All that remained was to book a passage on the ship that travelled from Swansea to Cork. This done, we piled our luggage into the capacious boot of our Jaguar and set off for Swansea, which is about 200 miles from Bowerchalke. In those days, there was only one motorway in the United Kingdom, and that went north from London, the M1. There were no motorways in the south-west or Wales. We travelled along the small winding roads across England to the Welsh border just beyond Gloucester. The driving through south Wales was far from pleasant; it was an urban industrial scene of smoking chimneys and horrendous air pollution. We drove along seemingly endless terraced streets with barely a sight of a tree. The Welsh are a vocal, not a violent people, and they expressed their tribal hatred of the English by large crude graffiti expressions such as ‘Kick the English out of Wales’, scrawled in letters feet high on bridges and buildings. It did not augur well, we thought, for a visit to Ireland, where feelings ran even higher. I suppose the English must be high on the list of the world’s most hated tribe; no doubt a legacy of our past imperial prowess and tendency to win wars. America, now the lead power, is experiencing this same dislike, but we will have to endure it for a long time yet. Individuals may be able to forgive and forget but tribes have memories lasting centuries or longer.
After six hours’ driving, we reached the docks at Swansea. We took our hand luggage, watched our car driven on to a pallet, and then hoisted by a crane into the cargo hold of the Innisfallen, the ship we were to take to Ireland. We had a pleasant pair of cabins on the upper deck, where we stowed our baggage, and went down to the saloon for tea. These were the days before mass travel on passenger aircraft and roll on–roll off car ferries. Travel on ships, even small ones, was a pleasure. There was a sense of leisured dignity, and there was the quiet and courteous attention now only available to the seriously rich. In addition, ships in those days did not suffer the din and vibration from overpowered diesel engines that makes the car ferries so unpleasant. Nor were there cramped and noisy quarters and cafeteria feeding the masses. I never tried it, but I’m told that the old aeroplanes, like the flying boats and the stratocruisers, provided an almost marine standard of comfort. Lack of comfort is the high price we pay for cheap mass travel.
For once in January, our journey to Cork, about fifteen hours, was quiet and free of the Atlantic storms that so often savage the western approaches to these islands. Arrival in the morning was a delight. The ship sailed into the drowned valley that forms the estuary leading to Cork Harbour and passes Cobh, once the port where transatlantic liners stopped to take on Irish emigrants. Then it sailed on down the river, between the green fields of Ireland, to Cork itself. We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast on the ship whilst it docked and discharged cargo, including the few cars that it carried. There was a customs inspection, and then we were free to drive on through Cork into Ireland. The quiet roads and small towns we passed through on the way to Kenmare wholly delighted us. We went by Bandon, Bantry, and Glengarriff, and rejoiced in the mountain scenery.
The Great Southern Hotel was a graceful manor house in spacious grounds near the small market town of Kenmare. It was warm, comfortable, and wonderfully quiet. Not surprisingly, we were almost the only guests. Mid-January is hardly a time for holidays anywhere, especially in these islands. To give a measure of the style of the hotel, the other party choosing to holiday there were Lord Rank, the media magnate, and his friends. We explored two of the mountainous peninsulas that stuck out into the Atlantic. The Beara Peninsula to the south, and the larger mountain chain to the north, which contains the McGillicuddy Reeks—the highest mountains of Ireland. It is a region of enthralling landscapes and coastline. Imagine the mountains of Wales, somehow placed within Cornwall, and all of it uninhabited but for a sprinkling of farms, small fishing villages, and towns. We fell in love with it there and then and prospected for a cottage to rent for a summer holiday later that year. We chose one on a mountainside just outside Kenmare.
In July we returned for two weeks and confirmed our January impressions. It was a wholly delightful place. We found the people of that part of Ireland courteous, friendly, and helpful. They remained so throughout the Troubles that were soon to start. A few of them were to become the staunchest of our friends. We so enjoyed the first week of our holiday that we looked for a house to buy so that we could come there and use it as a second home and place of work. The estate agent in Kenmare gave us a list of properties for sale and we travelled along the Beara Peninsula looking at them. All were inexpensive by English standards, ranging from £1,000 to £3,000 for small cottages, some even with acres of land. The choice suddenly narrowed to one cottage on the south coast of the Beara Peninsula, near the small village of Adrigole. There, on the slopes of the mountain Hungry Hill, made famous by Daphne DuMaurier in her novel, were three cottages, one of them a relatively modern-looking bungalow with a ‘For Sale’ sign outside. We stopped to look, when suddenly there was a knocking on the car window. I opened it to find a lady who asked if we could give her a lift into Castletown Bearhaven, about eight miles to the west. ‘Yes’, we said, and she then called out, ‘Jimmy’, and a small boy ran from the hedge to join her.
As we drove into the small town, we quizzed Mrs O’Sullivan about the cottage. Her husband, she said, had built it, and Miss Smith, who worked at Bantry Hospital as a pathologist, now owned it. It was a fine cottage, she said, and just the place for people like us. Her genuine enthusiasm confirmed the cognitive dissonance of our choice. The price asked was relatively high for Ireland, just over £3,000, but we bought it without bargaining. Extravagant by nature, I always believe that a little extra money paid for just what one wants is no waste at all, just an insurance against losing the chance to buy the place of one’s dreams.
Ard Carrig, the Adrigole cottage, was to become a dream place for us for nearly twelve years. It is still in the family. I sold it to my Irish son-in-law, Michael Flynn, sometime in the 1980s. We spent two or three months there every summer until 1977. We frequently went to Ireland in the other seasons as well, and soon established firm friendships with our neighbours, the O’Sullivans. Michael O’Sullivan was a tall lean man who was as strong as an ox. He would lift a 200-pound gas cylinder onto his shoulder and stride up the slope to the cottage as if it were no heavier than a bunch of flowers. It took me weeks before I could understand him, so strong was his West Cork accent. Theresa O’Sullivan, his wife, was a well-built handsome woman and known as ‘The Queen of Beara’. She knew everything and everyone on the peninsula, and far beyond as well. In those days, in what seemed to be an act of spite, the prosperous and growing European Economic Community denied the United Kingdom and Ireland membership. Consequently, both countries were still relatively poor. The O’Sullivans found it hard to make a living from their farm, which went from the shoreline to the slopes of Hungry Hill. Michael O’Sullivan welcomed the chance of winter work building a laboratory and an extra bedroom onto the small bungalow. He also, as a project, built a swimming pool one summer. Not so much as a luxury, but so that Helen could gain the exercise she needed to offset the enforced immobility of multiple sclerosis.
The easy informal life of western Ireland suited us as a family wonderfully well. Had it not been for the remoteness of the place and the difficulty for me of travelling elsewhere and keeping in touch with science, we would have moved there and kept only a foothold in England. I grew to love the wild slopes of Hungry Hill: warm slabs of bare, old, red sandstone piled up at an angle of forty-five degrees from the sea to the summit, some 2500 feet high. It was gloriously healthy walking and climbing country. There were a pair of lakes at about 1300 feet, overlooked by the precipitous mass of the mountain itself, and in the summer, the clear peaty water of these lakes was wonderfully warm for swimming. I used to sit on my favourite slab of rock overlooking Bantry Bay and the broad Atlantic. Here I would think through scientific problems that were my life’s work and here I composed my first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. I wrote it almost entirely
in the cottage below.
As I sat in the warm sun on my ledge, high up on the sandstone slabs of Hungry Hill, it was not easy to think about the Earth in any way except romantically. I composed the book as if I were writing a long love letter to a woman I had never met. I saw her as someone intelligent, lively, and full of fun, but not a scientist. My imaginary partner was like someone the Irishman, Bernard Shaw, had in mind when he wrote his work, An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Sovietism and Capitalism. My lady was not as serious, I think, as his. I sometimes wonder if my romantic style of writing was what offended my macho male critics of Gaia. If an excuse is needed, let’s say it’s the fault of the Irish, just as they say, when the weather is bad or they don’t win at the lottery, it’s the fault of the English. The extraordinary and wonderful thing that happened was that twelve years later, Sandy Orchard read the book as it was intended and written, and that is how and why we met.
Critics said that my first book, Gaia, was bad science. They were too serious-minded to notice that it was more a love letter than a textbook. It could have been written with less metaphor and made more acceptable for scientists, but it was not a carelessly written book; there is little in it that needs changing more than twenty years on. There was one mistaken statement, but that is the nature of all new theories in science. They are not born perfect; they evolve and their rough edges wear away under the grindstone of abrasive criticism. It can be painful at the time, but like good surgery is welcomed in retrospect. The problem with Gaia is the outrage I committed by putting forward so daring a theory in a book written for non-scientists. I compounded my error by writing ‘life regulates the Earth’. I should have said Gaia is made of living organisms and the material Earth and she regulates herself. It was an easy mistake to make in the beginning, and looking back it seems a small error compared with the giant mistake of my critics. They stated, with a certainty that was near to dogma, that life had nothing to do with the Earth’s apparent capacity to regulate its climate and chemistry.
About 200 yards in front of the cottage was the shoreline, reached by a narrow track that passed through the O’Sullivans’ land. In the springtime, the path wandered through gorse bushes festooned with shining golden flowers, so abundant that their honey and coconut scent filled the air. The beach was a fairyland of rocks and rock pools, interspersed with small beaches and coves. It was ideal for swimming and there were small islands just a hundred yards or so from the shore, far enough to make swimming to them an adventure. Even in August, it was a private place for the O’Sullivan family and ourselves. Such places are almost impossible to find in England or in Europe—we are so densely populated, compared with Ireland. Like the Isles of Scilly, the far south-west of Ireland has a mild winter climate where frost and snow are rare and consequently the shoreline is more diverse and different in its wildlife. I once saw a shark head a shoal of mackerel into our cove, and the water boiled as the terrified fish sought to escape.
Most of all, for me, the coast was a place rich in varieties of the large algae or seaweed. I would wander with a book, identifying the many species that were there. Because I had a gas chromatograph in the cottage, I could collect the different species of algae in jam jars and analyse the volatile compounds they emitted. I soon found the two prize performers. The long straps of Laminaria, looking like old-fashioned razor strops, and the fuzzy red brushes of Polysiphonia, which grow as epiphytes on bladder wrack. The Laminaria gave forth an amazing suite of volatile bromine and iodine compounds. Methyl iodide was the most abundant among them. To me as a chemist this was extraordinary and fascinating. A toxic compound and known carcinogen, something that an organic chemist would normally lock away in the fume cupboard, was here in the most natural of scenes. I soon found that almost all seawater around Adrigole had easily measurable amounts of methyl iodide in it. Later, in 1972, I was to discover that this is true of the whole of the world’s oceans. I soon found an evil-smelling chemical, something redolent of the bad side of the chemical industry, in the Adrigole seawater, namely carbon disulphide. This foul substance is a natural product and is in the oceans everywhere around the world. The most important thing I found was the copious emissions of dimethyl sulphide (DMS) from the fuzzy alga, Polysiphonia. It was not a new discovery—Challenger and others had noted it earlier—but for me the discovery was important because it marked the link between the life in the oceans and the great chemical and climate cycles of the atmosphere.
One of the several reasons why I regard the Green Movement with mixed vexation and affection is their obsession with the products of the chemical and nuclear industries. To many Greens, if a chemical like methyl iodide or carbon disulphide comes from some dark satanic mill, it is by nature evil, but if it comes from organically grown or natural seaweed, it must be good and healthy. To me, as a scientist, it does not matter where it comes from; I am poisoned if I eat too much of it. Strychnine or cyanide are no less poisonous if part of a plant grown naturally on an ‘organic’ farm and no more or less poisonous if synthesized in a laboratory. The most poisonous of all substances are the toxins of micro-organisms and plants: botulinus from bacteria, ricin from the castor-oil plant, and phalloidin from the toadstool, Ammanita phalloides, well-called the deathcap. Bruce Ames has wisely commented that in our normal diets, whether organically grown or from intensive agriculture, natural and just as toxic carcinogens and co-carcinogens are thousands of times more abundant than the products of the chemical industry. I do wish the Greens would grow up and forget the simplistic untruths of their student days. It is natural when young to distrust industry and the profit motive, but when we become consumers, we are all exploiting the Earth. Each one of us is as responsible for the damage done, as are the industries that supply our needs and wants. I wish that more among the Greens would turn their faces toward the real Green problem: how can we feed, house and clothe the abundant human race without destroying the habitats of the other creatures of the Earth?
Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s had tribal affairs, not environmental ones, at the top of its agenda. Despite this, we were never, while on the Beara Peninsula, subjected to dislike merely because we were English. I even recall queuing for the Sunday papers outside Murphy’s in Castletown Bearhaven and chatting with the local IRA man. I noticed with amusement that he always bought the English Sunday Times, not the Irish Sunday papers. Had we chosen to buy a cottage in one of the eastern counties of Ireland near the Border, such as Monaghan or Armagh, I suspect that we would have been less welcome. There they brought up children to hate the English, even when sitting on their mother’s knee.
The tribal instinct is so strong that young men will perform apoptosis for the love of their tribe. It must be the most powerful of instincts. It can make us embrace celibacy, it can drive us to starve ourselves to death, it destroys all feeling of compassion for our enemy. He or she is no longer human, like ourselves, but a thing to be eliminated utterly without pity. I wonder if the evolutionary biologists will assert that there is a genetic basis for tribalism. Did we evolve a trait of genocide in our ancestry? What better way to enhance our genes than to kill off all members, especially the women and children, of our opponents? Then their genes are gone forever. I find this thought hard to dismiss, awful though it is, and if true, it gives a grim slant to the religious concept of original sin. The distinguished biologist, EO Wilson, began an article in the New York Times in 1993 ‘Is humanity suicidal?’ with the thought: what a pity the first intelligent animal on Earth was a tribal carnivore. My daughter Christine once brought home a foreign student from Oxford, a boring young man who had acquired anarchism as if it were an infection like measles. When we teased him, mostly for his lack of humour, by saying that we were anarchists ourselves, he replied with a sneer, ‘You English are decadent; we are the only true anarchists.’ I remember this exchange with affection as the epitome of tribal thinking.
I am an island person, and my view of the human scene is coloured by experiences in and on the
se British Isles. The people of these islands have seen a substantial decline in their status during my lifetime: the one-time superpower is now a small island group of separate and separating small nations on the edge of Europe. Strangely, over the same period, there has been an improvement in the standard of living of the people, and nowhere more than in Ireland. I must admit that today’s ‘wonderful’ world of ‘wow’ does not fill me with enthusiasm, but I do see that people are now better off than they were when I grew up. What I dislike is the way we have traded good manners and a sense of personal responsibility for an uncritical belief in human rights and welfare. I do not whine about how much better things once were; instead, I give thanks for having lived through the most exciting and fulfilling century of human existence. In the main, things are not now worse or better, merely different.
Homage to Gaia Page 42