Beginnings, Part 2

Reason for Hope : A Spiritual Journey
By Jane Goodall, Ph.D., Phillip Berman

(Page 2 of 2)

As expected my father enlisted immediately, so the Birches, just a few minutes' walk from the English Channel, became my home. It was there, on the south coast of England, that I would spend the rest of my childhood and adolescence. Indeed, this much loved house is still my home, my refuge, when I am in England. It is where I am writing this book.

My maternal grandmother, known to all as Danny (again because I could not pronounce “granny”), was the undisputed head of the extended family that shared the Birches. She was a strong, self-disciplined, iron-willed Victorian who ruled over us with supreme authority and had a heart big enough to embrace all the starving children of the world. Her husband, a Welshman, had been a Congregational parson and had died before I was born. He had also been a brilliant scholar, receiving degrees in theology from three universities-Cardiff, Oxford, and Yale. And Danny, who survived him by more than thirty years, kept all his letters, tied up in red ribbon, and often read them before she slept. Also, she told us, she counted her blessings every night as she lay in bed, waiting for sleep. Above all, she had a horror of going to bed without making peace with those around her. There are always little upsets, minor rows, when many people live together-these should be resolved before bedtime; “Let not the sun set on thy wrath” she would quote. And to this day I hear her voice, when I quarrel with a friend: “How terrible you would feel if he (or she) should die before you made it up, before you said sorry.” I think that is why the words of Walter de la Mare strike home when he bids us “Look thy last on all things lovely every hour.”

We shared the Birches with my mother's two sisters, Olwen-immediately dubbed Olly by me-and Audrey, who preferred to be called by her Welsh name, Gwyneth. Their elder brother, Uncle Eric, who was a surgeon, came home from his hospital in London most weekends. And soon after the start of the war we took in two single women who, like hundreds of others, were left homeless by the ever-spreading chaos and destruction in Europe. All households were asked to find space for such unfortunates. And so the Birches, at that time, was an active place, filled with people of all sorts. We simply had to learn to get along with each other. The house had (and still has) a warm atmosphere; it was full of character and, despite the number of people, filled with peace. Best of all there was a big garden or backyard with many trees, and a green lawn and lots of secret places behind the bushes where, of course, gnomes and fairies lived and danced in the moonlight. My love for nature grew as I watched birds making their nests, spiders carrying their egg sacs, squirrels chasing each other round the trees.

My memories of childhood are almost inseparable from memories of Rusty, an endearing black mongrel dog with a white patch on his chest. He was my constant companion, and he taught me so much about the true nature of animals. There were other pets too at different times. A succession of cats, our two guinea pigs, a golden hamster, various tortoises, a terrapin, and a canary, Peter, who slept in a cage but was free to fly about the room in the daytime. For a while Judy and I each had our own “racing” snails with numbers painted on their shells. We kept them in an old wooden box with a piece of glass on the top and no bottom so they could eat the dandelion leaves as we moved the box around the lawn.

In one part of the garden there was a little clearing behind some thick bushes where Judy and I established a “camp” for the meetings of our club, a club which had just four members, we two and our best friends Sally and Susie Cary, who came to stay every summer holiday. In the camp we kept an old trunk containing four mugs, small supplies of cocoa and tea, and a spoon. We would light a fire and boil water in a tin can balanced on four rocks. Sometimes we went there for midnight “feasts”; during the war years almost everything was rationed, so we seldom had more than a biscuit or a crust of bread saved from our meals. It was the excitement, the silent creeping from the house, the lawn and trees ghostly in the moonlight, that we loved. Our feeling of achievement as we defied the rules provided the fun, not the insignificant bits and pieces that we gathered to eat. To this day, food is supremely unimportant to me.

Like most children who grow up in happy homes, I never had cause to question the religious beliefs of my family. Did God exist? Of course. God was as real to me then as the wind that rustled through the trees in our garden. God somehow cared for a magical world, full of fascinating animals and people who were mostly friendly and kind. It was an enchanted world for me, full of joy and wonder, and I felt very much a part of it.

Danny went to church every Sunday and at least one of us always went with her. Indeed, Audrey never missed a service, and Olly sang in the choir. But we children were never forced to go with them, nor did we go to Sunday School. Nevertheless, Danny tried to make sure that our beliefs weren't limited to the animistic worship of nature and animals. She believed deeply in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. She wanted Judy and me to share her belief for the comfort it would bring. And so she did her best to ensure that the ethics and wisdom of Christ's teachings influenced our lives. The rules that we had to obey were the simple ones contained in the Ten Commandments. She would sometimes quote texts from the Bible. Her very favorite, which I took as my own, was: “As thy days, so shall thy strength be.” This has helped me through the hardest times of my life. Somehow we shall find the strength to get through a day of unhappiness, of suffering, of heartache. Somehow, I always have.

As a child I was not at all keen on going to school. I dreamed about nature, animals, and the magic of far-off wild and remote places. Our house was filled with bookshelves and the books spilled out onto the floor. When it was wet and cold, I would curl up in a chair by the fire and lose myself in other worlds. My very favorite books at the time were The Story of Dr. Dolittle, The Jungle Book, and the marvelous Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books. I also loved The Wind in the Willows, and, to this day, I remember the beautiful and mystical experience shared by Ratty and Mole when they found the missing otter cub curled up between the cloven hoofs of the sylvan god, Pan. And I was enthralled by one other book: At the Back of the North Wind-a story full of Victorian moralizing that would make no sense to the children of today. Little Diamond, its boy hero, slept in a loft above Big Diamond, the cab horse upon whom the family, which was poor, depended for its livelihood. The icy north wind blew into Little Diamond's loft, and then appeared to the boy as a beautiful woman, sometimes small as a tinkerbell, sometimes tall as an elm tree. Then she would take him to see the world, safe in the still place behind the wind, curled into a nest that she made for him in her beautiful, long, thick hair. It was magic, mystical, and it introduced me to human suffering in story form, preparing me, in a way, for the real-life suffering of war. For the war was raging in Europe and, all too soon, it would make itself felt even in sleepy Bournemouth.

More and more often we would hear the drone of a German plane and the thunder of an exploding bomb. We were fortunate, as nothing fell close enough to do damage. But the windows rattled loudly, and some panes of glass were cracked. How well I still remember the wailing of the air-raid warnings. They usually sounded sometime in the night for that was when the bombers came over. Then we had to leave our beds and huddle together in the little air-raid shelter that was erected in our house in the small room (once a maid's bedroom) that, even today, is known as the “air-raid.” It was a low, steel-roofed cage about six feet by five feet and only four feet high. Thousands of these were issued to households who were living in potential danger zones. And there we had to stay-sometimes as many as six adults as well as we two children-until the welcome sound of the “All Clear.”

By the time I was seven I was used to news of battles, of defeats and of victories. Knowledge of man's inhumanity to man became more real as the newspapers and radio hinted at unspeakable horrors perpetrated on the Jews of Europe and the cruelties of Hitler's Nazi regime. Although my own life was still filled with love and security, I was slowly becoming aware of another kind of world altogether, a harsh and bitter world of pain and death and human cruelty. And although we were among the luckiest, far away from the horror of massive bombings, nevertheless, signs of war were all around: Our own father, far away and in uniform, somewhere in the jungles of Singapore. Uncle Eric and Olly setting off on air-raid duty, out into the dark night when the air-raid warning sounded. Audrey working as a land girl. The blackout that dominated our lives every evening. The American soldiers with their tanks who occupied the road outside the Birches. One of them became a real friend, but then went off to the front with his regiment and was, like so many hundreds, killed.

Even we had one narrow escape. It was during the fourth summer of the war. Judy and I, with our best friends Sally and Susie, were spending a week's holiday a few miles along the coast where one could actually get onto the sand (England was prepared for a possible German invasion, so most of the coastline was barricaded by miles and miles of barbed wire). One day, as our mothers sat on the sand and we children played, Vanne suddenly decided to take a different route back to our little guest house-a very long way around that meant we would miss lunch. But she was determined. Ten minutes after we set off, and as we were walking over some sand dunes, we heard the faint sound of a plane flying very high, heading south toward the sea. I can still remember, absolutely vividly, gazing up and seeing two tiny black objects, looking no bigger than cigars at that height, dropping from the plane into the blue, blue sky. German bombers often dumped their bombs along the coast if they had not managed to get rid of them on designated targets. It was safer when they met our planes on their way home. I can still remember the two mothers telling us to lie down, then trying to shield us with their bodies. I can still recall the terrifying explosions as the bombs hit the ground. And one of them made a deep crater halfway up the lane-exactly where we would have been but for Vanne's premonition.

When the war finally ended in Europe on May 7, 1945, the grim rumors about the Nazi death camps were confirmed. The first photographs appeared in the newspapers. I was eleven years old at the time, very impressionable and imaginative. Although the family would like to have spared me the horrifying Holocaust pictures, I had never been prevented from reading the newspapers and they did not stop me then. Those photographs had a profound impact on my life. I could not erase the images of walking skeletons with their deep-sunk eyes, their faces almost expressionless. I struggled to comprehend the agony of body and mind these survivors had gone through, and that of all the hundreds of thousands who had perished. I still remember seeing, with shock, a photo of dead bodies piled on top of one another in a huge mound. That such things could happen made no sense. All the evil aspects of human nature had been given free rein, all the values I had been taught-the values of kindness and decency and love-had been disregarded. I can remember wondering if it was really true-how could human beings do such unspeakable things to other human beings? It made me think of the Spanish Inquisition, and all the medieval tortures that I had once read about. And the terrible suffering that had been inflicted on black slaves (I had once seen a picture of rows of Africans chained in the galleys, a brutal-looking overseer standing with an upraised whip in his hand). I began to wonder, for the first time, about the nature of God. If God was good and all powerful as I had been led to believe, how could He allow so many innocent people to suffer and die? Thus the Holocaust dramatically introduced me to the age-old problem of good and evil. This was not an abstract theological problem in 1945; it was a very real question that we had to face as the horror stories mounted.

I found that things were not as clear-cut as they once had seemed; that life was full of ambiguity and contradictions. The Holocaust.

© 1999 by Jane Goodall and Phillip Berman

About the Author

Jane Goodall is the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees, having closely observed their behavior for the past quarter century in the jungles of the Gombe Game Reserve in Africa, living in the chimps' environment and gaining their confidence. Her observations and discoveries are internationally heralded. Her research and writing have made, and are making, revolutionary inroads into scientific thinking regarding the evolutions of humans.

PHILLIP BERMAN, whose discussions with Jane Goodall led to this book, has a degree in comparative religion from Harvard Divinity School. His award-winning books include The Courage of Conviction, The Search for Meaning, and The Journey Home. The PBS special Jane Goodall: Reason for Hope, underwritten by Tom's of Maine, Inc., was inspired by this book.