The headmaster of a large school is a remote and formidable figure. The stooping Gus Stainforth only taught me for one term – Divinity – and we were terrified of him. We read The Pilgrim’s Progress, and then had to produce our own artist’s impression of that rather unpleasant book. Halfway through his expected time at Oundle, Gus left to head his own old school, Wellington, and was succeeded at Oundle by Dick Knight, a large, athletic man who won our respect by his ability to hit a ball out of the ground (he had played cricket for Wiltshire) and by the way he sang with the ‘non-choir’ in the annual oratorio. He drove a big Rolls-Royce, 1920s vintage I would guess from its imposingly upright style – very different from the sleek purrers of later decades. He happened to be visiting Oxford on business at the same time as I and another boy were taking the Oxford entrance exam and being interviewed in our respective colleges of choice. When they heard this, Mr and Mrs Knight kindly offered us a lift back to Oundle in their ancient Rolls, and on the journey he discreetly raised the subject of my rebellion against Christianity. It was a revelation to talk to a decent, humane, intelligent Christian, embodying Anglicanism at its tolerant best. He seemed genuinely interested in my motives and not at all inclined to condemn. Years later, I was not surprised to learn from his obituary that, an outstanding classical scholar in his youth as well as a noted athlete, in retirement he took a degree in mathematics from the Open University. Sanderson would have loved him.
My father and grandfather had never contemplated any destination for me after Oundle other than Balliol College, Oxford. At the time, Balliol still retained its reputation as the foremost Oxford college, top of the examination league table and alma mater of a glittering list of distinguished old members: writers, scholars, statesmen, prime ministers and presidents all around the world. My parents went to see Ioan Thomas about my prospects. Mr Thomas was realistically frank: ‘Well, he might just scrape into Oxford, but Balliol is probably aiming too high.’
Mr Thomas might doubt that I was good enough for Balliol but – great teacher that he was – he was determined that I should give it my best shot. He had me round regularly at his home in the evenings for extra tuition (unpaid, of course; he was that sort of teacher), and by some miracle he got me into Balliol. More importantly, that meant I got into Oxford. And insofar as anything was the making of me, Oxford was.
Photographic Insert 2
My grandmother Enid with her dog Susan (left) in the garden of The Hoppet, where my parents first met. On the eve of war they were married (right) from Water Hall, seen below with my mother’s younger sister Diana in the garden.
My mother made the journey to Africa in a series of low hops in the flying boat Cassiopeia (top). Discovering on her arrival that my father had been called up, she accompanied him (illegally) to Kenya in the station wagon Lucy Lockett, seen here on a makeshift bridge where my mother is washing her face in the river and at breakfast-time in one of their many camps (bottom).
One of my father’s training locations coincided with Baden-Powell’s funeral and he was invited, as a former Scout, to be a pall-bearer. I think he looks very dashing in his KAR uniform, marching next to Lord Erroll (out of step) who was murdered soon after.
To signal landmarks in family life, my mother had the custom of painting big tableaux representing scenes and events. This is a small part of one called ‘The Ways that We Went’, which she did for her Golden Wedding in 1989. Alongside generic African scenes are my father’s armoured car in Somaliland, my mother and me striding into my life together, a sandy Lake Nyasa beach, Hookariah my pet chameleon, Percy our pet bushbaby, and our house at Makwapala with me pushing Sarah in the lorry towards Tui the dachshund.
I evidently looked up to my father from an early age, and accompanied him in climbing the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro.
Baraza kindly tolerated my dogged help in pushing my pram.
Later, we moved to Makwapala in Nyasaland (bottom) where I seem to have grown bored with the sewing class my mother was conducting in the garden. In 1946, on a brief leave, we stayed with my grandparents in England. During this time my uncle Bill and aunt Diana (middle row left, next to my parents) married at Mullion, and the whole family picnicked at Kynance Cove.
On our return to Nyasaland we lived in Lilongwe, where my parents bought Creeping Jenny, our first new car. I was sent to board at the Eagle School in Southern Rhodesia. In the picture here, Tank (the headmaster) is in the centre with Coppers (matron) and Dick (another teacher) on his right. I’m the very small boy third from left in the same row and David Glynn, also small, is in the mirror position the other side, next to Wattie who is next to Paul. David and I collected the beautiful swallowtail butterflies which he mysteriously called ‘Daddy Xmas’.
DREAMING SPIRES
MR DAWKINS? Sign here, sir. I remember your three brothers, very fine winger one of them was. I don’t suppose you play rugby, sir?’
‘No, I’m afraid not, and, er, actually I never had any brothers. You must be thinking of my father and my two uncles.’
‘Yes, sir, very fine young gentlemen, sign here please. You are on Staircase 11, Room 3, sharing with Mr Jones. Who’s next?’
Well, that’s approximately how the conversation went. I didn’t write it down at the time. The Balliol College porter took the timeless view characteristic of his bowler-hatted profession. Young gentlemen might come and go, but the college goes on for ever. Indeed, it was to celebrate its 700th anniversary during my time there. Talking of that loyal and ancient bowler-hatted profession, I can’t resist an anecdote more recently told me by the Head Porter of my present college, New College (well, it was new in 1379). An inexperienced new porter hadn’t yet got the hang of the porters’ incident book and what it was for. His entries in the log for his first night duty, at hourly intervals, consisted of (approximately; the details will be wrong):
8 p.m. Raining.
9 p.m. Still raining.
10 p.m. Raining harder.
11 p.m. Raining harder still. I could hear it banging on me bowler as I did me rounds.
Oxford, I should explain, is a federal university: a federation of thirty or so colleges, of which Balliol is one of three claiming to be the oldest. Except for the newer colleges, each one is built around a series of quadrangles. These beautiful old buildings mostly don’t have horizontally running corridors like hotels or halls of residence, with rooms along a passageway: instead, there are lots of staircases leading off doors from the quadrangle, each staircase giving access to a number of rooms on three or four floors. Thus each room is known by a staircase number and a room number within its staircase. In order to visit a near neighbour, you’d probably have to go out into the quadrangle and then in at another staircase entrance. In my time there was a bathroom on every staircase, so we no longer had to go out into the cold in our dressing gowns. Nowadays, the rooms are more likely to have their own en-suite bathrooms, which my father would have called ‘terribly molly’ (soft, namby-pamby). I suspect that a large part of the motivation for installing them is to cater for the lucrative conference trade, which all the Oxford and Cambridge colleges ply out of termtime.
The colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge are financially autonomous self-governing institutions, some of them, such as St John’s, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge, very wealthy. Trinity, by the way, is outstandingly rich in achievement as well as money. This one Cambridge college can boast more Nobel Prizes than any single country in the world except the USA, Britain (obviously), Germany and France. The University of Oxford can make the same proud claim, but no single Oxford college comes close to Trinity Cambridge, not even Balliol, which tops the table of Nobel Prizes for Oxford colleges. My father, I have just realized, is one of few people to have studied at both Balliol, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge.
At both Oxford and Cambridge, the relationship between the colleges and the university bears the same uneasy tension as that between the federal and state governments in the USA. The rise of science has increa
sed the power and importance of the ‘federal government’ (university), because science is too big an enterprise to be handled by each college separately (though one or two of them tried to go it alone in the nineteenth century). The science departments belong to the university, and it was the Zoology Department rather than the college that was to dominate my life at Oxford.
That porter must have been one of the first people to call me ‘Mr Dawkins’ (let alone ‘Sir’) – treat me as an adult – and I wasn’t used to it. I think it was characteristic of my generation of undergraduates that we worked rather self-consciously at appearing to be more adult than we were. Later generations of undergraduates have tended towards the opposite, dressing scruffily with hoods or baseball caps, loosely slung rucksacks and sometimes even more loosely slung jeans. But my generation favoured tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, smart waistcoats, corduroy trousers, trilby hats, moustaches, ties, even bow ties. Some (not I, despite the example of my father) put the finishing touches to this image by smoking a pipe. These affectations may have been prompted by the fact that many of my fellow freshmen really were two years older; for my cohort was almost the first of the post-war generations not to be called up for military service. Those of us who came straight from school in 1959 were boys, sharing lectures, quadrangles and a dining hall with militarily trained men, and this perhaps raised our aspiration to grow up and be taken seriously as adults. We left Elvis behind and listened to Bach or the Modern Jazz Quartet. We solemnly intoned Keats and Auden and Marvell to each other. Chiang Yee captured the mood in his charming book from a slightly earlier era, The Silent Traveller in Oxford,40 when he drew, in his elegant Chinese style, a pair of freshmen bounding, two steps at a time, up their college staircase. His deliciously perceptive caption read: ‘I could tell that they were freshmen because I heard one say to the other, “Do you read much Shelley?”‘
The claim that army service turns boys into men is the basis of a lovely story about Maurice Bowra, legendary Warden of Wadham College (anecdotes about Bowra are so numerous as to be best avoided, but this is an especially charming one). Immediately after the war, he was interviewing a young man for a place at the college.
‘Sir, I have been away at the war, and I have to confess that I have forgotten all my Latin. I cannot pass the Latin exam to qualify for entrance.’
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, dear boy, war counts as Latin, war counts as Latin.’
My older colleagues back from National Service in 1959 were not literally ‘battle-hardened’ like Bowra’s entrance candidate, but they had an unmistakable air of being worldly-wise and grown up, in a way that I was not. As I said, I think that those of my generation who affected pipe-smoking, bow ties and neatly trimmed moustaches may have been struggling to keep up with the military veterans. Am I right in suspecting that today’s undergraduates aspire in the opposite direction, towards juvenilization? On the first day of a new university year, a modern college noticeboard is likely to have notices saying things like this: ‘Freshers! Feeling lonely? Lost? Missing Mum? Do drop in for coffee and a chat. We love you.’ Such cosseting invitations would have been inconceivable on the noticeboard of my first term, which was more likely to carry announcements calculated to make me feel I had arrived in the adult world: ‘Would the “gentleman” who “borrowed” my umbrella . . .’
I had applied to read biochemistry. The tutor who interviewed me, the kindly Sandy Ogston, who later became Master of Trinity, declined – thank goodness – to let me in as a biochemist (perhaps because he was one himself and would have had to teach me) but offered me a place to read zoology instead. I accepted gratefully, and it turned out to be the perfect course for me. Biochemistry could not have captured my enthusiastic interest the way zoology did: Dr Ogston was as wise as his venerable grey beard suggested.
Balliol had no tutorial fellow in zoology, so I was sent out of college to the wonderfully convivial Peter Brunet in the Department of Zoology. He would be responsible for tutoring me or for arranging tutorials with others. One incident in an early tutorial with Dr Brunet may have marked the beginning of my weaning away from a school attitude to learning in favour of a university one. I asked Dr Brunet a question about embryology. ‘I don’t know,’ he mused, sucking on his pipe. ‘Interesting question. I’ll ask Fischberg and report back.’ Dr Fischberg was the department’s senior embryologist, so this was an entirely reasonable response. At the time, however, I was so impressed by Dr Brunet’s attitude that I wrote to my parents about it. My tutor didn’t know the answer to a question and was going to ask an expert colleague and report back to me! I felt that I’d joined the big boys.
Michael Fischberg was from Switzerland, with a very strong Swiss German accent. His lectures made frequent mention of things called ‘tonk bars’ and I think most of us wrote ‘tonk bars’ in our lecture notes before we finally saw the phrase written down: ‘tongue bars’, a feature of embryos at a certain stage of development. Endearingly, while at Oxford Dr Fischberg developed a great enthusiasm for our English national game, founding and captaining the departmental team. He had a most unusual bowling action. Unlike a baseball pitcher, a cricket bowler has to keep his arm straight. Throwing is strictly forbidden: you must not bend your arm. Given this constraint, the only way to propel the ball at any speed is to run and then bowl while still running. The fastest bowlers in the world, such as the terrifying Jeff Thomson (‘Tommo’) of Australia, have achieved ball velocities of 100 mph (comparable to a baseball pitcher with his bent arm), and they do it by running very fast before releasing the ball with a straight overarm action in graceful rhythm with their running. Not Dr Fischberg. He stood rigidly to attention facing the batsman, raised his straight bowling arm horizontally to take careful aim at the wicket, then swung it over in a single arc and let go of the ball at the top.
I was hopelessly bad at cricket, but was sometimes cajoled into playing for Zoology when they couldn’t find anybody better and were really desperate. I do, though, quite enjoy watching cricket, fascinated by the strategy of a captain placing his fielders around the batsman – like a chess master deploying his pieces to encircle the king. The best cricketer I ever saw playing in the Oxford University Parks was the Nawab of Pataudi (‘Tiger’), the Oxford captain and my exact contemporary at Balliol. As a batsman, the effortless way he steered the ball to outwit the fielders was sublime. But it was as a fielder himself that he especially impressed me. On one occasion a batsman hit the ball and called for what must have seemed like an easy run. Then he noticed that the fielder charging down upon the ball was Tiger Pataudi, and he frantically shrieked to his partner to go back to his crease. Sadly, Tiger later lost one eye in a car accident and had to change his stance to bat monocularly, but he was still good enough to captain India.
I said that Oxford was the making of me, but really it was the tutorial system, which happens to be characteristic of Oxford and Cambridge. The Oxford zoology course also had lectures and laboratory classes, of course, but these were no more remarkable than those at any other university. Some lectures were good, some were bad, but it scarcely made any difference to me because I hadn’t yet worked out the point of going to a lecture. It is not to imbibe information, and there is therefore no point in doing what I did (and what virtually all undergraduates do), which was take notes so slavishly that there was no attention left over for thinking. The only time I departed from this habit was once when I had forgotten to bring a pen. I was much too shy to borrow a pen from the girl sitting next to me (having been to a single-sex school, and shy to boot, I was in boyish awe of all girls at the time, and if I was too timorous to borrow a pen you can imagine how often I dared approach them for anything more interesting than that). So, for that one lecture I took no notes and just listened – and thought. It was not an unusually good lecture, but I got more out of it than from other lectures – some of them much better ones – because my lack of pen freed me to listen and think. But I didn’t have the sense to learn my lesson
and refrain from taking notes at subsequent lectures.
Theoretically the idea was to use your lecture notes in revision, but I never looked at mine ever again and I suspect that most of my colleagues didn’t either. The purpose of a lecture should not be to impart information. There are books, libraries, nowadays the internet, for that. A lecture should inspire and provoke thought. You watch a good lecturer thinking aloud in front of you, reaching for a thought, sometimes grabbing it out of the air like the celebrated historian A. J. P. Taylor. A good lecturer thinking aloud, reflecting, musing, rephrasing for clarity, hesitating and then grasping, varying the pace, pausing for thought, can be a role model in how to think about a subject and how to transmit a passion for it. If a lecturer drones information as though reading it, the audience might as well read it – possibly in the lecturer’s own book.
An Appetite for Wonder Page 13
