by Nick Webb
The Adamses always felt that they should give something back to the world, and Douglas Kinchin was no exception. Despite being a doctor and thus a member of a reserve profession able—indeed encouraged—not to go to war, he joined the Navy, in which he held a commission as a Medical Officer from 1914 to 1918, serving in the “X” Cruiser squadron, then on the flotilla blockading the Belgian coast, and finally on a battle cruiser. Twice he was torpedoed, but escaped with little harm. By the time Douglas Kinchin was twenty-eight, he’d packed in more living and more learning than most of us manage in a lifetime.
After the war he returned to Glasgow, where his medical career was touched once more by grace. Medical lectures are notoriously dull, being largely of the hip-bone-is-connected-to-the-thigh-bone variety, but with more Latin. Kinchin’s lectures at the University of Glasgow, however, were so coruscatingly brilliant that they attracted students and academics from other disciplines, prefiguring his grandson’s immense talent for public speaking in general and the gift of making complex ideas accessible in particular. For years, Douglas Kinchin was Consulting Physician to the Western Infirmary in Glasgow where he established a reputation and a consultancy practice that stretched extensively over western Scotland. Family legend has it that he lost his life savings in the crash of 1929 and the subsequent Depression, but wealth was not that important to him. Finding out how things worked was what motivated him.
The same could not be said of his son, Christopher. The need for money—not that he ever had any of his own—and the things it could buy ran through his life like molten lava.
The Philip Larkin School of Developmental Psychology (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do”) embodies a certain melancholy truth. That’s why everybody knows those lines. Larkin goes on to say that the parents had been fucked up in their turn. You may think that this is a sad, almost biblical account of damage, like a rugby ball being passed down the scrum of generations. The sins of the fathers visited upon the children, and so on forever. One can only take comfort from the fact that in many families the chain of grief is broken.
We cannot know now what made Christopher turn out as he did. Partly from loyalty, and perhaps because it’s still too painful, Janet will not speak of him at all. “Controlling, difficult, overwhelming, sulky, clever, charming, and complex” are the adjectives most commonly applied to Christopher by those who knew him. Douglas’s own relationship with his dad was one of his inner demons that haunted him all his life.
It cannot have been easy for Christopher to have had a superman for a father, especially with the suffocating weight of tradition mapping out the path for the men in the family. If you cannot bear the burden of such a mythic mantle, you might take an ego-bashing which transmutes over the years into selfishness and sourness. Sons of famous fathers are known to have a tough time of it. Often they grow into perfectly pleasant and well-balanced adults, but some are never able to come out from their dad’s shadow. Think of William Burroughs’s son striving to be even more depraved than Pa (a tall order and a fatal aspiration), or of Evelyn Waugh’s remark about Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph. When told that he had undergone an operation for the removal of a small growth that turned out to be harmless, Waugh remarked: “How typical of medical science to find the only part of Randolph that is not malignant, and remove it.”
Possibly Douglas Kinchin was so busy that he did not have enough time left over for his children, but there is no evidence of this in the folklore of the family. Besides, Christopher, impressed, perhaps oppressed, by the family’s long line of brilliant and altruistic doctors, was strong-willed and determined to go his own way. Possibly Douglas Kinchin made his paternal disappointment with his son apparent, something that could have a wretched effect on a child, but details of Christopher’s childhood are obscure. It is known that he had an intense falling out with his elder sister, Pauline, for reasons now lost in the fog of time. It has been suggested that Douglas Kinchin’s marriage had its problems, and that the children had been forced to take sides between mother and father. Whatever the source of the schism, it went very deep. Even when Christopher was in his forties and living close to Pauline in Eardiston, near Birmingham, they had scarcely any contact.
Christopher was highly intelligent, but he found it difficult to settle to anything for long. At the time he met Janet he had just finished a degree course at St. John’s, Cambridge (where he had been from 1949 to 1951), and for reasons that remain obscurely complex he had embarked upon a course of divinity at Ridley College, the school of theology in Cambridge. He had no vocation for the church, and became very dissatisfied with it as an institution, yet he did have—something his son was destined to share—an extreme curiosity about whether there was any purpose to the world. St. John’s records suggest that he was ordained, but the Johnian Office there admits that their documentation covering that period is incomplete. There is no record in Crockford’s Clerical Directory of Christopher being ordained, nor anywhere else for that matter. Christopher’s friend, G.R. Roche, says that Christopher never used any kind of clerical title or made any reference to the possibility of being ordained, but interestingly they met when they were both doing community work for the charity Toc H, an organization started in the First World War that has Christian values at its heart.
Some of the family have speculated that Christopher fancied the social status and the licence to meddle that a churchman enjoyed in those days. In British society there have always been those prepared to use religion as a balcony from which to look down on the rest of the population. There may have been something in that notion, but it seems only right to give Christopher the benefit of the doubt. One source of his religious impulse seems to have been a much deeper spiritual restiveness. His lifelong friend, the Reverend Ian Mackenzie, a cleric of some celebrity, describes an extraordinarily intense and hallucinatory religious experience that he, Christopher and the distinguished physicist, Claude Douglas Curling,* 28 underwent in the mid-fifties. They were on a retreat to the famous religious community on the Hebridean island of Iona that was founded by St. Columba and revived in the twentieth century by George MacLeod, the charismatic preacher. Claude Curling was there lecturing about physics and the perils of nuclear energy. Ian was in his second year there visiting the Abbey, and Christopher had been seconded as a part-time helper (wearing his probation officer hat) to keep a pastoral eye on the many young volunteers who were on the island helping with the rebuilding work.
The experience they underwent on Iona was too complex to be encapsulated in a few paragraphs here—even if I understood it fully. It deserves a book to itself, and I am grateful to Ian Mackenzie for taking such trouble to recall it, place it in context and describe so carefully what aspects of it can be described. It seems to have involved what a materialist would call a shared hallucination and others a mystical vision. Ian Mackenzie says that what Claude Curling and Christopher Adams endured was so intense and strange that afterwards Christopher found it impossible to talk or write about it in prose, and instead wrote an epic poem in the heroic mode in his effort to convey something of what it was about. Ian himself says that his role was that of the rational man, the bearer of the cool intellect of the Church of Scotland, who kept them all grounded and sane. He’s always wondered—unnecessarily, surely—if he might have somehow held back the other two from some greater mystery.
Unfortunately, Christopher Adams’s poem is lost. Although the Reverend says it was theologically unsound, the gist seems to have concerned a fusion between mysticism and science and the eternal battle between good and evil. The conflict between reason and mystery is age-old; some commentators have found room for the ineffable in the horribly counter-intuitive ambiguities of quantum physics and the predominant role of the observer in systems on the atomic scale. (The latter is widely misunderstood to justify all kinds of wide-eyed nonsense. It is subtle enough to deserve better. In the everyday world of classical physics, the one we inhabit, observat
ion is still the cornerstone of science.)
Of course, Douglas was just an infant when his father underwent this shattering experience, but Reverend Mackenzie recalls that Christopher was just bursting with it, and could talk about little else:
He talked about it for breakfast, lunch and tea. Christopher had a personality almost too big for his body (and that was enormous). He was not a man to keep quiet about interesting things that happened to him.
It is not difficult to imagine Christopher booming away about his relationship with God while Douglas was still a sprat, and it is possible that Christopher and Douglas discussed Iona when Douglas was more of an age to understand. In its very abstraction it would have been a safer topic than any emotionally closer to home, but we can never know for sure. Douglas had little time for mysticism, but he was fascinated by the problem of how the complexity of the world could have emerged without the need for an Intelligent Designer. The link with his father’s mystical experience may not be as direct as their having a conversation, of course. It’s hard to see that there could be a Mysticism Gene (where is the reproductive or survival advantage?), but it is less tricky to see that deep curiosity may have a hereditary component.
Of course, ecstasy is far removed from academic theology. Nonetheless this aspect too may have appealed to another facet of Christopher’s character, a kind of philosophical jokiness—something later manifested in a hugely stylish form in Douglas. Divinity must be the only subject in which you can not only fail, but commit heresy. (“I’m sorry, Simkins, following your viva we’ve decided to burn you at the stake . . .”) There is almost a crossword-puzzling linguistic playfulness to the subject. Think of Anselm defining God into being by starting off with a definition (the greatest possible object of thought) and showing how the existence of the deity must follow. If it didn’t, you would face a logical contradiction; for you could imagine a being with all the supreme attributes, but if it lacked that of existence it would not be the greatest possible object of thought—and thus be inconsistent with the “agreed” definition.* 29 Christopher, clever and complex, enjoyed the niceness of such argument; he also cared about precise usage. With a pedantic friend, he formed the Amateur Syntax Club into which his many children and stepchildren were press-ganged. He was never slow to correct anyone’s grammar—including Douglas’s.
Christopher was a restive spirit. To the extent that theology entails a search not just for God but for meaning, this trait was one of the many he passed on to Douglas. Certainly at 6’4" he was the origin of his son’s prodigious size. Great height was more unusual then.* 30 Christopher had a long face, ample nose, high forehead and thick, black-rimmed specs. He was bearded in a way that gave him a wicked, piratical look. He wasn’t particularly handsome, and he had a short temper and could be appallingly rude, yet his aggression and vitality made him nonetheless attractive. His friend, the Reverend, describes him as looking like the actor James Robertson Justice, especially as the irascible medical consultant in the series of British films, based on books by Richard Gordon, that started with Doctor in the House. Christopher could also be charming and sociable, and his evident willingness to take charge must have been appealing to a woman if she were feeling vulnerable or insecure.
He also had a huge appetite for luxury—whatever his financial circumstances—and regarded the good things in life as his by right. He was an excellent cook, though a firm believer in the maxim that whoever cooks does not do the clearing up afterwards. He liked smart restaurants, rich food and fine wine—and this high living may have been a factor in his early death from liver cancer at the age of fifty-seven. Often amusing in company, but more morose in private, he was capable of intense and tenaciously sustained sulking if he did not get his own way. Sue, his first daughter, reports that “Dad could sulk for England.” Years later Douglas’s sister, Jane, used the same expression about Douglas.
Susan Adams, Douglas’s sister, was born three years after Douglas, in March 1955, at a time when her parents’ marriage was already under great strain. Sue is a pleasant, intuitive woman who has had her share of sadness; she is fiercely protective of her mother.
By the time Douglas was five, his parents’ marriage had fallen apart. The family was quite hard up. Janet, as the practical one, routinely faced choices that most of us, thank God, do not have to consider today. Food or shoes? Our generation is seldom put to this test, and we can scarcely imagine the unremitting preoccupation with making ends meet. It’s the drip, drip, drip of the Chinese water torture with each little increment of anxiety—not huge in itself—adding to the agony. Christopher was indifferent to such trivia. He would order his expensive pipe tobacco mixture from Dunhill because he liked it—and it was the kind of stylish eccentricity that marked a gentleman. Damn it, it was his due. Janet must have been in torment. Eventually their relationship deteriorated to such an extent that she was unable to endure matters any longer. Feeling that something needed to be done to bring home to Christopher the severity of the crisis, she walked out, taking the two children. So Janet, with Douglas (five) and Sue (two), moved in with Janet’s mother and father in their house in Brentwood, Essex, the dark interior of which had not been changed since its Edwardian construction.
Her mother, Grandmama Donovan, was born in 1900 and lived to be nearly ninety-two. She was a woman with a good heart, but she was not overly interested in the children and it must have been a strain having them in that house. She and Janet sometimes argued about whether Janet indulged them too much. Granny Donovan loved mankind in the abstract while nurturing a healthy animus towards people in particular. In many ways she preferred animals to human beings, and her house in Brentwood was an official RSPCA refuge for hurt animals and the distressed pets of gentlefolk. Rather like Poe’s Raven, for years the household had a pigeon that lived above the kitchen dresser—“Pidge,” they called it—who sat with broody, bird-brained patience forever trying to hatch a china egg. All the scruffy animals exacerbated young Douglas’s hayfever and asthma. His nose dripped for years. It wasn’t until he was in his thirties that he discovered how fascinating animals could be and even started to like them.
Grandpa Donovan was bed-bound and ill, an invisible presence pervading the household. Douglas and Sue scarcely saw him. Sue Adams recalls that, until he died, his bedroom door was always closed at the end of a dark corridor. It was forbidden territory.
Janet had to earn money, and she continued as a nurse in the local hospital, mainly working the night shift in order to see more of the children during the day. She is strong, but she must have been fighting off tiredness for years.
Douglas recalled very few memories of living with his granny, but as he said:
It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal. But of course, it was difficult. My parents divorced when it wasn’t remotely as common as it is now, and to be honest I have scant memory of anything before I was five. I don’t think it was a great time, one way or another.* 31
It’s true, of course, that children have no way of knowing what is “normal” and, besides, it’s a word that is more useful for statistics than for describing human relations. Only when kids visit their friends’ homes or, with very sequestered upbringings, at college, do they find out that what is familiar to them may be unusual in the world at large.
It’s hard to judge the effect on the young Douglas’s imagination of this gloomy house full of damaged animals and a slowly dying grandfather. He was already a little withdrawn. The family legend is that he did not speak at all until he was four. Since this was when his mother and father were still together, perhaps in some way he felt the tension between them. Janet scoffs at this story of his silence, saying that he exaggerated it to make an amusing anecdote, but she was concerned enough to take him to Farnborough Hospital for an examination. Unsurprisingly, in view of Douglas’s later brilliance, the doctor was reassuring.
Janet does recall his first words which were uttered in the presence of some augu
st Canon on a visit to the theological college. “Da . . . da . . . da . . . ma . . .” Was it going to be Dad or Ma, bless him? Then suddenly it came out: “Damn, damn, damn!” Later his infant burbling was even racier as he was given to saying “Bugger, bugger, bugger.” James Thrift, hearing this story, remarked that there was no doubt who Douglas’s mother was then.
Inductively speaking, the number of polymaths is too small to generalize about, though there is some research that suggests a connection between late blooming and creativity. Einstein, for example, was said not to have spoken until unusually late, and some commentators think that his slow progress contributed to his genius for he was still asking those fundamental childlike questions about how things work at an age when most of us have ceased to wonder. The great Victorian sage, Lord Macaulay, was also reported to be a slow developer, remaining obstinately silent until an aristocratic friend, enquiring after the infant’s recent cold, was surprised to hear a little voice pipe up: “Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.”
