Charles Snow: Homecomings

Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester, on 15 October 1905. He was educated from age eleven at Alderman Newton’s School for boys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for an astounding memory and also developed a lifelong love of cricket. In 1923 he became an external student in science of London University, as the local college he attended in Leicester had no science department. At the same time he read widely and gained practical experience by working as a laboratory assistant at Newton’s to gain the necessary practical experience needed.

Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Master of Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. There, he went on to become a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1930 where he also served as a tutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched into other areas of activity. In 1934, he began to publish scientific articles in Nature , and then The Spectator before becoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he was also writing fiction during this period, with his first novel Death Under Sail published in 1932, and in 1940 ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was published. This was the first of eleven novels in the series and was later renamed ‘George Passant’ when ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was used to denote the series itself.

Discovery became a casualty of the war, closing in 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with the Royal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientific talent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He served as the Ministry’s technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, he became a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists to work for the government. He also returned to writing, continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. ‘The Light and the Dark’ was published in 1947, followed by ‘Time of Hope’ in 1949, and perhaps the most famous and popular of them all, ‘ The Masters’ , in 1951. He planned to finish the cycle within five years, but the final novel ‘Last Things’ wasn’t published until 1970.

He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950 and they had one son, Philip, in 1952. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the City Leicester. He also joined Harold Wilson’s first government as Parliamentary Secretary to the new Minister of Technology. When the department ceased to exist in 1966 he became a vociferous back-bencher in the House of Lords.

After finishing the Strangers and Brothers series, Snow continued writing both fiction and non-fiction. His last work of fiction was ‘ A Coat of Vanish’, published in 1978. His non-fiction included a short life of Trollope published in 1974 and another, published posthumously in 1981, ‘ The Physicists: a Generation that Changed the World‘ . He was also inundated with lecturing requests and offers of honorary doctorates. In 1961, he became Rector of St. Andrews University and for ten years also wrote influential weekly reviews for the Financial Times.

In these later years, Snow suffered from poor health although he continued to travel and lecture. He also remained active as a writer and critic until hospitalized on 1 July 1980. He died later that day of a perforated ulcer.

‘Mr Snow has established himself, on his own chosen ground, in an eminent and conspicuous position among contemporary English novelists’ — New Statesman

To

William Cooper

IT was a February afternoon of smoky sunshine, as I walked home along the embankment to my wife. The river ran white in the sun, the plume from a tug’s funnel came out blue as cigarette-smoke; on the far bank the reflections from windows shone through haze, and down towards Chelsea where I was walking, the smoke was so thick that the skyline, the high chimneys, had smudged themselves into it.

The day was a Tuesday, the year 1938; I had not been home since the Thursday before, which was my usual routine, as I had to spend half my week in Cambridge. I felt an edge of anxiety, a tightness of the nerves, as I always did going home after an absence, even an absence as short as this. Ever since I could remember, seeking deep into my childhood, I had felt this dread on the way home, this dread of what might be waiting for me.

It was nothing serious, it was just one of the reasonless anxieties one had to live with, it was no worse than that. Even now, when some times it turned out not so reasonless, I had got used to it. On those Tuesday evenings, walking home from Millbank to Chelsea along the river, I was anxious as I always had been, returning home, but I had put out of mind the special reason why.

Yet that day, as soon as I reached Cheyne Walk, my eyes were straining before I was in sight of our house. When I did see it, the picture might to a stranger have looked serene and enviable. The drawing-room lights were already on, first of the houses along that reach; the curtains had not been drawn, and from the road, up the strip of garden, one could see the walls, high with white-painted panels. If I had been a stranger, looking up the garden from Cheyne Walk, that glimpse of a lighted room would have had for me the charm of domestic mystery and peace.

As I walked up the path, I did not know how she would be.

The hall was brilliantly lit, pernicketily tidy, the hall of a childless couple. No voice greeted me. I went quickly inside the drawing-room. Here also the lights attacked me, as in the dazzle I saw my wife. Saw her quiet, composed, preoccupied. For she was sitting at a small table, away from the fireplace, looking down at a chess-board. On the board were only a few pieces, each of them much bigger than an ordinary chess-man, part of an Indian set which, out of some whim, Sheila had bought herself the year before. So far as I could see, she was not playing a game, but working out a problem. She looked up.

‘Hallo, you’re in, are you?’ she said. ‘You’d better help me with this.’

I was flooded with relief; relief so complete as to be happiness, just as I always was when I found her free from strain. Whatever I had expected, it was not this. I drew up a chair opposite her, and, as she bent her head and glanced at the board, I looked through the tall pieces at her forehead, the lines of which were tightened, not as so often with her own inner care, but with simple calculation.

‘I don’t see it,’ she said, and smiled at me with great light-filled grey eyes.

At this time she was thirty-three, the same age within months as I was myself. But she looked much older than her age. When I first fell in love with her, as long ago as fourteen years before, men had thought her beautiful. Since then her face had changed, though I, who had watched it as no one else had, would have been the last to recognize how much.

The lines, which when she was a girl had been visible on her forehead and under her eyes, were now deep; her fine, strong nose had sharpened; her expression had become both harder and more still, drawn and fixed with unhappiness. Only her eyes were untouched, and they, so large that they might have been mournful as a lemur’s, had not shared in the sadness of her face. Even at her worst, they could still look lively, penetrating, not-taken-in; just as her body, beneath the lined, overwrought face, was strong, almost heavy, the body of a woman powerful, healthy and still young.