An Appetite for Wonder Page 6
My favourite book at Eagle was Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle, which I discovered in the school library. It is now widely banned from libraries for its racism, and you can see why. Prince Bumpo of the Jolliginki tribe, steeped in fairy tales, desperately wanted to be the kind of prince that frogs magically turn into, or that falls in love with Cinderellas. Concerned that his black face might frighten any Sleeping Beauties he should chance to awaken with a princely kiss, he begged Doctor Dolittle to turn his face white. Well, it’s easy enough to see now why this book, unremarkable and uncontroversial in 1920 when it was published, fell foul of the shifting Zeitgeist of the late twentieth century. But if we must talk moral lessons, the splendidly imaginative Doctor Dolittle books, of which I think the best is Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, are redeemed of their touch of racism by their much more prominent anti-speciesism.
In addition to its school song and motto, Eagle took over the Dragon School’s tradition of calling the teachers by their nicknames or Christian names. We all called the headmaster Tank, even when being punished by him. At the time I thought the name meant the sort of tank that holds water in your roof, but I now realize that it almost certainly referred to the relentlessly unstoppable military vehicle. Probably Mr Cary acquired, during his years at the Dragon, a reputation for dogged persistence, moving forward in a straight line regardless of obstacles. Other masters were Claude (also a migrant from the Dragon), Dick (who had the popular duty of handing out a blessed ration of chocolate during our afternoon rest every Wednesday) and Paul, a darkly jovial Hungarian who taught French. Mrs Watson, who taught the most junior boys, was ‘Wattie’ and the matron, Miss Copplestone, was ‘Coppers’.
I cannot pretend that I was happy at Eagle, but I was probably as happy as a seven-year-old sent away from home for three months can expect to be. Most poignant was the fantasy which I think I indulged almost daily when Coppers used to do her quiet morning rounds of the dormitories and we were still dozing: I imagined that she would somehow magically be transformed into my mother. I prayed incessantly for this – Coppers had dark curly hair like my mother, so in my childish naivety I reasoned that it wouldn’t have taken a very big miracle to effect the transformation. And I was sure the other boys would like my mother just as much as we all liked Coppers.
Coppers was motherly and kind. I like to think that her report on me at the end of my first term was not entirely lacking in affection: I had, she wrote, ‘only three speeds: slow, very slow and stop’. She did scare me once, without the slightest intention of doing so. I had a horror of going blind, having once seen an African with white blank-staring eyes like the ends of hard-boiled eggs. I used to fret that one day I would become either totally blind or totally deaf and I decided, after much painful deliberation, that it was a close-run thing but that going blind was the worst thing that could possibly happen. The Eagle School was modern enough to have electric light, driven by our own generator. One evening, as Coppers was talking to us in the dormitory, the generator engine must have died. As the light faded into total darkness, I quavered fearfully, ‘Have the lights gone out?’ ‘Oh no,’ said Coppers with breezy sarcasm, ‘you must have gone blind.’ Poor Coppers, she little knew what she said.
I was also terrified of ghosts, which I pictured as fully articulated, rattling skeletons with gaping eye sockets, sprinting towards me down long corridors at immense speed and armed with pickaxes, whose blows they would aim with devastating precision at my big toe. I also had weird fantasies of being cooked and eaten. I have no idea where these awful imaginings came from. Not from any books I had read, and certainly not from anything my parents had ever told me. Maybe tall stories recounted by other boys in the dormitory – of the type that I was to meet at my next school.
For Eagle was also my first exposure to the boundless cruelty of children. I wasn’t bullied myself, thank goodness, but there was a boy called Aunty Peggy who was mercilessly teased, seemingly for no better reason than his nickname. As if in a scene from Lord of the Flies, he would be surrounded by dozens of boys, dancing around him in a circle and chanting ‘Aunty Peggy, Aunty Peggy, Aunty Peggy’ to a monotonous playground tune. The poor boy himself was driven demented by this, and would blindly rush at his tormentors in the circle, fists flying. On one occasion we all stood around and watched him in a serious and prolonged fight, rolling around the ground, with a boy called Roger, of whom we were in awe because he was twelve. The sympathy of the crowd was with the bully, who was good-looking and good at games, not the victim. A shameful episode, all too common among schoolchildren. Eventually, and not before time, Tank put a stop to this mass bullying, with a solemn warning at the morning assembly.
Every night in the dormitory we had to kneel on our beds, facing the wall at the head, and take turns on successive evenings to say the goodnight prayer:
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. Amen.
None of us had ever seen it written down, and we didn’t know what it meant. We copied it parrot fashion from each other on successive evenings, and consequently the words evolved towards garbled meaninglessness. Quite an interesting test case in meme theory, if you happen to be interested in such things – if you are not, and don’t know what I’m talking about, skip to the next paragraph. If we had understood the words of that prayer, we would not have garbled them, because their meaning would have had a ‘normalizing’ effect, similar to the ‘proofreading’ of DNA. It is such normalization that makes it possible for memes to survive through enough ‘generations’ to fulfil the analogy with genes. But because many of the words of the prayer were unfamiliar to us, all we could do was imitate their sound, phonetically, and the result was a very high ‘mutation rate’ as they passed down the ‘generations’ of boy-to-boy imitation. I think it would be interesting to investigate this effect experimentally, but have not so far got around to it.
One of the masters, probably Tank or Dick, used to lead us in community singing, including ‘The Camptown Races’ and:
I have sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence,
Sixpence to last me all my life
I’ve tuppence to lend and tuppence to spend
And tuppence to take home to my wife.
In this next one we were taught to sound the ‘r’ in ‘birds’, for reasons that I didn’t understand at the time, but perhaps it was presumed to be an American song:
Here we sits like brrrds in the wilderness
Brrrds in the wilderness
Brrrds in the wilderness
Here we sits like brrrds in the wilderness
Down in Demerara.
Some of the Dragon School’s famous spirit of adventure had been exported to Eagle. I remember one exciting day when the masters organized the whole school into a large-scale game of Matabeles and Mashonas (a local version of Cowboys and Indians, using the names of the two dominant Rhodesian tribes) which had us roaming through the woods and meadows of the Vumba (‘the mountains of the mist’ in the Shona language). Goodness knows how we managed not to get lost for ever. And although the school had no swimming pool (one was built later, after I left) we were taken to swim (naked) in a lovely pool at the foot of a waterfall, which was far more exciting. What boy needs a swimming pool when you have a waterfall?
I made one journey to Eagle by plane, quite an adventure for a seven-year-old travelling alone. I flew in a Dragon Rapide biplane from Lilongwe to Salisbury (now Harare), from where I was to go on to Umtali (now Mutari). The parents of another Eagle boy, who lived in Salisbury, were supposed to meet me and set me on my onward journey, but they failed to show up. I spent what seemed like a whole day (with hindsight it cannot have been that long) wandering around Salisbury airport by myself. People were nice to me, somebody bought me lunch, and they let me wander into hangars and look at the planes. Weirdly, my memory is that it was quite a happy day and I wasn’t at all frightened of being alone or of what might happen to me. Th
e people who were supposed to meet me finally turned up and I got to Umtali where, I think, Tank met me in his Willys Jeep station wagon, which I liked because it reminded me of Creeping Jenny and home. I’ve told this story as I remember it. David Glynn has a different memory, and I’m guessing there were two journeys, one with him and one on my own.
FAREWELL TO AFRICA
IN 1949, three years after their previous leave, my parents had another leave and we journeyed to England from Cape Town again, this time in a nice little ship called the Umtali, of which I don’t remember much except for the lovely polished wood panelling and the light fittings, which I now think were probably art deco. The crew was too small to have a paid entertainments officer, so one of the passengers, a life-and-soul-of-the-party type called Mr Kimber, was elected to perform the role. Among other things, when we passed the Equator he organized a ‘crossing the line’ ceremony, in which Father Neptune appeared in costume complete with seaweed beard and trident. Mr Kimber also organized a fancy-dress dinner at which I was a pirate. I was jealous of another boy who came as a cowboy, but my parents explained that his admittedly superior costume was simply bought off the shelf, whereas mine was improvised and therefore really better. I understand the point now, but didn’t then. One little boy came as Cupid, completely naked, with an arrow, and a bow which he threw at people. My mother came as one of the (male) Indian waiters, darkening her skin with potassium permanganate, which must have taken many days to wear off, and borrowing a waiter’s uniform with its prominent sash and turban. The other waiters played along with the joke and none of the diners saw through her: not even me, not even the Captain when she deliberately brought him ice-cream instead of soup.
I learned to swim on my eighth birthday in the Umtali’s tiny swimming pool, made of canvas stretched between posts and erected on deck. I was so pleased with my new skill that I wanted to try it in the sea. So when the ship docked at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands in order to take on a large cargo of tomatoes and the passengers were put ashore for the day, we went to a beach where I proudly swam in the sea, with my mother vigilant on the shore. Suddenly she saw an abnormally huge wave about to break, as she thought, right over my diminutive, dog-paddling self. Gallantly she rushed, fully dressed, into the water to save me. In the event the wave lifted me harmlessly up – and then broke with full force on my mother, who was soaked from head to toe. The passengers were not allowed back on the Umtali until evening, so she spent the rest of the day in salt-wet clothes. Ungratefully, I have no memory of this act of maternal heroism, and the account I have given is hers.
The cargo of tomatoes must have been poorly loaded, because it shifted alarmingly at sea and the ship listed so far to starboard that our cabin porthole was permanently under water, causing my little sister Sarah to believe that we ‘really have sunk now, Mummy’. Things became worse in the notorious Bay of Biscay, where the Umtali was seized by a spectacular gale, so strong it was hard to stand up. I excitedly rushed down to our cabin and pulled a sheet off my bunk to use as a ‘sail’ because I wanted to be blown along the deck like a yacht. My mother was furious, telling me – perhaps rightly – that I could have been blown overboard. Sarah’s precious comfort blanket, ‘the Bott’, was indeed blown overboard, which would have been a serious tragedy but for our mother’s prior foresight in cutting it in half so that she could keep a spare that had the right smell. I’m interested in the phenomenon of comfort blankets, though I never had one myself. They seem to be held in a position to be smelled while thumb- or finger-sucking. I suspect that there is a connection to the research of Harry Harlow on rhesus monkeys and cloth mother-substitutes.
We eventually docked in the Port of London and went to stay in a lovely old Tudor farmhouse called Cuckoos, opposite The Hoppet, which my paternal grandparents had bought to protect the land from developers. Living with us were my mother’s sister Diana, her daughter Penny and her second husband, my father’s brother Bill, on leave from Sierra Leone. Penny was born after her father, Bob Keddie, was killed in the war, as were both his gallant brothers – a terrible tragedy for old Mr and Mrs Keddie, who understandably then lavished their attention on little Penny, their only remaining descendant. They also were very generous to Sarah and me, her cousins, whom they treated as honorary grandchildren, and regularly gave us our most expensive Christmas presents and took us annually to a play or pantomime in London. They were rich – the family owned Keddie’s Department Store in Southend – and possessed a grand house with a swimming pool and tennis court outside, and inside a lovely Broadwood baby grand piano and one of the first television sets. We children had never seen a television before, and we were enthralled to watch the blurry black-and-white image of Muffin the Mule on the tiny screen in the middle of the big, polished wood cabinet.
Those few months living as two families in one at Cuckoos provided the kind of magical memories that only childhood can. Beloved Uncle Bill made us giggle, calling us ‘Treacle Trousers’ (which Google now tells me is Australian slang for what the English call ‘trousers at half mast’) and singing his two songs, which we would frequently request.
Why has the cow got four legs? I must find out somehow.
I don’t know and you don’t know and neither does the cow.
And this one, to a sailor’s hornpipe tune:
Tiddlywinks old man, get a kettle if you can,
If you can’t get a kettle get a dirty old pan.
Penny’s half-brother Thomas was born in Cuckoos while we were there. Thomas Dawkins is my double cousin, an unusual relationship. We share all four of our grandparents and hence all our ancestors except our immediate parents. Our proportion of shared genes is the same as for half-brothers, but we don’t, as it happens, resemble each other. When Thomas was born the family hired a nurse, but she lasted only as long as it took her to see dear Uncle Bill in action making breakfast for the two families. He was on the stone-flagged kitchen floor, surrounded by a circle of plates into which he was throwing eggs and bacon in turn like dealing cards. This was before the days of ‘health and safety’ but it was more than the fastidious nurse could stand and she walked out, never to return.
Sarah, Penny and I went daily to St Anne’s School in Chelmsford, the school that Jean and Diana had attended at the same age and under the same head teacher, Miss Martin. I don’t remember much about it, except for the mincemeaty smell of school dinners, a boy called Giles who claimed that his father had lain down between the rails and let a train run over him, and the fact that the music master was called Mr Harp. Mr Harp had us singing ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’: ‘I’d crowns resign to call her mine’, but I didn’t interpret it as ‘I’d resign crowns to call her mine’. I heard ‘crownsresign’ as a single verb, which I guessed, from the context, must mean ‘very much like’. I had made the same kind of misunderstanding with the hymn ‘New every morning is the love / Our wakening and uprising prove’. I didn’t know what ‘our prisingprove’ was, but evidently a prisingprove was an object anyone should be thankful to possess. The St Anne’s school motto was quite admirable: ‘I can, I ought, I must, I will’ (not necessarily in that order, but it sounds about right). The adults in Cuckoos were reminded of Kipling’s ‘Song of the Commissariat Camels’, and recited it with such a swing that I have never forgotten it:
Can’t! Don’t! Shan’t! Won’t!
Pass it along the line!
I was bullied at St Anne’s by some big girls – not really badly bullied, but badly enough to provoke me to fantasize that, if I prayed hard enough, I could call down supernatural powers to give the bullies their come-uppance. I pictured a purplish black cloud with a scowling human face in profile, streaking across the sky above the playground to my rescue. All I had to do was believe it would happen; presumably the reason it didn’t work was that I didn’t pray hard enough – as when I prayed at the Eagle School for the metamorphosis of Miss Copplestone. Such is the naivety of the childhood view of prayer. Some adults, of course, never grow out
of it and pray that God will save them a parking place or grant them victory in a tennis match.
I was expecting to return to Eagle after one term at St Anne’s. While we were in England, however, my family’s plans changed radically and I was never to see Eagle or Coppers or Tank again. Three years earlier, my father had received a telegram from England to say that he had inherited from a very distant cousin the Dawkins family property in Oxfordshire, including Over Norton House, Over Norton Park, and a number of cottages in the village of Over Norton. The estate had been much larger when it first came into the family, bought in 1726 by James Dawkins MP (1696–1766). He left it to his nephew, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry Dawkins MP (1728–1814), father of the Henry who eloped with the help of four hansom cabs galloping in different directions. Thereafter it passed through many generations of Dawkinses, including the disastrous Colonel William Gregory Dawkins (1825–1914), a choleric Crimean War veteran who is said to have threatened tenants with eviction if they didn’t vote his way, which was – oddly – liberal. Colonel William was irascible and litigious and squandered most of his inheritance suing senior army officers for insulting him: a drawn-out and futile process which benefited nobody except – as usual – the lawyers. Apparently a raving paranoid, he publicly insulted the Queen, assaulted his commanding officer Lord Rokeby in a London street, and sued the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge. Even more unfortunately, believing it to be haunted, he pulled down the beautiful Georgian Over Norton House and in 1874 built a Victorian replacement. His lawsuits drove him deeper and deeper into debt, forcing him to mortgage the Over Norton Estate to something more than the hilt, and he died in penury in a Brighton boarding house, living on the £2 per week allowed him by his creditors. The mortgage was eventually paid off by his unfortunate heirs in the early twentieth century, but only by dint of selling off most of the land, leaving the small nucleus that eventually passed to my father.