Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (4 page)

I made a grid, ten by ten, of the first hundred numbers, with the primes blacked in, but I could see no pattern, no logic to their distribution. I made larger tables, increased my grids to twenty squared, thirty squared, but still could discern no obvious pattern. And yet I was convinced that there must be one.

The only real holidays I had during the war were visits to Auntie Len in Cheshire, in the midst of Delamere Forest, where she had founded the Jewish Fresh Air School for ‘delicate children’ (these were children from working-class families in Manchester – many had asthma, some had had rickets or tuberculosis, and one or two, I suspect, looking back, were autistic). All the children here had little gardens of their own, squares of earth a couple of yards wide, bordered by stones. I wished desperately that I could go to Delamere rather than Braefield – but this was a wish I never expressed (though I wondered if my clear-sighted and loving aunt did not divine it).

Auntie Len always delighted me by showing me all sorts of botanical and mathematical pleasures. She showed me the spiral patterns on the faces of sunflowers in the garden, and suggested I count the florets in these. As I did so, she pointed out that they were arranged according to a series – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. – each number being the sum of the two that preceded it. And if one divided each number by the number that followed it (½, 2⁄3, 3⁄5, 5⁄8, etc.), one approached the number 0.618. This series, she said, was called a Fibonacci series, after an Italian mathematician who had lived centuries before. The ratio of 0.618, she added, was known as the divine proportion or the golden section, an ideal geometrical proportion often used by architects and artists.

She would take me for long, botanizing walks in the forest, where she had me look at fallen pinecones, to see that they, too, had spirals based on the golden section. She showed me horsetails growing near a stream, had me feel their stiff, jointed stems, and suggested that I measure these and plot the lengths of the successive segments as a graph. When I did so and saw that the curve flattened out, she explained that the increments were ‘exponential’ and that this was the way growth usually occurred. These ratios, these geometric proportions, she told me, were to be found all over nature – numbers were the way the world was put together.

The association of plants, of gardens, with numbers assumed a curiously intense, symbolic form for me. I started to think in terms of a kingdom or realm of numbers, with its own geography, languages, and laws; but, even more, of a garden of numbers, a magical, secret, wonderful garden. It was a garden hidden from, inaccessible to, the bullies and the headmaster; and a garden, too, where I somehow felt welcomed and befriended. Among my friends in this garden were not only primes and Fibonacci sunflowers, but perfect numbers (such as 6 or 28, the sum of their factors, excluding themselves); Pythagorean numbers, whose square was the sum of two other squares (such as 3, 4, 5 or 5, 12, 13); and ‘amicable numbers’ (such as 220 and 284), pairs of numbers in which the factors of each added up to the other. And my aunt had shown me that my garden of numbers was doubly magical – not just delightful and friendly, always there, but part of the plan on which the whole universe was built. Numbers, my aunt said, are the way God thinks.

Of all the objects at home, the one I missed most was my mother’s clock, a beautiful old grandfather clock with a golden face showing not only the time and date, but phases of the moon and conjunctions of the planets. When I was very young, I had thought of this clock as a sort of astronomical instrument, transmitting information straight from the cosmos. Once a week my mother would open the cabinet and wind the clock, and I would watch the heavy counterweight ascending and touch (if she let me) the long metal chimes for the hours and the quarters.

I missed its chimes painfully in my four years at Braefield and sometimes dreamed of them at night and imagined myself at home, only to wake and find myself in a narrow, lumpy bed, wet, as often as not, with my own incontinence. Many of us regressed at Braefield, and we were beaten savagely when we wet or soiled our beds.

In the spring of 1943, Braefield was closed. Almost everyone had complained to their parents about the conditions at the school, and most of them had been taken away. I never complained (nor did Michael, but he had moved to Clifton College, as a thirteen-year-old, in 1941), and finally I found myself almost the only one left. I never knew what happened exactly – the headmaster disappeared, with his odious wife and child – I was simply told, at the end of the holidays, that I would not be returning to Braefield, but going to a new school instead.

St. Lawrence College (so it seemed to me) had large and venerable grounds, ancient buildings, ancient trees – it was all very fine, doubtless, but it terrified me. Braefield, for all its horrors, was at least familiar – I knew the school, I knew the village, I had a friend or two – whereas everything at St. Lawrence was strange to me, unknown.

I have curiously little memory of the term I spent there – it seems to have been so deeply repressed or forgotten that when I mentioned it recently to someone who knew me well, and who knew much about the Braefield period, she was astonished, and said I had never spoken of St. Lawrence before. My chief memories, indeed, are of the sudden lies, or jokes, or fantasies, or delusions – I scarcely know what to call them – that I generated there.

I felt particularly alone on Sunday mornings, when all the other boys went to chapel, leaving me, a little Jewish boy, alone in the school (this had not happened at Braefield, where most of the children were Jewish). One Sunday morning there was a great storm, with violent lightning and tremendous peals of thunder – one so terrifyingly loud and close that I thought for a moment the school had been struck. When the others returned from chapel, I steadfastly insisted that I had, in fact, been struck by lightning, and that the lightning had ‘entered’ me, and lodged in my brain.

Other fictions I maintained had relation to my childhood, or rather an alternative version or fantasy of childhood. I said that I had been born in Russia (Russia was our ally at the time, and I knew that my mother’s father had come from there), and I would tell long, fanciful, richly detailed stories of jolly toboggan rides, of being wrapped in furs, and of howling wolf packs pursuing our sleigh at night. I have no memory of how these stories were received, but I stuck to them.

I maintained at other times that my parents, for some reason, had thrown me out as a child, but that I had been found by a she-wolf and brought up among wolves. I had read
The Jungle Book
and knew it almost by heart, and I was able to embroider my ‘recollections’ richly from this, telling the amazed nine-year-olds around me about Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the old bear who taught me the Law, and Kaa, my snake friend with whom I swam in the river, and Hathi, the king of the jungle, who was a thousand years old.

It seems to me as I look back on this time that I was filled with daydreams and myths, and that I was uncertain, at times, about the boundaries between fantasy and reality. It seems to me I was trying to invent an identity of an absurd yet glamorous kind. I think my sense of isolation, of being uncared for and unknown, may have been even greater at St. Lawrence than it was at Braefield, where even the sadistic attentions of the headmaster could be seen as a sort of concern, even love. I think I was, perhaps, enraged with my parents, who remained blind and deaf, or inattentive, to my distress, and so was tempted to replace them with kindly, parental Russians or wolves.

When my parents visited me at midterm in 1943 (and perhaps heard of my curious fantastications and lies), they finally realized that I was close to the edge, and that they had better bring me back to London before worse befell.

An Ideal Metal

I
returned to London in the summer of 1943, after four years of exile, a ten-year-old boy, withdrawn and disturbed in some ways, but with a passion for metals, for plants, and for numbers. Life was beginning to resume some degree of normality, despite the bomb damage everywhere, despite the rationing, the blackout, and the thin, poor paper on which books were printed. The Germans had been turned back at Stalingrad, the Allies had landed in Sicily; it might take years, but victory was now certain.

One sign of this, for me, was the fact that my father was given, through a series of intermediaries, an unheard-of thing, a banana from North Africa. None of us had seen a banana since the start of the war, and so my father divided it, sacramentally, into seven equal segments: one each for my mother and himself, one for Auntie Birdie, and one apiece for my brothers and myself. The tiny segment was placed, like a Host, on the tongue, then savored slowly as it was swallowed. Its taste was voluptuous, almost ecstatic, at once a reminder and symbol of times past and an anticipation of times to come, an earnest, a token, perhaps, that I had come home to stay.

And yet much had changed, and home itself was disconcertingly different, utterly changed in many ways from the settled, stable household there had been before the war. We were, I suppose, an average middle-class household, but such households, then, had a whole staff of helpers and servants, many of whom were central in our lives, growing up as we did with very busy and to some extent ‘absentee’ parents. There was the senior nanny, Yay, who had been with us since Marcus’s birth in 1923 (I was never certain how her name was spelled, but imagined, after I learned to read, that it was spelled ‘Yea’ – I had read some of the Bible, and been fascinated by words like
lo
and
bark
and
yea
). Then there was Marion Jackson, my own nanny, to whom I was passionately attached – my first intelligible words (I am told) were the words of her name, each syllable pronounced with babyish slowness and care. Yay wore a nurse’s headdress and uniform, which looked to me somewhat severe and forbidding, but Marion Jackson wore soft white clothes, soft as a bird’s feathers, and I would nestle against them and feel utterly secure.

There was Marie, the cook-housekeeper, with her starched apron and reddened hands, and a ‘daily,’ whose name I forget, who came in to help her. Besides these four women, there was Don, the chauffeur, and the gardener, Swain, who between them handled the heavy work of the house.

Very little of this survived the war. Yay and Marion Jackson disappeared – we were all ‘grown up’ now. The gardener and the chauffeur had gone, and my mother (now fifty) decided to drive her own car. Marie was due to come back, but never did; and in her stead Auntie Birdie did the shopping and cooking.¹

Physically, too, the house had changed. Coal had become scarce, like everything else in the war, and the huge boiler had been shut down. There was a small oil burner, of very limited capacity, in its stead, and many of the extra rooms in the house had been closed off.

Now that I was ‘grown up,’ I was given a larger room – it had been Marcus’s room, but he and David were now both at university. Here I had a gas fire and an old desk and bookshelves of my own, and for the first time in my life I felt I had a place, a space. I would spend hours in my room, reading, dreaming about numbers and chemistry and metals.

Above all, I delighted in being able to visit Uncle Tungsten again – his place, at least, seemed relatively unchanged (though tungsten was now in somewhat short supply, because of the vast quantities needed for making tungsten steel for armor plating). I think he also delighted in having his young protege back, for he would spend hours with me in his factory and his lab, answering questions as fast as I could ask them. He had several glass-fronted cabinets in his office, one of which contained a series of electric lightbulbs: there were several Edison bulbs from the early 1880
s
, with filaments of carbonized thread; a bulb from 1897, with a filament of osmium; and several bulbs from the turn of the century, with spidery filaments of tantalum tracing a zigzag course inside them. Then there were the more recent bulbs – these were Uncle’s especial pride and interest, for some of them he had pioneered himself – with tungsten filaments of all shapes and sizes. There was even one labeled ‘Bulb of the Future?’ It had no filament, but the word
Rhenium
was inscribed on a card beside it.

I had heard of platinum, but the other metals – osmium, tantalum, rhenium – were new to me. Uncle Dave kept samples of them all, and some of their ores, in a cabinet next to the bulbs. As he handled them, he would expatiate on their unique, sovereign qualities, how they had been discovered, how they were refined, and why they were so suitable for making filaments. As Uncle spoke of the filament metals, ‘his’ metals, they took on, in my mind, a special desirability and significance – noble, dense, infusible, glowing.

He would bring out a pitted grey nugget: ‘Dense, eh?’ he would say, tossing it to me. ‘That’s a platinum nugget. This is how it is found, as nuggets of pure metal. Most metals are found as compounds with other things, in ores. There are very few other metals which occur native like platinum – just gold, silver, copper, and one or two others.’ These other metals had been known, he said, for thousands of years, but platinum had been ‘discovered’ only two hundred years ago, for though it had been prized by the Incas for centuries, it was unknown to the rest of the world. At first, the ‘heavy silver’ was regarded as a nuisance, an adulterant of gold, and was dumped back into the deepest part of the river so it would not ‘dirty’ the miners’ pans again. But by the late 1700
s
, the new metal had enchanted all of Europe – it was denser, more ponderous than gold, and like gold it was ‘noble’ and never tarnished. It had a luster equalling that of silver (its Spanish name,
platina
, meant ‘little silver’).

Platinum was often found with two other metals, iridium and osmium, which were even denser, harder, more refractory. Here Uncle pulled out samples for me to handle, mere flakes, no larger than lentils, but astoundingly heavy. They were ‘osmiridium,’ a natural alloy of osmium and iridium, the two densest substances in the world. There was something about heaviness, density – I could not say why – that gave me a thrill, and an immense sense of security and comfort. Osmium, moreover, had the highest melting point of all the platinum metals, Uncle Dave said, so at one time it was used, despite its rarity and cost, to replace the platinum filaments in lightbulbs.