by Giles Foden
A cooling bath in the Cross Keys Hotel in Glasgow. The commanding voice of Sir Peter Vaward in an office on London’s Kingsway. Wind in the tobacco fields of Kasungu. Days gone by, existing only in the place of memory. Days that are fading like light in the bluegums at dusk. Days that will soon be gone for ever.
“Discover what the relevant range of values of his number is to an invasion front of, say, fifty miles. Learn how to apply them practically. Assume that you have about two months lead time in which to make rolling forecasts before you launch your invasion, and less than a week between making the critical final forecast and the invasion date.”
He paused, as if to make sure I was paying attention. “And Meadows?”
“Yes, sir?”
The flames in the grate licked about, searching for their portion of air.
“If you can persuade him to abandon his pacifist principles and help us defeat the Nazis, all the better.”
“Is that likely?” I asked.
“It’s more likely the king will invite Hitler to eat shepherd’s pie at Buckingham Palace, but you must try nonetheless. There is too much at stake for Ryman to be allowed to keep his research to himself. By the way, you’ll find a chap from Combined Operations Experimental Section at Dunoon, as well as our regular Met people. You know about the Experimental Section, I take it?”
“As much as anyone does,” I replied. It was a kind of asylum for professors run by Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Wildman-Lushington. The activities which took place under its auspices—all sorts of odd scientific research for the military—were the subject of much speculation by other government technical departments.
“Well, there is a bright person from that section in Dunoon who may be able to help you. His name is Pyke. He’s an expert in ice.”
I couldn’t see what ice had to do with it. There was quite enough to be going on with already. In fact I wanted to be sure before I left that the job was quite so large and forbidding as it was beginning to seem.
“So just to be clear, sir. You want me to come back here with hook, line and sinker on the Ryman number. You want me to find out how wide a field of adjacent zones of turbulence—Europe, the Atlantic, the Irish Sea, wherever—we need to know about in order to make amphibious landings across the Channel. And you want me to come up with a practical method of putting the uncertainty of all those zones, with the varying time series of their weather systems, into a single coherent scheme?”
“Yes. Well put, Meadows. You should know that I have chosen you because of your academic proficiency and the excellent reports Douglas and Stagg give of you. Are you up to the challenge?”
I nodded assertively—in truth a laughable response to such a question, but there it is.
Perhaps Sir Peter sensed this. “Don’t think it will be an easy leap,” he said. “Ryman is stubborn, somewhat peculiar. He’ll be cagey. He won’t be cajoled or charmed. You will have to make him respect you. That is another reason I have chosen you—because, if you don’t mind me saying, you share some characteristics with him.”
I suppose, looking back, he meant that I had a tendency to become technical and a capacity for obsession.
“You may find the best way to him is through his wife,” Sir Peter continued. “You yourself should keep secret anything you discover. Guard it close, because this is the big one. You may find this file useful. It contains meteorological various papers written by Ryman in the days when he used to publish.”
It may have been thumping as I remembered all this, lying in the bath in that Glasgow hotel, but as he spoke my head was swelling with heroic visions. I had left the director’s office under no illusion that I was to be anything but the indispensable saviour, someone who had been chosen to perform a vital job of individual service for the nation.
The water cooled round my body. Already, I reflected, I seemed to have stumbled. I had tripped over the jumble of impulses which nature plants in an individual to make sure we can never conceive our own personalities as well-organised information. From within as well as without, disorder is always waiting to pounce. Failure is always at the ready. All it takes is a little push at the brick of one’s self-possession and the whole enterprise is threatened. Sometimes memory is the only thing left holding the individual together: the crypt that is also the keystone.
Yet one cannot live in the past. One has to allow oneself to grow. Indeed, that is why the threat of complete disorganisation is necessary: it promotes the foliage of unformed states, of those strategic mental camouflages which work to increase our statistical protection from future risk. If the mind-system were closed, if there wasn’t always a threat of loss, it would run down through inanition.
In this thoughtful frame of mind, I hauled myself out of the bath and stood naked in front of the mirror, kneading my hair with a towel, then getting out my shaving kit. I had quite a trim figure in those days—rationing saw to that—and, despite the continuing effects of the previous night’s dissipation, I managed to face myself in the glass with something like equanimity. For a second, looking at my own dark eyes in the mirror, I saw the face of the boy who had run beneath the bluegums in Kasungu, scattering the storks from their tree of assembly, setting it awhirl.
As the black bristles came off, flecking the coils of soap foam, I began to recover some of the urgency I would need to resume the task with which Sir Peter had entrusted me.
I pulled aside the curtain and looked outside, to check the weather. The snow had almost completely gone, just as Krick had predicted. There was even a bit of sunshine. All that was left of the blizzard were puddles and dripping masonry, with occasional dubs of white sitting on sheltered lintels or between sequestered tiles.
A mongrel dog, spotted and barred, was nudging its way through wind-tipped rubbish bins along the waterlogged back alley behind the hotel. It was turning up damp pieces of this and that, testing their edibility before trotting on through the turmoil to the next unidentifiable item. Unidentifiable from where I was, anyway.
Turmoil, tohu bohu, turbulence…there too the issue of perspective is crucial. You might well ask again what it is, this thing which has been my life’s work. At one level it is simple. Turbulence is the jittery, swirling behaviour of a gas or liquid flowing round an obstacle (which could be another gas or liquid). More puzzlingly, it’s a predictable process seen from one perspective that becomes disordered and unpredictable viewed from another, or when observed over a different time period.
I put on my shirt and suit, knotted my tie—a dark-green spotted number—did up my shoelaces and repacked my suitcase. In a way things had worked out well, what with the Yanks giving me a ride in their car like that, and bringing me straight to a hotel.
By the time I had gone downstairs, eaten breakfast and drunk two cups of strong coffee, I was ready to go. I looked around for Krick and his crew as I paid my bill, but there was no sign of the Americans. Must have already gone to the airport, I thought, before walking out myself into the sodden embroilment of the pavement.
Filled with a fray of business folk and shoppers and servicemen, the street was surprisingly busy. Watching the morose crowd tramping through the melted remnants of the storm, it struck me that Scotland might as well be a foreign country to one such as myself. But then I often felt like that in England, too, as did many of us who had grown up in the colonies. It was as if we had returned to a home different from the one we had been holding in our heads all that time.
I couldn’t stand all the posh officers but the oiks seemed just as coarse and stupid. Many of the intellectuals were generally dismissive of science, which enraged me. I suppose I also felt distinct because I was raised as a Catholic and was half-Irish; but if I was anchored anywhere at all it would be in central Africa.
After some political difficulties at home—his family were merchants in Tralee in Co. Kerry—my father had emigrated to Africa, where, after numerous adventures in South Africa, Kenya and elsewhere, he eventually became manager of a tobacc
o farm in Nyasaland. My mother was the daughter of a British copper miner from Northern Rhodesia, a widower who moved to Nyasaland to prospect for gold and more or less dumped my mother in my father’s hands. It was she that was the Catholic, not him, despite his being Irish. The Meadowses were Protestants. So right from the start I came out of a mixed marriage.
Suitcase in hand, curling hair still slightly damp on my head, despite the vigorous kneading of half an hour ago, I stood for a moment watching the lugubrious Glaswegian throng—then tugged up the collar of my coat with my other hand and went on my way.
Four
The place I was headed for was in the Cowal, which is a district of Argyll. A ragged peninsula on the west coast of Scotland, the Cowal lies between Kintyre on one side and Glasgow and the Firth of Clyde on the other. As one could do in those days, I caught a paddle steamer, the Marchioness of Lome, from the Broomielaw quay in central Glasgow.
There was great hubbub as passengers—many of them soldiers with kitbags and rifles—and vast amounts of cargo and coal were loaded on. Then with a blow on the harbour master’s whistle the gangplank was rattled back on board. A warp of rope was thrown off the bollard by a fellow on the quayside. Vibrations thudded through the vessel as the engine engaged. Then the great paddle wheels themselves began to turn, making criss-cross patterns in their boxes, water gushing down.
The ship gave two toots of its horn, steam jetting from its twin red-and-black funnels, and so we were away, moving quickly through the bustle of Glasgow towards Clydebank.
At first I just set my suitcase down beside me and leaned over the taffrail, watching the sights. Pennants fluttering, we sailed out past miles of mills and warehouses, coal yards and cranes. We came through the roar of the Clydeside shipyards, which were full of red steel and tiny figures—ant-like creatures on the hulls of half-made dreadnoughts and cargo ships. From there we passed towards Greenock and Gourock and the tranquil lower Clyde, where the Firth opened up into a filigree of blue lochs and green hills.
Hence over the water was the Cowal shore. It was there, in a village called Kilmun, that I was to solicit—from a pacifist, on behalf of the military—the secret of weather forecasting.
The present weather had improved enormously since yesterday. Even though it was still cold, blue sky was showing through shifting, toothy clouds which moved over the crinkly sea as if to comb it. I sat down on a slatted wooden bench and watched the milky froth of the double wake of the Wee Lome (as the ship was colloquially known) trailing out behind. On either side of the water, thickly wooded hills enfolded churches and cottages and farmhouses.
After a while I pulled out the file Sir Peter had given me and, keeping a close hold on the flapping pages, boned up a bit more on Ryman and his work. I remember trying to place him in the context of what I myself had been doing at Kew, and to understand how his theories might really make a difference to an invasion. Most of the file contained scientific papers Ryman had written, but the first page was some kind of personal biography, which I suppose must have been supplied to Sir Peter by the intelligence services:
RYMAN, WALLACE. Mathematician, physicist, meteorologist, sociologist. Conscientious objector. Has travelled in Norway (1922) and Germany (1939). Has developed mathematical techniques of weather forecasting, expert in fluid dynamics, meteorological technology. Hobbies: none known.
Born 1892. Only child of Catherine Sarnett and David Ryman. A prosperous Quaker family. David Ryman running a successful tanning and leather manufacturing business. At age 12 sent to a Quaker boarding school, Bootham in York, where received an education which apparently stimulated an active interest in science. In 1909 went to Durham College of Science, where took courses in mathematical physics, chemistry, botany, and zoology. Two years later, gained scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. Graduated with double first-class honours in the natural sciences tripos in 1914. Joined as a Quaker the Friends Ambulance Unit same year. In 1932 married Gill Blackford (b.1906), daughter of William Blackford, chief engineer at the Saunders-Hoe seaplane factory in Cowes. No children.
Career:
Friends Ambulance Unit in France (1914-1918)
Researcher, National Physical Laboratory (1918-1919)
Lecturer, Paisley Technical College (1919-1920)
Researcher, Scottish Peat Company (1920-1921)
Researcher, National Physical Laboratory (1921-1926)
Senior Lecturer, Manchester College (1926-1927)
Met Office. Eskdalemuir Observatory (1927-1930)
Met Office. Benson, Oxfordshire (1930-1931)
Head of Research, Saunders-Roe, Cowes (1931-1933)
Professor, Paisley Technical College (1933-1939)
Resigned from Met Office when it was absorbed into Air Ministry, stating conscientious objections as reason. Currently living off modest private income following inheritance from parents, incl. shares in Ryman’s Tanning & Leather Ltd, York. Pursues personal scientific and some sociological research, i.e. causes of war and how to prevent them. In 1937: elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society.
What struck me most about this was how restless Ryman was, changing jobs every couple of years. Also how determined he was to keep himself not just out of the Oxford and Cambridge scene (which, with a double first and a King’s scholarship, he could have easily entered) but also away from London. It was as if he wanted to keep himself pure. If he had not had those spells at the Met Office, would anyone have heard of him at all? As it was, he was a square peg in a round hole so far as the rest of the meteorological community went, although I had often seen respectful mentions of his name in the literature.
At that time, weather forecasting in Britain was practised by following the evolution of physical quantities based on measurements taken at various stations around the country, then applying them mechanistically to the next two or three days—as if one were taking the recipe and ingredients of a cake and predicting what it would look like and taste like, which might be done with a fair degree of accuracy. Beyond three days it became a question of the relative probabilities of various weather narratives: the cake might turn out this way or that way or another way, depending on how it was cooked.
Ryman was the first person to have mathematically connected eddy motion across different scales, from the smallest gyre lifting a leaf in a corner of the garden to those of great storms, hundreds of miles across their turning diameter.
But his equations were so complex we had not yet been able to use them at the Met Office. The arithmetic required to solve them took too long. Even sitting there on the boat then, I remember having to stare at a single line of calculation in one paper for a full ten minutes before I understood it. I can often remember having to kick myself for being too stupid like that.
As I was number-crunching, my attention kept being distracted by the marine paraphernalia down on the foredeck. Winching equipment waiting for its moment. Coils of rope lying on wooden palettes like sleeping cobras. The ensign flapping at the prow. The face the life-ring’s open mouth made where it hung on the bulkhead. The rude welding—as if a child had been at work with gluepot and brush—which held together the steel panels of the Wee Lome. The derricks poking their noses over the side. Most of all the two paddles, milling over and over, just like my thoughts themselves.
I don’t want to give the impression meteorology was in the dark ages during the war. Our radiosonde balloons, such as I sent up at Kew, did allow us to make synoptic charts—‘maps’ of weather, which is more or less what you see on the television news nowadays. Synoptic means ‘seen at the same time’ and refers to measurements taken simultaneously in different locations. From extrapolation of these simultaneous measurements, the map of likely future weather emerges, moving across land and time.
But apart from synoptics, which came in not long before I joined the Met, our methods hadn’t changed radically since they were first devised by our suicidal founder, that same Admiral Fitz-Roy whose picture graced the wall outside Sir P
eter’s office. The lack of change was despite the partial adoption of various new methods which distinguished between different types of air ‘mass’, originating in the poles or the tropics. Using the term for a battle line, the Norwegians had invented the idea of ‘fronts’ to mark the edges of these bundles of weather.
Fronts are a graphic representation of the moving limits of weather systems; they try to put a discrete edge on shades within the continuity of the total. They are a kind of spectral lockdown, as if one is imprisoning the ghost of change in a line; but for all that they are very useful, giving a sense of emerging pattern.
Once again my attention was distracted, this time by the foghorn of another vessel. The most conspicuous aspect of that journey, I remember, was other ships. The water was thick with them. Puffers and dinghies and tugs, motor launches, supply barges, frigates, troopships…
The troopships were the most impressive of all, being as stately as their names: Queen of Bermuda, Aquitania, Empress of Britain…Filling the air with grey smoke, they were carrying armies from the Empire and the United States, either to ready themselves in training camps in the Cowal and points north, or on their way out to fighting in various theatres of war.
Ryman had set out to develop a numerical system that would complement the Fitz-Roy and Norwegian methods and possibly supersede them, by manipulating the quantities and limits of weather systems mathematically. His number, more properly a ratio, as I think I have said, was at the heart of this. It showed the rate of turbulence in an evolving weather system, dramatising the relationship between wind and heat as a number on a positive or negative scale.
Surrounded by all that rope and ships, I suddenly saw an easy way to explain it all to myself, as a kind of springboard for the more difficult task that lay ahead. When the Ryman number is positive, turbulence is decreasing, because the flow is dynamically stable. Cold air is reducing the roughening effect produced when wind goes over surfaces or when one wind hits another coming from a different direction. It’s like a tug of war—a rope being pulled between these wind irregularities and the calming effects of cold—and the cold is winning.