A Curious Boy

2 Eggs and After

In 2016 I found a bird’s egg on the forest floor of my own small patch of woodland. It has a ragged hole on one side, its contents gobbled up by a thieving magpie. The egg is still as blue as the sky on a cloudless spring day – bright and clear, unsullied with any hint of green or yellow. At its wider end there is a scattering of black dots. Now, lying in the palm of my hand, it weighs almost nothing, but it stirs old memories: I know that the egg was laid by a song thrush. It came from a nest about the size of half a coconut and well concealed amid thick bushes. The outside of the nest would have been woven from grass and moss, but the inner cup would have been an almost perfect hemisphere of dried mud, painstakingly constructed by the parent birds. A clutch of perhaps four eggs lay within the nest, which was perfectly shaped for thrushes to incubate the next generation. As a boy I would have been drawn to the nest after locating the unmistakable music of the song thrush from a tree nearby. The thrush builds its song from short phrases: intensely loud clusters of a few notes are rehearsed perhaps half a dozen times, and then followed by another, different phrase to be repeated in turn. The improvised song can continue for many minutes during the mating season, phrase after phrase, endlessly inventive. These liquid notes used to wake me up in my bedroom in Ealing when glowing crocus flowers were announcing the end of winter with a different kind of display. However, most of all, the discarded eggshell reminds me of my guilt.

When I was a small boy I collected birds’ eggs: I was following in my father’s footsteps again, though this time not necessarily along a riverbank. My father grew up in a small village outside Worcester called Lower Wick, which has since been swallowed up by the twentieth-century growth of the county town. He was at school during the First World War at Worcester Royal Grammar School. His parents ran a market garden, which was extraordinarily hard work. It was such hard work that Granny Fortey had a stroke in her fortieth year, which left one side of her face paralysed, although she lived on to a considerable age. I never met my grandfather: relentless labour involving wheelbarrows and chaise cloches led to his early death in 1934. My father’s was a country life, and it was full of the pursuits that country boys followed in the first half of the twentieth century. The fields and woods were theirs to roam. The River Severn was just down the road, so fishing was a given. Wildlife abounded, and country boys acquired knowledge of birds and plants as naturally as city boys learnt about buses and sweet shops.

The acceptable way to collect a wild bird’s egg today. A predated song thrush egg picked up from my wood.

Egg collecting is often portrayed as sheer vandalism, and sometimes it certainly is just that. The mad lust for a rare egg to complete a collection leads fanatics to illegal and reckless behaviour. My father insisted on strict rules. The first concern was to cause minimum impact on the birds themselves. Only one egg from a clutch was to be taken, as quickly as possible, when the bird was not sitting on the nest. If a nest belonged to a familiar species already collected then it was a case of look, but don’t touch. Leave the birds in peace. An egg that was close to hatching could be recognised by holding up the egg to the light – and quickly returned. My father claimed that brooding birds returned to the nest to continue sitting on the four eggs that remained of an original five. I never found reason to doubt this. Then the preparation of the egg was crucial – it should never be allowed to go bad and be wasted. A tiny pinprick was made at each end of the egg to allow it to be blown, or a little circular hole was drilled in the side and the contents puffed out using a delicate blowpipe placed close to the drilling. Finally, a blown egg was placed in a neatly compartmentalised box, with the name and date. There was a collection at home going back to my father’s boyhood, logically laid out in several flat wooden boxes; for this young boy it was the subject of endless contemplation. What would have astonished a twenty-first-century birder are some of the species that were included in the collection. The red-backed shrike is now so rare that it sets twitchers all of a twitch. It was so common when my father was young that he saw it on every summer walk and used the nickname ‘butcher bird’ because of its habit of impaling bugs on thorns of spiky trees. I remember its distinctive, small cream-coloured egg with a band of red-brown spots near one end. When he was a boy it was never a problem for my father to find grey partridge eggs, even though they were hard to discover among the herbage; a clutch may have had a dozen eggs, so that one collected really would not be missed. It has been many years since I encountered a covey of wild partridges scuttling over a cornfield. I think I may even remember a corncrake egg in the collection. To see this bird in 2020 and hear its distinctive call the enthusiast has to travel to islands off north-west Scotland. In those neat trays lay irrefutable evidence of what has happened to some of Britain’s native birds over the last century.

I confess that I, too, hunted for nests and eggs: the guilt sometimes steals up on me. I also believe that the search was part of my making as a naturalist. I became extraordinarily sensitive to the least movement: the twitch of a leaf, a small bird disappearing into thick cover, the furtive way a warbler would melt into the undergrowth; all pointers to where a nest might be hidden. In the water meadows by the River Lambourn I ran down the home of a reed bunting inside a sedge tussock. I cut my finger on one of the sharp, dangling leaves when I parted their green curtain to find my prize. Discovery was paid for in real blood. I located the tiny domed nest of a willow warbler tucked away in rough grass. I could somehow guess which hole in which tree would house a clutch of a great tit’s spotted eggs. This was the atavistic boy, the intuitive hunter, the useful member of the tribe. Like much of what gives rise to science, such concentrated awareness is about making close observations and drawing conclusions from them. The self is forgotten as the seeker puts everything into the senses, sight and sound. The fly fisherman ‘reading’ the trout’s intentions may not be so different. Past experience feeds future predictions: that patch of scrub looks just the place where a thrush might build his nest; this is not a pile of soggy weeds in the stream – it is a dabchick’s nest; grey wagtails favour the thick ivy covering on that bridge over a stream. We can outwit nature’s deceptions with sharp eyes and a good memory for detail. Nonetheless, some birds did fool the canny young hunter. I never discovered where the snipe hid his clutch on the ground in the damp fields, even though I saw the bird in flight many times zigzagging across the marsh; maybe the green and blotchy disguise of the eggs was just too perfect, or perhaps the bird led me astray too convincingly. Anyway, there was already a common snipe’s egg in the old collection.

I did add the egg of one species to my father’s neatly displayed arrangement: the grasshopper warbler. This is an uncommon and shy little bird, one that ornithologists lump with other ‘lbj’s’ (little brown jobs) that are hard to spot and harder to identify even if you are lucky enough to see one. Like many self-effacing insect-eating warblers, it skulks. Fortunately, it has a very distinctive song, a continuous churr, something like the rasping of the insect that gives the common name to this elusive bird. I must have heard the unusual song and located its general direction, and all those finely honed senses came into play; another of the elevated tussocks made by some variety of tough sedge hid a well-woven nest constructed of strands of grass, from which one egg was removed rapidly – a pretty, rosy-brown speckled affair. I glowed with satisfaction for hours. After the ritual of cleaning, it was placed into the collection in its own little cubicle, safe on a bed of sawdust.

In 1954 collecting birds’ eggs became illegal for species other than those that might be considered pests. I have no idea whether my grasshopper warbler find was made shortly before, or shortly after the enactment of the Protection of Birds Act. I do know that collecting that egg would now be a criminal act, but even then I paid a high price for my discovery. Guilt arrived in my childhood and, like inoculation, it never goes away.

My primary school on Pitshanger Lane, on the west side of London in Ealing, was rather a stern building of yellow brick with formal classrooms and wooden desks, and surrounded by a decent slab of tarmac to serve as a playground. It was within walking distance of suburban Ainsdale Road where we lived. I had already been to another school in the more distant suburb of Greenford, about which I recall nothing except a small boy pulling down his pants in class and weeing with enthusiasm, and a teacher becoming exasperated by my inability to learn to tie my own shoelaces, a task I found almost as difficult as managing to work a fishing rod. I think I must have spent most of my time in a kind of amiable fuzz. In due time I arrived at Pitshanger Lane. I assume the teaching was efficient, because I became a good reader at an early age. Playtime was announced by the ringing of several bells echoing in the corridors, and everyone belted outside. A boy known as Piggy Pearson led the gang that everybody wanted to belong to, but I was never invited. While Piggy’s gang ran around shouting ‘BANG! BANG! YOU’RE DEAD’ I preferred to hang out with several girls and two small boys who were prepared to listen to my stories.

One day I was summoned to the headmistress’s office. Miss Long was a serious woman soberly dressed whose smile never seemed entirely convincing. Headmistresses then were not meant to be twinkly. There was a complete lack of twinkle when I was instructed to occupy a small chair in front of her. She put on her glasses, framed in black. ‘How would you feel’, she asked, quietly, ‘if you were picked up by a fierce giant and plucked out from your house?’ All I recall is the intensity of the stare through her glasses. This was the ‘basilisk stare’ of P. G. Wodehouse’s fearsome aunts, but instead of turning to stone I turned to jelly. I cannot recall my reply, but it must have been along the lines of ‘I wouldn’t like it, Miss Long.’ Her face hardened. ‘This is what you do when you rob a bird’s nest! And I know you rob birds’ nests.’ Somebody had dobbed me in. I could not explain the finer points of taking only one egg and not disturbing the birds that I loved more than anything. I certainly could not explain how the hunt refined my nascent scientific instincts. I had neither the will nor the presence of mind. I was a robber. I was a destroyer of helpless families. I was a giant bringing death and destruction. I knew guilt, and guilt made me writhe and made tears well up. And Miss Long did not even know about the grasshopper warbler.

I think I know who spilled the beans. A boy in my road had junior membership of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), which was running a campaign against egg robbers. The Society was prominent in getting the law changed. I don’t imagine that my young contemporary contacted Miss Long himself, but his father was something important like a bank manager and not inclined to think that there might be more than one way of looking at things. I suspect he picked up the telephone. I arrived home in tears, and my mother was furious. She was more or less convinced of my perfection in all respects, and my distraught little face was more than she could bear. I think there must have been a subsequent scene at North Ealing Junior School in Pitshanger Lane. It was not long before I was taken away to a different school, and I suppose that Miss Long must have been part of the reason, but, as usual, nothing was said at home. When I asked what had happened in later years I was offered a different scenario. I was, said my mother, such a dreamer, that my parents thought I would never pass the 11-plus examination that was the passport to grammar school, and a superior education. So off I went to the junior school of the City of London School for Boys, an excellent private school in the middle of London, which was, of course, a fee-paying public school, according to the topsy-turvy nomenclature that is such a speciality of the English. I was nine years old, and I do not remember collecting any bird’s egg ever again.

Armed with The Observer’s Book of British Birds I was now just that – an observer. I have remained so. One of the first birds I spotted near my new school was a black redstart that had moved into a City bombsite left by the Luftwaffe. It was as rare as the grasshopper warbler. I didn’t seek out its eggs. Today, I doubt that I retain the skills to discover any small nest deeply hidden among a tangle of brambles. The eight-year-old boy would have got there first.

My father’s old egg collection, complete with its grasshopper warbler, simply disappeared. This is some sort of tragedy. It is illegal to trade in British birds’ eggs, so it certainly was not ‘sold on’. My mother may have accidentally dropped it during one of her many moves. However, the RSPB has encouraged the destruction of some of these collections, and that could well have been its fate. The disappearance of a century-old collection fillets a data source that might have provided a closer look at the time and pace of change affecting British avifauna. My father sampled Worcestershire when most grown-up naturalists were fighting in the trenches. Those records are gone, filed now only in my memory. Was there really a corncrake egg? Memories are fallible. Collections are archives of what was there, regardless of moral judgements about the way the specimens were collected. Although the incident of the grasshopper warbler still tweaks a guilty nerve I am not the only scientist to be sceptical about the role of egg collecting in the decline of British birds, just as I don’t believe my sister picking marsh orchids had anything to do with their virtual disappearance from the Lambourn Valley.

The garden of our house in Ainsdale Road was full of birds: Ealing was a leafy suburb. My mother often emphasised that our road was in postal district W5 rather than W13, an area that she regarded as rather downmarket. She should have known; she was brought up on the smarter side of Ealing, when it lay almost at the edge of London. Ealing Broadway station was the terminus of the District Line in the west and pre-dated other Underground lines that came to link distant villages like Ruislip into the city. I don’t suppose birds cared which postal district they were flying through, although I expect the ones in W5 had better vowels. Our garden thronged with house sparrows: Cockney sparrows. The cheerful ‘chip chip’ of the house sparrow was a perpetual presence around the garden; any morsel dropped by chance was seized in a second: chip chip (‘ta guv’nor’). We had a large garden for London, with a pond that was forever leaking, and a couple of apple trees that were assailed by bullfinches when the blossom was about to burst in April – they just seemed to delight in destroying the buds. House sparrows and bullfinches have grossly declined since our Ealing days.

Before our family owned Primrose Cottage, fly fishing was conducted from a caravan parked in a field on the Pococks’ farm at Woodspeen, just down the road from Boxford, towards Newbury. The two Fortey children ran wild through the farm with the Pocock kids, Roger and Susan. We made camps out of bales of straw, and we jumped from great heights into beds of hay. The Friesian bull was admired – from a safe distance. We spotted huge rats in the cavernous old barn, and they were always heading off furtively somewhere else. There was plenty of mud about, and our knees were usually filthy. We were free to wander over the fields and into the abandoned chalk quarry; cuts and bruises were a small price to pay for unfettered exploration. Nobody thought about hidden perverts. My sister discovered ponies. On the farm, sparrows flitted in small gangs everywhere, arguing amongst themselves. Their scruffy nests were stuffed into the eaves of outbuildings, and Tony the farmer occasionally poked them out, but the sparrows seemed unconcerned. They were back in a week or two. Neater nests of summer swallows perched on the cross beams in the barn. The aerobatics of the swallows provided an unremarked background to our adventures. Just above the farm a tiny single track railway line ran between Newbury and Lambourn: what might have been the smallest station in the world – Woodspeen Halt – was apparently there just to serve the farm. It was little more than a bare platform with a noticeboard. Every two hours a tiny train rattled along the track, but I never saw it pick up a passenger at the Halt. This little spur off the Great Western Railway must have been the least economically profitable line in Britain; a few years later it was axed by Dr Beeching.[1] Between trains, the track was part of our domain. Thorn bushes had grown up alongside the railway cutting, and in early summer it seemed that every bush included a singing bird. High-pitched recitals of ‘a little bit of bread and no cheeeese’ progressed in rough sequence along the trackside – the song of the yellowhammer (bunting if you prefer), and it was part of the indispensable music of summer. It was easier to appreciate the song than to identify the yellow face and red-brown back of the bird itself, tucked behind a bush. Small boys are not statisticians, and memory may decorate the past with more than a lick of paint, but I am certain that there were a dozen yellowhammers requesting the passer-by for bread without cheese along the small piece of railway track close to Woodspeen Farm. It was a common bird. In the twenty-first century it has become almost scarce. My attempts to teach my children to recognise the yellowhammer’s song – as my father once taught me – have been frustrated, although I still discover a few birds in the Chiltern Hills every year. The decline of this charming omnivore has not been because of the activities of egg collectors; in fact, the downturn in this, and many other species of birds, has happened since 1954. The disappearance of their food is surely the cause; after all, there are still plenty of bushes for them to occupy. Once more I recall the difference between two car journeys to the River Itchen half a lifetime apart: the first with my father, windscreen spattered with fat corpses at the end; the second with a body count hardly worth mentioning.

* * *

If I felt most alive in the countryside, for much of the time I was just a small boy in a London suburb. Ainsdale Road could be the example of the 1930s expansion of London westwards, part of an extensive development of similar-looking streets that stretched all the way to Park Royal station on the Piccadilly Line. That distinctive Underground station made it into Nikolaus Pevsner’s The Buildings of England as a pioneering piece of modernism. None of the houses on the estate that included my childhood home would have earned a mention in any guide: they were uniformly unremarkable. Even the most optimistic estate agent could not talk of a wealth of period features. Bay windows at the front, and French windows at the back, a perfunctory bit of exposed timber: that was the extent of their art deco embellishment. Ours was a semi, inseparable from a nearly identical neighbour, like a Siamese twin. A small brick wall separated a modest front garden from the quiet road lined on both sides with similar houses; a garage (with a shared drive) indicated that these were houses for people who could afford a car. The wealthier inhabitants had four bedrooms. Three bedrooms was the norm, like ours: an utterly undistinguished but comfortable home redeemed by a large back garden. Travellers returning by air to Heathrow glimpse uncountable similar estates from far above, where they seem to be draped around the Victorian cores of London’s first great expansion. They house millions of people. My mother remembered the houses being built, spreading outwards beyond Perivale to Greenford ‘like a rash’, she said. When she was a little girl Greenford was a village without electric light. It was an expedition to go there.

We were a tight nuclear family. My mother’s devotion to her two children was absolute. My sister Kath is two years my junior, and I was evidently not pleased when she arrived, displacing me from the centre of attention. There has been an undertone of competition ever since, but we played together well in our early years, so long as Kath tagged along behind me. She had her revenge much later. Few relatives visited Ainsdale Road: both of my grandfathers had died young and my mother’s mother was to follow suit before I was three. My mother’s maiden name was a distinctive one: Wilshin. There had been Wilshins in the old county of Middlesex[2] for several centuries. The youngest Wilshin and the most regular visitor was my mother’s younger sister – known to us forever and mysteriously as Auntie Bo – who was always described as the goody-goody, the favourite when they were young, while my mother cast herself as the rebel, the one who got into scrapes. Grandfather Wilshin had several sisters, most of them unmarried, and as the male in the family he had to take responsibility for them when his father died. They were said to have lost their hopes of matrimony in the 1914–18 war. Collectively they were known as the Wilshin Aunts, and they had the full set of names: Jessie, Madge, Gertie, Doris, Marion … They always called my mother ‘Peggy’, which is the name that is engraved upon her christening spoon. The Wilshin Aunts were occasional but memorable visitors to Ainsdale Road, and when they arrived they all carried with them the same smell of lavender bags placed in neat drawers. They tended to wear slightly billowing dresses with flowery designs. They all had terrible sight (‘the Wilshin Eyes’). My memory of them is dominated by their glasses, which were as thick as bottle bottoms and made the pupils enormous and shining like an owl’s. I had to smile convincingly while they peered through their optical contraptions and commented on the surprising fact that I had grown since their last visit. Auntie Jessie was a sweet soul who sent me a savings stamp worth half a crown on my birthday for as long as she lived. I had to stick the stamp into a book untiI I was ready to cash in the total. Auntie Marion went mad and was convinced that people were breaking into her house, so she tied strings of cotton all over the windows and doors to catch them out. Both my mother and Auntie Bo had the Wilshin Eyes and wore thick, if more fashionable glasses. My mother was terrified that the curse of the Wilshin Eyes might be passed down to yet another generation, but we Fortey children had perfect sight. This was a fortunate gift for any aspiring observer.

On the Fortey side there was just one visitor. My father had a sister called Anne, who looked after Granny Fortey in Worcestershire. If Aunt Anne arrived in London for a couple of days she would storm out in tears and leave early. Brother and sister did not get on. Return trips to Upton-on-Severn were as bad. My sister and I sat on uncomfortable chairs trying not to move. A clock ticked loudly and slowly, and the daylight was filtered through maidenhair ferns in pots on the window ledge. The only good thing was the garden, on which Anne lavished her attention. I asked the name of a mat-forming creeping plant in one of her flower beds. ‘Mind your own business,’ replied Aunt Anne, cackling vaguely. It was a joke of sorts. This little (Soleirolia) herb’s common name really is ‘mind your own business’. My aunt repeated the joke several times, amused on each occasion. She was briefly married to a Mr Hill who died young. ‘Nagged to death,’ said my father.

So our small and rather fractious family was not much visited, and my father’s fishing friends hardly ever appeared away from the water. Social life centred on my mother’s old school friends. She had been sent to a well-known private school, Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Girls, near Ealing. Tales about her terrifying headmistress, Miss Sprules, were part of our childhood lore. My grandfather never offered Mother the chance to go on to university after matriculation, something she was angry about for the rest of her life. The ‘old girls’ remained her best friends. Like ‘Uncles’ Eddy and Arthur in the fishing-tackle shops several of them became fake ‘Aunties’. One of them was to play an important part in my journey to science. There were tennis friends who went to play on Saturdays on the Haberdashers’ school tennis courts (a privilege of old girls). I was often taken along and mooched about the school grounds, but never took up a racket, rehearsing my lifetime role as a refugee from sport. There was a gossipy friend who was gooey about a crooner called Johnnie Ray, which my mother found rather absurd. Another friend certainly never became ‘Auntie’ Barbara. She was, my mother declaimed, ‘man mad’. Barbara had lots of lovers, married a postman, and had plenty of children. Although my mother professed disapproval, I detected an undercurrent of admiration for rebellion against the social norms. She ‘didn’t give a damn’. The only social norm we flouted at 40 Ainsdale Road was painting the exterior woodwork of the house mustard yellow. The other houses on the road were black and white or generic green. The next-door neighbour was vocal in disapproval.

‘Auntie’ Katharine was mother’s best friend. Unlike the other school chums she had a career, as a small-animal vet, so she had the higher education my mother had craved. Her maiden name was Morley-Jones. Her parents lived in one of the finer Victorian houses in the older part of Ealing. They were ‘intellectuals’ according to my mother, a term which seemed to embody both complexity and mystery to a young mind. I visited their house with my mother on several occasions. Mrs Morley-Jones was a ‘bluestocking’, I was told, which had me looking for her well-concealed legs. There was a kind of seriousness to the Morley-Jones household that was at the same time intimidating and seductive. Katharine’s brother Robert had been sent to Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight, a pioneering place for a liberal education. He was a mathematician of some kind, and rather shy. Mr Morley-Jones was tall and courtly and addressed this small child as if he were an adult. Mrs Morley-Jones had her long hair curled up into two whorls on either side of her head, a little like earmuffs. I never did discover the colour of her stockings. The day that matters most in my story was when Mr Morley-Jones asked if I would like to see his study. I did not know what a study was, precisely. This was the first one I had visited: a small room, rather dark and with one wall lined by cabinets, holding ranks of very thin drawers. Books took up another wall. Our house was far from devoid of books but I had never seen so many together. On a square desk there was a piece of apparatus: a microscope of shining brass above a small revolving stage. Mr Morley-Jones invited me to look down the eyepiece. A bright lamp was switched on to direct light through a slide already mounted on the stage. I squinted to get my eye in the right position, which took a little time. Then I saw the most marvellous things: elliptical plates penetrated by dense pores looking somewhat like colanders, but wonderfully symmetrical. ‘Diatoms,’ said Mr Morley-Jones, ‘that one is about a four-thousandth of an inch long.’ I knew only that whatever-it-was was very small and very beautiful. Mr Morley-Jones removed the slide and replaced it with another: this time it held ornamented triangles displaying perfect symmetry. Then came exactly circular wheels with what looked like spokes between a wealth of perforations. I understood that the cabinet behind me with its dozens of drawers must have held thousands and thousands of these tiny objects. Nature operated at all scales, not just as birds and fishes and trees. You could go down and down, smaller and smaller, and there would still be more to see. Mr Morley-Jones had selected these tiny algae from the infinity of living things to make them his own. Those ranks of books must have been part of his quest for knowledge. The Observer’s Book of Everything could not exist; there was simply too much to know. That microscope was a magic portal into this other realm.

‘Auntie’ Katharine also helped to complete our little family. She married a farmer – ‘Uncle’ Phil – a countryman with an accent as rich as well-rotted compost. They lived on a spectacularly unmodernised farm deep in the country near Petworth, where instead of having children Katharine bred Shetland sheepdogs for show. The dogs were fed on ghastly bits of sheep that hung up in their cavernous scullery. She worked for the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, and sad rescue dogs were part of the job. Several of them became our pets. A small fox terrier named Sue was the most beloved member of our family. She arrived as a shivering wreck, and little by little lost her fear to become totally devoted to us. She loved coming to Woodspeen Farm, where she would tackle rats almost her own size. No small dog has ever had more affection heaped upon it. We knew nothing of her history, but one day we discovered something by mischance. My sister and I had realised that by blowing up a brown paper bag and twisting the top to stop the air escaping we could generate a satisfactory bang by bursting the bag. Once, when we started this process with Sue in the room, the little dog went berserk with terror, yelping and scrabbling at the door to escape. She must have been tortured that way by her previous owner, and repeatedly. At that moment I understood what cruelty was, and it was not taking an egg from a nest. It was several days before Sue could forgive us.

Coronation Day, 1953, was not only a big day in the life of the nation it was a big day in the family, because a television set was purchased. It was a small screen in a big box, and those without television squatted down rapt before it, including Auntie Bo and her dog, a big chow-chow. The dog and I soon became bored. I offered to take the chow for a walk on its lead, and my offer was accepted with a wave as the royal coach made its encrusted way to Westminster Abbey. The problem turned out to be that instead of me walking the chow, the chow walked me. It tugged me up Ainsdale Road and into Birkdale Road beyond, and it dragged me onwards past Sandall Close, the site of the maisonette I was born in, where a doodlebug had demolished a neighbouring house during the war; I could not stop the dog marching me ever onwards into unfamiliar territory. Fortunately, there must have been virtually nothing on the roads (everyone was watching the Coronation) because dog and boy somehow breached the Western Avenue, with me hanging grimly on to the lead, and onwards into the Haymills Estate. I was now completely lost and frightened, and probably weeping. The only republican in Ealing W5 was cutting his hedge and realised something was wrong as I shot past. I could just about say where I lived: ‘40 Ainsdale Road,’ I gasped, between sobs. I arrived home in a police car. That is all I recall about the day our monarch came to the throne; the Queen who still reigns as I write these words. Nor can I remember the name of Auntie Bo’s chow.

In these early days BBC television programmes were not broadcast all day. They were interrupted by restful shots (‘intervals’ they were called, in black and white of course) of potter’s wheels turning or of wind playing over reed beds. When nothing at all was showing there was a curious, semi-abstract, but entirely motionless image called Test Card C. I assume it was supposed to demonstrate the range of grey shades the TV could encompass. I loved the new television, and if I had had the chance I would doubtless have gawped at it all day. As it was, after about an hour of sitting in front of Test Card C waiting for something to appear, I gave up. That was an excellent thing to happen in Ealing, W5. I was forced to do something, or read. I invented a game of my own based on the famous London Underground map. I would draw up new lines carefully on the map connecting Piccadilly and Bakerloo with District and Metropolitan Lines in ways undreamed of by town planners. On my new line a passenger could travel from Upminster to Uxbridge, by way of Bounds Green, East Finchley and Harrow & Wealdstone, in a great loop circumscribing North London. Or he might wish to go from New Cross Gate to Hounslow by way of Lambeth North and Wimbledon Park in the south. The new route might be called the Lakerboo Line or the Dillypically Line. For some reason, few of my passengers wanted to go into the middle of London. My idiosyncratic invention may, or may not, have something to do with my subsequent development. Bertrand Russell wrote an essay In Praise of Idleness arguing that lack of frenetic activity, or even boredom, may actually be a stimulant for the creative instincts, and this was about the best I could do. I began to devour books with complete lack of discrimination: Just William and Biggles and The Child’s Garden of Verses and The Water Babies and books from the grown-ups’ bookshelf. The oldest book was very old indeed, so old that ‘s’ was printed as ‘f’. It was an illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables (‘The Town Moufe and the Country Moufe’ was included) and I marvelled at its antiquity. It was also the smallest of any of our books, almost a miniature, and the simple, tiny illustrations – woodcuts possibly – headed up a tale that invariably finished with a moral: hard work defeateth sloth (or something like that). I don’t recall the Devil maketh work for idle hands but Bertrand Russell would certainly have disagreed, which is the problem with morals in general, unless you are Miss Long. From the grown-ups’ shelf, and quite high up, was The Psychology of Insanity by Bernard Hart, full of intriguing words like ‘psychosis’ and ‘Oedipus’. Much later, I learned that my father had had some kind of nervous breakdown before the war: Hart’s book must have been purchased at a time of crisis.

The Second World War left behind one memorial at Ainsdale Road. At the end of the garden was a miniature Anderson Shelter. It was half a tunnel roofed with overlapping sheets of corrugated iron. When the bombs arrived the family was supposed to crawl into the shelter until it was safe to go out again. In its redundant state it made an ideal ‘camp’ for a small boy. I retreated there on uneventful days to make what I termed inventions. They were combinations of bits of wire, old springs, string and whatever else I could find. I may have invented a time machine by accident on a wet afternoon, but if so I have forgotten how it was done. The inventions probably had more to do with Rowland Emett’s mechanical marvels and crazy machines that I had seen at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Let us be kind, and call the inventions works of art.

For two years I took the District Line train from Ealing Broadway to Blackfriars to the City of London School. Very little about that journey has changed on that old line, although I do not see many ten-year-old boys travelling alone, as I did. The school was on Victoria Embankment in the middle of the City by the River Thames close to Blackfriars Bridge, and boasted a rather grand entrance, complete with columns. It was decidedly impressive after Pitshanger Lane. A splendid hall housed assembly for the whole school in the morning, when Dr Barton, the headmaster, addressed us from the podium. The little boys were at the front. The many achievements of the bigger boys were announced. It was all rather awe-inspiring. I encountered a foreign language for the first time, when Monsieur Field encouraged us in oral French. ‘Ou est le plafond?’ ‘Je m’appelle Fortey’ – that kind of thing. Mr Lewis, the form master, taught almost everything else. My fellow pupils were from wealthier families. I was once invited to a birthday party at a large house in North London, where there was a conjurer who took out coloured ribbons endlessly from an empty hat, and made coins disappear. This sort of thing did not happen in Ealing, even in W5.

One day I did not go to the City of London School. Instead, I went back to Pitshanger Lane to take a test called the 11-plus. Miss Long was there, and even smiled wanly and said it was good to see me back in her school. I found a place in a room full of other children sitting at desks and went through various interesting exercises on paper to decide which number came next in a series of numbers, or what pattern fitted into which template, and then some fairly simple stuff with words. I did not realise the result was important. I passed the exam quite comfortably. I think both my parents were surprised to discover that I actually had a brain. They were probably relieved in equal measure that they could stop paying school fees when I was admitted to Ealing Grammar School for Boys. I was sad to leave the school at Blackfriars; Mr Lewis said how sorry he was to lose me from the class. After my last day I looked so bereft on the way back to Ealing Broadway station that a lady on the Tube gave me two shillings. I must have that kind of face.

* * *

Nothing was said, but the family must have been getting more affluent through my early life – the television set was an early indication. The post-war years were increasingly optimistic, and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan informed us all in 1957 that we had ‘never had it so good’. Anglers had more money in their pockets to buy superior rods and more luridly coloured gentles. Machines freed women from boring chores like sweeping and washing. Every time we went fishing we passed the splendid art deco Hoover factory in Perivale, on the Great West Road. The building – a palace, more like – carried the legend: ‘It beats as it sweeps as it cleans’ in great big letters, which description of their eponymous appliance neatly encapsulated domestic liberation. Our first family vehicle was a black affair with a small, oval back window, an automobile in which George Raft might have fled a heist in a dozen of his movies. A series of shapely Austin cars followed, each a little larger and faster than the last. At some stage a second car for my mother appeared, an ancient 1930s Morris with the registration number beginning ALD, and immediately nicknamed ‘Oldie’. The old crock gasped and wheezed westwards to take us kids to Ruislip Lido on hot summer afternoons, where we could splash around and get cool and look for dragonflies. Then its ‘big end’ went, and the car expired on the A40 uttering a series of spectacular thumps until it ground to a halt and the dog jumped out of the window. Undeterred, my mother bought a limousine for a song, an Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire coupé, no less, with real leather seats, and a top that folded back in the sunshine. It could accommodate all our young friends on the way to the lido. I believe these were the best days of my mother’s life: children who adored her, driving an Armstrong Siddeley, which she would have described as ‘mad’ in an approving way.

There were several caravans in succession on Woodspeen Farm, ranging from spartan to quite luxurious. The first caravan was impossibly small and there is no record of its title; the next one was called the Eccles Elite and had tables that turned into beds and a kitchen that folded out of the walls; the largest, the Stanmore Deluxe, was almost comfortable. From anonymous to elite to deluxe – what could better summarise material progression? When the rain pummelled down on the roof of the Stanmore my sister and I played board games, or headed for the barn to find the Pococks.

My parents were not generally extravagant. They were sparse drinkers: wine only appeared at Christmas dinner, and then it was a sweet Sauternes ill suited to the main course. The main indulgence was my father’s smoking. He could have smoked for the national team. The favoured brand was Player’s Navy Cut – untipped. There was a picture of a jolly jack tar (appropriate, it turns out, for all the wrong reasons) on the packet, and the motto ‘It’s the tobacco that counts’ appeared on the flap of the packet when it was opened. He would give each cigarette a short tap on the packet before lighting up yet again. His fingers carried the stubborn yellow stain of the nicotine addict. My sister and I must have been surrounded by a fog of smoke throughout our early years, even in the car. The only object I still own that bears testimony to that habit is a battered brass ashtray advertising Bass in Bottle that was alleged to have been taken from the NAAFI during the war. It has four depressions to hold smouldering gaspers, enough for about an hour. The consummate angler had his faults, and what others might there be?

At about the same time I realised that my mother was an awful cook. It was not a skill that could be honed during years of rationing, but even when bananas, brisket and butter were freely available she was still stuck in an era before cooking was regarded as a necessary skill. My sister tells me that she cannot recall eating at all; I remember only that Kath subsisted almost entirely on potatoes (Mother even dubbed her ‘Little Miss Murphy’). I have some recollections of boiled mince with tinned peach slices to follow. The only thing of culinary excellence we consumed was father’s trout – and he cooked them. We even looked forward to the school dinners that most children despised: there were delicious things like jam roly poly with bright yellow artificial custard on top. The real excitement at home was Sunday lunch. Like many middle-class families, we all had to come together for a weekly meal cooked by a beneficent mother, a ritual to which the dining room was dedicated. It was sometimes a terrifying experience. Joints of beef would be roasted until they halved in size and became almost impossible to carve; Yorkshire pudding somehow carbonised at the rim while still being soggy at the centre. Greens were mercilessly boiled. We were all grateful to whoever invented gravy powder (a Mr Bisto, I presume) to give us something with which to lubricate the plate. The excitement came with the dessert, especially if it was apple pie. I do not know how she managed it, but my mother’s pastry was some kind of hard and brittle ceramic. The pie arrived at the table in an enamel dish looking like an archaeological object unearthed from Thebes. The usual approaches to crust simply failed; knives bounced off it. Eventually a cleaver of sufficient gravitas was applied with great force, whereupon the pie crust suddenly shattered sending pieces flying around the dining room. Nothing was safe: bits bounced off the mirror with a ‘ping!’ The lampshade trembled under impact. The dog hid under the sideboard. It was remarkable, but the sliced apples within the pie had managed to stay hard. ‘Now,’ said my mother, ‘who’s for seconds?’

My mother’s cooking never improved. Late in life she did appreciate that she was required to entertain, and that cooking might be involved. She was delighted when she discovered a gourmet chicken recipe that required her to tip a tin of Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup over some chicken legs before putting the dish in the oven to cook. Her elderly friends were impressed (according to my mother’s account): ‘Margaret,’ they said, ‘so delicious! Do tell us your secret.’ She was – as she would have said – tickled pink by her cunning.

After Sunday lunch it was time for The Brains Trust on the television. It would be hard to imagine such a serious display of erudition being regarded as entertainment today. If we would have preferred to watch Roy Rogers we did not say so, and anyway it was not an option. We all sat in front of the ‘box’ as if in a classroom before a respected teacher. Questions were sent in by viewers and debated by three panellists, all of them noted savants of the day. Among those who appeared were Julian Huxley, probably the leading British biologist in the middle of the last century, Jacob Bronowski a renowned scientist and thinker, C. E. M. Joad the first television philosopher, A. J. Ayer a more distinguished academic one (see Chapter 8), and Marghanita Laski, one of the cleverest women in the United Kingdom. There were no camera tricks, just verbal banter, and a good quantity of smoke from pipes. Nor were the questions of the ‘What is your favourite book, and why?’ variety, instead, they cut to the chase on the meaning of existence. There were questions like: ‘Can we ever know ultimate truth by means of science?’ C. E. M. Joad was renowned for replying: ‘It all depends what you mean by … ultimate truth.’ ‘Is music the most perfect of the arts?’ came the question. ‘It all depends on what you mean by … perfect,’ came Joad’s response. Nonetheless, the quality of intercourse was very elevated (so elevated, indeed, that the word ‘intercourse’ could be used in its original sense) and I recognised words that I had first seen in The Psychology of Insanity – like ‘archetype’, ‘sublimation’ and ‘catharsis’. Words, I began to understand, were legion, multifarious, prolific – and powerful. I needed to get on top of words. I also appreciated the knowledge and wisdom that invariably typified Huxley’s replies. I did not know then that he was a member of a famous scientific clan that was founded by T. H. Huxley, defender of Charles Darwin and evolution. It would not be many years before I encountered Julian Huxley again in the scientific literature. I understood now what my mother had meant when she described Mr Morley-Jones as an intellectual – he was somebody that would have felt comfortable with confronting difficult questions. He appreciated scholarship, and admired reason. Sadly, on a black-and-white television I could not tell whether or not Marghanita Laski’s stockings were blue.

* * *

The butterflies that thronged on the railway embankment above Woodspeen Farm intrigued me. I could have identified them from The Observer’s Book of British Butterflies readily enough, but I felt compelled to make a collection. I had admired prepared butterfly specimens in old cabinets in museums with their wings displayed neatly flat and four-square. Few butterflies come like that naturally: they need to be pinned out for display, which requires a measure of legerdemain. I obtained a simple butterfly net and captured the poor creatures without too much difficulty. The main problem was extracting them from the net without destroying the beauty of the wings, the very thing that attracted me in the first place. Practice improved the delicacy of my handling, but then my victims had to be turned into a jar and killed before the pinning-out process. I obtained a pungent liquid called carbon tetrachloride (it was used for dry-cleaning as a solvent), and soaked blotting paper in the jar in the lethal fluid. When the butterfly was added to the jar the lid was screwed into place and the insect briefly fluttered, then stalled, and twitched before expiring. At this stage its wings could be moved into position and pinned into the mounting paper. I did not persist with this pastime for very long, though long enough to learn the common southern English butterflies. I made a small, and not very skilled, collection of spread-eagled species. Something about the twitchy ending of a fragile life in a jar gave me pause. I knew I could never become an obsessive lepidopterist. I am not proud of this period of slaughter, but it has left a legacy: my memories of abundance. Small tortoiseshell butterflies, whose caterpillars feed on the common nettle, often made orange clouds at the edges of the fields. Red admirals were nearly as common, unmistakable with their stripes of scarlet command. I captured wall browns with no difficulty. These familiar butterflies are not as common as they once were. The culling of the odd adult for a collection is an irrelevance in the prosperity of the species. It may be the birds’ story all over again. I am sure that nettles are more abundant than they were in my Woodspeen Farm days. Nitrogenous fertilisers have soaked nearly every ditch and hedgebank and encouraged nettles at the expense of a richer suite of wildflowers. Small tortoiseshells should be everywhere. Instead, the populations of small tortoiseshells have fallen by three-quarters in thirty years. The word ‘baffling’ has been used in official reports.

My sister’s sketch of Sue, our beloved fox terrier.