Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001)

by Oliver Sacks

  I had had some religious feeling, of a childish sort, in the years before the war. When my mother lit the shabbas candles, I would feel, almost physically, the Sabbath coming in, being welcomed, descending like a soft mantle over the earth. I imagined, too, that this occurred all over the universe, the Sabbath descending on far-off star systems and galaxies, enfolding them all in the peace of God.

  Prayer had been a part of life. First the Sh’mah, ‘Hear, O Israel…,’ then the bedtime prayer I would say every night. My mother would wait until I had cleaned my teeth and put on my pajamas, and then she would come upstairs and sit on my bed while I recited in Hebrew, ‘Baruch atoh adonai…Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who makest the bands of sleep to fall upon mine eyes, and slumber upon mine eyelids…’ It was beautiful in English, more beautiful still in Hebrew. (Hebrew, I was told, was God’s actual language, though, of course, He understood every language, and even one’s feelings, when one could not put them into words.) ‘May it be thy will, O Lord our God and God of my fathers, to suffer me to lie down in peace, and to let me rise up again…’ But by this point the bands of sleep (whatever they were) would be pressing heavily upon my eyes, and I rarely got any further. My mother would bend over and kiss me, and I would instantly fall asleep.

  Back at Braefield there was no kiss, and I gave up my bedtime prayer, for it was inseparably associated with my mother’s kiss, and now it was an intolerable reminder of her absence. The very phrases that had so warmed and comforted me, conveying God’s concern and power, were now so much verbiage, if not gross deceit.

  For when I was suddenly abandoned by my parents (as I saw it), my trust in them, my love for them, was rudely shaken, and with this my belief in God, too. What evidence was there, I kept asking myself, for God’s existence? At Braefield, I determined on an experiment to resolve the matter decisively: I planted two rows of radishes side by side in the vegetable garden, and asked God to bless one or curse one, whichever He wished, so that I might see a clear difference between them. The two rows of radishes came up identical, and this was proof for me that no God existed. But I longed now even more for something to believe in.

  As the beatings, the starvings, the tormentings continued, those of us who remained at school were driven to more and more extreme psychological measures – dehumanizing, derealizing, our chief tormentor. Sometimes, while being beaten, I would see him reduced to a gesticulating skeleton (at home I had seen radiographs, bones in a tenuous envelope of flesh). At other times, I would see him as not a being at all, but a temporary vertical collection of atoms. I would say to myself, ‘He’s only atoms’ – and, more and more, I craved a world that was ‘only atoms.’ The violence exuded by the headmaster at times seemed to contaminate the whole of living nature, so that I saw violence as the very principle of life.

  What could I do, in these circumstances, other than seek a private place, a refuge where I might be alone, absorb myself without interference from others, and find some sense of stability and warmth? My situation was perhaps similar to that which Freeman Dyson describes in his autobiographical essay ‘To Teach or Not to Teach.’

  I belonged to a small minority of boys who were lacking in physical strength and athletic prowess…and squeezed between the twin oppressions of [a vicious headmaster and bullying boys]…We found our refuge in a territory that was equally inaccessible to our Latin-obsessed headmaster and our football-obsessed schoolmates. We found our refuge in science…We learned…that science is a territory of freedom and friendship in the midst of tyranny and hatred.

  For me, the refuge at first was in numbers. My father was a whiz at mental arithmetic, and I, too, even at the age of six, was quick with figures – and, more, in love with them. I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt. (Years later, when I read 1984, the climactic horror for me, the ultimate sign of Winston’s disintegration and surrender, was his being forced, under torture, to deny that two and two is four. Even more terrible was the fact that eventually he began to doubt this in his own mind, that finally numbers failed him, too.)

  I particularly loved prime numbers, the fact that they were indivisible, could not be broken down, were inalienably themselves. (I had no such confidence in myself, for I felt I was being divided, alienated, broken down, more every week.) Primes were the building blocks of all other numbers, and there must be, I felt, some meaning to them. Why did primes come when they did? Was there any pattern, any logic to their distribution? Was there any limit to them, or did they go on forever? I spent innumerable hours factoring, searching for primes, memorizing them. They afforded me many hours of absorbed, solitary play, in which I needed no one else.

  I made a grid, ten by ten, of the first hundred numbers, with the primes blacked in, but I could see no pattern, no logic to their distribution. I made larger tables, increased my grids to twenty squared, thirty squared, but still could discern no obvious pattern. And yet I was convinced that there must be one.

  The only real holidays I had during the war were visits to Auntie Len in Cheshire, in the midst of Delamere Forest, where she had founded the Jewish Fresh Air School for ‘delicate children’ (these were children from working-class families in Manchester – many had asthma, some had had rickets or tuberculosis, and one or two, I suspect, looking back, were autistic). All the children here had little gardens of their own, squares of earth a couple of yards wide, bordered by stones. I wished desperately that I could go to Delamere rather than Braefield – but this was a wish I never expressed (though I wondered if my clear-sighted and loving aunt did not divine it).

  Auntie Len always delighted me by showing me all sorts of botanical and mathematical pleasures. She showed me the spiral patterns on the faces of sunflowers in the garden, and suggested I count the florets in these. As I did so, she pointed out that they were arranged according to a series – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. – each number being the sum of the two that preceded it. And if one divided each number by the number that followed it (½, 2⁄3, 3⁄5, 5⁄8, etc.), one approached the number 0.618. This series, she said, was called a Fibonacci series, after an Italian mathematician who had lived centuries before. The ratio of 0.618, she added, was known as the divine proportion or the golden section, an ideal geometrical proportion often used by architects and artists.

  She would take me for long, botanizing walks in the forest, where she had me look at fallen pinecones, to see that they, too, had spirals based on the golden section. She showed me horsetails growing near a stream, had me feel their stiff, jointed stems, and suggested that I measure these and plot the lengths of the successive segments as a graph. When I did so and saw that the curve flattened out, she explained that the increments were ‘exponential’ and that this was the way growth usually occurred. These ratios, these geometric proportions, she told me, were to be found all over nature – numbers were the way the world was put together.

  The association of plants, of gardens, with numbers assumed a curiously intense, symbolic form for me. I started to think in terms of a kingdom or realm of numbers, with its own geography, languages, and laws; but, even more, of a garden of numbers, a magical, secret, wonderful garden. It was a garden hidden from, inaccessible to, the bullies and the headmaster; and a garden, too, where I somehow felt welcomed and befriended. Among my friends in this garden were not only primes and Fibonacci sunflowers, but perfect numbers (such as 6 or 28, the sum of their factors, excluding themselves); Pythagorean numbers, whose square was the sum of two other squares (such as 3, 4, 5 or 5, 12, 13); and ‘amicable numbers’ (such as 220 and 284), pairs of numbers in which the factors of each added up to the other. And my aunt had shown me that my garden of numbers was doubly magical – not just delightful and friendly, always there, but part of the plan on which the whole universe was built. Numbers, my aunt said, are the way God thinks.

  Of
all the objects at home, the one I missed most was my mother’s clock, a beautiful old grandfather clock with a golden face showing not only the time and date, but phases of the moon and conjunctions of the planets. When I was very young, I had thought of this clock as a sort of astronomical instrument, transmitting information straight from the cosmos. Once a week my mother would open the cabinet and wind the clock, and I would watch the heavy counterweight ascending and touch (if she let me) the long metal chimes for the hours and the quarters.

  I missed its chimes painfully in my four years at Braefield and sometimes dreamed of them at night and imagined myself at home, only to wake and find myself in a narrow, lumpy bed, wet, as often as not, with my own incontinence. Many of us regressed at Braefield, and we were beaten savagely when we wet or soiled our beds.

  In the spring of 1943, Braefield was closed. Almost everyone had complained to their parents about the conditions at the school, and most of them had been taken away. I never complained (nor did Michael, but he had moved to Clifton College, as a thirteen-year-old, in 1941), and finally I found myself almost the only one left. I never knew what happened exactly – the headmaster disappeared, with his odious wife and child – I was simply told, at the end of the holidays, that I would not be returning to Braefield, but going to a new school instead.

  St. Lawrence College (so it seemed to me) had large and venerable grounds, ancient buildings, ancient trees – it was all very fine, doubtless, but it terrified me. Braefield, for all its horrors, was at least familiar – I knew the school, I knew the village, I had a friend or two – whereas everything at St. Lawrence was strange to me, unknown.

  I have curiously little memory of the term I spent there – it seems to have been so deeply repressed or forgotten that when I mentioned it recently to someone who knew me well, and who knew much about the Braefield period, she was astonished, and said I had never spoken of St. Lawrence before. My chief memories, indeed, are of the sudden lies, or jokes, or fantasies, or delusions – I scarcely know what to call them – that I generated there.

  I felt particularly alone on Sunday mornings, when all the other boys went to chapel, leaving me, a little Jewish boy, alone in the school (this had not happened at Braefield, where most of the children were Jewish). One Sunday morning there was a great storm, with violent lightning and tremendous peals of thunder – one so terrifyingly loud and close that I thought for a moment the school had been struck. When the others returned from chapel, I steadfastly insisted that I had, in fact, been struck by lightning, and that the lightning had ‘entered’ me, and lodged in my brain.

  Other fictions I maintained had relation to my childhood, or rather an alternative version or fantasy of childhood. I said that I had been born in Russia (Russia was our ally at the time, and I knew that my mother’s father had come from there), and I would tell long, fanciful, richly detailed stories of jolly toboggan rides, of being wrapped in furs, and of howling wolf packs pursuing our sleigh at night. I have no memory of how these stories were received, but I stuck to them.

  I maintained at other times that my parents, for some reason, had thrown me out as a child, but that I had been found by a she-wolf and brought up among wolves. I had read The Jungle Book and knew it almost by heart, and I was able to embroider my ‘recollections’ richly from this, telling the amazed nine-year-olds around me about Bagheera, the black panther, and Baloo, the old bear who taught me the Law, and Kaa, my snake friend with whom I swam in the river, and Hathi, the king of the jungle, who was a thousand years old.

  It seems to me as I look back on this time that I was filled with daydreams and myths, and that I was uncertain, at times, about the boundaries between fantasy and reality. It seems to me I was trying to invent an identity of an absurd yet glamorous kind. I think my sense of isolation, of being uncared for and unknown, may have been even greater at St. Lawrence than it was at Braefield, where even the sadistic attentions of the headmaster could be seen as a sort of concern, even love. I think I was, perhaps, enraged with my parents, who remained blind and deaf, or inattentive, to my distress, and so was tempted to replace them with kindly, parental Russians or wolves.

  When my parents visited me at midterm in 1943 (and perhaps heard of my curious fantastications and lies), they finally realized that I was close to the edge, and that they had better bring me back to London before worse befell.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  An Ideal Metal

  I returned to London in the summer of 1943, after four years of exile, a ten-year-old boy, withdrawn and disturbed in some ways, but with a passion for metals, for plants, and for numbers. Life was beginning to resume some degree of normality, despite the bomb damage everywhere, despite the rationing, the blackout, and the thin, poor paper on which books were printed. The Germans had been turned back at Stalingrad, the Allies had landed in Sicily; it might take years, but victory was now certain.

  One sign of this, for me, was the fact that my father was given, through a series of intermediaries, an unheard-of thing, a banana from North Africa. None of us had seen a banana since the start of the war, and so my father divided it, sacramentally, into seven equal segments: one each for my mother and himself, one for Auntie Birdie, and one apiece for my brothers and myself. The tiny segment was placed, like a Host, on the tongue, then savored slowly as it was swallowed. Its taste was voluptuous, almost ecstatic, at once a reminder and symbol of times past and an anticipation of times to come, an earnest, a token, perhaps, that I had come home to stay.

  And yet much had changed, and home itself was disconcertingly different, utterly changed in many ways from the settled, stable household there had been before the war. We were, I suppose, an average middle-class household, but such households, then, had a whole staff of helpers and servants, many of whom were central in our lives, growing up as we did with very busy and to some extent ‘absentee’ parents. There was the senior nanny, Yay, who had been with us since Marcus’s birth in 1923 (I was never certain how her name was spelled, but imagined, after I learned to read, that it was spelled ‘Yea’ – I had read some of the Bible, and been fascinated by words like lo and bark and yea ). Then there was Marion Jackson, my own nanny, to whom I was passionately attached – my first intelligible words (I am told) were the words of her name, each syllable pronounced with babyish slowness and care. Yay wore a nurse’s headdress and uniform, which looked to me somewhat severe and forbidding, but Marion Jackson wore soft white clothes, soft as a bird’s feathers, and I would nestle against them and feel utterly secure.

  There was Marie, the cook-housekeeper, with her starched apron and reddened hands, and a ‘daily,’ whose name I forget, who came in to help her. Besides these four women, there was Don, the chauffeur, and the gardener, Swain, who between them handled the heavy work of the house.

  Very little of this survived the war. Yay and Marion Jackson disappeared – we were all ‘grown up’ now. The gardener and the chauffeur had gone, and my mother (now fifty) decided to drive her own car. Marie was due to come back, but never did; and in her stead Auntie Birdie did the shopping and cooking.¹

  Physically, too, the house had changed. Coal had become scarce, like everything else in the war, and the huge boiler had been shut down. There was a small oil burner, of very limited capacity, in its stead, and many of the extra rooms in the house had been closed off.

  Now that I was ‘grown up,’ I was given a larger room – it had been Marcus’s room, but he and David were now both at university. Here I had a gas fire and an old desk and bookshelves of my own, and for the first time in my life I felt I had a place, a space. I would spend hours in my room, reading, dreaming about numbers and chemistry and metals.

  Above all, I delighted in being able to visit Uncle Tungsten again – his place, at least, seemed relatively unchanged (though tungsten was now in somewhat short supply, because of the vast quantities needed for making tungsten steel for armor plating). I think he also delighted in having his young protege back, for he would spend hours
with me in his factory and his lab, answering questions as fast as I could ask them. He had several glass-fronted cabinets in his office, one of which contained a series of electric lightbulbs: there were several Edison bulbs from the early 1880s, with filaments of carbonized thread; a bulb from 1897, with a filament of osmium; and several bulbs from the turn of the century, with spidery filaments of tantalum tracing a zigzag course inside them. Then there were the more recent bulbs – these were Uncle’s especial pride and interest, for some of them he had pioneered himself – with tungsten filaments of all shapes and sizes. There was even one labeled ‘Bulb of the Future?’ It had no filament, but the word Rhenium was inscribed on a card beside it.

  I had heard of platinum, but the other metals – osmium, tantalum, rhenium – were new to me. Uncle Dave kept samples of them all, and some of their ores, in a cabinet next to the bulbs. As he handled them, he would expatiate on their unique, sovereign qualities, how they had been discovered, how they were refined, and why they were so suitable for making filaments. As Uncle spoke of the filament metals, ‘his’ metals, they took on, in my mind, a special desirability and significance – noble, dense, infusible, glowing.