In 1941 Michael, now thirteen, left Braefield and went on to Clifton College, where he was unmercifully bullied. He made no complaints here, any more than he had ever complained about Braefield, but signs of trauma were visible to seeing eyes. Once, in the summer of 1943, soon after I had returned to London, Auntie Len, who was staying with us, spied Michael as he came, half naked, from the bath. ‘Look at his back!’ she said to my parents, ‘it’s full of bruises and wheals! If this is happening to his body’, she continued, ‘what is happening to his mind?’ My parents seemed surprised, said they had noticed nothing amiss, that they thought Michael was enjoying school, had no problems, was ‘fine.’
Soon after this, Michael became psychotic. He felt a magical and malignant world was closing about him (I remember his telling me that the lettering had been ‘transformed’ on the number 60 bus to Aldwych, so that the word Aldwych now appeared to be written in ‘old-witchy’ letters like runes). He came to believe, very particularly, that he was ‘the darling of a flagellomaniac God’, as he put it, subject to the special attentions of ‘a sadistic Providence.’ There was, again, no explicit reference to our flagellomaniac headmaster in Braefield, but I could not help feeling that Mr. B. was there, amplified, cosmified now to a monstrous Providence or God. Messianic fantasies or delusions appeared at the same time – if he was being tortured or chastised, this was because he was (or might be) the Messiah, the one for whom we had waited so long. Torn between bliss and torment, fantasy and reality, feeling he was going mad (or perhaps so already), Michael could no longer sleep or rest, but agitatedly strode to and fro in the house, stamping his feet, glaring, hallucinating, shouting.
I became terrified of him, for him, of the nightmare which was becoming reality for him, the more so as I could recognize similar thoughts and feelings in myself, even though they were hidden, locked up in my own depths. What would happen to Michael, and would something similar happen to me, too? It was at this time that I set up my own lab in the house, and closed the doors, closed my ears, against Michael’s madness. It was at this time that I sought for (and sometimes achieved) an intense concentration, a complete absorption in the worlds of mineralogy and chemistry and physics, in science – focusing on them, holding myself together in the chaos. It was not that I was indifferent to Michael; I felt a passionate sympathy for him, I half-knew what he was going through, but I had to keep a distance also, create my own world from the neutrality and beauty of nature, so that I would not be swept into the chaos, the madness, the seduction, of his.
16. Mendeleev’s Garden
In 1945 the Science Museum in South Kensington reopened (it had been closed for much of the war), and I first saw the giant periodic table displayed there. The table itself, covering a whole wall at the head of the stairs, was a cabinet made of dark wood with ninety-odd cubicles, each inscribed with the name, the atomic weight, and the chemical symbol of its element. And in each cubicle was a sample of the element itself (all of those elements, at least, which had been obtained in pure form, and which could be exhibited safely). It was labeled ‘The Periodic Classification of the Elements – after Mendeleeff.’
My first vision was of metals, dozens of them in every possible form: rods, lumps, cubes, wire, foil, discs, crystals. Most were grey or silver, some had hints of blue or rose. A few had burnished surfaces that shone a faint yellow, and then there were the rich colors of copper and gold.
In the upper right corner were the nonmetals – sulphur in spectacular yellow crystals and translucent red crystals of selenium; phosphorus, like pale beeswax, kept under water; and carbon, as tiny diamonds and shiny black graphite. There was boron, a brownish powder, and ridged crystalline silicon, with a rich black sheen like graphite or galena.
On the left were the alkali and alkaline earth metals – the Humphry Davy metals – all (except magnesium) in protective baths of naphtha. I was struck by the lithium in the upper corner, for this, with its levity, was floating on the naphtha, and also by the cesium, lower down, which formed a glittering puddle beneath the naphtha. Cesium, I knew, had a very low melting point and it was a hot summer day. But I had not fully realized, from the tiny, partly oxidized lumps I had seen, that pure cesium was pale gold – it gave at first just a glint, a flash of gold, seeming to iridesce with a golden luster; then, from a lower angle, it was purely gold, and looked like a gilded sea, or golden mercury.
There were other elements which up to this point had only been names to me (or, almost equally abstract, names attached to some physical properties and atomic weights), and now for the first time I saw the range of their diversity and actuality. In this first, sensuous glance I saw the table as a gorgeous banquet, a huge table set with eighty-odd different dishes.
I had, by this time, become familiar with the properties of many elements and I knew they formed a number of natural families, such as the alkali metals, the alkaline earth metals, and the halogens. These families (Mendeleev called them ‘groups’) formed the verticals of the table, the alkali and alkaline earth metals to the left, the halogens and inert gases to the right, and everything else in four intermediate groups in between. The ‘groupishness’ of these intermediate groups was somewhat less clear – thus in Group VI, I saw sulphur, selenium, and tellurium. I knew that these three (my ‘stinkogens’) were very similar, but what was oxygen doing, heading the group? There must be some deeper principle at work – and indeed there was. This was printed at the top of the table, but in my impatience to look at the elements themselves, I had paid no attention to it at all. The deeper principle, I saw, was valency. The term valency was not to be found in my early Victorian books, for it had only been properly developed in the late 1850s, and Mendeleev was one of the first to seize on it and use it as a basis for classification, to provide what had never been clear before: a rationale, a basis for the fact that elements seemed to form natural families, to have deep chemical and physical analogies with one another. Mendeleev now recognized eight such groups of elements in terms of their valencies.
Thus the elements in Group I, the alkali metals, had a valency of 1: one atom of these would combine with one atom of hydrogen, to form compounds such as LiH, NaH, KH, and so on. (Or with one atom of chlorine, to form compounds such as LiCl, NaCl, or KCl). The elements of Group II, the alkaline earth metals, had a valency of 2, and so would form compounds such as CaCl2, SrCl2, BaCl2, and so on. The elements of Group VIII had a maximum combining power of 8.
But while Mendeleev was organizing the elements in terms of valency, he was also fascinated by atomic weights and the fact that these were unique and specific to each element, that they were, in a sense, the atomic signature of each element. And if, mentally, he started to index the elements according to their valencies, he did this equally in terms of their atomic weights. And now, magically, the two came together. For if he arranged the elements, quite simply, in order of their atomic weights, in horizontal ‘periods’, as he called them, one could see recurrences of the same properties and valencies at regular intervals.