jane goodall

I had been fascinated by live animals
from the time when I first learned to crawl.
- In the Shadow of Man

Jane goodall's childhood letters take us from early 1942, when she was seven years old, to the end of her school years in the summer of 1952, when she was eighteen. Her family usually called her Valerie Jane during this time, while her friends often referred to her as "V.J." The stretch from 1942 to 1952 is long enough, and critical enough, that we can easily watch a transformation in writing style - including the development of that ironic, mock-literary voice first appearing in letters to her friend Sally in 1951. But in spite of the metamorphosis taking place during those years, as the writer moves from young child to young adult, it is striking how persistently her love of and fascination with animals remains a central theme - replaced to some degree only in the last two letters by the love of and fascination with a man, Trevor.

The earliest letter, written in a pencil-in-fist cursive to "Darling Mummy," addressed from "The Manor House" and dated February 16 with no year, was probably, but not certainly, done on February 16 of 1942. Valerie Jane did not start formal schooling until later in 1940, and it is likely she did not learn to write in cursive until 1941 or 1942. The location and some of the details of this letter might seem to suggest an earlier year. During the fall and winter of 1939-40, when Mortimer first enlisted in the army, Valerie Jane and her mother and sister were regularly staying with Mortimer's mother ("Danny Nutt") and stepfather, who lived at the Manor House, a grand sixteenth-century brick and stone edifice rising out of the shambles of the fourteenth-century Westenhanger Castle in Kent. Other regular visitors to the Manor House at that time included Mortimer's sister Joan and her fiancé, Michael Spens; but they would not have been "Mr and Misis Spens" until their marriage in 1941. Still, the mention of that "big dog called Jacky who is going to live here untill Uncle Micel come back" reminds us both of the young writer's eager excitement about the animals all around her as well as the background drama: the men were going to war.

Beyond the visible carnage of the war during those years (including the 1942 death of Mortimer's younger brother, Rex, in an RAF plane crash) lay the vast if invisible damage of broken lives and families. By the time Valerie Jane's father reentered civilian life, in 1951, the marriage was over. So "Daddy" was nearly always a remote presence, the source of occasional letters and long-distance phone calls and the rare visit on leave. The note in the middle of this chapter, written to "Mummy," possibly in late 1946, describes with only good cheer ("it was jolly good fun") the experience of "seeing Daddy off" on the Eastern Prince, bound apparently for Bombay. Mortimer was shipping out to his first posting in the Far East.

Valerie Jane entered the Uplands Girls School in 1945 and began her riding lessons around the same time. On Saturdays she would take a local bus out of Bournemouth to the small village of Longham, where Miss Selina Bush (often called "Bushel") lived in a rambling Queen Anne brick house with field and stables out back. Miss Bush's place was called Longham House, and her assistant, Sheila MacNaughton, was known as "Poosh." Some of the letters beginning with the one of September 1945 refer to the delightful Saturdays at Longham House with Bushel and Poosh.

The bulk of letters from Jane Goodall's childhood have been preserved by her friend Sally Cary Pugh, the daughter of the Honorable Byron and Daphne Cary, a couple who had long been good friends of the Morris-Goodalls. Mortimer had gone to school with Byron, and they had been roommates in a London boarding house when, in the early 1930s, Mortimer met Vanne. Sally was born a year after Valerie Jane; Sally's younger sister, Sue, was only two months older than V.J.'s sister, Judy. The girls made a natural foursome, in other words, particularly after the mid-1940s, when Sally and Sue regularly stayed at the Birches in Bournemouth during school holidays. Starting probably during their summer holidays of 1946, Valerie Jane invented for everyone's entertainment a nature club, the Alligator Society, which involved projects, games, rituals, and even - when the girls were apart during school sessions - nature quizzes by mail and an Alligator Society Magazine, to which everyone was expected to contribute articles. The girls had an Alligator Camp, in the garden. They walked into town in the Alligator style: single file with V.J. at the head and the other three girls bringing up the tail, strictly according to the order of their ages. They all took on Alligator code names: Valerie Jane, the oldest and therefore leader, was "Red Admiral," in reference to a dramatic-looking butterfly. Sally was "Puffin." Sue became "Ladybird." And Judy, the youngest, was "Trout." Unhappily, there seem to be no surviving copies of the Alligator Society Magazine, and we are left with only the few tantalizing references to it in some of these letters.

Holiday sessions of the Alligator Society were enlivened during the later 1940s and early 1950s by all-day visits from Rusty, the black spaniel cross owned by the managers of a hotel around the corner (first mentioned in the letter of March 7, 1951). Rusty was an unusually intelligent dog who found an unusually attentive human partner. He loved to do tricks, including the ordinary (shake hands, play dead, jump the hoop) and the less so (climb a tall stepladder, close the door). Unlike most dogs, Rusty adored being dressed up in clothes and so would sometimes find himself wearing pajamas and being pushed down the street in a pram. But as the girls learned, he had a real personality. If anyone laughed at him while he was dressed up, for example, Rusty "hated that and would walk off at once, trailing clothes behind him." He acted apologetic whenever he did something he had been taught was wrong, but he would sulk bitterly when unfairly accused. "Rusty was the only dog I have ever known who seemed to have a sense of justice," Jane was later to comment.

The family, deeply religious if cheerfully unorthodox, attended the First Congregational Church in Bournemouth, known, because of its location, as the Richmond Hill church. (Vanne's father, William Joseph, had been a Congregational minister, though never at Richmond Hill.) And Valerie Jane, a passionate and idealistic girl, was increasingly attracted to the grandeur of the church, its gargoyle-lined bell tower, the grand arched bank of stained glass windows, and (as we can gather from the letters of June and August 1952) the new minister, a charismatic Welshman named Trevor Davies. This was an utterly idealized and platonic infatuation of late adolescence. The Reverend Trevor Davies, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., cast his light on the Richmond Hill congregation between 1951 and 1971 and across the end of Valerie Jane's "childhood": the summer of 1952, when she finished school, passed her Higher Examinations, and prepared to enter the world of work and practicality.

Next >>

Surf this book on Amazon

Home | Email