Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man

I\ Daddy's Machine, Nanny's Garden\ 1930—1939 \ Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall was a member of the prosperous middle \ class, a status his family had acquired during the previous century as a \ result of initiative, industry, luck, and playing cards.\ \ According to family tradition, some ancient Goodall experienced a \ more than passing association with the gallows, as either a hangman or \ hanged man; but the family's more reliable record starts with the birth of \ Charles Goodall, on December 4, 1785, in the town of Northampton. By the \ early 1820s, Charles had finished his printer's apprenticeship in London and \ struck out on his own as a small-scale manufacturer of playing cards and \ message cards. Business was good, and he moved into progressively larger \ premises until he built a factory at 24 Great College Street. By this time the \ concern was known as Charles Goodall & Son.\ After Charles's death, in 1851, his sons, Jonathan and Josiah, \ began expanding operations, building more factory space, purchasing new \ high-speed color presses, and diversifying their line to include almanacs, ball \ programs, calendars, Christmas greeting cards, menu cards, memorial \ cards, New Year's and Valentine and visiting cards — and playing cards. The \ company trademark consisted of the name Goodall split in half, stacked four \ letters over three, and placed inside a heart: \ GOOD \ ALL \ By 1913, Charles Goodall & Son was printing, packaging, and \ selling over 2 million packs of playing cards a year, roughly three times the \ production of all other manufacturers combined, and by 1915sales had \ reached 2.2 million. The two Goodall brothers now running the company, \ Charles's grandsons, together took three quarters of the net profits, while a \ third brother, Reginald — the youngest — having been given no responsibility \ for running the company whatsoever, was forced to remain content with the \ final quarter of net profits.\ Reginald may have been a prodigal son, and after he married \ Elizabeth Morris, against the family's wishes, he proceeded to give all their \ children a hyphenated last name — Morris-Goodall — as if to make a point. \ He made the point five times before falling off a horse at the Folkestone Race \ Course in Kent and landing on his head, producing a cerebral blood clot that, \ on May 3, 1916, proved fatal.\ Mortimer Herbert was nine years old at the time of his father's \ death, and in the years following that unhappy moment the family moved a \ number of times, eventually settling down when his mother married again. \ Her new husband, the imposing Major Norman Nutt, DSO (who was said to \ have led a charge during the Great War by standing on top of a rolling tank \ and waving his sword), or Nutty, as Mortimer called him, managed the \ Folkestone Race Course. As an astonishing perquisite of the job, Major Nutt \ and his family were allowed to move into an ancient manor house built inside \ the ruins of an even more ancient castle owned by the Folkestone track. By \ then, however, Mortimer was off to Repton, a public school in Lancashire, \ where he proved an indifferent scholar. After Repton, he studied engineering \ and eventually took a job with Callender's Cable and Construction. \ Callender's had contracts for laying telephone cables all over England, and \ Mortimer would go around with a test phone to see that the cables were \ joined up correctly. "That was very interesting," he once recalled, "and it \ involved traveling and driving the test van, which was right up my street: I love \ driving."\ Driving was his life 's dominating passion. His mother taught him \ to drive when he was fourteen years old, and by his late teens he had bought \ his first car, a sporty four-cylinder H.E. (made by Herbert Engineering), which \ in 1930 he traded for a most magical machine.\ \ Aston Martin was started around the time of the Great War as a \ manufacturer of racecars, producing during the 1920s fewer than a dozen of \ their superb automobiles per year, on average; the company then began \ producing sports and touring cars and in the early 1930s picked up \ production, turning out some 210 cars between 1930 and 1932. But an Aston \ Martin was still a rare — and very beautiful — object when Mortimer first set \ eyes on a gleaming white three-seater International on display at the \ Brooklands Motors showroom at 110 Great Portland Street in London. "It \ looked so beautiful I was determined to have it," he later recalled, and so \ when the crankshaft on his H.E. broke, he sold the vehicle, borrowed against \ his inheritance, and bought the Aston. As he drove the gleaming machine out \ of the showroom, he thought to pause and ask the fellow who had just sold it \ to him where the factory was, and thus he learned that Aston Martin \ assembled cars in a London suburb not far from the showroom.\ He found the factory, known as "the Works": four huge brick \ buildings, each one inadequately heated by four small coal stoves, with the \ racecars under development at the end of one building, their frames \ strategically situated to avoid damage from rain coming through broken \ skylights. He walked onto the shop floor and began asking people for the \ boss. Someone said, "There he is," and so Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall \ met the chainsmoking, Italian-born engineer and racer Augustus Cesare \ Bertelli.\ Mortimer said that he had just bought an Aston Martin \ International and wanted to race it. Bertelli said that if Mortimer really wanted \ to drive competitively, his car would require some very significant \ modifications. Meanwhile, Bertelli advised, it was important to start out by \ driving in reliability trials rather than serious timed races, so that Mortimer \ could learn how to handle the car under pressure.\ During 1930 and into 1931, Mortimer drove his International in \ reliability trials as well as a few timed races, eventually achieving credible \ results in the long-distance runs from London to Land's End and from London \ to Edinburgh. The International, tuned for regular driving, could reach top \ speeds of around 80 miles per hour, not particularly fast for competition cars \ of that era, but its excellent handling and good brakes meant it could run at a \ high average speed under challenging conditions. So Mortimer did well, and \ by the middle of 1931 he believed he was ready to drive a real racecar.\ Aston Martin was now trying to make money selling first-rate \ sports and touring cars, but the company continued to promote its name with \ an of ficial race team, which by the early 1930s was concentrating on the \ most challenging and glamorous race of all, the twenty-four-hour Le Mans \ Grand Prix d'Endurance. Compared to the other cars running in the Le Mans \ Endurance — the Mercedes, Alfa-Romeos, Bugattis, Talbots, and so on — \ the Aston Martin racer was a lightweight understatement, but it was also \ nimble and reliable.\ In 1931, Bertelli transferred Aston Martin's seventh Le Mans racer \ (identifi ed as LM7) to Mortimer. European motor racing during this classic \ period expressed a certain nationalistic spirit, with racecars for each nation \ painted one color to simplify the problem of national identification. French \ cars were blue, Italian red, German white, and British green. Mortimer's LM7, \ therefore, was colored a sweet olive green. It had cut-out doors and wire \ wheels, an external exhaust pipe emerging with an elegant swoop on the \ passenger's side, a long louvered hood kept in place with bolts and a \ wraparound leather strap, front motorcycle-style fenders anchored to the \ brake plates and turning in concert with the front wheels, a tiny glass \ windscreen, big rock-screened headlamps mounted on short poles, and an \ aerodynamically tapered rear end. Soon after he took possession, Mortimer \ thoughtfully lined the passenger's side of the cockpit with green baize.\ \ Mortimer kept his job at Callender's, and he lived in London, sharing rooms in \ a Queensgate boarding house with Byron Godfrey Plantagenet Cary, a \ schoolmate from his Repton days. Their rooms happened to be on one of the \ lower floors, near the stairs. And, as the two young men noticed, late every \ afternoon the same stunningly attractive young woman would walk past their \ open door on the way to her bed-sitter, two floors up. Their door was left open \ on purpose, of course, and the pair would stand half out in the hall and talk to \ each other casually around the same time every evening in order to observe \ the young woman returning home from work.\ Margaret Myfanwe Joseph, or Vanne, possessed a striking \ combination of fine arches and curves in the face, a warm and confident \ smile, high bright cheeks, and a firm jaw. A certain young man once told \ her, "Your hair is liked burnished chestnut." Another young man commented \ on her eyes: "What do you think you are, a green-eyed goddess?" Vanne had \ come to London in the late 1920s from her family home in Bournemouth, first \ to acquire secretarial skills at the Pittman Secretarial College, near Russell \ Square, and then to practice them for the impresario Charles B. Cochran.\ Cocky, as he was called, had a small office at the top of 49 Old \ Bond Street and during the early 1930s was at the height of his career as a \ show business entrepreneur, creating and producing plays, musicals, and \ dance revues. Vanne's duties included answering the telephone ("Regent \ 1241"), typing up letters and documents, and taking dictation. By her own \ account, she was "absolutely useless" at shorthand and typing, but Cocky, \ who was famously fond of dachshunds and beautiful young women, may not \ have examined her secretarial skills very closely. At any rate, she \ remembered him as an agreeable, generous, and dynamic boss, \ and "famous actors and actresses, Noël Coward and people like that, used to \ sit on the arm of my chair and help me with my shorthand." Another benefit of \ working at 49 Old Bond Street was free admission to most of the major \ theatrical events in London.\ In those days people dressed up for evening events. Vanne wore \ silk stockings (nylon was yet to be invented), but she could afford only half \ an evening dress. The other half belonged to her sister, Olwen, who still lived \ at home in Bournemouth. Thus, before any major show, Vanne had to make \ sure that Olwen mailed the dress in time. The day after the show, the dress \ would be posted right back to Bournemouth.\ Among his many creative innovations, Cocky introduced a rotating \ stage to London audiences, for the 1930 Rodgers and Hart musical \ Evergreen.Vanne attended a performance, and because she worked for \ Cocky, she was able to slip backstage and visit with some of the dancers. \ As she was chatting enthusiastically, though, the stage began revolving. \ Someone shouted, "Hey, Vanne, look out!" And before she fully realized what \ was going on, she was front stage and facing a large, wildly applauding \ audience. She waved eagerly, as if she actually belonged onstage.\ Vanne's true ambitions were quieter and more solitary: "I always \ wanted to write. I was always practicing writing." Since she was also \ interested in music (and had played the violin), she would sit in her room, \ smoke Craven A cigarettes, and try her hand at writing biographies of \ musicians: the prodigy violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the pianist and composer \ Frédéric Chopin. "I just loved playing with words, sorting out the sentences, \ getting the right word for the incident. That's really what it was."\ Meanwhile, she began to notice that every time she climbed the \ stairs in the evening, two young men would be standing at their door and \ talking to each other. Once, one of them — tall, handsome, with bright blond \ hair, blue eyes, dimpled cheeks when he smiled — fell down the stairs in \ front of her. She said, "Now you've done it." He said, "Yes, I've \ done it too much." It was the only way he could think of catching her \ attention, but he had sprained his ankle in the process.\ Vanne checked on his condition the next day, and so they began \ talking. After a while he asked if he could drive her to work, and she began \ accepting rides in his Aston Martin racer. So the friendship brightened. He \ was kind, laughed a lot, and had wonderful friends, and he introduced Vanne \ to what she later identified as a "whirly kind of life." \ Mortimer's wonderful friends included particularly his roommate \ and old school chum, Byron Cary, who was the second son of the fourteenth \ viscount of Falkland. Byron's daughter Sally recalls her father as being "very \ witty and amusing and all the ladies would rock with laughter at his stories. \ In fact, one friend had only to see him, and she would start laughing in \ anticipation before he even spoke." His charm and sociability, however, were \ lubricated with a good deal of alcohol and hid a deep unhappiness. After the \ war he ran out of money and never settled into any fully satisfying \ occupation. Byron's later life, according to his nephew, Lord Cary, \ was "unsatisfactory" in many ways, "although he was always a devoted \ father. He was something of an eccentric personality and served a \ prosperous shipping family for some years as a rather grand Jeeves-type \ butler."\ But that, of course, takes us ahead of the story, into a dark time \ of destruction and disintegration, through a war and a world gone mad. For \ now, at the hopeful start of a decade, Byron and his friend and soon fiancée, \ Daphne, and then Mortimer and his friend and soon fiancée, Vanne, were \ enjoying the happy, whirly kind of life in London. Vanne loved dancing. Her \ favorite was the waltz, but she also loved the tango, fox trot, and onestep. \ After the free shows, courtesy of Cocky, the four of them might find a \ nightclub in the West End. As for drinking, pubs were considered off-limits to \ women in those years, so Byron and Mortimer might go into a pub and bring \ drinks out to Daphne and Vanne, who would be sitting in the car.\ Byron may have had a small family income. Mortimer tended to \ spend whatever he could get, often faster than he could get it. But if they \ were short of money, Vanne once told me, "there were always things to do. \ Going for a walk in the park, or going to the museum. Stand in the gallery \ and get a place for nothing."\ Mortimer and Vanne were married on September 26, 1932, at \ Trinity Church in Sloane Square. After the wedding they crossed the Channel \ and drove in the green racecar to Monte Carlo, where they stayed at a fancy \ hotel, watched dreary people losing money in casino games, and ran the car \ fast on roads snaking into the mountains. They returned to England "just in \ time," according to Vanne's recollection, for Mortimer to grab his racing gear \ and run the Aston Martin at the famed Brooklands racetrack outside London. \ Then they took up a regular married life at 2 Clabon Mews in Chelsea, not far \ from Sloane Square. It was a small, charming townhouse in a row of similar \ buildings, consisting of two bedrooms, a bath, a living area, and a small \ dining room, all on the first floor. The ground floor, formerly a stable, served \ as Mortimer's garage. And Vanne quit her job to become a full-time \ housewife and supporter of her husband's rapidly developing career as a \ racecar driver.\ \ In 1933, Mortimer was asked to add his LM7 to two team Aston Martins, the \ LM9 and LM10, for the Le Mans Grand Prix d'Endurance on June 17 and 18. \ The company team plus supporters and friends and family, including the \ young Mrs. Morris-Goodall, lined up for a photograph outside the Works, and \ then they climbed into their respective vehicles and pulled onto the highway \ in a green convoy. They crossed the Channel via Newhaven- Dieppe and then \ ran east like a small invading force: the three racecars in front (with rubber-\ bulbed ooga horns and spare wheels bolted onto their sides), followed by \ some Aston Martin touring cars and an Aston baggage wagon. Before \ reaching Le Mans, they stopped the convoy and raised a Union Jack onto the \ radiator of the lead car, and then they roared into town, honking madly. They \ set up headquarters in the Garage Lenoir and tested out the track: narrow \ spots and tight S curves, a tree at one corner with a hub-height groove, brick \ cobbling that got very slippery when wet on the corner known as Indianapolis, \ and so on.\ The Le Mans Endurance was a twenty-four-hour marathon, and \ the object was to drive as fast and far (as many laps) as you could, starting \ at four o'clock one afternoon and continuing until four o'clock the next \ afternoon. Each car had two drivers, and they were required to carry all their \ tools and spare parts with them, with everything officially identified and \ approved beforehand — including, at least for the three Aston Martins, a \ clothesline. Drivers sat in open cockpits wearing leather helmets and \ goggles, and they drove without safety harnesses or seat belts.\ The drizzly morning of June 17 turned dry by noon and \ intermittently sunny by afternoon, and at four o'clock the starting flag was \ waved over twenty-six madly whining, rumbling, roaring, spinning, spitting, \ smoking, accelerating cars. A pack of five Alfa-Romeos took the lead, and \ after a brief mix-up when the LM10, driven by A. C. Bertelli, spun around and \ threatened to crash head-on into Mortimer's LM7, the three Aston Martins \ pulled together into the middle of the pack.\ At two o'clock in the morning, Bertelli pulled into the pits and \ handed the LM10 over to his codriver, Sammy Davis, who at the first turn \ found the steering mechanism seizing up and nearly crashed; he pulled back \ into the pits after a lap and located a frozen kingpin close to the wheel hub. \ Meanwhile, Mortimer's LM7 had been running reliably around and around at \ its predetermined pace all evening and into the night, until 3:30 in the \ morning. Mortimer had by then passed the car over to his codriver, one of the \ very few women in the race: Leslie Wisdom, known to everyone as Bill. \ During her run down one of the straightaways, a rod blew through the side of \ the engine block. So that was the end, and Bill had to leave the car and walk \ along the edge of the track back to the pits. Various spectators and a few \ gendarmes had trouble understanding that Bill was a driver, and so they \ persisted in trying to pull her away from the track, and she persisted in \ beating them away with her crash helmet and shouting, in her best \ French, "Voiture bang! Voiture bang!"\ As the sun rose on the second day, the front mudguard of the \ LM10 broke loose. The clothesline had been included in the tool kit for just \ that sort of eventuality, and so Bertelli, driving at the time, stopped at the pits \ to secure the flapping part skillfully with a complex web of rope, and then he \ handed the car over to Sammy Davis. Both the LM10 and the LM9 stayed in \ the race, at one point skidding around a tree that had been knocked onto the \ track by a crashed Alfa-Romeo. They finally blasted underneath the finishing \ flag at 4 p.m. on June 18, with eleven other cars. The LM9 had covered 1,584 \ miles in twenty-four hours, to take fifth place. The LM10 had gone 1,463 \ miles, to rank seventh.\ Altogether, that was a fine showing for Aston Martin, and it \ marked the commencement of Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall's career as a \ top British racecar driver. Within a year he was a regular on the Aston Martin \ team, behind the controls of a new and updated machine. By the end of his \ career, he had distinguished himself as the only British motor racer ever to \ have competed eleven times in the grueling Le Mans Grand Prix \ d'Endurance. He drove in every major competition event in Britain and on the \ continent, and in 1954 he was part of a team that established several world \ land-speed records while driving a Healey on the salt flats of Utah. True, \ Mortimer was never as famous as, say, Sterling Moss, but he was good \ enough to team up with Sterling Moss, which he did in a Jaguar for the 1953 \ Mille Miglia.\ So the end of June 1933 was the beginning of something very \ exciting for Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall — and his first daughter, Valerie \ Jane Morris-Goodall, was born approximately nine months later, at 11:30 in \ the evening of Tuesday, April 3, 1934, in a nursing home in Hampstead \ Heath, North London.\ \ Though successful as a racecar driver, Mortimer proved less successful as a \ husband and father over the next few years. For one thing, he was \ irresponsible about money, which, as Vanne once told me, "just went out and \ out all the time." Once during those early years the gas company cut off their \ gas. There was no money, not a penny, and Vanne ran to a Sloane Square \ bank, took off her emerald ring, and handed it to the bank manager. "The \ bank manager just laughed. Took my hand in his. Pressed the ring back on \ my finger. Oh, dear!"\ Of course, Mortimer himself had grown up without a father — his \ stepfather, Major Nutt, always seemed more like an older brother — which \ may help explain his confusion and disengagement. He responded badly to \ Vanne's pregnancy, never comforting her during anxious times or offering \ emotional support, and after his daughter's birth he remained aloof, \ seemingly indifferent. "For the first year or so she was a baby," he told \ me, "and so I think until she was a year old there was nothing we could do \ with her. Then we moved, but I had a job in London, so that when I got home \ at night she was in bed, and again I didn't see her for about a year." \ Mortimer, for all his charm, verve, and social grace, was a cool, self-\ contained, and remote father, a man who, according to his daughter's \ recollection, "touched me only once" when she was a young child.\ What Mortimer contributed to the life of his remarkable offspring, \ therefore, was more of nature than of nurture, visible not only in certain facial \ similarities but also, more significantly, in some surprising similarities of \ physiology. His baby girl grew up to be a woman with a race driver's \ constitution: good eyesight, high energy, a natural and happy \ competitiveness, a capacity for intense and extended concentration, a \ surprising attraction to risk, and an unusual tolerance for physical stress and \ oscillatory motion — the latter feature protecting her from seasickness in \ rough weather and the need to tighten her grip on armrests during flight \ turbulence.\ \ When Valerie Jane was about three weeks old, a nanny arrived at 2 Clabon \ Mews. She had curly brown hair, blue eyes, and a well-defined and rather \ pointed face emphasized by a sharp jaw; according to Vanne's memory, \ she "stood a straight, sturdy five feet without her shoes."\ Nancy Sowden was an orphan who left school when she was \ sixteen, took a job in a photography shop, and attended art school in the \ evenings. She wanted to paint. But she had come of age in hard times for \ England's working class. The New York stock market collapse of 1929 led to \ a global recession, with 2 million British workers unemployed, and Nancy's \ older sister wisely counseled her to get a steady job with a home attached. \ Trying to make a career in art was too risky, the sister said, so she arranged \ for Nancy to become a proper nanny, which required twelve months' formal \ training (in child psychology, hygiene, nursery management, children's art \ and games) at the Hampstead Day Nursery and then three months' practical \ experience at the Swiss Cottage Hospital. After her education was complete, \ Nancy bought her uniform: brown skirt and tunic with white apron, white \ collar, white cap (which she hated, because her curly hair meant the cap was \ never straight), and for colder weather a brown wool coat and a wide-brimmed \ brown hat. A Hampstead Day Nursery badge identified where she had trained.\ Mrs. Morris-Goodall offered the standard compensation: room and \ board plus a pound a week spending money in return for six and a half days \ a week of child care. Nancy Sowden accepted the offer, and thus "when \ Valerie Jane was three weeks old, I started there. That's what I wanted: a \ small baby."\ The townhouse at 2 Clabon Mews, fronted with cream-colored \ brick and red-brick trim, occupied a quiet little spot on the inside corner of a \ long U-shaped, cobblestoned alley off Cadogan Square. Nanny and Valerie \ Jane shared the smaller of the two bedrooms, and every morning after \ breakfast, in all kinds of weather, Nanny bundled up her tiny charge and \ gently placed the bundle into a soft nest (frilly pillow and white coverlet) \ inside the black pram. The infant settled comfortably into place, facing \ forward, and was rolled out the front door into the light and the moving air and \ over the bumpy cobblestones. The pram proceeded from bumpy to smooth, \ sailed past the private Cadogan Gardens, and soon reached Sloane Street, \ where Nanny and Valerie Jane joined the morning's parade of nannies and \ prams, all headed for Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.\ The route turned north up Sloane Street, past the women's \ fashion shops, and through Edinburgh Gate into Hyde Park. Through a maze \ of walkways, they entered a green, flickering expanse of scampering \ squirrels, chattering birds, and horses cantering down Rotten Row. As the \ pram rolled on, the horses went away and the city's noise retreated to a \ distant din, mild competition with the whispering air that filtered through \ leaves. Perhaps they turned into the daisy walk, where all the aristocratic \ nannies sat and knitted next to crested prams; or perhaps they proceeded \ uphill to the pond, to gaze at boaters stroking the surface and squint against \ the light on the water. On overcast days the water became slick and gray, \ with wavering dark bruises pressed into the water where boaters worked their \ oars or ducks and other waterfowl floated.\ \ At a time when most English parents still believed in physical punishment as \ an important part of raising children, Vanne was a kind of philosopher of \ liberal parenting, emphasizing the importance of love and reasoned \ discipline: "My own early childhood had been a happy one. We had lots of \ love, lots of discipline, laughter and books." But according to Nanny's \ memory, her young charge hardly required discipline in any case: "She was a \ lovely child, very patient and happy, never needed scolding because she \ never did anything wrong! She was really happy."\ Vanne's mother (by then known to everyone as "Danny," a \ childfriendly pronunciation of "Granny") echoed that positive opinion in a \ report to Vanne on the infant's progress during a 1934 Christmas visit: "V.J. \ is asleep in the garden, she is a model baby, no trouble, behaves just as a \ good healthy baby should. She is wonderfully strong in fact she plays tennis \ already with her arms, & swims with her legs."\ At the same time, there may have been something unusually \ focused or attentive about the infant's demeanor. Nanny returned from a stroll \ one day very upset. She had stopped at the front entrance to Peter Jones, \ the department store, where a big uniformed man grandly welcomed \ customers and opened doors. "That porter," Nanny reported to Vanne, "was \ really nasty about Valerie Jane today." The big man had said, "She looks \ straight through me, just as though she knows all my secrets." Vanne \ pointed out that such words might be a compliment, but Nanny was not so \ easily mollified: "Do you think he is afraid there 's something peculiar about \ her?"\ \ There was something peculiar, or at least very interesting, about the gift \ Mortimer gave his daughter on her first birthday. Nanny was "horrified" by the \ thing. It was a child-sized stuffed toy chimpanzee, with dark shining button \ eyes, light-colored felt face and felt eyelids, a molded snout marked with a \ pair of comma-shaped nostrils, funneled ears, white downy chin, silken dark \ brown hair over the rest of the body, and felt hands and feet with separated \ thumbs and big toes. When a child squeezed its stomach, the chimpanzee \ played a music-box tune.\ The toy had been produced on special order to honor a real \ chimpanzee born in the London Zoo on February 15, 1935. The real baby was \ named Jubilee, in anticipation of the upcoming May 6 celebration marking the \ twenty-fifth anniversary of King George V's ascension to the throne. Jubilee \ was, in fact, the London Zoo's first captive-born chimp: important enough to \ warrant a photographic feature in the Times and to inspire Hamley's toy shop \ on Regent Street to organize the special manufacture of a stuffed toy \ chimpanzee. Mortimer, on the lookout for a birthday present, happened to \ pass through Hamley's, saw the toy, and bought it. "I was looking round for a \ sort of cuddly toy, and I just saw this. There was no other reason. It was just \ a cuddly toy," he explained. "Took it home. Didn't expect it to have the effect \ it did have."\ "She took to it," Nanny recalls, "and she was always carrying it \ around." In later years the child used to put her many toy animals and favorite \ dolls in a row and pretend to teach them things, but Jubilee was always the \ one who got to sit in her own chair and wear real castoff dresses.\ \ In the spring of 1935, the family — Mortimer, Vanne, Nanny, Valerie Jane, \ and Jubilee — moved out of London and into the suburban town of \ Weybridge, home of the world's first and England's most important motor \ racing track, Brooklands, a three-and-a-half-mile-long loop of concrete poured \ in 1906 and 1907. Their house, called The Winnats, was located at 27 \ Woodland Grove, a quiet side street in a suburban neighborhood. The \ Winnats was a red-brick, three-story Edwardian affair, and Valerie Jane was \ given her own bedroom, a gabled room on the top floor, while Nanny took one \ of the five available bedrooms on the floor below.\ In Vanne's view, the house was much too big: "The entire \ contents of the mews flat looked lost in a corner of our new entrance hall, a \ space we never managed to furnish adequately." Nanny likewise remembers \ the downstairs nursery as being "huge," but during bad weather she and \ Valerie Jane passed many happy hours there. The child loved to color with \ crayons, dress and undress her dolls, play with Jubilee, and sometimes \ throw dice with Nanny in the board game known as Snakes and Ladders. \ Compared to London, Weybridge was quiet — lonely for Nanny, who spent \ most of her evenings by herself. After she told Mortimer that she wanted a \ radio for company, though, he bought one, and thus in the daytime, dance \ band music on the radio became another source of entertainment for Nanny \ and her charge.\ The Winnats had three large oak trees, two at the front, one at the \ back. There was also a small garden and a small pond at the front, and at \ the rear a much larger back yard, which included a small flower garden and a \ surrounding edge of fir trees. From the nursery young Valerie Jane could \ now, according to an unpublished memoir by her mother, "listen drowsily to \ the songs of the black birds and the thrushes, the twitterings of all the little \ birds or the hooting of the owls in the woods behind the Church." In the spring \ she could smell the wallflowers and lilacs and lilies of the valley, and "it was \ a new delight to be able to run out into a garden of her own. The place had \ stood empty for a long time . . . and Nature had taken over the once trim \ lawns and scattered the long grass with wild sorrel and sturdy little blue \ bugles, buttercups and daisies and the golden stars of myriads of \ dandelions." They would sometimes have a picnic in the garden, where \ Valerie Jane soon became acquainted with "a new world, inhabited by gem-\ like beetles, spiders and ants, flies, wasps, bees and not least among all \ these fascinating creatures, the busy earthworms who slid so quickly from \ her sight beneath the ground."\ One evening the child brought some of those earthworms inside, \ and Nanny came rushing downstairs to inform Vanne: "I think it's quite \ disgusting. Valerie Jane has taken a bunch of earthworms to bed with her, \ under her pillow, and she 's touching them. I don't know what to do."\ Vanne went into her daughter's bedroom to find her lying blissfully \ in her bed, the evening sun pouring onto her face. Valerie Jane said, "Look!" \ and moved her pillow to show off the worms.\ Vanne said, "Well, Valerie Jane, if you keep these worms there all \ night, they'll be dead in the morning. They really ought to go into the garden \ where they belong." The child sighed and looked at the worms. And then \ together they took them down to the garden, dug a shallow hole, and put \ them back in the earth.\ That rear garden was big enough to run and play in, to line up the \ dolls and Jubilee for various make-believe enterprises in, to organize snail \ races in. To have a pet tortoise named Johnny Walker in. (Johnny Walker \ kept disappearing, and Nanny had to paint the top of his shell bright red so \ they could spot him more easily.) And to have a dog in.\ The dog was a bull terrier named Peggy. According to Nanny, \ Valerie Jane "could do anything with Peggy — sit on her back, take away her \ bowl, do anything." Peggy, however, was a fierce dog who would bite \ strangers coming in through the gate. She bit the postman, for instance, and \ Nanny had to sew a patch on his trousers. But at night, when Nanny was \ alone, Peggy always went up and sat with her, and that was comforting.\ Occasionally Peggy would disappear, and twice someone rang up \ from the local pub and said, "Your dog is here. Can you come and fetch it?" \ Mortimer went to the pub frequently in the evening, so probably Peggy had \ gone out looking for him.\ \ Mornings in Weybridge, Nanny would leash up Peggy, Valerie Jane might get \ on her tricycle, and the three of them would follow a sandy road lined on \ either side with rhododendrons that led to the village shops. Nanny might \ stop at the newsagent's and pick up her weekly copy of Nursery World — \ and one time Valerie Jane walked away with a small, cheaply illustrated \ booklet on circus life, with red and black pictures of a clown, ringmaster, \ animals. When they got home that day, Vanne commented on the booklet, \ whereupon the child blushed, closed the book, and sat on it. She had stolen \ it. Vanne took her hand and explained that since she had not paid for the \ object, she would have to return it. After much sobbing and hiccoughing on \ the way to the store, Valerie Jane recovered at the last minute, soberly stood \ on tiptoe, and reached over the counter to hand back her illgotten prize.\ The women and girls took occasional trips to Brooklands to watch \ Mortimer drive around the track or to sit in comfort inside the clubhouse and \ consume tea and pastries, and once Mortimer drove Nanny around the loop \ in his racing car. But most exciting were visits to the grandmothers: to \ Vanne's mother, Danny, and Mortimer's mother, Danny Nutt. When Valerie \ Jane was very small, she would be transported on the train for a couple of \ hours to Danny's house in Bournemouth. The Bournemouth holidays were \ short and sporadic in the winter, but in the summer they sometimes lasted \ all season. Vanne was not necessarily there, however, and thus Nanny and \ Danny often took charge. In the hot weather they went down to the beach, \ where Danny owned a bathing hut, and all three of them would splash in the \ water, eat sandwiches, and dig holes in the sand.\ Danny Nutt had the advantage of living in the most appealing of all \ possible places — the Manor House — and Valerie Jane began going there \ for short visits as early as April 11, 1935 (when Danny wrote to \ Vanne, "Bless the little Angel, you will miss her, I know, but you must think \ how much good it will do her, she will get such a lot of fresh air & come back \ with rosier cheeks than ever. Tell Nanny not to be afraid to ask Mrs. N. for \ whatever she wants for V.J."). The Manor House was an eighteenth-century \ red-brick mansion of two stories, with four reception rooms, eight bedrooms, \ and four baths. With various corridors leading hither and thither, the old place \ rambled out to the back before attaching itself to the last standing tower of \ the ancient Westernhanger Castle. The house, in fact, was surrounded by \ the remnants of the castle moat and nestled inside a crumbling stone \ rectangle, the heaps and piles of an edifice that had served Henry II in the \ twelfth century as well as Henry VIII in the sixteenth. In 1701, unfortunately, \ an enterprising real estate developer tore down and sold off most of the castle \ as building material for local barns and farmhouses, which helps explain why \ it was such a wreck.\ It was a fascinating wreck, though, pleasantly melancholic and \ suitably romantic. As Jane recalled years later, the castle ruins "seemed \ scary, all gray, crumbling stone and spider webs. There were bats in one \ room that still had part of its roof." As for the house inside the ruins: "If you \ walked from one end to the other, you had to go down one or two steps here, \ up a little slope there, and so on, because different parts had been built at \ different times." It had no electricity until perhaps the end of the 1930s, so \ kerosene lamps were lit every evening, and the house was permeated with \ their sweet and oily smell.\ In the country and adjacent to a large farm, the old Manor House \ was surrounded by gently rolling velvety green pastures dotted with white \ clots of grazing sheep, some cows, the occasional farm horse, and even \ sometimes a mare and colt from the nearby racetrack. Danny Nutt was fond \ of geese, so there always seemed to be half a dozen geese puttering about; \ and Major Nutt was master of the foxhounds, which meant that a seething \ pack of floppy-eared, sloppy-tongued dogs was in residence. There were \ sweet blackberries and bright daisies that turned into little moons at night. \ The Nutts also kept an enclosure for hens, along with five henhouses, and \ young Valerie Jane would help feed them and then gather their eggs. Finding \ the eggs was an adventure in itself, since many of the hens liked to lay their \ eggs in the bushes rather than in the henhouses.\ Mortimer's younger brother, Reginald, usually known as Rex, also \ lived at the Manor House during those years, and he managed a local stable \ of racehorses. Valerie Jane had her first experience riding a horse at an early \ age (about two years), when Uncle Rex lifted her onto a big brown steed \ named Painstaker. He showed her how to make Painstaker change \ directions by pulling gently on the reins, and so "I managed to steer him, all \ by myself," making figure eights around the trees along the road. "I was very \ proud."\ \ Johnny Walker the tortoise died. He hibernated on the compost heap in the \ garden, and then there was nothing left but his shell. Next Peggy began \ disappearing for long stretches of time, educating herself, it eventually \ became clear, in the art of killing sheep. One day she was brought home in a \ police van, along with a warning from the sheep farmer, and so she was given \ to a friend of Mortimer's who had a commission in the Queen's Regiment. \ The bull terrier became a regimental mascot, "loved, spoiled and cherished," \ according to Vanne.\ Valerie Jane likewise had been loved, spoiled, and cherished, but \ on her fourth birthday, April 3, 1938, a noisy object unpropitiously turned up \ in the back seat of a taxi: a baby sister, plump and hungry Judith Daphne. \ The old pram was dusted off, and Nanny became distracted with a series of \ new and, from a four-year-old's perspective, unpleasant things: smelly \ diapers, dirty bottles, demanding shrieks. Valerie Jane was very unhappy. \ Nanny remembers that once, when she was taking the pair for a walk, the \ baby in the pram, the older sister shouted out the vilest word she could think \ of: "Diarrhea! Diarrhea! Diarrhea!" As Valerie Jane has remembered, "Oh, I \ was jealous. Not so much of Mum, but Nanny. Nanny loved the little baby. \ And Nanny sort of almost abandoned me when Judy was born. So I went \ berserk for a while. I became very unmanageable and wild. I did awful things."\ Meanwhile, Byron and Daphne Cary, Mortimer and Vanne's best \ friends and married around the same time, had produced two girls, Rosemary \ Sally (born on June 18, 1935, little more than a year after Valerie Jane) and \ Susan Valerie Jane (January 30, 1938, slightly more than two months before \ Judy). Sally and Sue Cary eventually joined Valerie Jane and Judy to make \ up a very happy foursome. At the moment, though, only Sally was old \ enough to appreciate Valerie Jane's troubling ambivalence toward her baby \ sister — and also to notice the other playmate now turning up.\ Dimmy was an imaginary friend, but for Valerie Jane, he \ possessed enough substance to talk to, look at, and laugh with. Perhaps \ Dimmy moved at high speed, because according to Vanne's recollection, \ whenever Valerie Jane talked to him, she spoke very rapidly, in a voice that \ was "punctuated by little bursts of laughter when they shared a joke \ together." One day Sally pulled Vanne to the edge of a room to observe this \ phenomenon. In Vanne's words, "At the door she jerked us to a halt. Her \ large blue eyes were dark with concern. Valerie Jane was flitting from corner \ to corner of the room, talking to Dimmy who was evidently flying about near \ the high ceiling."\ Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall, even the four- or five-year-old version, \ was blessed with an unusually direct connection between her imaginative and \ analytical selves. From an early age, she seems to have possessed a \ capacity for focused attention and a mental clarity that was readily \ transported from inner to outer, from dreaming to waking, from vision to \ action. Yes, hints, possibilities, and promises were appearing in the life of \ this young girl — perhaps not so different from the hints, possibilities, and \ promises many eager parents observe with concern or excitement in their \ growing children. She had gifts and talents. But how would she use \ them?\ The social and financial advantages that may have seemed to \ surround this lucky child, heiress to the remnants of a playing card fortune, \ were flimsier than one might think, and her early environment during the \ London and Weybridge years was never as promising as her talents. Her \ father was handsome and charming but irresponsible and usually missing. \ Vanne, far more stable, sensible, and mature than Mortimer, always \ possessed a cheerful adaptability and sense of adventure, but during the \ early part of her daughter's life, she cheerfully adapted to Mortimer and threw \ herself fully and eagerly into the adventure of their marriage and his racing \ life. She was, as she once summarized for me, "a flibbertigibbet" during those \ years. Nanny was like a second mother, but with Vanne gone many \ evenings, weekends, and holidays, Nanny was gradually becoming the first. \ So, how, in such a context, would little Valerie Jane escape the prison of \ self? How would she move from her perfect position at the top of Painstaker \ and the center of things to a less comfortable place at the edge of the world, \ striving to push it in a better direction? How would she grow to discover a life \ beyond the infantile egotism that often distracts so many talented and \ otherwise admirable adults? Where would she locate and absorb the \ discipline and moral idealism that a few years later were to become such \ important parts of her adult personality? What quiet revolution or violent crisis \ would break through the nursery door and, like a thief or a monster, seize \ this child and transport her away from the potential damages of the coddled \ life, and from the sparkling promises of the whirly, flibbertigibbety life?\ \ Copyright © 2006 by Dale Peterson. Reprinted by permission of Houghton \ Mifflin Company.

Prologue ixPart I: The Naturalist 1. Daddy’s Machine, Nanny’s Garden • 1930–1939 3 2. War and a Disappearing Father • 1939–1951 19 3. A Child’s Peace • 1940–1945 29 4. Child in the Trees • 1940–1951 38 5. Childhood’s End • 1951–1952 53 6. Dream Deferred • 1952–1956 67 7. Dream Returned • 1956–1957 81 8. Africa! • 1957 92 9. Olduvai • 1957 107 10. Love and Other Complications • 1957–1958 122 11. The Menagerie • 1958 134 12. London Interlude • 1959–1960 149 13. Lolui Island and the Road to Gombe • 1960 167 14. Summer in Paradise • 1960 179 15. David’s Gift • 1960 194 16. Primates and Paradigms • 1960–1962 212 17. The Magical and the Mundane • 1960–1961 229 18. A Photographic Failure • 1961 245 19. A Different Language • 1961–1962 261Part II: The Scientist 20. First Scientifi c Conferences • 1962 281 21. A Photographic Success • 1962 295 22. Intimate Encounters • 1963 313 23. Love and Romance, Passion and Marriage • 1963–1964 332 24. Babies and Bananas • 1964 343 25. A Permanent Research Center • 1964–1965 354 26. Gombe from Afar • 1965 372 27. A Peripatetic Dr. van Lawick and the Paleolithic Vulture• 1966–1967 387 28. Epidemic • 1966–1967 403 29. Grublin • 1967 415 30. Promise and Loss • 1968–1969 431 31. Hugo’s Book • 1967–1970 449 32. Regime Changes • 1970–1972 465 33. Abundance, Estrangement, and Death • 1972 484 34. Friends, Allies, and Lovers • 1973 503 35. Things Fall Down — and Sometimes Apart • 1974 523 36. Domesticity and Disaster • 1975 541 37. A New Normal • 1975–1980 562 38. Picking Up the Pieces • 1980–1986 581Part III: The Activist 39. Well-Being in a Cage • 1986–1991 601 40. Orphans, Children, and Sanctuaries • 1986–1995 619 41. Circumnavigations • 1996–2000 639 42. Messages • 2000–2003 652 43. Woman Leaping Forward • 2003–2004 670 Notes 689 Works Cited 704 Acknowledgments 712 Index 715

\ Deborah Blum… the biography transcends its rather awestruck beginning and grows, detail by detail, into an absorbing portrait. At its best, it provides a remarkable account of what a person can accomplish through courage and self-sacrifice — and a reminder of how few of us are willing to commit our lives to such an extent. Whether Goodall really “redefined man,” as the book’s subtitle asserts, may be open to debate, but there’s no doubt that she powerfully redefined the way we see our fellow primates.\ — The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyIn this engaging but overlong biography, Peterson (The Deluge and the Ark) details the life of the woman who revolutionized primate studies. In 1960, at age 26, Goodall was sent by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey to the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) to study the chimps. With no scientific training and no precedents to follow, but with plenty of courage and the conviction that chimpanzees have individual personalities, she lived with the animals. Patiently observing them, she discovered that they eat meat, engage in warfare and use tools a revelation that persuaded Leakey that it was necessary to redefine "man," because the use of tools had always been thought to be uniquely human. Peterson provides colorful descriptions of day-to-day life at Gombe and Goodall's interaction with the chimps, and ably portrays her relationship with Leakey, the National Geographic Society (which sponsored much of her work), her two marriages, her reaction to her celebrity and her ventures as an activist for the well-being of chimpanzees in captivity and the wild. However, exhaustive details of Goodall's childhood, her youthful loves, the activities of her infant son and the lives of her students and fellow researchers become wearisome. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW. (Nov. 15) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ Children's LiteratureAs a child Jane Goodall loved animals and nature. But nothing in her childhood and adolescence foretold the dramatic impact she would have as a scientist, conservationist and humanitarian in our times. When reading this amazing biography, one is struck by the adventure her life has been. But also how tirelessly she has promoted the causes near and dear to her heart to make this world a better place. As a young woman in Africa she impressed the great archaeologist/paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey enough so that he secured funding and sent her off on her own to study chimpanzees in Gombe, a remote stretch of shoreline in Tanzania. Through quiet observations and detailed analyses, the young woman discovered that chimpanzees use tools to obtain food, which profoundly changed the definition of "man." She also discovered that chimpanzees eat meat; a fact not known until that time. The early years of her biography describe someone not unlike her peers— she loved family, friendships, romance, parties, and such. As she spent time observing the chimpanzees in Africa, she realized each animal was a distinct individual, with his or her own personality and quirks, just like humans. Her research has helped others understand more about chimpanzee attachment, aggression, mating, and social rituals. During this time, Jane Goodall was also maturing into someone who realized the impact that each human life has on the world around him or her. And so the private Jane became a very public person, who taught and lobbied to try to make the world a better place. Indeed, she is still doing these things. She was responsible for starting ChimpanZoo, to increase awareness and create better conditions at zoosaround the world for captive animals. She also began "roots and & shoots" clubs for young children to help them connect with nature, promote environmental awareness, and preserve animal habitats around the world. Readers will be awed by Ms. Goodall's schedule as she crisscrosses the globe to meet with children, world leaders, scientists, teachers and others to raise awareness and funds for her causes. Her books, films, and advocacy have won her numerous awards and critical acclaim. In 2002 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Jane Goodall an "United Nations messenger of peace." This first-rate biography should not be missed; it is well-written, insightful, informative, and a very satisfying read. Reviewer: Jeanne K. Pettenati, J.D.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalJane Goodall's discovery in 1960 that chimpanzees in the wild use crude tools meant that ability could no longer be considered a unique and defining characteristic of human beings. Today, as a writer and speaker, she is something akin to a cult icon. As her colleague and former collaborator (Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People), Peterson had access to a body of personal letters, conversations, and first-person accounts that enabled him to develop an empathy for his subject uncommon in scientific biographies. The picture of Goodall that emerges depicts her complexities she was a coquettish debutante who became a dedicated ethologist comfortable with living in the wilds; an intuitive and self-educated researcher who later matured into a major scientist and world authority on conservation. Peterson's book is divided into three sections: "The Naturalist," "The Scientist," and "The Activist." Goodall's career touches on many social and scientific flashpoints, and by rendering the complex totality of her personality, Peterson suggests the reasons for her popularity and enormous influence. Perhaps a bit overlong, perhaps a bit too adulatory (Goodall granted Peterson full access), nonetheless, this book captures the spirit of a remarkable woman in science; highly recommended for all libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/06; see the profile of Peterson in "Fall Editors' Picks," LJ 9/1/06, p. 34-39.] Gregg Sapp, SUNY at Albany Lib. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsA longtime literary collaborator traces the life of a young British girl who became a voice for humanity. Many have fallen under the spell cast by Jane Goodall. Peterson, who edited her two-volume autobiography (Reason For Hope, 1999; Beyond Innocence, 2001), paints his own glowing portrait here. The story begins in a seaside British home, where Valerie Jane was born, in 1933, cared for a menagerie of pets and spent her days reading Doctor Doolittle. She grew up, went to school and in 1955 got an invitation to spend several months in Africa. Her passion for animals got her introduced to anthropologist Louis Leakey, who envisioned a scientific study of chimpanzees living freely in the forest. Within a few years, the animal lover was on the edge of a crystal-blue lake surrounded by a lush emerald jungle. Day after day, Goodall dutifully headed into the forest, where her persistence eventually paid off. She developed a comfortable familiarity with the chimpanzees she studied, and her observations made her a household name. Peterson's pacing is particularly good, and the jungle never lacks for drama: There are love affairs both animal and human, as well as struggle, death and, ultimately, triumph. Though Peterson tends to gloss over the unhappier parts of his subject's life, much of her is exposed here. The reader sees Goodall as a disarming but determined advocate and activist who changed the lives of all who met her, whether human or beast. She adapted to her environment, but never forgot who she was. By the end, she is still young Valerie Jane, traveling the world to share her love of animals with the rest of humanity. A loving depiction of a remarkable woman who charmed the world as muchas it captivated her.\ \