Mendel's Dwarf Read Online Free

discovery of a further intervening generation had somehow depressed him. “With”—his bony finger would prod at the figure in the soutane, as though trying to prod it into life—“Uncle Hans. That is how he was known to the family. Uncle Hans. He was a famous man, boy, a famous man.”
    The picture is, in a sense, pivotal. It marks the last moments of the Austrian existence of the family Weiss. A few years later and the mother, that fragile, hopeful thing with the child on her lap, will have been abandoned, dead or alive—family history is uncertain on the point—in distant Vienna, and Gottlieb Weiss will have brought his only son to England. Once in England, Gottlieb found himself a second wife—English, Anglican, etiolated, stern—and, when name-changing became expedient in 1914, a second name: Godley Wise. He might have toyed with the etymologically accurate Theophilus White, but apparently that striking combination did not quite suit one who was a freethinker and agnostic, and a wayward disciple of Freud. So Gottlieb Weiss became Godley Wise— Doctor Godley Wise—and young Heinrich became Harry. Later a daughter was born, a half-sister to Harrybut nothing like him, so my mother claims. Miscegenation had diluted that Austrian blood beyond recognition. Quite English, my grandmother was.
    I will run time backwards, the generations backwards, back toward that portrait taken in some Viennese photographic studio, and beyond that into the realms of myth and legend: Gottlieb Weiss, a man who changed names as you might change your coat, was born Gottlieb Schindler, the grandson of one Anton Mendel of Heinzendorf, in Silensia. Anton Mendel was the father of Gregor Mendel. Gregor Mendel is the priest in the family photograph. Thus Benedict Lambert and Gregor Mendel are related. That is what Uncle Harry used to tell me in his thick and monotonous accent. By some quirk of history, caprice of fate, whim of genetics and inheritance, Gregor Mendel and I are related. We have genes in common: to be precise, three percent. I am Gregor Mendel’s great-great-great-nephew.

    At the age of eleven I sat an entrance exam for the local grammar school. My exam was called the eleven-plus, and was designed with good Mendelian principles in mind. Sir Cyril Burt of Oxford, Liverpool, Cambridge, and, finally, London universities was the principal advocate of the test, and I have a great deal to thank him for. Sir Cyril was a disciple of Galton. It was he whose work on twin and familial studies claimed to prove what Galton had only surmised, that intelligence is largely inherited, and that if you can measure a child’s intelligence, then you can measure its suitability for a decent education: the successful child goes to the grammar school; the failure goes to the secondary modern.
    I recall one of the questions, just one: If it takes three minutes to boil an egg, how long does it take to boil one hundred eggs?
    The answer, gentle reader, is three minutes . Anything else is wrong. At the time, sitting in an anonymous classroom of the local grammar school, stared at by the dozen or so children who, like me, were sitting the exam, I wanted to write, It all depends  … But I was too intelligent to do anything stupid like that. Three minutes .
    “At least he’s got something going for him, poor little chap,” one of my mother’s friends said. I overheard them talking shortly after news of my success had come through. “At least he’s got a brain in his head. Where did he get that from, I wonder? Was it his father? I expect it was. Although you can’t tell, can you?” My mother was at the sewing machine, frowning with concentration as she made some kind of shirt that would fit me, accommodate my all-but-normal trunk and my shrunken arms. Whenever she was at home, whenever she wasn’t cooking or doing the dishes, she seemed to be sewing clothes for me. It is impossible to buy clothes, you see. The industry doesn’t take into account