Geoff and I soon located the fossil-bearing rocks. They were well exposed along Profilbekken and extended along the shoreline towards the north. It was puzzling that they had not been discovered years ago. The landscape along Hinlopen Strait was dominated by the extensive stretch of raised beaches that flanked it landwards. This made for a particularly stony, bleak and uninviting habitat – nothing could live there. Even the polar bears seemed to eschew its windswept barrenness. Our theory was that geologists passing along the strait in their dories scanned the shore through binoculars and saw only this gravelly strandflat with the Valhallfonna ice sheet behind, and failed to notice the inconspicuous small rock cliffs at the sea’s edge. They just shivered and passed on, until one day in 1966 when they needed fresh water. If an earlier geologist had made landfall he could scarcely have missed the fossils – they were everywhere! Loose pebbles on the beach showed fragments of trilobites, and once the bedrock was discovered a few hammer blows revealed the fossils in their rocky home. Hundreds of millions of years ago another, very different sea had been thronging with a variety of these marine arthropods, all long extinct, whose entombed carapaces now awaited discovery on one of the most remote beaches on earth. We were opening a window on to a hitherto unknown vista of the deep past.
Our camp was pitched near the youngest rocks in a thick succession of rock beds – hundreds of metres of strata awaited exploration. The rocks were tilted in such a way that progressively older strata lay northwards along Hinlopen Strait. We soon realised that those first, chance finds were just one glimpse of a whole sequence of diverse Ordovician marine worlds: collecting the full story was going to be a long job, and one that needed to be approached systematically. This meant locating collections precisely, and in their proper order, measuring rock sections, and then sitting down to extract the trilobites from where they had been hidden from view for so long. Occasionally, the rock came away in slabs with a whole trilobite served up to view like a kipper on a plate: ours were the first eyes to gaze upon a species ‘new to science’. That was gratifying enough to distract us from our freezing toes, and celebrate with a smoke of the Wills cigarettes that were provided free to the expedition. More often, we had to smash tough limestone beds with our geological hammers to find fragmentary remains that could be dug out only much later in the laboratory. Few trilobites were as complete as the Moroccan one that began this chapter. Their carapaces fell to pieces when they died, and usually we uncovered just these fragments, particularly comprising heads and ‘tails’. A whole ‘dead’ trilobite was something we longed for while we waited for an icy squall to pass. Some of our trilobites were so strange that we felt compelled to coin a field name for them – ‘Fred’ was a common find in dark limestone, sporting a headshield with a brim something like a homburg hat. We had no idea what sort of trilobite ‘Fred’ was, but we knew he was something special. It did not take long for us to recognise that there were several different species of ‘Fred’ with broad and narrow brims. As collecting went on we realised that we must have discovered dozens of different species of trilobite. It was a fossil bonanza. We were revealing whole faunas changing through time. Few palaeontologists have the privilege of discovering something so rich, so important and so novel. Nobody had dreamed that Spitsbergen would hide one of the most diverse histories of ancient life in the world.
It got even better. On some of the thinner rock slabs – often with one of the ‘Freds’ – were the unmistakable fossils of the extinct colonial animals known as graptolites. There was something in Spitsbergen for both the current and previous Woodwardian Professors: Bulman would have been as surprised by the graptolites as Whittington by the trilobites. Graptolites are possibly less immediately appealing fossils than trilobites, but they are very useful for dating sedimentary rocks with great precision. Their colonies were composed of many individuals occupying small ‘tubes’ that were added one after another to make remarkably symmetrical structures. Bulman and his contemporaries had proved to everyone’s satisfaction that these colonies were part of the ancient plankton – which is why some species had such a wide distribution as they drifted over vanished oceans. They were preserved as fossils when they sank to the sea floor, and then the little ‘tubes’ occupied in life by tiny filter-feeding creatures showed up as a kind of fine saw edge preserved along each branch of the colony. Graptolites were rarely found in the same rocks as trilobites – their preservation often required conditions low in oxygen inimical to other life on the ancient sea floor. But Geoff and I found trilobites and graptolites together in our rock section along Hinlopen Strait, some of them shaped like crosses and a few inches in diameter, others resembling tuning forks, others again leaf-like – a whole gallery of different forms. They were easily collected from the thinner-bedded rocks on which they lay conveniently flat; we even knew a few of their Latin names. But if we didn’t recognise exactly what our hammers revealed we did know that the graptolites made the work even more scientifically important. Our discoveries now came with an accurate chronometer. The Hinlopen Strait story would make a great doctoral thesis.
Just over halfway through the field trip everything changed. We had one visit from the expedition’s small supply boat, partly to make sure we were surviving without mishap, but also to bring us our one mail delivery. The mail included the results of the end-of-year examinations. Geoff Vallance had a lower second as his final degree; I had a first-class grade in my Part 1B (my second-year assessment). The implications were obvious. I would be the likely candidate to take the discoveries we had made to the next level, in Cambridge, while Geoff would probably go elsewhere to earn a living. The field assistant would become the researcher. It was a profound disappointment for Geoff: the dice had spun in my favour. We were not natural friends, but in a small tent in the Arctic we were obliged to rub along as best we could. The excitement of discovery kept any major differences at bay (although we had argued about my taking an extra biscuit on one occasion) and the physical exertion of whacking rocks or marching through slushy snow all day did concentrate the mind on the essential business of how to process our dried food at supper into something palatable. I do not wonder that Geoff consumed much of his whisky ration after the boat had departed and chased me up the beach waving a piece of driftwood. Fortunately, he was too intoxicated to inflict much damage. To his credit, he went back to the rocks the next day and hammered out more trilobites. In a few weeks it was time for us to go back to the Norwegian town of Longyearben on Spitsbergen en route for the return to the mainland, and, ultimately, Cambridge. By then, the Arctic summer had given way to a perpetual gloomy pall, as if the sun had lost all enthusiasm for warming the North Pole. It glowered red, low in the sky. Our last task was to make sure our finds were safely packed in newspaper, and then stowed in collecting bags marked by locality, for passage to the Sedgwick Museum where the bags would eventually be unpacked for further study of the collections. After the 1967 expedition I never saw Geoff again.
* * *
Now at last I was fully focused. A trilobite-shaped deity was in charge of my destiny. My third undergraduate year was motivated by determination to get a final degree good enough to make those exciting Spitsbergen discoveries my future. I bade farewell to history and philosophy, although I was to discover much later that the discursive reasoning I had practised would become more useful than anything else when I began seriously to write for a wider public. Poetry ceased to be a preoccupation. My first-class passage through the examinations made me a senior scholar for my third year, and posh accommodation was one of its benefits. At last I had fine rooms close to the River Cam. My second year had been spent in ancient, but tiny rooms tucked behind the Arts Theatre, the bonus being that elsewhere in the same building I could hear six choral scholars rehearsing their way to becoming the perfectly harmonious King’s Singers. Now, from the window of my study I could see punts elegantly idling along the river, and beyond it a rich meadow where cows grazed peacefully along the ‘backs’. Nothing much
had changed for a century; this was the Cambridge so often portrayed in period dramas. I discovered that famous people had lived in the same part of the college. John Maynard Keynes had roomed there before he became the most famous economist in the world; he returned to King’s as bursar, so the money was in the right hands. E. M. Forster’s initials were reputedly carved into one of the doors. My name was neatly painted in white letters on a black background at the bottom of the staircase: how many names of people more remarkable than me were hidden beneath it?
I met Bridget at a party in Selwyn College. The usual cheap white wine was steeping in a bath with ice cubes, and little bits of cheese and pineapple were impaled on cocktail sticks arranged on plates. The Supremes blasted out ‘Baby Love’ from a Dansette record player. It was too loud and too hot, but I didn’t care. Bridget had come to the shindig with a good friend of mine, but she left with me; I believe I was overwhelmed. She had dark hair, lustrous eyes and a laugh I couldn’t resist. I could not quite believe that one so beautiful could be interested in me. I was smitten, and there was no turning back.
Many of my college friends were left-leaning students reading English, who continued on to left-leaning jobs. David Leigh became a renowned investigative journalist on the Guardian. It is difficult to connect this laconic student working all night, cigarette in mouth, to deliver an essay at the last conceivable possible moment, with the fearless exposé journalist who revealed Jonathan Aitken as a liar. He hid his courage well. Simon Hoggart, the son of Richard Hoggart who wrote The Uses of Literacy, became a much-loved political sketch writer also employed on the Guardian. Simon and I frequented an upstairs tearoom on King’s Parade, the Copper Kettle, where we pretended to be obscure members of the clergy. We christened our ancient waiter ‘Sideboard’; he wore a well-rubbed plum-coloured dinner jacket and a bow tie. ‘Ah!’ I might say in an exaggeratedly sibilant vicar’s voice, ‘I wonder what sweetmeats the excellent Sideboard has for us today?’ Simon would reply: ‘After Canon Teabag-Montefiore’s percipient sermon I confess to being a trifle overcome. I think I might relish a Viennese whirl!’ ‘Sideboard’ became complicit in our game, winking occasionally at these silly young parodists. We were an amusing diversion for him in a dull job, and he rewarded us by bringing endless supplies of hot water to top up our teapot. We could keep our entertainment going for an hour, all for the cost of a cake and a pot of tea. We were sometimes joined by our Welsh Marxist friend, Gwynn Pritchard, who became one of the founders of the Welsh channel of the BBC. My engineering friends went on to be engineers, my medic friends went on to be doctors, and those who read law became lawyers – useful lives well lived. Scientists rarely joined the Footlights, so I never knew comedians who would go on to star on the television. The student newspaper Varsity regarded scientists as rather dull – ‘grey men’ – but in the long run they probably contributed well to society. Salman Rushdie became the most renowned of my contemporaries but I have to admit that the fact he was from Rugby School seemed much more important to me than his connection to India or his literary brilliance. I would know better now.
My flirtation with undergraduate politics was brief. As part of the leftward push in King’s College there was pressure on the dons to have student representation on the College Council. Democracy demanded that the eternal traditions of the college should be scrutinised by the people! The groovy young economics don Bob Rowthorn was supportive: he was the very model of the new academic: clever, radical, handsome and with many girlfriends.[3] He was not afraid to stir things up with the older fellows. I think I might have been deemed the acceptable face of radicalism, because I found myself the first student representative. I was rather naïve about what that meant, and earnestly collected small grievances about such things as washing facilities or bar bills, concerning which I received responses from the college. My circulars addressed to my fellow students were mostly ignored, just crumpled up by the pigeonholes in the post room. It wasn’t long before I was removed by a palace putsch, and replaced by someone much more Marxist. My radical friend Gwynn Pritchard mumbled something about Kerensky and laughed, and indeed I had been removed by a classic revolutionary sleight of hand. I left politics alone after that, except to join the Grosvenor Square demonstrations against the Vietnam War in March 1968. I got quite bruised during a chaotic charge by the crowd, and had my name taken by the police. I am probably on file as an agent provocateur on some register buried deeply within MI5.
Colleges have grand feasts a couple of times a year, and King’s was no exception. The Founder’s Feast was the grandest of them all, when the wine steward went to the cellars to determine which claret was up to the task, and whether the ’49 was a vintage port worthy of completing the performance. Candles illuminated the Great Hall; the portraits of past provosts looked down with appropriate hauteur from the walls. College silver twinkled extravagantly in the candlelight, its baroque excess somehow appropriate for the occasion. Cutlery was laid out in a complex hierarchy designed to confuse the lowly born. As a senior scholar I was expected to sit on the high table with the bigwigs. The provost of the college sat at the centre of the table looking out upon the longer lines of guests below. Edmund Leach was an anthropologist well qualified to cope with the quirk of human behaviour that demanded such bizarre rituals. Distinguished guests were invited, some of whom had to say a few words. In a nod to inclusiveness undergraduates were placed between the guests, and I found myself next to the celebrated Oxford philosopher A. J. Ayer. He was familiar to me from that television programme we had watched in Ealing when we were children: he was one of the famous intellectuals on The Brains Trust. Recently, I had read his work as the leading logical positivist during my stint as a philosopher of science, and I had admired his forensic acuity. In truth, I was overawed. On my other side sat the college wine steward, Kendal Dixon – a nice old gentleman, but profoundly deaf. ‘What do you make of the burgundy?’ he enquired. ‘Very fruity,’ my reply. ‘Not as snooty as the ’54 by a long chalk!’ followed a knowing chuckle. It may have been nerves or plain greed that made me tuck into the burgundy with such dedication. As a selection of delicious wines accompanied successive courses I became more and more inebriated. Worse, a kind of combative truculence rose within me. Garbled recollections of my forays into Zen Buddhism elbowed out any common sense that might have held me in check. What was all this logical positivism stuff? There were truths out there that could only be accessed by letting go, by accessing the deeper reality that came with enlightenment: ‘the sound of one hand clapping’ and all that. I challenged the famous philosopher with my metaphysical insights. Reason only got you part of the way, or so I informed the ultimate reasoner. ‘’S’all transhendental,’ I lectured A. J. Ayer, taking my authority from the Beatles (who were in their mystic phase) and waving my hands vaguely in the direction of the blurry faces out there in the Hall. ‘The times they are a-changin’,’ I added, unnecessarily. I do not recall the philosopher’s response, but I believe it was kindly. When a headache jarred me into consciousness the following morning I remembered enough of my foolishness to be mortified, and I am mortified even now. I have awoken many times in the night under cover of darkness and flushed hot with embarrassment at the recollection of my oafish gaffe at the Founder’s Feast. Since 1968, I have never abandoned my adherence to rationalism.
* * *
I did get the first-class degree that was necessary to win a research grant. ‘Firsts’ were awarded sparingly, and I was convinced that a fellow geology student, Peter Alexander Marrack, was going to get one, and if there were only one it would surely not be mine. Peter did work extraordinarily hard and thoroughly deserved recognition for his diligence, and he was a nice person to boot, but I did manage to work up a kind of competitive lather in his presence which I understand is also true of sportsmen who feed on an antagonism to their opponents that lasts only as long as the match. In the end, both of us got the top grade. Professor Harry Whittington would now take me on as his research student.
I may have been encouraged by the euphoria that followed my success, because Bridget and I agreed to get married by her father at his church in Arbury as soon as we could. The King’s College senior tutor agreed that marriage was a good thing – a stabilising influence during the research years, in his opinion. Bridget’s family – the Thomases – became my family, and her father Degwel inevitably filled the place of my own father, or rather showed beguiling Welsh warmth that I had never experienced before. Before he got the calling he had trained as a metallurgist, and Bridget was happy to bring a young scientist into the family. She had three older sisters, all with partners, and all on the political left. I felt comfortable with them. However, the immediate challenge was how to survive financially through the summer break until October, when the grant for my research scholarship was due. I needed a job.
It was rumoured that good money was to be made as an ice-cream salesman. Ice-cream vans were sent around the countryside from a depot hidden on an anonymous trading estate on the edge of Cambridge. It was a large shed tucked behind a premises where used car tyres were supplied with retreads. Most of the sales vehicles were small vans with the ‘Walls’ logo emblazoned on both sides. Ice cream was dispensed through a small window in the side of the van. The stock was kept chilled on a block of dry ice resting in a metal-lined case, and it was in danger of melting on sweltering afternoons. The firm’s sales territory was divided up into strictly defined beats for each seller. Full-time employees were given the choice locations – like King’s Parade just outside my college, which was always thronging with tourists in summer. The regular vendors were tougher than the Carter’s boys – if anyone tried to poach their patch the dispute ended in fisticuffs. Rookies were allotted the villages and towns of the Fens, desolate places like March and Littleport. Prime targets were the council estates that surrounded the older town centres; these were jerry-built stretches of small houses constructed for the labourers who harvested the sugar beet whose lush leaves covered the endless flat fields of fenland. Nothing could have presented a greater contrast to the comforts of my ancient university. The little van had a wind-up musical box that played the same five notes over and over (a perky ‘dong dong ding-ding dong’) to announce our arrival. I came to detest that tune. The ice cream and lollies were bought from the boss in the depot to sell on for a margin – there was no basic wage, so everything depended on sales. I had to flog the stock before it melted or I would be out of pocket. Worse, I had a rival. The enemy was Milky Way, who had a larger van and a more interesting tune. If I approached the poorer end of some small fenland town Milky Way would come steaming out of the council estate just as I was about to cruise the same streets, triumphantly playing his tinny symphony at full volume to demonstrate that he had already cleaned up. My subsequent ‘dong dong ding-ding dong’ had a melancholy edge to it, a despairing superfluity. By the time I had paid for my fuel and cigarettes there was almost nothing left over. I had worked sixty hours for a few quid. I came to believe Milky Way had a spy on each estate who would tell him when he could sneak in to have the market to himself. The final insult was a visit to a particularly rough estate near Littleport that had already been fully supplied with ice lollies and cheap cones by Milky Way. I parked up on a grassy corner and wound up my signature tune for the hundredth time. A burly man with tattoos on both arms came striding across the grass. As I leaned forwards through the window he grabbed me by the throat. ‘I just bought bleedin’ ice creams for the kids from Milky Way and I don’t want you coming along and givin’ ’em ideas. So piss off!’ I did – and that was the end of my career as an ice-cream salesman.
A Curious Boy Page 21
