Homage to Gaia (8 page)

Part of the problem was the dramatic intensity of her arguments. I was never sure how much of it came from conviction and how much she was acting a part. Nell had enjoyed amateur acting and had polished her histrionic talents to a fine degree, but she was a good and principled woman and unselfishly cared for me when I was a child. She and my father had a loving relationship and one that endured, so that the Brixton shop, for all its drawbacks, was a warm and safe refuge for me as a child. But in later life, after my father’s death, Nell was wretchedly lonely and so strongly did she radiate her misery that no one could stand her company for long. Her fierce intensity, whether of love or hate, overwhelmed and burnt. Like the archetypal Jewish mother, she had the capacity to reduce me to a babbling child. Her widowhood was a twenty-four year torment for all of us, including her. By leaving me as a baby to be raised by my
grandmother
, she had unknowingly forfeited instinctive love and
bonding
. In later life, in her time of need, in place of a loving son, she had only a man who saw her as a relative in distress. My grandmother was to me my true mother, and her death in 1943 was a hard grief to bear.

From age fifteen onwards I spent part of the summer holidays bicycling or walking around England and Wales. The first of these expeditions was a journey from my home in Kent to Devonshire and back. I travelled sixty or so miles a day and stayed each night at a Youth Hostel. I well remember the road up the Chalke Valley in Wiltshire; it seemed endless as I pedalled my one-gear bicycle that hot July afternoon in 1934. I was thirsty and kept looking for the sign ‘Teas’—one that was on cottages everywhere in southern England except, that is, in the Chalke Valley. Here, through Coombe Bissett, Stratford Tony, Bishopstone, and Broadchalke, I saw none. In
Broadchalke
, in desperation, I asked a man working in his garden, was there anywhere that supplied lemonade, tea, or anything to drink? ‘Not here in Broadchalke,’ he said. ‘You are welcome to come in and have a glass of water but there is nowhere here that sells teas. We get so few visitors or folk travelling that it is just not worthwhile. Wait a minute, though, Mrs Hardiman in Bowerchalke, the next village, does do teas for walkers. You could try there. It’s only a couple of miles further on.’ Bowerchalke was on my route and I cycled up the slope beside the watercress beds and up the hill into the village itself. Sure enough, a few houses past the pub, The Bell Inn, Mrs Hardiman had a sign saying, ‘Teas’. She made me a full pot and supplied some bread, jam, and scones. For those interested, such a meal cost about six old pence. Mrs Hardiman told me that I was the first to call for a month and she was thinking of taking down the sign. I realized that Bowerchalke was truly remote and began to look at it more closely.

Refreshed after tea, and knowing it was only about ten more miles to my final destination, the youth hostel at Iwerne Minster in Dorset, I explored the village. At the back of the church was a meadow and beyond it the steep green hill of Marleycombe. Chalk downs walled the village and seemed to intensify its feeling of privacy. To me, at sixteen, it was the perfect village and I decided that, if ever the chance arose, this was where I would live.

In 1937, I chose Wales for my summer break. On the second day, I left the youth hostel at the small Welsh village of Dolwyddelan and made my way up the stony track that led to Moel Siabod. It was just before my seventeenth birthday and this was my first Welsh mountain. All through the spring and early summer I had planned my solo expedition to North Wales. The Ordnance Survey maps had been companions, together with George Borrow’s book,
Wild
Wales.
These filled my mind so that the path and the climb almost had a
sense of
déjà-vu.
I reached the lake below the glacial Cwm of the mountain in time for my sandwich lunch and a swim. Soon a thin sheet of cumulus clouds spread across the sky and reminded me of my objective, the peak itself. The climb was easy, never more in fact than a hill walk, and the enthralling sight of the other peaks emerging above a wide sea of clouds, was a fine reward. There in front of me was Snowdon and on either side the Glyders, and the Carneddau. It was like an archipelago of black rocks rising from a white sea. This was my first sight of clouds from above, even though Moel Siabod was a bare 3000 feet high, and I was moved. Mountains, like cathedrals and deep mature forests, are places with a transcendental ambience.

I started down through the clouds and soon I could see the Ogwen valley spread out before me. I had come out of the cloud onto a short run of scree. Scree is loose rocks and boulders piled against the mountain slope and only just stable. I had heard about scree running, the poor man’s version of skiing, and decided to have a try at it. I ran onto the rock pile and to my joy the mass beneath me began to move. It was easier to run with, and slightly ahead of, the mass of moving rock than to stand still and let it move you on. In no time, I had reached the bottom and jumped off sideways as the rocks behind me continued their downward course. I was lucky to have chosen a fairly safe and short run for my first try. A few years later, I saw the thousand-feet-long scree run above Wast Water in the Lake District. It beckoned to me, but here were boulders as large as cars. I never tried it, but thoughts of it have lingered in my mind and thirty years later sustained me during the long downhill run of the quest for Gaia.

The two last years of my schooldays were tolerable. I was by then in the sixth form and treated more like a student than a child. I had passed the Matriculation examination and was now preparing to take the ‘Higher School Certificate’ that is now known in the UK as ‘A’ levels. There was little teaching and we spent most of our time in private study, which in practice meant private conversation among friends. My schooldays ended in 1938 with an interview for a job as a laboratory assistant. This job was to prove a crucial step in learning to become a scientist.

2

The Long Apprenticeship

The tram to Victoria swayed as it clanked and ground and squealed its way round the corner into Stockwell Road. The view of the red-brick Brixton Odeon Cinema was enlivening this Tuesday morning in March 1938. I was at the front and top of the tram so that I could see everything that was going on, and I was on my way from my school in Brixton to an exciting job interview. More an inspection than an interview, for I had already been offered the job whilst still at school by a member of the firm I was about to visit. In 1938 the streets of Brixton and Stockwell were poor but clean, and uncluttered by cars and throwaway bags from fast-food shops. The fast-food of those days was fish and chips and the newspaper that wrapped it was swept away by the street cleaners at dawn, their work unhindered by parked cars. Half an hour later, the Victoria clock tower came in view marking the terminus of the line; I ran down the helical staircase of the tram and leapt off. Across the road were the underground station and the train to South Kensington, and I was as happy and as excited as if it were a tryst I was approaching, not a job, but a life doing science. The long, long hated years of school were over. I knew it was still years before I would be a qualified scientist but for now, I was thrilled to be an apprentice to a master scientist.

The firm of consultants who were hiring me occupied the premises of a shop. It was on the corner of a small road leading into Fulham Road just west of Brompton Hospital and about half a mile from South Kensington underground station. The shop windows were
dark and the entrance door closed. I pressed the bell, waited, and a young receptionist came and took me into the labs of Murray, Bull, and Spencer Ltd. She led me upstairs to see the proprietor, Humphrey Desmond Murray, a well-fed gentleman. He sat comfortably behind his desk like a modern Mr Pickwick and he had the upper-class speech and air so well portrayed by the actor, George Sanders. He had been a lecturer at Imperial College of Science and Technology, also in South Kensington, but he and his colleague, Spencer, had chosen to start their own business. Bull, I think, was a solicitor. They formed an independent firm of consultants who specialized in all aspects of the chemistry of photography. This included everything from the gelatine used to make the films, the chemicals of the photosensitive layers, the developers, and so on. They also were happy to take on odd jobs, such as making powders for Scotland Yard who used them to mark bank notes invisibly. They also sold dyes and stains for microscopy under the name Revector.

The labs were on the ground floor, in the cellars, and outbuildings of the shop and the offices were on the first floor. I never saw above this level and guessed that the upper floors were storerooms or empty. The labs were well-equipped by any standards. Even in 1938, they had electronic pH meters to measure acidity and alkalinity using glass electrodes, spectrometers and a wonderful suite of blown glass organic chemical pieces. To me it was the fulfilment of a dream that they wanted me to work in such a place. Humphrey Murray was firm and straight. He told me my hours: 9–5.30 with an hour for lunch and Saturday mornings 9–12.30. He insisted that in September of that year I enrol as a student in Birkbeck College of London University and go there in the evenings. He warned me that there was no future here at his firm. As soon as I graduated in chemistry I must leave and find a job elsewhere. He was quite open about this, but redeemed what would now seem a heartless attitude, by paying the fees of his
apprentices
to attend London University as evening-class students. More important for me than the formal education was the personal training and his insistence that the analyses I did were serious, not student experiments to emphasize a point of teaching. Because of this, unlike a full-time university student, I grew to regard accuracy in measurement as almost sacred. It took me a long while to reach this state of grace. As Humphrey was always saying, people’s lives and jobs could depend on the right answer and the cheating and fudging of results—so normal in the university—became for me an abomination. My starting wage, at
age eighteen, was about average for a working man in those days, £2 10s per week, and it rose shortly afterwards to £3 a week, equivalent to about £10,000 a year now.

My first task was to evaluate, under Humphrey Murray’s guidance, a new analytical method called ‘spot tests’. A German chemist, Fritz Feigel, had developed it, and Murray handed me a copy of his book and told me to read it. He must have known that I was the sort of boy who would take it home and read it in my own time. But this was not exploitative. Soon I was applying these novel methods of analysis, using just one drop of solution, not several millilitres in a test tube, to practical problems. I made the tests either on filter paper or in depressions spread in parallel rows across a slab of white porcelain. After a while, I grew unimpressed by these spot tests. They were fine for finding traces of things, like blood or sulphur, where they should not be, but they were hardly accurate or quantitative. The greatest surprise came when I had my first and only serious explosion in a lifetime as a chemist. It was a surprise because small-scale chemistry involving drops of reagent, not flasks full, is inherently safe. The quantities of chemicals used are so small that even violent reactions can do little harm. I had made a series of spot-test analyses for sulphur in photographic gelatine using a solution of sodium azide and iodine as a reagent. The presence of mere traces of sulphide makes this reagent fizz and lose its colour. When I completed my tests, I tipped the tray of solutions into a beaker, which happened to contain the residues of another earlier test using mercuric chloride. I was
surprised
to see that inside this beaker of mixed waste solutions, long delicate needle-shaped crystals had grown that glinted in the light. Elegance from dross, I thought, and I picked up the beaker, held it before me to the light, and shook it to watch the crystals move. As I shook it, there was a thunderous bang, which brought everyone rushing to my cellar. They found me unharmed, but dazed and slightly deafened. I was still holding the top of the beaker but there was no trace of the bottom of it or its contents. I learnt later that long crystals of the heavy metal azides, such as mercuric azide, are amongst the most sensitive of the primary explosives. Humphrey Murray was concerned and quite fatherly. He did not blame me. He apologized for not warning me that azides were notorious for making
dangerously
explosive compounds. He had just not thought that the
quantities
in each of the spot tests were large enough to represent a hazard, but clearly the combination of fifty or more tests certainly was. It was
a valuable lesson, and one that now might not be learnt. So concerned are we today about safety that I would never have had the chance to work with such a mixture.

A tall dark young man oversaw the lab at Murray, Bull, and Spencer. He was a graduate chemist and his name was Tyrrell. He also had been at the Strand School, only several years earlier than I had. He was a kindly mentor and advisor, and on several occasions covered for me when I made stupid mistakes. One of these happened one Saturday morning, when I washed up the accumulation of glassware in a vast sink fed by a gas-heated boiler. This laboratory scullery was in an outbuilding in what had once been the garden. It was long before the days of dishwashers and automatic devices, and we did washing up by hand. Fortunate is the woman who marries a practical chemist, for not only can he provide in times of scarcity most of the familiar toilet and domestic products, from lipstick to detergent, but he can also wash up and enjoy doing it. Few things are more difficult or challenging to wash as delicate, expensive chemical glassware. Often evil-smelling toxic tars coated the flasks and resisted all attempts to clean them. These tarry flasks I cleaned by filling them with a mixture of chromic and sulphuric acids, and leaving the mess to digest. After learning to cope with these horrors, washing up at home is simple.

On that Saturday morning, I was cheerfully humming a tune as I went through my weekly chore. I picked up a flask, which appeared to contain water, and poured it into the sink. It was not water, it was ether, and on contact with the hot water, it boiled instantly. Its boiling point, if you did not know, is blood heat, 36°C. The vapour rose in a cloud. Ether has a powerful and almost pleasant smell so I realized my mistake, but not fast enough. The vapour ignited as it reached the pilot flame of the gas boiler. There was an enormous whoosh and I felt my eyebrows and front hair singe, but amazingly the sheet of flame vanished almost as fast as it had begun, and without burning
anything
, not even me. Tyrell came running in from the house, saw that no harm had been done, and with quick thinking called back to Humphrey, ‘Nothing serious, just the boiler backfiring.’ It is good when young to have such friends.

Another person who worked for the firm was R Riley Ratcliffe, a young technician who was on the permanent staff. He was a typical Londoner, pert and street conscious. He was not fond of me and used to like to irritate by calling me ‘Alfie’. He probably thought me bumptious and, almost certainly, I was. There was another apprentice,
my long-time friend and companion of school days, Edward Newton. He was a talented artist and mathematician and had looks I envied. Rightly, he had been head boy of the Strand School. What on earth was he doing here as a mere technician, I wondered? He could easily have gained a place at Oxford or Cambridge.

By modern standards, it was a hard life. The alarm clock woke me at 6.30 am and I caught the 7.45 train to Victoria from Orpington. After work ended at 5.30 I travelled by Tube to Birkbeck and spent the hour before lectures began either in the Students Union or having supper at the canteen there. Lectures and practical work occupied the time from 7 until 9. I arrived home usually about 11 and was rarely in bed before midnight. Sundays were for walking in what was then the perfect English countryside. I set out after
breakfast
and walked as far south as Ide Hill and as far east as Wrotham. Favourite places on my route were the Pilgrim’s Way and Magpie Bottom. The latter was one of those dry green valleys that one finds in the chalk country. In those days, it was ‘unimproved’ and
wild-flowers
studded the turf, including numerous species of orchid. I usually called to have tea at a cottage in the village of Shoreham. An old lady of the village ran it and it faced the River Darrent. After tea, usually sandwiches and cake, I ran the six miles back to Orpington up the downs and across the two valleys that lay between. A typical Sunday’s walk and run would be about twenty miles. The most I ever walked in a weekend was forty-two miles, but this meant starting out on Saturday night and walking all night as well as all Sunday.

One of the firm’s customers made gelatine of photographic quality for Kodak. One day they were in serious trouble, for the photographic emulsion made with their gelatine was only weakly sensitive to light. Humphrey suspected a lack of sulphide in the gelatine and sent me, together with Riley Ratcliffe, the more experienced technician, to have a look at the process and find out what had gone wrong. It was my first look at the industrial world; I had never realized that gelatine came from the indigestible leftovers of the meat industry. Hoofs and skin were boiled in vast vats to make the thick soup that was allowed to gel and then dried as sheets of gelatine. We asked the foreman if he could think of anything that had changed in the process during the past few weeks. He replied that nothing had changed; everything was exactly as before. My colleague noticed an empty, rusty bucket next to one of the vats and asked what it was. The foreman replied, ‘That is the old bucket from which we add the hydrogen peroxide to clear the
gelatine at the final stage of cooking. As you can see it rusted away, so we bought a new one last week. Here it is.’ Light began to dawn. We knew that the lack of sulphide could have come from an excess of oxidant and here the new bucket was visibly larger than the old one. We soon solved the firm’s problem when we found that the new bucket was twice the volume of the old one. This small experience made real for me the academic fact that volume increases as the cube of the linear dimensions. The foreman buying the new bucket thought that an increase of one-quarter in diameter and depth was of small consequence. Universities can rarely supply golden
experiences
such as this.

My most vivid memory of apprenticeship days was the preparation of several hundred grams of the dye pigment carmine. The recipe was hand-written in an exercise book emblazoned with stains of the dyer’s craft. Take one hundred-weight of dried cochineal beetles, it said. Boil them in the copper with five gallons of ten-per-cent acetic acid. There was the 112-pound sack of beetles and the jars of acetic acid and in front of me was the copper. It looked just like the pictures I had seen of equipment in an alchemist’s laboratory. A semicircular stone parapet supported the large copper vat. A large wooden lid closed the top of the vat and heat came from a gas burner beneath it. The instructions said to bring the acid to a boil and then adjust the gas so that it slowly simmered. This I did, and then began to ladle in the beetles until they were all in the copper. The beetles cooked for four hours while a strange vinegary and musty odour filled the outhouse. I decanted the dark red-brown liquor from the beetle stew through a strainer into a set of jars. The next step was to add alum solution. Then, while stirring the mixture, to add ammonia. I watched the carmine lake precipitate. The last and most rewarding step was to filter the
suspension
of lake through a foot diameter filter paper held in a large
porcelain
funnel. I washed the powder several times and then put it in a vacuum desiccator to dry. At this final stage, it was a pure red colour so intense that it seemed to draw the sense of colour out through my eyes from my brain. What a joy to participate in the transmutation of dried beetles into immaculate carmine. I felt more like the sorcerer’s apprentice than merely Humphrey Murray’s junior technician.