An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist by Richard Dawkins

Author:Richard Dawkins [Dawkins, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-08-22T21:00:00+00:00

Sunset and the evening star

From Aden to Zanzibar.

The bonds of the Empire sundering

And final salutes are thundering

And man will not cease his wondering . . .

The same theatrical set introduced me to the Victorian Society, in whose company I spent some of my happiest times in Balliol. We met once or twice a term to sing music-hall songs to piano accompaniment, while sipping port. A master of ceremonies would call up soloists one by one to sing their special songs, and we’d all join in the chorus. Mostly they were cheerful, cheeky songs (‘Where did you get that hat?’ ‘Don’t have any more, Mrs Moore’; ‘You can’t do that there ‘ere’; ‘I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I am’; ‘My old man said follow the van’) interspersed with some sentimental weepies, for which tissues would be handed out (‘She’s only a bird in a gilded cage’; ‘Silver threads among the gold’), and the evening would end with jingoistic patriotism (‘Soldiers of the Queen’; ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do . . . The Russkies shall not have Constantinople’). If there’s one experience from Balliol days that I would dearly love to relive, it would be an evening with the Victorian Society.

It was much later in my life, but the nearest approach to such a reliving took place at the regular Friday evening sing-song at the Killingworth Castle pub in Wootton, a village just outside Oxford, to which I was introduced by my second wife Eve, mother of my beloved daughter Juliet. The music was British ‘folk’, not music hall, and the drink was beer, not port, but here I relived something of the atmosphere of the Victorian Society: a warm conviviality fuelled by music and community, more than by drink. The soloists and instrumentalists (guitar, squeezebox, penny whistle) on these Friday nights rotated between four or five regular performers or groups, all of them good in their different ways, all with their particular repertoires of songs, which were known to the regular chorus including Eve and me. For some songs quite stylish canons and descants would be produced, and – as with the Victorian Society – the chorus was always disciplined and up to a brisk tempo, very different from the usual ‘Just a song at twilight’ drunken dirge. We knew the more prominent members by private nicknames given them by Eve: ‘Two Pints’ (a large, bearded young man with a huge bass voice as muscular as the arms that raised his pints and took the collection for the musicians); ‘Big Daddy’ (a grandfatherly figure with an agreeable tenor, who sometimes volunteered ‘Cock Robin’ as a solo after the main soloists had finished); ‘Maynard Smith’ (a cheery, bespectacled fellow, named for his facial resemblance to the great scientist); ‘the Incredible Hulk’ (one of few who sang out of tune) and others.

Back in undergraduate days, my Balliol friends and I often went to the cinema, usually to the Scala in Walton Street: intellectual films by Ingmar Bergman, or Jean Cocteau, or Andrzej Wajda or other continental directors.

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