A Curious Boy

by Richard Fortey

  My parents were not generally extravagant. They were sparse drinkers: wine only appeared at Christmas dinner, and then it was a sweet Sauternes ill suited to the main course. The main indulgence was my father’s smoking. He could have smoked for the national team. The favoured brand was Player’s Navy Cut – untipped. There was a picture of a jolly jack tar (appropriate, it turns out, for all the wrong reasons) on the packet, and the motto ‘It’s the tobacco that counts’ appeared on the flap of the packet when it was opened. He would give each cigarette a short tap on the packet before lighting up yet again. His fingers carried the stubborn yellow stain of the nicotine addict. My sister and I must have been surrounded by a fog of smoke throughout our early years, even in the car. The only object I still own that bears testimony to that habit is a battered brass ashtray advertising Bass in Bottle that was alleged to have been taken from the NAAFI during the war. It has four depressions to hold smouldering gaspers, enough for about an hour. The consummate angler had his faults, and what others might there be?

  At about the same time I realised that my mother was an awful cook. It was not a skill that could be honed during years of rationing, but even when bananas, brisket and butter were freely available she was still stuck in an era before cooking was regarded as a necessary skill. My sister tells me that she cannot recall eating at all; I remember only that Kath subsisted almost entirely on potatoes (Mother even dubbed her ‘Little Miss Murphy’). I have some recollections of boiled mince with tinned peach slices to follow. The only thing of culinary excellence we consumed was father’s trout – and he cooked them. We even looked forward to the school dinners that most children despised: there were delicious things like jam roly poly with bright yellow artificial custard on top. The real excitement at home was Sunday lunch. Like many middle-class families, we all had to come together for a weekly meal cooked by a beneficent mother, a ritual to which the dining room was dedicated. It was sometimes a terrifying experience. Joints of beef would be roasted until they halved in size and became almost impossible to carve; Yorkshire pudding somehow carbonised at the rim while still being soggy at the centre. Greens were mercilessly boiled. We were all grateful to whoever invented gravy powder (a Mr Bisto, I presume) to give us something with which to lubricate the plate. The excitement came with the dessert, especially if it was apple pie. I do not know how she managed it, but my mother’s pastry was some kind of hard and brittle ceramic. The pie arrived at the table in an enamel dish looking like an archaeological object unearthed from Thebes. The usual approaches to crust simply failed; knives bounced off it. Eventually a cleaver of sufficient gravitas was applied with great force, whereupon the pie crust suddenly shattered sending pieces flying around the dining room. Nothing was safe: bits bounced off the mirror with a ‘ping!’ The lampshade trembled under impact. The dog hid under the sideboard. It was remarkable, but the sliced apples within the pie had managed to stay hard. ‘Now,’ said my mother, ‘who’s for seconds?’

  My mother’s cooking never improved. Late in life she did appreciate that she was required to entertain, and that cooking might be involved. She was delighted when she discovered a gourmet chicken recipe that required her to tip a tin of Campbell’s condensed mushroom soup over some chicken legs before putting the dish in the oven to cook. Her elderly friends were impressed (according to my mother’s account): ‘Margaret,’ they said, ‘so delicious! Do tell us your secret.’ She was – as she would have said – tickled pink by her cunning.

  After Sunday lunch it was time for The Brains Trust on the television. It would be hard to imagine such a serious display of erudition being regarded as entertainment today. If we would have preferred to watch Roy Rogers we did not say so, and anyway it was not an option. We all sat in front of the ‘box’ as if in a classroom before a respected teacher. Questions were sent in by viewers and debated by three panellists, all of them noted savants of the day. Among those who appeared were Julian Huxley, probably the leading British biologist in the middle of the last century, Jacob Bronowski a renowned scientist and thinker, C. E. M. Joad the first television philosopher, A. J. Ayer a more distinguished academic one (see Chapter 8), and Marghanita Laski, one of the cleverest women in the United Kingdom. There were no camera tricks, just verbal banter, and a good quantity of smoke from pipes. Nor were the questions of the ‘What is your favourite book, and why?’ variety, instead, they cut to the chase on the meaning of existence. There were questions like: ‘Can we ever know ultimate truth by means of science?’ C. E. M. Joad was renowned for replying: ‘It all depends what you mean by … ultimate truth.’ ‘Is music the most perfect of the arts?’ came the question. ‘It all depends on what you mean by … perfect,’ came Joad’s response. Nonetheless, the quality of intercourse was very elevated (so elevated, indeed, that the word ‘intercourse’ could be used in its original sense) and I recognised words that I had first seen in The Psychology of Insanity – like ‘archetype’, ‘sublimation’ and ‘catharsis’. Words, I began to understand, were legion, multifarious, prolific – and powerful. I needed to get on top of words. I also appreciated the knowledge and wisdom that invariably typified Huxley’s replies. I did not know then that he was a member of a famous scientific clan that was founded by T. H. Huxley, defender of Charles Darwin and evolution. It would not be many years before I encountered Julian Huxley again in the scientific literature. I understood now what my mother had meant when she described Mr Morley-Jones as an intellectual – he was somebody that would have felt comfortable with confronting difficult questions. He appreciated scholarship, and admired reason. Sadly, on a black-and-white television I could not tell whether or not Marghanita Laski’s stockings were blue.

  * * *

  The butterflies that thronged on the railway embankment above Woodspeen Farm intrigued me. I could have identified them from The Observer’s Book of British Butterflies readily enough, but I felt compelled to make a collection. I had admired prepared butterfly specimens in old cabinets in museums with their wings displayed neatly flat and four-square. Few butterflies come like that naturally: they need to be pinned out for display, which requires a measure of legerdemain. I obtained a simple butterfly net and captured the poor creatures without too much difficulty. The main problem was extracting them from the net without destroying the beauty of the wings, the very thing that attracted me in the first place. Practice improved the delicacy of my handling, but then my victims had to be turned into a jar and killed before the pinning-out process. I obtained a pungent liquid called carbon tetrachloride (it was used for dry-cleaning as a solvent), and soaked blotting paper in the jar in the lethal fluid. When the butterfly was added to the jar the lid was screwed into place and the insect briefly fluttered, then stalled, and twitched before expiring. At this stage its wings could be moved into position and pinned into the mounting paper. I did not persist with this pastime for very long, though long enough to learn the common southern English butterflies. I made a small, and not very skilled, collection of spread-eagled species. Something about the twitchy ending of a fragile life in a jar gave me pause. I knew I could never become an obsessive lepidopterist. I am not proud of this period of slaughter, but it has left a legacy: my memories of abundance. Small tortoiseshell butterflies, whose caterpillars feed on the common nettle, often made orange clouds at the edges of the fields. Red admirals were nearly as common, unmistakable with their stripes of scarlet command. I captured wall browns with no difficulty. These familiar butterflies are not as common as they once were. The culling of the odd adult for a collection is an irrelevance in the prosperity of the species. It may be the birds’ story all over again. I am sure that nettles are more abundant than they were in my Woodspeen Farm days. Nitrogenous fertilisers have soaked nearly every ditch and hedgebank and encouraged nettles at the expense of a richer suite of wildflowers. Small tortoiseshells should be everywhere. Instead, the populations of small tortoiseshells have fallen by three-quarters in thirty years. The word ‘baffling’ has been used in officia
l reports.

  My sister’s sketch of Sue, our beloved fox terrier.

  3

  The Chemi-shed

  A few items have survived from my time as a boy chemist: just a selection of my old glassware like flasks, bottles and a funnel. The bottles have serious, ground glass stoppers, and they were designed to contain equally serious chemicals. They hold rather less than half a pint of liquid, and any labels they once carried have long since fallen away. The flasks include one with a triangular section, designed to allow the user to swill around potions without slopping them on to his sleeves. Its special glass ensures that boiling liquids will not shatter the vessel. The small glass funnel has gently fluted sides, and readily takes the folded pleats of a filter paper; cloudy liquids poured into it emerge clear into the flask below, leaving behind insoluble residues on the paper. I must have used the funnel dozens of times. How these items came through the vicissitudes of my history is a mystery. Like the famous trout, they survived my mother’s frequent moves; they turned up without biographical notes in a box at my sister’s house at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The more complex pieces of apparatus, like my retorts or my Liebig condenser, must have been shattered when they were jolted too vigorously in some removal van. No trace of a rank of little screw-cap bottles has survived: they contained an array of chemicals for my experiments, substances once so treasured and so pregnant with possibilities. Coloured crystals were then carefully stored for future use in brown bottles, with their chemical formulae neatly written on the labels; mineral salts: pale green of iron, blue of copper, or purplish cobalt, all gone. Acids, alkalis, sulphates and chlorides must have been poured away in an abandoned chaos of elemental confusion when my chemistry shed was finally emptied. The very pipes carrying them away would have been corroded. There were no explosions that I recall.

  Chemistry began with a Christmas present, a chemistry set in a cardboard box with a smiling boy in short trousers on the lid doing something interesting with test tubes. There was a line of similar tubes inside the box and some of them included chemicals for my first experiments, designed specially for a budding scientist. I suspect that several of these chemicals would now be proscribed under health and safety legislation, as they included poisonous substances like copper sulphate, but I never felt compelled to drink a solution of anything to find out what might happen. A small spirit lamp was included to heat solutions in a chosen test tube, which had a lip that could be easily grasped by a simple set of tongs. The most exciting single item was a length of magnesium ribbon that came in a circular pillbox. When the ribbon was held in the tongs and heated in the flame of the lamp it burst into a white blaze of extraordinary incandescence that burned slowly to consume the silvery metal. All that remained was a white wisp. My delight in this simple experiment was unbounded. It demonstrated that one thing could transform into another. The world was not fixed, like school rules. I learned from helpful notes lying in the box that the proper word for what I had seen was ‘combustion’. Many ordinary things burned in all manner of ways, like my mother’s Yorkshire pudding, but matter itself is transmogrified by combustion. The white residue was still in some way magnesium, but magnesium mutated, and the process of mutation gave out heat and light. If the transformation happened in air, then the only place from which the mutating agent could be drawn was from the air itself. Air could not be empty; ‘vanishing into thin air’ was not possible because the very air had substance. I understood that oxygen was necessary at the same moment I realised it existed. Like the mayfly, the inanimate world could transform from one state to another: existence was a state of flux.

  A funnel and a few reagent bottles – all that survives from my chemical boyhood.

  There were other transformers waiting in my original chemistry set. Ammonium dichromate was a mass of orange crystals; if placed into a small paper pyramid and then ignited at the tip – sparks flew. A spitting, glowing combustion made a convincing replica of an erupting volcano; it even hissed in a satisfactory way. The most extraordinary feature of this transformation was that the pile of ‘volcanic’ debris was many times the size of the original dichromate. The orange crystals puffed up into a huge pile of a completely different dull greenish chemical (chromium sesquioxide I discovered later). The vigour of the reaction somehow suggested that the dichromate sought actively to change, as if motivated by desire rather than chemical inevitability. To young eyes this was as much magic as science: was there no end to possible transformations? There was even disappearance – the conjurer’s stock in trade. A few yellow sulphur crystals placed on a spoon in a flame glowed and were gone. But they could not have vanished into thin air, because there was no thin air. A sharp assault on my nostrils made me guess what had happened: no elemental prestidigitation, no chemical hocus-pocus. The combusted sulphur became a gas – not so much disappearing into thin air as thickening it with its own element. I recognised the same smell again when I went to Spain as a teenager and travelled on the old coal-fired steam engines. My eyes smarted, and my throat tightened into a cough. Sulphur hidden in poor quality coal was combusted into the atmosphere as sulphur dioxide. It was poison. It lurked in smog. It killed lichens that were immune to drought and starvation and the wrath of God.

  There was a particular logic to chemistry that I was just beginning to understand, but something equally stirred my imagination. The idea of metamorphosis is embedded in so many mythologies and in so many cultures that it must be rooted deep into the human mind. Greek gods transforming themselves into animals, trees embodying spirits, spirits then turned to stone, even transubstantiation; so many of the colourful costumes of religion are concerned with one thing becoming another, animate and inanimate. What Jung termed the collective unconscious, where such transformations are part of the psychic landscape, may be a legacy inherited from a common ancestor, an ancestor so deep in geological time that the boundaries between man and the natural world – between the animal, vegetable and mineral – were not taken for granted. They were blurred by superstition and need. The emotional appeal of chemical transformation may run keenly alongside a rational desire to find out how matter works. We anatomise substance, or even recognise atoms, spurred on by a primeval fascination with metamorphosis.

  I was given the book some time after the chemistry set. It was called something like Chemistry Experiments at Home and had a brown cover (dust jacket unknown); the author’s identity has escaped me, although the name of ‘Robinson’ popped into my head briefly and for no good reason, so Robinson it shall be.[1] I owe Robinson a big debt. He identified chemicals that could (then) be obtained for domestic purposes: sodium carbonate as a cleaner, chlorinated bleach, silver nitrate and ‘hypo’ for photographic development, sodium chlorate weed killer (now banned) potassium nitrate (banned), ammonia (still a cleaner), acetic acid (vinegar), potassium hydroxide (lye) and so on; they augmented my chemical arsenal considerably. Robinson told me how to grow giant copper sulphate crystals by suspending a very small one on a thread of cotton in a supersaturated solution of the same chemical. I loved the old names of some compounds, which went back to the days of the alchemists. Copper sulphate was ‘blue vitriol’ and sulphuric acid ‘oil of vitriol’ – which immediately explained the adjective ‘vitriolic’. Potassium nitrate was once termed saltpetre – an ingredient of explosives, as I was to learn – but in those days I could buy a pound of it with no trouble. Robinson detailed a range of experiments using such easily accessible chemicals. One of the first I sought out was sodium silicate, sold as ‘water glass’, which was formerly used to preserve eggs. It came in a tin, and was a kind of thick, colourless syrup. After it was diluted and the solution poured into a jar Robinson’s young chemist was invited to drop in crystals of copper sulphate, iron sulphate and similar metallic ‘salts’. I followed his instructions and over a day or two the most fantastical towers grew up into the solution from the crystals, composed of silicate compounds of the ‘seeds’ in the jar. They bore the colours of the
ir elements: blue for copper, green for iron. The growths were frayed, carbuncular and delicate, extravagant as stalagmites. They resembled the phantasmagorical columns portrayed in Max Ernst’s surrealist paintings made a few years before I was born. Once again, it was transformation, chemical creation, molecular magic. More prosaically, Robinson told me how to make a detergent from horse chestnuts. By boiling up the brown nuts I released a satisfactory foamy solution; the same chemical became the ‘secret’ ingredient of Badedas bath bubbles.

  The book also taught me chemical equations, through friendly words at first, rather than chemical symbols. That first flare of magnesium was the simplest possible equation:

  magnesium + oxygen = magnesium oxide

  (wrote Robinson). Two elements combined to make a compound molecule, the white residue. I understood that equations can go both ways, but to recover the magnesium would mean reversing all that heat and light – energy – that had been expended during its brilliant transformation. It was as if magnesium wanted to marry up with oxygen and was reluctant to part with it again. When I learned much later that elements formed bonds it seemed just the right word.

  Robinson led me easily through a slightly more complex case history using only the most everyday materials. I retrieved a lump of chalk picked up on one of the family fishing trips and roasted it on the gas stove. Eventually, it started to crumble. It had become lime. The relevant equation was simple enough: