Read Online Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley - Free Book Online

wells, animals; there had to be an understanding of portents and tricks, an answering of riddles.
    I would wonder - Is this or is it it not to do with the real world?
    Or - This is one of the riddles?
    Most of all during these evenings I would like the proximity of my mother; I would put my head against her shoulder so that I could better follow the words that she was reading; with the sun behind us, it was as if we were in long grass on a summer's day. My mother was a large golden-haired woman who sat straight-backed; there was a way in which the top half of her body seemed to be like milk contained miraculously by the air. I would put my arm around her; when she had finished reading she would hug me.
    She would say 'You shouldn't be stuck with your old mother! You should be out playing with friends.'
    I would say 'I haven't got any friends.'
    She would say 'Do you want any?'
    I would say 'No.'

    She would say 'Why not?' Then - 'Don't tell your old mother!'
    Often when my father was working in Cambridge he would bring a gang of his friends home at weekends. They would arrive in cars or on bicycles; they would come on to the lawn pulling off scarves and caps or goggles; they would be laughing and nudging one another and chattering. They broke into my mother's and my quiet world like Vikings in longboats from the sea. My father kept in the hall an enormous bag of shoes suitable for croquet or tennis; he would bring this bag out and toss shoes to people even as they came on to the lawn; they were supposed to catch them; this was a game even before the start of a proper game; it was as if there had to be established from the very beginning of a visit the style that the guest was expected to conform to.
    My mother would move graciously from one to another of my father's guests. She often wore a long white skirt nipped in at the waist. The people she spoke to would stand awkwardly and hit at their legs with a mallet or a racket. My mother would stay with them for a time; then move back through the windows into the drawing-room.
    Once, after my mother had gone, my father's friends played leapfrog on the lawn.
    My father would call to me 'Where are you off to?'
    I would say 'I thought I'd just go upstairs.'
    'Don't you want a game of croquet?'
    'I've just had one, thanks.'
    'Who with?'
    'Myself
    'Don't strain yourself, will you.'
    My father was a large, thick-set man with a moustache that came down over the lower part of his face like a portcullis. He would wear a panama hat when he played croquet. He would crouch over his ball, then go bounding after it. I would wonder - Why can he not let it go its own way; would he then have to trust to birds, rings, portents, riddles?
    I understood that my father was quite famous for the work he had done in biology. From books I had in my room I did not find it difficult to understand the business of natural selection: all life evolved by means of chance mutations in genes, the products of which are put to the test by the environment; most mutations die, because of course what is established is what is suited to the environment. But occasionally there is a change in the environment

    coincident with a genetic mutation, the result of which is suited to the change - suited in the sense that it is more likely to survive in the new conditions than the established stock from which it comes. So then it is the mutation or mutant that survives and eventually the old stock dies. But what seemed mysterious to me - what had once apparently seemed mysterious to my father - were the questions of what occasioned these mutations; what is called 'chance'; how many and how frequent coincidences had to occur for it to be possible for a new form of life to emerge? Was it not what might be called 'miraculous', that so many coincidences seemed to have to happen all at once for a new strain to occur?
    At Sunday lunches my mother would say to my father 'Can you explain to Max?'
    My father would say 'It's really a