Homage to Gaia by James Lovelock Read Free Book Online Page A

Victorian houses that led to Strand School, my destination. The school was a London County Grammar school. By the standards of today, it was a good school, but I hated it. I saw it as a place where, unjustly, I did time for the offence of being too young to work. I did not learn much science there, but it certainly formed my views on science. Let me explain. One morning in a moment of purposeless destruction, I started to carve my initials with my penknife in the wooden bench of the biology lab. I was sitting before it listening to the naturalhistory lesson delivered by Sidney Dark who taught biology to the senior boys and the soft subject of natural history to the young. I liked listening to him and contentedly carved away as he spoke—what made me carve I do not know. Suddenly there was a hush. The teacher stopped in mid-sentence and glared at me with eyes enlarged by thick magnifying spectacles. ‘Wretched boy, what are you doing?’ ‘ Nothing ,’ I replied, too startled for anything more accurate or reasonable. ‘You are destroying school property and not paying attention. You will be punished. Go and fetch the book and cane.’ I was astonished; Sidney Dark had never caned anyone. There were masters in the school who thoroughly enjoyed the swish and thwack of the cane as they beat a young boy’s bottom, but Mr Dark was not among them. The book was used to record the punishment and I think to curb excessive beating. Reluctantly I left the lab and made my way down to the Masters’ Common Room, where I knocked on the door and asked for the book and cane. In those times and earlier the process of punishment was invested with ritual so that it could entertain the innocent as well as be seen properly to punish the guilty. The ritual of the book and cane was, I know, an effective part of the punishment through its capacity to humiliate as well as hurt.
    I was not too worried as I took this punishment kit back to the biology lab, for I felt sure that Sidney Dark was much too kind and decent a man to use it. I did wonder, though, what I could say that would tip the balance in my favour. So vivid is my memory of this small event that I can easily picture the corridor flanked by the chemistry and physics labs. I can still smell the tang of hydrogen sulphide mixed with that of carbolic disinfectant. I went on to the biology lab and gave the book and cane to my teacher as was required by the ritual. He immediately put it down on his desk and began his harangue. This I knew was a good sign and I put on my air of utmost contrition. The sadists among the schoolmasters never wasted time on talk but went straight into the act itself. He had hardly warmed over his voice when the clamour of the fire bell drowned it and, as if automatons, boys and master immediately started the well-rehearsed fire drill, and prepared to move to the positions allocated to them outside the school. I turned to go, relieved at my escape by the bell, for I was sure that the fire drill would cool the teacher’s indignation. Suddenly, a punishment much more subtle than mere corporal came into his mind and as he turned to pick up the book and cane, he said, ‘Lovelock, you take care of this,’ and handed it to me. ‘We cannotleave it here to be burnt.’ I was obliged to rescue the cane from the mock fire in front of the whole school that found the episode hilariously funny. Ever after, they called me the boy who had saved the cane. It also was the start of my lifelong love–hate relationship with biology and biologists.
    You will by now have gathered that I was neither a perfect pupil nor happy to be at school. In fact, I hated it so much that every day was a kind of ordeal. If, as often happened in the winter, the filthy coal smoke that polluted the Brixton air made me ill, it was a vast relief. I could stay at home in bed with my beloved books, freed by bronchitis or pneumonia from the tyranny of school. Because of illness, I was a weedy child and