The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble

of the word ‘grand’ loop back to link him to his Yorkshire heritage?) ‘and we’re all about to make history. We
are
history, every man, woman and child of us, every grandmother, every niece, every auntie, every babe in arms! We’re all part of one big happy family! I know a lot of you may have groaned when people went on about happy families
—I
used to groan myself, believe you me, and family duty was never a strong suit with me—but this business has given a whole new fascinating, fascinating,
fascinating
meaning to the family! Thanks to Mr Cudworth’ (here familiar, friendly Mr Cudworth, a quieter-mannered gentleman, more the sort that most of them were used to, smiled in acknowledgement), ‘thanks to Mr Cudworth, I’ve been able to assemble you all here—all the Cudworths, all the Bawtrys, all the Badgers, and all the rest of you that fit into this astonishing pattern of kinship, and we’re going to compile a historic survey that will stand beside the Domesday Book! The new Book of Doom is being written even now, here and now!’
    And Dr Hawthorn presses yet another button on his machine, and brings up yet another array of chemical formulae, of double helices, of arrows and circles and flashing conjunctions, more thrilling to Dr Hawthorn than any one-armed bandit in Las Vegas or in the floating casinos of the Midwest, more childishly exciting than any game of road revenge in the Happy Eaters and Little Chefs of the roadway, than any pinball machine in any smoky pub of the West Riding. This machine means more to Dr Hawthorn, and, in his view, to humanity, than the sophisticated computerized defence programmes of the Pentagon. This machine will answer the riddles of time itself!
    The watchers blink in bewilderment, and some of them giggle nervously, but they are impressed. Dr Robert Hawthorn is impressive. He is the real thing. He is a millionaire and a genius and he is on his way, with their help, to win the Nobel Prize for Molecular Biology. He may sound like a salesman—he may even, in his smart casuals and his bright light brown suede shoes,
look
just a little like a travelling salesman—but he is not trying to sell them anything, as far as they can tell. He is, instead, trying to take something from them—though with, he assures and reassures them, their full cooperation and consent. He begs swabs from their cheeks, he beseeches tissue from their grandmothers’ skeletons, he pleads for their secret formulae, he wants their DNA. He is flash, he is brilliant, he is light on his feet, he is eloquent: but he does come from Yorkshire. This little pocket wizard with his mid-Atlantic accent is a grandson of Breaseborough by maternal descent. His mother had known its back alleys and its waste lots and its cinder paths and its recreation grounds, and he himself had often been to stay with his Breaseborough granny. As a naughty thieving boy he had scaled the forbidding high crozzle-topped walls of Mrs Barron’s orchard, and skinned his knees to steal the Barron apples, and been bawled out for the offence. Mr and Mrs Barron are long, long dead, and at rest, if rest it be, in the Nonconformist cemetery on Swinton Road, but one of their direct descendants is here now, ready to offer her secretions in the name of science.
    Dr Hawthorn does not at first glance look very like a grandson of Breaseborough, nor does he appear to have much in common with most of this commonplace congregation. Strong tea, powdered instant coffee, egg and cress sandwiches, bridge rolls and squares of Madeira and fruit cake are not his daily fare, and sharp-eyed young Faro Gaulden, who hopes that she herself also sticks out like a sore thumb from this assembly, can almost see a think-balloon hanging over his head which says ‘Jesus, do they
still
eat iced buns up here?’ Though the spread, in fact, had been carefully judged by the thoughtful master of ceremonies, Bill Cudworth, who knows that the older folk here—and there are a lot of