Our visit to my father’s sister, Aunt Dottie, in the summer of 1910 is the first sustained memory I have. She was one of our many maiden aunts, and the most interesting to me. She had an exquisite beetle collection, all pinned and framed and labeled in her copperplate, squares and squares of them, laid out on velvet. Other women had jewelry; Aunt Dottie had beetles in every color and shape, all found in the New Forest, which was ten miles from her house. It was to the New Forest we would go every day with her in our gumboots and our buckets knocking together. There was a pond she liked, a good hour’s walk in, and she’d be the first to march straight in it, the mud sometimes deeper than her wellies, and more than once we had to pull her out, all three of us in a line—me at the end on dry ground—and laughing too hard to be of any use, but Aunt Dottie would play it up, pretending to be stuck and sinking and then allowing us to slowly bring her up and out of the water. She always had the most stunning creatures in her net—a natterjack toad, a great-crested newt, a swallowtail butterfly—and could only be rivaled occasionally by John, who had more patience than Martin or me with our scoopfuls of tadpoles. That is where my mind goes when I think of John, twelve years old, wading into a steaming, buzzing pond in the New Forest on a hot July day, bucket in one hand, net in the other, his eyes scouring the filmy surface. We got a letter after he died from a fellow officer who said John treated the war like a good long field excursion. ‘I do not mean to imply that he was not focused when he needed to be; he was, as I’m sure you have learnt from his commanding officers, an exceptionally courageous and thoughtful soldier. But while his comrades were inclined to complain about living in a ten-foot ditch, John would let out a jubilant yelp, having found the fossil of a Pliocene mollusk or spied a rare species of falcon flying overhead. He had a great passion for this earth, and while he left it and us far too soon, I am certain he is home.’ My mother did not like this letter or its suggestion that John was ‘home’ when his body was blown to bits over a Belgian farm, but I took comfort in it. There was little comfort after John’s death, and I chose to take it where I could find it.
John had the most potential to fulfill my father’s wishes for us. He was a passionate naturalist. His indentification of an extremely rare caterpillar when he was fifteen made it into The Entomologist’s Record. He took the prize in biology in his final year at Charterhouse School. If the war had not interrupted his trajectory, he would have most likely gone on to become the fourth Bankson to be a Cambridge don. At least this is what we all tell ourselves. John would have placated Father, and Martin would have been at liberty to follow his fancies. But John did not want to kill the things he studied. Nor was he interested in eggs or peas or cells or what they were calling germ plasma. He was interested in the triple-jointed legs of beetles and the eclipse feathers of mallards. He wanted to be outside mucking about in a field. But there’s no need to quibble over John. He is gone, as is all his potential and his happy little yelp in the trenches of Rosières as he dug a fossil out of the hard dirt wall.
Martin tried to appease my father and my father’s terrible grief after John died by studying biology, zoology, and organic chemistry. Only on the side, on the sly, would he write a poem or a play. But his grades were poor and he was miserable and finally he had to tell my father the truth. He was more interested in creating literature. My father was a great reader and a lover of the arts; he took us to the British Museum and the Tate and he read Blake and Tennyson to us in the evenings when we were children. But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn’t happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man’s time. Science on the other hand, science needed an army of educated men. Science was a place where men of above-average intelligence and education could find a foothold and push out the walls of knowledge. Science needed its rare geniuses, but it also needed its foot soldiers. My father had produced three of those foot soldiers. It was hard to convince him of anything else. I do not know everything that happened between my father and Martin in the three short years they had together after John’s death. I was away at school, at Warden House then Charterhouse, but I believe there were a great many letters that passed back and forth between them. ‘Your father has had another letter from Martin,’ my mother’s letters to me often read. She said no more but it meant that my father was greatly agitated and that my mother was writing me as a way of appearing busy and uninterruptible. She grew tired of the argument, though she never sided with anyone but my father, ever. Even after he was dead.
My long boarding school years were bookended by death. When I was twelve, I got word in Latin class that John had died. There were so many brothers of boys dying that they no longer took you out of class. You got a note, written on the deputy headmaster’s yellow paper, and you were told that you could leave the room if you felt the need. Not even the most emotionally feeble among us would dream of admitting to such weakness, so I stayed in class while the teacher carried on and my classmates did anything but look in my direction. It wasn’t tears you felt, not at first. It was more like being bathed in ethyl alcohol, which we used at home to anesthetize our insects. At night you cried, because everyone around you was crying, halls and halls of boys crying in the dark for their brothers. ‘Tears are not endless and we have no more.’ That is the line I like best of all those war poets.
Even still, it took a long time to feel much of anything again.