A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  My first trip to the land of the trilobites did not end well. I picked up dysentery, not the kind that is over in a day, but some other persistent microbe that made my life progressively miserable. It was a challenge to ingest enough fluids to stop dehydration. With my growing beard and dressed in my own brown djellaba, and sandals manufactured from old car tyres, I looked like an ailing Moroccan whose days were numbered. Kris and the Norwegian managed to find an expatriate German (implausibly known as Desert Jim) in Marrakech to take the 2CV off our hands for cash. We may not have owned the car legitimately, or so Desert Jim said, so it was whisked off immediately and broken up into parts for reuse. There was just enough money to fly home from Tangiers. This was my first time in the air, and it should have been thrilling, but all I remember was astonishment at being able to look down upon clouds. When I arrived back in England my mother failed to recognise this cadaverous figure with staring eyes. Even in my diseased condition I enjoyed making such a dramatic entrance. An emergency trip to the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford got me the sulphonamide drugs I needed. The sad thing was that all the muscles I had built up during my time at Carter’s had just wasted away. The best bits of my body had vanished to feed an unpleasant germ. I was gangly again. It was the price paid for a measure of growing up.

  * * *

  Now, I was bound for Cambridge University to read natural sciences, so that should be an end to the intellectual blunderbuss. Time to buckle down and find a single target. In October 1965 my belongings were packed into a locked trunk, and placed on the ‘Varsity’ railway line that then connected Oxford with Cambridge (it is being reopened in the twenty-first century). I arrived with the trunk outside King’s College at the centre of the ancient city. Visitors had to go through the gatehouse to gain access to the inner courts. The college porter sitting grandly in his office looked down a list, nodded, and then addressed me as ‘sir’, something that had never happened to me before. My trunk and I were directed to Market Hostel, where I spent my first year. Across the road from the college on the other side of King’s Parade, my small, modernised room commanded a view of the old market square, set out with stalls selling fruit and cheese, with a selection of less conventional hawkers shouting from booths. Great St Mary’s Church was around the corner, where the vicar of Cambridge, Canon Sebag Montefiore, delivered his famous sermons (I never heard them). Nothing can prepare a young man from a London grammar school for the beauty of King’s College, and while you are a resident member of the college it is, however briefly, yours. Life in the college becomes as important as life in the specialist faculty of economics, science, languages, or whatever. Unlike many colleges, with their tight cloisters and secret passages, King’s is all air and space. The chapel is a supreme architectural achievement from the end of the medieval period, despite one of the dons describing it as a sow on its back. I was at the college long before women were admitted, and there was even a midnight curfew when the grand front entrance was locked. During our tour around the college we were shown (discreetly) how stranded undergraduates could climb in around the iron back gate, by shuffling above the muddy ditch that bounded the grounds. An intoxicated tumble into the duckweed was one of the necessary initiations.

  Until I arrived in 1965, I had no idea that King’s College was the traditional haven for homosexuals, a place where gay men bound for Cambridge from their public schools could be comfortable in the company of their friends, without attracting the attention of the law.[3] Several of the senior dons dated from that time. I briefly met E. M. Forster, by now a kindly old gentleman who spent his last days in the college as an honoured resident. The ex-provost Sir John Sheppard was nearly as old, suffered from dementia, and was prone to wandering around the quadrangle looking vaguely for whichever Greek boy had taken his fancy. The senior tutor, the Milton scholar John Broadbent, set about admitting more state-school students, and I doubt that the college had ever seen a pair of blue jeans before his appointment. Younger dons tended to be radical, and heterosexual, like most of the new generation of undergraduates. It was an interesting period of transition in the life of the college. For a former employee of Carter’s the builders it was extraordinary to hear the languid drawl of Etonians for the first time, emanating from one of the younger Mosleys or his friend Nigel Honorius Sitwell. Rugbeians, Salopians and Wykehamists were hardly less exotic, as expensive private schools sent their brightest onwards to King’s. It was almost as alien to me as my first immersion in a Moroccan souk. I realised that for these self-confident undergraduates a place in the splendid old college was taken for granted, just the next step in a privileged life. They probably felt completely at home with its haughty grandeur. They had been accustomed to portraits of distinguished predecessors in gowns and periwigs looking down from gilt frames. The perpetuation of the class system became clear to me. I now knew who would get the best-paid jobs, so that they could afford the education to get their children the best-paid jobs. I became what my mother would have called ‘chippy’. It took me some years before I could see past the privilege to the person.

  By contrast, one of the great virtues of science is that it is truly egalitarian. Whether you talk with an Estuary twang, flat Midlands vowels, or were brought up to say that you lived in a big hice with extensive grinds, it simply does not matter in the laboratory. It was not always so. Many of the famous scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from aristocratic or wealthy backgrounds – the Darwins or the Cavendishes come to mind. Educated clergyman/scientists were equally not ‘trade’, let alone of the labouring class. In the mid twentieth century merit alone finally became sufficient for employment, and women earned proper recognition at last. Some of the most brilliant scientists I know have had a much harder route to science than mine, do not talk ‘posh’, and rightly don’t give a damn about the niceties of cutlery usage at official functions. It is surely an advance in culture when the question ‘where did you go to school?’ can be replaced by ‘what have you discovered?’

  A particular virtue of the Cambridge system was its flexibility, which suited a butterfly like me. Within the broad natural sciences tripos students could change their principal subject as they better identified what they wanted to become. Three subjects were obligatory from the first, Michaelmas (autumn) term. The snag was that there were examinations at the end of each year, so there was no fooling about for three years until all-important finals loomed, as happened in Oxford. This system may have engendered Cambridge’s reputation for seriousness; equally, it might explain why Oxford produces so many politicians. I was able to study biology formally for the first time, even though I had been a biologist manqué since I could remember. I said goodbye to chemistry, but my training in the properties of the elements did not go to waste. Geological science was then rather absurdly split into two departments: geology itself and mineralogy and petrology, known to the faculty as ‘min and pet’ like the names of a pair of cockatoos. The departments were housed in slightly forbidding buildings, including the Victorian Sedgwick Museum of Geology on Downing Street; each department had its own professor. This is where I would spend much of the next five years.

  College life dominated my early days in Cambridge. I made friends very quickly, and one or two of my fellow undergraduates have remained friends for life. Nearly all my new intimates had come to Cambridge by a route similar to my own. As my mother was a widow with a low income I was supported by a full government grant. I felt affluent enough to smoke too many of the smallest cigarette known to man, Player’s No. 6, which a friend from Nottingham (where they were manufactured) said were made from the sweepings off the factory floor. It suited me that colleges had nothing to do with the university departments or faculties, so I was surrounded by students reading English, economics or medicine. There was no other King’s geologist in my year of matriculation. Although my polymathic ambitions had scaled down, I was still writing seriously all the time, and sacred music in the chapel introduced me to the glories of polyphon
y. I slipped into the back of the room to hear lectures by Raymond Williams on Marx and literature. F. R. Leavis was still in charge of his many acolytes. Some part of me still wanted to be living proof that the ‘two cultures’ – arts and science – which C. P. Snow had promulgated in 1959, could be embodied within a single cultural life. I was loosening up. My friend Victor Gray introduced me to jazz, particularly Miles Davis and Kind of Blue. I heard Thelonious Monk at the Students’ Union. I followed the Beatles like everyone else. I talked too much and drank too much. I do not think the fifteen-year-old avant-gardiste would have approved the new model, but this one was probably better company.

  8

  Three Lobes

  The trilobite on my desk came from Morocco. When I was travelling with Kris Jastrzembski I must have passed close to its original home in the Anti-Atlas, where the hills are made of limestone rock beds almost 400 million years old – but I did not know that then. This trilobite is my own messenger from deep time: a Devonian Hermes. As I write, the trilobite gazes at me through a pair of prominent eyes, a stony stare if ever there was one. The eyes are so well preserved that I can make out files of small, convex lenses lined up along the surface of each one. If I stare at the trilobite, he stares back. The compound, faceted structure of the eyes quickly proves that the fossil must belong within the arthropods, the most diverse group of all the animals in the biosphere; countless arthropod species have crawled on their jointed legs over every metre of the planet, from high mountains to the abyssal depths of the sea. Insects, crustaceans and spiders are all arthropods – and so are (I should say were) trilobites. Eyes are invariably positioned upon the heads of arthropods, so the front part of my trilobite, much of it taken up by an inflated lobe between the eyes, must also be where its brain was situated. If it were alive, the trilobite would crawl head first across my desk on the many legs concealed beneath its carapace and land in my lap, scrabbling. It would make quite an impact, too, for the specimen is at least six inches long. It was preserved as a fossil because its upper surface was protected by a thick ‘shell’ of calcite, something like that of a lobster, which is hard enough to fossilise very well. Now, that carapace is black, like the limestone that encloses it – but who knows what colours the trilobite may have had when alive upon the Devonian sea floor? It might have been as gay as a clownfish: sadly, pigments very rarely fossilise. Behind the head, an originally flexible thorax comprising eleven, similar-looking segments separates the front shield of the animal from a tail (pygidium) at the back composed of another nine or so segments all fused together. The ‘three lobes’ that give the trilobite its name run from front to back, as the middle lobe of the animal is elevated above those that flank it on either side. The whole upper surface feels rough to the touch, because it is covered with large tubercles. This was a businesslike arthropod, a well-protected army tank of an animal that had to be taken seriously in the Devonian ocean. It was no primitive dullard but a creature of its times, adapted to its own world, as closely as a skateboarder to the streets of New York. It has a scientific name, Drotops megalomanicus, that was given to it as recently as 1990 by the German palaeontologist, Wolfgang Struve. He clearly wanted its name to acknowledge this species’ unusual size among its contemporaries. When I passed through the hills of the Anti-Atlas all those years ago my trilobite must have been lying concealed within the strata, just waiting to be discovered.

  The large Devonian trilobite Drotops from Morocco.

  This megalomaniacal Drotops is a special object that was acquired more recently than the trout that began this book, or the Jurassic ammonite, my very first fossil. I was not permitted to keep a personal trilobite collection during the many years I worked at the Natural History Museum in London; the director considered that there might be issues around conflict of interest, although my own acquisitive instincts were fully satisfied by working with the national collections on a daily basis. Drotops was a gift from my publisher when my big book about evolutionary history (Life: An Unauthorised Biography) was published in 1997. The fossil’s robustness makes it an ideal specimen to take as a ‘show and tell’ when I talk to schoolchildren about life in a great museum (I sometimes have to ask for it back). I received another trilobite gift that could have been equally exemplary. This one is much smaller – the size of a large marble – and it is tightly rolled up into a ball, a feat accomplished by many trilobites thanks to the perfect articulation of their thoracic segments, which can glide past one another like the plates on the joints of a medieval suit of armour. This specimen is older than Drotops (by about 30 million years), and is a beautiful example of the ‘Dudley bug’ Calymene from the Midlands of England; it was left to me in 1999 by Sir James Stubblefield – the grand old man of trilobites – when he died aged ninety-eight. It came with a fragile letter, revealing that the Calymene had originally belonged to Professor Hawkins of Reading University, who willed it to Sir James. And Professor Hawkins had himself received it as a talisman to protect him in the trenches of the Great War. The letter from the donor to Professor Hawkins expressed the hope that the armoured ‘bug’ would offer an appropriate kind of luck to help its new owner survive the ordeal. Herbert Leader Hawkins did indeed survive and prosper, to pass the trilobite down the chain that led eventually to my mantelpiece.

  Another chain of circumstances tied my own future to trilobites in ways I could never have imagined when I took up my place in King’s College. I did know quite a lot about the extinct arthropods, ever since finding my first examples on the cliffs near St David’s. They soon became the favourites in my collection. The idea that they could ever become attached to a pay cheque would have seemed inconceivable. The events that eventually led to such an outcome illustrate that my good fortune was as considerable as that needed to survive the Battle of the Somme. What my mother always called ‘the professions’ had defined, clear routes to an income. Medical doctors know more or less how they will emerge at the end of their training. My own trajectory was unique. I wish I could claim that my route to science was the consequence of a particular set of virtues, but I would rather believe in a supernatural Fate with a quirky sense of humour and a penchant for rolling dice to see what happens next.

  There were false starts and red herrings. The idea of at last reading biology was enticing, and began well. My first college tutor Dr George Salt was everything an old-fashioned don should be – courteous and learned, and without a hint of patronisation. He invited me to tea at his home, a dark Victorian villa that reminded me of my visit to Mr Morley-Jones in his study. A grandfather clock ticked in the background as the tea and cake was brought out on a proper service. I found myself sitting rather too upright on a slightly uncomfortable chair. My host’s wife called her husband ‘Salty’. Conversation was a little stilted, but not unfriendly. Later, I spent a long time writing my first essay on the geological history of insects, and if it was just a precis of the reading I had done with nothing original about it Dr Salt was too kind to say so. I did not do quite so well with the college botanist, who I was hoping would be impressed by my work on the chalk flora of the Berkshire Downs; it was disappointing when he failed to register much interest. I wondered why: perhaps too much naïve enthusiasm was not quite the thing; I had to learn to be cool. I did not fare better on a fungus foray led by the famous mycologist Professor Corner. When I emerged from the bushes with my basket and pronounced I had found Clitocybe nebularis (which I had) or Coprinus comatus (ditto) he looked at me with a measure of distaste. I think it may have been his job to pronounce. As the day went on, I observed that his expression became like the grimace walkers direct at enthusiastic Labradors that insist on repeatedly returning with sticks, wagging their tails. They somehow exceed the bounds of propriety. I was disappointed, mostly with myself, and the rules I had failed to appreciate, but also with the don who might have recognised a devotion to natural history that at least deserved a pat on the head, which is all that a Labrador needs to carry on being irritating.

  G
enetics was new ground for me. Nowadays, I assume university teaching begins with DNA and gene sequencing and goes on from there, but when I started out the bread and butter of the course was classical Mendelian inheritance, understanding the expression of dominant and recessive genes, and the organisation, structure and function of chromosomes. This was way off my countryside interests, but good stuff to know. Whereas Gregor Mendel originally used plants to understand the principles of inheritance, by the middle of the last century the small ‘fruit fly’ Drosophila melanogaster had become the experimental workhorse for genetics. Drosophila was particularly prone to mutations of features like eye colour or wing development that could easily be observed under a binocular microscope. In the wild, most of these changes are rapidly eliminated as they reduce the fitness of the flies, but in the laboratory they are a boon to understanding how, and in what proportions, genetic mutations are handed on from one generation to the next – and it takes only a couple of weeks to breed up the next experiment. In the examination at the end of my first year we were given phials containing living flies that we had to kill with some liquid chemical so that we could examine the population and determine the numbers and ratios of mutants in the samples. I added whatever-it-was and the flies all dropped to the floor of the tube where they lay, immobile. I tipped them out on to a Petri dish and started counting. I was horrified to see that after a minute some of the flies started twitching. They were waking up. A number of them flew away – never to be seen again. I must have failed to administer enough dope. I am ashamed to admit that I made up the results for the examination paper – I guessed at what they wanted us to prove. That was the moment I realised the advantage of working on animals that had been dead for a very long time and could not fly away. Palaeontology was the intersection between geology and biology, the best of both worlds after all. If I had briefly considered being a geneticist, that fantasy flew away with the flies.