other important skills such as reading music or creative improvisation. It was worse than laziness. For a while I even snobbishly looked down upon musicians who ‘needed’ to read music. I thought improvisation was a superior skill. But it turned out that I was no good at improvising either. Invited to join the school jazz band, I soon discovered that, although I could play any tune faultlessly, I had absolutely no capacity to improvise upon it. I was very slovenly about practising scales. I have a very slight, partial excuse, which is that nobody ever explained to me what scales are for. With hindsight, as an adult scientist, I can piece the reason together. You play scales in order to become totally at home with every key, so that, once you’ve read the key signature at the beginning of the line, your fingers automatically and effortlessly feel their way into that key.

  The hours I spent in the Music School are best described as tootling rather than playing. I did learn to read a score adequately with the clarinet and saxophone. But on the piano – where you are expected to play more than one note at a time – I was unbearably slow, like a child learning to read and laboriously spelling his way through the words letter by letter, rather than fluently reading whole sentences at a time. My kind piano teacher, Mr Davison, recognized my innate melodic ability and taught me some rudimentary rules for accompanying myself with left-hand chords. But though I quickly learned these, I could do them only in the keys of C major and A minor (minimizing the black notes), and my style of left-hand chord-thumping was pretty monotonous – although inexpert listeners were impressed by my ability to play instant requests.

  I had a true and pure, though not very loud, singing voice as a treble, and was early recruited into the rather small and select Chancel Choir in the Oundle school chapel. I hugely enjoyed this; the regular rehearsal, under the Director of Music Mr Miller, was the high spot of my week. I think it was rather a good choir, up there with a typical English cathedral choir. And I can’t resist adding that we sang without the affectation of the half-rolled ‘r’ – sounding more like a ‘d’ – which, at least to my prejudiced ear, spoils much choral singing: ‘Maady was that mother mild / Jesus Cdist, her little child.’ ‘The dising of the sun / And the dunning of the deer / The playing of the meddy organ . . .’ By the way, while I’m doing my grumpy act, the fake Italian ‘r’ of John McCormack-vintage tenors is even worse: ‘Seated one day at the Oregon . . .’

  We performed an anthem every Sunday: Stanford or Brahms or Mozart or Parry or John Ireland, or earlier composers such as Tallis or Byrd or Boyce. We had no conductor, but two of the basses, facing each other in the back rows on the two sides of the chancel, performed the role by their miming head movements. One of these basses, C. E. S. Patrick, had a spellbindingly beautiful voice – probably the better for not being trained. I never spoke to him (one didn’t meet senior boys in other houses), but I hero-worshipped him as the star of the Male Voice Choir, which performed under the direction of another gifted music master, Donald Payne, at school concerts. Unfortunately I was never invited to join the Male Voice Choir. When my voice broke, it dropped in quality as well as in pitch.

  Oundle had a tradition – again founded by Sanderson – of involving the entire school in an annual oratorio. The choice of music was staggered in such a way that every boy would experience Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s B Minor Mass during his five years at the school. The intervening years offered a variety of works. My first term we did Bach’s Sleepers Wake cantata and Haydn’s Imperial Mass, and I loved them, especially the Bach, with its slow chorale for the voices cunningly set against the leaping counterpoint melody in the orchestra. This was a magical experience, of a kind I had never known before. Every morning, for five minutes after prayers, the tall, thin figure of Mr Miller would stride briskly forward and rehearse the entire school, just a few pages at a time, until the big day came for the performance. Professional soloists arrived from London: glamorous soprano and contralto in long dresses, tenor and bass in immaculate tailcoats. Mr Miller treated them with great deference. Goodness knows what they thought of the throaty roar of the ‘non-choir’. But none of the soloists, in my youthfully amateur opinion, could hold a candle to C. E. S. Patrick of the Male Voice Choir.

  It is hard to convey the atmosphere of the English public school during the era that I experienced it. Lindsay Anderson captured it well in his film If. I’m not referring to the massacre at the end of the film, of course, and he exaggerated the beating. Maybe prefects with swagger sticks and embroidered waistcoats took a run at it in earlier, crueller eras, but I’m sure it didn’t happen in my time. Actually, I never knew of anyone being caned at all while I was at Oundle and only recently heard (from a victim) that it did happen.

  If also beautifully captured the burgeoning sexuality that surrounds pretty boys in a school that has no girls. The flashlight inspection of groins by the matron in the enormous starched hat was only slightly exaggerated in the film. Our inspection was done by the school doctor, who didn’t peer as pruriently as the If matron. Nor did our mild doctor stalk the touchline of the rugby field like she did, screaming ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ But what Lindsay Anderson caught to perfection was the squalid conviviality of the studies where we mostly lived, worked, burnt toast, listened to jazz and Elvis, and fooled around. He caught the hysterical laughter that bonded teenage friends like wrestling puppies – not physical wrestling but verbal wrestling with odd, private languages and weird nicknames that grew and evolved term by term.

  As an illustration of the weirdness of nickname evolution (and maybe of memetic mutation generally), one friend of mine was called ‘Colonel’, although there was nothing remotely military about his personality. ‘Seen the Colonel anywhere?’ Here’s the evolutionary history. Years earlier, an older boy, who had by now left the school, was said to have had a crush on my friend. That older boy’s nickname was Shkin (corruption of Skin, and who knows where that came from – maybe some connection with foreskin, but that name would have evolved before I arrived). So my friend inherited the name Shkin from his erstwhile admirer. Shkin rhymes with Thynne, and at this point something akin to Cockney rhyming slang stepped in. There was a character in the BBC radio Goon Show called Colonel Grytte Pyppe Thynne. Hence my friend became Colonel Grytte Pyppe Shkin, later contracted to ‘Colonel’. We loved the Goon Show, and would vie with each other to mimic (as did Prince Charles, who went to a similar school around the same time) the voices of the characters: Bluebottle, Eccles, Major Denis Bloodnok, Henry Crun, Count Jim Moriarty. And we gave eac
h other Goon nicknames like ‘Colonel’ or ‘Count’.

  Some of the squalor would positively not be allowed by a health inspector today. After playing rugby we would have a ‘shower’. My hypothesis is that at some time in the past it really had been a shower, and other houses in the school probably had proper showers still. But in Laundimer House, all that was left of the shower was the porcelain rectangular base, which we would fill with hot water. It was just big enough for two boys to sit in, face to face, with their knees up under their chins. We queued up to enter the ‘shower’ and by the time all fifteen rugby players had been through it the ‘water’ was not so much water as dilute mud. The odd thing is that I don’t think we minded being in the last pair. It had the advantage that you could linger on in the warmth instead of rushing to let the queue go through. I don’t remember minding the fact that I was bathing in the muddy bathwater of fourteen other people, any more than I minded getting in a very small bath with another naked male – both things that I would dislike intensely today. Another indication, I suppose, that we are not the same people we once were.

  Oundle didn’t really live up to my parents’ expectations. The vaunted workshops were a failure, at least where I was concerned. There was too much adulation of the rugby team and too little prestige attached to intelligence or scholarship, or indeed any of the qualities that Sanderson fostered. But in my last year at least, my set of peers finally started valuing the mind. A bright young history master started a club called Colloquium for intellectual discussion among sixth-formers. I can’t remember what happened at the meetings: maybe we even used to ‘read a paper’, like earnest undergraduates. Equally earnestly, outside the meetings we would evaluate each other’s intelligence, in an atmosphere of po-faced snobbery not unlike that conjured by John Betjeman’s couplet:

  Objectively our common room is like a small Athenian state . . .

  Except for Lewis: he’s all right, but do you think he’s quite first rate?

  I and two friends in my house became militantly anti-religious in our last year, when we were seventeen. We refused to kneel down in chapel and sat with folded arms and closed lips, defiantly upright like proud, volcanic islands in the sea of bowed and mumbling heads. As you’d expect of Anglicans, the school authorities were very decent and never complained, even when I took to skipping chapel altogether. But here I need to go back and trace my loss of religious faith.

  I had arrived at Oundle a confirmed Anglican, and I even went to Holy Communion a few times in my first year. I enjoyed getting up early and walking through the sunlit churchyard listening to the blackbirds and thrushes, and I basked in righteous hunger for breakfast afterwards. The poet Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) wrote: ‘If ever I had any doubts about the fundamental realities of religion, they could always be dispelled by one memory – the light upon my father’s face as he came back from early communion.’ It’s a spectacularly silly piece of reasoning for an adult, but it sums me up at the age of fourteen.

  I’m happy to say it wasn’t long before I reverted to earlier doubts, first planted at the age of about nine when I learned from my mother that Christianity was one of many religions and they contradicted each other. They couldn’t all be right, so why believe the one in which, by sheer accident of birth, I happened to be brought up? At Oundle, after my brief phase of going to Communion, I gave up believing in everything that was particular about Christianity, and even became quite contemptuous of all particular religions. I was especially incensed by the hypocrisy of the ‘General Confession’ in which we mumbled in chorus that we were ‘miserable offenders’. The very fact that the exact words were written down to be repeated the following week, and the week after and for the rest of our lives (and had been so repeated ever since 1662), sent a clear signal that we had no intention of being anything other than miserable offenders in the future. Indeed, the obsession with ‘sin’ and the Pauline belief that everybody is born in sin, inherited from Adam (whose embarrassing non-existence was unknown to St Paul), is one of the very nastiest aspects of Christianity.

  But I retained a strong belief in some sort of unspecified creator, almost entirely because I was impressed by the beauty and apparent design of the living world, and – like so many others – I bamboozled myself into believing that the appearance of design demanded a designer. I blush to admit that I had not at that stage worked out the elementary fallacy of this argument, which is that any god capable of designing the universe would have needed a fair bit of designing himself. If you are going to allow yourself to conjure a designer out of thin air, why not apply the same indulgence to that which he is supposed to have designed, and cut out, so to speak, the middle man? In any case, of course, Darwin provided the magnificently powerful alternative to biological design which we now know to be true. Darwin’s explanation had the huge advantage of starting from primeval simplicity and working up, by slow, gradual degrees, to the stunning complexity that pervades every living body.

  But at the time the ‘it’s all so beautiful, there must have been a designer’ argument swayed me. My faith was reinforced by, of all people, Elvis Presley, of whom I was a dizzily enthusiastic fan, like most of my friends. I bought his records as soon as they were released: ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Moon’, ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Don’t be Cruel’, ‘Baby I Don’t Care’ and many others. Their sound is irrevocably – it seems now so appropriate – linked in my mind with the faintly sulphurous smell of the ointment with which many of us battled our adolescent spots. I once embarrassed myself by singing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ loudly at home, thinking I was alone in the house and not knowing that my father was in earshot. ‘You can knock me down / Step on my face / Slander my name / All over the place.’ To imitate Elvis properly in this song you have to rasp the words with a kind of venom, like a modern rap performer. It took my chagrined self a while to convince my father that I was not having some kind of fit, or suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome.

  So, I worshipped Elvis and I was a strong believer in a non-denominational creator god. And it all came together when I passed a shop window in my home town of Chipping Norton and saw an album called Peace in the Valley featuring a song called ‘I Believe’. I was transfixed. Elvis was religious! In a frenzy of excitement I dived into the shop and bought it. Hurrying home, I slipped the record out of the sleeve and on to the turntable. I listened with delight – for my hero sang that every time he saw the wonders of the natural world around him, he felt his religious faith reinforced. My own sentiments exactly! This was surely a sign from heaven. Why I was surprised that Elvis was religious is now beyond me. He came from an uneducated working-class family in the American South. How could he not have been religious? Nevertheless I was surprised at the time, and I sort of half-believed that in this unexpected record Elvis was speaking personally to me, calling me to devote my life to telling people about the creator god – which I should be especially well qualified to do if I became a biologist like my father. This seemed to be my vocation, and the call came from none other than the semi-divine Elvis.

  I am not proud of this period of religious frenzy, and I’m happy to say that it didn’t last long. I became increasingly aware that Darwinian evolution was a powerfully available alternative to my creator god as an explanation of the beauty and apparent design of life. It was my father who first explained it to me but, to begin with, although I understood the principle, I didn’t think it was a big enough theory to do the job. I was biased against it by reading Bernard Shaw’s preface to Back to Methuselah in the school library. Shaw, in his eloquently muddled way, favoured Lamarckian (more purpose-driven) and hated Darwinian (more mechanistic) evolution, and I was swayed towards the muddle by the eloquence. I went through a period of doubting the power of natural selection to do the job required of it. But eventually a friend – one of the two, neither of them biologists, in whose company I later refused to kneel in chapel – persuaded me of the full force of Darwin’s brilliant idea and I shed my last vestig
e of theistic credulity, probably at the age of about sixteen. It wasn’t long then before I became strongly and militantly atheistic.

  I said that the school authorities were decently Anglican about my refusal to kneel in chapel, and turned a blind eye. But that may not be quite true, at least not of two of them. The first was my English teacher at the time, Flossie Payne, familiar as an erect figure on his sit-up-and-beg bicycle with raised umbrella. Flossie publicly challenged me in class to explain why I was leading a rebellion against kneeling in chapel. I’m afraid I didn’t give a good account of myself. Far from seizing the opportunity to lead my classmates in the same direction, I miserably stammered something about an English lesson not being the appropriate place to have the discussion, and retreated into my shell.

  Second, I have only recently learned that my housemaster, Peter Ling (actually a nice man, if rather too conformist and conventional), telephoned Ioan Thomas, my zoology master, to voice his concern about me. In a recent letter to me, Mr Thomas reported that he warned Mr Ling that ‘requiring someone like you to attend chapel twice a day on Sunday was doing you positive harm. The phone went down without comment.’

  Mr Ling also summoned my parents for a heart-to-heart talk, over tea, about my rebellious behaviour in chapel. I knew nothing of this at the time and my mother has only just told me of the incident. Mr Ling asked my parents to try to persuade me to change my ways. My father said (approximately, by my mother’s recollection): ‘It is not our business to control him in that sort of way, that kind of thing is your problem, and I’m afraid I must decline your request.’ My parents’ attitude to the whole affair was that it wasn’t important.

  Mr Ling, as I said, was in his way a decent man. A contemporary and friend of mine in the same house recently told me the following nice story. He was illicitly up in a dormitory during the day, kissing one of the housemaids. The pair panicked when they heard a heavy tread on the stairs, and my friend hastily bundled the young woman up onto a window sill and drew the curtains to hide her standing shape. Mr Ling came into the room, and must have noticed that only one of the three windows had the curtains drawn. Even worse, my friend noticed, to his horror, that the girl’s feet were clearly visible protruding under the curtain. He firmly believes that Mr Ling must have realized what was going on but pretended not to, perhaps on ‘boys will be boys’ grounds: ‘What are you doing up in the dormitory at this hour?’ ‘Just came up to change my socks, sir.’ ‘Oh, well, hurry on down.’ Good call on Mr Ling’s part! The boy went on to become probably the most successful Old Oundelian of his generation, the knighted chief executive officer of one of the largest international corporations in the world, and a generous benefactor of the school, endowing, among other things, the Peter Ling Fellowship.