Homage to Gaia Read Online Free PDF Page B

wealthy suburb that it once was, and they hoped and believed that it would stay wealthy enough to sustain a demand for paintings and other works of art, and that this would give them a start in the life of their choice. The shop was, in fact, in a flawed position for such an upmarket enterprise. On the right-hand side was a small post office and beyond that a huge junk shop. The owner, Mr Callaby, had an extensive collection of second-hand iron goods stretching right out across the wide pavement in front of the shop—tin baths, mangles with an iron frame and wooden rollers and boxes full of oddments. On the left of our shop was an engineering workshop, Venners, and next to this a vast Victorian pub, the Telegraph. Beyond the Telegraph was a noisome alley, dark and narrow, running between tall buildings and with one courtyard leading from it. Here families lived in one-room cold-water flats, under conditions of Victorian poverty. As a small boy, I often visited the Voysey family who lived in one of these flats. The son was my friend and the mother a cheerful kindly young woman. They seemed to have no possessions, no furniture apart from boxes, and they appeared to live on bread and dripping. What little they had they shared generously, and the mother was always curious about my doings and what I thought and how we lived. The alleyway led from Brixton Hill to New Park Road—a typical London street. There were small industrial premises, among them paint shops smelling strongly of organic solvents. Across the street were rows of once agricultural cottages with long gardens in front of them. Branching off were new streets of semi-detached suburban houses that developers had built. There was little or no traffic and it was a playground for the children and the street gangs of those times. By a curious coincidence, the shop was to be, in a few years, the home of the Liss family. I first met my friend Peter Liss, now a distinguished scientist and professor, at the University of East Anglia in the 1970s.He was the first to realize the significance of my measurements taken aboard the Shackleton during its voyage to Antarctica in 1971.
    To make a living selling paintings in such a neighbourhood was a heroic enterprise, and my mother’s and father’s entire energies went into it. My father wisely kept his job with the Gas Company, now as a collector of coins from gas meters. It says something of those days that Tom Lovelock, in spite of carrying a heavy leather bag full of coins through one of the rougher areas of London, was never mugged. He was not particularly burly, 5’9” tall, slim and bespectacled . Even so, would-be assailants would have had a tough time, for he was both brave and skilled as an amateur boxer. My parents had no time to care for a baby and were glad to leave me in the willing arms of my grandmother, Alice Emily March.
    Grandmother March was a small plump cockney woman endowed with a surfeit of love. My great fortune was to have spent the first five important years in her care. Her children were by then all adults and astonishingly well married for a family of working-class girls. One of them, Kit, was married into the famous Leakey family, to Hugo, a cousin of Louis Leakey of Kenya fame. Her other daughter, Ann, was married to a New Zealand tobacco company executive, Howard Mason. Florrie was married to John Leete, who owned a prosperous tailor’s shop in Hitchin, the nearby market town. Their only son, Frank, was away at a job in London.
    William Golding once said to me that the education of a child requires above all things, love. So long as there is love, either given or obviously around, the child will grow in knowledge. He was then talking to me about the education of my youngest boy, John. Sadly, he was born with a mental handicap and Bill had suggested that we send him to a Rudolph Steiner school on just those grounds. Looking back on my own childhood, I now know how much I personally owe to those