I decided to support myself as a school teacher and had a practical and an idealistic reason for teaching in Molendinar Primary. Every pupil in that school except in the final year was my height or less. I also believed that good teachers are more important for primary schools than secondary schools, just as good teachers in secondary schools are more important than those in universities, because the earlier young folk get good schooling, the more it benefits their character. In those days nearly all students had their fees paid (like the armed forces) out of tax-payers’ money, because even Tories thought the nation needed all the well-educated citizens it could get. I was enough of a Socialist to believe that well-educated teachers from prosperous districts should carry their advantages to poorer ones. Most of my pupils were from Blackhill, a Glasgow municipal housing scheme built between the wars but less well-built than the housing schemes of Riddrie and Knightswood where clerks, schoolteachers and lower-paid professional folk were neighbours of skilled workmen. Blackhill was labelled a Slum Clearance Scheme and when high unemployment returned to Britain at the end of the sixties many Blackhill breadwinners lost their jobs and the number of crimes committed there greatly increased. My most difficult pupils came from fatherless homes. The poorest children lived with grandmothers. My first years in teaching made me very unhappy but I did some good. For several years I managed to take some of the poorest on camping holidays and twice got money from a charity that let me rent an H.F. guest house for them, Altshellach, in Arran. But like most idealistic teachers my enthusiasm dwindled so I was happy to become a Headmaster (the least responsible job in any school), happier to take early retirement and hide at last in research for my historic masterpiece.
The flaw in most histories is authors who pretend to be unprejudiced reporters of fact but keep describing the world coming to a good end in their own comfortable state — only Carlyle saw that nations whose only guiding principle was economic competition were preparing a Dark Age blacker than earlier ones. In the 17th century Bishop Bossuet showed history culminating in Louis XIV’s Catholic France; 18th century Gibbon thought it culminated in enlightened Europe; 19th century Hegel in Protestant Prussia, Macaulay in post-Reform Bill England. The Outline of History by H. G. Wells viewed it as an irregular uphill struggle toward a world government of a scienctific, humanitarian kind — a successful 20th century League of Nations. Mark Twain shot down such daftness by pointing out that if the age of the world was represented by the height of the Eiffel Tower, the not-quite million years of human history would correspond to the thickness of the paint on a knob at the very top. He wondered if those who thought the world had been created for mankind, and more especially for themselves, might believe the Eiffel Tower was mainly built to uphold the paint on the topmost knob and concluded, “Reckon they might. I dunno.”
If every history had a prologue describing the education of the writer’s mind, readers would know in advance why some facts dominate the narrative more than others. Dear reader you will soon see how well or badly I lay out mine. Like the Bible it starts in the only way well-educated folk now imagine the beginning.
18: MY WORLD HISTORY: PROLOGUE
A sudden endless gas explosion made all the material in this universe. Some parts collided with others, swirling into gassy clumps that got denser and hotter and became radiant globes as they rotated. Big neighbouring globes began turning round each other while smaller ones became satellites of a bigger partner. The lightest materials floated on the surface of the globes, sometimes cooling into floating plates of crust that grew bigger until their edges met, making a surface that only let out light where red-hot or where volcanoes exploded through. The air above this world of ours was of gases no life could breathe: methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour. The world’s crust thickened. The surface cooled until rain water could lie there without being scalded into steam. At last a sea of water covered the world except where a rocky continent, thicker than the ground under the sea, rose above it near the equator.40
The molten minerals under the Earth’s crust had currents slowly cracking it apart, making long submarine canyons on the ocean floor with bottoms constantly restored by lava welling up through volcanic vents. Boiling water above the vents was stopped evaporating by the weight of colder water over a mile-deep above it. In the hottest depths, in a broth of dissolved chemicals, droplets started circulating. They grew larger when they touched and merged with similar droplets, but when this made them too big for their skins they split in two and went on separately. Such droplets evolved into single-celled creatures we call living because they sense things outside their bodies that can nourish them and help them reproduce, having motive power to reach for them. The evolution from these chemical drops to living cells has never (yet?) been achieved in a human laboratory. It has to happen first in deep water because in those days lethal ultra-violet sunlight penetrated water to a depth of over thirty feet. In submarine depths the sun’s rays and Earth’s heat were reduced, yet still strong enough to generate and support single-celled microbes that were the only living things for at least three quarters of life on Earth before today.
Tiny primitive creatures fed on dissolved chemicals in the earliest sea, then bigger ones started also feeding on the smaller, breathing out carbon dioxide that rose above the sea, mixed with the atmosphere above and began screening out the lethal ultra-violet rays. This let larger living things evolve near the surface. More complex bacteria converted carbon dioxide into oxygen until the air above was two per cent oxygen, which let a kindlier sunlight shine on sea and land. Life now crossed the beaches, entering rivers, lakes, swamps, plains in the first great continent. Lichens, mosses, fungi were followed by primitive insects and those segmented worms that are ancestors of every lizard, fish, bird and mammal with a backbone. The whole upper Earth, fluid and solid, came to hold living things of every size — plankton, seaweeds, sponges, fish, squid, sharks in the oceans, — crawling things in submarine volcanic vents, rock pools and soil, — herbs, trees, amphibians, lizards on land, — spores, seeds, insects, bats, birds in the air. This living layer around our planet has been called the zoo-sphere. It is thinnest at the poles, thickest in tropical rainforests. There were many such forests on the swampy first continent.
The Earth’s interior moves more slowly than the zoo-sphere but is never still, currents in the molten rock under the solid crust always moving huge plates of crust apart on one side, and ramming them together on the other. Mountain ranges are raised when one plate is forced over another, then rain, wind, frost and lichen starts wearing the mountains down. Rocks and gravel fall into glens and valleys, rivers wash grit onto plains, spreading it and mixing it with dead plants and creatures, creating new soil. Meteor bombardments killed great sections of zoo-sphere through sudden global winters and ice ages, spreading seas have drowned them, the world’s shifting crust has covered them with new rock making underground layers of coal and metal, reservoirs of oil and gas. The world’s subterranean currents broke the earliest continent into smaller ones and drove them so far apart that they joined again on the other side of the world near the south pole. This again cracked into continents that drifted north and started roughly corresponding to those we know, though not in the order we know them at first. Some of the oceans between them widened, some narrowed or disappeared. The great plate of crust carrying India collided with Eurasia, elevating the Himalayas, our highest and youngest mountain range. The Alps are hardly middle-aged. The Wicklow Hills are all that remain of more ancient mountains.