by Giles Foden
The animal wore a harness, behind which it dragged a wretched tangle of reins. Gulls began to circle above the herring and the sandwich.
“We must do something about those reins,” said the man called Julius.
“Soon there won’t be any,” said Pyke. He turned to me. “Sea creatures, Mr Meadows, are far more intelligent than we realise. Especially the whiskered mammals. And the dolphins, of course.”
Lev reached the top of the stone stairway. Pyke gave him a fish. He lay at our feet, raising his black, sleepy-looking eyes to us as he chewed, slapping his tail on the slabs in what seemed like satisfaction. His thick hairy coat was covered with glistening droplets. He had extraordinarily long ear-lobes, which made him look as though he were wearing a Tibetan hat.
“How can we help?” continued Pyke. “I say ‘we’—in fact I’m the only person from Combined Ops up here at present. Julius is just helping out for a few days. But if you have a specific problem…” He began unclipping the reins from the harness. “Discoveries, isn’t it, Lev, my lad? That’s what we’re after. At least, that’s the plan.”
“Discoveries cannot be planned,” said the shaven-headed don, in a tone of only half-jovial reprimand. “They tend to show in the most unexpected places.” He had an accent. I later learned his surname was Brecher. He was one of those German scientists, many of them Jews, who had fled Nazi persecution.
“That may be, Julius. But perhaps we should turn our attention to more pertinent matters, like how can we be of assistance to our man from the Met. What are you working on?”
I told them a little about my work in fluid dynamics and at the Met Office, mentioning in passing Ryman’s method of applying differential calculus to the physical quantities of weather. Pyke had already heard of it. Then Brecher said much could be learned about biological systems from studying them mathematically in a similar way. “In all these disciplines there is a flux of identification and differentiation, as the system seeks rules by which to govern itself. The system’s own context is part of that. Think of the relationship between blood flowing in a capillary and the other tissue around it.”
When I knew Brecher in later years—we would often play billiards in the Baron of Beef in Cambridge—I would come to recognise such statements as typical. Of all the brilliant men I met during that peculiar wartime winter, he was the most able to express his ideas with philosophical cogency. But in the end it was always blood with Brecher. I don’t know how many times I saw his serious, energetic demeanour bent down over the cue, or listened over the click of the balls to him giving voice to some theory of the blood.
I tried to ignore him because it was all so seductive. I mean biology: you have to keep some areas of intellectual enquiry off-limits, pretending they are an uninteresting lumber room off to the left.
Otherwise you end up wandering down a maze of interconnecting caves until you enter the cavern of the central mystery. A place filled with sublime terror, where there is regularity but no fixed criteria for judging it; a place where you know the terms in which the mystery might be stated but not what it actually is. I suppose knowing the horror of this is the price of the relativity Ryman and other more famous thinkers have bought for humankind.
At the time I had no such fears. “I’m actually hoping to work with Ryman,” I said. “He lives up here. I wondered if you had come into contact with him. Sir Peter Vaward, our director, said you may be able to help me in this regard.”
Pyke’s eyes widened. “Ryman…yes, I knew he was in these parts. The king of turbulence! I once went to a fascinating seminar he gave—we were at Cambridge together—but I’ve never met him socially. Not sure I can be of any use to you.” He knelt down and rubbed the sea lion behind the ears. “I thought Ryman was a conscientious objector, anyway. Wouldn’t have anything to do with the war. How come he’s letting you work with him?”
“It’s a bit complicated,” I said, thinking on my feet.
“Mind you, I might need your help myself,” said Pyke. “With a fluid dynamics problem…”
“Involving sea lions?” I asked, bemused.
Pyke laughed. “No. Another project. Lev works in all weathers.”
The animal opened its mouth to display a ferocious looking set of teeth. “He can see in low light, which allows him to dive very deeply.” I looked doubtfully into the sea-lion’s cloudy eyes.
“There’s another team training dolphins, down in Devon,” his trainer continued. “At Ilfracombe. Teaching them to carry tools to divers. They’re also using them for hydrodynamic studies, to improve the performance of torpedoes. Lev here, his job will be to find mines on ships and be a prophylactic against attacks by frogmen.” Pyke talked very freely, I thought again.
The sea lion roared, as if in appreciation of his master’s voice. It was a spine-tingling noise at such close quarters and the beast’s breath did not exactly make you want to kiss it. But when he flapped his Tibetan ears, all the fearsomeness went out of him.
“Toss him another herring, Julius,” said Pyke.
The other man did so. “Human and animal in perfect harmony,” he said as he threw it.
“Julius is an idealist,” said Pyke. “But now and then he stoops to earth. He’s using crystallography to uncover the structure of haemoglobin. The secret of life is hidden there, isn’t it so, Julius?”
Brecher pulled a face, then shrugged.
“In blood?” I prompted.
“In blood,” said Brecher. “And other proteins. Cells in general. After the war it will be the job of scientists to unlock that secret more fully. We will be like explorers looking for a new continent.”
“Inspiring, isn’t he?” said Pyke, slapping Brecher on the back. “I keep asking him to join Combined Ops, but he won’t. Why don’t you come to Canada with me, Julius, to work on Habbakuk?”
“Habbakuk?” I asked.
“Ah, sorry, old chap, that’s the other project. Can’t say too much about it right now. But as I say, we might need a fluid dynamics man. I’ll bear you in mind as there don’t seem to be that many people about with a grasp of these issues.”
Suddenly Lev roared again. He leaped into the water, springing off with all four flippers, causing an enormous splash. With a valedictory turn of the head and a last look at us from his deep black eyes, he disappeared. I wondered why he should not do so for ever, but I suppose sea lions, just like humans, become inured to patterns of behaviour.
“Yes,” Pyke replied, when I asked if he came back because they fed him. “But I like to think there is affection there, too.”
“Cupboard love,” said Brecher.
“Your English is improving,” said Pyke.
Brecher laughed. “Let us go for a drink, my friend.” He turned to me, the aerial wafting above his head like a giant wizard’s wand. “You will come? There is a good pub just up the hill.”
Pyke picked up the half-finished sandwich and tossed it into the air, where a gull swooped on it. At once I was back on Lake Nyasa, where, out in our boat, my father used to wave chambo that were too small to eat up at the fish eagle, who would lift from his hieroglyphic lakeside tree and break magnificently out of the sublimely blue sky to receive the gift full toss. Chambo is like a perch or bream, but there are plenty of others to choose from: there are more species of fish in Nyasa than any other lake on earth.
But it was by Loch Eck that Brecher knelt down to gather the sea lion’s reins, and the rare fish in that place was powan or freshwater herring, the descendant of saltwater cousins trapped in the loch when glacial moraines blocked the route to the sea. Looking back, I don’t know which type were the fish we fed the sea lion. I hope it was not that survivor from the age of neanderthal caverns.
“You can bring that,” Pyke said, pointing at the crate containing what Lev had not consumed. “I’ll have some for supper. Actually, they serve pickled ones in the pub, if you’re hungry. Roll-mops.”
So I picked up the crate and we walked away from the quay up a ste
epish hill. On the way, Brecher told me more about his work with crystals, but what I found myself thinking about again was Gwen and Joan’s painting. I think it was that the notion of herring roll-mops reminded me of the picture’s curling dog-tails and breaker tops…
How foolish I was about those two, how foolish I was altogether. In days since I have often read about Liss and Lamb in the papers. I saw them in London a couple of times, at their house in Limerstone Street in Chelsea, and once in the 1960s they dropped in on me in Cambridge and we had tea in my rooms. They were exuberantly dressed in kaftans and beads and taffeta skirts. I remember one of the porters staring at me in surprise from under the rim of his bowler hat as we walked across Trinity Great Court.
We must have made another strange trio, coming up from Loch Eck to the pub: Pyke carrying the tangle of leather; Brecher with the radio on his back; me with a herring crate. Perhaps Joan was right about scientists. We can seem odd to others—but the truth is that like any part of society we are a mixed bunch.
The pub was called the Whistlefield Inn. A sign outside showed an old-time drover with his sheep. Pushing open the door, we were immediately surrounded by company: ancient locals in shabby brown jackets, white shirts and Wellington boots, and a number of young men with short hair, dressed in US Navy uniforms.
As well as the ornamental bronzes to be found in most pubs there were buoys, lobster pots, fishing nets, coils of rope and other, stranger objects hung from the ceiling and walls, such as a blunderbuss, a trombone, a sailor’s cutlass and a brass deep-sea diver’s helmet. There was even a small pram. There were framed brocades and unframed oil paintings, all sorts of ivories and other colonial monstrosities, carved from stone and wood, and shelf after shelf of old books covered with dust.
“I love the chaos of this place,” said Pyke. “There is always something else for the eye to settle upon. You two get us a pew.”
We shouldered our way through. The locals of the Cowal were talking loudly in soft Scottish accents, emitting vast clouds of smoke from distended cheeks as they spoke. The sailors, murmuring in low tones, were bent over their pints of heavy, staring at the contents—which resembled molasses or motor oil—with consternation.
Pyke, Brecher and I sat down to drink more of the same. I noticed a wooden tailor’s dummy standing in a corner of the room, unclothed except for a Kitchener-era helmet and—a recent addition in honour of the town’s guests—a Stars and Stripes flag over its shoulders. There was also an unusual ebony cabinet with two serpents painted on its doors, their heads facing each other and their bodies joining and separating at intervals in the design.
“The caduceus,” said Pyke, seeing me study the conjoined serpents through the smoke. “A symbol of the opposing forces of the universe. The endless dance of life. It’s why the best solution to any problem is always to be found in the most extreme form of the contradiction that constitutes the problem.”
He drew a figure 8 with his finger in some foam which had spilled on the table. The number disappeared before it had been written.
“Eight. Or infinity. The snake that chases its tail. Probably the most important number in the universe, eight. Don’t you think so, Julius?”
“I think the universe is pretty oblivious to what we think important or not,” came the reply.
The discussion continued, as pub discussions do, in desultory fashion. Describing his research, Brecher mentioned the passage of rhesus antibodies from mother to baby in the blood. Individuals either have or do not have the rhesus protein on the surface of their red blood cells.
“There may be danger to the fetus when the mother is rhesus negative and the father is rhesus positive,” he said. “The first pregnancy might run smoothly, but it becomes problematic with each subsequent one, as maternal antibodies attack the rhesus-positive child. Sadly, these mothers may never carry a child to term. They tend to miscarry earlier and earlier.”
“Rhesus was king of Thrace,” Pyke said gravely, with beer on his moustache. “Came to a bad end by not staying on the qui vive.”
At some point or other in the winding course of the conversation I quizzed Pyke about a subject—for I was innocent of it then—which had been puzzling me since we were down on the quay. I felt it was only fair, since I had filled them in on Ryman.
“Tell me about Habbakuk,” I said. “You mentioned it before.”
“Habakkuk,” said Pyke, “—with a b and three k’s—is the name of a prophet in the Old Testament.”
“A magus,” said Brecher.
“A wonder worker,” said Pyke, slurring.
“For I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.”
They both laughed, as if in recognition of some private joke.
“On the other hand,” said Brecher, “Habbakuk—with two bs and two ks—isn’t.”
They both laughed again.
Cross at being shut out like this, feeling as if I was being pulled down by some Lev-like creature into a swirling sea of alcohol, I abruptly made my excuses and left. The wind had got up and the sign outside the pub was creaking as it swung to and fro. I stumbled down to the quay and rode steadily back to Kilmun on the motorbike, grateful for the freshening air on my face.
On the way I passed a lorry carrying timber down from the hills. There were steel chutes like the one by Mackellar’s field all round these parts. A trio of foresters sat on the long logs on top of the lorry, the wind fluttering their hair and the green fabric of their overalls. When I got home, night had fallen. All along the Holy Loch, searchlights were probing long fingers of light across the water.
Ten
‘Home’, of course, was the cot-house in the field. Throat wooden, head buzzing from the beer, I threw myself onto the bed. As the clouds passed over the moon up beyond my uncurtained window, I thought of Lev the sea lion, Habakkuk the prophet—and again of Ryman, that other prophet whom I had not yet met.
Through the window’s film of moisture I watched the blue-grey clouds perform their intermittent veiling of the moon—restlessly gleaming and quivering, sometimes seeming to streak the darkness, sometimes to be streaked with it.
Lying there, staring at that deceptive dance of light and shade, my thoughts passed to my own old home…How once my mother had opened the door to our holiday cottage on Zomba mountain and a snake had shot out from under the draught⁄dust-excluder—some piece of vulcanised rubber, scuffed leather, something, nailed to the bottom of the rickety old door. Our dog Vickers chased off in pursuit.
There is a snake in every childhood. But mostly we had happy times. At harvest time I liked nothing more as a young boy than going to the tobacco auctions in Blantyre with my father, watching the great yellow bales he had grown and gathered being unloaded and sold. The auctioneers were mostly South Africans or Rhodesians. As they talked the prices up and down in the argot of the auction room, it was like listening to a strange music.
Once the sales were over we would go to the club in Limbe and I would drink a glass of squash while father had whisky and soda with his chums, their talk largely of the turn of the tobacco, which was not its curling leaf but the difference between the buying and selling price, and who would win next month’s cup at the races over in Salisbury. In those days people travelled about Rhodesia, Northern and Southern, and Nyasaland itself as if they were a single country.
There were wooden ceiling fans spinning as these discussions took place, moving the air around us. I remember these made a big impression on me. I wonder sometimes if they were the source of my interest in turbulence, but that probably had much more to do with the African weather—something emerging darkly from the apron of stirring cloud which tumbled off the edge of Zomba mountain plateau. Zomba and Mulanje are Nyasaland’s two great mountains. We visited both, to get away from the flat expanses of tobacco fields near Kasungu, and to escape the heat.
In later years, as the tobacco price rose, my father could afford to buy a cottage on Zomba. It was a green
-painted building hidden halfway up the mountain in a grove of tall trees. What I remember most fondly is the preparation to go there, back in Kasungu, the antecedent excitement of my mother packing cardboard boxes with provisions, my father putting bullets into the magazine of a hunting rifle, or preparing his fishing flies for the trout streams. There was water everywhere on Zomba. It was like a giant scoop or sponge sucking down the storms that pressed up from Lake Nyasa, with thousands of trickles and streams running through the forest, keeping everything in a luxuriant, dark-green harmony.
Other times we would go to Nkhotakhota, or Monkey Bay, and other places along the long strip of Lake Nyasa itself. It was called the calendar lake because it was 356 miles long and 52 miles wide. Sometimes we used to travel on a dented white steamer called the Ilala, which carried passengers and cargo up and down the kingfisher-blue expanse.
On one voyage to Monkey Bay, Vickers went crazy, leaping off the ship into the water in pursuit of some goats and chickens that were being unloaded into canoes. Rhodesian ridge-backs are good swimmers, and ours swam all the way to the shore and disappeared. With the help of some good-natured fishermen who were sitting cross-legged mending their nets, we eventually found him at sunset, running about on the sand with piebald dogs from the villages. They were all barking and jumping over each other, as if they had gathered for a celebration. The image has always stuck in my memory.
There were often waterspouts on Lake Nyasa—vast moving pillars of air and water whirling about a low-pressure core. They seem like divine manifestations but share, scientifically speaking, the characteristics of both the tornado that wreaks such violence in the United States and the street eddy that in cities across the world turns up leaves and dust and paper into a recognisable column. I could watch such visitations all day—they are hypnotic—but the event which was to determine my future interest in weather took place, as I say, in Zomba, in 1931. I was fifteen years old, and the first I knew of it was Vickers barking outside, followed by a sound in the distance, like a waterfall. Then one of my mother’s pickle jars trembled on a shelf in the cottage, before falling to the stone floor and smashing. I realised there was something wrong with the light coming in through the window.