The Island of the Colorblind

I think these dreams, this passion to regain the past, had something to do with being separated from my family and evacuated from London (like thousands of other children) during the war years. But the Eden of lost childhood, childhood imagined, became transformed by some legerdemain of the unconscious to an Eden of the remote past, a magical ‘once,’ rendered wholly benign by the omission, the editing out, of all change, all movement. For there was a peculiar static, pictorial quality in these dreams, with at most a slight wind rustling the trees or rippling the water. They neither evolved nor changed, nothing ever happened in them; they were encapsulated as in amber. Nor was I myself, I think, ever present in these scenes, but gazed on them as one gazes at a diorama. I longed to enter them, to touch the trees, to be part of their world – but they allowed no access, were as shut off as the past.

My aunt often took me to the Natural History Museum in London, where there was a fossil garden full of ancient lycopod trees, Lepidodendra, their trunks covered with rugged rhomboid scales like crocodiles, and the slender trunks of tree horsetails, Calamites. Inside the museum, she took me to see the dioramas of the Paleozoic (they had titles like ‘Life in a Devonian Swamp’) – I loved these even more than the pictures in Marie Stopes’ book, and they became my new dreamscapes. I wanted to see these giant plants alive, straightaway, and felt heartbroken when she told me that there were no more tree horsetails, no more club-moss trees, the old giant flora was all gone, vanished – though much of it, she added, had sunk into the swamps, where it had been compressed and transformed into coal over the eons (once, at home, she split a coal ball and showed me the fossils inside).

Then we would move ahead 100 million years, to the dioramas of the Jurassic (‘The Age of Cycads’), and she would show me these great robust trees, so different from the Paleozoic ones. The cycads had huge cones and massive fronds at their tops – they were the dominant plant form once, she would say; pterodactyls flew among them, they were what the giant dinosaurs munched on. Although I had never seen a living cycad, these great trees with their thick, solid trunks seemed more believable, less alien, than the unimaginable Calamites and Cor-daites which had preceded them – they looked like a cross between ferns and palms.[77]

On summer Sundays, we would take the old District Line to Kew – the line had been opened in 1877, and many of the original electric carriages were still in use. It cost 1d. to enter, and for this one had the whole sweep of the Garden, its broad walks, its dells, the eighteenth-century Pagoda, and my favorites, the great glass and iron conservatories.

A taste for the exotic was fostered by visits to the giant water lily Victoria regia, in its own special house – its vast leaves, my aunt told me, could easily bear the weight of a child. It had been discovered in the wilds of Guyana, she said, and given its name in honor of the young queen.[78]

I was even more taken by the grotesque Weiwitschia mirabilis, with its two long, leathery, writhingly coiled leaves – it looked, to my eyes, like some strange vegetable octopus. Weiwitschia is not easy to grow outside its natural habitat in the Namibian desert, and the large specimen at Kew was one of the few which had been successfully cultivated, a very special treasure. (Joseph Hooker, who named it and obtained the original material from the euphonious Welwitsch, thought it the most interesting, though ugliest, plant ever brought into Britain; and Darwin, fascinated by its mixture of advanced and primitive characteristics, called it ‘the vegetable Ornithorhynchus,’ the platypus of the plant kingdom.)[79]

My aunt especially loved the smaller fern houses, the ferneries. We had ordinary ferns in our garden, but here, for the first time, I saw tree ferns, rearing themselves twenty or thirty feet up in the air, with lacy arching fronds at their summits, their trunks buttressed by thick cably roots – vigorous and alive, and yet hardly different from the ones of the Paleozoic.