A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  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 respons
ibility. 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 fu
nnier. 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.

  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.