Rosalind Franklin by Brenda Maddox Read Free Book Online Page A

summoned by the High Mistress to hear the complaint that their daughters were bullying Margaret Douglas. ‘Rosalind and I achieved a certain notoriety,’ Jean recalled, ‘which strengthened our alliance.’ This took them into joint projects, such as a small book on Japan, Rosalind doing the maps and drawings, and becoming patrol leaders in the Girl Guides, both winning among other proficiency badges, one in signalling — sending messages in Morse and semaphore.
    Rosalind’s parents were coming to recognise that their elder daughter could be difficult outside the family circle as well as within it. They sympathised with the efforts of her teachers to break through what Rosalind’s mother called ‘her reserve and apparent lack of response’. She referred to it as Rosalind’s ‘walking alone’ stage. There were, as Ellis and Muriel well knew, strong rebels in the Franklin family. The most notorious was Ellis’s brother Hugh, a pro-suffragist who in 1910 had accosted the then Home Secretary Winston Churchill on a train and had attempted to strike him with a dogwhip because of Churchill’s opposition to women’s suffrage. (Churchill was unharmed by the attack and continued on to the dining car.) For this episode, Hugh drew headlines in The Times as ‘Mr Churchill’s Assailant’ and was imprisoned for several months. Then there was Ellis’s older sister Alice. From a conventional start — Alice had been a debutante and presented at Court in 1909 — she turned into a left-wing socialist with cropped hair and pinstriped clothes, sharing a household with a woman partner in an arrangement about which the family made no comment. (Alice’s intellectual energies were diverted into the Fawcett Society and Townswomen’s Guild, for which service she was awarded the OBE.) As for Aunt Mamie, during the First World War, before she married Norman Bentwich and moved to Jerusalem and shocked the diplomatic corps by driving her own car at all hours, she had been dismissed from the Woolwich Arsenal for ‘Bolshevist tendencies’ — organising a trades union for women workers.
    Was Rosalind going to be a younger version of these radicals? The teachers could not get through her apparent hostile indifference. As a strategic manoeuvre, Ellis and Muriel, acting either with imagination or on advice, bought Rosalind a Persian kitten. Named by Rosalind ‘Wilhelmina’ or ‘Willy’, the pet played its part in calming her down, waiting for her to come home from school and perching on the arm of her chair while she did her homework. What the nervous parents were probably witnessing was simply the beginning of adolescence. Rosalind’s menstrual periods began when she was thirteen.
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    Trouble with teachers, anxiety over marks, delight in science, sport and sewing: the pattern from boarding school reasserted itself at St Paul’s. In a sequence of revealing letters written to her parents when they were away, Rosalind poured out her schoolgirl woes, with confidence to write the way she spoke:
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    Dear Mummy and Daddy,
    I was told in the drawing lesson this morning, that I was too literal-minded; We were doing designs for lino-cuts, they are lovely fun, and I did a thing something like this. [detailed diagram] She said that when there was a lot of it it would look too spotty, couldn’t I put tails onto the rounds. I said I did not see how you could put tails on rounds so she said I was too literal-minded, and this was what she meant. This was the result. [another diagram] Would you have been able to guess what she meant? We spent the whole arithmetic lesson today with a lovely discussion about gravity and all that sort of stuff. I am doing my knitting on 4 needles, as Nannie said it would look untidy on two. I have come here at the right time as there is the party on Friday and we are probably going to the military tournament the