6

Entr’acte

For most of my school years I rose an hour early so that I could arrive at The Green, Ealing, in time for choir practice. My juvenile voice was as clear as a bell, with that poignant edge typical of boy sopranos. My mother had even tried to get me into the choir school at New College, Oxford, when she thought that I lacked a brain. Fortunately, at that time I also lacked the ability to read music reliably and their choirmaster sent me packing. Ealing Grammar School boys’ choir rehearsals became my favourite part of the day. It nurtured my musical aspirations from the soprano days, through the alto period when my voice started breaking, until stabilisation came at the baritone of my maturity. The boy soprano was allowed to sing the intro to the mighty chorus ‘Glory to God’ in Handel’s Messiah. I can still do it, in a strangled falsetto, if I am plied with strong spirits. ‘And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heav’nly host, praising God and saying …’ Not a big part, but a significant one. The choir had a regular engagement at the Christmas carol service, when we sang beautiful arrangements of traditional carols by David Willcocks, choirmaster of King’s College, Cambridge, and all the parents attended. We looked forward to the arrival of Simper’s mother, who was dressed up to the nines, and wore fantastic hats. The music was moving, no question, and I might have had difficulty squaring this with my increasing atheism. I believe I took God out of the equation and put human genius in its place. I did not examine too closely the conundrum that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote sublime music out of profound conviction. I suppose I was just grateful for his depth of belief: don’t look at the motor, look at the distance covered.

In charge of the choir was John Railton, who lived for music. He was the only rival to Mr Williams for modest, but absolute dedication to his subject. He never had to bully or cajole; he just carried his choir with him on the back of his enthusiasm. When he was in his thirties he had a cancer which entailed having one of his arms amputated, but he was soon back on the podium conducting with his other arm. He was a modernist, with particular enthusiasm for the music of Benjamin Britten. We sang all of Britten’s cantatas during my schooldays. John Railton introduced us to the visceral excitement of Stravinsky and Bartók, and young enthusiasts would listen respectfully to Vaughan Williams in the music room, where they had a machine that played the new, long-playing vinyl discs.

At home, when I was young we had an old machine that played 78 rpm shellac records that came out of brown paper sleeves decorated with an image of a quizzical terrier looking into a gramophone: ‘His Master’s Voice’. Since each side lasted just a few minutes my music was bite-sized. I knew Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto only in morsels, but I sang along to the opening melody while the striding piano chords accompanied me. Short pieces by Delius, or Chopin études played by Arthur Rubinstein fitted more neatly on to one side. Beniamino Gigli sung conveniently concentrated arias by Puccini, and Wagner was represented only by overtures. Some even older records were inherited from the music-hall days, and humorous monologues written by Stanley Holloway were my favourites. I listened over and over to a funny double act called ‘Gert & Daisy Make a Christmas Pudding’. Elsie and Doris Waters (G&D) were once great variety stars, now totally forgotten, but their names – real and stage – could have been a catalogue of the Wilshin Aunts. I remember a few 78s by title alone: a number called ‘Under the Bazunka Tree’[1] will remain forever obscure. Maybe the title was more memorable than the tune.

John Railton introduced some taste into my arbitrary musical selection, and made me a lifelong devotee of many twentieth-century composers whose works I first heard or performed in his company. We sang Belshazzar’s Feast, William Walton’s wonderful and frenetic oratorio, and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande. My schoolmate John Sivell played the brilliant piano part in the latter; he was destined to be a professional musician. We became involved with performances of contemporary music: Peter Maxwell Davies’s O Magnum Mysterium was exceptionally difficult, and I will not forget the almost shockingly intense glittering brilliance of the composer’s gaze when he came to give us his blessing. Lennox Berkeley’s Mass was an altogether gentler affair, and the composer was reticent and gracious. The acme of the choir’s achievement was performing in the offstage chorus in one of the very early performances of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. I was, of course, an absolute square – I was neither a hep cat, nor did I dig bebop. Rock ’n’ roll passed me by like one of those speeding cricket balls that never engaged with my hand or my bat.

My teens were the years of intellectual seriousness. I have never been so serious since. I climbed rather than retreated inwards, reading everything in an unstructured way, making collections of ideas as I might fossils or fungi. My equally cerebral friends and I had pretensions to be young aficionados at the cultural cutting edge. Our music even left Mr Railton behind as we ventured to hear serialist composers, or the continental enfants terribles. I made discoveries. The operas of Leoš Janáček had recently been performed under the championship of Charles Mackerras in the 1960s, and I was an early convert. The BBC had a series of Thursday Invitation Concerts, and they were free – although you had to apply for tickets. They were broadcast on the intellectual’s own radio channel, the Third Programme, and the presiding spirit was the very embodiment of the avant-garde, Hans Keller. He looked a little like Albert Einstein, only cleverer. His cranium bulged with brains. Private Eye regularly mocked his Germanic earnestness. The concerts were held at the Maida Vale studios in London, and there was Hans Keller himself shaking hands with the people that mattered. A few boys in their mid-teens must have seemed slightly anomalous but nobody threw us out. We heard John Ogden play Olivier Messiaen’s Oiseaux exotiques, and six instrumentalists and a contralto perform a version of Pierre Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître. There may have been some Hans Werner Henze. I believe I was also at a performance of John Cage’s infamous 4′33″, but since that comprises four minutes and thirty-three seconds of total silence, it is hard to say.

John Railton disappeared from my life after I left school, and the singing that had once been so important to me became occasional. I briefly joined an amateur choir in Berkshire, and performed the usual glees and madrigals with pleasure, but it was not the same as being part of the exciting London scene. The larynx began to rust. I have never forgotten Railton’s influence, and the musical tastes I developed at the time that I sang in the school choir have stayed with me. I never thought to hear about him again, but in 2006 I was surprised to receive a letter from Devon from a gentleman who wanted support for his proposal to get John Railton an MBE – the award for those who are not part of the great and good, but who deserve recognition for what they give to others. It is an award by acclamation, and so is probably the one that is actually worth something. John Railton had retired to Devon and made another, wonderful choir. It gave me great pleasure to compose that letter. I asked my correspondent whether he would give me a contact for my former choirmaster – I felt that I needed to thank him for his benign influence on my life. Railton replied to say that he could not remember me very well, but he had a recollection of a jolly, red-haired boy (I was both gloomy and dark). This proves that the importance of the student to the teacher is not equivalent to that of the teacher to the student, but I was not very disappointed. After all, his music came first. I learned in 2012 that the MBE had been awarded to John Railton for his inspiring example.

As the teenage intellectual developed, communication with parents almost ceased. My room became a haven, and the Third Programme on the ‘wireless’ a constant companion. The radio may have been my best friend during puberty. I certainly did not cause any trouble for Mother or Father; I was more like a trainee monk. The BBC was apparently laying things on especially for me, and it was an extraordinary time for culture. I heard what was possibly the first broadcast of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I knew it was important, but I could not work out why. I wallowed in an early repeat of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Some lines lodged in my memory: ‘before you let the sun in, mind he wipes his shoes’ and the night ‘starless and Bible black’ are still lurking deeply somewhere inside my skull. I still think of one of my favourite composers as ‘Johann Sebastian mighty Bach’. I owned a published collection of Thomas’s radio pieces (Quite Early One Morning) that conjured the poet’s Swansea boyhood so well, and I practised trying to write in that wordy, musical way that he had made his own. I listened to accounts of his alcoholic end in New York, and part of me was horrified, and the other part thought that this was the way a poet ought to die. I learned his poem ‘Fern Hill’ by heart. There was a revival of interest in the anarchic plays of Alfred Jarry, and my ear was glued to the radio to learn of the dreadful deeds and goings-on of Ubu Roi. I doubt any youth could have been more eclectic.

The ‘theatre of the absurd’ was all the rage. I caught Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros on the Third Programme, a drama that established the genre. A British playwright in the same vein, N. F. Simpson, was soon enjoying success in London with A Resounding Tinkle. My first excursion to the live theatre was to see its successor, One Way Pendulum. It was a cacophony of eccentric invention set in a suburban house not so very different from Ainsdale Road, and I could identify with the son, Kirby, who was attempting to teach a battery of stolen ‘speak your weight machines’[2] to sing the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah. N. F. Simpson must surely be the godfather of Monty Python. I was inspired to write a play of my own entitled The Cow in the Attic, in which a suburban family sit down to supper while a cow’s tail, udders, and so on dangle above their heads from a hole in the ceiling. The dialogue had a wee bit of Waiting for Godot about it, I dare say. The English master Mr Sheehan read it and was clearly unaware of its masterly place among its contemporary theatrical oeuvres. Sadly, no copy of the work survives.

I read in a voracious but random way. If I discovered writers I liked I barged through almost everything they wrote. Rider Haggard, of course, and how I thrilled to the horrific climax as She, the anti-heroine, crumbled into decrepitude within a few ghastly minutes. I had an old set of Charles Dickens in blue covers with the famous illustrations by Phiz. They were gobbled up indiscriminately, despite the tiny print size. Now they have merged into a kind of melange where individual characters are sharply focused but the novels from which they came have become blurry. Wackford Squeers belongs clearly in Nicholas Nickleby, and may have unconsciously coloured my descriptions of the head teachers in my own life, but the narrative detail of the novel has escaped me. Feckless Mr Micawber and the unspeakable Uriah Heep belong in David Copperfield, and both are still vivid in my head, but the chronology in which they play a part is confused; Mr Micawber is defined further by a wonderful cinema portrayal by W. C. Fields. It is not unlike my attempts to reconstruct this narrative of my own life, where events seem to have more substance than time. I discovered the novels of William Faulkner and worked my way through the whole of Yoknapatawpha County novel by hefty novel. Now, what remains? A febrile picture of the Deep South, like a hangover that refuses to go away, and the execrable Popeye from Sanctuary still sharp in my memory, as ineradicable as an unresolved trauma. Agatha Christie was reserved for days when I was unwell: her plots always lasted just as long as my illness.

Once I had been directed towards science, I thought I could make up for the missing ‘arts side’ by myself. I could become a cultured, well-rounded person through my own efforts, armed with my particular species of retentive seriousness. Thanks to the cunning ruse to escape games into the Art Room, the visual arts remained on my school agenda. However, my wayward and unmethodical approach to reading meant that many writers remained unread. I was obliged to follow neither the canon nor the curriculum, so I did not feel compelled to engage with The Mill on the Floss, Tristram Shandy, or Trollope. I preferred George Orwell, Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh. I read Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham and soon saw the possibilities of science fiction. There was a collection of horror stories compiled by Dorothy L. Sayers in the family bookcase that chilled me more than it should have done. Perhaps that is why I followed Sigmund Freud into dreams and Carl Gustav Jung into archetypes. The public library slaked my appetite for reading, which was as greedy as quicklime for water. I still have great chasms in my appreciation of the standard classics to this day, but, in general, my campaign to be a schoolboy polymath was not unsuccessful: it could be easier to become a literate scientist than to be wedded to the humanities and still retain a broad grasp of the sciences. The foibles of educational systems may have generated the ‘two cultures’ in the first place, but it is not a gap in human nature. We are all creatures of invention and curiosity, not of circumscribed subjects.

Occasionally, I would slip downstairs at Ainsdale Road and sneak into the living room to watch the television, peeping around the door. Nigel Kneale wrote two gripping weekly science-fiction series centred on the scientist Professor Quatermass. They held me as much as the stories in the Dorothy Sayers collection, and I was paralysed with fear as I watched, but oddly unable to avert my eyes. In Quatermass and the Pit a bunch of terrifying Martian horrors were trapped in a spacecraft, and when they were suddenly revealed at the end of an episode in all their horrid arthropodan spindliness it touched some deep memory. It might have been of the scuttling creatures I had seen at the gamekeeper’s larder when I was very young.

Many intellectually precocious teenage children write poetry, at least those who are inclined to delve into their psyche. I still have a green-covered school notebook holding some of my early and undisciplined verses. The cover says ‘Middlesex County Council’ which no longer exists, just as Ealing Grammar School for Boys no longer exists. In the absence of any diaries these pages afford the only direct evidence of my thoughts as I moved towards adulthood. Whatever their shortcomings, I have felt a need to take care of them like nothing else from my past. I showed the same tendencies in my taste for poetry as I did for everything else – I established some favourites and ignored much else of worth. William Blake, W. B. Yeats, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift appealed to me particularly[3] – and for almost incompatible reasons. The Augustan poets attracted me by their wit, clarity and formal cleverness; Blake and Yeats were linked by a kind of visionary irrationality. They made magical lines that simply could not be parsed. I followed Yeats into exploring such hermetic arcana as Rosicrucianism and tried to unscramble some of the mysteries of Blake’s rambling prophetic books, supplemented by visits to see his extraordinary watercolours in a special room at the Tate Gallery. If my mind was taken by the rational, critical and formal then another part of me was drawn towards something elusive and irrational. I would surely have agreed with Pope when he wrote: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night / God said “let Newton be!” and all was light.’ Yet paradoxically I could also embrace Blake’s now overused line: ‘the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’. I had an intuition for some grand passion beyond rationality that could burrow down to the truth of existence.

On one occasion my youthful verses went before a proper poet. Maurice Carpenter lived in Pewsey, not far from our country home. My mother had met his wife through a common interest in horse trials, and my sister befriended his son Robin. Maurice had been taken under the wing of those arbiters of taste, the Sitwells, as one of the ‘Forties poets’ and he had published several slim volumes. When he proved not to be as stellar as his aristocratic patrons might have hoped he was dropped with matching rapidity. He became a schoolmaster to make ends meet and to support his family. Philip Larkin would have approved: he believed that poets should disguise themselves as teachers or vicars or bank managers, just as he worked as a librarian in Hull University. Maurice’s wife would have preferred her husband to abandon writing altogether, but he nursed ambitions to be readmitted to the ranks of the leading poets, at a time when Sylvia Plath had already risen to prominence, and Ted Hughes’s best work was to come. I somehow finished up reading him a selection of my attempts at poetry, and he was sufficiently impressed to take them away for further consideration. When he contacted me again, he said that my reading was actually much more persuasive than the poems themselves. It was not quite a put-down, but it was a clear indication that I was no Rimbaud. Nonetheless, I persisted with the business of precise expression that marks out poetry. I believed it was first cousin to the exact observation entailed in the recognition of a fungus or a fossil species. In my old folder, some of the poems are even written on the back of a page with a science essay on the other side. Later, through my university years, I struggled to write something with my own voice that was more than introspection. I did feel as strong a bond – probably stronger – with some young Cambridge poets as I did with the scientists. My friend Robert Wells became a true poet and a fine translator of Latin classics. For a while, I dared to think that my own verses were good enough to be called poems, and Robert treated them kindly. If I had followed that road it might have led somewhere interesting, but telling yourself you are a poet is not the same thing as being one.

I have discovered one poem in my old collection that records the moment when I moved from leading a kind of double life to pursuing the scientific route. I imagine it was addressed to Robert Wells, and the fact that it was written on a portable typewriter dates it to my Cambridge days. I taught myself to touch-type on a machine called the Brother Deluxe. This was probably the most useful skill I ever acquired: I have written all my books and papers without looking at the keys. The typescript of the verse is fading after half a century. The excerpts from the poem below could almost be a diary entry of a pivotal moment.

Why should I cease to try

This unheard, unproductive art of poetry?

…

Reason rhythms, splendour of rocks,

Visions of lava and atoms, thrills to dumbness

The flickering allsorts of emotions …

I will not face the livid nakedness

Of truths that scream

Too deep for physicists.

…

Creation must not be a duty but

Inevitable, the lava of the mind outpoured

In images upon the chilling air,

The helpless fossils of past fears

Silicified for ever.

I am still pleased with the last five lines. The rest is better read as therapy – running away from the ‘flickering allsorts of emotions’ that might otherwise have led God-knows-where. The truth ‘too deep for physicists’ acknowledges the irrationality, but simultaneous profundity of Yeats and Blake, but also the general angst of youth. I was surprised to read recently that the arch rationalist Richard Dawkins is also a great admirer of the poetry of Yeats, even though what inspired the poet was a terrible mishmash of the theosophist Madame Blavatsky and Irish mysticism. I was not alone in trying to square an impossible circle.

If I could meet my teenage intellectual apogee now I don’t know whether I would admire him or feel sorry for him. I would certainly be impressed by his assurance and boundless curiosity. I suspect he would be rather priggish. His knowledge would be imposing but his recitation of it might soon become tedious. Modern, and superficial assessors might mention him as being ‘on the spectrum’ but my father would probably have said he ‘didn’t know his arse from his elbow’; that would have been more accurate. I would regret that his fun was so wholly cerebral. There seemed to be no space for letting go, for girls, for pop music, for hanging around by the swings in parks and trying out cigarettes. Clothes were a distraction, unworthy of the true scholar. Not all of this single-minded focus can be attributed to A. Sainsbury-Hicks and his insistence on trying for the Oxbridge entrance. When hormones kick in, so does sublimation – no doubt the young bookworm had read all about it in Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis. Shyness popped up like zits. It proved as obstinate to clear up. What price a spotty, gawky, ‘square’ young intellectual, given to being somewhat sententious, and revelling in things obscure? The same young man also acquired an armoury of words that served his older version well. The attempt to retain broad intellectual sympathies and not become the specialist’s specialist was admirable then, and, even if impossible, would be admirable now. Later in Cambridge I encountered the polymath’s polymath, George Steiner, and realised that I was as short of true omniscience in the same proportion as I fell short as a poet.

*    *    *

Weekends were almost always down to the countryside, where I could still be a natural historian when I was not being horsebox boy. Primrose Cottage in Boxford had been exchanged for Forge Cottage, Ham; it was a little further to the west, near Hungerford. The cottage was deeply thatched, very old and rather dark inside. Black oak beams crossed the ceilings and upstairs several of the floors sloped in an exciting fashion. One end of the cottage was weatherboarded – it must have been the site of the original forge. A swarm of bees once settled in it, and for a while honey dribbled down the wall into the drawing room. Ham is a tiny village crouching at the foot of the Berkshire Downs, a tucked-away little place, at the edge of three counties, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire. The nearest high point of the chalk highlands, where Combe Gibbet stands, is just under 1,000 feet above sea level, which is almost mountainous for southern England. Those condemned to hang from the gibbet in past centuries would have been visible for miles. An ancient track running along the edge of the downs was where my sister’s horse Curlew attempted a bid for freedom with me on his back. The trout of the River Lambourn were now further away, but those of the River Kennet were correspondingly close. Another well-known angler, Bernard Venables, lived in the same village. He had written a popular comic strip in the Daily Mirror called ‘Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing’, and later founded the Angling Times. Our telephone number was Inkpen 270, which might have been taken as a portent by any aspiring writer. If you wanted to make a telephone call to Forge Cottage you had to go through an operator, who addressed you as ‘caller’ in lofty tones. There was a village baker called Mr Lansley, a village squire called Mr Brown, and an old pub that was frequented by a scriptwriter for the radio soap opera The Archers who picked up his agricultural tidbits by staying in the pub all day. ‘I hear mangelwurzels have been havin’ a hard ole toim this year …’ – that kind of thing. Mr Brown was very old, and when congratulated on both his longevity and sprightliness would reply ‘You’re young, or you’re dead.’

A life divided between Ainsdale Road and Forge Cottage was really quite privileged. My mother used to refer to us being ‘comfortably off’ by the 1960s. With the social antennae of her generation she would say that we were doubtless middle class, but when I pressed her further she was quite insistent that we were not lower middle class, and neither were we upper middle class, which only left middle middle class. I really wanted to push her to say whether we were lower middle middle or upper middle middle but by then she detected an element of sarcasm in my questions. The social signifiers that established these niceties were really quite arcane, and in our present materialistic age the system that recognises your place in the scala naturae by whether you drive a BMW and what size it is, has the great advantage of simplicity. Naturally, the young intellectual despised such signifiers. The conundrum of whether the WC should be referred to as the toilet (lower middle), loo (middle middle) or lavatory (upper middle) was solved by unfailingly referring to it as ‘the jakes’ (a Shakespearean term, dontcha know). I was guaranteed to annoy my mother by regularly calling the drawing room (upper middle) the lounge. I simply cannot remember which way napkins, doilies and serviettes went, but I am sure there was a status indicator in there somewhere. My sister and her horses guaranteed that she mostly moved among the upper-middle-class ‘county’ and farmers who didn’t give a damn – in fact, the social hierarchy at the hunt was more or less related to height above the ground. The upper-class Master (red in all parts – notably face and jacket) was often mounted on the most impressive steed, farmers a little lower and more hobbledehoy, with a declining series of ponies below that, and the ‘village’ on foot following along behind. My politics nudged progressively leftwards.

A sketch of Forge Cottage, Ham, Wiltshire, made by a school friend in the early sixties.

The lanes around Ham were deeply sunken into the greensand that lay beneath the chalk. (During the great freeze of 1963 the roads filled with snow and the village was cut off from the outside world for more than a week. Mr Lansley was able to shift all his old stock from the village store, including tough old biscuits and Force breakfast cereal.) In the spring, the scent of ramsons hung heavy in the air, wild garlic carried village-wide in the slightest breeze. At that time the downs were still grazed by sheep, and a mass of daisies, vetch and eggs-and-bacon splashed the smooth hills with yellow patches in the early summer. Fossil sponges could be collected from the rocks in our own garden. A short bicycle ride would take me to pits dug out to accommodate silage, and from their chalk walls ammonites and sea urchins were recovered quite easily. My collections were growing, and each new addition had a number with its locality recorded: I was beginning to learn to be scientifically organised. Then I wrote bucolic poems about beech hangers and the antiquity of flint. Or I cycled to Shalbourne, the neighbouring village, to bring back fresh watercress from the spring waters that were clear as rock crystal – a mineral that now I knew was pure silicon dioxide, with silicon and oxygen conjoined in an impregnable cage. At that time my different worlds were cross-linking like chemical bonds, science and natural history contributing to some kind of poetry. It could not last.

Nor did it. A financial disaster overtook the family. Within the space of a few months 40 Ainsdale Road, our suburban anchor for years and home of the chemi-shed, was sold off to the first buyer.

Money had to be raised – and fast. The reason was not made known to the offspring: as so often, nothing was said. Later, we learned that my father had never filed a tax return. He simply ignored what he did not wish to confront. If official-looking papers arrived they went straight into the bin. All those years of increasing affluence were actually built upon not paying anything to the Inland Revenue. We were indeed ‘comfortably off’ – comfortably off the official radar. The proceeds from fishing rods and gentles and tropical fish just went into the till and into the pocket. Eventually, the taxman caught up with Tooke’s and Harding’s. A colossal bill must have been compiled by government investigators, and sent to my father with the obligatory scary threats of imprisonment and disgrace if the sum was not paid up in full within thirty days. That, too, was ignored; it was obviously a jolly good time to go trout fishing. The Inland Revenue is made of stern stuff, and continued to demand arrears for astonishing amounts of money. My mother told us that in the end an officer of the Inland Revenue pursued my father all the way to the riverbank. The government employee stood in his suit among the irises and sedges waving a demand for huge payments, hollering: ‘What are you going to do about this, Mr Fortey?’ while Father continued to cast his pale watery nymph and pretend that the horrible man wasn’t there. The stand-off went on for some time: fly flicking delicately through the air on to the stream, ranting official waving his papers next to my studiedly oblivious parent, River Itchen gurgling gently onwards as it had for a thousand years. I am unsure whether the expression ‘in denial’ was current in the early 1960s, but this remains the definitive example.

My mother had to take control. We discovered then that she was always the tougher and more practical partner in the marriage. If the family home in Ealing had to be sold, so be it. Margaret Zander Winifred Wilshin had inherited a portfolio of shares from her father that had already been used several times as security for the businesses during our years of growing affluence. Her father had been shrewd in his investments, and doubtless had good City advice; his acumen saved our bacon. Needs must, thought Mother. Sale of the house and many of the shares was enough to get the man from the Inland Revenue to go away. If a crisis was averted it was also the end of a kind of innocence: the notion of our father as the strong and silent type was hardly consistent with wilful financial irresponsibility. Maybe his early ‘nervous breakdown’ was not so inexplicable after all, and the silence about it more understandable. If there were parental rows we never heard them, but ledgers and bank balances became part of mother’s fiefdom thereafter. If there were tears shed for severing her connection to Ealing after two generations we never got to see them. The ‘queen of the suburbs’ was history. The countryside would be our home from now on. Who wants suburbia when there is open downland, and a thickly thatched cottage set in a pretty village? My sister could relocate to a good grammar school in Newbury, Berkshire. And it would be much handier for the horses.

I was another problem to be sorted out. I had advanced too far at Ealing Grammar School for Boys to be moved willy-nilly to a new school. Tooke’s came to the rescue. Above the premises at 614 Fulham Road was a gloomy, but spacious apartment. I could live there, sometimes with my father when he was in London, and see out my schooldays above a fishing-tackle shop a few miles east of The Green, Ealing. At the weekends I would join the family in the country, commuting westwards from Paddington station to Hungerford, Berkshire; here I would be picked up to give a hand with the horsebox and muck out the stables. It was one way to ensure that I continued my serious trajectory through the education system, and I accepted it without demur.

The Fulham flat was dowdy and neglected, and the decorations dated from well before the Second World War, such that the linoleum and wallpaper had faded equally to an unenthusiastic brown. Hot water came from a fearsome geyser with a booming gas ring beneath it. When it filled the bath, gasps and wheezes and sudden jolting noises suggested that it was heated by an angry dragon hidden deep within the large circular tank hanging off the wall. My bedroom had a high ceiling and just a wardrobe and nothing cheery about it at all. The living room lay at the front of the house, and commanded a view of Fulham Road, lined on both sides with small shops. Opposite 614 on the other side was a thoroughly weird window with a large neon flying saucer illuminated in spooky green and red occupying much of it. It never seemed to be switched off. A sign announced that this was the headquarters of the Aetherius Society. The mission of this organisation was to foster relations with the alien beings now visiting our planet in their vaguely saucer-like machines (today’s UFOs). They seemed to be appearing all over the planet. Plan 9 from Outer Space is a 1959 movie in which hordes of saucers invade the earth with evil intent, even if they appeared on screen to be jiggling slightly, as if attached to some all too terrestrial cotton threads. The Aetherius Society logo was very like one of writer-producer-director Ed Wood’s cosmic interlopers. Occasional visitors in dark coats would scuttle through the side door of the Society’s premises, as if bearing secret tidings. If I was attempting to do my homework in the odd green glow that infused the living room at night, my eyes would tend to stray to the building opposite to detect any hint of what went on behind the neon saucer. I never found out anything of interest.

At this time my favourite listening was the Bela Bartók string quartets, and the dissonant fourth in particular seemed to embody the right degree of malaise, as I sat alone wrestling with my physics and chemistry and pure mathematics, bathed in a sickly light from the Aetherius Society. In that eerie pall my face must have resembled the pallor of the dead poet in Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton. It was perhaps rather unwise to leave a sensitive youth in such gloomy environs, where Mr Railton’s ‘jolly, red-headed’ boy could not have been further from reality, and I did succumb to existential gloom.

Now I was realising that the ‘all-rounder’ had his limitations. As I advanced further into mathematics I recognised shortcomings in my capacity to think in the abstract. I was fine with geometry, anything I could visualise, but the more sophisticated algebra became, the more I knew that I was applying formulae by rote, just obeying the rules, and that I had not got under the skin of how mathematics really worked. I learned to perform, not to understand. I began to see that physics was, at root, more mathematics, and had been since the time of Isaac Newton. I had never formally studied biology, my natural métier, because I had assumed that I could find out all about that stuff by myself. I had chemistry and geology (and art) to play to my natural inclinations. Much of my life at 614 Fulham Road, however, was a hard slog through calculus and conductivity.

There were diversions. A. Sainsbury-Hicks considered drama an enhancement to the Oxbridge applicant. He also realised that the convention of having small boys playing female leads had its limitations, so he licensed a production of Sheridan’s School for Scandal in conjunction with the most superior girls’ school in Ealing: Notting Hill School for Girls. The actors might genuinely include both sexes. Lady Sneerwell, for example, was actually female. I was Snake, a small, yet I like to consider vital part with some very good comic lines and not too much to learn. In the play I had to double-cross almost everybody, which allowed for a fair degree of overacting in the pursuit of laughs. On the night of the performance Mrs Simper turned up in a hat resembling a large stack of American pancakes. Desperate parents behind her craned their necks to catch a few moments of the performance by their loved one. My friend Bob Bunker played the duplicitous Sir Joseph Surface with panache, and all the laughs came on time. I believe that Lady Sneerwell fancied me a little. I could have invited her back to 614 Fulham Road, with no parental supervision. Somehow the depressing decor of my bedroom would not have encouraged any kind of bliss, or even moderately satisfactory fumbling. Shyness and embarrassment ruled once more.

In the sixth form I was made a prefect. A special room was set aside for this elite recruited from within the elite. This was where I learned the only game at which I excelled: tiddlywinks. There was an official version of this familiar game, with complicated rules. Standard winks came in three sizes – tiny ones about the size of a 5p piece, and others twice the diameter. They were propelled (‘squidged’) by a still larger wink (‘squidger’ of course). A large, felt mat (also standard) was unrolled to start the game, and a small pot with sloping sides was placed at the centre. Each player had two of the big winks and four or five of the small ones. It was not a question of just getting the winks into the pot. Most of the tactics were about landing your wink on top of an opponent’s (‘squopping’) which meant the underdog could not be played until released. Complicated multi-wink piles could result, but if your wink was on top you ruled the roost and paralysed everything below. If you managed to squop all your opponent’s winks you had as many goes at the pot as you had free winks – and an extra go if you succeeded in getting one in. I developed a way of potting winks even if they were under the rim of the pot. Some games could become very elaborate before all your winks made it into the pot.[4] Ah! The fun we had! The bad thing about being a prefect was not only the school cap, but having to wear one with a tassel on it. When I was travelling on the Tube or the bus pretty girls would remark loudly to their friends: ‘Look at ’im … ’e’s got a tassel on ’is ’ead!’ It was mortifying, but as a prefect, I could not possibly take off the cap.

This period was dominated by changes in perception: my father was not fully in control of our family circumstances; fishing overruled wisdom; I was not quite the ‘all-rounder’ I had been branded, but natural history remained my consolation and inspiration, a route to dispelling the disquietude I had felt alone in the Fulham Road; our mother had more strength than I realised, but where there is strength there is often also the possibility for confrontation. I soon discovered another, and unsuspected, talent of my father’s. Bernard Venables had set up a new, deliberately literary fishing magazine called Creel (1963–6). It was an upmarket journal to balance the successful mass-market Angling Times, with its cover that invariably featured a bloke displaying an implausibly large carp between outstretched arms. Creel was more in the tradition of Isaak Walton and G. E. M. Skues in extolling the finer points of the art of the angler. Venables commissioned Frank Fortey to write articles for early numbers of the magazine. I still have copies dating from the middle of 1963. The pieces show a precise command of language with an occasional poetic turn of phrase, and Father’s delight in the skills of successful fishing seems to mirror the intense pleasure I had in discovering a fine trilobite. It seems that both writing about, and analysis of, the natural world may have been something we shared. Even if we did not talk about it, there was a common connection at another level, running deep as a hidden pool in a trout stream.

Difficult news awaited me at Ealing Grammar School for Boys. A. Sainsbury-Hicks decided that I should be head boy, presumably because he believed that I was able simultaneously to manage examinations and extra responsibility. I lacked the courage to refuse. It was a jubilee year for the school and the headmaster had ambitious plans to raise money for a new hall, so I was called upon to make short speeches to the mayor and other bigwigs, and to administer the prefects. I certainly would not administer punishments. I enjoyed reading out the most declamatory parts of the Bible from the podium at assembly (‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity’). However, now I had to see A. Sainsbury-Hicks on a daily basis, so that he could display his glorious ambitions for his school to a deferential pair of ears. I was not very good at the head-boy job, and my deputy, John Banger, would have done it much better. Worse, it was obvious to me that A. Sainsbury-Hicks recognised this fact quite quickly. He sometimes eyed me balefully, as if he could not quite believe that he had chosen me for the top spot. Mr Williams had been right – when I told him about becoming head boy he had said: ‘Oh, what a pity …’ The only good thing to come out of it was that I learned to avoid administering anything for the rest of my life if I could possibly avoid it. A. Sainsbury-Hicks eventually got his new school hall, to add to his stellar university statistics.

My forceful headmaster’s achievements crumbled away quickly. Within a few years grammar schools were abolished in the London area, and all A. Sainsbury-Hicks’s ambitions to create the best state school in the capital came to nothing. Nowadays, the buildings he strived for are part of a tertiary college, specialising in media, and trading on their proximity to the famous Ealing Studios. Doctor Who won in the end.

*    *    *

Tragic events often start innocuously enough. Just before Christmas in 1963 my father gave me a lift back from London to Ham at the weekend on a bitterly cold night. He always drove too fast, with a cigarette clenched between his teeth. At that time the A4 road ran through the periphery of Newbury through a part of the old town with some high red-brick walls. The car hit a patch of black ice, skidded, and plunged directly into a wall. My father probably died instantly. I was in the passenger seat, and survived with a broken arm and some bad bruising. I woke up in hospital. All clear memories of that night have been erased from my mind, and remain so.

My mother never fully recovered from the shock. Although she was not demonstrative, she was devoted to her wayward fly fisherman. They had built up everything they had together. They had survived the Second World War as a team. She had helped save the family’s security from the taxman. For years, she had taken two children on family caravan holidays – to Dorset, Somerset and West Sussex – coping alone so that her husband could have a fishing break of his own. There was no funeral. She must have preferred to witness his cremation all by herself. She told us that she wanted to spare us a painful experience, but maybe she did not want us to see how bereft she was. For the rest of her life she trotted out the mantra ‘you’ve got to be tough’. Although it was often directed at some perceived feebleness on my part, I suspect she was speaking to herself much of the time. She quickly disposed of nearly all of Frank’s effects that had anything to do with fishing. I believe the rods and the fishing library went to my father’s best friend, John Goddard, who became a renowned fishing writer, and acknowledged my father in several of his books. It was as if giving away the angling gear became a symbol of moving on; or perhaps she did not want too many reminders of all that she had lost. She failed to settle in one place for the rest of her life – after leaving Forge Cottage she moved house six times. Taking on a new property was another way of forgetting her bereavement, of leaving an old life behind before its memories could surprise her in the dark. As for me, I would never discover whether I had more in common with my father than I had thought. He went away just as he was coming into focus. He might even have forgiven me for not being a fisherman.

This was my lowest point. I had my A level examinations approaching, by which so much store had been set. I had to cope with those school leadership duties for which I had little talent. I had nowhere to live in London; it was now impossible to imagine living alone in the dingy apartment at 614 Fulham Road. The worst bugaboos haunted me. Arts versus science seemed of little moment compared with life versus death. I kept going by doggedness alone. A kindly family – the Brownings – offered to take me in until I finished my examinations. Their son Charles was one of my contemporaries; they lived in a modest house in Isleworth to the west of Ealing. They were generous and supportive, and I suspect I was very unrewarding, just carrying on carrying on. I do not remember much of my time with these good people; I suppose I was shutting out grief, and most of the world with it. I do recall one redemptive moment. Mrs Browning entered a local flower show with some roses that she had gathered that morning from their own, very ordinary rose bushes. She won first prize, beating rose specialists who had laboured for months over their blooms. Her delight was unbounded, and her pleasure was balm to the desensitisation that inward sadness breeds. I smiled for the first time in several months.

This chapter has not been about science or natural history. It is a kind of entr’acte. I cannot disentangle the story of the scientist I became from a reconstruction of the youth I once was – a complex person, not altogether sympathetic, too serious, voraciously questioning. If it had not been for several strong shoves from A. Sainsbury-Hicks I might not have tried for a leading university, nor would I have necessarily gone along the way marked ‘science’ when I met that mandatory fork in the road. It took me three decades to bring those roads together again, and to recombine myself; but the poet never returned. I survived the solitary sadness of Fulham, and the sudden death of my father, so there was resilience in there somewhere. The natural world took me out of myself. Science required concentration rather than brooding. The pleasure of discovery is not like anything else, and it cannot be faked. Through all the difficult times, I continued to add to my knowledge of nature. I quarried for fossils or filled baskets with fungi. I cannot say whether I was driven by compulsion or by evasion, but it was fundamental to my sense of who I was: a curious boy.

*    *    *

An odd quirk of my father was that he never washed his hair. Instead, he used some sort of hair oil to slick back his locks every day. This mysterious unguent may have been a descendant of the Macassar oil used by Victorian gentlemen to make their hair smooth and shiny; I never saw it anywhere else. My father’s daily toilet was rather particular. He shaved with a razor – the Rolls ‘autostrop’[5] – that could be resharpened after use in a special box, so that a single blade lasted for months. Whatever honed the blade made a curious clattering noise, which was part of the regular ritual. Only the best badger-hair shaving brushes would suffice, and I often wondered how the hair from the badgers could be collected to make them. I had never heard of badger farms. I liked to stroke the dry brush and imagine the living animal, the hair so soft and pliant. After a thick icing of shaving cream had been lathered with the brush the shave itself had the precision of a professional using a cut-throat razor. A quick rinse followed, and then came the application of the pomade (or whatever it was); it was worked into the hair, which was then brushed back vigorously. Completion of the ritual was marked by the ignition of a Player’s Navy Cut. On one occasion my mother insisted that his hair just had to be washed. She ignored any excuses. Maybe it had something to do with the nits my sister and I picked up from the scruffy kids at Bagnor. The purging of the hair took place over the washbasin. My father reluctantly held his head down as if he were bowing to an execution. Hot water was swished over the greasy locks and an attempt was made to raise suds from a shampoo. A kind of grey sludge oozed off the hair and coloured the water in the basin black. The slurry gurgled reluctantly away down the waste pipe. The process was repeated, and a similar result recurred: grime coaxed from concealment. The washing went on and on again and again until we children got the giggles, and since giggles are more catching than chicken pox Mother started giggling too. Now everyone was laughing fit to bust, including my father, and for no good reason, but the lack of a reason made the whole thing still funnier. Somehow, more sluicing continued, and eventually the water began to run clear. Now the drying process began, and when it was finished my father’s hair had turned all grey and fluffy. It was the funniest thing in the world; that laughter still lives on in some remote corner of the universe, an eternal echo from one of the best moments in a vanished life.