By the boys, for the boys. The boys know best.
Leave it to them to pick the rotters out
With that rough justice decent schoolboys know.
John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
I GOT the English public school experience too late – thank goodness – for the real cruelties of the John Betjeman era. But it was quite tough enough. There were ludicrous rules, invented ‘by the boys for the boys’. The number of buttons you were allowed to undo on your jacket was strictly laid down according to seniority, and strictly enforced. Below a certain seniority level, you had to carry your books with a straight arm. Why? The masters must have known this sort of thing was going on, yet they did nothing to stop it.
The fagging system was still going strong, although happily it no longer is. (Note to American readers: this doesn’t mean what you think. In British English, a ‘faggot’ is not a homosexual but a bundle of sticks or a rather nasty meatball. And ‘fag’ means cigarette or boring task or – as in this case – schoolboy slave.) Each house prefect at Oundle chose one of the new boys as his personal slave or fag. I was chosen by the deputy Head of House, known as Jitters because he had a tremor. He was kind to me, but I still had to do his every bidding. I had to clean his shoes, polish the brasses of his Cadet Corps uniform and make toast for him at teatime every day on a paraffin pressure stove in his study. I had to be ready to run errands for him at any time.
Not that fags were totally immune to sexual importuning. On four separate occasions I had to fend off nocturnal visits to my bed from senior boys much larger and stronger than I was. I suspect that they were driven by neither homosexuality nor paedophilia in the normal sense of the outside world, but by the simple fact that there were no girls. Pre-pubescent boys can be pretty in a girlish sort of way, and I was. There was also folklore, rife throughout the school, of boys having ‘crushes’ on other boys with girlish appeal. Once again, I was the victim of many such rumours, whose only real damage was the – considerable – time they wasted in idle gossip.
Many things about Oundle were intimidating after Chafyn Grove. In the Great Hall for morning prayers on my first day, new boys were yet to be assigned places and we had to find empty chairs where we could. I found one and timidly asked the big boy next to it whether it was taken: ‘Not as far as I can observe’ was his icily polite reply, and I felt crushed very small. After the treble chorus and foot-pumped harmonium of Chafyn Grove, Oundle’s deep bellowing of ‘New every morning is the love’, accompanied by the massive, thundering organ, was alarming. The stooping headmaster in his black MA gown, Gus Stainforth, was formidable in a different way from Gallows. In nasal tones he exhorted us to ‘break the back of the term’s work’ by the third week: I wasn’t sure how you set about breaking the back of anything, let alone a term’s work.
My form master in 4B1, Snappy Priestman, was a gentle man, cultivated, kind and civilized except when he (very occasionally) lost his temper. Even then, there was something oddly gentlemanly about the way he did it. In one of his lessons he caught a boy misbehaving. After a lull when nothing happened, he began to give us verbal warning of his escalating internal fury, speaking quite calmly as an objective observer of his own internal state.
Oh dear. I can’t hold it. I’m going to lose my temper. Get down below your desks. I’m warning you. It’s coming. Get down below your desks.
As his voice rose in a steady crescendo he was becoming increasingly red in the face, and he finally picked up everything within reach – chalk, inkpots, books, wood-backed blackboard erasers – and hurled them, with the utmost ferocity, towards the miscreant. Next day he was charm itself, apologizing briefly but graciously to the same boy. He was a kind gentleman provoked beyond endurance – as who would not be in his profession? Who would not be in mine, for that matter?
Snappy had us reading Shakespeare and assisted my first appreciation of that sublime genius. We did Henry IV (both parts) and Henry V, and he himself played the dying Henry IV, chiding Hal for having taken the crown prematurely: ‘Oh my son. God put it in thy mind to take it hence, that thou mightst win the more thy father’s love, pleading so wisely in excuse of it.’ He asked for a volunteer who could do Welsh (Williams) and Irish (Rumary: ‘Oh, Rumary, you are a treasure.’) Snappy read us Kipling, putting on a creditable Scottish accent for the hymn of the Chief Engineer, M’Andrew (that really is Kipling’s spelling). The hauntingly rhythmical opening verse of ‘The Long Trail’ put me sadly in mind of the ricks of Over Norton and the ‘all is safely gathered in’ satisfaction of early autumn (please read it aloud to get the Kipling rhythm).
There’s a whisper down the field where the year has shot her yield,
And the ricks stand grey to the sun,
Singing: ‘Over then, come over, for the bee has quit the clover,
And your English summer’s done.’
And, right on cue for the mellow fruitfulness, Mr Priestman read us Keats.
Our mathematics master that same year, Frout, was prone to dizzy fits. Once, before he arrived in the classroom, I seem to remember that we set all the lights swinging from the ceiling. Then when he came in we swayed in unison with them. I don’t recall what happened next. Maybe remorse has blocked out the memory. Or maybe it is a false memory based on a schoolboy folk legend about what others had earlier done to him. Either way, I now see it as yet another example of the lamentable cruelty of children – a recurring theme of my schoolday recollections.
We didn’t always get it our own way. One time the 4B1 physics master, Bufty, was ill and the class was taken instead by the senior science master, Bunjy. Having ascertained that we had reached Boyle’s Law in our curriculum, he proceeded to teach us, labelling us with numbers in place of our names, which he had no time to learn. Small, stooping, old, and more short-sighted than anybody I have ever encountered before or since, he was, we thought, easy meat for ragging. He seemed scarcely to notice our insolence. We were wrong. Hypermyopic he may have been, but he noticed. At the end of the lesson, Bunjy quietly announced that he was keeping us all in detention that very afternoon. Crestfallen, we returned in the afternoon and were instructed to write on a clean page in our notebooks: ‘Extra Lesson for Form 4B1. Object of the Lesson: To teach 4B1 good manners and Boyle’s Law’. I am confident that this is not a false memory and I, for one, have never forgotten Boyle’s Law.
One of our masters – the only one we were allowed to call by his nickname – was prone to fall in love with the prettier boys. He never, as far as we knew, went any further than to put an arm around them in class and make suggestive remarks, but nowadays that would probably be enough to land him in terrible trouble with the police – and tabloid-inflamed vigilantes.
Like most schools of its type, Oundle was divided into houses. Each boy lived in, and dined in, one of eleven houses, and his house commanded his loyalty in all competitive fields of endeavour. Mine was Laundimer. I don’t know what the others were like inside because we were discouraged from visiting other houses, but I suspect that they were all much the same. Interestingly, however, our minds tended to see each house as having a ‘personality’, and we unconsciously grafted that personality onto individual boys in the house concerned. These house ‘personalities’ were so nebulous that I cannot find it in me to attempt a description of any one of them. It was just something one ‘felt’, subjectively. I suspect that this observation represents, in a somewhat more innocent form than many prevalent in the wider world, that ‘tribal’ human impulse that lies behind much that is more sinister, such as racial prejudice and sectarian bigotry. I’m talking about the human tendency to identify individuals with a group to which they belong, rather than seeing them as individuals in their own right. Experimental psychologists have shown that this happens even when individuals are allocated to groups at random in the first place and labelled with badges as arbitrary as T-shirts of different colours.
As a particular illustration of the effect – actually rather an agreeable one in this case – there was a single boy of African ancestry at Oundle when I was there. It is my impression that he suffered no racial prejudice whatsoever at that time, possibly because, being the only black boy, he was not identified with a racial group within the school. But he was identified with the house to which he belonged. Along with his contemporaries at Laxton House, we saw him not as noticeably black at all but as ‘one of the Laxton crowd’, with a similar personality to others in Laxton. In hindsight, I doubt that there was any identifiable personality trait that could reasonably be associated with Laxton or any other house. My observation relates not at all to the reality of life at Oundle but to a general characteristic of human psychology, the tendency to see individuals as badged with a group label.
My reason for choosing Laundimer as my house was a rumour, which proved ill-founded, that it was one of the few houses that lacked the tradition of an initiation ceremony (what American college students call ‘hazing’). As it turned out, we did have to stand on the table and sing a song. In my piping treble I sang one of my father’s songs:
Oh the sun was shining, shining brightly
Shining as it never shone before – shone before.
Oh the sun was shining so brightly,
When we left the baby on the shore.
Yes we left the baby on the shore.
It’s a thing that we’ve never done before – done before.
When you see the mother, tell her gently
That we left the baby on the shore.
Singing this was an ordeal, but not as bad, in the event, as I had feared.
I didn’t see much individual bullying at Oundle, but there was a kind of formalized bullying which afflicted every new boy for one week in his first term or two, at least in Laundimer, and I think much the same happened in the other houses. This was the dread week when he was ‘bell boy’. In your week as bell boy you were responsible for everything, and you were to blame if anything went wrong – which it usually did. You had to light the fire and make sure it didn’t go out. On Saturday during your week of ordeal as all-purpose scapegoat, you had to go round all the studies taking orders for Sunday newspapers, and collecting money for them. Then, on Sunday morning, you had to get up very early, walk to the far end of the town to buy the newspapers, then carry them back and distribute them to all the studies. Your most publicly noticeable function was to ring the bell at exactly the right time to signal each of many deadlines throughout the day: getting up time, mealtimes, bedtime and so on. That meant you had to have a very accurate watch. By the end of my week as bell boy, I had got the hang of it, but the first day was a disaster. For some reason, I hadn’t grasped that the five-minute warning bell had to be rung exactly five minutes before the breakfast gong. Many of the senior boys were in the habit of getting out of bed five minutes to the dot before the gong rang, and five minutes is not long to wash and dress so the timing was crucial. On my first day as bell boy I rang the five-minute bell, then strolled across to belabour the gong about half a minute later. Consternation was rife, and angry ridicule ensued.
The duties of bell boy and fag were such that it is a wonder we new boys got any work done at all, let alone succeeded in ‘breaking the back of the term’s work’. Fagging has now been abolished, I think in all English schools. But I remain at a loss as to why it was ever permitted in the first place, and why it lasted as long as it did. In the nineteenth century there was a weird belief that it had some kind of educational value. Perhaps its long persistence had something to do with the ‘I went through it in my time so why shouldn’t you?’ mentality – a mentality that is still, incidentally, the bane of many a junior doctor’s life in Britain.
Not entirely surprisingly, my stammer resurfaced in my early terms at Oundle. I had trouble with hard consonants like ‘D’ and ‘T’ and it was unfortunate that my surname begins with one of them, for it was often necessary to enunciate it. When we had tests in class, we had to tick our correct answers, count the ticks and then shout out the tally, out of ten, for the master to record in his book. When I got ten out of ten, I used to call out ‘nine’ because it was so much easier to say than ‘t-t-t-ten’. In the army Cadet Corps we were to be inspected by a visiting general. One by one we would have to march out from the ranks, stamp to attention in front of him, shout our name, salute, smart about turn and march back. ‘Cadet Dawkins, sir!’ I dreaded it. I had sleepless nights about it. It was fine to practise by myself, but when I had to shout it out in front of the whole parade? ‘Cadet D-d-d-d-d . . .’ In the event, it passed off all right, with just a long, hesitating pause before the D.
The Cadet Corps was not quite compulsory. You could get out of it if you joined the Boy Scouts. Or the other way out was to spend the time tilling the land with Boggy Cartwright. In a previous book I described Mr Cartwright as ‘a remarkable, bushy-browed man, who called a spade a spade and was seldom seen without one’. Although paid to teach us German, what he actually taught us, in a slow, rural accent, was a kind of earthy, agricultural eco-wisdom. His blackboard permanently had the word ‘Ecology’ written on it and if anybody erased it when he wasn’t looking he promptly rewrote it without saying a word. When writing German on the blackboard, if a sentence threatened to overwrite ‘Ecology’, he would cause the German sentence to flow around and over it. He once caught a boy reading P. G. Wodehouse and furiously tore the book clean in two. He had evidently bought into the calumny – assiduously fostered by Cassandra of the Daily Mirror – that Wodehouse had been a German collaborator during the war, on a par with Lord Haw-Haw or – the American equivalent – Tokyo Rose. But Mr Cartwright had the story even more garbled than Cassandra’s slander. ‘Wodehouse once had the opportunity to kick a German colonel downstairs, and he didn’t take it.’ That makes him sound like an angry man. He really wasn’t, except under extreme provocation, which, bizarrely, P. G. Wodehouse (he said ‘Woadhouse’ instead of the correct ‘Woodhouse’) seems to have constituted. He was just a wonderfully original character, ahead of his time in his ecological eccentricity, slow-spoken and literally down to earth.
I was not enterprising enough to get out of the Cadet Corps by either of the two escape routes. I was probably too influenced by my peers – which actually was the story of my life at Oundle. Eventually I got out of the worst parts of army training by joining the band, playing first the clarinet and then the saxophone, conducted by a bandsman NCO: ‘Right, we’ll go from the very commencement of the ‘ole march.’ Of course, being in the band didn’t get us out of the weekly duty of polishing our army boots, blanco-ing our belts and shining our brasses with Duraglit or Brasso. And we had to go to army camp once a year, living in the barracks of some regiment or other, going on long route marches and fighting mock battles with blank ammunition in our antiquated Lee-Enfield rifles. We also fired live rounds at targets, and one boy in my platoon accidentally shot the adjutant in the fleshy part of the leg. He fell to the ground and immediately lit a cigarette, while we witnesses, still on the ground with our Bren guns, felt very queasy.
On one expedition to the Leicester barracks we were exposed to a real sergeant major, the genuine article complete with huge, waxed ginger moustache. He would bellow, ‘Seeerloooooope ARMS’ or ‘Ordeeeeeer ARMS’, the first word in each case being a bass and prolonged bellow, while the second word was a staccato – and absurdly high – soprano shriek. We suppressed our laughter into terrified snorts, in the manner of Pontius Pilate’s soldiers in the Monty Python ‘Biggus Dickus’ scene.
We had to pass an examination called Certificate A, which involved rote learning of army knowledge: an exercise clearly designed to suppress anything remotely resembling intelligence or initiative – commodities not valued in the ranks of general infantry. ‘How many kinds of trees do we have in the army?’ The correct answer was three: Fir, Poplar and Bushy Top (the poet Henry Reed picked up on this point, but our drill sergeants would not have appreciated his satire).
Peer pressure among schoolchildren is notoriously strong. I and many of my companions were abject victims of it. Our dominant motivation for doing anything was peer pressure. We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was – until my last year at Oundle – anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Evolutionary psychologists might have interesting things to say on the question.
But such missed opportunities! There were all sorts of exciting clubs and societies, any of which I could have joined with benefit. There was an observatory with a telescope – perhaps the gift of an old boy – and I never went near it. Why not? I would be enthralled to do so now, to be instructed by a knowledgeable astronomer with a real telescope that I didn’t have to set up myself. I sometimes think schooldays are too good to be wasted on teenagers. Perhaps devoted teachers, instead of casting their pearls before piglets, should be given the opportunity to teach pupils old enough to appreciate their beauty.
For me at Oundle, the biggest missed opportunity of all lay in the workshops, which were my father’s main reason for sending me to the school in the first place. It wasn’t entirely my fault. Sanderson’s unique innovation of a compulsory week in the workshops was still in full swing, and the workshops were superbly well equipped. We learned how to use lathes, milling machines and other advanced machine tools which we would be unlikely to meet in the big world outside. What we did not learn was precisely what my father was so good at: improvising, designing, making do and coping, knocking things up from what was available – in his case, mostly red binder twine and dirty old bits of iron.
The first thing we made in the Oundle workshops was a ‘marking gauge’. We weren’t even told what a marking gauge was. We copied exactly what the instructors told us to do. We made a wooden pattern for the metal object we were trying to make. We took it into the foundry and made a mould of our wooden pattern by pounding sticky sand around it. We donned protective goggles and assisted in pouring molten aluminium from a glowing crucible into the mould. We disinterred the cooled metal from the sand and took it to the metalwork shop to file it, drill it and finish it. And we took home our finished marking gauge, still with no idea what a marking gauge was and having used no initiative or creativity of any kind. We might as well have been workers in a mass production factory.
And part of the problem may indeed have been that the instructors were not teachers but were recruited – I’m guessing – from the ranks of factory floor foremen. They taught us not how to develop skills in general, but how to do particular things. I met the problem again when I took professional driving lessons in the town of Banbury. I was taught how to reverse round a particular corner in Banbury, which happened to be the favourite corner the examiner headed for when testing that particular skill: ‘Wait till that lamp-post is level with the back window, then swing hard around.’
The one exception in the Oundle workshops, the one partial upholder of the Sanderson tradition for me, was an old retired blacksmith who manned a little forge in a corner of the metal shop. I hived myself off from the ‘factory floor’ and apprenticed myself to this kindly, bespectacled little old man. He taught me the traditional arts of the smith, plus acetylene welding, and my mother still has the poker I made, sitting in its scrolled stand. Even with the old smith, however, I pretty much did exactly what I was told, rather than exercising much creative resourcefulness.
A bad workman blames his tools – and his instructors. What was definitely my own fault is that I never went near the workshops except during the prescribed week. I didn’t seize the opportunity to go in the evenings and make things to my own design. Just as I didn’t go to the observatory to look at the stars. Mostly I wasted my spare time in the same way my colleagues did, lazing around, making toast on a Primus stove and listening to Elvis Presley. Plus, in my case, tootling on musical instruments rather than playing real music. Such a waste of first-class, expensively bought opportunities is little short of tragic. Once again, is school too good for teenagers?
I did, however, join the beekeeping club, run by Ioan Thomas, Oundle’s inspiring young zoology master, and the smell of beeswax and smoke still evokes happy memories. Happy in spite of the fact that I was quite frequently stung. On one such occasion (I am mildly proud to report) I didn’t brush the bee off my hand but carefully watched as she slowly waltzed round and round on my hand, ‘unscrewing’ her sting from my skin. The stings of bees, unlike those of wasps, are barbed. When a bee stings a mammal, the barbs cause the sting to stick in the skin. When you brush the bee off, the sting stays behind and tears out some of the bee’s vital organs. From an evolutionary point of view, the individual worker bee is behaving altruistically, sacrificing her life as a kamikaze fighter for the benefit of the hive (strictly speaking, for the benefit of the genes that programmed her to do it, in the form of copies in queens and males). While she goes off to die, her sting remains in the victim, the poison gland still pumping venom and therefore acting as a more effective deterrent to the putative hive-raider. This makes perfect evolutionary sense, and I’ll return to the theme in the chapter on The Selfish Gene. Given that she is sterile, the worker bee has no chance of passing on copies of her genes via offspring, so instead she works to pass them on via the queen and other non-sterile members of the hive. When I let my worker unscrew herself from my hand I was behaving altruistically towards her – but my motivation was mostly curiosity: I wanted to watch at first hand the procedure I had heard about from Mr Thomas.
I’ve mentioned Ioan Thomas in previous publications. My very first lesson with him, at the age of fourteen, was inspirational. I don’t remember the details, but it conveyed the kind of atmosphere I was later to strive for in Unweaving the Rainbow: what I would now call ‘science as the poetry of reality’. He had come to Oundle as a very young teacher because of his admiration for Sanderson, although he was too young to have met that old headmaster. He did meet Sanderson’s successor, Kenneth Fisher, and told a story showing that something of the spirit of Sanderson had lived on. I retold the tale in my inaugural Oundle Lecture, given in 2002.
Kenneth Fisher was chairing a staff meeting when there was a timid knock on the door and a small boy came in: ‘Please, sir, there are Black Terns down by the river.’ ‘This can wait,’ said Fisher decisively to the assembled committee. He rose from the Chair, seized his binoculars from the door and cycled off in the company of the small ornithologist, and – one can’t help imagining – with the benign, ruddy-faced ghost of Sanderson beaming in their wake. Now that’s education – and to hell with your league table statistics, your fact-stuffed syllabuses and your endless roster of exams . . .
Some 35 years after Sanderson’s death, I recall a lesson about Hydra, a small denizen of still freshwater. Mr Thomas asked one of us: ‘What animal eats Hydra?’ The boy made a guess. Non-committally, Mr Thomas turned to the next boy, asking him the same question. He went right round the entire class, with increasing excitement asking each one of us by name, ‘What animal eats Hydra? What animal eats Hydra?’ And one by one we guessed. By the time he had reached the last boy, we were agog for the true answer. ‘Sir, sir, what animal does eat Hydra?’ Mr Thomas waited until there was a pin-dropping silence. Then he spoke, slowly and distinctly, pausing between each word.
‘I don’t know . . .’ (Crescendo) ‘I don’t know . . .’ (Molto crescendo) ‘And I don’t think Mr Coulson knows either.’ (Fortissimo) ‘Mr Coulson! Mr Coulson!’
He flung open the door to the next classroom and dramatically interrupted his senior colleague’s lesson, bringing him into our room. ‘Mr Coulson, do you know what animal eats Hydra?’ Whether some wink passed between them I couldn’t say, but Mr Coulson played his part well: he didn’t know. Again the fatherly shade of Sanderson chuckled in the corner, and none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today’s assessment-mad exam culture.
Those two occasions, when I fancifully invoked the ghost of a long-dead headmaster, have been held up as showing that I must be in some sense a supernaturalist. Of course they show nothing of the kind. Such imagery should perhaps be called poetic. It is legitimate so long as it clearly is understood to be non-literal. I hope the context of those two quotations is sufficiently clear to obviate misunderstanding. Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: ‘It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.’ Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true. I hope and trust that no reader thinks I believe Sanderson really was standing in the corner beaming at Mr Thomas’s lesson.
Our lesson on Hydra was the scene of a slightly embarrassing story, but I should tell it as it might be revealing. Mr Thomas asked us whether any of us had seen Hydra before. I think I was the only boy to put his hand up. My father had an old brass microscope, and we had spent a lovely day a few years earlier looking at hugely magnified pond life: mostly crustaceans such as Cyclops, Daphnia and Cypris, but also Hydra. I had regarded the slowly waving, almost plant-like Hydra as rather dull compared with the crustaceans, leggy and vigorously kicking. Hydra was the least exciting memory of that memorable day, and I think I snobbishly looked down upon all the attention that Mr Thomas was giving to it in that lesson. So, when he asked me for more details of my previous encounter with Hydra, I said: ‘I’ve seen all those sorts of animals.’ To Mr Thomas, of course, Cyclops, Daphnia and Cypris were not at all the same sort of animal as Hydra, but to me they were because I had seen them all on the same day with my father, and so lumped them together. Mr Thomas probably suspected that I hadn’t seen Hydra at all, and he cross-examined me closely. I am sorry to say that this had exactly the wrong effect on me. Perhaps I took his cross-questioning as some sort of slur on my father, who had introduced me to ‘all those sorts of animals’ and told me their Latin names. I obstinately dug in my toes and, instead of saying, clearly and unequivocally (and truthfully), that I had indeed seen Hydra, I persisted in my refusal to separate it from ‘all those sorts of animals’. Embarrassing to recall. Revealing? Maybe, but I don’t know of what. Perhaps it was connected with the fierce loyalty that I felt towards all things associated with my parents, whether it was Ferguson tractors (‘Dirty old Fordson!’) or Jersey cows (‘Friesians don’t give milk, they give water’).
Mr Thomas having introduced me to beekeeping, I was able to carry on with the hobby in the school holidays when my father’s eccentric old schoolfriend Hugh Corley gave me a hive. They were a wonderfully docile strain which literally never stung, and I used to work them without veil or gloves. Unfortunately they were later poisoned by insecticide wafting over from a neighbour’s field. Mr Corley, passionate organic farmer and early eco-warrior, was outraged and gave me another hive. Unfortunately these went to the opposite extreme – undoubtedly a genetic difference – and stung everything that moved. I didn’t react badly to stings in those days. But I wonder whether those many stings in my boyhood sensitized me to stings in later life. I have been stung only twice as an adult, once in my forties and once in my fifties, and on both occasions I reacted strangely and in a way that never happened when I was an active beekeeper. The region around one eye swelled up hugely, so that I could scarcely see. Why the eye, given that the stings were respectively on hand and foot? And, especially, why only one eye?
Apart from beekeeping with Mr Thomas, I suppose my other mildly constructive spare-time occupation at Oundle was playing music. I spent many hours in the Music School, but even there I have to confess to massive wasting of opportunities. From my earliest childhood, musical instruments of any kind would draw me like a magnet, and I had to be dragged away from shops that had violins or trumpets or oboes in the window. Even today, if a string quartet or a jazz band has been engaged to play at a garden party or a wedding, I will neglect my social duties and hover around the musicians, watching their fingers and talking to them during the intervals about their instruments. I don’t have perfect pitch like my first wife Marian, and my harmonic sense is poor, unlike that of my present wife Lalla, who can effortlessly improvise harmonious descants to any melody. But I do have a natural melodic ability, meaning that I can play a tune about as easily as I can sing it or whistle it. I’m sorry to say that one of my pastimes in the Music School was illicitly to pick up instruments that didn’t belong to me and teach myself to play tunes on them. On one occasion I was caught playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ on a rather expensive trombone belonging to a senior boy, and got into trouble because the trombone was later found to be damaged. I genuinely believe I didn’t do the damage, but I was blamed (not by the owner himself, who was rather nice about it).
My facile melodic gift turned out to be a curse rather than a blessing, at least in a child as lazy as I was. Playing by ear was so easy for me that I neglected other important skills such as reading music or creative improvisation. It was worse than laziness. For a while I even snobbishly looked down upon musicians who ‘needed’ to read music. I thought improvisation was a superior skill. But it turned out that I was no good at improvising either. Invited to join the school jazz band, I soon discovered that, although I could play any tune faultlessly, I had absolutely no capacity to improvise upon it. I was very slovenly about practising scales. I have a very slight, partial excuse, which is that nobody ever explained to me what scales are for. With hindsight, as an adult scientist, I can piece the reason together. You play scales in order to become totally at home with every key, so that, once you’ve read the key signature at the beginning of the line, your fingers automatically and effortlessly feel their way into that key.
The hours I spent in the Music School are best described as tootling rather than playing. I did learn to read a score adequately with the clarinet and saxophone. But on the piano – where you are expected to play more than one note at a time – I was unbearably slow, like a child learning to read and laboriously spelling his way through the words letter by letter, rather than fluently reading whole sentences at a time. My kind piano teacher, Mr Davison, recognized my innate melodic ability and taught me some rudimentary rules for accompanying myself with left-hand chords. But though I quickly learned these, I could do them only in the keys of C major and A minor (minimizing the black notes), and my style of left-hand chord-thumping was pretty monotonous – although inexpert listeners were impressed by my ability to play instant requests.
I had a true and pure, though not very loud, singing voice as a treble, and was early recruited into the rather small and select Chancel Choir in the Oundle school chapel. I hugely enjoyed this; the regular rehearsal, under the Director of Music Mr Miller, was the high spot of my week. I think it was rather a good choir, up there with a typical English cathedral choir. And I can’t resist adding that we sang without the affectation of the half-rolled ‘r’ – sounding more like a ‘d’ – which, at least to my prejudiced ear, spoils much choral singing: ‘Maady was that mother mild / Jesus Cdist, her little child.’ ‘The dising of the sun / And the dunning of the deer / The playing of the meddy organ . . .’ By the way, while I’m doing my grumpy act, the fake Italian ‘r’ of John McCormack-vintage tenors is even worse: ‘Seated one day at the Oregon . . .’
We performed an anthem every Sunday: Stanford or Brahms or Mozart or Parry or John Ireland, or earlier composers such as Tallis or Byrd or Boyce. We had no conductor, but two of the basses, facing each other in the back rows on the two sides of the chancel, performed the role by their miming head movements. One of these basses, C. E. S. Patrick, had a spellbindingly beautiful voice – probably the better for not being trained. I never spoke to him (one didn’t meet senior boys in other houses), but I hero-worshipped him as the star of the Male Voice Choir, which performed under the direction of another gifted music master, Donald Payne, at school concerts. Unfortunately I was never invited to join the Male Voice Choir. When my voice broke, it dropped in quality as well as in pitch.
Oundle had a tradition – again founded by Sanderson – of involving the entire school in an annual oratorio. The choice of music was staggered in such a way that every boy would experience Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s B Minor Mass during his five years at the school. The intervening years offered a variety of works. My first term we did Bach’s Sleepers Wake cantata and Haydn’s Imperial Mass, and I loved them, especially the Bach, with its slow chorale for the voices cunningly set against the leaping counterpoint melody in the orchestra. This was a magical experience, of a kind I had never known before. Every morning, for five minutes after prayers, the tall, thin figure of Mr Miller would stride briskly forward and rehearse the entire school, just a few pages at a time, until the big day came for the performance. Professional soloists arrived from London: glamorous soprano and contralto in long dresses, tenor and bass in immaculate tailcoats. Mr Miller treated them with great deference. Goodness knows what they thought of the throaty roar of the ‘non-choir’. But none of the soloists, in my youthfully amateur opinion, could hold a candle to C. E. S. Patrick of the Male Voice Choir.
It is hard to convey the atmosphere of the English public school during the era that I experienced it. Lindsay Anderson captured it well in his film If. I’m not referring to the massacre at the end of the film, of course, and he exaggerated the beating. Maybe prefects with swagger sticks and embroidered waistcoats took a run at it in earlier, crueller eras, but I’m sure it didn’t happen in my time. Actually, I never knew of anyone being caned at all while I was at Oundle and only recently heard (from a victim) that it did happen.
If also beautifully captured the burgeoning sexuality that surrounds pretty boys in a school that has no girls. The flashlight inspection of groins by the matron in the enormous starched hat was only slightly exaggerated in the film. Our inspection was done by the school doctor, who didn’t peer as pruriently as the If matron. Nor did our mild doctor stalk the touchline of the rugby field like she did, screaming ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ But what Lindsay Anderson caught to perfection was the squalid conviviality of the studies where we mostly lived, worked, burnt toast, listened to jazz and Elvis, and fooled around. He caught the hysterical laughter that bonded teenage friends like wrestling puppies – not physical wrestling but verbal wrestling with odd, private languages and weird nicknames that grew and evolved term by term.
As an illustration of the weirdness of nickname evolution (and maybe of memetic mutation generally), one friend of mine was called ‘Colonel’, although there was nothing remotely military about his personality. ‘Seen the Colonel anywhere?’ Here’s the evolutionary history. Years earlier, an older boy, who had by now left the school, was said to have had a crush on my friend. That older boy’s nickname was Shkin (corruption of Skin, and who knows where that came from – maybe some connection with foreskin, but that name would have evolved before I arrived). So my friend inherited the name Shkin from his erstwhile admirer. Shkin rhymes with Thynne, and at this point something akin to Cockney rhyming slang stepped in. There was a character in the BBC radio Goon Show called Colonel Grytte Pyppe Thynne. Hence my friend became Colonel Grytte Pyppe Shkin, later contracted to ‘Colonel’. We loved the Goon Show, and would vie with each other to mimic (as did Prince Charles, who went to a similar school around the same time) the voices of the characters: Bluebottle, Eccles, Major Denis Bloodnok, Henry Crun, Count Jim Moriarty. And we gave each other Goon nicknames like ‘Colonel’ or ‘Count’.
Some of the squalor would positively not be allowed by a health inspector today. After playing rugby we would have a ‘shower’. My hypothesis is that at some time in the past it really had been a shower, and other houses in the school probably had proper showers still. But in Laundimer House, all that was left of the shower was the porcelain rectangular base, which we would fill with hot water. It was just big enough for two boys to sit in, face to face, with their knees up under their chins. We queued up to enter the ‘shower’ and by the time all fifteen rugby players had been through it the ‘water’ was not so much water as dilute mud. The odd thing is that I don’t think we minded being in the last pair. It had the advantage that you could linger on in the warmth instead of rushing to let the queue go through. I don’t remember minding the fact that I was bathing in the muddy bathwater of fourteen other people, any more than I minded getting in a very small bath with another naked male – both things that I would dislike intensely today. Another indication, I suppose, that we are not the same people we once were.
Oundle didn’t really live up to my parents’ expectations. The vaunted workshops were a failure, at least where I was concerned. There was too much adulation of the rugby team and too little prestige attached to intelligence or scholarship, or indeed any of the qualities that Sanderson fostered. But in my last year at least, my set of peers finally started valuing the mind. A bright young history master started a club called Colloquium for intellectual discussion among sixth-formers. I can’t remember what happened at the meetings: maybe we even used to ‘read a paper’, like earnest undergraduates. Equally earnestly, outside the meetings we would evaluate each other’s intelligence, in an atmosphere of po-faced snobbery not unlike that conjured by John Betjeman’s couplet:
Objectively our common room is like a small Athenian state . . .
Except for Lewis: he’s all right, but do you think he’s quite first rate?
I and two friends in my house became militantly anti-religious in our last year, when we were seventeen. We refused to kneel down in chapel and sat with folded arms and closed lips, defiantly upright like proud, volcanic islands in the sea of bowed and mumbling heads. As you’d expect of Anglicans, the school authorities were very decent and never complained, even when I took to skipping chapel altogether. But here I need to go back and trace my loss of religious faith.
I had arrived at Oundle a confirmed Anglican, and I even went to Holy Communion a few times in my first year. I enjoyed getting up early and walking through the sunlit churchyard listening to the blackbirds and thrushes, and I basked in righteous hunger for breakfast afterwards. The poet Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) wrote: ‘If ever I had any doubts about the fundamental realities of religion, they could always be dispelled by one memory – the light upon my father’s face as he came back from early communion.’ It’s a spectacularly silly piece of reasoning for an adult, but it sums me up at the age of fourteen.
I’m happy to say it wasn’t long before I reverted to earlier doubts, first planted at the age of about nine when I learned from my mother that Christianity was one of many religions and they contradicted each other. They couldn’t all be right, so why believe the one in which, by sheer accident of birth, I happened to be brought up? At Oundle, after my brief phase of going to Communion, I gave up believing in everything that was particular about Christianity, and even became quite contemptuous of all particular religions. I was especially incensed by the hypocrisy of the ‘General Confession’ in which we mumbled in chorus that we were ‘miserable offenders’. The very fact that the exact words were written down to be repeated the following week, and the week after and for the rest of our lives (and had been so repeated ever since 1662), sent a clear signal that we had no intention of being anything other than miserable offenders in the future. Indeed, the obsession with ‘sin’ and the Pauline belief that everybody is born in sin, inherited from Adam (whose embarrassing non-existence was unknown to St Paul), is one of the very nastiest aspects of Christianity.
But I retained a strong belief in some sort of unspecified creator, almost entirely because I was impressed by the beauty and apparent design of the living world, and – like so many others – I bamboozled myself into believing that the appearance of design demanded a designer. I blush to admit that I had not at that stage worked out the elementary fallacy of this argument, which is that any god capable of designing the universe would have needed a fair bit of designing himself. If you are going to allow yourself to conjure a designer out of thin air, why not apply the same indulgence to that which he is supposed to have designed, and cut out, so to speak, the middle man? In any case, of course, Darwin provided the magnificently powerful alternative to biological design which we now know to be true. Darwin’s explanation had the huge advantage of starting from primeval simplicity and working up, by slow, gradual degrees, to the stunning complexity that pervades every living body.
But at the time the ‘it’s all so beautiful, there must have been a designer’ argument swayed me. My faith was reinforced by, of all people, Elvis Presley, of whom I was a dizzily enthusiastic fan, like most of my friends. I bought his records as soon as they were released: ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Hound Dog’, ‘Blue Moon’, ‘All Shook Up’, ‘Don’t be Cruel’, ‘Baby I Don’t Care’ and many others. Their sound is irrevocably – it seems now so appropriate – linked in my mind with the faintly sulphurous smell of the ointment with which many of us battled our adolescent spots. I once embarrassed myself by singing ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ loudly at home, thinking I was alone in the house and not knowing that my father was in earshot. ‘You can knock me down / Step on my face / Slander my name / All over the place.’ To imitate Elvis properly in this song you have to rasp the words with a kind of venom, like a modern rap performer. It took my chagrined self a while to convince my father that I was not having some kind of fit, or suffering from Tourette’s Syndrome.
So, I worshipped Elvis and I was a strong believer in a non-denominational creator god. And it all came together when I passed a shop window in my home town of Chipping Norton and saw an album called Peace in the Valley featuring a song called ‘I Believe’. I was transfixed. Elvis was religious! In a frenzy of excitement I dived into the shop and bought it. Hurrying home, I slipped the record out of the sleeve and on to the turntable. I listened with delight – for my hero sang that every time he saw the wonders of the natural world around him, he felt his religious faith reinforced. My own sentiments exactly! This was surely a sign from heaven. Why I was surprised that Elvis was religious is now beyond me. He came from an uneducated working-class family in the American South. How could he not have been religious? Nevertheless I was surprised at the time, and I sort of half-believed that in this unexpected record Elvis was speaking personally to me, calling me to devote my life to telling people about the creator god – which I should be especially well qualified to do if I became a biologist like my father. This seemed to be my vocation, and the call came from none other than the semi-divine Elvis.
I am not proud of this period of religious frenzy, and I’m happy to say that it didn’t last long. I became increasingly aware that Darwinian evolution was a powerfully available alternative to my creator god as an explanation of the beauty and apparent design of life. It was my father who first explained it to me but, to begin with, although I understood the principle, I didn’t think it was a big enough theory to do the job. I was biased against it by reading Bernard Shaw’s preface to Back to Methuselah in the school library. Shaw, in his eloquently muddled way, favoured Lamarckian (more purpose-driven) and hated Darwinian (more mechanistic) evolution, and I was swayed towards the muddle by the eloquence. I went through a period of doubting the power of natural selection to do the job required of it. But eventually a friend – one of the two, neither of them biologists, in whose company I later refused to kneel in chapel – persuaded me of the full force of Darwin’s brilliant idea and I shed my last vestige of theistic credulity, probably at the age of about sixteen. It wasn’t long then before I became strongly and militantly atheistic.
I said that the school authorities were decently Anglican about my refusal to kneel in chapel, and turned a blind eye. But that may not be quite true, at least not of two of them. The first was my English teacher at the time, Flossie Payne, familiar as an erect figure on his sit-up-and-beg bicycle with raised umbrella. Flossie publicly challenged me in class to explain why I was leading a rebellion against kneeling in chapel. I’m afraid I didn’t give a good account of myself. Far from seizing the opportunity to lead my classmates in the same direction, I miserably stammered something about an English lesson not being the appropriate place to have the discussion, and retreated into my shell.
Second, I have only recently learned that my housemaster, Peter Ling (actually a nice man, if rather too conformist and conventional), telephoned Ioan Thomas, my zoology master, to voice his concern about me. In a recent letter to me, Mr Thomas reported that he warned Mr Ling that ‘requiring someone like you to attend chapel twice a day on Sunday was doing you positive harm. The phone went down without comment.’
Mr Ling also summoned my parents for a heart-to-heart talk, over tea, about my rebellious behaviour in chapel. I knew nothing of this at the time and my mother has only just told me of the incident. Mr Ling asked my parents to try to persuade me to change my ways. My father said (approximately, by my mother’s recollection): ‘It is not our business to control him in that sort of way, that kind of thing is your problem, and I’m afraid I must decline your request.’ My parents’ attitude to the whole affair was that it wasn’t important.
Mr Ling, as I said, was in his way a decent man. A contemporary and friend of mine in the same house recently told me the following nice story. He was illicitly up in a dormitory during the day, kissing one of the housemaids. The pair panicked when they heard a heavy tread on the stairs, and my friend hastily bundled the young woman up onto a window sill and drew the curtains to hide her standing shape. Mr Ling came into the room, and must have noticed that only one of the three windows had the curtains drawn. Even worse, my friend noticed, to his horror, that the girl’s feet were clearly visible protruding under the curtain. He firmly believes that Mr Ling must have realized what was going on but pretended not to, perhaps on ‘boys will be boys’ grounds: ‘What are you doing up in the dormitory at this hour?’ ‘Just came up to change my socks, sir.’ ‘Oh, well, hurry on down.’ Good call on Mr Ling’s part! The boy went on to become probably the most successful Old Oundelian of his generation, the knighted chief executive officer of one of the largest international corporations in the world, and a generous benefactor of the school, endowing, among other things, the Peter Ling Fellowship.
The headmaster of a large school is a remote and formidable figure. The stooping Gus Stainforth only taught me for one term – Divinity – and we were terrified of him. We read The Pilgrim’s Progress, and then had to produce our own artist’s impression of that rather unpleasant book. Halfway through his expected time at Oundle, Gus left to head his own old school, Wellington, and was succeeded at Oundle by Dick Knight, a large, athletic man who won our respect by his ability to hit a ball out of the ground (he had played cricket for Wiltshire) and by the way he sang with the ‘non-choir’ in the annual oratorio. He drove a big Rolls-Royce, 1920s vintage I would guess from its imposingly upright style – very different from the sleek purrers of later decades. He happened to be visiting Oxford on business at the same time as I and another boy were taking the Oxford entrance exam and being interviewed in our respective colleges of choice. When they heard this, Mr and Mrs Knight kindly offered us a lift back to Oundle in their ancient Rolls, and on the journey he discreetly raised the subject of my rebellion against Christianity. It was a revelation to talk to a decent, humane, intelligent Christian, embodying Anglicanism at its tolerant best. He seemed genuinely interested in my motives and not at all inclined to condemn. Years later, I was not surprised to learn from his obituary that, an outstanding classical scholar in his youth as well as a noted athlete, in retirement he took a degree in mathematics from the Open University. Sanderson would have loved him.
My father and grandfather had never contemplated any destination for me after Oundle other than Balliol College, Oxford. At the time, Balliol still retained its reputation as the foremost Oxford college, top of the examination league table and alma mater of a glittering list of distinguished old members: writers, scholars, statesmen, prime ministers and presidents all around the world. My parents went to see Ioan Thomas about my prospects. Mr Thomas was realistically frank: ‘Well, he might just scrape into Oxford, but Balliol is probably aiming too high.’
Mr Thomas might doubt that I was good enough for Balliol but – great teacher that he was – he was determined that I should give it my best shot. He had me round regularly at his home in the evenings for extra tuition (unpaid, of course; he was that sort of teacher), and by some miracle he got me into Balliol. More importantly, that meant I got into Oxford. And insofar as anything was the making of me, Oxford was.