Aestivation -a Summer Dream

As this endless summer draws to its close, with its dream of endless gardening and country life, the word aestivation – sleeping through the summer – takes me back to my youth in Cambridge. It was a favourite word of my great teacher Philip Hall, friend of Keynes and tutor to Turing, who used to say that aestivation is what Cambridge does in summer.

Another favourite word of his was eremitic – hermit-like. He was himself famous for this, never attending the grand High Table in college, with its wines bought by the then bursar Maynard Keynes, as an investment of course, and now worth millions.

To my amazement I got good results in the final undergraduate examination. It gave you no formal qualification, but was extremely difficult, designed to get one up to research level, which in pure mathematics is way beyond anything normally expected of undergraduates.

In those days the results were read out outside the Senate House, one of the loveliest corners of Cambridge, at eight o’clock in the morning about a week after the ‘Mays’, as the exams were called. They would then be posted on a little noticeboard. This happened the day after the May Ball, at which I had stayed up until three in the morning, floating down the river with my unofficial fiancée. I still remember the green light in the sky.

Very hungover, I managed to get to the noticeboard at about twelve and saw the magic star next to my name, indicating a distinction which qualified me to apply to do a PhD.

I had been entranced by the beauty of Philip’s legendary lectures, but had not dared approach him before. I left a note for him at the Porters’ Lodge at King’s, where he was a Fellow. After several days with no response I asked the porters whether they had seen him.

“Oh no, not for months, and we don’t know his address.”

Famously, he kept it secret. I knew he lived with his mother somewhere outside Cambridge, so I looked in the telephone directory and found a Mrs Hall living in Impington. Nervously I rang the number and he answered. Very surprised, he nevertheless agreed to see me the following week.

When the time came I nervously climbed the stairs to his grand rooms in a college gatehouse tower. I knocked and he said, “Come in.” I stood just inside the door, struck by the decoration: alternate life-size panels of men and women, the men all naked and the women fully dressed. I later discovered these had been done by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell for their friend Maynard Keynes.

He barked questions at me.

“What do you know?”

Well, I thought, he has just marked my exam paper. He should know the answer to that one.

“What interests you?”

Rather at a loss, I replied that I was interested in methods of solving algebraic problems rather than any particular topic.

Anyway, he took me on and we became friends. After his mother died I was, uniquely, allowed to drive him home and have tea.

There followed ten years of exciting creativity, working with some of the greatest minds, including an American genius from whom important new theorems seemed to fly spontaneously. As was said of Raphael’s paintings, they seemed to arrive as painlessly as apples from an apple tree.

To give some idea of the significance of this work, I was amazed to learn recently that the current classification of ‘elementary particles’ – the ultimate building blocks of matter – is based on a closely related branch of mathematics. When I heard this I actually laughed out loud.

I myself had originally hoped to work on elementary particles, but sixty years ago the theory was in a mess. I heard a lecture which announced that the then-current theory involved some 117 different particles. The lecturer confessed that this was a hopeless position, rather like stamp collecting. It seems that the pure mathematicians have helped to sort it out.

Now here I am at 85, aestivating in the summer heat, surrounded by ripening fruit. The apples, though sweetening, are still incredibly hard, but the figs, grapes, plums, tomatoes and raspberries... we can’t keep up.

There is endless watering in the evenings, while in the mornings I often wake early and recite psalms or poetry. Today it was Michelangelo’s lovely:

Quanto si gode, lieta et ben contestadi fior sopra ’l crin d’oro una ghirlanda...

about a happy garland of flowers, so joyful to be on the hair of a presumably beautiful woman; her dress happy to clasp her bosom and fall around her, the golden fillet around her neck... eroticism purified.

Last night I remembered Max Jacob’s surreal lyrics, written in beautiful Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in the last days before his tragic death under the Nazis.

In the morning I do emails after Tai Chi and a woodland walk, and in the afternoon it is gardening, cooking and harvesting fruit.

In the course of a long and varied life – with not much to show for it, as someone once said at an old boys’ dinner – I have met a lot of interesting people. My wife says I should write about them, as in the I Once Met column in The Oldie.

I started making a list last night with Iris Murdoch, E. M. Forster – Morgan to his friends – Francis Crick and Stephen Hawking, and got to thirty fairly quickly via Jung Chang, David Mamet, R. D. Laing and Michael Horovitz. During the night I remembered to add Will Self, Prince Charles-Henri de Lobkowicz de Bourbon-Parme, Lucian Freud, Charles Saatchi, Uma Thurman and Jools Holland.

I also remembered that I once sat next to Jodie Foster without recognising her, was in the same room as Francis Bacon, and listened to Cambridge grandees such as Paul Dirac – who predicted antimatter long before it was discovered – and a famous literary critic who never wore socks.

The garden is awash with fruit and the days filled with church events. There was a lovely tea party under an ancient yew tree for church helpers, organised by myself. Such a happy occasion, it reminded me of childhood, when church was a normal part of family life – everyone there, all classes, from a famous musician downwards.

At another event I felt rather looked down upon for not being a member of the right class. I’m not used to this and really don’t like it, although I think it was probably a useful experience. They’re all very rich. I would probably have looked down on them myself in my time as a flâneur in London.

Then there was a lovely dinner for a retiring priest, a most distinguished man, also organised by myself. A tremendously enjoyable event, a feast of reason and a flow of soul indeed.

I was able to talk about a wonderful poem I found the other day, perhaps the most beautiful thing I have ever read, by Michelangelo:

Veggio nel tuo bel viso, Signor mio...

about the face of Jesus which, while still clothed in flesh, had ascended many times to heaven, the source of all beauty and wisdom.

It is very difficult to disentangle the sixteenth-century Italian, but worth it. My summer sleep is full of jewels.

My love of fruit and vegetable growing goes back to 1945 and the war. Our little Birmingham garden was very productive. There were two plum trees whose fruit was immensely welcome in wartime. The lawn was dug up and planted with vegetables, and my job, aged four, was to remember what had been grown where the previous season.

Now in my old age I have spent the last twenty years planting fruit trees and still do. But whenever I see an oak sapling springing up I try to leave it, happy to think of the orchard slowly turning to woodland.

My favourite tree is an ancient plum which could be a hundred years old. It is very tall, producing what might be called egg plums, each the size of a large hen’s egg and almost a meal in itself.

Unfortunately there is a lot of disease in the tree. The dreaded brown rot claims about half the fruit, but there is still more than enough. Limbs have fallen off and a tree surgeon wanted to cut it down, but still the baskets of fruit appear.

When ripe, you can easily peel them with your fingers – well worth doing, as the skin is rather thick. The antithesis of supermarket fruit, they give me enormous pleasure.