Homage to Gaia by James Lovelock Read Free Book Online

junction of Elm Park Road and Brixton Hill. My first teacher was an embittered Irishwoman, Miss Tierney. She soon took an intense dislike to the precocious boy put in her charge and used the cane frequently on my hands and fingers. In the way of small children, I said nothing of this to my family and suffered until I could endure it no longer. Then I decided to leave home as usual in the morning and instead of going to school, play in the long untidy gardens full of shrubs that ran down to Brixton Hill. This lasted for a few days, but somehow my truancy was discovered. There was an inquest and they moved me to the next teacher, Miss Plumridge, a plump motherly woman who referred to me always as ‘The brand plucked from the burning’. An accurate description, as I had tasted hell, and her disciplined effective teaching was heaven by comparison. Under her tuition, I learnt fast and soon was reading science fiction from the Brixton Library. My last teacher at this primary school was Miss Beavan, a wonderful Welsh woman, who in spite of a huge class had the capacity to make us feel that she gave each of us her full attention. I shall never forget her enthusiasm and encouragement when I painted a rose well enough to be a true likeness.
    I believe that primary schooling is by far the most important part of education. We need to acquire literacy and numeracy early in childhood , so that they become automatic activities needing no more effort than that used to keep our balance while riding a bicycle. These things can be learnt later but never with the same fluency. In the same way, no language learnt later in life can be as fluent as one’s first language.
    My mother was full of working-class good intentions and she had an unquestioning belief in education. She was determined thatI should go to a grammar school and as soon as possible. She had been denied the chance of a ‘good education’ and she did not intend that I should suffer from a lack of it. I now realize that my mother blamed her lack of good schooling for her failure to realize her potential. She did not see that the ‘better’ schools did not so much educate as indoctrinate the customs of the middle and upper-middle classes. In her days, an incompetent with good manners and speech could easily find the employment denied a working-class applicant, no matter how able. My mother was an intelligent woman but she really believed that ‘a good education’ could turn any girl into Florence Nightingale or a Jane Austen and any boy into a Darwin or an Orwell. This powerful attribute of education is still widely believed. So pervasive is the idea that we can make silk purses from sows’ ears that the phrase ‘He never had a proper education’ is the inevitable cliché that decorates an account of a misspent life. Looking back, I wish I could have stayed on until puberty at that primary school. Apart from the bad first year it provided an environment in which I was unfolding fast. In the spring of 1929, aged nine, she wrenched me from this childhood paradise and enrolled me at the Strand School about a quarter of a mile further down Elm Park Road. As grammar schools went, it was not bad, but for me it proved to be the wrong place to go.
    I walked to my new school from my Uncle Fred’s house near King’s Road. The route took me past Brixton Prison. It was a grim place, especially in the dark years of the 1930s depression. As I walked beside the high long walls and past its vast closed door I could not help wondering what it was like inside. My father had done time as a boy in Reading gaol but he would never talk of it except to say that he had done wrong and had been punished, and that was all there was to it. Like most pre-pubescent boys, I was full of fantasies and fears, and the prospect of imprisonment was high on my mind’s agenda.
    At the end of the prison approach road was the main road, Brixton Hill. Directly across was Elm Park Road, a street of terraced