A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  I read in a voracious but random way. If I discovered writers I liked I barged through almost everything they wrote. Rider Haggard, of course, and how I thrilled to the horrific climax as She, the anti-heroine, crumbled into decrepitude within a few ghastly minutes. I had an old set of Charles Dickens in blue covers with the famous illustrations by Phiz. They were gobbled up indiscriminately, despite the tiny print size. Now they have merged into a kind of melange where individual characters are sharply focused but the novels from which they came have become blurry. Wackford Squeers belongs clearly in Nicholas Nickleby, and may have unconsciously coloured my descriptions of the head teachers in my own life, but the narrative detail of the novel has escaped me. Feckless Mr Micawber and the unspeakable Uriah Heep belong in David Copperfield, and both are still vivid in my head, but the chronology in which they play a part is confused; Mr Micawber is defined further by a wonderful cinema portrayal by W. C. Fields. It is not unlike my attempts to reconstruct this narrative of my own life, where events seem to have more substance than time. I discovered the novels of William Faulkner and worked my way through the whole of Yoknapatawpha County novel by hefty novel. Now, what remains? A febrile picture of the Deep South, like a hangover that refuses to go away, and the execrable Popeye from Sanctuary still sharp in my memory, as ineradicable as an unresolved trauma. Agatha Christie was reserved for days when I was unwell: her plots always lasted just as long as my illness.

  Once I had been directed towards science, I thought I could make up for the missing ‘arts side’ by myself. I could become a cultured, well-rounded person through my own efforts, armed with my particular species of retentive seriousness. Thanks to the cunning ruse to escape games into the Art Room, the visual arts remained on my school agenda. However, my wayward and unmethodical approach to reading meant that many writers remained unread. I was obliged to follow neither the canon nor the curriculum, so I did not feel compelled to engage with The Mill on the Floss, Tristram Shandy, or Trollope. I preferred George Orwell, Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh. I read Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham and soon saw the possibilities of science fiction. There was a collection of horror stories compiled by Dorothy L. Sayers in the family bookcase that chilled me more than it should have done. Perhaps that is why I followed Sigmund Freud into dreams and Carl Gustav Jung into archetypes. The public library slaked my appetite for reading, which was as greedy as quicklime for water. I still have great chasms in my appreciation of the standard classics to this day, but, in general, my campaign to be a schoolboy polymath was not unsuccessful: it could be easier to become a literate scientist than to be wedded to the humanities and still retain a broad grasp of the sciences. The foibles of educational systems may have generated the ‘two cultures’ in the first place, but it is not a gap in human nature. We are all creatures of invention and curiosity, not of circumscribed subjects.

  Occasionally, I would slip downstairs at Ainsdale Road and sneak into the living room to watch the television, peeping around the door. Nigel Kneale wrote two gripping weekly science-fiction series centred on the scientist Professor Quatermass. They held me as much as the stories in the Dorothy Sayers collection, and I was paralysed with fear as I watched, but oddly unable to avert my eyes. In Quatermass and the Pit a bunch of terrifying Martian horrors were trapped in a spacecraft, and when they were suddenly revealed at the end of an episode in all their horrid arthropodan spindliness it touched some deep memory. It might have been of the scuttling creatures I had seen at the gamekeeper’s larder when I was very young.

  Many intellectually precocious teenage children write poetry, at least those who are inclined to delve into their psyche. I still have a green-covered school notebook holding some of my early and undisciplined verses. The cover says ‘Middlesex County Council’ which no longer exists, just as Ealing Grammar School for Boys no longer exists. In the absence of any diaries these pages afford the only direct evidence of my thoughts as I moved towards adulthood. Whatever their shortcomings, I have felt a need to take care of them like nothing else from my past. I showed the same tendencies in my taste for poetry as I did for everything else – I established some favourites and ignored much else of worth. William Blake, W. B. Yeats, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift appealed to me particularly[3] – and for almost incompatible reasons. The Augustan poets attracted me by their wit, clarity and formal cleverness; Blake and Yeats were linked by a kind of visionary irrationality. They made magical lines that simply could not be parsed. I followed Yeats into exploring such hermetic arcana as Rosicrucianism and tried to unscramble some of the mysteries of Blake’s rambling prophetic books, supplemented by visits to see his extraordinary watercolours in a special room at the Tate Gallery. If my mind was taken by the rational, critical and formal then another part of me was drawn towards something elusive and irrational. I would surely have agreed with Pope when he wrote: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night / God said “let Newton be!” and all was light.’ Yet paradoxically I could also embrace Blake’s now overused line: ‘the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction’. I had an intuition for some grand passion beyond rationality that could burrow down to the truth of existence.

  On one occasion my youthful verses went before a proper poet. Maurice Carpenter lived in Pewsey, not far from our country home. My mother had met his wife through a common interest in horse trials, and my sister befriended his son Robin. Maurice had been taken under the wing of those arbiters of taste, the Sitwells, as one of the ‘Forties poets’ and he had published several slim volumes. When he proved not to be as stellar as his aristocratic patrons might have hoped he was dropped with matching rapidity. He became a schoolmaster to make ends meet and to support his family. Philip Larkin would have approved: he believed that poets should disguise themselves as teachers or vicars or bank managers, just as he worked as a librarian in Hull University. Maurice’s wife would have preferred her husband to abandon writing altogether, but he nursed ambitions to be readmitted to the ranks of the leading poets, at a time when Sylvia Plath had already risen to prominence, and Ted Hughes’s best work was to come. I somehow finished up reading him a selection of my attempts at poetry, and he was sufficiently impressed to take them away for further consideration. When he contacted me again, he said that my reading was actually much more persuasive than the poems themselves. It was not quite a put-down, but it was a clear indication that I was no Rimbaud. Nonetheless, I persisted with the business of precise expression that marks out poetry. I believed it was first cousin to the exact observation entailed in the recognition of a fungus or a fossil species. In my old folder, some of the poems are even written on the back of a page with a science essay on the other side. Later, through my university years, I struggled to write something with my own voice that was more than introspection. I did feel as strong a bond – probably stronger – with some young Cambridge poets as I did with the scientists. My friend Robert Wells became a true poet and a fine translator of Latin classics. For a while, I dared to think that my own verses were good enough to be called poems, and Robert treated them kindly. If I had followed that road it might have led somewhere interesting, but telling yourself you are a poet is not the same thing as being one.

  I have discovered one poem in my old collection that records the moment when I moved from leading a kind of double life to pursuing the scientific route. I imagine it was addressed to Robert Wells, and the fact that it was written on a portable typewriter dates it to my Cambridge days. I taught myself to touch-type on a machine called the Brother Deluxe. This was probably the most useful skill I ever acquired: I have written all my books and papers without looking at the keys. The typescript of the verse is fading after half a century. The excerpts from the poem below could almost be a diary entry of a pivotal moment.

  Why should I cease to try

  This unheard, unproductive art of poetry?

  …

  Reason rhythms, splendour of rocks,

  Visions of lava and atoms, thrills
to dumbness

  The flickering allsorts of emotions …

  I will not face the livid nakedness

  Of truths that scream

  Too deep for physicists.

  …

  Creation must not be a duty but

  Inevitable, the lava of the mind outpoured

  In images upon the chilling air,

  The helpless fossils of past fears

  Silicified for ever.

  I am still pleased with the last five lines. The rest is better read as therapy – running away from the ‘flickering allsorts of emotions’ that might otherwise have led God-knows-where. The truth ‘too deep for physicists’ acknowledges the irrationality, but simultaneous profundity of Yeats and Blake, but also the general angst of youth. I was surprised to read recently that the arch rationalist Richard Dawkins is also a great admirer of the poetry of Yeats, even though what inspired the poet was a terrible mishmash of the theosophist Madame Blavatsky and Irish mysticism. I was not alone in trying to square an impossible circle.

  If I could meet my teenage intellectual apogee now I don’t know whether I would admire him or feel sorry for him. I would certainly be impressed by his assurance and boundless curiosity. I suspect he would be rather priggish. His knowledge would be imposing but his recitation of it might soon become tedious. Modern, and superficial assessors might mention him as being ‘on the spectrum’ but my father would probably have said he ‘didn’t know his arse from his elbow’; that would have been more accurate. I would regret that his fun was so wholly cerebral. There seemed to be no space for letting go, for girls, for pop music, for hanging around by the swings in parks and trying out cigarettes. Clothes were a distraction, unworthy of the true scholar. Not all of this single-minded focus can be attributed to A. Sainsbury-Hicks and his insistence on trying for the Oxbridge entrance. When hormones kick in, so does sublimation – no doubt the young bookworm had read all about it in Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis. Shyness popped up like zits. It proved as obstinate to clear up. What price a spotty, gawky, ‘square’ young intellectual, given to being somewhat sententious, and revelling in things obscure? The same young man also acquired an armoury of words that served his older version well. The attempt to retain broad intellectual sympathies and not become the specialist’s specialist was admirable then, and, even if impossible, would be admirable now. Later in Cambridge I encountered the polymath’s polymath, George Steiner, and realised that I was as short of true omniscience in the same proportion as I fell short as a poet.

  * * *

  Weekends were almost always down to the countryside, where I could still be a natural historian when I was not being horsebox boy. Primrose Cottage in Boxford had been exchanged for Forge Cottage, Ham; it was a little further to the west, near Hungerford. The cottage was deeply thatched, very old and rather dark inside. Black oak beams crossed the ceilings and upstairs several of the floors sloped in an exciting fashion. One end of the cottage was weatherboarded – it must have been the site of the original forge. A swarm of bees once settled in it, and for a while honey dribbled down the wall into the drawing room. Ham is a tiny village crouching at the foot of the Berkshire Downs, a tucked-away little place, at the edge of three counties, Berkshire, Wiltshire and Hampshire. The nearest high point of the chalk highlands, where Combe Gibbet stands, is just under 1,000 feet above sea level, which is almost mountainous for southern England. Those condemned to hang from the gibbet in past centuries would have been visible for miles. An ancient track running along the edge of the downs was where my sister’s horse Curlew attempted a bid for freedom with me on his back. The trout of the River Lambourn were now further away, but those of the River Kennet were correspondingly close. Another well-known angler, Bernard Venables, lived in the same village. He had written a popular comic strip in the Daily Mirror called ‘Mr Crabtree Goes Fishing’, and later founded the Angling Times. Our telephone number was Inkpen 270, which might have been taken as a portent by any aspiring writer. If you wanted to make a telephone call to Forge Cottage you had to go through an operator, who addressed you as ‘caller’ in lofty tones. There was a village baker called Mr Lansley, a village squire called Mr Brown, and an old pub that was frequented by a scriptwriter for the radio soap opera The Archers who picked up his agricultural tidbits by staying in the pub all day. ‘I hear mangelwurzels have been havin’ a hard ole toim this year …’ – that kind of thing. Mr Brown was very old, and when congratulated on both his longevity and sprightliness would reply ‘You’re young, or you’re dead.’

  A life divided between Ainsdale Road and Forge Cottage was really quite privileged. My mother used to refer to us being ‘comfortably off’ by the 1960s. With the social antennae of her generation she would say that we were doubtless middle class, but when I pressed her further she was quite insistent that we were not lower middle class, and neither were we upper middle class, which only left middle middle class. I really wanted to push her to say whether we were lower middle middle or upper middle middle but by then she detected an element of sarcasm in my questions. The social signifiers that established these niceties were really quite arcane, and in our present materialistic age the system that recognises your place in the scala naturae by whether you drive a BMW and what size it is, has the great advantage of simplicity. Naturally, the young intellectual despised such signifiers. The conundrum of whether the WC should be referred to as the toilet (lower middle), loo (middle middle) or lavatory (upper middle) was solved by unfailingly referring to it as ‘the jakes’ (a Shakespearean term, dontcha know). I was guaranteed to annoy my mother by regularly calling the drawing room (upper middle) the lounge. I simply cannot remember which way napkins, doilies and serviettes went, but I am sure there was a status indicator in there somewhere. My sister and her horses guaranteed that she mostly moved among the upper-middle-class ‘county’ and farmers who didn’t give a damn – in fact, the social hierarchy at the hunt was more or less related to height above the ground. The upper-class Master (red in all parts – notably face and jacket) was often mounted on the most impressive steed, farmers a little lower and more hobbledehoy, with a declining series of ponies below that, and the ‘village’ on foot following along behind. My politics nudged progressively leftwards.

  A sketch of Forge Cottage, Ham, Wiltshire, made by a school friend in the early sixties.

  The lanes around Ham were deeply sunken into the greensand that lay beneath the chalk. (During the great freeze of 1963 the roads filled with snow and the village was cut off from the outside world for more than a week. Mr Lansley was able to shift all his old stock from the village store, including tough old biscuits and Force breakfast cereal.) In the spring, the scent of ramsons hung heavy in the air, wild garlic carried village-wide in the slightest breeze. At that time the downs were still grazed by sheep, and a mass of daisies, vetch and eggs-and-bacon splashed the smooth hills with yellow patches in the early summer. Fossil sponges could be collected from the rocks in our own garden. A short bicycle ride would take me to pits dug out to accommodate silage, and from their chalk walls ammonites and sea urchins were recovered quite easily. My collections were growing, and each new addition had a number with its locality recorded: I was beginning to learn to be scientifically organised. Then I wrote bucolic poems about beech hangers and the antiquity of flint. Or I cycled to Shalbourne, the neighbouring village, to bring back fresh watercress from the spring waters that were clear as rock crystal – a mineral that now I knew was pure silicon dioxide, with silicon and oxygen conjoined in an impregnable cage. At that time my different worlds were cross-linking like chemical bonds, science and natural history contributing to some kind of poetry. It could not last.

  Nor did it. A financial disaster overtook the family. Within the space of a few months 40 Ainsdale Road, our suburban anchor for years and home of the chemi-shed, was sold off to the first buyer.

  Money had to be raised – and fast. The reason was not made known to the offspring: as so often, nothing was sa
id. Later, we learned that my father had never filed a tax return. He simply ignored what he did not wish to confront. If official-looking papers arrived they went straight into the bin. All those years of increasing affluence were actually built upon not paying anything to the Inland Revenue. We were indeed ‘comfortably off’ – comfortably off the official radar. The proceeds from fishing rods and gentles and tropical fish just went into the till and into the pocket. Eventually, the taxman caught up with Tooke’s and Harding’s. A colossal bill must have been compiled by government investigators, and sent to my father with the obligatory scary threats of imprisonment and disgrace if the sum was not paid up in full within thirty days. That, too, was ignored; it was obviously a jolly good time to go trout fishing. The Inland Revenue is made of stern stuff, and continued to demand arrears for astonishing amounts of money. My mother told us that in the end an officer of the Inland Revenue pursued my father all the way to the riverbank. The government employee stood in his suit among the irises and sedges waving a demand for huge payments, hollering: ‘What are you going to do about this, Mr Fortey?’ while Father continued to cast his pale watery nymph and pretend that the horrible man wasn’t there. The stand-off went on for some time: fly flicking delicately through the air on to the stream, ranting official waving his papers next to my studiedly oblivious parent, River Itchen gurgling gently onwards as it had for a thousand years. I am unsure whether the expression ‘in denial’ was current in the early 1960s, but this remains the definitive example.

  My mother had to take control. We discovered then that she was always the tougher and more practical partner in the marriage. If the family home in Ealing had to be sold, so be it. Margaret Zander Winifred Wilshin had inherited a portfolio of shares from her father that had already been used several times as security for the businesses during our years of growing affluence. Her father had been shrewd in his investments, and doubtless had good City advice; his acumen saved our bacon. Needs must, thought Mother. Sale of the house and many of the shares was enough to get the man from the Inland Revenue to go away. If a crisis was averted it was also the end of a kind of innocence: the notion of our father as the strong and silent type was hardly consistent with wilful financial irresponsibility. Maybe his early ‘nervous breakdown’ was not so inexplicable after all, and the silence about it more understandable. If there were parental rows we never heard them, but ledgers and bank balances became part of mother’s fiefdom thereafter. If there were tears shed for severing her connection to Ealing after two generations we never got to see them. The ‘queen of the suburbs’ was history. The countryside would be our home from now on. Who wants suburbia when there is open downland, and a thickly thatched cottage set in a pretty village? My sister could relocate to a good grammar school in Newbury, Berkshire. And it would be much handier for the horses.