Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) (2 page)

Given all my aunts and uncles (and a couple more on my father’s side), my cousins numbered almost a hundred; and since the family, for the most part, was centered in London (though there were far-flung American, Continental, and South African branches), we would all meet frequently, tribally, on family occasions. This sense of extended family was one I knew and enjoyed as far back as memory goes, and it went with a sense that it was our business, the family business, to ask questions, to be ‘scientific,’ just as we were Jewish or English. I was among the youngest of the cousins – I had cousins in South Africa who were forty-five years my senior – and some of these cousins were already practicing scientists or mathematicians; others, only a little older than myself, were already in love with science. One cousin was a young physics teacher; three were reading chemistry at university; and one, a precocious fifteen-year-old, was showing great mathematical promise. All of us, I could not help imagining, had a bit of the old man in us.

‘37’

I
grew up just before the Second World War in a huge, rambling Edwardian house in northwest London. Being a corner house, at the junction of Mapesbury and Exeter Roads, number 37 Mapesbury Road faced onto both, and was larger than its neighbors. The house was basically square, almost cubical, but with a front porch that jutted out, V-shaped at the top, like the entry to a church. There were bow windows that also protruded on each side, with recesses in between, and thus the roof had a most complex shape, resembling, to my eyes, nothing so much as a giant crystal. The house was built of red brick of a peculiarly soft, dusky color. I imagined this, after I learned some geology, as being old red sandstone from the Devonian age, a thought encouraged by the fact that all the roads around us – Exeter, Teignmouth, Dartmouth, Dawlish – themselves had Devonian names.

There were double front doors, with a little vestibule between them, and these led onto a hall, and thence to a passage that led back toward the kitchen; the hall and the passage had a floor of tesselated colored stones. To the right of the hall, as one entered, the staircase curved upward, its heavy bannister polished smooth by my brothers sliding down it.

Certain rooms in the house had a magical or sacred quality, perhaps my parents’ surgery (both of them were physicians) above all, with its bottles of medicine, its balance for weighing out powders, the racks of test tubes and beakers, the spirit lamp, and the examining table. There were all sorts of medicines, lotions, and elixirs in a large cabinet – it looked like an old-fashioned chemist’s shop in miniature – there was a microscope, and bottles of reagents for testing patients’ urine, like the bright blue Fehling’s solution, which turned yellow when there was sugar in the urine.

It was from this special room, where patients were admitted, but not (unless the door was left unlocked) my childish self, that I sometimes saw a glow of violet light coming out under the door and smelled a strange, seaside smell, which I later learned was ozone – this was the old ultraviolet lamp at work. I was not too sure, as a child, what doctors ‘did,’ and glimpses of catheters and bougies in their kidney dishes, retractors and speculums, rubber gloves, catgut thread and forceps – all this, I think, rather frightened me, though it fascinated me too. Once, when the door was left accidentally open, I saw a patient with her legs up in stirrups (in what I later learned was the ‘lithotomy position’). My mother’s obstetric bag and anesthetic bag were always ready to be grabbed in an emergency, and I knew when they would be needed, for I would hear comments like, ‘She’s half-a-crown dilated’ –  comments which by their unintelligibility and mysterious-ness (were they a sort of code?) stimulated my imagination in all sorts of ways.

Another sacred room was the library, which, in the evenings at least, was especially my father’s domain. One section of the library wall was covered with his Hebrew books, but there were books on every subject – my mother’s books (she was fond of novels and biographies), my brothers’ books, and books inherited from grandparents. One bookcase was entirely devoted to plays – my parents, who had met as fellow enthusiasts in a medical students’ Ibsen society, still went to the theater every Thursday.

The library was not only for reading; on weekends, the books that were out on the reading table would be put to one side to make room for games of various sorts. While my three older brothers might be playing an intense game of cards or chess, I would play a simple game, Ludo, with Auntie Birdie, my mother’s older sister, who lived with us – in my early years, she was more a play companion than my brothers were. Extreme passions developed over Monopoly, and even before I learned to play it, the prices and colors of the properties became engraved on my mind. (To this day I see the Old Kent Road and Whitechapel as cheap, mauve properties, the pale blue Angel and Euston Road next to them as scarcely and better. By contrast, the West End is clothed for me in rich, costly colors: Fleet Street scarlet, Piccadilly yellow, the green of Bond Street, and the dark, Bentley-colored blue of Park Lane and Mayfair.) Sometimes we would all join in a game of Ping-Pong, or some woodworking, using the big library table. But after a weekend of frivolities, the games would be returned to the huge drawer under one of the bookcases, and the room restored to its quiet for my father’s evening reading.

There was another drawer on the other side of the bookcase, a fake drawer which, for some reason, did not open, and I frequently had a fixed dream about this drawer. Like any child, I loved coins – their glitter, their weights, their different shapes and sizes – from the bright copper farthings and halfpennies and pennies to the varied silver coins (especially the tiny silver three-penny bits – one was always concealed in the suet pudding at Christmas) to the heavy gold sovereign my father wore on his watch chain. And I had read in my children’s encyclopedia about doubloons and rubles, coins with holes in them, and ‘pieces of eight,’ which I imagined to be perfect octagons. In my dream the false drawer would open to me, displaying a glittering treasure of copper and silver and gold mixed together, coins of a hundred countries and ages, including, to my delight, octagonal pieces of eight.

I especially liked crawling into the triangular cupboard under the stairs, where the special plates and cutlery for Passover were kept. The cupboard itself was shallower than the stairs, and it seemed to me that its back wall, when tapped, sounded hollow; it must have concealed, I felt, a further space behind it, a secret passageway, perhaps. I felt snug in here, in my secret hideaway – no one besides me was small enough to fit in.

Most beautiful and mysterious in my eyes was the front door, with its stained glass panels of many shapes and colors. I would place my eye behind the crimson glass and see a whole world red-stained (but with the red roofs of the houses opposite strangely pale, and clouds startlingly distinct against a blue sky now almost black). It was a completely different experience with the green glass, and the deep violet blue. Most intriguing was the yellowish green glass, for this seemed to shimmer, sometimes yellow and sometimes green, depending on where I stood and how the sun hit it.

A forbidden area was the attic, which was gigantic, since it covered the entire area of the house, and stretched up to the peaked, crystalline eaves of the roof. I was once taken up to see the attic, and then dreamed of it repeatedly, perhaps because it was forbidden after Marcus climbed up once by himself and fell through the skylight, gashing his thigh (though once, in a storytelling mood, he told me that the scar had been inflicted by a wild boar, like the scar on Odysseus’ thigh).

We had meals in the breakfast room next to the kitchen; the dining room, with its long table, was reserved for shabbas meals, festivals, and special occasions. There was a similar distinction between the lounge and the drawing room – the lounge, with its sofa and dilapidated, comfy chairs, was for general use; the drawing room, with its elegant, uncomfortable Chinese chairs and lacquered cabinets, was for large family gatherings. Aunts, uncles, and cousins in the neighborhood would walk over on Saturday afternoons, and a special silver tea service would be pulled out and small crustless sandwiches of smoked salmon and cod’s roe served in the drawing room – such dainties were not served at any other time. The chandeliers in the drawing room, originally gasoliers, had been converted to electric light sometime in the 1920
s
(but there were still odd gas jets and fittings all over the house so that, in a pinch, we could go back to gas lighting). The drawing room also contained a huge grand piano, covered with family photos, but I preferred the soft tones of the upright piano in the lounge.

Though the house was full of music and books, it was virtually empty of paintings, engravings, or artwork of any sort; and similarly, while my parents went to theaters and concerts frequently, they never, as far as I can remember, visited an art gallery. Our synagogue had stained glass windows depicting biblical scenes, which I often gazed at in the more excruciating parts of the service. There had been, apparently, a dispute over whether such pictures were appropriate, given the interdiction of graven images, and I wondered whether this was a reason we had no art in the house. But it was rather, I soon realized, that my parents were completely indifferent to the decor of the house or its furnishings. Indeed, I later learned that when they had bought the place, in 1930, they had given my father’s older sister Lina their checkbook, carte blanche, saying, ‘Do what you want, get what you want.’

Lina’s choices – fairly conventional, except for the chinoiserie in the drawing room – were neither approved nor contested; my parents accepted them without really noticing or caring. My friend Jonathan Miller, visiting the house for the first time – this was soon after the war – said it seemed like a rented house to him, there was so little evidence of personal taste or decision. I was as indifferent as my parents to the decor of the house, though I was angered and bewildered by Jonathan’s comment. For, to me, 37 was full of mysteries and wonders – the stage, the mythic background, on which my life was lived.

There were coal fires in almost every room, including a porcelain coal stove, flanked by fish tiles, in the bathroom. The fire in the lounge had large copper coal scuttles to either side, bellows, and fire irons, including a slightly bent poker of steel (my eldest brother, Marcus, who was very strong, had managed to bend it, when it was almost white-hot). If an aunt or two visited, we would all gather in the lounge, and they would hitch up their skirts and stand with their backs to the fire. All of them, like my mother, were heavy smokers, and after warming themselves by the fire, they would sit on the sofa and smoke, lobbing their wet fag ends into the fire. They were, by and large, terrible shots, and the damp butts would hit the brick wall surrounding the fireplace and adhere there, disgustingly, until they finally burned away.

I have only fragmentary, brief memories of my youngest years, the years before the war, but I remember being frightened, as a child, by observing that many of my aunts and uncles had coal black tongues – would my own, I wondered, turn black when I grew up? I was greatly relieved when Auntie Len, divining my fears, told me that her tongue was not really black, that its blackness came from chewing charcoal biscuits, and that they all ate these because they had gas.

Of my Auntie Dora (who died when I was very young), I remember nothing except for the color orange – whether this was the color of her complexion or hair, or of her clothes, or whether it was the reflected color of the firelight, I have no idea. All that remains is a warm, nostalgic feeling and a peculiar fondness for orange.

My bedroom, since I was the youngest, was a tiny room connected with my parents’ bedroom, and I remember that its ceiling was festooned with strange, calcareous concretions. Michael had had this room before I was born, and had been fond of flicking gelatinous spoonsful of sago – the sliminess of which he disliked – onto the ceiling, where it would adhere with a wet smack. As the sago dried, nothing but a chalky mound would remain.

There were several rooms which belonged to nobody and had no clear function; these were used to house extras of all kinds – books, games, toys, magazines, waterproofs, sports equipment. In one small room there was nothing but a Singer sewing machine with a treadle (which my mother had bought on her marriage, in 1922) and a knitting machine of an intricate (and, to my mind, beautiful) design. My mother used it to make our socks, and I loved to watch her turning the handle, to watch the glittering steel knitting needles clacking in unison and the cylinder of wool, weighted with a lead bob, descending steadily. On one occasion I distracted her as she was making a sock, and the cylinder of wool got longer and longer, until finally it hit the floor. Not knowing what to do with this yard-long cylinder of wool, she gave it to me to keep as a muff.

These extra rooms enabled my parents to accommodate relatives like Auntie Birdie and others, sometimes for long periods. The largest of them was reserved for the formidable Auntie Annie, on her rare visits from Jerusalem (thirty years after her death, this was still referred to as ‘Annie’s room’). When Auntie Len came to visit from Delamere, she, too, had her own room, and here she would establish herself, with her books and her tea things – there was a gas ring in the room, and she would make her own tea – and when she invited me in, I felt I was entering a different world, a world of other interests and tastes, of civility, of unconditional love.

When my uncle Joe, who had been a doctor in Malaya, became a Japanese prisoner of war, his older son and daughter stayed with us. And my parents would sometimes take in refugees from Europe during the war years. So the house, though large, was never empty; it seemed, on the contrary, to house dozens of separate lives, not just the immediate family – my parents and my three brothers and myself – but itinerant uncles and aunts, the resident staff – our nanny and nurse, the cook – and the patients themselves, who would come and go.