An Encyclopaedia of Myself

by Jonathan Meades

  Diana Colombine’s skin was deliciously fawn like a doe’s, like a high-baked biscuit. Precisely, like a Huntley and Palmers Breakfast Biscuit – a smooth 10-mm-deep rectangle whose corners were curved, whose centre was marginally concave and which I longed for because it was forbidden (rival manufacturer). I longed for her too and her sweet smooth limbs, her sun-streaked bobbed hair whose bangs she was coltishly learning to throw. She didn’t know that she was going to be my squaw even though her qualifications were impeccable: she was the only girl of my age whom I now saw regularly. She had arrived in Wiltshire from Colombo with her parents Harry and Beryl, who had quickly become great friends of my parents. Colombo was in Ceylon. I knew that. And knew too that Ceylon was nearly India. She bore a name that derived from that city and whilst nearly Indians and Red Indians were from different continents they were clearly kin for otherwise they would not be so called. A further link: a lifesize painted statue of a Sioux warrior stood above the entrance of the Indianerhof, a prodigy of Viennese social housing designed by Karl Dirnhuber, father of one of Harry’s co-authors of microbiological and bacteriological papers. That proved something.

  The interior of their thatched cottage at Winterbourne Gunner was dark. The sitting room was all files and bookshelves. The ceilings were unusually high. He would sit at a staunch table placed against the back of a high-back pub settle to whose planks he drawing-pinned notes. He wrote on foolscap notepads unfazed by any activity around him, lit as though by an annunciatory beam. The house was set back from the road beyond a lush paddock which a pony cropped. I confidently impressed Diana with assurances of my equestrian prowess though I had never ridden a horse. I confidently impressed her with my Apache outfit one day when she and her parents came for lunch.

  I greeted her naked save for a Lone Ranger mask over my eyes, a paisley handkerchief round my head with a rook feather stuck in it, bolts of warpaint lipsticked on my cheeks, a leather belt round my waist and an improvised breechcloth – a length of fabric secured by the belt to cover my genitals and my bottom. This ensemble was completed by an air rifle and a bow and arrow, more mature choices of weapon than a plastic tomahawk. Beryl was startled by my appearance. She was a tense woman forever on the point of breaking into tears. She looked at me with a look my parents wouldn’t see, a look which I knew I could not mention. She must have wondered what they were thinking of in allowing me to dress thus. Harry was balding, saturnine, dark-eyed, restless, energetic. He had skin as smooth as his daughter’s, well-cut clothes and what I supposed to be the mien of a brahmin.

  He joined my fantasy with the amused bonhomie he displayed towards both children and adults. I liked the way he could turn on life-and-soul joviality. And I was grateful that an Indian of a sort – even an Indian who, unlike me, did not look the part, but who like me did not speak with an Indian accent – was apprised of the Apache’s homelands. He was familiar, too, with Cochise, the Chiricahua chief I favoured over the publicity hog Geronimo who had the face of an ancient charlady. I knew that the Apache used poisoned arrows. Harry explained how they were poisoned: with the pounded liver of an animal (often a deer) which had been bitten by a rattlesnake, or with that snake’s venom glands. Such arrowheads were used against enemies but not for hunting. Did I know why? Because they might contaminate the meat of beasts so taken. This was information that grown-ups seldom imparted, were seldom interested in. He did not, however, share my preoccupation with the homicidal (and probably right-handed) Henry McCarty aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid. This oversight was a disappointment to me. No matter. Apaches ate plants which made them dance and reel for hours, which made them courageous in battle, which made them see things they had never seen before. Visions? Precisely! Holes in the sky, Old Chap. Mountains changing shape as much in a minute as they had done in a million years. Cacti smiling at them. They stared at the sun till it blinded their eyes. Were they mad? Harry clapped me on my naked Apache back, congratulated me on my perception – and how delighted I was to be so patronised!

  He asked me how I was enjoying the Swan School, he hoped I appreciated the historic building. I described the smell of the old people waiting to die in Trinity Hospital. He made a caricaturally quizzical face. A few moments later as we were sitting down to lunch he laughed at whatever aperçu his brain had conveyed. He was also laughing at me. I had learnt early that I prompted laughter without intending to, a characteristic I rued. He suggested that what I thought was the smell of old people was the smell of the mash in Gibbs Mew brewery just along the street from Trinity Hospital. I had surely noticed the building with the hoists, the cranes, the barrels? He explained how beer is made and why the process smells the way it does. He explained in detail I could not understand. He was suddenly oblivious to his audience’s shortcomings, making no allowance for children or indeed non-scientists. I was taken by Harry’s enthusiasm. But I still thought that was the way old people smelled.

  After lunch Diana and I crept under the plum tree into the cheap plastic and canvas conical tent that I called my wigwam. She agreed to be my squaw. I gave her a headdress of plastic feathers that just about fitted. I stroked her skin.

  The next day:

  Diana and I returned as pupils to our respective schools.

  My mother walked 200 yards up the road to the school where she taught. My father rose early to go off on his rounds.

  Beryl probably congratulated herself on not pouring her first drink before noon.

  Dr Harry Cullumbine (not Colombine, not that I realised for years) drove five minutes from the cottage at Winterbourne Gunner to CDE Porton Down, where he monitored marmosets on atropine, observed rats breathing kerosene fumes and pigs hooked to ethanol drips, fed Datura stramonium to monkeys and ketamine to lambs. Having attended to his zoo of junky primates and barbiturate-dependent quadrupeds he dosed human volunteers with LSD. This perpetually tanned Yorkshireman (who occasionally failed to suppress the ghost of that accent), sometime Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Colombo, was now head of the Physiology Section at Porton. The volunteers were national servicemen. In this context volunteers is today habitually written ‘volunteers’. A little less than a year before, Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddisonfn2 had died in Salisbury Infirmary four hours after participating in a Porton experiment which exposed him to 200 mg of Sarin. The Coroner came under pressure from the Home Office, from the Intelligence Services, from the Minister of Supply, Duncan Sandys. Nonetheless, it is conceivable that the verdict of death by misadventure might have been returned even without those illegitimate influences: autres temps, autres moeurs.

  Exceptionally, a second inquest was held fifty-one years later in 2004. To the doubtless smug delight of Attorney General Goldsmith and DPP Calvert-Smith, brown-nosed cretins of the New Labour establishment, it returned the altogether predictable verdict of unlawful killing. Like the quotes round ‘volunteers’ this verdict was the presumptuous judgment of the present on the past. Here was the Age of Apology or Rights or Compensation or Complaint castigating the Age of – what? Duty? Exploitation? Service? Mortal Quackery? Such retrospective perdition is cooked up in a whiggish void. With confidently 20/20 hindsight it overlooks the threats of nuclear devastation, Soviet aggression and world war which were omnipresent at Porton half a century previously. A society which deludes itself that risk can be eliminated is unlikely to understand one which accepted privation and danger with stoic fatalism, with forelock-tugging resignation. The volunteers’ choric plea that they believed they were assisting in the researches of the Common Cold Unit at Harvard Hospital eight miles from Porton on the other side of Salisbury would be plausible were it not for the fact that experiments had been conducted over two years before Maddison’s death and would continue subsequently.

  Only a handful of men were used in a single day. After the experiment each would return to his base. It defies credibility that there was no mess talk, no tap-room gossip, no barracks rumour about what happened in the chambers. Potential vol
unteers of the future would thus have known to expect something other than Harvard Hospital. Five hundred and sixty-two men had been involved in the Sarin experiments before an adverse reaction was suffered. At which point the dose was reduced from 300 mg to 200 mg. Maddison was volunteer no. 745. For the volunteers it must have seemed like light prostitution. In exchange for a meagre sum and a day free of the boredom of conscripted life they surrendered their body to a chemical rather than a human intrusion. The liberal judiciary’s discernment of a moral equivalence between Porton’s experiments and those conducted by SS doctors is an instance of the usual grotesque trahison des clercs gauchistes. Of course we all know that the camp doctors loved their children, hearth and Bach. The many Porton doctors and boffins whom I met exhibited similarly congenial traits. This does not make them wicked. Nor do their experiments, although age and ethical climate weather a scientist. I was twelve when I first met Ken James.fn3 He was forty-three and had bought the plot of land next to my parents’. His opinions were no doubt different then from those he held fifty years later.

  He was an organic chemist, an expert in chemical warfare and defence against it, a jazz trumpeter, a pioneer of operational research, an inventor, a craftsman, an entrepreneur, a writer. He was a man of formidable learning, exceptional energy and limitless curiosity.

  He was born at Shepherd’s Bush. His father, then serving as a soldier, never really recovered from the First World War. When he was demobbed he became a groom in Neasden, then still more or less a village. It was in such places on the periphery of west and north-west London that Ken grew up as his father moved from job to job and his family moved from one rented flat to the next. Alcoholism, indigence and bailiffs followed them.

  His mother walked out – she would live to a great age on the north Kent coast. He left Latymer Upper at the age of sixteen after taking the School Certificate and sought work in order to provide for his increasingly unemployable father. By night he played trumpet in a jazz band with, inter alia, Les Hitchcock, nephew of Alfred, and Cliff Townshend, future father of Pete. At Number One Rhythm Club, off Haymarket, they were joined on stage one night by Louis Armstrong.

  By day he was a laboratory chemist. At C. A. Vandervell he was employed by the father of Tony Vandervell, who in the late 1950s manufactured the Vanwall F1 car. At British Drug Houses he was precociously involved in the development of an early commercial thyroxine used to stimulate underactive thyroid glands. It was made clear to him that an autodidact, no matter how talented, would always suffer a competitive disadvantage to a graduate, no matter how dull. He cut down on jazz and enrolled in evening classes at the Northern Polytechnic in Holloway to take a London external degree. He had yet to complete it when, just before the outbreak of war, he was offered a job at the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton Down.

  Salisbury had not then, and still has not, a seat of tertiary education. Its intelligentsia was mainly composed of Porton Down scientists. They were clever people and, incidentally, my ad hoc teachers. Ken said that Porton had ‘the atmosphere of a university … there were scientists of every discipline – there was even an archaeologist who had dug round Stonehenge.’ Having received his degree and several promotions, he was, after little more than a year devoted to the design of chemical weapons, appointed head of the Munitions Section of the Australian Field Experimental Station. ‘Assessing bomb performance … What that actually meant was laying waste to a considerable area of the Queensland jungle.’

  Post-war he was seconded from there to BAOR, and then to Washington DC, Utah and Alberta, where he encountered the practices of operational research.

  The house next to my parents’ that Edward Fielden’s firm had torpidly built for Ken and Peggy was hardly finished when Ken was appointed Director, Chemical Defence Research and Development at the War Office. They let the house and moved to Twickenham. The first tenants sublet the granny annex to a girl who played host to Salisbury’s folkies, among them the future actor Brian Protheroe (né Jones), then a lab assistant at Porton. Ken sat on various NATO committees, went on to become Director of the Operational Research Establishment at Byfleet. In 1968 he was given the post of Scientific Adviser to the Treasury with a brief to apply operational research methods to large-scale government projects including the funding of the Channel Tunnel and the Thames Barrier, the NHS’s expansion and the introduction of decimalisation. He was instrumental in bringing computers into government. A move which was widely, though ultimately unsuccessfully, resisted. When he retired he was Chief Scientific Officer. He had come to admire William Armstrong, Denis Healey and Harold Wilson. He had foreseen, correctly, that Victor Rothschild’s CPRS – which he reckoned to be a club-like vanity project – presaged the advent of partial ‘special advisers’ and battalions of consultants. He was astonished by Tony Benn’s ‘silliness’. His reaction to any mention of our eventual Salisbury neighbour Edward Heath was to suppress a laugh.

  Although he was an ambulatory encyclopaedia he was reluctant to foist his knowledge on the unwilling. He was a measured optimist who believed in the values of the Enlightenment and in the beneficence of science. He was, equally, bewildered by the intellectual baselessness and fatuity of religious ‘faith’ and contemptuous of the tribalism that accompanies it.

  ‘I suppose we did do some pretty terrible things [at Porton] … In the chambers. The chambers … Even thinking about those chambers is, ah … Putting on masks to go in them … We did some pretty terrible things to ourselves too. It’s amazing there weren’t more like Baconfn4 – no one followed the safety drill. Pretty reckless, but that was how it was in those days. Thankless task Darlowfn5 had – no one took any notice … The thing is, we didn’t think of what we were doing as terrible … It wasn’t terrible then … Defence of the realm – not too fashionable nowadays. Being one step ahead – that was the deterrent … Letting them know we were one step ahead. No one wanted to go to war again … Anything but that. Anything. Not like this … bunch.’

  He considered that to judge the seldom injurious experiments conducted at the height of the Cold War by the standards of the rights-obsessed early twenty-first century was morally, judicially and philosophically flawed. He was inured to the sensationalism that attaches to experiments that go wrong. Such experiments were, he argued, the very rare exceptions that proved the rule of Porton’s probity. They provided, and still provide, a straw for the enemies of science to clutch at.

  That God’s Own Bomber – the most religious thus most delusional British prime minister since Gladstone and the most bellicose since Palmerston – should have presided over a government that sanctimoniously damned a predecessor’s chemical warriors is risible. Of the 30,000 men who underwent experiments at Porton less than 2 per cent, about 500, claim to have suffered ill effects. Because the suits brought against the MoD have mainly rested on the question of whether informed consent was obtained, the plaintiffs’ representatives have not concerned themselves with differentiating between nerve gases and psychomimetics. Anyone else would differentiate. The recreational use of nerve gases is a masochistic specialism. That of psychomimetics is not.

  The SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, precursor of MI6), on whose behalf the experiments with LSD were conducted, concluded, peremptorily and wrongly, that its uses in both conflict and interrogation were few because its effects were unpredictable. But it does not follow that they are uncontrollable. Reactions are almost wholly determined by the subject’s surroundings and companions. Amend these and you amend the experience. Harry Cullumbine understood this. He persisted in the belief that such a trigger might possess protean psychotherapeutic properties. And because Porton was not monolithic he managed to grant himself permission to continue to test it: he held a senior post, he was known as ‘the Chief’.

  Further, LSD was still more than a decade away from proscription. He used it in non-clinical circumstances. He took his work home with him. He dosed himself. He discovered its capacity to promote wonder, to make him see mou
ntains change shape, to show him holes in the sky. He shared its powers (aesthetic, oneiric, chromatic, comic, moral, hedonistic) with a close coterie. Did they witness cosmic phenomena as they dosed themselves in tweeds and Bedford cords, in twinsets and circle skirts? Did downland junipers mutate into pyrites? Did hares boast of being jackals? Did they know that the leathery crones’ faces at Great Yews were really bole knots? Did they forget that the berries were poison? Did they read the chalky scrawl inscribed in turf as rabbit runes? Did they believe they were hallucinating when they saw myxomatotic faces grinning from warrens?

  Given LSD’s availability, its legality and the level of intellectual and pharmacological curiosity it is hardly surprising that it was used clandestinely. In the period 1953–55, when Harry Cullumbine was experimenting with it, the suggestive linkage of LSD to religious or animistic experience had yet to be made. There was no reason to suspect that this crystal-clear chemical would foment a sloppy goofy subculture. Cullumbine’s tests had ceased by the time that Aldous Huxley first dosed himself on Christmas Eve 1955. Huxley had a long history of mystical enquiry. His bias towards such revelations, propagated in Heaven and Hell, would have a determining effect on the millions of people who took LSD over the next quarter-century. If you expect to suffer transcendence or expect to find god you are more likely to do so than if you dose yourself without such preconceptions. The drug does not take complete control of the brain. It is susceptible to guidance, it can be nudged in a particular direction both by intellectual preparation and by exterior stimuli – place, people, climate. The effect of the experience can be purely material. That is what Porton scientists would probably have expected, thus would probably have got.