My father read zoology in St. John’s College at Cambridge and became a fellow and steward there as was expected. He and my mother met in 1897, married that June, and had three boys three years apart: John then Martin then me.
My father had a big moustache, which often hid a small smile. I didn’t understand his humor until I was grown and he had lost it, and took him very much at his word, which amused him, too. He was interested, for my entire childhood, in eggs. He incubated them first in Nanny’s room then, when she complained, out in a shed. When they were ready he’d pick up each egg, write down the number of the pen, hen, and date of laying, then pick off the shell and study every detail of the embryo. He bred mice, pigeons, guinea pigs, goats, and rabbits; he grew and studied snapdragons and peas. He never lost his passion for Mendel. He believed there was a missing piece to Darwin’s theories, as did Darwin himself, for there had to be an explanation of how phenotypes were transferred from one generation to the next. His concept of genetics began with an image of a wave or a vibration. His career—piebald as it was, sometimes pariah, sometimes hero—was the result of his curiosity, his interrogative nature. He was an apostle of science, of the pursuit of questions and answers, and he expected his sons to be apostles, too.
By the time I reached New Guinea in 1931, when I was twenty-seven, my mother and I were the only remaining members of our family, and she had become a great psychological burden to me, both needy and despotic, a tyrant who seemed not to know what she wanted for or from her last remaining subject. But she had not always been so. In my youth I remember her as soft and sweet and, though I was the last of the lot, young. I remember her deferring to my father in all instances, waiting for his word on one matter or the other, unable to give us boys answers to the most benign of questions: Could we bring the spiders in the house if they were in jars? Could we spread jam on the rock to watch the slave-maker ants try and transport it? We had a special bond because she did not want me to grow up and I did not want to grow up either. My brothers didn’t make it look easy. John agreed to everything my father said, and Martin next to nothing. Neither road looked all that sunny to me, so I was happy to sprawl in my mother’s lap for a good long time.