by Ann Harries
For what my dear Saunders had neglected to take into account, when choosing for his recruiting ground that indigent area of Oxford (to the outsider, a contradiction in terms), is that where the proletariat are dehumanised by their own labour, the revolutionary will flourish. I do not merely refer to those followers of the late Herr Karl Marx who dedicate themselves to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and who utter phrases like ‘class struggle’ and ‘means of production’, as if somehow embedded in these words is the very secret of human life. It has to be said that these revolutionaries have the whole species in mind, and their actions are unlikely to affect the individual directly, except in the instance of civil uprising. More insidious are the sub-revolutionaries they have spawned, who take on ‘causes’ rather than mankind as a whole. The fanaticism of these groups is only too well illustrated by those ‘new women’ who feel that their demented protests will convince everyone that the franchise should be extended to females! To an ordered mind like my own, it is incomprehensible that this kind of wild behaviour can be considered proof that women are men’s intellectual equal, and able to elect parliamentary representatives. But wild behaviour, I was to learn, is the hallmark of these minority groups, and when Mr Philips’ eyebrows twitched during our interview, this minuscule facial movement was to prove the first flexing of a much larger set of muscles.
‘Cymbals, sir?’ he queried, in his rustic Oxfordshire voice. Later I was to recognise satire in those melodious tones, but in my early ignorance, I attributed his question to stupidity.
‘The idea being,’ I explained, as if to a child, ‘that the bird must be prevented from hearing its own song.’
‘And the cymbals must be clashed for a full twelvemonth?’
‘I have different birds in different parts of my laboratory, each providing a control to its pair. Some of the birds will be subjected to daily cymbal clashing, some will not; some will hear only the sound of your whistle playing Irish jigs and ditties, some will not.’
‘I’m told that a certain farmer in China, wishing to prevent the birds from eating his crops, instructed his serfs to strike a series of gongs continuously, night and day, till the birds fell exhausted from the sky, and died. A year later, no bird visited his fields.’ Desmond Philips permitted himself a short, sour laugh which, again, should have put me on my guard. ‘But his crops were worse than ever. Of course.’
What did he mean, ‘of course’. My brain worked furiously. Mistaking my silence for encouragement he continued: ‘Every insect known to man moved in, didn’t they? No predators. But you’ll know this story, sir.’
‘Pure folklore.’ The words came too quickly. I said, with authority: ‘Besides, it is not the diet of the nightingale that I am investigating: it is his song. You and your companions will be required to play up to sixty different phrases on your whistle every day, as well as clashing cymbals.’
My severity appeared to have the required effect. ‘I’m glad to have the work, sir.’ And he doffed his peaked cap.
Glad to be able to find his way to the other cages and chambers, he meant. Glad to infiltrate the laboratory and find the birds attended to by Professor Mitsubishi’s deft fingers.
Ten years earlier I had attended the meeting between the university authorities and Ruskin which had terminated with the Art Professor, now bearded and white-haired, crying out: ‘I can no longer remain at a university which descends to such depths of human cruelty. I cannot lecture in the next room to a shrieking cat, nor address myself to the men who have been – there’s no word for it!’
I found it unsettling that Ruskin could find no word to describe what my colleagues and I planned to do in our laboratories. In my darkest moments I wonder how that innocent promoter of beauty and goodness, particularly as manifested in the natural world, would have responded to my more recent experiments. Perhaps it is as well he has gone mad.
* * *
Ten years earlier also saw the termination of my friendship with Dodgson.
Since our Carfax meeting in the early seventies, the creator of Alice had allowed me to use his dark-room – an extraordinary privilege, which even now overwhelms me with its generosity. The reason was simple: he admired my photographs of the natural world (his own camera work was restricted to portraits and landscapes), and wanted the prints to be of the finest quality. Consequently he put at my disposal a range of dark-room gadgetry, some of it designed by himself, that was uniquely fitted to its task. Being a perfectionist in everything he did, he was satisfied only with a perfect print, no matter how onerous the process. In fact, he very much enjoyed the fiddly process of working with wet collodion, time-consuming as it was, particularly when his little girl subjects ‘helped’ him develop the large glass plates. On several occasions I arrived at his Christ Church rooms to find the dark-room had been metamorphosed into a thrilling theatre full of mystery and adventure in which Charles played the part of cunning magician, excitedly assisted by a small female, still in fancy dress, who stood upon a box, open-mouthed, watching the image of herself gradually appear in a shallow acid bath, upon a negative plate.
Though he loved to adorn his young subjects with theatrical finery or national dress, and to arrange them into artful poses with ingenious props, his favourite costume was no clothes at all. ‘Naked children are so perfectly pure and lovely, but Mrs Grundy would be furious – it would never do,’ he said to me as we paged through an album of half-clad young girls climbing across rocks or flitting through fields – all labelled and classified in his accompanying notebooks with compulsive orderliness.
He instructed his scout to let me into his rooms, should he not be at home when I wished to use his equipment – and instructed me on how to ensure the consistency of temperature and elimination of draughts in his drawing-room.
One evening he shows me tiny photographs, the negatives of which he claims to have destroyed. He places a miniature ivory telescope viewer in my hand. ‘You will see that an artist has painted in some highly ingenious backdrops!’ He has changed into a clean pair of grey cotton gloves.
The little naked girls overwhelm me with their blatant physicality. They lie stretched out upon imaginary fields and rocks, as if waiting to be ravished by a passing Greek god. They stare at me with their insolent eyes. I see no innocence there.
But Dodgson’s gaze is reverent. ‘Such purity,’ he whispers. ‘Theirs is a sacred presence, preserved forever.’ His face twists briefly with pain. ‘Who could see anything other than beauty in these pictures? The children come with their mothers. Yet I have heard vile rumours …’
And now Charles Dodgson’s eyes are filled with a simple, hopeless sweetness that is altogether absent from those of his sitters. I feel a stab of envy. For in those eyes dwell not only innocence and goodness, but an emotion which is new to me: unreserved love; a love which demands of itself no mirror image.
Dodgson was thoroughly involved in university and college affairs, being Common Room Curator, Sub-Librarian, Mathematical Lecturer and Curate, among other things. But I began to feel somewhat alarmed when he took a passionate interest in the issue of vivisection, both within and beyond the university walls. Although I was still an undergraduate when he first embarked on his anti-vivisectionist crusade, I had long ago acknowledged that the killing or maiming of animals was necessary for a scientific understanding of their behaviour, particularly within an evolutionary framework. Like any other scientist I recognised that man’s superiority over animals gave him the right to use less intelligent creatures in any way that might further human progress or even alleviate human suffering. During our occasional walks round Oxford, usually culminating in a museum visit, I fell silent as Dodgson held forth, in his gentle, stammering voice, on the question of whether experiments with animals might not well eventually lead to experiments with human beings: he predicted that scientists might become tempted to cut open the live bodies of incurables and lunatics in the interests of research, informing the unfortunate victims that they should be
thankful to have been spared by natural selection for so long.
In 1880 the art of photography was revolutionised by the dry-plate process. Though tempted by the speed with which prints could now be developed, my friend considered the end result to be inferior to that achieved through the endless timings and delicacy of control of wet collodion. He shut down both his dark-room and the glass house above his chambers, and never took another photograph.
A few years later, when I received Dodgson’s note informing me that he could no longer sustain friendship with ‘a man who vivisects’, his decision cut as sharply into my heart as any vivisector’s knife; but I fear my heart cannot compete with the imploring eyes of a lobotomised dog.
Great Granary 1899
As we waltzed up the avenue, hand-in-hand, I allowed Maria’s shrill chatter to pour over my ears and into my central nervous system like warm balm. I did not on the whole listen to the content of her monologue: the unexpected cadences, the rising and falling pitch, the stammering staccatos and syncopated silences were to me of far greater interest than what she was actually saying. Thank heaven the stream of words required no more than grunts and expressions of astonishment by way of reply, for even when I tried I could make neither head nor tail of her discourse. Quite apart from the fact that her accent was quite foreign (though charming) to my ears, the rapid, fragmented topics which she covered were equally alien to me. These topics seemed mainly to concern local characters, all called only Auntie or Uncle, with whom she expected me to be as familiar as she was, an assumption which somehow gave an air of pleasing intimacy to our system of communication (I cannot call it ‘conversation’). I felt curiously at peace with myself.
There was something about the atmosphere on that long, shadowy avenue that reminded me of Oxford, though I knew perfectly well that no such conifer-lined road existed in that city of parks and gardens. Perhaps it was merely the pleasure of being in the company of an adorable chatterbox that soothed me and allowed me to surrender my defences, making me feel for once at home with both myself and my immediate environment.
But all at once I knew exactly why I felt I was in Oxford.
From the direction of the aviaries floated a familiar sound. At first one could be forgiven for thinking someone was sliding his lips up and down a flute or pipes of some kind, testing out the instrument with rapid scales. This precarious solo was followed by a chorus of whistles and chirps, and within minutes the blissful music of the English countryside was flooding through the palm trees and bougainvillaea as every blackbird, nightingale, thrush and chaffinch that I had brought with me across the sea burst inexplicably into song. It seemed scarcely believable. I was now in the ridiculous position of wanting to rush to my cages to ascertain the cause of this sudden phenomenon but having to drag my feet unbearably in order to keep pace with the dear little creature beside me. I longed to pick her up, to swing her on to my shoulders so that I could break into a run – what vestigial parental instinct yet lurked? – but knew such behaviour was doomed to failure because my inexperience with such matters would be only too evident: oh for the gift of spontaneity!
Our progress across the lawns beside the horseshoe of hydrangeas was made even slower as Maria bent down to gather acorns dropped by squirrels, or stiffened into statues of arrested excitement when the squirrels themselves darted across the lawn. An earthworm abandoned by a sparrow caused her to drop to her knees with a cry of pity, whereupon she proceeded to dig a hole in the lawn as a safe haven for this fortunate Annelid, which she tucked beneath the soil with all the concern of a mother putting her infant to bed.
At last we reached the aviaries, submerged, as usual, in purple shadow while the rest of the garden glowed in the sun. There was no sign of Salisbury and Chamberlain leaping in exultation, as one might expect. I could see in a flash that no nightingale sang, nor any thrush in the cage next door. The chaffinches and blackbirds too were songless as ever, hunched accusingly in the dark. The entire clamour tumbled from the cage of starlings who had, to the last bird, given up their vow of silence and were simultaneously exercising their syrinxes not so much in song as in unadulterated mimicry! The singing lessons they had received daily from their absent tutors now repeated themselves endlessly in the liquid trills, warbles and flutings of their silent co-species, and I cursed myself for having been so entirely deceived by their well-known imitative powers.
But what had triggered off this chorus of plagiarised birdsong from a species that, till the morning, was struck dumb as the rest of them? Even as the question formed itself in my mind, a jaunty whistle from a starling by my ear gave me the answer. The bright-eyed little mimic was reproducing, with syncopated expertise, exactly the rhythmic melodies that had disturbed me in my morning slumbers. It seemed that the dissonances of the Cakewalk were having precisely the effect upon the starling syrinx as they had had on my naked legs: neither song nor dance could resist its call.
‘The b-birds are singing nicely, hey?’
Maria’s little face was alight with pleasure. I could not bring myself to speak of my own disappointment, so I said, consciously imitating the sing-song way Kipling spoke to the very young: ‘Well, Maria, would you like to give names to the birds who are singing or to the ones who aren’t singing?’
She placed her chubby index finger over her chin, its tip poking into her mouth and arousing the interest of her gleaming red tongue.
‘I think …’ Clearly she had no idea what she thought, but much enjoyed this pose of deep seriousness. ‘I think I’ll name the singing b-birds … no, the birds who aren’t singing … no …’ Then: ‘The singing ones mustn’t sing too much or they’ll get sore throats, hey?’
I took her by the arm and led her to the silent cages. ‘Perhaps if you give these ones names they’ll begin to sing,’ I suggested.
‘Then will they come when I call them?’
‘We’ll have to wait and see.’
Maria’s system of nomenclature was unrelated to the methods of taxonomy I had hitherto encountered. I did not try to influence her decisions other than to point out that female birds might not logically be given names such as Eric, Cyril or George, and after making several such mistakes the clever child moved on to genderless names like Sunshine, Whistle or Treetops. Certainly the naming of birds was a passionate affair for her and an object of considerable interest to me, as I perceived the absolute necessity in the child for bestowing individual identities upon each of these creatures. Salisbury and Chamberlain, who had materialised from nowhere, pretending they had never been absent, sulked on the other side of the aviaries and grumbled loudly in their own tongue: it struck me that they had already named the birds according to some primitive classification system of their tribe.
‘Say good morning to the Professor, dear.’ Mrs Kipling’s soft voice curled up from behind my back. A conflict of emotions instantly erupted in my breast: displeasure at the interruption of my intimacy à deux, and pleasure at the sound of Mrs K’s motherly voice. However, fixing my features into a rictus of indifference, I turned to confront the smiling woman, who pushed forward the little girl of yesterday’s hydrangeas. This young person curtsied briefly and uttered the required greeting in a leaden voice (quite unlike the sugary chirrups provoked by her papa), her eyes resting with lively interest upon Maria’s pointing finger as the child continued to reel out her list of imaginative names.
‘I see we are interrupting a christening!’ exclaimed Mrs K gaily. ‘Run along and help, dear. Isn’t it interesting, Professor Wills, how children’s first concern is always to give everything a name – whether it’s a toy bear or a tortoise. Oh dear! I mustn’t speak too loudly or my husband will instantly compose a story upon the topic. Did you know he was writing a little book of children’s stories – how the leopard got his spots, that sort of thing. Not quite the explanation Mr Darwin would have provided, I daresay …’ Her plain face darted with mischief.
‘Mr Darwin has certainly incited a mania in the literary world for
inventing origins,’ I remarked dryly. ‘I only hope that the confusions created in the children’s minds will not create havoc in their later lives.’
This attack on her husband’s work seemed to amuse her further. ‘Oh, these stories will certainly ruin any sense of Geography, I assure you – rhinoceroses by the Red Sea, hedgehogs on the Amazon – but does it matter, as long as they delight the imaginations of children?’
‘I am the wrong person to ask. I deal in facts, not imaginative fictions. Invention plays no part in my drab life.’
‘Are you then opposed to delight, Professor Wills?’ she enquired, a smile twitching in just one corner of her mouth.
‘It is perfectly possible to obtain delight from the natural world just as it is. Darwin’s Beagle journals are full of rapture at the infinite variation and diversity of nature, as indeed is his Origin of Species. For myself, I consider imagination to be much overrated.’
‘Well, you must be delighted to have your birds singing at last! What a relief!’ She seemed so pleased for my sake that I found it almost painful to have to inform her of the true state of affairs.
‘Oh, no one will know the difference!’ she exclaimed, then turned, still smiling, to the little girls at the aviaries, each outdoing the other in choosing bird-names. ‘Listen!’
