and jewellery,
not with oven-cleansers or Kilner Jars, with my mother’s ambitions not her insecurities, with my sister’s bright blond hair
not her noisier toddler habits. But I can only guess. I would give much now for a few sentences of how Cleopatra and the professor
first met, that first clash of other worlds. But the name is all there is. Sometimes one just has to accept the absence of
memory as better than the pretence of it.
There is nothing so very wrong in remembering only a name. Much of what we know of antiquity are names, the names of lost
people, plays, histories, the names of learned treatises, works on medicine, on how to prevent slaves escaping and how to
apply make-up. My own Cleopatra (as I saw her then), the seventh woman of her name to rule in Egypt after its submission to
the Greek generals of Alexander the Great, wrote a treatise about make-up. Or maybe she had her name attached to someone else’s
lipstick tips: librarians and booksellers even then believed that a work was more likely to be read under the name of a celebrity.
If history had happened differently,mascara might have been all we knew about her. Instead, she became the lover of two great Roman generals and, as some came
to say, changed the history of the western world. On Cleopatra’s name there is space enough to pile a mountain.
Professor Rame’s own name was different. It was invented as a disguise, a suggestion of what I was supposed to become. My
professor wore an adult form of school uniform, National Health pink-rimmed glasses and was a master of engineering science.
He had to be. He could hardly be a professor of anything else if he were to travel in space and time.
Imagination of the ancient world was a luxury in 1959. Engineering was the necessity, in our case radar engineering. For my
father and the men who lived around us, seeing the invisible was a profoundly practical matter. Max Stothard was a designer
of military machines that made us safe.
In our house there was no time for the nonsense of any history older than the century. Ours were homes built in anxious haste,
dug out of a butcher’s farmland below a giant steel aerial mast that had been erected against the Communists as soon as the
Nazi threat was past. The mobilisation of men and material to watch for Cold War missiles was as urgent as in the hot wars
– from Crete to Alamein – in which my father and his engineering friends had learnt their craft. In former fields, beside
a town that already boasted the title ‘Birthplace of Radio’, we were the families whose fathers understood klystrons, tweeters
and ‘travelling-way tubes’ for the long-distance radar that kept the enemy at bay.
Every man on the estate knew either about the transmitters that saw things faraway in the dark or about the various electric
valves that powered a radar’s eyes. They worked at benches, not at desks. Therewas a wartime spirit still. The interest was not the Korean War, the one that filled the headlines of the
Daily Telegraph
of 28 February 1951, the issue my mother kept in the sideboard because it marked the day of my birth. Still less did it stem
from the Suez War, a nasty disturbance that might as well have happened in Cleopatra’s Egypt for all the concern it created
for us. Our war was the war with Moscow.
The Soviet threat was an evil. But, like everything in that hopeful time, it was also a good. As well as defending British
prosperity against the great Red menace, we were supposed to share in it, creating a haven of high education, a science park,
even an Essex garden community in which the clay cut to make the foundations of 51 Dorset Avenue might one day grow cabbages,
fruit trees and flowers. By 1960 Mr Churchill’s England had become Mr Macmillan’s – with only the barest distraction from
Mr Eden’s debacle in Colonel Nasser’s Egypt. Life was going to be fine.
There were many advantages for us on
not with oven-cleansers or Kilner Jars, with my mother’s ambitions not her insecurities, with my sister’s bright blond hair
not her noisier toddler habits. But I can only guess. I would give much now for a few sentences of how Cleopatra and the professor
first met, that first clash of other worlds. But the name is all there is. Sometimes one just has to accept the absence of
memory as better than the pretence of it.
There is nothing so very wrong in remembering only a name. Much of what we know of antiquity are names, the names of lost
people, plays, histories, the names of learned treatises, works on medicine, on how to prevent slaves escaping and how to
apply make-up. My own Cleopatra (as I saw her then), the seventh woman of her name to rule in Egypt after its submission to
the Greek generals of Alexander the Great, wrote a treatise about make-up. Or maybe she had her name attached to someone else’s
lipstick tips: librarians and booksellers even then believed that a work was more likely to be read under the name of a celebrity.
If history had happened differently,mascara might have been all we knew about her. Instead, she became the lover of two great Roman generals and, as some came
to say, changed the history of the western world. On Cleopatra’s name there is space enough to pile a mountain.
Professor Rame’s own name was different. It was invented as a disguise, a suggestion of what I was supposed to become. My
professor wore an adult form of school uniform, National Health pink-rimmed glasses and was a master of engineering science.
He had to be. He could hardly be a professor of anything else if he were to travel in space and time.
Imagination of the ancient world was a luxury in 1959. Engineering was the necessity, in our case radar engineering. For my
father and the men who lived around us, seeing the invisible was a profoundly practical matter. Max Stothard was a designer
of military machines that made us safe.
In our house there was no time for the nonsense of any history older than the century. Ours were homes built in anxious haste,
dug out of a butcher’s farmland below a giant steel aerial mast that had been erected against the Communists as soon as the
Nazi threat was past. The mobilisation of men and material to watch for Cold War missiles was as urgent as in the hot wars
– from Crete to Alamein – in which my father and his engineering friends had learnt their craft. In former fields, beside
a town that already boasted the title ‘Birthplace of Radio’, we were the families whose fathers understood klystrons, tweeters
and ‘travelling-way tubes’ for the long-distance radar that kept the enemy at bay.
Every man on the estate knew either about the transmitters that saw things faraway in the dark or about the various electric
valves that powered a radar’s eyes. They worked at benches, not at desks. Therewas a wartime spirit still. The interest was not the Korean War, the one that filled the headlines of the
Daily Telegraph
of 28 February 1951, the issue my mother kept in the sideboard because it marked the day of my birth. Still less did it stem
from the Suez War, a nasty disturbance that might as well have happened in Cleopatra’s Egypt for all the concern it created
for us. Our war was the war with Moscow.
The Soviet threat was an evil. But, like everything in that hopeful time, it was also a good. As well as defending British
prosperity against the great Red menace, we were supposed to share in it, creating a haven of high education, a science park,
even an Essex garden community in which the clay cut to make the foundations of 51 Dorset Avenue might one day grow cabbages,
fruit trees and flowers. By 1960 Mr Churchill’s England had become Mr Macmillan’s – with only the barest distraction from
Mr Eden’s debacle in Colonel Nasser’s Egypt. Life was going to be fine.
There were many advantages for us on
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