A Slip of the Keyboard (24 page)

It was winter, but the Bee Research Association came to my aid with a matchbox full of dead ones, a piece of wild honeycomb, and their most interested best wishes.

I made a pyramid of wax, and on it placed a bee—poised in flight. I ran tiny wax threads to antennae and wings, so that the molten metal would flow into every crevice, working with tweezers and a heated needle.

And in the workshop I mantled it in an okay cocoon, baked it to red heat, melted a fragment of 22-carat gold in a crucible, spun the whole lot in a centrifugal caster, and dropped the mould into a bucket of cold water. It exploded. And from the steaming water we took a gold bee, eye-faceted, wing-perfect, pollen bags still full—but full
of gold. It took two days to free from its golden web and remove the last trace of clay.

Then I melted it down. Well, why not? I needed the gold. Some fast talking got me some five locusts from London Zoo—a dozen flew out when I went into the little locust breeding rooms under the insect house, where they’re bred for the zoo’s insectivores. It’s
Quatermass and the Pit
in there, I can tell you. But the ones that escaped didn’t defoliate the country—they can’t breed in Britain.

I cast locusts in silver. And the Natural History Museum donated four dead grasshoppers surplus to requirements. In gold you could have used their back legs as saws—and in fact they were once used, in bronze, for that purpose. I cast a honeycomb in silver, a few inches square. It took days to prepare and dripped with silver honey. And finally the gold was used in another bee, which stayed out of the crucible this time.

It worked, and I had become a minor expert in the ways of transforming insects into gold. Trouble is, anything else would have been repetitive, so I stopped. But at least I knew it could be done.

Michael Ayrton did it, too. When I met him later, I saw the golden honeycomb he had cast after a challenge by a rich reader of the book. On it were seven golden bees, the best of forty attempts. The whole thing was worth, I suppose, £1,000 at the time. When the new owner set it in the grass by his beehives, the bees visited it. I’ve always wondered whether they filled it with honey, and if the honey was unusually sweet.

Bath and West Evening Chronicle
,
2 October 1976

The song of the mushrooms woke me from my bed. And I groped my way into the laid-out clothes and crept downstairs, it being somehow wrong to put the lights on at five in the morning.

Past the cat, asleep on her chair, and the evening’s last log crumbling into ash. Up the garden a cockerel starts to crow. Damn thing seen kitchen light flicker on at last; where hell paper bag? Ah—

And out past the sleeping houses, keeping to the grass because
boots ring like bells on the road at this hour. I’ve probably been spotted, even so. (My father recalls trying to fit a new windscreen on his old Singer, on a driveway completely surrounded by bushes and, furthermore, up a grassy lane. It didn’t fit. When he went to the pub that night, a man from the other side of the village gave him a grin and said, “Dint fit, didit …”)

Mist curls like a cliché over the fields, and there’s half a mile of them to cross. Rabbits scatter. A larger mammal, possibly a hippo, trundles away through a spinney.

There’s many a clump of ink caps along the forestry track. They’re fungi, and melt into an alarming black goo when ripe. But they’re edible, and taste like mushrooms, and are shunned by the ignorant masses, thank goodness, which means I can pick them without competition and eat them by the plateful as mushrooms should be eaten.

But this morning picking them would be like shooting a hen. The quarry is more elusive, more unreliable, more like a gift from the gods.

Through a bramble hedge and there’s a small misty field. It’s a blank green until you get into the way of seeing and look for the right kind of grass.

Once the eye gets the hang of it, the mushrooms spring out like stars.

Pick one—and there is a slight cough. Nothing offensive, mark you, just a sort of verbal call sign. There’s someone else in the field. He carries a plastic bag.

We regard each other for a few moments, then go back to our tasks, each surreptitiously watching the other. He’s got the right technique—ignore the little buttons and rotting giants, and pick the nice pink teenagers. Not that a really ripe mushroom isn’t tasty if you’ve a robust palate. Two years ago I knew a field that sprouted huge horse
mushrooms and even after I’d taken my shirt off and filled it, I hardly made an impression.

In a few minutes I’ve got my ration and my solitary co-picker passes me on the way to the stile at the opposite side of the field. We nod. Speech in a mushroom field at half past five on a misty morning is sacrilege.

And back home, pausing twice to leave mushrooms outside the back doors of more favoured neighbours. At this stage a few ink caps go into the bag—shame to waste them.

And there’s happy and sad thoughts. Happy because there’s a breakfast of mushrooms and huge knobbly tomatoes. Sad, because somewhere there are mushroom fields I shall never visit and no one knows about—oh, it makes the fingers tingle.

After breakfast the sky’s light grey, and some cottage lights are on. Wellington boots clang down the road—someone thinks he’s going after mushrooms, and he’ll probably look in the local fields, where the farmers use fertilizer out of a bag, and say there’s no mushrooms again this year. You’ve got to look sharp—when the song of the mushrooms drifts out of the night.

January 2001

I hate Dave Langford for writing this book. This was the book I meant to write. God wanted me to write this book.

For a large part of the 1980s I effectively worked (which was definitely not the same as worked effectively) for the civil nuclear industry, or at least that part of it that produced cheap, clean nuclear electricity, if I remember my facts correctly, in South West England.

Reactors hardly ever exploded. I was a Press Officer, so you can trust me on this. But they didn’t have to explode. Some little-known component of nuclear radiation made certain that life for anyone involved with the public face of the industry became very
weird. And I worked with Dave Langfords all the time. I had to. I knew about words, they knew about uranium. They were a fine body of men, with a refreshingly different view of the universe.

When a member of the public turned up at a nuclear power station and was found to be too radioactive to go near the reactor, they advised me. When I had to deal with the news story about the pixie that shut down a nuclear power station, they advised me again. Scientists with a twisted sense of humour can do wonders for your education, provided you believe only 50 percent of what they tell you. (Er … perhaps 30 percent, come to think of it—I never did actually use the phrase “The amount of radiation released was so small that you could hardly see it.”)

They’d produce figures to show that the sun was an illegal emitter of laser light and under Health and Safety regulations no one should be allowed outdoors, or that the natural background radiation in granite areas meant that registered nuclear workers should only be allowed to go on holiday in Cornwall if they wore protective clothing. And I can no longer hear the words “three completely independent fail-safe systems” without laughing.

The job was also my introduction to the Civil Service. Yes, there really was the man who came round every six months to check that I still had the ancient four-function calculator that I’d signed for on joining, and was probably worth 10p. Yes, some of the Langfords upstairs brought in their own word processors to write their reports and then, because of the regulations, sighed, and sent the printouts down to the typing pool to be retyped. And then there was the guy who actually went into a nuclear reactor and … but I’ll save that one, because you’d never believe it. Or the one about the lavatory.

It’s no wonder that this clash of mind-sets produced something like
The Leaky Establishment
(which of course deals with an entirely different kind of nuclear establishment to the ones I worked in, where things were not actually intended to blow up). The book is
practically a documentary. I read it in horror, in between laughing. This man had sat in at exactly the same kind of meetings! He’d dealt with the same kind of people! He’d been at the same Open Days! The sheer reality of it all leaked from every page! It was just like the book I’d been planning to write one day! How could I ever write my book now?

And then I got to the end and … well, Dave Langford’s garden would probably bear examination by the Health and Safety Executive, that’s all I’ll say.

I’d rank this book alongside Michael Frayn’s
The Tin Men
, another neglected classic. I’ve wanted for years to see it back in print. It is one of those books you end up buying several copies of, because you just have to lend it to friends. It’s very funny. It’s very real.

I hope it’s as successful as hell, and will happily give up any plans to write my own nuclear book. After all, I’ll always have my memories to keep me warm: and, come to think of it, the large, silvery, and curiously heavy mug they presented to me when I left.…