An Appetite for Wonder Page 5

  Another illustration of childhood gullibility: someone had attempted to relieve my distress at the death of pets by telling me that animals, when they die, go to their own heaven called the Happy Hunting Ground. I believed this totally, and didn’t even wonder whether it was also ‘heaven’ for the prey animals they hunted there. Once, in Mullion Cove, I met a dog and asked whose dog it was. I misheard the answer as ‘Mrs Ladner’s dog come back’. I knew that, before I was born, my grandmother had had a dog called Saffron, now long dead. I immediately presumed, with a credulous curiosity too mild to be even worth following up, that this dog was indeed Saffron, returned from the Happy Hunting Ground for a visit.

  Why do adults foster the credulity of children? Is it really so obviously wrong, when a child believes in Father Christmas, to lead her in a gentle little game of questioning? How many chimneys would he have to reach, if he is to deliver presents to all the children in the world? How fast would his reindeer have to fly in order that he should finish the task by Christmas morning? Don’t tell her point blank that there is no Father Christmas. Just encourage her in the unfaultable habit of sceptical questioning.

  Christmas and birthday presents in wartime, thousands of miles from relatives and high streets, were inevitably limited, but my parents made up for it in ingenuity. My mother made me a magnificent teddy bear, as big as I was. And my father made me various ingenious contraptions including a lorry, which had under the bonnet (hood) a single real (and incongruously but delightfully not-to-scale) sparking plug. The lorry was my pride and joy when I was about four. My parents’ notes show that I would pretend it ‘broke down’, whereupon I would:

  Mend the puncture

  Wipe the water off the stridibutor (distributor)

  Fix the battery

  Put water in the radiator

  Tickle the carburettor

  Pull the choke

  Try the switch the other way

  Fix the plugs

  Put the spare batteries in properly

  Put some oil in the engine

  See if the steering is all right

  Fill up with petrol

  Let the engine get cool

  Turn it over and have a look underneath

  Test the pops by shorting the terminals [I now don’t know what that meant]

  Change a spring

  Fix the brakes

  Etc

  Each item is followed through with appropriate motions and noises, and is followed by Ger er er er er Ger er er er er on the starter, which may, or usually may not, start the engine.

  In 1946, the war having ended the previous year, we were able to go ‘home’ to England on leave (England was always ‘home’ even though I had never been there; I have met second-generation New Zealanders who follow the same nostalgic convention). We went by train to Cape Town where we were to board the Empress (I thought it was ‘Emprist’) of Scotland, bound for Liverpool. South African trains had an open walkway between carriages, with railings like a ship’s that you could lean over to watch the world go by and catch the cinders from the horribly polluting steam engine. Unlike a ship’s, however, these railings had to be telescopic so they could lengthen or shorten when the train went round a bend. Here was an accident waiting to happen, and indeed it did. I had hooked my left arm over the rail and didn’t notice when the train started going round a bend. My arm was caught as the railings telescoped in, and there was nothing my stricken parents could do to free me until the long bend ended and the line straightened out again. At the next station, Mafeking, the train was halted while I was taken to hospital to have my arm stitched. I hope the other passengers were not annoyed by the delay. I have the scar still.

  When we finally reached Cape Town, the Empress of Scotland turned out to be a dismal ship. It had been converted as a wartime troop-carrier: no cabins, but dungeon-like dormitories with three-high rows of bunks. There were dormitories for the men and separate dormitories for the women and children. There was so little space that they had to take turns doing things like getting dressed. In the women’s dormitory, as my mother’s diary records . . .

  it was bedlam with so many small children. We dressed them and took them to the door and handed them to the relevant father waiting in a long queue to collect his own. And he took them off to queue for breakfast. Richard had regular trips to the ship’s doctor for dressings to his arm, and of course half way through the three-week voyage I had a malaria bout and Sarah and I were put into the ship’s hospital, and poor Richard was left alone in the dreadful dormitory. They wouldn’t allow him to go with John or me, which was cruel.

  I don’t think we appreciated what a horrible time that whole journey must have been for Richard. And what a long effect it must have had. He must have felt that his whole world security had suddenly gone. And when we got to England he was quite a sad little boy, and had lost all his bounce. While we were looking out of the ship at Liverpool docks in the dark rain, waiting to go ashore he asked wonderingly ‘Is that England?’ and then quickly asked ‘When are we going back?’

  We went to my paternal grandparents at The Hoppet in Essex, which

  in February was bitterly cold and spartan, and Richard’s confidence ebbed and he took to having a stammer. He couldn’t cope with his clothes. Having lived most of his life in very few garments, buttons and shoe-laces defeated him and the grandparents thought he was backward: ‘Can’t he dress himself yet?’ Neither we nor they having any child psychology books they set about getting some discipline going and he became quite a withdrawn little person and a bit paralysed. There was a ritual in the Hoppet that he must learn to say Good Morning when he came to breakfast and he was sent out of the room until it happened – His stammer got worse and none of us were happy. I am ashamed now that we allowed that grandparental behaviour.

  Things were not much better with the maternal grandparents in Cornwall. I disliked almost all food, and would psych myself up to retch when grandparents made me eat it. Horrible, watery vegetable marrow was the worst, and I actually vomited into my plate. I think everyone was relieved when the time came for us to board the Carnarvon Castle at Southampton bound for Cape Town, and return to Nyasaland – not back to Makwapala in the south, but to the central district around Lilongwe. My father was posted first to the agricultural research station at Likuni, outside Lilongwe, and then to Lilongwe itself, now the capital of Malawi but then a small provincial town.

  Both Likuni and Lilongwe are places of happy memory. I must have been interested in science by the age of six, because I can remember regaling my poor long-suffering little sister, in our shared bedroom at Likuni, with stories of Mars and Venus and the other planets, their distances from Earth and their respective likelihoods of harbouring life. I loved the stars in that most un-light-polluted place. Evening was a magically safe and secure time, which I associated with the Baring-Gould hymn:

  Now the day is over,

  Night is drawing nigh,

  Shadows of the evening

  Steal across the sky.

  Now the darkness gathers,

  Stars begin to peep;

  Birds, and beasts, and flowers

  Soon will be asleep.

  I don’t know how it came about that I knew any hymns at all, because we never went to church in Africa (although we did when staying with the grandparents in England). I suppose my parents must have taught me that hymn, along with ‘There’s a friend for littul chuldren, above the bright blue sky’.

  Likuni was also where I first noticed, and was fascinated by, the long shadows of evening, which at the time had none of the foreboding evoked by T. S. Eliot’s ‘shadow at evening rising to meet you’. Today, whenever I hear Chopin’s Nocturnes, I am transported back to Likuni and the secure, comforting feeling of evening when ‘stars begin to peep’.

  My father invented wonderful bedtime stories for Sarah and me, often featuring a ‘Broncosaurus’ which said ‘Tiddly-widdly-widdly’ in a high falsetto voice, and lived faaaaar away in a distant
land called Gonwonkyland (I didn’t finally take the allusion until undergraduate days when I learned about Gondwanaland, the great southern continent that broke up to form Africa, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica, India and Madagascar). We loved watching the luminous dial of his wristwatch in the darkness, and he would draw a watch on our wrists with his fountain pen, so we could keep track of the time under our mosquito nets during the comfortable night.

  Lilongwe, too, was a place of precious childhood memory. The official house of the District Agricultural Officer was smothered in cascades of bougainvillea. The garden was filled with nasturtiums, and I loved to eat the leaves. Their unique, peppery taste, still encountered occasionally in salads, is the other candidate for my Proustian madeleine.

  The identical house next door was the doctor’s. Dr and Mrs Glynn had a son, David, of exactly my age, and we played together every day, in his house or mine or round about. There were dark blue-black grains in the sand, which must have been iron because we picked them up by dragging a magnet on a piece of string. On the verandah we made ‘houses’, with little rooms and corridors, by draping rugs and mats and blankets over upended chairs and tables. We even equipped our verandah ‘houses’ with piped water, whose plumbing we made by sticking together hollow stems from a tree in the garden. Perhaps it was a Cecropia, but we called it a ‘rhubarb tree’, presumably deriving the name from a song that we liked to sing (to the tune of ‘Little Brown Jug’):

  Ha ha ha. Hee hee hee.

  Elephant’s nest in a rhubarb tree.

  We collected butterflies, mostly yellow and black swallowtails, which I now realize were probably various species of the genus Papilio. David and I, however, didn’t differentiate: we called them all ‘Daddy Xmas’, which he said was their proper name although it made no sense of their yellow and black colour scheme.

  My butterfly habit was encouraged by my father, who made me a box for pinning them, using dried sisal instead of the cork favoured by professionals, and by my Dawkins grandfather – who was a collector himself – when he and my grandmother came to visit. They planned a grand tour of East Africa, calling on their sons in turn. They went first to Uganda to see Colyear, then made their way south to Nyasaland, through Tanganyika, as my mother recounted,

  in a series of short-term local bus journeys, incredibly uncomfortably packed in with crowds of Africans and poor chickens with their legs tied, and enormous bundles of goods. But there was no transport further than Mbeya [in southern Tanganyika]. However, a young man with a little light aircraft offered to try to take them on. So they set off but got into bad weather and had to turn back. Meanwhile we had heard nothing from them at all. When their weather improved they tried again, flying low so that Tony [my grandfather, short for Clinton] could lean out and identify rivers and roads reading an old map as they went, and directing the pilot.

  Grandfather would have been in his adventurous element. He loved maps. Also railway timetables, which he knew by heart and which came to constitute his only reading matter in extreme old age.

  In Lilongwe everyone knew when a plane was coming about ten minutes before it arrived. This was because a local family kept pet crested cranes in their garden. These birds could hear an approaching plane long before people could and would start shrieking about it. Whether in fear or joy one didn’t know! The regular weekly plane not being due, we wondered if it could be the grandparents when the cranes started shouting one day – so we went up to the air field, Richard and David on their tricycles, and we were in time to see the tiny plane arrive circling around the town twice before landing with enormous bumps and then Granny and Grandfather climbing out.

  Nothing so obvious as Air Traffic Control, then. Just crested cranes.

  It was in Lilongwe that we were struck by lightning. One evening a huge thunderstorm came. It was very dark and the children were having their suppers under their mosquito nets in the (wooden) beds. I was reading sitting on the floor and leaning against our so-called sofa (made of an old iron bedstead). Suddenly I felt as though a sledgehammer had landed on my head and I was completely flattened. It was a tremendous, carefully aimed blow. We saw that the wireless aerial and a curtain were on fire and we rushed into the children’s bedroom to see if they were alright. They were totally unaffected and were chewing on their maize-cobs in a fairly bored sort of way!

  History doesn’t relate whether my parents extinguished the curtain fire before or after rushing into our bedroom to see if we were safe. My mother’s memoir continues:

  I had a long red burn all across my side where I had been leaning against the iron bed, and we discovered all sorts of other funny things later. Like a lump of concrete floor torn up and put onto the garage roof! The cook had a knife snatched out of his hand and was knocked over, a wire clothes-line was melted and the panes of glass in the sitting room were all splattered with molten wire from the radio aerial which totally disappeared, etc. etc. We now can’t remember it all but it was dramatic.

  My memory of that lightning strike is hazy, but I do wonder whether the cook’s knife was really snatched out of his hand or whether he threw it in fright – as I would have. I do recall the multicoloured patterns made by some kind of residue all over the windows. And the actual moment of strike itself when the noise, instead of the usual boom boom de boom boom boom (which is mostly echoes) consisted of a single, prodigiously loud bang. There must have been a simultaneous very bright flash, but I have no memory of it.

  Luckily it didn’t leave us thunderstorm-shy because there were plenty of splendid ones in Africa. They were immensely beautiful, silhouetting mountain ranges black against brilliant-lit skies, all to the grand opera accompaniment of the sometimes almost non-stop thunder.

  At Lilongwe we bought our first ever brand new car, a Willys Jeep station wagon called Creeping Jenny, to replace Betty Turner, the old Standard Twelve. I remember with nostalgic delight Creeping Jenny’s exciting new-car smell. Our father explained to Sarah and me its advantages over all other cars, most memorable of which were the flat mudguards over the front wheels. He explained to us that these were especially designed to act as tables for us to put our picnic on.

  At the age of five I was sent to Mrs Milne’s school, a little one-room nursery school run by a neighbour. Mrs Milne couldn’t really teach me anything because all the other children were learning to read, and my mother had already taught me to read; so Mrs Milne sent me off to one side with a ‘grown-up’ book to read to myself. It was too grown-up for me and, although I faithfully forced my eyes to travel over every word, I didn’t understand most of them. I remember asking Mrs Milne what ‘inquisitive’ meant, but I couldn’t muster enough of the stuff to keep asking her the meanings of words when she was busy teaching the other children. So I then

  shared lessons with the doctor’s son David Glynn taught by the doctor’s wife. They were both bright, keen little boys and we think they probably learned a lot. Then he and David went on to the Eagle School together.

  EAGLE IN THE MOUNTAINS

  THE Eagle School was a brand new boarding school set high among the conifers of the Vumba Mountains, near the border with Mozambique, in Southern Rhodesia (now the sick joke dictatorship of Zimbabwe). I use the past tense because the school closed for ever during the conflicts that later beset that unhappy country. It was founded by Frank (‘Tank’) Cary, a former housemaster from the Dragon School in Oxford, I think the largest and arguably the best prep school in England, with a wonderful spirit of adventure and a remarkable list of distinguished alumni. Tank had come out to seek his fortune in Africa, and his school was a faithful scion of the Dragon. We had the same school motto (Arduus ad solem, a quotation from Virgil) and the same school song, to Sullivan’s tune for ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’: ‘Arduus ad solem / By strife up to the sun’. Tank had visited our family in Lilongwe when he was on a tour trying to drum up business from Nyasaland parents: mine liked him and decided that Eagle was the school for me, as did Dr and Mrs Glynn
for David, and we went there together.

  My memory of Eagle is hazy. I think I was there for only two terms, including the second term of the school’s existence. I remember being there for the formal opening of the school, which was much talked about in advance as the ‘Opening Day’. This mystified me because I took it to be an allusion to ‘O God our help in ages past’:

  Time like an ever-rolling stream,

  Bears all its sons away;

  They fly forgotten, as a dream

  Dies at the opening day.

  Hymns made a big impression on me at Eagle, even ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’, sung to a stupefyingly dreary tune more appropriate to dozing than fighting. All parents were told to equip their sons with a bible. My parents, for some reason, gave me The Children’s Bible, which was not the same thing at all, and I felt rather left out and ‘different’. In particular it was not divided up into chapters and verses, which I felt as a terrible deprivation. I was so intrigued by the biblical method of subdividing prose for easy reference that I went through some of my ordinary story books, writing in numbered ‘verses’ for them too. I have recently had occasion to look at the Book of Mormon, fabricated by a nineteenth-century charlatan called Smith, and it occurs to me that he must have had the same fascination with the King James Bible, laying his book out in verses and even imitating the sixteenth-century English style. Incidentally, it is a mystery to me why that last fact alone didn’t instantly brand him a fake. Did his contemporaries think the Bible was originally written in the English of Tyndale and Cranmer? As Mark Twain cuttingly remarked, if you removed all occurrences of the phrase ‘And it came to pass’, the Book of Mormon would be reduced to a pamphlet.