An Appetite for Wonder

by Richard Dawkins

  The duties of bell boy and fag were such that it is a wonder we new boys got any work done at all, let alone succeeded in ‘breaking the back of the term’s work’. Fagging has now been abolished, I think in all English schools. But I remain at a loss as to why it was ever permitted in the first place, and why it lasted as long as it did. In the nineteenth century there was a weird belief that it had some kind of educational value. Perhaps its long persistence had something to do with the ‘I went through it in my time so why shouldn’t you?’ mentality – a mentality that is still, incidentally, the bane of many a junior doctor’s life in Britain.

  Not entirely surprisingly, my stammer resurfaced in my early terms at Oundle. I had trouble with hard consonants like ‘D’ and ‘T’ and it was unfortunate that my surname begins with one of them, for it was often necessary to enunciate it. When we had tests in class, we had to tick our correct answers, count the ticks and then shout out the tally, out of ten, for the master to record in his book. When I got ten out of ten, I used to call out ‘nine’ because it was so much easier to say than ‘t-t-t-ten’. In the army Cadet Corps we were to be inspected by a visiting general. One by one we would have to march out from the ranks, stamp to attention in front of him, shout our name, salute, smart about turn and march back. ‘Cadet Dawkins, sir!’ I dreaded it. I had sleepless nights about it. It was fine to practise by myself, but when I had to shout it out in front of the whole parade? ‘Cadet D-d-d-d-d . . .’ In the event, it passed off all right, with just a long, hesitating pause before the D.

  The Cadet Corps was not quite compulsory. You could get out of it if you joined the Boy Scouts. Or the other way out was to spend the time tilling the land with Boggy Cartwright. In a previous book I described Mr Cartwright as ‘a remarkable, bushy-browed man, who called a spade a spade and was seldom seen without one’. Although paid to teach us German, what he actually taught us, in a slow, rural accent, was a kind of earthy, agricultural eco-wisdom. His blackboard permanently had the word ‘Ecology’ written on it and if anybody erased it when he wasn’t looking he promptly rewrote it without saying a word. When writing German on the blackboard, if a sentence threatened to overwrite ‘Ecology’, he would cause the German sentence to flow around and over it. He once caught a boy reading P. G. Wodehouse and furiously tore the book clean in two. He had evidently bought into the calumny – assiduously fostered by Cassandra of the Daily Mirror – that Wodehouse had been a German collaborator during the war, on a par with Lord Haw-Haw or – the American equivalent – Tokyo Rose. But Mr Cartwright had the story even more garbled than Cassandra’s slander. ‘Wodehouse once had the opportunity to kick a German colonel downstairs, and he didn’t take it.’ That makes him sound like an angry man. He really wasn’t, except under extreme provocation, which, bizarrely, P. G. Wodehouse (he said ‘Woadhouse’ instead of the correct ‘Woodhouse’) seems to have constituted. He was just a wonderfully original character, ahead of his time in his ecological eccentricity, slow-spoken and literally down to earth.

  I was not enterprising enough to get out of the Cadet Corps by either of the two escape routes. I was probably too influenced by my peers – which actually was the story of my life at Oundle. Eventually I got out of the worst parts of army training by joining the band, playing first the clarinet and then the saxophone, conducted by a bandsman NCO: ‘Right, we’ll go from the very commencement of the ‘ole march.’ Of course, being in the band didn’t get us out of the weekly duty of polishing our army boots, blanco-ing our belts and shining our brasses with Duraglit or Brasso. And we had to go to army camp once a year, living in the barracks of some regiment or other, going on long route marches and fighting mock battles with blank ammunition in our antiquated Lee-Enfield rifles. We also fired live rounds at targets, and one boy in my platoon accidentally shot the adjutant in the fleshy part of the leg. He fell to the ground and immediately lit a cigarette, while we witnesses, still on the ground with our Bren guns, felt very queasy.

  On one expedition to the Leicester barracks we were exposed to a real sergeant major, the genuine article complete with huge, waxed ginger moustache. He would bellow, ‘Seeerloooooope ARMS’ or ‘Ordeeeeeer ARMS’, the first word in each case being a bass and prolonged bellow, while the second word was a staccato – and absurdly high – soprano shriek. We suppressed our laughter into terrified snorts, in the manner of Pontius Pilate’s soldiers in the Monty Python ‘Biggus Dickus’ scene.

  We had to pass an examination called Certificate A, which involved rote learning of army knowledge: an exercise clearly designed to suppress anything remotely resembling intelligence or initiative – commodities not valued in the ranks of general infantry. ‘How many kinds of trees do we have in the army?’ The correct answer was three: Fir, Poplar and Bushy Top (the poet Henry Reed picked up on this point, but our drill sergeants would not have appreciated his satire).

  Peer pressure among schoolchildren is notoriously strong. I and many of my companions were abject victims of it. Our dominant motivation for doing anything was peer pressure. We wanted to be accepted by our fellows, especially the influential natural leaders among us; and the ethos of my peers was – until my last year at Oundle – anti-intellectual. You had to pretend to be working less hard than you actually were. Native ability was respected; hard work was not. It was the same on the sports field. Sportsmen were admired more than scholars in any case. But if you could achieve sporting brilliance without training, so much the better. Why is native ability more admired than hard graft? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Evolutionary psychologists might have interesting things to say on the question.

  But such missed opportunities! There were all sorts of exciting clubs and societies, any of which I could have joined with benefit. There was an observatory with a telescope – perhaps the gift of an old boy – and I never went near it. Why not? I would be enthralled to do so now, to be instructed by a knowledgeable astronomer with a real telescope that I didn’t have to set up myself. I sometimes think schooldays are too good to be wasted on teenagers. Perhaps devoted teachers, instead of casting their pearls before piglets, should be given the opportunity to teach pupils old enough to appreciate their beauty.

  For me at Oundle, the biggest missed opportunity of all lay in the workshops, which were my father’s main reason for sending me to the school in the first place. It wasn’t entirely my fault. Sanderson’s unique innovation of a compulsory week in the workshops was still in full swing, and the workshops were superbly well equipped. We learned how to use lathes, milling machines and other advanced machine tools which we would be unlikely to meet in the big world outside. What we did not learn was precisely what my father was so good at: improvising, designing, making do and coping, knocking things up from what was available – in his case, mostly red binder twine and dirty old bits of iron.

  The first thing we made in the Oundle workshops was a ‘marking gauge’. We weren’t even told what a marking gauge was. We copied exactly what the instructors told us to do. We made a wooden pattern for the metal object we were trying to make. We took it into the foundry and made a mould of our wooden pattern by pounding sticky sand around it. We donned protective goggles and assisted in pouring molten aluminium from a glowing crucible into the mould. We disinterred the cooled metal from the sand and took it to the metalwork shop to file it, drill it and finish it. And we took home our finished marking gauge, still with no idea what a marking gauge was and having used no initiative or creativity of any kind. We might as well have been workers in a mass production factory.

  And part of the problem may indeed have been that the instructors were not teachers but were recruited – I’m guessing – from the ranks of factory floor foremen. They taught us not how to develop skills in general, but how to do particular things. I met the problem again when I took professional driving lessons in the town of Banbury. I was taught how to reverse round a particular corner in Banbury, which happened to be the favourite corner the examiner headed for when testing tha
t particular skill: ‘Wait till that lamp-post is level with the back window, then swing hard around.’

  The one exception in the Oundle workshops, the one partial upholder of the Sanderson tradition for me, was an old retired blacksmith who manned a little forge in a corner of the metal shop. I hived myself off from the ‘factory floor’ and apprenticed myself to this kindly, bespectacled little old man. He taught me the traditional arts of the smith, plus acetylene welding, and my mother still has the poker I made, sitting in its scrolled stand. Even with the old smith, however, I pretty much did exactly what I was told, rather than exercising much creative resourcefulness.

  A bad workman blames his tools – and his instructors. What was definitely my own fault is that I never went near the workshops except during the prescribed week. I didn’t seize the opportunity to go in the evenings and make things to my own design. Just as I didn’t go to the observatory to look at the stars. Mostly I wasted my spare time in the same way my colleagues did, lazing around, making toast on a Primus stove and listening to Elvis Presley. Plus, in my case, tootling on musical instruments rather than playing real music. Such a waste of first-class, expensively bought opportunities is little short of tragic. Once again, is school too good for teenagers?

  I did, however, join the beekeeping club, run by Ioan Thomas, Oundle’s inspiring young zoology master, and the smell of beeswax and smoke still evokes happy memories. Happy in spite of the fact that I was quite frequently stung. On one such occasion (I am mildly proud to report) I didn’t brush the bee off my hand but carefully watched as she slowly waltzed round and round on my hand, ‘unscrewing’ her sting from my skin. The stings of bees, unlike those of wasps, are barbed. When a bee stings a mammal, the barbs cause the sting to stick in the skin. When you brush the bee off, the sting stays behind and tears out some of the bee’s vital organs. From an evolutionary point of view, the individual worker bee is behaving altruistically, sacrificing her life as a kamikaze fighter for the benefit of the hive (strictly speaking, for the benefit of the genes that programmed her to do it, in the form of copies in queens and males). While she goes off to die, her sting remains in the victim, the poison gland still pumping venom and therefore acting as a more effective deterrent to the putative hive-raider. This makes perfect evolutionary sense, and I’ll return to the theme in the chapter on The Selfish Gene. Given that she is sterile, the worker bee has no chance of passing on copies of her genes via offspring, so instead she works to pass them on via the queen and other non-sterile members of the hive. When I let my worker unscrew herself from my hand I was behaving altruistically towards her – but my motivation was mostly curiosity: I wanted to watch at first hand the procedure I had heard about from Mr Thomas.

  I’ve mentioned Ioan Thomas in previous publications. My very first lesson with him, at the age of fourteen, was inspirational. I don’t remember the details, but it conveyed the kind of atmosphere I was later to strive for in Unweaving the Rainbow: what I would now call ‘science as the poetry of reality’. He had come to Oundle as a very young teacher because of his admiration for Sanderson, although he was too young to have met that old headmaster. He did meet Sanderson’s successor, Kenneth Fisher, and told a story showing that something of the spirit of Sanderson had lived on. I retold the tale in my inaugural Oundle Lecture, given in 2002.

  Kenneth Fisher was chairing a staff meeting when there was a timid knock on the door and a small boy came in: ‘Please, sir, there are Black Terns down by the river.’ ‘This can wait,’ said Fisher decisively to the assembled committee. He rose from the Chair, seized his binoculars from the door and cycled off in the company of the small ornithologist, and – one can’t help imagining – with the benign, ruddy-faced ghost of Sanderson beaming in their wake. Now that’s education – and to hell with your league table statistics, your fact-stuffed syllabuses and your endless roster of exams . . .

  Some 35 years after Sanderson’s death, I recall a lesson about Hydra, a small denizen of still freshwater. Mr Thomas asked one of us: ‘What animal eats Hydra?’ The boy made a guess. Non-committally, Mr Thomas turned to the next boy, asking him the same question. He went right round the entire class, with increasing excitement asking each one of us by name, ‘What animal eats Hydra? What animal eats Hydra?’ And one by one we guessed. By the time he had reached the last boy, we were agog for the true answer. ‘Sir, sir, what animal does eat Hydra?’ Mr Thomas waited until there was a pin-dropping silence. Then he spoke, slowly and distinctly, pausing between each word.

  ‘I don’t know . . .’ (Crescendo) ‘I don’t know . . .’ (Molto crescendo) ‘And I don’t think Mr Coulson knows either.’ (Fortissimo) ‘Mr Coulson! Mr Coulson!’

  He flung open the door to the next classroom and dramatically interrupted his senior colleague’s lesson, bringing him into our room. ‘Mr Coulson, do you know what animal eats Hydra?’ Whether some wink passed between them I couldn’t say, but Mr Coulson played his part well: he didn’t know. Again the fatherly shade of Sanderson chuckled in the corner, and none of us will have forgotten that lesson. What matters is not the facts but how you discover and think about them: education in the true sense, very different from today’s assessment-mad exam culture.

  Those two occasions, when I fancifully invoked the ghost of a long-dead headmaster, have been held up as showing that I must be in some sense a supernaturalist. Of course they show nothing of the kind. Such imagery should perhaps be called poetic. It is legitimate so long as it clearly is understood to be non-literal. I hope the context of those two quotations is sufficiently clear to obviate misunderstanding. Problems arise when (especially) theologians use such metaphorical language without realizing that that is what they are doing, and without even realizing that there is a distinction between metaphor and reality – saying something like: ‘It is not important whether Jesus really fed the five thousand. What matters is what the idea of the story means to us.’ Actually it is important, because millions of devout people do believe the Bible is literally true. I hope and trust that no reader thinks I believe Sanderson really was standing in the corner beaming at Mr Thomas’s lesson.

  Our lesson on Hydra was the scene of a slightly embarrassing story, but I should tell it as it might be revealing. Mr Thomas asked us whether any of us had seen Hydra before. I think I was the only boy to put his hand up. My father had an old brass microscope, and we had spent a lovely day a few years earlier looking at hugely magnified pond life: mostly crustaceans such as Cyclops, Daphnia and Cypris, but also Hydra. I had regarded the slowly waving, almost plant-like Hydra as rather dull compared with the crustaceans, leggy and vigorously kicking. Hydra was the least exciting memory of that memorable day, and I think I snobbishly looked down upon all the attention that Mr Thomas was giving to it in that lesson. So, when he asked me for more details of my previous encounter with Hydra, I said: ‘I’ve seen all those sorts of animals.’ To Mr Thomas, of course, Cyclops, Daphnia and Cypris were not at all the same sort of animal as Hydra, but to me they were because I had seen them all on the same day with my father, and so lumped them together. Mr Thomas probably suspected that I hadn’t seen Hydra at all, and he cross-examined me closely. I am sorry to say that this had exactly the wrong effect on me. Perhaps I took his cross-questioning as some sort of slur on my father, who had introduced me to ‘all those sorts of animals’ and told me their Latin names. I obstinately dug in my toes and, instead of saying, clearly and unequivocally (and truthfully), that I had indeed seen Hydra, I persisted in my refusal to separate it from ‘all those sorts of animals’. Embarrassing to recall. Revealing? Maybe, but I don’t know of what. Perhaps it was connected with the fierce loyalty that I felt towards all things associated with my parents, whether it was Ferguson tractors (‘Dirty old Fordson!’) or Jersey cows (‘Friesians don’t give milk, they give water’).

  Mr Thomas having introduced me to beekeeping, I was able to carry on with the hobby in the school holidays when my father’s eccentric old schoolfriend Hugh Corley gave
me a hive. They were a wonderfully docile strain which literally never stung, and I used to work them without veil or gloves. Unfortunately they were later poisoned by insecticide wafting over from a neighbour’s field. Mr Corley, passionate organic farmer and early eco-warrior, was outraged and gave me another hive. Unfortunately these went to the opposite extreme – undoubtedly a genetic difference – and stung everything that moved. I didn’t react badly to stings in those days. But I wonder whether those many stings in my boyhood sensitized me to stings in later life. I have been stung only twice as an adult, once in my forties and once in my fifties, and on both occasions I reacted strangely and in a way that never happened when I was an active beekeeper. The region around one eye swelled up hugely, so that I could scarcely see. Why the eye, given that the stings were respectively on hand and foot? And, especially, why only one eye?