Travelling to Infinity (19 page)

In the face of dogmatic rational arguments, there was no point in raising questions of spirituality and religious faith, questions of the soul and of a God who was prepared to suffer for the
sake of humanity – questions which ran completely counter to the selfish reality of genetic theory. Issues of morality, conscience, the appreciation of the arts, were best kept out of the
arena lest they too became victims of the positivist approach. Still reacting against the organized religion of my childhood, I did not attend either of the two churches at the end of the lane
regularly, but I sought sanctity in the garden of Little St Mary’s, where Thelma Thatcher assigned a small patch of ground by the railings opposite our house for me to tend. There, under the
rambling roses, I could weed, rake, hoe and plant bulbs for the spring and roses for the summer while pondering mysteries, theories and realities. Robert and Inigo played running along the winding
paths and clambering over the mossy tombs while I worked. The ancient, sacred garden sprang to life with the music of their bright young voices, and our strip of ground blossomed with the
pink-and-white striped rose that Stephen had given me for my birthday. It was the famous
Rosa gallica
, named Rosamundi after Henry II’s mistress, Fair Rosamund.

Since the churchyard garden was enclosed, Robert and Inigo could play there safe from harm, letting off their inordinate amounts of energy. From early infancy it was quite
apparent that Robert was blessed with at least twice the normal fund of energy of a small boy. Quite apart from overturning all my notions regarding the sleep patterns of a newborn infant, he
discovered, at about eight weeks, that his feet and legs were meant for standing on. Thereafter, he would not sit down, insisting on being held upright on my knee. Even when in Seattle we had been
invited to take advantage of a free photographic session by courtesy of the diaper service, Robert resisted all attempts to make him lie gurgling on a rug or peep out coyly from under a blanket
draped over his head, and reduced the photographer to a state of apoplexy when grudgingly he had to allow my arms to appear in the shot, in discreet support of the twelve-week-old baby who was
firmly planted on his two small feet.

By the age of seven months, this inventive child had found out how to dismantle his cot so that all the joins, catches and hinges had to be tightly tied together with string to stop him falling
out. Nevertheless, no sooner had Stephen and I turned our backs each evening and crept away downstairs, yawning and fondly trusting that repetitive readings of
Thomas the Tank Engine
had
at last softly lulled our audience into the realms of sleep, than we would hear the tiny feet coming busily down the stairs to join us for our supper and whatever concert we might be listening to
on the radio. Since he could no longer dismantle his cot, Robert learnt to vault over the bar and then drop onto the floor beneath. At about eleven o’clock we would all fall into bed
together.

Even before he had perfected that degree of agility, Robert’s dynamism had given us a quite a scare. In the spring of 1968, my parents took us to Cornwall once again with my brother Chris.
Happily Robert was prepared to sit quite contentedly in the car, strapped in his seat, no matter how long the journey – but when at last in the early evening we adults sank drowsily into the
comfortable armchairs in our rented cottage, Robert, already able at ten months old to walk nimbly round the furniture, set off on a tour of the ground floor. A sudden high-pitched scream from
behind my back roused us precipitately. To steady himself, Robert had placed one small hand, his right, against an electric storage heater, which, unbeknown to us, was turned to its maximum
setting, and the heat had seared off the skin of his palm. Thanks to my brother’s medical training, Robert was pacified with a fraction of an aspirin – the only painkiller available
– the hand gently treated and bandaged in a clean handkerchief, and we all, though shocked, managed to get a good night’s sleep. Robert, Chris and I spent the best part of the next day
searching out a doctor, because overnight the infant hand had swollen into one huge blister. The doctor, impressed at the quality of the first aid administered by a mere dental student, simply
provided a pediatric painkilling prescription and more substantial dressings and thereafter commissioned Chris to continue to care for his small patient.

In the summer of that same year, the year of Robert’s first birthday, How Ghee and Peck Ang with their small daughters left the house at number 11 to return home to Singapore. In true
Little St Mary’s Lane style, the Thatchers gave an informal farewell party for them, to which we and Inigo and his parents were invited, together with half a dozen or so other guests. Inigo
and Robert were by this stage completely at home in the Thatcher household. They adored Thelma, and she reciprocated with a grandmotherly affection. They would call on her every morning, peering
through her letter box, calling “Tatch, Tatch!” in the hope of being invited in to play with the collection of bright marbles on her solitaire table. They were frequent teatime
visitors, sitting at her elegant Regency table on her elegant Regency chairs – though as a precautionary measure she did apologetically cover the yellow-striped damask seats with plastic
sheeting. At the Angs’ party no one took much notice of the small boys who were happily amusing themselves, until Thelma called for a toast to the Angs – How Ghee, Peck, Susan and
demure little Ming – and their future happiness. We all turned to pick up our glasses of champagne from the occasional tables only to find that they were all drained dry. From upstairs, there
came the sound of running water, of much flushing and splashing and peals of laughter. Two rather tipsy one-year-olds were having their own, much more entertaining party well out of sight in the
Thatchers’ bathroom.

Later that summer Stephen and I took Robert on his first bucket-and-spade holiday to the north Norfolk coast, where I encountered the unforeseen dilemma of needing to be in two places at once.
As Stephen’s speed of movement slowed down, so Robert’s accelerated. Stephen found it difficult to walk across the soft, yielding sand, and so did I, as I supported him on one arm and
carried bags, bucket and spade, towels and a folding chair on the other. Robert, in the meantime, would be racing away, heading for the open sea. Luckily, on that coast, the tide goes out as far as
the eye can see, and that week was a week of low tides by day, so we managed to avoid undue mishap.

On the final morning I went upstairs to pack our bags, leaving Stephen and Robert downstairs in the main room at the front of the house. At the back, a sun room with an open mezzanine half-loft
approached by a rickety ladder had been added to the cottage. For obvious reasons we did not use this room and kept the door to it firmly closed. After half an hour of packing I came downstairs to
find Stephen sitting alone in the front room. “Where’s Robert?” I asked in bewilderment. Stephen gestured towards the back room. “He opened that door,” he said,
“went through it and closed it behind him. There was nothing I could do, and you didn’t hear when I tried to call you.”

Momentarily I glanced at the door in horror, then burst into the room. There was no sign of Robert. My eyes travelled upwards, and there, to my astonishment, was my little son in his blue
T-shirt and checked trousers, sitting at the top of the ladder on the open mezzanine floor, cross-legged like an infant Buddha, blissfully unconcerned by the drop beneath. I raced up the ladder and
grabbed him before he had time to move.

If on that first visit to the coast, Robert did not succeed in hurling himself into the sea, it was only because his legs were too short for him to get to the water’s edge before I caught
up with him. After depositing his father on the folding chair on the firmer sand midway between the dunes and the shore, I would sprint over the beach at speeds which could well have won me an
Olympic medal. Over the course of the next two or three years, Robert regularly threw himself headlong into any available stretch of water, be it sea, pond or swimming pool, as soon as my eye was
distracted for a second. On a later visit to Norfolk with the Ellises and their little daughter – dark-haired, blue-eyed Maggie – Sue plunged into the sea like lightning to rescue
Robert, who had run straight into the water and disappeared. When we visited the Cleghorns – the parents of Stephen’s school friend Bill – out in the country, Robert made a
beeline for their pond and fell in, amongst the weed, the mud and the frogs. And in the summer of 1969, when we spent the month of July at the University of Warwick at a summer school appropriately
enough on Catastrophe Theory, Robert excelled himself by jumping into the deep end of the nearby swimming pool at every opportunity. Happily on those occasions, as his father was in lectures and
not dependent on my supporting arm, Robert had the full benefit of my undivided attention.

That summer school coincided with that “great leap for mankind”, the Moonwalk, which we watched on television in the student Common Room. Giant leaps, small steps and all-too-real
catastrophes narrowly averted, these sonorous terms seemed to sum up the essence of our day-to-day lives. Giant leaps were needed to keep up with Robert’s mercurial movements, while
Stephen’s steps were becoming smaller, slower and more unsteady. Each morning I would drive Stephen from the student hostel where we were lodging to the lecture hall on the other side of the
new campus. At Stephen’s pace, the lecture hall was some five minutes’ walk away from the car park, across courtyards and through a maze of passages. Robert, just two years old, would
shoot out of the car as soon as it came to a standstill, and hare away ahead of his father and me. The only consolation was that he had an unerring sense of direction which led him through the
tortuous route to the lecture hall, where he would install himself in the front row. It became a standing joke among the other delegates that Robert’s appearance in the early morning always
heralded Stephen’s arrival five minutes later. The lecturer would then adjust the order of his lecture notes, deferring any important results until Stephen arrived.

At home, we had to barricade the house to prevent Robert from escaping and throwing himself in the river. On our afternoon walks I was hard-pressed to find a means of expending all his energy
without exhausting myself, especially as he would never turn round to go back home until he was on the point of collapse, and then he had to be carried or taken in the pushchair. Generally I left
the pushchair at home, because on our outward journeys, when speed of reflex was all-important, it tended to interfere with the swiftness of my reactions. “Put reins on him,” my parents
urged sensibly, worried by my haggard appearance. “You don’t understand, he won’t walk with reins on,” I insisted, to their disbelief. “Nonsense,” they said,
thinking that this was just another example of my crackpot theories about personal freedoms. “All right, you try,” I replied defiantly, handing them back the set of pale-blue, leather
reins they had just given me. They picked up their cherubic, blond, blue-eyed grandson, and carried him and the reins down to the broad path along the river bank, away from the traffic. In no time
at all, they were back at the house asking for the pushchair. “You were right,” my mother sighed, “when we put the reins on him, he sat down and refused to move. When Dad tried
tugging on the reins, he kept his legs firmly crossed and when Dad lifted the reins, he just left the ground, and there he was, dangling in mid-air on the end of the strap!”

Never in all the long years of my education and, unsurprisingly, nowhere in all those reams of medieval literature, had I encountered one jot of advice on bringing up children. Apparently
through the ages, children had just happened, and it had never been thought necessary to teach their parents how to look after them. If this was an example of the workings of the geneticists’
selfish gene, the selfish gene was intent on self-destruction. From six o’clock in the morning till eleven at night, Robert was full of golden smiles – cheerful, loving and utterly
adorable – but his boundless energy brought me to my knees. I thumbed through my only guide, the already well-worn pages of Dr Spock’s
Baby and Child Care
, searching for help
and reassurance. Comfortingly, Dr Spock seemed to recognize the problem, but his solution – putting a netting over the cot – was not one that I could bring myself to adopt for fear that
Robert might strangle himself. Then I turned to my doctor, Dr Wilson, who sympathetically recommended a glass of sherry – for me – in the evening “at about six o’clock, when
Robert has gone to bed”, and also prescribed a tonic.

Early one morning in the September of 1969, I was aroused from my slumbers not by a sound or by a light but by a smell – a sweet sticky smell which subconsciously I knew to be wrong. I
opened my eyes to find Robert standing by my side of the bed with a broad grin all over his face and a viscous, pinkish liquid dribbling down the front of his blue sleeping suit. I jumped out of
bed and stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen. A chair stood by the fridge and the floor was littered with empty bottles, all of them medicine bottles. One of the bottles had contained the sweet,
syrupy antihistamine which the doctor had prescribed for Robert for a recent cold and earache, and which had a conveniently soporific effect; another had contained the stimulant which I had been
taking to pep me up. At two years of age, Robert had pushed a chair into the kitchen, climbed up onto the fridge and reached up to the shelf where, for want of a medicine cupboard, the bottles were
stored. He had swigged the lot.

Leaving Stephen to fend for himself as best he could, I dressed in haste and ran with Robert in his pushchair to the doctor’s surgery. The surgery, only a couple of hundred yards away, was
just opening, and we were given priority. As Robert was already starting to show signs of drowsiness, Dr Wilson sent us immediately to hospital, half a mile away in the other direction, by taxi.
There the nightmare really began, as the seriousness of the situation became evident. Robert, his arms and legs jerking and flailing out in all directions, was taken from me and held down while his
stomach was pumped out. At first, the nurses were terse, only asking what medicines he had taken, then, when they had tried all the interventionary methods at their disposal to rid the
child’s system of the poisonous cocktail, one of them turned to me and said: “He is extremely ill, you realize – there is nothing more we can do, we shall just have to wait and
see what happens.”