The Cambridge terms lasted for only eight weeks, but were extraordinarily intense. Would-be scientists had to work more hours than students of the humanities. Not only were lectures obligatory in the mornings, but laboratory work also took up the afternoons, and essays had to be written in the evenings. Only the medics worked harder, learning in their first year the endless roll call of our bones and organs. I could hear them in adjacent rooms intoning aloud the details of human anatomy to drum it home – ‘organ recitals’ I called them. There was something annoying about watching my friends who read English, still in their pyjamas at eleven o’clock in the morning nursing their hangovers when I had already been at work for a couple of hours. I invented a kind of automatic writing so that I could take notes during a nine o’clock lecture regardless of my condition. It would serve me well in committee meetings in the years ahead. Generally, I was not happy during what Americans call the freshman year. I experienced delayed grief for my father; I was still confused about my scientific destiny, and my attempts at being a Renaissance man were faltering. At Ealing Grammar School for Boys I had been top dog, and here I was a nobody. Even a mycological professor found me tedious. I had taken to reading about Eastern philosophy. Alan W. Watts’s books explaining Zen Buddhism helped, or maybe confused my attempts to discover whether there were ‘truths too deep for physicists’ as my poem had it. Depression descended upon me like an incapacitating blanket. For a short while I was under medical supervision, and took pills that numbed me as much as helped me. I was comparatively lucky: one of my fellow students never emerged from a cloud of confusion, and had to leave. It seemed to me that the Old Etonians and Wykehamists in King’s were immune to such angst: they had had an expensive inoculation against it. Somehow, I continued to churn out the necessary essays on my Brother Deluxe typewriter. J’ai survécu le tremblement de terre, as my old French textbook would have said: I have survived the earthquake.
I also discovered debt. King’s College had a buttery that was open in the evenings, where the ‘gentlemen’ could furnish themselves with their perquisites. It was a secret storeroom of delicious luxuries, staffed by the college butler in evening dress. The catch for a simpleton like me was that everything went on a tab to be settled at the end of term. Those Turkish cigarettes were a magnificent improvement upon Player’s No. 6 – why, they even had an elliptical cross section! ‘Several young gentlemen have remarked that the Chambertin ’59 is very drinkable at the moment, sir,’ the butler said, encouragingly. ‘In that case I had better take a couple of bottles,’ was my response, while the butler made notes in a kind of ledger. So it continued for a whole term. I must have learned a great deal about good wine. When the buttery bill arrived at the end of Michaelmas term I was aghast. Could I have really spent that much? My embarrassment was exacerbated by the knowledge that all my university fees were covered by a full government grant, as my mother had little income as a widow. Here was this freeloader, guzzling Chambertin; I deserved to be branded as a debtor. Then I remembered that I had tucked away a small legacy that came directly from Granny Fortey. It very nearly covered the whole of the buttery bill – my entire inheritance gone in a trice. I steered clear of temptation for the rest of my time at King’s College. I became frugal. From then on it was back to the cheap cigarettes and Blue Nun Liebfraumilch.
During the first Easter break the geology course took the undergraduates to the Isle of Arran, lying a short distance off the west coast of Scotland; Arran was the traditional nursery for the science. To save money I hitch-hiked northwards up the Great North Road (A1), attempting conversation with a Glaswegian trucker with an accent more impenetrable than ancient Icelandic. I arrived at the ferry just in time. Arran is a geological much-in-little, with the main classes of ancient rocks – igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic – all displayed in outcrop, and the whole island decorated with relics of the last great Ice Age. The considerable granite mass of Goat Fell dominates the topography. Traditionally geological hotels welcomed students to Brodick, the only town of any size, and they were glad of the out-of-season trade. For a week a bunch of us followed W. B. Harland, our lecturer, as he demonstrated contacts between one rock formation and another, or showed how the hot granite arising from deep in the earth had baked and altered the ‘country rocks’ that it intruded. We followed the Highland Boundary Fault through a pretty glen, and failed to find fossils in black shale exposed in a streambed there, as generations of students had failed before us. I loved it all, revelling in those steps from observation to understanding I had first enjoyed with Mr Williams. My only problem was that W. B. Harland was very fit, and shot up hillsides like a mountain goat, so I sometimes trailed in at the end of his explanations. The final ascent of Goat Fell was my worst performance. I had foolishly decided to wear my Moroccan sandals, with tough soles made from old rubber tyres, but with poor grip and no protection from the elements. The weather turned wintry, punctuated with snow flurries. I lagged further behind, watching Harland’s nimble, stick-like figure ever further away, only pausing from time to time for a bit of extravagant gesticulation. My feet froze. I fell in with the only other fledgling geologist as ill equipped, a small woman from Barbados who had never seen snow before. Together, we limped back at the end of the day, not much wiser about granite. W. B. Harland was later to be crucial to the next spin of the dice that led me on to trilobites.
I was happier in my second year. I had begun to enjoy geology,[1] and my essays began to show some independence of thought. For years, I had been trained in the regurgitation of facts in the interests of good grades, and never really understood that learning was about ploughing a new furrow. My verse was being published in a slim magazine called Pawn (I have to be shy about saying that my writing career was launched in Pawn). It cost one shilling and sixpence, and there was an image of a chess piece on the front cover. I was published alongside others who subsequently became widely known – Clive James, Dick Davis and Clive Wilmer, as well as Robert Wells, so I must have made some artistic progress. I have kept this magazine all my life as a voucher of a life that might have been.
I made one last deviation towards a wider intellectual compass. One of the courses available as an addition to the regular tripos was in history and philosophy of science, which had a small department tucked inside the Whipple Museum – a strange and compelling collection of astrolabes and early clocks in Free School Lane. The required reading could not have been more different from the earthly realities of geology and mineralogy. The debate about what distinguished the scientific method from metaphysics was in full swing, so I read Karl Popper at an early stage, and understood that science was as much about presenting hypotheses that were capable of being disproved as it was about establishing universal truths. I began to see Charles Darwin as almost inevitable – rather than as a lone genius – through the writing of Thomas Kuhn, who demonstrated that apparently ‘new’ ideas had their appropriate time in history, regardless of the name that carried the banner for change. I learned about the alchemical roots of modern science. I struggled briefly with symbolic logic. This new discursive world of letters fought it out with Zen Buddhism in some subconscious boxing ring deep in my psyche. Was enlightenment compatible with the Enlightenment? I learned that the incomparable Isaac Newton seemed to be able to encompass reason and religion inside one great brain – but not happily. The history and philosophy course allowed me to explore style in my essays as much as content, although I found puns hard to resist, as in ‘he always put Descartes before the horse’, although the context in which this astonishing aperçu was employed has escaped me. I was having such an interesting time that I did wonder whether to become a historian or critic of science rather than a practitioner. Such a transfer would have been possible under the Cambridge system, and might have laid the ghost of A. Sainsbury-Hicks’s fundamental question about ‘people or things’. One session of supervision with the brilliant philosopher/historian Nicholas Jardine may have nudged me back to natural science. I had
worked hard upon my essay, but still recall the young don’s assessment that my work was no more than a ‘well-written precis of the recommended texts’ – not so much damning with faint praise, as faint praise mitigating a decisive put-down. I was to discover that such remarks were typical of academic life, and competitive Cambridge academic life in particular, but it made me cautious about entering that particular arena. If that were the weaponry I would prefer to fight elsewhere.
The tutorial system was, and still is, touted as the great advantage of the Cambridge collegiate system. The image is of a kindly don offering wisdom and constructive criticism as crumpets toast before the fire, while a few, select students sit in comfortable armchairs to receive aphorisms they will treasure for life. The nearest approach to this ideal that I experienced was just one tutorial on Charles Darwin hosted by a Jesuit priest. The philosophy tutorials – not least Dr Jardine’s – did serve to keep me on my toes, but were hardly cosy. The ones in ‘min and pet’ were often discouraging, but I greatly enjoyed the practical side of the study of rocks (petrology). This involved peering through a microscope to examine sections through samples ground thin enough to observe the optical properties of the individual mineral grains. They came in all colours and made beautiful patterns: mosaics or swirls that changed again in polarised light. The department was a pioneer in sophisticated microscopy. I learned forensic detective work that led to the identity and chemistry of the many rock-forming minerals, and my old enthusiasm for the dance of the elements was rekindled. The lectures were comparatively dull. The ‘prof’ was W. A. Deer, whose great work on rock-forming minerals was co-authored by R. Howie and J. Zussman; his lectures were not much more than a trot through the book. His tutorials came alive only if his seminal work on the Skaergaard Intrusion of Greenland was mentioned. This layered igneous mass was where Deer deduced many important facts about the evolution of magma chambers, but the adventure of fieldwork in a remote part of the world lifted it from being a recitation of scientific results. Who would not want such a pioneering life? A second tutor in ‘min and pet’, Ian D. Muir, was an expert on basalts who seemed totally unenthusiastic about the job of guiding the young; indeed, on one occasion he nodded off in the middle of our supervision. Geology was better. Peter Friend made sedimentary rocks easy to interpret, effortlessly explained their origins, and he, too, had stories of working in Greenland. The head of department when I first arrived in Cambridge was Oliver Meredith Boone Bulman, the world authority on fossil graptolites, and he was a formal, very old-fashioned style of professor, but a great lecturer. The real treat was a seminar from the curator of the Sedgwick Museum, Bertie Brighton, who made palaeontology thrilling with his vivid explanations of how you could infer much of the living animal from the ancient remains preserved in rocks. I still believe that reanimating life that has passed from the earth is one of the most interesting things to do as a palaeontologist. Through him I learned that geological time is written in the succession of fossils – each time interval with its own diagnostic fauna (or flora). Learning the succession of British fossils was routine, even a chore, but I am grateful now that I persisted with the task. Even today as I travel through the geological landscape it is animated in my mind by tableaux of the creatures that once lived there. My knowledge is transformative: a comparatively banal geological map becomes a visualisation of the history of life.
When I was offered the chance of my own Arctic adventure I signed up immediately. For some years W. B. Harland had been running expeditions to Svalbard, a group of islands way north of the Arctic Circle. He was rapidly becoming the authority on the geology of the largest of the islands, Spitsbergen, somewhat to the annoyance of some Norwegian geologists. After all, they had first claim on the Svalbard group, which was administered by Norway’s own sysselmann (governor) – although other countries had rights there, too, including the United Kingdom and Russia. Harland’s new expedition was to take place during the long summer vacation at the end of my second year. In the previous summer of 1966 one of the boat parties returning to base had stopped off along Hinlopen Strait adjacent to the most remote northern part of the island. They wanted to collect fresh drinking water from a melt stream running across a raised beach in front of the huge Valhallfonna glacier that occupied the centre of Ny-Friesland, as this part of Spitsbergen is called. The landing party was surprised to discover fossils littering the foreshore. No fossil-bearing strata had been mapped in this area before – this was undoubtedly an exciting new discovery. A small collection was made on the spot, but there was no time for a proper investigation. Trilobites were conspicuous among the small bagful of specimens that were brought back to Cambridge.
By another curious twist, Professor Bulman’s tenure as the Woodwardian Professor of Geology had come to an end during my first year, and his replacement, Harry B. Whittington, was an authority on trilobites. He had been recruited from Harvard University. It was rumoured that his rival for this famous post – the equally distinguished brachiopod researcher Alwyn Williams – had queered his pitch by actually applying for the job. The Cambridge way was to issue an invitation, not to have somebody ringing the doorbell like a tradesman. The Woodwardian Professor’s office was at one end of the Sedgwick Museum, a classic nineteenth-century treasury lined with ranks of polished, glass-topped mahogany cabinets full of fossils laid out in rows. Approaching the professor’s redoubt through the gallery was like drawing near to the altar after progressing along a nave enclosed by holy relics. The destination was impressive, and not a little awe-inspiring. Visitors tapped on the door inscribed in gold letters ‘Woodwardian Professor’ with their hearts in their mouths. However, Whittington could not have been more different from the aloof Professor Bulman. He was dark-haired, with a neat moustache, and many years spent in the USA had concealed the flattened vowels of his Birmingham accent. He came with American informality. He insisted on Christian names, which Bulman reserved for his wife and children, and that only behind closed doors. When the fossils from the chance Spitsbergen discovery were shown to ‘Harry B’ he pronounced quickly that they indicated mid-Ordovician – the first rocks of this age (465 million years) known from the whole Svalbard Archipelago. Some of the trilobites were familiar from species he knew well from Canada, and especially Newfoundland, where they could be collected from similar-looking dark limestone. Clearly, this part of Spitsbergen demanded a proper geological investigation. A dedicated visit to Hinlopen Strait was planned as part of the 1967 expedition. A final-year student, Geoff Vallance, would be the lead geologist, and he needed a field assistant from the second year. That would be my job.
I used this expedition to Spitsbergen to introduce the concept of geological time in a book written more than twenty years ago. This trip also played a crucial part in my journey to science. If I had chosen to do something else in the summer of 1967 my life would have been very different. I only have to hear the Beatles’ anthem ‘All You Need is Love’ to be transported to a vast shingle beach at nearly 80 degrees north, where our tough Whymper tent hunkered down among the cobbles. This was our home for seven weeks of perpetual daylight. It sheltered us during periodic blizzards when we passed the time in our eiderdown sleeping bags reading The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace. We never removed our undergarments, which were old-fashioned woollen combinations. It had taken nearly two weeks to get to Hinlopen Strait, all the way up the coast of Norway, then across the raging Maelstrom to Bear Island in a decommissioned sealer, and on to Svalbard, where we changed to a small boat called Salterella that dodged the ice floes around the island to take us to our field area. There we were abandoned. The World Service of the BBC was our only link to the outside world; there were not even radio communications with other members of the expedition. Health and safety regulations would not allow such isolation in the twenty-first century. ‘All You Need is Love’ was Top of the Pops every week while we were encamped at the Top of the World. With a twiddle of a knob we could tune in to Radio Moscow, which promised the en
d of capitalism and the triumph of Marxist–Leninist ideology, but the English hit parade was what we waited for. White Arctic foxes snuffled around outside the tent for the leftovers from our meals, which were all boiled up from dried ingredients. We drank lemonade made up from crystals dissolved in the pure water of the melt stream next to the tent. A few years later that stream would be christened Profilbekken; it had never had a name before. The sharp cries of terns and the sinister mewing of Arctic skuas accompanied the slow suck of the waves against the shore to lull us into sleep (strictly, at ten o’clock) even though the light hardly dimmed. Routine was an effective antidote to feeling alone in a vast and hostile wilderness.[2]
A Curious Boy Page 20