OUR life remained as peripatetic as it had been in Kenya. John and the other returnees from the army were used as stand-ins so that resident agricultural officers who had had no leave from their tropical duties since the beginning of the war could take a break in the balmy haven of South Africa. So John was posted to a different job, in a different part of Nyasaland, every few months. But, as my mother acknowledged, ‘it was good fun and no doubt good experience for John, and we saw a lot of Nyasaland and lived in lots of interesting houses’.
Of this period, the house I remember best is the one at Makwapala, under Mount Mpupu near Lake Chilwa, where my father was in charge of an agricultural college and prison farm. The prisoners, who provided labour on the farm, seemed to have a good deal of freedom, and I remember watching them playing football with their toughened bare feet. My sister Sarah was born in Zomba hospital during this time, and my mother recalled that the Makwapala prisoners, some of them convicted murderers, ‘used to queue up to be allowed to push her in her go-cart after tea’.
When we first arrived at Makwapala, we had to share the official Agricultural Officer’s house with the outgoing family, whose return passage to England had been delayed a few weeks. They had two sons, the elder of whom, David, had the unpleasant habit of biting other children. My arms became covered with bite marks. On one occasion, at tea on the lawn, my father caught David at it and gently interposed his shoe to stop him. David’s mother was outraged. She clasped the child to her bosom and roundly scolded my poor father. ‘Do you have no idea of child psychology? Surely everybody knows that the very worst thing you can do to a biter is to stop him in mid-bite.’
Makwapala was a hot, humid, mosquito- and snake-infested place. It was too remote to enjoy a regular postal service, and the settlement had its own ‘messenger’, Saidi, whose daily job was to cycle the 15 miles to Zomba and back with the mail. One day Saidi didn’t return; we learned that
the unprecedented rain on Zomba mountain had roared down all the steep ravines washing great lumps of mountain and enormous rocks ahead of it. In Zomba Town, roads and bridges disappeared, and people in their cars, houses were marooned, and of course the road to Makwapala had washed away.
Saidi was safe, but I was sad that a nice man called Mr Ingram, who used to let me drive his car sitting on his lap, had been killed when a bridge that he was driving over washed away. ‘Later’, my mother wrote, ‘we learned from local people that this sort of thing had happened before, though not in living memory. It was caused by some enormous snake-like creatures called Nyapolos, who got into the valleys and disrupted everything.’
I loved the rain. I think I perhaps picked up the sense of relief that people in a periodically dry country feel ‘the day that the rains came down’. At the time of the great Nyapolos rain, having ‘missed out on rain mostly’, I was apparently, ‘enchanted – he stripped off and rushed about in the downpour shouting with joy and going quite mad’. I still get a warm feeling of contentment in heavy rain, but I no longer like being out in it, perhaps because English rain is colder.
Makwapala is the site of my earliest coherent memories, and also of many of my parents’ recordings of my sayings and activities. Here are just two of many:
Come and look Mummy. I’ve found where the night goes to sleep when it’s sun-times [darkness under the sofa].
I measured Sally’s bath with my ruler, and it said seven and ninepence, so she’s very late for her bath.
Like all small children I was obsessed with pretending.
No, I think I’ll be an accelerator.
Now you stop being the sea Mummy.
I am an angel, and you’re Mr Nye, Mummy. You say Good morning Angel. But angels don’t talk, they just grunt. Now this angel’s going to sleep. They always go to sleep with their heads under their toes.
I also enjoyed second-order meta-pretends:
Mummy, let me be a little boy pretending to be Richard.
Mummy, I’m an owl being a water wheel.
There was a water wheel near where we lived, which fascinated me. My three-year-old self tried to put together some instructions for how to make a water wheel:
Tie a bit of string on the sticks all round, and have a ditch near and very fast water in it. Now get a bit of wood and put a bit of tin on it for a handle and use it for the water to come. Then get some bricks for the water to go rushy down, and get a bit of wood and make it round and make a lot of things sticking out of it, then put it onto a long stick and that’s a water wheel and it goes round in the water and makes a big BANG BANG BANG noise.
I suppose the following is zero-order pretending, for my mother and I both had to pretend to be ourselves:
Now you be Mummy and I’ll be Richard and we’re going to London in this garrimotor [most likely this Anglo-Indianism entered my family through my colonial grandparents and great-grandparents, but it may have spread from India throughout the Empire].
In February 1945, when I was nearly four, my parents recorded that I had ‘never been known to draw anything recognizable’. This may have been a disappointment to my artistically gifted mother, who had been hired to illustrate a book when she was sixteen, and later attended art school. To this day I remain quite extraordinarily inept where visual art is concerned, and I have a blind spot even for appreciating it. Music is another matter entirely, as is poetry. I can easily be moved to tears by poetry and (slightly less easily) by music, for example the slow movement of the Schubert String Quintet, or some songs of Judy Collins and Joan Baez. My parents’ notes show an early fascination with the rhythms of speech. They would listen in when I was having my afternoon rest at Makwapala.
The wind blows in
The wind blows in
The rain comes in
The cold comes in
The rain comes
Every day the rain comes
Because of the trees
The rain of the trees
Apparently I talked or sang to myself all the time, often in nonsensical but rhythmic cadences.
The little black ship was blowing in the sea
A little black ship was blowing in the wind
Down down down to the sea
Down in the meadows, a little black ship
The little black ship was down in the meadows
The meadows were down to the sea
Down to the meadows, and down to the sea
The little black ship down in the meadows
Down in the meadows, down to the sea
I think that this kind of soliloquizing, experimenting with rhythms and permuting words perhaps only half understood, is common among small children. There is a very similar example in Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, when he tells of eavesdropping on his two-year-old daughter Kate talking to herself, and hearing her say:
The North wind blows over the North Pole.
The daisies hit the grass.
The wind blows the bluebells down.
The North wind blows to the wind in the South.
My best guess is that my garbled allusion to Ezra Pound in the following must have come from my parents’ reading aloud.
The Askari fell off the ostrich
In the rain
Huge sing Goddamn
And what became of the ostrich?
Huge sing Goddamn
My parents also record that I had a large repertoire of songs, which I would render, always correctly in tune, pretending to be a gramophone, sometimes with ‘jokes’ such as getting stuck in a groove and singing the same word over and over until the ‘needle’ (my finger) was pushed out of the groove. We had a portable, wind-up clockwork gramophone, of exactly the kind immortalized in Flanders and Swann’s ‘Song of Reproduction’.
I had a little gramophone
I’d wind it round and round.
And with a sharpish needle,
It made a cheerful sound.
And then they amplified it
It was much louder then.
And used sharpened fibre needles,
To make it soft again.
My father didn’t buy fibre needles. Characteristically, he improvised with the thorns at the end of sisal leaves.
Some of my songs I think I got from records, some were gibberish made up by me on the spur of the moment like those quoted above, and some were from my parents. My father, especially, delighted in teaching me nonsense songs, often derived from his own father, and many an evening rang to the strains of such gems as ‘Mary had a William goat’, ‘Hi Ho Cathusalem, the harlot of Jerusalem’ or ‘Hoky Poky Winky Fum’, which I learned was sung daily by my Smythies great-grandfather while lacing up his boots and at no other time. I was once temporarily lost on a Lake Nyasa beach, and was eventually discovered sitting between a pair of old ladies in deckchairs regaling them with the Gordouli song, bawled since 1896 by Balliol undergraduates as a mocking serenade over the wall to the neighbouring college, Trinity, and a favourite of my grandfather and father.
Gordooooooooli.
He’s got face like a ham.
Bobby Johnson says so.
And he ought to know.
Bloody Trinity. Bloody Trinity.
If I were a bloody Trinity man
I would. I would.
I’d go into the public rear,
I would. I would.
I’d pull the plug and disappear.
I would. I would.
Bloody Trinity. Bloody Trinity.
Well, it’s scarcely great poetry and never normally sung sober, but I suppose it is slightly intriguing to wonder what the old ladies made of it. My mother reports that, despite being missionaries, they seemed to be enjoying it. When I eventually got to Balliol myself in 1959, by the way, I discovered that the tune had changed for the worse – having suffered a destructive memetic mutation and lost a subtlety – at some point during the twenty-two years since my father had left.
My gramophone metaphor was regularly pressed into service in a guileful attempt to postpone bedtime: the gramophone would run down, the song becoming slower and grinding down in pitch, and would need to be ‘wound up’. This was indeed a part of everyday life, for we had no electricity and our clockwork gramophone had to be wound up at frequent intervals to play my father’s collection of 78 rpm records: mostly Paul Robeson, whom I adore to this day, plus another great bass, Feodor Chaliapin, singing Tom der Reimer in German (I wish I could track down that recording, but iTunes has so far let me down) and some miscellaneous orchestral music including César Franck’s Symphonic Variations, which I called the ‘Dripping Water’, presumably in reference to the piano part.
With no electricity, our houses were lit by paraffin pressure lamps. They had to be primed with methylated spirit to heat the mantle, then pumped up with paraffin vapour, whereupon they hissed comfortably through the evening. For most of our time in Nyasaland we didn’t have a water closet either, and had to use an earth closet, sometimes in an outhouse. In other respects, however, we lived in great luxury. We always had a cook, a gardener and several other servants (known, I regret to say, as ‘boys’), headed by Ali, who became my constant companion and friend. Tea was served on the lawn, with beautiful silver teapot and hot-water jug, and a milk jug under a dainty muslin cover weighted down with periwinkle shells sewn around the edges. And we had drop scones (Scotch pancakes) which, to this day, are my equivalent of Proust’s madeleine.
We had bucket-and-spade holidays on the sandy beaches of Lake Nyasa, which is big enough to seem like the sea with no land visible on the horizon, staying in a nice hotel whose rooms were thatched beach huts. We also had a holiday in a borrowed cottage high up Zomba Mountain. One anecdote from this trip demonstrates my lack of critical faculty (and perhaps belies the story of my seeing through Sam’s Father Christmas act when I was one). Playing hide and seek with a friendly African man, I searched one particular hut and he definitely wasn’t there. Later I went back to the same hut and he was there, in a place where I had positively looked. He swore that he had been there all the time, but had made himself invisible. I accepted this explanation as more plausible than the now obvious alternative hypothesis that he was lying. I can’t help wondering whether a diet of fairy stories filled with magic spells and miracles, including invisible men, is educationally harmful. But whenever I suggest such a thing today I get kicked around the room for seeking to interfere with the magic of childhood. I don’t think I told my parents my Zomba Mountain hide-and-seek story, but I can’t help feeling that I’d have been rather pleased if they had talked me through a version of Hume on miracles. Which do you think would be the greater miracle? The miracle that a man might tell a lie to amuse a gullible child? Or the miracle that he really did turn himself invisible? So, little Richard, now what do you think really happened in that hut, high on Zomba Mountain rearing up out of the plain?
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.