My parents were born in Australia. My father, when he was about twenty-four, was beginning his lifework as a marine biologist. He hung around the house of a family named Young, where there were three beautiful young women, Alice, Betty and Marelle. Father was interested in Betty, but my mother, Marelle, nabbed him. He must have been a pushover for Mother. She was twenty-one and full of animal spirits. He was just a tall hunk of scholarship.
My father and mother, after marriage, were on board a ship called the Aurora, making a very early scientific expedition to the South Pole. My father shipped as a biologist. The boat was in Australia–Tasmania waters when Mother was found to be pregnant. She was put ashore at Hobart, Tasmania, and my father went on with the expedition.
They strung a bunch of names on me: Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn. I dropped the name Leslie because I had an uncle of that name and we hated each other’s guts.
Father settled in Tasmania as a biology lecturer at the Hobart University—a very young man soon to hold a full professorship. Mother began to like the place and they decided to stay there. My earliest years were in this strange cold little land to the south of Australia.
Hobart is a town that nestles at the foot of Mount Wellington. My principal recollection of it is of its apples, its jams, its rosy-cheeked girls. I am happy to note that even at that early age I was pretty observant.
We lived in a little two-storey brick house, and there was a courtyard behind us where I spent much of my time. The region was agricultural. A beach, Sandy Bay, was not far away and I was often there, swimming at the age of three.
The beach was of hard brown sand, the water freezing cold. Mother was a good swimmer, and she took me there often. I have never been out of ocean water for very long ever since.
From about four or five I began one long unending scrap with my mother.
As she tells it today—she is living with my father, in England—I was a devil in boy’s clothing. I can only sympathise with her. I can readily understand she had a good case in finding me unmanageable. I wish I could say that time had changed the situation between us. It has not. We have fallen out all our lives.
I have a mindful of memories of these childhood hassles.
Mother was quick to anger and she didn’t believe in sparing the rod. She would grab the hairs at the back of my head, pull them very hard, and, held in that position, I’d get a whacking.
I don’t say she didn’t love me. She may have—in her way. I revolted from time to time, bellowing, ‘Every time you come near me you only want to wash me!’ That is the sign of a protective mother, I suppose. My resistance to authority led naturally to incessant scoldings and thrashings…
The rapport was with my father.
He looked Irish. He had red, bushy eyebrows, black hair; he was lean, angular, full of charm, good will, and a certain professorial quietness. He spoke with a clipped British accent, tinged with touches of Irish brogue.
When school finished, I raced home to be at his side, to hurry out into the back yard, where we had cages of specimens of rare animals. That courtyard was a fascinating place for a small boy.
Tasmania is the only spot in the world where three prehistoric animals, the Tasmanian tiger, the Tasmanian devil and the animal Zyurus, are found. Father had specimens of all of these in his cages, as well as kangaroo rats, opossums, sheep. I got to know these creatures very well, even the most savage, and I hated it when he had to chloroform one and dissect it. The kangaroo rat in particular was friendly. This animal strayed around like a dog, and it was upsetting to me to observe it being sliced up. Father’s experiments were directed at determining the relationship of these animals to the human being. This was a period when Darwin was being confirmed by many biologists. Darwin was my father’s hero, and he followed in the footsteps of Darwin and of Thomas Huxley.
To this day there is a very very long account of my father’s accomplishments in the British Who’s Who—with no mention of the exploits of his son.
Through Father’s activity I made my first venture into commerce. He bought all the kangaroo rats he could get hold of for Hobart University. I learned to set box traps in the hills of near-by Mount Wellington. He paid a shilling a head.
Occasionally I went with him on a trip in quest of one of the rare Tasmanian animals. We headed for the western coast, a difficult terrain, where there were huge fossilised trees. We hunted the Tasmanian tiger, an animal so rare it took Father four years to trap one. Yet though he prowled in nature frequently, he wasn’t essentially an outdoors man. Mostly his work was inside, over books, papers, microscopes, slides.
There were trips into the interior of Tasmania when Father went on his scientific jaunts, along quiet streams up toward Launceston, which was the second biggest city in Tasmania. He looked into out-of-the-way rivers, with microscopes and magnifying glasses, while I ran around ferreting rabbits or trying to catch a fresh-water fish called bream. I tagged along, like a puppy, whenever he would take me.
There was the wonderful fishing expedition when the University hired a trailer, with great metal seines, to scoop up the bottom of the ocean. It was fascinating to see what came up from below: every kind of sea animal peculiar to this region. These investigations afterwards won Father remarkable acclaim in scientific circles; the sea spider, the anemone, the giant polar crab two feet in width, scallops, electric eels and electric rays—all these things came out of the steel net. He bottled his finds, exclaiming, ‘Oh, what a lovely thing! What a beauty! A beauty!’ as if it were some rare pearl or a rare woman.
He was patient when I asked why he cut up some specimen. He’d have a frog stretched out with thumbtacks and he’d split the brain. I peered over his hands, breathing heavily, and he pushed me aside gently and went on with his fine delicate work.
Once Mother brought him a new suit. I admired it enormously, but he ignored it. Yet a day or two later, when the University appropriated enough money to get some new device which would slice the ovary of the echidna (porcupine, to us) to one-two hundred thousandth of an inch, he was delighted. He jumped about like a youngster with a new toy.
I also fancied myself a scientist…
I found out that if you gave a duck a piece of fatty pork, something in its intestinal make-up caused the bird to pass the pork within a minute or two. From beak to exit it was a spectacle you could observe very swiftly.
We had plenty of ducks in our back yard. I pondered a night over this.
It occurred to me that it would be interesting to tie a string about ten feet long to the pork.
Out came the pork, which I then gave to another duck with the same result, holding on to the string that entered the first duck’s mouth. In a few minutes I had a half-dozen ducks tied together beak to rectum on this greased string.
I was, in a stroke, and at the age of eight or nine, inventor of the first living bracelet. No scientist discoverer of an antibiotic could have been more enchanted than I.
At once I commercialised. I sold tickets to my friends. The ducks dragged one another around in all directions.
Father came home and witnessed my venture into the world of science.
‘You cruel little devil!’ He broke his unopened umbrella across my back. I scampered away with a cry of fright and a burst of tears.
‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you cut open animals all day long in your laboratory. What did I do wrong?’
He looked at his broken umbrella. He saw I had a point. Tears came to his eyes.
It was the only violence I ever experienced at his hands.
So I was destined never to become a laboratory technician—unless my experience with women can be called such.