Free The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble Page B

no need now to stay stuck in the same valley for centuries, for millennia. You could clamber out now, however steep the sides. Phil Barron dreamed of flying, and fly he will. Ellen and Bert Bawtry fell in love with their phallic Royal Enfield and its rattling sidecar: Bert would polish and tinker for hours of happiness, and mending punctures was to him a joy. Already, in Bessie’s young womanhood, the heroic journeys of Dickens and Twain, of Trollope and Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, were beginning to look commonplace rather than heroic. The world was on the move, and the age was dawning when our astral bodies would flap wearily behind speeding jumbo jets, never able to catch up with ourselves. Successful authors would be forced to circle the globe on unceasingly repeating biennial book tours as though the convenience of the written word had never been invented. One form of restlessness begets another.
    Speed would reach even Hammervale, Breaseborough and Cotterhall. The slow years would be no more. If you didn’t like it where you were, you could go somewhere else. Couldn’t you?
    Dr Hawthorn, who is now at last about to be discovered, some decades later, in Breaseborough, beside his giant computer screen, is not interested in the long, slow, unpleasant past, that dull past from which we will now take a period of leave. He is a post-Gutenberg, post-word, up-to-date Internet man. He is interested in migrations, but not in the migrations of words or ideas. He operates, across time, with unimaginable celerity. His subject could be said to be a form of that old-fashioned pursuit called genealogy, but Dr Hawthorn does not have to waste time on handwritten records illegibly transferred to microfilm, he does not have to sweat it out in public record offices inspecting census returns and birth, marriage and death certificates. He does not have to battle foolishly and noisily with faulty machines and snappy, bad-tempered, snaking spools of slippery sepia, attracting disapproving stares from those who have laboriously mastered the interim technology of ancestor retrieval. Dr Hawthorn has already left all that behind him. When he wants to find out where somebody comes from, all he has to do is to plunge a needle into bone or tissue, and extract some DNA. You can be six thousand years in your grave, but Dr Hawthorn will track you down.
    Well, perhaps it’s not quite as easy as that, though he is so thrilled by the implications of the new developments in molecular biology that he would like you to think it is. He is a champion of the new, a proselytizer, a prophet. Behold him as he stands there, in the now largely disused hall of the Wesleyan Methodists—it is that very room where bored little Bessie Bawtry once sat listening angrily to children’s Sunday school sermons about virtuous little boys saving drowning babies from canals, while she idly popped the varnished blisters on the bench in front. Behold him, proud and powerful, as he prepares to unfold the wonders of his genealogical research! He is slight and light of stature, and grey of hair, but that grey hair bounds in exuberant curls irrepressibly from his small neat round head, a thick springing crop, borne upwards by its own momentum: he is a man of fire and wire and sinew, and his slightly protuberant blue-grey eyes flash with fervour at his audience while he propounds the amazing capacities of his computer, the novelty of his project and the implications of his experiment, and describes the help which he wishes to enlist from those who are gathered here together on this significant Saturday in June. ‘We’re all in this together!’ he cries happily, with boyish, impish, gnomelike fun. His face shines with manic happiness. He talks too fast for some of his slow audience, but most of them, even those who can hardly follow him at all, are carried along by his high spirits. ‘This is a grand opportunity,’ he keeps repeating, ‘a grand opportunity’ (does that usage