4

The Ammonite

My ammonite is about 165 million years old. It had lain undiscovered, concealed deep in the rocks, until I plucked it from its hiding place. A few years ago somebody accidentally dropped it and split it in two, but the halves still fit together to remake the whole specimen. I would have been dismayed if it had shattered, because it is the first fossil I ever discovered, and I have kept it with me throughout my life. At first glance it looks like a discus, about the size of a tea plate. The ammonite is preserved in limestone, which gives it a creamy yellow colour. It is curled into a flat spiral that expands gradually in width and diameter until the end of its growing margin is over an inch across, the outer whorl somewhat embracing the inner ones. I count five turns on the spiral recording the growth of the animal during its lifetime. Ammonites are an extinct kind of mollusc, and their spiral form compares with the elegant shapes of living ramshorn snails. The names of both snail and fossil refer to their resemblance to horns – the snail reminiscent of those carried by a male sheep, while Ammon Zeus was a horned god in ancient Greece (derived from an Egyptian precursor). My own ammonite carries ribs that run crossways over each whorl in a regular pattern: a strong inner rib is joined by another, intercalated rib on the outside of the whorl. It might almost have been a carving made by a sculptor. A groove runs all along its back on the exterior of the outer whorl. The fossil feels cool to the touch even on a warm day.

Our Stanmore Deluxe caravan had been moved to a site near the sea, where it was made available to let for holidaymakers. Ranks of similar caravans were parked at West Bay, near Burton Bradstock, Dorset, on the English south coast. Our summer holiday was spent in our mobile home, just me, my sister and our mother. Father never joined us, as the businesses had to be looked after, although it was strange how every year the mayfly seemed magically to release him from his duties. West Bay was a rather bleak spot, where a small stream breached the high cliffs and a patch of flat land allowed caravans to provide summer accommodation. The beach was little more than a mass of rounded flinty stones, so there was no chance to build sandcastles or ride donkeys. Even seashells were hard to find. The cliffs were ramparts of rusty yellow sandstones that were fretted into more resistant horizontal benches separated by softer, eroding layers; notices warning of falling rocks were set up along the beach. To reinforce this advice large boulders of hard limestone lay at the foot of the cliffs where they had come to rest after tumbling down from high above. They could have been killers. From the sea’s edge it was obvious that the sandstone cliffs were overlain by a prominent band of rock close to the top of the cliff that jutted out in places, ready to drop.

A path led over the cliff inland towards the nearby village, running close to the precipitous edge. A premonition of children falling over the drop made Mother particularly nervous, as we darted cheerfully in all directions over the short turf marking the track. Behind the path and away from the sea was a golf course. It may have been the golfers that were responsible for dredging back some of the rock layer that made the dangerous overhang at the top of the cliff. Now piles of broken limestone rock lay close to the cliff edge. I saw my ammonite just poking out of the rubble, like a gift specially intended for me and me alone. I grabbed it while my mother shouted at me not to get any closer to the edge for God’s sake.

My first fossil, the Jurassic ammonite Parkinsonia.

I soon learned the Jurassic age of my discovery from leaflets handed out at nearby Abbotsbury, where I went in my role as bird boy a little later to see the famous mute swans and their nests. The capping rock was known as the Inferior Oolite, a limestone formation that overlay the softer, deep ochre-yellow Bridport Sands making up the bulk of the cliffs. Nowadays, this stretch of coastline is just a small section of a World Heritage Site for the Jurassic Coast. Online visitors can take a walk through time along the coast following the succession of rock formations without danger of falling off the cliffs. They can find out about fossils without getting their hands dirty. For me at that time, it was back to Arthur Mee’s encyclopedia, where I turned to an illustration of ‘Life in the Jurassic Period’.[1] Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs fought one another in limpid seas, while strange fish lurked in the shallows. Pterodactyls soared in the air above an alien landscape decked out with cycad palms. On the sea floor lay the dead shell of my ammonite. I was thrilled. My discovery was a precious relic of lives long vanished, a message addressed to me from the depths of time. I wanted to know more, to give the fossil a name, to capture it into my personal taxonomy. I did not realise that my encyclopedia’s view of the English Jurassic sea was already long obsolete. Nor did this really matter: inspiration was the important thing.

On my first solo visit to the Natural History Museum in London I carried the Dorset ammonite safely in a small bag. South Kensington station was a direct journey on the District Line from Ealing Broadway; I had regularly passed it on my way to City of London School. The museum was reached by way of a passage running below street level, which echoed in a satisfying way – it is still there, and buskers now make use of the acoustics to bulk up their sound. Once I left the tunnel the museum stood before me in all its Gothic immensity, enhanced by its curious towers. The entrance was more like that of a cathedral than a house of science, and I climbed its steps with my heart fluttering nervously. A warden wearing a dark blue uniform and a peaked cap directed me rather grumpily towards an antique, polished brown door. On admittance, an Enquiries Officer in a tweed jacket took my fossil with a friendly smile, issued a receipt, and informed me that it would be examined in due course by a scientist, one who specialised in the Ammonoidea. I was astonished to discover that such a person could exist. Were there really so many ammonites that a scientist could spend a lifetime on their study? I was fond of the Rupert Bear annuals as part of my indiscriminate reading, and Rupert had a friend who was a professor – a benign figure with a bald pate surrounded by a fringe of fluffy hair. My involuntary image of the ammonite expert was similar. I imagined him holding my specimen up to the light as if it were a fine wine, nodding his head wisely, before giving an authoritative opinion in a kindly, if abstracted voice.

Two weeks later I went back to the Natural History Museum – it was called the British Museum (Natural History) at the time – and collected my ammonite. With it was a handwritten label that announced ‘Parkinsonia parkinsoni, Inferior Oolite’. My fossil had been identified – or ‘determined’. It did not take deductive genius to infer that it was named after someone called Parkinson. My old encyclopedia soon revealed who he was, and, indeed, it was the same Parkinson who first diagnosed the disease that carries his name. But he also wrote pioneering and well-illustrated works on palaeontology, first published in 1804, so my lucky find at Burton Bradstock now had connections not only with the remote Jurassic Period, but also with a famous nineteenth-century scientist. It felt like a propitious combination. As for the Inferior Oolite, I discovered that it was a particular kind of limestone made largely from tiny, perfectly spherical grains called ‘ooliths’ that could be easily seen under a hand lens. It was ‘inferior’ because it lay underneath a thicker rock formation called the Great Oolite, not because it somehow failed to come up to scratch. Almost immediately, geology became an additional addiction for me, another mass of facts to master, but facts that seemed appropriate to my other enthusiasms. A collection of fossils carried no worrying baggage about harming living organisms; if I didn’t collect them, fossils would crumble away to nothing. I would save precious evidence of the past from destruction. Miss Long would have approved.

Most kids go for dinosaurs. I know several small children who will lecture me solemnly about the differences between Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, and master the pronunciation of Pachycephalosaurus before they know about multiplication and division. Skeletons of dinosaurs are the centrepiece of every major natural history museum: vast sauropods, toothy carnivores, plated stegosaurs, stocky Triceratops with its horns in a threatening pose. Moving animatronic dinosaurs have become more and more realistic. My own grandson hid nervously behind my legs when we went to see the snarling Tyrannosaurus rex in London; he was not entirely convinced that it was a simulacrum. For the most part dinosaurs inspire in children just the right mixture of terror and security. They are scarily huge but safely extinct. Smaller, gracile dinosaurs are always on display alongside their monster cousins, but they do not produce quite the same frisson of delicious scariness. Every modern display worth its salt tells the visitor that the dinosaurs did not actually go extinct, because they live on as birds, and the best collections will have on display a Chinese fossil that shows an intriguing bridge between the two. Fewer museums have got around to covering their carnivorous dinosaur reconstructions with feathers – for which there is some evidence – it somehow does not fit with their macho schtick. Dinosaur-shaped jelly babies are the giant reptiles’ saddest commercial demotion – from kings of the Mesozoic world to a sugary novelty.

My first exposure to dinosaurs was thanks to Walt Disney. A trip to what my mother always called the West End was exciting; it was our downtown from suburban Ealing, all smartly dressed people, big shops and red buses. Oxford Street was the nexus of the West End, and somewhere along it a cinema called Studio One was perpetually showing Fantasia. The movie was made in 1940, and at the time it was the apotheosis of the cartoon. It is a musical tribute to the possibilities of Disney’s medium, as animated episodes illustrate and accompany classical music, conducted by the great Leopold Stokowski. Apart from a mawkish moment when the maestro has to shake hands with Mickey Mouse it is all music and marvellous images: abstract shapes accompany Bach, bucolic rustics illustrate Beethoven’s pastoral symphony, mushrooms dance to Tchaikovsky. The episode most people know is Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where Mickey appears again as the unfortunate hero. However, the most dramatic section is reserved for Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It is used to encapsulate the history of life, albeit a chronologically eccentric history in which the first few hundred million years flash by in a minute or so. Trilobites have a walk-on part for a second, rather in the way that Alfred Hitchcock would appear momentarily in his thrillers. Drama is supplied when the dinosaurs march in. Giant herbivores like Diplodocus are shown wallowing in freshwater lakes gobbling weed, an idea current at the time. (Nowadays they are portrayed more like elephants, in great terrestrial herds.) The savage ostinato of Stravinsky’s Rite comes later and is matched by a bloody battle between T. rex and Stegosaurus. At the end, the whole tribe of dinosaurs lumbers towards extinction as the climate changes and the world becomes a lurid desert. Only bones remain. I was transfixed. The cartoon had nothing of the veracity of Jurassic Park and its numerous successors, but it was relentlessly gripping. My older self might ruminate on the mutability of knowledge – what Disney showed was the science of his time, and much of it has changed. Nothing was known in 1940 of the meteorite impact that is implicated in the demise of the reptilian giants. If it had been known then, it might have supplied an even more dramatic ending for Disney’s masterpiece. I understand that reconstructions of dinosaurs will change yet again with new discoveries and new scientific techniques. Maybe what we think we know now will one day line up alongside Arthur Mee and Fantasia. That is really not the point. The curiosity stirred up in the young boy endured, even if the narrative has changed in many ways. You cannot calibrate inspiration by a catalogue of facts.

Discovering the ammonite aroused different emotions from those that lit up my day in the cinema on Oxford Street. I could never own a dinosaur, I could only wonder from afar. The Natural History Museum had (and still has) a splendid gallery of marine reptiles – ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, several of them collected in the nineteenth century by the pioneering woman scientist, Mary Anning. A number of these specimens were discovered at Lyme Regis, a little further west along the Dorset coast from Burton Bradstock. The most I could expect to find of one of these magnificent beasts would be a vertebra or two. The ammonite was different. It was a whole specimen, and I could add others of its kind to my collection. The commonest fossils are invariably those of smaller marine creatures whose shells were entombed in sediment after they died. They are the pawns on the chessboard of life. Humble they may be, but they constitute a wonderful array of different kinds of animals: clams, snails, sea urchins, brachiopods, belemnites, corals, trilobites. I wondered if there was a specialist for every one of them in the Natural History Museum. I would learn all their names; I would master the past! Fossils would become my next target: I would discover where they were hiding in cliffs and quarries and ditches. Who knows what I might turn up?

There is a common misconception that fossils are uncommon. My first ammonite seemed to me an object of great significance, a rarity as precious as a Roman gold coin. When I began seriously to look for fossils I discovered that there were special localities where they were rather numerous. I soon recognised that a collection could sample a whole ancient habitat, and give a feel for life on sea floors that had long vanished into deep history. I could wade in the warm waters of a Jurassic reef, or I could swim alongside the ammonites. I could even devise my own pictures to replace the old images in The Children’s Encyclopedia. The charisma of collecting increased in direct proportion to the age of the fossils; the more ancient, the more exotic. I soon learned the geological periods in their proper order, the litany of geological time. Their names seemed romantic and evocative, and the older ones had a special magic. Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian had an irresistible allure, an alien strangeness. My new geological map of Britain was easily read as a diagram to predict what fossils I could find in a particular stratum, as the rock formations were plotted out in colour describing bands across the land. Some of the colours on the modern map dated all the way back to the first geological map made by William Smith in 1815, like the green that signified Cretaceous chalk. Green it has remained for two centuries. I still sometimes feel that at some subliminal level chalk must be green, even though I know perfectly well it is as white as … chalk.

My father fished pure chalk streams, and on Woodspeen Farm there was an old pit dug down into the white rock beneath, probably to make quicklime to ‘sweeten’ the soil – part of the process Robinson had outlined in my first chemistry book. It was an obvious place for me to commence fossicking for fossils. Old chalk pits were rather common after the war, a legacy of a time before chemicals were bought in for agricultural purposes. Picking over the pallid lumps in the quarry I soon learned to recognise flints within the chalk; they were part and parcel of the same sediments – hard silica, white outside and black inside, and so inert as to be practically immortal. Sometimes flint nodules resembled a baby’s foot or a small head, but they were put there specially to mislead the novice, for these were nothing more than ‘pseudofossils’, fortuitous shapes designed to fool the unwary. Flints of whatever form survive indefinitely to frustrate gardeners with their unassailable obduracy. Then something different caught my eye, partly sticking out of a lump of chalk, rounded and the size of a large coin, but with a suggestion of pink to it – a fossil! I carried the chalk cobble home to see if I could extract the rest of the fossil from its rocky hiding place. The good thing about chalk is that it is a very soft type of limestone that can even be cut with a sharp knife. I tapped off small chunks that were obviously not part of the fossil, and then carefully pared off layers of the chalk matrix until I was close to the specimen that had lain hidden for so long. When I felt I was in danger of damaging whatever-it-was I stopped carving and started scrubbing. An old toothbrush steeped in water slowly scraped off the chalk, but the bristles were not hard enough to damage any entombed fossil. Gradually, a shape emerged, a heart shape, and as more of the chalk wore away I made out five shallow grooves excavated into the highest part of my find. The opposite side of the fossil was flattened. It was a beautiful sea urchin. I found out later that the scientific name of the heart urchin was Micraster, which means ‘small star’, presumably referring to the five grooves making that rayed pattern. Under a magnifying glass I saw that the whole animal was made up of calcite plates that fitted together as perfectly as a mosaic, except for two round holes that I learned subsequently were the urchin’s mouth (on the bottom) and the anus (at the end). The whole urchin would have originally been covered with hairy spines, almost a fur. The glass revealed something else: there were smaller fossils perched upon my fossil: the tube of a small worm, and a branching colony of tiny bryozoans.[2] These would have settled on the dead urchin to filter out tiny organic particles from the seawater that washed over it. My sea urchin housed a whole community! The fossil fitted neatly into the palm of my hand and I cradled it as if it were some kind of talisman. I felt that it had crossed 90 million years especially to be discovered by me, fossil boy.

Fossils of sea urchins were common in the chalk at the edge of the Berkshire Downs.

The collection had begun. I discovered more fossils in the chalk as I explored other quarries nearby. Two sea urchins other than Micraster found a place in the shoebox that first housed my finds; one was a neat cone, the other larger and shaped rather like a round bun. The ‘bun’ was cast in flint, but it was no pseudofossil – it looked as if the inside of the sea urchin had been filled up with flint, as now there was none of the original shell remaining. I had picked it up in a field where it must have been brought up by the plough. Fossil urchins like this were long known as ‘shepherd’s crowns’, so they must have been spotted by farm hands who knew nothing of their true antiquity. They might well have believed that the ‘crowns’ were placed in the fields by mischievous sprites. These flinty urchins were much tougher than the original fossils, so they survived erosion and ploughing to pop up from the ground like treasure to puzzle passing shepherds. If the sea urchins were the stars of the collection, there were also simple clams that looked not very different from oysters and scallops, a small ammonite that sported lumps as well as ribs, and rounded brachiopods about the size of boiled sweets. All these discoveries were made of the same shell material – calcium carbonate, chemically the same as chalk itself (CaCO₃), the favoured building material for the majority of marine animals. But the quarry was to yield up something utterly different. Out of a lump of chalk a shining, sharp blade protruded – I could have cut myself with it. It was a shark’s tooth. The brilliant lustre on the tooth was proof that it was made of bone rather than calcite. It was not difficult to dig out; it was larger than my thumbnail and just the shape you would expect from one of the ranks of teeth that fill the mouth of Jaws. It was going to displace Micraster as the favourite chalk discovery. I began to sketch a picture of the chalk sea in my head: sea urchins, brachiopods and clams on the soft sea floor, a shark cruising above in search of fishes. What I could not see was that all the white stuff of the chalk itself comprised uncountable millions of tiny fossils of planktonic, single-celled organisms. It required an electron microscope to explore their secrets.

As the collection grew I needed names for my finds, as well as a larger cabinet to house it. There was something rather grand about Latin names, and few fossils had common ones. I was not intimidated by classical names because I was taught Latin by Mr Saunders, who drilled his class with such efficiency that nearly everyone got 90%. We learned the translation of Caesar’s Gallic Wars (Book 3) by heart, so that when it came to our O level examinations we just had to recognise a few prompts to write out the whole passage in perfect English. One phrase that remains with me is that Caesar’s navy sails were ‘lightly tanned and dressed with alum’, for which information I have yet to find a use. Only Smithers misidentified the prompt and wrote out a completely different passage that bore no relation to the Latin original. Few fossil names were as obvious as Parkinsonia. Some were real mouthfuls: my heart urchin was probably Micraster cortestudinarium, and I confess to a certain braggadocio when I trotted out the name to impress anyone who was interested, and many more who were not. I realised that the complicated species name referred to a heart (cor) and a tortoise (testudo) so it was not implausible as a description. I had my first inkling that the Latin (I should say scientific) names served as an international language and provided a rational way to deal with the immense diversity of life.

The Geological Museum was next to the Natural History Museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington. It was much less visited, except by me. The upper floors had systematic collections of British fossils laid out according to their age and locality. Specimens were displayed in old-fashioned cases with glass tops, just ranks of examples with their geological age and scientific name on the label. Southern England would have a case or two with chalk fossils in the Cretaceous section, another couple of cases with the typical fossils from the Inferior Oolite as part of the Jurassic section. This particular case held a much better specimen of the ammonite Parkinsonia parkinsoni than my founding fossil. The display was fairly comprehensive, and an enthusiast could pore over the cases almost undisturbed. There was nothing here to get the warders in a tizzy, no ‘Do not touch’ notices to be disobeyed. I was often the only person in the gallery, and certainly the youngest. I would take out a fossil I had brought with me to match it with one on display. In the chalk section: my pyramidal sea urchin was like Conulus albogalerus, my shepherd’s crown was a dead ringer for Echinocorys scutata. One of my big clams was certainly an Inoceramus, but I could not decide which species exactly matched mine. The brachiopods were a more varied group than I had realised: I was learning more precise observation and more refined discrimination. I carried a notebook to record the details so that I would be able to update the labels in my own collection. I was as happy as could be. In the early 1960s the Natural History Museum produced handbooks with good drawings of fossils to supplement my visits[3] but there was no substitute for looking at the real thing – and besides there was always the chance of finding a species which was not included in the handbook. While my contemporaries played Saturday football in Pitshanger Park I was the solitary child in the Geological Museum. My mother must have thought that I was a curious boy.

The display cases have all gone. They began to seem old-fashioned, and they were not as attractive to the average visitor as new exhibits with friendly text offering full explanations, and plenty of special effects. The Story of the Earth appeared in the Geological Museum in the early 1970s and became a great success, because it explained the advances in geological understanding of our home planet since the advent of plate tectonics; it also featured earthquakes and erupting volcanoes. The stratigraphic collection of fossils on display was doomed, and the fine examples of ammonites and all the other invertebrate shells mostly went back into storage in the vaults. Nowadays, there are other ways for curious children to identify their specimens. But if there were such things as ghosts, after the visitors have left for the day I could imagine hearing the footfall of a young wraith walking back and forth seeking the cabinets that once held such a special charm. The former Geological Museum is now just part of the Natural History Museum – the Earth Galleries, or the Red Zone. Schoolchildren flock through it on the way to the dinosaurs.

*    *    *

I was extraordinarily lucky to be able to study geology as a subject while I was at Ealing Grammar School for Boys. The geography master proved to be a geologist manqué. He was one of those rare teachers that almost every student recalls with gratitude and respect. K. E. Williams was known to most of his students as ‘Kew’; for me, he always remained Mr Williams. He was a small Welshman with a long, pointy chin and a ready smile. He never had to raise his voice to control a classroom – it just seemed to happen. Some of his colleagues used tricks to achieve the same end, the deployment of sarcasm being a popular ruse. To a talkative pupil such a master might say, meaningfully: ‘I am sure you would wish to share your brilliant insights, Smithers, with the rest of the class.’ Smithers blushed, and mumbled in embarrassment as silence fell. Mr Williams just effortlessly interested his audience in the Nile Delta, the crops of the Mediterranean region, or the climate of central Spain. He hardly ever set homework, and almost all his students passed the geography examinations with distinction. His real passion was geology. He had completed a geological master’s degree at the University of Aberystwyth. He had published a scientific paper based upon his thesis in the Geological Magazine in May 1927: ‘The glacial drifts of western Cardiganshire’. The title may not resound mightily, but it was his contribution to scholarship and he was proud of it, shyly producing a ‘reprint’ of the article for his small geology class to admire. I felt a similar diffidence when I published my first article in what our trade calls a ‘learned journal’. Mr Williams had amassed a select teaching collection of fossils that included some of the species I had discovered. This was where I handled my first trilobite.

Day trips into the field in southern England took us over the chalk downs and across the Weald. It was a happy release from the routine of school life; we felt as if we belonged to a small and exclusive club that was allowed to have fun – but we were also learning. This was better than sitting in the physics laboratory fiddling with a Wheatstone bridge! Mr Williams explained how the sequence of strata controlled the landscape. The downs rose up to make the high ground, and the slopes near Box Hill were dark with native yew and box trees, while white gashes marked old quarries that revealed the chalk beneath. I wanted to stop to find another Micraster sea urchin. Near Dorking we inspected the Silent Pool; water as pure and clean as in any spa bubbled up from a spring on the line where permeable chalk met the impermeable clay beneath. This Gault clay then made a poorly drained valley that was tracked by the main routes and rivers. It could all be followed logically on the geological map. In the distance the hard ridge of the Lower Greensand rose up at Leith Hill to match the downs in elevation, and we drove to examine it along narrow sunken lanes that had been eroded by centuries of ox carts struggling up steep inclines. Dark green straps of hart’s tongue ferns lined the route. From the top of the sandstone scarp the view south over the Weald showed another broad strip of deeply wooded low clay ground with misty hills in the distance where yet more resistant sandstones came into outcrop. Hill and vale followed the bidding of the rocks, and geology provided the key to reading the landscape. Even the older houses we passed reflected the underlying strata: flint with brick corners on the chalk; clay bricks in the poorly drained valleys, timber houses in the wooded Weald. In future I would be wearing geological glasses on my journeys around Britain. Mr Williams had helped to change my vision of my homeland.[4]

When I was fourteen we had a family holiday (minus Father, of course) to St David’s, Pembrokeshire, the smallest cathedral city in Britain, on the south-western tip of Wales. By now, we had graduated from the caravan to staying in a spartan guesthouse. The peninsula on which St David’s is perched is rather flat and featureless, and Mr Williams would doubtless have described it as an uplifted peneplain. The city itself was (and is) both ancient and charming, running down the hill towards the old cathedral. Most buildings are rather modest, and almost everything is built from the tough purplish or green sandstone that underlies much of the tip of this small peninsula. It is geologically one of the most ancient areas south of the Highlands of Scotland; the streets of St David’s have grown from their rocky foundations and feel at ease with their surroundings. The result is a pleasing little city with nothing that seems out of place. The square-towered cathedral is tucked in a hollow backed by open countryside. It manages to be hard to see until the visitor stumbles right upon it, as if it were crouching discreetly. Ruins of a large and opulent Bishop’s Palace add to the impression of an important medieval centre for English church and state when most of Wales was still inaccessible.

The glory of St David’s is its coastline, where ancient rocks abut a fierce sea. Inaccessible bays are backed by mighty vertical cliffs that have been fretted by thousands of years of erosion. Clefts in the rock face make narrow caves into which the waters suck and belch. The strata making up the cliffs have been mangled by the profound earth movements that elevated the Caledonian mountain chain about 400 million years ago: nothing here remains horizontal, and the rock beds are often twisted tortuously into folds, or abruptly terminated by great faults that cut vertically as if to ignore the geology altogether. Different colours were juxtaposed when the earth’s crust was sliced into these chunks: Caerfai Bay is backed by bright red shale; Solva displays black slaty rocks; massive, subtly coloured sandstones define promontories. Most implacable of all is St David’s Head – a huge mass that welled up as hot magma cooled to make an igneous intrusion that offers endless resistance to the relentless breakers. These rocks have suffered deeply in the past and face an onslaught today; the fine spray thrown skywards as another wave crashes ashore is like the exhalation of some enormous whale. The sea picks at the unyielding rock atom by atom.

On the wall of the guest house an old map illustrated the geology of the St David’s area. The rocks had all the glamour of extreme antiquity, for here were the Cambrian and Ordovician strata I had long sought, with their outcrops clearly plotted, and even notes on what to expect in the way of fossils. ‘Cambrian trilobites here’ was marked on a narrow bay called Porth-y-rhaw; north of St David’s Head ‘Ordovician graptolites abundant’ was printed next to Abereiddy Bay. All I wanted to do was to get to these places to see what I could find. My holiday was about to become my destiny. My sister tells me that it rained a lot of the time, which is not unknown in Wales, but my enthusiasm was more effective in buoying my spirits than any raincoat. All I needed was to be dropped off, and picked up before dark. My mother and sister went off in the car in search of ponies to ride, or to find somewhere to get dry. Porth-y-rhaw hardly qualified as a bay, being more like a diminutive Cornish cove, a narrow cleft in the implacable coastline, with a beach of rounded boulders through which a small stream found its way to the sea. Short turf and gorse covered the higher ground. Dark-coloured hard shales that had been tipped nearly vertical were accessible on the left-hand side of the inlet as I faced out to sea, but the waves broke dangerously close. When I jumped to avoid getting wet I glanced up at the cliff and there was the trilobite – and not just any trilobite, but a huge one, at least a foot long. It was out of reach on the steep rock face, proof if any were needed of the tectonics that had tipped everything upwards. Its surface was wrinkled and cracked, but the trilobite’s head, and thorax of many segments could easily be made out even though it was the same colour as the enclosing shale. It had suffered but not been obliterated, a survivor from the Cambrian period, a messenger from 500 million years ago. When I learned it was called Paradoxides, it seemed to be an appropriate name: it indeed appeared to be a paradox that such an ancient animal could be so complex, and more so than Parkinsonia to my naïve eye. I wanted to find one of these trilobites for myself, but there was no way I could extract a large enough piece of the hard rock. My more modest efforts were not entirely in vain. Once I had learned to break the rock with my hammer along the plane of the ancient sea floor I recovered several tiny trilobites with short thoraces (Eodiscus punctatus) just sitting on the surface of the broken rock exactly as they must have died in Cambrian times. Pride of place went to another trilobite, the flanks of whose body seemed to be covered with ramifying veins. I wrapped my finds safely in newspaper so that they could not scratch one another, and this was my first collection of the animals I would spend many years studying. It was a day well spent. When I got back to our lodgings I unwrapped the best specimens trying to imagine the seas in which they lived, taking a dive back through time and space to a world that was waiting to be explored.

Abereiddy Bay was more conventional seaside, wide and gentle compared with Porth-y-rhaw, with a proper beach partly covered with flattened discs of weathered black shale. Beyond it, to the north, a huge ‘slate’ quarry had carved out a great bowl deep into the cliffs. It is now full of seawater and known as the Blue Lagoon by water-sport enthusiasts and wild swimmers; it was the site of a spectacular landslide in 2018. Derelict buildings made of piled ‘slate’ lend the place a certain air of romance. Everything about the rocky cliffs is dark, almost brooding. The black rocks are Ordovician in age – the period after the Cambrian – which was a time when marine life radiated into many ecological niches that are still occupied today. When I went to Abereiddy as a youth almost every flat pebble on the beach yielded graptolites when it was split apart. The shales were sometimes a little like piled sheaves of papers that could be parted into single thin layers. The graptolites were not subtle fossils; they were startlingly white against the black background of the rock, and on some surfaces they were so abundant that they smeared into one another. The largest specimens were a couple of inches long at most. The commonest species looked like the tuning fork that was carried by every choirmaster to give a pure tone when it was struck. The inner surface of the ‘fork’ had a finely serrated edge, and a closer look revealed that each serration was actually the end of an inclined tube, now flattened on to the rock surface. It did not take me very long to add specimens of Didymograptus murchisoni to my collection – the only problem this time was that I had to decide which ones to reject.

Graptolites were part of the ancient plankton, floating around the world in the Ordovician seas. They were colonial animals. The little tubes were formerly occupied by tiny creatures (called ‘zooids’), that fed on microscopic algae and larvae. There could be dozens of zooids in one graptolite. While trilobites were obviously part of the great phylum Arthropoda – the jointed-legged animals that include living insects, crustaceans and spiders – the place of graptolites in the tree of life was debated for decades. Now they are known to be distant relatives of an obscure living animal phylum called Hemichordata, with a few living examples encrusting pebbles and succeeding very well in being inconspicuous. Their days as graptolites marked the zenith of their evolution, when they would have been both conspicuous and ubiquitous. The seas thronged with their drifting colonies. Just in Abereiddy Bay there must have been millions of them preserved in the dark shale. I imagined clots of dead graptolites sinking into the depths to a place where nothing else survived, there to be entombed in deep-sea mud forever. Nothing living today is quite like a graptolite. Some years later I spent much time focusing my research on these extinct and curious creatures, trying to understand the apparently endless variation in their colonies. The derivation of the name ‘graptolite’ comes from Greek for ‘writing’ – to early observers the fossils looked like symbols written on the rock surface. This was strangely appropriate for the fourteen-year-old boy in Pembrokeshire who tapped rocks with the simple enthusiasm of a besotted naturalist, just rejoicing in what a hammer blow might reveal – to be the first pair of eyes to gaze at white outlines which could have been written messages smuggled down through millions of years. Palaeontology was a road less travelled, an esoteric journey that few others had embarked upon. It had the fascination of the arcane, of being something of a secret world. I felt comfortable there, as I did with Mr Bland and Robert Gibbs in the Art Room, or with Mr Williams on the chalk downs. I felt I was being admitted to another club with a membership I had yet to discover. Maybe the club met behind the old polished doors at the Natural History Museum.

I was repeatedly drawn back to St David’s. I came with my school friend Bob Britton during my later teens to find more and better trilobites at Nine Wells, not far from Porth-y-rhaw. Together we explored several other sites in the bays and cliffs, locating the sparse and special layers where fossils could be found. Our collections grew. Even now I feel a twinge of envy for a lovely complete trilobite that Bob hammered out from the Cambrian. When I returned again on a field trip with my Cambridge University class I was an old hand. An old-fashioned and courteous ‘gentleman don’ – Dr Richard Hey – led the trip; he brought students to south-west Wales every year to give them experience with real rocks. The party trotted around many of my familiar haunts. At Porth-y-rhaw I was incensed to discover that some vandal had mutilated the Paradoxides trilobite in the cliff, which was pocked with hammer marks in a bungled attempt to remove it from its rocky perch. It was not now much good for teaching, or anything else. (Nowadays, it is frowned upon to collect anything at all, as the site has been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest.) When the party trooped around a rocky promontory at Whitesands Bay close to St David’s Head, Richard Hey announced that fossils were allegedly to be found there, but none had been discovered in the fifteen years he had been visiting. Insouciantly, I detached myself from the group and went to a particular seam in the cliff face that I had discovered with Bob Britton. I whacked it hard, and extracted a large, net-like graptolite. There was general astonishment. ‘Well, I never!’ said Richard Hey. In a narrow band of shales at another place, this time near Abereiddy, our leader announced that nobody had found a fossil there since 1896, waving the yellowing pages of a report in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London as proof. ‘Is this what we expected?’ I said (I admit a tad faux naïf), handing over a nice example of a ‘tuning fork’ graptolite plucked from a secret spot. ‘Goodness me!’ said Richard Hey. So it continued in other sites, until Dr Hey had run out of modest expressions of astonishment. Finally came one site I had not visited before, and our leader remarked that the party might just as well stay at the cliff top, while I went down and found the fossils. What was remarkable was that my luck held: I found some odd brachiopods that had been recorded long ago from the rocks near the shoreline. I felt that discovering fossils was my métier – ‘Fortey’s forte’ as Richard Hey put it, smiling weakly at his own joke. I suspect that my fellow students had other opinions.

*    *    *

If my sister ever felt that my serial interests tended to take over both our lives, redress was at hand. Kath had the young girl’s love affair with horses. As time went by the animals got steadily bigger. She had ponies to ride from a very young age, and seemed quite reconciled to their quirks. If one of them was liable to buck her off, she just climbed back on again. She was quite tiny, so that a good toss could propel her for some distance, and I remember her emerging from several hedges cheerfully pulling out prickles. After one toss near Woodspeen Farm she broke her arm and the image is ineradicable of this little girl lying on the ground with her arm bent back the wrong way at the elbow. One little pony was called Mandy. She was bought through the magazine Horse and Hound which featured large numbers of small advertisements that lied about the tractable properties of the steeds for sale. Mandy was a sweet-looking roan dedicated to being very disobedient and getting out of places like paddocks. Kath joined the pony club and started to do relay races and pony-back egg-and-spoon races. While I bargained for a piece of chemistry glassware for a birthday present, Kath would plead for items of leather tack like martingales, or for a new snaffle. Mother joined in the horseplay, too, and they were off cantering over the Quantock Hills on holiday while I sat in the car reading the entire collected stories of Sherlock Holmes.

Matters got worse when the jumping started. By now Kath had graduated to a small horse, a dapple grey named Starlight who was something of a ‘goer’ (14.2 hands is the boundary between pony and horse, one of those facts, like Mr Thornhill’s litmus jingle, that is welded into my subconscious). I got used to the sight of my diminutive sister sailing over absurdly high brushwood jumps in the local horse trials, as she tried to knock a second or two off the round. My job was to help with the horsebox and to avoid getting kicked as I followed my sporty sister from show to show. Now, it was my turn to be the assistant. Kath started to acquire rosettes the way I acquired fossils, and I am sure my parents were much more impressed by the former.

Kath’s last horse was Curlew, who was a great jumper, and marked her pinnacle as a rider. I did learn to ride myself, eventually, on an old grey called Robert, who may have had a previous life as a carthorse. His back was broad and his fetlocks hairy; his temperament was equable bordering on asleep. I did learn to stay on, turn left and right, and sit at the canter. I enjoyed hacking through the Berkshire Downs following behind Curlew and getting to places I had never reached on foot. I made only one serious mistake. The long track known as the Ridgeway was one of the places we often rode along together, and once I suggested that we swap horses. As soon as I was on Curlew he took off at a tremendous gallop heading for Silbury Hill about twenty miles away. I learned the origin of that expression about getting the bit between the teeth, and there was nothing I could do about it. Kath had no way of propelling Robert fast enough to keep anywhere near. As my sister fell further and further behind she yelled out: ‘Bring him round!’ So I did. I yanked as hard as I could on one rein, and the well-schooled horse did a surprisingly sharp turn through half a circle. I continued onwards through the air following a well-understood principle of physics. It was fortunate that the Ridgeway is grassy rather than flinty. I was thoroughly winded, and lay on the ground making extraordinary hooting noises while Curlew caught up with a bit of grazing. I never suggested a horse swap again.

Splitting a rock to reveal the remains of an ancient animal is to unearth a secret, something hidden from view and brought into the light. I did not anticipate that Ainsdale Road could spring a similar surprise. I was looking for notepaper in the old desk that held all kinds of family stuff when I noticed a folded document jutting out slightly from a pigeonhole; it had a kind of official look. Curiosity got the better of me. It was a divorce certificate: my father had had a previous marriage. As always, nothing had been said. When I thought about it at all I had assumed that parents were an immutable entity, largely there to serve the needs and wishes of their children. My real business was making fireworks or gathering collections, and the permanence of those who made these activities possible was simply assumed. How could it be otherwise? I needed an explanation. When I confronted my mother with the piece of paper she was quite taken aback. I believe she would have preferred the secret to have remained undiscovered, like a fossil interred in an unreachable part of a cliff face. As far as she was concerned the important part of her history began with her meeting and marrying my father. In the end I learned rather more than I would have wanted. The confession, if that is what it was, introduced me to a strange menu of adult behaviour that I only partly understood.

Constance Sophy Judge was some years older than my father. They must have met when he was working briefly for the United Dairies, doing a job he hated. I was assured I had no half-siblings. They were married in 1931 and were together for five years. When father met my mother there was not much point in pretending that the first marriage would survive. The parting was quite amicable, or so my mother said. Her very conventional parents were shocked that she had taken up with a married man – it simply wasn’t the done thing. In those days divorce was quite difficult, and adultery was the only cast-iron escape route. There was a way of getting evidence that would be accepted in court, but leave the good names of both ‘respectable’ women in the situation untarnished. This required the services of a prostitute, a private detective, and a hotel room in Brighton. My father went with the prostitute to the hotel where they would be registered as Mr and Mrs Smith. The private detective stood outside the hotel all night and reported ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ leaving together in the morning, leading the divorce court to an inescapable conclusion. That is all there was to it. Why weren’t we told about the first marriage? It was much better forgotten.

However, once unearthed, this story could not be forgotten. Maybe it could be obliterated, like the hammer blows that nearly rubbed out the memory of Paradoxides in Porth-y-rhaw, but even then the damage would still be visible. And if this story were ‘better forgotten’ how many more such stories might that apply to? I remembered that book I had discovered high on the bookcase: The Psychology of Insanity by Bernard Hart, and the reference to a nervous breakdown. I could now guess when that crisis happened. It must have been after my father left Worcester Royal Grammar School and before he married the first Mrs Fortey. Was this breakdown the reason that he never finished his degree at Oxford? The story we were told was that in those days Oxford had a mandatory Latin qualification, and that my father had one year to complete it – and failed to do so. Another scenario presented itself: the brilliant sports star from a village in Worcestershire was overwhelmed by coming to Oxford, and suffered a temporary collapse. After his recovery, this crisis joined the list of other things about which nothing was said. There is now no ‘fossil’ to unearth to reveal the truth. What has changed is my view of the perfectionist fly fisherman devoted to his art. Maybe it was that art that kept the other unmentioned and unmentionable things in their place.

When I first visited Brighton I admired its elegant bow-fronted and stuccoed Georgian villas. By the 1960s, many of them were hotels and probably had been hotels for decades. I wondered how many Mr and Mrs Smiths had passed through their polished doors, and imagined the knowing little smile that played on the lips of the concierge as he signalled to the porter to help with the night bag. Every now and then, I suppose, a couple arrived who really were Mr and Mrs Smith. Did they have to pretend to be a Mr and Mrs Frobisher to protect their reputation?