Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)

by Oliver Sacks

  The library was not only for reading; on weekends, the books that were out on the reading table would be put to one side to make room for games of various sorts. While my three older brothers might be playing an intense game of cards or chess, I would play a simple game, Ludo, with Auntie Birdie, my mother’s older sister, who lived with us – in my early years, she was more a play companion than my brothers were. Extreme passions developed over Monopoly, and even before I learned to play it, the prices and colors of the properties became engraved on my mind. (To this day I see the Old Kent Road and Whitechapel as cheap, mauve properties, the pale blue Angel and Euston Road next to them as scarcely and better. By contrast, the West End is clothed for me in rich, costly colors: Fleet Street scarlet, Piccadilly yellow, the green of Bond Street, and the dark, Bentley-colored blue of Park Lane and Mayfair.) Sometimes we would all join in a game of Ping-Pong, or some woodworking, using the big library table. But after a weekend of frivolities, the games would be returned to the huge drawer under one of the bookcases, and the room restored to its quiet for my father’s evening reading.

  There was another drawer on the other side of the bookcase, a fake drawer which, for some reason, did not open, and I frequently had a fixed dream about this drawer. Like any child, I loved coins – their glitter, their weights, their different shapes and sizes – from the bright copper farthings and halfpennies and pennies to the varied silver coins (especially the tiny silver three-penny bits – one was always concealed in the suet pudding at Christmas) to the heavy gold sovereign my father wore on his watch chain. And I had read in my children’s encyclopedia about doubloons and rubles, coins with holes in them, and ‘pieces of eight,’ which I imagined to be perfect octagons. In my dream the false drawer would open to me, displaying a glittering treasure of copper and silver and gold mixed together, coins of a hundred countries and ages, including, to my delight, octagonal pieces of eight.

  I especially liked crawling into the triangular cupboard under the stairs, where the special plates and cutlery for Passover were kept. The cupboard itself was shallower than the stairs, and it seemed to me that its back wall, when tapped, sounded hollow; it must have concealed, I felt, a further space behind it, a secret passageway, perhaps. I felt snug in here, in my secret hideaway – no one besides me was small enough to fit in.

  Most beautiful and mysterious in my eyes was the front door, with its stained glass panels of many shapes and colors. I would place my eye behind the crimson glass and see a whole world red-stained (but with the red roofs of the houses opposite strangely pale, and clouds startlingly distinct against a blue sky now almost black). It was a completely different experience with the green glass, and the deep violet blue. Most intriguing was the yellowish green glass, for this seemed to shimmer, sometimes yellow and sometimes green, depending on where I stood and how the sun hit it.

  A forbidden area was the attic, which was gigantic, since it covered the entire area of the house, and stretched up to the peaked, crystalline eaves of the roof. I was once taken up to see the attic, and then dreamed of it repeatedly, perhaps because it was forbidden after Marcus climbed up once by himself and fell through the skylight, gashing his thigh (though once, in a storytelling mood, he told me that the scar had been inflicted by a wild boar, like the scar on Odysseus’ thigh).

  We had meals in the breakfast room next to the kitchen; the dining room, with its long table, was reserved for shabbas meals, festivals, and special occasions. There was a similar distinction between the lounge and the drawing room – the lounge, with its sofa and dilapidated, comfy chairs, was for general use; the drawing room, with its elegant, uncomfortable Chinese chairs and lacquered cabinets, was for large family gatherings. Aunts, uncles, and cousins in the neighborhood would walk over on Saturday afternoons, and a special silver tea service would be pulled out and small crustless sandwiches of smoked salmon and cod’s roe served in the drawing room – such dainties were not served at any other time. The chandeliers in the drawing room, originally gasoliers, had been converted to electric light sometime in the 1920s (but there were still odd gas jets and fittings all over the house so that, in a pinch, we could go back to gas lighting). The drawing room also contained a huge grand piano, covered with family photos, but I preferred the soft tones of the upright piano in the lounge.

  Though the house was full of music and books, it was virtually empty of paintings, engravings, or artwork of any sort; and similarly, while my parents went to theaters and concerts frequently, they never, as far as I can remember, visited an art gallery. Our synagogue had stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes, which I often gazed at in the more excruciating parts of the service. There had been, apparently, a dispute over whether such pictures were appropriate, given the interdiction of graven images, and I wondered whether this was a reason we had no art in the house. But it was rather, I soon realized, that my parents were completely indifferent to the decor of the house or its furnishings. Indeed, I later learned that when they had bought the place, in 1930, they had given my father’s older sister Lina their checkbook, carte blanche, saying, ‘Do what you want, get what you want.’

  Lina’s choices – fairly conventional, except for the chinoiserie in the drawing room – were neither approved nor contested; my parents accepted them without really noticing or caring. My friend Jonathan Miller, visiting the house for the first time – this was soon after the war – said it seemed like a rented house to him, there was so little evidence of personal taste or decision. I was as indifferent as my parents to the decor of the house, though I was angered and bewildered by Jonathan’s comment. For, to me, 37 was full of mysteries and wonders – the stage, the mythic background, on which my life was lived.

  There were coal fires in almost every room, including a porcelain coal stove, flanked by fish tiles, in the bathroom. The fire in the lounge had large copper coal scuttles to either side, bellows, and fire irons, including a slightly bent poker of steel (my eldest brother, Marcus, who was very strong, had managed to bend it, when it was almost white-hot). If an aunt or two visited, we would all gather in the lounge, and they would hitch up their skirts and stand with their backs to the fire. All of them, like my mother, were heavy smokers, and after warming themselves by the fire, they would sit on the sofa and smoke, lobbing their wet fag ends into the fire. They were, by and large, terrible shots, and the damp butts would hit the brick wall surrounding the fireplace and adhere there, disgustingly, until they finally burned away.

  I have only fragmentary, brief memories of my youngest years, the years before the war, but I remember being frightened, as a child, by observing that many of my aunts and uncles had coal black tongues – would my own, I wondered, turn black when I grew up? I was greatly relieved when Auntie Len, divining my fears, told me that her tongue was not really black, that its blackness came from chewing charcoal biscuits, and that they all ate these because they had gas.

  Of my Auntie Dora (who died when I was very young), I remember nothing except for the color orange – whether this was the color of her complexion or hair, or of her clothes, or whether it was the reflected color of the firelight, I have no idea. All that remains is a warm, nostalgic feeling and a peculiar fondness for orange.

  My bedroom, since I was the youngest, was a tiny room connected with my parents’ bedroom, and I remember that its ceiling was festooned with strange, calcareous concretions. Michael had had this room before I was born, and had been fond of flicking gelatinous spoonsful of sago – the sliminess of which he disliked – onto the ceiling, where it would adhere with a wet smack. As the sago dried, nothing but a chalky mound would remain.

  There were several rooms which belonged to nobody and had no clear function; these were used to house extras of all kinds – books, games, toys, magazines, waterproofs, sports equipment. In one small room there was nothing but a Singer sewing machine with a treadle (which my mother had bought on her marriage, in 1922) and a knitting machine of an intricate (and, to my mind, beautiful)
design. My mother used it to make our socks, and I loved to watch her turning the handle, to watch the glittering steel knitting needles clacking in unison and the cylinder of wool, weighted with a lead bob, descending steadily. On one occasion I distracted her as she was making a sock, and the cylinder of wool got longer and longer, until finally it hit the floor. Not knowing what to do with this yard-long cylinder of wool, she gave it to me to keep as a muff.

  These extra rooms enabled my parents to accommodate relatives like Auntie Birdie and others, sometimes for long periods. The largest of them was reserved for the formidable Auntie Annie, on her rare visits from Jerusalem (thirty years after her death, this was still referred to as ‘Annie’s room’). When Auntie Len came to visit from Delamere, she, too, had her own room, and here she would establish herself, with her books and her tea things – there was a gas ring in the room, and she would make her own tea – and when she invited me in, I felt I was entering a different world, a world of other interests and tastes, of civility, of unconditional love.

  When my uncle Joe, who had been a doctor in Malaya, became a Japanese prisoner of war, his older son and daughter stayed with us. And my parents would sometimes take in refugees from Europe during the war years. So the house, though large, was never empty; it seemed, on the contrary, to house dozens of separate lives, not just the immediate family – my parents and my three brothers and myself – but itinerant uncles and aunts, the resident staff – our nanny and nurse, the cook – and the patients themselves, who would come and go.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Exile

  In early September 1939, war broke out. It was expected that London would be heavily bombed,, and parents were put under great pressure by the government to evacuate their children to safety in the countryside. Michael, five years older than I, had been going to a day school near our house, and when it was closed at the outbreak of the war one of the assistant masters there decided to reconstitute the school in the little village of Braefield. My parents (I was to realize many years later) were greatly worried about the consequences of separating a little boy – I was just six – from his family and sending him to a makeshift boarding school in the Midlands, but they felt they had no choice, and took some comfort that at least Michael and I would be together.

  This, perhaps, might have worked out well – evacuation did work out reasonably well for thousands of others. But the school, as reconstituted, was a travesty of the original. Food was rationed and scarce, and our food parcels from home were looted by the matron. Our basic diet was swedes and mangel-wurzels – giant turnips and huge, coarse beetroots grown for cattle. There was a steam pudding whose revolting, suffocating smell comes back to me (as I write almost sixty years later) and sets me retching and gagging once again. The horribleness of the school was made worse for most of us by the sense that we had been abandoned by our families, left to rot in this awful place as an inexplicable punishment for something we had done.

  The headmaster seemed to have become unhinged by his own power. He had been decent enough, even well liked, as a teacher in London, Michael said, but at Braefield, where he took over, he had quickly become a monster. He was vicious and sadistic, and beat many of us, with relish, almost daily. ‘Wilfulness’ was severely punished. I sometimes wondered if I was his ‘darling,’ the one selected for a maximum of punishment, but in fact many of us were so beaten we could hardly sit down for days on end. Once, when he had broken a cane on my eight-year-old bottom, he roared, ‘Damn you, Sacks! Look what you have made me do!’ and added the cost of the cane to my bill. Bullying and cruelty, meanwhile, were rife among the boys, and great ingenuity was exercised in finding out the weak points of the smaller children and tormenting them beyond bearable limits.

  But along with the horror there were sudden delights, made sharper by their rarity and contrast with the rest of life. My first winter there – the winter of 1939-40 – was an exceptionally cold one, with drifting snow, higher than my head, and long glittering icicles hanging from the eaves of the church. These snowy scenes, and sometimes fantastic snow and ice forms, conveyed me in imagination to Lapland or Fairyland. To get out of the school to the surrounding fields was always a pleasure, and the freshness and whiteness and cleanness of the snow allowed a wonderful, though brief, release from the shut-in-ness, the misery, the smell of the school. Once I somehow contrived to separate myself from the other boys and our teacher and got briefly, ecstatically, ‘lost’ among the snowdrifts – a feeling that soon turned to terror when it became clear that I really was lost, and no longer just playing. I was very happy to be found, finally, and hugged and given a mug of hot chocolate when I got back to school.

  It was during the same winter that I remember finding the windowpanes of the rectory doors covered with hoarfrost, and being fascinated by the needles and crystalline forms in this, and how I could melt some of the frost with my breath and make a little peephole. One of my teachers – her name was Barbara Lines – saw my absorption and showed me the snow crystals under a pocket lens. No two were ever quite the same, she told me, and the sense of how much variation was possible within a basic hexagonal format was a revelation to me.

  There was a particular tree in a field that I loved; its silhouette against the sky affected me in a strange way. I still see it, and the winding path through the fields that led to it, when my mind drifts back. The sense that nature, at least, existed outside the dominion of school was deeply reassuring.

  And the vicarage, with its spacious garden, where the school was housed, the old church next door to it, and the village itself were charming, even idyllic. The villagers were kind to these obviously uprooted and unhappy young boys from London. It was here in the village that I learned to ride horses, with a strapping young woman; she sometimes hugged me when I looked miserable. (Michael had read me parts of Gulliver’s Travels and I sometimes thought of her as Glumdalclitch, Gulliver’s giant nurse.) There was an old lady to whom I went for piano lessons, and she would make tea for me. And there was the village shop, where I would go to buy a gob-stopper and occasionally a slice of corned beef. There were even times in school which I enjoyed: making model planes of balsa wood, and a tree house with a friend, a little red-haired boy of my own age. But, overwhelmingly, I felt trapped at Braefield, without hope, without recourse, forever – and many of us, I suspect, were severely disturbed by being there.

  During the four years I was at Braefield, my parents visited us at the school, but very rarely, and I have almost no memory of these visits. When, in December 1940, after nearly a year away from home, Michael and I returned to London for the Christmas holidays, I had a complex mixture of feelings: relief, anger, pleasure, apprehension. The house felt strange and different, too: our housekeeper and cook had gone, and there were strangers there, a Flemish couple who had been among the last to make their escape from Dunkirk – my parents had offered to take them in, now that the house was nearly empty, until they found a place. Only Greta, our dachshund, seemed the same, and she greeted me with yelps of welcome, rolling on her back, wriggling with joy.

  There were physical changes too: the windows were all hung with heavy blackout curtains; the inner front door, with the colored glass I had loved to look through, had been blown out by a bomb blast a couple of weeks earlier; the garden, now planted with Jerusalem artichokes for the war effort, was changed almost beyond recognition; and the old gardening shed had been replaced by an Anderson shelter, an ugly, blocky building with a thick reinforced-concrete roof.

  Although the Battle of Britain was over, the Blitz was still at its height. There were air raids almost every night, and the night sky would be lit up with ack-ack fire and searchlights. I remember seeing German airplanes transfixed in the roving searchlight beams as they flew in the now-darkened skies over London. It was frightening, and also thrilling for a seven-year-old – but most of all, I think, I felt glad to be away from school and at home, protected, once again.

  One night, a thousand-pound bomb
fell into the garden next to ours, but fortunately it failed to explode. All of us, the entire street, it seemed, crept away that night (my family to a cousin’s flat) – many of us in our pajamas – walking as softly as we could (might vibration set the thing off?). The streets were pitch dark, for the blackout was in force, and we all carried electric torches dimmed with red crepe paper. We had no idea if our houses would still be standing in the morning.

  On another occasion, an incendiary bomb, a thermite bomb, fell behind our house and burned with a terrible, white-hot heat. My father had a stirrup pump, and my brothers carried pails of water to him, but water seemed useless against this infernal fire – indeed, made it burn even more furiously. There was a vicious hissing and sputtering when the water hit the white-hot metal, and meanwhile the bomb was melting its own casing and throwing blobs and jets of molten metal in all directions. The lawn was as scarred and charred as a volcanic landscape the next morning, but littered, to my delight, with beautiful gleaming shrapnel that I could show off at school after the holidays.

  A curious, and shameful, episode stays in my mind from that brief period at home during the Blitz. I was very fond of Greta, our dog (I wept bitterly when she was later killed by a speeding motorbike, in 1945), but one of my first acts, that winter, was to imprison her in the freezing coalbin in the yard outside, where her pitiful whimperings and barkings could not be heard. She was missed after a while, and I was asked, we were all asked, when we had last seen her, whether we had any idea where she was. I thought of her – hungry, cold, imprisoned, perhaps dying in the coalbin outside – but said nothing. It was only toward evening that I admitted what I had done, and Greta was fetched, almost frozen, from the bin. My father was furious and gave me ‘a good hiding’ and stood me in a corner for the rest of the day. There was no enquiry, however, as to why I had been so uncharacteristically naughty, why I had behaved so cruelly to a dog I had loved; nor, had I been asked, could I have told them. But it was surely a message, a symbolic act of some kind, trying to draw my parents’ attention to my coalbin, Braefield, my misery and helplessness there. Even though bombs were dropping daily in London, I dreaded returning to Braefield more than I could say, and longed to stay at home with the family, to be with them, not separated, even if we all got bombed.