MR DAWKINS? Sign here, sir. I remember your three brothers, very fine winger one of them was. I don’t suppose you play rugby, sir?’
‘No, I’m afraid not, and, er, actually I never had any brothers. You must be thinking of my father and my two uncles.’
‘Yes, sir, very fine young gentlemen, sign here please. You are on Staircase 11, Room 3, sharing with Mr Jones. Who’s next?’
Well, that’s approximately how the conversation went. I didn’t write it down at the time. The Balliol College porter took the timeless view characteristic of his bowler-hatted profession. Young gentlemen might come and go, but the college goes on for ever. Indeed, it was to celebrate its 700th anniversary during my time there. Talking of that loyal and ancient bowler-hatted profession, I can’t resist an anecdote more recently told me by the Head Porter of my present college, New College (well, it was new in 1379). An inexperienced new porter hadn’t yet got the hang of the porters’ incident book and what it was for. His entries in the log for his first night duty, at hourly intervals, consisted of (approximately; the details will be wrong):
8 p.m. Raining.
9 p.m. Still raining.
10 p.m. Raining harder.
11 p.m. Raining harder still. I could hear it banging on me bowler as I did me rounds.
Oxford, I should explain, is a federal university: a federation of thirty or so colleges, of which Balliol is one of three claiming to be the oldest. Except for the newer colleges, each one is built around a series of quadrangles. These beautiful old buildings mostly don’t have horizontally running corridors like hotels or halls of residence, with rooms along a passageway: instead, there are lots of staircases leading off doors from the quadrangle, each staircase giving access to a number of rooms on three or four floors. Thus each room is known by a staircase number and a room number within its staircase. In order to visit a near neighbour, you’d probably have to go out into the quadrangle and then in at another staircase entrance. In my time there was a bathroom on every staircase, so we no longer had to go out into the cold in our dressing gowns. Nowadays, the rooms are more likely to have their own en-suite bathrooms, which my father would have called ‘terribly molly’ (soft, namby-pamby). I suspect that a large part of the motivation for installing them is to cater for the lucrative conference trade, which all the Oxford and Cambridge colleges ply out of termtime.
The colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge are financially autonomous self-governing institutions, some of them, such as St John’s, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge, very wealthy. Trinity, by the way, is outstandingly rich in achievement as well as money. This one Cambridge college can boast more Nobel Prizes than any single country in the world except the USA, Britain (obviously), Germany and France. The University of Oxford can make the same proud claim, but no single Oxford college comes close to Trinity Cambridge, not even Balliol, which tops the table of Nobel Prizes for Oxford colleges. My father, I have just realized, is one of few people to have studied at both Balliol, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge.
At both Oxford and Cambridge, the relationship between the colleges and the university bears the same uneasy tension as that between the federal and state governments in the USA. The rise of science has increased the power and importance of the ‘federal government’ (university), because science is too big an enterprise to be handled by each college separately (though one or two of them tried to go it alone in the nineteenth century). The science departments belong to the university, and it was the Zoology Department rather than the college that was to dominate my life at Oxford.
That porter must have been one of the first people to call me ‘Mr Dawkins’ (let alone ‘Sir’) – treat me as an adult – and I wasn’t used to it. I think it was characteristic of my generation of undergraduates that we worked rather self-consciously at appearing to be more adult than we were. Later generations of undergraduates have tended towards the opposite, dressing scruffily with hoods or baseball caps, loosely slung rucksacks and sometimes even more loosely slung jeans. But my generation favoured tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, smart waistcoats, corduroy trousers, trilby hats, moustaches, ties, even bow ties. Some (not I, despite the example of my father) put the finishing touches to this image by smoking a pipe. These affectations may have been prompted by the fact that many of my fellow freshmen really were two years older; for my cohort was almost the first of the post-war generations not to be called up for military service. Those of us who came straight from school in 1959 were boys, sharing lectures, quadrangles and a dining hall with militarily trained men, and this perhaps raised our aspiration to grow up and be taken seriously as adults. We left Elvis behind and listened to Bach or the Modern Jazz Quartet. We solemnly intoned Keats and Auden and Marvell to each other. Chiang Yee captured the mood in his charming book from a slightly earlier era, The Silent Traveller in Oxford,40 when he drew, in his elegant Chinese style, a pair of freshmen bounding, two steps at a time, up their college staircase. His deliciously perceptive caption read: ‘I could tell that they were freshmen because I heard one say to the other, “Do you read much Shelley?”‘
The claim that army service turns boys into men is the basis of a lovely story about Maurice Bowra, legendary Warden of Wadham College (anecdotes about Bowra are so numerous as to be best avoided, but this is an especially charming one). Immediately after the war, he was interviewing a young man for a place at the college.
‘Sir, I have been away at the war, and I have to confess that I have forgotten all my Latin. I cannot pass the Latin exam to qualify for entrance.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, dear boy, war counts as Latin, war counts as Latin.’
My older colleagues back from National Service in 1959 were not literally ‘battle-hardened’ like Bowra’s entrance candidate, but they had an unmistakable air of being worldly-wise and grown up, in a way that I was not. As I said, I think that those of my generation who affected pipe-smoking, bow ties and neatly trimmed moustaches may have been struggling to keep up with the military veterans. Am I right in suspecting that today’s undergraduates aspire in the opposite direction, towards juvenilization? On the first day of a new university year, a modern college noticeboard is likely to have notices saying things like this: ‘Freshers! Feeling lonely? Lost? Missing Mum? Do drop in for coffee and a chat. We love you.’ Such cosseting invitations would have been inconceivable on the noticeboard of my first term, which was more likely to carry announcements calculated to make me feel I had arrived in the adult world: ‘Would the “gentleman” who “borrowed” my umbrella . . .’
I had applied to read biochemistry. The tutor who interviewed me, the kindly Sandy Ogston, who later became Master of Trinity, declined – thank goodness – to let me in as a biochemist (perhaps because he was one himself and would have had to teach me) but offered me a place to read zoology instead. I accepted gratefully, and it turned out to be the perfect course for me. Biochemistry could not have captured my enthusiastic interest the way zoology did: Dr Ogston was as wise as his venerable grey beard suggested.
Balliol had no tutorial fellow in zoology, so I was sent out of college to the wonderfully convivial Peter Brunet in the Department of Zoology. He would be responsible for tutoring me or for arranging tutorials with others. One incident in an early tutorial with Dr Brunet may have marked the beginning of my weaning away from a school attitude to learning in favour of a university one. I asked Dr Brunet a question about embryology. ‘I don’t know,’ he mused, sucking on his pipe. ‘Interesting question. I’ll ask Fischberg and report back.’ Dr Fischberg was the department’s senior embryologist, so this was an entirely reasonable response. At the time, however, I was so impressed by Dr Brunet’s attitude that I wrote to my parents about it. My tutor didn’t know the answer to a question and was going to ask an expert colleague and report back to me! I felt that I’d joined the big boys.
Michael Fischberg was from Switzerland, with a very strong Swiss German accent. His lectures made frequent mention of things called ‘tonk bars’ and I think most of us wrote ‘tonk bars’ in our lecture notes before we finally saw the phrase written down: ‘tongue bars’, a feature of embryos at a certain stage of development. Endearingly, while at Oxford Dr Fischberg developed a great enthusiasm for our English national game, founding and captaining the departmental team. He had a most unusual bowling action. Unlike a baseball pitcher, a cricket bowler has to keep his arm straight. Throwing is strictly forbidden: you must not bend your arm. Given this constraint, the only way to propel the ball at any speed is to run and then bowl while still running. The fastest bowlers in the world, such as the terrifying Jeff Thomson (‘Tommo’) of Australia, have achieved ball velocities of 100 mph (comparable to a baseball pitcher with his bent arm), and they do it by running very fast before releasing the ball with a straight overarm action in graceful rhythm with their running. Not Dr Fischberg. He stood rigidly to attention facing the batsman, raised his straight bowling arm horizontally to take careful aim at the wicket, then swung it over in a single arc and let go of the ball at the top.
I was hopelessly bad at cricket, but was sometimes cajoled into playing for Zoology when they couldn’t find anybody better and were really desperate. I do, though, quite enjoy watching cricket, fascinated by the strategy of a captain placing his fielders around the batsman – like a chess master deploying his pieces to encircle the king. The best cricketer I ever saw playing in the Oxford University Parks was the Nawab of Pataudi (‘Tiger’), the Oxford captain and my exact contemporary at Balliol. As a batsman, the effortless way he steered the ball to outwit the fielders was sublime. But it was as a fielder himself that he especially impressed me. On one occasion a batsman hit the ball and called for what must have seemed like an easy run. Then he noticed that the fielder charging down upon the ball was Tiger Pataudi, and he frantically shrieked to his partner to go back to his crease. Sadly, Tiger later lost one eye in a car accident and had to change his stance to bat monocularly, but he was still good enough to captain India.
I said that Oxford was the making of me, but really it was the tutorial system, which happens to be characteristic of Oxford and Cambridge. The Oxford zoology course also had lectures and laboratory classes, of course, but these were no more remarkable than those at any other university. Some lectures were good, some were bad, but it scarcely made any difference to me because I hadn’t yet worked out the point of going to a lecture. It is not to imbibe information, and there is therefore no point in doing what I did (and what virtually all undergraduates do), which was take notes so slavishly that there was no attention left over for thinking. The only time I departed from this habit was once when I had forgotten to bring a pen. I was much too shy to borrow a pen from the girl sitting next to me (having been to a single-sex school, and shy to boot, I was in boyish awe of all girls at the time, and if I was too timorous to borrow a pen you can imagine how often I dared approach them for anything more interesting than that). So, for that one lecture I took no notes and just listened – and thought. It was not an unusually good lecture, but I got more out of it than from other lectures – some of them much better ones – because my lack of pen freed me to listen and think. But I didn’t have the sense to learn my lesson and refrain from taking notes at subsequent lectures.
Theoretically the idea was to use your lecture notes in revision, but I never looked at mine ever again and I suspect that most of my colleagues didn’t either. The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought. You watch a good lecturer thinking aloud in front of you, reaching for a thought, sometimes grabbing it out of the air like the celebrated historian A. J. P. Taylor. A good lecturer thinking aloud, reflecting, musing, rephrasing for clarity, hesitating and then grasping, varying the pace, pausing for thought, can be a role model in how to think about a subject and how to transmit a passion for it. If a lecturer drones information as though reading it, the audience might as well read it – possibly in the lecturer’s own book.
I exaggerate a little when I advise never to take notes. If a lecturer produces an original thought, something striking that makes you think, then by all means write yourself a memo to think again about it later, or look something up. But struggling to record a piece of every sentence the lecturer utters – which is what I tried to do – is pointless for the student and demoralizing for the lecturer. When lecturing to a student audience today, all I notice is a sea of tops of heads, bowed over notebooks. I prefer lay audiences, literary festivals, memorial lectures, guest lectures at universities where if the students come it is because they want to and not because it is on their syllabus. At such public lectures, the lecturer sees not bowed heads and scribbling hands but alert faces, smiling, registering comprehension – or the reverse. When lecturing in America, I get quite cross if I hear that some professor has required students to attend my lecture for ‘credit’. I’m not keen on the idea of ‘credit’ at the best of times, and I actively hate the idea that students are getting credit for listening to me.
Niko Tinbergen, my later mentor, entered my life as the lecturer on molluscs. He announced no special affinity for that group save a fondness for oysters, but he played along with the department’s tradition of handing out a phylum to each lecturer, more or less at random. From those lectures, I recall Niko’s swift blackboard drawings; his deep voice (surprisingly deep for a small man), accented but not obviously Dutch; and his kindly smile (avuncular, as I thought it then, although he must have been much younger than I am now). In the following year he again lectured to us, this time on animal behaviour, and the avuncular smile broadened with enthusiasm for his own subject. In that heyday of his research group in the gull colony at Ravenglass in Cumberland, I was enchanted by his film on eggshell removal by black-headed gulls. I especially liked his method of plotting graphs – laying out tent-poles on the sand for axes, with strategically placed eggshells for data points. How very Niko. How very un-PowerPoint.
After each lecture there was a practical class in the laboratory. I had no aptitude for practical work, and – so young and immature was I – the opposite sex was even more of a distraction in the laboratory than in lectures. It was really only the tutorial system that educated me, and I shall forever be grateful to Oxford for this unique gift – unique because, at least where science subjects were concerned, I think even Cambridge was not equal in this respect. The Cambridge Natural Science Tripos Part I, which occupies the first two years of the undergraduate course, is commendably broad but in consequence it cannot give the student the exhilarating experience, as Oxford does, of becoming a world authority – I mean it only slightly short of literally – on a set of (admittedly very narrow) subjects. I explained this in an essay which was published in various places and definitively in a book called The Oxford Tutorial: ‘Thanks, you taught me how to think’.41 Parts of the following paragraphs are derived from this article.
I made the point there that our Oxford course was not ‘lecture-driven’ in the way that many undergraduates like their studies to be, feeling that they should be examined on, and only on, topics directly covered in lectures. On the contrary, when I was an undergraduate the entire subject of zoology was fair game for the examiners. The only constraint was an unwritten convention that the exam in any one year should not depart unfairly from the general precedent of previous years. And tutorials, too, were not ‘lecture-driven’ (as I fear they may be today); they were zoology-driven.
In my penultimate term Peter Brunet managed to secure for me the rare privilege of tutorials with Niko Tinbergen himself. Since he was solely responsible for all the lectures in animal behaviour, Dr Tinbergen would have been well placed to give ‘lecture-driven’ tutorials. I need hardly say that he didn’t. Each week my tutorial assignment was to read one DPhil (Oxford-speak for PhD) thesis. My essay was to be a combination of DPhil examiner’s report, review of the history of the subject in which the thesis fell, proposal for follow-up research, and theoretical and philosophical discussion of the issues that the thesis raised. Never for one moment did it occur to either tutor or pupil to wonder whether this assignment would be directly useful for answering some exam question.
Another term Peter Brunet, recognizing that my bias in biology was more philosophical than his own, arranged for me to have tutorials with Arthur Cain, effervescently brilliant rising star of the department, who went on to become Professor of Zoology at Manchester and later Liverpool. Far from these tutorials being driven by any lectures on our course, Dr Cain had me reading nothing but books on history and philosophy. It was up to me to work out the connections between zoology and the books that I was reading. I did, and I loved it. I’m not saying that my juvenile essays on the philosophy of biology were any good – with hindsight I know they weren’t – but I can say that I have never forgotten the exhilaration of writing them, or the feeling of being a real scholar as I read in the library.
The same is true of my more mainline essays on standard zoological topics. I have no memory of whether we had a lecture on the water-vascular system of starfish. Probably we did, but that fact had no bearing upon my tutor’s decision to assign an essay on the topic. The starfish water-vascular system is one of many highly specialized topics in zoology that I now recall for the same reason – that I once wrote an essay on them. Starfish don’t have red blood; instead, they have piped sea water, constantly circulated through an intricately plumbed system of tubes which form a ring around the centre of the star and lead off in branches down each of the five arms. The piped sea water is used in a unique hydraulic pressure system, operating the many hundreds of tiny tube feet arrayed along the five arms. Each tube foot ends in a little gripping sucker, and these shuttle back and forth in collusion to pull the starfish along in a particular direction. The tube feet don’t move in unison but are semi-autonomous and, if the circum-oral nerve ring that gives them their orders should chance to become severed, the tube feet in different arms can pull in opposite directions and tear the starfish in half.
I remember the bare facts about starfish plumbing, but it is not the facts that matter. What matters is the way in which we were encouraged to discover them. We didn’t just mug up a textbook: we went into the library and looked up books old and new; we followed trails of original research papers until we had made ourselves as nearly world authorities on the topic as it is possible to become in one week (nowadays one would do much of this work on the internet). The encouragement provided by the weekly tutorial meant that one didn’t just read about starfish hydraulics, or whatever the topic was: for that one week, I remember that I slept, ate and dreamed starfish hydraulics. Tube feet marched behind my eyelids, hydraulic pedicellariae quested and sea water pulsed through my dozing brain. Writing my essay was the catharsis, and the tutorial was the justification for the entire week. And then the next week there would be a new topic and a new feast of images to be conjured up in the library. We were being educated . . . And I believe it is largely to this week-by-week training that I owe such writing ability as I may be judged to possess.
The tutor for whom I wrote the starfish essay was David Nichols, who went on to become Professor of Zoology at Exeter. Another notable tutor who shaped me as a young zoologist was John Currey, later Professor of Zoology at York University. He introduced me to, among other things, his – and now my – favourite example of revealingly bad ‘design’ in animals: the recurrent laryngeal nerve. As I explained in The Greatest Show on Earth, instead of going directly from the brain to its end organ the larynx, this nerve makes a detour (in the case of the giraffe, a spectacularly long detour) down into the chest, where it loops around a large artery before proceeding back up the neck to the larynx. This is eloquent of terribly bad design, but is completely explicable the moment you forget design and start thinking in terms of evolutionary history instead. In our fishy ancestors the shortest route for the nerve was posterior to the then equivalent of that artery, which in those early days supplied one of the gills. Fish don’t have necks. When necks started to lengthen on land, the artery gradually moved backwards relative to the head, step by tiny step through evolutionary time further away from brain and larynx. The nerve kept abreast – kind of literally – making at first only a small detour but then, as evolution progressed, a longer and longer detour until, in a modern giraffe, its diverted route is a matter of several metres. Just a few years ago, as part of a television documentary, I was privileged to assist in a dissection of this remarkable nerve in a giraffe that had unfortunately died a few days earlier.
My genetics tutor was Robert Creed, pupil of the eccentric and misogynistic aesthete E. B. Ford, himself heavily influenced by the great R. A. Fisher, whom we were all taught by Ford to revere. I learned from those tutorials, and from Dr Ford’s own lectures, that genes are not atomistically separate from each other, where their effects on bodies are concerned. Rather, a gene’s effect is conditioned by the ‘background’ of the other genes in the genome. Genes modify one another’s effects. Later, when I became a tutor myself, I devised an analogy to try to explain this to my pupils. The body is represented by the shape of a bed-sheet, hanging approximately horizontally by thousands of strings attached to an array of hooks in the ceiling. Each string represents one gene. A mutation in the gene is represented by a change in the tension in that string’s attachment to the ceiling. But – here is the important part of the analogy – each string is not isolated in its attachment to the sheet hanging below it. Rather, it is tangled up with lots of other strings, in a complicated cat’s cradle. This means that when a mutation occurs in any one ‘gene’ (change of tension in its attachment to the ceiling hook), the tensions in all the other strings with which it is entangled change at the same time, in a series of knock-on effects throughout the cat’s cradle. And the shape of the sheet (the body) is consequently influenced by the interaction of all the genes, not by each gene working separately on its ‘own’ little part of the sheet. In fact, no gene does ‘own’ any single part of the sheet. The body is not like a butcher’s diagram, with ‘cuts’ of the body corresponding to particular genes. Rather, a gene may influence the whole body in interaction with other genes. An elaboration of the parable introduces environmental – non-genetic – influences tugging on the cat’s cradle from the side.
From Arthur Cain, whom I mentioned above, I learned to dissent from the still fashionable trashing of numerical systems for classifying animals by mathematical measurement of the similarities and differences between them. Quite separately, I also learned from Dr Cain to be impressed by the power of natural selection to produce adaptations of extreme perfection – notwithstanding important and interesting exceptions such as the recurrent laryngeal nerve, just mentioned. Both these lessons set me somewhat at odds with certain orthodoxies, which still dominate the world of zoology. Arthur also taught me to be sparing in my use of the word ‘mere’ – an exercise in consciousness-raising that has stayed with me ever since. ‘Humans are not mere bags of chemicals . . .’ Well, of course they are not, but when you have said that you have said nothing interesting, and the word ‘mere’ is supererogatory. ‘Humans are not mere animals . . .’ What have you just said that is more than trite? What weight does the word ‘mere’ carry in that sentence? What is ‘mere’ about an animal? You haven’t said anything meaningful. If you intend to mean something, say it.
Arthur also told me a never-forgotten story about Galileo, which summarizes what was new about Renaissance science. Galileo was showing a learned man an astronomical phenomenon through his telescope. This gentleman said, approximately: ‘Sir, your demonstration with your telescope is so convincing that, were it not that Aristotle positively states the contrary, I would believe you.’ Today it amazes us – or ought to – that anybody could possibly reject real observational or experimental evidence in favour of what some supposed authority had simply asserted. But that’s the point. That is what has changed.
For us zoologists, unlike undergraduates reading history or English or law, tutorials almost never happened in our college, or indeed in any college. Nearly all were in the Department of Zoology, a rambling up-stairs and down-dale appendage to the University Museum. It was this warren of rooms and corridors which, as I have already mentioned, was the centre of my being. This was very different from the typical experience of an Oxford undergraduate reading a non-scientific subject, for whom the college was the centre of existence. Old-style college tutors think that tutoring outside the college walls is a sort of second-best. My experience suggests exactly the opposite. It was refreshing to have a different tutor every term, for reasons that seem to me almost too obvious to specify.
I did have friends in Balliol, most of whom were reading non-scientific subjects. Nicholas Tyacke (with whom I later shared lodgings, and who became a professor of history at University College, London) and Alan Ryan (who became a distinguished political philosopher and Warden of New College) were on my staircase. As it happened, several of my friends were in the college’s acting fraternity, which led me to see some amateur dramatic productions. One of the most moving theatrical evenings I ever experienced was a Balliol College Dramatic Society production of Robert Ardrey’s Shadow of Heroes, about the Hungarian revolution of 1956. More light-hearted were the Balliol Players, a travelling company who each year would put on a pastiche production of an Aristophanes play. I think that when they started in the 1920s the Players did Aristophanes straight, even in Greek. But the tradition changed, and by my time they were rewriting Aristophanes into revues satirizing modern politics. The leading lights of the Players in my time were Peter Snow, who became a familiar face on television, and John Albery, a witty and talented member of the famous theatrical dynasty, who later became Master of University College, Oxford. John Albery did a splendid General Montgomery (‘Now God said – and I agwee with him . . .’), and Peter Snow an equally memorable General de Gaulle: ‘La gloire . . . la victoire . . . l’histoire . . . et . . . la plume . . . de ma tante.’ Jeremy Gould scarcely had to act at all to do Harold Macmillan singing ‘My birthday honours list is certain to contain . . . And plenty of OBEs . . .’ It was the time of the twilight of empire, and the Players did a lovely valedictory song, presumably written by John Albery, of which I remember only five lines:
Sunset and the evening star
From Aden to Zanzibar.
The bonds of the Empire sundering
And final salutes are thundering
And man will not cease his wondering . . .
The same theatrical set introduced me to the Victorian Society, in whose company I spent some of my happiest times in Balliol. We met once or twice a term to sing music-hall songs to piano accompaniment, while sipping port. A master of ceremonies would call up soloists one by one to sing their special songs, and we’d all join in the chorus. Mostly they were cheerful, cheeky songs (‘Where did you get that hat?’ ‘Don’t have any more, Mrs Moore’; ‘You can’t do that there ‘ere’; ‘I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I am’; ‘My old man said follow the van’) interspersed with some sentimental weepies, for which tissues would be handed out (‘She’s only a bird in a gilded cage’; ‘Silver threads among the gold’), and the evening would end with jingoistic patriotism (‘Soldiers of the Queen’; ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do . . . The Russkies shall not have Constantinople’). If there’s one experience from Balliol days that I would dearly love to relive, it would be an evening with the Victorian Society.
It was much later in my life, but the nearest approach to such a reliving took place at the regular Friday evening sing-song at the Killingworth Castle pub in Wootton, a village just outside Oxford, to which I was introduced by my second wife Eve, mother of my beloved daughter Juliet. The music was British ‘folk’, not music hall, and the drink was beer, not port, but here I relived something of the atmosphere of the Victorian Society: a warm conviviality fuelled by music and community, more than by drink. The soloists and instrumentalists (guitar, squeezebox, penny whistle) on these Friday nights rotated between four or five regular performers or groups, all of them good in their different ways, all with their particular repertoires of songs, which were known to the regular chorus including Eve and me. For some songs quite stylish canons and descants would be produced, and – as with the Victorian Society – the chorus was always disciplined and up to a brisk tempo, very different from the usual ‘Just a song at twilight’ drunken dirge. We knew the more prominent members by private nicknames given them by Eve: ‘Two Pints’ (a large, bearded young man with a huge bass voice as muscular as the arms that raised his pints and took the collection for the musicians); ‘Big Daddy’ (a grandfatherly figure with an agreeable tenor, who sometimes volunteered ‘Cock Robin’ as a solo after the main soloists had finished); ‘Maynard Smith’ (a cheery, bespectacled fellow, named for his facial resemblance to the great scientist); ‘the Incredible Hulk’ (one of few who sang out of tune) and others.
Back in undergraduate days, my Balliol friends and I often went to the cinema, usually to the Scala in Walton Street: intellectual films by Ingmar Bergman, or Jean Cocteau, or Andrzej Wajda or other continental directors. I was especially affected by Ingmar Bergman’s dark monochrome images in Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, and the lyrical love scenes of Summer Interlude before it turned tragic. Films of that kind, and poetry to which my father introduced me – Rupert Brooke, A. E. Housman and above all the early W. B. Yeats – turned my young self into unrealistic, indeed deluded, byways of romantic fantasy. Like many a naive nineteen-year-old I fell in love – not with any particular girl, but with the idea of being in love. Well, there was a girl, and she happened to be Swedish, which chimed with my Bergman-led fantasies, but it was the idea of love itself, with me in the role of a tragic Romeo, that I loved. I moped over her for a ludicrously long time after she had returned to Sweden and – no doubt – had long forgotten her brief Summer Interlude with me.
I didn’t finally lose my virginity until much later, at the rather advanced age of twenty-two, to a sweet cellist in London, who removed her skirt in order to play to me in her bedsitter (you can’t play the cello in a tight skirt) – and then removed everything else. It is fashionable to decry one’s first such experience but I shall not. It was wonderful, and what I chiefly remember is the feeling of atavistic fulfilment: ‘Yes, of course, this is what it was always going to feel like. This is the way it was going to be from the beginning of time.’ It isn’t difficult for a biologist to explain why nervous systems evolved in such a way as to make sexual congress one of the consistently greatest experiences life has to offer. But explaining it doesn’t make it any the less wonderful – just as Newton’s spectral unweaving never diminishes the glory of the rainbow. And it doesn’t matter how many rainbows you see throughout your life. The glory is reinvented afresh, and the heart leaps up every time. But I’ll say no more on the subject, and will betray no confidences. It isn’t that kind of autobiography.
Wordsworth, as it happened, was never a favourite of mine, but I would like to quote here a few fragments of some of the poems that did move me as a young man. These verses were an important part of making me what I am, and they were all (in some cases still are) word-perfect in my memory.
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, ‘Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old . . .’ ‘And when we die
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips,’ said I,
‘Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!’
‘We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!’ we said;
‘We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!’ . . . Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
–And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
Rupert Brooke
Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.
A. E. Housman
I dreamed that I stood in a valley, and amid sighs,
For happy lovers passed two by two where I stood;
And I dreamed my lost love came stealthily out of the wood
With her cloud-pale eyelids falling on dream-dimmed eyes:
I cried in my dream, O women, bid the young men lay
Their heads on your knees, and drown their eyes with your hair,
Or remembering hers they will find no other face fair
Till all the valleys of the world have been withered away.
W. B. Yeats
Heart handfast in heart as they stood, ‘Look thither,’
Did he whisper? ‘look forth from the flowers to the sea;
For the foam-flowers endure when the rose-blossoms wither,
And men that love lightly may die–but we?’
And the same wind sang and the same waves whitened,
And or ever the garden’s last petals were shed,
In the lips that had whispered, the eyes that had lightened,
Love was dead.
A. C. Swinburne
My father kept a loose-leaf folder in which he bound a large number of his favourite poems, all copied out in his own hand. My own taste in poetry was strongly influenced by this private anthology, which my mother still possesses. I was touched to learn that it originated in letters to her in their early twenties, sent from Cambridge where he was doing postgraduate studies, each poem enclosed with a letter and preserved by her.
But, to my own undergraduate days and my thoughts of what should come next: I don’t think I ever seriously contemplated joining my father in farming. Increasingly, I wanted to stay on at Oxford to do a research degree. I didn’t have any very clear idea of what might follow after that, or of what kind of research I wanted to do. Peter Brunet offered me a biochemical project, and I gratefully signed up to it and studied the relevant research literature, though without much enthusiasm. But then I went for tutorials with Niko Tinbergen on animal behaviour – and my life changed. Here was a subject I could really think about: a subject with philosophical implications. Niko was apparently impressed by me: his end-of-term report to my college said I was the best undergraduate he had ever tutored – although that verdict must be tempered by the fact that he didn’t do much undergraduate tutoring. Anyway, it raised my courage to the point of asking him whether he would like to take me on as his research student, and to my enduring delight he said yes. My future was assured, for the next three years at least. And for the rest of my life, now that I think about it.