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.
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.