How I write

This is from an unpublished memoir for my son (the introduction of which is here). It goes into the writing of the Hiroshima chapter in my book E=mc²...

It was a quiet late afternoon, when you were about 5 ½, and we'd arrived back after a dawdling walk from school. Once we were settled at home – and after the mandatory milk and chocolate chip cookies – I'd suggested you build a Star Wars spaceship. Your little sister of course would be Princess Leia, so along with dragging the big red cushions down from the sofa for the fuselage, and finding empty cardboard tubes (from used cling film containers) for the rocket launchers, you’d also have to create a comfortable pillow seat for her, and fix pontoons for landing on swampy planets, with spherical containers – soccer balls? – attached for the fuel reserves.

It was a difficult task, but when I explained that I'd give you 40 minutes to do it – and showed you where the clock hands would be when I'd come in to check – you accepted it with determination. And then, once you'd begun, I went to my desk, swinging the door mostly closed. The papers for the chapter I had to write next in my E=mc² book were in neat piles on the desk.

I’d already finished the first part of the book, on Einstein’s ideas, and also most of the second section, on the Manhattan Project where the atomic bomb was first built. It was time now to show what that had all led towards:

The bombing of Hiroshima, in 1945.

I would have had few qualms about the decision if the bomb had been dropped on Japanese troop emplacements, but Hiroshima was a civilian city, with almost no young men of military age there. The head of American strategic bombing in Japan, as well as the commander of the US Pacific Fleet, both thought it was the totally wrong target.

The vision of the bomb floating downwards had haunted me for years: not so much the details of the physics, but this image of it in the air, moments before the explosion; the vision of a terrible fate, unknowingly foreordained.

The reason I’d set you the task of building the spaceship, and given you a time limit, was that I knew I had to write the chapter describing this in a single, quick burst. For there was an occasion many years before, when I had been in a position to save an innocent life, yet I’d failed to do so. That memory had never gone away, and was behind my choosing to write about E=mc² at all.

It had happened when I was an undergraduate in Chicago, working afternoons part-time in a neurophysiology lab to help pay my tuition. I was officially just there to wash glassware, but the woman who headed the lab, Sarah, was young, just out of a joint MD/PhD. program at a top Ivy League university. She’d noticed that I was interested in her work, and said she’d give me offprints of her recent research on the auditory nerve. It involved giving new-born kittens chemicals that affected their hearing on one side, and then, after a few weeks, sacrificing them for dissection, then quickly staining key cell structures so she could study the changes under a microscope.

I wanted to learn more, but she had an assistant, a pre-med named Alison who was a few years older than me. Alison was committed to getting into a good medical school, and knew that a research article jointly authored with Sarah would be ideal for that. Yet, like many ambitious pre-meds at the time at my university, Alison was also uninterested in abstract science. She recognized that I could be better at it, and knew that if I learned enough of the research in this lab to suggest new approaches to Sarah, she might be squeezed out.

This meant that the offprints that Sarah had vaguely promised – and which Alison was to pass along – never quite appeared. And on days when Sarah was coming in during my shift, Alison also made sure I had extra stacks of glassware that would keep me busying washing while, breathlessly, she opened up her organic chemistry textbooks, and asked Sarah for personal help.

I was too shy to do anything at first. For what if Alison was right? I was just a new undergraduate: she - and even more so Sarah - had layers of solid knowledge I had yet to acquire. Yet despite that, part of me still wanted to understand what was going on in their research. It was fun swirling jets of water on glassware in the sink for my washing job, but it wasn’t that much fun. I managed to find some times to chat with Sarah about ideas I had for her research: we had a nice rapport.

Then, in an April I think it was, Sarah got word that a last-minute slot had opened for a presentation at a conference in her field in New York. But who was to go with her? Alison had more qualifications, but she could tell that Sarah had enjoyed her talks with me. It wouldn't be unheard of to bring a promising newcomer along, rather than an ordinary pre-med.

Alison and I hadn't spoken much – over-cheerful greetings from her largely blocked that – but at least once she'd spent time asking me about animal experiments. My view was that for important matters – curing cancer, or other life-threatening human illnesses – then there was no problem, so long as the animals were treated decently. In a trade-off of life against life, humans came first. But for unimportant matters such as cosmetics research, they were entirely wrong.

When I came in for my next afternoon shift the lab was different than usual. Experiments were usually run in the morning, but everything was set up for one now. Alison apparently hadn’t been able to be there in the morning, and so this was the only time for Sarah to do the last experiment before the conference. Alison turned to me, friendly than ever:

Would I mind helping them?

A kitten had already been brought up from the animal welfare room in the basement. I stood aside while she and Sarah got it ready: a sedative to calm it into deep breathing sleep; then their strapping it, belly splayed, onto the wooden board. My job would be to lift a beaker of salt water, and hold it directly above the needle-tipped tube Sarah would insert. Gravity would then quickly perfuse its water into the kitten's body. It was the quickest way to flush away the kitten's own blood. A few metals were mixed in with the salt water, to help fix the cells in the brain slices that would be quickly dissected afterwards.

Until that point – taking in my instructions; watching Sarah and Alison quickly get ready – I'd been too caught up in what I had to do to step back and evaluate what Alison had so quickly set up for me. Yet where did the research for the New York presentation fit on the scale of importance? I had only skimmed one of Sarah’s articles, in all my time at the lab. It was on shiny paper, in a big edited collection. Yet even with her background from a top university, it hadn’t seemed a decisive contribution. Would what was going on now do more than just confirm an already well-known auditory pathway?

I remember looking down at the kitten. There was something about the vulnerability of its exposed belly. The dog I’d had as a child had liked rolling onto his back and lifting his paws in a similar way; there was nothing more satisfying for me as a little boy than rubbing his exposed belly as he grunted away in contentment. When I was even younger I’d loved skedaddling away from my father, then being lifted up and tickled on the stomach. All of us have moments of total vulnerability. More than anything else we need to be treated with kindness, compassion, at those moments.

The needle went in, and then they were ready for me to lift the beaker. Alison was at the next table, concentrating on getting the microscope ready. A faint smile on her lips. Hoping that I might now bow out? Sarah was right beside me, breathing intently; scalpel ready; her white lab coat pressing against my t-shirt. The kitten was strapped down. I could see its skin move where its heart was beating. I knew what was happening was wrong. The kitten was unconscious, but still alive. Sarah opened the valve. I lifted the beaker.

I wish I could say I pulled out the needle; grabbed the kitten and ran to safety. In fact though I did nothing. The young animal died, for an unnecessary bit of research. I stopped work at the lab soon after.

I did see Alison once or twice more, around the campus, but then she was accepted to medical school. Sarah got a job offer at a prestigious West Coast lab, and even invited me to a going away party, but I didn’t show up.

Now, these years later in our London home, the typing of the Hiroshima chapter came fast. I had all the figures and data at hand, helped by mimeographed copies of the actual lecture notes given to arriving physicists at Los Alamos, where many of the details were worked out.

I wasn't going to describe the blast effects on the ground, but rather just show, in extreme slow motion, the moment up in the air, when the bomb in its heavy steel casing began to transform; with atoms starting to shatter inside the uranium at its core. No one that morning in the city below knew what was happening, but what was underway made the destruction that would come a second later utterly unstoppable.

I knew that if I paused to think about the chapter halfway along I’d stop, and find it impossible to face it again. My hurried typing wasn't complete penance, but the closest I could come.

About 6 pm I was done; came out to see you proudly show me the most intricate spaceship you in fact had completed, your little sister sitting contently, safely defended, in the passenger seat. It’s impossible to foresee how the past will affect us. You probably don’t remember how I hugged you.