Last Things
I am being encouraged by the administration of my former
workplace (in case you missed it, I retired in February) to clear what was my
office by the end of this month. I have been ruthlessly binning material and
sending reams of paper to recycling. On the one hand, decluttering can be
satisfying, but on the other, there is always the fear that something important
may be discarded. And of course, there is the more general feeling of
attachment to some items of no practical use. Also, in exercises of this
nature, you are always astonished at the amount of… stuff that you accumulate
in this life. We recently had the entire interior of the house decorated and
during the process took several hundredweight of stuff to charity shops. Once
the redecoration was over, however, we were surprised to find that we still
didn’t have room for what was left.
I am taking home a few things from the office. One is a book
which I rescued from a skip outside the library of the Clinical Research Centre
at Northwick Park in the 1980’s. Teach Yourself the Slide Rule, by Burns
Snodgrass (surely that’s not his real name?). See picture above. This has such
antique charm. Another is a copy of Cambridge Elementary Statistical Tables,
edited by Lindley and Miller (not to be confused with Windy Miller, the character in the popular children’s
television series Camberwick Green). My attachment to this one is that it has
my late father’s signature on one of the early pages, laying claim to the book.
My dad taught maths at a technical college, and this book of tables, which I
still use despite it falling to bits, was his at one time.
There are some other things that I am rescuing, mostly in
relation to my work over the years in Sweden, Singapore, Italy, India, France
and Russia. My Singapore driving license from 1985. My air ticket from Moscow
to London on 19th August 1991, the day after the putsch against
Gorbachev. What happened to that young fellow who went all over the world doing
cancer epidemiology? He turned into an old baldy guy with a big hooter.
The title of this piece, Last Things, is the final
book in the Strangers and Brothers series by CP Snow. This series of
eleven novels follows the career of Lewis Eliot, who despite a relatively
humble background, moves at high levels through both academia and the corridors
of power (a phrase which originated with Snow, I think) of British politics and
the senior civil service. The novels must have been partly autobiographical as
Snow’s own life followed much the same path. The books are a little clunky to
read, but they show great courage in covering some very difficult issues of
Snow’s time, including the development of atomic weapons and the conflicted
loyalties of many of the scientists involved. One of the series, The Sleep
of Reason, is a chilling fictionalisation of the moors murders trial, with
the disturbing ingredient of the narrator having a personal responsibility to
one of the perpetrators. Although Snow’s prose is sometimes a little
cumbersome, his observation of interviews, courtroom processes and officialdom
generally is brilliant, and the dialogue in these areas is unnervingly
accurate.
In the blurbs on the back covers of many editions of Snow’s
novels, you see the statement that he ‘was born in Leicester in 1905 and
educated at a secondary school’. I had previously thought that this was code
that he had failed the eleven-plus, like my literary hero JL Carr. In the same
way, biographical notes on MR James or EF Benson collections stating that ‘he
never married’ have the subtext that the person referred to was gay. Anyway, I
was wrong. Snow attended the prestigious Leicester grammar school, Alderman
Newton’s, and throughout his entire educational career distinguished himself by
impressive achievements and high marks.
Snow was a chemist to training but had what you might call a
mission to unify the humanities and sciences, the ‘two cultures’. Although I
knew nothing about him at the time, this gelled very well with the attitudes of
myself and my know-all pals when we were students in Edinburgh in the 1970’s.
We would postpone tomorrow by staying up late drinking coffee (if no alcohol
was available), talking nonsense and agreeing that art and science both had the
same essential ingredient of problem-solving, and were therefore much closer
than they appeared. All a bit simplistic, but on (very) mature reflection, I
think we were probably right. We didn’t know, however, that Charles Percival
Snow had got there long before us.
Snow was married to the very successful novelist, Pamela
Hansford Johnson, another big thinker and powerful character. What must it have
been like in their house?
Why have I moved from the business of clearing my office on
retirement to all this gubbins about CP Snow? Well, for twenty years, my old
pal from school Kevin Connelly worked within a mile or so from my institute in
London, and we would meet every month or so for lunch in the pub. During this
time, Kevin introduced me to the work of Snow, starting with his most famous
novel, The Masters, and during the noughties, we read all eleven of the Strangers
and Brothers series. Like those late night conversations when I was a
student in the 1970’s, the regular beery lunches with Kevin were a great
safety-valve for me, helping to prevent various work issues from driving me mad.
And now the meetings still occur, despite us both being retired. However, when
we were working, our get-togethers may have been more therapeutic for being
stolen pleasures during work time.
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OK, that’s enough of that. The weekend before last we had a
little holiday in Bruges. We had a lovely time, enjoying doing all the
stereotypical things tourists do in Bruges: Groeninge Museum, Gruuthuis Museum,
climbed the belfry, Beer Museum, canal boat trip, numerous walks and runs
including one through the Beguine Convent gardens, and so on. However, I must
give an unashamed plug for the hotel we stayed in, the Grand Hotel Normandy. It
had all the facilities of a slick corporate establishment, swimming pool etc,
combined with the welcoming and homely atmosphere of a family hotel. The people
were so kind and helpful too. Lovely place. And if you do go, it’s worth
booking the breakfast too. It’s great.
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