Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  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.

  The happy childhood at Letchworth ended when Grandfather March retired in 1925. They sold Norton Croft to provide a pension and moved to rooms above the shop. The move to Brixton was by train from Letchworth to the terminus at King’s Cross, and what an excitement that was. In the 1920s, boys were, as now, interested by the engineering achievements of the time. England was still a superpower with the railways a proud part of it, but travel by train was painful as well as exciting. The engines blew off steam from their safety valves when stopped at a station, and to my young ears, the noise was intense and agonizing. I discovered from tests when I was a student at Manchester that the upper range of my hearing was above 20 kHz and more acute than most. The hiss of high pressure steam escaping is rich in ultrasonics and I heard it as an appalling noise. The journey by Tube from King’s Cross to Stockwell was just as unpleasantly noisy, but the Tube system was little different from today. The trains were those familiar streamlined worms that rushed from their small tunnel into the tiny stations. We took the tram from Stockwell to Brixton Hill and the shop. The living conditions were primitive compared with Norton Croft. Behind the shop were two large rooms: one for living in and the other a bedroom where my mother and father slept in a large double bed. A door from the living room led to a tiny scullery with a WC and sink basin just beyond; for most of the time they cooked on a gas ring in this scullery. A door led on to a yard, an area of paved ground with a high wooden fence around it with a gate leading on to New Park Road. Opposite the door was a disused chapel, a storehouse for theatrical props. A large wooden shed stood in the yard, which held a gas oven used to cook the Sunday lunch, and a galvanized iron hipbath where we all bathed. Bathing was infrequent in the winter, because it was so cold in the draughty shed. My mother, in spite of these difficult surroundings, made a fighting effort to keep me clean. She gave me daily baths in front of a large gas fire in the living room. It must have been a frustrating task, for a layer of soot from the ubiquitous coal-burning fires of London coated all surfaces outside.

  The customers were people living nearby who wanted photographs framed or, if they were less wealthy, put behind a sheet of glass and held by a sticky coloured tape called passé partout. A few middle-class customers bought framed pictures or prints. My father worked in the evenings restoring paintings in an underground basement below the shop. They employed as a shop assistant a Mr Weatherby who was a First World War veteran. He was a thin, pale, tallish man with a limp from a wound gained in the First World War and I saw him, in the thoughtless cruelty of a child, as a miserable man. No matter how much I pressed him he would never talk of the war but, like many ex-service-men, he forever grieved over the injustice of his plight. He had been called to be a hero, and was promised much, but received little. In the first years that I was at the shop, business was good. My mother and father were able to take a two weeks’ holiday in Europe each year visiting centres of culture. It was usually a tour organized by Thomas Cook, and among the cities they visited were Rome, Madrid and Paris. They were also fond of Chamonix and Interlaken in Switzerland. These holidays seemed to be what sustained them and made their life of drudgery worthwhile. They did not take me on these journeys and it never occurred to me that this was a matter of importance. My mother’s thirst for music and culture was slaked by concerts every week or so. An old bachelor—Mr Wright, who seemed to find comfort away from a lonely existence in a Streatham house—accompanied her. My father never seemed to mind my mother’s outings with Mr Wright, and I’m sure that he had no cause for concern.

  My own excursions were with my grandparents. ‘Let’s go to Margate on the steamer,’ they said. It was a lovely sunny Sunday morning in May and Brixton’s charms were somewhat worn. We finished breakfast at the shop and the three of us—Will, my grandpa, Alice and I—took the tram to Westminster where the Royal Sovereign was berthed and waiting to take us down the river to the sea. Such spontaneous journeys illuminated my life as a child and left me feeling that ships were transports to heaven. The Royal Sovereign was a paddle steamer with two huge paddle wheels, like those of a water mill, on either side amidships. She was a coal burner and had a high funnel, but even this did not prevent the grit and soot and sulphur fumes from falling on the unwary who sat downwind. Will and Alice were old hands and they took seats near the bow. Strangely, I never remember the ship being overcrowded. There was competition from other steamers and there always seemed space to spare. In those days of course, London was not the tourist destination it is now.

  Those paddle steamers that plied the Thames were in a way museums of Victoriana and Victorian engineering. The engine room had giant gleaming pistons proudly displayed to anyone who wanted to walk along the open catwalk above it. Paddle wheels turned relatively slowly so that we could watch the dignified mechanical motion of the engines and wonder about it. It was not like the fussy urgent noisiness of the internal combustion engine. Only once have I seen a comparable slow and steady internal combustion engine, and that was on an experimental farm where there was a huge single-cylinder caterpillar tractor. This strange machine had one enormous cylinder and firing a shotgun cartridge into it started the slowly moving piston.

  London’s river was full of ships in those days. The docks carried the cargoes of the world and the passengers who now travel to and from Heathrow. The whole journey fascinated and I needed nothing other than the prospect that was slowly moving before my eyes to keep me happily entertained. We passed the stately buildings of the Greenwich Naval Hospital set in the green of their park surroundings, and the grim satanic-looking Becton gasworks, so large it seemed to take an age to pass. Then we sailed on to Tilbury, where passenger liners left for South America, China, and anywhere in the world. How I longed to be setting off on one of them.

  On the Royal Sovereign it was truly better to travel than to arrive; our destination was an anticlimax. The pier, where the ship arrived at Margate, led to a dirty beach and a tacky promenade with an overpowering smell of fish frying in rancid fat, and waiting to be sprinkled with malt vinegar. Malt vinegar and paraffin—kerosene to those outside these islands—were smells that I loathed as a child and still dislike. Wisely, Alice and Will did not venture into the town itself. There was in any case only an hour before the return journey to Westminster. The sheer joy of these trips left in my young mind a love of ships and the sea.

  At the age of six I was sent to a private primary school at the junct
ion of Elm Park Road and Brixton Hill. My first teacher was an embittered Irishwoman, Miss Tierney. She soon took an intense dislike to the precocious boy put in her charge and used the cane frequently on my hands and fingers. In the way of small children, I said nothing of this to my family and suffered until I could endure it no longer. Then I decided to leave home as usual in the morning and instead of going to school, play in the long untidy gardens full of shrubs that ran down to Brixton Hill. This lasted for a few days, but somehow my truancy was discovered. There was an inquest and they moved me to the next teacher, Miss Plumridge, a plump motherly woman who referred to me always as ‘The brand plucked from the burning’. An accurate description, as I had tasted hell, and her disciplined effective teaching was heaven by comparison. Under her tuition, I learnt fast and soon was reading science fiction from the Brixton Library. My last teacher at this primary school was Miss Beavan, a wonderful Welsh woman, who in spite of a huge class had the capacity to make us feel that she gave each of us her full attention. I shall never forget her enthusiasm and encouragement when I painted a rose well enough to be a true likeness.

  I believe that primary schooling is by far the most important part of education. We need to acquire literacy and numeracy early in childhood, so that they become automatic activities needing no more effort than that used to keep our balance while riding a bicycle. These things can be learnt later but never with the same fluency. In the same way, no language learnt later in life can be as fluent as one’s first language.

  My mother was full of working-class good intentions and she had an unquestioning belief in education. She was determined that I should go to a grammar school and as soon as possible. She had been denied the chance of a ‘good education’ and she did not intend that I should suffer from a lack of it. I now realize that my mother blamed her lack of good schooling for her failure to realize her potential. She did not see that the ‘better’ schools did not so much educate as indoctrinate the customs of the middle and upper-middle classes. In her days, an incompetent with good manners and speech could easily find the employment denied a working-class applicant, no matter how able. My mother was an intelligent woman but she really believed that ‘a good education’ could turn any girl into Florence Nightingale or a Jane Austen and any boy into a Darwin or an Orwell. This powerful attribute of education is still widely believed. So pervasive is the idea that we can make silk purses from sows’ ears that the phrase ‘He never had a proper education’ is the inevitable cliché that decorates an account of a misspent life. Looking back, I wish I could have stayed on until puberty at that primary school. Apart from the bad first year it provided an environment in which I was unfolding fast. In the spring of 1929, aged nine, she wrenched me from this childhood paradise and enrolled me at the Strand School about a quarter of a mile further down Elm Park Road. As grammar schools went, it was not bad, but for me it proved to be the wrong place to go.

  I walked to my new school from my Uncle Fred’s house near King’s Road. The route took me past Brixton Prison. It was a grim place, especially in the dark years of the 1930s depression. As I walked beside the high long walls and past its vast closed door I could not help wondering what it was like inside. My father had done time as a boy in Reading gaol but he would never talk of it except to say that he had done wrong and had been punished, and that was all there was to it. Like most pre-pubescent boys, I was full of fantasies and fears, and the prospect of imprisonment was high on my mind’s agenda.

  At the end of the prison approach road was the main road, Brixton Hill. Directly across was Elm Park Road, a street of terraced Victorian houses that led to Strand School, my destination. The school was a London County Grammar school. By the standards of today, it was a good school, but I hated it. I saw it as a place where, unjustly, I did time for the offence of being too young to work. I did not learn much science there, but it certainly formed my views on science. Let me explain. One morning in a moment of purposeless destruction, I started to carve my initials with my penknife in the wooden bench of the biology lab. I was sitting before it listening to the natural history lesson delivered by Sidney Dark who taught biology to the senior boys and the soft subject of natural history to the young. I liked listening to him and contentedly carved away as he spoke—what made me carve I do not know. Suddenly there was a hush. The teacher stopped in mid-sentence and glared at me with eyes enlarged by thick magnifying spectacles. ‘Wretched boy, what are you doing?’ ‘Nothing,’ I replied, too startled for anything more accurate or reasonable. ‘You are destroying school property and not paying attention. You will be punished. Go and fetch the book and cane.’ I was astonished; Sidney Dark had never caned anyone. There were masters in the school who thoroughly enjoyed the swish and thwack of the cane as they beat a young boy’s bottom, but Mr Dark was not among them. The book was used to record the punishment and I think to curb excessive beating. Reluctantly I left the lab and made my way down to the Masters’ Common Room, where I knocked on the door and asked for the book and cane. In those times and earlier the process of punishment was invested with ritual so that it could entertain the innocent as well as be seen properly to punish the guilty. The ritual of the book and cane was, I know, an effective part of the punishment through its capacity to humiliate as well as hurt.

  I was not too worried as I took this punishment kit back to the biology lab, for I felt sure that Sidney Dark was much too kind and decent a man to use it. I did wonder, though, what I could say that would tip the balance in my favour. So vivid is my memory of this small event that I can easily picture the corridor flanked by the chemistry and physics labs. I can still smell the tang of hydrogen sulphide mixed with that of carbolic disinfectant. I went on to the biology lab and gave the book and cane to my teacher as was required by the ritual. He immediately put it down on his desk and began his harangue. This I knew was a good sign and I put on my air of utmost contrition. The sadists among the schoolmasters never wasted time on talk but went straight into the act itself. He had hardly warmed over his voice when the clamour of the fire bell drowned it and, as if automatons, boys and master immediately started the well-rehearsed fire drill, and prepared to move to the positions allocated to them outside the school. I turned to go, relieved at my escape by the bell, for I was sure that the fire drill would cool the teacher’s indignation. Suddenly, a punishment much more subtle than mere corporal came into his mind and as he turned to pick up the book and cane, he said, ‘Lovelock, you take care of this,’ and handed it to me. ‘We cannot leave it here to be burnt.’ I was obliged to rescue the cane from the mock fire in front of the whole school that found the episode hilariously funny. Ever after, they called me the boy who had saved the cane. It also was the start of my lifelong love–hate relationship with biology and biologists.

  You will by now have gathered that I was neither a perfect pupil nor happy to be at school. In fact, I hated it so much that every day was a kind of ordeal. If, as often happened in the winter, the filthy coal smoke that polluted the Brixton air made me ill, it was a vast relief. I could stay at home in bed with my beloved books, freed by bronchitis or pneumonia from the tyranny of school. Because of illness, I was a weedy child and should have been the target of bullies, the more usual reason to dislike school. I was blessed by having a wonderful group of fellow sufferers as my schoolmates. To them, I was the ‘mad scientist’, good when needed for a wheeze that would confound our common enemy, the masters.

  Let me tell you briefly of one small battle in our long war. A master, who taught French so badly that I could recall hardly a word of it, had the nickname ‘Sappho’. This was not because he was inclined, like others among the staff, to a feeble fumbling of young boys that aimed at, but never reached, its target of pederasty. No, we called him ‘Sappho’ because it was in his hour that pubescent boys explored their bodies in an orgy of mutual masturbation. Much is made of the troubled minds of young girls of those repressed times, of their panic when they reached the menarche and first exper
ienced bleeding from their vaginas. I cannot recall ever having heard any public comment on the similar puzzlement of boys when masturbation produced a sticky liquid product. For most of them, the 1930s were still a time when masturbation was a mortal sin, not something to mention to parents or indeed any adult. It was not so surprising that in the warm community of their peers they explored their bodies and discussed such things. As far as I know, little of this intimacy led to homosexuality; those of that inclination seemed to pair up early on and avoid the general scrimmage in Sappho’s room. We had nothing against Sappho: he rarely punished and was so short-sighted that we could get away with anything. Perversely, and exhibiting the bad side of the group, we used him as an easy target and once played a cruel joke on him. In December, just before term ended, the classroom was decorated with tinsel, paper bells, and the paraphernalia of Christmas; and above the master’s desk were two balloons. One of us had the idea of adding ink to one of these balloons, arranging a small leak in it, and replacing it over the desk just before Sappho entered the room. He swept in like an elderly bat, trailing his black academic gown like a pair of crumpled wings. He must have thought the class unusually quiet as he walked to his desk, sat down, and opened his notes for the day’s lesson in French verbs. After a minute or so, his hand moved to his bald head as he felt something impinge on it. He gazed dimly at the class but all seemed well. Then his hand rose again, and he felt the wetness of the ink, and rubbed it around first his head and then his face. There was an explosion of laughter from the boys; we could contain ourselves no longer. We laughed so much that it hurt. Sappho tried in his way to keep order, but kept wiping more and more ink onto his face, growing ever more like a badly made-up minstrel. Aroused by the noise the headmaster entered and brought order; I cannot remember the sequel and the punishments we received, except that they were collective, and the boys responsible were not betrayed.