7
Flowers
The most dog-eared book I own is now so battered that its grey covers are coming away from the spine. The dust jacket fell to pieces a long time ago and I had to consult the Internet to remind myself what it originally looked like: a lively blue gentian and a nodding fritillary were featured items on the cover, both set against a pink background. A Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers by David McClintock and R. S. R. Fitter was another in the line of transformative books published by Collins for the amateur naturalist – an illustrated compendium of the complete British flora. The date in my copy is 1961 so I was fifteen when I started to use it. I began to tick off the plants I had seen from that time onwards, and I have used the same book ever since as a kind of diary recording additions to my own personal flora. My very first entries in pencil are still visible, if faded, and at the outset I did not write down details of sites, although I can remember many of them: the flower name alone triggers precise recall. Later entries are brief: ‘Walberswick 1989’ and the like, but they, too, often come with sharp visual recollection. I found herb Paris for the first time decades ago in a beech wood on the side of the Berkshire Downs, and the thrill is indelible of finding this uncommon plant among endless groves of dog’s mercury clothing the hillside. Since both plant species are green in all parts, including the flowers, the discovery marked a threshold, a point where I knew I was not easily misled by superficial similarities. The book is also a record of how the environment has changed during my lifetime. I have a tick recording the discovery of corn buttercup on Ham Hill long ago, and this species is now red-listed and ‘critically endangered’. I can remember it growing by a cattle trough on the edge of a cornfield – a rather small buttercup with a large prickly fruit. I may have been an innocent witness to the passing of a species.
Fifty years of continuous botanical use. A page from my Collins Pocket Guide to Wild Flowers, with two sightings of grass of Parnassus duly recorded.
More illustrated books appeared in the next few years to help the amateur botanist, and the flower paintings were often a considerable improvement over the original Collins book. The Reverend Keble Martin’s 1965 Concise British Flora in Colour has a special place on many a naturalist’s shelves, not least because each colour plate is a joy in its own right. This book was more cumbersome to take on a walk than a pocket guide, but when there was a question of identification a small sprig brought home could almost always be matched on one of Keble Martin’s colour plates. He sorted out the ‘worts’ – pearlwort, crosswort and squinancywort, glasswort and pennywort, strapwort and sandwort, stitchwort and fleawort. There were always troublesome plants, like brambles, that seemed to defy identification, and these have continued to be troublesome even in the molecular era, when gene sequences have replaced close observation of prickles or the counting of leaflets. Challenges were part of the fun. The numerous yellow daisies still cause me to confuse my hawkbits with my hawkweeds, and my hawkweeds with my hawksbeards. I continue to feel a sense of achievement if I can negotiate a good identification for a confusing member of the parsley family, as the flowers of this group of plants are all very similar. In most species tiny white flowers are born in flat bouquets called umbels. I used to describe them as uriahs, on account of ’umble Uriah Heep. I learned to call all parsleys ‘umbellifers’ as did many naturalists of my antiquity (the meaning is ‘umbel carriers’). Now we are told that in modern botany they are correctly termed ‘Apiaceae’, but for me they will remain eternally umbellifers – but this is just my ’umble opinion.
I still return to the Collins pocket guide as the place where I record every plant that I have seen in Britain. I don’t know why: it is a ritual I do not question, rather like the Anglican litany of my schooldays. The last addition I made, in 2018, was smooth rupturewort found on a heath in Suffolk, a modest, tiny, and uncommon herb growing over bare soil. It really deserved its mark in the precious old book. At some deep and irrational level I must believe that as long as I keep ticking off more plants in the Collins book I shall live for ever. I cannot possibly leave this world until they are all recorded; it is a metaphysical certainty. My tradition of recording goes back to a time before I used scientific names for animals, plants and fungi, so I remember the vast majority of my flowering plants by their old English name – or I should say names, as many of them have a plethora of local tags, as Geoffrey Grigson and Richard Mabey have exhaustively recorded. The charm of wildflower names is often only a short step away from poetry: pellitory-of-the-wall, wood goldilocks, frosted orache, ploughman’s spikenard, venus’s looking glass. They sound like ingredients for a magic potion. I attempted to teach my children some of these old names, but met a certain resistance. They felt country walks were in danger of becoming more like memory tests. ‘Moschatel,’ I would intone holding up a very small greenish herb. ‘Can’t you see it looks just like a town hall clock?’ Nobody seemed to disagree. My son found a way out by always giving the same answer. When I held up red campion and asked him to identify it he would reply ‘cragwort’; if I displayed henbit dead nettle that was ‘cragwort’, too; likewise lesser stitchwort. I almost wish there really was a plant called cragwort so that there would have been a theoretical possibility of one of the children arriving at the right answer. But of the many worts, none is craggy.
One of the first plants I ticked off in the book was cuckoo flower – also called lady’s smock (Cardamine pratense). I allow it to grow in the rougher parts of my garden where its very pale pink flowers emerge in small clusters from among coarse grasses, displaying a surprising delicacy among their rank neighbours. Its common name says that the flowers should arrive at the same time as the cuckoo. The annual migration of this avian parasite from southern climes was once routine: as a boy I used to hear cuckoos even in Ealing W5. In 2019 I have waited in vain for the bird to be reunited with its flower: but there is no cuckoo within hearing distance of my small country town, despite the well-wooded hills nearby. The cuckoo population has declined by 80% since I started recording plants in my Collins guide, and research published in 2018 relates this sad loss particularly to adverse conditions along one of two migration routes back to Africa. There is not enough food to sustain the birds on their long journey, and a familiar inventory of causes has been trotted out, yet again, with climate change and unhelpful farming practices top of the list. The arrival of the cuckoo now largely resides as a memory in the name of its charming flower. I dread having to explain what a cuckoo once was to my grandchildren, as if it were archaeopteryx. Perhaps I should try to forget the old common name. It is much less upsetting to explain a lady’s smock.
British wildflowers have a particular place in my story, as they were the basis of my first scientific paper. As the Cambridge entrance examinations began to loom on the horizon, it was suggested at school that I should try to win a Trevelyan Scholarship. A thesis had to be submitted in support of the application for the scholarship, which offered generous support during the undergraduate years. I decided to work on a project to survey the wildflowers of the chalk downland and adjacent areas along the Berkshire Downs, running from Inkpen Beacon to Shalbourne Hill. This was my local patch around Forge Cottage, and whenever I was at home I went out on the hunt. Intense concentration on the search was balm, or at least distraction, from the events that had shaken my life. I was out in all weathers, sometimes hunched against a strong wind, my eyes scanning the short turf for plants of particular interest. ‘Sharp sight’ is a curious phrase, but it does convey that the eye spears the sought object, pins it down. In our physics classes the rays that impinged on the retina were always shown as tracks entering the eye from a distance, coming the other way, but the sharp eye reversed the process – the eye did the catching. I thought of a photograph I had seen in Arthur Mee’s encyclopedia of an Amazonian native spearing a fish from a dugout. The eye lances the treasure. The hunter can only think of the hunt, no time for morbid thoughts, or self-doubt.
The downlands were in the process of transition when I carried out my survey. The village of Ham was set below the scarp of the chalk, which rose steeply upwards to the ancient track that followed its crest. This was a landscape cleared and exploited by farmers since the Iron Age. For several hundred years the steep slopes of the downs supported sheep and had not been artificially fertilised. The turf was short, and continually nibbled back. Chalk flowers abounded. At some time shortly before my survey began cattle were introduced to increase profitability, and fertilisers were applied to encourage grass growth. I was surveying on the cusp between age-old practice and modern farming. I was not to know that many of the flowers that I recorded with pleasure were destined to disappear from much of the landscape within a few years. At Ham Hill an old, steep-sided cut climbed up the scarp –maybe it was once a drover’s route. Now it made a superb habitat for orchids, those most pernickety of flowering plants. I found ten different species. Some were common enough at the time: early purple, spotted, fragrant, and pyramidal orchids, and the all-green twayblade, looking so unassuming among its more glamorous friends. All of them still survive widely in the right habitats. Several species that grew on the steep slopes would now be listed as star performers in any nature reserve: the burnt orchid, compact with a plum-coloured tip to a flowering spike that shaded to white beneath; frog orchid with strange brown-green flowers only remotely resembling the eponymous amphibian; bee orchid on patches of exposed soil, a miniature exotic with a short spike carrying just a few flowers having three pink sepals framing the ‘bee’ of the petals – the kind of flower that every tyro botanist wants to admire. The Collins book had a measure of rarity for each species, marked by asterisks – zero to three, with three being the rarest. Most of the orchids were ‘one star’ at the time the book was printed (only the spotted and pyramidal orchids were commoner). Ham Hill yielded further orchids that were flagged with two asterisks, which meant that they were uncommon even in the early 1960s. The man orchid displayed a tall spike of brownish flowers with what the guidebook described as a ‘marionette-like lip’ – the flowers really did look like a bunch of tiny figures dangling with arms and legs. This unusual orchid was quite common towards the top of the hill and stood proud of the turf – it couldn’t be missed. The slender musk orchid was comparatively inconspicuous, with a short spike of white sweet-smelling flowers, and it grew only on the steepest slopes, tucked away. Both were a joy to discover. Even the little lane that led to the hill had a treasure. Leaning out from the hedgebank were long spikes composed of small white flowers: a ‘three star’ discovery, the Bath asparagus (Ornithogalum pyrenaicum). I assume from the name that it was once used as a vegetable, although it is now so rare that if it turns up it makes the news rather than the pot. My survey continued, with a growing inventory of pretty chalk-loving vetches, milkworts and gentians, and many inconspicuous curiosities. Where the flinty ground had been ploughed cornfield weeds were still common – poppies and corn marigolds and venus’s looking glass, brilliant scarlet and gamboge yellow washed among the wheat; but that single corn buttercup may have been the last of its kind. I compiled the details of distribution and habitat of each plant to feed into the thesis: it was simple but engrossing science.
I failed to get the Trevelyan Scholarship. The thesis got me as far as the interview, but there I mumbled and bumbled before a distinguished if intimidating board, and I must have failed to impress, or even condemned myself from my own mouth. This scholarship scheme has now been discontinued, but I really want my thesis back. The written evidence of what I saw on the Berkshire and Wiltshire border is a valuable voucher, a benchmark against which to measure what has happened to the flora since the 1960s. It could well provide the only evidence for an important site – I remember that I even included some colour photographs. I have failed to trace any archive of the work submitted to the Trevelyan Scholarship board; I hate to think of those miles trudged and hours with the identification guides simply lost. The long view of nature depends on knowing the status of wildlife over past decades. Memories are fallible. Claims without documentary support about how things used to be might well be treated with suspicion by the next generation. I am reminded of one of my father’s eggs, collected from a red-backed shrike’s nest in Worcestershire long ago, and now lodged only in my own memory; a sceptic might say it is no more than a tall story.
It may have been a mistake to go back but a few years ago I returned to Ham Hill, to the slopes and banks where I had made my discoveries. From a distance, nothing seemed to have changed: the downs still lay like a supine and sensuous torso below the wide sky. The lane leading to the high ground had been tidied up. When I lived at Ham one of the last hedgers-and-ditchers was still employed by the local council to keep banks in good condition. His tools were a billhook, a sickle and a mattock. Mechanical flails have long since replaced him; I now saw no trace of the rare Bath asparagus. The old track was still there running up the hillside, but it was choked with ash trees, and brambles covered the steep banks that had once been dappled with wildflowers. All the orchids had gone, even the common ones.[1] At the crest of the hill cereal crops grew almost to the edge of the ancient track. Deeply green fields of barley supported neither poppies nor corn marigolds, nothing was flowering to disturb the programmed growth of cereals. Doubtless yields per acre had trebled over the decades thanks to sprays and fertilisers. I felt bereaved. I recalled that other death: two deaths conflated on a single hilltop commanding one of the best views in the south. My vision north across the green belly of Middle England was blurred with tears.
I have known scientists who regard enthusiasm for the identification of organisms as a kind of stamp collecting. This is not intended to be flattering. They ask: what is the need to know all those damned names? The real business is with sequencing the genome, identifying chemical pathways in organelles, crunching vast sets of data in supercomputers, and other research at the cutting edge. Nineteenth-century vicars did the naming stuff. I have wondered whether some of these critics might regard the extinction of species as rather a good thing, since it would reduce the complexity of natural systems available for analysis. The issue is more than the well-rehearsed division between ‘whole organism biologists’ and ‘scientific reductionists’. I have been on walks with dedicated professional botanists who cannot identify the commonest wildflowers; identification has never been part of their culture. It would be harder for them to experience the empathy with the natural world that I have described earlier in this book. Perhaps they have never felt the harmony that comes with a throng of different flowers buzzing with dozens of insects, a sense of countless natural livings earned in countless ways. Life is polyglottal, symphonic, inventive, and inevitably diverse. Complexity and richness are the hallmarks of life itself. If I could make one generalisation from studying the long history of life on earth it would be that evolution has generated richness. Repeatedly. After the sudden mass extinctions that punctuated life’s leisurely trajectory richness reasserted itself every time. After the terrestrial dinosaurs were removed from earth, mammals exploded into a thousand ecological niches. Rich forests reappeared again and again after being wiped from the face of the planet. Nature did indeed abhor a vacuum, but repopulated the ecology with a hundred thousand species each pursuing its own ends, jostling, collaborating or competing within a multifarious biosphere.
The language of nature is written in an abundance of species. When human beings exterminate many of these species they are diminishing that language. To fail to recognise species is like being unaware of words that are essential to cogent speech. The extinctions of recent decades mean that strands in the web of communication are being slashed, leaving an impoverished language. I don’t know how all those plants and animals on Ham Hill talked to one another but I could recognise that there were subtle interconnections. There is a feeling of rightness when an ecosystem is functioning as it should; the organisms are comfortable with themselves, a kind of contentment. It does not matter that competition is ruling what is happening between individuals, what matters is the sound of the language. But the names/species are the words, and without them you cannot understand the narrative. Those who don’t appreciate this are effectively deaf.
* * *
Forge Cottage had a small greenhouse, and this became the focus for a short-lived passion for cacti. My interest was sparked by moving a miserable-looking, spiky cactus that had been refusing to die for many years into the greenhouse to see if it would cheer up. It rewarded my attention by producing a huge white flower, longer than the plant itself. The trumpet of slender, pointed petals curved outwards l ike some sort of exploding firework to surround numerous yellow stamens: it was spectacular. I started to collect as many species of succulent as I could and learned a fundamental principle of evolution. True cacti were just one family of plants that had learned to cope with arid conditions by storing water in their bloated stems, the surfaces of which became the site of photosynthesis. Other families had learned a similar trick, and several had become such close mimics of true cacti that you had to look closely to spot the differences. I would later come across many of these interesting plants in the wild when my fieldwork took me to deserts around the world, but for the moment the greenhouse was my passport to New Mexico or Namibia. Real cacti are almost confined (as natives) to the Americas. In Africa, Euphorbia evolved into numerous species that look very similar to cacti, but their unspectacular tiny flowers betray their true identity; no exuberant blossoms for these succulents. They are related to troublesome weeds that flourish in my garden. Euphorbia is one of the most widely distributed plant genera, and species can be anything from a leafy herb to a tree. All of the 2,000 species have a white juice and all the books warn that it is noxious. I can confirm that judgement: I once accidentally rubbed some of the juice into my eye and was dancing up and down in agony for hours. The ones that resemble cacti have spines, but they usually originate as outgrowths coming directly from the ribs; on true cacti spines emerge from little woolly cushions, so the two kinds of succulents can be told apart even when not in flower. There is no better example of convergent evolution than cacti and Euphorbia, a demonstration that similar habits and habitats generate close resemblance derived from separate ancestors, even down to details like spines. I soon discovered that much of the charm of cacti lay in the symmetry and arrangement of their spiny covering. The spines could be viciously hooked or delicately splayed, or cover the whole of the plants like a strange cobweb. I grew large prickly pears and mounds of mammillarias and ferociously armed barrel cacti (Echinocactus). The real triumph was persuading them to flower in a garden in a corner of the English countryside. True cactus flowers often have an odd, shiny brilliance that can almost hurt the eyes, and I had red, pink, yellow and white flowers to prove it. No cacti have blue flowers. I grew succulents that stored water in plump leaves rather than in their stems, culminating in the ‘stone plants’ which were reduced to a single pair of fat leaves, and really did look extraordinarily like rounded pebbles – until the surprising yellow, daisy-like flower emerged from between the leaf pair.
During my period of obsession with succulents I went back to Kew Gardens, where I had first become aware of the riches of the plant kingdom on family visits from Ealing by bus. In those early days the visit to the tropical jungle in the huge humid hothouse was the highlight of the trip, a challenge to see how long we could stay in Amazonia with its sweltering atmosphere, giant leaves, and dripping glass panes before pleading to be let out into the gardens to cool down. Then an ice cream was the highlight. But now it was straight to the succulent house, and there were all the cacti I had in small pots in my greenhouse grown to splendid maturity. Some species were true trees, with leafless branches reaching for the roof, rivals to the mighty saguaro (Carnegia gigantea), the giant candelabras familiar from a hundred westerns. Barrel cacti nearly as tall as I was displayed their sheaves of blades challenging all comers to breach their defences. A sign saying ‘Do not touch the plants’ seemed not a little redundant. Shelves were packed with mammillarias that resembled balls of wool piled on one another except that circlets of small scarlet flowers emerged from the top. The ‘stone plants’ had a special display at eye level, with the various Lithops species set among similarly coloured pebbles so that the visitor could appreciate the perfection of their disguise. I peered closely at all the labels much as I had in the Geological Museum where the fossils were on parade. I stood on the base of the railing and craned my neck to try to see some species at the back of the higher shelves. My hungry inspection was interrupted by a querulous voice: ‘And what do you think you are doing, young man?’ A senior gentleman with a white mane of hair and a grubby coat was eyeing me with suspicion. He rather resembled William Hartnell, the first Doctor Who. I told him that I was trying to see the names of the species at the back, and he looked very cross. Then I noticed he had a staff badge pinned to his coat that read ‘Maxton’. I said with genuine awe: ‘Can you be the Maxton of Crassula maxtoni?’ The transformation was immediate. He almost blushed, impressed that I had heard of this species named after him … honoured of course … lifetime in the greenhouse … unsung contribution … He became more Dr Dolittle than Doctor Who. We talked about succulents, and I dropped what little knowledge I had into the conversation, and I had arrived somewhere I wanted to be. This was my first contact with the world ‘behind the scenes’, where collections are stored for scientific reference. I told Mr Maxton that this might be my ambition, and his face clouded. ‘Don’t do it … unless you want to finish up a terrible curmudgeon like me.’ I had been warned.
* * *
The frost was kept at bay from my succulent collection in the greenhouse with the help of two old-fashioned paraffin lamps. One January night there was an exceptionally severe freeze. Worse still, one of the two lamps went out. When I realised what had happened it was too late. Many of the plants had gone all watery by the time the sun shone on the greenhouse. The poor sad things turned black and died. Only a few inhabitants of cold deserts survived; most succulents never encounter a frost in nature. I carried those few surviving plants with me for years, but I never had the heart to try to build up the collection again. Many years later in the Mojave Desert I saw barrel cacti and Echinocereus with its brilliant red flowers and it was like meeting up with old friends.
I passed the Cambridge University scholarship examinations. I had applied to King’s College for no better reason than its famous choir and because my predecessor as head boy of Ealing Grammar School, Peter Sheldrake, had secured a place there. I found the examinations much more testing than A level, although most of them have subsequently been filed under ‘best forgotten’. The physics paper had an obligatory essay question: ‘“What goes up must come down.” Discuss.’ I really had no idea how to tackle such a deceptively simple statement, and must have wittered on a bit about gravity and temperature, but I could not possibly have passed. However, the telegram that arrived telling me of my success was real enough. I had almost a year before I needed to go ‘up’ to university. Time to grow up.
I moved permanently to Forge Cottage, Ham, and got a job. I had previously worked briefly for Mr Lansley, the village shopkeeper and baker, delivering loaves up rutted tracks leading to remote farmhouses, the chassis of the baker’s van scraping against flints and sticks to make it through. Mr Lansley’s loaves were shaped rather like large bricks, and were delicious on the day they were baked, but on the following day hardened up so dramatically they could have been used to build a real wall. ‘Are you the new baker’s boy?’ a sweet-faced farmer’s wife enquired, but I was only in the job while the usual fellow was ailing. My job at Carter’s was more serious. I was a builder’s labourer, and the lowest of the low. Carter’s was a building firm based at Inkpen, up the road, and maybe Mr Carter took me on out of curiosity to see how long I would last. The first day I had to shovel builder’s waste all day, and at the end of it my hands were raw and bleeding. Austin, a kindly carpenter, took pity on me and dabbed gentian violet solution on to my wounds, which stung abominably. ‘Green hands,’ said Austin. Calluses formed and my hands became less green. I was paying the price for the years of evading football and cricket in the Art Room. Swinging a pickaxe all day made every muscle ache in my enfeebled intellectual’s body. This was genuinely testing my theoretical socialist dedication to understanding the working class by joining it. I slowly became fitter, and a more useful labourer’s mate, and less theoretical. I put on a stone’s worth of pure muscle. Some genteel ladies from the village called in discreetly to tell my mother that they were concerned that her son was working with ‘those rough Carter’s boys’.
As we moved from job to job, the Carter’s boys educated me in the slang and genetics of the network of villages around Hungerford. The local word for sexual intercourse was ‘treading’. It took me a while to link this with the indecorous way drakes mounted ducks on the Kennet and Avon Canal. There was much talk about who was treading whom as we munched our lunchtime sandwiches, until the grizzled old foreman cleared his throat and muttered: ‘Well, we’re not ’ere to spit and cough …’ and got us back to labouring. The mightiest Carter employee was Jim Bowley. While I staggered beneath the weight of a single sack of cement, Jim could carry one under each arm. He resembled Desperate Dan, the brawny character in the Dandy comic, who had a jutting, bristly chin and could lift anything. Dan was nourished on cow pie, with a pair of horns projecting from the pie crust. Jim Bowley was, they told me, a most prodigious treader. He would tread anything going. If he slipped off for half an hour when we went to Buttermere to fix a roof, not much was said, but a few significant glances indicated that some treading was going on somewhere round the back. In the surrounding villages I began to notice quite a few burly young children with jutting chins and five o’clock shadows (the latter mostly boys), and I started to appreciate that natural selection was not confined to the pages of a textbook, or to rutting stags. The Bowley genes were a-spreadin’, even without the help of cow pie.
The communist in the adjacent village of Shalbourne bought me a beer in the village pub. Mr Wiggins the pub landlord made it obvious that he would have preferred me to consume it in the saloon bar along with the other people with middle-class accents. The communist thought I was a class warrior. If Miss Simkins, the village gossip, had seen me she would have said it was bad enough that this young man was consorting with those rough Carter boys, but now he was conspiring with a known Bolshevik. She would probably have taken a more benign view of my other efforts to integrate with local life. I joined a drama group. The problem was that I was just about the only male to volunteer, and certainly the only young one. The director had to find a play with many mature female roles and very few male ones, and especially only one romantic lead. Such a play did exist: Great Day by Lesley Storm (1943). I was the romantic lead. It concerns the misadventures that accompanied a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to the Women’s Institute in a small village during the war.[2] The director said it was a ‘period piece’. Numerous women of a certain age got into comical scrapes; stage effects were enhanced by the inclusion of a few farmyard animals like ducks, rabbits and hens in cages. The only other male was the ‘caretaker’ who had to do the business with a broom from time to time, while uttering comical asides. The romantic lead was on leave from the front, so I was dressed as a soldier, and shared some slightly excruciating scenes with Daphne, my beloved, somewhat along the lines of Brief Encounter. Daphne was a young girl from Inkpen, and when I uttered lines like ‘Darling, I can’t live without you,’ she really thought I meant it. Two performances were given: the first in Inkpen Village Hall, followed by its equivalent in Ham. During the second performance I was just trying to inject the right dose of sincerity into the line ‘Never mind, darling, this too, too beastly war will soon be over’ when one of the chickens laid a particularly large egg, and celebrated the event with a bout of enthusiastic clucking. It brought the house down, and my theatrical career to an end.
While I worked at Carter’s I met my first proper girlfriend, the daughter of the local vet in Hungerford. My previous amours had all been crippled by my diffidence. One of my sister’s friends, a local farmer’s daughter, had captured my heart completely, but all I did about it was to initiate interminable telephone conversations, and somehow never manage to ask her out. Worse, I fell in love with the girlfriend of one of my closest school friends, the brilliant Krzystof Jastrzembski. His father had fled Poland during the uprising against the communist regime in 1956, when many Poles settled in Ealing. They were welcomed: the bravery of Polish airmen during the war was a recent memory. Krzystof’s father had been something in the government, and could not remain in his homeland. Kris (as he became) was clever, tall, dark and very handsome, with curled locks like those of the Discobolus of Myron. He resembled the actor Zbigniew Cybulski, who starred in the wonderful films of Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds) that were emblematic of Poland’s cultural awakening at the time. Martine was blonde and French and to me impossibly beautiful, and for that reason obviously belonged with the comely Pole. A spindly, spotty, cerebral person could aspire to the position of best friend and confidant, and perhaps even secretly revel in the suffering of an unrequited admirer. ‘Alone, and palely loitering’ seemed to be the part for which I was best suited. Had I confessed to my mother (heaven forfend!) she would have countered with a brusque ‘faint heart never won fair lady’ and my heart was, truly, not a little faint. It was odd how a spell as a builder’s labourer beefed up the heart as well as the muscles.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that my time at Carter’s was a political gesture, in spite of my being flattered by the village communist. I was saving my modest wages and boarding at home cost-free; I was not living on the money. However, I did now better understand the implications of being a member of Marx’s proletariat. One morning I arrived five minutes late at Carter’s yard after sustaining some damage to my bike – no excuses, I was sent home by Mr Carter himself and docked that day’s wages. If the Carter crew were ‘rough boys’ it was because their lives were tough. The one advantage was that when the day’s work was over both body and mind were free: there was no room for brooding. I was fully relaxed for the first time: A. Sainsbury-Hicks was history. The intense intellectual of my teenage years was fading, and only now can I mourn his passing; that intensity of focus, that breadth of ambition. Enthusiasm for natural history was not starved: I continued to add to my collection of fossils at the weekends. After I learned to drive I used an ancient Austin 10 (registration number OW 6686) to reach chalk quarries at Ogbourne St George, near Marlborough, where rare examples of extinct snails, and even a coral or two could be collected. On Saturdays, a pub crawl with the local river-keeper’s son was a fixture, and I should never have driven the Austin back from Marlborough along such tiny country lanes, bouncing occasionally off the high banks. Bucolic regularly, alcoholic occasionally, melancholic rarely: it was a restorative interlude.
The money I earned at Carter’s was spent on an adventure travelling to Morocco with Kris Jastrzembski. At that time hitch-hiking was customary, supplemented by bus journeys where necessary, and we spent a long time travelling southwards across France and along the southern coast of Spain. We stopped for a break near Almeria, at the edge of the desert in the Cabo del Gata, the hottest and driest part of Spain. A seaside village called Carboneras was then almost as it had been for centuries: low, square houses with thick walls and small windows and everything whitewashed. Old widows sat in doorways, dressed in black from head to foot; they may have lost their husbands at sea long ago. It was very quiet. A few pesetas went a long way then, and we were able to stay in a clean room in a small pensión for the cost of a cheap supper back in England. Generalissimo Franco was still in charge, and the old Falangist emblem of yoke and arrows, somewhat battered now, greeted the traveller as the bus entered the village. A member of the Guardia Civil wearing a curiously flattened, shiny black hat was there to keep order, but he didn’t have a lot to do. Part of the movie Lawrence of Arabia had been filmed there, and a dry riverbed nearby still held faded remains of cardboard palm trees that had once sheltered David Lean from the relentless glare.
After the trance of sweltering Spain, crossing from Algeciras by the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangiers was a profound shock. My first baptism into another culture was more than a splash on the forehead – it was total immersion. The music was different, the smells challenged identification, and the crowds of men in their djellabas seemed frantically bent on mysterious but urgent business. The narrow streets in the medina were piled with colour: swatches of garish fabrics vied with sacks of deep red paprika, yellow turmeric, brown cumin, glistening dates. Artisans showed their skills to passers-by, beating copper into shape, working leather, or boiling sugary snacks. It was like travelling into the bustling maze of a medieval city, where all the trades were still on open display. Occasionally, a highly decorated door indicated the entrance to some old and grand private courtyard. We found the Café of the Dancing Boys where it was clear that this urban society acknowledged homosexuality without public censure. There was an ill-lit room at the back where kif – cannabis resin – was smoked in tiny clay pipes by middle-aged hashish-lovers. We became accustomed to a characteristic sharp tang in the atmosphere as we took off southwards.
Hitch-hiking proved riskier in Morocco than in Europe. No doubt Kris’s handsome features attracted attention. One last lift in an opulent Mercedes took us along a very dusty track. The driver was dressed in a fine, silky, pale blue djellaba and a selection of rings sparkled on his fingers. He was a sheik and would take us to his palace in the desert – no, he could not possibly accept our excuses. He smiled broadly, revealing gold. We swept into the courtyard of an extensive single-storey building, and were taken to a spacious reception room surrounded by a ledge bearing many plush cushions. Intricate tiles all interlocking curlicues and arabesques made up the floor. The obligatory mint tea was proffered – fresh mint leaves, much sugar from a solid block, steeped in boiling water, and served in a glass (how tired we became of the quip ‘berber whisky’). Mr Marney’s French was very useful. Since both Moroccan host and his English guests spoke inadequate French we conversed quite fluently. Couscous was served. We remembered to rinse our hands in the rose water placed in a bowl for the purpose, and to use our right hand for eating. Gold smiles flashed, particularly in the direction of Kris. When we said we really must be on our way we were told that it was quite out of the question, and that we must stay as guests. We were shown to a simple room with comfortable-looking beds and a jug and basin in the corner. After waiting for about half an hour we tried the door. It was locked from the outside. We did not have to engage in much discussion before opening the small window, checking that our packs would fit through it followed by our lissome bodies falling uncomfortably to the ground; we headed off in the dark to the track that had brought us to the sheik’s redoubt. We were not pursued. Once back on the main drag we picked up an honest lift as far as Marrakech, where we met up with a Norwegian boy with considerably more money than we had, and together we bought an old Citroën 2CV. This flimsy contraption – as much tin can as automobile – took us over the Atlas Mountains by way of the pass of Tizi-n-Test. I shall never forget the extraordinary views south to the fringes of the Sahara Desert. Not far away, there were groves of ancient cedars on the high slopes, whispering gently in the wind.
The Anti-Atlas to the south was more like a series of hills in the desert. Everywhere was so dry; parched plains between the hills relieved by a few thorny bushes eking out a meagre existence waiting for the first drops of rain. Strata were beautifully displayed on the hillsides, the geology written on the ground in differently coloured layers as if designed to share the narrative of the rocks with every passing traveller. I was not able to persuade my companions that a day or two walking up a wadi would be time well spent. The 2CV choked on the sand, until we kept her going by attaching strings to the toggle controlling the petrol supply.
At that time there were no small hawkers trying to sell fossils. The locals did not yet realise they were sitting on a palaeontological gold mine. When I returned several decades later the hills around Erfoud and Alnif had become the source of trilobites for hundreds of rock shops around the world. Every small bush hid a smaller boy. No matter how far off the main road you were, as you approached in your vehicle the boy would emerge from cover with outstretched hand: ‘Trilobite mister? Good price specially for you.’ I traversed the Anti-Atlas in search of rare species, but by now the fossils had acquired a commercial value, and the desert was pockmarked with excavations made by the native Berber folk in pursuit of valuable rarities. Local entrepreneurs had become expert in extracting beautiful (or even rather bizarre) trilobite species from their rocky redoubts, and some of these middlemen had made a lot of money. They travelled to ‘fossil fairs’ around the world to sell top rarities to serious collectors with deep pockets. It was a wonder those Berber workmen could labour under the relentless sun, smashing rocks, but by the time of my last visit with Sir David Attenborough in 2010 the television people were able to summon dozens of extras to belabour the hillsides with pickaxes and hammers to make a perfect background for a piece to camera. I was well known for my trilobite research by then, and when we visited Alnif my arrival caused some excitement. Fossil merchants wanted to be photographed with me alongside: this was the only place on earth where I was better known than David Attenborough. By then, many of the local rock shops also sold fake trilobites manufactured in their dozens from moulds vaguely based on real specimens; a dollar or two for a piece of bogus ancient history.
My first trip to the land of the trilobites did not end well. I picked up dysentery, not the kind that is over in a day, but some other persistent microbe that made my life progressively miserable. It was a challenge to ingest enough fluids to stop dehydration. With my growing beard and dressed in my own brown djellaba, and sandals manufactured from old car tyres, I looked like an ailing Moroccan whose days were numbered. Kris and the Norwegian managed to find an expatriate German (implausibly known as Desert Jim) in Marrakech to take the 2CV off our hands for cash. We may not have owned the car legitimately, or so Desert Jim said, so it was whisked off immediately and broken up into parts for reuse. There was just enough money to fly home from Tangiers. This was my first time in the air, and it should have been thrilling, but all I remember was astonishment at being able to look down upon clouds. When I arrived back in England my mother failed to recognise this cadaverous figure with staring eyes. Even in my diseased condition I enjoyed making such a dramatic entrance. An emergency trip to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford got me the sulphonamide drugs I needed. The sad thing was that all the muscles I had built up during my time at Carter’s had just wasted away. The best bits of my body had vanished to feed an unpleasant germ. I was gangly again. It was the price paid for a measure of growing up.
* * *
Now, I was bound for Cambridge University to read natural sciences, so that should be an end to the intellectual blunderbuss. Time to buckle down and find a single target. In October 1965 my belongings were packed into a locked trunk, and placed on the ‘Varsity’ railway line that then connected Oxford with Cambridge (it is being reopened in the twenty-first century). I arrived with the trunk outside King’s College at the centre of the ancient city. Visitors had to go through the gatehouse to gain access to the inner courts. The college porter sitting grandly in his office looked down a list, nodded, and then addressed me as ‘sir’, something that had never happened to me before. My trunk and I were directed to Market Hostel, where I spent my first year. Across the road from the college on the other side of King’s Parade, my small, modernised room commanded a view of the old market square, set out with stalls selling fruit and cheese, with a selection of less conventional hawkers shouting from booths. Great St Mary’s Church was around the corner, where the vicar of Cambridge, Canon Sebag Montefiore, delivered his famous sermons (I never heard them). Nothing can prepare a young man from a London grammar school for the beauty of King’s College, and while you are a resident member of the college it is, however briefly, yours. Life in the college becomes as important as life in the specialist faculty of economics, science, languages, or whatever. Unlike many colleges, with their tight cloisters and secret passages, King’s is all air and space. The chapel is a supreme architectural achievement from the end of the medieval period, despite one of the dons describing it as a sow on its back. I was at the college long before women were admitted, and there was even a midnight curfew when the grand front entrance was locked. During our tour around the college we were shown (discreetly) how stranded undergraduates could climb in around the iron back gate, by shuffling above the muddy ditch that bounded the grounds. An intoxicated tumble into the duckweed was one of the necessary initiations.
Until I arrived in 1965, I had no idea that King’s College was the traditional haven for homosexuals, a place where gay men bound for Cambridge from their public schools could be comfortable in the company of their friends, without attracting the attention of the law.[3] Several of the senior dons dated from that time. I briefly met E. M. Forster, by now a kindly old gentleman who spent his last days in the college as an honoured resident. The ex-provost Sir John Sheppard was nearly as old, suffered from dementia, and was prone to wandering around the quadrangle looking vaguely for whichever Greek boy had taken his fancy. The senior tutor, the Milton scholar John Broadbent, set about admitting more state-school students, and I doubt that the college had ever seen a pair of blue jeans before his appointment. Younger dons tended to be radical, and heterosexual, like most of the new generation of undergraduates. It was an interesting period of transition in the life of the college. For a former employee of Carter’s the builders it was extraordinary to hear the languid drawl of Etonians for the first time, emanating from one of the younger Mosleys or his friend Nigel Honorius Sitwell. Rugbeians, Salopians and Wykehamists were hardly less exotic, as expensive private schools sent their brightest onwards to King’s. It was almost as alien to me as my first immersion in a Moroccan souk. I realised that for these self-confident undergraduates a place in the splendid old college was taken for granted, just the next step in a privileged life. They probably felt completely at home with its haughty grandeur. They had been accustomed to portraits of distinguished predecessors in gowns and periwigs looking down from gilt frames. The perpetuation of the class system became clear to me. I now knew who would get the best-paid jobs, so that they could afford the education to get their children the best-paid jobs. I became what my mother would have called ‘chippy’. It took me some years before I could see past the privilege to the person.
By contrast, one of the great virtues of science is that it is truly egalitarian. Whether you talk with an Estuary twang, flat Midlands vowels, or were brought up to say that you lived in a big hice with extensive grinds, it simply does not matter in the laboratory. It was not always so. Many of the famous scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from aristocratic or wealthy backgrounds – the Darwins or the Cavendishes come to mind. Educated clergyman/scientists were equally not ‘trade’, let alone of the labouring class. In the mid twentieth century merit alone finally became sufficient for employment, and women earned proper recognition at last. Some of the most brilliant scientists I know have had a much harder route to science than mine, do not talk ‘posh’, and rightly don’t give a damn about the niceties of cutlery usage at official functions. It is surely an advance in culture when the question ‘where did you go to school?’ can be replaced by ‘what have you discovered?’
A particular virtue of the Cambridge system was its flexibility, which suited a butterfly like me. Within the broad natural sciences tripos students could change their principal subject as they better identified what they wanted to become. Three subjects were obligatory from the first, Michaelmas (autumn) term. The snag was that there were examinations at the end of each year, so there was no fooling about for three years until all-important finals loomed, as happened in Oxford. This system may have engendered Cambridge’s reputation for seriousness; equally, it might explain why Oxford produces so many politicians. I was able to study biology formally for the first time, even though I had been a biologist manqué since I could remember. I said goodbye to chemistry, but my training in the properties of the elements did not go to waste. Geological science was then rather absurdly split into two departments: geology itself and mineralogy and petrology, known to the faculty as ‘min and pet’ like the names of a pair of cockatoos. The departments were housed in slightly forbidding buildings, including the Victorian Sedgwick Museum of Geology on Downing Street; each department had its own professor. This is where I would spend much of the next five years.
College life dominated my early days in Cambridge. I made friends very quickly, and one or two of my fellow undergraduates have remained friends for life. Nearly all my new intimates had come to Cambridge by a route similar to my own. As my mother was a widow with a low income I was supported by a full government grant. I felt affluent enough to smoke too many of the smallest cigarette known to man, Player’s No. 6, which a friend from Nottingham (where they were manufactured) said were made from the sweepings off the factory floor. It suited me that colleges had nothing to do with the university departments or faculties, so I was surrounded by students reading English, economics or medicine. There was no other King’s geologist in my year of matriculation. Although my polymathic ambitions had scaled down, I was still writing seriously all the time, and sacred music in the chapel introduced me to the glories of polyphony. I slipped into the back of the room to hear lectures by Raymond Williams on Marx and literature. F. R. Leavis was still in charge of his many acolytes. Some part of me still wanted to be living proof that the ‘two cultures’ – arts and science – which C. P. Snow had promulgated in 1959, could be embodied within a single cultural life. I was loosening up. My friend Victor Gray introduced me to jazz, particularly Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. I heard Thelonious Monk at the Students’ Union. I followed the Beatles like everyone else. I talked too much and drank too much. I do not think the fifteen-year-old avant-gardiste would have approved the new model, but this one was probably better company.