Hell or the garden of eden

I bought some ring binders into which to gather and order my notes, written out after many hours in the library, using several books. This process resulted in some degree of understanding, but after forty five years of study I know now that it was a shallow understanding. The thing that strikes me now is that no one understands nature at all. If they did they would not destroy it. The lectures in mathematics consisted of ideas and equations written out on a board, but kicked back with problems to be solved in what was known as “home work”. That assumed that the students had a home. In my case it was a table crowded with alcohol and half an attic room. In the evening I was too tired to walk up to a library, so the problems must have been solved in day time shortly after the lecture. The mathematics lecture theatres were smaller, with smaller boards, so I suppose that the lecturers had shorter arms. I remember none of the names of the maths lecturers with the exception of a Mr Breen (or similar) who gave a course on Schaum’s vector algebra and stopped suddenly as tensors approached. There was no social contact whatsoever between lecturers and students. The mathematics examinations were deadly, there was no room for waffling or wavering.

Chemistry was my main subject but I never understood why. Perhaps because it was a colourful reaction that I had seen in the Grammar School, or a lump of sodium exploding in water. So now I was trapped in the grim prison of the EDCL and had to make the best of it, otherwise my father would not let me back to Pant y Bedw. The lectures in that first year in chemistry must have been organized into physical, inorganic and my least liked subject of all, organic. The physical chemistry course must have been taken by the acting head of department of that year (1968 to 1969). I had never heard of him before my transplant to Aberystwyth. In the time table appeared the name Mansel Davies, the strange first name being Norman in origin, the second name commonplace. The time for that first lecture came around and I climbed out of my shared hole in the ground. It seemed as if I was looking up at the crashing waves, and that Sea View Place was beneath sea level. In fact you cannot see the sea at all and it is a few feet above the sea. I did not notice anything - I was just wondering what this lecture was going to be like. Judging by Young’s lecture it was going to be awful. Being intense and obedient I got to every single lecture in time, and was seated and ready, biro drawn. The biro was used for scribbling and a fountain pen for writing up. It was a good luck gift from my parents, and it was a faithful excalibur. As a post doctoral and as I thought his obedient assistant, I got to one of Mansel Davies’ lectures late and he blasted away in a crazy hysterical voice as was his custom. The image was not the man.

The other students drifted in and sat all over the large lecture theatre of the EDCL, which again had one of those ridiculous gigantic boards and a large demonstration bench, designed in the same way as physics. At the back was a slide projector and room, on the sides were small windows. The last time I saw this theatre was the summer of 1993. It had been smashed to pieces by vandals and left to rot. It was later demolished and never existed, because the College is always excellent and could never have had any failures. So although no one understood what I was doing, or so I was told quite frequently, I outlasted the theatre. I can now fill a hundred thousand lecture theatres without having to suffer any dampness or stale bacon. While I was sharpening my biro the double doors of the theatre were pushed open and in walked an apparition with a black gown half hanging off its shoulder. It had white wavy hair and a very pale face with lines of age incised deeply upon it. To me it looked mean and threatening. There must have been a green tie to indicate a radical open mind. That was the custom of the thirties, but this was 1968. This was Professor Mansel Davies, who had received a personal chair. At the time I thought it was a bit weird because no one at the Grammar School wore a gown, and no other lecturer. I remember almost nothing of the actual lectures, because of the intense concentration that it took at the time to make any sense out of them. I recall a course book called “Valence” by Coulson. I did not notice that some fingers of his right hand were missing. I noticed only that the writing was terrible. Much later, when I was sitting with him in his office, I realized at last that there were stubs where the fingers had been. They had been blown off in a synthesis. I began to see that he was an intelligent man, but could at any time explode in a rage and was very unstable. He could play the common man, but immediately become the snobby middle class Cambridge don if you became too familiar, o even if you cracked a joke. In fact he was never a don, he was a post doctoral in Peterhouse. He was given a job at the EDCL without open competition in 1947. At Aberystwyth you had to know the right people, which is why it is such a barren failure. I will have a lot more to write about him.

In 1968 however it was again a matter of retiring to the library to write a good set of notes. I did not even know that there would be examinations at the end of that term, I think it was called Christmas term. Luckily I found out in time and memorized my notes. After memorizing they were regurgitated in a frenzy and almost immediately forgotten. By the time I was a graduate under this same Mansel Davies I had forgotten almost all my undergraduate work, and the real learning began. I remember nothing about those first term lectures by Mansel Davies except for his teaching of the Schroedinger equation. This was strangely reticent for a man who boasted of his Cambridge friends and never tired of explaining how superior they were in intellect. He seemed to be in slow motion, wrote down an H followed by a psi, then an equals sign, then an E followed by a psi. There seemed to be nothing deeper in his understanding. When I was a post doc he suddenly dropped the facade one day and told me that of course he did not understand operators. I maintained a straight face by locking my jaw. I knew all along that he did not understand operators. One bright spark of an eighteen year old may have asked why the psi did not cancel out, and then he would be stuck, ossified in time, or probably would have blasted away again. One look at that face was enough to teach me to be perfectly obedient and perfectly silent. Then he could be kindly and erudite, and very helpful. As a fellow Silurian I found him infinitely preferable to some blue nosed genius of string theory.

Each day of that first term was very exhausting, especially as I had little to eat and began to lose a lot of weight. I think I lost three stones in weight that first term, forty two pounds, and it was lucky that the landlady gave us three meals each Sunday. I was not yet in athletics training so the whole thing was unhealthy. The memories of that room with six students are laced with hunger to this day. Gradually I realized that I had a talent for debating with my fellow first year undergraduates when they had not been drinking. There was one other from Cardiff. So I developed all kinds of ways of explaining that there was a Welsh language, and that it was a great and ancient language. None of them was a scientist, two or three of them had to buy a course book called Plato’s “Republic”, with which they struggled. Gradually some trust was built up until one day Tony Atkinson offered to lend me his bike for a road run of about thirty miles around Aberystwyth. I had managed to get away from the lectures and lecturers once or twice on a Saturday afternoon, I remember a walk up the Rheidol taking black and white photographs of the quiet, ancient, salmon laden river. During that walk the elements of sanity prevailed, no falling Morrisons. Another walk took me down to the mouth of the Ystwyth (the river that winds) along the south beach past Pen Dinas. This is a giant Celtic hill fort with rings still easily visible. On another occasion I had a look at Aberystwyth Town playing soccer. Those were the only breaks from the tedium of work.

With the bike I could go further and set out for Devil’s Bridge, out of Aberystwyth and back in to the real Wales, which at that time had not been destroyed by turbines and immigration. The healthy and pure sounds of the Dyfed dialect were still to be heard everywhere and I began to feel human again, not a digit amidst student numbers. After the hard initial struggle up hill the road levelled off a bit and I found myself in the countryside. There were not too many cars in those days, and they were smaller and more carefully driven. On the left hand side I was soon able to look down on the deep valley of the Rheidol, with a newly built dam. Somewhere down there was the narrow gauge railway built from Aberystwyth to Devil’s Bridge. On holiday as a seven or eight year old this was a journey from wildest fantasy, and ten years later as an eighteen year old it was none the less exciting. In the distance there were some beautiful hills of the Cambrian Mountain range. It was late autumn so the colours of the leaves were a painting from van Gogh. The air filled my lungs and I exhaled the accumulated pyridine. The farms were populated with Friesians and Herefords and were still human sized. The giant cowsheds and giant black bales had not yet made their ugly appearance. Towards Devil’s Bridge the road goes sharply downhill and very suddenly bumps into a railway siding and hotel, built by the Victorians. Devil’s Bridge has three bridges built one on top of the other, and there are paths down to the bottom of the Rheidol Valley. I sped past these and over the bridge in an effort to climb the other side - but was forced off to push the bike.

This was a push in to the wilderness for me, I was suddenly enclosed by the primordial land. It was a rare day with no rain, so the colours of autumn dazzled the imagination like the Mabinogion. Although I did not know it I was pushing the bike up the shoulders of Punlumon and towards the main road from the east in to Aberystwyth. The road from Devil’s Bridge met the main road a short distance from the George Burrow Hotel, and a short distance from the road up to Punlumon itself. Being out of condition and (without knowing it) weakened from severe loss of weight I could not ride the bike up but walked it up. Suddenly I was on the summit and there followed a long, tremendously exciting descent to the floor of the Rheidol. The black mountains shadowed from the sun flew past either side. It was the longest descent I had ever made on a bike. It ended with the flat long road of the Rheidol valley, a rare flat stretch in Wales along which I could use the top gear and really fly back into Aberystwyth with screaming muscles freezing up and turning to lead. A few years later this became part of my regular ten mile road run. The road came in to Aberystwyth and I cycled slowly back to the hole in the ground in Sea View Place. The oxygen going through my brain meant the digs looked like home for the first time.

Sometimes the students from the digs walked around the Castle like tourists and listened to the boom of the sea on the walls, but I never went drinking with them, so I tended to be alone in the digs on a Saturday night. If not too tired or hungry I would read a book, or as examinations approached revise some notes. There was no TV or radio for the use of the students so we did not know that there was a danger of being conscripted for Vietnam if Britain became embroiled in that. The first thing I knew about it was when Atkinson became frightened one evening and very scared of being conscripted. He was very nervous and highly strung, sometimes difficult to live with. In the second year in another digs in Powell Street (a terrible hole) he broke down a door in a drunken haze and attacked Roger Goodger and myself. That was the only time such a thing happened. The other students were not worried about Vietnam. One other student from Cardiff was also nervous, and had a lot of problems with examinations. He dosed himself with caffeine tablets as they approached and danced like a kangaroo around the digs and streets. After all, caffeine is not much different from quinine and heroin. His intention was to keep awake in the night for last minute revision. The others did not seem to prepare very much for exams., but my method of preparation was strictly methodical, based on revision which began weeks before the examinations. Having memorized the notes there was little chance of running in to an unforeseen problem. The exception was mathematics, where one could be hit with a stinker of a paper no matter how much revision you had made. In this sense chemistry was the safest subject to take. It had continuous assessment for some practical courses. Some poor students were hit really hard with examination nerves and could not finish the course. Others would waffle their way through to a lower second or third.

To get a first class degree the work had to be good for the whole three years. As usual I started slowly and was not fully aware of things until about half way through the Christmas term. As soon as I heard that there were going to be examinations the methods of the Grammar School were used, that meant reading and memorizing a really good set of notes. The atmosphere at the time was that of the late sixties, with student uprisings and general discontent. None of that could be allowed to interfere in my aim of getting a first class degree and doing as well as I could. I was a most sincere student in most cynical world, and so it has remained ever since. None of my immediate family had ever been to university or even a grammar school, so I was completely on my own. I did not ever ask questions of lecturers or tutors, but in a sense took over the material for myself. I quickly realized that there was to be no time for any distraction, with the exception of Saturday afternoons, some walks and that one exhilarating bike ride in a wonderful new country.

Of that first term there are only shards of memory, because all my concentration was focused on getting good marks. I cannot remember whether the assessment of practical classes as continuous or by examination. The practical class in physical and inorganic chemistry took place in the upper level of the new wing of the EDCL, built in 1962, destroyed by 1993. This is appalling maladministration. The new wing was built because money became available, and that seems to be all. There was no thought as to the number of students likely to be available from Wales, so this stupidity was bound to harm the Welsh language very greatly. Each student was assigned some laboratory apparatus in physical, inorganic and organic chemistry, and I recall that there was a mania for making the students wash glassware until their fingers dissolved. The apparatus differed from the school in that it had ground glass stoppers in place of corks. The class was administered by lecturers and demonstrators who used to deliver the occasional sarcasm and little else. There were small rooms off the main laboratory, which was filled with far too many benches for student numbers, but the first years were not allowed in them. There was a furnace for crucibles near the windows, which looked out over a mass of greyness - the damp town of Aberystwyth - then out over the cold black sea. Each experiment came with a set of instructions, often incomprehensible, and there were long stools to perch on like chickens. The heaviest days were those of a lecture at nine followed by a practical class. Then the notes had to be written up the following day or as soon as I could in the library. As the examinations approached there was the additional work of memorizing and revising. It is impossible to know at this distance in time how I managed to memorize those notes in a crowded alcoholic room filled with students who seemed to never to work at all.

I have a vague recollection that the worst experience in practical classes was physics. It was a long walk stuffed with bacon up to physics on the Penglais campus, through Aberystwyth and on to the Machynlleth road, up a hill past the hospital and entrance to the National Library of Wales, past Pant y Celyn Hall and cutting through the campus past the biology building. Physics seemed as dry as dust, the main lecture theatre was used because there should have been a hundred or so students, but there never was. It was an entirely dark theatre with no windows and was filled with irrelevance, spotlights, large boards, projectors, and a vast number of seats for a small number of scraped up students. One lecturer called Kersley used an overhead projector and a roll of transparency on which he scribbled in between loud bouts of sniffing. Maybe he was blowing last night’s snuff or heroin out of his long nose. The scribbles were in red, white and blue. He was a permanently irritated Scot loaded with a first year class. I forget entirely what he taught, which is not the greatest of commendations. There was one revolting course in thermodynamics for which a course book by McGraw Hill had to be bought, making me even hungrier. I have never come across anyone who could teach thermodynamics, least of all Morrison of chemistry. There must have been the usual physics courses, but I am sure that they never got as far as the Maxwell Heaviside equations.

The physics practical courses were held in cubicles called laboratories hidden inside the Penglais concrete maze. Again there were set experiments with instructions to get through each as best as I could. The school work was not coordinated with the work at first year undergraduate, so it was matter of following a set of instructions like Mecano. Obviously I learnt nothing, but I must have got through them somehow until I could ditch physics as soon as I could at the end of that first year. In the first few weeks of that term in the autumn of 1968 time stood still, one interminable, ugly, day following the other. There was no common room for undergraduates, and at the end of the first year I still did not know who they were. It must have dawned on me at some point that there going to be examinations at the end of the first term in chemistry, physics and mathematics, but where and when was not made clear. In a very vague way I remember being told in an offhand kind of way that the purpose of these exams was to make sure that all the students were working, or whether some had blown a transistor or valve. I seemed to be working, but my ribs were protruding

The most desiccated subject was mathematics, with lectures delivered in small rooms with windows. Probably there were very few mathematics students to be found. One course book from 1968 has survived, Stephenson’s “Mathematical Methods for Science Students”. I still use it now. It was taught by I forget whom by simply reading out the material. We were told that the mathematics may seem to be very boring now, and in fact it was very boring, but would be useful later. I vaguely remember a half bald red headed man whose task it was to make students enthusiastic about mathematics. He seemed to cough out his lectures as if under a great weight of being stuck in this place forever. Later on as a post doctoral I came across A. R. Davies, who told me that all students are morons. Naturally he became a full professor. The subject of mathematics was preferable to physics because it had no practical work but it was impossible to be enthusiastic about limit theorems. In later years I taught myself mathematics, and it is indeed useful and very elegant. One would never have guessed it in 1968. Everything was dominated by looming examinations. In the mathematics papers one pounced on a problem that could be solved and frantically looked for more.