MORNING SERIAL
I NODDED. He changed tack. Opportunities for both of us had just flitted across his radar screen. A better future.
“I just thought,” he said thoughtfully. And he probably had. “I just thought … would you consider some, temporary of course, to suit you, parttime, appointment here? A research fellowship perhaps? And we could help, you know, with any, er, archiving, or whatever. A permanent home, perhaps? A depository of your lifetime’s achievement under your own name? I don’t know about you, but that’d excite me. We could get external funding for that, I’m sure. The William Maddox Photographic Centre. Nice ring to it. And, hey, talking of names, what d’you think of ours?”
I smiled. He smiled. I waited. He settled into accustomed pedagogic mode.
“No? Don’t blame you. I’ve had to inform quite a few. Well, he was Welsh of course. And nowadays, things have changed quite a lot in that department, Billy boy, so we have to stress that connection. Born in 1823 was our very own Alfred Wallace. Just as everything in our part of the world was beginning to take off big time. He was from Monmouthshire. Gwent as they say now. Clothes on a poodle but still a dog underneath. Our dog though.
“And he died in 1913, just as our madcap growth, our boom and bust, iron and coal, and people swarming in, was about to end. Perfect timing.
“And here’s the thing. He was the boy who first came up with the notion of the natural selection of the species, the key concept to understand the evolution of everything. Not Charles Darwin, Bill, but his correspondent and co-worker, our own Alfred Wallace. No one really denies this anymore. Wallace was the originator and the catalyst to Darwin’s work. Fantastic, eh? And the thing is, it gets even better. For us to use his name, I mean. Because, you see, Darwin’s emphasis was all on competition, between individual units in the same species, so to speak, for there to be any survival of the fittest.”
> The Crossing by Dai Smith is published by Parthian in the Modern Wales series www.parthianbooks.com