Mendel's Dwarf Read Online Free Page A

people of my proportions.
    At least he’s got a brain in his head . Even then I wasn’t so sure that was much of a consolation. But I passed the examination and was admitted to the grammar school.

    At my grammar school, biology was taught in a classroom like all the others. There was a blackboard and a raised podium at one end, and rows of sloping desks facing it in dutiful attention. Mendel himself would have recognized the kind of place. Elsewhere in the school there were proper laboratories for physics and chemistry, but biology was an afterthought, consigned to a room that was fit for dictation, for sitting and listening and taking notes. There was an atmosphere of lassitude about the place, a sensation that nothing much would ever happen there. A poster on the wall showed the internal organsof the human body in lurid and unlikely color. It was a prudish, sexless picture, and someone had tried to scribble in genitals where none had previously existed. The attempt had been rubbed out, but the crude lines were still risible like the scars from some dreadful operation. Below the poster was a bench with a row of dusty test tubes containing Tradescantia cuttings, the debris of some halfhearted demonstration that had been set up weeks before and then forgotten. There were microscopes, but they were locked away in some cupboard and marked for senior pupils only.
    I clambered with difficulty onto a chair. The class watched and whispered. The biology teacher, a Mr. Perkins, coughed impatiently as though it were my fault that I was late, my fault that I was an object of curiosity, that I was what I was and am. “Gregor Mendel was an Austrian monk,” he informed us once quiet had fallen. He paid scant attention to matters of fact. “The monastery was miles away from anywhere. No one knew about him and his work, and he knew nothing about what was going on in the scientific world of his time, but despite all these disadvantages, he started the whole science of genetics. There’s a lesson for you. You don’t need expensive laboratories and all the equipment. You just need determination and concentration. Stop talking, Dawkins. You never stop talking, boy, and you never have anything worth saying. You will find a photograph of Mendel on page one hundred and forty-five of your textbook. Look at it carefully and reflect on the fact that it is the likeness of a man with more brains in his little finger than you have in the whole of your cranium. But photographs won’t help you pass your exams, will they, Jones? Not if you don’t pay attention and don’t learn anything and spend all your time fiddling.”
    I turned the pages. From page 145 a face looked out of the nineteenth century into the twentieth with a faint and enigmatic smile, as though he knew what was in store. I held my secret to my chest, like a cardplayer with a magnificent hand.
    “Below the picture you may see one of his crosses,” Mr. Perkins said. “Study it with care, Jones.”

    “This is the most famous of his experiments. Mendel took two strains of garden pea—”
    “Please, sir, how do you strain a pea, sir?”
    “Shut up, boy.”
    “Dawkins strains while having a pee. Is that anything to do with it, sir?”
    “Detention, boy! You are in detention. One of the strains was tall and the other was dwarf …”
    “Is a dwarf like Lambert, sir?”
    The racket of laughter stopped. Mr. Perkins reddened. “That’s enough of that, boy.”
    “But is it, sir?”
    “Enough, I said. Now I want to explain what Mendel discovered. You will open your notebooks and take down this dictation …”
    And then I played my hand. “Please sir, he’s my uncle. I meangreat-uncle. Great-great-great-uncle. That’s what Uncle Harry told me.”
    There was a terrible silence. Someone giggled. “Don’t be foolish, child,” Mr. Perkins said.
    “He is, sir.”
    The giggling spread, grew, metamorphosed into laughter.
    “But he is , sir. Uncle Hans.