Free Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley Page B

honesty

    and even his sanity; they claimed that he was 'cooking' his results -even those that were so obviously tentative.
    One of the difficulties about all this in 1923 was that Kammerer's experiments with salamanders had been done before the First World War; during the war his laboratory had been dismantled and most of his specimens destroyed; in the post-war inflation in Vienna he had found it impossible to get money to set up his experiments again. And then there was the fact that when other biologists tried to repeat his experiments, they could not keep alive long enough to get any results the animals that Kammerer had managed to keep alive through several generations. It was perhaps annoyance at this that drove mainstream biologists to hint that Kammerer must be a charlatan.
    Nevertheless his reputation was still such that he was invited to Cambridge in 1923: he was only the second ex-enemy-alien to be invited to Cambridge since the war. (The first - you will be pleased at the coincidence! - had been Einstein.)
    I picked up bits and pieces about all this at the time: I learned details later. But the picture I had in my mind about Kammerer did not have to be much amended later.
    At the end of that day when he had played tennis on the lawn and after he had gone along with the rest of my father's guests - I had not properly said goodbye to him: I minded about this: I had run out on to the drive just in time to wave as he drove away; I think he waved to me; but of course it was more probable that he was waving to my mother -
    - At the end of this day, when my mother and father and I were settling down to some plates of cold meat for supper, my father said -
    'Well, what's the verdict?'
    My mother said The verdict about what?'
    'Dr Kammerer, of course.'
    'He is certainly very charming.'
    'Yes, "charming" is the word I would use myself
    'You use it with a certain distaste.'
    'It is not a word held in high regard in scientific circles.'
    'But this afternoon we were not in scientific circles.'
    'No indeed we were not.'
    And so on.
    This was the sort of conversation that had to be suspended while Watson the parlourmaid came in with dishes. Watson was a tall

    craggy woman like a member of a military band. She would bang her plates and cutlery about at the sideboard like percussion.
    The word 'charming' was one I had not heard my mother use before. I thought - Well, no, you could not call my father's friends charming: and my mother's friends, well, but their charm is like that of witches around a lukewarm cauldron. But Dr Kammerer was like a wizard with his hands round a crystal ball -
    My mother said 'He played tennis very well.'
    My father said 'He never moved.'
    'How lovely to find someone who hardly needs to move!'
    'Well in his line of business he certainly moves one or two pieces around on the board, when no one is looking, I can tell you!'
    When my father and my mother went on like this I usually switched my attention off: but every now and then I cared about something enough to want to try to divert them.
    I said 'But why do you think Dr Kammerer was able to keep his salamanders alive in captivity, while others could not?'
    My father said 'That is indeed a subject on which we have little information.'
    My mother said 'Perhaps he loved them.'
    My father said 'Loved them!'
    My mother said 'Haven't you heard that things are sometimes helped to stay alive if they are loved?'
    Perhaps Watson clattered in or out again at this point with some dishes. I sometimes wondered - Might one of the reasons why people employ servants be so that they can be rescued at regular intervals from their dreadful conversations?
    But now my father ploughed on. 'Yes indeed Dr Kammerer is said to have an amazing way with animals. Once, when he was out on one of his walks looking for specimens, he is said to have picked up a toad and to have kissed it.'
    My mother said 'I'm sure it turned into a princess.'
    Watson had become curiously quiet at the