A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  Abereiddy Bay was more conventional seaside, wide and gentle compared with Porth-y-rhaw, with a proper beach partly covered with flattened discs of weathered black shale. Beyond it, to the north, a huge ‘slate’ quarry had carved out a great bowl deep into the cliffs. It is now full of seawater and known as the Blue Lagoon by water-sport enthusiasts and wild swimmers; it was the site of a spectacular landslide in 2018. Derelict buildings made of piled ‘slate’ lend the place a certain air of romance. Everything about the rocky cliffs is dark, almost brooding. The black rocks are Ordovician in age – the period after the Cambrian – which was a time when marine life radiated into many ecological niches that are still occupied today. When I went to Abereiddy as a youth almost every flat pebble on the beach yielded graptolites when it was split apart. The shales were sometimes a little like piled sheaves of papers that could be parted into single thin layers. The graptolites were not subtle fossils; they were startlingly white against the black background of the rock, and on some surfaces they were so abundant that they smeared into one another. The largest specimens were a couple of inches long at most. The commonest species looked like the tuning fork that was carried by every choirmaster to give a pure tone when it was struck. The inner surface of the ‘fork’ had a finely serrated edge, and a closer look revealed that each serration was actually the end of an inclined tube, now flattened on to the rock surface. It did not take me very long to add specimens of Didymograptus murchisoni to my collection – the only problem this time was that I had to decide which ones to reject.

  Graptolites were part of the ancient plankton, floating around the world in the Ordovician seas. They were colonial animals. The little tubes were formerly occupied by tiny creatures (called ‘zooids’), that fed on microscopic algae and larvae. There could be dozens of zooids in one graptolite. While trilobites were obviously part of the great phylum Arthropoda – the jointed-legged animals that include living insects, crustaceans and spiders – the place of graptolites in the tree of life was debated for decades. Now they are known to be distant relatives of an obscure living animal phylum called Hemichordata, with a few living examples encrusting pebbles and succeeding very well in being inconspicuous. Their days as graptolites marked the zenith of their evolution, when they would have been both conspicuous and ubiquitous. The seas thronged with their drifting colonies. Just in Abereiddy Bay there must have been millions of them preserved in the dark shale. I imagined clots of dead graptolites sinking into the depths to a place where nothing else survived, there to be entombed in deep-sea mud forever. Nothing living today is quite like a graptolite. Some years later I spent much time focusing my research on these extinct and curious creatures, trying to understand the apparently endless variation in their colonies. The derivation of the name ‘graptolite’ comes from Greek for ‘writing’ – to early observers the fossils looked like symbols written on the rock surface. This was strangely appropriate for the fourteen-year-old boy in Pembrokeshire who tapped rocks with the simple enthusiasm of a besotted naturalist, just rejoicing in what a hammer blow might reveal – to be the first pair of eyes to gaze at white outlines which could have been written messages smuggled down through millions of years. Palaeontology was a road less travelled, an esoteric journey that few others had embarked upon. It had the fascination of the arcane, of being something of a secret world. I felt comfortable there, as I did with Mr Bland and Robert Gibbs in the Art Room, or with Mr Williams on the chalk downs. I felt I was being admitted to another club with a membership I had yet to discover. Maybe the club met behind the old polished doors at the Natural History Museum.

  I was repeatedly drawn back to St David’s. I came with my school friend Bob Britton during my later teens to find more and better trilobites at Nine Wells, not far from Porth-y-rhaw. Together we explored several other sites in the bays and cliffs, locating the sparse and special layers where fossils could be found. Our collections grew. Even now I feel a twinge of envy for a lovely complete trilobite that Bob hammered out from the Cambrian. When I returned again on a field trip with my Cambridge University class I was an old hand. An old-fashioned and courteous ‘gentleman don’ – Dr Richard Hey – led the trip; he brought students to south-west Wales every year to give them experience with real rocks. The party trotted around many of my familiar haunts. At Porth-y-rhaw I was incensed to discover that some vandal had mutilated the Paradoxides trilobite in the cliff, which was pocked with hammer marks in a bungled attempt to remove it from its rocky perch. It was not now much good for teaching, or anything else. (Nowadays, it is frowned upon to collect anything at all, as the site has been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest.) When the party trooped around a rocky promontory at Whitesands Bay close to St David’s Head, Richard Hey announced that fossils were allegedly to be found there, but none had been discovered in the fifteen years he had been visiting. Insouciantly, I detached myself from the group and went to a particular seam in the cliff face that I had discovered with Bob Britton. I whacked it hard, and extracted a large, net-like graptolite. There was general astonishment. ‘Well, I never!’ said Richard Hey. In a narrow band of shales at another place, this time near Abereiddy, our leader announced that nobody had found a fossil there since 1896, waving the yellowing pages of a report in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London as proof. ‘Is this what we expected?’ I said (I admit a tad faux naïf), handing over a nice example of a ‘tuning fork’ graptolite plucked from a secret spot. ‘Goodness me!’ said Richard Hey. So it continued in other sites, until Dr Hey had run out of modest expressions of astonishment. Finally came one site I had not visited before, and our leader remarked that the party might just as well stay at the cliff top, while I went down and found the fossils. What was remarkable was that my luck held: I found some odd brachiopods that had been recorded long ago from the rocks near the shoreline. I felt that discovering fossils was my métier – ‘Fortey’s forte’ as Richard Hey put it, smiling weakly at his own joke. I suspect that my fellow students had other opinions.

  * * *

  If my sister ever felt that my serial interests tended to take over both our lives, redress was at hand. Kath had the young girl’s love affair with horses. As time went by the animals got steadily bigger. She had ponies to ride from a very young age, and seemed quite reconciled to their quirks. If one of them was liable to buck her off, she just climbed back on again. She was quite tiny, so that a good toss could propel her for some distance, and I remember her emerging from several hedges cheerfully pulling out prickles. After one toss near Woodspeen Farm she broke her arm and the image is ineradicable of this little girl lying on the ground with her arm bent back the wrong way at the elbow. One little pony was called Mandy. She was bought through the magazine Horse and Hound which featured large numbers of small advertisements that lied about the tractable properties of the steeds for sale. Mandy was a sweet-looking roan dedicated to being very disobedient and getting out of places like paddocks. Kath joined the pony club and started to do relay races and pony-back egg-and-spoon races. While I bargained for a piece of chemistry glassware for a birthday present, Kath would plead for items of leather tack like martingales, or for a new snaffle. Mother joined in the horseplay, too, and they were off cantering over the Quantock Hills on holiday while I sat in the car reading the entire collected stories of Sherlock Holmes.

  Matters got worse when the jumping started. By now Kath had graduated to a small horse, a dapple grey named Starlight who was something of a ‘goer’ (14.2 hands is the boundary between pony and horse, one of those facts, like Mr Thornhill’s litmus jingle, that is welded into my subconscious). I got used to the sight of my diminutive sister sailing over absurdly high brushwood jumps in the local horse trials, as she tried to knock a second or two off the round. My job was to help with the horsebox and to avoid getting kicked as I followed my sporty sister from show to show. Now, it was my turn to be the assistant. Kath started to acquire rosettes the way I acquired fossils, and I am sure my parents
were much more impressed by the former.

  Kath’s last horse was Curlew, who was a great jumper, and marked her pinnacle as a rider. I did learn to ride myself, eventually, on an old grey called Robert, who may have had a previous life as a carthorse. His back was broad and his fetlocks hairy; his temperament was equable bordering on asleep. I did learn to stay on, turn left and right, and sit at the canter. I enjoyed hacking through the Berkshire Downs following behind Curlew and getting to places I had never reached on foot. I made only one serious mistake. The long track known as the Ridgeway was one of the places we often rode along together, and once I suggested that we swap horses. As soon as I was on Curlew he took off at a tremendous gallop heading for Silbury Hill about twenty miles away. I learned the origin of that expression about getting the bit between the teeth, and there was nothing I could do about it. Kath had no way of propelling Robert fast enough to keep anywhere near. As my sister fell further and further behind she yelled out: ‘Bring him round!’ So I did. I yanked as hard as I could on one rein, and the well-schooled horse did a surprisingly sharp turn through half a circle. I continued onwards through the air following a well-understood principle of physics. It was fortunate that the Ridgeway is grassy rather than flinty. I was thoroughly winded, and lay on the ground making extraordinary hooting noises while Curlew caught up with a bit of grazing. I never suggested a horse swap again.

  Splitting a rock to reveal the remains of an ancient animal is to unearth a secret, something hidden from view and brought into the light. I did not anticipate that Ainsdale Road could spring a similar surprise. I was looking for notepaper in the old desk that held all kinds of family stuff when I noticed a folded document jutting out slightly from a pigeonhole; it had a kind of official look. Curiosity got the better of me. It was a divorce certificate: my father had had a previous marriage. As always, nothing had been said. When I thought about it at all I had assumed that parents were an immutable entity, largely there to serve the needs and wishes of their children. My real business was making fireworks or gathering collections, and the permanence of those who made these activities possible was simply assumed. How could it be otherwise? I needed an explanation. When I confronted my mother with the piece of paper she was quite taken aback. I believe she would have preferred the secret to have remained undiscovered, like a fossil interred in an unreachable part of a cliff face. As far as she was concerned the important part of her history began with her meeting and marrying my father. In the end I learned rather more than I would have wanted. The confession, if that is what it was, introduced me to a strange menu of adult behaviour that I only partly understood.

  Constance Sophy Judge was some years older than my father. They must have met when he was working briefly for the United Dairies, doing a job he hated. I was assured I had no half-siblings. They were married in 1931 and were together for five years. When father met my mother there was not much point in pretending that the first marriage would survive. The parting was quite amicable, or so my mother said. Her very conventional parents were shocked that she had taken up with a married man – it simply wasn’t the done thing. In those days divorce was quite difficult, and adultery was the only cast-iron escape route. There was a way of getting evidence that would be accepted in court, but leave the good names of both ‘respectable’ women in the situation untarnished. This required the services of a prostitute, a private detective, and a hotel room in Brighton. My father went with the prostitute to the hotel where they would be registered as Mr and Mrs Smith. The private detective stood outside the hotel all night and reported ‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ leaving together in the morning, leading the divorce court to an inescapable conclusion. That is all there was to it. Why weren’t we told about the first marriage? It was much better forgotten.

  However, once unearthed, this story could not be forgotten. Maybe it could be obliterated, like the hammer blows that nearly rubbed out the memory of Paradoxides in Porth-y-rhaw, but even then the damage would still be visible. And if this story were ‘better forgotten’ how many more such stories might that apply to? I remembered that book I had discovered high on the bookcase: The Psychology of Insanity by Bernard Hart, and the reference to a nervous breakdown. I could now guess when that crisis happened. It must have been after my father left Worcester Royal Grammar School and before he married the first Mrs Fortey. Was this breakdown the reason that he never finished his degree at Oxford? The story we were told was that in those days Oxford had a mandatory Latin qualification, and that my father had one year to complete it – and failed to do so. Another scenario presented itself: the brilliant sports star from a village in Worcestershire was overwhelmed by coming to Oxford, and suffered a temporary collapse. After his recovery, this crisis joined the list of other things about which nothing was said. There is now no ‘fossil’ to unearth to reveal the truth. What has changed is my view of the perfectionist fly fisherman devoted to his art. Maybe it was that art that kept the other unmentioned and unmentionable things in their place.

  When I first visited Brighton I admired its elegant bow-fronted and stuccoed Georgian villas. By the 1960s, many of them were hotels and probably had been hotels for decades. I wondered how many Mr and Mrs Smiths had passed through their polished doors, and imagined the knowing little smile that played on the lips of the concierge as he signalled to the porter to help with the night bag. Every now and then, I suppose, a couple arrived who really were Mr and Mrs Smith. Did they have to pretend to be a Mr and Mrs Frobisher to protect their reputation?

  5

  Fungus

  The autumn is my best of times. When the September rains blow in from the west the trees in our woodland are so soaked that raindrops cascade off the leaves on to the forest floor. Dry leaf litter that has lain under the trees for many weeks soon becomes sodden. Mossy banks in the wood that have looked crisp and almost moribund all summer awake within a few days into fresh green cushions that are cool to the touch. Their long wait is over, and now just as the leaves complete their year’s work the mosses start to grow and propagate. Rotten logs absorb water into their brown flesh. Smells of rot and growth subtly mesh to infuse the woods with a distinctive fragrance – the combined emanations of freshly dampened earth and all the microscopic life that is grateful for the rain. It is a good smell, one that makes you breathe in deeply. Crane flies bumble through the undergrowth, legs dangling. Myriads of lesser flies emerge from hiding to buzz about to mate or feed. Birds that like to eat insects hop enthusiastically from twig to twig; wood pigeons in small groups scavenge in the litter for morsels to fatten them up for winter. Much of this awakening is invisible, as it takes place below ground when the rainwater finally trickles into cracks and interstices to moisten the soil and subsoil. Uncountable multitudes of woodlice and springtails and mites, and billions of single-celled organisms reinvigorate the soil and provoke roots into action. This hidden world is the concealed vital organ for the health of the wood, its stomach and nervous system. In a couple of weeks a whole kingdom will be made manifest: mushrooms will start to heave up from beneath the moist litter, their caps opening out as they rise, announcing their arrival in colours ranging from gentle tans to startling reds. The fungus season has arrived. It is the time of year when I feel most indisputably alive.