Mellowest of British industrial cities, Bristol was known for the friendliness of its people, its mild and wet climate and the hilly roads that wend their way down to the moorings on the river Avon, eight miles from the coast. Bristol was then a thriving manufacturing centre, producing Fry’s chocolate, Wills’s cigarettes, Douglas motorcycles and many other commodities. Together, these industries had eclipsed the declining trade in shipping, which had been the city’s main source of wealth for centuries, some of it based on the slave trade.4 Most of the city’s wealthiest maritime figures were members of the Merchant Venturers’ Society, a secretive group of industrialists with a strong philanthropic tradition. It was the generosity of the Society that had made possible the founding of Charles’s school together with the high standard of its workshop and laboratory facilities.5
During a visit to the Central Library a few months after his arrival in Bristol, Charles met Florence Holten, the guileless nineteen-year-old librarian who would become his wife. Though no beauty, she was attractive and possessed features that she would later pass on to her most famous child: her oval face was framed by dark, curly hair, and a firm nose darted out from between her dark eyes. Born into a family of Cornish Methodists, she was brought up to believe that Sunday should be a day of rest, that gambling was sinful and that the theatre was decadent and best avoided.6 She had been named after the nurse Florence Nightingale, whom her father Richard met during the Crimean War, where he served as a young soldier before becoming a seaman.7 He was often away for months at a time, leaving behind his wife and six children, of whom Flo was second eldest.8
Flo Holten and Charles Dirac were an odd couple. She was twelve years younger than him, a daydreamer uninterested in pursuing a career, whereas Charles was strong-minded and industrious, devoted to his job. The couple had been raised in different, scarcely compatible religions. She was from a family of devout Methodists and so had been raised to frown on alcohol, whereas Charles had been brought up in a Roman Catholic home and liked a glass of wine with his meals. Catholicism had been the cause of riots in Bristol and other English cities, so Charles may at first have kept his religious beliefs to himself. If he did disclose them, his relationship with the young Flo would have raised eyebrows in her circle.9
Despite the possible sectarian tensions, by August 1897 Charles and Flo were engaged, though Flo was feeling sore. Charles had chosen to ‘break the spell’ of their relationship to visit his mother Walla, a dressmaker in Geneva, leaving his fiancée to sulk in Bristol’s incessant rain. His father had died the year before. He had been a highly strung junior schoolteacher and later a stationmaster at Monthey station in south-west Switzerland but was dismissed for repeatedly being drunk on duty, leaving him plenty of time to pursue his interest in writing romantic poetry.10 The Swiss stretch of the Rhône valley had been home to the Dirac family since the eighteenth century, when – according to family lore – they moved from the Bordeaux area in western France. The names of many of the towns in this region and its vicinity end in -ac, such as Cognac, Cadillac and the little-known village, about ten kilometres south of the Angoulême, called Dirac.11 Charles believed his family had originated there, but there is no evidence for this among the family records, now stored in the town hall of Saint Maurice (near Monthey), where the colourful Dirac coat of arms – featuring a red leopard with a three-leaf clover in its right paw, below three downward-pointing pine cones – is one of many painted on the walls.12
Uneven postal delays caused Charles’s letters from Switzerland to arrive out of order, infuriating Flo, who wished that ‘letters went by electricity like tram cars’; a century would elapse before long-distance lovers benefited from the type of communication she was vaguely envisioning – electronic mail.13 Lonely and disconsolate, she repeatedly read Charles’s notes and, when her family was not looking over her shoulder, replied with newsy letters of how they could not resist teasing her about her pining for ‘my own boy’. Struggling to put her longing into words, she sent him a poem full of ardour; in return, he sent a posy of Alpine flowers which she hung round his photograph.
Almost two years later, Flo and Charles were married ‘according to the rites and ceremonies of the Wesleyan Methodists’ in Portland Street Chapel, one of the oldest and grandest of Bristol’s Methodist churches. The couple moved into Charles’s residence in 42 Cotham Road – probably in rented rooms – a short walk from Flo’s family home in Bishopston, in the north of the city. Following custom and practice, Flo stopped doing paid work and stayed at home to do the housework and read about the first skirmishes of Britain’s latest imperial venture, the Boer War in South Africa. Soon, she had other things on her mind: the Diracs’ first son Felix was born on the first Easter Sunday of the new century.14 Nine months later, the country mourned the passing of an era when Queen Victoria, having reigned for an unprecedented sixty-three years, died in the arms of her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Soon after a period of national grief, mitigated only by relief at the ending of the war, the family prepared for a new beginning of its own. In July 1902, they moved into a slot in one of the new terraces on Monk Road, to a roomier, two-storey home that Charles named after his native town of Monthey. The Diracs would soon need extra space as Flo was again pregnant, with only a few weeks to go before the birth.15
On Friday, 8 August 1902, Bristol’s eyes were on London, where King Edward VII was to be crowned on the following day. Thousands took the train from Bristol to the capital to see the coronation procession, but the celebrations were a sideshow in the Dirac household. On that Friday morning, Flo gave birth at home to a healthy six-pound boy, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. He was, as his mother later recalled, a ‘rather small’, brown-eyed baby, who slept contentedly for hours in his pram in the patch of the front garden.16 His mother worried that he ate less food than most children, but the family doctor reassured her that Paul ‘was OK, perfectly proportioned’.17 His parents nicknamed him ‘Tiny’.
When Felix and Paul were young, they resembled each other, each a quiet, round-faced cherub with a thick bonnet of black, curly hair. Flo dressed them stylishly in thick woollen waistcoats topped with stiff, white-lace Eton collars that reached out to their shoulders, like the wings of a huge butterfly. From family letters and Flo’s later testimony, it appears that the boys were close and liked to be with their father, whose top priority was to encourage them to learn. With the virtual absence of visitors and opportunities to mix outside their immediate family, Paul and Felix probably did not appreciate they were being brought up in a singularly unusual environment, a hothouse of private education overseen by a father who would speak to them only in French and a mother who would talk only in English. According to one witness, the young Paul Dirac believed that men and women spoke different languages.18
But Paul and Felix were let off the leash occasionally. Their mother sometimes took them to the Bristol Downs so that they could play on the vast expanse of grassy parkland stretching from the cliffs of the Avon Gorge to the edges of the city’s suburbs.19 From their favourite spot on the Downs, the Dirac boys had an excellent view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, one of the most famous creations of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the charismatic engineer who also left Bristol with its Floating Harbour and Temple Meads railway station, two of the city’s finest monuments.
In the summer, the family would take a bus trip to the beach at nearby Portishead, where the boys learned to swim. Like most families of their modest means, the Diracs rarely took vacations, but, in 1905, they went to Geneva to visit Charles’s mother, who had an apartment a stone’s throw from the lake and ten minutes’ stroll from the railway station.20 The brothers spent hours by the lakeside statue of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, playing together and watching the artificial geyser shoot its jet of water ninety metres towards the sky. When the seventy-year-old Dirac told this story, one of his earliest memories, he liked to point out that his first trip to Switzerland took place at the same time as Einstein was having his most suc
cessful spurt of creativity in Berne, only a short train journey from Geneva. That year, Einstein wrote four papers that changed the way people think about space, time, energy, light and matter, laying the foundations of quantum theory and relativity. Twenty-three years later, Dirac would be the first to combine the theories successfully.
There exist two vivid snapshots of life in the Dirac household in the summer of 1907, shortly before Paul started school, a year after the birth of his sister Betty. The first is the correspondence between Charles Dirac and his family when he was in Trinity College, Cambridge, attending the International Esperanto Congress. Earlier in the year, Charles had qualified to teach the language, which he championed in Bristol for the rest of his life.21 When Charles was away, his family showered him with loving notes. Flo’s affectionate gusto was almost as intense as it had been in the heat of their passion, ten years before. Up to her ears in the chaos of having to look after the three children – taking them for walks, feeding the pet mice, cooking Paul his favourite jam tarts – she had the undivided attention of her boys: ‘It is very quiet without you, the boys are sticking to me for a change.’ She assured her husband that his family at home ‘all had a nice dinner, mutton, peas, junkets [a sweet dessert]’. The boys missed Charles terribly, Flo told him, just as she did: ‘I shall miss you in the bye-bye [i.e. bed] tonight.’22 Flo enclosed in her letters to Charles notes from Felix and from Paul, who wrote in stick-letter capitals of the welfare of the mice and, most importantly, his love for him: ‘Tiny hopes Daddie has not forgotten little Tiny’ and ‘I love you very much. Come home soon to your own Tiny Dirac xxxxx.’ Charles replied with a postcard, written mainly in English but with a little French, promising to bring home some Esperanto chocolate and concluding, ‘I would not go out if I did not have to.’
Nothing in this loving correspondence bears any sign of the terrible home life that Dirac described to Kurt Hofer. Charles’s use of English words appears to be inconsistent with the French-only linguistic regime that Paul claimed his father practised, and his father’s tone bears no sign of the heartlessness that Paul remembered.
It is clear that Charles was as keen as any other father to keep a photographic record of his children. At about this time, he purchased a camera – probably one of the fashionable Kodak box Brownies – to take pictures of his children, many of them showing Felix, Paul and Betty reading avidly. Charles also wanted a portrait of his family to be taken by a professional and for the result to be printed on postcards for family and friends. The photograph, the only surviving image of the entire family, was taken on 3 September and gives us the second impression of the Diracs in 1907.23 Flo looks demure and serious, her long hair tied up at the back, baby Betty on her lap. Felix is leaning towards her, smiling broadly and looking directly into the camera like Paul, whose left arm rests on his father’s right leg, apparently seeking reassurance. Charles leans forward to the camera, eagerly, his alert eyes shining. He steals the picture.
This photograph of a happy family is subverted by Dirac’s later memories of trauma and unhappiness. In one stinging memory, his parents bawled at each other in the kitchen while he and his siblings stood in the garden, frightened and uncomprehending. He once remarked in an interview that his parents ‘usually ate separately’, though twenty years later friends wrote that he told them he ‘never’ saw his parents have a meal together – apparently a rare example of his being caught exaggerating.24 The rift between his parents was, according to Dirac, responsible for his dining-table ordeals. Three times every day, the tinkling of cutlery, the clatter of saucepans on the gas stove, the waft of cooking smells through the house presaged the ritual that he loathed. In none of the surviving accounts of the dining arrangements did he explain why he alone sat with his father, while his brother and sister ate with their mother in the kitchen. The only partial explanation that Dirac ever gave was that he could not sit in the kitchen because there were insufficient chairs.25 But this says nothing about the mystery of why Charles singled out him, not Felix or Betty, for special treatment.
The dining ritual was particularly harrowing on winter mornings, Dirac remembered. He would sit at the table with his father in the silent room, warmed by the burning coal in the fireplace and lit by a few oil lamps. Charles would be dressed in his three-piece suit, ready to cycle to the Merchant Venturers’ School, always anxious not to be late for Assembly. His wife, scrambling and disorganised in the kitchen, made his anxieties worse by serving breakfast – usually large portions of piping-hot porridge – much too late for comfort. While he was waiting for his breakfast, Charles gave his first French lesson of the day to his younger son. Quite apart from Dirac’s hatred of these arrangements, he grew to dislike eating mainly because his parents insisted, even when his appetite had been sated and he felt sick, that he must eat every morsel of food on his plate.26
For the young Dirac, this was normality. In his early thirties, he wrote to a close friend of the sourness of his home life: ‘I did not know of anyone who liked someone else – I thought it did not happen outside novels.’27 In another letter, he wrote: ‘I found it to be the best policy as a child […] to make my happiness depend only on myself and not on other people.’28 According to Dirac, his best defence against the unpleasantness and hostility he perceived all around him was to retreat into the bunker of his imagination.
Dirac first experienced the company of children outside his family shortly after his fifth birthday, when he started at the small and intimate Bishop Road Junior School.29 This was his first opportunity to socialise, to get a sense of other children’s lives, of other domestic customs and practices. But he apparently made no attempt to talk to other children: he remained silent and continued to live in his own private world.
The school was round the corner from his home, so close that he could hear its bell ringing at the start of the day. Despite the daily hurry of the breakfast routine, he and his brother always arrived on time.30 Dirac’s class typically consisted of about fifty children crammed into a room about twenty-five feet square, the pupils sitting in rows of identical wooden desks, learning in an atmosphere that was, by today’s standards, extremely disciplined and competitive.31 At the end of their time at school, children had to compete for scholarships that would help to pay for their senior education. Success meant that the child’s parents would have to pay little or nothing; failure often meant that the child would be sent out to work.
Paul and Felix were recognisably brothers, but Felix had a rounder face, was a few inches taller and was more heavily built.32 He was placid and well behaved, though given to lapses of concentration, as his headmaster pointed out when he wrote across his school report: ‘The boy appears to me to be a perpetual dreamer. He must wake up!’ Felix appears to have taken the advice, as he soon improved and did well in most subjects, especially drawing.33
From Dirac’s later descriptions of his early life, we might expect him to have been an unhappy child, but there are no signs of this in the extant descriptions of him at the time. Twenty-seven years later, when his mother wrote a short poem about him for her own amusement, she described him as ‘a cheerful little schoolboy’, and added that he was ‘contented’ and ‘happy’.34 In official reports written when he was eight, teachers at Bishop Road do not comment on his demeanour, saying only that he was ‘well behaved’, ‘an intelligent boy’ and ‘a very steady worker’. But there are indications that Dirac was not performing to his potential. A few teachers allude to this, most notably the Headmaster, who, on seeing that Dirac had only just managed to be ranked in the top third of the class, wrote on his report in November 1910, ‘I expected to find you higher.’35
Among the boys Dirac did not get to know at Bishop Road School was Cary Grant, then known as Archie Leach and living in poverty about half a mile from Monk Road. In the classrooms and playground of the Bishop Road School, Dirac acquired the distinctively warm Bristol accent, which sounds slightly hickish to other native English speakers, evocative of fa
rmers in the south-west of the country. Like other young natives of Bristol, Dirac and Grant added an L to the pronunciation of most words that end in the letter A, a practice that is now dying out, though many English people still recognise Bristol as the only city in Britain to be able to turn ideas into ideals, areas into aerials.36 Cary Grant shed this accent when he emigrated to the United States, but Dirac kept it all his life. He spoke with a gentle intonation and an unassuming directness that would surprise the many people who expected him to talk like the plummy-voiced English intellectual of popular caricature.
Like his brother, Dirac’s ranking in the class gradually improved. He was good though not exceptional at arithmetic, and he did well in most subjects that did not involve his meagre practical skills. Soon after his eighth birthday, his teacher described him as ‘An intelligent boy, but must try hard with his handwork’, drawing attention to his poor marks for handwriting (45 per cent) and drawing (48 per cent). His disappointed teacher commented that he should have done better than thirteenth in the class. Two years later, Dirac was consistently at or near the top of his class, his overall grade occasionally lowered by his relatively weak performance in history and brushwork.37 At home, he pursued his extra-curricular hobby of astronomy, standing in his back garden at night to check the positions of the visible planets and constellations and, occasionally, to follow the track of a meteor hurtling across the sky.38
The Strangest Man Page 2