Thinking about Staudinger & Fixation reminded me that I had only put up chapter 1. Here's chapter 2. I'll put up chapter 3 next week - I wasn't happy with the ending of it, and I never really got going on chapter 4 at all, which is why the whole project got stuck.
Liverpool October 1968
Peer pressure, eh? I was already in the gang, and I wasn’t going to go away, so I couldn’t see the point of this stupid new initiation rite, but I didn’t have much choice. The banger in my gloved hand started to shoot out sparks, and I tensed. I had already seen the ringleaders do the same stunt bare-handed, and escape virtually unharmed, except for maybe red scabby palms, but I was content to stay lower down the pecking order. It wasn’t losing fingers per se that worried me so much - after all, I had another hand - but the thought of what I would tell my mum if anything went wrong.
The fallout from the game of “Catch the Banger”, a pyrotechnic version of “Pass the Parcel”, had been bad enough. I had the greatest difficulty in explaining away the burn marks around my cheekbone, obtained when I fumbled a head-high “Cannon”. I felt like an idiot and a fraud, for in reality I could have lost an eye.
Misty autumn evenings always remind me now of those smoggy adolescent nights in the weeks leading up to November 5th. We never called it Guy Fawkes Night. The large number of Catholics in Liverpool who wanted to participate meant that the sectarian origins of the celebration were quietly forgotten. For us it was always just Bonfire (or in the Scouse near-dialect “Bommy”) Night. The preparations would start about a month in advance. Obviously we needed to save our pocket money for boxes of Brock’s and Standard Fireworks and collect firewood. But equally obviously we had to test our purchases and, as we got older, add a few touches of our own. Thanks to atmospheric inversions the smell of gunpowder would linger for hours, mixed with stranger scents from home-made explosives and incendiary devices.
Except for some of the tests of manhood, it was all reasonably harmless. Other gangs went further. Copper pipe bombs filled with weed-killer and sugar thrown onto bonfires. Small children killed by the shrapnel. Given that every side street used to have its bonfire in those days, it was a miracle that the carnage wasn’t greater. We were good guys really, keeping our experiments amongst consenting teenagers, and generally down the back alleys, off the public highway. But nevertheless the gang was crazy about violent chemical reactions, and I was the Chief Chemist.
The whole atoms and molecules thing had a grip on me from the moment that I realised that there was such a subject. In that respect, I don’t think I was particularly unusual. Most of the boys of my age were into explosions, acids and stink bombs, but for me it developed into a mania. I bought my own Bunsen burner. I would take text books out of the library that were years too advanced for me. I knew the Periodic Table by the time I was eleven.
Again, while mine wasn’t a common mania, it certainly wasn’t unheard of. And I shared with my friends most of the normal boyhood crazes. There was football, of course, but not at the intensity you might expect, given that this was sixties Liverpool. None of the gang, and few of my classmates went regularly to matches. Lack of money was one reason, as was parental disapproval, for soccer hooliganism was on the increase. But there was also the gang’s perversity in supporting Everton, even though we could have walked to Anfield, could hear the roar whenever the Reds scored, while Goodison was two bus rides away. Why then did we all follow the Blues? Strange as it seems, for all Shankley’s bluster, in the early sixties they were much the more glamorous, more successful team. Even if we couldn’t go to Goodison, we still needed the scores and the match reports. Saturday afternoon pyrotechnics had to be interrupted for Sports Report, and there were generally fights to be the first to read the Pink Echo (a soccer special edition of the local evening paper).
We were also virtually obliged to worship the Beatles - it was a civic duty. My secondary school was just around the corner from Penny Lane - fish and finger pies, the barber shop, the Fire Station, all that stuff. And at Christmas they sent hampers and toys to the Salvation Army orphanage at Strawberry Fields. We had no direct connection with the fab four - Penny Lane was a much posher, suburban area than our realm of gardenless terraces, jowlers, delapidated pre-fabs. We were also too young ever to have seen them live, and certainly much too young to have heard them, rather than the screams of their girl fans. Nevertheless, every new single was eagerly awaited, and virtually all the records I have from those days are by The Beatles, or by Paul’s brother’s band, The Scaffold.
Obviously television, and occasionally the cinema, generated many of our manias. The teleprinter on Grandstand, and Doctor Who straight after it, were required viewing, as was Top of the Pops, but maybe more influential were the spy/action series. It was a crime to miss an episode of The Man from UNCLE, Danger Man (or The Prisoner), The Avengers, Batman. And looming over all these were the Bond films with their spin-off toys, the Corgi Aston Martin with machine guns and an ejector seat, the Airfix autogyro - the more gadgetry the better.
Then there were comics, and collecting things. We never got into the hard stuff, train-spotting, but we did bus numbers and stamp collecting, the Justice League and innumerable Airfix models. Particularly Panzers, German battleships, strike aircraft. And the boxes of miniature soldiers that went with them, with which we fought ferocious battles, no prisoners, barely a British 8th Army grenade thrower left standing at the end.
Armed conflict had earlier formed a major part of our schoolyard play in the Juniors - Cowboys and Indians of course, Spies versus the Russians, Marines against the Japanese, but also bizarrely on swimming days Arabs and Foreign Legion. (Towels fixed to the head by swimming cozzies made a suitable approximation to Bedouin dress.) The First World War was a favourite of mine. I was fascinated by the strangeness: the spiked helmets, the funny shaped tanks, the map of Europe being all wrong, but also by the shear monochrome ghastliness of trench foot, barbed wire and poison gas.
Nevertheless, chemistry was always the business. Not only the spectacular stinks and bangs, but also background stuff, the shapes and structures of molecules. I was once asked to make space-filling representations of some of the simpler ones by cutting up polystyrene balls with a razor, painting them and sticking them together. It was then that I began to take an interest in nitrogen, to wonder at its ambivalence. To model the gas that makes up most of the atmosphere I needed to cut two little blue balls (for that is its conventional colour) almost in half, and glue the bigger bits together. For the nitrogen atom is a narcissistic beast that likes nothing better than to spend its life in a tight embrace with an exact copy of itself. This struck me as hugely important.
It’s a chemist’s thing - you wouldn’t understand. Even my allies in the back streets wandered off when I tried to explain. But this mundane fact has nagged away at me down the years; and I now view it as the key to understanding Life and twentieth century history.
Let’s start with Life. At the most prosaic level, you, me, our dogs and cats, we are all bags of bone and water held together by proteins. And to make proteins you need to prize apart those little blue balls, persuade them abandon their partners and hang about with water, oxygen, carbon dioxide.
And that’s where the problems start, for none of us can do it. Except for a few vegetarians, we get most of our protein by eating herbivores. And the herbivores and vegetarians can’t do it either, they have to eat plants, and huge quantities of them. Even the plants can’t manage it unaided. Most scrape by, scavenging the limited amounts of nitrate in the soil released by decomposing vegetable matter, dung and dead bodies.
The recycling is pretty efficient, but it’s not enough for a mushrooming human population, for every new person ties up kilos of nitrogen. Thunderstorms help a little, blasting the blue balls apart, but until the Germans sorted out how to break the nitrogen-nitrogen bond on an industrial scale just before the First World War, the only serious quantities of new nitrate came from two sources. There are friendly bacteria living in the roots of peas, beans and clover, who can do nitrogen fixation. And there is a mineral, saltpetre, found in small deposits around the world, and one huge deposit in Chile.
Which brings me to History. Think about the late nineteenth century. Western Europe was following Britain down the industrial revolution trail, national economies could support ever increasing populations. But this meant that agriculture had to become more intense, that crop rotation could no longer furnish sufficient nitrate. Perhaps inevitably, but certainly unfortunately, the European population explosion coincided with a rising militarism, so that saltpetre which could have been used agriculturally was instead diverted off to be mixed with charcoal and sulphur to blow things up. Even the replacement of gunpowder by newer high explosives didn’t help, because TNT, Gelignite, picric acid and even the mercury fulminate detonator all require nitrogen fixed in one way or another.
The military planners of the Great Powers prepared for war without considering this complication. A few Germans realised the consequences the nitrate shortage could have if there were a prolonged war - the Royal Navy could easily stop neutral ships from supplying the Reich. But even fewer listened - the campaign in France would be finished in weeks - the plan said so - and anyway, the British wouldn’t be so caddish. As a result, when Moltke narrowly failed to encircle Paris in 1914, and there wasn’t a Schlieffen Plan B, the war was already lost for Germany.
Belatedly, a message was sent to the German far-east squadron, which was visiting Valparaíso at the time. The commander, Admiral Graf Spee, understood the urgency and set off immediately for the South Atlantic to try to capture the Falkland Islands, keep open the trade route from Chile, and maraud against British shipping with his capital ships, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. However, thanks to Intelligence reports, the Admiralty knew what was happening. A fleet was waiting for Graf Spee, and his big ships were sunk. (Those of you who shared my adolescent hobbies should now be thinking “Hang on. He’s making this up. That’s not what happened to the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. But it’s quite true. Look up the Battle of the Falklands.)
Thus it was that only BASF’s limited quantities of synthetic nitrate and the incompetence of the French and British generals kept the Germans going past 1916. As it happened they held out long enough to collapse the Russian Empire and give the Bolsheviks the start they needed. And in their desperation to break the blockade they succeeded in bring America into the war, thus creating the American armaments industry, and allowing Woodrow Wilson to dictate the Treaty of Versailles. Poland and its corridor. The League of Nations. The nitrogen-nitrogen bond has a lot to answer for.
I’ll stop being didactic now. I should have put all this stuff in a preface, but you wouldn’t have read it. To return to my own story, I began to be aware of the astonishing impact that German chemists had on the world in the eighty years or so leading up to the Second World War. Not just in warfare and fertilisers, but in dyestuffs, in medicine, in the plastics revolution. I developed an interest in the nicer bits of German culture, watched the BBC German language courses, wished we did it at school rather than French. I stopped building Airfix models and amassing double O scale armies. Peer pressure lost its attractions and I drifted away from the gang, concentrated on my A-levels. The Beatles split up. Alan Ball left Everton (the bastard - we didn’t win another title until the mid-eighties). The gang itself evaporated, as sex, drugs and rock and roll competed for attention with blowing things up and hanging around under lampposts.
It’s the usual way with adolescent males. Their fixations are not usually threats to society, and even if they do turn nasty they tend not to last very long. But when I went off to college, or took vacation jobs, I began to meet inadequates who hadn’t shaken off their teenage compulsions. Most often these would be meek, timid types, who would drift off and join the Moonies or whatever. However, a handful of the more vociferous were clearly embittered by the desertion of their former cronies, and by association, with the whole well-balanced portion of the human race. They were generally political extremists, usually on the right. It worries me when these aggressively obsessed gain access to greater resources. When you find them in the police or the armed forces. When the minor soccer hooligan buys himself a filofax and mobile and starts organising riots in other countries. When people who know that ammonium nitrate can turn back into nitrogen, oxygen and water with a bang induce it to do so by the van load outside a public building in Oklahoma. When a small dark Austrian with a fetish about tall blond Germans latches on to a national feeling of betrayal.
Soccer violence, paranoia about the power of the state, racial purity - none of these are exactly “mainstream” manias, and most of us would recognise them as dangerous, would hope to see them die out. At the other end of the spectrum the middle-aged biker, “Barmy Army” man, railway enthusiast or wargamer, living with his mum, may strike us as sad, but not as somebody whose behaviour ought to concern us.
But in between we run into ethical swamps, areas of zealotry - patriotic, political or religious - that are often applauded by large sections of the population, maybe even by local majorities. Leon Trotsky, Michael Collins, Mahatma Ghandi, Ayatollah Khomeini, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Pol Pot - you and I may feel that we know which of these were or are good men, which could only be described monsters, which will go down in History as ruthless pragmatists fighting for what they believed to be a good cause, but whole classes or countries may judge them differently.
And give such a zealot some technological proficiency and the moral questions become even harder, for it is then often not their own actions that need to be judged, but the uses to which others put their inventions. Was an anti-Nazi physicist “right” to build the atom bomb? He could argue that it shortened the war, saved millions of lives, that it wasn’t his idea to use it against a civilian target. What about the patriotic chemist who developed gas warfare? He thought it would break the deadlock, stop the slaughter in the trenches.
Even when the schoolboy inside seems well buried he can still dig his way to the surface at extreme moments. I have never been asked to work on chemical weapons, and I hope there is nothing that could induce me to do so now. But would I have felt the same in 1917 or 1945 or 1961? I don’t know, and I don’t wish to know. I can’t be sure because the old hobbies haven’t all withered away. I still keep an anxious eye on the Everton scores. I still have my stamps and coins, indeed I’ve added enormously to my collections. I love to visit Portmeirion and reminisce about The Prisoner. I can’t say that I’m still heavily into spy thrillers, but I should point out that I’m tall, blond and burly, so you can guess which role I’ve written for myself here. But it’s not a serious daydream, I’ll never be the Action Hero - I’m much too indolent, risk-averse. For this meticulously under-researched novel, I haven’t been knee deep in guano, signalling to an off-shore submarine, nor have I seen the need to visit Valparaíso or Hamburg to check if various scenes could have been possible. I have spent my entire career as an industrial chemist.
It’s not a job that brings very many perks. Yes, there’s some foreign travel, but it‘s typically, and predictably, to the centres of the chemical industry, to the international versions of Widnes and Middlesborough. But occasionally, at my employer’s expense, I have been able to explore some more attractive locations. Ninety nine percent in Western Europe, but no matter, for there’s still plenty that’s spectacular or picturesque. Most appositely, recent trips have taken me to various key locations for my story. Berlin was a bonus away job, a conference rather than a customer visit, so I could take time for sight-seeing. Highly pleasurable were several visits to an atmospheric, “Hotel du Lac” sort of place overlooking Lake Zurich. And for me there was a true pilgrimage, Heidelberg. Gloomy philosophers, famous chemists (even you lot must have heard of Bunsen, he of the burner), and a firework display over the Schloss, on a misty October evening,, that hit my mental rewind button and prompted these reminiscences.
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[this is good]
Posted by: T.Ashokkumar | 05/20/2008 at 07:28 a.m.
Thanks for the approval. How on earth did you find the piece? What were you searching for?
Posted by: DB | 05/31/2008 at 11:51 a.m.