Homage to Gaia by James Lovelock Page A

of the successes of her daughters. Sadly, they and their husbands did not much welcome long visits from Alice or Ephraim March. The two old outspoken cockneys did not fit well with the precious academic environment of the Leakeys or the cosy bourgeois atmosphere of Hitchin. In a way,the disdain of the Hitchin bourgeoisie was easier to accept, for they had never pretended otherwise. To them, the working classes were below in the natural order, and that was that. Neither the Leakeys nor the Leetes were ever unkind to my grandmother and grandfather. They did not have to be for them to see that they were unwelcome. I remember some tearful sessions with Alice March after she had returned from brief visits to her daughters. My mother and father were the ones who gave my grandparents a home and let them stay with them throughout the illnesses that ended their lives. We never understood at the time that we were a part of a vast transition in customs. In the Victorian nuclear family, the old had rights divinely instituted, of residence in the family home of their children.
    Many years later, I was to face the same problem in my own home, where her daughter-in-law, Helen, rejected my mother, and I could well understand my mother’s sense of injustice. She had paid her dues willingly to her parents, yet was now unwanted and unwelcome. I could see Helen’s despair at having to cope with a strong-willed woman who interfered, with the best of intentions, in the running of her home. So abrading were the quarrels that the misery of it loomed like a dark cloud over the years between my father’s death in 1956 and my mother’s death in 1980.
    Part of the problem was the dramatic intensity of her arguments. I was never sure how much of it came from conviction and how much she was acting a part. Nell had enjoyed amateur acting and had polished her histrionic talents to a fine degree, but she was a good and principled woman and unselfishly cared for me when I was a child. She and my father had a loving relationship and one that endured, so that the Brixton shop, for all its drawbacks, was a warm and safe refuge for me as a child. But in later life, after my father’s death, Nell was wretchedly lonely and so strongly did she radiate her misery that no one could stand her company for long. Her fierce intensity, whether of love or hate, overwhelmed and burnt. Like the archetypal Jewish mother, she had the capacity to reduce me to a babbling child. Her widowhood was a twenty-four year torment for all of us, including her. By leaving me as a baby to be raised by my grandmother , she had unknowingly forfeited instinctive love and bonding . In later life, in her time of need, in place of a loving son, she had only a man who saw her as a relative in distress. My grandmother was to me my true mother, and her death in 1943 was a hard grief to bear.
    From age fifteen onwards I spent part of the summer holidays bicycling or walking around England and Wales. The first of these expeditions was a journey from my home in Kent to Devonshire and back. I travelled sixty or so miles a day and stayed each night at a Youth Hostel. I well remember the road up the Chalke Valley in Wiltshire; it seemed endless as I pedalled my one-gear bicycle that hot July afternoon in 1934. I was thirsty and kept looking for the sign ‘Teas’—one that was on cottages everywhere in southern England except, that is, in the Chalke Valley. Here, through Coombe Bissett, Stratford Tony, Bishopstone, and Broadchalke, I saw none. In Broadchalke , in desperation, I asked a man working in his garden, was there anywhere that supplied lemonade, tea, or anything to drink? ‘Not here in Broadchalke,’ he said. ‘You are welcome to come in and have a glass of water but there is nowhere here that sells teas. We get so few visitors or folk travelling that it is just not worthwhile. Wait a minute, though, Mrs Hardiman in Bowerchalke, the next village, does do teas for walkers. You could try