Just off Kensington High

Just off Kensington High

I arrived in England in the summer of 1966 with a wife, two children, 13 bags and an ice axe to commence my studies for a PhD at Imperial College.  I hasten to add, the ice axe was being delivered to an acquaintance of a friend in the States. I was not into climbing mountains, or at least had given it up at that time in my life. Our first order of business was to find living quarters. Schools for our 15 year old and 5 year old boys came second. That task, unexpectedly, turned out to be a not inconsiderable job in itself.

We looked at a number of places in the Kensington area that were within walking distance or easy commute to Imperial College located just south of Hyde Park and the Albert Hall. It’s a pretty ritzy area but I was on the Navy’s dime and we felt we could afford it. After a week or so of looking we felt very fortunate to find a flat (‘apartment’ in Americanese) in a lovely old six story Victorian building just off Kensington High on Allen Street. In fact this grand structure was called Allen House. You can inspect it to this very day on Google Earth if you like. I’ve included a screenshot which shows that it hasn’t changed a jot since that far off time. 

 

The flat was on the northwest side of the building in front on the fourth floor. Those windows at the very top of the picture on the left are ours. The master bedroom window looked down on an alley that ran behind the shops on Kensington High Street; in particular we had a view of the back entrance to Sainsbury’s grocery and meat market. Barbara said it took some getting used to seeing the sides of beef being thrown out onto the alley from the delivery trucks and later dragged into the rear door of the shop. Don’t get me wrong Sainsbury’s is a good chain. We traded there regularly.

Straight across Allen Street to the west was a Chinese restaurant facing out onto Kensington High. We used to gaze down at the roof of this building which seemed to have far more than its share of pigeons in residence. We never ate there. We weren’t sure if those pigeons might not be serving some financial purpose to the owners of the food establishment below. Someone had told us that you should not eat London pigeons. They were not good for you.

We had been warned by the U.S, Navy authorities down on Audley Street in the center of London that we should use the Navy-provided rental agreement form for any rental or lease agreements we should undertake. Good advice. After we returned home in 1968 dear Mrs. McGarvy-Munn, the owner, spent years through her solicitor trying to collect property tax expenses from us. Thank goodness for the Navy rental form. Before we could take possession a surveyor appeared on the premises and began to list in a large book everything in the place including the light switches. In the kitchen he noted jelly glasses on the shelf as crystal ware. We had to sign this and were expected to pay up for anything lost, worn or damaged when we left. In a way this was a relief because it insured that we would never attempt to clean anything very well.

Back to the negotiations for this elegant domicile: Barbara later came to call it “a magnificent ruin.” All the flats in Allen House were privately owned, condo style, and I’m sure, except for ours, were well maintained. We couldn’t be sure of that since, as foreigners, we were never invited into any of our neighbor’s places. Strangely, I never saw the aforementioned lady but my wife surely did. Mrs. McGarvy-Munn was asked what the heating consisted of. She said, “Central heating. It comes out of the walls.” To our extreme discomfort that turned out to be untrue. The flat had about six rooms including two bedrooms, a formal parlor, a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and maid’s quarters in the back. That room went to our 15 year old. The parlor had a magnificent chandelier with many hundreds of dangly crystals which we were strictly admonished not to touch. The parlor was furnished with gilt formal furniture of about 1880 vintage upon which we never dared to sit. The side board piece with its gilt framed mirror served as a repository for the wire mesh enclosed soda water bottle that was traditionally refilled by a vendor who was supposed to visit on occasion. The kitchen was another matter. The linoleum was so worn that the holes in it were an actual tripping hazard. The refrigerator worked but was only hip high and held very little. It was a good thing milk was delivered daily, and that Safeway was just across Kensington High with Sainsbury’s just below. The ragged carpet in the long hall that ran the length of the apartment presented the same hazard as the kitchen linoleum. Although promised the dear lady never came through on any of our requests for new linoleum and hall carpet.

The approaching winter turned out to be quite cold, so without heat we were forced to buy some small electric space heaters to make up for the phantom central heat. These were quite high wattage with very high velocity fans. They were about the size of a toaster and believe it or not could actually warm a room. We were most thankful for that. On one occasion while I was at the University and the children were at school Barbara decided to finally really get warmed up, got in the tub and let the warm water fill to the overflow. While relaxing and luxuriating she heard a banging on the door, an unusual occurrence since we didn’t know anyone. When she finally did get to the door it turned out to be John, the building porter, wanting to know if she was all right. It seems that water was dribbling down the outside of the building from our flat. The tub overflow led directly out to what was once a lead pipe sticking out into empty space. This had been sawed off long ago flush to the brick wall by thieves who were about their business of stealing lead.

Barbara didn’t smoke – well, one every now and then to promote regularity. Besides, it was nice to have some cigarettes around for guests, should any ever show up. Everyone in England seemed to be smokers in those days so we kept a supply. We got them at the Navy PX down town and kept them on an upper shelf in our bedroom closet. They were hard to keep on hand even though we seldom used them ourselves and we had very few smoking guests. I don’t know how she did it, she was quite a short person, but Mrs. McGarvy-Munn would use her illicitly retained key to enter our place while Barbara was out and steal the cigarettes.

One last anecdote about our landlady: She claimed to be a dear and close friend of the late Queen Consort to George V, Mary of Teck. Queen Mary had died just 13 years prior to our coming to England. We could never know if this was true but it made a good story.

All was not harsh discomfort at Allen House. There was always John the porter. We became quite fond of him. And then there was the milk man who came every morning early with his hand drawn electric powered milk wagon. Our five year old would dash down to the street and give the milk man a hand in distributing the bottles to the various flats.

As I recall the lift (‘elevator’ in Americanese) was one of those cage affairs which allows full view in or out in all four directions and has the staircase winding alongside in view of the lift passengers. It may have been water-powered; many were at the turn of the century. In fact I was inspired to write this account while reading a Maisie Dobbs mystery novel (Jacqueline Winspear) in which the heroine finally acquires a flat in Pimlico which had just such a lift. Pimlico is a district not far from Kensington. 

Living in Allen House had other benefits. It was near Kensington Palace. Our youngest son who attended school at Kensington Cathedral got to play near the statue of Peter Pan at the Round Pond in Hyde Park after school. In fact, he starred as Peter Pan in a school produced performance. His mother made his costume from potato sacks. I walked the back streets to Imperial College passing through what I recall as Thackeray Square. The William Makepeace Thackeray house had the familiar London landmark blue plaque near the door. This inspired me to finally get around to reading about Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair.

You could probably not live ‘up market’ off Kensington High today: times have changed.

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox! Who the heck is Fermi?

EnricoFermi (1901 –1954) was an Italian born physicist who pioneered the development of controlled nuclear fission. His name has been attached to many important things – Fermi-Dirac quantum statistics for one, for which he got the Nobel Prize in 1936. In fact the entire visible universe is made up of Fermions and Bosons. How’s that for putting your stamp on things? He had the job of creating the first controlled nuclear power pile under the stadium stands at the University of Chicago in 1942. The principal nuclear particle research facility of the United States, the Fermi Lab near Chicago, is named in his honor. Enough of that: he was very famous and really a very nice guy. Although he didn’t live very long he got started early and got a lot done in his short life.

A very important facet of his brilliant career began when he joined the group at Los Alamos to work on the development of the atomic bomb in 1943. Three other scientists, well known to most of us, were also hard at work at Los Alamos and were involved at the birth of the Fermi Paradox some years later. These three men were Edward Teller of H-Bomb fame; Emil Konopinski, nuclear physicist; and our own beloved Herb York, variously first head of the Lawrence Livermore Labs, founding Chancellor of UCSD, professor of physics, and Ambassador to Geneva to negotiate the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The ethnic origins of these four give a clue as to why America does science so well: Fermi, Italian; Teller, Hungarian; Konopinski, Polish; and York, Mohawk Indian. We remember three of these men with great admiration but Edward Teller fell from grace in the physics community after he threw J. Robert Oppenheimer under the bus at a Senate hearing in 1954, kick starting the McCarthy witch hunting era.

The Paradox – One day in 1950 at Los Alamos these four were on their way to lunch. Without preamble Fermi spoke up, “Where are they?” The others knew immediately what he was referring to. They had discussed it before. It seems the Universe is vast, as many as 400 billion stars in just our own Milky Way galaxy and there are hundreds of billions more galaxies out there. It seemed inconceivable that not only life but intelligent life must have appeared many times over among these almost uncountable stars. Back in 1950 we had no evidence of planets around distant stars as we have today but scientists assumed that processes similar to those that created our own planetary system must exist around other stars. And indeed we now know that nearly all stars have planetary systems.

Though the average citizen has probably not paid much attention to these three little words, they have rattled around the scientific and speculative community for the nearly seven decades. Literally thousands of scientific and quasi-scientific papers have been written on the subject. The SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project has been on going for a very long time. Some agree it’s a good idea; others disagree. That’s not the point. Considerable astronomical resources and brainpower have been searching diligently for evidence of ET, and all these erudite scientists have been wondering ‘where are they’ and why haven’t we found any evidence of their presence.

Here are some of the factors in the question. The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. Life has been on earth only about one billion years and the human species, as we know it, has been around for less than a million. One has to realize that this is but a momentary blink in the time scale of the existence of the universe. For life to have appeared, however unlikely that might be assumed, it must have appeared literally millions if not billions of times on the planets of suitable stars in our own galaxy. And we are indeed finding today that there are a great many suitable stars. Keep in mind, if we assume a very low probability of intelligent life, maybe on just a mere million planets, these million planets having some sort of intelligent life may seem a lot, but it is only 0.00025% of the total number. Life may exist in literally billions of planetary systems just here in the Milky Way, intelligent life on just a tiny fraction – only a million.

We being around here at all to ponder these interesting speculations is the result of a pretty low probability event, the meteor strike in Mexico, the Chicxulub impactor, which wiped out the dinosaurs. This was a highly unlikely occurrence that gave mammals a chance to thrive and for humans to evolve. We also tend to forget that the age of dinosaurs was a very very long period, far longer than the period that mammals have had since. Maybe a species of dinosaurs such as the velociraptor would have evolved into a truly sentient and technically competent species. What we know about crows today, a close relative of the dinosaurs, and their intelligence give us cause to think it could happen. We’ll never know.

The next important factors are the distance between stars and the velocity of light, the ultimate maximum speed. Like it or not, Einstein’s limit on velocity of anything is probably the most certain fact in the realm of physics. Distances between stars are measured in light-years, how far light can travel in one year. The nearest stars are of the order of a few light years distant but most of what we see in the sky at night are thousands of light-years away. Sending any material object from one star to another is a prodigiously difficult undertaking. Even achieving 1% of the speed of light is hard to conceive. That would certainly stand in the way of much traffic between the stars.

Scientists who are concerned with evolution and the development of civilizations, etc. have opined that a sentient race may arise and become extinct in a blink of time – a few million years at most. This would mean that having two or more technically adept civilizations coexisting within any sort of reach of each other might be highly unlikely.

Since the invention of lasers the early radio telescope efforts of SETI (which are still underway however) may be totally obsolete. At one time scientists worried that the leakage of I Love Lucy into interstellar space would alert some malevolent ETs to our presence and result in our obliteration. Not to worry; recent calculations seem to confirm that there isn’t enough energy in such broadcasts to be detected outside our local region. Some assume that very advanced races would communicate using point-to-point means employing, not radio, but light. We might be looking with the wrong technology. But the leakage of laser radiation between the stars is highly unlikely. We use lasers for precisely the reason of economy - all the radiation gets to its intended goal. Setting up laser SETI systems would be a fool's errand.

Other theories abound. One says we are being quarantined because of our warlike nature; another, natural evolution removes interest for interstellar exchanges, and so on.

There is a considerable community of serious scientists that say that it is dangerous to try to make contact with possible interstellar civilizations whose motives we could not possible guess. Best left alone!

All of these ideas and efforts leave out what I like to think of as the elephant in the living room that no one seems to have noticed – Artificial Intelligence – Machines. Surely no one has missed the recent news that 1000 scientists have signed a letter protesting the development of autonomous weaponry, really a first step towards AI. In a recent conversation with a well known author and scientist I opined that machine evolution could advance very rapidly once they achieve any sort of sentience, achieving super intelligence in a hundred years. His response was, “A hundred days, not a hundred years.” Why would we assume a sentient machine would be a nice guy like Star Trek’s Data? Maybe she (?) would be more like Ava of the recent British thriller, Ex Machina.

Here’s a thought. Maybe the universe is populated by machines that neither love nor hate us and, at the moment, are not in need of the resources represented by our planet and us. Have a nice day.

Loss of the Emmons

If you followed he link on the Emmons you would have discovered that it was sunk by Japanese kamikazes shortly her arrival off Okinawa with the loss of nearly half the crew.

A WWII story - Two Misses - & Two Misses

This is a very personal account, but so many years have passed, and since I seem to be the last man standing, it needs to be told. Unlike many war stories full of blood and gore and high courage, it’s just a simple story of two misses who made up the distaff side of two couples who survived the war unscathed and managed to lead long and happy lives. But the story of these two misses has a curious and fortunate twist – two other but different sorts of misses.

On February 2, 1945 after repair and upkeep, the carrier Franklin CV13, departed Puget Sound escorted by the destroyer Nicholson DD442. It was on its way to assist in the upcoming fierce battle of Okinawa and to take part if necessary in the invasion of the Japanese Islands. On their way out of the sound the Nicholson struck a log and had to return to the shipyard for minor repairs. She then sailed on to Pearl Harbor where I was taken aboard for my first at-sea duty assignment. At Okinawa the Franklin was beset by severe attacks from kamikazes, nearly sunk, and suffered enormous loss of life – nearly a thousand. They managed to stay afloat and returned under tow to the US with a skeleton crew of about 400. We aboard the Nicholson ‘missed’ that action even though we made it to Okinawa. Over 300 US Navy ships were sunk or damaged there. We were in harm’s way but came through safely, unlike the unlucky Franklin. I have often wondered what might have transpired if the Nicholson had stayed with the Franklin and what would have happened to me if I had been assigned to a different destroyer. These greyhounds were the primary targets of the air attacks.

The other miss had to do with Warren Cortiss’s service aboard the USS Emmons DD457. The Emmons, with Warren aboard, served with distinction in the Atlantic, taking part in D-Day landings and combat operations in the Mediterranean. In Late 1944 the Emmons returned to Boston for conversion to a high speed minesweeper (see the movie “Caine Mutiny” for activities and role of a duplicate ship). Warren, along with a third of the crew, were transferred off the ship and replaced by crew experienced in anti-mine warfare. He then went aboard the Alfred A. CunninghamDD752 and eventually deployed to the Western Pacific, but not to duties at Okinawa.

 If you followed the link on the Emmons you would have discovered that it was sunk by Japanese kamikazes shortly her arrival off Okinawa with the loss of nearly half the crew.

The two beautiful misses of this tale were and Ruth Flemons, wife of Warren and mother of their seven wonderful children, and Barbara Flemons, my lifelong companion of nearly 68 years. That’s their Canadian uncle Ralph Flemons standing between them.