Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  Mary Delahunty and I spent my twenty-first birthday in Blackpool. We saw a Spitfire fly by at a hundred feet or so above the beach. The sight of it made us think how beautiful it was, yet we were pacifists, and what we saw was a perfectly constructed killing machine. Like Blake’s tiger, it had a perfect symmetry. I remember the spirited but outrageous reply of a Cambridge don in the First World War. A super-patriotic woman gave him a white feather, symbol of cowardice, because he was young, apparently fit, but not fighting at the front. He replied, ‘Madam, I represent the culture the other men are fighting to save.’ In the civilized atmosphere of the Second World War, white feathers had no place, but in a way, their absence was just as hard to bear. It really was our finest hour, although few then knew the cost. The war brought the nation from the status of a superpower to a state of impoverishment, barely better than that of a developing country now. In a way, it left us worse off than the vanquished, for we still had to keep up the appearances of a superpower, and pay the costs expected of one, from almost no reserves.

  August came, and soon we encountered the hardest work of all: harvesting the oats by hand. It had been good summer weather for northern England, but even so, enough wind and rain had beaten down a great deal of the crop. The horse-driven side-cutter could manage only a part of the cutting; we had to do the rest by hand with scythes and sickles. I soon learnt that wonderful swaying motion and movement needed to cut a flowing swathe through the oats. Much harder was the gathering of the sheaves of cut oats, which we tied together by two stems of oats, forming a kind of string. I was hopelessly inefficient at this and they left me to scythe on. The sheaves of oats were stacked in piles of six, with two on top acting as a kind of thatch to stop the rain from rotting the crop beneath. The hardest job of all was the pitchforking of the sheaves onto the cart. Hard, because in the fickle weather of this mountainous oceanic region, we had to do the job immediately the sheaves were dry. We started at first light one day in late August and the job was not finished until midnight. I did not see the end of it: the boys told me I passed out in the field in the evening and they carried me back to the house to bed. I can only remember waking the next morning, stiff and still feeling tired.

  September, after the harvest was over, was by comparison a wonderful month. Work eased off and there was time to visit the delightful small towns like Silverdale, and for picnics on the River Lune. One job for me in this month was taking the milk round, or, should I say helping the horse to deliver the milk. The Whittaker boys harnessed this wonderful intelligent animal to the milk-cart and, as soon as I shook the reins, it set off for Bolton le Sands. It knew the way and stopped of its own volition at the first house where milk was due to be delivered. All that I had to do was ask the woman at the door how much milk she needed and then ladle it from the churn into her jug. After collecting the payment I went back to the horse, shook her reins, and off we went again to the next house. This went on until the horse decided, not me, that the round was over and that we should go back to the farm. I have rarely felt so redundant as on this occasion when I served as an assistant to a horse. The Whittakers were farmers who were unusually compassionate and understanding of their animals. They were concerned for their pain and seemed to know them all as individuals. The farm dog was intelligent enough that when called from the bedroom window at 7 am she would go out into the fields and round up the milking cows from the rest of the herd. She would drive them back to the byre unaided so that they were there waiting to be milked by the time we had washed, dressed, and shaved.

  When it was time for me to go back south in the middle of September, Peggy arranged a special dinner on the Sunday to send me on my way next morning. I had grown very fond of the family and of Dale Barns and thought of it as a home. The parting was painful. Next day I rode my bicycle into Lancaster to catch the train to Manchester. I badly wanted to see Mary but I knew that I had to move on to my home in Kent. I had promised my mother and father that I would see them for a while before starting the autumn term, and I compromised by spending just a day in Manchester. I then hitched a ride with a friendly lorry driver I knew who regularly travelled between Manchester and the London suburb of Mitcham. I went to a factory in the east of Manchester to pick up the lorry. The business of the firm was packaging. Packaging is usually associated with the wasteful extravagances of marketing—think of the ballpoint pen displayed in what looks like an acre of white card emblazoned with hyperbolic advertising. In spite of wartime austerity, some products still needed packaging, and my friend the driver spent his days and nights moving the material of packaging between Manchester and London.

  It was early in the morning of 14 September when I boarded his lorry; a medium-sized panel truck with a diesel engine separating the passenger and driver’s seats in the cab. When moving, it was intolerably noisy and smelly and the seats hard and uncomfortable. It was so miserable as to make long-distance charter flights in economy seem like an orgy of hedonism. We slowly trundled south along the narrow roads of England, and I remember passing through the beautiful town of Lichfield but skirting Birmingham. We stopped to eat at my driver’s favourite diner called Clifford’s Closet on the Cliff. It was at Bromsgrove, and an island of prosperity in a heavily rationed landscape. Almost anything to eat was there and consumer goods were exchanged freely. There were prostitutes also, plying their trade discreetly. Wartime truck driving was a miserably stressful job, but an essential one. I guess the authorities knew what went on at Clifford’s Closet but ignored what was a small matter nationally, just as they never attempted to ration the farmers. Rationing worked well in wartime United Kingdom. We never were indignant about these minor cheats by the producers and carriers of food. What brought community disapproval and anger was cheating by wealthier neighbours; happily, this was rare.

  After a farm-style lunch, we drove on. By evening, as the sun was setting, we were near Luton and on the Dunstable Downs, looking south towards London. The sky was red in the west but to our surprise, it was red in the south also. At first we thought we were looking at mock sunset, a meteorological phenomenon. Then we realized that it must be a large fire. So free of action had the first year of war been in England that our first thought was not of a fire caused by bombing but one that had happened naturally. Nothing was further from our minds than the fact that London was burning because of a large bomber raid. As we moved south through Watford and darkness fell, the southern sky glowed red. We began to wonder what was in store for us. We crossed London on the western side, as this was our route to Mitcham, and it was then clear that most of the fires were to the east. We encountered only occasional evidence of bombing: crumbled houses, blocked-off roads and the occasional fire. We crossed Hammersmith Bridge and went on to Mitcham, where all was relatively quiet. I had planned to take a train from there to Orpington, where my mother and father lived, but no trains were running. This was the first large air raid and the disorganization was far worse than it was later with even worse raids.

  To me the greatest military blunder of the Second World War was the blind belief of all participants in bombing as a means of winning the war. It almost equalled in cruel stupidity the blunders of the First World War, when men died horribly by the millions in the noxious mud of the trenches. All of us, military and civilian, had drawn wrong conclusions about the effects of bombing. What misled us were the events of the Spanish Civil War, where almost unopposed fleets of bombers defeated the defenders of small, tight Mediterranean towns like Teruel and Guernica. The larger European war was not like this, and in addition the emotional impact of the Spanish war was for many of us, especially those of Leftist inclinations, so great that the Second World War seemed quite tame by comparison. The Spanish war was for the Left almost a holy war; the Second World War was merely a job to do. Both sides believed in the myth of the all-powerful bomber and that strategic bombing would certainly lead to capitulation. The evidence of the bombs in the Second World War is quite to the contrary, and it was only when there
was a qualitative change in intensity, with the dropping of the first nuclear weapons, that they had the expected result. In London, most of those who were seriously frightened by bombing left for safer places, and the remainder adapted stoically. The only time during that war when I can recall a sense of real unease about military action was towards the end of the war when the V-weapon missiles were used. I think it was the absence of any definite respite, the period of peace between raids, that made the difference. Bombs dropped by aircraft can be withstood because the event is never continuous; with missiles you never know when another one will fall and there is no spell of quiet and safety for recuperation. We have heard far too little about the feelings and plight of average German and Japanese people. They suffered bombing at a higher intensity and for far longer than ever we did. That their spirit was never broken is surely proof of the inefficiency of bombing civilians as a practical way of winning wars.

  The visit to my Orpington home of a New Zealand relative made easy my return to Manchester. He was a Major in the army and he came in a Land Rover driven by a Maori driver for a brief visit to my mother and father. He broke the journey between his base in Kent and another in Hertfordshire and was able to take me to Mitcham to keep my appointment with the lorry driver. It meant only the slightest detour and, on the way back through London we saw more damage from the bombing, but remarkably the greater part of the city seemed as usual. A journey through Docklands at that time would probably have revealed a different scene. We encountered a few streets closed by signs saying ‘unexploded bomb’ and it was a wonderful excitement to have my New Zealand relative, the Major, override the police and just drive past whatever was waiting to explode. The Army delivered me to my friend the lorry driver and we set off on the tedious journey back to Manchester.

  The teaching lab for third year students was a long room with teak benches arranged in parallel rows. Each bench was about twenty-five-feet long and split longitudinally by a central wooden wall with shelves for reagent bottles. There were, of course, Bunsen burners, without which no lab seemed complete. But new to me was steam heat with taps to the steam supply at every student’s position. Around the walls were fume cupboards—glass chambers in which we did experiments that produced noxious or toxic fumes. At each student’s bench, there were small sinks with a swan-necked tap. These taps fed cold water to the condensers—those elegant blown-glass constructions that are so much a part of organic chemistry. Most of the year’s work was to analyse the composition of mixtures made up from three different organic compounds, and there were ten or more of these mixtures to analyse. I thought them a fascinating puzzle and soon found that the first step was to separate the mixture into discernible parts. We could distil it and so separate it into portions that distilled at different temperatures and put these aside for identification. We could mix it with water or some other solvents to see if it separated into two layers. We could add acid or alkali to see if something precipitated. When the mixture was finally separated into three single substances these had to be identified by measuring their boiling or melting points and then checked against a table of melting and boiling temperatures. Sometimes it was necessary to go further and characterize the compounds isolated by making special compounds from them. Thus, if we suspected that a ketone or an aldehyde had been isolated, we used the reagent 2, 4 dinitrophenylhydrazine to make the hydrazone, which was usually fine red or orange crystals. The melting point of these crystals helped to identify the ketone from which it had originated. There was a list of the melting points of the dinitrophenyl hydrazones and other compounds on the instructor’s desk at the end of the lab. It was a delightful and challenging way to stretch the student’s mind and analytical skills. Here again my apprenticeship at Humphrey Desmond Murray’s laboratory came to my aid. I knew the smells and appearances of an amazing range of organic chemicals. We started the course with easily separated mixtures, such as acetone, butyl acetate and methylene dichloride. We moved on to more difficult mixtures, such as picoline, xylene and acetophenone. Then finally to the stumper: a mixture of cyclohexene, cyclohexane, and benzene, all of which were hydrocarbons and all of which boiled at the same temperature and therefore could not be separated by distillation.

  Knowing the strangely evocative smell of picoline and the penetrating odour of cyclohexene, I was usually ahead of my fellow students. Instead of wasting a futile week trying to separate a mixture by distillation, something impossible to do, I was busy removing such compounds as cyclohexene by its reaction with bromine and then identifying the dibromocyclohexane. I was through the entire collection of mixtures intended to keep us occupied until the Spring of 1941 by Christmas 1940.

  The months from May 1940 until January 1941 spent in Mary’s company taught me more than a lifetime at a university could have done. My dear, myopic, politically conscious mother had looked after me in my adolescence with all the intensity of a Jewish mother. With the very best of intentions, she had provided me with little room to grow. I think I was the last boy of my year in 1936 to stop wearing short-length trousers. I was oblivious that I cut an absurd figure. I just liked the freedom that shorts gave for walking, and my mother never noticed. My love for Mary made me a part of the Delahunty family. The Delahuntys were a wondrously warm and human family and soon, with subtle suggestions, made up for the lost and lonely years of adolescence. Mary’s uncle, Ted Doran, was a drama critic for the Manchester Guardian, as it then was. He would sometimes have a pair of free tickets for the better seats in the opera house. We lived a life that seemed almost sybaritic in the otherwise utterly grim environment of wartime Manchester. We saved enough for the occasional night out at the Squirrel Restaurant in Manchester, where the standard of food supplied, at a price, was far above that of the rations. Manchester was, until Christmas 1940, spared most of the bombing. London and Liverpool were the prime targets of the German bombers, but a few bombs did fall on Manchester and to these, I am eternally grateful. They gave me the reason and excuse to stay the night at Mary’s flat, and soon I gave up my digs in Fallowfield. I had never been at any time in my life the kind of male who wished to play the field. I was in love with Mary Delahunty and I wanted to marry as soon as we could. I knew that I would have to wait until I had my degree and the means to keep her. In those days, students were never married. They rarely ever lived together as lovers, but in 1940 bombs arriving at random from the sky were a fine reminder that life can be short and should be lived now, not postponed and taken later like a pension.

  So much was I learning in those days about life, about love, about decent human relationships, that there was no place in my mind for the excellent chemistry that was being taught at the university. The final year at Manchester was mainly about the research program that Professor Todd had made famous. The chemistry was the nucleoside bases. These are the links of the molecular chain that is DNA—that wondrous double helix and the living program of all organisms. Of course, ten more years were to pass before Crick and Watson discovered the nature of DNA itself, but Todd and his colleagues were setting the scene so that when it came the discovery was inevitable. Quite rightly, Todd received the Nobel Prize for this work. Yet, here was I, with this wonderful opportunity to learn from such a master, so bemused with Mary and her family and all they had to teach me that I turned aside from the best organic chemistry in the world.

  There was more to it than this. My love for science was all embracing. I had always been repelled by intense specialization, such as was the nature of nucleoside chemistry. I did no more than commit to memory just enough of it to ensure that I got some sort of degree. As a subsidiary subject, I attended bacteriology classes at the Manchester Infirmary. This I found entrancing and I never missed a single lecture or practical session. Perhaps it was the background of fear when handling live tubercle bacilli or typhoid organisms that kept me interested, in addition to the discipline of sterile working that has to be learned until it becomes instinctive. It all seemed so much more real to me than t
he intricacies of a chemistry that had no ‘hands-on’ content. I did not know it then, but the bacteriology I learnt was to be an important part of the biology that helped me in the quest for Gaia twenty or more years later.

  The idyllic time with Mary ended in early 1941. Mary had gone to stay with a strange couple called the Stormont Murrays, who lived near High Wycombe. The sculptor, Eric Gill, who lived at Piggots, just near there, had entranced her. She had taken to me somewhat less intensely than I to her and on the rebound from a betrayal by a previous lover. He was an architect at the University Department of Architecture, where she had worked as a secretary. I think the last straw that severed our relationship was an encounter with my mother in a tearoom at a London railway station. Mary told me later that on her way to meet her she bought a posy of violets as a gift. My mother’s response to this warm gesture was not pleasure but complaint—they were she said, a waste of money. This was followed by a lecture on the evils of Catholicism, and the statement that her boy was not to have his career blasted by an early marriage and a string of children. It must have been an awful tea. Nell Lovelock was a formidable woman and utterly set in what she knew was right, or thought was right. Soon after, I received the letter from Mary that was to close our affair. I was devastated for quite a while in spite of the support I received from the Delahuntys, especially from Mary’s mother. By spring 1941 the need to prepare and organize an Easter holiday walk in the Lake District took my mind off my troubles. I had offered to escort a party of students belonging to the Ambrose Barlow Catholic Society. We planned to stay at youth hostels. Among the students was a Delahunty relative, Moya Kearney, who knew of the break between Mary and me and was warm, sympathetic, and kind. The last I saw of Mary, until we met again forty-five years later, was in July 1941, just after I had learned that I had passed my degree examination, but only as a bottom second. On that day, we spent a heavenly time bicycling from her mother’s house in Moss Side to the village of Delph, near Oldham, where her Aunt, Ciss Seed, had a cottage. I can still recall that last kiss in the warm sunshine outside the smoke-dark brick of the bank house where the family lived on the corner of the road in Moss Side.