Free Homage to Gaia by James Lovelock Page B

forward to my next visit to Welwyn and drooled over the thought of her mock steak-and-kidney pie. The Leakey’s art deco house had an upper storey like a ship, with a wide wall enclosing a balcony surrounding the main bedrooms. Above that, there was a flat roof for sunbathing. Here the whole family, any guests, and me included, sunbathed naked. It rapidly cured me of any prudery about my body. Nakedness in the warm sunny airbecame a joy and a freedom. Oddly, in spite of being over-sexed, as are most adolescent boys, naked girls were not arousing just to look at. This was not true of the act of undressing, and I remember trying to hide my erect and over-eager phallus by turning to the wall when I had watched a thoughtless striptease. This was a rare event: it was a rule that only bodies unclothed could use the sunbathing terrace. I feel sorry for the many whose acts of love have been marred by fears about their bodies. The Leakeys’ ad hoc finishing school was the best of my educations.
    Hugo had an amazing brother, Basil, who lived in three houses in a wood near Stevenage. One house had bedrooms on the second floor, the ground floor being a barn for gardening tools. Another house had the kitchen, and a third, the living quarters, and paved paths connected all these houses. Basil was a professional magician, part of the company called Maskelyne and Devant. I often wondered later if JBS Haldane’s book, My Friend, Mr Leakey, which was about a magician, had Basil as its exemplar.
    Felix was Kit and Hugo’s only child, and was for me like a younger brother. We would spend hours together exploring the fine countryside of those days around Welwyn Garden City on our bicycles. We even made a trip together to Cornwall in 1935, travelling down the West Coast from Port Isaac to St Agnes and on round by St Ives to Land’s End. We returned past the Lizard to Plymouth, Dartmoor, and home by train from Exeter.
    When younger, Kit and Hugo were away in Argentina, where they had a bee and apple farm at Bahia Blanca. During their absence I would go, for school breaks, to Aunt Florrie at Hitchin. John Leete, her husband, was a handsome man who resembled the actor, Wilfrid Hyde-White. He had a firm and gentle disposition. He, together with his brother, Claude, owned Hitchin’s main tailor’s shop. It was a comfortable middle-class Tory home, a complete contrast to the Leakeys and to the shop in Brixton. John and Flo’s great passion in life was golf. They were both quite good at it and had, at one time or another, been county champions. Life for them seemed to revolve around bridge tournaments and playing at the Letchworth Golf Club. Their friends were mainly other businessmen and their wives from Hitchin. In many ways, it represented the world my mother hated and envied most passionately. She keenly felt the injustice of her and Tom’s endless struggle to keep a sinking shop afloat. The affluence of Uncle John’s shop, where money flowed in apparently effortlesslywas, she felt, so unfair. All that was tempered by a strong devotion and loyalty to her sister, and the recognition that John and Flo were kind and generous. In the convoluted class hierarchy of England, being in trade, and therefore people of little consequence, damned us both. Strangely, the picture shop occupied a slightly higher place in that category of snobbery than did the wealthier tailor’s. Somehow, the association with art and artists made it less bourgeois. I was in grave danger, exposed to so many worlds ranging from my father’s working-class friends to the upper-middle-class Leakeys, of evolving into a feeble and flabby liberal—someone without passion, who could see every point of view and yet was unable to decide what was right or wrong, someone like Judas, who betrayed from lack of commitment, not from wilful error. Fortunately, my commitment to science and the unshakeable quest to become a practising scientist kept me from this kind of indecision.
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