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

should have been the target of bullies, the more usual reason to dislike school. I was blessed by having a wonderful group of fellow sufferers as my schoolmates. To them, I was the ‘mad scientist’, good when needed for a wheeze that would confound our common enemy, the masters.
    Let me tell you briefly of one small battle in our long war. A master, who taught French so badly that I could recall hardly a word of it, had the nickname ‘Sappho’. This was not because he was inclined, like others among the staff, to a feeble fumbling of young boys that aimed at, but never reached, its target of pederasty. No, we called him ‘Sappho’ because it was in his hour that pubescent boys explored their bodies in an orgy of mutual masturbation. Much is made of the troubled minds of young girls of those repressed times, of their panic when they reached the menarche and first experienced bleeding from their vaginas. I cannot recall ever having heard any public comment on the similar puzzlement of boys when masturbation produced a sticky liquid product. For most of them, the 1930s were still a time when masturbation was a mortal sin, not something to mention to parents or indeed any adult. It was not so surprising that in the warm community of their peers they explored their bodies and discussed such things. As far as I know, little of this intimacy led to homosexuality ; those of that inclination seemed to pair up early on and avoid the general scrimmage in Sappho’s room. We had nothing against Sappho : he rarely punished and was so short-sighted that we could get away with anything. Perversely, and exhibiting the bad side of the group, we used him as an easy target and once played a cruel joke on him. In December, just before term ended, the classroom was decorated with tinsel, paper bells, and the paraphernalia of Christmas; and above the master’s desk were two balloons. One of us had the ideaof adding ink to one of these balloons, arranging a small leak in it, and replacing it over the desk just before Sappho entered the room. He swept in like an elderly bat, trailing his black academic gown like a pair of crumpled wings. He must have thought the class unusually quiet as he walked to his desk, sat down, and opened his notes for the day’s lesson in French verbs. After a minute or so, his hand moved to his bald head as he felt something impinge on it. He gazed dimly at the class but all seemed well. Then his hand rose again, and he felt the wetness of the ink, and rubbed it around first his head and then his face. There was an explosion of laughter from the boys; we could contain ourselves no longer. We laughed so much that it hurt. Sappho tried in his way to keep order, but kept wiping more and more ink onto his face, growing ever more like a badly made-up minstrel. Aroused by the noise the headmaster entered and brought order; I cannot remember the sequel and the punishments we received, except that they were collective, and the boys responsible were not betrayed.
    Although a loner by nature, I realized in adolescence and earlier the importance of my peer group. What is rarely discussed is how much good comes from it. In the grimly custodial environment of the school, the warmth and companionship of my friends went far to make life tolerable. Much more than this, a large part of the knowledge I gained in school years came from interaction with my peers. In spite of its location in Brixton, the pupils of the Strand School were an elitist bunch. They were almost all of them selected by examination, which in those days let through no more than a few per cent. I well recall four of us discussing, at about age thirteen, particle accelerators. We were, like most boys, fascinated by speed and power, and the idea of accelerating charged atoms to near the speed of light was, at the time, exciting. We knew about Cockcroft and Walton’s famous experiment with an early linear accelerator—we had seen the apparatus in the Science