A Curious Boy Read online

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  The chemistry laboratory in Ealing Grammar School for Boys seemed sterile after my own chemi-shed. It was indeed more truly sterile as it had sinks and running water to keep everything spotless. There was a series of parallel benches for the boys to work at and all the glassware one could wish for. Chemicals were labelled, and those that were dangerous were kept in a separate cupboard, but there was still a much wider range on open display than would be permitted today. I think we had to don white coats. Our first chemistry master was Mr Thornhill, a kindly and mild-mannered teacher, if not naturally inspiring. He invented useful chemical mantras for beginners to remember. We tested the acidity of solutions using old-fashioned litmus paper (later replaced by phenolphthalein) as an indicator that changed colour according to whether a test solution was acid or alkaline. The paper came in little strips suitable for dipping into a test tube. In acid solutions the paper was red, and in alkaline ones the colour changed to blue. To help the tyro remember which way round it went Mr Thornhill coined the execrable jingle: ‘Red to blue – alkaloo; blue to red – a-sed.’ I had already made my own indicators in the chemi-shed from beetroot juice, so I knew all about pH and colour changes. Nowadays, no colour change is involved, and a figure is read off a dial. Nonetheless, Mr Thornhill’s rhyme is deeply lodged within, or even below my cerebral cortex. When my poor mother was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease I was astonished when she suddenly and triumphantly blurted out: ‘The square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides!’ Pythagoras’ theorem had embedded itself so profoundly it had outlasted almost everything else. If I ever suffer similar decline Mr Thornhill’s ditty may be the last thing I remember, but nobody will know what it means.

  I discovered the cruelty of schoolboys in Mr Thornhill’s lab. Early experiments involved the manufacture of hydrogen gas H2 from hydrochloric acid and iron filings, an equation almost as simple as that describing my first experience with magnesium ribbon:

  2HCl + Fe = FeCl2 + H2

  The colourless hydrogen was collected into a small test tube and its identity could be checked by the simple expedient of bringing a lighted taper to the mouth of the tube, when the hydrogen exploded with a small ‘pop’ as it combined with the oxygen in the atmosphere. This immediately suggested to one member of the class (not me) that a much bigger bang could be made in a much bigger flask. To that end rather more iron filings and a good deal more acid were put to work filling a large flask with the gas. When the taper was applied there was a considerable ‘boom’. The effect on Mr Thornhill was dramatic: his hands started shaking uncontrollably and he fled from the laboratory. Our form master told us solemnly the following morning that Mr Thornhill had suffered from shell shock during the war, and that sudden loud noises could set him back. The guilty party still thought it was a bit of a laugh.

  The chemi-shed smoothed my way comfortably through school chemistry exams. If we were asked to identify mystery combinations of substances I could recognise them at once from Mr Ehrbar’s secret provisions. I went through a series of formal identification tests just to get full marks in the exams. The nomenclature of reactions became more complicated, but it was still all about transformation, and my early feel for such molecular trading remained with me. Valency and ions and solubility coefficients were added to my vocabulary, titration to my skills. I learned about catalysts, and how fertiliser could be snatched from the nitrogen in the air itself thanks to the Haber process. Chemical balances could now weigh in milligrams. In the cupboards around the chemistry lab a few molecules were modelled with coloured billiard balls standing in for atoms and with white sticks representing chemical bonds. My recollection is that carbon was appropriately black, hydrogen red, and there was some attempt to suggest their differences in atomic weight by the size of the balls. For a long time I really envisaged that molecules were built out of billiard balls of different sizes held together by electrical rods. Outside, in the real world, Crick and Watson were cracking the secrets of DNA (this was never mentioned in school) but the early models of the most important substance for all living organisms were still constructed from balls and sticks. Then the atom itself was unpicked in our classes into a positive-charged nucleus and surrounding negative-charged electrons, and the nucleus again further anatomised into light protons and heavy neutrons: I envisioned them as packed together like some sort of raspberry. The atomic model arranged as a submicroscopic solar system persisted in my consciousness until that, too, was displaced by Nils Bohr’s altogether fuzzier but mathematically sophisticated constructions. By now, the chemi-shed was left far behind. Somewhere along the way I lost the simple amazement of burning magnesium ribbon.

  I never became a chemist despite my precocious start. I do not believe this was just because more and more complex ideas and equations erased the simple wonder of transformation. Organic chemistry had its particular fascination – the endless permutations of carbon-based molecules were a new source of astonishment. Carbon atoms could hold on to one another to engender a creative profusion that eclipsed all other elements. I visualised the construction of complex organic chemicals as being as much architecture as science – a benzene ring here, an alkyl radical there, welded together like the iron skeleton of some fantastical skyscraper, trailing oxygen and nitrogen as bolts and rivets, hydrogen as bunting. A whole new language was needed to describe these carbon architraves and flying buttresses. I was soon to learn that carbon’s older brother on Mendeleev’s periodic table – silicon – could form structures in minerals and rocks nearly as elaborate as those of carbon, another world of complexity and taxonomy. Maybe I felt intimidated by the sheer scale of the task of learning all these new molecular designs, a task for which the chemi-shed had become irrelevant. I persisted with formal chemistry qualifications as far as I could at school but never followed on at university.

  This rationalisation of my dwindling motivation is probably disingenuous. I think it is much more plausible that the young chemist felt demoted when he could no longer do it all himself. That is why I recall the details of my own experiments at home with much more clarity than the years with pipettes and white coats in the laboratory at Ealing Grammar School for Boys. I left the romance and excitement of chemistry behind in the chemi-shed. The fact is that it would never get better than making the smelliest substance known to man.

  4

  The Ammonite

  My ammonite is about 165 million years old. It had lain undiscovered, concealed deep in the rocks, until I plucked it from its hiding place. A few years ago somebody accidentally dropped it and split it in two, but the halves still fit together to remake the whole specimen. I would have been dismayed if it had shattered, because it is the first fossil I ever discovered, and I have kept it with me throughout my life. At first glance it looks like a discus, about the size of a tea plate. The ammonite is preserved in limestone, which gives it a creamy yellow colour. It is curled into a flat spiral that expands gradually in width and diameter until the end of its growing margin is over an inch across, the outer whorl somewhat embracing the inner ones. I count five turns on the spiral recording the growth of the animal during its lifetime. Ammonites are an extinct kind of mollusc, and their spiral form compares with the elegant shapes of living ramshorn snails. The names of both snail and fossil refer to their resemblance to horns – the snail reminiscent of those carried by a male sheep, while Ammon Zeus was a horned god in ancient Greece (derived from an Egyptian precursor). My own ammonite carries ribs that run crossways over each whorl in a regular pattern: a strong inner rib is joined by another, intercalated rib on the outside of the whorl. It might almost have been a carving made by a sculptor. A groove runs all along its back on the exterior of the outer whorl. The fossil feels cool to the touch even on a warm day.

  Our Stanmore Deluxe caravan had been moved to a site near the sea, where it was made available to let for holidaymakers. Ranks of similar caravans were parked at West Bay, near Burton Brads
tock, Dorset, on the English south coast. Our summer holiday was spent in our mobile home, just me, my sister and our mother. Father never joined us, as the businesses had to be looked after, although it was strange how every year the mayfly seemed magically to release him from his duties. West Bay was a rather bleak spot, where a small stream breached the high cliffs and a patch of flat land allowed caravans to provide summer accommodation. The beach was little more than a mass of rounded flinty stones, so there was no chance to build sandcastles or ride donkeys. Even seashells were hard to find. The cliffs were ramparts of rusty yellow sandstones that were fretted into more resistant horizontal benches separated by softer, eroding layers; notices warning of falling rocks were set up along the beach. To reinforce this advice large boulders of hard limestone lay at the foot of the cliffs where they had come to rest after tumbling down from high above. They could have been killers. From the sea’s edge it was obvious that the sandstone cliffs were overlain by a prominent band of rock close to the top of the cliff that jutted out in places, ready to drop.

  A path led over the cliff inland towards the nearby village, running close to the precipitous edge. A premonition of children falling over the drop made Mother particularly nervous, as we darted cheerfully in all directions over the short turf marking the track. Behind the path and away from the sea was a golf course. It may have been the golfers that were responsible for dredging back some of the rock layer that made the dangerous overhang at the top of the cliff. Now piles of broken limestone rock lay close to the cliff edge. I saw my ammonite just poking out of the rubble, like a gift specially intended for me and me alone. I grabbed it while my mother shouted at me not to get any closer to the edge for God’s sake.

  My first fossil, the Jurassic ammonite Parkinsonia.

  I soon learned the Jurassic age of my discovery from leaflets handed out at nearby Abbotsbury, where I went in my role as bird boy a little later to see the famous mute swans and their nests. The capping rock was known as the Inferior Oolite, a limestone formation that overlay the softer, deep ochre-yellow Bridport Sands making up the bulk of the cliffs. Nowadays, this stretch of coastline is just a small section of a World Heritage Site for the Jurassic Coast. Online visitors can take a walk through time along the coast following the succession of rock formations without danger of falling off the cliffs. They can find out about fossils without getting their hands dirty. For me at that time, it was back to Arthur Mee’s encyclopedia, where I turned to an illustration of ‘Life in the Jurassic Period’.[1] Ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs fought one another in limpid seas, while strange fish lurked in the shallows. Pterodactyls soared in the air above an alien landscape decked out with cycad palms. On the sea floor lay the dead shell of my ammonite. I was thrilled. My discovery was a precious relic of lives long vanished, a message addressed to me from the depths of time. I wanted to know more, to give the fossil a name, to capture it into my personal taxonomy. I did not realise that my encyclopedia’s view of the English Jurassic sea was already long obsolete. Nor did this really matter: inspiration was the important thing.

  On my first solo visit to the Natural History Museum in London I carried the Dorset ammonite safely in a small bag. South Kensington station was a direct journey on the District Line from Ealing Broadway; I had regularly passed it on my way to City of London School. The museum was reached by way of a passage running below street level, which echoed in a satisfying way – it is still there, and buskers now make use of the acoustics to bulk up their sound. Once I left the tunnel the museum stood before me in all its Gothic immensity, enhanced by its curious towers. The entrance was more like that of a cathedral than a house of science, and I climbed its steps with my heart fluttering nervously. A warden wearing a dark blue uniform and a peaked cap directed me rather grumpily towards an antique, polished brown door. On admittance, an Enquiries Officer in a tweed jacket took my fossil with a friendly smile, issued a receipt, and informed me that it would be examined in due course by a scientist, one who specialised in the Ammonoidea. I was astonished to discover that such a person could exist. Were there really so many ammonites that a scientist could spend a lifetime on their study? I was fond of the Rupert Bear annuals as part of my indiscriminate reading, and Rupert had a friend who was a professor – a benign figure with a bald pate surrounded by a fringe of fluffy hair. My involuntary image of the ammonite expert was similar. I imagined him holding my specimen up to the light as if it were a fine wine, nodding his head wisely, before giving an authoritative opinion in a kindly, if abstracted voice.

  Two weeks later I went back to the Natural History Museum – it was called the British Museum (Natural History) at the time – and collected my ammonite. With it was a handwritten label that announced ‘Parkinsonia parkinsoni, Inferior Oolite’. My fossil had been identified – or ‘determined’. It did not take deductive genius to infer that it was named after someone called Parkinson. My old encyclopedia soon revealed who he was, and, indeed, it was the same Parkinson who first diagnosed the disease that carries his name. But he also wrote pioneering and well-illustrated works on palaeontology, first published in 1804, so my lucky find at Burton Bradstock now had connections not only with the remote Jurassic Period, but also with a famous nineteenth-century scientist. It felt like a propitious combination. As for the Inferior Oolite, I discovered that it was a particular kind of limestone made largely from tiny, perfectly spherical grains called ‘ooliths’ that could be easily seen under a hand lens. It was ‘inferior’ because it lay underneath a thicker rock formation called the Great Oolite, not because it somehow failed to come up to scratch. Almost immediately, geology became an additional addiction for me, another mass of facts to master, but facts that seemed appropriate to my other enthusiasms. A collection of fossils carried no worrying baggage about harming living organisms; if I didn’t collect them, fossils would crumble away to nothing. I would save precious evidence of the past from destruction. Miss Long would have approved.

  Most kids go for dinosaurs. I know several small children who will lecture me solemnly about the differences between Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus, and master the pronunciation of Pachycephalosaurus before they know about multiplication and division. Skeletons of dinosaurs are the centrepiece of every major natural history museum: vast sauropods, toothy carnivores, plated stegosaurs, stocky Triceratops with its horns in a threatening pose. Moving animatronic dinosaurs have become more and more realistic. My own grandson hid nervously behind my legs when we went to see the snarling Tyrannosaurus rex in London; he was not entirely convinced that it was a simulacrum. For the most part dinosaurs inspire in children just the right mixture of terror and security. They are scarily huge but safely extinct. Smaller, gracile dinosaurs are always on display alongside their monster cousins, but they do not produce quite the same frisson of delicious scariness. Every modern display worth its salt tells the visitor that the dinosaurs did not actually go extinct, because they live on as birds, and the best collections will have on display a Chinese fossil that shows an intriguing bridge between the two. Fewer museums have got around to covering their carnivorous dinosaur reconstructions with feathers – for which there is some evidence – it somehow does not fit with their macho schtick. Dinosaur-shaped jelly babies are the giant reptiles’ saddest commercial demotion – from kings of the Mesozoic world to a sugary novelty.

  My first exposure to dinosaurs was thanks to Walt Disney. A trip to what my mother always called the West End was exciting; it was our downtown from suburban Ealing, all smartly dressed people, big shops and red buses. Oxford Street was the nexus of the West End, and somewhere along it a cinema called Studio One was perpetually showing Fantasia. The movie was made in 1940, and at the time it was the apotheosis of the cartoon. It is a musical tribute to the possibilities of Disney’s medium, as animated episodes illustrate and accompany classical music, conducted by the great Leopold Stokowski. Apart from a mawkish moment when the maestro has to shake hands with Mickey Mouse it is all music and marvellous i
mages: abstract shapes accompany Bach, bucolic rustics illustrate Beethoven’s pastoral symphony, mushrooms dance to Tchaikovsky. The episode most people know is Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where Mickey appears again as the unfortunate hero. However, the most dramatic section is reserved for Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It is used to encapsulate the history of life, albeit a chronologically eccentric history in which the first few hundred million years flash by in a minute or so. Trilobites have a walk-on part for a second, rather in the way that Alfred Hitchcock would appear momentarily in his thrillers. Drama is supplied when the dinosaurs march in. Giant herbivores like Diplodocus are shown wallowing in freshwater lakes gobbling weed, an idea current at the time. (Nowadays they are portrayed more like elephants, in great terrestrial herds.) The savage ostinato of Stravinsky’s Rite comes later and is matched by a bloody battle between T. rex and Stegosaurus. At the end, the whole tribe of dinosaurs lumbers towards extinction as the climate changes and the world becomes a lurid desert. Only bones remain. I was transfixed. The cartoon had nothing of the veracity of Jurassic Park and its numerous successors, but it was relentlessly gripping. My older self might ruminate on the mutability of knowledge – what Disney showed was the science of his time, and much of it has changed. Nothing was known in 1940 of the meteorite impact that is implicated in the demise of the reptilian giants. If it had been known then, it might have supplied an even more dramatic ending for Disney’s masterpiece. I understand that reconstructions of dinosaurs will change yet again with new discoveries and new scientific techniques. Maybe what we think we know now will one day line up alongside Arthur Mee and Fantasia. That is really not the point. The curiosity stirred up in the young boy endured, even if the narrative has changed in many ways. You cannot calibrate inspiration by a catalogue of facts.