I wanted to tell you this, my beloved Leni, because now we must look to the future. Will you understand what I mean. The age of sacrifice is over. There has to be, I believe there is, a new dispensation.
The children of light will have to be as wise as serpents: wiser than the children of darkness.
I believe I have a means of getting this letter to Franz.
Will you trust -
Your ever loving, ever trusting,
Father
When I had finished reading this letter I folded it and put it in my pocket. It was as if I were still standing where I had been standing before but the world had flipped over, and on again, in a circle. I had been, briefly, in the presence of huts, watchtowers; now I was again with ladies and gentlemen in their masks. I said to Walburga 'Can I borrow your car?' She said 'What do you want it for?'
I said 'I've got to see Franz. To find out about my father.' She said 'Now you mustn't be angry with your father!' Rudi said 'Will you please answer our questions.' I said 'You can have the diamonds when I get back.' Rudi said 'I want them now.'
Walburga said 'You two ought to be in jail.'
Rudi was sitting, Walburga and Stefan and I were standing, at the table in the cafe. I thought — Oh but I will be once more on a journey in the Black Forest!
Stefan said 'But you may not come back.*
Walburga said 'Can I come too?'
I said 'No, I think I must go alone.'
I thought — But indeed I may not be able to get back!
Rudi said 'How do we trust you?'
Walburga said 'All right, I'll fetch the car.'
I said to Walburga 'Has my father been working with Franz?'
Walburga said 'You know he's been working for the government?'
I thought — But of course I trust you, of course you can trust me, and all that is happening, O my father!
That was at lunchtime. Since then I have been writing this in the Gasthaus. Walburga will be back here by midnight. I will set off in the morning. Or will the war have started? So how, in fact, will I get back. I will leave this notebook in my suitcase addressed to you. Something of me will get back — to my angel in England!
Take care of yourself, my beloved.
I think I glimpse how things work: will we ever be able to describe this?
Thank you for being more to me that what I am to myself.
Sit on the gasworks: keep them warm for me.
Tollington Park, Norfolk August 1939 My darling Eleanor, my Angel,
This is the enormous country house we have been evacuated to: I think I am supposed not to tell you where it is.
Donald is here, and some of the people from Cambridge. The idea is that we will be away from the likelihood of bombs. What irony!
Please take care. Please don't go into Germany; and come home, if war seems certain.
I am supposed to say nothing of the work we are doing here. I will write to you in this notebook.
We have imagined that we might send each other messages, you
and I: of course, there would be no means of describing exactly what these were.
Practising.
This is an enormous country house in the baroque style. It consists of a central block and two wings. The central block has been empty, which is where we are to set up our laboratory. In one of the wings lives a very old lady who is the owner of the house: she was supposed to have moved out when we arrived, but then she became too ill, and so she stays on with a cook and two nurses. No one sees her.
I have a room on the top floor of the opposite wing. From my window I look out across parkland. The landscape is very beautifuclass="underline" there are sheep and groups of deer dotted here and there; the trees stand out from the paler green like things that contain their own shadows. It is like a landscape into which man has not yet come.
In fact, this is a part of the country where some of the earliest traces of humans have been found: primitive humans settled here not because the soil was good but because it was poor — and so did not encourage predators. And just under the ground there were flints, which humans could mine and so make weapons to keep out what predators there were. Oh humans have to use cunning in the face of adversity!
To be cunning, to be wise, humans of course have had to get out of the Garden of Eden.
Near to this house there is being built an enormous army camp: the uncluttered landscape is seen as providing a perfect training ground for soldiers. And the soldiers might be useful in protecting us scientists, I suppose, from anyone who might be jealous of our chance to destroy the world — or of giving it a chance of survival.
As a matter of fact it is now thought that our work may take several years: a particular uranium isotope has to be separated if there is to be a chain reaction. And this, as Donald has always said, will require complex engineering and much money. To find a moderator to slow the reactions down we are beginning to experiment with both graphite and heavy water: but it is difficult to make the former sufficiently pure, and almost no supplies are available for the latter. So there are still many who say that the thing can't be done: in which case who cares — so long as it can't be done by Nazis. But there are other ways of destruction; there may not be other ways for survival.
Perhaps you will have been able to see Franz? The Nazis are the
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only people I can imagine who might be glad to blow up themselves along with everyone else: what could be more glorious than such a Gotterddmmerungl But if we learn to look at and live with the implications of such a Bomb, self-destruction might seem less glorious.
The Russians have seemed not to mind killing or being killed: but they have not made out that there is much glory in destruction and self-destruction.
Is there any news about your father?
I sit at my window here and try to imagine what you are doing. I see you on the edge of your lake: perhaps a bird comes flying across; perhaps it has a message in its mouth, like the twig of a tree.
What do you think that Tree of Life looked like that those people never came across in their Garden of Eden?
A young girl has come to stay with the old lady in the opposite wing of the house. She is the old lady's granddaughter. She comes wandering on to the stone-flagged terrace in front of the house — past the orangery, the antique bowling-alley, a huge ornamental fountain. She has long fair hair. Of course, I have invested her with the lineaments of a fairy story! She is like someone in exile from a future country. So can I tell you this? Do you remember the idea that there is no mathematical reason why messages should not exist from the future as well as from the past; it is our structuring in accordance with time that would prevent us from recognising these. This girl also reminds me of myself that summer, years ago, when I was at home and had nothing to do; my school had burned down; I used to go out on my bicycle to look for lost landscapes, lost gardens. I found a lake and a ruined boathouse. This was the summer when I tried to make a perfect setting for my salamanders. This was not to show the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics — God forbid! — but to see whether from a setting that was aesthetic something new and beautiful might grow — something like a visitor from the future, do you think? This was the sort of experiment, I imagined, that had been performed successfully by Kammerer. So I collected my ferns and crystals, my rare alpine plants, my white sand and coloured stones. And in the event I achieved — but how did I know what I had achieved? — I glimpsed, yes, that something beautiful had grown; but I hardly stayed to check; I had to go back to school; or did I not really want to check? Was not what I had wanted to achieve just such a glimpse of