A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  During my period of obsession with succulents I went back to Kew Gardens, where I had first become aware of the riches of the plant kingdom on family visits from Ealing by bus. In those early days the visit to the tropical jungle in the huge humid hothouse was the highlight of the trip, a challenge to see how long we could stay in Amazonia with its sweltering atmosphere, giant leaves, and dripping glass panes before pleading to be let out into the gardens to cool down. Then an ice cream was the highlight. But now it was straight to the succulent house, and there were all the cacti I had in small pots in my greenhouse grown to splendid maturity. Some species were true trees, with leafless branches reaching for the roof, rivals to the mighty saguaro (Carnegia gigantea), the giant candelabras familiar from a hundred westerns. Barrel cacti nearly as tall as I was displayed their sheaves of blades challenging all comers to breach their defences. A sign saying ‘Do not touch the plants’ seemed not a little redundant. Shelves were packed with mammillarias that resembled balls of wool piled on one another except that circlets of small scarlet flowers emerged from the top. The ‘stone plants’ had a special display at eye level, with the various Lithops species set among similarly coloured pebbles so that the visitor could appreciate the perfection of their disguise. I peered closely at all the labels much as I had in the Geological Museum where the fossils were on parade. I stood on the base of the railing and craned my neck to try to see some species at the back of the higher shelves. My hungry inspection was interrupted by a querulous voice: ‘And what do you think you are doing, young man?’ A senior gentleman with a white mane of hair and a grubby coat was eyeing me with suspicion. He rather resembled William Hartnell, the first Doctor Who. I told him that I was trying to see the names of the species at the back, and he looked very cross. Then I noticed he had a staff badge pinned to his coat that read ‘Maxton’. I said with genuine awe: ‘Can you be the Maxton of Crassula maxtoni?’ The transformation was immediate. He almost blushed, impressed that I had heard of this species named after him … honoured of course … lifetime in the greenhouse … unsung contribution … He became more Dr Dolittle than Doctor Who. We talked about succulents, and I dropped what little knowledge I had into the conversation, and I had arrived somewhere I wanted to be. This was my first contact with the world ‘behind the scenes’, where collections are stored for scientific reference. I told Mr Maxton that this might be my ambition, and his face clouded. ‘Don’t do it … unless you want to finish up a terrible curmudgeon like me.’ I had been warned.

  * * *

  The frost was kept at bay from my succulent collection in the greenhouse with the help of two old-fashioned paraffin lamps. One January night there was an exceptionally severe freeze. Worse still, one of the two lamps went out. When I realised what had happened it was too late. Many of the plants had gone all watery by the time the sun shone on the greenhouse. The poor sad things turned black and died. Only a few inhabitants of cold deserts survived; most succulents never encounter a frost in nature. I carried those few surviving plants with me for years, but I never had the heart to try to build up the collection again. Many years later in the Mojave Desert I saw barrel cacti and Echinocereus with its brilliant red flowers and it was like meeting up with old friends.

  I passed the Cambridge University scholarship examinations. I had applied to King’s College for no better reason than its famous choir and because my predecessor as head boy of Ealing Grammar School, Peter Sheldrake, had secured a place there. I found the examinations much more testing than A level, although most of them have subsequently been filed under ‘best forgotten’. The physics paper had an obligatory essay question: ‘“What goes up must come down.” Discuss.’ I really had no idea how to tackle such a deceptively simple statement, and must have wittered on a bit about gravity and temperature, but I could not possibly have passed. However, the telegram that arrived telling me of my success was real enough. I had almost a year before I needed to go ‘up’ to university. Time to grow up.

  I moved permanently to Forge Cottage, Ham, and got a job. I had previously worked briefly for Mr Lansley, the village shopkeeper and baker, delivering loaves up rutted tracks leading to remote farmhouses, the chassis of the baker’s van scraping against flints and sticks to make it through. Mr Lansley’s loaves were shaped rather like large bricks, and were delicious on the day they were baked, but on the following day hardened up so dramatically they could have been used to build a real wall. ‘Are you the new baker’s boy?’ a sweet-faced farmer’s wife enquired, but I was only in the job while the usual fellow was ailing. My job at Carter’s was more serious. I was a builder’s labourer, and the lowest of the low. Carter’s was a building firm based at Inkpen, up the road, and maybe Mr Carter took me on out of curiosity to see how long I would last. The first day I had to shovel builder’s waste all day, and at the end of it my hands were raw and bleeding. Austin, a kindly carpenter, took pity on me and dabbed gentian violet solution on to my wounds, which stung abominably. ‘Green hands,’ said Austin. Calluses formed and my hands became less green. I was paying the price for the years of evading football and cricket in the Art Room. Swinging a pickaxe all day made every muscle ache in my enfeebled intellectual’s body. This was genuinely testing my theoretical socialist dedication to understanding the working class by joining it. I slowly became fitter, and a more useful labourer’s mate, and less theoretical. I put on a stone’s worth of pure muscle. Some genteel ladies from the village called in discreetly to tell my mother that they were concerned that her son was working with ‘those rough Carter’s boys’.

  As we moved from job to job, the Carter’s boys educated me in the slang and genetics of the network of villages around Hungerford. The local word for sexual intercourse was ‘treading’. It took me a while to link this with the indecorous way drakes mounted ducks on the Kennet and Avon Canal. There was much talk about who was treading whom as we munched our lunchtime sandwiches, until the grizzled old foreman cleared his throat and muttered: ‘Well, we’re not ’ere to spit and cough …’ and got us back to labouring. The mightiest Carter employee was Jim Bowley. While I staggered beneath the weight of a single sack of cement, Jim could carry one under each arm. He resembled Desperate Dan, the brawny character in the Dandy comic, who had a jutting, bristly chin and could lift anything. Dan was nourished on cow pie, with a pair of horns projecting from the pie crust. Jim Bowley was, they told me, a most prodigious treader. He would tread anything going. If he slipped off for half an hour when we went to Buttermere to fix a roof, not much was said, but a few significant glances indicated that some treading was going on somewhere round the back. In the surrounding villages I began to notice quite a few burly young children with jutting chins and five o’clock shadows (the latter mostly boys), and I started to appreciate that natural selection was not confined to the pages of a textbook, or to rutting stags. The Bowley genes were a-spreadin’, even without the help of cow pie.

  The communist in the adjacent village of Shalbourne bought me a beer in the village pub. Mr Wiggins the pub landlord made it obvious that he would have preferred me to consume it in the saloon bar along with the other people with middle-class accents. The communist thought I was a class warrior. If Miss Simkins, the village gossip, had seen me she would have said it was bad enough that this young man was consorting with those rough Carter boys, but now he was conspiring with a known Bolshevik. She would probably have taken a more benign view of my other efforts to integrate with local life. I joined a drama group. The problem was that I was just about the only male to volunteer, and certainly the only young one. The director had to find a play with many mature female roles and very few male ones, and especially only one romantic lead. Such a play did exist: Great Day by Lesley Storm (1943). I was the romantic lead. It concerns the misadventures that accompanied a visit by Eleanor Roosevelt to the Women’s Institute in a small village during the war.[2] The director said it was a ‘period piece’. Numerous women of a certain age got into comical scrapes; stage effects wer
e enhanced by the inclusion of a few farmyard animals like ducks, rabbits and hens in cages. The only other male was the ‘caretaker’ who had to do the business with a broom from time to time, while uttering comical asides. The romantic lead was on leave from the front, so I was dressed as a soldier, and shared some slightly excruciating scenes with Daphne, my beloved, somewhat along the lines of Brief Encounter. Daphne was a young girl from Inkpen, and when I uttered lines like ‘Darling, I can’t live without you,’ she really thought I meant it. Two performances were given: the first in Inkpen Village Hall, followed by its equivalent in Ham. During the second performance I was just trying to inject the right dose of sincerity into the line ‘Never mind, darling, this too, too beastly war will soon be over’ when one of the chickens laid a particularly large egg, and celebrated the event with a bout of enthusiastic clucking. It brought the house down, and my theatrical career to an end.

  While I worked at Carter’s I met my first proper girlfriend, the daughter of the local vet in Hungerford. My previous amours had all been crippled by my diffidence. One of my sister’s friends, a local farmer’s daughter, had captured my heart completely, but all I did about it was to initiate interminable telephone conversations, and somehow never manage to ask her out. Worse, I fell in love with the girlfriend of one of my closest school friends, the brilliant Krzystof Jastrzembski. His father had fled Poland during the uprising against the communist regime in 1956, when many Poles settled in Ealing. They were welcomed: the bravery of Polish airmen during the war was a recent memory. Krzystof’s father had been something in the government, and could not remain in his homeland. Kris (as he became) was clever, tall, dark and very handsome, with curled locks like those of the Discobolus of Myron. He resembled the actor Zbigniew Cybulski, who starred in the wonderful films of Andrzej Wajda (Ashes and Diamonds) that were emblematic of Poland’s cultural awakening at the time. Martine was blonde and French and to me impossibly beautiful, and for that reason obviously belonged with the comely Pole. A spindly, spotty, cerebral person could aspire to the position of best friend and confidant, and perhaps even secretly revel in the suffering of an unrequited admirer. ‘Alone, and palely loitering’ seemed to be the part for which I was best suited. Had I confessed to my mother (heaven forfend!) she would have countered with a brusque ‘faint heart never won fair lady’ and my heart was, truly, not a little faint. It was odd how a spell as a builder’s labourer beefed up the heart as well as the muscles.

  It would be disingenuous to pretend that my time at Carter’s was a political gesture, in spite of my being flattered by the village communist. I was saving my modest wages and boarding at home cost-free; I was not living on the money. However, I did now better understand the implications of being a member of Marx’s proletariat. One morning I arrived five minutes late at Carter’s yard after sustaining some damage to my bike – no excuses, I was sent home by Mr Carter himself and docked that day’s wages. If the Carter crew were ‘rough boys’ it was because their lives were tough. The one advantage was that when the day’s work was over both body and mind were free: there was no room for brooding. I was fully relaxed for the first time: A. Sainsbury-Hicks was history. The intense intellectual of my teenage years was fading, and only now can I mourn his passing; that intensity of focus, that breadth of ambition. Enthusiasm for natural history was not starved: I continued to add to my collection of fossils at the weekends. After I learned to drive I used an ancient Austin 10 (registration number OW 6686) to reach chalk quarries at Ogbourne St George, near Marlborough, where rare examples of extinct snails, and even a coral or two could be collected. On Saturdays, a pub crawl with the local river-keeper’s son was a fixture, and I should never have driven the Austin back from Marlborough along such tiny country lanes, bouncing occasionally off the high banks. Bucolic regularly, alcoholic occasionally, melancholic rarely: it was a restorative interlude.

  The money I earned at Carter’s was spent on an adventure travelling to Morocco with Kris Jastrzembski. At that time hitch-hiking was customary, supplemented by bus journeys where necessary, and we spent a long time travelling southwards across France and along the southern coast of Spain. We stopped for a break near Almeria, at the edge of the desert in the Cabo del Gata, the hottest and driest part of Spain. A seaside village called Carboneras was then almost as it had been for centuries: low, square houses with thick walls and small windows and everything whitewashed. Old widows sat in doorways, dressed in black from head to foot; they may have lost their husbands at sea long ago. It was very quiet. A few pesetas went a long way then, and we were able to stay in a clean room in a small pensión for the cost of a cheap supper back in England. Generalissimo Franco was still in charge, and the old Falangist emblem of yoke and arrows, somewhat battered now, greeted the traveller as the bus entered the village. A member of the Guardia Civil wearing a curiously flattened, shiny black hat was there to keep order, but he didn’t have a lot to do. Part of the movie Lawrence of Arabia had been filmed there, and a dry riverbed nearby still held faded remains of cardboard palm trees that had once sheltered David Lean from the relentless glare.

  After the trance of sweltering Spain, crossing from Algeciras by the Straits of Gibraltar to Tangiers was a profound shock. My first baptism into another culture was more than a splash on the forehead – it was total immersion. The music was different, the smells challenged identification, and the crowds of men in their djellabas seemed frantically bent on mysterious but urgent business. The narrow streets in the medina were piled with colour: swatches of garish fabrics vied with sacks of deep red paprika, yellow turmeric, brown cumin, glistening dates. Artisans showed their skills to passers-by, beating copper into shape, working leather, or boiling sugary snacks. It was like travelling into the bustling maze of a medieval city, where all the trades were still on open display. Occasionally, a highly decorated door indicated the entrance to some old and grand private courtyard. We found the Café of the Dancing Boys where it was clear that this urban society acknowledged homosexuality without public censure. There was an ill-lit room at the back where kif – cannabis resin – was smoked in tiny clay pipes by middle-aged hashish-lovers. We became accustomed to a characteristic sharp tang in the atmosphere as we took off southwards.

  Hitch-hiking proved riskier in Morocco than in Europe. No doubt Kris’s handsome features attracted attention. One last lift in an opulent Mercedes took us along a very dusty track. The driver was dressed in a fine, silky, pale blue djellaba and a selection of rings sparkled on his fingers. He was a sheik and would take us to his palace in the desert – no, he could not possibly accept our excuses. He smiled broadly, revealing gold. We swept into the courtyard of an extensive single-storey building, and were taken to a spacious reception room surrounded by a ledge bearing many plush cushions. Intricate tiles all interlocking curlicues and arabesques made up the floor. The obligatory mint tea was proffered – fresh mint leaves, much sugar from a solid block, steeped in boiling water, and served in a glass (how tired we became of the quip ‘berber whisky’). Mr Marney’s French was very useful. Since both Moroccan host and his English guests spoke inadequate French we conversed quite fluently. Couscous was served. We remembered to rinse our hands in the rose water placed in a bowl for the purpose, and to use our right hand for eating. Gold smiles flashed, particularly in the direction of Kris. When we said we really must be on our way we were told that it was quite out of the question, and that we must stay as guests. We were shown to a simple room with comfortable-looking beds and a jug and basin in the corner. After waiting for about half an hour we tried the door. It was locked from the outside. We did not have to engage in much discussion before opening the small window, checking that our packs would fit through it followed by our lissome bodies falling uncomfortably to the ground; we headed off in the dark to the track that had brought us to the sheik’s redoubt. We were not pursued. Once back on the main drag we picked up an honest lift as far as Marrakech, where we met up with a Norwegian boy with considerably m
ore money than we had, and together we bought an old Citroën 2CV. This flimsy contraption – as much tin can as automobile – took us over the Atlas Mountains by way of the pass of Tizi-n-Test. I shall never forget the extraordinary views south to the fringes of the Sahara Desert. Not far away, there were groves of ancient cedars on the high slopes, whispering gently in the wind.

  The Anti-Atlas to the south was more like a series of hills in the desert. Everywhere was so dry; parched plains between the hills relieved by a few thorny bushes eking out a meagre existence waiting for the first drops of rain. Strata were beautifully displayed on the hillsides, the geology written on the ground in differently coloured layers as if designed to share the narrative of the rocks with every passing traveller. I was not able to persuade my companions that a day or two walking up a wadi would be time well spent. The 2CV choked on the sand, until we kept her going by attaching strings to the toggle controlling the petrol supply.

  At that time there were no small hawkers trying to sell fossils. The locals did not yet realise they were sitting on a palaeontological gold mine. When I returned several decades later the hills around Erfoud and Alnif had become the source of trilobites for hundreds of rock shops around the world. Every small bush hid a smaller boy. No matter how far off the main road you were, as you approached in your vehicle the boy would emerge from cover with outstretched hand: ‘Trilobite mister? Good price specially for you.’ I traversed the Anti-Atlas in search of rare species, but by now the fossils had acquired a commercial value, and the desert was pockmarked with excavations made by the native Berber folk in pursuit of valuable rarities. Local entrepreneurs had become expert in extracting beautiful (or even rather bizarre) trilobite species from their rocky redoubts, and some of these middlemen had made a lot of money. They travelled to ‘fossil fairs’ around the world to sell top rarities to serious collectors with deep pockets. It was a wonder those Berber workmen could labour under the relentless sun, smashing rocks, but by the time of my last visit with Sir David Attenborough in 2010 the television people were able to summon dozens of extras to belabour the hillsides with pickaxes and hammers to make a perfect background for a piece to camera. I was well known for my trilobite research by then, and when we visited Alnif my arrival caused some excitement. Fossil merchants wanted to be photographed with me alongside: this was the only place on earth where I was better known than David Attenborough. By then, many of the local rock shops also sold fake trilobites manufactured in their dozens from moulds vaguely based on real specimens; a dollar or two for a piece of bogus ancient history.