And then there was the question of delay. The action of light normally seemed instantaneous. But with phosphorescence, the energy of sunlight, seemingly, was captured, stored, transformed into energy of a different frequency, and then emitted in a slow dribble, over hours (there were similar delays, Uncle Abe told me, with fluorescence, though these were far shorter, just fractions of a second). How was this possible?
19. MA
One summer after the war, in Bournemouth, I managed to obtain a very large octopus from a fisherman and kept it in the bath in our hotel room, which I filled with seawater. I would feed it live crabs, which it tore open with its horny beak, and I think it grew quite attached to me. It certainly recognized me when I came into the bathroom, and would flush different colors, indicating its emotion. Although we had had dogs and cats at home, I had never had an animal of my own. Now I had, and I thought my octopus quite as intelligent, and as affectionate, as any dog. I wanted to bring it back to London, give it a home, a huge tank festooned with sea anemones and seaweed, have it as my very own pet.
I did a lot of reading about aquariums and artificial seawater – but, in the event, the decision was taken from me, for one day the maid came in, and seeing the octopus in the bath, she had hysterics and poked it, wildly, with a long broom. The octopus, upset, discharged a huge cloud of ink, and when I returned a little later, I found it dead, sprawled out in its own ink. I dissected it, sorrowfully, when I got back to London, to learn what I could, and kept its scattered remains in formalin in my bedroom for many years.
Living in a medical household, hearing my parents and older brothers talk about patients and medical conditions, both fascinated and (sometimes) appalled me, but my new chemical vocabulary allowed me, in a sense, to compete with them. They might talk about empyema (a beautiful, nuggety, four-syllable word for a vile suppuration in the chest cavity), but I could cap it with empyreuma, that glorious word for the smell of burning organic matter. It was not just the sound of these words that I loved, but their etymology – I was now doing Greek and Latin at school, and I spent hours teasing out the origins and derivations of chemical terms, the sometimes twisted and indirect paths by which they had acquired their present meanings.
Both my parents were given to telling medical stories – stories which might start from a description of a pathological condition or an operation, and extend from this to an entire biography. My mother, especially, would tell such stories, to her students and colleagues, to dinner guests, or to anyone who was around; the medical, for her, was always embedded in a life. I would occasionally see the milkman or the gardener transfixed, listening to one of her clinical tales.
There was a large bookcase full of medical books in the surgery, and I would rummage through them at random, often in a state of mixed fascination and horror. Some of them I returned to again and again: there was Bland-Sutton’s Tumours Innocent and Malignant – this was especially notable for its line drawings of monstrous teratomas and tumors; Siamese twins joined in the middle; Siamese twins with their faces fused together; two-headed calves; a baby with a tiny accessory head near its ear (a head which reflected, in tiny replica, I read, the expressions of the main face); ‘trichobezoars’ – bizarre masses full of hair and other stuff, swallowed and embedded, sometimes fatally, in the stomach; an ovarian cyst so large it had to be carried on a handcart; and, of course, the Elephant Man, whom my father had already told me about (he had been a student at the London Hospital not so many years after John Merrick had lived there). Scarcely less horrifying was an Atlas of Dermachromes, showing every vile skin condition on the face of the earth. But the most informative, the most read, was French’s Differential Diagnosis – its tiny line illustrations were especially appealing to me. Here, too, horrors lay in wait: the most frightening, for me, being the entry on progeria, a galloping senility that could hurtle a ten-year-old child through a lifetime within months, turning him into a fragile-boned, bald, beak-nosed, piping creature who looked as old as the shriveled, monkeylike Gagool – the three-hundred-year-old witch in King Solomon’s Mines – or the demented Struldbrugs of Luggnagg.
Though with my return to London and my ‘apprenticeship’ (as I sometimes imagined it) with my uncles, many of the fears of Braefield had vanished like a bad dream, they had left a residue of fear and superstition, a sense that some special awfulness might be reserved for me, and that this might descend at any moment.
The special dangers of chemistry were sought out, to some degree, I suspect, as a means of playing with such fears, persuading myself that by care and vigilance, prudence, forethought, one could learn to control, or find a way through, this hazardous world. And here, indeed, through care (and luck), I never hurt myself too much, and could maintain a sense of mastery and control. But with regard to life and health generally, no such protection could be counted on. Different forms of anxiety, of fearfulness, now struck me: I became afraid of horses (still used by the milkman to drive his float), afraid they might bite me with their large teeth; afraid of crossing the road, especially after our dog, Greta, was killed by a motorbike; afraid of other children, who (if nothing else) would laugh at me; afraid of stepping on the cracks between paving stones; and afraid, above all, of disease, of death.
My parents’ medical books nourished these fears, fed an incipient disposition to hypochondria. Around the age of twelve I developed a mysterious, though hardly life-threatening, skin condition, which produced an exudation of serum behind my elbows and knees, stained my clothing, and made me avoid ever being seen undressed. Was it my fate, I wondered fearfully, to get one of these skin disorders or monstrous tumors I had read about – or was progeria the unspeakable fate that was reserved for me?
I was fond of the Morrison table, a huge table of iron that was lodged in the breakfast room, and which was strong enough, supposedly, to bear the whole weight of the house if we were bombed. There had been many accounts of such tables saving the lives of people who would otherwise have been crushed or suffocated beneath the debris of their own houses. The whole family would take cover under the table during air raids, and the notion of this protection, this shelter, took on an almost human character for me. The table would protect us, look out for us, care for us.
It was very cozy, I felt, almost a little cottage within the house, and when I came back from St. Lawrence College, at the age of ten, I would sometimes crawl under it and sit or lie there, quietly, even when there was not an air raid.
My parents recognized that I was in a fragile state at this time, and they offered no comments when I retreated and crawled under the table. But one evening, when I emerged from beneath it, they were horrified to see a bald circle on my scalp – ringworm was their instant, medical diagnosis. My mother scrutinized me more closely and murmured with my father. They had never heard of ringworm appearing with such suddenness. I admitted nothing, tried to look innocent, and concealed the razor, Marcus’s razor, which I had taken with me under the table. The next day, they took me to a skin specialist, a Dr. Muende. Dr. Muende gave me a piercing glance – I had no doubt that he saw straight through me – took a specimen of hair from the bare spot, and put it under his microscope to examine. After a second, he said, ‘Dermatitis artefacta ‘ meaning that the hair loss was self-inflicted, and when he said this, I blushed a deep crimson. There was no discussion afterwards as to why I had shaved my head, or lied.