Homage to Gaia (3 page)

Let me start by telling you about my childhood and the events that shaped my evolution as an independent scientist.

1

Childhood

The March family, that is to say, my mother’s relatives, grew up in east London, north of the Thames. My grandmother was a Chatterton and, according to the family, she was a descendant of the notable Victorian, Daniel Chatterton; how true is this claim I do not know, only that a photograph of him was in the family collection, now sadly gone. I loved my grandmother dearly and she was, for all emotional and practical purposes, the mother figure of my childhood. My true mother was as confused by women’s issues and their struggle for recognition as are many women today. I think that I was an unwanted child, an accident of the celebration of armistice night on 11
November
, 1918. My mother then had a responsible and fulfilling job as personal secretary to what we would now call the CEO of Middlesex County Council. It stretched her very capable mind and gave her status far beyond the working-class expectations of her childhood. She had a powerful intellect, but with little chance to reach her potential, she was bitter and resentful. As the eldest of a large family, she had, when a child, to take full responsibility for her younger siblings. The bitterest blow for her came when she won a rare
scholarship
from her primary school in Islington to a grammar school. She could not take it because the family needed her earning power at thirteen to survive. Instead of an enlightened education that was, she thought, her due, she spent her days in a pickle factory sticking labels on the jars. She graduated to another menial job in the Middlesex County Council, but her intelligence liberated her for a brief period in the First World War, when the male employees went to feed that vast human mincing machine of the trenches.

Grandfather March was a skilled craftsman, a bookbinder, so skilled indeed that Winchester Cathedral chose to exhibit one of the books he bound. The family came from somewhere near Dagenham in Essex. I often wondered if they were Jewish: my great-grandmother’s name was King and March could have once been Marx. They had many Jewish characteristics, including a love of music and an
unnatural
skill at card games. Great-grandfather March was a sergeant in the mounted police, hardly a Jewish occupation, but maybe things were different then. The family fortunes improved when my
grandfather
took a job with the Cockerel Press at Ewell in Surrey. The village of Ewell was then at the borders of the London conurbation and effectively in the countryside. Here my mother, who commuted to work by train, met my father, who travelled on the same train to the South Metropolitan Gasworks at Vauxhall. They fell into a long, intense, but unrequited love. My mother told how they walked and sat in Nonsuch Park at Ewell and held hands; that was the limit of their physical contact. My father was then in his mid-30s but married and with two children. His wife had been committed to a lunatic asylum after the birth of their second child when she developed a malign post-partum depression. In the early 20
^th
century, extra
marital
liaisons met with stern disapproval, even among the rich. In the lower classes, there was an overwhelming sanctimonious
righteousness
about adultery, whatever the circumstances; it was a sin, and sins were worse than crimes. The cruel dogma of those times kept my father celibate but he was fortunate to have my Grandmother March’s approval and the unfulfilled relationship between my mother and father continued until 1914, when his first wife died and they were able to marry.

My father was too old by then, about his mid-40s, either to be a volunteer or later a conscript for the war and with both of them working and living in a flat in Mandalay Road, Clapham, they had a happy start to their marriage. My father had a natural appreciation of the beauty of artefacts, as well as of natural things, and he developed an intense feeling for paintings. My mother had a passion for classical music. Their life during the First World War in London must have been idyllic, for they were in love and fulfilled by all that that great city had to offer. There was negligible bombing in the first war so that life in London went on more or less as usual, except for food and material shortages. I have no idea what method of contraception they used. They never talked on such intimate subjects, not even years later. I only
know that whatever it was, it failed in November 1918. The last thing my mother wanted then was a child. I was born close to 2 pm in the afternoon of July 26, 1919, during a thunderstorm and at my
grandmother’s
house in Letchworth Garden City, which is about 30 miles north of London. Pregnancy and the return of men from the war put an end to my mother’s employment with the Middlesex County Council.

My mother and father then chose to take on a risky venture. They rented a shop on Brixton Hill and opened it as the Brixton Hill Galleries. Between the two wars, Brixton retained remnants of the wealthy suburb that it once was, and they hoped and believed that it would stay wealthy enough to sustain a demand for paintings and other works of art, and that this would give them a start in the life of their choice. The shop was, in fact, in a flawed position for such an upmarket enterprise. On the right-hand side was a small post office and beyond that a huge junk shop. The owner, Mr Callaby, had an extensive collection of second-hand iron goods stretching right out across the wide pavement in front of the shop—tin baths, mangles with an iron frame and wooden rollers and boxes full of oddments. On the left of our shop was an engineering workshop, Venners, and next to this a vast Victorian pub, the Telegraph. Beyond the
Telegraph
was a noisome alley, dark and narrow, running between tall buildings and with one courtyard leading from it. Here families lived in one-room cold-water flats, under conditions of Victorian poverty. As a small boy, I often visited the Voysey family who lived in one of these flats. The son was my friend and the mother a cheerful kindly young woman. They seemed to have no possessions, no furniture apart from boxes, and they appeared to live on bread and dripping. What little they had they shared generously, and the mother was always curious about my doings and what I thought and how we lived. The alleyway led from Brixton Hill to New Park Road—a typical London street. There were small industrial premises, among them paint shops smelling strongly of organic solvents. Across the street were rows of once agricultural cottages with long gardens in front of them. Branching off were new streets of semi-detached suburban houses that developers had built. There was little or no traffic and it was a playground for the children and the street gangs of those times. By a curious coincidence, the shop was to be, in a few years, the home of the Liss family. I first met my friend Peter Liss, now a distinguished scientist and professor, at the University of East Anglia in the 1970s.
He was the first to realize the significance of my measurements taken aboard the
Shackleton
during its voyage to Antarctica in 1971.

To make a living selling paintings in such a neighbourhood was a heroic enterprise, and my mother’s and father’s entire energies went into it. My father wisely kept his job with the Gas Company, now as a collector of coins from gas meters. It says something of those days that Tom Lovelock, in spite of carrying a heavy leather bag full of coins through one of the rougher areas of London, was never mugged. He was not particularly burly, 5’9” tall, slim and
bespectacled
. Even so, would-be assailants would have had a tough time, for he was both brave and skilled as an amateur boxer. My parents had no time to care for a baby and were glad to leave me in the willing arms of my grandmother, Alice Emily March.

Grandmother March was a small plump cockney woman endowed with a surfeit of love. My great fortune was to have spent the first five important years in her care. Her children were by then all adults and astonishingly well married for a family of working-class girls. One of them, Kit, was married into the famous Leakey family, to Hugo, a cousin of Louis Leakey of Kenya fame. Her other daughter, Ann, was married to a New Zealand tobacco company executive, Howard Mason. Florrie was married to John Leete, who owned a prosperous tailor’s shop in Hitchin, the nearby market town. Their only son, Frank, was away at a job in London.

William Golding once said to me that the education of a child requires above all things, love. So long as there is love, either given or obviously around, the child will grow in knowledge. He was then talking to me about the education of my youngest boy, John. Sadly, he was born with a mental handicap and Bill had suggested that we send him to a Rudolph Steiner school on just those grounds. Looking back on my own childhood, I now know how much I personally owe to those heavenly years of loving at Norton Croft.

Grandfather March must have done well in the latter part of his life, to judge by the house that we lived in at Letchworth. Norton Croft was a detached four-bedroom villa in the characteristic Letchworth Garden City architecture—echoes of William Morris. There was a large well-kept garden at the back and across the quiet road was an open piece of wood and heathland, Letchworth Common. The road itself, Icknield Way, was tree-lined with grass verges and ran along the route of an ancient trackway that linked the communities of Neolithic south-eastern England. For me as a child, the place and the house
were a perfect habitat. Grandmother March—Nana—as we called her, bustled, cooked, hugged, laughed, and was the ideal mother. My real mother, Nell, her eldest daughter, was away in London trying, like the good feminist that she was, to prove herself in a man’s world. It was a good bargain. Grandma was brimming with maternal love and here at last was the first grandchild on whom she could lavish it.

The six years I lived at Letchworth formed my life. They were the years of warmth, safety and health. They were years where, unfettered by schooling, I could let my curiosity run free. Without doubt, I was a spoilt child, and sometimes dangerously mischievous. When I was about four or five years old, Grandmother March enrolled me in a small nearby school. It did not last long. One unwise teacher showed the class the various poisonous plants that grew on the Common. She had bunches of hemlock, dog’s mercury, and deadly nightshade. I was fascinated and curious to know what would happen if any of these were eaten. During the break, I seized a bunch of black deadly
nightshade
berries and tried to persuade the girls in another class that they were good to eat. Fortunately, a teacher came in and stopped my apprenticeship to the Borgias from going any further. They sent me home in disgrace, but I can remember no punishment. Perhaps Alice could not believe that her Jimmy was responsible for such a dastardly deed. My father and grandfather had reinforced my interest in elementary pharmacy by pointing out the harmful plants during walks. Perhaps the first years of childhood are not the best time for this kind of teaching.

The real and the fantasy worlds had yet to separate. Once I stood outside the tobacco and sweet shop on the corner of Letchworth Parade. I asked passers-by for a penny, two halfpennies, or four farthings because my father was out of work, and I needed the money to repair my electric train. This unusual pitch worked and a seemingly endless flow of coins came my way. I could have added to the family income but, undisciplined as I was, I ran in with each gift to the shop and bought sweets. It was not long before the shopkeeper grew suspicious and soon they took me home again in disgrace. Our neighbour, Mrs Stallybrass, was a retired schoolteacher and she took me in hand as a part-time pupil. I spent happy afternoons in her sitting room or in her garden learning simple arithmetic and general
knowledge
, but she never taught me reading or writing.

Apart from these childhood crimes, they were years full of
happiness
and sunshine. Perhaps I should have spent more time with other
children and not conversed entirely with adults, but that is how it was. Memories of childhood at Norton Croft are particularly vivid in my mind and some are accurately dated. I recall my Aunt Kit’s return from Singapore. It was a great event for Alice and Kit brought with her a trunk full of presents. It was just like Christmas all over again. She had a strangely elegant pushchair for my cousin Felix, who was between one and two years old at the time. I can still see my father’s mother in the kitchen before Christmas 1922, and the ambulance that stopped outside the house early in 1923 to take her away on her last journey. My Aunt Flo lived in Hitchin, a few miles away, and we would go there by bus and have tea with her in her house in Nun’s Close. This house fascinated me because it had electric light and a telephone, something we did not have at Letchworth. I cannot remember how the house was lit but guess it must have been by gaslight. The most important event of my days at Norton Croft was Christmas 1923. My father gave me as a present a wooden box filled with electrical odds and ends. A bell, a flash-light bulb, wires, batteries and other items I have forgotten. Such collections now come in kit form, but not then. It was the best of all the Christmas gifts. The experiments I did with it led me to ask the family and even the postman: why do I need two wires to carry electricity? Why will one not do as with gas or water? No one could answer my simple questions and it was this, I believe, that led me to a life of science. I realized that I would have to find the answers myself.