Hopeful Monsters (7 page)

I would wonder - Is this or is it it not to do with the real world?

Or - This is one of the riddles?

Most of all during these evenings I would like the proximity of my mother; I would put my head against her shoulder so that I could better follow the words that she was reading; with the sun behind us, it was as if we were in long grass on a summer's day. My mother was a large golden-haired woman who sat straight-backed; there was a way in which the top half of her body seemed to be like milk contained miraculously by the air. I would put my arm around her; when she had finished reading she would hug me.

She would say 'You shouldn't be stuck with your old mother! You should be out playing with friends.'

I would say 'I haven't got any friends.'

She would say 'Do you want any?'

I would say 'No.'

She would say 'Why not?' Then - 'Don't tell your old mother!'

Often when my father was working in Cambridge he would bring a gang of his friends home at weekends. They would arrive in cars or on bicycles; they would come on to the lawn pulling off scarves and caps or goggles; they would be laughing and nudging one another and chattering. They broke into my mother's and my quiet world like Vikings in longboats from the sea. My father kept in the hall an enormous bag of shoes suitable for croquet or tennis; he would bring this bag out and toss shoes to people even as they came on to the lawn; they were supposed to catch them; this was a game even before the start of a proper game; it was as if there had to be established from the very beginning of a visit the style that the guest was expected to conform to.

My mother would move graciously from one to another of my father's guests. She often wore a long white skirt nipped in at the waist. The people she spoke to would stand awkwardly and hit at their legs with a mallet or a racket. My mother would stay with them for a time; then move back through the windows into the drawing-room.

Once, after my mother had gone, my father's friends played leapfrog on the lawn.

My father would call to me 'Where are you off to?'

I would say 'I thought I'd just go upstairs.'

'Don't you want a game of croquet?'

'I've just had one, thanks.'

'Who with?'

'Myself

'Don't strain yourself, will you.'

My father was a large, thick-set man with a moustache that came down over the lower part of his face like a portcullis. He would wear a panama hat when he played croquet. He would crouch over his ball, then go bounding after it. I would wonder - Why can he not let it go its own way; would he then have to trust to birds, rings, portents, riddles?

I understood that my father was quite famous for the work he had done in biology. From books I had in my room I did not find it difficult to understand the business of natural selection: all life evolved by means of chance mutations in genes, the products of which are put to the test by the environment; most mutations die, because of course what is established is what is suited to the environment. But occasionally there is a change in the environment

coincident with a genetic mutation, the result of which is suited to the change - suited in the sense that it is more likely to survive in the new conditions than the established stock from which it comes. So then it is the mutation or mutant that survives and eventually the old stock dies. But what seemed mysterious to me - what had once apparently seemed mysterious to my father - were the questions of what occasioned these mutations; what is called 'chance'; how many and how frequent coincidences had to occur for it to be possible for a new form of life to emerge? Was it not what might be called 'miraculous', that so many coincidences seemed to have to happen all at once for a new strain to occur?

At Sunday lunches my mother would say to my father 'Can you explain to Max?'

My father would say 'It's really a matter of statistical analysis.'

My mother would say 'I understand that it is a matter of all sorts of mutations being latent and potentially available in the gene pool.'

My father would say 'Lovely bits of mummy and daddy swimming in the gene pool.'

My mother would say 'I do think it a pity that you cannot be serious with Max.'

My father would say 'You can use such images if you like. But such language does not help explanation.'

My mother would look away as if she were someone in a fairy story imprisoned in a castle.

There were times, nearly always when my father was away, when a group of my mother's friends came down from London. They would emerge on to the lawn having walked perhaps from the station; they were unlike my father's friends in that they did not make much noise. There was a rather ancient young man with steel spectacles and beard; a much younger-looking young man in white flannels who danced up and down in front of him. There were two tall ladies in floppy hats and with beads who went and gazed at the herbaceous border. Then they would all sit in deckchairs and seem to be waiting to be photographed. When they talked it was as if they were trying out lines for a play.

After they had gone, and my father had come home, he would say 'And how are the Wombsburys?'

My mother would say 'Very well, thank you.'

My father would say 'Bedded any good boys lately?'

My mother would say 'Please don't talk like that in front of Max.'

I would want to say - But of course he can talk like that in front of me!

My father once said to my mother 'If I were you, I'd watch out for them having a go at Max.' My mother got up and left the table.

I suppose I wondered why my father and my mother went on at each other like this; but their style seemed to be just part of the grown-up world. There was all the battling and jockeying for position. I would wonder - This is something to do with the needs of natural selection?

Quite often I went through to talk to Mrs Elgin and Watson in the kitchen. In their separate world they would be banging pots and pans about and getting on with polishing the silver.

I would say 'Who do you like best, my father's or my mother's friends?'

Mrs Elgin would say 'I've got something better to do all day than think about things like that!'

I once said 'I think that man with the beard is going to ask the man in white flannels to marry him.'

Watson said 'One day the wind will change and you won't be able to get rid of those ideas!'

I would think - Oh one day will I find someone with whom talk is not a testing or a battle?

Then sometime in 1923 (this was the summer of my eleventh birthday) there appeared on the Cambridge scene - I mean by 'Cambridge scene' not only the academics in their lecture-rooms and laboratories but also, on this occasion at least, the concourse on my father's lawn - a biologist from Vienna called Kammerer. The story of Kammerer is quite well known; but I have this particular memory of him among the men in white flannels and knickerbockers and the croquet hoops on our lawn. Kammerer was a thin, youngish middle-aged man with a high forehead and brushed-back hair; he wore a dark suit of a strangely hairy material. His eyes were alert and watchful; he seemed puzzled, yet not put out by the things going on around him. When my father introduced him to my mother, he kissed her hand. Then he held on to her hand for a moment, as if his attention had been caught by something just behind her eyes. My mother put one foot behind the other and rubbed her ankle with it; it was almost as if she were doing a curtsey.

I thought - But he is like someone come down from a strange planet: a mutation?

My father stood hitting a tennis racket against his leg.

Now what I had heard of this Dr Kammerer was that my father looked on him as a great enemy: they had been having some dispute about the nature of genetic inheritance. Dr Kammerer (so I had understood from my father) was a heretic - something called a 'Lamarckian'. What he was supposed to believe in (it is impossible in such areas, as you say, to avoid the jargon) was the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

What Darwinists such as my father believed in (arguments about dogma go round and round; it is impossible also not to repeat oneself) was that parents can transmit through heredity only what they have inherited themselves - they cannot pass on the skills or faults or features that they have acquired during their lifetimes; though they can, of course, pass on something of these by teaching. Evolutionary jumps take place when mutations in genetic material occur by chance; 'chance' means here just what cannot be explained scientifically in terms of what is predictable. There was even a theory that genetic mutations might be caused by cosmic radiation, but this conjecture could not be tested.

Lamarckians (taking their name from a French biologist who lived in the early nineteenth century) claimed that it is impossible to explain evolution by chance occurrences: for such huge steps to have occurred as, for instance, the emergence of the human eye, there would have to have been such myriad interlocking coincidences as to be inconceivable: what possible evolutionary advantage could there have been in the emergence on their own of one or two still useless facets of the complex totality of the human eye which only functions when it is complete? For explanations to make sense there had to be taken into account the likelihood of some directing or at least coordinating force among the plethora of required mutations: and it did seem, yes, that this might be provided by the possibility of what had been of advantage to parents being in some way genetically passed on. This would not mean, for instance, that a parent who had lost a limb would pass on to an offspring this lack of a limb: Lamarckians suggested that only such characterises might be passed on as would be of advantage in coming to terms with the environment.

But this sort of talk was anathema to Darwinists, ostensibly because there was no means of explaining scientifically how this learning on the part of parents could be transmitted to the genetic material, the cells of which could be shown (or so it was believed)

to be quite separate from the cells of the other parts of the body. But it seems to me now (of course, no scientist talked like this at the time) that there was some rage or even terror amongst biologists at the suggestion that what a person had acquired (or not acquired!) during a lifetime might be passed on to offspring: what a burden of responsibility this would place upon a parent! Every failure would be perpetuated; every fault would make a person accountable for ever.

During the early years of the twentieth century the situation remained confused: neither Darwinists nor Lamarckians seemed able to answer the objections that each put up against the other. Then there was the rediscovery by people like my father of Mendelian genetics - theories about inheritance suggested by Mendel fifty years earlier but not at the time taken up. These described how innumerable small differences occurring naturally in genetic material could be seen, by an understanding and application of mathematics, to account for the larger changes in living forms seeming to occur just when a change in the environment, as it were, provoked or required them: it was as if (my mother had used an image that was coming into vogue at the time) there were indeed all sorts of latent mutations hanging about waiting to be encouraged to emerge from what might be called a 'gene pool'. This image, it was true, did not seem very explicit about what it actually referred to; but then experts such as my father could retreat behind their jargon - or behind their claim that such a matter could properly only be understood by mathematicians.

But then, just when geneticists like my father seemed to be getting the business sorted out, or at least protected, there turned up on the scene this Viennese biologist called Kammerer who appeared to claim once more that Lamarck was probably right - in certain circumstances parents could, yes, be shown to transmit by heredity to their offspring characterics which they had acquired during their lifetimes.

Kammerer was this thin man with a high forehead and brushed-back hair; he had come on to our lawn and had kissed my mother's hand: my father was banging his tennis racket against his leg.

This was on a Sunday afternoon; there were the men in blazers and white flannels on the lawn. They were playing croquet; at any moment they might be playing leap-frog. Dr Kammerer was looking round the garden as if he were sizing up possible escape routes; or perhaps manoeuvres for survival on this strange planet.

My father said 'Do you play tennis?'

Dr Kammerer said 'I sometimes play.'

My father said 'I can lend you a pair of shoes.'

Now I knew about my father's ways of playing tennis: he used a tennis court as some sort of battle-ground on which to engage with the people (and these seemed to be most people) against whom he felt aggression. He was, I suppose, quite a good player for his age; he put great energy into his game; he would serve and rush to the net; he would leap to and fro volleying; he would prance backwards towards the baseline slashing at high balls as if they were seagulls or vultures attacking him. Sometimes I would be his partner in a foursome and it seemed to be his aim, at the net, never to let a ball reach me. Once there was a very high lob and my father came staggering back; it was obviously my ball; I tried to get to it; my father and I collided and he fell on top of me. I remember the bright amused look in his eye as people ran up to us as if he might have done me some injury.

Now Dr Kammerer was saying 'Oh I don't need any shoes!'

My father said 'You can't play in those.'

Dr Kammerer said 'I will play in bare feet.'

He sat on the grass and took off his shoes. My mother watched him. When he looked up he seemed to wink at my mother.

Then he took off his jacket and jumped up and down on his toes. He had trousers that were much narrower than the trousers of my father's friends. He looked elegant. Trousers at that time were apt to be like the screens behind which one undressed in a doctor's consulting-room.

My father said 'Well I suppose you'll need a racket!'

Dr Kammerer said 'Or shall I use my bare hands!' He smiled, not quite catching my mother's eye.