Homage to Gaia by James Lovelock

Leetes had one daughter, Margaret, a few years younger than me. It was good to have a young girl as a cousin. It helped offset the isolation of our one-child families. A special attraction of my Hitchin visits was the Vincent family. Mr Vincent was the manager of Hitchin’s only department store, and a friend of John’s. Margaret and I were invited to a children’s party at the Vincents when about twelve or thirteen. The Vincents had two daughters, Jean and Mary, and two sons. I must have behaved well at the party for they invited me on many occasions afterwards. They lived in a fine detached villa, two blocks from Nun’s Close. One spring day in 1932 Mrs Vincent, a handsome woman whose affectionate nature reminded me of my grandmother, took her children and me on an expedition to Pirton Woods to pick primroses. I remember a heavenly sunny day and larking about with the girls—they were both older than I was—and we played games that involved plenty of contact. Suddenly they were no longer just children, and gender ceased from then on to be an abstract concept. Jean was a striking girl, with red hair and a pale freckled skin, and she was the one who enlivened my incoherent fantasies for at least a year, and then it was the more mature Mary, plainer but somehow more feminine, who became the girl of my dreams. Apart from these fantasies over Jean and Mary, I was celibate until a student at Manchester University. It seems incredible now, but celibacy was almost normal among adolescents in the 1930s. It was not, as thought by those who do not understand the English, from lack of lust, for I had that in abundance. It was a consequence of asolitary existence as a lone child, and low self-esteem. As schoolboys we wore short trousers and were in uniform up to nearly sixteen years, and we were hardly attractive. I could not believe that any female would have me, and thinking back to the child I was then, I was probably right. Unconsciously I dressed to fulfil this prophecy—round spectacles shielding myopic eyes, scuffed shoes, and knee-length shorts. Perhaps the sheer frustration of life in those times fuelled my fantasies about life as a scientist, and perhaps it was just as well, because when that friendly city, Manchester, gave me my first taste of real love, I was transported and, for a few years, science took second place.
    To modern adolescents, this tame distant kind of relationship will seem quaint but in those days, the restraints of custom were so strong that our urges to explore each other’s bodies stayed firmly theoretical. Practical sex was definitely out of bounds, and just as well, for other than hard-to-get French letters, there was nothing to prevent pregnancy . Any suggestion that we were timid or undersexed at that time is wrong. Our instincts are constant and do not vary; only custom changes. What a different adolescence I might have had if the Pill had been around in those days like now.
    Those wonderful aunts of mine are long dead and I miss them. I was to see another one of them for the first time in 1975, Aunt Ann, who had married a New Zealander, Howard Mason, and went there with him after the First World War. She died in 1998 aged 101. I spent a week in Wellington visiting her in 1975. She was of the same stock as the other aunts and I realized how good it would have been to go there as a child. My New Zealand cousins were a lively three. Bruce, the eldest, distinguished himself as a playwright, so much so that over ten years after his death, his face looked out at me from the air-mail stamp from New Zealand. It was on a letter from his widow Diana. Lorna was the youngest cousin and still lives in New Zealand. Tim, the middle one, had moved to South Africa. I never saw him before he died. I saw little of my uncle Frank until we moved to Kent in the mid 1930s; he was away in Argentina with the Leakeys for some of the time and working in London for the rest of it.
    Grandma March was right to be proud