Rosalind Franklin (11 page)

Rosalind Franklin, in other words. The lack of indoor plumbing and the hard floor were positive attractions, as were the other hardships they encountered on the way — shabby hotels, the rickety bridges hastily thrown up to replace those destroyed during the war, and a stomach bug. The young women took the advice of a guide, who taught them the use of ice axes and ropes, and climbed to the summit of the steep Aiguille Pers. It took them so much longer than they had planned that when they returned, they found that the modest hotel where they were then staying (and which had been a little surprised to find two English girls travelling alone) was organising a search party. Embarrassed but forgiven, Rosalind and Jean drank wine with the crowd and passed round the cigarettes they had brought from England. On returning home, Rosalind wrote to her mother, ‘I am quite sure I could wander happily in France for ever. I love the people, the country and the food.'

Did she ever fall in love with an individual? Jean Kerslake recalled that as much time as she spent with Rosalind, that summer and over many years, they never spoke about romance or sex, nor gossip about the love life of any of their friends. ‘She did not talk about men as the rest of us did,' said Jean, looking back, ‘and it seemed impossible to break down her reserve.'

The possibility naturally occurred to Rosalind's friends and some of her family that she might have been inclined towards the love of women. They all ruled it out because of too much evidence to the contrary. In London in the autumn of 1946 Jean, with another school friend Celia Martin, joined Rosalind when she showed the tourist sights of London to two French scientists who had come to London for a Royal Institution conference on carbon. To them, it was obvious, seeing Rosalind animated and chatting happily away in French, that she was strongly attracted to the younger of the two, Jacques Mering. Seeing her unfamiliar sparkle, her friends thought it was most unfortunate that, as they gathered, Mering already had a wife and a mistress. They would have liked to see Rosalind settle down as they and their other St Paul's friends were doing. In Jean's opinion, ‘I think she would have liked to have a relationship with a man, but had not the remotest idea of how to cope with them or where to start.'

What Rosalind did know how to do, at the age of twenty-six, was to speak forcefully in public. At the Royal Institution's meeting she presented a paper, and then rose to her feet to point out the errors in someone's measurements of X-ray powder diagrams. She was self-confident and forthright, or, in the words of the head of crystallography at Birkbeck College, Harry Carlisle, ‘abrupt and peremptory'. There was no answer to her comments, Carlisle granted. However, he observed (after getting to know her much better), ‘her characteristic of being forthright when she knew she was on firm ground sometimes gained her enemies'.

But not among the two French visitors. Mering and his colleague, Marcel Mathieu, were crystallographers from a French government laboratory; Mathieu was a close friend of Adrienne Weill's, and at her suggestion had looked up Rosalind when they came to London.

Within weeks Rosalind had the offer of her dreams: a challenging job requiring the services of a physical chemist to study holes in coal in Paris. Adrienne Weill had turned out to be the fairy godmother she had seemed.

SIX
Woman of the Left Bank

(1947 - 49)

T
HE
L
ABORATOIRE
C
ENTRAL DES
S
ERVICES
C
HIMIQUES DE L
'E
TAT,
at 12 Quai Henri IV in the fourth arrondissement, downriver from Notre Dame, was the right place for a francophile with a taste for the analysis of awkward crystals. It was a government laboratory, originally under the French Ordnance Ministry (Ministere de Poudre) but with a post-war research programme aimed at industrial applications. In the ‘labo', as the staff called it, there were fifteen
chercheurs,
of whom Rosalind was one, and half a dozen technicians, under the direction of Jacques Mering. They were all terribly impressed by Rosalind, Mering not least. He immediately saw that she knew what she was doing and that she was very good at delicate experimental work. His speciality was the use of X-rays to study the internal structure of crystals known as ‘disordered' because of imperfections in the arrangement of their molecules. Rosalind, in her studies of the carbon structure at BCURA, had used physical-chemical techniques such as heating and grinding to measure the porosity of coal and carbon. Now Mering could teach her how to employ X-ray diffraction to look at the internal organisation of charcoal and clay.

Mering (pronounced Mer-eeng - no nasal) had been trained by Marcel Mathieu, the good friend of Adrienne Weill who had been responsible for bringing Rosalind to Paris. In 1946 Mathieu, a witty, expansive, brilliant, card-carrying Communist, was working in the department of materials under the Ministry of Defence, and kept a paternal eye on Adrienne's protégée. He had been trained in crystallography at the Royal Institution in London in the 1920s, under the elder (William Henry) Bragg.

In applying X-ray analysis to amorphous substances, Rosalind had, at last, the satisfaction of building on what she had been doing before. Mering used highly monochromatic (single wavelength) and finely focused X-rays to take low-angle photographs, revealing bands of varying intensity rather than the sharp spots made by more ordered crystals. Disordered matter had become a French speciality, analysed by techniques then not widely used in other countries. With her skill at chemical preparation, Rosalind was soon on her way to detecting and clarifying the fundamental difference between the carbons that turned into graphite on heating and those that did not.

Mering was ‘Monsieur', not ‘Professeur'. A Russian-born Jew, he had come to France early in life and was working at the Labo Central when the Nazis occupied Paris. The Ordnance Ministry, in a move to protect basic research pursuits as well as the distinguished French-Jewish scientists on its staff, shifted work out of Paris. Mering thus moved to the University of Grenoble, where he set up an X-ray laboratory. At great risk to himself, Mering did not declare his Jewishness, a fact which was supposed to be stamped in his identity card, and thus lived without proper identity papers throughout the war. When he came back to Paris, without seeking further academic qualifications, he resumed his research at the Laboratoire Central. He was just one of many returning refugees, for whom the first priority was, in the words of Marianne Weill, Adrienne's daughter, ‘knowing who was alive and who was dead'. Marianne, who had returned from England with her mother, was now at the Sorbonne, while Adrienne was a metallurgist at the French government laboratory for naval research.

 

When she arrived in Paris in February 1947, Rosalind quickly became, in D.H. Lawrence's word, ‘unEnglished'. Apart from her breakfast, that is. Resuming her practice of weekly letters home with detailed information about her well-being and finances, she recited what she ate every morning: bread (rationed), butter (black market), marmalade (English), tea (English), milk, and fruit.

 

In Paris Rosalind found, by heating carbons of different origin to as high as 3000 degrees C that graphitising carbons
(top)
and non-graphitising carbons
(bottom)
formed two distinct classes. In this schematic representation, the non-graphitising carbons are distinguished by a rigid, finely porous mass. This discovery had important industrial applications.

 

Adrienne had found her a room in the sixth arrondissement, in a huge flat on the top floor of a house in the rue Garancière, around the corner from the Church of St Sulpice. The owner, a widow, had made a bedroom of the library stuffed with the relics of the professor, her late husband. The rules were strict. No noise after 9.30 p.m.; use of the kitchen only after the maid had finished preparing the widow's evening meal; use of the bathroom (that is, the room with the bathtub) once a week. Otherwise, the washing facilities were a tin basin behind a screen. But the room was spacious and the location ideal, in the heart of the Left Bank, a few picturesque streets away from St Germain des Prés where tourists hovered around the Cafés de Flore and Deux Magots hoping for a glimpse of the pair whom the
New York Times
called ‘France's No 1 and No 2 Existentialists' — Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre

Considering its restrictions, Adrienne had expected the accommodation to be temporary, but Rosalind stayed there for the next three of her four years in Paris. She felt secure, and the rent was low — the equivalent of about £3 a month, only a third of what she would have to pay elsewhere because, she recognised, ‘the owner is more anxious that I be respectable than that she should make money'. She could get to the lab in about a quarter of an hour by bus, or by making a slight detour in half an hour, walking by the river all the way. She cast a researcher's eye on the constant haze over the Seine: ‘while London mists are yellow, Paris's are blue'.

Her parents were not so sure about the respectability of Rosalind's new arrangements. Was she not lowering her standard of living? How could she live on her salary? And how important was her work? She fell easily back into her old epistolary mode:

 

Of course my standard of living is lower than at home . . . Of course I appreciate conventional comforts and of course I would rather the food situation here were normal . . . but provided one does not go below certain minimum none of these things are of supreme importance to me ... I find life interesting . . . I have good friends though my circle is naturally smaller than in London but I find infinite kind ness and goodwill among the people I work with. All this is far more important than a large meat ration or more frequent baths.

 

Her job was in a government research establishment, with no immediate industrial objective. Some people might call it ‘pure research', while others could argue ‘that there is no such thing as “pure research” since all scientific advance is ultimately useful'. She was paid according to the salary scale for French government workers, with the freedom and facilities ‘to work on my own ideas — and anybody else's I may be able to borrow'. Her earnings of approximately £5 a week were sufficient for her ordinary living expenses. Extras such as holidays and clothes had to come out of what money she brought with her. Besides: ‘One only feels rich or poor in relation to the people one mixes with, and as all my friends are in the same circle . . . or worse off because they have not resources in England.'

Resources in England could not help very much. In 1945 John Maynard Keynes wrung a $4 billion loan from the US Treasury instead of the $5 billion outright gift he had expected in recompense for Britain's brave and successful resistance to Hitler. The loan was supposed to last four years but was gone in less than two. In consequence, the newly nationalised Bank of England slapped stringent restrictions on taking sterling abroad. Any gifts and even personal possessions were subject to rigorous examination by Customs officials on both sides of the Channel. Even Rosalind's sewing machine was held up for two months.

For Rosalind, such restrictions merely added to the zest of her new existence. Not only was her work fascinating but the crowd at the lab were fun. Every day they crossed the river to lunch at a small restaurant, Chez Solange, overlooking the Ecole de Physique et Chimie where Pierre and Marie Curie had discovered radium. Many of the lunchtime regulars had been in the Resistance, many were communists and all were glad to be part of
‘la bande de Solange'
or
‘les gens de Chez Solange'.

After lunch the band would move into the Physics and Chemistry School for a ritual known as
‘les Cafés de PC
— coffee brewed in a laboratory flask and served in evaporating dishes while the animated conversation rolled on — in a spirit described by one of their number as ‘liberal, Cartesian laced with atheism and defence of the rights of man': in other words, French intellectuals playing the part of French intellectuals. There was plenty to discuss and the women engaged as equals, with no fear of condescension. Paris was at the height of its post-war political ferment, looking for a ‘third way' between the Soviet Union and the United States. To the band of
camarades
General de Gaulle seemed a right-wing threat. They also talked science. Rosalind would show her X-ray photographs to Mering, who would interpret them. On occasion, English crystallographers would drop in, notably J.D. Bernal, a good friend of Marcel Mathieu's.

In that milieu Rosalind seemed ‘a sound and cheerful young lady' who spoke perfect French with a very slight English accent and who was totally committed to her work. On occasion the group would go for a swim at a pool nearby. At night they sometimes went dancing, Rosalind riding pillion on someone's motor cycle. UnEnglished, she was having the time of her life.

She alerted her parents to a gallic indulgence of temperament:

 

I've been told several times my French is best when I'm angry. I had a glorious row this a.m. in a shoe shop that sold me a pair of straps of wildly different length. I enjoyed it immensely. I haven't felt the language flow so freely since the row which Roly witnessed with the hotel keeper in Pralognan. It's odd but I couldn't do it in English with a straight face. Here a battle of words is a sort of game which nobody takes seriously. I hate it when it happens to people I know but with disagreeable hotel keepers and shopkeepers it can be a satisfying pastime.

 

Then in the next breath:

 

Are skirts seriously getting longer in London? Here any thing that hasn't been lengthened is really coming to look ridiculous — a most tiresome business. And new things are only 8—10 inches from the ground (not mine). People take it seriously (and that's most people) chop up their skirts and put extra bits in and cut down their waists to ¾ length.

 

Paris affected Rosalind as it does many women who suddenly find themselves trying harder to match the scarf to the jacket. She had always taken clothes seriously and combined good taste with restraint and propriety but now she was challenged to change. The imperative to smarten up became urgent when — world news in 1947 — Christian Dior introduced his ‘New Look'. Utterly out of step with bankrupt Britain and the masculine look of women in uniform, it set off an international controversy with its exaggerated femininity — nipped-in waistlines, small shoulders and extravagant use of material in long voluminous skirts. Rosalind was an immediate convert. ‘I've had dress material made into a handsome [pronounced] NEV Look frock and bought some nylons,' she wrote home, ‘but need a new petticoat forty-four inches long to wear under this long-line.' Could her mother's seamstress make her one out of parachute silk (more easily available in London than in Paris) and also some silk underclothes so she could throw away her pre-war collection? She sent, along with a diagram of the shape of knickers she wanted, her measurements: bust 34, waist 27, hips 38. She also followed prevailing post-war style by registering her small waist with a neat belt.

A lab visit to Nancy with Mering at her elbow, shows her in a classic New Look bold-checked suit: with small neat shoulders, a dramatically cinched waist, and exaggerated full skirt: with her hair side-parted and held off her forehead with two combs.

 

Away from the ‘labo', Rosalind began to explore her new environment. She went with friends on walking trips to the forest of Chantilly; she found a ‘delightfully clean' place to swim in the upper Seine, she took in exhibitions at the Grand Palais, and she mastered the shops. Certain commodities were scarce, but as a
travailleur de force,
she got extra shares of cooking oil, wine and bread, and she gloried in the street markets, full of fresh fruit and vegetables long unseen in London. The maid at the flat tutored her in cooking and she enjoyed improvising: ‘Bananas suddenly appeared' and before they disappeared again, almost immediately, ‘I had time to invent a pudding — tinned milk, cream cheese, sugar, Fry's chocolate and chopped banana. Excellent.'