Hell or the garden of eden

The only thing I knew was that I had to arrive at Nice International Airport on a given date. I stayed with my parents for a couple of days and my father accompanied me by train to Gatwick Airport. This was the first time that either of us had seen one of these hallmarks of a fuel hungry world populated with nomads. My father was a brave man, a gold, silver and bronze medallist of the Mines Rescue Service and was present at Aberfan, but he never flew in his life, and was instinctively repelled by those gigantic aircraft landing and taking off from Gatwick. For the first time I saw that he did have respect for me. We shook hands at the gateway down to the aircraft. Then I was on my own. I had to board a Comet, which in its early years crashed from window design faults. It was the first time I had been in an aircraft, and it was a narrow tube with seats. The acceleration pushed me back as it gathered speed and gradually climbed into the skies. There was a pattern of fields and suddenly the sea. Everything was obscured by cloud cover so I tried to settle down in my seat, carefully looking for cracks in the windows. None appeared and suddenly we were going to land. I thought “What am I doing here”. Luckily for me Madame Brot was waiting for me. She was Danish and walking out of the Airport we saw Patrick Campbell consuming whisky, or it may have been liquid cyanogen of which I have thought ever since Sam Graham peered into the pot. Campbell was a TV celebrity at the time. Madame Brot pointed him out to me, he was wearing a blue blazer and cravat, all ponsed up.

Brot was away in Paris, probably arranging for his group to move to Nice in Provence, which was as foreign to them as it was to me. My first impressions of Nice were clouded by concrete all the way down the Promenade des Anglais. Madame Brot drove a small car as I seem to remember, entirely on the wrong side of the road. It was a cloudy, rainy day and I was tired from the trip. There were no arrangements at all, I stayed in Brot’s flat and slept on the couch with Madame Brot next door. I wondered uneasily what Brot would think of that, having heard of the French temperament, crimes of passion and assassinations. In the morning there was a bowl of chocolate and a croissant I think, and Madame Brot had to go off to fetch Monsieur Brot at the airport. He arrived and looked at me suspiciously with dark, darting eyes. He was a French Jew whose family had somehow survived and his wife was a Dane with blue eyes and sandy hair. She spoke French with a heavy accent, and spoke English well. Fortunately Brot also spoke English, with great reluctance. It was immediately obvious that Claude Brot did not know what to do, there had been no communication with Mansel Davies. I was shifted out into a hotel and taken up to Parc Valrose. This had been the winter house of a Russian aristocrat but was now a campus of the University of Nice. I found that Brot was the Director of the CNRS Laboratoire de Physique de la Matiere Condensee, the Consensed Matter Physics Laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, with laboratories distributed all over France, an excellent research system that I later tried to establish in Britain.

The drive up to the CNRS laboratory gave me some opportunity to talk with Brot, and to try to find out what I was doing there, but he seemed entirely uninterested. I was deposited in a room with a shade against the Provencal sun of van Gogh, which was strong even in Spring. I was fortunate in having a bright and friendly group to work with: Pierre Sixou, the deputy director, Pierre Bezot, Francoise Freed and Bernadette Lassier. They were setting up equipment which included a far infra red spectrometer and laser system and were capable workers. They invited me to restaurants around Nice. There was another member of the group, a Breton called Bernard Quentrec, in charge of computer simulation, but he visited only once or twice and later committed suicide very suddenly. He seemed to be the most confident and able member of the group, and apparently came from a fishing family. I managed to get my bursary after a lot of trouble from a very angry assistant who spoke no English and who could not understand my French. Brot smoked constantly, and was very nervous. Later he died of cancer, but not before I found out that he was a generous and highly intelligent man. I had just been dumped on him at the wrong time. I was given meal tickets at the Restaurant Universitaire, free food for the students. The food was good, Provencal salads, olives, fish and vin ordinaire which I did not consume. I watched the other students drink it down like water. I was surrounded by a sea of French language. Outside Nice in villages like la Turbie overlooking Monaco the language is no longer French, it is or was Provencal, of which I could not understand a word. I could pick up the French if they slowed down to bottom gear. The Parisians of the Brot group had no idea of Provencal, or seemed not to. Nice was as new and exotic to them as it was to me.

To pass the time in the hotel (a concrete box affair) I read Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward”, which had just appeared in print. Its main character was Kostoglotov, or Bone Chewer, caught in an ugly world. None uglier than Solzhenitsyn’s time in the Gulag. Later he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. I walked to work from the hotel and for the first time noticed the orange trees. There was a booth where I could get a small cup of coffee. I drank it down much too quickly, and danced around in a caffeine induced frenzy. It was as thick as porridge. Near the entrance to Parc Valrose was a memorial to people cornered and shot by the Vichy Police, and its large driveway was populated by basking lizzards. In the distance were hills of parched land above the commercialized concrete grey of Nice. Unknown to me there was an ancient Nice, the Cimiez with its triumphal arch of Augustus, and the old Italian town of Nice transferred to France in a treaty. I arrived in the laboratory and there was literally nothing to do. So I had to improvise, just as at Aberystwyth. I decided to translate a Thesis from the French. There were two types: Troisieme Cycle and d’Etat. Completely by accident this led to an understanding of correlation functions, which could be obtained from a far infra red / microwave spectrum by Fourier transform. Theory was often expressed in terms of the correlation function. I found that they could be evaluated by one sided Laplace transforms that I could code up in Algol. Eventually this led to an entirely new understanding of the far infra red in terms of memory functions.

I was transferred out of the hotel to live with friends of Brot for a while, and there I passed away the time reading Racine and Moliere. One day I found myself in Brot’s office and he suddenly asked with ill concealed hostility: “What do you want from me?”. I thought of replying “nothing”, but waffled something. This was an obvious disaster coming from total lack of communication between Mansel Davies and Claude Brot and I just had to fish myself out of it. There were only six weeks in Nice but it seemed interminable with occasional sparks of interest. The Thesis translation was interesting but tedious work, so I decided to perfect the method of computing correlation functions by Laplace transform. This was another turning point in my research. Brot’s group invited me to their dinners in restaurants on the Mediterranean, which had no tides, the fish came straight off the boats on to the quay and into the restaurant, where there were different menus for the same price, thirteen francs, about pound in the money of 1973. There was always a bottle of vin ordinaire on the table. They talked away in French and I tried to grasp some meaning. There was a piano recital in an elegant setting. One day I discovered the Cimiez and the Musee Matisse, where drawings with one line came vividly alive, and attended an out door occasion in the Roman amphitheatre near the triumphal arch of Augustus and perfectly preserved Roman town and baths. To pass the time at weekends I decided to walk first to Cap d’Antibes and then to La Turbie overlooking Monaco. The Musee Picasso at Cap d’Antibes was full of the younger era Picasso and suddenly I walked around a corner to directly above the sea. There was a warm breeze, and not a cold Atlantic blast. The Impressionists spent a lot of time here as did novelists such as Graham Greene.

In late May there was the Monaco Grand Prix and I walked along the Haute Corniche in the hope of seeing something from the vantage point of La Turbie. Earlier, Brot had introduced me to a colleague of his living in this ancient Provencal village with its own microclimate and stone and timbered houses. Monaco lay beneath me and in the distance the Italian border town of Ventimiglia, but I could see nothing of the Grand Prix, only rugged, rocky coastline. So I walked back on the Moyenne Corniche above the very blue sea, dodging manic drivers, and arriving in a heap back in Nice. The driving in France was something that had to be survived. One day on the way to the Nice Observatory, Bernadette Lassier said something to Brot that infuriated him instantly, and he swung the car around viciously in a 180 degree turn, driving like a fool back to the laboratory. At that point I felt that I had had fully enough of Nice despite its attractions. There was a visit to St. Paul de Vance and the Maeght Foundation of Modern Art where another side of Brot’s character emerged, more relaxed and cultured as one would expect. The kindly and reserved Francoise Freed invited me for a drive in her tiny car, which looked as if it had been pressed out of one sheet of metal. The rugged mountains of Provence dominated that drive and I have always wondered what happened to Francoise, another highly intelligent French Jew whose family may or may not have survived. She had the infinitely sad, almost black, eyes of an internal refugee like Sakharov.

The time approached for me to transfer to Nancy in the north east of France to the CNRS group run by Prof. Jean-Louis Rivail in one of the Universities of Nancy, Universite de Nancy 1 in the CNRS Laboratoire de Chimie Theorique (Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory). I packed the various Thesis volumes and my translations and notes, and waited in the laboratory, because the train was an overnight one through Marseilles, Avignon and Dijon. I waited and waited, and with a nearly fatal shock realized that I had misread the time and that the train was due to go in half an hour. Very luckily Pierre Sixou offered to rush me through Nice to the train station, driving like a laser, shovelling gendarmes aside with the demonic determination of a condensed matter theorist, or Inspector Clouseau. We arrived in one piece and shook hands outside the station, then I ran to the train and a compartment. It was not a sleeper so I had to sit up all night. At first the rugged country between Nice and Marseilles sped past the window, but it soon grew dark and the train drew in to Marseilles in darkness. At that point I thought of gangsters, drugs and the French connection, and pressed myself into my seat. The train sped off towards Avignon in the south east of France and I hoped it would not take a wrong turning. I got a few hours of half sleep before it pulled in to Dijon and made its way towards Lorraine, of which Nancy is the capital. In the morning I could see flat agricultural land with no hedges, no mad king had been around to enclose the ancient land with stone wall as in Wales. Finally after an infinite journey the train pulled in to the station at Nancy, where I met organization in the shape of Jose Goulon.

Jose Goulon had been sent from Prof. Jean-Louis Rivail’s group and had just finished an outstanding These d’Etat, more accurately two Thesis volumes. He was a very capable theoretician and experimentalist, as one glance at the Thesis volumes showed. As usual in France they were published in many copies in paperback, not just two or three copies as in Wales. Rivail himself though was nowhere to be found and again there was nothing prepared for my visit, so Mansel Davies had not talked to Jean-Louis Rivail either. At that point there was only one thing for it - to complete my Ph. D. myself after getting back from France, and work independently thereafter. There were six weeks to go in Nancy, and again the students turned out to be friendly and sociable, some in a highly cultured kind of way. Jose Goulon drove me to my room in a Hall of Residence, so the organization at Nancy was better. The CNRS labo or laboratory was to be found in a kind of doughnut made of concrete that perplexed the French themselves until they were told that it was architecture. The nation of Chartres and the Abbey Church of Vezelay were allergic to doughnuts and had to work in a joke. The laboratory in Nancy had a microwave interferometer and I eventually wrote a paper on my work there which was submitted on 19^th December 1974 from Oxford and published in “Molecular Physics” as Omnia Opera number twelve on www.aias.us. This was another advance for me because it was the first time that I used different experimental techniques on the same problem, a method that was later developed in to the Delta Project of the European Molecular Liquids Group (EMLG). The latter was founded at the National Physical Laboratory in 1980 and I was its first European Coordinator. I worked with Jose Goulon on the microwave interferometer and the results are in that 19^th December 1974 paper together with results from the far infra red and NMR relaxation. My co authors were Jose Goulon, Daniel Canet and Graham J. Davies, with whom I had obtained data at the Post Office Research Centre in Dollis Hill in North London.

That submission date was more than a year in the future from my time at Nancy in about May and June of 1973. Nancy was a much different France from Nice, the people were taller, many fair haired and blue eyed. The food was entirely different, seemingly dominated by sausage, ham and cheese. One supermarket had a wall covered entirely in cheese, after all this was the land of Charles de Gaulle, who had to govern a nation with as many varieties of cheese as varieties of attempted assassination. Nancy is on the Meurthe and Moselle rivers, and its most famous mathematical product is Henri Poincare. It boasts the Place Stanislaw after a deposed Polish Lithuanian King who was given the Duchy of Lorraine by his son in law Louis XV in 1737. It has some very fine real architecture in the classical style and the Son et Lumiere of Place Stanislaw is memorable. The concrete doughnut though was to be my workplace. There was a violently volatile scientist called Roussy who exploded one day when told something by Goulon, returning a volley across the empty centre of the doughnut. The architect’s idea was to place offices and laboratories around this centre. Later the same Roussy invited me to dinner at his home, where Madame Roussy made a delicate and wonderful and genuine Quiche Lorraine. Goulon reacted to Roussy by normal conversation, but I had taken cover under the interferometer. The long midday breaks were spent playing chess and cards with the students, sometimes in an elegant apartment filled with cigar smoke and Beaujolais. The latter was forced upon me as a classic wine, but it tasted like cyanogen. As a joke I was told to drink down a Mirabelle one evening in one go, and fire emerged from my nostrils like a dragon. Cyanogen could not have been more effective. How do the French survive such liquids? At other times I was attacked by fake and playful hand grenades as an Anglais. I explained to them that I was the long lost cousin of Asterix, related to Vercingetorix and Eddy Merckx (Eduard Louis Joseph, Baron Merckx of the Tour de France) and that did the trix. We were all Gauls or Celts here.

Eventually I bumped in to Rivail when he was trying theoretically to park his car and painting the atmosphere a shade of post impressionist blue with elaborate swearing in French of which I had picked up a few pungent words. He was a small, nervous but kindly man in glasses. He never did park that car, but later took us on an outing to the Vosges Mountains. I think it was with Goulon and his wife Chantal and myself in his powerful Renault car, always driving again on the wrong side of the road. The Vosges is the area to the west of the Rhine, opposite the Black Forest. It has high mountains and forest of its own. The land was completely different from Provence, it was northern European with unfenced farmland, many small churches filled with art, some small towns and villages consisting of farm houses clustered together. By now it is probably all plastered by wind turbines unless the spirit of Vercingetorix, Charlemagne or Charles Martel is still alive in France. We took a walk up in to the high mountains along a forested path where all was silent and full of ancient nature. The oxygen reverberated with vibration and rotation but we did not have infra red eyes. Both Brot and Rivail actually talked to and walked with their students, the only walk I took with Mansel Davies was in to his study and never took a walk with J. M. Thomas anywhere. The French were not so comically self important and pompous and did not pretend to democracy. Rivail took us in the car to a village in Alsace from which it was possible to look down on a flat plain stretching to the horizon. The city of Strasbourg must have been somewhere on that plain. In that Alsace village Rivail treated us to dinner and we were asked by a waitress: “Drei assiettes de chauffer io?”, using two languages and a dialect. There was some Rhine wine which was tolerable and sweeter than Beaujolais but still toxic. The others drank it down. Goulon could also drive like a maniac and we headed off to Belfort along straight roads at superluminal vel city. The idea was to see his grandmother ahead of the speed of light. She must have been nearing a hundred years old and thought that I was a Tommie from the first war. This was a region that had been turned into carnage many times over and there were ghosts of Tommies everywhere.

We were due in Paris for a conference and drove down there across the paved roads of northern France turned into modern highways. These are the tree lined roads of many famous artists. The unfenced land again contained small villages made up of clusters of farms, and the occasional small town designed exclusively for the Tour de France. I think that Goulon was driving and Brot had kindly lent me his apartment high above the Arc du Triomphe in the middle distance. Every morning there was the smell of baguettes and coffee, with Parisians drifting in and out of the patisserie just beneath me armed with lances made out of fresh bread. There was little time for all that and Brot suddenly turned up in a hypersized car, probably a Mercedes, and drove me in to the conference in Universite de Paris Sud. I bumped in to Mansel Davies there and was told to walk up to the board in the middle of his lecture to draw out a very large MBBA formula before a bemused conference. Was I going to assassinate my supervisor? Much as I would have liked to, I drew out the formula as he kept talking about my MBBA work in the far infra red, and some work on dielectric relaxation on the same liquid crystal. The purpose of this eludes me even now. Why not use an overhead projector? I suppose it was meant to convey that he was a grand old baron with serfs and squires. I felt like a fool and retreated to the giggling French group from Nancy. My drawing was not van Gogh or Monet. The incredibly ambitious Graham Williams was also there and complained about Mansel Davies disappearing in the middle of the conference. “Where has Mansel gone?” asked Graham with authority, and nobody cared or answered. Mansel had probably gone off to see the Louvre. He thought Paris the best designed city in the world.

Graham Davies was also there and we drifted around the Cartier Latin in Paris for a while, looking at nothing in particular, with one more scientist from Dollis Hill I think, or it may have been someone else from South Wales. There were the usual tourist traps like the Moulin Rouge but it was not Toulouse - Lautrec. There were some dubious ladies in war paint looking at us very strangely from doorways. They may have been early string theorists. Later I took the metro back from the conference and walked along the whole length of the dark wall of the Louvre, there were pavement drawings in chalk all along the Seine. Graham Davies came from a poor area of Swansea and had been a demonstrator during my final year undergraduate in the EDCL. He left one dark evening for Dollis Hill, where he was in charge of an interferometer with a liquid helium Rollin detector. He thought that the EDCL was a holiday resort for people who had never been in the real world, and presumably Dollis Hill was real. To me it looked as dreary, anonymous and car choked as the rest of north London. He later moved to Martlesham Heath and then became an administrator in Birmingham and finally Australia. He could be generous and tried to donate apparatus when I was in Swansea. His donation was refused by the money obsessed and perverse Swansea administration. Back in 1972 he visited Nancy and the Place Stanislaw. He stayed some time and Jose Goulon took him to see the battlefield at Vaux, which he wanted to see and I did not. I tagged along out of my usual politeness.

Fort Vaux was one of the most savage battles around Verdun, and even in 1972 it was pockmarked with shell craters. Why would anyone wish to see a place like that? There was a military cemetery and idle tourists such as ourselves were led through what remained of the fort, a pile of rain swept stone. I had not come to Nancy to see a graveyard, and Goulon had no desire to be reminded of all that. I said something to the effect that it was a waste of life and was glad to leave. Much to the calm natured Goulon’s puzzlement and slight annoyance, Graham lost his cool. There were no dead British soldiers there, only two million dead French and German. That is enough for anyone. These days such carnage is no longer possible because of mutual assured destruction. Although I was slightly acquainted with Graham Davies, I was secretly glad when he left because I had got used to Nancy and he reminded me of enveloping and purposeless and small minded ambition and the provincial EDCL administration. For the time being the administration did not bother me but later they caused science great damage. Mansel Davies’ best side was his pacifism, and in this, he stuck to his Baptist principles. He would never have gone anywhere near a golgotha of utter slaughter. I always think of places like that as if I were in them at the time of real danger, and not walking around in safety many years later. A photograph of Vaux from the air shows a pentagonal type military fort looking like smallpox, plastered by thousands of shells. I was glad when Jose Goulon drove us back across a large river that must have been the Moselle or Meurthe or similar, through Metz and back to Nancy. My six weeks at Nancy were almost over and I had a big pile of books to carry back. So I bought a large mountain pack in the town of Nancy and stuffed it with Troisieme Cycle and d’Etat, many volumes in all, along with notes, calculations and diagrams.

I said my goodbyes to my colleagues and friends of Nancy and started back towards Calais on the early morning train. This ran along the ghastly Western Front of which nothing was visible out of the window. It eventually reached Amiens and made its way towards Calais.

My parents were waiting in Dover so I embarked looking like a mountaineer with a heavy pack of books. This was the first time I had ever been on a sea going vessel, and the motion of the ship had not begun to disturb my physiology. After many violently rough crossings of the Irish Sea to Trinity College Dublin I began to suffer later from sea sickness, so I can no longer travel on a ship. With the internet there is no need to travel anywhere, and after years of being forced to run around strange places that suits me fine. The ship made its way towards Dover in a calm sea and for the first time I saw the approaches to Britain, there was little sign of white cliffs, but what seemed to be a low shoreline. The ship slowed down to a crawl and ropes were thrown across. The passengers disembarked down the side and I joined them. My parents were waiting there and I was very glad to see them, despite “Pant y Bedw”. It was a long train journey home through London, and started off badly when my father quarreled with the ticket collector. I was very tired, and had hoped that his character had changed and that he had developed some respect for me but he blasted away as usual in front of everyone. The effect on me was to make me want to return to Cwrt Mawr as soon as I could, there being no “Pant y Bedw”, only a small semi detached stone house suffering from decay, chosen at random. After the sophistication of the work at Nancy it was difficult to return to a country where no one understood it, least of all my Ph. D. supervisor. My mother was bewildered and very unhappy that I wanted to leave so early for Aberystwyth but much later I found put that she had been pressurizing my father to sell for a long time. By that time I had no choice but to move on.