Homage to Gaia by James Lovelock Page B

there. It’s only a couple of miles further on.’ Bowerchalke was on my route and I cycled up the slope beside the watercress beds and up the hill into the village itself. Sure enough, a few houses past the pub, The Bell Inn, Mrs Hardiman had a sign saying, ‘Teas’. She made me a full pot and supplied some bread, jam, and scones. For those interested, such a meal cost about six old pence. Mrs Hardiman told me that I was the first to call for a month and she was thinking of taking down the sign. I realized that Bowerchalke was truly remote and began to look at it more closely.
    Refreshed after tea, and knowing it was only about ten more miles to my final destination, the youth hostel at Iwerne Minster in Dorset, I explored the village. At the back of the church was a meadow and beyond it the steep green hill of Marleycombe. Chalk downs walled the village and seemed to intensify its feeling of privacy. To me, at sixteen, it was the perfect village and I decided that, if ever the chance arose, this was where I would live.
    In 1937, I chose Wales for my summer break. On the second day, I left the youth hostel at the small Welsh village of Dolwyddelan and made my way up the stony track that led to Moel Siabod. It was just before my seventeenth birthday and this was my first Welsh mountain. All through the spring and early summer I had planned my solo expedition to North Wales. The Ordnance Survey maps had been companions, together with George Borrow’s book, Wild Wales. These filled my mind so that the path and the climb almost had asense of déjà-vu. I reached the lake below the glacial Cwm of the mountain in time for my sandwich lunch and a swim. Soon a thin sheet of cumulus clouds spread across the sky and reminded me of my objective, the peak itself. The climb was easy, never more in fact than a hill walk, and the enthralling sight of the other peaks emerging above a wide sea of clouds, was a fine reward. There in front of me was Snowdon and on either side the Glyders, and the Carneddau. It was like an archipelago of black rocks rising from a white sea. This was my first sight of clouds from above, even though Moel Siabod was a bare 3000 feet high, and I was moved. Mountains, like cathedrals and deep mature forests, are places with a transcendental ambience.
    I started down through the clouds and soon I could see the Ogwen valley spread out before me. I had come out of the cloud onto a short run of scree. Scree is loose rocks and boulders piled against the mountain slope and only just stable. I had heard about scree running, the poor man’s version of skiing, and decided to have a try at it. I ran onto the rock pile and to my joy the mass beneath me began to move. It was easier to run with, and slightly ahead of, the mass of moving rock than to stand still and let it move you on. In no time, I had reached the bottom and jumped off sideways as the rocks behind me continued their downward course. I was lucky to have chosen a fairly safe and short run for my first try. A few years later, I saw the thousand-feet-long scree run above Wast Water in the Lake District. It beckoned to me, but here were boulders as large as cars. I never tried it, but thoughts of it have lingered in my mind and thirty years later sustained me during the long downhill run of the quest for Gaia.
    The two last years of my schooldays were tolerable. I was by then in the sixth form and treated more like a student than a child. I had passed the Matriculation examination and was now preparing to take the ‘Higher School Certificate’ that is now known in the UK as ‘A’ levels. There was little teaching and we spent most of our time in private study, which in practice meant private conversation among friends. My schooldays ended in 1938 with an interview for a job as a laboratory assistant. This job was to prove a crucial step in learning to become a scientist.

2

The Long Apprenticeship
    The tram to Victoria swayed as it clanked and ground and