An Appetite for Wonder Page 7

  By 1945, the owner of what remained was Colonel William’s great-nephew, Major Hereward Dawkins, who lived in London and seldom went near the place. Hereward, like William, was a bachelor, and he had no close relations bearing the name Dawkins. Evidently, when making his will, he looked up the family tree and lit upon my grandfather as the senior surviving Dawkins. His lawyer presumably advised him to skip a generation, and so he ended up naming my father, his much younger third cousin, as his heir. As things turned out, it was a brilliant choice, although he couldn’t have known at the time that my father was ideally suited to preserve the land and make a go of it: the two of them had never met, and I don’t think my father even knew of Hereward’s existence when the telegram arrived in Africa, out of the blue.

  In 1899 a long lease on Over Norton House had been given, as a wedding present, to a Mrs Daly. No doubt the rent vanished into the bottomless pit of Colonel William’s debt repayments. Mrs Daly lived there in grand style with her family, a pillar of the local gentry and stalwart of the Heythrop Hunt, and my parents had no expectation that Hereward’s legacy would change their lives. My father intended to rise through the ranks of the Nyasaland Department of Agriculture until he retired (or, as it would in fact have turned out, until the country became independent as Malawi).

  When the Umtali docked in England in 1949, however, my parents received a piece of unexpected news: old Mrs Daly had died. Their immediate thought was that they should set about finding another tenant. But the possibility of leaving Africa and farming in England began to occur to them, and slowly gained favour in their minds. Jean’s susceptibility to a dangerous strain of malaria was one reason, and I expect they were also attracted by the thought of English schools for Sarah and me. Their parents counselled against leaving Africa, as did the family lawyer. The Dawkins parents thought it was John’s duty, in keeping with family tradition, to carry on serving the British Empire in Nyasaland, while Jean’s mother was filled with dark forebodings that they would ‘fail farming’ as most people did. In the end, Jean and John went against all advice and decided to forsake Africa, live at Over Norton and take the estate in hand as a working farm – the first time after more than two centuries as parkland for the leisured gentry. John resigned from the Colonial Service, forfeiting his pension, and apprenticed himself to a series of English small farmers to learn the new skills he would need. He and my mother decided not to live in Over Norton House itself, but to divide it up into flats in the hope that it might pay for itself (lawyers’ advice was to pull it down and cut their losses). We ourselves would live in the cottage at the entrance to the drive, but it needed a lot of renovation, and while this was being done we did live – well, camp would be a better way of putting it – in a corner of Over Norton House.

  I was still very keen on Doctor Dolittle, and my dominant fantasy during this brief interlude in Over Norton House was of learning, like him, to talk to non-human animals. But I would go one better than Doctor Dolittle. I would do it by telepathy. I wished and prayed and willed all the animals from miles around to converge on Over Norton Park, and me in particular, so that I could do good works for them. I did this kind of wishful praying so often, I must have been deeply influenced by preachers telling me that if you want something strongly enough you can make it happen; that all it takes is willpower, or the power of prayer. I even believed you could move mountains if your faith was strong enough. Some preacher must have said this in my hearing and, as is all too common with preachers, forgot to make the distinction between metaphor and reality clear to a gullible child. Actually, I sometimes wonder whether they even realize there is a distinction. Many of them don’t seem to think it matters much.

  My childhood games around the same time were imaginative in a science-fictiony way. My friend Jill Jackson and I played spaceships in Over Norton House. Each of our beds was a spaceship, and we hammed it up for each other for hour after happy hour. It is interesting how two children can cobble together a storyboard for a joint fantasy, without ever sitting down together to work out the plot. One child suddenly says: ‘Look out, Captain, Troon rockets are attacking on the left flank!’ and the other instantly takes evasive action before announcing his side of the fantasy.

  My parents had by now formally withdrawn me from Eagle and set about finding a school for me in England. They would probably have liked to send me to the Dragon, which was close by in Oxford, so that I could continue with something like the ‘adventurous’ Eagle experience. But such was the demand for places at the Dragon that you had to have your name down at birth to get in. So instead, they sent me to Chafyn Grove in Salisbury (the English Salisbury, after which the Rhodesian one was named), where my father and both his brothers had been, and not a bad school in its own right.

  Chafyn Grove and Eagle were both – I should explain to those unfamiliar with such British arcana – ‘preparatory schools’: ‘prep schools’, for short. What did they ‘prepare’ us for? The answer is the even more confusing ‘public schools’, so called because they are in fact not public but private – open only to those whose parents can pay their fees. Close to where I live in Oxford there is a school called Wychwood, which for some years had a delightful notice outside the gates:

  Wychwood School for Girls (preparatory for boys).

  Anyway, Chafyn Grove was the prep school to which I was sent from eight to thirteen, to prepare me for public school from thirteen to eighteen. I don’t, by the way, think it occurred to my parents to send me to anything other than the kind of boarding schools that Dawkinses normally attended. Expensive, but worth making sacrifices for – that would have been their attitude.

  Photographic Insert 1

  The Dawkins family have been members of the Chipping Norton set since the early eighteenth century, when my great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry Dawkins MP built a family mausoleum in St Mary’s Church for, in the words of the inscription on the memorial tablet (below), ‘himself and his heirs’. Brompton’s 1774 portrait of Henry’s family serves as backdrop to a family photograph taken in Over Norton house around 1958. My Grandfather Dawkins, with his pink Leander tie, sits between his wife Enid and his daughter-in-law Diana. My sister Sarah is in front of him; uncle Bill is behind him between Uncle Colyear and me. My father is on the far left. My mother is between Enid and Colyear’s wife Barbara.

  Is Zuleika Dobson among the spectators on the college barge as my grandfather Clinton G. E. Dawkins, leaning forward, prepares to row for Balliol?

  My grandfather’s education as an undergraduate (right) was supported by his uncle (later Sir) Clinton Edward Dawkins (left), whose freethinking views were celebrated in the Balliol Rhymes.

  My father (left) and his rugby-playing brother Bill (right) followed their father and several other Dawkinses to Balliol after an idyllic childhood in the forests of Burma.

  Above: The Smythies family at Dolton, Devon. Top: my paternal grandmother Enid, with dog and book, sits by her mother (in the very fine hat), brother Evelyn (with tennis racquet) and father (in panama hat), along with two unidentified guests. Bottom: Smythies cousins around 1923. Sitting on the ground, from right to left, are Bill, Yorick, John and Yorick’s sister Belinda. Colyear is in his mother’s arms.

  Evelyn Smythies’ wife Olive was known as ‘Tiger Lady’ from her disagreeable hobby of shooting tigers. Her son, my father’s first cousin Bertram Smythies, took a less destructive and more literary interest in the natural world.

  My maternal grandfather ‘Bill’ Ladner (seated third from left in the picture at top), was among a group of naval officers sent to Ceylon to help build a wireless station during the First World War. Was the dog the station mascot? It seems to be the same dog my grandmother Connie is petting. The family returned to England when my mother Jean (bottom right) was three.

  They lived in Essex (right: my mother has her arms around a little friend) and spent their holidays at Mullion in Cornwall: here on the beach my Aunt Diana is holding hands with her mother and sister.
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  Above, my grandfather Ladner, a wireless engineer employed by Marconi and the author of the standard textbook on short wave wireless communication, demonstrates some equipment to visiting Arab royalty. He first met my grandmother in Cornwall while working at the Poldhu Wireless Station. Some of the thick slates used by the station as insulated instrument boards ended up as paving stones at our family house at the neighbouring Mullion Cove.

  UNDER SALISBURY’S SPIRE

  BEGINNING at any new school is bewildering. On the very first day I became aware that there were new words to learn. ‘Puce’ puzzled me. I saw it written on a wall and wrongly thought it must be pronounced ‘pucky’. I eventually worked out that it was derogatory, synonymous with ‘wet’, also a favourite word, both meaning feeble. ‘Muscle’ meant the opposite: ‘I was born in muscle India, Africa is puce’ (in that era, many children who went to that kind of school were born in one or the other of those areas coloured Imperial pink on the map of the world). ‘Wig’, in the same school dialect, meant penis. ‘Are you a roundhead or a cavalier? You know, your wig, is it a mushroom or a bootlace?’ Such anatomical details were not confidential anyway, for we had to line up naked every morning for a cold bath. As soon as the rising bell sounded, we had to leap out of bed, take off our pyjamas, pick up our towels and stumble to the bathroom, where one of the three baths was filled with cold water. We plunged in and out as quickly as we could, supervised by the headmaster, Mr Galloway. From time to time the same bell was used to rouse us in the middle of the night for a fire practice. On one such occasion I was so dizzy with sleep that I went mechanically into morning getting-up routine, took my pyjamas off and had reached the bottom of the fire escape completely naked and carrying my towel before I noticed my mistake – everyone else was wearing pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers. Fortunately it was summer. The cold baths were not the only baths we had, of course. We had a proper hot bath in the evening (I forget how many times per week) in which we stood up to be washed by a matron, which we quite liked, especially when it was the pretty under-matron.

  It was a time of austerity, close enough to the end of the war for many things still to be rationed. The food, with hindsight, was pretty horrible. Sweets were among the goods rationed by the government, and this had the paradoxical effect – presumably to the detriment of our teeth – that we actually had more sweets than we otherwise would have, because our sweet ration was scrupulously handed out after tea. I gave most of mine away. Now that I think about it, why was the wartime sweet ration anything other than zero? Couldn’t what little sugar survived the U-boats have been put to better use?

  My feet were frequently cold, and I suffered terribly from chilblains. Smells are notorious triggers of memory, and the eucalyptus smell of the chilblain liniment with which my mother supplied me is irrevocably associated with Chafyn Grove and the torment of itchy toes. We were often cold in bed at night, and we tried to stave it off by putting our dressing gowns on our beds. There was a chamber pot under each bed to obviate the need to go along the corridor during the night. I wish I had known at the time the North Country word for this object: gazunder (because it goes under).

  Only one master was still at Chafyn Grove from my father’s time: H. M. Letchworth, a kindly old Mr Chips-like figure who had fought in the First World War and had once been joint headmaster. We called him Slush, but not to his face, because Chafyn Grove didn’t have the Dragon/Eagle convention about nicknames. The only exception was during the annual Scout Camp, when he liked to be called Chippi, an older nickname which I think dated from long before when he had known Baden-Powell. He didn’t like the name Slush. One Latin lesson the word tabes appeared in the vocabulary that we had to learn. Mr Letchworth was testing us and when the time came for a boy to translate tabes (‘slush’ in the context of the text we were reading) we all started sniggering. Mr Letchworth told us sadly that the name stemmed from that very passage of Livy (‘All those years ago . . . that very sentence . . . all those years ago . . .’), though he never told us how it had come to stick to him.

  The headmaster, Malcolm Galloway, was a formidable figure (maybe headmasters become formidable ex officio) whom we called Gallows. As befitted his nickname, he was not reluctant to use the extreme penalty, which in the case of Chafyn Grove was the cane. Unlike Eagle’s ‘bacon slice’ beatings with a ruler, Gallows with the cane really hurt. He was reputed to have two canes, Slim Jim and Big Ben, and the punishment varied between three and six strokes depending on the severity of the misdemeanour. I never had Big Ben, thank goodness, but three strokes with Slim Jim was painful enough and caused bruises which we used to show off with pride, like battle scars, in the dormitory afterwards. They took several weeks to fade, turning from purple to blue to yellow on the way. Boys joked about stuffing an exercise book down the pants to soften the blows, but of course Gallows would have detected that instantly and I am sure it was never really tried.

  Nowadays corporal punishment is illegal in England, and hindsight suspects teachers who employed it of cruelty or sadism. I am convinced that Gallows was guilty of neither. We have here an example of the speed with which customs and values change – an aspect of what I called, in The God Delusion, the ‘shifting moral Zeitgeist’. Not under that name, the shifting moral Zeitgeist over a great span of history is massively documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature.36

  Gallows was capable of great kindness. He would go around the dormitories before lights-out like a genial uncle, cheering us up, calling us by our Christian names (then only: never during the school day). One evening Gallows noticed the Jeeves Omnibus on a shelf in my dormitory, and he asked whether any of us knew P. G. Wodehouse. None of us did, so he sat down on one of the beds and read a story to us. It was ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’, and I suppose he must have spread it over several evenings. We loved it. It has remained one of my favourite Jeeves stories, and P. G. Wodehouse one of my favourite authors, read, reread, and even parodied to my own purpose.

  Every Sunday evening, Mrs Galloway used to read to us in the family’s private sitting room. We had to leave our shoes outside and we all sat on the floor, cross-legged amid a faint smell of damp socks. She would read a chapter or two each week, and would get through a book a term. They were usually stirring adventure stories like Moonfleet or Maddon’s Rock or The Cruel Sea (the ‘cadet edition’ with the sex scenes removed). One Sunday, Mrs Galloway was away and Gallows read instead. We had reached the bit of King Solomon’s Mines where the gallant pith-helmeted heroes were confronted with the twin mountains called Sheba’s Breasts (fascinatingly, this name was censored in the film version starring Stewart Granger, a version which, bizarrely, included a woman on the expedition). Gallows paused to explain to us that these mountains were the Ngong Hills. (I say, you fellows, that’s utter rot. Gallows is just showing off that he’s been to Kenya. King Solomon’s Mines wasn’t set in Kenya at all. Race you upstairs to the dorm.)

  When there was a severe thunderstorm at night, Gallows went up to the most junior dormitory, switched the light on and comforted the tinies (small enough to be allowed teddy bears) who might have been frightened. Halfway through each term, on ‘Going Out Sunday’ when parents came to take their sons out for the day, there were always one or two boys with no visitors, perhaps because their parents were abroad or ill. It happened to me once. Mr and Mrs Galloway took us out with their own children, in their big old 1930s touring car called Grey Goose and their little Morris 8 called James. We had a lovely picnic by a weir, and it makes me almost tearful remembering how kind they were to us, especially given that they might have preferred a day out with just their own children.

  But as a teacher, Gallows was frightening. He would bellow at the top of his powerful voice and his stentorian scorn could be clearly heard in all the other classrooms throughout the school, provoking conspiratorial smiles between us boys and the other masters. ‘What do you do when you meet “ut with the subjunctive”? . . . STOP AND THINK!’ (Though
, come to think of it, rules like that are not the way language really works.) Mr Mills, one of several who taught Latin, was more frightening still: too alarming even to have a nickname. He had a menacing presence and insisted on total accuracy and flawless handwriting: one mistake and we had to write the whole passage out again. Miss Mills – no relation – plump, sweet and motherly, with pigtails tied up in a sort of halo around the back of her head, taught the tinies and called us all ‘dear’. Mr Dowson, the jovial, bespectacled maths master, was nicknamed Ernie Dow. We none of us knew where the ‘Ernie’ came from until one day he read us a poem and ended up telling us the author: Ernest Dowson, of course. I don’t remember which poem it was, possibly ‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter’, but it was certainly wasted on us anyway. Ernie Dow was a good teacher who, in his faintly northern accent, taught me most of the calculus I was ever to know. Mr Shaw didn’t have a nickname, but his teenage daughter was called ‘Pretty Shaw’ for no better reason than to justify the puerile joke that inevitably followed when anybody said ‘I’m pretty sure . . .’ There was a continuous turnover of young masters, presumably students waiting to go up to university or just come down from it, whom we mostly liked, probably just because they were young. One of these was a Mr Howard, Anthony Howard, who later became a distinguished journalist and editor of the New Statesman.