Although a loner by nature, I realized in adolescence and earlier the importance of my peer group. What is rarely discussed is how much good comes from it. In the grimly custodial environment of the school, the warmth and companionship of my friends went far to make life tolerable. Much more than this, a large part of the knowledge I gained in school years came from interaction with my peers. In spite of its location in Brixton, the pupils of the Strand School were an elitist bunch. They were almost all of them selected by examination, which in those days let through no more than a few per cent. I well recall four of us discussing, at about age thirteen, particle accelerators. We were, like most boys, fascinated by speed and power, and the idea of accelerating charged atoms to near the speed of light was, at the time, exciting. We knew about Cockcroft and Walton’s famous experiment with an early linear accelerator—we had seen the apparatus in the Science Museum. It occurred to us that the particles would go faster if they went round a racetrack and were given a push on each rotation. In the course of an hour’s discussion, we arrived at a rough design for a powerful accelerator driven by radio frequency energy. We knew nothing then of the Californian physicist Lawrence’s now famous invention, the cyclotron. Of course, our invention, although independently made, was a bare skeleton of an idea and we had no means to make it in real life. Nevertheless, the recollection illustrates the power of children in a small group to learn heuristically.
I do believe that a good school or university is one blessed with good students. The teachers are less important. At the best universities, the students rarely see their professors because, by the time a professor takes a Chair at an elite university, his time is often committed for years ahead in the committee rooms of public service and the university administration. It does not matter because the students themselves set the pace and directly, or indirectly, teach each other; where the tutorial system is used, the meeting between student and tutor can be like that between apprentice and master.
The idea that there is no diversity among human minds is absurd. We vary in many ways and each of us needs teaching in a way that allows our potential to develop. The notion that all should be taught together since we are born equal is as foolish as decreeing that we can make do with only one size of clothing. It is patronizing to assume that those who fail in academic subjects are less able than the skilled passers of examinations. I suspect that many graduates with excellent degrees are barely able to do anything other than pass examinations. The sculptor Eric Gill often quoted Ananda Coomaraswamy: ‘the artist is not a special sort of man but that every man is a special sort of artist’. If we expand this thought to include women and other creative professions, we see that every child has a potential. It could provide a better prescription for our children’s upbringing.
The myth that egalitarian schools will break class barriers is dear to liberal humanists, but humans vary widely in their capacity and ability and it is unkind to treat them as if they were all the same. I think that the breaking of class barriers is less important than giving children the chance to develop their innate capacity. If we teach all children equally, we lessen this chance, whatever it may be. Each of us was once an egg in which the genes of our parents merged. Before and after conception our genetic composition is shuffled so that we are different from our parents. We are each of us at birth dealt a new hand and most assuredly, we are not born equal. Some are born with a hand full of aces and kings and others nothing but deuces. Rightly, we admire most the player who can win or can make a good defence from a poor hand. We admire him much more than the one who merely cashes in the gifts that the dealer dealt.
In spite of hating school, I was determined to become a scientist, whatever it took. The prospect of six more years at the Brixton school, followed perhaps by several at university, was too awful to contemplate at twelve years old, so I lived each day as it came. I knew that I would have to soldier on for years until I possessed that small piece of paper listing me as a Bachelor of Science. Without it, I could never hope to be in charge of an experiment in a laboratory. To make this time of imprisonment bearable I decided that while society required me to submit daily to school it had no rights over my evenings and weekends. This meant refusing to do homework or to attend Saturday sports—a rebellion that I sustained throughout all my years at school.
None of this endeared me to my masters. The possession of a retentive memory and an ability to listen enabled me to do well in examinations in spite of never doing homework. This did not work with mathematics or languages where mere memory is not enough but I was too young then to realize what a loss this would be. They punished me repeatedly by caning or by making me write one hundred or more times some banal sentence. When they saw that punishment would not work, they left me alone, and things were not so bad from about fourteen years old onwards.
I learnt most of my science from books borrowed from the Brixton Library and from discussing their contents with my friends. My first visit there was at about eight years old and I went with my mother, to whom books were at least half of life. On fine days, we walked from our shop on Brixton Hill the mile to the library in the centre of Brixton, and when wet we took the tram. At first, I took home novels, mostly science fiction, by authors like Jules Verne, Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells, but soon I found my way to the basement where the science textbooks were stored. I can vividly recall first reading Wade’s Organic Chemistry. In those days, long before the Health and Safety bureaucracy had forbidden the handling of chemicals, chemistry had soul. The old chemists wrote poetically about mobile refractile liquids and compared them to diamonds in motion. If ever you have held a small round flask half-full of diodomethane and shaken it in the light, you will understand. Organic chemistry, as it then was, fascinated me with the elegance of its blown glass apparatus and the powerful odours of the compounds distilling within them. There were substances with strange yet evocative odours, such as anisole (methoxybenzene), or awful but curious odours, like pyridine. I wonder if students and schoolchildren now even see sealed bottles of these wonderful substances; such is the unreasoning fear of chemicals. We chemists do occasionally die because of our love of chemicals, but on average, according to the statistics of the Royal Society of Chemistry, we live longer than most other professionals do. Is it right to deny children the real pleasure of hands-on experience because of some remote and trivial risk?
I learnt physics, like chemistry, from the books of the Brixton Library. Among them, Jeans’s Astronomy and Cosmology and Soddy’s The Interpretation of Radium. On Christmas 1928 I received a ‘hobbies annual’ and in it were the plans and instructions for building a simple short-wave radio receiver. The author claimed it was sensitive enough to receive broadcasts from Australia. My aunt Kit had married into the Leakey family and we spent some of Christmas 1928 at the house of Papa Leakey, the grandfather of my cousin Felix. The old man was famous as an early Fabian socialist and was a regular user of the airlines in his travels around Europe to promote the use of Esperanto. I was amazed to receive his full attention when I told him about this radio receiver. I suppose he saw it as a means for making the world speak one language, Esperanto. His encouragement lingered, and several years later I sold my stamp collection and used the proceeds, about ten shillings, to buy the components for this radio. I made it and was entranced to hear on first try an American station in Pittsburgh. Soon I heard Moscow, which even then seemed to be shouting, with megawatts of power, its communist faith from the highest tower of the Kremlin. There were few electronic components on sale in those days and I had to make much of the radio from raw materials. I wound the coils by hand on jam jars and the chokes, that separated the sound from the radio frequencies, on pencils. This experience with electronics was to serve me well later when I came to make my own instruments.
The physics taught in school was, by comparison, unrelievedly dull, almost as if intended to repel. I remember one exercise in physics that typified the school’s inability to inspire even receptive
minds. It was the reading of the Fortin Barometer. Most of us just tap the glass of an aneroid barometer to see if the pressure is increasing for fine weather or decreasing as heralds rain and wind, but to read a proper physicist’s barometer is much more complicated. The Fortin Barometer measures air pressures in the classical way—by observing the height of a column of mercury when the pressure of the atmosphere balances it. It is a vertical glass tube, closed at the top and filled with liquid mercury, and the bottom rests in a cup of mercury, open to the air. The height of the tube is about eighty centimetres and chosen to be longer than seventy-six centimetres of mercury, the weight of a normal atmospheric column. This corresponds to an air pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch, or two kilograms per square cm for the metricated. The upper part of the glass tube above the mercury column is a vacuum but for the small amount of mercury vapour. As the air pressure changes, so the mercury column rises or falls. When it rises, it is often for fine weather, and when it falls for foul. We use mercury as the liquid to fill the barometer because it is so dense. You could make a water barometer but you would need a thirty-foot tube, which is not so convenient.
The physics so far could have been interesting to a receptive twelve-year-old but not in the way it was taught. Academic scientists who drew up the school syllabus had long forgotten their childhood and wanted physics taught as an exact science. They wanted us to understand the errors inherent in the barometer that would prevent us from measuring the true pressure. We had to allow for the fact that the density of mercury changes with temperature, and that the length of the metal scale used to measure the height of the column also changes with temperature and in a different way from the mercury itself. We also had to allow for the pressure of mercury vapour above the liquid mercury, and take into account the possible error that came from the fact that the top and bottom of a column of mercury is round, not flat. We made these corrections to the observed height of the mercury column laboriously by pen-and-paper arithmetic. Now this would be fine stuff for an apprentice physicist who really needed to know the air pressure when he made a crucial and interesting experiment. To a twelve-year-old it seemed remote and absurd, especially since it took an hour to calculate the pressure, during which time it would have changed.
I never did biology at school after natural history teaching ceased at about age twelve. Those opting for science had a limited choice of subjects and mine were physics, chemistry, and pure and applied mathematics. Biology in those days was for those intending to become dentists or physicians. It included a fair amount of dissection, even of live frogs, the thought of which I found revolting.
I learnt my biology from reading, especially books by JBS Haldane. None of the other scientists’ books I read had his personal and hands-on approach. He became my hero when I read of his use of himself as a ‘guinea pig’ in physiological experiments, such as when he swallowed grams of ammonium chloride to increase the acidity of his blood. Practical biology came from walks in the country with my father, who had a lively sense of wonder and a way of passing it on. On weekends during the warmer seasons, I would leave home with my mother and father early on Sunday morning, take the tram to Streatham Common, and there take an electric train to Dorking. At Dorking, we changed onto a small steam train that pushed and pulled its way to Horsham. Half-way was the station of Holmbury St Mary where we alighted. We then began a walk across glorious meadows to the woods on the flanks of Leith Hill. From there, we walked on to Coldharbour village, where we stopped for lunch or tea. I think my father had been an apprentice to a poacher when he was a boy and before the gamekeepers caught him. He had a strong sense of ecology, knew the habitats, could see the trails of all the common mammals, and knew where the birds nested and their names. I learnt from him the common names of nearly all the wild plants, and such useful wisdom as that it is safe to enjoy the sweet crimson berries of the yew tree so long as the deadly pips are spat out. Leith Hill was a wonderland. I learnt to catch trout by hand from the small streams and gorged on blueberries, or hurts, as the locals called them.
As a child, my parents fed and bathed me but otherwise left me to my own devices. When not at school I roamed the Brixton streets and played with the children there. Coal smoke pollution fouled the air in wintertime and, when there was a still night, the loss of heat from the ground to the dark sky lowered the surface temperature, resulting in a pool of cold air a few hundred feet deep, which filled the London basin. The United Kingdom was a superpower before the Second World War but it did nothing to relieve the harm of smog. In certain ways, the plight of the Los Angelenos, beset by smog from their cars, matches the helplessness felt by Londoners. When I was a child, London had worse smogs than other British cities because the combination of geography and meteorology made it easy for the air to form an invisible but tightly closed lid above the city. This lid, or inversion as the meteorologists call it, lies between a hundred and a few thousand feet above the ground, and under it everything emitted in the city accumulates, sometimes to lethal levels. The air in this cold pool was stable and it did not mix with the warmer atmosphere above, so that the fumes built up to make the infamous pea-soup fog. It could be so bad that I could see no further than a few yards in front of me and sometimes even one’s feet seemed to be vanishing in a foul haze that smelt acrid and was choking to breathe. A clean shirt became black after a short walk as the filthy air impinged upon it, and a film of greasy black soot soon covered all exposed surfaces—it took days of rain to wash away a night’s accumulation.
Dr Wise, our GP, was a wonderfully kind and cool young man, and would often call in on his bicycle during the winter. My father was never ill but my mother suffered chest infections every year, exacerbated by the foul air and by her habit of smoking, and I was often ill. It seemed that only those with a resistance to the coal smoke survived long in the London basin. We were lucky to have had the 1930s Depression, which closed the shop, for after a few more years of Brixton air I might not be writing now. It was extraordinary that we tolerated this poisonous environment, and that nearly everyone regarded the smog as a weather phenomenon, something natural and about which we could do nothing. In the 13th century, King Edward I banned the burning of coal in London and warned that hanging would be the punishment for those who disobeyed. It was not until the mephitic smog of 1952 killed more than 4000 Londoners that they reinstated the ban.
Those were times when coal dominated our lives. The open grates in our homes burnt the dirty fuel that fouled the air but gave no proper warmth. The hot smoke of its combustion rushed up the chimneys into the over-laden air and cold air flowed in through the cracks along the sides of ill-fitting windows and doors. In the evenings the family huddled round the fire trying to keep warm and retired later to bedrooms so cold that water on their bedside tables would often freeze. The English had hot water bottles not because they were under-sexed, but because they really needed them to keep warm in the wintertime. The fire demanded continual feeding with black lumps of coal, and in the morning someone had to clear the grate of its accumulation of ash and dust. To keep her home clean in those days was a heroic and strenuous task, but nearly all women in Brixton seemed to do it, and clothes and houses were clean despite the endless rain of dirt. It was a Kafkaesque scene. Working people endured a cruel regime where they must stay clean in a world where black soot falls endlessly from the smoke-filled sky. The wealthy suffered less. Many had central heating from a single, coal-fired water heater. We were lucky to have the shop heated by gas; at least there was no ash and dust to contend with. It was astonishing after the Second World War to visit government buildings in London’s Whitehall where every office had its open fire, whose incessant demands were fed by minions scurrying around all day with their coal buckets.
To add to the self-inflicted harm of winter in London, smoking was a normal part of life and all the adults I knew, except my father, smoked pipes or cigarettes. Tobacconists’ shops were as common as pharmacists, and deemed equally esse
ntial. No wonder the life expectation was only a year or so over sixty. It was an awful environment in which to raise children. There were other poisons more deadly and more hidden. Everything was painted with lead paint that when old, would flake into dust. Children playing would take in a daily dose of lead that could harm their developing brains and stunt their growth. The lead compounds had a sweet taste and this would attract some children to chew pieces of wood that had been lead painted, adding to the problem. Mercury was also ubiquitous. A favourite indoor firework set off regularly at children’s parties was Pharaoh’s Serpent. It was a little pyramid package of tinfoil containing ammonium dichromate and a pellet of mercury thiocyanate. When lit, it gently spurted forth a green powder, while a long twisting black snake arose from this green pseudo grass. Anyone unwise enough to breathe the smoke coming from this clever pyrotechnic display would breathe in a dose of mercury vapour, a potent brain poison. Toy puzzles had beads of mercury quicksilver in them. I remember when a class of thirty boys at my grammar school was given test tubes containing a few grams of red mercury oxide. The schoolmaster instructed us to heat them over our Bunsen burners until the red oxide decomposed into oxygen and metallic mercury and when we did this the vapour of the mercury condensed on the sides of the tube as a bright silvery mirror. To show the oxygen produced, we inserted a glowing wooden splint into the test tube and saw it burst into flame in the oxygen-rich gas. It scares me to think how much deadly mercury vapour that group of selected children breathed in. They were the cream of their generation, the one per cent who had passed their 11+ examinations. I suspect that the same thing took place in schools around the country and may have set a whole generation of children at risk of brain damage. Then of course there was calomel, mercurous chloride. This was a favourite laxative, given to babies when they teethed. In addition, if this were not enough, dentists thrust mercury silver amalgam into the cavities of our teeth. I have often wondered if a sudden loss of the ability to play chess, and a growing awareness of dyslexia when I was aged about eleven had something to do with the mercury in my environment. But we are a tough species—despite these insults that 1920s London imposed upon us—and my mother and father lived to their 90s and 80s, respectively. These were gross pollutions and I view with wry amusement the hypochondria of the many who now agonize over trivial levels of chemicals in the food they eat.
Homage to Gaia Page 5