It was spring term of my last year at Charterhouse when I was called out of study hall and sent to the headmaster’s office. He told me Martin had shot himself and was dead. My parents had given instructions that I was to finish the school term before coming home. Martin had killed himself on John’s birthday beneath the statue of Anteros in Piccadilly Circus. There was an inquest, and a hearing, and his photograph on the front of the Daily Mirror. It was the most public suicide in English history. It must have been a great topic of conversation just beyond my earshot. To me, no one spoke a word.
I began my studies at Cambridge, where I took zoology, organic chemistry, botany, and physiology. That Christmas holiday I had planned to go to Spain with some chums, but the house fell through at the last minute and I ended up traveling the three miles to my parents’ house, where my father had me join him in a study at the British Museum on the anomalous striped feathers of the red-legged partridge. Next term I began to suspect, as Martin had before me, that I was not made for science. And yet I had to be made for science; Martin had made it clear that any other path was not worth taking. The meaning of life is the quest to understand the structure and order of the natural world—that was the mantra I was raised on. To deviate from it was suicide. When an opportunity arose to go to the Galápagos, the Holy Grail, I leapt at it. That was where the spark would be rekindled, where I would become enlightened. But I found the work as tedious on a boat as it was in the Bird Room at the British Museum with my father. I came to see that the whole Darwinian story of the fat-beaked finches eating nuts and the thin-beaked finches eating grubs was bunk because they were all mixed in together eating caterpillars quite happily. The only discovery I made was that I love a warm humid climate. I had never felt so good in my skin. But I came home despondent about my future as a scientist. I knew that I could not spend my life in a laboratory.
I took a course in psychology. I joined the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and found myself on a train to Cheltenham for an archaeological dig. I had taken a fancy to a girl named Emma in the Society, and had hoped to maneuver it so I’d sit with her, but another fellow had had the same idea and a bit more foresight, so I was left on my own behind them. An older man, clearly a Cambridge don, took the seat beside me, and once I gave up my sulk about the girl, we began talking. He was curious about my trip to the Galápagos, not about the birds or the caterpillars but about the Ecuadorian mestizos. He asked a number of questions I didn’t know how to answer but found intriguing and wished I’d thought to ask myself when I was there. He was A. C. Haddon, and this was my first conversation about a discipline he told me was called Anthropology. By the end of the ride, he’d invited me to do my Part II in Ethnology. Within a month, I’d switched over from the biological sciences. It was a bit terrifying, a bit of a free fall, to go from an extremely ordered and structured physical science to a nascent, barely twenty-year-old social science. Anthropology at that time was in transition, moving from the study of men dead and gone to the study of living people, and slowly letting go of the rigid belief that the natural and inevitable culmination of every society is the Western model.