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.