Homage to Gaia (12 page)

The visit to my Orpington home of a New Zealand relative made easy my return to Manchester. He was a Major in the army and he came in a Land Rover driven by a Maori driver for a brief visit to my mother and father. He broke the journey between his base in Kent and another in Hertfordshire and was able to take me to Mitcham to keep my appointment with the lorry driver. It meant only the slightest detour and, on the way back through London we saw more damage from the bombing, but remarkably the greater part of the city seemed as usual. A journey through Docklands at that time would probably have revealed a different scene. We encountered a few streets closed
by signs saying ‘unexploded bomb’ and it was a wonderful excitement to have my New Zealand relative, the Major, override the police and just drive past whatever was waiting to explode. The Army delivered me to my friend the lorry driver and we set off on the tedious journey back to Manchester.

The teaching lab for third year students was a long room with teak benches arranged in parallel rows. Each bench was about
twenty-five
-feet long and split longitudinally by a central wooden wall with shelves for reagent bottles. There were, of course, Bunsen burners, without which no lab seemed complete. But new to me was steam heat with taps to the steam supply at every student’s position. Around the walls were fume cupboards—glass chambers in which we did
experiments
that produced noxious or toxic fumes. At each student’s bench, there were small sinks with a swan-necked tap. These taps fed cold water to the condensers—those elegant blown-glass constructions that are so much a part of organic chemistry. Most of the year’s work was to analyse the composition of mixtures made up from three different organic compounds, and there were ten or more of these mixtures to analyse. I thought them a fascinating puzzle and soon found that the first step was to separate the mixture into discernible parts. We could distil it and so separate it into portions that distilled at different temperatures and put these aside for identification. We could mix it with water or some other solvents to see if it separated into two layers. We could add acid or alkali to see if something precipitated. When the mixture was finally separated into three single substances these had to be identified by measuring their boiling or melting points and then checked against a table of melting and boiling temperatures. Sometimes it was necessary to go further and characterize the
compounds
isolated by making special compounds from them. Thus, if we suspected that a ketone or an aldehyde had been isolated, we used the reagent 2, 4 dinitrophenylhydrazine to make the hydrazone, which was usually fine red or orange crystals. The melting point of these crystals helped to identify the ketone from which it had originated. There was a list of the melting points of the dinitrophenyl hydrazones and other compounds on the instructor’s desk at the end of the lab. It was a delightful and challenging way to stretch the student’s mind and analytical skills. Here again my apprenticeship at Humphrey Desmond Murray’s laboratory came to my aid. I knew the smells and appearances of an amazing range of organic chemicals. We started the course with easily separated mixtures, such as acetone, butyl acetate and methylene
dichloride. We moved on to more difficult mixtures, such as picoline, xylene and acetophenone. Then finally to the stumper: a mixture of cyclohexene, cyclohexane, and benzene, all of which were
hydrocarbons
and all of which boiled at the same temperature and therefore could not be separated by distillation.

Knowing the strangely evocative smell of picoline and the
penetrating
odour of cyclohexene, I was usually ahead of my fellow students. Instead of wasting a futile week trying to separate a mixture by distillation, something impossible to do, I was busy removing such compounds as cyclohexene by its reaction with bromine and then identifying the dibromocyclohexane. I was through the entire
collection
of mixtures intended to keep us occupied until the Spring of 1941 by Christmas 1940.

The months from May 1940 until January 1941 spent in Mary’s company taught me more than a lifetime at a university could have done. My dear, myopic, politically conscious mother had looked after me in my adolescence with all the intensity of a Jewish mother. With the very best of intentions, she had provided me with little room to grow. I think I was the last boy of my year in 1936 to stop wearing short-length trousers. I was oblivious that I cut an absurd figure. I just liked the freedom that shorts gave for walking, and my mother never noticed. My love for Mary made me a part of the Delahunty family. The Delahuntys were a wondrously warm and human family and soon, with subtle suggestions, made up for the lost and lonely years of
adolescence
. Mary’s uncle, Ted Doran, was a drama critic for the Manchester
Guardian,
as it then was. He would sometimes have a pair of free tickets for the better seats in the opera house. We lived a life that seemed almost sybaritic in the otherwise utterly grim environment of wartime Manchester. We saved enough for the occasional night out at the Squirrel Restaurant in Manchester, where the standard of food supplied, at a price, was far above that of the rations. Manchester was, until Christmas 1940, spared most of the bombing. London and Liverpool were the prime targets of the German bombers, but a few bombs did fall on Manchester and to these, I am eternally grateful. They gave me the reason and excuse to stay the night at Mary’s flat, and soon I gave up my digs in Fallowfield. I had never been at any time in my life the kind of male who wished to play the field. I was in love with Mary Delahunty and I wanted to marry as soon as we could. I knew that I would have to wait until I had my degree and the means to keep her. In those days, students were never married. They rarely ever lived
together as lovers, but in 1940 bombs arriving at random from the sky were a fine reminder that life can be short and should be lived now, not postponed and taken later like a pension.

So much was I learning in those days about life, about love, about decent human relationships, that there was no place in my mind for the excellent chemistry that was being taught at the university. The final year at Manchester was mainly about the research program that Professor Todd had made famous. The chemistry was the nucleoside bases. These are the links of the molecular chain that is DNA—that wondrous double helix and the living program of all organisms. Of course, ten more years were to pass before Crick and Watson
discovered
the nature of DNA itself, but Todd and his colleagues were setting the scene so that when it came the discovery was inevitable. Quite rightly, Todd received the Nobel Prize for this work. Yet, here was I, with this wonderful opportunity to learn from such a master, so bemused with Mary and her family and all they had to teach me that I turned aside from the best organic chemistry in the world.

There was more to it than this. My love for science was all
embracing
. I had always been repelled by intense specialization, such as was the nature of nucleoside chemistry. I did no more than commit to memory just enough of it to ensure that I got some sort of degree. As a subsidiary subject, I attended bacteriology classes at the Manchester Infirmary. This I found entrancing and I never missed a single lecture or practical session. Perhaps it was the background of fear when handling live tubercle bacilli or typhoid organisms that kept me
interested
, in addition to the discipline of sterile working that has to be learned until it becomes instinctive. It all seemed so much more real to me than the intricacies of a chemistry that had no ‘hands-on’ content. I did not know it then, but the bacteriology I learnt was to be an important part of the biology that helped me in the quest for Gaia twenty or more years later.

The idyllic time with Mary ended in early 1941. Mary had gone to stay with a strange couple called the Stormont Murrays, who lived near High Wycombe. The sculptor, Eric Gill, who lived at Piggots, just near there, had entranced her. She had taken to me somewhat less intensely than I to her and on the rebound from a betrayal by a previous lover. He was an architect at the University Department of Architecture, where she had worked as a secretary. I think the last straw that severed our relationship was an encounter with my mother in a tearoom at a London railway station. Mary told me later that on
her way to meet her she bought a posy of violets as a gift. My mother’s response to this warm gesture was not pleasure but complaint—they were she said, a waste of money. This was followed by a lecture on the evils of Catholicism, and the statement that her boy was not to have his career blasted by an early marriage and a string of children. It must have been an awful tea. Nell Lovelock was a formidable woman and utterly set in what she knew was right, or thought was right. Soon after, I received the letter from Mary that was to close our affair. I was devastated for quite a while in spite of the support I received from the Delahuntys, especially from Mary’s mother. By spring 1941 the need to prepare and organize an Easter holiday walk in the Lake District took my mind off my troubles. I had offered to escort a party of students belonging to the Ambrose Barlow Catholic Society. We planned to stay at youth hostels. Among the students was a Delahunty relative, Moya Kearney, who knew of the break between Mary and me and was warm, sympathetic, and kind. The last I saw of Mary, until we met again forty-five years later, was in July 1941, just after I had learned that I had passed my degree examination, but only as a bottom second. On that day, we spent a heavenly time bicycling from her mother’s house in Moss Side to the village of Delph, near Oldham, where her Aunt, Ciss Seed, had a cottage. I can still recall that last kiss in the warm sunshine outside the smoke-dark brick of the bank house where the family lived on the corner of the road in Moss Side.

The books read at my family home at Orpington tended to be political: Gollancz’s famous Left Book Club made up many of them, with their characteristic yellow jackets and black print which stood out like grounded wasps on our bookshelves. I was well versed in the socialist litany and swallowed without qualm books like Edgar Snow’s
Long
March
and, of course, anything good about the Soviet Union. Even the novels at home tended to be political, like Cronin’s famous book,
The
Citadel.
It was only after working for several years for the Medical Research Council, target of much of Cronin’s
diatribe
, that I realized that things were not so simple as portrayed in his book. Shaw was my mother’s bible and prayer book combined. My grandmother happily was less intellectual. She would walk at least twice a week the mile or so downhill towards Orpington High Street to visit the Penny Library. She borrowed what she called her ‘little bit of love’, what she read were the Mills and Boon books of her day. The Delahuntys gave me the other side of literature, not the political other side but the reading for pleasure rather than for instruction. Mary
opened my mind with Yeats and such craftsmen of literature as CE Montague, and such light-hearted books as the Penguin
Weekend
Book
and
Cold
Comfort
Farm
by Stella Gibbons. I think that, by taking in this and missing much of Todd’s expertise in the specialist branch of chemistry, I lost little. So few scientists are able to express their science in a readable and interesting way, and I owe the
Delahuntys
a debt for opening my mind to literature. More than this was the way that they gently plucked away the prickles and thorns of a childhood in the wild.

One Sunday morning Mary’s mother, Helen, insisted on coming with me to the Friends Meeting House. Instead of walking, as was my usual way, we took the tram to the centre of Manchester. The Meeting House was an imposing building with a large central hall, containing pews arranged in a square several rows deep. The Manchester Friends were good speakers and when moved by their internal voice of
conscience
would rise and give forth, sometimes for as long as twenty minutes, an amazingly coherent and relevant comment on some contemporary affair. I was envious of their ability to speak so well and was never able to get up and contribute myself. It was not until many years later that I discovered that such extemporary speaking needs a lot of prior preparation. After the meeting Mrs Delahunty was grateful and revealed how she had always wanted to experience a religious service other than in a Catholic church. She expressed the wish that her own priest would talk even half as much on interesting topics as those that she had just heard. It was not fair, though, to compare the capacity to entertain of the elite of the Society of Friends in Manchester with that of a humble parish priest.

In 1941 Mary’s mother asked me what might happen now that Germany was at war with the Soviet Union. I replied, ‘It is wonderful news for us. There will be a lot less bombing, as they will need their planes for the Russian campaign. War with Russia defeated Napoleon; perhaps it will be Hitler’s ending also.’

I have wondered how I passed my degree examination and, still more, why Professor Todd should have recommended me for employment at the National Institute for Medical Research. It was an institute run by his father-in-law, Sir Henry Dale, at that time President of the Royal Society, and one of the most distinguished labs in the country. Did he see in me a good chemist who had done poorly in examinations because of privations or did he see me as a superb technician? Professor Todd was the best of professors—an
outstanding, active scientist, yet one who cared for his students. He would appear suddenly in the teaching lab and move around the benches like the hospital consultant visiting the beds of his patients. When he came to me, our conversation was never about chemistry, always about politics or the war. I remember him coming in one morning carrying a frown of considerable disapproval on his face. He towered above me. ‘Lovelock,’ he said, ‘is it true that you’re a conscientious objector?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m a Quaker.’ His prepared lecture, no doubt intended to bring me to my senses, crashed before it had even flown. I think he saw conscientious objectors as the cowardly who used a legal loophole to escape fighting for their country. But in his mind also was a belief that Quakers were brave dissidents who had odd views but which were acceptable and civilized. The conversation began again, Todd now in his lively role trying to flesh out the curiosity, ‘What do Quakers really think?’ asked he. Students rarely ever realize that such encounters are the real examinations. Todd had little respect for set examinations and said that he would not ask questions at the examination on anything in his class lectures. I think he saw the degree examinations as a mere formality. My rapid passage through the maze of set analyses may not have passed unnoticed.