Homage to Gaia (5 page)

You will by now have gathered that I was neither a perfect pupil nor happy to be at school. In fact, I hated it so much that every day was a kind of ordeal. If, as often happened in the winter, the filthy coal smoke that polluted the Brixton air made me ill, it was a vast relief. I could stay at home in bed with my beloved books, freed by bronchitis or pneumonia from the tyranny of school. Because of illness, I was a weedy child and should have been the target of bullies, the more usual reason to dislike school. I was blessed by having a wonderful group of fellow sufferers as my schoolmates. To them, I was the ‘mad scientist’, good when needed for a wheeze that would confound our common enemy, the masters.

Let me tell you briefly of one small battle in our long war. A master, who taught French so badly that I could recall hardly a word of it, had the nickname ‘Sappho’. This was not because he was inclined, like others among the staff, to a feeble fumbling of young boys that aimed at, but never reached, its target of pederasty. No, we called him ‘Sappho’ because it was in his hour that pubescent boys explored their bodies in an orgy of mutual masturbation. Much is made of the troubled minds of young girls of those repressed times, of their panic when they reached the menarche and first experienced bleeding from their vaginas. I cannot recall ever having heard any public comment on the similar puzzlement of boys when masturbation produced a sticky liquid product. For most of them, the 1930s were still a time when masturbation was a mortal sin, not something to mention to parents or indeed any adult. It was not so surprising that in the warm community of their peers they explored their bodies and discussed such things. As far as I know, little of this intimacy led to
homosexuality
; those of that inclination seemed to pair up early on and avoid the general scrimmage in Sappho’s room. We had nothing against
Sappho
: he rarely punished and was so short-sighted that we could get away with anything. Perversely, and exhibiting the bad side of the group, we used him as an easy target and once played a cruel joke on him. In December, just before term ended, the classroom was
decorated
with tinsel, paper bells, and the paraphernalia of Christmas; and above the master’s desk were two balloons. One of us had the idea
of adding ink to one of these balloons, arranging a small leak in it, and replacing it over the desk just before Sappho entered the room. He swept in like an elderly bat, trailing his black academic gown like a pair of crumpled wings. He must have thought the class unusually quiet as he walked to his desk, sat down, and opened his notes for the day’s lesson in French verbs. After a minute or so, his hand moved to his bald head as he felt something impinge on it. He gazed dimly at the class but all seemed well. Then his hand rose again, and he felt the wetness of the ink, and rubbed it around first his head and then his face. There was an explosion of laughter from the boys; we could contain ourselves no longer. We laughed so much that it hurt. Sappho tried in his way to keep order, but kept wiping more and more ink onto his face, growing ever more like a badly made-up minstrel. Aroused by the noise the headmaster entered and brought order; I cannot remember the sequel and the punishments we received, except that they were collective, and the boys responsible were not betrayed.

Although a loner by nature, I realized in adolescence and earlier the importance of my peer group. What is rarely discussed is how much good comes from it. In the grimly custodial environment of the school, the warmth and companionship of my friends went far to make life tolerable. Much more than this, a large part of the
knowledge
I gained in school years came from interaction with my peers. In spite of its location in Brixton, the pupils of the Strand School were an elitist bunch. They were almost all of them selected by examination, which in those days let through no more than a few per cent. I well recall four of us discussing, at about age thirteen, particle accelerators. We were, like most boys, fascinated by speed and power, and the idea of accelerating charged atoms to near the speed of light was, at the time, exciting. We knew about Cockcroft and Walton’s famous experiment with an early linear accelerator—we had seen the
apparatus
in the Science Museum. It occurred to us that the particles would go faster if they went round a racetrack and were given a push on each rotation. In the course of an hour’s discussion, we arrived at a rough design for a powerful accelerator driven by radio frequency energy. We knew nothing then of the Californian physicist Lawrence’s now famous invention, the cyclotron. Of course, our invention, although independently made, was a bare skeleton of an idea and we had no means to make it in real life. Nevertheless, the recollection illustrates the power of children in a small group to learn heuristically.

I do believe that a good school or university is one blessed with good students. The teachers are less important. At the best
universities
, the students rarely see their professors because, by the time a professor takes a Chair at an elite university, his time is often
committed
for years ahead in the committee rooms of public service and the university administration. It does not matter because the students themselves set the pace and directly, or indirectly, teach each other; where the tutorial system is used, the meeting between student and tutor can be like that between apprentice and master.

The idea that there is no diversity among human minds is absurd. We vary in many ways and each of us needs teaching in a way that allows our potential to develop. The notion that all should be taught together since we are born equal is as foolish as decreeing that we can make do with only one size of clothing. It is patronizing to assume that those who fail in academic subjects are less able than the skilled passers of examinations. I suspect that many graduates with excellent degrees are barely able to do anything other than pass examinations. The sculptor Eric Gill often quoted Ananda Coomaraswamy: ‘the artist is not a special sort of man but that every man is a special sort of artist’. If we expand this thought to include women and other creative professions, we see that every child has a potential. It could provide a better prescription for our children’s upbringing.

The myth that egalitarian schools will break class barriers is dear to liberal humanists, but humans vary widely in their capacity and ability and it is unkind to treat them as if they were all the same. I think that the breaking of class barriers is less important than giving children the chance to develop their innate capacity. If we teach all children equally, we lessen this chance, whatever it may be. Each of us was once an egg in which the genes of our parents merged. Before and after conception our genetic composition is shuffled so that we are different from our parents. We are each of us at birth dealt a new hand and most assuredly, we are not born equal. Some are born with a hand full of aces and kings and others nothing but deuces. Rightly, we admire most the player who can win or can make a good defence from a poor hand. We admire him much more than the one who merely cashes in the gifts that the dealer dealt.

In spite of hating school, I was determined to become a scientist, whatever it took. The prospect of six more years at the Brixton school, followed perhaps by several at university, was too awful to
contemplate
at twelve years old, so I lived each day as it came. I knew that
I would have to soldier on for years until I possessed that small piece of paper listing me as a Bachelor of Science. Without it, I could never hope to be in charge of an experiment in a laboratory. To make this time of imprisonment bearable I decided that while society required me to submit daily to school it had no rights over my evenings and weekends. This meant refusing to do homework or to attend
Saturday
sports—a rebellion that I sustained throughout all my years at school.

None of this endeared me to my masters. The possession of a retentive memory and an ability to listen enabled me to do well in examinations in spite of never doing homework. This did not work with mathematics or languages where mere memory is not enough but I was too young then to realize what a loss this would be. They punished me repeatedly by caning or by making me write one
hundred
or more times some banal sentence. When they saw that
punishment
would not work, they left me alone, and things were not so bad from about fourteen years old onwards.

I learnt most of my science from books borrowed from the Brixton Library and from discussing their contents with my friends. My first visit there was at about eight years old and I went with my mother, to whom books were at least half of life. On fine days, we walked from our shop on Brixton Hill the mile to the library in the centre of Brixton, and when wet we took the tram. At first, I took home novels, mostly science fiction, by authors like Jules Verne, Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells, but soon I found my way to the basement where the science textbooks were stored. I can vividly recall first reading Wade’s
Organic
Chemistry.
In those days, long before the Health and Safety bureaucracy had forbidden the handling of chemicals, chemistry had soul. The old chemists wrote poetically about mobile refractile liquids and compared them to diamonds in motion. If ever you have held a small round flask half-full of diodomethane and shaken it in the light, you will understand. Organic chemistry, as it then was, fascinated me with the elegance of its blown glass apparatus and the powerful odours of the compounds distilling within them. There were
substances
with strange yet evocative odours, such as anisole (
methoxybenzene
), or awful but curious odours, like pyridine. I wonder if students and schoolchildren now even see sealed bottles of these wonderful substances; such is the unreasoning fear of chemicals. We chemists do occasionally die because of our love of chemicals, but on average, according to the statistics of the Royal Society of Chemistry,
we live longer than most other professionals do. Is it right to deny children the real pleasure of hands-on experience because of some remote and trivial risk?

I learnt physics, like chemistry, from the books of the Brixton Library. Among them, Jeans’s
Astronomy
and
Cosmology
and Soddy’s
The
Interpretation
of
Radium.
On Christmas 1928 I received a ‘
hobbies
annual’ and in it were the plans and instructions for building a simple short-wave radio receiver. The author claimed it was sensitive enough to receive broadcasts from Australia. My aunt Kit had married into the Leakey family and we spent some of Christmas 1928 at the house of Papa Leakey, the grandfather of my cousin Felix. The old man was famous as an early Fabian socialist and was a regular user of the airlines in his travels around Europe to promote the use of Esperanto. I was amazed to receive his full attention when I told him about this radio receiver. I suppose he saw it as a means for making the world speak one language, Esperanto. His
encouragement
lingered, and several years later I sold my stamp collection and used the proceeds, about ten shillings, to buy the components for this radio. I made it and was entranced to hear on first try an American station in Pittsburgh. Soon I heard Moscow, which even then seemed to be shouting, with megawatts of power, its communist faith from the highest tower of the Kremlin. There were few electronic
components
on sale in those days and I had to make much of the radio from raw materials. I wound the coils by hand on jam jars and the chokes, that separated the sound from the radio frequencies, on pencils. This experience with electronics was to serve me well later when I came to make my own instruments.

The physics taught in school was, by comparison, unrelievedly dull, almost as if intended to repel. I remember one exercise in physics that typified the school’s inability to inspire even receptive minds. It was the reading of the Fortin Barometer. Most of us just tap the glass of an aneroid barometer to see if the pressure is increasing for fine weather or decreasing as heralds rain and wind, but to read a proper physicist’s barometer is much more complicated. The Fortin Barometer
measures
air pressures in the classical way—by observing the height of a column of mercury when the pressure of the atmosphere balances it. It is a vertical glass tube, closed at the top and filled with liquid mercury, and the bottom rests in a cup of mercury, open to the air. The height of the tube is about eighty centimetres and chosen to be longer than seventy-six centimetres of mercury, the weight of a
normal atmospheric column. This corresponds to an air pressure of about fifteen pounds per square inch, or two kilograms per square cm for the metricated. The upper part of the glass tube above the
mercury
column is a vacuum but for the small amount of mercury vapour. As the air pressure changes, so the mercury column rises or falls. When it rises, it is often for fine weather, and when it falls for foul. We use mercury as the liquid to fill the barometer because it is so dense. You could make a water barometer but you would need a thirty-foot tube, which is not so convenient.

The physics so far could have been interesting to a receptive
twelve-year
-old but not in the way it was taught. Academic scientists who drew up the school syllabus had long forgotten their childhood and wanted physics taught as an exact science. They wanted us to
understand
the errors inherent in the barometer that would prevent us from measuring the true pressure. We had to allow for the fact that the density of mercury changes with temperature, and that the length of the metal scale used to measure the height of the column also changes with temperature and in a different way from the mercury itself. We also had to allow for the pressure of mercury vapour above the liquid mercury, and take into account the possible error that came from the fact that the top and bottom of a column of mercury is round, not flat. We made these corrections to the observed height of the mercury column laboriously by pen-and-paper arithmetic. Now this would be fine stuff for an apprentice physicist who really needed to know the air pressure when he made a crucial and interesting experiment. To a twelve-year-old it seemed remote and absurd, especially since it took an hour to calculate the pressure, during which time it would have changed.