Sodom and Gomorrah had their attractions for their inhabitants, no doubt, and so it was with Brixton. Despite its winter miasma, or maybe because of it, Brixton seemed to be an entertainment centre for London. There were theatres and cinemas, dancehalls and skating rinks, and there were public parks and commons a short walk away and, above all, there was easy access by tram and tube to all else that London had to offer, and even to get out of it if you wanted. My grandmother and grandfather had come to live in the flat above the shop and they would take me with them on walks or to the theatre, or on voyages down the Thames. My lonely wanderings around the Brixton streets lessened, and at every school holiday—three weeks at Christmas, four weeks at Easter and six in the summer—I went away into the country. This was partly to ease the burden on my parents, whose working day was already full and partly because the well-named Dr Wise, our GP, recognized that the Brixton smog caused my frequent winter illness. Sometimes I would go to stay with my aunts, but at other times they sent me to remote farms in East Anglia, that were prepared to take children. Some of these, like the chicken farm at Baldock, where a kindly family cared for me with love and affection were heavenly. It was at the Baldock farm that I learned to ride a bicycle. Others were brutal in their cruelty. I dreaded the strongly Nonconformist religious farms in East Anglia. Here, every Sunday was a punishment. I would have to dress in a suit and go to chapel three times during the day. To me the services were intolerably boring. When not at chapel they made me sit on a stiff chair and wait for the next meal or next service. To go outside to walk, except to chapel, was forbidden, and so was reading anything other than the Bible. Any infringement of these rules led to a beating. That kind of mainly working-class religion was of course self-defeating, and no child of spirit subjected to it could do anything other than rebel.
My happiest times in this period were those spent with Miss Saunders and her brother at the village of Coldharbour near Dorking. The village was in the heart of what seemed to me endless heath and woodland on the slopes of Leith Hill. I enjoyed new explorations every day, discovered snakes and lizards, and caught trout in the sparkling water of its streams. It was what I mean by real countryside. Miss Saunders was a countrywoman and she ate simply but not well by finicky middle-class standards. She would give me tinned peas or baked beans for lunch, and I loved them. They did not eat the fresh vegetables that her brother grew in the garden. I do not know where they went: probably they gave them away. Children and those living in the countryside often have a perverse taste for junk food, and as a child I was no exception.
The Depression of the 1930s hit us hard. There was one year when only one customer entered the shop. At the end of that year, with sorrow and with much discussion, my mother and father had no option but to dismiss our shop assistant, Mr Weatherby. The family savings were flowing away and, after much agonized talk, they finally decided to tell him that he must go because they could no longer afford to keep him on. The shop was rented, and the rent and tax were high. They sought in vain for someone to take it over until suddenly, in 1932, an art enthusiast appeared and took it on from them. They were then able, from their remaining savings, to buy a small house at Orpington in Kent, in Hillview Road, just near the station. The move to Orpington did little to change my personal life. I continued at the Strand School and travelled by train to Brixton. The journey, which involved a mile walk from Brixton Station, took over an hour, which meant early rising and a late return from school. I saw little of Orpington and made no friends there.
Although only ten to twelve during this period, I was deeply aware of their unhappiness, which resonated with my own miserable schooldays. In the way of children, I was ashamed to be a shopkeeper’s child. The middle-class peer group of the Strand School included children whose parents were minor civil servants, dentists, solicitors, and so on. To them, shopkeepers and small business were ‘Trade’ and, in the snobbery of the time, they disdained them. The sign, outside the villas of the bourgeoisie, ‘Tradesman’s Entrance’ pointed to a dark alley leading to the scullery door. I suppose this tribal scorn against trades folk of any kind arose from envy of imagined wealth. It had trickled down from Victorian times when the aristocracy had been offended by the wealth and success of entrepreneurs. It is easy to forget how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, their antecedents judged people. Breeding alone was thought to bring forth the good qualities. It was widely held that no newly rich person could ever be a gentleman or a gentlewoman and what the aristocracy thought yesterday the bourgeoisie thinks today. The collective contumely of the petty bourgeois was for its victims little different from racial hatred. What is odd is that the intellectual middle class, whose members would be deeply distressed to be called racist, still stigmatizes ‘Trade’ as if those connected with commercial activity were of a different race.
One day in December 1931, my school announced that boys could sit for the Supplementary Junior County Scholarship. I realized that this would relieve the burden of school fees from my mother and father and I asked the schoolmaster who made the announcement how I should apply. He laughed and said, ‘Don’t waste your time, you haven’t an earthly chance.’ Even so, I went to the school secretary, Miss Borer, a plump and friendly woman who had a spacious office at the front of the school, and she readily gave me a form and helped me complete it in her office. I went home and soon forgot all about it and never mentioned it, but in February 1933 a letter arrived summoning me to another school in Streatham to sit the examination itself. I was incubating pneumonia at the time and was feverish; perhaps because of this I could think more quickly. Anyway, the exam was not difficult. One requirement was an essay. There was a choice of subjects and one of these was ‘Iron and Steel’. I had recently read a book from the Brixton Library about the steel industry, mostly technical, and had found it fascinating. I had a good memory and was able to write at length about iron smelting, Bessemer converters, and the production of the various alloy steels. I knew little in real terms about these metals but phrases like molybdenum steel, or chrome vanadium steel, all were filed away in my mind, along with their remarkable properties. I staggered home from the examination and was ill for six weeks. There were no antibiotics then, and infections just had to take their course. They sent me to the Saunders family at Coldharbour near Dorking to convalesce, and it was here that the good news of my award of the scholarship came. I feel sure it was the essay that did it, and I remember Miss Saunders coming to my bedroom early one spring morning with the good news that astounded as well as pleased me: just for once, something right had happened.
The school, like many today, had little trust in tests or examinations, and preferred teachers’ assessments of a pupil’s abilities. They ignored my scholarship success and punished me for my cheek by making me repeat the previous year’s work, and in the lowest stream. The seventy-five boys of each year were divided into three streams: Upper, A, and B. Lovelock, the freak, was placed in the B stream. My life might have been a dismal one if, like today, my future had depended on teachers’ assessments alone. Examinations taken anonymously gave me my chance.
There were a few wonderful teachers like Ginger Warren, a bearded man with ginger hair, who looked like George Bernard Shaw, and was stern. He was strong, just, and taught so well that in one term under his tuition I learnt more French than in three years under the flabby, sadistic Froggy Adair. There was also Harold Toms, the chemistry teacher, and the only one at the school with a PhD. His lessons were my refuge. He taught so well that the Strand School excelled itself in Firsts in the external examinations in chemistry. The masters at the Strand School included too many incompetents and these misguided men tried hard to diminish me. A favourite trick was to make me stand before the class while they, like prosecuting lawyers, harangued me on my pacifism or socialism, as if these were crimes and I were a felon. If they expected that the boys, my peers, would then visit me with their own bigotry, they were wrong. Their pettiness merely enhanced my reputation as the mad s
cientist, who had eccentric views as well. What matters to boys, pre- and post-adolescent, is courage. An ability to fight back without too much fuss was all that I needed to have their support.
In addition to air pollution, Brixton offered another pollution: its local accent. Playing with the local children may have made me street-wise but at the cost of a voice that would have condemned me to a working-class life in those intensely class-conscious times. My Pygmalion was Uncle Hugo Leakey, and when I first stayed with Kit and Hugo at their Welwyn Garden City home, Hugo decided to eliminate from my speech the glottal stop, the dropped h, and the whining cockney vowels. Every morning, immediately on waking, I had to practise vowel sounds or sentences like ‘It’s not the hunting that hurts the horses’ hoofs but the hammer hammer hammer on the hard high road’, and then repeat them at breakfast. He was a professional and kept this training going until I had an accent that, although still not upper-middle-class would fool many listeners. Things change and in England now a down-market accent is sought after, but I am deeply grateful to my uncle for his unstinting effort to change mine. They would never have chosen me in 1941 for the post of junior scientist at the National Institute for Medical Research had I spoken as a native South Londoner.
The Leakeys expanded my horizons in other important ways. They gave me the speech and mannerisms of the avant-garde political far-Left, which was so popular at that time. Something very different from my mother’s old Labour views and antithetical to my father’s natural Toryism. I soon imbibed the Marxist jargon and was, in a way, dialectically materialized. The evangelical communists, with their yellow book bibles from Gollancz’s Left Book Club, were all around me, and they were as certain in their beliefs as were the Catholics I was soon to meet at university. Everyone of the Leakey crowd was sure that they were right. Soon the intense tribal conflict of the Spanish Civil War was to engulf them all: many as participants on the Republican side; many like me, supporters too young to join in. Strangely, the intensity of feeling among the Left over the civil war in Spain far exceeded their passions for the fight against Nazism during the Second World War. The Spanish war was an affair of the heart as well as the mind, and a political commitment. The Second World War seemed more to be a necessary but unfortunate act, more for principle than for passionate conviction. Also, of course, the Second World War was, in a way, an English war, and the Left, as part of their internationalism, were not enthused by England as such, or even the United Kingdom.
I have often wondered if there is a second awakening like that of puberty. At thirteen years, gender suddenly becomes invested with meaning. At somewhere around fifteen, in a similar way, politics and tribal matters suddenly reveal their colours. That is how it was for me. I would avidly absorb the News Chronicle, the liberal Left paper that the family favoured at Orpington. The Old Labour paper that they might have bought, the Daily Herald, was so dull that we all found it much too stodgy. Republican success in Spain lit up my day, and their frequent reverses depressed me. The hopelessness of the Republican cause did nothing for my adolescent angst.
The Leakeys were not merely political, they were also vegetarian and sexually enlightened, or at least in that prudish era they seemed so. The March girls, my mother included, were all first-rate cooks. Kit’s vegetarian food was quite delicious, something very rare in my experience. I always looked forward to my next visit to Welwyn and drooled over the thought of her mock steak-and-kidney pie. The Leakey’s art deco house had an upper storey like a ship, with a wide wall enclosing a balcony surrounding the main bedrooms. Above that, there was a flat roof for sunbathing. Here the whole family, any guests, and me included, sunbathed naked. It rapidly cured me of any prudery about my body. Nakedness in the warm sunny air became a joy and a freedom. Oddly, in spite of being over-sexed, as are most adolescent boys, naked girls were not arousing just to look at. This was not true of the act of undressing, and I remember trying to hide my erect and over-eager phallus by turning to the wall when I had watched a thoughtless striptease. This was a rare event: it was a rule that only bodies unclothed could use the sunbathing terrace. I feel sorry for the many whose acts of love have been marred by fears about their bodies. The Leakeys’ ad hoc finishing school was the best of my educations.
Hugo had an amazing brother, Basil, who lived in three houses in a wood near Stevenage. One house had bedrooms on the second floor, the ground floor being a barn for gardening tools. Another house had the kitchen, and a third, the living quarters, and paved paths connected all these houses. Basil was a professional magician, part of the company called Maskelyne and Devant. I often wondered later if JBS Haldane’s book, My Friend, Mr Leakey, which was about a magician, had Basil as its exemplar.
Felix was Kit and Hugo’s only child, and was for me like a younger brother. We would spend hours together exploring the fine countryside of those days around Welwyn Garden City on our bicycles. We even made a trip together to Cornwall in 1935, travelling down the West Coast from Port Isaac to St Agnes and on round by St Ives to Land’s End. We returned past the Lizard to Plymouth, Dartmoor, and home by train from Exeter.
When younger, Kit and Hugo were away in Argentina, where they had a bee and apple farm at Bahia Blanca. During their absence I would go, for school breaks, to Aunt Florrie at Hitchin. John Leete, her husband, was a handsome man who resembled the actor, Wilfrid Hyde-White. He had a firm and gentle disposition. He, together with his brother, Claude, owned Hitchin’s main tailor’s shop. It was a comfortable middle-class Tory home, a complete contrast to the Leakeys and to the shop in Brixton. John and Flo’s great passion in life was golf. They were both quite good at it and had, at one time or another, been county champions. Life for them seemed to revolve around bridge tournaments and playing at the Letchworth Golf Club. Their friends were mainly other businessmen and their wives from Hitchin. In many ways, it represented the world my mother hated and envied most passionately. She keenly felt the injustice of her and Tom’s endless struggle to keep a sinking shop afloat. The affluence of Uncle John’s shop, where money flowed in apparently effortlessly was, she felt, so unfair. All that was tempered by a strong devotion and loyalty to her sister, and the recognition that John and Flo were kind and generous. In the convoluted class hierarchy of England, being in trade, and therefore people of little consequence, damned us both. Strangely, the picture shop occupied a slightly higher place in that category of snobbery than did the wealthier tailor’s. Somehow, the association with art and artists made it less bourgeois. I was in grave danger, exposed to so many worlds ranging from my father’s working-class friends to the upper-middle-class Leakeys, of evolving into a feeble and flabby liberal—someone without passion, who could see every point of view and yet was unable to decide what was right or wrong, someone like Judas, who betrayed from lack of commitment, not from wilful error. Fortunately, my commitment to science and the unshakeable quest to become a practising scientist kept me from this kind of indecision.
The Leetes had one daughter, Margaret, a few years younger than me. It was good to have a young girl as a cousin. It helped offset the isolation of our one-child families. A special attraction of my Hitchin visits was the Vincent family. Mr Vincent was the manager of Hitchin’s only department store, and a friend of John’s. Margaret and I were invited to a children’s party at the Vincents when about twelve or thirteen. The Vincents had two daughters, Jean and Mary, and two sons. I must have behaved well at the party for they invited me on many occasions afterwards. They lived in a fine detached villa, two blocks from Nun’s Close. One spring day in 1932 Mrs Vincent, a handsome woman whose affectionate nature reminded me of my grandmother, took her children and me on an expedition to Pirton Woods to pick primroses. I remember a heavenly sunny day and larking about with the girls—they were both older than I was—and we played games that involved plenty of contact. Suddenly they were no longer just children, and gender ceased from then on to be an abstract concept. Jean was a striking girl, with red hair and a pale freckled skin, an
d she was the one who enlivened my incoherent fantasies for at least a year, and then it was the more mature Mary, plainer but somehow more feminine, who became the girl of my dreams. Apart from these fantasies over Jean and Mary, I was celibate until a student at Manchester University. It seems incredible now, but celibacy was almost normal among adolescents in the 1930s. It was not, as thought by those who do not understand the English, from lack of lust, for I had that in abundance. It was a consequence of a solitary existence as a lone child, and low self-esteem. As schoolboys we wore short trousers and were in uniform up to nearly sixteen years, and we were hardly attractive. I could not believe that any female would have me, and thinking back to the child I was then, I was probably right. Unconsciously I dressed to fulfil this prophecy—round spectacles shielding myopic eyes, scuffed shoes, and knee-length shorts. Perhaps the sheer frustration of life in those times fuelled my fantasies about life as a scientist, and perhaps it was just as well, because when that friendly city, Manchester, gave me my first taste of real love, I was transported and, for a few years, science took second place.
Homage to Gaia Page 6