Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (7 page)

Uncle’s bulbs, and my taste for improvisation, incited me to set up a lighting system of my own inside the dark cupboard under the stairs. I had always been fascinated and slightly frightened by this space, which had no light of its own and seemed to disappear, in its furthest recesses, into secrecy and mystery. I used a 6-watt bulb, lemon-shaped, of the sort used in the sidelights of our car, and a 9-volt battery designed for an electric lantern. I put a switch, rather awkwardly, on the wall and ran wires from it to the bulb and the battery. I was absurdly proud of this little installation and made a point of showing it to visitors when they came to the house. But its glare penetrated the recesses of the cupboard, and in banishing the darkness, banished its mystery, too. Too much light, I decided, was not a good thing – there were some places best left with their secrets intact.

The Land of Stibnite

I
think I was somewhat a loner at my new school, The Hall, at least when I first came back to London. My friend Eric Korn, who had known me before the war – we were much the same age, and would both be taken to Brondesbury Park to play by our nannies – felt that something had happened to me. I had been aggressive and normal, he said, before the war, would pick fights, stand up for myself, speak my mind; where now I seemed intimidated, timid, did not start fights or conversations, withdrew, kept my distance. I did indeed keep a distance, in almost all ways, from the school. For I was fearful of more bullying or beating, and slow to realize that school could be a good place. But I was persuaded (or forced – I can no longer remember) to join the Cub Scouts. This, it was felt, would be good for me, would make me mix with others of my own age, teach me ‘needed’ skills for the outdoor life, like making a fire, camping, tracking – though it was not quite clear how such skills would be deployed in urban London. And for some reason, I never really learned them. I had no sense of direction, and no visual memory – when we played Kim’s Game, memorizing an array of different objects, I was so bad that there was some thought I might be mentally defective. Fires I laid could never be started, or went out within a few seconds; my attempts at making fire by rubbing two sticks together never succeeded (though I was able to conceal this, for some time, by borrowing my brother’s cigarette lighter); and my attempts to pitch a tent caught universal mirth.

The only things I really liked about the Cub Scouts were the fact that we all wore the same uniform (which reduced my self-consciousness, my sense of being different), the invocations to Akela the grey wolf, and our identification with the wolf cubs in
The Jungle Book
 – a gentle founding myth that pleased my romantic side. But the actual scout life, with me at least, continually miscarried in all sorts of ways.

This came to a head one day when we were asked to make a special damper like those made by Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scouts, on his sojourn in Africa. Dampers, I understood, were hard, baked discs of unleavened flour, but when I sought for flour in our kitchen I found the flour bin, as it happened, empty. I did not want to ask if there was more flour, or go out and buy some – after all, we were supposed to be resourceful and self-sufficient – so I looked around further, and then, to my pleasure, discovered some cement outside, left by builders who had been constructing a wall. I cannot now reconstruct the mental process by which I persuaded myself that cement would do instead of flour, but I used the cement, made it into a paste, flavored it (with garlic), shaped it into a damperlike oval, and baked it in the oven. It became hard, very hard – but then dampers
were
very hard. When I brought it to the Cub meeting the next day, and handed it to Mr. Baron, the scoutmaster, he was astonished, but (I think) gratified, or intrigued, by its weight, the unusually heavy nourishment it promised. He put it into his mouth and sank his teeth into it, and was rewarded with a loud cracking as one of his teeth broke. He instantly spat the thing out; there were one or two twitters, and then an awful silence: everyone in the wolf pack looked at me.

‘How did you make the damper, Sacks?’ Mr. Baron asked, his voice menacingly quiet. ‘What did you put in it?’

‘I put cement, sir,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t find any flour.’

The silence deepened, extended; everything seemed to freeze in a sort of motionless tableau. Struggling to control himself, and (I think) not to hit me, Mr. Baron made a short, impassioned speech: I had seemed quite a nice boy, he said, decent enough, though shy, incompetent, and a terrible bungler, but this business of the damper now raised very deep questions – did I realize what I was doing, was it my intention to harm? I tried to say it was only a joke, but it was beyond me to get any words out. Was I just incredibly stupid, was I vicious, or perhaps insane? Whatever the case, I had grossly misbehaved, I had injured my master, betrayed the ideals of the wolf pack. I was not fit to be a Scout, and with this Mr. Baron summarily expelled me.

The term ‘acting out’ had not yet been invented, but the concept was often discussed, not a mile from the school, in Anna Freud’s Hampstead Clinic, where she was seeing every sort of disturbed and delinquent behavior in youngsters who had been through traumatic evacuations.

The Willesden Public Library was an odd triangular building set at an angle to Willesden Lane, a short walk from our house. It was deceptively small outside, but vast inside, with dozens of alcoves and bays full of books, more books than I had ever seen in my life. Once the librarian was assured I could handle the books and use the card index, she gave me the run of the library and allowed me to order books from the central library and even sometimes to take rare books out. My reading was voracious but unsystematic: I skimmed, I hovered, I browsed, as I wished, and though my interests were already firmly planted in the sciences, I would also, on occasion, take out adventure or detective stories as well. My school, The Hall, had no science and hence little interest for me – our curriculum, at this point, was based solely on the classics. But this did not matter, for it was my own reading in the library that provided my real education, and I divided my spare time, when I was not with Uncle Dave, between the library and the wonders of the South Kensington museums, which were crucial for me throughout my boyhood and adolescence.

The museums, especially, allowed me to wander in my own way, at leisure, going from one cabinet to another, one exhibit to another, without being forced to follow any curriculum, to attend to lessons, to take exams or compete. There was something passive, and forced upon one, about sitting in school, whereas in museums one could be active, explore, as in the world. The museums – and the zoo, and the botanical garden at Kew – made me want to go out into the world and explore for myself, be a rock hound, a plant collector, a zoologist or paleontologist. (Fifty years later, it is still natural history museums and botanical gardens I seek out whenever I visit a new city or country.)

One gained entrance to the Geological Museum, as to a temple, through a great arch of marble flanked by enormous vases of Derbyshire blue-john, a form of fluorspar. The ground floor was devoted to densely filled cabinets and cases of minerals and gems. There were dioramas of volcanoes, bubbling mudholes, lava cooling, minerals crystallizing, the slow processes of oxidation and reduction, rising and sinking, mixing, metamorphosis; so one could get not only a sense of the products of the earth’s activities – its rocks, its minerals – but of the processes, physical and chemical, that continually produced them.

Up on the top floor was a colossal cluster of stibnite – glossy black, spearlike prisms of antimony sulfide. I had seen antimony sulfide as an unremarkable black powder in Uncle Dave’s lab, but here I saw it in crystals five or six feet high. I worshiped these prisms; they became for me a sort of totem or fetish. These fabulous crystals, the largest of their sort in the world, had come from the Ichinokawa Mine, the legend said, on Shikoku Island, in Japan. When I grew up, I thought, when I was able to travel, I would pay a visit to this island, pay my respects to the god. Stibnite is found in many places, I subsequently learned, but that first sight joined it indissolubly with Japan in my mind, so that Japan, ever afterwards, was for me the Land of Stibnite. Australia, similarly, became the Land of Opal, no less than the Land of the Kangaroo and the Platypus.

There was a great mass of galena in the museum too – it must have weighed over a ton – which had formed in gleaming dark grey cubes five or six inches across that often had smaller cubes embedded in them. These in turn, I could see by peering through my hand lens, had yet smaller cubes seemingly growing out of them. When I mentioned this to Uncle Dave, he said that galena was cubic through and through, and that if I could look at it magnified a million times, I would still see cubes, and smaller cubes attached to these. The shape of the galena cubes, of all crystals, Uncle said, was an expression of the way their atoms were arranged, the fixed, three-dimensional patterns or lattices they formed. This was because of the bonds between them, he said, bonds that were electrostatic in nature, and the actual arrangement of atoms in a crystal lattice reflected the closest packing that the attractions and repulsions between the atoms would allow. That a crystal was built from the repetition of innumerable identical lattices – that it was, in effect, a single giant self-replicating lattice – seemed marvelous to me. Crystals were like colossal microscopes that allowed one to see the actual configuration of the atoms inside them. I could almost see, in my mind’s eye, the lead atoms and the sulphur atoms composing the galena – I imagined them vibrating slightly with electrical energy, but otherwise firmly held in position, joined to one another now, coordinated in an infinite cubic lattice.

I had visions (especially after listening to stories of my uncles in their prospecting days) of being a sort of boy geologist myself, armed with chisel and hammer and collecting bags for my trophies, coming upon never-before-described mineral species. I did try a little prospecting in our garden, but found little beyond odd chips of marble and flint. I longed to go out on geological excursions, to see the patterns of the rocks, the richness of the mineral world, for myself. This desire was fanned by my reading, not only accounts of the great naturalists and explorers but also more modest books that came to hand, such as Dana’s little book
The Geological Story
, with its beautiful illustrations, and my favorite nineteenth-century
Playbook of Metahj
which was subtitled
Personal Narratives of Visits to Coal, Lead, Copper and Tin Mines
. I wanted to visit different mines myself, and not just the copper and lead and tin mines in England, but the gold and diamond mines which had drawn my uncles to Africa. But failing this, the museum could provide a microcosm of the world – compact, attractive, a distillation of the experience of innumerable collectors and explorers, their material treasures, their reflections and thoughts.

I would devour the information provided in the legends for each display. Among the delights of mineralogy were the beautiful and often ancient terms used.
Vug
, Uncle Dave told me, was a term used by the old tin miners of Cornwall, and came from the Cornish dialect word
vooga
(or
fouga
), meaning an underground chamber; ultimately this came from the Latin
fovea
, a pit. It intrigued me to think that this funny, ugly word bore testament to the antiquity of mining, to the Romans’ first colonization of England, drawn by the tin mines of Cornwall. The very name for tin ore, cassiterite, came from the Cassiterides, the ‘Tin Isles’ of the Romans.

The names of minerals especially fascinated me – their sounds, their associations, the sense they gave of people and places. The older names gave one a sense of antiquity and alchemy: corundum and galena, orpiment and realgar. (Orpiment and realgar, two arsenic sulphides, went euphoniously together, and made me think of an operatic couple, like Tristan and Isolde.) There was pyrites, fool’s gold, in brassy, metallic cubes, and chalcedony and ruby and sapphire and spinel. Zircon sounded oriental, calomel Greek – its honeylike sweetness, its ‘mel,’ belied by its poisonness. There was the medieval-sounding sal ammoniac. There was cinnabar, the heavy red sulphide of mercury, and massicot and minium, the twin oxides of lead.

Then there were minerals named after people. One of the most common minerals, much of the redness of the world, was the hydrated iron oxide called goethite. Was this named in honor of Goethe, or did he discover it? I had read that he had a passion for mineralogy and chemistry. Many minerals were named after chemists – gay-lussite, scheelite, berzelianite, bunsenite, liebigite, crookesite, and the beautiful, prismatic ‘ruby-silver,’ proustite. There was samarskite, named after a mining engineer. Colonel Samarski. There were other names that were evocative in a more topical way: stolzite, a lead tungstate, and scholzite, too. Who were Stolz and Scholz? Their names seemed very Prussian to me, and this, just after the war, evoked an anti-German feeling. I imagined Stolz and Scholz as Nazi officers with barking voices, sword sticks, and monocles.

Other names appealed to me simply for their sound or for the images they conjured up. I loved classical words and their depiction of simple properties – the crystal forms, colors, shapes, and optics of minerals – like diaspore and anastase and microlite and polycrase. A great favorite was cryolite – ice stone, from Greenland, so low in refractive index that it was transparent, almost ghostly, and, like ice, became invisible in water.«5»

Many elements had been given names from folklore or mythology, sometimes revealing a little of their history. A
kobold
was a goblin or evil sprite, a
nickel
a devil; both were terms used by Saxon miners when cobalt and nickel ores proved treacherous, and did not yield what they should. Tantalum brought up visions of Tantalus tantalized in Hell by water that retreated from him whenever he bent down to drink from it; the element was given its name, I read, because its oxide was unable to ‘drink water,’ that is, to dissolve in acids. Niobium was named after Tantalus’ daughter, Niobe, because the two elements were always found together.