Physics is Fun Memoires of Richard Wilson Version of September 25th 2009

The War Years
I suppose that I began to think that war with Germany was inevitable in mid September 1938 when, at age 12, I was issued my first gas mask. This was a funny device. Closely fitting the face with a rubber seal; breathing in through a graphite filter, and exhaling by blowing air out of the sides with a funny noise that made us all laugh. In mid September 1938 plans were made for evacuating school children from London in anticipation of air raids and a gas attack. The upper forms (maybe only the Upper first) of Colet Court were sent to a camp at “Big Wood” in Radley just south of Oxford. We got there by train from Paddington station. We were there less than a week before the Munich agreement postponed our concern for awhile and we had to return to school from our brief holiday. I remember the concern in March 1939 when the German army took over Bohemia and Moravia, which was what was left of Czechoslovakia, and our Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave his famous undertaking to Poland. If Germany attacked Poland we would go to war. Much has been written, particularly in the United States, about British appeasement. Everyone in our family was against appeasement and Laurie, then in Oxford, actively worked in September 1938 for the candidate opposing Quintin Hogg, the sitting conservative MP, in a by election. But it was complex. France was very weak. They had lost so many young men in WWI and an equal number in the influenza epidemic in the year following, that they did not want a war. They could have opposed Hitler’s military reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 but declined to do so. France had made an undertaking to Czechoslovakia which they did not want to honor. England had not made any undertaking to Czechoslovakia,. The USA seemed completely uninterested in opposing Hitler’s Germany or at times they even appeared to support it. Ambassador (to the UK) Joseph Kennedy and the aviator Lindbergh were among those praising achievements of Nazi Germany. But in 1939 England was reluctantly getting ready. Watson Watt was developing his radar system and “Chain Home” was ready by the outbreak of war. My cousin Derek in the first summer in college (Cambridge) in 1938 worked on radar with John, later Sir John) Cockroft. By 1939 Derek had left college and was installing and calibrating radar stations. But this “Chain Home” had a problem that it could not detect low flying aircraft because of the “Lloyd’s Mirror” effect. The reflection of the radio waves at the surface of the sea created an interference pattern with a zero at zero degrees. It was impossible to detect any low flying aeroplane close to the surface of the sea. So it was followed soon by “Chain Home Low” at a shorter wavelength and taller towers.
We were on a short holiday in South Shields, County Durham, staying with an old school friend of my mother’s, Maggie Dawson (née Ridley). There we saw the newspaper report of the Stalin-Ribbentrop pact and my father immediately said “this means war” and we went home. The German Army invaded Poland shortly thereafter and Britain gave an ultimatum on September 1st, and at the same time started the evacuation of children from London. By this time I had been accepted into St Paul’s School so that was where I went. On the afternoon of September 1st, my older brother Geoffrey and myself set off on our bicycles for Crowthorne in Berkshire. We had rucksacks on our backs, a box on a rear carrier with panniers hanging from the carrier. I was not sure what was going to happen. I do clearly remember my mother (then 48) running down the road with us to the corner of Mostyn Road, before letting us go. My memory of that is still very clear. I did not want to leave home, and was very deeply sorry for the obvious worry that my mother had, but at the same time I was excited about new happenings in my life. Was the evacuation to be like the 1938 evacuation which seems like a small holiday? I thought intellectually of course that I might not see my family again, but could not bring myself to think about it emotionally. I suppose that many English people felt that way: it enabled us all to keep going.
That day, Friday September 1st and the next day, Saturday September 2nd, evacuation was organized. Probably 2 million children left London on these afternoons by various transportation methods. The dual highway, the “Kingston Bypass” was one way on each roadway going out of London. Our route had been specified in advance. Down the bypass to Esher, on to Claygate, Byfleet, Camberley and up to Crowthorne. A 40 mile ride which took a little over 3 hours. We arrived just before dark and people were not prepared. They were anticipating arrival the next day. We reported to a schoolmaster, Mr Harbord, who was staying with a friend in Crowthorne. We ended up in a large house, Alderbrook, Duke’s Ride, Crowthorne, Berkshire, sleeping under the table in the billiard room. A couple of days later the billiard table was taken apart, and the slate parts of the table were stored by the wall (beside my bed). This house, with a two car garage and chauffeur’s quarters on top, had 7 acres attached, and was owned by Major (old man) Knowles. He and his wife had dinner every night served formally by the two maids - and if I remember aright, produced by a third servant, a cook. Two sons were already in the army. We were invited to join them and everything was formal. We all waited behind our chairs as they came in, and one of us had to hold Mrs Knowles’ chair as she sat down. At the end of dinner we all stood and waited till they left. Major Knowles told us many fascinating stories of his life, particularly his young life. He had been a railroad engineer in China in the late 1890s. He was playing golf northwest of the Celestial City while the Boxer rebellion was going on . He described how the Chinese workmen would rest for lunch when they were digging a hole - for a well for example. They seemed to have no concept of safety. They would haul to the top of the digging tower the digging tool so that they could get a good start after lunch. And then they would sit in the hole, under the tool to eat their lunch oblivious to the idea that the rope might suddenly give way and annihilate them.
There were 8 (later 6) of us boys were billeted on him and his wife (and servants). It turned out very soon that 3 of us boys were christened Richard so that a problem of distinguishing us arose. There was Dick Stock; then there was Richard XX, whose surname I have forgotten, and then me. I was the youngest so I clearly had to change my name to avoid confusion. and then the oldest boy, Bill Stock, said that I was a Mugwump. So Mugwump I became, (Wump for short) to everyone in the school including the school masters. What is a Wump?” Bill was asked. “Here he is, that is a Wump”. I never liked being called Mugwump. But it seemed unwise to protest. It was a case of preferring to fit in and go along with my friends, peers, and teachers. When I got to college 4 years later the opportunity came to drop the name and until recently I have not been willing to talk about it except with close friends - all of whom have gone along with my desire to drop the nickname. Similarly Andrée dropped the nick name Dizzy when we got married and she acquired a new circle of friends.
The school met in Easthampsted House in a large park belonging to an Irish peer, the Earl of Downshire. It was 4 miles away, which was reached in 20 minutes by bicycle when the bicycle was working. Boys and masters shared the same problems. I remember passing one master with an upturned bicycle and helped to fix his puncture. It seemed the natural thing to do. It was still 2 weeks before the start of term. These were spent in preparing for the worst. We dug trenches in which to shelter during an air raid. This turned out to be a silly way of protecting oneself. We practiced decontamination, from mustard gas, with the local first aid party. Mustard is not actually a gas but a liquid and therefore persistent. The procedure was to wash it down the drain rapidly with any hose available. Only after that is done, need there be careful measurements of the contamination. Individual decontamination was necessary if contamination was suspected. There were showers in the decontamination trailer, and all clothes would be immediately destroyed. Hopefully others will be provided. But safety must, and did, take precedence over modesty. In the practice, though, we were allowed to continue to wear a bathing suit and our clothes were not burnt. We got the clothes back. I still have my little book on poison gases. They were never used in WWII, so actually the book describes the experience of the poison gases in WWI.
We cut down trees on one of the acres of “old man” Knowles property to prepare firewood for a hard winter. We anticipated that little coal would come because the miners would be in the army. It was then I learned how to use a felling axe but was unsuccessful in another more technical endeavor. One tree had a diameter of 24 inches - to big for my axe, so we tried to bring it down by making a small cut, and filling it with gunpowder that we mixed with materials purchased from the chemists shop. Welit a fairly long fuse and went to the end of the wood. But the gunpowder merely burnt - and did not explode. We gingerly went back to the tree to see what had happened. But someone else had to cut down that tree professionally. I learned later that a Russian scientist, Dr Nikitin of Leningrad, who I met later in 1957, had better luck when he was a teenager in1938. He synthesized nitroglycerine and exploded it under a snowman in the schoolyard. Two windows were broken and he was almost expelled from his school by the principal. But his chemistry teacher pointed out that he had managed to synthesize nitroglycerine and it would be wrong to interrupt a promising career!
A more successful activity in 1939-1940 was to go the golf course behind the house on the busy weekends and pick up golf balls that had been accidentally sent into the trees and bushes. We sold them back to the golf “professional” for a penny each. But soon schoolwork took over. I had been put into a form (class) 5X, that was supposed to be on a fast track for getting to the forms where one studied for University scholarships and entrance. But I found the classes absurdly easy and lobbied to be promoted in mid year from 5X to 6X, jumping ahead a year. I would then take the “School Certificate” at the end of the year. This lobbying was successful at Christmas time. But I then had to catch up to the class. I was told that for the English school certificate examination, the class would be reading Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The usual terrible procedure for the class was to read 2 pages or so for homework and discuss them in class the next day. I read both books straight through, with great pleasure, over Christmas. I found that I got ahead of the rest of the class and by reading the whole book in one session (of 2 days) it was far more enjoyable than the piece work reading of 2 pages for homework each week. I had already realized this a couple of years before when we had to translate Jules Vernes’, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” 2 pages at a time for Mr Downes of Colet Court. It was a good idea to have an interesting book for class work, but limiting myself to two pages at a time was, for me, impossible.
We had mice in our sleeping room (the billiard room). So we devised a very effective mouse trap. Two bare wires connected to the 110 volt outlet with a piece of cheese in between. The following morning we found no mouse but a smell of burning. That was the last of the mouse! I have never been able to persuade Andrée that this was far more effective than the “humane” trap she uses; to trap the mouse and then move it to the park or some other community to be exchanged for a mouse caught in the other community.. Geoffrey recently reminded me that the house had 110 volt DC presumably because when the house was built there was no connection o the 230 volt line. There was an emergency generator in the garage. Major Knowles’ chauffeur, a Mr Hand, came and stoked the central heating boiler and we kidded with him a lot. He had several, maybe 3, maybe 5, children who we obviously called the “fingers”. One finger I met again later since she was a First Aid Party volunteer. Because we could no longer get trees, wood or paper from Canada and the USA we had to recycle. I went round every week with a “trek cart”, usually tying it to my bicycle to pick up waste paper and bottles to be recycled. I took them to the sorting depot but never did the sorting myself.
My parents had taken their own precautions in our family house that I found in coming home from school for the Christmas holidays. In September 1939 every house had to be prepared for an attack with incendiary bombs and they were duly inspected by the local air raid warden (a civilian volunteer). My father cleared the top rooms of our family home in a London suburb of inflammable material. The wooden tables for the model railroad in the top floor were taken apart - and the trains never ran again! My box full of railroad magazines had to be trashed but it was up to me to do the trashing. I understood the need and wanted to play my part. Into the waste paper (recycled as of September 1939) they went. Later I regretted that disposition particularly when I became friendly with another younger boy (Geoffrey Best) interested in railroads. In later years my son Nicholas has also commented on their loss. But the trains themselves were another matter. In summer 1940 I tried to convert the layout into a portable one able to be set up and dismantled on the living room floor. But that was never finished either.
In the place of the magazines and the model railway were buckets full of water and sand, and a small hand “stirrup” pump was there to put out incendiary bombs. There was a maximum of three minutes before a bomb on the top floor would burn through the floor and set the fire below, and after 1940 there was a maximum of three minutes before the small explosive charge blew the fragments of burning magnesium around. It was easier as a two person job. The stirrup pump was pumped by one person and the water was directed by another. The pump had two settings. The “Jet” and the “Spray”. The spray was for the bomb itself and the jet for the surrounding fire. History records that in many situations those two minutes were enough. Jokes about the difference between the jet and the spray continued for a decade or so after the war.
In autumn term 1939 the boys were encouraged to find an extracurricular interest by a school prize for so doing. One of my interests in railroads was in track and signaling layouts. So I chose to spend time at the weekends exploring the railroad tracks with my bicycle and looking over the railroad bridges. I won a prize by submitting drawings of every switch and signal in the quadrangle Ascot, Aldershot, Hook and Reading. I do not have the roll up paper chart I submitted but of course I transcribed them also into my big book of track layouts that I still have. I completed Basingstoke and Worting Junction later in the summer when Geoffrey and I did a weekend camping trip there in Summer 1940. As a result I was able to complete the location of every signal and every switch on the main line from Waterloo to Basingstoke. I later added Winchester and Salisbury but were never able to connect them up at Micheldever. These drawings are in my book which I still keep. Most of the line remains the same, although it is electrified and I suspect that the signals have been improved.

On my return to school just after Christmas I got sick. I had discharges from the left ear, diagnosed as “otitis media”. I knew enough Latin to realize that just mean middle ear, and was one of the many ways a doctor had of saying “we don’t know”. I had to stay in bed most of a month. This was the time I learned calculus by reading the book and working the examples. Whether it was because I learned on my own or something else, I found that when I got back to school I was really ahead of the class. So when I got back to school I was put in a small group of three doing extra work in the class of 30. At the end of the year I took the “School Certificate” exam and was head of the class - especially in mathematics.

I am not sure whether it was in spring 1940 or autumn 1940 that a crippled boy called Goldstein, whose given name I have forgotten, came to the school. He was very good at mathematics and he, like myself, were put at the table at the back of the classroom to do more advanced work. The other boys ignored him. I am not sure to this day why I befriended him. Maybe because he and I both enjoyed mathematics, or maybe because I was sorry for him as a cripple. Maybe a bit of both. But during the vacation my father, presumably because he had been so advised by the mathematics master Chris Heath, told me not to be too friendly with Goldstein. He never explained why, nor did I know why. Goldstein left in the middle of the next term. Was it naked anti-Semitism on the part of Chris Heath who, up to that time seemed to me to be without many flaws? It still worries me but at the time I resolved to try to be more open minded. I thought again about this when on Christmas day about 1998 I visited Chris and his wife at his house in Tattenham Corner with Andrée and Annette. Chris was at that time mostly confined to a wheel chair. My daughter Annette at once thought that Chris was anti-Semitic. Yet it was more complex than that. At that meeting Chris asked me whether I knew what several of his best students were now doing. He was clearly proud of them They were all Jewish.
It was about this time I realized that our bicycling route to Crowthorne, through Cobham, and Byfleet is about 10 miles longer than through Chertsey and Chobam Common. It took 3 ½ hours compared to 2 ½ hours for the shorter route. So on one weekend home I proposed to go that way. I was meeting Geoffrey after school at the bicycle racks to ride home. Then I attempted a practical joke about which I will always feel badly. I waited, with another schoolfriend, probably Geoffrey Best who was going to come with us, 100 yards down the hill in the bushes out of the line of sight. The idea was to surprise Geoffrey. But Geoffrey came by cycling very fast. As he passed I tried to catch up with him. But he was going too fast, presumably to catch up with me. I presume he had assumed that I had gone ahead. Our ways diverged 3 miles ahead, and I took the short route home and got back sooner than Geoffrey who took the longer route. Geoffrey never took me to account for this failed practical joke. I presume that I apologized but probably not very graciously. I keep remembering this incident but as the song, then popular said in a somewhat different context: “what is done one never, never can undo.”
In April 1940 we made our last visit to Elmer Beach during a brief school holiday. While my mother went down by car, probably Grannie’s car, from Merton Park, Geoffrey and I put our bicycles on the train from Crowthorne to Guildford, and set off down the Portsmouth road past Godalming and on to Petworth. There was a strong opposing wind and I got extraordinarily tired. I could not face climbing the South Downs so we diverged and went to Pulborough, 5 miles to the east, and downhill. There we put our bicycles on the train to Ford Junction and bicycled on the three miles to Elmer Beach. The weather was brisk, the sea too cold for bathing, but we walked on Elmer beach for what turned out to be the last time.
On May 10th 1940 that the Nazi armies invaded Belgium and Holland. They quickly overcame the frontier forts, and on May 28th King Leopold of the Belgians surrendered, leaving the British and French armies to face the blitzkrieg alone. This left over 350,000 British troops in a difficult position. They fell back on Dunkerque and were surrounded except for the sea. At home we braced ourselves for the news of capitulation and capture of the army. That would have left England undefended, and we anticipated invasion within a week. The last week of May and the first of June we began to be prepared for invasion. I remember two items. We had a few days off school. The evacuated troops landed at Dover or thereabouts and were loaded into trains. Many trains went around London on the line passing through Crowthorne. I remember going down to the station where a women’s auxiliary group was making tea and sandwiches. When a train stopped, as many did waiting for the track to be clear at Wokingham and Reading, they handed the sustenance up through the windows to the soldiers. I talked to one group of soldiers. They had left all their arms behind on the beach and had nothing to eat or drink for 24 hours. Being a rail buff, I asked the engine driver where he was headed. “I don’t know mate” he replied. “I will go wherever the signal at Reading tells me to go.” I envisioned then that as the soldiers came off the 2,000 boats bringing them to England, they were pushed onto a train. No one knew where the train was going. It was extraordinary improvisation..
I envisioned the 330,000 men without weapons ready to save England. I also remember being taught unarmed combat. I had learned how to box at Colet Court, being taught by a former WWI army sergeant. I was taught the Queensborough rules - never hit below the belt. I now learned: “always hit below the belt” “Knee him in the crotch. Stamp on his instep. If you can creep up behind, cut off his head with a cheese wire.” Recently Pat Pankhust, Geoffrey’s wife for 53 years, told us that as a 14 year old school girl in Sevenoaks in SW London they practiced making Molotov cocktails. As I write this my mind goes at once to Churchill’s famous speech:

“We shall go on to the end,

we shall fight in France,

we shall fight on the seas and oceans,

we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,

we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,

we shall fight on the beaches,

we shall fight on the landing grounds,

we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,

we shall fight in the hills;

we shall never surrender.”
For us teenagers it was not mere rhetoric as some of my American colleagues thought at the time. It is what we proposed to do. If we had been tested there would of course have been carnage. Most of us knew that at the time. But talking with the refugees from Europe at school had convinced me that we had no alternative. Indeed I believed in September 1939 that there would not be a Jew alive in areas of Nazi domination at the end of the war. That turned out to be overly pessimistic. Many years later, when I read “Bram” Pais’, memoires I was surprised that he was walking unconcerned in Amsterdam in summer 1941 and only went into the attic in 1943. I was also buoyed by Churchill’s earlier speech to the House of Commons: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
Few weeks had as much influence on my later life as this one. I am a member of a Permanent Terrorism Monitoring Panel of the World Federation of Scientists (WFS). In my mischevousness I like to say that in 1940 I was trained as a terrorist. Few people understand this but a Belgian on the WFS understands this and says that he was a terrorist too.
We were home on holiday in August 1940 when the bombing began. It was a fine summer afternoon and we were having tea by the bay window in the dining room when we saw the dog fight. About fifteen Junkers 87 dive bombers (Stukas) were diving followed by a dozen British fighters - Spitfires or Hurricanes. Only half the Stukas got out of the dive. The Stukas were not again used in the UK but were used effectively in summer 1941 against an unprepared Russia. One plane was out of formation and dropped a single bomb- about 50 - 100 lb TNT - on a house in Hatfield Road just ½ mile away from our house and we went round to see the damage afterwards. The bomb had exploded after it had passed through three floors, and the house was destroyed. One person was killed. Nowadays I remind people that this is one billionth of the explosive power of a big hydrogen bomb. This is discussed later when I was informed of the first atomic bomb explosion over a city in 1945. It was a few weeks later, just before I went back to school, that there was a major air raid, at night, on east London and the docks. We could see the red sky of the fires from 30 miles away. The bombs set a paper warehouse alight and the next day our garden was covered with burnt paper. We were glad we did not live near the docks but sorry for the people who did.
It was probably about this time that Katherine Shroeder, daughter of the Reverend Shroeder who was minister of the Unitarian church in Halifax when my father was a boy, wrote and offered to make a home for Geoffrey and I in America. Katherine was a ballet dance teacher and choreographer, who married a widower, Howell Forbes who was a stockbroker in New York. I am not sure whether we would have stayed in New York, or in Cambridge, MA with Eric Shroeder, who was curator of Islamic Art at the Fogg art museum at Harvard and had married the daughter of the head of the museum, a Forbes who was a cousin of Howell. I had met Katherine once before, about 1935, when she came home on a vacation. I do not remember talking to Geoffrey about this but I told my mother that I did not want to leave the family. We stayed in England; evacuated in Crowthorne in term time and at home in SW London during holidays. But I called on Howell and Katherine in New York City when I arrived in the US in June 1950. After I married, I found that about 1948 Andrée had met Katherine when she went to New York in an attempt to become a ballet dancer. Katherine had been a ballet dancer and was an instructor. Andrée and I met Howell and Katherine by chance at a Boston Symphony orchestra concert at Tanglewood in 1956 and we stayed another time at their summer house above Stockbridge. Howell somewhat later lost his mind and while remaining unfailingly courteous, could not remember anything more than 10 minutes or so. My father had built an air raid shelter in the house. Taking a workshop next to the living room, he sandbagged the windows, added 6 inches of concrete to the flat roof, and 4" X 4" wooden pillars to support it. We all slept there when an air raid was anticipated. To keep the air tolerable, we generated ozone as an oxidizing agent. I have wondered since whether this was sensible because the oxidant, ozone, is a carcinogen and regulated as such by the US Environmental Protection Agency. But even with my present knowledge, I suspect we selected the lesser of two risks.

I think it was early in September 1940 that the first air raid came on the London docks which were 20 miles away from our house to ENE. We could at night see the red sky in the east. A paper storage warehouse was set alight. The next day our garden - and many others - was covered with burnt paper. When back at school in late September 1940, we saw, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon a squadron of a dozen Junkers 88 (a newer and faster dive bomber than the Stuka) proceeding, at high altitude, towards Reading. 10 minutes later they came back. But this time the vapor trails told the story. British fighters were weaving in and out. It was not only a beautiful sight but a welcome one.

Sometime that winter a lone German aircraft came near the school at low altitude - about 500 feet. The enthusiastic members of the Officers Training Corps ran up to the roof with a machine gun to try and shoot it down. There was not much chance of shooting it down, of course, but we cheered. In retrospect that endangered the school. The pilot could easily have taken shooting from the large building as an excuse to bomb a civilian target. But for all of us the enthusiasm for fighting the Nazis was enormous.
The second year of the war, 1940-41, we also planned to spend at Alderbrook, but now there were only 6 boys. The Knowles felt that 8 was too many. Bill Stock had left school. Another boy - probably David Parsons - was now the senior boy, and neither Geoffrey nor I were comfortable with him. So we asked to be transferred somewhere else. We also decided that it would be better if we were separate although our different “billets” were only 5 minutes walking apart. I in particular wanted to be thought of as myself rather than as a younger brother who needed his elder brother’s protection. So in January 1941 we moved. Geoffrey spent 1941-1942 at a large house run as a hostel by schoolmasters Mr and Mrs Monk Jones before going to Queens College, Oxford (in 1942), and I went to Meadhurst run by Chris Heath. There at Meadhurst, and also in the top mathematics form, (Maths 8) I got to know Klaus Roth who had come over from Breslau in 1934. Klaus and his mother and younger brother walked over the mountains from Germany to Austria, carrying all the money they had. If they had traveled normally they would have only been allowed by Hitler’s government to take $100 out of the country. Then the Roths came to England and they leased a house in Stanmore. His father, a lawyer, waited a year and followed but died soon thereafter. In 1939, Stanmore was the area for the Royal Air Force home command and where Air Vice Marshal Dowding set up his command headquarters for defending SE England. Enemy aliens had to leave. Mrs Roth had to break her lease, and the landlord sued. The landlord was clearly legally in the right but, I am glad to say the judge was sufficiently scathing that he dropped the case. Klaus moved down the northern line to Hampstead where Mrs Roth ran a boarding house for elderly Jewish refugees. I noted that there was an interesting geographical progression about the Jewish refugees. The poorest refugees came to Shoreditch on the east of London. As they got a bit more money they moved to Edgeware or Stanmore. Then gentility set in and they moved to West Hampstead or Golders Green. My parents friend Joe Newton (who ran a tailors’ shop near the Elephant and Castle under the name John Newton) lived in Edgeware.
Klaus was a maddening character at times but we became good friends. In 1942-3 Klaus and I were put in a little attic room by ourselves. Just room for 2 beds and to stand in between. I had, at that time, the duty of fixing everything that went wrong in the house. I had to replace tap washers. I had to remount door hinges. I had to repair window glass and fix broken chairs and table legs. Klaus had the duty of keeping the central heating boiler stoked. Klaus was also in the top Mathematics form with me (Maths. 8) with a group of four working for university Scholarships I got a scholarship to Christchurch Oxford, Michael Burns an exhibition (a sort of junior scholarship) to Hartford College, Oxford and Klaus an exhibition to Peterhouse, Cambridge. Klaus got 4th class honors at Peterhouse in 1945. The low degree almost doomed him as I feared that my second class degree would doom me. But Klaus was no ordinary academic. Klaus got a job as assistant master at Gordonstown School in Scotland, a school designed to build “character” (whatever that may be) where Prince Philip had gone to school. In that year he became chess champion of Scotland. In 1946 he persuaded University College London to accept him for graduate study, where he got his MA in 1948, PhD in 1950, Reader in 1955, and Professor in 1961. In the 1950s he married a beautiful girl, Melek, who I understand was a niece of King Farouk Klaus was awarded the world’s most prestigious medal for mathematics, the Fields medal, at age 33 in 1958. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society - an honor I have never achieved. I saw him occasionally in 1945-6, and indeed we went on a walking trip together as described later, but after that only intermittently till 1996 when he retired with his wife Melek to the north of Scotland where he is uninterested in meeting any of his old friends. But I do not forget him and if I ever do it will only be because I forget everything..
There were “first responders” in wartime England who were volunteers as Air Raid Wardens and First Aid Party members. It was not necessary for them to be as fast as the 3 minutes of responding to an incendiary bomb that I described earlier but their speed probably fits any ordinary definition. At Meadhurst at age 15 I was a First Aid Party messenger and later a First Aid Party member. On a YELLOW warning (enemy planes are massing over northern France) the telephone would ring in our hostel and all the boys in one of 5 rooms would dress quickly for their various duties. Within a few minutes we would get the RED warning (enemy planes have crossed the coast). Within seconds I was on my bicycle. My immediate duty was to bicycle about 2 miles. Blowing a whistle because much of the area had no air raid siren. I had to wake up 3 first aid party members who had no telephone. One, Ms. Hand, was the daughter of Major Knowles chauffeur (Mr Hand) who was described earlier. Then we all assembled at the first aid post in the church hall. Some members were already there but others arrived (on their bicycles ) within a few minutes and we sat down to wait for the emergency which, fortunately, never came on my shift.
In summer 1941 I and some other boys were asked to work on a farm. Most of Britain’s farm laborers were in the army - out of the country, probably in the middle east or far east. So we helped to bring in the harvest. The farm belonged to an old Pauline, a Mr Morgan, who also ran a dairy, Morgan’s dairy, in Wandsworth. So I bicycled to Tibbets Corner, where the Portsmouth Road from Wandsworth westward crosses Wimbledon Common Road. There the Morgan’s dairy milk delivery lorry picked up a couple of us. For the next 50 miles we sat on the empty milk churns in the back making sure our bicycles did not fall off. There were a dozen of us camping in the Morgan’s orchard at Fullerton. I cannot remember who the others were. Most days we took the sheaves of wheat that were thrown out by the “combine” harvester and put them, 6 at a time, onto a “stook” to dry. The tractor pulled the combine starting at the outside of the field leaving a smaller and smaller area in the middle. We would then stop stooking, pick up a stick and wait, joined by other farm hands now, for rabbits to escape the diminishing cover. Stun the rabbit with the stick, pick it up and break its neck. Then we could have rabbit stew for supper, although we actually ate the rabbit caught the previous week after it had hung for awhile. We worked from 9 to 6 with only a short break. At 6 pm one night the other farm laborers invited us all to join them at the local pub. I was only just 15, and looked 11, but they swore I was 16 - the legal age for drinking at that time. I had my first pint of farmhouse cider - probably 8% alcohol. But I was able to cycle back to camp with no problem.
It was expected (at Meadhurst) that any boy who was a Christian would go to church on Sunday. I, brought up as a Unitarian, had not gone to the “ordinary” Church of England services. But I did go out of curiosity to the church in Crowthorne which was dull. I went once or twice, at Chris Heath’s suggestion, to hear a sermon by a clergyman in Sandhurst who was particularly interesting. The nearest Unitarian Church was in Reading - about 20 miles away. On many Sundays Geoffrey and I would bicycle there. In 1940-1942 our grandmother (Kingston) rented some rooms in a boarding house in Reading to escape the air raids on London and we would stop there for lunch. It was there, in summer 1940, that I was introduced to Alexis Kougoulsky who was about to come to our school. He was a son of the Yugoslav ambassador to Belgium, and when Belgium capitulated to the Nazi armies in May 1940 his parents told him: “Go! Don’t Wait! Walk to the British Army at Dunkerque” As the British army evacuated he swam a couple of miles out to a troop ship and was taken to England where he stayed with an aunt in Notting Hill. I lost track of him after school but I don’t think that he ever saw his parents again. At the time I thought that Alexis was Jewish but now I am not so sure. There were many refugees from the Nazis with other backgrounds.
Meadhurst was a large private house, not as large as our present one in Newton Centre, which hosted 25-30 boys. I remember 3 upstairs bedrooms with 6 boys each and another down. A bedroom for Chris Heath and his wife and one for Chris’ sister who helped out. Each of the rooms had 6 beds and a small bedside cupboard for belongings and more in a suitcase under the bed. We were all assigned Air Raid Precaution duties. Each room was “on duty” on an assigned roster. In my room I was assigned to be a First Aid party messenger. When the air raid warning yellow was given the telephone rang in the corridor. An air raid warning yellow meant that German airplanes were assembling over northern France. Air raid warning red meant that they had crossed the south coast. All of us in the room on duty had to roust out of bed. By the time we had thrown our clothes on, the red warning came. I bicycled 2 miles blowing a whistle to warn people (there was only one air raid siren for the whole village) waking up the first aid party, most of whom had no home telephone. I took between 5 and 10 minutes for the ride - perhaps going as fast as 20 mph. By that time unlike the prewar years, when I rode 13 miles in 40 minutes, I had a bicycle with a three speed, Sturmey Archer, gear.
I had already joined the “air scout” troop, hoping eventually to be come a pilot. But in that fall I also joined the Air force Officer Training Corps which was an activity that replaced organized sports.. But it was as an air scout that I got my most interesting experience. Chris Heath was both the “housemaster” at Meadhurst, my mathematics master and scoutmaster. He had arranged for a visit for several days to a Fleet Air Arm training airfield - HMS Kestrel, on Worthy Down just north of Winchester. This was in October or November 1942. That field was a race course before the war. Not an ideal airfield because it was on a slope. The slope meant that when a US lend lease plane tried to land it crashed and remained on the field. We stayed in the youth hostel in Winchester in an old mill on top of the river. We then bicycled out to Worthy Down every day. Chris Heath also thought of the evenings. On two of them we did a play reading of Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man”, and on another we read James Elroy Flecker’s “Hassan - a confectioner of Baghdad’. I remember them, and occasionally reread them, with pleasure to this day. Indeed “Arms and the Man” got me interested in the Balkans, and Yugoslavia in particular.
At HMS Kestrel the training was primarily the training of navigators. It was very important that they be able to find their way. If they failed to get back to their aircraft carrier, the prospect of survival was bleak. They had 6 weeks training in “ordinary” navigation and were now being trained for a week in using radar. They were flown out every day to any destination the pilot chose and had to find their way with the rear cockpit closed. But there was a spare seat - with a spare control, beside the pilot and this was a place for us to have joy rides. The planes were Fairey Sharks, and a monoplane whose manufacture I cannot now remember. I had a ride in each. We had to put on a warm flying suit and have a parachute clipped to a harness over the chest. There was no runway at HMS Kestrel - only a sloping grass field. Alas, I was airsick each time. The first time I had contained myself till the pilot, at 300 ft, took a turn around a small town (Wantage) and asked me to identify it. There was the town revolving around the church steeple!. My lunch went that way (in a bag fortunately) . The second time, in a Shark this time, I was not so lucky. I spewed up all over the pilot’s flying suit! After this, we had to bicycle the 40 miles back to Crowthorne in the drizzle. Chris went ahead with the stronger boys and I was left to look after the younger ones. It was nice to be trusted with responsibility but I had a completely empty stomach and was very tired. I remember as we passed Hook and looked up at the 150 Kev electricity transmission lines there was a blue discharge around the wet insulators. It looked very eerie. I had to reassure one of the younger boys that it was alright and not dangerous. I think I calmed him but was somewhat concerned myself!
The pilots welcomed us, and after the first day one of the boys thought he recognized one. Indeed he had. He was Lieutenant Laurence Olivier, RNVR, better known for his acting in Hollywood films. He had learned to fly when in Hollywood, and volunteered in 1939 - but at age 27 he was already too old to be a fighter or bomber pilot so he was in this useful but less romantic job flying navigators on training runs.. Soon afterwards he was released from active duty for another job - making and acting in the film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. That film was clearly an important morale booster for beleaguered Englishmen, although the war was just over when it was released in summer 1945. I have seen Henry V several times since. But the Olivier version is the one I will always remember. Although when I tell this story orally to airline pilots I say, to be impressive, that I threw up over Lt. Olivier’s flying suit, I actually threw up over another pilot’s flying suit. It was a more senior boy, Dick Stock who had been one of the boys at Alderbrook, who flew with Lieutenant Olivier. Dick did not have a queasy stomach.
All the rest of my life I have had motion sickness, but I learned to be careful. The early airliners such as the DC3 had fixed wings Fortunately aircraft nowadays have wings that flap and that gives a smoother flight. But again at age 81 I traveled in a small plane (De Havilland Beaver) piloted by Bill Anders, former fighter pilot, astronaut, ambassador and company President, I am glad that I treated my friend Bill better than the I treated the pilot from HMS Kestrel.
The next year when I was 16 I went to work again on a farm The work this time was arranged more directly by the school masters, in summer 1942. This was at Tetbury in Gloucestershire. We traveled down in a very crowded train - myself sitting with the bicycles on the floor of the guard’s van. Then a change at Kemble, for the small train to Tetbury. We camped on the village green, which was also the cricket field, bicycling out each day to a farm which needed help. My main task for 3 weeks was weeding cail on a farm in Didmarton. Then we went to a farm just south of Barton End. The work was somewhat back breaking. But there was no question whether I was allowed to drink this time. I was 16 which was above drinking age at the time. The schoolmaster organizers clearly stated the rules. “You are doing a man’s job. You will be treated as men”. But I did get a problem with a parasite which burrowed under the skin. I went to the doctor and got an ointment to kill it. It had a name. The “Harvester’s Bug.” The farm laborers thought that going to a doctor was a waste of time and money. “You should just piss on it,” they said. This was the old time-honored remedy which was not in the British pharmacopeia.
The school years 1942-1943 were spent in the most advanced mathematics class. The “Maths 8". The master in charge was Chris Health although we had other another mathematics teacher, Mr Moakes who also taught physics, for some classes. We met in small groups in the same classroom. I was in a group of four as we progressed, and there was another group, including Geoffrey, a year ahead. In my group there was, in addition to myself, Klaus Roth, David Parsons, and Michael Burns. One of Chris’s methods of teaching was to test us on an examination paper from previous examinations for scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge. We had a three hour test, as if we were taking the examination, and then later in the week we tackled the problems that we had failed to answer in the “time test”. I found this to be challenging, but it led me to think not only about meeting the requirements of a specific examination, but also to get an answer by a deadline - which is so important in life. If one of our solutions was well written, it was compared with previous solutions in Chris’ file. If it was better, perhaps shorter in argument, than what was there before from a previous year, it replaced it. My solutions replaced one or two but not many.
We were also exposed to physics and to a more limited extent, to Chemistry. I remember in particular Mrs Monk-Jones, wife of the master Monk-Jones who I believe taught Latin and Greek She was one of the few ladies teaching in the boy’s school. She was recruited, as my mother had been 25 years befoe, because of the war. She was more inspiring than the other, more senior, physics teachers, Mr (Jack) Moakes and Mr Peters. One fine day in summer 1942 she decided to spend the hour with an experiment to measure the velocity of sound. We spread out on a long 1 ½ mile section of straight road, inside Wellington College grounds, whose old physics laboratories we were using. One boy continuously banged a dinner gong at one second intervals. We walked away from him and the sight of the hammer hitting the gong no longer was synchronized. Then, as we walked on we found a place where the sight and sound were synchronized again. That was the distance sound traveled in one second (assuming of course that the velocity of light was much greater than the velocity of sound). I thereby learned that physics can be fundamental but simple. I learned mechanics from Mr Moakes, and was able to fit into my understanding at the time that mechanics was what led Newton to differential calculus whereas Leibnitz looked at it from a more abstract point of view. But Mr Peters also influenced us. He was a chain somker and his fingers were yellow with cigarette tar. By that time I already know from my father’s experience, but not with as much detail as I know today, that cigarette smoking was medically stupid. Mr Peters assigned and oversaw several experiments. In one, we were all asked to look through a microscope at a lens superimposed on a flat piece of glass and saw Newton’s rings. We had to write up a report on our observations. Mr Peters sardonically commented that none of our reports matched the mystery of the observations and he read out to us the relevant section of Newton’s “Opticks” which describes the rings so eloquently. Indeed Mr Peters was right. Indeed it makes a great deal of difference when a laboratory report is well written. It is of course necessary to write well in order to get the interest of others, but I find it a source of pleasure to myself.