by Meave Leakey
Adding to her hardships, my mother, Joe, struggled with her health, occasionally leaving me with Taya so she could recuperate in hospital. Joe’s father was a village postman and her mother the daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire tradesman. Both she and my maternal grandmother suffered from debilitating tuberculosis, which in those days had no known cure other than bracing fresh air. My grandmother was permanently confined to a shed in the garden, used her own cutlery and crockery, and never mixed with her children or society. It must have been truly dreadful for her—suffering from a painful and debilitating cough and bad chest, and being forced to live in isolation in England’s damp, drizzly outdoors as a cure!
When she was young and her own condition worsened, Joe was also sometimes confined to the garden shed. Her tuberculosis was not the more common pulmonary tuberculosis. Instead, it primarily affected her left knee joint, although sometimes she also had chest problems. As a child, she was an invalid, completely bedridden for the first twelve or thirteen years of her life. But this did not cow her independent spirit and strong sense of equality. My sister, Judy, recalls a story Joe would tell about when she was first able to leave her sick chamber. Not content with the tame diversions afforded by delivering the post to the villagers with her father in the pony and trap, she persuaded her brothers to take her sailing with them even though she could not yet swim. When her brothers were beaten soundly for their poor judgement, Joe pointed out that she ought to be beaten too. And so she was, albeit with a slipper.
By the time I knew my mother, she had a permanently stiff leg because of surgery. Although this made driving almost impossible for her, it did not visibly slow her down in other ways. She was not a healthy woman, but we never thought of her as frail. Throughout my childhood, she went to London to have annual checkups at Guy’s Hospital, and she would frequently pass out on these trips. It was her delicate health that prevented her from ever matriculating and ensured that her jobs were confined to tasks as an assistant, though she undoubtedly had much higher aspirations. This was probably a huge factor in why Joe pushed her own daughters’ education so strongly.
When I was four, my mother heard the all-too-familiar sound of my screams. “Mummy, Mummy, there is a huge man at the door!” I announced in terror, and promptly ran away to hide. The tall stranger standing at the door in his service uniform and holding a suitcase was an unexpected and initially unwelcome intrusion for me. It was my father. The war was finally over.
Soon after his return, my father completed his training, which had been interrupted by the war, and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Judy arrived in due course, providing me with a companion and playmate. After my father was fully qualified, he secured a position as an orthopaedic surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in Rochester, and we moved to a great big run-down Georgian house in Kent, which we called the White House. Judy was followed by my brother, Roger, five years later.
White House was a grand place to grow up. My parents had chosen the house because of its grounds, as my father wanted to try his hand at being a smallholder. It had a large garden with orchards of cherries, apples, and plums. We also grew raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, rhubarb, asparagus, mushrooms, and lots of other vegetables. Every week, we’d gather our produce in big baskets and send it to the Covent Garden market in London to sell. There were a series of Nissen huts left in our garden by the army, who had used the grounds during the war. These huge structures of corrugated sheet metal bent into arch-shaped enclosures were much like aircraft hangars. I am not sure what wartime purpose they originally had, perhaps dormitories for the troops, but they were ideal for cultivating mushrooms and housing pigs, geese, and chickens in peacetime. When I was eight or nine years old, I started my own microbusiness for pocket money. I incubated goose eggs and spent a fraught month nurturing the eggs until hatching day. Then I fattened the goslings and sent them to market. Along with my baby geese, I also kept a line of lambs, orphaned and passed on to me from neighbouring farmers.
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BUT FOR A CHILD, the best thing at White House was undoubtedly the garden with all its glorious trees. I spent hours climbing them and have since noticed how most children love to climb—no doubt a reflection of our arboreal primate ancestry.
On one occasion, the milkman knocked on the door. “Mr. Epps, your daughter is down the road up a tree and can’t come down again,” he said.
My father duly appeared and informed me that since I could climb up I could most certainly climb down again. After this valuable lesson, I became very adept at this pastime, spending many hours up in the soaring trees. The practice came to an end when my mother noticed me through the window perched high up a tall sycamore tree with a live electricity wire dangling perilously close.
It hadn’t taken me long to overcome my fear of the unfamiliar man who was my father. Despite being always extremely busy with work, my father was very good at making time for his children. Over the years, we spent a lot of time together on two joint hobbies—carpentry and photography. My father had studied joinery before he became a surgeon, and he was an excellent craftsman. He taught me how to do odd jobs around the house and insisted on good practice: “How many times do I tell you to hold the hammer at the end of the handle, that is what it is for!” And when I was sandpapering a piece of wood: “Wrap the sandpaper around a square piece of wood so that it has a flat base; you cannot sandpaper with your hand!”
We made bookshelves, a large desk, tables, and other pieces of furniture in his workshop in one of the outhouses at White House. We spent many happy hours developing photos in a small attic room we had converted into a dark room. My father also taught me how to sail and gave me my love of the sport.
My mother must have been terribly overworked trying to refurbish the huge shabby house, keep up the livestock and garden, and look after all of us while not enjoying the best of health. Along with our efforts at smallholding, my father also augmented his income with private patients. My mother recorded his dictated reports using her proficient shorthand skills then carefully typed up the patients’ reports required by the insurance companies. She made it seem easy. The house was always overflowing with flowers from her garden, the smells of her delicious cooking, and the sound of classical music from a windup gramophone. She was also a talented seamstress and made most of our clothes as well as her own, even stitching elaborate suits for her visits to London. And because of her unmatched hospitality, there was almost always somebody staying with us. We all had our chores to do, but the burden on my mother was the heaviest, and more often than not, she was worn out.
Deprived of her own opportunities for further learning, my mother encouraged us to take every opportunity to learn whatever we could. Joe wanted to travel and see the world, and she did everything in her power to help her children to do so, never allowing anything, including chauvinism, to stand in the way of our interests and ambitions. She encouraged us to travel overseas, and as a teenager, I spent my summer vacation in Italy as an au pair. While at university, I looked after three children for six weeks in the United States before taking time to see some of the great American highlights. In those days, it was possible to pay ninety-nine dollars for ninety-nine days’ travel anywhere in North America on a Greyhound bus, and so I did. My mother fully approved.
* * *
EVERY YEAR, we took a fortnight’s family holiday in Cornwall, and my mother enjoyed some well-earned rest. We rented a small Cornish cottage called Retalick in a secluded valley not far from the sea. My parents slept in the main cottage with my brother and sister, and I slept in a little hut in the garden. I loved the solitude and the sounds of the constantly gurgling stream that ran beside the hut. It was during these happy times that I fell in love with the sea, and the many fascinating animals that lived in the rock pools provided me with hours of entertainment and kindled my interest in marine biology. We spent many hours peering into the tidal pools, identifying the myriad creatures they contained, and reveling
in the natural beauty of the dramatic Cornish coast with its high cliffs, rough seas, and lonely beaches. My parents loved to surf, a passion they passed on to me, and we would ride the wonderful waves of the north Cornish coast on plywood boards my father fashioned for us.
When I was eleven, I was sent to a boarding school called Burgess Hill Parents’ National Educational Union School. The PNEU were a consortium of schools with a shared philosophy, conceived by Charlotte Mason, of turning out well-rounded individuals through a strong arts-and-music focus. Unfortunately, the school fell rather short in terms of academic rigor. One evening, shortly after I completed my O-level exams, my parents sat me down beside the fire in our living room.
“What is it that you’d like to do with your life?” my father asked.
Without hesitation, I replied, “Biology.”
It dawned on my mother with horror that the school only taught “general” science. This subject involved one lesson a week devoted to physics, chemistry, and biology and was totally inadequate for any student wishing to apply to university to study these subjects. Girls in those days were not expected to be scientists. Our science teacher was an uninspiring lady who frequently taught us erroneous “facts,” which I occasionally corrected, but more often than not, I kept quiet. The teacher never believed that my corrections were justified.
My sister was promptly moved to a different school, and I started attending a technical college, the Medway Towns Polytechnic, to do my A-levels in zoology, physics, chemistry, and an AO-level in maths. After the sheltered and closeted life at a girls’ boarding school, the freedom I enjoyed at the polytechnic was intoxicating. With the money I earned selling my lambs and working during summer holidays at a research lab run by Shell Chemicals, I had bought a rather ramshackle 1938 Morris 8 for the princely sum of twenty-five pounds. I refurbished this car myself using an old greenhouse in the garden with a sunken walkway running down the centre. It was ideal for my needs, as I could drive the little car directly into the greenhouse and use the central depression as my mechanic’s pit. The hard top came off the little black car, and once I had fitted a new engine, this was the perfect set of wheels. There were hardly any girls at the polytechnic, so we had our pick of consorts. Many of the male students were a racy lot from the Royal Engineers Corps. I enjoyed this imbalance, often favouring the boys with the fastest sports cars or the best knowledge of mechanics!
As far as I can recollect, I never had a curfew, and the door was never locked. But I am sure my mother used to lie awake until I was safely home in the evenings. She had good reason. One night I had retired to my bed in the attic when my mother was roused by somebody knocking at the door. One of my boyfriends was standing blearily on the step.
“Is Meave home?” he asked, too hopefully. He had woken up to find himself in his car in a ditch and, rather bravely and honourably, had thought it prudent to check if he had already brought me home before falling off the road and knocking himself out. Although I always thought my mother was very strict, I can see now that I enjoyed a remarkably free rein.
Most of the time I was far too busy studying for my A-levels to get into too much trouble. I was determined to become a marine biologist, and I needed the grades to get into university to do so. My hard work at the polytechnic paid off, and I was admitted to my first choice, the University of Bangor in North Wales, which had a famous marine biology program. Upon arrival, I was discouraged in the most strenuous terms, from pursuing a joint degree in marine biology and zoology. The lecturers thought this combination too challenging and rigorous a course load for even the brightest students.
I refused to be deterred. In fact, their policy to discourage students from the joint program worked entirely in my favour. I was the only student foolhardy enough to disregard their advice, and therefore I was the only undergraduate in marine biology classes levelled at the graduate students. The calibre of my fellow students and the quality of teaching was far superior to that in classes geared solely to undergraduates.
I loved it. The marine biology station was situated on Anglesey, a hunk of land separated from the rest of North Wales by the Menai Strait, a small channel of water running through a steep gorge. On Anglesey’s wild and desolate seashore, surf pounded against dramatic high cliffs, which rang with the cries of thousands of seabirds. Inland, the Welsh mountains offered endless hours of walks in wild country inhabited largely by sheep and the odd farmer. It was a spectacular place to live and study.
My first year, I had “digs” with a landlady who lived with her son. I shared a room with a highly religious arts student, Meghan, with whom I had little in common. She could never understand my total lack of belief in a god who had created all life and who kept a vigilant eye on each individual, saving them from the worst of life’s disasters. Initially, I spent fruitless hours trying to get her to understand the exquisite logic of evolution and see my point of view. In vain, I explained some of the amazing evolutionary transitions I was learning about in my lectures, such as when fish first evolved into tetrapods that walked on the land between 380 and 365 million years ago.
“You can see it all so clearly in the fossils! It’s amazing how their bodies changed over this time; the fishes’ fins became legs; the tetrapods evolved necks. Evolution makes so much sense if you look at all of life from single-celled animals to aquatic vertebrates to the first amphibian that crawled onto the land.”
“How could that be possible, God created everything in seven days, the Bible tells us this,” Meghan inevitably replied in disbelief.
“But, Meghan, you cannot take the Bible literally, seven days must not be interpreted literally, it really means billions of years,” I would respond. “It is just that whoever first made a written record of the Bible in 400 BC, or whenever it was, had no idea about evolution, so how could they write about it?”
“Because it is not true, of course!”
These discussions never led anywhere, and we eventually confined our conversations to more mundane topics.
After my first year, I moved with three other students to an apartment that overlooked the Menai Strait. Here, with my own room and able to cook my own meals, I had more freedom as I shuttled between my oceanography classes on Anglesey and my zoology classes at the main Bangor campus. I bought a scooter, which I rather reluctantly replaced my Morris 8 with to save money. This gave me ready access to explore the beauty of the Welsh countryside and the shores of Anglesey.
My zoology courses featured an abundance of both eccentric and excellent lecturers, perhaps the most colourful being a character named Mr. Jackson. Although he was hugely knowledgeable, he never had lesson plans and never knew what he would teach prior to each lecture. Instead, he brought handfuls of newspaper clippings to class and taught from the subject that happened to be on top of the pile. Inevitably, his lectures were a string of amusing and fascinating stories about natural history but had little to do with our required syllabus.
In total contrast was the man who would become my mentor. Dr. Robert McNeill Alexander was a brilliant evolutionary biologist who taught us palaeontology and evolution. He specialised in functional morphology—why the way we use parts of our bodies affects their shape. He was always bringing models to class to demonstrate a point and would sometimes illustrate the functional principles by climbing on the desk and moving his limbs. He was the only lecturer whose lessons were so well planned that he brought us a sheet of notes, which meant that we gave him our undivided attention rather than scribbling frantically.
As graduation from Bangor neared, I spent a number of weeks fruitlessly applying for jobs as a marine biologist. My interest in the subject went beyond my love of the sea. At that time, little was known about the oceans. They felt to me like the final frontier of exploration and a wonderful opportunity to do something very novel and useful with my career. I wrote to all the main marine research stations in the United States and Great Britain, but I kept running into the same roadblock at every turn. I would rec
eive polite but short replies thanking me for my interest that went on to say, “We regret that we cannot accommodate female scientists aboard our ships.”
My gender, which I had never really considered before, was a far larger obstacle than I had ever realised. Reluctant to give up my dreams but impatient to have my own job and start a career, I was becoming ever more frustrated. Eventually, I came to the realization that my chances of finding a job on a boat were terribly slim and that I would need to consider alternatives.
At Bangor, I enjoyed the friendship and attentions of a number of young men. It was one of them, a friend named John, who alerted me to an advert on the back cover of the Times. Given how seasick I always get and how rich my career on dry land ended up being, I suppose this twist of fate turned out to be a very positive one, although I certainly didn’t see it that way at the time. The advert invited applicants for a research position in Kenya at the Tigoni Primate Research Centre and listed a telephone number. I halfheartedly picked up a handful of coins, walked down the street to the red public phone box, and dialled the number printed in the newspaper.
Louis Leakey was sitting in London waiting impatiently for the phone to ring. In his characteristically breathless voice, he immediately began peppering me with questions, hardly waiting for an answer.
“You must come to London for an interview.”
“When can you be here?”
“I can explain to you then what we would like you to do.”
“Have you ever been to Africa?”
“Will you be able to work in Kenya?
“When will you be free to get away?”
I didn’t think he would ever stop talking—and he hadn’t even told me the details of his London address. When I had grabbed a handful of coins for the phone call, I had not counted them or noted their value. I frantically fed my diminishing pile of small change into the hungry call box and desperately hoped that it would last until I had secured the essential details of when and where to meet him.