Homage to Gaia (10 page)

The society was like most student societies—radical. It would have fitted well with the liberation theology of present-day South America. The stuffy Catholic hierarchy, represented by the Bishop of Salford, referred to the society in a letter sent to parish priests as a place where the young would be ‘in the proximate occasion of mortal sin’. He used these strong words because he felt righteous anger over the society’s intention to host a university debate on the subject ‘God or Stalin’. They had asked the Socialist Society to provide a champion for Stalin. They proposed a debate on traditional moral theology lines and the Marxists were delighted with the chance to perform on so intellectual a stage. To add to the Bishop’s concern, his informant must have mentioned my presence as an active member of the
Catholic
society. This led him to warn of the dangers of mixed marriages. I found all this fuss a refreshing change from university socialism, which by then had become indistinguishable from the dull and cheerless faith of Marxism. There were also fringe benefits. The society held dancing classes for its members in the crypt of the Holy Name church close to the University. Here I met a wonderful group of attractive and intelligent Irish girls. The girl who particularly caught my fancy
was Mary Delahunty. She had been a secretary in the Architecture Department and had become a member of the Ambrose Barlow Society. Her clear-minded maturity and her good looks attracted me.

Manchester and, indeed, most northern industrial towns were deep in poverty in the 1930s. George Orwell’s book,
The
Road
to
Wigan
Pier,
captures the all-pervasive squalor under which so much of
northern
England then lived. In the north in those days women usually worked outside the home. Many were descended from those who immigrated to England to escape the famine in Ireland at the failure of the potato crop. There was little tradition of cooking among them, and consequently malnutrition exacerbated the effects of poverty. Wandering as a student around the streets of Manchester I was amazed to find no shops or street markets selling fruit and vegetables. This was something so common in London that one expected it everywhere and, indeed, this was true in most southern cities. I did manage to find two greengrocers in greater Manchester: one was near the town centre and another in Didsbury, an affluent suburb. In most parts, the corner shops stocked only potatoes. We were well fed in my digs in terms of calories and tastiness, but the fruit and green vegetables so common in the south were lacking. I experienced the poverty of Manchester briefly when there was a severe snowstorm in January 1940—so severe that it isolated Manchester from the rest of the country for at least a week. I remember living on baked beans and nothing else. At the end of this period, they admitted me to the Manchester Royal Infirmary for the treatment of scurvy, a Vitamin C deficiency. My professor, Alexander Todd, had elucidated the chemical structure of at least one vitamin and was shocked to find vitamin deficiency in one of his students. It was to be the turning point in my days as a student at Manchester. Todd became quite concerned when he learned how I was trying to survive, and he became convinced that I was far poorer than in fact I was. He excused my poor attendance and examination results and saw me, I think, as a student struggling against adversity.

The chemistry taught at Manchester specialized in what one might call high organic chemistry, the chemistry that was to make Todd a Nobel Laureate. His award was for the discovery of the structures of the nucleoside bases, which led in its turn to perhaps the most important discovery of the 20
^th
century—that of the structure of DNA. Perversely, I found this science, no matter how important it was, uninteresting, even boring. I would spend time that I should have spent at chemistry lectures attending lectures on history,
economics, and indeed anything that seemed interesting. In some ways, this was using the university properly, but it was not part of the approved life of a student. My favourite subjects of my own syllabus were bacteriology and physics. I must admit that I chose chemistry as the main subject for my degree because it contained, in those days, relatively little mathematics. Physics was so mathematical that I feared failure if I took it. It was not that I found mathematics or its principles difficult to understand; quite the reverse. Mathematical problems still fascinate me, but I was slow in the execution of the arithmetic steps of those problems, and my slowness prevented me from answering the necessary number of set questions. Some time in the Lent term of 1940, I moved to new digs in Fallowfield, along with two other students, Malcolm Woodbine and William Griffiths. We moved partly for companionship and partly because it was considerably cheaper than the digs in town. It was much further out from the
university
—too far to walk, but an easy tram ride. The new digs were quite comfortable and the food was healthier and included vegetables.

At the end of my first term in physics I was singled out with two other students and warned that, if I did not improve my performance by the spring term examinations, I would be thrown out of the university. My slowness at mathematics had struck again and let me down. Therefore, from January until March 1940, I worked hard. This was the only time I did so at Manchester. I practised endless examples of physics and physical chemistry until at last I was proficient in the handling of the arithmetic background of physical principles. As the great mathematician Euler said, and the desktop computer in front of me proves, all operations in mathematics are no more than simple addition. I remember looking with distaste at the textbook proofs of electromagnetic theory and finding them all based on trigonometrical functions like sines and cosines, arranged in a near pathological prolixity. I knew that by using the Heaviside operator based on that wonderful, outrageous, impossible number, the square root of – 1, the same proofs reduced from several pages of
trigonometry
to a few lines of equations. I knew that in the 1940s mathematical purists still regarded a proof using this operator as no more than a sleight of a hand. I gambled that my physics examiners would
consider
the use of these operational functions as quite appropriate and see that, as a good scientist should, I was using a simple device to achieve an end. I hoped that they would not see me merely as taking a short cut through what seemed to be an unnecessarily meandering
path of trigonometrical equations. It worked, and after the spring examinations, they even praised me for my diligence in finding another way to solve the problem. This made me realize that
Manchester
in those days was a good university and one that rewarded enterprise. I was intrigued to read in
Nature
of September 1999 that Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls were on the staff of the Physics Department in 1940, and there calculated the size of the critical mass of uranium-235 needed for an atom bomb. They found it was astonishingly small, and that therefore the bomb was feasible.

Teaching labs and lecture rooms at Manchester were all but unheated in that bitter winter of 1940. I recall one Monday morning entering the physical chemistry teaching laboratory. It was a large room with benches arrayed in parallel rows with wooden stools in front of them. At my place, on the bench, was set out an experiment to measure electrode potentials. Polished wooden potentiometers, galvanometers, and a large battery, and pieces of wire, beakers, etc. were all there. My task was to find the potential as measured against a calomel electrode of various solutions of sodium chloride. There was also on the bench a wash bottle half filled with distilled water. When I picked it up a wonderful change occurred. The clear water suddenly filled with lace-like crystals of ice. So cold was the laboratory that the water was well below its freezing point, but as a super-cooled liquid. The moment I disturbed the water by lifting the wash bottle it froze. Although clothed only in trousers, shirt, vest and jacket, I cannot remember feeling cold myself at that time, nor did I feel cold when sitting for a one-hour lecture shortly afterwards on the same morning. Feeling cold is a penalty of ageing.

I registered as a conscientious objector at the Labour Exchange in Manchester. It was an uneasy experience, waiting in the queue of men enlisting and having to say, ‘I want to register as a conscientious objector.’ I half expected shouts of scorn or accusations of cowardice from the men around me. It did not happen. The clerk merely said, ‘Go to counter No. 10 and they will deal with you.’ I went to counter No. 10 and was asked courteously to take a seat while they took down what were in those days called one’s particulars: age, qualifications, schooling, and so on. The clerk said, ‘You know, do you, that as a registered full-time student in the sciences you do not have to register here.’ I did know, but I wanted to go through with it. I wanted to feel committed; I had come too far to duck out now. When I explained this the clerk said: ‘Very well, you will receive a summons to appear
before a tribunal within a few months.’ The Society of Friends ran a school for conscientious objectors, which trained them to cope with the problems raised by our odd status in wartime England. They held mock tribunals at which we faced questions from a panel of senior Quakers acting as judges. The questions were those actually asked at the real tribunal.

My summons came early in 1940. I was to appear before the
tribunal
, consisting of three judges, in March, but first I must make a written statement of about a thousand words on why I was a CO. This I had to post to the tribunal and read it to them when I appeared there. All that I can recall of this statement is the start, which went: ‘A lifelong association with the Society of Friends has led me to believe that war is evil.’ The Chairman of the tribunal asked me why I was not a Quaker. I replied, ‘I intend to become one after the tribunal, whatever its conclusion.’ It seemed to me improper to present myself before them as a Friend, since Quakers were often exempted as a matter of course. They asked me other questions, mainly, it seemed, to discover how long I had held pacifist beliefs. When it became clear that they were longstanding, and that I had not joined the Cadet Corps at my school on conscientious grounds, they conferred amongst themselves and the senior judge looked straight at me and said, ‘We have decided to grant you an unconditional exemption from military service. We feel that we can rely on you to follow your conscience and do what is right.’ Oddly, he added finally, ‘We think you should make some kind of gesture, such as volunteering as a blood donor, but this we do not ask as a condition of your exemption. We leave it to you.’ I was much moved and thankful. Their conclusion placed me in deep debt to my country. It was then truly civilized. They had shown trust in me in the most remarkable way. I went to the Royal Infirmary to enrol as a blood donor, but after tests, the young doctor came back to tell me that I had a blood group not suitable for donation.

Soon after my public appearance before the tribunal, I asked the quarterly meeting of the Quakers in Manchester if they would accept me as a Friend. They gave me the two
Books
of
Discipline
to read, which recount the experiences of the Quakers since their formation in the 17
^th
century. A month or so passed and two Manchester Friends asked me to come to the Meeting House for, as they put it, a talk. They were young northerners of that quiet respectable kind that is common in north Lancashire. They first asked me if I had ever had a religious experience. I answered no, thinking probably rightly in their
context, that they meant something transcendental such as that so well described by Bishop Montefiore in his autobiography,
Oh
God,
What
Next?
Here he movingly tells how, as a schoolboy at Rugby, he saw in his room an appearance of Jesus who said ‘Follow me’. This overwhelming event changed and coloured his life from then on. For me, life had always been firmly grounded and most solid in its reality. Looking back, though, I wonder, in my own context, if the whole of life is in certain ways a religious experience. The world of good human relationships can be so delightful that the concept of Heaven seems to imply a sensory overload. Sunlight dappling the fallen leaves of a wood or glinting on the pebbles of a stream is beautiful, but to look at the sun itself is blinding.

The two Friends did not seem put out by my saying no to their enquiry about a religious experience. They asked me about my
philosophy
, which was that of a Fabian socialist. They then moved on to what was their principal concern: was I merely asking to become a Friend because of my conscientious objection? Again, I replied no, thinking of my childhood and the benign influence of the Street family in Brixton. They then told me what I had known but had never fully understood: that each Friend was in truth a minister of religion, and that this was both a distinction and a burden. Was I ready to take it on? I asked if this meant that I should now become
evangelical
on behalf of the Society of Friends. Oh no, they said, not unless that is your calling. What you must do is always to obey your
conscience
, that still small voice within. I then realized that the God of the Quakers was part of the model Universe that exists in our minds. This was something that at that time did not clash with my true vocation as a scientist. Sometime later, they accepted me as a Friend.

My inquisitors were right to be concerned about the pressures of wartime England on my mind. I doubt, if peace had continued, that I would have taken so serious a step as to become a Quaker. Only those who lived through those years of the Second World War in England can understand how intense, how certain, and how fulfilling was the tribal acceptance that we were one nation and engaged in a just war. We knew that it was not a war of conquest in any sense, but one for justice. There was something in such a
Weltanschauung
that left no place for conscientious objectors. All I had left was a youthful fantasy of becoming a Quaker martyr. I had for years schooled myself to cope with the thought of the cruelties, the ignominy experienced by COs in the First World War, and I was certain it would be repeated. At the
very least, I would be imprisoned or have to serve as a stretcher-bearer under battle conditions. It was wholly unnerving at age twenty to receive respect, especially from old soldiers, as someone of principle. It was hard to be reminded daily that everything, from the food I ate, to my clothes and books, were dearly bought with the lives of brave sailors and merchant seamen. It was impossible not to share the pride of the nation in the brave young pilots of the Battle of Britain.