Authors: James Lovelock
The school, like many today, had little trust in tests or
examinations
, and preferred teachers’ assessments of a pupil’s abilities. They ignored my scholarship success and punished me for my cheek by making me repeat the previous year’s work, and in the lowest stream. The seventy-five boys of each year were divided into three streams: Upper, A, and B. Lovelock, the freak, was placed in the B stream. My life might have been a dismal one if, like today, my future had
depended on teachers’ assessments alone. Examinations taken
anonymously
gave me my chance.
There were a few wonderful teachers like Ginger Warren, a bearded man with ginger hair, who looked like George Bernard Shaw, and was stern. He was strong, just, and taught so well that in one term under his tuition I learnt more French than in three years under the flabby, sadistic Froggy Adair. There was also Harold Toms, the chemistry teacher, and the only one at the school with a PhD. His lessons were my refuge. He taught so well that the Strand School excelled itself in Firsts in the external examinations in chemistry. The masters at the Strand School included too many incompetents and these misguided men tried hard to diminish me. A favourite trick was to make me stand before the class while they, like prosecuting lawyers, harangued me on my pacifism or socialism, as if these were crimes and I were a felon. If they expected that the boys, my peers, would then visit me with their own bigotry, they were wrong. Their pettiness merely enhanced my reputation as the mad scientist, who had eccentric views as well. What matters to boys, pre- and post-adolescent, is courage. An ability to fight back without too much fuss was all that I needed to have their support.
In addition to air pollution, Brixton offered another pollution: its local accent. Playing with the local children may have made me street-wise but at the cost of a voice that would have condemned me to a working-class life in those intensely class-conscious times. My Pygmalion was Uncle Hugo Leakey, and when I first stayed with Kit and Hugo at their Welwyn Garden City home, Hugo decided to eliminate from my speech the glottal stop, the dropped h, and the whining cockney vowels. Every morning, immediately on waking, I had to practise vowel sounds or sentences like ‘It’s not the hunting that hurts the horses’ hoofs but the hammer hammer hammer on the hard high road’, and then repeat them at breakfast. He was a
professional
and kept this training going until I had an accent that, although still not upper-middle-class would fool many listeners. Things change and in England now a down-market accent is sought after, but I am deeply grateful to my uncle for his unstinting effort to change mine. They would never have chosen me in 1941 for the post of junior scientist at the National Institute for Medical Research had I spoken as a native South Londoner.
The Leakeys expanded my horizons in other important ways. They gave me the speech and mannerisms of the avant-garde political
far-Left
,
which was so popular at that time. Something very different from my mother’s old Labour views and antithetical to my father’s natural Toryism. I soon imbibed the Marxist jargon and was, in a way, dialectically materialized. The evangelical communists, with their yellow book bibles from Gollancz’s Left Book Club, were all around me, and they were as certain in their beliefs as were the Catholics I was soon to meet at university. Everyone of the Leakey crowd was sure that they were right. Soon the intense tribal conflict of the Spanish Civil War was to engulf them all: many as participants on the
Republican
side; many like me, supporters too young to join in. Strangely, the intensity of feeling among the Left over the civil war in Spain far exceeded their passions for the fight against Nazism during the
Second
World War. The Spanish war was an affair of the heart as well as the mind, and a political commitment. The Second World War seemed more to be a necessary but unfortunate act, more for principle than for passionate conviction. Also, of course, the Second World War was, in a way, an English war, and the Left, as part of their
internationalism
, were not enthused by England as such, or even the United Kingdom.
I have often wondered if there is a second awakening like that of puberty. At thirteen years, gender suddenly becomes invested with meaning. At somewhere around fifteen, in a similar way, politics and tribal matters suddenly reveal their colours. That is how it was for me. I would avidly absorb the
News
Chronicle,
the liberal Left paper that the family favoured at Orpington. The Old Labour paper that they might have bought, the
Daily
Herald,
was so dull that we all found it much too stodgy. Republican success in Spain lit up my day, and their frequent reverses depressed me. The hopelessness of the Republican cause did nothing for my adolescent angst.
The Leakeys were not merely political, they were also vegetarian and sexually enlightened, or at least in that prudish era they seemed so. The March girls, my mother included, were all first-rate cooks. Kit’s vegetarian food was quite delicious, something very rare in my experience. I always looked forward to my next visit to Welwyn and drooled over the thought of her mock steak-and-kidney pie. The Leakey’s art deco house had an upper storey like a ship, with a wide wall enclosing a balcony surrounding the main bedrooms. Above that, there was a flat roof for sunbathing. Here the whole family, any guests, and me included, sunbathed naked. It rapidly cured me of any prudery about my body. Nakedness in the warm sunny air
became a joy and a freedom. Oddly, in spite of being over-sexed, as are most adolescent boys, naked girls were not arousing just to look at. This was not true of the act of undressing, and I remember trying to hide my erect and over-eager phallus by turning to the wall when I had watched a thoughtless striptease. This was a rare event: it was a rule that only bodies unclothed could use the sunbathing terrace. I feel sorry for the many whose acts of love have been marred by fears about their bodies. The Leakeys’ ad hoc finishing school was the best of my educations.
Hugo had an amazing brother, Basil, who lived in three houses in a wood near Stevenage. One house had bedrooms on the second floor, the ground floor being a barn for gardening tools. Another house had the kitchen, and a third, the living quarters, and paved paths
connected
all these houses. Basil was a professional magician, part of the company called Maskelyne and Devant. I often wondered later if JBS Haldane’s book,
My
Friend,
Mr
Leakey,
which was about a magician, had Basil as its exemplar.
Felix was Kit and Hugo’s only child, and was for me like a younger brother. We would spend hours together exploring the fine
countryside
of those days around Welwyn Garden City on our bicycles. We even made a trip together to Cornwall in 1935, travelling down the West Coast from Port Isaac to St Agnes and on round by St Ives to Land’s End. We returned past the Lizard to Plymouth, Dartmoor, and home by train from Exeter.
When younger, Kit and Hugo were away in Argentina, where they had a bee and apple farm at Bahia Blanca. During their absence I would go, for school breaks, to Aunt Florrie at Hitchin. John Leete, her husband, was a handsome man who resembled the actor, Wilfrid Hyde-White. He had a firm and gentle disposition. He, together with his brother, Claude, owned Hitchin’s main tailor’s shop. It was a comfortable middle-class Tory home, a complete contrast to the Leakeys and to the shop in Brixton. John and Flo’s great passion in life was golf. They were both quite good at it and had, at one time or another, been county champions. Life for them seemed to revolve around bridge tournaments and playing at the Letchworth Golf Club. Their friends were mainly other businessmen and their wives from Hitchin. In many ways, it represented the world my mother hated and envied most passionately. She keenly felt the injustice of her and Tom’s endless struggle to keep a sinking shop afloat. The affluence of Uncle John’s shop, where money flowed in apparently effortlessly
was, she felt, so unfair. All that was tempered by a strong devotion and loyalty to her sister, and the recognition that John and Flo were kind and generous. In the convoluted class hierarchy of England, being in trade, and therefore people of little consequence, damned us both. Strangely, the picture shop occupied a slightly higher place in that category of snobbery than did the wealthier tailor’s. Somehow, the association with art and artists made it less bourgeois. I was in grave danger, exposed to so many worlds ranging from my father’s
working-class
friends to the upper-middle-class Leakeys, of evolving into a feeble and flabby liberal—someone without passion, who could see every point of view and yet was unable to decide what was right or wrong, someone like Judas, who betrayed from lack of commitment, not from wilful error. Fortunately, my commitment to science and the unshakeable quest to become a practising scientist kept me from this kind of indecision.
The Leetes had one daughter, Margaret, a few years younger than me. It was good to have a young girl as a cousin. It helped offset the isolation of our one-child families. A special attraction of my Hitchin visits was the Vincent family. Mr Vincent was the manager of
Hitchin’s
only department store, and a friend of John’s. Margaret and I were invited to a children’s party at the Vincents when about twelve or thirteen. The Vincents had two daughters, Jean and Mary, and two sons. I must have behaved well at the party for they invited me on many occasions afterwards. They lived in a fine detached villa, two blocks from Nun’s Close. One spring day in 1932 Mrs Vincent, a handsome woman whose affectionate nature reminded me of my grandmother, took her children and me on an expedition to Pirton Woods to pick primroses. I remember a heavenly sunny day and larking about with the girls—they were both older than I was—and we played games that involved plenty of contact. Suddenly they were no longer just children, and gender ceased from then on to be an abstract concept. Jean was a striking girl, with red hair and a pale freckled skin, and she was the one who enlivened my incoherent fantasies for at least a year, and then it was the more mature Mary, plainer but somehow more feminine, who became the girl of my dreams. Apart from these fantasies over Jean and Mary, I was celibate until a student at Manchester University. It seems incredible now, but celibacy was almost normal among adolescents in the 1930s. It was not, as thought by those who do not understand the English, from lack of lust, for I had that in abundance. It was a consequence of a
solitary existence as a lone child, and low self-esteem. As schoolboys we wore short trousers and were in uniform up to nearly sixteen years, and we were hardly attractive. I could not believe that any female would have me, and thinking back to the child I was then, I was probably right. Unconsciously I dressed to fulfil this prophecy—round spectacles shielding myopic eyes, scuffed shoes, and
knee-length
shorts. Perhaps the sheer frustration of life in those times fuelled my fantasies about life as a scientist, and perhaps it was just as well, because when that friendly city, Manchester, gave me my first taste of real love, I was transported and, for a few years, science took second place.
To modern adolescents, this tame distant kind of relationship will seem quaint but in those days, the restraints of custom were so strong that our urges to explore each other’s bodies stayed firmly theoretical. Practical sex was definitely out of bounds, and just as well, for other than hard-to-get French letters, there was nothing to prevent
pregnancy
. Any suggestion that we were timid or undersexed at that time is wrong. Our instincts are constant and do not vary; only custom changes. What a different adolescence I might have had if the Pill had been around in those days like now.
Those wonderful aunts of mine are long dead and I miss them. I was to see another one of them for the first time in 1975, Aunt Ann, who had married a New Zealander, Howard Mason, and went there with him after the First World War. She died in 1998 aged 101. I spent a week in Wellington visiting her in 1975. She was of the same stock as the other aunts and I realized how good it would have been to go there as a child. My New Zealand cousins were a lively three. Bruce, the eldest, distinguished himself as a playwright, so much so that over ten years after his death, his face looked out at me from the air-mail stamp from New Zealand. It was on a letter from his widow Diana. Lorna was the youngest cousin and still lives in New Zealand. Tim, the middle one, had moved to South Africa. I never saw him before he died. I saw little of my uncle Frank until we moved to Kent in the mid 1930s; he was away in Argentina with the Leakeys for some of the time and working in London for the rest of it.
Grandma March was right to be proud of the successes of her daughters. Sadly, they and their husbands did not much welcome long visits from Alice or Ephraim March. The two old outspoken cockneys did not fit well with the precious academic environment of the Leakeys or the cosy bourgeois atmosphere of Hitchin. In a way,
the disdain of the Hitchin bourgeoisie was easier to accept, for they had never pretended otherwise. To them, the working classes were below in the natural order, and that was that. Neither the Leakeys nor the Leetes were ever unkind to my grandmother and grandfather. They did not have to be for them to see that they were unwelcome. I remember some tearful sessions with Alice March after she had returned from brief visits to her daughters. My mother and father were the ones who gave my grandparents a home and let them stay with them throughout the illnesses that ended their lives. We never understood at the time that we were a part of a vast transition in customs. In the Victorian nuclear family, the old had rights divinely instituted, of residence in the family home of their children.
Many years later, I was to face the same problem in my own home, where her daughter-in-law, Helen, rejected my mother, and I could well understand my mother’s sense of injustice. She had paid her dues willingly to her parents, yet was now unwanted and unwelcome. I could see Helen’s despair at having to cope with a strong-willed woman who interfered, with the best of intentions, in the running of her home. So abrading were the quarrels that the misery of it loomed like a dark cloud over the years between my father’s death in 1956 and my mother’s death in 1980.