An Encyclopaedia of Myself. Jonathan Meades

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СКАЧАТЬ and a bow and arrow, more mature choices of weapon than a plastic tomahawk. Beryl was startled by my appearance. She was a tense woman forever on the point of breaking into tears. She looked at me with a look my parents wouldn’t see, a look which I knew I could not mention. She must have wondered what they were thinking of in allowing me to dress thus. Harry was balding, saturnine, dark-eyed, restless, energetic. He had skin as smooth as his daughter’s, well-cut clothes and what I supposed to be the mien of a brahmin.

      He joined my fantasy with the amused bonhomie he displayed towards both children and adults. I liked the way he could turn on life-and-soul joviality. And I was grateful that an Indian of a sort – even an Indian who, unlike me, did not look the part, but who like me did not speak with an Indian accent – was apprised of the Apache’s homelands. He was familiar, too, with Cochise, the Chiricahua chief I favoured over the publicity hog Geronimo who had the face of an ancient charlady. I knew that the Apache used poisoned arrows. Harry explained how they were poisoned: with the pounded liver of an animal (often a deer) which had been bitten by a rattlesnake, or with that snake’s venom glands. Such arrowheads were used against enemies but not for hunting. Did I know why? Because they might contaminate the meat of beasts so taken. This was information that grown-ups seldom imparted, were seldom interested in. He did not, however, share my preoccupation with the homicidal (and probably right-handed) Henry McCarty aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid. This oversight was a disappointment to me. No matter. Apaches ate plants which made them dance and reel for hours, which made them courageous in battle, which made them see things they had never seen before. Visions? Precisely! Holes in the sky, Old Chap. Mountains changing shape as much in a minute as they had done in a million years. Cacti smiling at them. They stared at the sun till it blinded their eyes. Were they mad? Harry clapped me on my naked Apache back, congratulated me on my perception – and how delighted I was to be so patronised!

      He asked me how I was enjoying the Swan School, he hoped I appreciated the historic building. I described the smell of the old people waiting to die in Trinity Hospital. He made a caricaturally quizzical face. A few moments later as we were sitting down to lunch he laughed at whatever aperçu his brain had conveyed. He was also laughing at me. I had learnt early that I prompted laughter without intending to, a characteristic I rued. He suggested that what I thought was the smell of old people was the smell of the mash in Gibbs Mew brewery just along the street from Trinity Hospital. I had surely noticed the building with the hoists, the cranes, the barrels? He explained how beer is made and why the process smells the way it does. He explained in detail I could not understand. He was suddenly oblivious to his audience’s shortcomings, making no allowance for children or indeed non-scientists. I was taken by Harry’s enthusiasm. But I still thought that was the way old people smelled.

      After lunch Diana and I crept under the plum tree into the cheap plastic and canvas conical tent that I called my wigwam. She agreed to be my squaw. I gave her a headdress of plastic feathers that just about fitted. I stroked her skin.

      The next day:

      Diana and I returned as pupils to our respective schools.

      My mother walked 200 yards up the road to the school where she taught. My father rose early to go off on his rounds.

      Beryl probably congratulated herself on not pouring her first drink before noon.

      Dr Harry Cullumbine (not Colombine, not that I realised for years) drove five minutes from the cottage at Winterbourne Gunner to CDE Porton Down, where he monitored marmosets on atropine, observed rats breathing kerosene fumes and pigs hooked to ethanol drips, fed Datura stramonium to monkeys and ketamine to lambs. Having attended to his zoo of junky primates and barbiturate-dependent quadrupeds he dosed human volunteers with LSD. This perpetually tanned Yorkshireman (who occasionally failed to suppress the ghost of that accent), sometime Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at the University of Colombo, was now head of the Physiology Section at Porton. The volunteers were national servicemen. In this context volunteers is today habitually written ‘volunteers’. A little less than a year before, Leading Aircraftman Ronald Maddison^fn2 had died in Salisbury Infirmary four hours after participating in a Porton experiment which exposed him to 200 mg of Sarin. The Coroner came under pressure from the Home Office, from the Intelligence Services, from the Minister of Supply, Duncan Sandys. Nonetheless, it is conceivable that the verdict of death by misadventure might have been returned even without those illegitimate influences: autres temps, autres moeurs.

      Exceptionally, a second inquest was held fifty-one years later in 2004. To the doubtless smug delight of Attorney General Goldsmith and DPP Calvert-Smith, brown-nosed cretins of the New Labour establishment, it returned the altogether predictable verdict of unlawful killing. Like the quotes round ‘volunteers’ this verdict was the presumptuous judgment of the present on the past. Here was the Age of Apology or Rights or Compensation or Complaint castigating the Age of – what? Duty? Exploitation? Service? Mortal Quackery? Such retrospective perdition is cooked up in a whiggish void. With confidently 20/20 hindsight it overlooks the threats of nuclear devastation, Soviet aggression and world war which were omnipresent at Porton half a century previously. A society which deludes itself that risk can be eliminated is unlikely to understand one which accepted privation and danger with stoic fatalism, with forelock-tugging resignation. The volunteers’ choric plea that they believed they were assisting in the researches of the Common Cold Unit at Harvard Hospital eight miles from Porton on the other side of Salisbury would be plausible were it not for the fact that experiments had been conducted over two years before Maddison’s death and would continue subsequently.

      Only a handful of men were used in a single day. After the experiment each would return to his base. It defies credibility that there was no mess talk, no tap-room gossip, no barracks rumour about what happened in the chambers. Potential volunteers of the future would thus have known to expect something other than Harvard Hospital. Five hundred and sixty-two men had been involved in the Sarin experiments before an adverse reaction was suffered. At which point the dose was reduced from 300 mg to 200 mg. Maddison was volunteer no. 745. For the volunteers it must have seemed like light prostitution. In exchange for a meagre sum and a day free of the boredom of conscripted life they surrendered their body to a chemical rather than a human intrusion. The liberal judiciary’s discernment of a moral equivalence between Porton’s experiments and those conducted by SS doctors is an instance of the usual grotesque trahison des clercs gauchistes. Of course we all know that the camp doctors loved their children, hearth and Bach. The many Porton doctors and boffins whom I met exhibited similarly congenial traits. This does not make them wicked. Nor do their experiments, although age and ethical climate weather a scientist. I was twelve when I first met Ken James.^fn3 He was forty-three and had bought the plot of land next to my parents’. His opinions were no doubt different then from those he held fifty years later.

      He was an organic chemist, an expert in chemical warfare and defence against it, a jazz trumpeter, a pioneer of operational research, an inventor, a craftsman, an entrepreneur, a writer. He was a man of formidable learning, exceptional energy and limitless curiosity.

      He was born at Shepherd’s Bush. His father, then serving as a soldier, never really recovered from the First World War. When he was demobbed he became a groom in Neasden, then still more or less a village. It was in such places on the periphery of west and north-west London that Ken grew up as his father moved from job to job and his family moved from one rented flat to the next. Alcoholism, indigence and bailiffs followed them.

      His mother walked out – she would live to a great age on the north Kent coast. He left Latymer Upper at the age of sixteen after taking the School Certificate and sought work in order to provide for his increasingly unemployable father. By night he played trumpet in a jazz band with, inter alia, Les Hitchcock, nephew of Alfred, and Cliff Townshend, future father of Pete. At Number One Rhythm Club, off Haymarket, they were joined on stage one night by Louis Armstrong.

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