‘AND YOUR ENGLISH SUMMER’S DONE’

 

OF COURSE, there was life beyond school. At Chafyn Grove, we longed for the end of every term, and our favourite hymn was the one we sang on the last day: ‘God be with you till we meet again’. It ranked even higher than the stirringly martial missionary hymn that we also loved:

 

Ho, my comrades! See the signal waving in the sky
Reinforcements now appearing, victory is nigh.
‘Hold the fort, for I am coming,’ Jesus signals still.
Wave the answer back to Heaven, ‘By thy grace we will.’

 

We all went joyfully home for the holidays, some on the school train to London, some fetched by parents in their cars – in my case a battered old Land Rover which never caused me the embarrassment that snobbish boarding-school children are alleged to feel when their parents show up in anything less expensive than a Jaguar. I was proud of the ragged leaky-roofed old war-horse, in which my father had driven us crashing through the undergrowth on a dead straight compass course, on the child-delighting theory that there must have been a Roman road connecting two colinear stretches of dead straight highway on the well-thumbed Ordnance Survey map.

Very typical of my father, that kind of thing. Like his own father, he loved maps; and both loved keeping records. Weather records, for instance. Year after year my father filled notebooks with meticulously dated measurements of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures, and of rainfall – his enthusiasm only slightly dampened when we caught the dog peeing into the rain gauge. We had no way of knowing how many times dear Bunch had done this before and how many past rainfall records were similarly augmented.

My father always had an obsessive hobby on the go. It was usually one that would exercise his practical ingenuity, which was considerable, although he was of the scrap metal and red binder-twine rather than the Major Campbell lathe and welding-kit school of thought. The Royal Photographic Society elected him a Fellow for his beautiful ‘dissolving’ productions. These were carefully crafted sequences of colour slides, displayed by twin projectors working side by side in alternation, each slide artistically fading into the next, with musical and spoken accompaniment. Today it would all be done by computer, but in those days the fading in and fading out had to be achieved by iris diaphragms, inversely linked so that each opened as the other closed. My father fashioned cardboard iris diaphragms for the two projectors, coupled to each other by a fiendishly ingenious system of rubber bands and red string, activated by a wooden lever.

Family tradition changed ‘dissolving’ to ‘drivelling’, because that is how it had once been misread in a hastily scribbled note. We all became so used to calling his art-form ‘drivelling’ that we never thought of calling it anything else and the word lost its original meaning. On one occasion my father was giving a public presentation (one of many around that time) to a photographic club. It happened that this particular presentation was largely put together from earlier photographs, taken before he had begun his ‘dissolving’ hobby, and he began by explaining this to the audience. He had an endearingly halting and rambling style of delivery, and the audience warmed, in a somewhat bemused way, to his opening sentence: ‘Er, I actually, I actually, er, these photographs mostly date, er, mostly date from before I started drivelling . . .’

His less than fluently accomplished style of speaking had earlier shown itself during his courtship of my mother, when he lovingly looked deep into her eyes and murmured, ‘Your eyes are like . . . spongebags.’ Bizarre as this sounds, I think I can make some sort of sense of it and it again has something to do with iris diaphragms. When seen end-on, a spongebag’s drawstrings look a bit like the radiating lines which are an attractive feature of an eye’s iris.

Another year, his hobby was making pendants for all his female relations, each one a sea-smoothed Cornish serpentine pebble bound with a leather thong. At yet another time in his life, his obsession was to design and build his own automated pasteurizer for the dairy, with flashing coloured signal lights and an overhead conveyance system for the churns, which provoked a lovely verse from one of his employees, Richard Adams (not the famous rabbit man), who managed the pigs:

 

With clouds of steam and lights that flash, the scheme is most giganto,

While churns take wings on nylon slings like fairies at the panto.

 

My father had a ceaselessly creative mind. While cultivating a field on his little grey Ferguson tractor, wearing his battered old KAR hat and singing psalms at the top of his voice (‘Moab was my washpot’: by the way, the fact that he sang psalms emphatically didn’t mean he was religious), he had plenty of time to think. He calculated that all the time spent doubling back at the end of each row was wasted. So he devised an ingenious scheme for zigzagging diagonally across and along the field with shallow turning angles, such that the whole field could be covered twice, in little more than the time it would normally take to cover it once.

Ingenious on the tractor he may have been, but always sensible he was not. On one occasion the clutch on the tractor stuck down. Unable to get it out of gear, he lay down on the ground beneath the clutch to see why it was stuck, and eventually succeeded in freeing it. Now, if you lie down under the clutch of a tractor you’ll find that you are also lying directly in front of the large left rear wheel. The tractor enthusiastically leapt into action and ran him over, and all I can say is it was a good thing it was a Ferguson and not one of today’s giant tractors. The little Fergie went bowling triumphantly across the field, and Norman, my father’s employee who was standing there, was too dumbstruck with horror to do anything about it. My father had to sit up and tell him to chase after the tractor to stop it. Poor Norman was also too shaken to drive him to hospital, so my father had to do that himself. He spent some time in hospital with his leg in traction, but apparently suffered no lasting damage. His stay in hospital had the beneficial side-effect of prompting him to give up smoking his pipe. He never went back to it, and its only legacy was hundreds of empty baccy tins bearing the slogan ‘And assuredly this is a grand old rich tobacco’ which he was still using decades later for keeping assorted screws, nuts and washers and the miscellaneous dirty old metal scraps in which he took such delight.

Under the influence of an evangelical agricultural author called F. Newman Turner, and also perhaps of his eccentric friend from Marlborough and Oxford days, Hugh Corley, my father was an early convert to organic farming, long before it became fashionable or patronized by princes. He never used inorganic fertilizers or weedkillers. His organic farming mentors also disapproved of combine harvesters, and our farm was too small to justify one anyway, so in the early days we harvested with an old binder. It clattered noisily across the field behind the little grey tractor, scissoring the wheat or barley in front and spitting out neatly tied sheaves behind (I marvelled at the clever mechanism for tying the knots). And then the real work began, because the sheaves had to be stooked. An army of us walked behind the binder picking up sheaves two at a time and stacking them against each other to make little wigwams (stooks), six sheaves to a stook. It was hard work, leaving our forearms scratched and grazed and sometimes bleeding, but it was satisfying and we slept well that night. My mother would bring jugs of draught cider (scrumpy) out to the fields for the stookers, and a warm feeling of good fellowship suffused the Hardyesque scene.

The purpose of stooking was to dry the crop, after which the sheaves were carted and tossed up onto a rick. As a boy, I was not strong enough with a pitchfork to toss a sheaf right to the top of a high rick, but I tried hard and I envied my father’s strong arms and horny hands, the equal of any of his employees. Weeks later, a threshing machine would be hired and parked next to the rick. The sheaves were fed in by hand, the grain threshed out and the straw baled. The farm workers all joined in with goodwill, regardless of what their real jobs might have been – cowman or pigman or general handyman or whatever. Later we moved with the times and hired a neighbour’s combine.

In an earlier chapter I said I was a secret reader who used to escape to my bedroom with a book instead of rushing around outside in all weathers in true Dawkins tradition. Secret reader I may have been, but I can’t honestly pretend that my reading in the school holidays had much to do with philosophy or the meaning of life or other such deep questions. It was pretty standard juvenile fiction: Billy Bunter, Just William, Biggles, Bulldog Drummond, Percy F. Westerman, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Treasure Island. For some reason my family disapproved of Enid Blyton and discouraged me from reading her. My Uncle Colyear gave me the Arthur Ransome books in succession, but I never really got on with them. I think I found them too girly, which was silly of me. Richmal Crompton’s William has, I still think, genuine literary merit, with irony that can appeal to an adult as well as a child. And even the Billy Bunter books, though so formulaically written they might almost have been composed by computer, have pretensions to literary allusion in such phrases as: ‘Like Moses of old, he looked this way and that, and saw no man’ or ‘Like a podgy Peri at the gates of Paradise’. Bulldog Drummond plumbs depths of jingoistic and racist bigotry which unmistakably label its era but passed over my naive young head. My maternal grandparents had a copy of Gone with the Wind, which I reread avidly on more than one summer holiday, never really noticing the paternalistic racism until I was older.

Family life at Over Norton was about as happy as family life gets. My parents were a united couple who celebrated their seventieth wedding anniversary together shortly before my father died in December 2010 aged 95. We were not a particularly rich family, but we weren’t poor either. We had no central heating and no television, although the latter was from choice more than poverty. The family car was the dirty old Land Rover I mentioned or a cream van, neither of them luxurious but they did the job. Sarah’s and my schools were expensive, and my parents surely had to skimp in other areas of life to send us there. Our childhood holidays were not in posh hotels on the Côte d’Azur but in army surplus tents in Wales, pelted with rain. On those camping trips we washed in an ex-Burma-Forest-Department canvas bath, warmed by the camp fire on which we also cooked our meals. Sarah and I, in our tent, heard our father sitting in his bath with his feet outside it, meditatively ruminating to himself, ‘Well, I’ve never had me bath in me boots before.’

For three of my most formative years in my early teens I had the equivalent of an elder brother. Our great friends from Africa, Dick and Margaret Kettlewell, had stayed on in Nyasaland. Dick had at an unusually young age become Director of Agriculture, and distinguished himself in the job so resoundingly that he later became Minister of Lands and Mines in the provisional government on the way to full independence. When their son Michael, a playmate of mine in our very early days, turned thirteen he started as a boarder at Sherborne School in England; and, as with my father a generation before, the question arose of where he should go in the school holidays. I was delighted when he came to us. The age gap was only just over a year, and we did everything together: swimming in the freezing cold stream in the valley; indoor pursuits like chemistry sets, Meccano,39 ping-pong, canasta, badminton, miniature snooker, various childish concoctions and recipes for making beetroot wine, or detergents, or vitamin pills. With Sarah, we had a junior farming enterprise called The Gaffers. My father gave us a litter of piglets, which we called The Barrels. We fed them daily and were wholly responsible for looking after them. Mike and I have remained lifelong friends. Indeed, he is now my brother-in-law and the grandfather of most of my young relations.

There is a downside to having an elder brother in your formative years, however. It can mean that whenever you do anything, he actually does the operation and you pass him the instruments (since Mike later became a distinguished surgeon, the metaphor is not unsuitable). My Uncle Bill had a lifelong reputation for being ‘no good with his hands’, whereas my father had the opposite reputation, and it was probably for the same reason. The younger brother is apt to be the apprentice, never the master craftsman. The elder brother tends to be the decision-maker, the younger brother the follower, and early habits stick. Unlike my Uncle Bill, I didn’t cultivate a reputation for being no good with my hands. Nevertheless I was – and now am – no good. Mike did everything, with me as superfluous assistant, and my father probably looked forward to my imminent exposure to the famous workshops of Oundle, which should set me belatedly in the footsteps of Major Campbell. But those workshops, as we shall see, proved to be a disappointment.

I was probably a disappointment as a naturalist, too, despite the rare privilege of spending a day with the young David Attenborough, when we were both guests of my Uncle Bill and Aunt Diana. Already famous but not yet a household name, he had been their guest on a filming expedition up-country in Sierra Leone, and they remained friends. When Bill and Diana moved to England and I happened to be staying with them, David brought his son Robert to visit, and had us children wading all day through ditches and ponds with fishing nets and jam jars on strings. I’ve forgotten what we were seeking – newts or tadpoles or dragonfly larvae, I expect – but the day itself was never to be forgotten. Even that experience with the world’s most charismatic zoologist, however, wasn’t enough to turn me into the child naturalist that both my parents had been. Oundle beckoned.