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.
4. 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I returned to London in the summer of 1943, after four years of exile, a ten-year-old boy, withdrawn and disturbed in some ways, but with a passion for metals, for plants, and for numbers.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 1880s, 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 1700s, 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’).
1
Only one person stayed: Miss Levy, my father’s secretary. She had been with him since 1930, and though somewhat reserved and formal (it would have been unthinkable to call her by her first name; she was always Miss Levy) and always busy, she sometimes allowed me to sit by the gas fire in her little room and play while she typed my father’s letters. (I loved the clack of the typewriter keys, and the little bell that rang at the end of each line.) Miss Levy lived five minutes away (in Shoot-Up Hill, a name that seemed to me more suitable perhaps for Tombstone than Kilburn), and she arrived at nine o’clock on the dot every weekday morning; she was never late, never moody or discomposed, never ill, in all the years that I knew her. Her schedule, her even presence, remained a constant through the war, even though everything else in the house had changed. She seemed impervious to the vicissitudes of life.
Miss Levy, who was a couple of years older than my father, continued to work a fifty-hour week until she was ninety, with no apparent concessions to age. Retirement was unthinkable to her, as it was to my parents, too.