Scientist Richard Fortey pens memoir charting his ‘obsession’ with nature

‘I made the smelliest stink-bomb in history’: Natural History Museum scientist Richard Fortey pens evocative memoir charting his ‘obsession’ with nature which stems from childhood

  • Distinguished scientist Richard Fortey has wrote a memoir about his childhood
  • He is a world expert on trilobites but first found his obsession with nature as boy
  • Fungi, fossils, wildflowers and insets have always captured Richard’s attention
  • His book A Curious Boy is an account of the childhood that created the scientist

SCIENCE

A Curious Boy: The Making Of A Scientist

By Richard Fortey (William Collins £20, 352 pp)

‘I spent a chunk of my childhood half-wild in the countryside,’ Richard Fortey writes in this brilliant memoir of his early life.

Fortey is a distinguished scientist, now retired from the Natural History Museum, where he spent nearly all his working life.

He is a world expert on trilobites — odd invertebrate creatures which scuttled across ancient seabeds and became extinct 250 million years ago.

But he makes clear that, as a boy, he developed a lasting obsession with every aspect of the natural world. He followed his father, a devoted angler, along the banks of Berkshire chalk streams. 

Scientist Richard Fortey (pictured) has penned a memoir about his childhood, exploring how his obsession with the natural world began when he was a young boy

He collected birds’ eggs — this was legal, just, in the early 1950s, but he still feels slightly guilty about it.

At school, he avoided sports. During games of cricket he preferred to be ‘far out on the pitch where the ball rarely came, and where I could identify wildflowers and take an interest in passing insects’.

He cherished a field guide to flowers in which he could tick off those he had seen. He took pleasure in the charm of their names — wood goldilocks, Venus’s looking-glass, ploughman’s spikenard — which are ‘often only a short step away from poetry’.

Fungi and fossils also attracted his attention. And a trip to the cinema to watch Disney’s Fantasia thrilled him, particularly at the moment a cartoon T. Rex engaged in bloody battle with a Stegosaurus.

The present of a chemistry set turned him into a precocious experimenter. ‘I did manage several satisfactory explosions,’ he notes. He also learned in The Guinness Book Of Records of ‘the smelliest substance known to man’ — ethyl isocyanide — and could not wait to create it in his garden shed. 

His book, A Curious Boy: The Making of a Scientist, is an account of the childhood that created the distinguished scientist

His book, A Curious Boy: The Making of a Scientist, is an account of the childhood that created the distinguished scientist

He did so and briefly released this ‘prince of pongs’ in a Tube train waiting to leave Ealing Broadway station. To his wicked delight, passengers fled in disgust.

The adult Fortey is acutely aware of the disappearance of so much of the wildlife he saw as a child. Birds such as the yellowhammer, with its song sounding like ‘a little bit of bread and no cheeeese’, are now scarce. 

Wildflowers he once had no difficulty in tracking down are now rare. Also vanished is the world of 1950s and early 1960s middle-class childhood, which Fortey evokes so well. 

One of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, featuring world maps with the Empire coloured pink. 

Of watching the Coronation on a tiny black-and-white television (when seven-year-old Fortey escaped to take the family dog for a walk but got hopelessly lost and was brought home in a police car). 

Of visits from unmarried great-aunts who ‘carried with them the same smell of lavender bags placed in neat drawers’.

Much has changed in the decades since, but Fortey’s delight in what first excited him remains.

‘I still believe in the inexhaustible interest of the natural world,’ he writes, and A Curious Boy is a gloriously evocative account of the childhood that created the scientist.