Why did the R101 crash?

Nevil Shute Norway, with the R100 he helped design

I mentioned in the comments section of my last that scientists these days are dependent on research funding, academic tenure etc., so they may feel constrained in what they can say or do; whereas in the nineteenth century and earlier, scientists could speculate fearlessly. Agreeing with this, Natalie suggested that some ideas derided by orthodoxy today may yet take root and flourish in a yet unimagined future.

And then I was reminded of something, a broader principle which has long convinced me, and I can trace it back to a particular time in my life, a book which made an impression, and a particular passage in that book.

Nevil Shute’s novels span four decades, from the Twenties to the Fifties. By profession he was an aeronautical engineer. In his memoir Slide Rule, he tells the story of two rival British airship projects: the R100 and the R101. Everyone remembers the R101 because it crashed on its first big flight from England to India, killing 48 of the bigwigs who travelled as passengers. Many of them had hoped to bask in its reflected glory. The R101 was a government-sponsored project funded with taxpayers’ money and managed by civil servants. Much of Shute’s book analyses what it did wrong compared with its rival airship R100, which was privately designed and built; and which had promoted Shute (in his real name of Nevil Shute Norway) as its deputy chief engineer.

I was more interested in this book than his novels, discovering myself to be an engineer at heart, though my professional career was in software, a rather abstract realm that wouldn’t suit me now. I’d sooner work with materials. I’m just old enough to have used a slide rule at school. Shute’s book takes its name from the millions of slide rule calculations used in designing the R100 airship, in the late Twenties. I was fascinated by every detail in his book, but the bit I remember best was about “private means”:

Now and again, we would find some cheerful young commander or captain who was not affected by these scruples, who was as brave in the office as he was at sea. Commenting on such a regular officer and on his way of doing business we would say,

The R101 at Carrington, where it was built and trialled

"He’s a good one. I bet he’s got private means. Invariably investigation proved that we were right. The officers who were brave in the Admiralty were the officers who had an independent income, who could afford to resign from the navy if necessary without bringing financial disaster to their wives and children. It started as a joke with us to say that a brave officer in the office probably had private means. and then it got beyond a joke and turned into an axiom. These were the men who could afford to shoulder personal responsibility in the Admiralty, who could afford to do their duty to the Navy in the highest sense.

Such men invariably gravitate towards the top of any government service that they happen to be in because of their carefree acceptance of responsibility. They serve as a leaven and as an example to their less fortunate fellows; they set the tone of the whole office by their high standard of duty.

“The greatest disaster in the history of aviation
The torn and twisted skeleton of R101
An aerial view of the wreck on a hill near Beauvais”

I think this is an aspect of inherited incomes which deserves greater attention than it has had up to now. If the effect of excessive taxation and death duties in a country is to make all high officials dependent on their pay and pensions. then the standard of administration will decline and that country will get into greater difficulties than ever. Conversely, in a wealthy country with relatively low taxation and much inherited income a proportion of the high officials will be independent of their job, and the standard of administration will probably be high.

I do not know the financial condition of the high officials in the Air Ministry at the time of the R101 disaster. I suspect, however, that an investigation would reveal that it was England’s bad luck that at that time none of them had any substantial private means. At rock bottom, that to me is probably the fundamental cause of the tragedy. [My italics.]

To see virtue in inherited wealth is of course an old-fashioned attitude, popularly identified with conservatism. Today’s world is anxious and aspirational. Money is pursued as a proxy for contentment. The rich are envied and hated. Heedless of the tenth commandment, people are encouraged to consider covetousness the new virtue. It churns the economy, increases the GDP. It doesn’t do much for the sense of well-being but many are prepared to pay that price.

Shute wrote Slide Rule in 1954. The values he extols carry little weight in today’s landscape, but I take his words personally. There is still a class of person with “private means”, who is able to step out of the economic rat race. I remember it said that British pre-eminence in pop music in the Sixties—the Beatles leading the way—was financed by a generous system of unemployment benefit which allowed young men (mainly) to develop new styles, because they had time to do so, and could afford to fail.

Why did the R101 crash? Shute hints that it may have been because few if any of its team could afford to lose their jobs by speaking out against the rush to deadline, the cut corners, the glaring risks whitewashed over, so as to win the race against the R100 and get all the kudos.

There will always be persons of private means. They are the ones whom progressive parties promise to squeeze when it’s General Election time. Tax the rich to feed the poor. But you don’t have to be rich. There’s a whole army of persons no longer in full employment, whose bodies and minds are not yet worn out, who can expect to live for some years yet, thanks to medical advances not available in Shute’s day. And his words still apply. We (for I march in that number) shelter under the aegis of retirement, and ought to accept a “high standard of duty”. Instead of lazing about, waiting till I become a burden on the young, I can afford to “shoulder responsibility” and do my duty to the universe “in the highest sense”. Crashes of all kinds occur in this flawed world. If R101 had not crashed on its maiden long-distance flight, airships might have had a safe few years, helium would have become available instead of hydrogen, and the world would have been a little different.

On being an animal

What I really wanted to say in my last was: “I am an animal”. The intended piece got hijacked by its own introduction, if you can believe that. “I am an animal” sounds like an oxymoron, requires an explanation before you can make sense of it. “I am . . .” implies awareness. “Animal” implies lack of human awareness. But I don’t know of an event in evolution where animality can be supposed to have fallen away, letting us think of ourselves as disembodied minds, with all the other bits replaceable by prosthetics. Before Darwin, to call someone an animal would be to call them subhuman. Perhaps naïve creationists still think that way. Perhaps we all do, when we think in clichés. Most discussion of humanity, specialized or otherwise, takes it as given that humanity has transcended “the animals”. I can’t say that any more. I say “the other animals”. I owe them respect and even reverence, just as I do to the eight great-grandparents I never knew. And by extension, I owe as much respect to every distant cousin. I always think of a favourite example, the charmingly humble slug, so defenceless yet such a doughty survivor. How do I know that it doesn’t live “in Eternity’s sunrise”?

I first said “I am an animal” in a post of that name I wrote in 2006. This was before my discovery of two books which deepened my understanding of its significance. The first of these is Becoming Animal by David Abram, which claims that we’ve been “taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance.” He continues: “This book subverts that distance, drawing readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth.” *

Though I endorsed his words wholeheartedly, I found myself resistant to taking them as primary truth. To do so would be to hold my own recent experience of the world at a distance. So as I read his book, I found myself arguing with it, and sometimes indulging the fantasy that I could have written parts of it better. For I felt that there is no way to “draw readers ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore from within . . .” In retrospect my resistance arose from rejecting the notion of a teacher, and specifically any sort of self-help book. Rejecting the teacher was the turning-point of my life. I followed a self-styled guru for more years than I care to admit. By the time I walked out, I’d spent half my life following his injunction to practise meditation by “turning the senses inwards” in a narrow prescribed way. Opening David Abram’s book at random, I find this quote from John Muir:

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.

That was the walk I should have taken, but it took a long expedition into alleged spirituality before I could see it. We are animals because we are bred from this earth. The process of evolution has ensured that our native habitat—“we” referring to all creatures, whether slugs, rats or ourselves—shaped the way our species has developed, or we could say designed, just as boats are designed to ply the rivers and oceans. We are in constant provisional symbiosis with what surrounds us. Symbiosis is a fancy term for co-synchronous adaptation, which is a fancy abstract way of saying that the bee and the flower have evolved at the same time for mutual co-operation. But it’s all provisional. In the vastness of time, space and interactions on the surface of Earth, we may find islands of tranquil stability but everything is prone to catastrophe. For all we know, the Big Bang was itself a catastrophe, which destroyed everything before it so that everything could start again. Nature is flawed, just as every attempt at theology is flawed. Even perfection, existing in our imagination, is flawed.

The detailed mechanics of evolution are poorly understood, by me at any rate, but more expert minds have traced the existence of Man back to the time when all creatures with backbones lived in the sea as fish. Three hundred million years ago, a certain type of fish was in danger of becoming extinct. I’ll let Loren Eiseley take up the story, from his book The Immense Journey:

It was a time of dizzying contrasts, a time of change. . . . The pond was doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the creature would not die. It could breathe air direct through a little accessory lung, and it could walk. In all that weird and lifeless landscape, it was the only thing that could. It walked rarely and under protest, but that was not surprising. The creature was a fish.

There have been many species in the lineage from fish to man. How does speciation (the formation of new species) arise? Though Darwin is most famous for writing The Origin of Species, he was never able to guess an adequate answer. Much research has since been undertaken in the laboratory with fruit flies, which can reach adult form in as little as seven days from conception. Then, as little as eight hours later, they’re ready for sex and the cycle repeats. Technicians don’t even have to wait patiently for random mutations to occur. They can induce them, using radiation, chemicals & other forms of interference. That’s how evolution is studied. The same experiments on humans (God forbid) would take millions of years. As I said in my last, evolution is not a suitable subject for teaching young people science. Let’s call it a creation myth and move on. But it’s a worthy topic to include when creation myths are discussed.

Another thing worthy of life-long study is how the human equivalent of a cub, puppy, chick, kitten, calf, kid, lamb, tadpole, foal, joey or cygnet can develop into a wise adult. In my experience, enlightenment cannot be taught. We each have to make our own path. Sometimes I think I wasted thirty years of my life going off in a direction unsuited to my own nature. It seemed like a catastrophe, but for all I know it was the shortest route from there to here. I have learned to heed hints and whisperings from within, instead of conforming to the crowd. It’s not an easy thing to do.

Having missed the swinging Sixties, I got tangled in the Age of Aquarius, ending up stranded in a hippy commune. Refusing to admit I’d lost my bearings, I hitched a ride on that guru-bandwagon, convincing myself that Destiny had planned it so. Indeed it was spiritual, in the sense that it scorned the material and physical, all the better to focus on the divine. My body, being that of an animal descended from animals, never gave up protesting. I got ill, it wasn’t hepatitis as I’d assumed, but one of those chronic conditions which medical science wanted to deny, finding no evidence of physical dysfunction or mental illness. I was like that fish which Eiseley describes: “the pond was doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the creature would not die.” It metamorphosed somehow into a new species. I too was in some sense reborn, out from spirituality and into what I knew not. My cure, occurring thirty years after the onset, was instantaneous. A healer asked me a question, told me to ask my body, via memory, for the answer. I felt a subtle shift inside. I was released, and knew it

The newborn chick of a greylag goose follows the first thing it sees, its species instinct gambling on the odds that this will be its mother. So it was with me. From the healing moment onwards, I took on the notion that symptoms are messengers; the mind can play cruel tricks on us; body-wisdom can be trusted. But the therapy which engineered my cure had its own mumbo-jumbo. After escaping the guru, I’ve been wary of mumbo-jumbo, try to keep it at bay. The world is so choked with it, people declutter themselves of one kind whilst filling the empty space with another, imagining themselves now free. Needless to say, I too am “people”. There is nothing in this universe unflawed, only our fine words, which cruelly deceive us. Reducing the clutter to its minimum, leaving my excess baggage at the airport terminal, I feel myself to be an animal. Perhaps I mean a hunter-gatherer, but it doesn’t matter. To step out the door, on a mundane errand or for aimless wayfaring, is often enough to connect. I touch the world, it touches me back. It’s enough. It’s everything.

After writing the above words, I thought, “OK, I could end here,” but then I suddenly remembered a loose end left hanging from the beginning of my second paragraph above. I mentioned “the discovery of two books” and went on to mention the first, Becoming Animal, by David Abram. The second is Theory of Religion, by Georges Bataille (translated from French in my edition). Chapter 1 is headed “Animality”. It immediately becomes clear that he talks about animals so as to distinguish their sense of self-versus-other, if any, from the human sense of self-versus-other. Then comes his oft-quoted sentence:

That one animal eats another scarcely alters a fundamental situation: every animal is in the world like water in water.

So he says that “animals” (he could never say “other animals”) don’t have a sense of self at all, even when eating one another or being eaten. And in his next section he says that it’s a poetic fallacy to imagine that animals are in any way like us, or we like them.

Nothing, as a matter of fact, is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended.

At least he acknowledges the basic theory of evolution. French intellectuals don’t get any weirder than Georges Bataille, I suspect, and his theory of religion doesn’t repay the enormous effort of trying to grasp what he’s saying, and why he thinks it’s worth saying. (Perhaps he didn’t: it was published posthumously ten years after his death.) But his famous saying: “every animal is in the world like water in water” illuminates my own sense of oneness with every animal. For when I am in this awareness, knowing my cousinhood to the slug, buoyed by mother earth, canopied by the sky, grateful for the air, I too am water in water. It’s a sense of ecstatic oneness. Within this awareness, I see it reflected in everything else. Intelligence wasn’t evolved in the human brain so much as enslaved and domesticated by the human tyrant from its wild and flourishing omnipresence. We have tamed the universal mind just as we tamed nature with fields of wheat and cattle. We human beings can only see how things truly are in moments when the separating sense of self, the “I”, dissolves.

The fall from Eden describes the birth of agriculture and the enslavement of our brains in the anxious clamour of separation. To become animal is to regain Eden. This is why I don’t have a use for the word “spirituality”.

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* Becoming Animal, David Abram: previously mentioned in three posts—Falling into Place, Infinite are the Depths and Becoming Animal.

Intelligent Design

Group photo in the Physical Laboratory of the
“Old Andersonian” (A Scottish university), 1902

I’m sure there must be various ways to introduce the elements of science in schools, some good and some bad. Let the reader judge.

Aged 9, I was excited by the prospect of Science lessons. We started by proving the existence of air, a project which seemed disappointingly trivial and uninteresting. We thought we knew about air. But we discovered through experiment that it weighs something, exerts pressure, gets partially used up by a candle flame, and so on. We saw these things for ourselves. We became scientists. It was a beginning, a process of discovery where everything was interesting. Experiment could reveal more than meets the casual eye. At some point later we had a brief foray into Biology, learning about the Amoeba, its shapelessness—easy to draw!—its boring method of asexual reproduction, just splitting itself in two. I can’t remember anything more. I think the lessons stopped soon after. Improvising where memory fails, I guess that respect for living creatures held everyone back from dissecting worms or frogs, or whatever children do in biology. So we did no more on that subject, till one day in the Grammar School, which I attended from the age of 12, a visiting lecturer talked to the full assembly of boys about Sex. How it was done was not explained: it was supposed that we knew already. The talk was to warn us of the dangers of disease and casual intercourse resulting in pregnancy. And when in 1966 I formed the romantic idea of studying medicine at Edinburgh (like Conan Doyle & Robert Louis Stevenson) I discovered you needed no prior qualification in biology, so it didn’t appear to be an important subject for schoolchildren.

Science, therefore, when I resumed it at the Grammar school in preparation for GCE (General Certificate of Education), consisted of Physics and Chemistry. Much but not all of chemistry took place in the lab, with bunsen burners, test-tubes, pipettes and other items of equipment, along with various jars of chemicals. It consisted of experiments, observations and inferences, all of which we had to write down coherently. In classroom sessions we were taught some theory, with reference to historical discoveries, some of which refuted long-held prior assumptions. Physics took place more in in the classroom than the lab. We learned about heat (conduction, convection); light (reflection, refraction); electricity (volts, amperes, watts and ohms); gravity, mass, weight, inertia, Newton’s Laws of Motion.

So that was science. As these were an English private schools and not American publicly-funded ones, we were taught Scripture in the prep school and Religious Education at the Grammar school. Same subject, different name. The method was straightforward: to study prescribed parts of the Bible, not to make us into Christians, but to ensure we received a Christian education. It was never indoctrination and indeed we were often told about scholarly research which questioned the literal truth of the text. For example various miracles presented as divine were shown to have been possibly natural occurrences (manna, the plagues in Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the Gadarene swine, and many more). We also learned that the Gospels were compilations of anecdotes edited many years later by authors not alive at the time, then further edited for doctrinal reasons. And when we were (occasionally) told things like this, it was never to undermine the religion, or any sect thereof, but to let us know different angles. Outside lessons, we were expected to participate in Christian worship, because this was the Forties and Fifties and these were private schools where a Christian education was expected and delivered.

We all knew about Evolution, it was a fun idea, but it wasn’t taught, merely discussed informally. Everyone knew it was a controversial theory. I’m not sure how it could have been taught, except as history. Darwin went round the world on the Beagle, wrote up his notes, added further weight to an argument already prevalent in certain quarters. The theory was hotly debated in the later part of the nineteenth century, it was a theory like Freud’s: provocative, obviously challenging to religion, but unproven. We could hardly do experiments on Evolution, as we could with physics and chemistry in the lab. It was a theory, like Einstein’s. Darwin’s theory was an historical event, like Harvey’s discovery that the heart pumps blood around the body. From the popular newspapers we learned that scientists were looking for a Missing Link, which would demonstrate a clear connection through the fossil record between homo sapiens and the primate apes. A colleague in the Sixth Form used to draw cartoons of me resembling a Neanderthal or gorilla, with the caption “Darwin was right!”

So when I heard (recently) about a theory called Intelligent Design, which questions the purely mechanical notions of evolution based on random mutation and natural selection, it struck me as intuitively plausible, and in no sense deserving of derision or contempt. Try entering “intelligent design” into Google Images. You’ll get hundreds of unfunny cartoons mostly against, a few in favour. Few if any reach the level of satire. They are too far off the mark, mere mud-slinging.

I somehow think the American Constitution is implicated here, in its First Amendment. In the UK, religious education is compulsory in publicly-funded schools. In the US, it is forbidden, despite the US being far more religious in terms of church attendance. Intelligent Design is a convenient football kicked around in the endless match between aggressive Christians and aggressive atheists.

Americans, I note, love this kind of fight: National Rifle Association vs. gun control; pro-life vs. pro-choice. . . . The British instinct is to minimize confrontation, reach a quiet compromise; unless we are talking real politics, i.e. votes and seats in Parliament, where no punch is too low or too vicious.

In one sense I don’t feel it’s for me to interfere in someone else’s brawl, and I nearly let pass a remark by Arash (who lives in Canada) in his recent review of a book called Galileo’s Dialogue :

“It may come as a surprise that certain people would insist [that the earth is flat] despite evidence to the contrary, but we do not need to look too far today, i.e. intelligent design to find similar strains of foolishness floating around.”

It was that word “foolishness” that got to me. Whatever Intelligent Design represents in someone else’s football match, it sounds very like a speculative idea of my own, that everything is alive, everything has intelligence, everything desires. I have respect for Arash and most of the views he expresses in his blog. His throwaway remark about Intelligent Design shocked me, as a gratuitous slur on a viewpoint or speculative theory worthy to be expressed and investigated. He said I had missed the point, his post wasn’t really about that, but repeated his view with the same vehemence:

“To return to our starting point, intelligent design or creationism is claiming that their ideas are rooted in facts and are scientific in nature. They are as scientific as phrenology.”

I have just started reading this book.
See this previous post on a Nagel book.

Again, I don’t blame Arash. He is merely repeating the fashionable view, that Intelligent Design is pseudo-science, not rooted in facts, and a form of creationism in disguise. I can’t refute that fashionable view for I haven’t studied enough science to weigh up the evidence. But my understanding is that Evolution (by random mutation & natural selection alone) is another theory which lacks enough facts to clinch the deal. There are still missing links, unexplained phenomena. The existence of those gaps is a fact. So when the evolutionist says, “Trust me, we are right, you’ll see, we are working on it,” he is asking us to have faith, just like the priest, whose role he has usurped.

And what we have is a war of insults between those who want to make religion extinct—partly because it is such a damned nuisance to the new would-be orthodoxy; versus certain Christians who are pretty mad that religion can’t be taught in schools (because of the First Amendment), while Evolution, a Trojan horse concealing an anti-religious agenda, is compulsory. A simple answer would be, don’t teach evolution in schools at all. It is merely hubris, merely triumphalism of the usurpers, with low (arguably negative) educational value.

Sadly, Britain has followed in America’s footsteps, at least in part:

In each of the countries of the United Kingdom, there is an agreed syllabus for religious education with the right of parents to withdraw their children from these lessons. The religious education syllabus does not involve teaching creationism, but rather teaching the central tenets of major world faiths. At the same time, the teaching of evolution is compulsory in publicly funded schools. For instance, the National Curriculum for England requires that students at Key Stage 4 (14–16) be taught:

—that the fossil record is evidence for evolution
—how variation and selection may lead to evolution or extinction

Similar requirements exist in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. [click for source]

If there is foolishness, it is not in Intelligent Design, whose only fault is to offend against a dominant ideology, to the point of arousing irrational outrage. I think the foolishness is to teach evolution in schools, at the expense of physics and chemistry, which more humbly offer the student a chance to be a scientist, and make one’s own discoveries in the laboratory. And if, because of the First Amendment, religion cannot be taught, then the new orthodoxy, the rival creation-science should also not be taught. This scenario would not be passed off in classrooms as the truth:

First there was nothing. This gave rise to the Big Bang, which gave rise to time and space, which gave rise to matter, as in Chemistry, and a set of physical laws, as in Physics, and then together they gave rise to the stuff of Biology, which gave rise to the flora and fauna and all the creeping things upon the earth, which finally gave rise to Mankind, which gave rise to mind, which gave rise to consciousness, which gave rise to science. And if this all sounds most unlikely, remember it took billions of years of randomness. In that time, literally anything could happen. Furthermore there may be billions of alternative universes. All the missing links will be revealed to you by scientists in due course. Amen.

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I hope in a forthcoming post to offer some more personal musings on the topic, as they continue to evolve; and a review of Thomas Nagel’s book, Mind and Cosmos, as illustrated above. See also a previous post, “Creation Myth”.

On fresh air alone

If you want to go somewhere and enjoy an undisturbed smoke I suggest the Nineteen-Fifties. If you were actually around at the time, it’s no problem—wings of memory will take you and your membership remains free for life. Otherwise you need to be escorted as a guest. I’ll do my best to take you to that strange land before smoking was “an unfashionable and socially reprehensible thing to do”, with “myriads of ugly propaganda campaigns urging us smokers to quit”*. But for the proper leisurely cruise, I recommend Simon Gray and his four volumes of Smoking Diaries, which posterity may still cherish when his plays are long forgotten. He wrote them not as a paean to smoking, but to try and break the habit, in the few years between a fatal diagnosis and its inevitable conclusion. Instead of reaching for a cigarette, he would write—anything that came to mind: the scene in front of him, the never-ending saga of a working playwright coping with revivals of his work, friends getting ill and dying (including his better-known friend & colleague, Harold Pinter), reminiscences, wry comments on life. And there’s always the running sub-plot of a backsliding into smoking again.

The first time I gave up smoking myself was on New Year’s Day 1958, about 1.30 in the morning. I was walking back in the fog and frost from a party hosted by my mother’s school-friend Joy Townsend. I was not yet sixteen. We’d played various parlour games, including Consequences, which turned out rather adult and risqué in that company. There was a competition for the best effort at carving a large potato into the shape of an animal, which I won. I wasn’t used to alcohol, & by the end felt in sore need of some fresh air. But Joy’s niece, the same age as I, persuaded me, without my noticing, to stay till the other guests had left, so we were left alone on the sofa. This was a new thing for me, having spent most of my childhood at boys’ boarding schools with only hearsay experience. I’d thought it was supposed to be boys who chased girls; and if they’d shown otherwise in the movies, I’d always been bored by those bits, when the “real action” had inexplicably slowed down. When we kissed, I noticed pale hairs on her upper lip, which hindered any budding romantic interest.

I was glad then of solitude & cold air as I walked home through the empty roads. Home? I must have been lodging at Katie Spencer’s, another of my mother’s school-friends from the Twenties. I didn’t actually have a home in the normal sense. I’d lived with my parents on the Isle of Wight but they had to move away. Going down Springfield Road, I remember frost sparkling on the sidewalk under each streetlamp, plumes of steam from my breath, a sense of purity and promise on this first day of the year. I might have recalled these words from Tennyson:

Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon:
My breath to heaven like vapour goes:
May my soul follow soon!

I was not like any other boy that I knew, that’s certain; nor any girl that I’d met, including Joy’s niece. On a sudden impulse, I took from my pocket the pipe I’d bought the week before, broke it in two and threw it across the sidewalk, scattered the freshly-bought ounce of tobacco, emptied my box of matches with reckless disregard for civic tidiness. I don’t remember why I bought the pipe, or how many times I had smoked it, only this dramatic New Year resolution, part of a dedication to being a new me.

As for cigarettes, I did have more familiarity. I was eight when I first bought some, with the intention of selling them on at a slightly higher price to tenants at my grandparents’ house. When they were not interested, I tried one myself. I didn’t really start till I joined the Cadet Force. It seemed inevitable, once given the uniforms and being encouraged to play at soldiers. On Field Days, we’d be transported to some remote spot on the Downs for manoeuvres—keeping out of sight, creeping up on the enemy, waiting endlessly in the chaotic “fog of war” for something to happen, anything at all. In short we were play-acting, heroes in our own war movies. Initiative was the thing, and a surreptitious smoke behind a hedge offered more excitement than most of our botched military exercises.

Later I joined the Air Force Section and for one of our annual “camps” we were posted to a station called Gütersloh, still at that time part of the post-war Allied Occupation of West Germany. Instead of the usual barrack rooms, we were billeted in the Officers’ Mess where you could obtain Lucky Strikes, Camels & other exotic cigarettes tax-free. I bought as many as I could carry on the flight back to England. We were taken in a DH Dove belonging to Transport Command, back to an English RAF station with no immigration or customs checks. When I got “home” I smoked them incessantly. I call it “home” in quotes because I hadn’t been there before, they hadn’t given me a bedroom to myself at this stage so I camped on a couch in the lounge & considered myself an elegant young officer. It may have been then that the smoking really caught on.

Back at school, I had been moved to a different House. As a scholarship boy I was expected to earn my keep as required looking after younger boys but now I was billeted with boys only a year or two younger than I. One of them was John Perkins, who lived in Rhodesia, and had brought back large bags of partially cured leaves from his parent’s tobacco farm. The aroma was like nothing else, not pipe tobacco, cigar leaf or Virginia, but it was nice. We used to find a quiet place among the outbuildings and general wilderness around the House, in which to make roll-ups in thin brown paper.

I can’t remember any reason not to smoke in those days, though our Headmaster was very much against, for reasons of his own which you can read here. You could smoke upstairs in a bus, in railway carriages other than “no smoking” ones, upstairs in the cinema, at work, in pubs of course; but also in the home and in other people’s homes, unless they fussily said they would rather you didn’t. At least that is how I recall it. My eldest daughter was born at home in April 1970, and I used to have a photo of the newborn in bed with her mother, an open packet of cigarettes lying alongside on the table. They were “only” Churchmans No. 2, small like Woodbines and filter-tipped. We bought them in packs of 10 and considered this hardly smoking at all.

It was a few months later, in January 1971, that I gave up smoking again, in circumstances oddly reminiscent if the first time. It was a morning of frost and fog. I was working at County Hall, on the River Trent at Nottingham, near to the famous Trent Bridge Cricket Ground. Our programming team had been moved out to an annex. There was a meandering riverside path to the new offices, and it was still dark; but under the streetlamps, the frost sparkled, and my breath came out in plumes of steam. Again, I had this wonderful sense of a new beginning. I discovered a sacredness in the air itself. The sharp cold air entering my lungs was divinely intoxicating, and I saw that nicotine was a mere drug, one that was trying to rule my life, creating its own annoying ebbs and flows of desire and satisfaction, like ocean tides pulled by the Moon. With pure air, I would be free from those flows and liberated to serve my own goddess, whoever she might be. I don’t think by then I’d discovered Gerard Manley’s poem “The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe”, but it expresses exactly what I felt:

This air which by life’s law,
My lung must draw and draw
Now but to breathe its praise
Minds me in many ways
Of her . . .
. . . Mary Immaculate,
Merely a woman, yet
Whose presence, power is
Great as no goddess’s
Was deemèd, dreamèd; who
Let all God’s glory through,
. . .
I’m under no illusions that this, my recipe for giving up smoking, will immediately appeal to the general public, let alone my select band of readers. I’m not here to preach its virtues, especially as its fragile magic lasted for two weeks only, destroyed by a fatal interruption. This was when I became the guest of a hippy from America, with a long black pigtail. In great ritual solemnity, he offered me small square of wallpaper to chew. It was impregnated in LSD. My love-affair with “World-mothering air, air wild / Wound with thee, in thee isled,” was over. There followed a great drift into lostness which lasted the next thirty years, punctuated by always-guilty cigarettes.

It is of course pointless to smoke these days, amid the misery of mass condemnation. Smokers of old, that is to say till some time in the late 20th century, were able to invest soul in it, with tobacco as their drug of choice for contemplative moments. Furthermore, it was imbued with meaning socially, the focus of a myriad complex behavioural codes. For good or bad it fuelled the twentieth century, all its wars, dramas, catastrophes, manias, French intellectuals, existentialists, lovers, soldiers, tramps, revolutionaries, starving artists in garrets.

Eventually it became clear that it hastens death, so it must (so the logic goes) be made extinct, like polio, tuberculosis, malaria, though none of these has, yet. The logic must be pushed to its conclusion. One by one, every single cause of death, not excluding old age must be eliminated. Every dangerous practice, such as climbing up ladders alone, must be forbidden. Only suicide, in theory, will declutter the world of surplus humanity, unless people become spontaneously murderous. There is no shortage of weapons. And now we read:

Cancer is the best way to die and we should stop trying to cure it, says doctor

Dr Richard Smith said cancer gave sufferers time to say goodbye and pain could be endured through ‘love, morphine, and whisky’

Meanwhile, the world is awash with do-gooders alive anxious to point out that the past, by and large, was intolerant, prejudiced and evil. Only the present day is enlightened, they have us believe, but they cannot resist legitimate targets to harass and hound.

So I’ll end with this quote from Simon Gray’s The Last Cigarette:

I read in the papers the other day that they’re going to ban smoking in California prisons, including in the cells on death row. As all things Californian, except its weather, eventually spread round the world, there’s more than a good chance that smoking will also be banned in prisons near home, the ones in which if I am sent to prison, I am likely to be housed. I once spent almost a month in Los Angeles, but apart from a misunderstanding with an attractive Jewish lesbian stand-up comic, whose breasts seemed, from a drunken male heterosexual point of view, more Jewish than lesbian, I don’t believe I did anything in California for which I could still be extradited, although you never know, with new sex laws being introduced every day, no doubt all of them to be retroactive, I might conceivably end up in a prison there, perhaps even on death row. On the other hand, as I’m trying to give up smoking, that could be the sort of extreme solution I’m looking for.

This is not a good century in which to smoke. Tobacco’s glory days are over. Amen.
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* See Bubo’s post about giving up smoking.

RAF Gutersloh, Officers’ Mess

De Havilland Dove