Free Homage to Gaia by James Lovelock Page A

class while they, like prosecuting lawyers, harangued me on my pacifism or socialism, as if these were crimes and I were a felon. If they expected that the boys, my peers, would then visit me with their own bigotry, they were wrong. Their pettiness merely enhanced my reputation as the mad scientist, who had eccentric views as well. What matters to boys, pre- and post-adolescent, is courage. An ability to fight back without too much fuss was all that I needed to have their support.
    In addition to air pollution, Brixton offered another pollution: its local accent. Playing with the local children may have made me street-wise but at the cost of a voice that would have condemned me to a working-class life in those intensely class-conscious times. My Pygmalion was Uncle Hugo Leakey, and when I first stayed with Kit and Hugo at their Welwyn Garden City home, Hugo decided to eliminate from my speech the glottal stop, the dropped h, and the whining cockney vowels. Every morning, immediately on waking, I had to practise vowel sounds or sentences like ‘It’s not the hunting that hurts the horses’ hoofs but the hammer hammer hammer on the hard high road’, and then repeat them at breakfast. He was a professional and kept this training going until I had an accent that, although still not upper-middle-class would fool many listeners. Things change and in England now a down-market accent is sought after, but I am deeply grateful to my uncle for his unstinting effort to change mine. They would never have chosen me in 1941 for the post of junior scientist at the National Institute for Medical Research had I spoken as a native South Londoner.
    The Leakeys expanded my horizons in other important ways. They gave me the speech and mannerisms of the avant-garde political far-Left ,which was so popular at that time. Something very different from my mother’s old Labour views and antithetical to my father’s natural Toryism. I soon imbibed the Marxist jargon and was, in a way, dialectically materialized. The evangelical communists, with their yellow book bibles from Gollancz’s Left Book Club, were all around me, and they were as certain in their beliefs as were the Catholics I was soon to meet at university. Everyone of the Leakey crowd was sure that they were right. Soon the intense tribal conflict of the Spanish Civil War was to engulf them all: many as participants on the Republican side; many like me, supporters too young to join in. Strangely, the intensity of feeling among the Left over the civil war in Spain far exceeded their passions for the fight against Nazism during the Second World War. The Spanish war was an affair of the heart as well as the mind, and a political commitment. The Second World War seemed more to be a necessary but unfortunate act, more for principle than for passionate conviction. Also, of course, the Second World War was, in a way, an English war, and the Left, as part of their internationalism , were not enthused by England as such, or even the United Kingdom.
    I have often wondered if there is a second awakening like that of puberty. At thirteen years, gender suddenly becomes invested with meaning. At somewhere around fifteen, in a similar way, politics and tribal matters suddenly reveal their colours. That is how it was for me. I would avidly absorb the News Chronicle, the liberal Left paper that the family favoured at Orpington. The Old Labour paper that they might have bought, the Daily Herald, was so dull that we all found it much too stodgy. Republican success in Spain lit up my day, and their frequent reverses depressed me. The hopelessness of the Republican cause did nothing for my adolescent angst.
    The Leakeys were not merely political, they were also vegetarian and sexually enlightened, or at least in that prudish era they seemed so. The March girls, my mother included, were all first-rate cooks. Kit’s vegetarian food was quite delicious, something very rare in my experience. I always looked