The next speaker was a small neat man with a beard. He explained how the so-called 'corroboration' of the General Theory was anyway not scientific because it was probable that any peculiarities in the experimenters' measurements were caused by the deflection of light by the murky atmosphere round the sun. And anyway, he added — was it not significant that the theory of Professor Einstein had been confirmed, if that could be the word, by the British! This last remark brought forth a growl of approval from the hall. My father was sitting with his hair seeming to stand on end. I thought — But he will not shoot up and make some public protest, will he? Is it not best, in this strange territory, if we remain somewhat secret; then according to the theory will not these people find their criticisms coming down upon themselves?
Then at a certain stage of the evening there was a slight disturbance in the hall; heads were turning as if a wind were blowing them; there were people entering late and settling down in one of the boxes in the first tier. One of them, sitting at the front, even looked like Professor Einstein. People around us began to whisper; my father was looking up at the box as if he were indeed now transfixed by light; then he murmured to me that the man in the box was, to be sure, Professor Einstein. There was the dark halo of hair; the humorous look that seemed to be going far outwards and inwards all at once. This was the only time that I saw Einstein in the flesh. From the front of the box he bowed slightly to the audience; he
seemed to be acknowledging their whisperings. The speaker on the platform had paused; Einstein waved at him as if he were encouraging him to continue. The whispering in the hall subsided. (This was on 27 August 1920; I have checked the date; do you think it makes it more telling if I can say 'I have checked the date'?) Einstein sat back in his box. The speaker went on. He was suggesting what a dangerous and terrible thing it was to have no objectivity. Einstein was nodding and smiling; he leaned back and spoke to one of the people behind him; this person laughed. The man on the stage paused again; he seemed both at a loss and furious. I thought suddenly — But what of that crowd, those waiters, the people who jeered at the soldiers! Einstein leaned forward and clapped, sardonically, at the speaker; it was as if the performance might be over. Then my father whispered 'Oh don't overdo it!' I remember this whisper quite clearly: I thought I understood it. I put my head in my hands. Several images had come into my mind all at once: there was my mother walking like a bird amongst the dead or dying bodies as if on a battlefield; there was the girl curled up with her hands to her middle (I read later that she had died); then there was a photograph I had come across recently when I had been looking through some of my mother's papers, which was of the body of Rosa Luxemburg when she had been dragged from the canal some months after she had been killed. Her face was like that of a wooden doll, half eaten by worms. So I felt I understood when my father whispered 'Oh don't overdo it!' When the small furious man on the platform began speaking again his beard pointed and waggled up and down like a machine-gun. Professor Einstein seemed only to have his halo of hair to protect him.
human intercourse and the enjoyment of exquisite objects. He had begun one lecture with the words 'We should spread scepticism until at last everybody knows that we can know absolutely nothing'; and then apparently had been overcome with laughter.
My father also came from a Cambridge family but one of a more austere intellectual tradition. He was a scientist: his father and grandfather had been scientists — one a biologist and the other a physicist. My father was a biologist specialising in the field of genetic inheritance. There was a good deal of controversy in this area as he grew up; orthodox Darwinists were under attack; it was difficult for them to explain how evolution could have occurred simply through chance mutations and natural selection. There seemed to be too many coincidences required for the emergence, by these means, of complex organic forms.
I was an only child. I do not know why my father and my mother did not have more children. Perhaps too many coincidences have to be taken into account for the answering of such questions.
I had a bedroom on the top floor of our house, from which I could look down on what went on in the world below. There were the red-tiled roofs of the village; the tops of creeper-covered walls along which squirrels ran. My mother might be talking to Mr Simmons the gardener by one of the herbaceous borders; my father might emerge on to the lawn from the greenhouse where he had once kept the famous collection of sweet peas with which he had been able to confirm some of the ideas about genetic inheritance put forward by Mendel. These had made it easier to understand the evolution of complex organic forms.
I had been allowed the use of an attic room of our house in which I could set up my toys. At an earlier time in my childhood I had created a model village complete with houses and shops and a church; there were roads and a railway system that ran right round the room; at the door there was a drawbridge to allow giant humans to go in and out. It had seemed important to me to try to make a model of the real world in my attic; not exactly so that I could control it, but rather perhaps so that there should be somewhere orderly and exact in which I might feel at home. At the time about which I am writing my model village was still intact: but now I spent more time with my electricity and chemistry sets, which I suppose were like factories springing up and polluting the once pristine countryside.
Beyond a green baize door on the top floor of the house there
were the rooms of Mrs Elgin the cook and Watson the parlourmaid (what complex evolution of forms must have been required for a cook but not a parlourmaid to have acquired the prefix 'Mrs'!). On the floor below there were my mother's bedroom and my father's separate bedroom and their bathrooms and two spare rooms. There was a primitive bathroom next to my bedroom, which had pipes that shuddered and bubbled like pieces of my chemistry set.
The times when I felt most at home outside the fastness of my attic were when my father was away; he used to go on lecture tours to the Continent and to America. Then I could ride my bicycle in and out of the croquet hoops of the lawn; in the evenings I could stay in the drawing-room and be read to by my mother. My mother and I would sit side by side on the curved seat on the inside of a bow window; our backs would be to the setting sun; there would be the cool touch of flames at our necks. When I was younger my mother had read to me fairy stories; I think we went on being interested in fantasies and myths somewhat after a time when they might have been thought suitable for a boy. My mother had a professional interest in fairy stories since she was studying psychoanalysis and saw that useful insights might be gained by an analysis of such matters: I suppose I liked whatever was of interest to my mother. In particular I enjoyed stories in which a person went on a journey for the sake of some precious object that had to be found or some person to be rescued; on the way there were meetings with birds, magicians, rings, wells, animals; there had to be an understanding of portents and tricks, an answering of riddles.
I would wonder — Is this or is it it not to do with the real world?
Or — This is one of the riddles?
Most of all during these evenings I would like the proximity of my mother; I would put my head against her shoulder so that I could better follow the words that she was reading; with the sun behind us, it was as if we were in long grass on a summer's day. My mother was a large golden-haired woman who sat straight-backed; there was a way in which the top half of her body seemed to be like milk contained miraculously by the air. I would put my arm around her; when she had finished reading she would hug me.