A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  Another book helped me to the science. The seventh in Collins’ New Naturalist series dealt with fungi. During the 1950s the series was a real trailblazer. The writers were not merely expert, they were often world leaders in research. The book covers have become classics, a blend of the semi-abstract and the specific that has real style. Nikko Tinbergen was the father of ethology – if one excludes Darwin, who inevitably got there first – and The Herring Gull was ninth in the series; fourth was L. Dudley Stamp on Britain’s Structure and Scenery, which was one ancestor of my own book The Hidden Landscape. Mushrooms and Toadstools by John Ramsbottom was for a year or two my bible. Its combination of history, learning, anecdote and science had me enthralled. I still have my old copy, the dust cover long decayed, the binding coming loose through decades of use.[2] The book helped me understand the many different kinds of fungi. Puffballs and regular mushrooms were distant cousins, I learned, and there were wonderful things called earthstars for me to discover that looked like fungi crossed with starfish. That ‘orange peel’ I collected in Ruislip Woods belonged to another group of fungi altogether that bore their spores in flasks (asci – hence the Ascomycetes) rather than exposed to the air on special cells (basidia, hence Basidiomycetes) as in regular mushrooms. A whole chapter dealt with the mycological equivalent of ethyl isocyanide – the stinkhorn, the smelliest fungus known to man. The stench of rotting flesh that emanated from its dripping gleba attracted flies that helped disperse its spores; its Latin name (Phallus impudicus) was a perfect anatomical description of its shape (at that time I would have described it as rude). It seemed to me that fungi could resemble almost anything, so long as it was bizarre. I followed every word of Ramsbottom’s grisly account of the effects of poisoning by death cap (Amanita phalloides): how the victim would recover for a while after a lethal meal only to be plunged into further agonies as the toxin destroyed his or her internal organs. This was the end envisaged for me by the man on the bus back from Ruislip Woods. Within a couple of years I found a death cap for myself – it was hiding among the beech mast and I did not dare touch it. The heart of Ramsbottom’s book was a huge list of fungi associated with different habitats that showed me just how many varieties there were that were not in my Observer’s Book. Several kinds of grasslands, woodlands and fens each had their own special species. It was a challenge thrown down for my future investigations. While I encountered so much that was new I also built up an image of the writer: learned, but with a light touch, kindly, broadly cultured, and literate. Maybe he was like the professor I had imagined identifying my first ammonite in the Natural History Museum. John Ramsbottom had been its Keeper of Botany at a time when fungi and plants were classified together. They are now separate kingdoms; their DNA tells us so.

  As for food, I supplied my family with unfamiliar mushrooms, and they ate them. It could be said that eating is the ultimate test of taxonomy, the proof that you are willing to put your money (or mushroom) where your mouth is. I now know enough about fungi to understand that I was really lucky not to have made any mistakes. There are pitfalls that do not appear in The Observer’s Book of Common Fungi. I might have unwittingly followed Graham Young the ‘teacup poisoner’ in using my family as experimental material to observe the effects of alkaloid poisoning. There are some deadly toadstools that are normally rare – and hence missed out of any book on common finds. But occasionally they have a ‘good year’ and appear in several localities. One of the scarlet webcaps (Cortinarius) has caused several severe cases of mushroom poisoning, notably in 2008 the family of Nicholas Evans, writer of The Horse Whisperer. The guilty mushroom was unusually abundant in Scotland that year, and was presumably mistaken for the excellent edible chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius), which has a similar bright orange colour. Three of Evans’ family had to have kidney dialysis; Evans himself eventually received one of his daughter’s kidneys three years later. The mushroom that causes more stomach ache and vomiting (but not death) than any other looks very like the familiar ‘shop mushroom’. It belongs to the same genus, Agaricus, typically with a white cap with black gills and a ring on the stem. Its close relative the field mushroom, Agaricus campestris, is the only mushroom picked by a typical forager. Its poisonous and deceptive relation is called the yellow staining mushroom (Agaricus xanthodermus, ‘yellow skin’ in Greek). Even now I will rush excitedly towards a patch of promising white mushrooms only to find that they are this dangerous lookalike, the disagreeable doppelgänger. It does, of course, have a distinctive smell, which is difficult to characterise other than that it is not ‘mushroomy’. It is the chemical phenol, which was present in the writing ink we used before the ballpoint pen was invented, and the inkwell became redundant. The identity of the white fraudster is best revealed if the base of its stem is scratched, where the flesh turns canary yellow in a trice. The same often happens with the edge of the cap. Fortunately, this was one trick I learned early on. My neighbour was not so fortunate: he appeared at my door ashen-faced last year. ‘What have I eaten?’ he asked, holding out a plastic bag with a few mushrooms lying in the bottom. ‘I’ve been sick all night.’ The yellow staining mushroom had claimed another victim.

  There are relatively few very poisonous toadstools, but many more that are not worth eating – too small, tough, tasteless or vaguely nasty. The Observer’s Book identified some of the best and safest edible species and these were the ones that found their way on to the family table. Boletes were the easiest to recognise because in this family normal fungus gills were replaced by masses of narrow tubes, giving the underside of the cap a spongy look. There were very few that had to be avoided, and all of these uncommon. The penny bun (Boletus edulis) was the most sought after of its kind, as it is everywhere in Europe, where it is variously known as porcini, cep, Steinpilz, or Karl Johan’s sopp, all of which are synonyms of ‘delicious’. It is chunky, and from a distance the cap does indeed looked like a freshly baked old-fashioned bun, its only drawback being that maggots find it as tasty as we do. When you beat them to it, you are treated to a nutty, almost meaty, gastronomic delicacy. The Russians slice them and dry them, and open their jars of dried porcini to inhale the smell to drive away the blues brought on by their endless winters. Parasol mushrooms (Macrolepiota) were bigger and more statuesque than anything else, and could be spotted from a speeding car, growing out of rough sward; I would insist on my parents stopping long enough for me to gather the prize. Even the white giant puffball could be sliced and fried in butter when it was young. I was walking in the beech woods near Woodspeen Farm when I discovered my first pure gold: chanterelles. There was a troop of them in a leaf-filled ditch, and they were shining like jewellery: golden yellow funnel-shaped mushrooms variously lobed and pleated, some growing from mounds of moss like baubles presented on velvet cushions. I gathered them joyfully. They smelled of apricots: the Kingdom of the Fungi can always spring a surprise.

  And here is another: truffles are fungi that grow to maturity underground. There are numerous species that have evolved this habit, many of them small, roundish and knobbly; few of them are of culinary interest. However, the Italian white truffle (Tuber magnatum) is famous for being the most expensive food in the world, outstripping Beluga caviar weight for weight. The aroma of this truffle is a confection of all the most delicious chemicals that can set the salivary glands to work. The black truffle (Tuber melanosporum) grows in the south of France and is hardly less delicious; it was formerly so abundant that special trains loaded with them were sent to Paris before the truffle’s incomparable odour could fade. The summer or English truffle (Tuber aestivum) is not quite in the same class, but it is good enough to have once employed truffle hunters on some of our great estates. Truffles rely on animals with a sharp sense of smell, like wild pigs, to grub them up and spread their spores in their droppings. They are a challenge to find, and those who make their livelihood from truffles use trained dogs to sniff them out. I saw some sorry little dogs in Corsica at their work – they had to be kept hun
gry to perform, and I was tempted to slip them a few biscuits while nobody was looking. John Ramsbottom mentioned that there were special flies whose larvae gorged on truffles; they, too, can detect their special aroma. The crowning triumph of my youthful forays was discovering my own summer truffle in Savernake Forest, just east of Marlborough. Fine avenues of beech trees divide this ancient woodland. In a clearing I noticed flies dancing over a particular patch of leaf litter – they might be truffle flies (Suillia) showing me the site of buried treasure. I dug down, and about six inches below the surface of the ground I found what I had hoped for. In my hand the truffle was about the size and colour of a grenade, all warty on the outside, not a thing of beauty, but to me the most exciting find of my mushrooming year.

  I have stayed loyal to both fungi and fossils. The latter became my livelihood, while the former have remained my hobby. It could well have been the other way round.

  My mycological knowledge increased in proportion to the books I had available. After Ramsbottom’s New Naturalist came the Collins field guide, abstracted by F. Bayard Hora of Reading University from a great and beautiful 1935–40 publication in several volumes by J. E. Lange on the fungi of Denmark. My well-thumbed old copy of this Collins guide testifies to the use it enjoyed for many years – it more than doubled the species I could recognise in the field. It was carried in my jacket pocket, and more than once dropped into a puddle (I carefully dabbed the pages dry as if the pictures were by J. M. W. Turner). Lange had followed a tradition of fungal illustration, using watercolour drawings to illustrate the nuances that separated species. He had a knack for encapsulating just the important features that helped the identifier make a decision. F. B. Hora led forays near my home town in which he sent everyone off into the woods to seek interesting mushrooms. Then he would produce a cacophonous blast on a hunting horn to summon his forayers back to base, so that he could deliver judgement on their finds. In 1981 Roger Phillips produced the famous Pan Original Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Britain and Europe. This was the first time photographs successfully competed with a tradition of watercolours going back to the eighteenth century. Even Beatrix Potter took time off from Peter Rabbit to add some exquisite examples to that genre. Phillips’ book described more than 900 species of fungi, using truly excellent photographs. At the time it seemed to be the last word – but of course there is never a last word.

  My own interest fluctuated. I never missed a year without going on forays, but while I was establishing my academic career as a palaeontologist my knowledge of fungi ticked over gently. My interest reawakened with the autumn rains, when the basket was disinterred, and gratifying forays through woods began again. I loved introducing wildlife groups to the charm of toadstools. The arguments about smells came up with every new season. There was always somebody who would challenge whether the aroma of the false death cap (Amanita citrina) was really like cut potatoes, while others would insist that it could hardly be anything else. Nobody disputed that stinkhorns were stinky. There was often an irritating forayer who would ask no question other than ‘Can you eat it?’ while I was explaining how the gills attach to the stem, or eloquently explaining the function of spore dispersal. I have been known to silence these individuals by inviting them to taste a few drops from a particularly fiery milk mushroom. When I lived in London my local forays were often around West Norwood cemetery, a huge nineteenth-century graveyard not far from our house. I would progress with my basket and hand lens around the trees dotted among rather splendid tombs, poking about and finding all manner of small and interesting fruit bodies. One week I discovered from the local newspaper that a series of drug busts had taken place the week before – the cemetery had apparently been bristling with heroin and cocaine as well as agarics. I imagined what the pushers would have made of my pretence of being a harmless fungus gatherer. It might have been as dangerous as eating a death cap.

  Throughout these middle years I was merely revising my knowledge annually when the mushroom ‘season’ began, recycling what I had learned from Roger Phillips and his predecessors. I was doing just what a nineteenth-century ‘botanising’ parson might have done. Thirty years ago I decided that I must learn microscopy, and I started to become a modern mycologist. My hand lens was replaced by oil immersion. I looked at spores close up, and at the cellular structure of the edge of the fungus gills. It changed the process of identification, and opened up a new level of accuracy. I could now explore different kinds of fungi: tiny ones that erupted on horse manure; white patches on the underside of logs; even fungi that grew on other fungi. I learned the deficiencies of all my previous books and bought more. In the process I lost something of the innocent pleasure of that young boy who discovered his first chanterelles, or the simple delight of the slightly older one who dug up a summer truffle.

  In recent years I have been deprived of my sense of smell. I cannot help wondering whether it is a punishment from the gods for my youthful misuse of the smelliest substance known to man. I can no longer detect Russian leather. I still lead fungus forays but now I have to appoint an ‘official nose’ before I start. I might choose someone with a resemblance to Cyrano de Bergerac, or if Cyrano has not turned up I find young women are often superior in the nose department. ‘Does it smell of wet chicken feathers?’ I will ask. ‘Oh, absolutely!’ comes the reply. Occasionally, I have an independent-minded official nose who disagrees with everything I say. ‘Cut new potatoes,’ I will announce, holding up a false death cap. ‘Nonsense!’ the rebel will respond. ‘It smells of umbrellas!’ There is nothing to do in these circumstances but to hold a referendum on the smell, and then head with the group onwards into the forest in the hope of finding a stinkhorn.

  * * *

  Chemistry and fossils integrated seamlessly into my progress at Ealing Grammar School for Boys, but I kept the mushrooms to myself. They were my esoteric secret. This was as far away from team games as could be imagined. I was a team of one, rewarding my own curiosity with my own prizes. I never studied biology at school. I thought I could do it all myself, and that it would kill some of the fun I had if it were a ‘subject’. I studied almost everything else. As I went upwards through the school system it became clear that I was an all-rounder, which was not a particularly good thing to be (except for getting marks). One or two of my contemporaries were gifted linguists but no good at mathematics. We had one extraordinarily able musician, and Allen Jones the artist has been mentioned. The paths through life of dedicated linguists, musicians and painters could have been printed in their genes. They don’t have the agony of choice. In our school lifetime there was one fork in the road that it was not possible to avoid. After the Ordinary level examinations were completed A levels and two years of the sixth form came next, and the school divided into an arts and a science sixth. I was unhappy about closing off a whole range of my interests from more school-time exploration. By the time I reached my teens writing had already become important to me, and a growing cultural life ran in parallel with my natural-history enthusiasms. I never recognised the arts/science ‘two cultures’ schism that C. P. Snow had promulgated when I was thirteen years old, but I knew that I would be forced to make a decision, and that the outcome would close off some possibilities for ever. And it was almost true: it took me much of my life to reintegrate myself into the person I was when I was sixteen.