Brief Candle in the Dark Read online

  The rumble grew to a roar. ‘I have never been so insulted in my life. You have the most atrocious manners. You obviously must be an Etonian.’ The target of this damning sally was not me, thank goodness, but our quirkily brilliant classical historian, Robin Lane Fox. Robin was hopping with anxiety and bewildered apology: ‘But what have I done? What have I done?’ I didn’t immediately succeed in discovering what the problem was, but in my hostly role I saw to it that the two of them were seated as far from each other as possible. I later learned the full story. It had begun at lunchtime that day. Lunch is an informal, self-service meal and fellows sit where they like, although it is conventional to fill up the tables in order. Robin noticed that a new fellow was hesitantly looking for a place. He courteously motioned her to sit, but unfortunately the chair he indicated was the very chair for which Sir Michael was heading himself. The perceived slight rankled, simmered up through the afternoon and finally boiled over after dinner at dessert. The story had a happier ending, as Robin told me when I asked him recently. A couple of days after that distressing incident, he was approached by Professor Dummett who offered the most gracious apology, saying that there was nobody in the college whom he would less wish to insult than Robin. Thank goodness I was never the target of his ire, although I might have been vulnerable as he was a devout Roman Catholic with the zeal of the convert.

  Not that it is at all relevant, Robin Lane Fox does happen to be an Etonian. You may know him as the gardening correspondent of the Financial Times and author of Better Gardening, whose chapter on ‘Better Shrubs’ follows the one on ‘Better Trees’ with this deliciously anachronistic, and utterly characteristic, opening salvo:

  Swinging down from the branches to the level of better shrubs, I will not leave the days when the world was young and Dawn Redwoods dawned among the dinosaurs. Among mastodons and dimetrodons, what could be more natural than my own dying species, the Oxford ancient-history-don? Though long declared moribund, we are far from extinct.

  World authority on Alexander the Great and enthusiastic horseman, he agreed to advise Oliver Stone on filming the epic Alexander, on condition that he was allowed to appear as an extra, leading the cavalry charge. And he did. It has been a privilege of my career to have been surrounded by such idiosyncratically unpredictable colleagues, who would make even committee meetings entertaining. I could tell parallel stories of many such colleagues and friends, but will desist. One will have to stand for all – although I suppose that belies the very meaning of idiosyncrasy.

  I have great affection for New College and for many friends made there over the years. I feel pretty sure I’d say the same if the roll of the dice had placed me in another college – or indeed a Cambridge college – for these very similar institutions are wonderful places, mixing scholars in different subjects but sharing the same academic and educational values – values from which, I like to think, the students benefit. Quirky individuality, nevertheless, abounds, and Oxbridge colleges are famously hard to govern, as many an incoming head from the big world outside has discovered. Yes, we have our share of scholarly prima donnas, clever but not necessarily as clever as their vanity persuades them. And we have the reverse: a scholar so lacking in vanity as laughingly to tell, at lunch, a story like this against himself:

  I was telephoned by the student newspaper today: ‘Dr ——, have you any comment on the fact that, in your lecture this morning, one of the students yawned so vigorously that he dislocated his jaw?’

  As it happens, the same student newspaper, Cherwell (pronounced ‘Charwell’, like the Oxford river after which it is named) once telephoned me when it was doing a survey of dons to see how cool we were. The student reporter put to me a list of questions to assess my street cred, such as: ‘What is the price of a packet of Durex?’ And then: ‘What is the price of a Big Mac?’ To which, in my naivety, I replied: ‘Oh, about £2,000 with a colour screen.’ He was laughing too much to continue the interview, and put the phone down.

  In one of my speeches as Sub-Warden of New College, I had to bid farewell to the chaplain, Jeremy Sheehy, who (as was the custom in those days) was moving on to a Church of England living. We had often voted together on the liberal side of contentious issues and I mentioned in my speech a political affinity with him that I sensed at college meetings, ‘catching his eye in concord, across the abyss of our differences’. At the time, the New College kitchen was in the habit of serving a rather delicious pudding, a sort of moist, black, cakey sponge topped by a creamy white sauce, but it always appeared on the menu under an unfortunate name: Nègre en Chemise. The Reverend Jeremy was repeatedly and rightly upset by this, and I wanted, as my parting gift to him, to get the name changed. I went to the chef (one of the few powers possessed by the Sub-Warden) and asked him to serve the dish up at dinner, but under a new name. In my speech at dessert that night, I told the story and explained that I had chosen the new name in the chaplain’s honour: Prêtre en Surplice. Alas, after he left, it wasn’t long before the delicacy started to reappear under the original name, Nègre en Chemise, and by then I no longer had Sub-Warden’s powers to do anything about it.

  Incidentally, I heard of a related problem at a care home for old people in England. One day, the menu included a traditional English pudding, the long, raisin-infested, custard-bespattered suet roll called Spotted Dick. The local government inspector demanded that it be banned from the bill of fare as its name was ‘sexist’.

  The arduous climax to the Sub-Warden’s oratorical career at New College is the speech at the gaudy, the annual reunion dinner to which a different cohort of old members is invited each year. The choice of age group marches backwards a few years at a time with, in deference to the grim reaper, lengthening stride as vintage gives way to veteran and eventually we hit the ‘old gaudy’, which embraces everybody who came up to New College before some early cut-off date. Then the cycle begins again with the ‘young gaudy’ – those who left the college only a decade or so ago. As it happened, in my year as Sub-Warden the cycle had reached the old gaudy but their depleting numbers, alas, couldn’t fill the tables, so they were afforced by new blood from the young gaudy, callow youths in their thirties. And so I faced the difficult task of appealing to guests one half of whom were separated from the other half by a world war, a great depression and about fifty years. Not an easy speech to compose. I tried to play on the contrast between the roaring twenties, when the old contingent had been undergraduates, and the 1970s which, at least by contrast with my own era, the 1960s, could, at a pardonable stretch, be regarded as somewhat staid. Describing myself as having reached ‘the lunchtime of life’, I cobbled together something about ‘gilded age meeting crabbed youth’, which I think pleased the old while not seriously annoying the young who perhaps didn’t believe it anyway.

  I tried to arouse nostalgia in the oldies, coupled with incredulous amusement in their young successors, by reading from the Junior Common Room (JCR) Suggestions Book of the 1920s, which the college archivist kindly lent me. Incredulity, for example, on discovering that apparently many of the baths in the 1920s were in one great hall with cubicles, as testified by the several letters that said things like: ‘Would the gentleman who was attempting unsuccessfully to sing, in the fifth bath on the left this morning, please refrain in future?’ Incredulity too, perhaps, at the presumptuous treatment of college servants, tell-tale badge of the haughty ‘Brideshead generation’ that emphatically no longer typifies the Oxford colleges (with the possible exception of the much despised ‘Bullingdon Set’):

  If one wants a plate of cucumber sandwiches sent up to ones rooms for tea, I understand the kitchen requires notice before 11 am. This is most inconvenient.

  Would it be possible for either the boot cleaner or the bath attendant to scrape the mud off the football boots (and if necessary grease them) in the bathroom?

  There were many complaints about the door of the JCR squeaking. I’d like to think that the 1970s cohort might quietly have applied a drop of
oil to the hinge rather than braying for someone else to do it for them.

  But mostly the appeal of my quotations was gentle nostalgia for a bygone age:

  Would it be possible for a new pair of hairbrushes (really hard) and a new comb to be provided in the old bathroom?

  May I suggest that pipe cleaners be provided in JCR? These articles strike me as being more useful than tooth picks.

  Wishing to telephone this morning, I was surprised to find the Telephone Box missing. What can have happened to it? May I add, as a suggestion to be conveyed to the right quarter, that there seems to be no particular reason to replace it?

  I think my speech went down quite well. One of the old brigade wrote a thank-you letter to the Warden, which said it reminded him of his old tutor, Lord David Cecil. It seemed to be meant as a compliment, although Kingsley Amis’s recollections, in his autobiography, of that aristocratic savant give me pause.

  LORE OF THE JUNGLE

  AMONG the 115 mammal species on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal there is an irregularly shifting population of Homo scientificus, and this includes short-term migrant visitors, invited for a month or so to interact with (and, it is hoped, refresh and invigorate) the resident population of biologists. In 1980 I was privileged to be invited as one of two birds of passage, the other being, I was delighted to hear, the great John Maynard Smith.

  The densely forested Barro Colorado Island sits in the middle of Lake Gatún, which forms a substantial chunk of the Panama Canal, and is home to a world-renowned tropical research centre run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). Why such forests are so rich in species is one of the perennial questions in ecology. Their biodiversity outstrips all other major ecosystems, and the six square miles of Barro Colorado are surely (with the possible exception of Wytham Wood near Oxford) the most intensively studied, most picked-over, most analysed, most binocular-scanned, most mapped square miles of forest in the world. What a privilege, to be invited there for a month.

  At the time of my visit, Ira Rubinoff, the Director of STRI in Panama who originally invited me, was going on sabbatical leave, leaving the institute in the capable and genial hands of his deputy, my old friend Michael Robinson. Mike and I had been fellow graduate students of Niko Tinbergen at Oxford in the 1960s. He was a little older than the rest of us, having gone back to university as a mature student to indulge his passion for entomology, after what some (not I) might consider a mis-spent youth as a left-wing agitator. At that stage of his life, British troops were fighting insurgents in Malaya, and Mike once spent a whole night rushing around the streets of Manchester painting slogans on wall after wall after wall: ‘Hands off Malaya.’ ‘Hands off Malaya.’ ‘Hands off Malaya.’ Dawn came and he prepared to crawl off to bed, unarrested and with a good feeling of a night well spent and Manchester well and truly taught a lesson. He looked up at his final daub with a sigh of satisfaction and noticed to his horror that it said: ‘Hands of Malaya.’ He didn’t need to go back to check his earlier handiwork. A sinking hindsight told him that all his slogans throughout the night contained the same slip, mechanically repeated from the first one.

  When, after completing an excellent doctoral thesis on stick insects at Oxford, Mike was offered a job at STRI, his officially organized itinerary to Panama took him via Miami. Because he had once been a member of the Communist Party, the US authorities refused to grant him a visa to touch down in Miami, even though he would never leave the airport’s secure area, and in spite of the fact that his fully agreed salary in Panama was to be paid by the US government. Stalemate! I forget how it was resolved, but he did eventually make it to Panama. All must later have been comprehensively forgiven (or at least officially forgotten), because he eventually rose to become Director of the National Zoo in Washington DC, one of the most famous zoos in the world. At the time of my visit to Panama he was accepted enough to be Acting Director of STRI, and was still exactly as I remembered him: that rosily beaming face with its little red goatee and matching apical tuft on the top of the head (a young woman in Oxford, seeking to establish which one he was in a group, had once whispered to me: ‘Is he the one with the little beard?’ while her accompanying hand gesture cheekily indicated the top of the head).

  My guide when I arrived in Panama was another old friend from Oxford days – Fritz Vollrath, the spider man. If Mike Robinson was cheerful, Fritz is world-class cheerful, but with none of the negative connotations of the ‘life and soul of the party’: more the life and soul of everyday life itself. I first encountered his quizzically laughing eyes when he arrived in Oxford from Germany to work as a teenage ‘slave’ in the Tinbergen group. He was introduced by the wildly brilliant Juan Delius, his cousin, who was at that time a leading member of the group. Fritz immediately fitted in, laughing at his own broken English even more than the rest of us did. When I met him again in Panama years later he had scarcely changed. His English was much better and his Spanish didn’t seem at all bad either. We drove around the environs of Panama City, pausing to watch a sloth as it slowly descended from a tree for its weekly defecation. We climbed a peak in Darien – alas, not the very one where (as I murmured to myself) stout Cortez with his eagle eyes silently star’d at the Pacific and all his men look’d at each other with a wild surmise. Fritz was based in Panama City, while I was bound for Barro Colorado in the interior of the country, but it was a delight to see him for just that one day. He is now back in Oxford, close friend and distinguished authority on spiders, their behaviour and the unparalleled properties of their silk.

  The journey from Panama City to Barro Colorado was (is?) by a small, rattling train with unpadded wooden seats. It stops by Lake Gatún, halfway across the peninsula, at a tiny halt (too small and deserted to be called a station). Hard by is a landing stage, and every train is met by a boat from the island. Or, at least, is supposed to be met. On one occasion during my month, John and Sheila Maynard Smith had gone on a day trip to Panama City. They returned late, on the last train, and were pleased to see the boat chugging towards the dock. Then, to their dismay, it suddenly turned around and headed back to the island. Apparently the boatman had decided it was so unlikely anyone would be on the last train that he might as well not bother even to look. The Maynard Smiths shouted and yelled but the wretched man didn’t hear them above the engine noise. There was no telephone, and so the elderly couple were forced to spend the night at the halt, with little shelter and nothing but wooden boards to sleep on. They were surprisingly nice about it the next morning. I never discovered whether the boatman was sacked, nor what mental aberration caused him to turn the boat around without troubling to check if anyone was waiting for him; nor why, indeed, if he had no intention of going to the station dock, he had bothered embarking in the first place.

  At the time of my own first arrival, all went according to plan and the boat did its duty. From the island’s small dock, you climb steep steps to the main compound of the Research Institute: a purpose-built cluster of red-roofed houses and laboratories. My bedroom proved to be bare but functional, and I didn’t mind the companionable large cockroaches. Two cooks provided hot meals at set times in the communal dining room, where the researchers gathered to eat and talk. There were probably about a dozen of them when I was there, mostly graduate students and post-docs (a post-doctoral fellowship is the normal next step of a bright young academic scientist after completing a PhD), working on a range of subjects from ants to palm trees. Most were from North America, one from India – and the Indian biologist Ragavendra Gadagkar was of particular interest to me as he was working on wasps, the primitively social Ropalidia, which plausibly might represent an intermediate on the diagram Jane Brockmann and I had constructed for our paper, published in the journal Behaviour the previous year, on potential evolutionary origins of insect sociality. (More of this in the next chapter.)

  I don’t think I imagined this: the social atmosphere in the dining room and around the compound seemed a tiny bit colder than I ha
d become accustomed to among groups of working scientists. It thawed markedly later during my month there, and I eventually felt accepted enough to remark on it – at which point I was told that this was a well-acknowledged characteristic of the place, which the residents attributed to the fact that they were on an island. I wasn’t sure how to tie this psychological insight in with my knowledge of the theory of island biogeography (the title of a famous book by two old Barro Colorado hands, Robert MacArthur, who died tragically young, and Edward O. Wilson). But after I had been on the island a month, I too found myself feeling ever so slightly territorial when newcomers arrived. I therefore made a conscious effort to counteract this by going out of my way to befriend the latest arrival before I was to leave, Nancy Garwood, at the New Year’s Eve party. As it turned out she had been there before so didn’t need me to go out of my way, but I’m glad I did, and I hope she was too.

  This party was also memorable because of the firework display on a huge ship passing through the canal just beyond the trees. Actually falsely memorable, because for years I have been utterly convinced that we saw in not just a new year but a new decade: 1 January 1980. So detailed and full were my recollections of ‘seeing the new decade in’, it took multiple documentary evidence, kindly sent me by Ira Rubinoff, Ragavendra Gadagkar and Nancy Garwood, to finally convince me that what I had thought to be a crystal clear memory was faulty. It was actually 1 January 1981, not 1980. I was quite shaken to discover this, because it made me worry how many other clear memories actually never happened (and the reader of my memoir is, I suppose, duly warned).