A Liberating Aerial Bombardment

In November 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, I was solving trematode life cycles in the Marine Biological Station at Plymouth. Before the fighting began I had received an impressive-looking form from the Royal Society asking for details of my qualifications, and announcing that as a scientist I was placed in a reserved occupation and could not volunteer for any form of national service should hostilities commence. I therefore continued with my work (I had already qualified as an air-raid warden) with a patriotic sideline: producing chicken feed made from seaweed. I recall that the product I concocted gave me horrible hiccups. The laboratory was totally unprepared for any form of aerial attack. The director, Stanley Kemp, adopted the view that (a) there would be no bombing from the air in this war, and (b) if there was aerial bombing Plymouth would escape it. Why? Because it was an open secret that the oil storage tanks had been emptied, the docks were insignificant and Plymouth was not on one of the main air lanes. With great difficulty I persuaded the director, in my capacity as an air-raid warden, to allow me to provide the laboratory with fire-fighting equipment in the form of stirrup pumps and gas masks. It is difficult to believe, but this equipment, ridiculously inadequate as it was, was the only fire-fighting apparatus on the premises when the raids eventually began. No water had been stored in the massive tanks available, and of course the mains were soon put out of action. A year later, in the middle of one of the worst carpet-bombing raids of the war, a surrealistic scene occurred when the aquarium was partly demolished. A shell-shocked Indian student was standing knee-deep in water, with conger eels thrashing 'round him on the floor, aimlessly directing a thin dribble of water from one of my stirrup pumps at nothing in particular. The first big air raid on Plymouth began at dusk, just before we separated to go to our respective lodgings. The laboratory had no proper air-raid shelter but the tunnel leading to the boat house gave some natural protection. We all spent the night there while sticks of bombs thrumped and crunched down on either side of us. Through a big open space in the roof of the tunnel we could see a purple square of sky, with silver pencils of the searchlights sweeping across it. Optimistically I wrote a long letter to an absent lover. I asked Belinda Kemp, the director's daughter, who was about 17, if she was terribly frightened. "No," said Belinda thoughtfully. "I have no imagination; I can't believe I won't be alive tomorrow." Someone else remarked that it was immoral to hope that the bombs wouldn't fall on us since that meant they would fall on someone else. At 4 a.m. the raid was over and we lined up outside to watch, awestruck and appalled, while the oil tanks blazed. Of course they had not been emptied! Burning oil is terrifying. There is none of the spitting and crackling associated with an ordinary fire; it burns in silence except for a soft licking, sobbing murmur. There was a thick pall of smoke over everything. Not a word was spoken. Eventually Dr. Kemp kindly suggested that we go into his house, try to boil a kettle, and afterwards get some sleep in deck chairs. Following the cup of tea Mrs. Kemp carefully divided the sexes and ushered us into separate rooms. I knew then that we were going to win the war. When dawn came and there was light enough to see—for of course we had no artificial light working—I staggered to my room to assess the damage. An incredible sight met my eyes. The door had gone and the room appeared to be empty, except for a huge pile of tiny splinters of glass on the floor and, picking its way delicately among the debris, the sole survivor: my tame sand-piper, a redshank. Where were my notebooks and manuscripts? Where were the labeled drawings? Where were the cultures of intermediate hosts, the infected gobies, the hundreds of isolated infected snails? Where were the microscope, the watch glasses, the finger bowls, the tubes, the shelving, the jars? Gone. Seven years' work had vanished, pulverized with a ton of glass. For three days I felt nothing except for a vague backache. I was stunned. A blank. A German reconnaissance plane slipped in over the still-burning oil tanks, wheeled through the pall of smoke and vanished unmolested. Would we have another raid immediately? The fire surely provided a perfect visible target. Nothing happened. Next morning I found that my redshank had died, possibly from delayed shock or internal injury due to the blast. Had she died in great pain? I felt deeply disturbed as I saw her lying quietly among the slivers of broken glass—an unequivocal indictment of the human race. I grieved for her. The following day I was seized by a sense of meaningless excitement and lightheadedness. Without realizing it I had gradually become an appendage of my trematode life cycles. At the time I had no assistant, which meant that I could not afford a day's illness, let alone a vacation or a free weekend. There were all those intermediate hosts to tend and feed and rear; all those snails to nurture; scores of beautiful ephemeral cercariae to count, draw and describe; all those shells to measure; all those twinkling flame-cell patterns to unravel, and my flock of seagull hosts to coax from egg to adult. It had meant a remorseless 16-hour day. Why, I even saw cercariae in the clouds and flame cells beating in my dreams. Now, all at once, I was free. I packed my bags and left Plymouth, never to return as a research scientist. At the time I did not know that butterflies and fields of flowers were to be exchanged for free-swimming cercariae and the turbulent Atlantic Ocean. But temporarily, at least, the German Air Force had liberated me. Although she never took a formal science degree, Miriam Rothschild has a scientific reputation as formidable as the distinguished family into which she was born in 1908. The author of nearly 300 research papers on subjects ranging from flatworm parasites to butterflies, she helped to show how the reproductive cycle of rabbit fleas is dependent on that of their host. Her books include Fleas, Flukes, and Cuckoos (Collins, 1952), and Dear Lord Rothschild (Balaban, 1983), a biography of her uncle Walter distributed in the Western Hemisphere by ISI Press. Rothschild has long financed her independent scientific research through profits from her farm at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire. "One flea is enough for most of us, but she has faced some 22,000 and despatched them," said her honorary DSc citation at Oxford in 1968, a reference to her painstaking achievement in cataloguing her father's collection of fleas—the largest in existence.

A Liberating Aerial Bombardment

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