The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring that are better able to cope with a changed environment. It is said cross-pollinating plants also tend to produce more and better-quality seeds. If my one-year-old son is anything to go by (a cross-pollination between a lapsed-Catholic horticulturalist feminist, and an intellectual Jew!), then I can certainly vouch for the truth of this. Sisters, the bottom line is this: if we are to continue wearing flowers in our hair into the next decade, they must be hardy and ever at hand, something only the truly mothering gardener can ensure. If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even she requires the occasional helping hand!
– Joyce Chalfen, from The New Flower Power, pub. 1976, Caterpillar Press
Joyce Chalfen wrote The New Flower Power in a poky attic room overlooking her own rambling garden during the blistering summer of ’76. It was an ingenuous beginning for a strange little book – more about relationships than flowers – that went on to sell well and steadily through the late seventies (not a coffee table essential by any means, but a close look at any baby-boomer’s bookshelves will reveal it lying dusty and neglected near those other familiars, Dr Spock, Shirley Conran, a battered Women’s Press copy of The Third Life of Grange Copeland by Alice Walker). The popularity of The New Flower Power surprised no one more than Joyce. It had practically written itself, taking only three months, most of which she spent dressed in a tiny t-shirt and a pair of briefs in an attempt to beat the heat, breast-feeding Joshua intermittently, almost absent-mindedly, and thinking to herself, between easy-flowing paragraphs, that this was exactly the life she had hoped for. This was the future she dared to envisage when she first saw Marcus’s intelligent little eyes giving her big white legs the once-over as she crossed the quad of his Oxbridge college, miniskirted, seven years earlier. She was one of those people who knew immediately, at first sight, even as her future spouse opened his mouth to say an initial, nervous hello.
A very happy marriage. That summer of ’76, what with the heat and the flies and the endless melodies of ice-cream vans, things happened in a haze – sometimes Joyce had to pinch herself to make sure this was real. Marcus’s office was down the hall on the right; twice a day she’d pace down the corridor, Joshua on one substantial hip, nudging open the door with the other, just to check he was still there, that he really existed, and, leaning lustily over the desk, she’d grab a kiss from her favourite genius, hard at work on his peculiar helixes, his letters and numbers. She liked to pull him away from all that and show him the latest remarkable thing that Joshua had done or learnt; sounds, letter recognition, coordinated movement, imitation: just like you, she’d say to Marcus, good genes, he’d say to her, patting her behind and luxurious thighs, weighing each breast in his hand, patting her small belly, generally admiring his English Pear, his earth goddess… and then she’d be satisfied, padding back to her office like a big cat with a cub in its jaws, covered in a light layer of happy sweat. In an aimless happy way, she could hear herself murmuring, an oral version of the toilet-door doodles of adolescents: Joyce and Marcus, Marcus and Joyce.
Marcus was also writing a book that summer of ’76. Not so much a book (in Joyce’s sense) as a study. It was called Chimeric Mice: An Evaluation and Practical Exploration of the Work of Brinster (1974) Concerning the Embryonic Fusion of Mouse Strains at the Eight-cell Stage of Development. Joyce had read biology in college, but she didn’t attempt to touch the many-paged manuscript that was growing like a molehill at her husband’s feet. Joyce knew her limitations. She had no great desire to read Marcus’s books. It was enough just to know they were being written, somehow. It was enough to know the man she had married was writing them. Her husband didn’t just make money, he didn’t just make things, or sell things that other people had made, he created beings. He went to the edges of his God’s imagination and made mice Yahweh could not conceive of: mice with rabbit genes, mice with webbed feet (or so Joyce imagined, she didn’t ask), mice who year after year expressed more and more eloquently Marcus’s designs: from the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding, to the chimeric fusion of embryos, and then the rapid developments that lay beyond Joyce’s ken and in Marcus’s future – DNA microinjection, retrovirus-mediated transgenesis (for which he came within an inch of the Nobel, 1987), embryonic stem cell-mediated gene transfer – all processes by which Marcus manipulated ova, regulated the over or under expression of a gene, planting instructions and imperatives in the germ line to be realized in physical characteristics. Creating mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them. And always with humanity in mind – a cure for cancer, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s – always with the firm belief in the perfectibility of all life, in the possibility of making it more efficient, more logical (for illness was, to Marcus, nothing more than bad logic on the part of the genome, just as capitalism was nothing more than bad logic on the part of the social animal), more effective, more Chalfenist in the way it proceeded. He expressed contempt equally towards the animal-rights maniacs – horrible people Joyce had to shoo from the door with a curtain pole when a few extremists caught wind of Marcus’s dealings in mice – or the hippies or the tree people or anyone who failed to grasp the simple fact that social and scientific progress were brothers-in-arms. It was the Chalfen way, handed down the family for generations; they had a congenital inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise. If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius. Marcus created beings. And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smaller versions of Marcus.
Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve) and Oscar (six), bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing. The Inner Life of Houseplants (1984) and a college chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties boom and bust, financing an extra bathroom, a conservatory and life’s pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. Now there were two new works-in-progress: The Secret Passions of the Climbing Rose and Transgenic Mice: A Study of the Inherent Limitations of DNA Microinjection (Gordon and Ruddle, 1981) in Comparison with Embryonic Stem (ES) Cell-mediated Gene Transfer (Gossler et al., 1986). Marcus was also working on a ‘pop science’ book, against his better judgement, a collaboration with a novelist that he hoped would finance at least the first two children well into their university years. Joshua was a star maths pupil, Benjamin wanted to be a geneticist just like his father, Jack’s passion was psychiatry, and Oscar could checkmate his father’s king in fifteen moves. And all this despite the fact that the Chalfens had sent their kids to Glenard Oak, daring to take the ideological gamble their peers guiltily avoided, those nervous liberals who shrugged their shoulders and coughed up the cash for a private education. And not only were they bright children, they were happy, not hot-housed in any way. Their only after-school activity (they despised sport) was the individual therapy five times a week at the hands of an old-fashioned Freudian called Marjorie who did Joyce and Marcus (separately) on weekends. It might appear extreme to non-Chalfens, but Marcus had been brought up with a strong respect for therapy (in his family therapy had long supplanted Judaism) and there was no arguing with the result. Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally healthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and, unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful and only ever over political or intellectual topics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soul/body dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway.