Charles Snow: The New Men

It became one of my duties to help them collect staff. I could hardly have had a more niggling job, for almost all scientists were by this time caught up in the war. Even for projects of high priority it was difficult enough to extract them, and so far as priority was concerned, the Barford project still had none at all. The only good scientists not yet employed were refugees, and it was clear that they would have to form the nucleus of Barford.

Accepting those facts, the Barford superintendent and his backers still made a claim, a modest claim, for at least one or two of the better young Englishmen. It was thus that I was asked to sound Walter Luke; if we could get him released from his radio work, would he be willing to move to Barford?

Then I wondered about Martin. I had heard little from him. I should have heard, if things had been going well, if like a good many scientists of his age, he had fallen on his feet. For eighteen months he had been doing a piece of technical routine. He seemed to be doing it just as competently, neither less nor more, than a hundred other young men in the naval ports. From a distance I had been watching, without being able to help.

I could not say much about Barford; in any case I knew that in this matter his temperament would work like mine; we said yes, but we did not like to be managed. Nevertheless, I could drop a hint. He could see for himself that it might give him a chance.

Later, my memory tended to cheat; it made me look as though I had the gift of foresight. That was quite untrue. In the spring of 1941, there were several other projects on Bevill’s files which seemed to me of a different order of importance from Mr Toad. As for Barford, I did not believe that anything would come of it, and my chief interest was that it might give Martin a better chance.

IT was some weeks before either Luke or Martin could get to London, but then I arranged to see them both on the same afternoon in May.

Martin was the first to arrive. It was over a year since we had met, and, as we enquired about each other, there was the sense of well-being, the wiping away of anxiety’s fret, that one only gets with those who have become part of the deep habit of one’s life.

Soon I asked: ‘How is Irene?’

‘Very well,’ said Martin, looking straight into my eyes, giving nothing away.

He walked round my office, admiring the Regency mantelpiece and the view over Whitehall. He was rejoicing that I was having something of a success — for, entirely through the Minister’s backing, I had just been promoted. In a section of the war, I now had my bit of subfusc power. I was for shrugging it off; but Martin, however, set more store by official honours than I did.

‘Are you sure you’re making the most of it?’ he said, with a proprietorial, insistent air,

He was delighted, and in his delight there was no envy. Yet suddenly he was sounding knowledgeable and worldly; it was strange, out of the haze of family memories, to see him standing there, a calculating man. If he had a success himself, I thought, he would have all the tricks ready to exploit it.

Actually, he had nothing to exploit. I listened to him saying that, as far as his job went, there was still nothing whatever to report. No change. I was full of irritation, for, when you hope for someone as I did for him, you blame them for their own misfortunes.

‘So far as there’s been any luck in the family,’ I said, ‘I’ve had it.’

‘I don’t believe in luck to that extent,’ said Martin, without complaint.

‘You’ve had none,’ I said.

Then Martin smiled, and brought out a phrase which would have been meaningless to any but us two. ‘You’ve got someone to live up to.’ It was a phrase of our mother’s, holding me up before him as an example, for I had been her favourite son. I recalled her as she lay dying, instructing me sternly not to think too little of Martin. No injunction could ever have been less called for; but later I believed that she was making amends to herself for not having loved him more.

Martin was talking of her when, an hour before I expected him, Walter Luke came in. Ever since I had known him as a younger man — he was still not thirty — he had thrown the whole of his nature into everything he felt. I had seen him triumphant with every cell of his body, as a human integer of flesh and bone: and I had seen him angry. That afternoon he was ashamed of himself, and it was not possible for a man to throw more of his force into being ashamed.

‘Hallo, Lewis. Hallo, Martin,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been ticked off. I deserved it, and I got it, and I’m beginning to wonder when I shall manage to grow up.’

He slumped on to a chair, immersed in his dejection. His backbone usually so straight in his thick energetic frame, curved disconsolately against the leather; yet he exuded vigour, and both Martin and I were smiling at him. His cheeks were not as ruddy as when I first saw him at high table, five years before. In the last two years he had carried responsibility, and even on his physique the strain had told. Now he looked his age; there were grey hairs at his temples; but his voice remained eager, rich and youthful, still bearing a rumble from the Plymouth dockyard where he was brought up.

He had just come from one of the radio committees, where he had been arguing with someone he called a ‘stuffed shirt’ (and who was highly placed). The stuffed shirt had been canvassing his favourite idea, ‘and I tell you,’ said Luke, ‘if I’d been asked to think of something bloody silly, I couldn’t have thought up anything so fantastically bloody silly as that.’ Luke had apparently proceeded to say so, using his peculiar resources of eloquence. The chairman, who was even more highly placed than the stuffed shirt, had told him this was not the right spirit: he was thinking of his own ideas, and didn’t want the other’s to work.

‘The old bleeder was perfectly right,’ said Luke with simplicity. He went on: ‘I never know whether I’ve got cross because some imbecile is talking balderdash or whether my own precious ego is getting trampled on. I wish one of you shrewd chaps would teach me.’

Walter Luke was neither pretending nor laughing at himself; he was contrite. Then, with the same freshness and resilience, he had finished with his contrition. He sat up straight in his chair, and asked what I wanted to see him about.

I said we had better have a word alone. Luke said: ‘Why have we got to turf Martin out?’

‘Lewis is right,’ said Martin, getting ready to go.

‘It depends which surprise-packet he’s going to pull out of the bag,’ said Luke, with a broad, fresh grin. He looked at me: ‘Barford?’

I was taken off guard.

‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs, said Luke. ‘We know all about that .’

Martin was smiling, as Luke began to talk to him. It was clear that Martin, though he was discreet, knew enough to horrify the Minister; as for Luke, he knew as much as anyone had heard.

For anyone used to Bevill’s precautions, this was startling to listen to. In terms of sense, it should not have been such a surprise. Word was going round among nuclear physicists, and Luke, young as he was, was one of the best of them. He had already been consulted on a scientific point; he could guess the rest.

I had to accept it. There was also an advantage in speaking in front of Martin; it might be the most natural way to draw him in.

At that moment, he was listening to Luke with a tucked-in, sarcastic smile, as though he were half-admiring Luke’s gifts, half-amused by him as a man.

‘Well,’ I said to Luke, ‘as you know so much, you probably know what I’ve been told to ask.’